House of Lords Reform Bill

Helen Goodman Excerpts

Monday 9th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys). I agree that reform and an elected House of Lords are essential. It is a basic principle of democracy that those who legislate for everybody else are voted for by the other citizens of the country.

Whatever their positions on the Bill, hon. Members on both sides of the House agree that the House of Lords should complement and not duplicate the House of Commons in both its function and its make-up. Unfortunately, the Bill is weak on both counts. Clause 2 is inadequate in setting out the functions of the reformed House. I agree with the letter written by my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) to the Deputy Prime Minister. We must see a new draft of clause 2 early in the passage of the Bill. We cannot be expected to agree to a measure if we do not know what the functions will be until some distant time in future, after the Bill has been to the Lords.

Furthermore, the Bill reveals one of the weaknesses of our unwritten constitution. It would be helpful if Ministers considered not only how to preserve the primacy of the Commons but what special responsibilities the other House should have. At one point, giving the other House special responsibility for human rights was considered.

On the make-up of the second House, many noble Lords are going around saying that the Lords is more reflective of the population than the Commons. That is not true. Only a fifth of Members of both Houses are women and 5% or fewer are from ethnic minorities. However, more than 96% of Members of the other House are over 50. The Government’s proposals in the Bill are extremely weak on that. The proposed 15-year terms are weak not just on accountability; they will add to that age bias.

The objective is surely to widen involvement in our political institutions—[Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Lady. You have made your speech, Ms Sandys. Turning round and having a private conversation, along with many other Members, is not fair and does not show due respect to the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman). Given the importance that hon. Members have attached to this Bill, perhaps they can ensure they listen to the debate on it.

[Helen Goodman]

Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am obviously so boring that other hon. Members cannot be bothered to listen—[Hon. Members: “No!”]

Our politics and our democracy are not exactly in a crisis, but confidence in them is beginning to look rather tattered round the edges. If we are to restore that confidence, we need both institutional reform and higher levels of participation. Today is an opportunity to discuss the institutional reform—we can talk about participation on another occasion.

For many, the heyday of our popular democracy was the early 1950s, when voting participation under universal suffrage was at its highest, and when the two-party system seemed to provide a reasonable reflection of the choices for the country. However, in 1997, at the end of 20 years of Tory rule, the overwhelming sense one had was of anachronistic institutions that were completely unrepresentative of who we are and what we expect from our democracy. Institutional reforms redressed the balance between citizens and the state. They were significant and welcome, but they did not address some of the key failings. Why are so few Members of Parliament in either House women? Why is it right that the second Chamber should reserve places for Anglican bishops but none for other denominations and religions? Those are failings of the institutional arrangements, but they reflect a deeper failure: a failure to make sense of our new British identity.

To tackle that malaise, we need institutions that provide equal rights within their arrangements. This is an extremely unusual country, because it is both a multinational state built over more than 500 years from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and a multi-ethnic country, which in the past 50 years has had a huge change in its constitution. Such significant cultural diversity can make the task of building inclusive citizenship seem huge, and we do it against a background of growing globalisation, which seems to be reducing the importance of the nation state. It is vital, however, if we are to get the levels of participation that we need.

[Andrew Griffiths]

The hon. Lady makes some important statements about the need to ensure that the Chambers are representative, but does she not accept that the other place has the same representation of women, and a higher representation of disabled people and ethnic minorities?

[Helen Goodman]

The differences between the numbers of ethnic minorities and people with disabilities are tiny compared with the great distortion of age.

This Chamber represents people according to the communities in which they live. Once upon a time, the differences between living in Sheffield, which was a steel town, and Nottingham, where there were lots of lace factories, were significant, but increasingly the idea of communities based on economic differences defines only a part of people’s lives. With House of Lords reform, we have the opportunity to consider the other aspects of identity and the issues arising from them, which are often just as important—for some people, more important—as the communities in which they live. I propose that we look at House of Lords reform in an attempt to redress that imbalance. It is obviously a deep and complex problem requiring a lot of consideration. Tomorrow evening I will vote for Second Reading, so that we have a democratic second Chamber, but against the programme motion, so that we can unpick some of these very significant matters.