House of Lords Reform Bill

Jack Straw Excerpts

Monday 3rd September 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I would like to correct the right hon. and learned Gentleman on one point: the Steel Bill would not remove hereditary peers. It would do three things, to be precise. It would extend the, in effect, voluntary retirement scheme that is in place in the other place, which I think has led to the spectacular result of two of its Members choosing to do that. Having seen the coverage of the views of some Members of the other place who are from my party, I can think of one or two whom I hope would take early retirement, but there would not be a mass cull in the way that the right hon. and learned Gentleman implies.

Another provision relates to crooks, but let us remember that that means future, not existing, crooks, who would—hey presto!—not be allowed to sit in the other Chamber. Also, any peer who did not attend once, not even for a few minutes to sign on for their £300 tax-free daily allowance, would be disallowed. I am afraid that any scrutiny of that Bill shows that it would barely trim at the margins the size of the House of Lords, so by its own reckoning it would not do what it purports it would do, which is dramatically to reduce the size of the House of Lords. While I have a great deal of respect for the considerable time and effort that Lord Steel has put into this, my view remains that there is no surrogate for democracy.

[Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)]

Does the Deputy Prime Minister not recognise that his relying on timetabling problems will be seen as a tawdry excuse for a lamentable failure of political will? To my certain knowledge, because I handled such Bills, plenty of controversial constitutional Bills, not least in the first Labour Administration, were not subject to timetabling at all. Such Bills can be got through the House, as this Bill could have been, either by informal agreement or, if necessary, by subsequent guillotining. If he had any courage, that is what he should have done with this measure.

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

Not only did I have the courage, but I had the courtesy to speak to the leader of the right hon. Gentleman’s party and ask a simple question: if there were objections from the official Opposition to a timetable motion, or even the concept of a timetable motion, how many days would they want? We were prepared to offer more days.

As the right hon. Member for Blackburn knows, under the Labour Government, time and again Bills of constitutional importance were timetabled, and for good reasons. Members in all parts of the House rightly said that at a time of severe economic distress they wanted us to get on with the House of Lords Bill, but for the Bill not to consume all available parliamentary time. What answer did I get, both publicly and privately? That the Labour party wanted individual closure motions.

I am not as much of an old hand in parliamentary procedure as is the right hon. Gentleman, but he knows just as well as I do that that would have led us into a morass and the thing would have been dragged out for months. That once again showed the skin-deep sincerity of the Labour party’s commitment to reform, and it is a great betrayal of his great work in the previous Administration that his party is becoming a regressive roadblock to political reform.