House of Lords Reform Bill

James Gray Excerpts

Monday 9th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[John Thurso (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

In 1970 I had the privilege of sitting on the steps of the throne in the other place to listen to my father’s maiden speech. In 1995, following what I thought was his untimely death, I had the opportunity to go there myself to make my own speech. In the intervening period I often sat on the steps of the throne, largely because doing so was free and, as a trainee in the Savoy company, I was able to spend afternoons on split shifts there. I listened, watched and learned a great deal about the House of Lords. I remember many great noble Lords making many great speeches, but I came to the view that, however wonderful it was, it was no way to run a legislature. When I arrived in this place, in my maiden speech I made it clear, as I had done in speeches in the other place, that I would seek to work for reform of the Lords and would not rest until it was an elected House.

Therefore, I rise to support my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister’s Bill. When I made my maiden speech in this House, what I said on Lords reform was said more in hope than expectation, but let me tell him now that the expectation is high, because this is the right reform, at the right time and in the right context. I believe that for two fundamental reasons. First, in my view the House of Lords is broke. It does not actually work. An hon. Friend referred earlier to the number of Government amendments that the Lords voted against in the last Parliament, but the crucial point is the number that survived scrutiny afterwards in this place. As we all know, when an amendment that is made in the other place arrives here we are told that the Lords have asked us to think again but, as they are not legitimate or elected, let us, the legitimate and elected House, strike it down. That is the critical fix that we need to make.

[Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

If I understand the hon. Gentleman’s argument correctly, he is now saying that, because Members of the House of Lords are to be elected, when they turn something down and it comes to this House we will be more likely to give way to their views. If that is the case, surely he accepts that we are in fact giving up part of our powers?

[John Thurso]

Let me come to that point in a moment, because it is a critical part of the argument.

The second fundamental reason I believe that the House of Lords should be reformed is that for the past 50 years the Executive have gradually been pruning the powers of Parliament. For 50 years the ability in this House, and in Parliament as a whole, to hold the Government to account has been diminishing. For me, the Bill is primarily about the primacy of Parliament as a whole. It is not a zero-sum game. Increasing the legitimacy of the Lords will increase the legitimacy of Parliament as a whole.

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[Harriett Baldwin]

I have given way twice, so unfortunately I do not have time to do so again.

On the question of what voting system we use, I am aware that the coalition agreement said that we would use proportional representation and that it has some attractions. Some of the things we like about the second Chamber at the moment, such as the fact that some distinguished former Members of this House have been appointed to it, could be continued were we to carry on with that voting system. I would fight for Baroness Thatcher to be top of any list that the Conservative party would field, so from that point of view there are some merits in the PR system. However, it is clear that in many countries where PR has been used it is an extremely unsatisfactory system. Israel elects its “Commons” on the basis of PR, which often ends up giving the balance of power to undesirable elements. I would have a significant concern about that.

I think we all agree that Cross Benchers play an extremely important role, and if I were to move in any direction from what is proposed, it would be to give an increased weight to them. However, I now wish to discuss something that has not been mentioned—the geographical problems of what is being proposed—and relate it to my private Member’s Bill in the last Session on the West Lothian question. In its current form, the Bill would clearly exacerbate problems with the West Lothian question. We have yet to see the report from the West Lothian commission, but I anticipate it in this Session of Parliament. A further look at how the upper House worked would clearly need to be taken because of the West Lothian question, so I throw out a proposal to colleagues: rather than have the much larger geographical constituencies proposed in the Bill, let us do away with the geographical link altogether and have national proportional weighting in the allocations in the upper House. Such an approach would completely sever the geographical link, which I know a lot of colleagues have expressed concerns about, and would solve the West Lothian question.

[Mr Gray]

rose—

[Harriett Baldwin]

I have taken two interventions and have only a couple of minutes left. I want to allow many colleagues to contribute, so unfortunately I will not give way.

I wish to conclude by saying that I hope we can use the 10 days available to move forward constructively with the things the House agrees on. I hope that in this Session our proposals will carry the majority of the House, so that we can look back on this opportunity to reform the House of Lords and say that we did not fall into the temptation to filibuster and talk out the Bill, but were able to leave behind, for future Parliaments, a more reformed second Chamber.

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[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

It is with a heavy heart that I speak to the Bill before the House. I am a reformer and I would welcome a well-crafted Lords reform Bill without election that reduced the size of the upper House, removed those who have committed serious criminal offences, improved the scrutiny of legislation, strengthened the appointments process, reduced political patronage, converted the hereditary peers to life peers, and separated the peerage as such from the legislature. Those measures would constitute a great reforming Bill and would, I suspect, pass through this House on a free vote. This Bill, however, is a hopeless mess.

Members of the House can properly differ on the merits of the underlying issues. What they cannot differ on are the flaws in the Bill itself. It is deeply confused and, indeed, dangerous legislation. It will prevent real reform. It will reduce diversity and deep expertise in our political system. It would be a catastrophe for this country if the Bill were ever enacted.

David Lloyd George famously referred to the House of Lords as Mr Balfour’s poodle, but if the Bill goes through we will have Mr Clegg’s lapdog—a Chamber full of elected party politicians.

There has also been an important failure of due process. The Government originally worked hard to establish a consensus on the Bill, but without success. The Joint Committee sat for longer than any in recent memory. Because of its internal disagreements, it was forced to put more issues to the vote than any recent Committee. It even produced an unprecedented minority report, signed by six Privy Counsellors, but the views of the Joint Committee have barely been heeded by the Government. Its key recommendations were that an issue of this constitutional magnitude required a referendum and that the crucial clause governing the relationship between Lords and Commons should be entirely rethought.

Those recommendations have been ignored or brushed aside. The result is that important matters have been introduced without any pre-legislative scrutiny. Those include a revised clause 2 on the relations between the Houses, and a party list voting system. Instead, the Government have treated the votes of a highly divided Committee as a consensus when they were nothing of the kind. The Government refused to allow the Committee to publish the costs of the draft Bill, and refused to schedule a debate on its report, as is normal practice. They have rushed to get the Bill into Parliament before the summer.

[Mr Gray]

As evidence of the lack of consensus that my hon. Friend so well describes, has he ever attended any Second Reading debate in which every speech of any substance at all was against the principle behind the Bill?

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[Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt). I listened carefully to the Deputy Prime Minister’s speech this afternoon—I listened dutifully and did not intervene. He seems to have become the Andy Murray of this House; he has gone from being a set up and at break point two years ago to being in deep trouble in the fourth set this afternoon. I suggest that part of the reason is that his arguments seem to centre on the point that we do not want to spend a huge amount of Government time on the Bill and just need to get on with it and get it through—we basically just need to agree with Nick. However, from what I have heard over the last few hours, very few of the Members who have spoken so far seem to agree with Nick, but there is still time and, of course, there is tomorrow.

Many Members have said that the Government should not be spending time on this issue right now and that no one cares about Lords reform, but I do not entirely agree. Governments multi-task all the time, so the Bill takes its place alongside many others, and that is the choice of Ministers this time. I also do not think that it is fair to say that no one cares about Lords reform. The truth is that those who care about it do so passionately. I suspect that they come predominantly from one political tradition, but that does not make their views any less valid, and I certainly do not dismiss them. I have received a huge number of e-mails from constituents over the past few weeks putting both sides of the argument, and I do not dismiss any of their points.

I agree with what so many Members have said today, but let me also state from the outset that I believe in the reform of Parliament, including the House of Lords. I stand by the manifesto commitment I stood on two years ago to work to build a consensus and deeply regret that we have been unable to do so.

[Mr Gray]

My hon. Friend alleges that no consensus has been achieved, but surely the real feeling in this afternoon’s debate shows that there is a strong consensus that the Bill should be consigned to the dustbin of history?

[Steve Brine]

Although it is tempting to agree with my hon. Friend, there is quite a long way to go on Second Reading, but I certainly feel that there are straws in the wind.

I think that there is plenty we can do to reform the other place. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) touched on a number of things we could do without abolishing the House of Lords or jamming up Parliament for months, if not years, with a clumsy Bill that seems to get worse the more times I read it.

To be blunt, I think that we are approaching the whole business the wrong way round. Reform of Parliament should start with a simple question: what do we want this House and the other place to do? I think that we want a second Chamber that acts as a revising Chamber, largely free from the politics of the first Chamber and, ultimately, always subservient to it. In other words, purely with regard to the roles performed and the way we make the laws of this land, I think that we have it about right in the United Kingdom. We can argue until the cows come home, and no doubt until they go out again, about who should sit in this bicameral Parliament but, when it come to the system of checks and balances on the Government of the day, I think that most of the sensible people I represent would say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Let me turn to who sits in the upper House. What is proposed in the Bill is a host of senators—let us call them that for now—who would sit for an unrepeatable term of 15 years. From what I have heard so far this afternoon, that seems to be at the heart of the concerns right across this House. The record will show that I asked the Deputy Prime Minister in this House on 20 March whether he thought that

“a 15-year senator who is unable to stand for re-election is more or less accountable than a current Member of the other place”.—[Official Report, 20 March 2012; Vol. 542, c. 639.]

I have to say that the answer I received was hardly convincing. The current Leader of the House of Lords, Lord Strathclyde, helped greatly when he told the BBC recently:

“They’re not accountable… there will be no power of de-selection. Once they’re there, they’re there for 15 years.”

I accept that it is absolutely the case that under current rules, without the power of recall, Members of this House could leave the election night count, jump in a cab and go to Heathrow, take a flight direct to Barbados, sit on a deckchair on a white sandy beach for five years and that decision would catch up with them only if ultimately they sought re-election to this place at the next general election. I take that seriously. The point is that I am accountable to the people of Winchester only if or when I seek re-election to this place. A guaranteed job on £300 a day, with zero accountability—why on earth are we even considering creating such a gravy train? If it were not so serious, it would be funny.

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[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

I regret that I will not be in the same Lobby tomorrow night as my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Mr Brady), even though I agreed with much that he had to say today. I think that the primacy problem in this place has nothing whatever to do with the House of Lords or even the House of Commons. The real issue that lies at the heart of UK constitutional politics is the corrosive effect of the overweening primacy of the Executive.

Anything, but anything that provides an effective counterweight to the oft unchallenged power of the Executive is, in my view, a good thing. I remain to this day staggered by the sheer gutlessness of this place, including of many Members who will vote against this Bill’s Second Reading and programme motion tomorrow night, because we waved through the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011, and it was a terrible bit of legislation.

That legislation cravenly supported a reduction in the size of this House, and it was promoted by the Deputy Prime Minister on the basis of a fatuous saving to the public purse of £10 million a year, which even in his own words has been overwhelmed by the additional amount of money that will be required for the new House of Lords. At the same time, we failed either to nail down any commensurate shrinking of the size or cost of the House of Lords, or to address the constitutional iniquity surrounding the absurdly inflated Scottish Parliament and Northern Irish and Welsh Assemblies.

But I am a democrat, and since my maiden speech in this House I have supported, and will continue to support, a fully elected House of Lords. The case for the preservation of the “ancient traditions”, as many hon. Friends have assured me, of the upper House was conclusively lost in 1999. Once the vast bulk of the hereditaries had been removed, so too should all appointed Members have followed. Instead, today we have a bloated House of Lords, of which the Lords Winstons and Puttnams are assuredly the exception rather than the rule.

Over the past 13 years the ranks of the upper House have been swelled by literally hundreds of party hacks and large-scale political donors, along with dubious-quality legislators given the nod on politically correct grounds. In the charming words of my Liberal Democrat opponent at the last election, ironically herself also the daughter of a life peer, I was too “male, pale and stale”. That may well be the case, but I was also elected, and in a democracy that matters.

While I am happy to support the principle of electing the House of Lords both on Second Reading and in the vote on the programme motion, I believe that in many of its particulars the Bill is shoddy and poorly drafted.

[Mr Gray]

If my hon. Friend is right in saying that the Bill is shoddy and ill drafted, how on earth can he support the programme motion, which should have allowed us the time to put that right?

[Mark Field]

I will come to that at the end of my remarks, if I may.

The Bill misses the opportunity to propose an elegant solution that might have resolved effectively the four main domestic constitutional uncertainties that have plagued our whole political arena for the past three decades. I hope that when it is in Committee and in the other place we might be able to make some progress in that regard. With a federal UK parliament and four elected national parliaments, we could have not only maintained the monarchy, strengthened the Union, and resolved questions over the legitimacy of an unreformed House of Lords, but given independent and equal representation to citizens in England as well as in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

As many Members have said, the British constitution has been one of the success stories of modern politics. It has kept this country together, united under a common Crown and a common Parliament, for over 300 years—not for us the coups, revolutions and counter-revolutions that have plagued many of our European partners over that period. So successful has it been that we Britons had perhaps stopped thinking about some of its great successes. Until 15 years ago, nobody in this House or beyond gave much thought to constitutional issues; we knew instinctively that we had a British constitution that worked well for the whole of these islands. I am afraid that that was destroyed in 1999 when we got rid of the traditional House of Lords, removing much of the genuinely independent hereditary element and created hundreds of new life peers. Shamefully, this process has continued even under the coalition Government, with some 120 new life peers being created. That is unacceptable.

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[Laura Sandys (South Thanet) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth).

The two Members who have excited me the most in this debate are my hon. Friends the Members for Altrincham and Sale West (Mr Brady) and for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field). We need true, bicameral reform. Both parts of this Parliament need to look at themselves and ensure that we have a dynamic, active and reformed Parliament—one Parliament, two Chambers, which in my view should both be elected. I appreciate that the Bill is merely one step on the way and is not the answer to the big parliamentary deficit from which we suffer, but we have an opportunity to consider a new settlement between the public, Parliament and, most importantly, the Executive.

Although many people might have heard a lot of conflict in the debate and a lot of difference between the Government’s position and that of other Members, over the past 10 months the process of public debate, the proceedings of the Joint Committee, on which I served, and other discussions have delivered, in a strange way, a significant amount of consensus. There is consensus about a reduction in numbers in the Lords, the end of patronage and the decoupling of titles. Those are all fundamental points about the anomaly at the heart of our constitution, and I think we can agree on them. The sticking point is whether we have a second Chamber that is elected or selected.

In many people’s minds, the case for selection is that people without political bias would be appointed. Does that mean that membership of any political party would preclude someone from being put forward? What criteria would be used for the selection? As we have discussed before, we must consider whether people would represent vested interests and embed the status quo rather than offer a Parliament that can provide reform and take things forward. Are those people not a group of professionals who have benefited from the status quo and are part of the elite?

[Mr Gray]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the most passionate and powerful opponents of what the Government are doing with regard to, for example, the reductions in the armed forces are the field marshals, generals and others in the House of Lords? They are the passionate opponents of the Government, not their supporters.

[Laura Sandys]

Yes, but they have no vote on this matter, because it is one of financial restructuring. They can discuss it, but to be frank they do so more in the media than in Parliament. Formers members of the military, or of any institution, have every right to discuss Government proposals, but I am not sure they need the House of Lords to do that.

We have an example of how selection can be negative. One of the previous chairmen of the House of Lords Appointments Commission said, “We don’t want hairdressers in the House of Lords.” I am very proud that we have a hairdresser in our House. Any selection process will not choose people who have not been to the right dinner party. Those who do not know the right people, or who have not networked and become well connected, or those who do not come from the south-east, will not be selected.

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[John Stevenson]

We are talking about our institutions where there is representation and where laws are made.

To any rational person, the current arrangement is absurd. We live in a democracy and we, the British people, should be allowed to elect those who make our laws and govern us. Equally importantly, we should also be allowed the opportunity to put ourselves forward for such a role. As things stand, I have to be able to explain to my constituents that, when it comes to the House of Lords, although they live in a democracy and we can vote for and be councillors, MPs, mayors and so on, they cannot vote for some of the people who pass laws over them, nor do they have the opportunity to hold such offices themselves. That cannot be right.

[Mr Gray]

Perhaps my hon. Friend will answer one simple question: is he, or is he not, a hereditary monarchist?

[John Stevenson]

I do not believe that the monarchy is part of our constitution where effective—[Hon. Members: “What?”] No, it is not involved in our effective day-to-day constitution, in terms of the laws that are passed, so when my hon. Friend talks about the monarchy as such, he is talking about a different concept.