House of Lords Reform

Kirsty Blackman Excerpts

Tuesday 10th January 2023 Westminster Hall

[Anthony Mangnall (Totnes) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Gary. I come to this debate somewhat prepared and somewhat remembering my A-level classes, where we had to debate the idea of House of Lords reform. As I stand here now, a few years on from my A-levels, and think about the merits of the House of Lords, I fear that the wolves are circling.

When SNP Members turn up to a Westminster Hall debate and promise to improve the constitution of the United Kingdom, I feel they are somewhat acting like pandas: they want to eat, shoot and leave our constitution. I worry about that and about the damage the proposals from the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) might cause. In his typically erudite way, he came up with a whole host of reasons for some of the mistakes and problems that can be seen in the House of Lords. Of course, we can see mistakes and problems in the House of Commons, and we should not be outright opposed to some reforms or changes. However, what the hon. Gentleman typically forgot to do was to talk about some of the positive aspects of the House of Lords and the important work it does, or about many of the occasions on which the SNP has been led to support the House of Lords when it has checked the Government on important pieces of legislation.

I will start with a few points of rebuttal, since I do believe this is like an A-level debate.

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

As the hon. Gentleman knows, supporting something and agreeing with a decision are two very different things. Just because, on occasion—particularly during Brexit—the SNP has agreed with decisions that the House of Lords has made, that does not mean that we support it or have ever said that we support it.

[Anthony Mangnall]

I was not suggesting for a second that the SNP had done so. I was more making the point that, although I hope Scotland always remains part of the Union of the United Kingdom, if the SNP wants to not be part of it, perhaps it should not be making comments on this topic.

The hon. Member for Glasgow North made a point about opulence and tradition—that he was not so in favour of it and that he is lost for words when he stands in the House of Lords. I, too, am lost for words when I stand in the House of Lords—because of the sheer magnificence, the history and the tradition. No nation was ever weakened by a love of tradition; in fact, a nation can be strengthened and improved by it. We can use tradition to our advantage.

When we talk about that tradition and that opulence, we can also talk about the important pieces of legislation that start in the House of Lords and make huge differences to people across the land, not because those in the Lords have necessarily been elected by the people, but because they bring with them a specific understanding and knowledge of sectors that would never normally put individuals into the public eye to make pieces of legislation.

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[Anthony Mangnall]

If I may, the hon. Member’s colleague, the hon. Member for Glasgow North, started off by saying that he was not going to be specific about individuals, and I do not think it is right that we are specific about individuals. However, if there is an individual who has done extremely well in business as a woman in the 21st century, I think it is important to note that. But I might also point out that the House of Lords has been a welcoming home to refugees, in the form of Baroness Helic, who fled the war in Bosnia. It also has extraordinary scientists, such as Lord Winston. These extraordinary people make an extraordinary contribution, and they are not the minority—they are the majority.

In his opening remarks, the hon. Member for Glasgow North pointed out only a few small issues, rather than the vast majority of positive things that go on throughout the House of Lords. He made the point about cronies in the Lords; the House of Lords is still conditioned to the standards that Parliament sets, and it is still compliant with the rules that we too must follow. It is important to remember that it is not some lawless upper Chamber in which people can do what they want. It is set to the same procedures and scrutiny that we must follow. I do not think we should put that aside.

I have a few points to make. First, the House of Lords serves as an important check and balance. I notice that not a single SNP Member was at yesterday’s debate on the Procurement Bill, apart from the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman), who was on the Front Bench. Dry, difficult and sometimes dull as procurement might be, it is a perfect example of how a Bill can be introduced in the House of Lords, shaped by fantastic expertise from across the Chamber and then brought to the House of Commons, where it passes its Second Reading, not with great confrontation and difficulty, but with acceptance that it is a good piece of legislation that will make a huge difference.

[Kirsty Blackman]

I would be interested to know whether the hon. Member thinks that the Government will undo some of the amendments the Lords put in and that the Bill will end up looking more like it did when the Government introduced it—rather than retaining what those experts in the House of Lords did to it?

[Anthony Mangnall]

It is perfectly acceptable to say that there will be scrutiny and change, as there always is, but that is not to say that the job has not been well done by Members of the House of Lords. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Aberdeen North may laugh about that, but that is exactly the point of the process. We want to be able to make use of that expertise in the House of Commons, and we want our legislative agenda to be scrutinised in the House of Lords. That is the way the system works.

Those important checks and balances have meant that pieces of legislation that have been passed on the fly—I have felt that, in some cases, they have perhaps been passed too quickly—have been checked and sent back by the House of Lords. When it comes to international development, which I am deeply concerned about, the House of Lords has been extremely effective in that regard. That is something that those on the Labour Front Bench might agree with me on.

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[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

I appreciate you taking the time to chair this debate so excellently, Sir Gary. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) for securing this debate. When I was first elected to the House of Commons, I was made the SNP spokesperson on the House of Lords. It is the easiest job an SNP politician can do, because when they do something, we say, “Abolish them,” and when they do something else, we say, “Abolish them,” again. There is just one line you need to know. That is why this debate has been interesting. It has been a thoughtful debate with lots of issues and concerns raised about the House of Lords. Some Members have talked about how great they think the House of Lords is, but we have also discussed a number of different issues.

I will focus briefly on the issue of constitutional obsession. We all have a constitutional obsession. Indeed, hon. Members would not be here if they did not think that things that were not working needed to be changed. It is not just about improving a single constituent’s life by writing to an energy company to complain about a wrong bill. We can improve all of our constituents’ lives by changing the system. That is what all of us are here to do. We are all here to talk and think about the constitution and the changes we want to make to it and to the systems and the ways in which we operate.

My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North is correct that Governments of any type, in any country, have less impetus to deliver change than anyone else. Governments are appointed by whatever system they work within. That means that the system works for them: it has put them there and entrenched their power. Why would they want to lessen their future chances of getting that power?

That point is neatly summed up by the fact that one in 10 Conservative peers have donated more than £100,000 to the party. I do not know which came first: did they donate money and then happen to become a peer, or did they become a peer and then happen to donate money? I do not know the order in which it works, but surely that is a symbiotic, beneficial relationship for both groups of people. It is great for the Conservative party that it can get so much in donations, and it is great for peers that they can get £332 a day, as well as the power and prestige that comes with being a Member of the House of Lords as a result of their relationships, patronage and appointment for life.

I will now talk specifically about how the House of Lords works and operates, and what it looks like. The most recent figures I could find in the Library are from 2019 and show that the average age of Members of the House of Commons is 51. That is not as young as it should be and does not reflect the general population or even the general voting population. However, the average age of Members of the House of Lords is 71. The hon. Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) may be interested to know that he is younger than the youngest peer in the House of Lords. Although he and I are relatively young Members of Parliament, we are far from being the youngest MPs these days.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

As a 71-year-old Member of the lower House, I will not take offence at the hon. Lady’s ageism. I will just point out, however, that if people get to the top of their professions before they get seats in the House of Lords, where they can apply their expertise, they will tend to be older rather than younger.

[Kirsty Blackman]

My issue is not with the actions of individuals at certain ages or with the fact that there are many 71-year-olds who could run rings around significant numbers of us younger ones—I absolutely agree that that is the case. My issue is that it does not represent the population. We are supposed to have a representative democracy but it fails to be so because its membership does not look like the rest of the population.

I will take a moment to tackle another thing that the hon. Member for Totnes said. Some 57% of Members of the House of Lords went to private schools, which is ridiculously high.

[Anthony Mangnall]

That number is going down.

[Kirsty Blackman]

It is going down, yes, but much more slowly than if we had an elected Chamber where Members were not appointed for life. Some 6% of Members of the House of Lords are from a minority ethnic background, whereas 13% of people in the UK are from such a background. Because the unelected Chamber is over 800 people large, every person appointed to the House of Lords over a period of years would need to be from a minority ethnic background in order for the membership to look like the population. The unrepresentative nature of the House of Lords is a problem that cannot be fixed easily or quickly because of the fact that people in that House are appointed for life.

The issue of attacking the House of Lords because of what it is rather than what it does has been raised. That is the opposite argument to the one we hear from the Labour party, which suggests that we should not attack the current constitutional arrangement because of what it is—that we should not attack the current constitutional arrangement. The Labour party says that just because the Conservatives are in power, that does not mean that the constitutional arrangement for the devolution settlement is less than perfect, and that once we have a Labour Government it will be grand and everything will be significantly better than it currently is. I am not going to buy that. I am going to attack things for what they do and what they are. It is completely reasonable for us to have issues with the actions of the House of Lords or of the Government in the House of Commons, and with the way that those institutions are set up and run. I see no contradiction in making criticisms of both those things and am quite comfortable doing so.

I do not think that anybody here believes—I really hope they do not—that the current constitutional settlement and the way the House of Lords currently works and interacts with the House of Commons is 100% perfect. I do not think that anybody is willing to defend the current system as absolutely the best possible system we could have. I do not think that is the case, because the system is indefensible. We have a massive House in the other place, and one of the things that frustrates me most about the House of Lords is the fact that it can originate legislation. It is a checking and balancing system; how dare they originate legislation? Lords are unelected. It is done for reasons of timetabling. That is completely shocking if it is to continue to be an unelected Chamber.

I very much appreciate my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North having secured this debate and allowed me to have a bit of a rant about the House of Lords and my criticisms of it. Obviously, the way to resolve this—I am quite happy to eat, shoot and leave—is for us to leave the United Kingdom and leave youse to it. In the meantime, while we are members of this United Kingdom, although currently against our will, we would like to improve it. We would like to try to make it better, and to do that we need to abolish the House of Lords.

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[Fleur Anderson]

I do not think the hon. Member is alone in having questions about our policy, which is to have a conversation with the British people to decide what the future policies would be. I am not going to be outlining all the dotted i’s and crossed t’s of Labour party policy, because that would be wrong. We need to have further conversation about the result of our conversations. Later in my speech, I will go into what will underpin that.

The SNP has used this debate about the second Chamber for game playing, to undermine the strength of the Union, and has denied Scottish people a voice in the second Chamber by boycotting it—by just leaving it alone. It has no interest in making Westminster or devolution work. Labour will work with the Scottish people to give Scotland and other parts of the UK an even greater say in UK-wide legislation through a new second Chamber. Under a Labour Government, a second Chamber that is more representative will give Scottish people more of a mandate to deliver for Scotland and undo the damage caused by the SNP and the Conservatives.

There are three reasons why we need reform, the first of which is trust. Trust in Westminster is at an all-time low, and in many ways who can blame the public? Never before has the privilege of power been used and abused for personal gain so much and so frequently. The mantra of “It’s one rule for them and another for us” is said far too frequently; people should not feel like that about their elected bodies, and the Lords is a prime example.

Take the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson). He recommended 87 new life peerages, but two of those people have not made maiden speeches, even though one was appointed in September 2019 and the other in July 2020. His brazen attempt to subvert democracy by rewarding donors, lackeys and friends makes him the latest in a long line of Conservative Prime Ministers who have gamed the system by installing a conveyor belt of their cronies into the House of Lords, undermining it as a result. Instead of rewarding Conservative donors, we should be rebuilding trust in politics.

[Kirsty Blackman]

How many peers did the most recent Labour Prime Minister recommend?

[Fleur Anderson]

I do not know, but we are talking about the system. It should not be the patronage of the Prime Minister that gets to recommend those who vote on our behalf; the people should decide who is going to make those decisions. That is the point I will be making, whichever party the Prime Minister comes from.

In the past seven years, every former Conservative party treasurer bar one has been offered a seat in the Lords, and 22 of the party’s biggest donors have been made lords since 2010. We cannot keep on sheepishly asking for the trust of the people: we need to show how things will be different. Reforming the second Chamber has to be part of that.

The second reason is democracy. Devolution was a major achievement of the last Labour Government, and the next Labour Government are committed to continuing that proud democratising tradition. We have shown that we will put our money where our mouth is when elected. We must go further than the devolution that has already taken place, which includes making the second Chamber of our Parliament fit for the 21st century. It must be more democratic and accountable, and therefore effective, and must accurately represent the people of our diverse regions and nations across the United Kingdom.

We need reform that retains expertise, yes, but the right expertise from throughout the country, not just expertise in knowing the right people. Consecutive Conservative Prime Ministers have ridden roughshod over the system of appointing people to the House of Lords. If things continue as they are, there will not be many experts left; instead, the House of Lords will be packed to the rafters with those who owe their place to favours and dodgy dealings rather than talent and expertise. For too many, a peerage is a fancy title or an Instagram photo opportunity, which undermines the work done by so many hard-working peers.

Hansard tells us all we need to know. There are 41 Members in the House of Lords who have only made one contribution since the beginning of the 1992-93 Session—one contribution in 30 years—yet those Members can claim more than £300 a day for attending and can vote on any issue, changing the lives of people up and down the country. They are not accountable; there is no check or balance. Those Members do not have to look into people’s eyes and be accountable for what they have done, how many times they have attended, what they have said and what they have voted on.

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[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Alex Burghart)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship today, Sir Gary.

I join others in congratulating the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) on securing this very interesting debate. I often think that we do not spend enough time in the Commons debating our constitution in the broadest sense, although I know that the hon. Gentleman is more interested in the constitution in a narrower sense. If a party is a single-issue party, it is important for it to adhere to that single issue; otherwise, what is it? Nevertheless, it is genuinely interesting to hear what the SNP thinks about the House of Lords because, notwithstanding the fact that the party has a shadow Minister for the House of Lords, as I discovered today, we do not often hear its views on such broader constitutional issues.

That said, it is atheists musing on the divine, in that, like some sort of mystic panda, the SNP intends, as my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) put it in his truly excellent speech, to “eat, shoot and leave”. Were SNP Members proposing long-standing major constitutional reform with the intention of living in that new constitutional structure, I would probably have slightly more time for their arguments, but alas it is not to be. We heard today a range of complaints and grievances about the House of Lords without any alternative proposal other than that there should be an independent Scotland. The SNP is entitled to hold that view, just as it is entitled not to engage with the House of Lords by having SNP Members of it.

I cannot help but think that after the 2014 referendum which, as the SNP acknowledged at the time, was a vote for a generation, it was somewhat churlish of the SNP not to join the current House of Lords, even if it disagreed with the structure and wished to see it reformed. That would have been a way of representing Scottish views in the United Kingdom, which people in that country voted to remain part of. Because the Union continues, I am proud to say, I encourage the SNP to rethink its position of—I was about to say “abstinence”, but that is the wrong word entirely—abstaining, or staying out of, the House of Lords.

Much as I disagree with the SNP’s views, I think that the Lords Chamber would be richer for the presence of SNP Members. I would like to see more people from more parts of the United Kingdom represented there. Would that it were not so, but a lot of people vote for the SNP, and it would be good if there were SNP expertise in the House of Lords to seek to influence legislation that would have a bearing on people in Scotland. But that is a decision for the SNP. I did not come into the House of Commons to give advice to the SNP.

My own experience of the House of Lords is rather different from that of the hon. Member for Glasgow North, who is grudgingly prepared to acknowledge that maybe one or two Lords have some expertise and something to say. As a Back Bencher and as a Minister, I have attended a large number of debates in the Lords, and I am always struck by how well informed they are and their courteous nature. It is acknowledged that people on the other side of the argument are worthy of respect, even if one disagrees with their views. I have also been struck by the fact that in that forum there is a great deal of highly positive soft diplomacy on legislation. As a Minister I have seen that. You hear and absorb the views of learned folk in the upper House and you start to wonder how and whether they should be reflected in policy.

When I was first elected to the Commons, I had a conversation with—I hope he does not mind my mentioning his name—Lord Young of Cookham. I asked how he was getting on as a Minister in the Lords and he said, “Well, it is a bit of a change from being a Minister in the Commons. In the Commons you get your briefing pack from your officials, you stand up and you can feel fairly confident that you’re on firm ground. When you stand up at the Dispatch Box in the Lords, five former Secretaries of State, three former heads of the civil service and a whole bunch of expertise from the wider world are all waiting to hold you to account.” That is a level of scrutiny of which we should be proud and that we should think twice about before seeking to remove. This is a good-natured debate, but we cannot just chuck away the life experience and professional experience of people we all know are making a positive contribution to legislation in our country.

[Kirsty Blackman]

The Minister is making a good case for a culture change in the House of Commons. There should be more listening to experts. When we consider the Procurement Bill, will he and his colleagues listen to the words of those giving evidence? Will he listen to their expertise and consider making changes? Or will the Bill come out with no amendment that any expert has put forward other than in the House of Lords?

[Alex Burghart]

We have already listened very closely to arguments made in the Lords, and we have already started to make policy improvements based on some of their recommendations. That does not mean that the Government will agree to all of the amendments that the Lords have made. The important thing is the debate, because iron sharpens iron. We can pretend that we will get similar expertise—as the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson), said—from a democratically elected second House, but that simply is not true, for the reasons that my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes made clear.

There are a great many people in the Lords with huge experience, perhaps towards the end of their careers, who will not want to stand for democratic election. They will not want to put themselves through that and on the doorstep, and I have sympathy with them. I understand. It would be terribly sad if we lost those people from our legislature and if we did not have their expertise. Also, alongside that expertise, there is space for people in our legislature who are of no party affiliation. I know that the hon. Member for Glasgow North has a passionate, political viewpoint. He is a passionate member of his political party, but not everyone in the country is; not everyone in the world is. There are a great many sensible, intelligent people who have a lot to give our democracy, but who do not wish to stand for election under the flag of a particular party. If we were to move to a system of proportional representation, they would have to. There would be no independence in the Commons or the Lords. That, too, would make our Houses poorer and, I think, weaker.

The Government accept, as I think everybody here accepts, that our constitution evolves. It has been in a constant state of evolution for centuries. We are alive to the fact that we will always need to consider changes. The hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) and the Opposition spokesperson spoke in favour of radical reform. Were a future Government to undertake that radical reform, it would bring major risks with it. There would not just be the loss of expertise, but a conflict of mandates, as described by the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer), who is no longer in his place. It is very easy to brush that aside and pretend that we will deal with it later or that it does not matter. I can guarantee that in the event that we had a fully elected upper House, it would start to use its mandate against the mandate of the Commons from day one, and voters would not know how long the mandate in one House would last over the other. We would very likely find ourselves in a constant cycle of elections, rather than being in a position where one party or a coalition of parties could be elected for a term and deliver based on their mandate. Those are all risks that we as parliamentarians must be alive to and aware of.

I have greatly enjoyed the debate today. It is important that from time to time we engage in debate on these major issues.