House of Lords: Reform

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Monday 11th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I suggest that we do not regard Lords reform as solely about future changes to the membership of this House. We also need to address how the existing House can and should perform its functions better. A week ago, a booklet was circulated to your Lordships on the work of the House in the past year. On page 19 is set out the policy committees’ reports for the year. Vast areas of public policy are entirely absent. There is nothing on any of the public services, education, health, law and order, energy, transport, defence, immigration or on welfare, yet in all these areas Members of the House possess great expertise which is largely untapped. In my entire five years as a Minister in the education and transport departments, I was never once called upon to give evidence to a committee of the House on domestic policy. Our record as a deliberative assembly—if I may differ from the noble Lord—is not much better. In my year as Secretary of State for Transport and as a Cabinet Minister accountable to this House, there were three major government policy decisions: on the third runway at Heathrow, on high-speed rail and on the ending of motorway construction. The House did not debate any one of those three policy developments.

A century and a half ago, Walter Bagehot said that the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to come and look at it. I fear—if I could dissent from what I know is the consensus in your Lordships’ House—that this is still too often true today. Being objective about ourselves, I recognise that we are diligent and public-spirited, that now and then we strike a chord of issues of public interest and that, occasionally, we act as a constitutional backstop. However, we have failed to develop modern procedures or committees for scrutiny or deliberation, and, across large swathes of public policy, we are practically non-existent as a parliamentary assembly. We need to improve our existing House as well as debating a future one.