House of Lords: Reform

Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon Excerpts

Tuesday 21st June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

My Lords, I have explained that I fully accept that there are splits behind me, and everyone knows that. We have been totally open about that, but we are united in our view that this is a bad Bill. That is where the difference between my Benches and the noble Lord’s Benches comes.

The debate will also demonstrate that the clear and united view on these Benches is, as I have said, that this is a bad Bill accompanied by an inadequate White Paper. Even for a Government who are making it their specialist subject to bring forward bad Bills, this is a very bad Bill. It is a bad Bill because it is badly done and because it is not up to the task that it is addressing. The Government can, for example, assert to their hearts’ content, as they do in Clause 2, that nothing in the Bill,

“affects the primacy of the House of Commons”,

as the Leader of the House explained earlier. Ministers can, if they wish, assert that the moon is made of green cheese. They can even put such an assertion in the Bill, should they so choose, but however eloquent such an assertion is, and however well drafted such a provision is, it makes not a jot of difference in fact, because the changes to the House as it is currently constituted, and its replacement by an elected senate, will automatically affect the primacy of the House of Commons. The fact that needs to be faced is that further reform of your Lordships' House is not so much about the House of Lords but the House of Commons. The real impact of Lords reform is not in this place, but in the other place. With the publication of the draft Bill and the White Paper, this Government have put the primacy of the House of Commons into play.

There will be many other areas on which to focus. Difficult issues have not been addressed to date. They have not been considered or resolved. This is a bad Bill because it does not answer the key questions on the issue. What is the role of the House of Lords? What should be the role of the second Chamber? What powers should a reformed House of Lords have? What powers do the Government want a reformed House of Lords to have? What will be the conventions that govern relations between the two Chambers? What happens to the current conventions that govern the relationship between the two Chambers? Should that relationship be codified? These and others are big questions that will have to be properly addressed, properly considered and properly resolved before any Bill to reform fundamentally your Lordships’ House is enacted by Parliament. These are questions with which constitutional reformers have grappled for years. They are questions that successive Governments have considered for years. They are questions that were considered in depth by the Joint Committee on Conventions, chaired by my noble friend Lord Cunningham of Felling—the conclusions of which included that the conventions would need to be considered again if substantive proposals on composition were brought forward, as they have been in this draft Bill, and approved by all parties in both Houses.

However, the Bill ducks those questions because, to Liberal Democrats, such questions and those who raise them are roadblocks to reform. They believe that those who pose such questions are just anti-reformers slipping into constitutionalist disguise. However, we on these Benches do not accept that. These are real questions and genuine constitutional problems. We certainly wrestled with them when we were in Government and wanted to proceed with Lords reform. Other Administrations have done the same. What is simply not adequate or sufficient is to do what this Bill tries to do—just to put the questions aside as though they do not matter. They do matter and they—

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

I have listened very carefully to the noble Baroness, but, with great respect to her, it seems to me that her entire speech is predicated on the fact that she has been presented with a Bill. She is not being presented with a Bill. She is being presented with a White Paper.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

I am sure that the noble Baroness understands the difference between the two.

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

My Lords, if the noble Lord were to read the White Paper again and reconsider it, he would find that within it there is a draft Bill. It is the draft Bill about which I am addressing my remarks.

We on my Benches give the House warning that when the draft Bill has been finalised, if it ever comes before this House, it will be properly scrutinised. Some Members of the House were disquieted by the way that we, as an Opposition, scrutinised the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill earlier this year. We may not necessarily scrutinise the Bill in the same way, but the Government need to know that if it comes before the House, we will scrutinise it with the same focus and intensity. However, we are a long way from there. First, we have the Joint Committee of both Houses. Joint Committees of both Houses of Parliament are excellent instruments. The Joint Committee is the proper committee to address all the difficult issues that require to be debated about further reform of your Lordships' House.

The Joint Committee, whose establishment we welcome, will, I am sure, do a first-rate job, and we thank all those who have volunteered to serve on it. We on these Benches thank in particular our Members from this House on the committee: the noble Lord, Lord Richard, a former Leader of the House, who is taking on the particularly onerous role of chairing the committee, two former Ministers and Deputy Leaders of the House, the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, and the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, and a former Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews. All are widely respected not just on these Benches but throughout the House.

Their task is a challenging, even a daunting one, as is the task before all members of the committee from both Houses. The scale of that task has been made clear by the responses to the publication of the draft Bill and White Paper: almost all of them sceptical or negative. I cite only two responses. The House of Lords specialist, Donald Shell, the University of Bristol politics academic whose book, The House of Lords, is the acknowledged primary guide to the House, argues that some hard thinking needs to take place. He asks a key question of the Bill: do MPs really want a Lords that can challenge the Commons? A key question indeed, although one that the Bill seems wholly to shrink. I might quote Martin Kettle; on the other hand, I might cite Peter Oborne in the Telegraph, who described the Bill as.

“a recipe for chaos, one that will see British government come to resemble the annual shambles of the Lib Dem conference”.

Mr Oborne concludes that,

“exactly 100 years ago, Lords reform helped wreck HH Asquith’s Liberal ascendancy. History may be about to repeat itself”.

Those are grim warnings for the coalition and for Parliament. It will take all the skill of those serving on the Joint Committee to navigate their way through those rocks and shoals.

It may be that if, as we on these Benches expect, the Joint Committee addresses itself properly to the complexities and difficulties which abound around the issue of further reform of your Lordships' House, its work may take time. The Leader of the House has already acknowledged in this Chamber that if the Joint Committee needs more time to conclude its work than by the end of next February, more time it will get. We welcome that commitment.

It may well also be that if the complexities and difficulties with which the Joint Committee will be wrestling prove as intractable as they have been for the past 100 years, the part-Liberal Democrat coalition Government may find greater attraction in the proposals put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood, a distinguished former leader of the Liberal Democrats, in the Bill he has before the House. Members of the House will recall that we on these Benches had included the bulk of the Steel Bill recommendations in our Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill before the election, but they were struck out in the wash-up by one of the parties now on the government Benches.

When the Bill eventually appears in the House, there will be a clear position from these Benches. As I said, we have many different opinions on these Benches about Lords reform. Many of my Members are strongly opposed to a directly elected second Chamber, but we are united in seeing the Bill—and it is a draft Bill—as a bad Bill. That is not a unity in papering over the cracks, as the coalition parties on the Benches opposite will no doubt seek to do, but a unity of resolve to ensure that the issues involved in further reform of this place are properly considered. It is a resolve to ensure that any Bill that comes to this House is properly scrutinised and a resolve to ensure that, if this House is to be reformed, it will be reformed by good and proper legislation, not by a Bill as bad as the one before us today.

This House, this Parliament, our politics and our constitution merit more than that. Reform should mean proper reform. That in turn means a better Bill, a good Bill. We, as an Opposition, will work to ensure that this House, our politics and our constitution get the legislation that they deserve.