House of Lords: Lord Speaker’s Committee Report

Lord Birt Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, this report has all the analytical rigour we have come to expect from the noble Lord, Lord Burns, who has had more praise heaped upon him during the course of the day than most of us could hope for in a lifetime. No doubt his ears are burning.

In paragraph 10 of the report, we find the killer insight: on present trends, the size of this House will eventually exceed 1,000. The case for action is overwhelming. I strongly support the approach to reducing the size of the House that the report recommends—but I have three reservations, like some other noble Lords.

My first reservation is over the bishops and the hereditaries. In a diverse House, reflecting the whole nation, I, like the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, would hope to see archbishops, cardinals, rabbis, imams and representatives of other faiths. Many hereditary Peers justify their presence in this Chamber by the quality of their contributions, not least today, but it is anomalous in the 21st century for Britain to be the only country in the world where parentage is a passport to Parliament—and, alongside Iran, to be one of only two countries in which an established religion has a guaranteed place in the legislature. Comprehensive reform of the House of Lords would address these historic anomalies, but I find the notion that every part of the House should reduce its numbers except the bishops and the hereditaries, and that at the end of this process those groups would end up as a significantly higher percentage of the House than they are now, to be profoundly distasteful—as did the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor.

My second reservation relates to paragraph 15, where the report refers to,

“existing members who may have arranged their affairs on the basis of membership for life”.

The report suggests that such Members should be treated fairly but is silent on how. I do not expect this issue will affect many noble Lords—it certainly does not apply to me—but some Members of this House, as we all know, gave up established careers, perhaps in academia, to make a full and continuing contribution to our affairs, and they calculated when they did so that their attendance allowances would make up for their loss of income and, later in life, for a reduced pension. For a small number of Members, unanticipated change may bring real hardship, and it would be unjust of us not to consider that.

My third and final reservation is that the report helpfully shows what the outcome would have been if the regime proposed had applied from 1959. It shows the hypothetical position at three critical inflection points in our recent political history—1979, 1997 and 2015—when a new party of government, with a radical agenda, held the reins untrammelled. At these three moments, the new governing party would have been the smaller of the two main parties and, on two occasions, far smaller. I am sceptical that, were those circumstances to recur, which they are bound to, and with the voluntary system proposed, an incoming Prime Minister will naturally show restraint. We will all feel mightily foolish if we march out the door, only to see a little later a longer line marching back in the opposite direction. Even if our current Prime Minister agrees this system, she cannot bind her successors, as many speakers have said. I conclude that, difficult though it may be, this eminently sensible scheme will work only if it can be enshrined in legislation. Given the consensus apparent during the course of this long day, I do not understand why that is not possible.