House of Lords: Reform

Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts

Tuesday 21st June 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, the longest day may be an apt moment to embark on this new stage of what the Leader of the House has called the longest of long stories in the reform of this House. Whatever the deficiencies of your Lordships' House that the Bill seeks to address, a lack of opportunity to discuss and debate reform is certainly not one of them.

I shall not detain your Lordships by rehearsing all of the consistent position held by those on this Bench over many years on reform. A summary of the Church of England's response to the Bill was published three weeks ago in my name. The mixed reaction that it received put me in mind of Mrs Cadwallader in Middlemarch. She was a vicar's wife who despaired of her husband, and said:

“He will even speak well of the bishop, though I tell him it is unnatural in a beneficed clergyman; what can one do with a husband who attends so little to the decencies? I hide it as well as I can by abusing everybody myself”.

The essence of that church’s response was that we welcome an opportunity to reform this House, and to improve, develop and adapt its working in ways that are advantageous to the functioning of Parliament as a whole and to the service of the nation. Where evidence of improved functioning is clear and well established, we on this Bench will be ready to consider changes and to play a part in bringing them about. However, where such evidence is lacking—and we believe that it is lacking in much of the Bill—and where the test of parliamentary functioning and service to the nation is seriously in doubt, this House and Parliament as a whole should expect challenge and questioning from those on the Lords Spiritual Bench.

I anticipate that those of us speaking from this Bench in the next two days will demonstrate a concern that is wider and deeper than the narrow question of whether Bishops should be retained in a reformed House, and if so, how many. We accept that in the institutions that we represent, we have been entrusted with the spiritual well-being of the people of this country—a trust that we share with many others. Therefore, we cannot see our role in these debates as being simply to defend privilege or to maintain the present arrangements at all costs. Rather, we recognise that we have a duty to press into the debate some fundamental issues of principle, because we do not accept that the government of the country should be left exclusively to politicians, and religion to the churches and other faiths.

We shall give careful attention to four tests of what is proposed in the White Paper. The first is whether the proposals flow from a clear enough definition of the role of the second Chamber, and whether a change in the present role is implied although not clarified by what is proposed.

The second test will relate to the independence of the upper House and its ability to require Governments to think again about specific legislative proposals. If we on these Benches discern a drift towards greater party-political control, through which any governing party or coalition can rely on a majority in the second Chamber, we shall find ourselves questioning the proposals.

Thirdly, we shall apply a test related to the question of the primacy of the House of Commons, and we shall be keen to determine whether the two Houses of Parliament will find themselves increasingly in conflict with each another. We note that the Wakeham commission expressed strong opposition to,

“a situation in which the two Houses of Parliament had equivalent electoral legitimacy. It would represent a substantial change in the present constitutional settlement in the United Kingdom and would almost certainly be a recipe for damaging conflict”.

Fourthly, we shall apply a test to claims of democratic legitimacy. Of course we recognise that all three major parties are committed by manifesto to some degree of constitutional change. The key question is whether the amount of change in these proposals is proportionate to the perceived problem that it is designed to address. On all four tests at the present moment we remain unpersuaded.

Let me draw your Lordships’ attention to the specific proposals on the place of Bishops in a reformed Chamber. We are pleased and indeed grateful that the draft Bill proposes retaining 12 places for episcopal members in the event of a reform to an 80 per cent elected House. We are glad also to see the Government propose,

“that in a fully reformed second chamber which had an appointed element there should continue to be a role for the established Church”.

That role was clearly spelt out by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York, speaking in your Lordships’ House four years ago. He said,

“the Queen in Parliament is sovereign, but is also Queen in law, in council, and in the Executive. That is the constitutional arrangement. Are we going to preserve it? The Lords Spiritual remind Parliament of the Queen's coronation oath and of that occasion when the divine law was acknowledged as the source of all law. We see ourselves not as representatives, but as connectors with the people and parishes of England. Ours is a sacred trust—to remind your Lordships' House of the common law of this nation, in which true religion, virtue, morals and law are always intermingled; they have never been separated.”—[Official Report, 13/3/07; col. 580.]

Your Lordships will need no reminding of the physical expression of establishment: the outworking of the church’s wider vocation to the service of the nation. Without doubt there is no better placed organisation, religious or otherwise, able to cite a presence in all communities, and have good understandings of and relationships with all denominations and faiths. In his submission on Lords reform, the noble Lord the Chief Rabbi wrote,

“disestablishment would be a significant retreat from the notion that we share any values and beliefs at all. And that would be a path to more, not fewer, tensions”.

Establishment secures a place for spirituality in the public square. This benefits all faiths and not just Christianity.

The draft Bill proposes that the House should contain 12 episcopal members comprising the five named senior sees and seven ordinary members. This proposal will confront the Church of England with some challenging decisions about how those 12 particular episcopal offices are identified so that Bishops can continue to make a distinctive, competent and influential contribution to a reformed Upper House. Your Lordships should be in no doubt that the Church of England stands ready to make those decisions in the event of this reform being enacted.

In short, your Lordships will find that we on this Bench will be active in furthering proposals for reform that render this House more effective in exercising its scrutinising and revising role. Without a clear definition of some new role that determines the composition of an effectively new House, we on this Bench will press the questions that we have consistently asked.

I speak from a Bench of those whose presence in the House is an expression of their service to their communities rather than any privileged influence and whose track record is of a concern for the common good. What constitutes the common good in any situation is what politics is or ought to be about. For the Christian, the common good arises partly from the imperative to love God with all one’s heart and to love one’s neighbour as oneself. From a Christian perspective, if God’s purpose for humanity is a common purpose, we have a duty to ask how the organising of society and of Parliament makes this purpose harder or easier, more or less attainable. It is in that spirit and on those principles that we look forward to playing our part in this debate in the months ahead.