Draft House of Lords Reform Bill

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, for two reasons. One is that he very properly paid a compliment to the alternative report, and—in declaring an interest as the co-chairman of the Campaign for an Effective Second Chamber, to which the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, referred—I can say that, from moneys subscribed by Members of your Lordships’ House and coming from nowhere else, we have been able to fund the publication in a permanent form of this admirable document. There are copies in the Cloakroom, the Library and all the Whips’ offices, and any Member of the House who has difficulty in obtaining one has only to ask me or the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, and it will be presented to them; in her case, it will be autographed.

The other reason I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, is this. He referred to the part his grandfather played in those momentous days in 1911. That gives me an opportunity to remind your Lordships’ House that we often talk as if nothing has happened since then. How ridiculous that is. This House has altered more during the reign of Her Gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth II than almost any other institution in this country. When the Queen came to the throne, there were no women in this House, and there were no life Peers. I remind your Lordships that it was a Conservative Government who produced the legislation which led to the advent of women Peers and life Peers.

Then we had that other momentous change at a time when I was privileged to lead on constitutional affairs in another place, when the Government of Mr Blair decided on a mass expulsion of hereditary Peers. I was unhappy about the way that was done, but it has altered your Lordships’ House beyond recognition. I might say in parenthesis that if the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, when she was Prime Minister, had only accepted a Bill I introduced in another place in 1984 which would have cut down the number of hereditary Peers—they would have elected so many of their number at the beginning of each Parliament—we might not have had the traumas of 1997 to 1999, but that is another story.

We are now debating the report of the noble Lord, Lord Richard, on the draft Bill that was produced by the Government almost a year ago. We all owe the noble Lord and his colleagues on the committee a great debt of gratitude. However, he very honestly said that his committee was constrained, dealing not with a clean sheet of paper but with a draft Bill. He decreed, quite rightly, that that was what they had to concentrate on, which is one reason why the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, and others decided that they wanted to produce a more far-reaching report, for which we are very much in their debt.

That the noble Lord, Lord Richard, and his committee were very constrained was underlined by my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth, who talked about going back to first principles. The committee had no opportunity to do that. It was dealing with a document and a premise that were essentially flawed—the premise that you could maintain the supremacy of the House of Commons if you had two elected Chambers. The committee of the noble Lord, Lord Richard, drove a coach and horses through Clause 2 and made it quite plain that that just was not the case.

One therefore has to face up to the question of what the relationship between the two Houses is to be. Here again was the flawed premise, because, in constitutional matters, form should follow function. That is why the noble Baroness has suggested in the report that she and her colleagues have produced that there should be a constitutional convention to look at first principles, to look at function and then to determine form. We are asked to agree to form without regard to function, which is wrong. It is illustrated particularly in that—I must choose my words with moderation and care; I would have said “fatuous”—strange proposal that there should be a hybrid House.

What happens in a hybrid House if you have 20 per cent of the Members appointed and the others elected? You have two categories, two classes, of Member. As the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, pointed out at a meeting that I attended only last week—and I made the point in my own evidence to the committee—if you have a situation where the non-elected 20 per cent carry the day, you have the makings of a constitutional crisis if the Bill is important. If you recognised the validity of that proposition and therefore had a 100 per cent elected House, you would do away at a stroke with that valuable ingredient in your Lordships’ House to which the noble Baroness, Lady Knight of Collingtree, referred in her intervention: independence.

I sat at the other end of the corridor for 40 years. During the whole of that time, we had virtually no independent Members elected to the House of Commons. There were those who bore the label, but it was either because there had been some constituency spat—sometimes within the political party concerned, as in one of the Welsh seats; I think that it was Ebbw Vale—or because there had been a local issue such as Wyre Forest and the Kidderminster hospital, but there was no phalanx of independent Members. So even if those who are here because of their illustrious careers in the Foreign Service, the Civil Service and all the rest of it sought to stand for election, which many of them would believe was not the right and proper thing to do in a political contest, they would not get here anyhow.

What if one values a House with an independent group of experts? As I speak now, I look across and see the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris—our experts do not all sit on the Cross Benches. The noble Lord, Lord Winston, informs every debate in which he takes part in this House with his superb knowledge. I may not always agree with what he says, but, by Jove, he enriches the place by his presence. You would not get that in the sort of assembly that would result from a cobbled-together Bill such as we are now threatened with, and I hope that it will not come to pass.

In her speech, the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, said that we were suffering from wear and tear—some of us more than others perhaps. But she is completely right. This House needs reform. However, as others have pointed out, there is a Bill, the so-called Steel Bill, which addresses most if not all of these issues and on which I believe that it would be possible to have consensus. We could reform this House in a way that would be acceptable and much less expensive than the elected House with which we are now threatened. I urge the Government to consider it very carefully and consider the convention suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady Symons. It merits serious and sympathetic consideration.

We are talking about the British constitution. We are not talking about something that should be the plaything of any particular political personality or something that should be regarded, as someone said, as the glue that holds the coalition together. We are talking about the future of our country and there are other things that could be done in the future. The noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, who will address us shortly, has an idea for electoral colleges, which he will explain, which has some merit and is worth serious consideration and debate.

I end on this note. I have two points. When he gave evidence to the Joint Committee, the Clerk of the House of Commons said that at the moment the House of Commons and the House of Lords are complementary to each other. If we had two elected Chambers, they would be in competition with each other. If we are to move to that undesirable state, surely the people must have the ultimate decision. How fatuous to wave the flag of democracy but say, “You can’t have a vote on it”. That is the ultimate insult to the British people, and up with that we should not put.