House of Lords: Size

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

Monday 5th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I fear that I may be about to be branded as awkward but an old joke asks, “What do you call 40 lawyers on the bottom of the ocean?”. The answer, of course, is, “A good start”. You can make the same joke with 400 or 4,000 lawyers because the issue is not the number but the public perception of lawyers. Lawyers—we have them here aplenty—say that they are a useful but simply misunderstood part of our society.

Exactly the same applies to us. There is a silly chattering-classes soundbite going around that compares this House to the National People’s Congress of China, and I am sad to have heard it repeated by Members of this House. It is an absurd point but the cheap jibe is a symptom of the real underlying problem of poor public understanding of what we do here. It is not that we are many but that we are still perceived, including by Members of the House of Commons, as a fuddy-duddy gentlemen’s club for men in ermine drinking port and thwarting democracy. The soundbite about numbers has simply been added to that list.

Organisations that offer expertise, as we do, typically like to boast of the number of people on their books, not get rid of them. Those who know us appreciate that we draw on a great range of people who have successfully dedicated their lives mainly to activities other than winning elections. The public value this depth and breadth in our House.

There is also a suggestion that our numbers should be the same as those in the House of Commons. Why? Where is the logic in that wholly false symmetry? We are different in so many ways and, again, we seem to be concerned with the superficial—the cosmetic. Do we suppose that the public would like us to imitate the Commons? Most people whom I speak to value the very differences between us and the House of Commons.

The thing that I dread most is a gradual remaking of this Chamber into a smaller cadre of semi-professional politicians who can trade soundbites on almost any subject, rather than specialists, a wide group of whom may speak only occasionally but really know their subject. That would be to ape the Commons in a way that would do a disservice to the people and Parliament alike, and it would remove one of the most unique and important contributions of this Chamber.

I have asked proponents of shrinking this House what problems they are seeking to solve and very often I have been surprised by the answers. Rather than office space, cost or crowding—at least, for 30 minutes every day—I have been told that the numbers are indeed a cosmetic issue and that we must cut them as a fear-based PR exercise. Further, I am told that the typical level of participation is around 450—well below the 600 touted as matching the Commons. Most surprising of all is that those apparently targeted for removal are the Peers who seldom turn up—in fact, the very people who make almost no impact on the effective numbers but who in some cases make occasional but very valuable specialist contributions rather than anodyne speeches on almost any issue.

Party balance, reflecting the Commons, has also been raised by a number of speakers today. Are we to have a Peers’ hokey-cokey, where Peers go in and out as elections reconfigure the party balance of the other place? That is just not a workable system—not least determining who goes in and who goes out on each occasion. Symptoms are being muddled with causes. If this House defies rather than advises the other place, which is certainly the greatest bugbear one hears from Members of the Commons, perhaps we need to revisit that—or has the recent announcement put that particular dog back in its basket for now?

Coming back to numbers, I recognise that if ever more Peers are appointed and attend, which not all do, as some have pointed out powerfully tonight, there must be an attendance overload point—not because of silly comparisons with China but for the House to be capable of functioning. I can only echo what others have said about inflow and outflow: if you want to lower the level of your bath-water, there is no point bailing out one end with the taps full on at the other. That is our current situation and a swathe of sackings would achieve only a temporary reduction.

Detailed solutions are for another day, so I am not going to go there. However, to conclude, if only as a dissenting voice in the debate, I believe that we are running scared and addressing the wrong issue. We need to focus on representing ourselves far more effectively, so that both our contribution and our value for money can be properly understood. After all, if people do not understand what we do, how can they possibly know whether we are too many—or, indeed, too few?

Strathclyde Review

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

Wednesday 13th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

I join those thanking the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, for his very thoughtful and thought-provoking review, not least because of the quality of the debate that it has provoked here today, which has brought forth two such excellent and educational maiden speeches. I was a little more nervous to hear about the dreams that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, has of beheading Cromwells, even if they are not my kinsmen, but I hope he sleeps rather better tonight after the very powerful speech he gave us earlier on.

When I first read the review, I found a great deal to like in it. Option 1 is, I suspect, a straw man, while option 2 is almost the status quo. Option 3, to which we are therefore ineluctably led, has an appeal. All the options in the report are designed with one purpose, which is to reduce the ability of this House to thwart the will of the other place. That is, of course, as it should be. Noble Lords may cite examples of where that thwarting has saved the Commons from itself, and we may even have reflected the popular mood on an issue better than the other place on occasion, but that is not our job. The role of this revising Chamber, which it does brilliantly, is, first, to assist the other place in avoiding the unintended consequences of the Government’s legislative programme and, secondly, to provoke thought rather than confrontation. This is achieved through a combination of the wealth of experience in our House and our role in painstaking examination of proposed legislation. However, in the end, the elected Chamber must have its way. That includes the right to pursue policies and legislation that are unpopular, including with some Members of this House, and taking the electoral consequences.

The second thing that appealed to me about option 3 was that it stresses the need for clarity and simplicity. We have talked very inwardly tonight, but out there beyond the Westminster village there is a great need for that clarity of understanding. Many citizens—lamentably few of whom know what this House does or contributes—need a clear understanding of the valuable role of this House, the areas where it excels and where its authority starts and finishes. Option 3 goes a long way to making clear and giving practical effect to the primacy of the House of Commons in interaction between the two Houses. I believe that is what the people of this country would expect.

However, there are difficulties, as ever, in the details of the report, particularly with option 3. First, as a number of noble Lords have said—notably the noble Lord, Lord Empey, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead—what is to prevent the House of Lords overusing the ability conveyed in option 3? There is a real risk of option 3 enabling political skirmishing between the Houses. That would be regrettable and I hope that the closing speeches we will hear tonight will tell us how that will be avoided. Conversely, on the other side of that coin, what is to prevent the Commons—a number of speakers have touched on this—simply adding a tick-box process to dismiss the communications from this House and paying little heed to their content? This is a real concern, widely mentioned this evening. A number of commentators have raised worries about the quality of scrutiny in the Commons anyway: both before statutory instruments even come to us and how they would be scrutinised and debated in the Commons if this House sent them back. The review suggests that a requirement for a Written Ministerial Statement might be used, but is that really going to be enough? Again, I hope that we shall get more clarity on this in the closing part of the debate.

The review ends with two further recommendations. The first is a review of when Commons-only procedures should apply. That makes sense if it avoids the abuse of the system to smuggle through aspects of policy and legislation that deserve proper debate and scrutiny. It would be helpful to know if or when this review has actually been scheduled. Secondly, there is not so much a recommendation as an appeal to the Commons to provide Bills and instruments that are more fully written—or, to use the language of tonight, less skeletal. This is something which has often been expressed in this House and is devoutly to be wished for. However, we may wonder whether it is more of a hope than an expectation. Were any signs of progress in this area detected during the course of the review?

Finally, I see the merits of option 3 as a one-off updating of the conventions of this House. But—and again it is a substantial but—it is of course risky to adjust, as this review does, one part of the machine in isolation from other, wider changes in this House and, crucially, in the other place. But that is probably a debate for another day, or perhaps even a Joint Committee.