House of Lords Reform (No. 2) Bill

Lord Davies of Stamford Excerpts

Friday 28th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my own congratulations to those that the noble Lord, Lord Steel, has already, rightly, received. We have a very important Bill, which we hope will pass on its way today, enshrining three principles which are desperately needed here. One is the need for provision for retirement, the second is the need for a provision to deal with those who never turn up and the third is the need for a provision to exclude those who have abused their membership of the House or conducted themselves in such a way as to diminish its reputation and, indeed, the reputation of our democracy. This represents not only a remarkable exhibition of parliamentary skill on the part of the noble Lord, Lord Steel, but a remarkable display of persistence—a perhaps often undervalued human quality, which is essential for human achievement in any field.

I will make three points. Two relate to unfinished business on which I believe we should continue to focus once we have sent the Bill on its way and one relates to a profound reservation that I have about the Bill we are passing in its present form. The first unfinished business is about numbers. I totally agree with the views that have been expressed by so many noble Lords that we need to address this issue. Our numbers are already too great and are quite absurd. I think we are becoming the largest legislature in the world and there is no natural limit to it, as we must be one of the very few legislatures in the world which does not have a constitutionally set number. We need to do something about that. Like other noble Lords who have spoken, including the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, I do not feel that merely having the facility for retirement or the opportunity to expel people who do not turn up is going to make a very big dent in the numbers in itself. We probably need to add to the right to retire some incentives and some constraints: either a retirement age or, if that takes us into conflict with the age discrimination rules and laws, some maximum term of service or something of that kind. We need to come back to that. We should also come back to the imaginative, interesting and, I think, largely very attractive suggestions that the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, has just made to the same purpose and the same end.

The second area where I think there is substantial unfinished business is in respect of a strengthened statutory appointments commission. In an earlier Bill brought forward by the noble Lord—I cannot remember whether it was the fourth or fifth—there was provision for that, as the House will recall, in some detail. I think it is absolutely essential. The idea was that there would be an independent commission—the noble Lord suggested its members would be appointed by the Lord Speaker and the Speaker of the House of Commons—which would not only vet all nominations coming from anybody for independent Peers or from party leaders for members of party groups but would have the responsibility of making a nomination to the Queen. That is enormously important. The provisions in the noble Lord’s original draft would have gone as far as it would be humanly possible to go to ensure that we had people with the right degree of integrity and personality, who could really stand up to pressures from party leaders, Prime Ministers or anywhere else if there was any suggestion of abuse. Of course there are and have been abuses, which I will come on to in a moment.

There is also a potential for abuse, which concerns a number of people in the country, in that if we provide for retirement from this place, it could become just a feeder for the House of Commons, with party leaders putting forward people who they want to promote as parliamentary candidates. That would be an abuse and only a statutory commission could give the public confidence that it was not happening. Of course, if from time to time, Member of this House genuinely feels a vocation to stand for election to the elected House, that is not something that one would wish to inhibit in any way. It is rather unusual in other countries to go from, for example, the Senate to the House of Representatives or from the Sénat to the Assemblée nationale but it does happen. There is no reason why it should not happen, although it more usually happens the other way round. In any event, that is a concern which would be addressed by a proper, strengthened, statutory appointments commission of the kind the noble Lord, Lord Steel, himself envisaged.

An even more important role for such a commission would be to address what I think is a major national scandal, all the more shameful and squalid precisely because people do not want to talk about it. People do not want to talk about it because it affects all the three main parties. In this place it is still possible—even now, in the 21st century—to buy your way in by signing a large cheque to one of the political parties. We should not shy away from that. Some may be shocked by my even mentioning the unmentionable, but it needs to be mentioned and needs to be addressed. It is a big problem. All of us in this place are inclined to be a bit complacent about our democracy in this country. If we heard that in some other democracy somewhere you could buy your way into the local legislature, we would all say, “Well that is obviously a system that is corrupt, a country that is corrupt. The least that can be said is that it is not an exemplary democracy”. We do not like to face that when it happens here. It needs to be addressed here and I think it will be effectively addressed only when the appointments are taken out of the hands of the Prime Minister or party leaders and put in the hands of a statutory appointments commission which can withhold its consent and approval for nomination. If it does so, it will become public if the Prime Minister or party leader concerned persists in pushing forward that particular candidate. That is what would need to happen. It is badly needed and badly required.

My third point is about the area where, I am afraid, I disagree with the Bill as drafted. That will not be news to noble Lords who have taken part in our previous debates. On the last occasion I put forward an amendment on this matter but was prevailed on not to put it to a vote because I did not want at that time to hold the whole Bill up. I certainly do not want to hold the whole Bill up now. It would be appalling if we risked losing getting those three essential principles that I talked about on to the statute book and nobody would want to throw out the baby with the bathwater by arguing the toss on something that, while important, would be secondary in relation to those broad principles. However, my concern is with the provision that anybody who is convicted for a prison term of more than one year is automatically excluded from the House. That is clearly arbitrary and is both too little and too much. It is quite wrong. There has been conduct in this House, even in the few years since I have been here, which resulted on several occasions in prison sentences of less than a year, or in no prison sentence at all, which should have resulted in exclusion from the House. Such conduct was quite incompatible with being a Member of a legislature and we should have recognised that. It was a great pity we did not have the power of exclusion at that time. Under the present system, the same problem would arise—we would not be able to exclude.

Equally, one year can be far too much. Imprisonment can, in some cases, involve no moral turpitude at all. Even within the lifetime of noble Lords in this Chamber there have been appalling scandals in this country of people being sent to jail for consensual male homosexual acts. I think all of us would agree that that does not reflect in any way badly on the individuals concerned—it was an appalling injustice that they were faced with jail. In no circumstances should just the fact of being sent to jail exclude you either from nomination for this place or for the right to continue to sit here if one is already a Member. If one goes back within a hundred years, one can think of those people who were sent to jail in the First World War, either because they were pacifists or because they spoke or wrote, as it was put at the time, in a way that might be damaging to recruitment. If you go back to the late 19th century, within 150 years, we had two of the finest parliamentarians who ever sat in the House of Commons—Charles Stewart Parnell and John Redmond—both sent to jail under the Coercion Acts that were passed by this House, and of course the other place, in the late 19th century. Just the fact of going to jail should not itself necessarily be an excluding factor, whether for one year or less than one year.

The solution is that we should retain the statutory right to exclude which the noble Lord is about to give us if we pass this Bill—it is absolutely right and very urgent that we should have that—but we need to use our own discretion to decide whether an offence merits exclusion or not. Indeed, we implicitly accept that principle in that under the Bill we would have to use our discretion in relation to prison sentences imposed by a foreign court. The idea of using our discretion in a case such as that is not therefore something which the House, or indeed the noble Lord who is promoting the Bill, is inherently against.

When I raised this matter previously, there was only one substantive argument raised against me, which was that the House of Commons had a similar system to the one that we were trying to introduce here. That is a very bad argument. We should not repeat the mistakes of other people. If it is a mistake, we should change it. If we think we can do better than the Commons—and that goes for any legislative context—we should do better as we see it. That is our responsibility before the British public. The Commons may or may not conclude that we were right and they were wrong, and move to align themselves with our system; that is not a matter for us. We should do what we think is right.

There is no way that I intend to take this matter forward in the course of this Bill, as I have already explained. I do not want to hold up what is a very important Bill and I would be the last person to wish to do so. But we shall have to come back to all these matters, particularly the latter one, in due time, when there is another opportunity to do so. I just hope that there is not some horrible scandal over the next few years that makes us feel that we really did need the power to exclude, even though a court had not sentenced someone to more than a year—even though perhaps a court had sentenced someone twice, but to two terms of less than a year—but we had no opportunity to exclude at all even though the behaviour concerned was really blatant and egregious. That is my profound hope. Once again, I greatly support the essential principles in the Bill and pay tribute to the very distinguished parliamentarian to whom we owe it.