House of Lords: Reform

Lord Desai Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, over the weekend I completed 20 years in your Lordships’ House, so I am, by the Goodhart criterion, five years past redundancy and I shall await the chop falling on my head when the Bill is passed.

Over those 20 years I have never been persuaded of my own perfection as a legislator or of the perfection of your Lordships’ House as a Chamber. We are, as the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, said, a weak second Chamber. As the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, reminded us, if we were democratically more legitimate, we could provide a stronger check on the Executive than we do at present. The British Executive do not receive a sufficient check from the House of Commons alone; we need the House of Lords.

I recall how the reputation of your Lordships’ House went up when, during the many years of Mrs Thatcher’s prime ministership, petitioners for halting some of the changes had to come to the House of Lords. I particularly remember the abolition of the ILEA and arriving here in those days to lobby Bishops to do something about that. I think that the reputation of this House has grown in more recent times because the Executive have become more powerful as the Whips at the other end have become more powerful. Therefore, we should see our strength more as a reflection of the imperfection in the system rather than as an example of its perfection.

I have always supported reform of your Lordships’ House. I believe in a 100 per cent-elected House. However, I quite agree with all the noble Lords who have said that this Bill is an abolition of the House of Lords as it is at present. I do not see why the Government or the Liberal Democrat party are being so shy about their radicalism. We are about to replace the House of Lords with a senate. If that is the programme, let us say so openly.

Such a replacement cannot be done piecemeal by saying, “We shall retain the primacy of the House of Commons”. It is obvious that we shall not. During the debates on the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill we passed an amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, that said that since no Parliament can bind any future Parliament, each Parliament should reaffirm the fixed-term decision. Would we like each Parliament to reaffirm the primacy of the Commons in the future? That is what would be required once we had replaced the House of Lords. As a reformer, I do not want to soften the blow; doing so would get us not good reform but muddled reform. After all, we have been discussing this for 20 years, and I have been speaking about Lords reform for about 15 years non-stop. There is a great continuity of ideas in the royal commission’s report. The draft Bill and White Paper have not come out of nowhere; they come from the royal commission under Jack Straw and should not have surprised anyone.

If we want to retain the primacy of the Commons, we should follow what the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, said yesterday: there should be a statutory provision, in a separate Bill that is somehow in a form that future Parliaments cannot easily amend, affirming the primacy of the Commons, not just in Clause 2 of this Bill.

We are going to have elections but the various reports have been timid about the basis for them. I agree that if you make constituencies—whether large or small—the basis for electing a second Chamber, you are repeating what already exists in the Commons. Here is an opportunity to do something completely different and not rely on, for example, European Parliament constituencies. I would take up the idea that the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, has suggested, but I would make electoral constituencies the basis. He has suggested—as I think did the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, in a previous debate—that we should have constituencies other than territorial constituencies as the basis for electing people to this House. It could be the Royal Society, the British Academy, the CBI or the TUC.

Over the 12 years since we passed the previous House of Lords reform Bill, British politics has become much less unitary than used to be the case; we now have three devolved Assemblies. This trend towards quasi-federalism ought to be given a further push. We ought to make Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales constituencies from which, senate-style, 20 Members can be elected to your Lordships’ House—directly or indirectly; it does not matter. We now have many elected mayors in English cities. Perhaps every city with an elected mayor should be asked to send a representative—again, it would not matter if they were directly elected by PR or not. Why do we not use some imagination and fancy, and create a different type of representation? It has already been remarked—I think that my noble friend Lady Quin said this yesterday—that the Midlands and the north of England are underrepresented here. We should look at how we can achieve regional representation indirectly by means of representatives from local authorities or cities. We should aim to have a much richer mix of representatives here who will be elected but will not be able to challenge the House of Commons on the basis of territorial representation. Members of the House of Commons will remain accountable to constituents as defined on a territorial basis whereas the new senate that is to replace your Lordships’ House could have another kind of representation based on regional, commercial, industrial or cultural factors. The Joint Committee, which will be chaired by my noble friend Lord Richard, will have plenty of time to think about these alternatives. There are ways of achieving an elected House of Lords which are not enshrined in stone in the draft Bill. We may yet be able to fashion a better bicameral system that is more accountable than the present one. I predict that that will not happen in this Parliament but it may happen in the next.

[Lord Campbell of Alloway]

I am very confused. I am not being wicked about this, but I did not understand what the noble Lord was saying. Is he suggesting that we should abolish this House?

[Lord Desai]

I am saying that any proposal to have an elected House involves abolishing this House and replacing it with a senate. Whether or not you call that reform does not really matter; it is de facto abolition and we should say so.