Peerages: Recommendations

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 3rd March 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Desai (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I welcome the invitation to wash our dirty ermine in public that the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, has presented to us. We had a Bill a while ago on the status of the Appointments Commission and why it should be made statutory and so on—I think it was a Private Member’s Bill. I said at that time that one difficulty is that we have no legitimacy; our legitimacy comes from the fact that the Crown nominates us, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister.

The Appointments Commission is neither here nor there. It is not statutory; it is there as a respectable front, but it does not matter. What matters is what the Prime Minister recommends to the Crown. That is the only basis of our legitimacy. We are almost like a colony. We have more like dominion status—a little bit further—but we are not self-governing. We may be in our internal affairs, but our appointments are entirely determined outside the House of Lords. That has to be absolutely clear.

Even if we followed the proposition that the noble Lord has assiduously found from reading the history books, it would not be acceptable, nor would it have any constitutional position. His example was of the commission making various recommendations which were completely ignored by the Prime Minister—whoever the Prime Minister, it has been ignored.

In a sense, our problem lies not within us but outside us. The problem of reforming this House is very simple. If the House was reformed, the House of Commons would lose its primacy. The day the House of Lords becomes legitimate would be the death of the primacy of the House of Commons, so the House of Commons has an immense interest in not having us reformed. It is very important for the House of Commons that we be thought of as figures of fun, as the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, said.

Whenever the Daily Mail writes about us, it always uses a picture from when Her Majesty comes to open Parliament, because then we are in our ermine. It says, “These are people prancing around in ermines, they do not do any work, they are called Lords, they get lots of money—millions of pounds—and isn’t it ridiculous?”. I am trying to write a book to tell people what we actually do in our daily work, so they realise that we do not just come on one day of the year.

Our difficulties are deeply structural. They are in the constitution of the United Kingdom, and there is no way that the constitution can be amended. It is in the nature of the constitution that the House of Commons derives its power from the fact that, of all the second Chambers in the world, we are the weakest. We are very good at advising, we have a lot of expertise—go and listen to the health and social care debate, where there is fantastic expertise—but we have no legitimacy.

There is not much we can do about that, so I recommend that we adjust our expectations. I would like our names to be changed from Lords to something else, but that will not happen. On a historical note, what has happened is much more than what happened under George V, who was very much praised. The substantial reform of this House has been under the rule of our present monarch. Life Peers were added, women were able to come and we have a sort of Appointments Commission. We are slightly more in touch with the public, and we have had the House of Lords reform undertaken by the Labour Party in Tony Blair’s first Administration.

Nothing more is possible—nor can I speak any more, so I will sit down.