House of Lords: Lord Speaker’s Committee Report

Lord Elder Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elder (Lab)]

My Lords, I am conscious that we are far into this debate. I intend to try to make two brief preliminary points and one more substantive point. The preliminary points arise from things that have already been said. The first is about the idea of a 15-year membership. One of the consequences of that is that effectively people are not going to come in until they are pretty well retired and have reached the point where they have sufficient pension put away to look after themselves, so I think that would inevitably make it an older grouping; indeed, that fits in well with some of the things that have been said about retired MPs. The second preliminary point is about the London allowance. We are going to get a system whereby people are really going to have to have retired and are going to have to stay in London. Whatever else is said about the composition of the Lords, that does not seem to make for a satisfactory House covering the whole country.

My more substantive point arises from the submission that the noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, and I put in. We said that, “to change the composition of the House more in line with the elected House would, after all, give the House a degree of electoral authority, albeit indirectly, and would perhaps increase the willingness of the second Chamber to challenge the first. That would be a fundamental constitutional change and hardly something that should be done by a change in Standing Orders of the upper House”. When you look at the electoral arithmetic of past elections—I am grateful for Appendix 3 of the report, on historical modelling, because it produces some very revealing insights—it turns out that on historic modelling the highest number of seats that Labour would ever have had in this House would have been after the electoral triumph of October 1959. The second highest would be after another electoral triumph—May 2010. When Labour actually won, in May 1997, we would have been more than 150 seats behind the combined total of the Conservatives and Liberals.

My contention is that if we are to be able to describe what happens as giving a degree of elective authority to the House, albeit over three elections, this House will be representative in a countercyclical way. On a number of occasions there will be a big majority for the people who have just lost the election. I do not see how we can safely do that and stick to the current constitutional understanding that this House does not directly challenge the directly elected House—so my nervousness about this is very considerable. It is compounded by the fact that—mea culpa—our submission said that we should do that by changing the Standing Orders of this House. But if we are to change the effective balance between this Chamber and the other place, I do not believe we should be entitled to do that by changing our own Standing Orders. I think it has to be done with the agreement of the other place. I have changed my view on that—but our proposal was not such a fundamental change. If we are going to change the balance of power between this House and the other place, as I believe these proposals would, that is a matter for both Houses to consider.