Queen’s Speech

Lord Elton Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elton (Con)]

My Lords, I shall follow my noble friend Lord Kakkar on two issues that he raised. The first is to do with statutory instruments. One aspect of them has not been much touched on that is very germane to the relationship between the two Houses: financial privilege. Financial privilege in the House of Commons applies only to primary legislation. That is because primary legislation is the right vehicle for bringing forward and into law major decisions affecting the raising, distribution and paying of taxes, with which it does not want your Lordships to get involved. That is understandable, since we are not elected. It does not apply to secondary legislation, which is not designed for that purpose.

When your Lordships refused to affirm the statutory instrument on tax credits, we did no more, in my view, than a conscientious traffic policeman stopping a grossly overloaded lorry carrying a cargo that it was not licensed to carry. A convention was broken, but it was not broken in this House. We cannot leave it there, because more lorries will come creaking and clanking and backfiring into this House loaded with stuff that should be going into main legislation. We need a Joint Select Committee of both Houses to agree some sort of limit to the weight, importance and financial impact of what can be put into a statutory instrument. That needs to be agreed by both Houses and observed by the Government.

My noble friend—he is my noble friend, but he is sitting in the wrong block for me to say so—referred to trust in Parliament and to the size of the House. I am hunting the same hare, but I am possibly a little further ahead of him, albeit with a smaller pack, if I can use the analogy, because I have a very simple Bill, which I shall be asking your Lordships’ leave to introduce to this House tomorrow, to which is invisibly attached a draft standing order. Together they will have the effect of limiting the size of this House at the beginning of every Parliament to the size of the then House of Commons, allowing the Prime Minister to put in as many people as he likes during a Parliament, but at the next Parliament the same process takes place so the more he puts in, the more of them or others go out. This is achieved by election within each of the party groups and the non-party groups of Peers temporal in this House in exactly the same way as was done very successfully in 1999 to reduce the hereditary peerage by 90%.

The arrangement that I propose would not change the proportionality of the separate groups; it would remain the same within the smaller total. I commend the Bill to your Lordships. I do not expect it to succeed, but I hope it will crystallise conversation and focus our minds on practicalities. It will also have the advantage of showing to the public, the press, the other place and all the other people, including ourselves, who say we ought to be doing something about it, that we think we are overdue for reform, and this is the first, easiest and most direct way in which we can do it. I think that will perhaps restore a little street cred to the parliamentary system.

As an ex-Minister for prisons for three years, I cannot sit down without following up the comments from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, and endorsing what he said, not only about overcrowding in prisons but about staff ratios. You can have the most wonderful teaching aids, the most brilliant teachers and lovely classrooms, but if there are insufficient numbers of prison officers to get the prisoners who need to be there from all the different parts of the prison when they are needed, all those facilities might as well not be there.

I have had my five minutes. The only thing that I have left out is: for goodness’ sake, do not forget the judges. We love judges, including the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, but we do not want them in the courts telling us how to manage our business. By all means let us have a Joint Select Committee but, whatever we do, let us not have legislation controlling the relationship between the Houses, because that would be not just a can of worms but a Pandora’s box.