House of Lords Reform

Lord Goodhart Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goodhart]

My Lords, it is now 99 years since the passing of the Parliament Act 1911. I think it would have considerably surprised the supporters of that Act that, a century on, the question of how people should become Members of your Lordships’ House is still undecided. To use for a moment the story that the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, raised about the man who said that everything that could be said once on a subject has been said but not everybody had said it, the situation here is more than that. Everything that could be said on this subject has been said and, what is more, everybody has said it. The trouble is that not everybody has said it more than 20 times. I shall therefore concentrate, perhaps slightly as a form of light relief, on other aspects of reform, just pausing to say that I support strongly the 80:20 per cent formula.

There have been many important changes since 1911 in the way in which your Lordships’ House operates. Notably, we have had the Life Peerages Act 1958 and the House of Lords Act 1999 which between them have fundamentally altered the nature and membership of the House. In 1911, Members of your Lordships’ House were mainly grandees, the hereditary aristocracy, the great landowners and the descendants of great landowners. That had been so ever since Parliament had first come into being 600 years earlier. But that is very far from the present membership. No new hereditary peerage, I believe, has been created since Harold Macmillan was created Earl of Stockton in 1984. It is several years now since any peerages have been included in the New Year’s or Birthday Honours.

[A noble Lord]

Lord Tonypandy and Viscount Whitelaw.

[Lord Goodhart]

My Lords, I think Lord Tonypandy and Viscount Whitelaw were given peerages in 1983, a year earlier.

It is increasingly clear that new peerages created now are not awards of honours but are awarded as a method of appointment to a job. But there are many features of your Lordships’ House which are unsuitable to the House as it now exists and should be removed or altered. Let me start with a trivial matter. Why do we have to hire fancy dress from Ede and Ravenscroft if we want to attend the State Opening of Parliament? Scarlet robes are taken as a sign that we are still a group of hereditary aristos. Robes make us look out of date because the media always use photographs of us at the State Opening. I remember a photograph appeared in the newspapers of noble Lords dressed in robes and awaiting the gracious Speech in which I was the only identifiable face in the picture because I had turned around to talk to a Peer sitting behind me. Unfortunately the headline over the photograph was “Cash for peerages”. I must say that I thought I had good grounds for huge libel damages, but I avoided taking it any further.

More seriously, why do we have to have titles? Why do we have to be Lord X or Baroness Y? Why do many of us have to add place names on to our surnames? Titles, even if they are for life peerages only, seem to be another remnant of the hereditary aristocracy. Why not call ourselves—and here I disagree entirely with my noble friend Lord Onslow—senators in the same way as professors call themselves Professor or doctors call themselves Doctor without altering their names?

Let me move on to a more important matter. Why are we appointed for life? Again, that is a leftover from the time of hereditary peerages. I believe that all appointments to your Lordships’ House should have a time limit, and I agree, as most people have said, with 15 years. The Cross Benches add valuable expertise to your Lordships’ House which is particularly important when fewer and fewer Members of the House of Commons have experience of any work outside of politics. But most Cross-Benchers are only appointed on or close to retirement, and expertise has a sell-by date. After 15 years, expertise is usually not worth very much, and I believe that political appointments or elections should also be time-limited. In the case of elections that is inevitable, of course, because they will run only until the next appropriate election, but it should apply to those who in the future are appointed to sit in your Lordships’ House as party Members. I would extend this to those who have already been appointed, except that I do not want to be lynched by Members of the House, and indeed it would cause serious problems for my noble friends Lord Strathclyde and Lord McNally.

Quite plainly, our numbers are too large. Since your Lordships’ House is the best geriatric daycare centre in the country, we live for too long. I have been a Member for more than 13 years and I am conscious that my ability to contribute to the House is beginning to decline. When I will have completed my 15 years, my membership should come to an end.

The need to recognise and explain to other people that appointments to your Lordships’ House are for work and not for honour is completely different from the functions of Members of the House in 1911, and it is significantly different from the situation before the House of Lords Act 1999 came into force. But our retention of titles or life membership and other habits are out of date and mislead the public about the character of this place. It is time that we made it clear what we really are and stop pretending to be what our predecessors used to be.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

My Lords, I am strongly in favour of reform of this House and I am strongly in favour of the Bill of my noble friend Lord Steel. I hope that, at the end of the proceedings, he will press his Motion because I think it deserves support. It will give an instant impetus to what I would call sensible and organic reform and will stand to the credit of this place. Having said that, I also agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, said at the beginning of the debate when she observed that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I do not think that this House is broke. It needs reform, certainly, but it is not broke. Sometimes I scratch my head and wonder how the other place manages constantly to point at us because if there is a broken House in our Parliament, it is, I fear, the other place.

Before I go on to say why, contrary to my instincts, I am against elections, I would say briefly that I am strongly in support of what the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, said in opening for the Opposition—that at some point we must have a referendum on the issue of election if it is pressed forward. I spoke to that effect in the debate on the Queen’s Speech and I do not propose to add to it more than to support what she said; she covered most of the key points.

To come back to elections, I was interested to hear the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, say that he thought that if 20 per cent of the House was retained on an appointed basis, he did not really see how the outcome would be very different from what we have now. I disagree with him radically for these reasons. The 80 per cent elected would, I fear, be beholden to the party members who put them on the list. Those high on the list would be particularly beholden and once in this House they would have, if you like, a powerful partisan obligation to be a great deal more observant of the Whips than Members currently feel they must be. Secondly, those personal party loyalties which are a natural—

[Lord Goodhart]

What does my noble friend think is the difference between that situation and the present situation in which appointments are made by the party leaders? Are they not equally under an obligation?

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

They are under an obligation, but a much more fuzzy and weaker one, and they are not constantly having to go back to their constituencies —as an elected Member would have to do—to justify themselves to their members. I have no doubt about that. As I was saying, the personal party loyalties, which are perfectly normal and good in our system, would not—contrary the hopes of the noble Lord, Lord Butler—allow many outsiders to appear high on the party list at elections.

In any event, the number of party members in this country is very low and still declining.