House of Lords Reform Bill [HL]

Lord Grenfell Excerpts

Friday 3rd December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grenfell]

My Lords, we have heard two remarkable maiden speeches from Peers who will clearly be enormous assets to this House. I wonder whether we would have had that benefit if this had been an all-elected House. I rather doubt it. This is one of the great strengths of the House we have. If I may say so, the news of the conversion of the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, was not just music to my ears but a veritable ode to joy.

I have sometimes been tempted to think of the noble Lord, Lord Steel, as Sisyphus rolling his stone up the hill, only to see it falling back again, down the hill. Of course, Sisyphus was not at all a nice man. The noble Lord, Lord Steel, on the other hand, is an extremely nice man and he will be following Sisyphus not into Hades, but into that pantheon of politicians who never give up on a good cause.

There is a principle which we ignore at our peril, which is that one should not tear down and replace an institution unless one is sure that the defects in the existing institution rendering it insufficiently fit for purpose cannot be corrected. If you believe, as I do, that the creation of a fully or mostly elected second Chamber presumes the abolition of the present institution, in order to create a wholly different one, you will understand why I support the Bill. It seeks to put right some obvious defects and introduce some real improvements, and the means proposed and the ends desired are eminently sensible and achievable. What is more, they can be put in place without prejudice to the discussion we absolutely must have about the purposes of a second Chamber before we tackle the divisive question of its composition.

There is already broad support in this House for most of the measures proposed in the Bill. I know that there is unhappiness in some quarters over the proposed ending of by-elections to fill hereditary vacancies, because of the solemn undertaking given in 1999—of which the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, reminded us. As a hereditary Peer fortunate enough to have been given a life peerage, I share the discomfort of those who feel that a promise made to them risks being broken. On the other hand, it was never foreseen that a second stage of reform would still not have been reached 11 years later.

Our hereditaries make a contribution to the work of this House out of all proportion to their numbers. They contribute individually as Ministers, shadow Ministers, Deputy Chairmen and Deputy Speakers, committee activists, and Front-Bench and Back-Bench experts in many fields of human endeavour. I do not wish to see them go, but in an already inflated House an occasional reduction in their number through natural causes does not seem to be unreasonable. Those remaining should be allowed to serve on as Peers for life, and their continuing contribution should be welcomed on all sides of the House.

As to the Bill’s other proposals, their objectives seem to be subjects of a growing consensus among your Lordships. The case for a statutory appointments commission has been made time and time again and I have no wish to weary the House with further rehearsal of its obvious merits. The case for a permanent leave of absence, one of the options currently under consideration in the group of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, is likewise familiar to the House and I need to make no further comment on that. The provisions in Part 4 for cases of conviction of a serious criminal offence seem to be proportionate, fair and sensible, and I believe that I am far from alone in that view.

So what should we be asking the coalition Government to do? The noble Lord, Lord Steel, was surely correct in suggesting some time ago that these are issues not normally considered to be suitable for a Private Member's Bill, but it is absolutely right that we now carry it forward as a means of making the Government aware of the strength of feeling in many parts of this House that certain measures of reform should not be delayed further. The Minister will doubtless urge us to wait patiently for the delayed draft Bill now promised for early in the new year. Is that a guarantee that the modest reforms proposed in today’s Bill will reappear in some similar form in the later Bill, and, if they do, will we then have to wait years for them to be implemented?

I entirely share the doubts expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, that enactment of any Bill based on the coalition’s awaited draft will have to wait until some time in 2012, and yet we are called upon to be patient. Perhaps I should remind the House, as the poet Dryden wrote:

“Beware the fury of a patient man”.

If the coalition does not agree with the aims of these proposals, it must say so, and, if it does, it must assure us that it will not seek to delay or obstruct their implementation. As I said at the outset, they do not prejudice the outcome of the future debate on the purposes of this House and the composition that will enable us to fulfil those purposes. We are simply trying to ensure that, unless and until this House is, God forbid, abolished and replaced, we have a scrutinising and revising second Chamber even better equipped to do the excellent job that it currently does.

I wish the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Steel, a fair wind and I hope that his stone will remain at the top of the hill.