House of Lords Reform (No. 2) Bill

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Friday 28th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, inevitably, we are towards the end of a debate—perhaps the end of a process as far as this Parliament is concerned. I just want to thank the two people who have been most involved in this Bill: Dan Byles, a new Member in the House of Commons and, of course, and the noble Lord, Lord Steel, who I suppose we would have to say is probably now in the middle phase of his parliamentary career. They have combined so effectively to give us the Bill that we have today. It is a Bill which is sensible, straightforward and focused. I am therefore quite surprised that it is highly likely to find its way onto the statute book.

I repeat my congratulations to my noble and very good friend Lord Grenfell. He has added an additional service today, because, as well as the value of his speech, he has answered a number of the points made about the process that we should adopt when someone leaves this House, because there I rest my case. We do not need any elaborate procedure. We simply need a mechanism which started in the Commons prior to the 2010 election, when Chris Mullin adopted the practice of a valedictory speech just prior to retirement. It worked very well there. It has been copied, although it does not have to be. We simply will not improve on that as a mechanism. I suggest to the House that we do not want anything more elaborate than that.

I remember that when I left the other Chamber in 1979 there was no mechanism to recognise my departure other than cheering in the crowds at the count in my constituency from my political opponents, who did not seem too distraught at my departure from the Commons. I think we should leave it at that point.

As there is little more that I want to say about the Bill, which I support, and as we are not too far from the end of this Parliament and this will almost certainly be the last House of Lords reform Bill in this Parliament, I would like to use my few moments to consider what we have learnt about the process of Lords reform and what lessons it might offer for the future.

It can be called simply a tale of two Bills. We had the Government’s Bill, which was introduced soon after the start of this Parliament, and we have the Bill before us today. The contrast could not be greater on a whole range of bases. The first was a government Bill. It had all the massive advantages of being a government Bill. Numerous documents were associated with it, no doubt expensively produced. I have them all in my file on the draft House of Lords Reform Bill. It had the Government’s publicity machine behind it. It was supported by the leaders of all three parties—which always makes you wonder whether we should look at something a bit more carefully. Also, predictably, it was led—I will try to keep this as neutral as I can—evangelically by Mr Nick Clegg, who, as I recall, pointed out at the beginning of this Parliament that this was to be a Parliament which, in terms of constitutional reform, would be on a par with the 1832 constitutionally reforming Parliament of the early part of the last but one century.

For all that, we know exactly what happened to the Bill, whereas the Bill we are considering now was introduced by a private Member—a new Member, as I mentioned. He was not even number one in the ballot but number five. There was very restricted time to get the Bill through. We all know what has happened to the two Bills—I hope that I am not being premature in saying this. One Bill, utterly predictably, as warned time and again by many people who are here in the House today, ran into the sand and ended in ignominy. The other is soon, I hope, to become an established part—albeit a small one—of the constitutional arrangements of this country.

As I suggested, there are some very simple lessons that need to be learnt from that experience. The overwhelming one, as was mentioned by my noble friend Lord Grenfell earlier, is that the lesson from the past 100 years could not be clearer: if you want to reform the second Chamber, you need to focus on a narrow problem to which you provide the solution, and you need clear parliamentary support. The 1911 Bill was about stopping the Lords from writing the Budget—simple, common-sense, straightforward and now part of the constitution. There was the 1958 Bill introducing life Peers—not uncontroversial but with a pretty simple, straightforward objective. There was the 1999 Bill largely to remove the hereditary principle from our legislature—again simple, straightforward, and with a parliamentary majority to back it up. That is the model for constitutional reform, and one that I hope we have all learnt, because what we need for the future is clear Commons support and a simple, straightforward objective.

I will conclude by doing something which I have found to be an almost entirely fruitless activity in the past, which is to give advice to party leaders. It is advice in connection with the manifestos which will shortly be being drafted by large brains in all three parties. It is simply this. If you are to approach constitutional reform in the way of House of Lords reform, as my noble friend Lord Howarth said, please do not try for a Bill that is a grandiose, all-singing, all-dancing solution to all problems. It will not work. Should anyone do that—I do not care which party it is, or which combination of parties—I can speak only for myself, but I look round and think that there may be quite a few others who will create considerable problems. Please do not look in the crystal ball when you can read the history books. Those kinds of proposal do not work. They allow people to grandstand but they achieve nothing.

I end with this plea, not just to the Leader of the House, the noble Lord, Lord Hill, but also to my noble friend Lord Hunt, who will be winding up from our Front Bench. I do not expect them to stand up now and say that a great Lords reform Bill is not going to happen, but I appeal to them to undertake in their winding-up speeches to pass on to their leaders, or whoever draws up their party manifesto, that the settled view of the majority of people in this House, without self-interest at stake—if it takes five or six or seven years, we will all be here, so it is ridiculous to say that it is all about self-interest—on the basis of experience, not least of the experience in this Parliament, is that you can approach it by all means, but approach it on the basis of a clearly defined problem that you are trying to solve. Keep it narrow, make sure you have parliamentary support and you may get something in your manifesto that is not just a wish list but a practical solution to a constitutional challenge.