House of Lords: Lord Speaker’s Committee Report

Lord Hayward Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, it is difficult when you rise at this stage in the debate to know how to cover things that are new, and I do not want to repeat many of the comments that have been made by many other people in the Chamber today during the debate. I would merely say at this stage that I agree very much with what has just been said by the noble Lords, Lord Cromwell and Lord Mawson.

I look back 34 years ago plus one month when, as a new Member of Parliament for Bristol, I stood up at Business Questions for the first time in the other Chamber and asked if we could have a debate on reducing the number of Members in the House of Commons. Thirty-four years on, there has been no reduction. As I say, I was MP for Bristol. Rather than going back a mere 50 years to Visconti, as my noble friend Lord Grade referred to earlier, if one goes back 230 years there was another much greater MP for Bristol, one Edmund Burke, who advocated that in terms of the British constitution we should adapt to change while affirming traditional values. That is what I think the report of the noble Lord, Lord Burns, achieves so admirably. I could therefore describe the report as positively Burkean.

The only comment that I want to make goes back to what I said just now about the number of MPs. By any measure—the noble Lord, Lord Horam, referred to this in part earlier—this country is overgoverned. We have too many Members of this and the other House, and too many Ministers. I hope that by the rapid implementation of the Burns report this House can lead the way.