House of Lords: Reform

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Tuesday 21st June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield]

My Lords, there have been several plans for the demise of your Lordships’ House over the past century or so, but today I have in mind a little known example dreamt up in a fleeting moment almost exactly 114 years ago by an Independent Labour Member of the other place, John Burns. The occasion was the great naval review off Spithead to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, and the date was 26 June 1897. Mr Burns, along with his fellow MPs, was aboard the huge Cunarder, the “Campania”. Just ahead of the great liner was a much smaller vessel, the “Danube”, on which their Lordships of the day serenely sailed as they passed along the lines of the most powerful fleet the world had ever seen. John Burns suddenly piped up with a suggestion that if the captain of the “Campania” could be persuaded to put on a quick burst of speed and ram the “Danube”, the question of the House of Lords would be settled for ever. We have been living in the shadow of a possibly terminal collision ever since the crisis summer of 1911, and the draft Bill before us today, if it succeeds, will be it.

The future of your Lordships’ House has been a part of the recitative of British politics and constitutional history ever since, at Sir Edward Grey’s insistence, a passage was inserted into what became the Parliament Act 1911, describing it as an interim measure until,

“a second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of a hereditary basis”,

could be brought into being. However, the conditions of your Lordships’ collective probation have altered very substantially since the great constitutional showdown of 1911, when your Lordships’ hands were prised from money Bills and this House’s delaying power set at a tariff of two years. In 1949 that tariff was reduced to a single year, and in 1958 Parliament passed the Life Peerages Act, the most beneficial and cumulatively transforming of all the Lords-related statutes.

One of the most surprising things the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Nick Clegg, has said about the current question of your Lordships’ House is that he wishes to “gently cajole” us “from the 19th into the 21st century”. This was in conversation with Jon Snow on “Channel 4 News” on 5 April this year. It is as if in composition and provenance, we were unchanged from the Peers aboard the “Danube” in 1897. Mr Clegg’s knowledge, too, of the ingredients of the 1911 Act is lacking. The White Paper before us asserts the coalition’s belief,

“that the powers of the second chamber and, in particular, the way in which they are exercised should not be extended and the primacy of the House of Commons should be preserved”.

In other words, the Government declare that a largely elected second Chamber will not by its very existence create a potential rival to the other place. This was not the view of the Deputy Prime Minister’s Liberal ancestors when they framed the 1911 legislation. For, as my former student Dr Andrew Blick has reminded me, there is another paragraph in that famous preamble to the Parliament Act which is about powers. It reads like this:

“And whereas provision will require hereafter to be made by Parliament in a measure effecting such substitution”—

that is, of an elected House for a hereditary one—

“for limiting and defining the powers of the new Second Chamber, but it is expedient to make such provision as in this Act appears for restricting the existing powers of the House of Lords”.

The key verbs are “limiting” and “defining”. In other words, Asquith, Lloyd George and Grey acknowledged that a popularly chosen second Chamber required a statutory limitation of its powers—that, without a redefinition of the relative powers of the two Houses, the dangerous prospect of duelling Chambers would arise. It is the question of powers that is the fault line into which this draft Bill will sink.

So, how to proceed? How best to secure a dignified recognition of reality on the part of the proposers of this legislation? One way is to arrange for the Bill to start its passage in your Lordships’ House, thereby avoiding a grade 1-listed row about the use of the Parliament Act. Could not the Joint Committee, on which I shall have the honour to serve, be given longer to pursue its scrutiny and evidence-gathering than is currently expected? This would increase the chances of a mature debate, without the clock ticking, between the Joint Committee reporting and the next general election, allowing a well informed choice to be made by the electorate on at least those sections of the party manifestos that deal with the future of the second Chamber.

There need be no shame and no loss of political face in such a timetable if it could be agreed to soon, before hardened positions are taken up and a debilitating, time-eating trench warfare breaks out, without dignity and shorn of the possibility of a consensual outcome. This would provide time, too, for a set of organic reforms to be given a parliamentary run along the lines suggested in the Bill proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood, and the reports produced for the Leader of the House by the noble Lords, Lord Hunt of Wirral and Lord Goodlad.

Reform of our Chamber is needed and we must avoid what de Tocqueville called a “perpetual utterance of self-applause”. But every page of the coalition’s proposals before us today carries an invisible watermark which reads, “All this will end in tears”. There is a better way and it lies in organic reform, not abolition, of your Lordships’ House.