House of Lords: Reform

Lord Higgins Excerpts

Monday 11th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Higgins]

My Lords, I think that we are all very clear what the purposes of this Chamber are: first, to act as a revising Chamber with regard to legislation, which was tremendously important in the last Parliament because the House of Commons had virtually ceased to legislate and programmed everything; and, secondly, to hold the Government to account. That was, again, demonstrated very clearly in the previous Parliament, when the Government were more preoccupied with passing Acts on terrorism and so on than with human rights, liberty and so forth. We therefore have tremendously important responsibilities.

I do not propose to repeat the very well rehearsed basic arguments about election and non-election, although I suddenly discover that we have great publicity as a result of the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, pointing out that it would undermine the sovereignty of the House of Commons. He failed to mention that it would also undermine the position of individual Members of Parliament in their constituencies. Instead, I want to draw attention to what seemed to me a considerable danger: that some developments since the election may undermine the status of this House, and consequently make it easier for people to say, “We should have an elected Chamber instead”.

I start with two-minute speeches. I do not recall any precedent for them, but I would be rather surprised if the media do not suddenly say, “Well, here they are, all making two-minute speeches at a new rate of expenses”, then work out the cost-effectiveness of those speeches. The arithmetic is not terribly difficult, but this is not a laughing matter. In that context, one should also say clearly that the bureaucracy has somehow come up with a form for claiming expenses where you have to decide each month what rate to claim, whereas we all know perfectly well that we come here sometimes for a short time and sometimes for a very late-night sitting. We ought to have the flexibility to be able to decide the appropriate level within given ranges.

The other thing that somewhat endangers us is that we are clearly in a coalition now and, as a result, it will be more difficult for the opposition forces to defeat the Government by way of persuasion, whereas in the previous Parliament we certainly had the opportunity to do that by persuading the other parts of the House to go along with us. It appears that that will no longer be the case.

Finally, on the size of the House, again there is a considerable danger that we are getting so large as to be open to ridicule. We ought to be gravely concerned about that, because all these recent developments lead to the position of the House being undermined and the call for it to be an elected Chamber.