House of Lords Reform Bill [HL]

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Friday 3rd December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, we must thank the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood, for refining his Bill into ever more satisfying harmonies, echoed today by the sweetly plucked strings of the noble Marquess, Lord Lothian. I congratulate the noble Marquess and the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield, on their very fine maiden speeches. Both of them have a deep knowledge of Parliament and of our institutions of government and will make invaluable contributions in your Lordships’ House.

I support entirely the purposes of the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood, in his Bill. I will refrain from repeating the case for an appointed as opposed to an elected House—we will have, I fear, all too many opportunities for that in 2011 and 2012—save for saying one thing. I believe that the tests of proposals for reform of your Lordships’ House should be that they would improve the performance and the reputation of Parliament. Proposals for an elected second Chamber would not improve either the performance or the reputation of Parliament. Proposals for an appointed House, reformed through the measures in this Bill, would, however, make us both more competent and more “respected revisers”—in the phrase of the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, drawing from Bagehot.

The Appointments Commission, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme, does very good work indeed as we have seen, for example, in its decision to recommend the appointment of the two noble Lords who made their maiden speeches today. Yet it is unsatisfactory, in principle, that the Appointments Commission is the creation of Downing Street and has to make up the rules as it goes along.

The Bill would legitimise the Appointments Commission. We will continue to need, for the foreseeable future at the very least, to have an Appointments Commission. The Bill would put it on a statutory footing and make its membership independent of Downing Street patronage. Appointments by the Speakers of both Houses would be above reproach. The criteria set out in Clause 5 for the appointment of new Peers and the guidelines that the Appointments Commission might follow, as dealt with in Clause 6, would both have to be approved by both Houses of Parliament. That goes a long way towards dealing with the charge that an appointed House could not be legitimate in a democratic age. It is not a charge that I accept—there are other sources of legitimacy—but it deals pretty effectively with that point. In parenthesis, I hope that among the criteria which might be adopted by the Appointments Commission and approved by both Houses of Parliament would be that big donors to the political parties would be excluded from membership of your Lordships’ House. I hope that we can come to that once we have finally been able to tackle the funding of political parties.

Clause 8(1) also provides for transparency, in that the Appointments Commission would have to give reasons for why it proposed particular individuals for appointment to your Lordships’ House. Clause 8, as a whole, addresses real and important problems. Clause 8(2)(b) stipulates that,

“the Commission shall have regard to”,

the principle that,

“no one party, nor a coalition of parties forming a Government, shall have a majority of members in the House of Lords”.

It is damaging to the character of this House and to the quality of our proceedings that the coalition parties together now have a majority in this House. We stumbled accidentally, as is often the case with constitutional change in Britain, into something of a golden age in the period after 1999 with the emerging constitutional principle that neither the Government nor any other party should have a majority in this House. That has meant that the Government have had to win their case reasonably, by argument and not by force, but since the coalition parties have had a majority in this House they are able to bulldoze your Lordships’ House, and are doing so. We are becoming the upper House of the legislative sausage machine.

I wonder if the means by which this evil is to be eradicated, as set forth in the Bill, are almost too ingenious and elaborate. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood, has sat down at his computer to stress-test, as the bankers say, the compatibility of some of the different provisions in the Bill. It is not obvious to me how we would square the requirements that no one party should have a majority; that the majority of a coalition should be no more than 3 per cent of the membership of the House; that membership of your Lordships’ House, now well over 800, should be no larger in future than the House of Commons, whose membership may indeed be reduced to 600; and that this should be achieved within two full Parliaments, with the hereditaries departing one by one, decapitated by the Grim Reaper but not by any other means, and departures on permanent leave of absence being only voluntary. The measures in this complex section of the Bill are finely tuned but may possibly want some retuning in Committee.

I strongly approve of the principle that the Cross Benches should hold no less than 20 per cent of the membership of your Lordships’ House, but 20 per cent of 600 is only 120, a great many fewer than the 182 Cross-Benchers whose presence and companionship we value so much in our House at the moment. I would be happy to see the Cross-Benchers as a larger proportion of the House. The strengths of the House of Lords ought to complement those of the House of Commons, in that this House represents, in some real sense, the great interests of the land—professional, economic, social and spiritual. If we are to be an advisory House, then the authority and quality of our advice should be marked by professional authority, intellectual standing, specialist expertise, general experience and the reputation of the individuals who are Members of this House. Those are qualities that will not be supplied in any House of Parliament by election, but can be by appointment.

I favour the phased departure of the hereditary Peers, not least because I believe that there should be gratitude and courtesy in politics. It would be wrong for them to be removed summarily and brutally.

The provisions for permanent leave of absence address a pressing and important problem, made more important by the packing of this House by coalition patronage. In the 21st century, the principle of peerages for life is no more acceptable than the hereditary principle for membership of the legislature. Knowledge dates, and wisdom does not invariably grow with the years. The House will need new blood. We may need to find more effective means than are put forward in the Bill. Permanent leave of absence, as proposed in the Bill, should be given only to people who have volunteered for it. Clause 12 deals with those fail to attend, but it will be too easy for them to turn up for one day in a Session for five minutes only and escape that censure. We should not constrain the deliberations of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, and his committee; there is no easy answer to this problem. It is a nettle that the House needs to grasp, and I am not convinced that Part 3, as it is, grasps it.

I hope that the coalition Front Bench will take time out from its conspiracy to create an artificial consensus between the Front Benches in support of an elected House to look at the real merits of the Bill, which is capable of further improvement, and will facilitate the passage into law of the Bill or, at least, of the provisions contained within it.