House of Lords: Labour Peers’ Working Group Report

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friends. The tone of their report is right and they have charted out an extensive area of common ground. They are proud of our institution but also critical of it. It always seems to me that the test that should be applied to proposals for reform of your Lordships’ House is not whether they would be popular or radical but whether they would tend to improve or impair the functioning of the House and of Parliament as a whole. The working group has made an unanswerable case for reform and I agree with nearly everything that it has said. Some of what it has recommended has already been advanced in the recent Steel Act.

I profoundly agree with my noble friends when they say:

“Constitutional reform only works well, perhaps only works at all, when it is the product of consensus, conducted away from partisan political processes and electoral considerations”.

No Prime Minister or Deputy Prime Minister, and no party or coalition of parties, has the right to play fast and loose with our constitution. Politicians are elected and we in this House are appointed to serve within the frame of the constitution. We should have massive respect for the constitution, which is the product of the whole of our political history. A majority in the House of Commons, particularly in circumstances of coalition, does not confer upon the politicians who find themselves in office for the time being an entitlement to rewrite the constitution at whim or act recklessly towards our historic institutions. The formal power to do so does not confer a moral right to do so. An elective dictatorship is still a dictatorship. Our unwritten constitution is predicated on restraint and on the attempt by those in government to construct a genuine majority, indeed a consensus, where major reform is in question.

There is an excellent passage in the report on the desirability of political balance in your Lordships’ House. The working group is right to dismiss the newfangled doctrine enunciated in the coalition’s programme for government that it would be appropriate to make appointments to a second Chamber so as to create a Chamber,

“reflective of the share of the vote secured by the political parties in the last general election”.

There is no basis in theory or convention for that proposition. It was a self-serving proposition that betrayed a failure to understand the place of your Lordships’ House within our wider constitution. The role of this House is to scrutinise and advise, to hold the Executive to account and to act as a check and balance against the more arbitrary or ill considered initiatives of the Government and the House of Commons. We perform that role by way of debates, reports, questions and, perhaps most importantly, the amendments that we recommend to legislation.

To perform that last responsibility of offering our advice to the elected House of Commons by way of amendments to Bills is difficult, if not practically impossible, in circumstances where the Government have a political majority in this House. We understand that, by definition, the Government of the day have a majority in the elected House of Commons and will use their majority to get their way. For that very reason it is inappropriate that the Government should also be able to use the political machine, through a whipped vote with an assured majority, equally to bulldoze opposition and get their way in the second Chamber. Ministers ought to be able to make their case rationally and persuasively, and to prevail by virtue of their arguments. The House works properly when no party has a political majority, and certainly when no coalition has one.

There are at present rumours that new Members from the coalition parties are to be appointed to your Lordships’ House to increase their political majority even further. They do not need it, not least because, as we have seen from the valuable statistics offered to us by the House of Lords Library, all Governments—not just the present coalition Government—can typically rely on some 18 to 20 Cross-Bench votes to boost their majority. If they create more Peers now, it would simply be an abuse of patronage.

I am apprehensive of the recommendation in the working group’s report for a constitutional commission. It is true that we face major systemic challenges all at once: the move to Scottish independence which will issue, at a minimum, in more devolution because of vague and rash commitments made by the political parties; our future relationship with the European Union as the integration of the eurozone proceeds; the growing problem of the disproportionate power of London within our national life; and, of course, the widespread disaffection of our citizens from our formal democratic processes. My noble friends have been tempted by a grand attempt to wrap up all these issues in a blueprint for constitutional reform but I think that the parties should distance themselves from any such exercise. It might valuably be undertaken by academics and think tanks, which could elucidate the issues and offer useful ideas.

A royal commission, or a commission or convention, will get things wrong. What they recommend will be found not to work. Even the founding fathers of the United States of America, those preternaturally wise constitution-makers, failed to anticipate the power of the Supreme Court within their system. They failed to anticipate the impasse created by having two elected Houses of the Congress. The members of the National Convention that was established in the French revolution thought that they could rebase French history at the year zero. Their work proceeded amid the utmost bitterness and its products were proved unstable in practice. In the end, much of what they did was undone. The members of the Scottish Constitutional Convention, the architects of devolution, thought that they had designed a system which would be proof against one party and one man dominating the Scottish Parliament and driving Scotland on a reckless path towards the break-up of the United Kingdom. They failed to foresee the future.

The phrase “constitutional settlement” always rings an alarm bell with me, as it did when I saw it in the report. There is no such thing as a constitutional settlement. Written constitutions are in due course amended or indeed overthrown; unwritten constitutions continuously adapt and develop organically in response to new events and needs. That is their great merit. My noble friends were right to call for gradualism: for an incremental, pragmatic and cautious approach of testing opinion, seeing what works and beginning to descry what may be appropriate at the next stage. However, they contradicted themselves by then saying that there ought to be a commission to report within two years by working at breakneck speed—the grass would be far too short—and then that there should be legislation within the next Parliament. If we were to proceed that way, I fear that way constitutional madness would lie.

As politicians, we are guardians and trustees of our constitution. If Parliament, after much debate, concludes that major constitutional change is needed and that there ought, for example, to be an elected second Chamber then it would be right that that proposition should be put to the people in a referendum. The constitution belongs to the people and not to the political class.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I have listened to and read our debates on the gracious Speech with interest. I was struck by the catalogue of omissions that this Government had made and what should have been done. I am therefore delighted that the first debate in Labour time is a navel-gazing exercise on reform of the House of Lords. It is also the first debate on reform of the Lords that I have taken part in where Conservative Peers have been outnumbered by Labour Peers by over five to one.

I found the report a very interesting document and a useful contribution to our ongoing debate about reform of the Lords. I have one criticism of it: I thought that the way in which the recommendations were set out made it difficult to tie them in with the places in the text where they appeared. That could have been clearer.

However, we ought not to be considering reform of the Lords without the wider context. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby said, reform of the other place is just as important as reform of this one. While I am on Bishops, or indeed past Bishops, I say to the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, that defeats are but a small part of what this House does. When I was a Minister I was much more interested in getting a compromise with the other side. There was therefore no Division and it did not strike a headline, but it was actually better for the country to do it that way round.

People change when they come to this House. It is noticeable how many Members from another place change when they come here. Therefore, I say to my noble friend Lord Stephen that he should not be surprised that some in the Labour Party have changed their position, from being abolitionists of this House, to wanting an elected House, to wanting something a bit more democratic, a bit more in touch. That is quite normal when people come here and see the advantage of this House and that it should be maintained.

Where I disagree profoundly with the report is on the question of hereditary Peers, and I do so on a point of principle. I take your Lordships back to 1999 when we discussed this and what the then Lord Chancellor, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, said. He was referring to the Weatherill agreement:

“The noble Lord’s amendment would provide for the interim retention of one in 10 of the hereditary Peers, 75 out of the existing 750, plus 15 hereditary office-holders, until the second stage of House of Lords reform has taken place. The amendment reflects a compromise negotiated between Privy Councillors on Privy Council terms and binding in honour on all those”—

I stress “all those”—

“who have come to give it their assent. Like all compromises it does not give complete satisfaction to anyone. That is the nature of compromise”.—[Official Report, 30/3/99; col. 207.]

A lot of people who had served this country well left this House as a result of that. There was no alternative to that compromise. It was a fait accompli. We were not allowed to amend it. It would be quite wrong for the hereditary Peers to be removed and for by-elections to be stopped until we have stage two. I see it as somewhat similar to Russia being able to tear up an international agreement about Ukraine when something binding in honour in the House on which we voted is summarily torn up. I will fight that—

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords—

[The Earl of Caithness]

No, I am not going to give way to the noble Lord. I have limited time, and I will debate this with him at length on another occasion.

The report suggests that attendance should be three-fifths of the working time. That happens already. If one looks at the latest figures, since the 2010 Session the figure is already more than 60%, and I am glad to report that the hereditary Peers are higher than the rest of the House. It just shows that the hereditary Peers are taking their duties more seriously than the life Peers. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Richard, that it is the hereditary Peers who are the block to stop the subtle creation of an appointed House. He and I want an elected House; therefore, I say to him that we should keep the hereditary Peers because we are his best chance of getting the elected House.

On the size of the House, I think 450 is too large. I would like to see a House half the size of another place. I shall make two suggestions about how we can get to whatever figure is agreed, be it 450, 300 or half the other House. We have had an election of hereditary Peers, so why do we not have an election of life Peers? That would reduce the numbers quite happily.

My second suggestion would be that no MPs are allowed to be made Peers until five years after they have ceased to be an MP. One could offer them a peerage without the right to sit in this House, but I think it would help the House if there were rather fewer former MPs. Our debates have changed in character enormously due to their influence. A lot of that is to the good, but there is quite a lot that is to the bad.

I disagree about money Bills. I think the House of Lords should now discuss money Bills. I would say that we are better qualified, having listened to the work of some of our committees, to discuss money Bills than those in another place. I hope that we will be able to discuss them.

Let us take a step back to look at the future. Some people have talked about a constitutional convention or committee to look at this. Whatever happens in Scotland on 18 September, the constitution of this country has to change. We cannot stay with the status quo. Therefore, it might be that this Chamber becomes the chamber of the regions in due course. It would be a very good use of this Chamber. There will have to be fewer Scottish MPs in the other place and there will have to be more self-governance for Wales and perhaps other parts of the United Kingdom, so this Chamber could be transformed to a chamber where all those features came together to discuss things which would not be discussed in another place. We could also continue our role of looking at Europe in a critical way, which we do so effectively in our sub-committees and Select Committees.