House of Lords (Peerage Nominations) Bill [HL]

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 18th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Norton, warmly for introducing the Bill. I thank, too, the Lord Speaker for reminding Downing Street, on behalf of your Lordships’ House, that it would be an abuse of the spirit of the constitution if the departed Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, were again to flood the House with new creations, possibly ignoring objections to individual nominations by the House of Lords Appointments Commission—a fortiori, outgoing Prime Minister Liz Truss. I also thank the members of the existing Appointments Commission for their determination to maintain propriety in the appointments process.

This Bill is one more measure in a programme of incremental reform of the House of Lords, which has been discussed by many of us across the House over the years and has extensive support. Less than revolutionary though the Bill may be, the enigmatic provisions of Clause 7(3), on “additional criteria”, could point the way to significant and beneficial change. I believe strongly in an appointed House. Were we to have an elected second Chamber, the primacy of the House of Commons would be undermined, and the democratic accountability of the Executive muddied. The question remains, however, of how to achieve recognition by the public of the legitimacy of an appointed House.

The existing Appointments Commission has no statutory basis and is the creature of prime ministerial patronage. The authority that it has derives only from the wisdom and steadfastness of its members. It has minimal influence on the appointment of nominees put forward by party leaders. Rationing by Downing Street has significantly reduced its scope to put forward new Cross-Bench Peers. The size of the House has grown inordinately, with mass appointments of political Peers. Whatever the individual merits of new colleagues, the scale and partisanship of appointments has damaged both the reputation and the functioning of the Lords.

If a statutory appointments commission, an SAC, were to be created, it could do much to address the problem of legitimacy and provide over time a more rationally constituted and respected second Chamber. The way to this is indicated in Clause 7(3), which permits the SAC to propose additional criteria for appointments, and in Clause 7(4), which requires that in so doing it must have regard to the diversity of the UK population. It is essential that, as the Bill provides, such criteria are approved by both Houses of Parliament. My hope is that the SAC, in proposing further criteria, would be bold in its proposals. It should invite Parliament to task it to construct a second Chamber, the composition of which provides not only gender balance but a due representation of minorities, age groups and the regions and nations, as well as a spread of occupational and cultural backgrounds. A method should be determined for addressing the difficult issue of how to establish an appropriate balance of the parties in the House of Lords, within the overall requirement of this legislation that no one party may have an absolute majority. An appointed Chamber thus reconstituted, on a basis explicitly approved by the House of Commons, would have legitimacy while being no threat to the democratically elected House.

This reform may be difficult to reconcile with unfettered discretion for party leaders to appoint to the Lords whoever they and their parties wish. That freedom should be subordinated, in the interests of parliamentary democracy, to an overriding duty for the SAC to achieve a suitable balance of skills, backgrounds and party allegiance. It should be accepted, therefore, that the SAC will have a greater power than HOLAC to say no.

Then there is the question of the timescale of the transition, which the Bill does not address. The challenges we face are pressing, and there are other schemes afoot for replacing this House with an institution altogether different. If we are to preserve an appointed House, reform of it had better not be as glacial as Lords reform usually is. We should start by approving this Bill.