Strathclyde Review

Lord Jopling Excerpts

Wednesday 13th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jopling (Con)]

My Lords, I have put my name down to speak this afternoon with a background as a former business manager and a former instigator of procedural changes in another place. Quite frankly, it is time that we faced up to the problem of statutory instruments. We have argued about it for years. It is not a new issue. We have had references this afternoon to Lord Simon of Glaisdale and to the reports by my noble friends Lord Wakeham and Lord Goodlad. We need to get on with it. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, who has just spoken, made exactly the same point.

I shall begin by making one or two general points. In my experience, some Ministers are sometimes tempted to cut corners in getting their policies agreed by Parliament. It has nothing to do with the matter before us, but I remember cases where Ministers produced huge draft Bills to the Cabinet committee on legislation and the Cabinet committee said, “Oh no you don’t. You cut that down”, and made them take a third of it out, and that seemed all right. Then, to the fury of the business managers, one found that they put all the things they had taken out back as Schedules to the Bill at Committee stage. One has to put up with the enormous appetite of some Ministers to legislate. That was an abuse.

It is also an abuse to cut corners and try to enact policies through statutory instruments rather than through primary legislation. I deplore that trend. I have never been able to convince myself that the tax credit issue should not have been done through primary legislation. I commend the last few words of my noble friend Lord Strathclyde’s executive summary, where he says that,

“it would be appropriate for the Government to take steps to ensure that Bills contain an appropriate level of detail and that too much is not left for implementation by statutory instrument”.

I believe very strongly in that. I also cannot get my mind around why the tax credit issue came here at all, because it seemed to me that it was a financial issue that we should never have been asked to discuss.

In his report, my noble friend gives us three options. I am very strongly opposed to the first option of taking the consideration of statutory instruments away from this House. That would be a travesty of the bicameral basis of our parliamentary procedures. For the first three or four years, I was a member of the Select Committee on the Merits of Statutory Instruments where, as my noble friend Lord Trefgarne pointed out, we looked at more than 1,000 statutory instruments a year. That consideration of legislation in the form of statutory instruments is hugely important and thorough and is far better than what is carried out down the corridor in another place. Indeed, I was one of the instigators in that committee of the recommendation to reject the draft Gambling (Geographical Distribution of Casino Premises Licences) Order 2007, which this House, quite rightly, kicked out.

I also do not like option 2 because it does not take us much further than the current contentious situation. It seems to be a recipe for continued argument.

I see much more merit in option 3. It preserves the right of the Commons to ride over us. I cannot see the logic of this House being able to delay primary legislation whereas on the other hand it can veto statutory instruments; that seems to me to be the wrong way round, and the two ought to be comparable together. My old friend, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, who I think is no longer here, said that we must preserve the right to say no. Option 3 maintains that right. It is an extension of the Wakeham all-party proposals as well as the similar Goodlad all-party ideas. I suggest that the Government should listen to our views, have this report debated in another place and bring legislation that develops the option 3 proposal. The Leader of the Opposition said in her opening speech that the tax credit event gave the Government the opportunity to think again. So does option 3, and I believe that that is the way we should go.

House of Lords Reform

Lord Jopling Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jopling (Con)]

My Lords, I do not apologise for returning to a theme I have been pursuing for some 12 years in suggesting how this House might be reformed. I was very pleasantly surprised to hear the speech of my noble friend Lord Cormack about the meeting that the committee he runs with my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth has just had. It seems that it embraced nearly all the points I have been advocating for the past 12 years and which, about eight years ago, I presented to that distinguished committee. I do not apologise for returning to this issue because if we are talking about incremental changes, we ought to know where those changes are going to take us and, therefore, where the steps are going to take us.

On the size of the House, I find it rather curious that the Government keep topping up the Members when the same Government, in coalition, proposed in legislation only a few years ago a House of about 500 Members. I think we all agree that the House is now far too big, and I have been advocating a cap for all these years.

The argument I want to make today is entirely illustrative, and I hope it will be taken that way. To make the arithmetic easy, let us suggest a cap of 500. I have suggested all along that the Cross-Bench element should be 20%, which would mean 100 Cross-Bench Peers. I suggest that at each general election, the cap should return to that total of 500. Within each Parliament, there should be only limited opportunities for new appointments, totalling 5% or 10%, say.

I am opposed to an age limit, and I do not agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Steel, is proposing. I would leave it to each party after each general election, based on the result, to decide who stays and who goes. The party caucus knows best who contributes, who attends, who does not bother and who is really of no great assistance.

I come to a point that I have not made before. People often talk about the party balance of the 400 Members who are left, saying that it should reflect either the general election or the state of the party balances in another place. I have always advocated that the balance of the parties here should reflect what goes on outside. I have been trying to illustrate how that might work, and I am most grateful to Russell Taylor of the Library, who has done a survey for me on how the 400 Peers with a party affiliation might be split. He has kindly worked out for me what the House would look like today if the remaining 400 were proportionately distributed among the UK parties, based on a halfway point between their percentage share of the vote and their percentage of seats in the House of Commons after each general election.

I find the result quite interesting. Under present arrangements, the Conservative Party would have 175 seats, some 38% of the total vote in this House. The Labour Party would have 132 seats—about 27%—not far from where they are now. The Scottish National Party would have 27 seats, about 5%. The Liberal Democrats would have 18 seats, about 4%. UKIP would have 26 seats, about 5%. The Greens would have eight seats, which is between 1% and 2%. That would leave 14 seats for some of the regional groups—the Northern Ireland parties and Plaid Cymru—which together would have around 3% of the total. This is purely an illustration of how it might be done. You could alter it so that it was not 50% of votes and seats, but that would be a matter for discussion.

I believe, as I have believed for the last 12 years, that a solution such as this would result in a House with a substantial Cross-Bench element, which everyone seems to want. You would have a Government with less than 40% of the vote and maybe a cap on all governments, so that they would not be allowed to go over that figure. It would avoid having a membership that mirrored that of the Commons, which an elected Chamber, to which I am opposed, would lead. It would mean that the House of Lords would remain no ultimate threat to the House of Commons. I make these suggestions once more as illustrations, and I hope they may be helpful.