House of Lords: Labour Peers’ Working Group Report

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, strongly welcome the report. My noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton and my good friend Lord Grenfell, now ensconced in Paris, have done a remarkable job. They have taken on board a clear change of mood in the country about the question that we are trying to answer. A degree of repetition and predictability had come into the debate regarding elect/appoint, to which the answer was primacy or non-primacy. You cannot get on a horse called Primacy of the House of Commons while at the same time getting on another horse going in the exact opposite direction called Elect, without having to have a kind of Supreme Court role in the middle.

It is indicative of the value of the report that the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, a speaker of some distinction on these matters on the Conservative Benches, has expressed his appreciation for the open-mindedness with which the members of the Labour Party commission have approached this question. I think that that is significant.

Something whose significance I do not know—maybe a member of the commission could answer this later—is that for the past couple of hours, the annunciators have referred to the Labour Peers’ Working Group report on the future of the House of Lords and its place in “a wider constitution”. The actual terms of reference were to consider long-term proposals for reform of the House of Lords and its place in “the wider constitution”. I have been thinking about that. “The wider constitution” suggests that we have a fixed constitution and we have to find how the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fit within it. If we are starting to use the phrase “a wider constitution”—although it may be that I am just picking on an accidental usage of the indefinite article on the annunciators—given what is happening in so many related debates at present, that may be apt. I think that we are indeed now talking about the place of reform in “a wider constitution”—in other words, a constitution that does not look exactly like the one that we have at the moment. That has been an interesting change in the past few months.

To mention one context, whatever happens in the Scottish referendum, there will be shifts in some ways between the balance in London and Edinburgh. Need one say that the role of the Treasury comes into this? Then there will be knock-on effects of any Treasury changes in the rebalancing of the north and south of England and so on and looking at whether there is too much centralisation in the great wen called London.

That relates to the discussions that we have had about how people get into this House and the imbalance in the socioeconomic groups that they come from. We have exacerbated that problem by the way in which, as some people have pointed out, our expenses system makes it pretty tough for people living in the north of England, who have a genuine need for a second home, to keep up a second home here for 365 days a year for only 120 days’ expenses. That is also relevant to how we see our role fitting in with the changing perceptions around the country of what we want politicians for, whether we in this House are politicians and so on. I say to my noble friend Lord Whitty that simply electing “another lot of politicians”, selected in exactly the way that the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Clifton, referred to, prima facie cannot be the answer to the question that has been posed.

All these thought-provoking problems lead us to the criticism that has been made that it is not really a sensible idea to throw everything under the sun into a convention. We all have experience of these matters in different fields. Surely the point can be made that we could have some sort of umbrella framework commission to see precisely how things interact within the scope of those examinations. I do not think that it would mean a royal commission report volumes thick; it would not need to be much longer than this report, as clear thinking by people with experience is what is needed.

I have two other remarks to make. One is about size. I hope that the Liberal Democrats will appreciate the hubris of their demand in 2010 that the proportions in this House reflect the results of the previous election; it is most unlikely, if one were to take that literally, that that would be very good news for them a year from now. I am not saying this in any spirit of trying to be clever about it but it simply shows that one needs a long-term interparty agreement, possibly chaired by the chairman of the statutory Appointments Commission once it becomes statutory—not, by the way, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, in order to have anyone else select which members of the Conservative Party become Conservative Members of this House but simply to get the balance between the parties. That is certainly overdue.

My other remark is that we have to look at the internal workings of the House. I support some of the points made by my noble friend Lord Whitty about our committee structure. If we are going to elect everyone, we might start by electing members of our committees.

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[Lord Borrie (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a delight—as it would have been on other occasions—to follow the noble Viscount, Lord Tenby. We have known one another for many years now and I am not surprised that he has given a measured and generally favourable comment on the report that we are debating. He has said all I need to say about the excellence of this report. My noble friend Lord Lipsey need not fear that the only people round the House who would welcome the report would be those in one particular political party. We have found this afternoon that many of the comments, and many of the conclusions of the report, have been supported on all sides. I am sure that my noble friend Lady Taylor must be very pleased with the outcome of this debate.

I want to comment on two matters, both of which the group regarded as either too difficult, and therefore put into the “too difficult” tray, or in some other way not appropriate for it to go into, perhaps owing to a large number of disagreements.

The first is the matter of religious groups. Here I come in to attack the Bishops’ Benches, and I am glad that there are two of them there now because there was a danger a short while ago that nobody would be there. In recent years various religious groups have increasingly found membership of this House by the Appointments Commission, and the rest of us in this House have welcomed that a Sikh, a Muslim or two, rabbis from the Jewish faith and, of course, quite a few non-conformist Christian groups have been so represented. In other words, Bishops are no longer the only people representing a particular religious faith.

Perhaps, of course, I should emphasise that the Bishops have a specially privileged position. The matter has been raised by a number of noble Lords this afternoon and my understanding is that, at any given moment, the two Archbishops, the Bishops of Winchester, London and Durham, plus 21 other Bishops in accordance with the seniority of their appointment, are eligible to sit in this House. That is a total of 26. Compared with the other religions that I mentioned, which may have some limited representation through the Cross Benches, that is an extraordinary number which could hardly be justified in the long term. However, when changes are made in this House, the short term seems to become the long term. I am not sure whether the Bishops would agree with me but surely, in any new House, the representation of Bishops must be changed. [Interruption.] There we have the usual mix of views from the Liberal Democrat Benches.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I ask my noble friend Lord Borrie to note not only the long history of many centuries but that the established church is part of the equation, as are prayers at the beginning of the Sitting. This would widen considerably what the constitutional commission would look at. Could this not be considered by a different constitutional commission? That needs to be thought about.

[Lord Borrie]

I note what my noble friend is saying. My feeling is that, despite this being a difficult question in terms of history—and it certainly seems to be regarded by a number of colleagues through the House of Lords generally as an embarrassing question to raise—I would like to hear whether the Bishops have any agreement at all with me as regards the 26 Bishops who are entitled to sit being a permanent feature of this House.

The other matter in the group’s report that I want to mention was one that was put off for some future discussion—the position of the Lord Speaker. Since we changed from having a Lord Chancellor, we went fairly quickly into creating a Lord Speaker, who, together with the work of the deputies, some of whom we have seen today, does a remarkably good job. However, a matter alluded to several times this afternoon is the large number of Lords and the fact that, at Question Time in particular, there is great competition between large numbers of new Members in particular to catch the eye of the powers that be. It is not the eye of the Speaker, as it would be in the House of Commons. There may be four or five people on one side and two or three on the other—but the job of choosing between them is not that of the person sitting where he or she would best be able to see where the voices are coming from but of someone sitting on the Government Front Bench. Nearly half of those in the House are sitting behind that person and therefore cannot be seen; the Leader of the House or the Whip tasked to consider that matter does not know who is getting up behind him or her. Of course, it is so often the case that the person with the loudest voice is the one heard best.

Would it not be better if the task that we give to a non-independent person, the Leader of the House or the Whip, no matter how fair they try to be, was done by the Chairman or Speaker? We have put that issue aside as the years have gone by. I can see that the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, in his role as Deputy Speaker, is doing what I do not think he is supposed to do—he is shaking his head. I do not think that he is supposed to give an indication of his view. Perhaps he can nod, but not shake.

There are certain matters that the group considered and put into the “too difficult” box, and it is a pity that it will be years before we get any conclusion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The House has a structure of committees that regularly discuss House procedures. I am not able to give any commitment. We have already discussed within this Parliament the question of the role of the Lord Speaker, for example, and the House decided at that point that it did not wish to move further. It is unlikely between now and the next election that major changes will be agreed and made, but it is certainly quite appropriate that further discussions should continue.

On the question of the size of the House, the figure of 450 Members suggested in this report was in the Government’s Bill. In the long run, we might also have a smaller House of Commons if more power is devolved to the regions and the nations. Indeed, the Conservative proposals that fell saw a House of Commons of 600 rather than 650. How to move from here to there is of course the most difficult issue. Do we go for an age limit or for a time limit—or, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, suggested, a post-election weeding out within each group, which would be a wonderful series of bloodlettings within each of the two groups?

A member of the Supreme Court talked to me some months ago about the statutory age of senility. It is a wonderful concept which, for judges, is slowly being reduced from 75 to 70. The suggestion is made here for the Lords’ statutory age of senility to be 80. I realised the last time we debated this that I will hit 25 years of service in this House within a couple of months of reaching the age of 80—and that, clearly, is the point at which I should do what Lord Grenfell did so gracefully and retire. We should all accept that we cannot move from where we are to where we would like to be without a number of us retiring. The suggestion that I think I got from the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, that those of us who are here already should somehow be exempt from the changes, is not possible.

The reason I will not give any commitment about future lists, although I am not aware of any list at the present, is that we need to keep renewing and refreshing the House. As the noble Lord, Lord Gordon of Strathblane, said, experience and expertise go stale. When I joined the House, it had an average age of 67. It now has an average age of 70—I have just passed it. It has 139 Members over the age of 80 and only 131 under 60. That House is a little difficult to defend.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

Does the Minister not accept that most people think that the major motive of Governments in having extra lists is that they will have a net increase in their number here. The idea that it is motivated by renewal of the House is not how the dark arts of 10 Downing Street operate.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am not an expert on the dark arts of Downing Street—perhaps the noble Lord is. I simply stress that the question of age balance is important, and the idea of a House that stops recruiting new Members and simply grows older and older relatively gracefully is not one that we would accept or recognise.