House of Lords: Labour Peers’ Working Group Report

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, the House does not often spend a day debating a report by a committee of one of the parties in it. Naturally, as a member of my noble friend Lady Taylor’s group, I hope that the quality of our report justifies it. Certainly under the admirable joint chairmanship of my noble friends Lady Taylor and Lord Grenfell—goodness, we miss him—we did not approach our task in a partisan spirit.

There is another good reason why this House should address a Labour report on this subject. We are not going to see fundamental reform of this House under a Tory Government, not under one in coalition with the Liberal Democrats and not under a majority one. Tory Back-Benchers crushed the misbegotten Clegg Bill, and the humiliation is not one that any Tory Prime Minister is likely to wish to repeat. However, it is perfectly possible that a Labour Government would contemplate fundamental Lords reform, particularly if the party required the support of any Lib Dems who may remain in the new Parliament to form a Government. What form should that fundamental reform take? That is the question our report addresses.

As several noble Lords have said, our group did not opine on election to the Lords. We agreed instead on two related propositions: first, that Lords reform needed to be looked at by a broad constitutional commission; and, secondly, that any move to election should be subject to a referendum.

We did canvass one major objection to election, which has come up in this debate; namely, that it would lead to a power struggle between the two Houses of Parliament. That part of the case has been immeasurably strengthened as a result of recent developments. We do not now have, or we cannot be sure we are going to have, a three-party system in England. We have a four or perhaps five-party system emerging. It is perfectly possible that the next Government will be formed by a party with, say, 30% to 35% of the Members of the House of Commons on a turnout of say 66%, a Government who have the support of only about a fifth of the electorate. If at the same time you had a Lords elected on a proportional basis, which has always been the proposal for this House, its Members would be sure to go for a power grab. That is what elected people do. If you have any doubts, see the present bid by the European Parliament to seize control over who becomes President of the European Commission. Unlike the situation in the French Senate, which has been referred to, we do not have a mechanism in this country to resolve contested issues where the two Houses disagree, although our report suggests that such machinery be created. So the danger of stasis would be very great indeed. The Americans, of course, put up with that, but theirs is a country which wants government to be weak. We, mostly, do not.

I add one other point on the relative roles of the two Houses, which was not considered in our report and which bears on election. Since I joined this House 15 years ago—it seems unbelievable—it has become more assertive and more successfully assertive. The evidence is laid out in Meg Russell’s magisterial The Contemporary House of Lords. This is not surprising. The removal of most hereditary Peers—the speech just made by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, will serve as a threnody to their joys—has increased the legitimacy of the House greatly while that of the House of Commons, I am afraid and regret, has unquestionably declined.

The result is a distinct shift in the balance between the two Houses. In most cases, but not all, that has been hugely to the benefit of our national governance—blocking, for example, populist snap measures in response to some alleged movement in public opinion at the cost of fundamental civil liberties. However, what we have had to throw out is as nothing compared to what would have happened if there had not been a House of Lords. Governments would then have had no need to stop at anything. I would fear for the nature of our democracy in a situation under which the House of Lords was a great deal weaker. In other words, I favour a balance of power between the two Houses. Of course, the Commons should retain ultimate supremacy, but the balance now is a great deal better than it was when I first came into politics when, frankly, the Commons got its way, this House had low attendance and with a large proportion of hereditaries was largely ignored by Ministers. The balance we have now is one thing in our constitution which is working correctly.

I have a couple of points on which to end. The Leader of the House manages to say that there is no problem with numbers. You cannot come into this House every day and believe that there is no problem with its numbers. You cannot sit through debates in which people are making one or two-minute speeches, or sit through the bear-garden that is now Question Time, and think that there is no problem with numbers. We have a double-pronged approach to this: retirement after the Parliament after which you turn 80 and a minimum attendance of 60% of sittings. There is no ideal way of getting these numbers down but, frankly, these are hardly draconian measures. The alternative is a House that grows and grows, when the aim should be to shrink the membership to 450.

My final point is that when the constitutional commission meets, it will not face a Cleggian choice between an elected House and the present House. There are many ways in which the House could be chosen. There has today been a lot of canvassing of a more federal House, such as the German Bundesrat. There is a case for that, although I have doubts about whether it is a good idea to have both Houses chosen on a geographical basis, because the House of Commons is chosen by MPs sitting for constituencies. There is a case for a different basis here. I am quite interested in an occupational basis, which is something a constitutional commission could look at.

Whatever option might be chosen, there are complex questions involved in any method of choosing the House about the interrelationship between the basis for membership and party allegiance. For there is one thing upon which our group was absolutely unanimous, and which I hope would command unanimity in this House: we do good work—by God, we do good work —only because in the House of Lords the Government can never be sure of winning.