House of Lords: Labour Peers’ Working Group Report

Lord Maxton Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

The noble Lord is preoccupied with the past. I am talking about the future. That is all we should be talking about. I am not talking in general terms: I am talking in specific terms about what happens in France. We could also look at Germany where the Bundesrat, the second Chamber, represents the Länder. It has a different role and is elected in a different way. There are different models. We could look at Ireland and different models around the world. We can learn from other countries. We should be learning. We do not have a monopoly of knowledge here in the United Kingdom, so we should be doing that.

I would explain to my noble friend Lord Richard if he were here why I am enthusiastic about a constitutional commission. The issue will not be kicked into the long grass. We are saying that the commission should have a period of two years in which to report. I am enthusiastic for two reasons. The first is because we have piecemeal devolution and centralisation—I think that the Liberal Democrats agree with me on that. That needs to be structured, reformed and looked at. But also, looking at how devolution and decentralisation fit in with this Westminster Parliament will help to bind the United Kingdom, which is in danger of fracturing at the moment. The second Chamber can perform a valuable role, not just as a revising Chamber, but by bringing together the various parts of the nation of the United Kingdom and the regions of England. It is worthwhile doing that kind of exercise.

I welcome the contribution of my noble friend Lady Bakewell because it was not one of those reread, pre-prepared contributions. It was commenting on the debate. I hope that during the rest of the debate—and I hope it is a genuine debate in spite of the Front Bench opposite trying to stifle proper debate—we do not just go back into the old tram lines of whether the second Chamber should be directly elected or appointed. There are different ways of looking at it.

[Lord Maxton (Lab)]

Will my noble friend include a third option, which is not elected, nor appointed, but abolished?

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

That is an option, absolutely. It is possible to look at a unicameral option. I was in favour of that. When I was in the other place, I voted for abolition. We have heard about the examples of New Zealand and Israel, and all the Scandinavian countries operate unicameral systems. My only doubt is because of what has happened in Scotland. In Scotland, there is one Chamber which is controlled by one party, which is controlled by one man who decides who the Presiding Officer should be and who members of the committees should be. The committees do what they are told and they do not challenge the Parliament or the Executive. There is no House of Lairds to question, challenge or revise. I am beginning to doubt unicameralism because of that. I have made the main point about the future.

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[Lord Maxton]

My Lords, first, I thank my genuinely noble friend Lady Taylor for the way in which she introduced the report, and for the report itself. It is also a great pity that we do not have her joint chairman, Lord Grenfell, with us. I might not have agreed with his contribution, but it would have been well worth hearing—and as my noble friend says, extremely eloquent.

I have a slightly different point of view from the rest of the speakers so far. I do not believe that we can go on tinkering around with Lords reform without having, as the report quite rightly says, a constitutional commission that looks at the way in which our whole country is governed, how those people who are part and parcel of the elected Houses—I emphasise the plural—are elected, and finally, whether we should be in this building at all.

I will address those three points. First, being in the modern world, we have to have a written constitution. We have to lay down exactly what powers this place has and how much power we devolve to other parts of the United Kingdom—not just to the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly or to Northern Ireland, but to other parts of the United Kingdom as well. To me, devolution was always about devolving power to the people, not necessarily to the institutions that represent those people. First, therefore, we ought to have that part of our constitution in the Bill.

Equally, the changes that have taken place in our society in the past 100 years since we first reformed the House of Lords have been quite remarkable—so much so that we do not appreciate just how much change there has been. In this place there were no women, but there were also no motor cars or aeroplanes, you could not travel the world, there was no internet, telephones, television or radio—none of those things existed 100 years ago. We have achieved all that in part because of democracy: because we are a democratic, free society that allows people to develop new ideas, new thoughts, and new ways of doing things. However, our democracy is now in danger of failing to keep up with that rate and pace of change.

In particular, our younger people do not understand why they should go to a ballot box in some strange school down the road, pick up a pencil and put a cross on a piece of paper to vote, when they could do it with their iPads, mobile phones, or whatever. I suggest that we reintroduce compulsory ID cards, which would form the register and then be part and parcel of electronic voting. That would allow people to vote wherever they want, using some form of encryption to make sure that they are the right people, and would ensure that we had a system which at least our younger people and those who are more adept, shall we say, with the new technologies, could understand and use.

[A noble Lord]

Hear, hear.

[Lord Maxton]

My noble friend says “Hear, hear”, but he is younger than me, and I know how to use those things. We have to keep pace with our younger people in society, moving our constitution forward in a way that allows our young people to say, “That is how we ought to be operating. It’s part and parcel of our life—why isn’t it part of parcel of their lives?”.

That is also to do with the policies in our society. We debate education both down the Corridor, in here, in the Scottish Parliament or wherever it might be. However, no one seems to be aware that the whole of the world’s knowledge is available to me on this tablet—not just the facts, but the ideas as well. Our young people understand that and want to use it, but other people do not.

We are moving to an age when the first person to live to 150 almost certainly is now in their mid-30s or mid-40s. That will become the norm. As politicians we need to be aware of those things and think about them.

My next point is that part of that written constitution has to be to move out of this old building. It is falling apart at the seams and we will have to be shipped out anyway. Why do we not just take the much bolder step of moving out completely? This Chamber and this whole building—certainly for those of us on this side of the House—is riddled with the class system. It is part and parcel of a system of class. It was built for an age when the things I have already mentioned did not exist. We ought to be thinking of building a brand new Parliament somewhere else, which is relevant to the modern age, built for the modern age, in which people can genuinely use the new technologies that have already been developed and will continue to be developed.

I fully support the minor tinkering in the report which can be done without legislation. However, the real part of the report is the establishment of a constitutional commission. That will look at our constitution and draw up a written constitution, which will enable us to relate to the new democracies and the new technologies that are part of democracy. That will make sure that we live in the modern world, that we have policies that are adapted to the modern world, and that we are—if you like—moving forward. The tinkering can no longer take place. The gradual change of our constitution in a world that is changing so rapidly is no longer relevant. We have to ensure that we are part of that change and that change takes place.

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[Lord Phillips of Sudbury (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the Labour Party for having brought its group together and congratulate it on the outcome of its deliberations. Like every other speaker, I cannot resist mentioning the affection in which I held Lord Grenfell. I am sure that he will read this debate and note how many noble Lords thanked him for his part in all this.

I would like to draw to the attention of the House the broad political context in which we are holding this debate and looking at these issues, which has not been much mentioned. That context is one of considerable crisis in this country, not just in the political sense. By all the yardsticks, at no time since the last war has politics been held in such confused and, I am afraid, low repute, and it behoves us to look at the issues we are discussing in the light of that. I share the concern about young citizens expressed by a number of noble Lords. The society that we have constructed is of such barbaric complexity that it is almost impossible to get to grips with it, particularly as our schools do not have a compulsory citizenship programme; in fact, it is being cut back as we speak.

I do not know about other noble Lords but, time without number, when friends and acquaintances discover that I am a Member of the House of Lords, they say, “Thank God for the House of Lords; it at least shows a bit of independence”. Much as I am naturally inclined to support an elected House—it seems on every conceivable, theoretical basis to be the obvious thing—as things stand in this country, and as the Commons is now, an elected House is not an option.

The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, gave some statistics about the occasions when we in the Lords have defeated the Government in the Lobbies. I obtained some statistics a couple of years back from the Commons research department, and they are even more striking than his. In the 11 years up to 2012, we defeated the Government 503 times. In the same period in the Commons, the Government were defeated six times—once in every two years. That allows production-line legislation, which in turn has led to us having the fattest statute book in the whole of the free world, which in turn leads to citizen perplexity, which in turn leads to the impossibility of normal, interested citizens being able to engage with what we do here, because the legislation flashes past in droves so fast that many of us sometimes think, “My gosh, has that already come before the House?”.

Preservation of our independence here is, therefore, the first and foremost priority. That is closely related to what many noble Lords have mentioned—most recently the noble Lord, Lord Cormack—the flight path of Peers getting into this place. Let me emphasise that I do not wish to denigrate the House of Commons or MPs in any way; they are a fine lot of people. I am talking about a system. The fact is, however, that if you come into this place having been a businessman, a doctor, a judge, a vet, a teacher or whatever, you have a complete experiential wisdom that, I am afraid, is not available to young men and women, however able, who have led their entire lives in the House of Commons.

[Lord Maxton]

Very few MPs spend their whole lives as Members of Parliament. I was a teacher before I became an MP. Others I knew were doctors, lawyers, miners et cetera. The range of experience in the House of Commons is wider than the noble Lord suggested.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

The noble Lord would have to agree that the trend—statistics have been published in the press in the past three days—is very much towards full-time politics, I am afraid. The number of MPs who have been in politics before they came into the Commons is increasing all the time.

As I say, independence is inconsistent with being a full-time Member of this House. I am anxious about the numbers game because if you are going to have only 450 Members, let alone the 312 suggested by my party, that is not consistent with people having a duty and presence here while continuing their careers in whatever walk of life. Those people are infinitely valuable to this place. Again and again, every day, we are beneficiaries of that experience which is brought into our arena, and is bang up to date.

I therefore hope that we will resist the temptation to have a specific number of Peers. I absolutely agree that we have to reduce numbers. For that reason, I am in favour of a cut-off at 80 years of age—which does not leave me with many years—and although I fear that all age limits are to some extent arbitrary, this proposal is a reasonable compromise and avoids any possibility of judging retirement on any other basis.

I should like to say a word about secondary legislation, which the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, referred to and is important. We should do more to make our oversight of secondary legislation, which is much greater in volume than primary legislation, more effective. Our inability to amend secondary legislation is weird. Is there another legislature in the world that prevents such amendments? It was only dreamt up to prevent the House of Lords being an obstruction to the smooth passage of Commons legislation, but that is not good enough. In fact, some noble Lords may not know that it is possible to put in primary legislation a provision that allows amendment of secondary legislation to be built on the back of that primary legislation. It has happened in only six or 10 statutes—I remember the India Act of the 1920s, for example. We should put in all major legislation, under which huge powers are left to secondary legislation, a power for Parliament to amend it. I also agree with the proposal for a three-month delay, which need not be at the expense of rejecting a piece of secondary legislation altogether. We have done that only half a dozen times in our history.

As a low and doubting Anglican, I cannot resist mentioning the reverberating debate about the Bishops. I do not see why—indeed, I see every reason to the contrary—the Bishops cannot be paralleled by the leaders of other faiths. I would like to see a leading Hindu or Muslim or two and so on. That would add to the richness of our debates. Finally, I cannot resist taking up the challenge of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, who, I think, wanted to abolish titles altogether. That might never see the light of day, but why on earth can we not have an option to choose whether we take a title when we come in here? That at least would ease the feelings that some of us have.