House of Lords: Reform

Lord Neill of Bladen Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Neill of Bladen]

My Lords, I am number 82 in the list of speakers in the debate and I agree with my predecessor who has just spoken that everything that has to be said has already been said. I should like to summarise my views by saying that I agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, said yesterday and what the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, said today. I also agree strongly with the statement made yesterday by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon:

“the changes to the House as it is currently constituted, and its replacement by an elected senate, will automatically affect the primacy of the House of Commons”.—[Official Report, 21/6/11; cols. 1161-62.]

I am opposed to the destruction of the present House of Lords and I am opposed to the creation of a new Chamber as per the model in the White Paper and the draft Bill. I also object to the spurious urgency that is being heaped upon the committee which has been asked to look at the White Paper. It should have all the time that it could possibly want in order to carry out the job. However, it has really been given the wrong agenda because the Bill and the White Paper are, to put it rather mildly, not 100 per cent on course. What the committee should be thinking about are what incremental changes are needed and can be made without damaging the overall fabric.

I want to spend a little time on the principle that underlies the desire for having elected Members in this House. The benefit of being elected will be conferred upon 80 per cent of the Members, but there will be another 20 per cent who will not have it. Part of the scheme provides that some 20 per cent of the House will be illegitimate by the test of direct election. There are also the 12 bishops who, on the same test, would not have that benefit; and then the Ministers, however many there may be, would be specially nominated by the Prime Minister to serve in this House. So there will be a group of people who will not have been blessed by the touch of the people.

Where does this principle come from and where does one find an exposition of it that is applicable to our circumstances? We have a country in which the entire electorate has its own Member of Parliament in the form of some 60,000 people per constituency. They have a right to call upon their MP to look after their own interests or the interests of the constituency in the form of local interests, and indeed national matters if that is their concern. It is the duty of the MP to answer those concerns. The Chamber in which their MPs sit is accorded primacy under a system of conventions which have been set up, so their representatives sit in a Chamber which has the final call on what legislation is enacted. Look at all that and then look at what the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister say in the foreword:

“In a modern democracy it is important that those who make the laws of the land should be elected by those to whom those laws apply”.

That condition is fully met in the case of the House of Commons, but why, one asks, does it have to be met for a second time in relation to the House of Lords?

I do not know how well your Lordships remember the passage getting on a bit in the book where there is some discussion about the European Convention on Human Rights and the composition of the House of Lords. I shall read paragraph 428 on page 162 to your Lordships.

“The Government is not aware of any Strasbourg case-law on the composition of the second chamber of a member state of the Council of Europe. There is a variety of types of membership: in the Czech Republic all members of the Senate are directly elected; in Austria all members of the Bundesrat are indirectly elected; the Seanad in Ireland includes appointed members; the Senate in Italy includes a few appointed members and a few ex officio members; the Belgian Senate contains directly elected members, indirectly elected members, co-opted members and hereditary/ex officio members. In other words, while first chambers must be elected by the people in order to comply with the Convention, second chambers will frequently have a different form of composition, which may or may not involve direct election. If one looks beyond Council of Europe member states, all the members of the Canadian Senate are appointed”.

So there is absolutely no widespread recognition of any general principle that applies to the appointment to a second Chamber and I call that in question.

I want to draw attention, as has been repeatedly referred to, to the extraordinary feature of the elected Members—that they get a 15-year term and they are never questioned or brought up for review at general elections as they come and go over those 15 years. The matter is taken even further by the provision in relation to payment, that their salary has to be set below that of the MPs because they,

“would not have constituency duties”.

What an incredible phrase. One might expect there to be funds for an office to be set up for this huge constituency of pushing on for half a million. One might expect special funding for that, but there is not a word about that. It is not conceived. There is a completely dead hand; once the vote has been given in their favour they are in for 15 years. There is nothing to stop them setting up an office—true enough—but there is no concept of that; it has not be dreamt of or thought of by those who make these proposals and that is an extraordinary feature.

Those who propound the democratically-elected principle must believe in it. One is amazed then that they fall short of demanding a 100 per cent elected House. Why are these other 20 per cent deliberately selected as not having the benefit of this electoral process? They nevertheless get a 15-year term, unquestioned, however they perform their duties. One is surprised at the poverty of the demand. One would expect that, if they really believed in the importance of this principle, they would be going for 100 per cent.