House of Lords Reform

Lord Norton of Louth Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Norton of Louth (Con)]

My Lords, I wish to address three points based on the four Motions before us. The first is on the purpose of reform. I very much welcome the Motion moved by my noble friend the Leader of the House. She quite rightly stresses the importance of incremental reform. There is general acceptance in the House that we should undertake such reform to address the size of the House. The acceptance is, in many respects, a starting point in our consideration. We accept the need for it but are in danger of avoiding the reasoning behind it. Why do we undertake reform? We need to have a clear understanding of the qualitatively distinctive role of the House and the justification for it; only then can we establish what needs to be done to ensure that we are doing our job as effectively as we can. The House of Commons indulges in the politics of assertion. This House engages in the politics of justification. We need to protect that. Our work rests, as with much of the British constitution, on a series of understandings. We could begin by recognising what they are and drawing them together. That would in essence establish the foundations of this House’s role in the political system.

The size of the House can be located within this wider context. Having a larger membership creates problems for the efficient functioning of the House and in how it is perceived by the media and the public. It is necessary that we address it and I initiated a debate on it last year. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that while such reform is necessary it is not sufficient. A smaller House may increase our efficiency, but we need to look not just at the size of the House but also at the process by which Members are appointed.

My second point relates very much to the Motion tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall. There is public disquiet at the size of the House, but the legitimacy of the House in the eyes of the public rests as much on the process of appointment as it does on how many Peers sit in the House. The 2007 Ipsos MORI poll of public attitudes to this House found that the factor deemed most important in determining the legitimacy of the House was trust in the appointments process. Some 25% of those questioned deemed it important; 70% deemed it very important. Next in ranking was the process of detailed legislative scrutiny. We need to look therefore at the appointments process, implementing the provisions of the Steel Bill by putting the Appointments Commission on a statutory basis, raising the threshold for appointment and making the whole process more transparent.

My third point relates to the other two Motions before us in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Steel of Aikwood and Lord Pearson of Rannoch. As we have heard this afternoon there are various proposals for reducing the size of the House. The point to stress, and it has come over in a number of speeches, is that they are not mutually exclusive. One could have an age limit, as we have heard, but one may need to think about other reforms as well. Indeed, I argue that we have to. An age limit is effective but, as we have heard, it is arbitrary and does not deal with the party-political conundrum highlighted by the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Pearson. As we have heard, one can get fluctuations in party support, sometimes quite significant ones as we saw in May’s general election. One may get alternation of parties in office, with each incoming Government wanting to boost their numbers. We may need therefore to consider a more subtle means of adjusting numbers than is possible through an age limit. One possibility is to consider a formula whereby following an election each party is allocated a number of Members based on the party’s support in the election, be it in terms of votes or seats or arguably, following the line of my noble friend Lord Jopling, a combination of the two, with say 90% of the Members being elected by the party group in the House and the remaining 10% in the gift of the party leader. That is one possibility, but it is to be considered alongside and not necessarily instead of the others put forward.

We have a track record of achieving change. The obstacle to achieving legislative reform has not been this House, but rather successive Governments, who have had to be pressed to agree to the reforms we favour getting on to the statute book. Major reform has failed not in this House, but in the Commons. We have the political will to achieve change. We should articulate our role and the understandings that sustain it and then agree on what needs to be done to ensure that we are as effective as we can be. We cannot afford to miss the opportunity, but let us make sure we do not fixate on just one part of what needs to be done. Our starting point should be not size, but purpose.