House of Lords (Alternative Second Chamber) Bill [HL]

Lord Pack Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 23rd October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pack (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, and express my envy of her luck in coming out of the ballot. I hope she might perhaps be tempted to buy me some lottery tickets this weekend. This is an important issue and, as both the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, have noted, this debate today forms a fortuitous pair with yesterday’s debate about written constitutions. It is a particularly enjoyable pair for those of us enthusiastically speaking in both debates.

There is an important commonality about how we best ensure our constitutional arrangements are well suited for the challenges that our country faces. Yesterday, we heard from many noble Lords the virtues of flexibility and the ability to evolve our constitutional arrangements. That is something that this Bill is very much in tune with, as it proposes—to pick up on the points of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, and others—setting out a route that would lead potentially to an improved and different Chamber rather than its simple abolition.

I am not sure how many of the categories of the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, I fall into, but I should at least plead guilty to having a bedroom and occasionally dwelling in it. I often think about reform of this place on a Sunday morning—this may make the noble Lord feel that I definitely fit some of his other categories—because that is when I usually do my work preparing for a meeting of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee and go through the paperwork. That committee’s work is a good example of the sort of scrutiny that we often rightly pride ourselves on this House having a key part in. I often reflect that I am only able to spend the time working through the paperwork on a Sunday morning in part because I am not an MP. If I were an MP, I would either be rushing around various fêtes and other community events—no doubt acquiring many raffle tickets along the way—or I would be spending some precious time with my family ahead of doing exactly that in the afternoon. It is important to acknowledge that there are some benefits in the difference in the structures that we have.

There is also a very significant downside, because if I chose to stop doing that work diligently—I reassure noble Lords that I have no intention of doing so—what could anyone do about it? As a member of a political party, I could be sacked from my current role or even be threatened with the withdrawal of the party Whip. But for anyone who is less diligent, threatening them with those things is threatening them with having less work to do and having fewer WhatsApp groups to be in. It is, even in the hands of the most persuasive leaders or Whips, not the most effective of threats.

That is a real problem, because there are undoubtedly some changes to how this House operates—in due course, we will debate participation rates and retirement ages—that can get a bit close to the edge of that fundamental lack of accountability for anyone who does not do their job properly. Likewise, standards codes, such as the Members’ Code of Conduct and related documents, can address that. But for all that it is important to have a Members’ Code of Conduct that properly protects staff in this place from bullying, even the most enthusiastic supporter of such processes will not argue that how well you read page 32 of a PDF document is going to be subject to such processes.

We should always be cautious about any process that allows a Member of this House or the House of Commons to be removed in some way. It is why we have such a complicated—one might even say tortuous—process in the House of Commons by which somebody can be removed for misbehaviour. But one of the key safeguards and one of the reasons it has now become a well-established system and an acceptable process to have a ruling against an MP, a recall petition or a subsequent by-election is because, in the end, it places power with the public. It allows voters to decide, not party bosses. As a former party boss, I am very keen on the public having the power in those cases.

However, we do not have the equivalent in the House of Lords. We do not have the accountability to the public that should be at the heart of a democracy. There are many important details to work out—for example, on the roles of the Bishops in this place, as my noble friend Lord Scriven touched on—but the Bill wisely sets out a route by which we can address some of those issues.

Another area, quite rightly mentioned by several noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Taylor and Lady Bennett, is the relations between the House of Commons and a reformed House of Lords. I mentioned yesterday the risk sometimes in debates outside this place of a certain myopic insularity, as if problems such as that are somehow insuperable. We forget to look, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, wisely pointed out, at the many other countries which have faced an equivalent problem and found solutions to it. We should have self-confidence that, if other people can find solutions to it, it should not be beyond us.

There are already ways in which the different roles of the House of Commons and this House are embedded in our approaches. There are the Parliament Acts and the rules about money Bills. There are many ways that those sorts of differences could be further embedded, such as making it much more than just a constitutional convention, perhaps with the requirement for the Prime Minister to be in the House of Commons. One can be pretty sure that wherever the Prime Minister is, that place will get more attention than the other. Many other countries managed to sort out those problems, and we should not put ourselves off with the thought that we would struggle to find solutions ourselves.

There is one issue, touched on by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, where I think the solution that we need to reach is having more power for this place and less subservience—if I might put it like that—to the House of Commons, and that is to do with secondary legislation. Statutory instruments often get precious little scrutiny, sadly, in the House of Commons. We have these different processes of negative, affirmative and super-affirmative processes, but even the super affirmative process for secondary legislation is not really that super. Fundamentally, for reasons that I politely disagree with but acknowledge, and for key points of principle that both Labour and Conservative Peers have consistently expressed, neither party when in opposition will vote down a piece of secondary legislation, except in the most exceptional and unusual of circumstances.

However good our scrutiny of a piece of secondary legislation, however pertinent the criticisms of its drafting by, say, the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments and however pertinent the questions raised about whether the statutory instrument is really right, statutory instruments will all but always go through unamended, exactly as the Government wished. Therefore, in a way, having some more democratic legitimacy for our House that might make us feel more empowered to be a bit difficult now and again on secondary legislation would be a good thing, and it would end up in enhancing the work of the House of Commons rather than undermining it.

As several noble Lords have touched on, this is obviously a very long-running issue. As a good Liberal Democrat, I do of course have the preamble to the 1911 Parliament Act engraved on my heart:

“And whereas it is intended to substitute for the House of Lords as it at present exists a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis”.

I think it is fair to say that Parliament agreeing that in 1911 and not yet having managed to act on it is fairly slow-moving, even by the standards of restoration and renewal.

As I know colleagues on the Conservative Benches often like historical precedents and quotes to bolster arguments, I cannot help but observe that the Conservative manifesto from the December 1918 general election included:

“it will be one of the objects of the Government to create a Second Chamber which will be based upon direct contract with the people”.

I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, and others may be tempted to rediscover the spirit of December 1918.

More fundamentally, however, as several noble Peers have touched on, form should follow function. There is an important function for a second Chamber, but it is one that requires legitimacy, and legitimacy in a democracy fundamentally comes from the public. I therefore commend this Bill because it sets out a route for applying that; it rightly acknowledges that there are many areas of detail to be worked out and gives us a chance of finally moving on from that commitment in 1911 to actually taking effective action.