Draft House of Lords Reform Bill

Lord Phillips of Sudbury Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

My Lords, I thank those who compiled this report and those who compiled the alternative report. I find myself much more in sympathy with the alternative report. Tonight I speak against my instincts. My instincts are for democratic elections to be held wherever they are practical and worth while. I know that some of my noble friends, if not all of them, agree with that. However, I am not at all persuaded that the proposed reforms of this House will achieve their aims, irrespective of whether it is wholly or partly elected. Indeed, I think that a partly elected House would be more of a dog’s dinner than a wholly elected one. I am much more committed to the reforms proposed in the original Steel Bill, with others besides—in particular the reform of the appointments system, which is lacking. I believe that criteria for appointments should be agreed between both Houses of Parliament.

Having said that, I am very concerned that we are throwing the baby out with the bath water and not recognising sufficiently the very considerable benefits that accrue from the status quo: namely, that this House adds value to the other place in two ways that I am convinced will not survive election. Everyone has referred to those two principal virtues: namely, that we in this place are experience-rich and relatively independent. Those virtues stand in increasingly strong contrast with what happens in the other place, which I have no wish to disparage. It is made up of good, true and well intentioned young men and women. However, they are young and inexperienced, as others have said. They come mainly from a professional flight path and are ever more susceptible to the regimentation and partisanship that have made the other place into a wholly ineffective control on the Government of the day.

You only have to look at the number of guillotines that are applied and the number of Bills that arrive in this House having been only partially considered. You only have to look at the quantity of legislation that is enabled by this production line, to which the noble Lord, Lord Framlingham, referred. We are now legislating between 12,000 and 15,000 pages of new statute law a year and we repeal only about 2,000, 3,000 or 4,000 pages. We are legislating more than any respectable democracy in the western world by far. Dire consequences arise from having this excessive quantity of legislation, much of which is half baked and not implemented, or implemented unevenly; and we know it. I believe that the election of this House would worsen that state of affairs. The notion that this place, when elected, will somehow be a better check on the Executive is laughable. I will say a word or two more about that in a second.

We spend more time dealing with the legislation here and we deal with it in a more open-minded fashion. Above all, we do not take the Government’s word for it, as they constantly do in the other place. I repeat the statistic that I put to my noble friend Lord Ashdown: in the 13 years in which the previous Labour Government were in power, they suffered less than one defeat in the House of Commons every two years. That made a total of six over 13 years. What sort of control on the Executive does that represent? By contrast, in this House—it is hard to believe it—the Labour Government were defeated not six times but 528 times. In the nearly two years of the coalition’s term in office, there have been no defeats in the other place but 48 in this House. Noble Lords may say that those defeats do not stick and are overturned in the other place. However, that is not the case. A great deal of hard work has been done on this by the Constitution Unit at UCL. It is not an easy calculation to make, but Meg Russell and her colleague, Maria Sciara, reckon that 40 per cent of the amendments that we win through the Lobbies in the Lords stick in whole or in part, although there are compromises, of course, and that we make a major impact on legislation. We are doing the job that the primary, the only democratic, Chamber does not do. What does that tell us about our state of affairs and the health of our democracy? Not much, I suggest.

Public disenchantment with politics has been referred to by one or two noble Peers. We have to be very careful indeed about giving way to reforms that could, I believe, worsen that state of affairs. I refer to one particular poll that noble Lords may have seen referred to in the useful Library Note on public attitudes towards the reform of this place, published in March this year. The final poll in the report deals with general attitudes and was conducted by Ipsos MORI in 2009. It found that in 2001 the proportion of the public satisfied with the work of Parliament as a whole was 45 per cent. By 2009 it had dropped to 20 per cent. The dissatisfaction level had risen from 30 per cent in 2001 to 63 per cent in 2009. More tellingly, when the figures between the Commons and Lords were broken down, the poll found that in 2009 15 per cent were satisfied with the performance of the House of Commons, while 71 per cent were dissatisfied. We did not do too well, but we did a heck of a lot better—23 per cent were satisfied and 50 per cent were dissatisfied. That is scarcely a case for the major reform of this place, and is more likely to be a case for reform of the other place.

The level of disenchantment is important, and the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, referred to the Power inquiry. The public want less party control, more independence, more life experience and less legislation. Moreover, there is no public agitation for election to this House. If there were people on the streets with petitions and rest of it, I would take a different view, but there is no sign of them. Anecdotally, I find very few people who do other than come up to me and say, “Thank God for the House of Lords”. When I held a public meeting in Sudbury to consider the matter of electing this House or not, a poll at the beginning of the meeting found quite a number in favour, but at the end of the meeting—and all points of view were fairly represented—there was a complete switch. Again and again, this is the experience.

I am sorry; I should sit down and shut up. However, there is a paradox at the heart of all this. I am content for the Commons to be the democratic Chamber and for us, as the inferior House, to retain the virtues of complementariness.