Queen’s Speech

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

Indeed, and I am not very comfortable with that. One thing that we ought to do is to learn from our mistakes in the past, look at the problems that have arisen from things that we have done and not do it again. That is what I am arguing very strongly. It would be an entirely nonsensical system, just as it is nonsensical to suggest that an elected Chamber would not demand extra powers. That goes against every principle of politics. Look at the devolved Parliaments—they are asking for extra powers, saying, “We are elected and we want more powers”. That is just so obvious that it should be accepted by all politicians. A hybrid House would have real problems in terms of having two classes of Members.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan]

I wonder whether the noble Lord has given some thought to this question, which could be part of his constitutional convention’s considerations. Given that in this country, unlike many other countries in the world, the Executive are not elected separately—the Government are the Government because they command a majority in the elected House—if there were two elected Houses, which one would determine the Government?

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

That is a very good question, and there is no answer that I can give to it and no answer given by the proponents of the Clegg Bill. What the noble Lord, Lord Reid, says is yet another argument. Day by day, week by week and month by month, the arguments accrue in favour of a constitutional convention to look at all these things to get some coherence into our constitutional changes instead of the piecemeal changes that we have had in the past.

My fourth point about the Clegg Bill is that no account is taken of the possibility of Scottish independence or indeed of the West Lothian question and the McKay commission. So let us abandon the Clegg Bill and find another way forward—in the short term, as I have suggested, with the beefed-up Steel Bill, and the constitutional convention in the long term. It is not just the extra problems of the economy and others that are facing the Government. We could do with a little less legislation considered a little more carefully and we could spend more time dealing with legislation that really matters to our people. We could also continue to fulfil the other important role of this House, which we share with the other House, of keeping a check on the Executive—and my goodness that is needed more and more each day.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

I will follow up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, before I turn to the issue of this House. The amount and complication of legislation is a far more serious long-term issue for this Parliament than we generally recognise. Although some may say that the Queen’s Speech is shorter than some, it still contains 20 pieces of legislation, several of them very major indeed. For example, we have reform of the courts and of security and intelligence services; we have a raft of complex reforms around children, families and parents; we have reforms of banking utilities; and so on. To legislate as we do, more than any other free democratic assembly in the world, is one of our besetting sins. I am sure that most noble Lords know that we put on the statute book between 12,000 and 15,000 pages of statute law a year, while repealing only 2,000 or 3,000. That is inevitably bureaucratising, centralising, complicating and demoralising. It has a great deal to do with the disaffection of politics by so many of our fellow countrymen. That disenchantment is tracked rather effectively—for those of you who do not know of it—by the Hansard Society’s Audit of Political Engagement. It has been conducted year by year for eight years, and at the start of the executive summary says:

“The growing sense of indifference to politics … appears to have hardened into something more serious this year: the trends in indicators such as interest, knowledge, certainty to vote and satisfaction with the system of governing are downward, dramatically so in some instances”.

The report says that,

“only …49% … agree that the issues debated and decided in Parliament have relevance to their own lives; only 38% agree that the government is being held to account by Parliament; and only 30% agree that Parliament encourages public involvement in politics”.

We need to pay much more serious attention to that piece of evidence—and there is much more like it—because we cannot go on as we are going. I suggest that one major cause of this tsunami of legislation is indeed the system that prevails in the other, superior, Chamber. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, touched on it when he spoke about the way in which that Chamber conducts its business. Some may recollect that, in the reform debate that we had last week, I referred to the degree of holding to account by the Commons. My noble friend Lord Wallace said that he would answer my questions in this debate, and I much look forward to that. I got from the helpful Library staff comparable figures for Lords and Commons over the last 10 parliamentary Sessions, from 2001 to 2012. I thank Patrick Vollmer here and Paul Lester there. In that period in the Commons there were 3,078 Divisions, of which the Government lost six—one every two years. Is that holding the Executive to account? It is a farce; it is a rubber-stamp machine down there. Whatever one says about this extraordinary place, although it certainly could not withstand scrutiny by a panel of academics drawn from across the realm, at least in 1,455 Divisions we defeated the Government 425 times, or one in every three or four votes, compared down the other end with one in 513 votes. I fear that I am out of step with the majority on these Benches, but before we take this astonishingly pregnant step of electing Members to this place, we must address what is already a fundamental defect in our parliamentary system.

We are therefore between the devil and the deep blue sea. The devil would be to go ahead with election to this House without seeking to ensure that it did not become a replica of the other place. I am afraid to say that I do not see how it could fail to become a replica of the other place. A 15-year term would not counterbalance the even greater dependence on party patronage that the regional list system would necessarily involve. Those who would effectively elect to this place would comprise a tiny caucus of party faithful—all good men and women. None the less, they would adopt those of their own kind. Once here they would be ever more grateful for the party patronage that got them here, given the system of election, given that they would have been put on the list and given that they would have been given priority in the list.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan]

Although the noble Lord makes the point very well, he underestimates the problem because at least under the system of election at present, although there is a party influence, there are different ideas and opinions within each party constituency, so there is a degree of separation between the patronage of the leadership and local communities. Under the list system, it is completely in the gift of the party leadership. Therefore, even before someone got in here under the list system, they would already be the creature of the ideological and political leadership of the party.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for that comment as it constitutes my next point.