House of Lords Bill [HL]

Lord Rennard Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 21st October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, on 7 September last year I asked from these Benches whether the then Leader of the House agreed that,

“there should be a moratorium on further appointments to this House until sensible measures are agreed to reduce its size and that seeking consensus through a constitutional convention, involving all parties, is the best way forward for reform of this House in the long run”.—[Official Report, 7/9/16; col. 1211.]

I made it clear that I wanted to see action to limit the size of the House, and many noble Lords have referred today to concerns about its size at present. Sadly, the Government accepted neither the principle of a moratorium on appointments, nor the kind of constitutional convention argued for then by my noble friend Lord Purvis of Tweed and others.

The reason that we now have a House of more than 800 Members is a simple one. The last Prime Minister and the present one have between them created 261 Peers over the last six years. That is a rate of 43 per year. Gordon Brown was relatively modest, only creating an average of 11 Peers per year, but his predecessor, Tony Blair, created them at a rate of 37 per year. So the current rate of creating Peers exceeds significantly the number of Members leaving the House for whatever reason. I do not want to dwell too much on actuarial calculations, nor on the fact that the average age of membership of your Lordships’ House is 69. Suffice it to say that what one might call the natural reduction in the size of the House is somewhat less than 20 per year. Some progress has been made on reducing the size of the House through various measures such as the House of Lords Reform Act introduced by my noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood. Between them, these measures have allowed 61 Members to resign or retire in the past six years—an average of 10 per year. So the size of the House has increased by more than 100 since 2010, giving rise to present concerns.

I want to address particularly the issue of linking the size of this House to that of the House of Commons. I have said before that I agreed with the Lord Speaker when he said in an interview with The House magazine:

“I don’t think that we can justify a situation where you have over 800 peers at the same time as you’re bringing down the Commons to 600 MPs”.

But I also believe that we should re-examine the case for a reduction in the number of MPs. The passage of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill was a very difficult experience for me and for a number of other noble Lords present—I look particularly at the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. It was part of the coalition programme that I had to accept if I accepted the coalition. The constituency boundary review proposals were a major part of it, and I was really unhappy about them. This was partly because I did not see the case for reducing the size of the Commons from 650 to 600 without securing the progress that we needed on other related measures such as reducing the size of the ministerial payroll in order to prevent the Executive gaining greater leverage over the elected House, much greater devolution of power from Westminster, and establishing greater legitimacy for this House to hold government to account, which I believe could come only from electing at least some of its Members. In the absence of these things, the case for reducing the size of the House of Commons was, in my view, not made.

It was claimed that the size of the House of Commons had grown inexorably with previous Boundary Commission reviews. But the fact is that membership of the House of Commons grew only from 640 in 1945 to 650 in 2010, while in that 65-year period the electorate grew by more than 12 million voters. In 1945 each MP represented an average of 52,000 voters, while in 2010 each MP represented an average of just over 70,000 voters. The Boundary Commission proposals that have just been published show that in future MPs will be expected to represent an average of 75,000 voters; in other words, after the next general election, MPs will be expected to represent 44% more voters than their predecessors did in 1945, even though expectations of what they can do for individual constituents have risen inexorably. So when we compare the size of the Houses, parity is not such a bad principle, but we need to agree on the relevant size of each House. If we consider again the size of each House, we also have to consider the representation of the Lords Spiritual in this respect, which the Bill does not.

Of course, the fundamental question is: how might we reduce the size of this House? I believe that this Bill does not provide a good way of doing that. The noble Lord, Lord True, appeared to think that the simplest and best answer to the problem is to reduce the size of the representation on the Lib Dem Benches, based on our level of support at the last general election. I would be very happy if our representation was based on the latest election result: 30% in Witney yesterday. My more serious point is that if you do base representation on previous election results, you should not base it simply on the most recent election. In five of the last six general election results, the Liberal Democrat share of the vote was always 20 plus or minus three. So actually our representation of 105 out of more than 800 is less than proportionate if based on votes over the past 30 years. I rest my case.

Repeating the kind of process by which hereditary Peers voted to determine which of their number remained in the House would not be very seemly, as many noble Lords have said. It seems to me, working out the maths, that it would be possible for everyone who wanted to stay here to do so provided that they voted for themselves and found one Peer who wanted to vote for them also. Finding support from people who have been appointed to the House in various ways but do not wish to remain in the House would not, I think, be a great exercise in democracy.

However, we could take some practical and immediate steps to reduce the size of the House. First, we must end the farcical process of the by-elections to replace hereditary Peers. The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has put forward a Bill to do exactly that and it should be properly considered without the threat of filibuster. I noted the suggestion that this Bill might require a rather long Committee stage. I believe that we should take these issues rather more seriously. Secondly, and most importantly, we have to curb the power of prime ministerial and party leader patronage. The original “Steel Bill” was drafted so as to put the independent Appointments Commission on a statutory footing. Pending the kind of real reform that my party supports, the Appointments Commission should be able to consider and approve party nominations subject to a strict cap on numbers aimed at bringing the size of both Houses into line over time.

In conclusion, we should be acting to reduce the size of the House, and in the absence of other constitutional reforms, the size of the House of Commons may be a good target to aim for over time. This Bill, while worth considering, does not provide the best answers to the problem, but curbing prime ministerial and party leader privilege to appoint Peers may be an important part of the solution.