Draft House of Lords Reform Bill

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, at the end of a long day—indeed, it is a different day from the day on which we began this debate—which is before another morning of debate on this subject, one week before another two days of debate on constitutional reform and 101 years after the passage of the Parliament Act 1911 that promised to replace the hereditary basis on which men came to this House with a popular principle in its place, I shall be brief. But I want to address the issue that has again been contested today as to whether these proposals are best described as evolutionary or revolutionary.

First, I want to respond to the alternative report and to those noble Lords who have so far argued that there has been insufficient debate about proposals for reform of your Lordships’ House in order to proceed with a Bill along the lines proposed by the Joint Committee, which was so well chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Richard.

It seems to me that it is only in the House of Lords that the argument could be advanced that 101 years is insufficient time properly to consider the merits of a proposal, especially when the proposal is as basic as the principle of democracy, which many of us so easily advocate for other countries. I would also like to correct a mistake I made in a recent article I wrote for a public sector magazine about Lords reform. I said that our country was in a league of two with Lesotho in maintaining the hereditary principle in the legislature. I now understand that I was wrong. I am told that Belgium preserves the right for the children of the king to be members of its upper House, but by convention they do not vote. So in fact we are, in this country, alone with Lesotho in maintaining voting rights in Parliament that are inherited. I believe that the changes now proposed by the Joint Committee are logical and evolutionary because they build on previous legislation such as the Life Peerages Act 1959, which enabled men and, for the first time, women to come here without committing their descendants, and the House of Lords Act 1999, which ended the hereditary principle save for 92 seats, and known then as stage 1 reform.

The proposals now follow more than a decade of cross-party work which has seen proposals similar to these from a royal commission, a Joint Committee of both Houses, the Public Administration Select Committee, a cross-party group of MPs convened by my noble friend Lord Tyler, and two Labour government White Papers. After another decade of discussion, it must be time for stage 2 reform. The Joint Committee’s report states that:

“It is readily apparent that many of the principal elements of the current draft Bill have been proposed before”.

It is time to decide and not just to debate.

I also agree with the committee proposal that the appropriate size for the House in the future, especially in the absence of serious devolution within England, is 450. That is a number big enough for the House to do its work, and big enough for elections under a proportional system to be proportional within large constituencies or regions. It would improve diversity, but not include extremes. Of course, and despite the references made by many noble Lords earlier in the debate, a proportional system is very different from the alternative vote system which was rejected by voters last year and which is in fact only a small modification to first past the post. In practice, we should be electing 120 Members of this House in three years’ time. That would be an appropriate time, in my view, to complete the promise of the 1999 legislation and that of 1911, and bring an end to the principle of inheriting a right to vote in the legislature.