House of Lords

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Excerpts

Tuesday 6th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Williams, for giving us the opportunity to debate this very important topic. I also congratulate him on securing a debate that does not have the usual constraints of time limits on the speeches. I will come back to that, as I may come to regret it as I look down the list of speakers, but that is my initial thought.

I have one regret, however, about the subject for the debate, which is that it focuses on what I regard as only one side of the problem: the size of the House. The difficulty we have is that changing it—we have rehearsed this well and I will not go into it again—is very difficult and, I have no doubt, will be very contentious. However, it seems to me that we have not debated sufficiently the way in which we might be able to adjust our procedures to deal with this fact and to begin to allow a better use of the talent that we have in this place, perhaps—I throw this in as a possibility—by extending the use of committees with real powers to carry out some of the work of this House.

If you are a Cross-Bencher, you find that to raise a supplementary in Question Time you have pretty well got to surprise God and the Bishops by coming in for Prayers in order to be seated in the right sort of place. That is not sensible. Equally, if you wish to speak in a debate in which you believe you have some expertise, you might well find that the list of speakers is so long that there is the crass example of the two-minute speech. That is not good enough. Yes, most of what I want to say can be said in a minute and a half—I shall not do that just now but it can be done—but often if there are real points of issue, and that has applied to some of the debates in which many of us have taken part, the constraint on time is a great difficulty.

Is there no way of beginning to deal with that? I can think of several ways, none of which I will put forward now because they will be shot down but they are worth detailed discussion, including the use of a more extensive committee system; for example, education is one of the areas in which my own background gives me some expertise but there is no committee on education allowed in this House. Equally, we can take some of the Bills in Committee next door but there could be a much greater pre-legislative scrutiny process, as applies in some areas of our business. I throw these in simply as suggestions. It is a two-part issue: size and adjusting procedures to the size because undoubtedly we will not reduce the numbers significantly within a short period of time.

Those who are looking to the next election should consider the worries of the noble Lord, Lord Butler, about conspiracies here. If one looks at the figures for the two years following the previous election, the net numbers in this House increased by 90. That tells us what is going to happen after the next election, especially with more parties in play. That inevitably will increase the number of those hoping and reasonably wanting to come into the House.

Many of your Lordships who have come through other routes will perhaps not know much about the scrutiny that some of us Cross-Benchers went through. When the Appointments Commission was set up in the previous big revolution here in the House of Lords, it was a complicated procedure and eventually 16 of us were nominated in 2001 and introduced to the House. As part of my involvement in this, I filled in a nine-page form on request from the committee, I nominated referees and I even went and had what was initially referred to as a conversation—although in fact it was more like an interview—and in that interview there were three things that the committee wanted to establish, as far as I could see.

The first was that I had a background of relevant experience—I could match the claims and the pro formas sent in and what my referees said. The second, and I think the most important for them, was that on no account should I be tainted by the virus of party politics. I was to be an independent Cross-Bencher. The third, which was probably just my own paranoia, was ensuring that I did not make social gaffes too often, so I avoided asking for three lumps of sugar in my cup of tea. I passed the test, apparently, and here a number of us are. I think there are about 50 of us now. But there was a procedure.

The important part of the procedure came next. The interview was a two-part process so I asked what was expected of me. I did not know and I wanted to be sure that the job was doable. Occasionally one is invited to take on posts—I am sure your Lordships all have been—but the job is not doable. I actually got very good advice from the sub-committee I met. The good advice was, first, make sure you identify areas of interest and expertise on which you could make contributions. Secondly, the hint was to stick to those, but that was up to me because freedom of thought was part of the deal. Thirdly, I should make sure that I was here on the right occasions—not chalking up a sufficient number of attendances to be allowed in next time there was a ballot but taking part in the debates on which I was thought to have something to contribute. I thought, “Yes, that is doable. I can do this”. My training in philosophy immediately reminded me that Immanuel Kant, whom I believe to be the greatest European philosopher, formulated the premise that “ought” implies “can”. If I ought to do that, then surely I should be able to do it. That is partly up to me, but it is partly up to the structures of this place.

What I want to say in this debate is very precise. My worry is that, with the way that things are moving in this House, where we have not adjusted procedure sufficiently to take account of its size, it may well be the case that we cannot make the contributions for which we were brought here. If one is to slim us down, there is a special issue for the Cross-Benchers; I was glad to hear that mentioned, not least by the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. However, the broader issue is: can we do this, and does the way in which the House operates allow us to do it? My plea is that, in any further discussion, we set our minds to the questions of procedures that relate to the size of this place.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Maxton]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Williams of Elvel for introducing this debate. During the Recess, I read that his stepson, the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, had contracted pneumonia. I hope that he is now well on the road to recovery. I shall make two points, one of which is in relation to the transport problems of my noble friends Lady Taylor and Lord Foulkes. I attend this debate having taken today five forms of transport to get here. I took a car to a hotel on the Isle of Arran, a bus across the island, a boat from the island to the mainland, a train to Glasgow and a train from Glasgow to London, and then the Underground. If that does not deserve a pat on the back, perhaps it should.

My noble friend Lord Gordon of Strathblane and I are the same age and will be 80 next year, which means that, under the proposals being put forward, we might have to retire. However, recently I did an online test which showed that my real physical age, if you take the fact that I take exercise, go to the gym and do this and that, is 60. That therefore means I have another 20 years to go until I have to retire.

In this debate, it would be very easy to fall into the trap of defending the House of Commons against those who are attacking it. I spent quite a long time there and have to say that some of the changes, although not all of them, have been beneficial. The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, said that rebuilding the Chamber still has to be adversarial, but it always has been such. I am sure that, like me, when he shows people around the two Houses, he points out the sword lines in the Commons and says, “You can’t step over that line because the length of the sword is between the two”. It always has been adversarial. I had an uncle who was thrown out of the House of Commons for making an overtly political, let us say, insult to a Member of the Tory party.

The question that has not been asked is not whether we should change the size of the Lords but whether we should change at all at this point in time. My answer would be no. I agree with my noble friend Lord Clark that we have to have legislation but, before we have legislation, surely we have to look at the whole way in which we are governed, including whether we still should be in this building, how and whether we should vote, whether we should vote online and the type of card we should use to vote, right through to the sort of devolution we should have to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. After all, we have just had the referendum in Scotland and have seen more powers given to the Scottish Parliament. We may have to say, “You will not be able to serve on the education committee in this House because you are a Scot. Education in Scotland is devolved and is not part of the English system, so you will not be able to serve on a committee that is about the education system”.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

I may be a Scot. I worked for 20 years in England and London. I was Chief Inspector of Schools here for England and vice-chancellor of the University of London. I think that that opens the door a tad.

[Lord Maxton]

I was born in Oxford of an academic. Therefore, like the noble Lord, I probably would have the same qualification, although I spent all my career in education in Scotland. The fact is that we are living in a political world that is changing very rapidly. We are also living in a high-tech world that is changing very rapidly, not just in terms of this country but in terms of the world more generally. The idea of the nation state may be at an end. Let alone whether we devolve power to different parts of this country, this country may have to be part of a larger organisation in order to govern itself and to control the companies and organisations that are now much bigger than a country. Companies such as Amazon and Apple—I hold one of its products in my hand—are as big as some of the countries in which they operate and have a turnover larger than those countries.

Surely we must look at the whole issue, which is why I am in favour of something for which my noble friend Lord Foulkes has been pushing for some time; namely, a convention on the constitution to look in the broadest possible way at how we govern ourselves, the people of this country, and how we fit in with the rest of the world. Until we have done that, we should hold off any changes in this place. That will require legislation but surely we should sit back and say, “Let us have the general election, see what happens and then consider what we are going to do”. I hope that the Labour Party will win an overall majority, will set up the constitutional convention and will look at the way in which we govern.

Finally, I say to my noble friend Lord Williams, having expressed a hope that the most reverend Primate the Archbishop is on the mend, that he is not talking about 400 Peers in this Chamber. He is talking about 426 Peers because 26 are here automatically; namely, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of York, the three Bishops, plus the others who make up their number. Should they be here? Are they part of this deal? I am told that there is separate legislation for them and therefore the plan put forward by my noble friend cannot cover them. Are the Bishops prepared to be part of the plan? Are they prepared to say, “We will not attend if this plan goes ahead”? I hope so. A noble friend says, “Of course”, and I hope they will. That ought to happen. The Bishops’ Bench is the biggest single anomaly in this place at the moment. That is because this is now a multicultural society and they do not represent even the majority of the people of this country, so why should they, and they alone, be sitting in the House of Lords, which is part of the legislature, the body which makes the laws of this country? That cannot be right. It is time that we separated the church and the state completely and the Bishops should be told to go. We should resolve that this House becomes completely secular. People will still talk about religion and different religions are represented here, but the Church of England should not be an established church within our organisation.