House of Lords Reform

Lord Wakeham Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wakeham (Con)]

My Lords, it is well over 50 years since I first got into the House of Commons, but I do not think I have ever sat in a debate and heard reports that I had written 25 years ago quoted as freely as some have quoted them this afternoon. The first thing I ought to do is declare an interest as a former chairman of the royal commission that was set up after the last reform of the House of Lords, to think about the future. We spent a long time discussing it, and some of the things that have been said reflect well on that and some do not. I do not intend to go any further than that, except to say that—sorry, I have not made a speech for a long time, and there is a new factor in my life that I have not noticed before: I cannot even read my own writing.

Nevertheless, the royal commission that I chaired is a very old feature of Parliament but a dying one. Mine, nearly 30 years ago, was the last one to be set up. I hope that was not a reflection on me, but I think it is a reflection of the view of the Civil Service and the Government that royal commissions cause more trouble to the Government than they like, so they are disappearing from the scene. They have been going a long time. As a matter of fact, I suspect no one here will know that King William I had a royal commission that set up the Domesday Book.

The second interest I declare is that I have been a member of the Lord Speaker’s committee on the size of the House, chaired so ably by the noble Lord, Lord Burns. He has already expressed a lot of the views of our committee, so I do not have to. What I want to say, in the few words I have, is that, in spite of all the faults that everybody likes to talk about, the House of Lords does an extremely good job of work and none of us should ever feel ashamed of the work that we do. We look at Bills in detail, which the House of Commons gave up doing a long time ago, as far as I can make out. We are proud of what we do; the problem is what the future composition of the House should be.

I know what I would do. If I was the Leader of the House, I would set up a committee and say to the House, “You tell me what you think it ought to be”. You would almost certainly get a surprisingly good report as each party recognises that it has a responsibility but not overall command of the situation. I would certainly continue the reduction of the size of the House of Lords to 600. The size is not absolutely important; the important thing is that it will stop any future Prime Minister pushing in a lot of people without the agreement of the House. It is not the actual number, but that it is a limited number, that is important.

I believe the Lords ought to have a big say in the way the House of Lords conducts its business, because I think we are the ones who know best. A number of the things that have been said by others are right. I would find agreement within the House on how it should be divided up by party and how many places each party should have. That should be fixed and take account of, probably, the total vote of the electorate at the last general election. In my view, new Members should have 15 years. I argued for 20 years in the committee but I had to agree with the rest that 15 years was probably about long enough to keep the right flow in the new Chamber.

Those are the main changes that I would want to see. There are a whole range of changes that I would like to see in the way the House of Lords conducts its work, in spite of the fact that it does a good job. For example, quite a lot of time is spent passing resolutions when there is not the slightest chance of them ever going through the House of Commons. We are all here for hours when there are much more constructive things to do.

I welcome where we have got to. The Government are right to try to do something about these things, and I think they should take a great deal of notice of what the House of Lords says.