House of Lords: Lord Speaker’s Committee Report

Lord Wallace of Tankerness Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness (LD)]

My Lords, when I realised that I was speaking 86th in this debate, I was reminded of an apocryphal comment attributed to the seventh husband of Elizabeth Taylor. He knew what to do; the challenge was how to make it interesting. I join every other speaker in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and his committee on this report. There was widespread agreement, not least from last year’s debate, on the need for the desired outcome of reducing the size of your Lordships’ House, so to make a recommendation for 600 was probably the easy bit. However, given that there were things that the committee could not do, not least the fact that there was not likely to be any major primary legislation, it is a remarkable achievement to have produced a set of proposals which has commanded such widespread support in your Lordships’ House and, indeed, beyond.

I do not resile from my own personal party position that we would rather see a predominantly elected second Chamber, with proper buttressing of the voices from the regions and nations of the United Kingdom. However, as my noble friend Lord Beith said, where we are is the “best show in town”, and I readily contribute to the consensus on these proposals. They are not perfect, but that is not necessarily a criticism of the committee; it is because of the inability to produce primary legislation.

Numerous Members of your Lordships’ House have picked up on two issues that will need to be addressed: the future role of the Bishops and of the hereditary Peers. Tables 1, 3 and 4 in the report extrapolate the numbers in your Lordships’ House to 2047, when I will be 93 and not here, either through death or retirement. It is worth reflecting, as we consider proposals that will take us almost to the middle of the 21st century, that the outcome would be that Bishops and hereditary Peers have a higher proportion of the membership of your Lordships’ House than they do today. I do not believe that that is fatal to these proposals, but they are loose ends. As anyone knows, if a number of loose ends are picked at the garment can slowly but steadily unravel. It is not impossible to address this: it does not need major legislation to have, for example, what one might call an episcopal haircut. The Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015 was introduced in the run-up to a Dissolution of Parliament, when there is always great pressure on the legislative programme. It had its Second Reading in the House of Commons on 19 January 2015, its Third Reading in this House on 12 March 2015 and Royal Assent a fortnight later. When people want it to be done, it can be.

When I tell people about how the House of Lords is constituted, I have to reflect on the fact that at the last hereditary by-election among my own Liberal Democrat colleagues there was an electorate of three and seven candidates. The winner, my noble friend Lord Thurso, achieved a 100% vote on a 100% turnout, which exceeds even North Korean proportions. That situation is not tenable as we go forward. The Bill proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has been mentioned. This Session of Parliament goes to May 2019. It must surely be possible to make progress on that legislation, particularly if these proposals have been adopted.

The most important point, raised by a number of noble Lords, is that this needs a buy-in, not just from the respective parties and Cross Benches, but also from the Prime Minister. The committee itself, in paragraph 53 of the report, states:

“Maintaining the current mechanism of appointment means that the success of our proposals hinges on Prime Ministers undertaking to appoint no more new members than there are vacancies, and to do so in the party proportions implied by the system proposed”.


That cannot be stressed too much. We are told that a raft of new Peers will be created in the coming weeks and that would change the baseline. Given all the work that has been done and the consensus achieved, that should not be fatal, but it might mean the proposals will be in intensive care. If we do not take this opportunity, it will be missed. It is, therefore, important that the Leader of the House takes back to the Prime Minister and her ministerial colleagues the consensus that there is for these proposals and that we should get on with it.