House of Lords Reform

Mark Field Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

The hon. Gentleman has, say, six Members of the European Parliament floating around, as he puts it, in his area already, and I assume that relations are perfectly cordial. I do not want to cast aspersions on the future reformed House of Lords by comparing it too directly to the European Parliament, but the idea that politicians with different mandates, elected on different cycles and different systems, cannot co-exist, is patently not the case. It happens now, and I think it will happen in the future.

By reforming the upper House so that it is more legitimate but still independent, we can ensure that it continues to function as an effective revising Chamber, able to hold Government to account, but with a new democratic mandate. We can preserve everything that is good about the other Chamber—expertise, independence and wisdom—but at the same time we can inject democracy into the mix and reform the Lords so that it is fit for modern times.

[Mr Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

I am probably in a minority on the Government Benches, but I support a democratic House of Lords. Does the right hon. Gentleman not realise, however, that the complications that he has already put in place in the 20 minutes that he has spoken so far will help opponents of reform to frustrate what he is trying to achieve, whether it be 15-year terms, a partly elected or fully elected Chamber, or a proportional representation system? It is literally seven and a half weeks since the people of this country, in a plebiscite, had a chance to say, overwhelmingly, that they did not want a PR system in our Parliament. How can he possibly consider that this is the right way forward for democratising the House of Lords?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

The two issues are wholly separate. More than that, if my hon. Friend has other ideas about how we can arrive at our shared objective of a wholly or mainly elected House of Lords, that is precisely why we are now creating a Joint Committee. That is precisely why we have published not a final Bill but a draft Bill with a White Paper and why that followed a process of cross-party discussion in a Committee that I chaired, and which in turn built on many recommendations of a cross-party nature over the years and the decades. It was not just an invention of this Government. The Wakeham commission, the Straw committee and others came up with many of the recommendations that we are now suggesting. If he thinks they are too complicated, I look forward to his suggestions about how they can be made simpler.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sadiq Khan]

My hon. Friend makes his point very well.

Another area that the Joint Committee will have to examine is the transition. What will happen to the existing Members of the House of Lords? One option is to allow them to continue until they choose to leave by their own volition or die. Even the option of a phased move over time leaves the question of which Members to keep and which to ask to leave. That would not be easy to manage and would not be cheap.

[Mr Field]

Is there not a precedent from what happened in 1999, when the hereditary peers whittled down their own number from 650 to 92? Will the shadow Secretary of State and his party support a similar situation if there is any sense of frustration from this Bill in the years to come, whereby the massively over-bloated House of Lords is reduced from 800 or so Members to 300, allowing each group, including the political parties and the Cross Benchers, to choose their Members on a pro rata basis? Might that not be an important poisoned pill to ensure that we get reform with some speed and alacrity?

[Sadiq Khan]

It is very unusual for me to be fair to the Deputy Prime Minister, but he did include that very option in the White Paper. The Joint Committee will have to look into that before a Bill is finally published in February, as the Government hope.

We are also faced with the cost. Each peer, as I have said, costs £108,000 a year. The 117 new peers who have already been announced will cost £63 million over this Parliament. A transition that involves a 15-year phasing out of existing peers would therefore result in a substantial cost to the taxpayer. Other areas that need resolution are the size of the second Chamber, the impact of early elections, the electoral system to be used, and the need for a referendum for such a big constitutional change.

Between 1997 and 2010 a number of parliamentarians, including some very good ones, stood where the Deputy Prime Minister just made his speech from and argued for reform of the House of Lords. During that time, we made some progress in reforming the House of Lords. We removed 90% of the hereditary peers, created the post of elected Lord Speaker, separated our judiciary from the Lords by creating our first ever Supreme Court, and created people’s peers. We clearly did not go as far as we would have liked. However, as I am sure has happened and will happen to the Deputy Prime Minister, we encountered opposition to our proposals at every turn, most tellingly from his new political bedfellows. The Conservatives opposed our attempts to remove the hereditary peers from the Lords, most recently in the passage of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. They undermined our attempts to reach a cross-party consensus on Lords reform throughout our 13 years in government. The irony is that this Government are embarking on Lords reform at a time when citizens up and down the country are more preoccupied with fears about job losses, their pensions and cuts to public services. They expect us to prioritise those bread and butter issues as well.

One great parliamentarian who stood where the Deputy Prime Minister just stood and argued for major change to the House of Lords was Robin Cook. When I look at the draft Bill and the White Paper presented by the Deputy Prime Minister, and when I think of the task facing the Joint Committee, I think of the words of Robin Cook on the evening in 2003 when the House of Commons rejected all seven options for reform that had been presented by another Joint Committee:

“We should go home and sleep on this interesting position. That is the most sensible thing that anyone can say in the circumstances.”

He went on to say that

“the next stage in the process is for the Joint Committee to consider the votes in both Houses. Heaven help the members of the Committee, because they will need it.”—[Official Report, 4 February 2003; Vol. 399, c. 243.]

Reflecting on those comments, I sincerely wish the members of the Joint Committee and the Deputy Prime Minister the best of luck in the challenge ahead.