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Address in Reply to Her Majesty's Most Gracious Speech

My Lords, although he is not in his place, I should first like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Alliance, on his maiden speech. His is a very remarkable story. He also illustrates one of the points that I want to make. I feel that people of his experience often find—I hope I am wrong in his case—that, because of our procedures, they do not make the extremely valuable contribution to the House that could be made, given their experience and knowledge. I shall come to that in a moment. Secondly, I congratulate the Government on their election victory. It was a significant achievement. I suspect that they called the election just in time. As Kenneth Clarke said the other day, in the end, Labour governments run out of money. I want to concentrate my remarks on the sentence in the gracious Speech that referred to this House. There is much to be done. The Government are right to continue their efforts, and I hope that they will find a consensus on the best way forward. This is not the time for me to speculate on what would be the best way forward, but there are some important points to bear in mind as we seek that consensus. First, no one will get everything that he or she wants. Unless we are prepared to compromise, either nothing will be achieved or great damage will be done. That applies to the Government, my noble friends on the Opposition Front Bench, the Liberal Democrats and the House of Commons as well as the House of Lords. Ever since the Royal Commission, which I had the honour to chair, attempted to produce a compromise, everybody has told me why they wanted something different. Nobody has asked how we can make progress that everybody can live with. So a compromise of some sort is necessary. Secondly, the changes must come about over time. We can agree a plan or a blueprint, but the implementation must take place over years. Life peerages have been a great success; they were brought in over a great deal of time, and the House absorbed them very successfully. Thirdly, your Lordships' House and, more particularly, the other place, need to bear it in mind that this House is a very different place and does a very different job from the House of Commons. Obviously, we are a revising Chamber, and in the end it is right and proper that the House of Commons and the Government should get their way if we cannot persuade them otherwise. But that is not all. That brings me back to the noble Lord, Lord Alliance. We are a different House because many of your Lordships are not primarily politicians. Many arrived in this place because of distinguished work or great experience in a range of fields. Increasingly I think that our procedures are not designed to make the maximum use of their expertise. Of course, many of the noble Lords to whom I refer form the backbone of the Select Committees and contribute significantly to the international reputation of our work, but I wonder whether their involvement in legislation with, of course, a number of important and distinguished exceptions, matches that contribution. I suspect that they find that some parts of our procedures are not conducive to the best scrutiny of legislation. If the Minister or the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor have any doubts, I invite them to talk privately to a number of the distinguished colleagues who have come from industry or the professions to their side of the House since 1979 but no longer play a great part in the House and ask them exactly why they do not. I think that it will be found that many of them do not believe that our procedures are necessarily conducive to getting the best out of their expertise. The Labour Party report prepared under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, tackles some of those issues. I, for one, would be happy to see some of its aspects studied further. There are other aspects of the report with which I disagree profoundly. For example, I can see no justification for an arbitrary 60-day timetabling of Bills. Very few would fall foul of it, and in all the cases that I have seen the Government have had the major responsibility. I am in favour of timetabling but on the basis of agreement through the usual channels. There have been many attempts to reform your Lordships' House, and some of us bear the scars. We all seem to flounder on composition. My view is that we ask the wrong question. We are reasonably clear on what job the House should be doing; the question is how we get those best suited to do that work. We need experience and expertise, particularly from those who are not primarily politicians. There are plenty of politicians in the Commons, and we certainly do not want the politicians who cannot make it to the House of Commons or any of the other Parliaments or Assemblies. As someone put it in evidence to the Royal Commission, we do not want the fourth XI of political life as Members of this House. As I said, compromise is essential if we are to find a consensus. It was for that reason that some of us, with some reluctance, supported the idea of some elected Members of the House. They need to be few to start with, elected for a long time, and, in my view, without the option of being re-elected. They would come from and be chosen by the citizens of their region; they would not be looking over their shoulder but would be free to do what they felt best. They would be different from other Members of the House, but we already have Members who arrived here from many different routes, and we seem to have no difficulty in working together. I am still a strong supporter of the first-past-the-post system for the House of Commons, but there is a strong case for the political membership of this House being broadly on a PR basis. With all those things, there are some practical difficulties to be got over, but those questions have been addressed many times before, and it is possible to find solutions for all of them, particularly if we do not want to fix it in five minutes. I wish the Government well in their consideration of these matters.