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Honours System (Reform)

: One of the points about having a different system is not only to do with the mechanics of choosing the names. The bit that we do not do very well is the bit that gets under the skin of our society: finding the kind of people whom I mentioned at the beginning. The honours system hardly does that at all now, and it certainly does not do it well. We would benefit from a system that more actively took on board the idea of going and finding the people doing the work that we as a society would like to reward, rather than simply taking the names in from the usual transmission belts. That is the point about having a different system. I bring my remarks to a close by mentioning propriety, which has caused some excitement in recent weeks. Interestingly, the Committee decided several months ago that it wanted to revisit its work on the honours system in relation to propriety. That is, how effective was the machinery at guaranteeing the integrity of the system? The issue relates to the scrutiny committees that were set up at the beginning of the previous century, the work of the commission that has now taken that on board and the way in which the scrutiny committee has been absorbed into the House of Lords appointments commission. We decided to do that work long before the recent excitement, when things were calm. Since then, of course, there has been all the excitement. The appointments commission has raised queries about names. It seems from the reports in the press—I do not know whether they are true—that it did so the previous year, I think in relation to Conservative nominees, which put all parties on a yellow warning. The commission returned to the issue only this year, more actively querying certain names, because of that history. One could say that that shows that the system is improving. We have had a political honours scrutiny committee since the early part of the 20th century. As we know from all the evidence, we have also had people appearing to receive honours and peerages because they gave money to political parties and sailing through quite serenely. We might therefore take some comfort from the fact that we now have a piece of machinery that is more energetic. Someone said the other day that there should be a donor's Bench in the House of the Lords. People who sat there could wear special ermine and everything would be above board. We could go down that route, but it would not be the preferred route. It would be much better to try to clean up the system, so that honour did not flow just from money. The central issue—on which the Committee reported in responding to the Wakeham commission report on the House of Lords—is a second Chamber that has a built-in confusion between being part of the honours system and being a legislative chamber, the second Chamber in Parliament. That confusion causes all the difficulty. People in society are not queuing up to be legislators in the second Chamber of Parliament, but they are queuing up to become Lords. Yet one is unfortunately indissolubly linked to the other.