---

House of Lords: Reform

My Lords, I served as a member of the royal commission chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham. We spent a year of our lives thinking deeply about the role of this House and taking a wide range of evidence about it. I supported and continue to support the royal commission's conclusions. Overall, those recommendations did not get a very good reception when they were published—especially, if I may say so, from those who had thought less deeply about the issues than we had. But at least in some respects experience has brought people round in favour of them. The most obvious example is the method of appointment to your Lordships' House. The royal commission recommended that the final decision on all discretionary appointments to your Lordships' House, including party-political appointments, should be in the hands of an independent, statutory Appointments Commission. We recommended that the Prime Minister should no longer play a role in appointing members of the second Chamber. We made that recommendation because we recognised that, while the power to make appointments remained in the hands of the Prime Minister and other party leaders, the suspicion of corruption could never be removed. There were no takers for that recommendation at the time. Now, for, reasons that are not very hard to discern, all parties seem to have come round to it. The noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, quoted Mark Twain. I am reminded of another quotation from him: "““When I was 14, I thought my father was a fool. When I was 21, I was surprised at how much he had learned in the past seven years””." I just want to make one simple point today. There is a deep division in the other place among those who voted for an 80 per cent elected and a fully elected House. As other noble Lords have remarked, the option of 100 per cent was opposed not only bythe Leader of the House but by the leadership of the Conservative Party. They voted for a 20 per cent appointed element to ensure the continuance of a non-political element that would prevent any party from gaining an overall majority in this House. This is not just a matter of degree. I believe that, with 80 per cent of this House elected, the important aim of the Leader of the House of Commons and, apparently, on the basis of today's debate, of all parties in this House could not be achieved. The Father of the House in another place put it succinctly and very well. He said: "““Just think of the realities of a political Chamber where the elected Members—whatever percentage there happen to be—time and again find that the unelected Members are swinging the majority away from them ... Once we start down this road, we will eventually arrive at a fully elected House of Lords””.—[Official Report, Commons, 6/3/07; col. 1427.]" Of course, that is certain to be true if the whole point of the reform is electoral legitimacy. If I may say so, that seems to me to be the fundamental flaw in the position of those who favour an 80 per cent elected House. Most of those who voted for a 100 per cent elected House wanted something different; they want a fully political Chamber. The right honourable gentleman, Kenneth Clarke, whom I greatly admire, said that, "““if any new state proposed a new constitution and suggested having an upper House that took the same form as ours, it would be regarded as utterly ridiculous””.—[Official Report, Commons, 6/3/07; col. 1430.]" That may or may not be true, but it is not the situation that we face. We are not a new state. We are a very old state which has developed its constitutional relationships over a long period. With respect, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine, said, those relationships are subtle, they are not ridiculous and they work. I firmly believe—and I think that much of the population believes—that this House does a valuable job. With my colleagues on the royal commission, I believe that we can survive a small element of hybridity for the specific purpose of ensuring that some in this House can speak for regional interests in the country with the confidence that comes from being elected by them. If we go beyond that, the inevitable consequence is a fully party-political House, which, as other noble Lords have said, will not be content to be a subordinate partner to the House of Commons. Those who want an independent element in this House must make a choice. They will not get it with an 80 per cent elected House—even less with a 50 per cent elected House. This is not a matter of being willing to compromise. It is a matter of thinking clearly about what will work in the national interest. It is a matter of producing a House that is fit for its revising purpose. I can vote for a 20 per cent elected element or for a fully appointed House, but I cannot vote for a larger elected element than that.