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House of Lords: Reform

My Lords, the other place last week was not Philadelphia—the House of Commons did not vouchsafe the wisdom of the founding fathers. It had a vigorous debate for sure, but its conclusions were the result of a random collision of opinions and tactical improvisations. The Front Benches of both major parties were defeated by their own Back Benches. The other place did not find the consensus that the Prime Minister and Jack Straw have acknowledged is desirable to validate major constitutional reform. Surely, the only test that matters for reform of the House of Lords is that it should improve the performance of Parliament. The Government assert that there is another standard that reform must satisfy—democratic legitimacy. But democratic legitimacy is satisfied by the primacy of the elected House of Commons. That is not to say that the House of Commons as we have it is a perfect vehicle of democracy, and there are other debates that need to be had about its reform. But a Parliament in which the House of Commons is accountable to the people in regular elections, while its primacy is acknowledged axiomatically by the unelected second Chamber whose role is to advise but not to determine, satisfies the democratic principle. There is a serious argument for a fully elected second Chamber. It is that it could hold both the Executive and the House of Commons, which is so dominated by the Executive, effectively to account. It could restrain the ““elective dictatorship””. But the House of Commons is not willing to face the logic of its own vote. Supporters of a fully elected second Chamber in last week’s debate in one breath expressed the hope that its Members would be spirited and independent, and partners in invigilation, but then insisted that the primacy of the House of Commons must be upheld. Jack Straw cites the Czech Republic, Japan and Poland as comforting examples of countries with elected second Chambers that have few powers. Those instances are irrelevant. The political institutions of a country are the product of its history and political culture. The British people demand of their elected representatives in Parliament that they should hold the Executive to account, be spirited and independent, and respond to the wishes of their constituents—whatever the failings in practice of the House of Commons. To be fair, there was much breast-beating about them in the Commons debate. If people of real ability and character are to be elected to the second Chamber, the primacy of the House of Commons will not go unchallenged. The Parliament Acts, framed to restrain the power of a non-elected House, are at least of uncertain application to an elected House. The conventions that today govern the relationship between the elected and unelected Houses will be shattered. Members of a fully elected second Chamber, elected by proportional representation and possibly elected more recently, will claim a democratic authority at least as great as that of the House of Commons. No longer will Governments be able to carry business that is complex or controversial without more searching and prolonged scrutiny and without more compromise. Some may think that a good thing. Other consequences, however, will surely be undesirable. There will be much more contention between the two Houses at Westminster, not occasional ping-pong but routine wrestling. With two elected Chambers, one of the virtues of Parliament as we have it, that it is capable of taking clear-cut decisions in a reasonable timescale, will be lost. So too will the clarity of Parliament’s present accountability whereby voters, knowing that it is the House of Commons which must take responsibility, give their verdict on the day of the general election. The principle of the single-member constituency will be lost, and MPs will hate having another Member of Parliament, from the second Chamber, wandering around their constituencies, legitimately claiming also to represent their constituents and funded by the taxpayer to make political mischief. Coexistence between MPs and AMs and MSPs is already less than harmonious, but how much scratchier it will be if both lots are Members of the same Parliament. Because neither the Government nor MPs actually want a vigorous and powerful elected second Chamber, they seem minded to seek to entrench limitations on its powers. They will find this technically difficult to achieve, as the report on conventions has explained. If they succeed, it will be a large step towards a written constitution and will render both elected Houses of Parliament significantly subordinate to an unelected judiciary. Here I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Roper. Beyond that consideration, if toothlessness is to be entrenched, why should voters bother to vote in elections to such a Chamber? And what politicians worth electing would stand? All political parties have problems finding enough candidates of quality for the elections we already have. The media call us former MPs in your Lordships’ House hacks; they ain’t seen nothing yet. These people will of course require for themselves salaries, pensions, staff, offices and allowances to match those of MPs—at prodigious cost. If they are to sit for a single term of three Parliaments there will be no accountability anyway, and they will never need condescend to come among the people who elected them; quite old-fashioned, really. What a price to pay for a functionally useless extension of democracy. The party leaders, appalled by what they have let loose, may try to slide back to the 80 per cent elected, 20 per cent appointed option. Despite the advocacy of the noble Lord, Lord Richard, that seems the least worthwhile of all the options. It would produce the problems of a hybrid House—and I put it to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, who says that he does not understand the problems of a hybrid House, that they are inequality between the two classes of Member and instability arising from the capacity of the unelected to combine with the elected to defeat the Government in the House of Commons—together with the minimum advantage of having appointed Members. With no more than20 per cent appointed, there would be far less opportunity to benefit from the contribution of distinguished individuals or to progress towards a better balance of gender, region and race among appointed Members than we have now. No case has been made that either a wholly or a partly elected second Chamber would improve the performance of Parliament, a point argued very powerfully by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe. It seems far more likely that, in terms of quality of scrutiny and debate, capacity to reach decisions and accountability, Parliament would be damaged. I hope that the Government and MPs will, after all, look carefully at the case for a reformed but wholly appointed second Chamber. It would not challenge the primacy of the elected Chamber and would continue to offer considered advice from its Members, people eminent in many walks of life as well as people with much political experience but no longer in thrall to ambition and tribalism. We need a reformed appointments commission, statutory, its membership approved by the House of Commons and charged by it to bring into being an appointed second Chamber that will indeed be, "““effective, legitimate and more representative””;" a House whose strengths complement those of the elected House. For all the historic and present contribution of hereditary Peers, I do not see that in the future there can be a place in Parliament for anyone by virtue of heredity. I hope that those who wish to do so will continue to serve by appointment. We cannot accept that Parliament should be so damaged in consequence of a spasm of embarrassment over party funding, misplaced democratic sentiment, a glib compulsion to modernise, a spurious equation between legitimacy and election, and confused tactical voting. Unelected though we are in this House, our responsibility is to improve our parliamentary democracy, not collude in its harming.