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House of Lords: Reform

My Lords, I came into this House in 1992, having spent some two or three years prior to the election in that year working with the then right honourable Neil Kinnock, the former leader of the Labour Party, on aspects of constitutional reform. I came into this House after the election firmly convinced of the need for it to move, over time, to being a wholly elected Chamber. I still hold to that view and I shall say why. It seems to me a fundamental democratic principle that power should be exercised only with the consent of those over whom it is exercised. That would be an argument in favour of some kind of electoral basis for this House, although obviously it could be elaborated a lot more. The counter-argument, very powerfully put by my great friend Sir Patrick Cormack in the debates on the reforms proposed by the late Robin Cook, was that that was an irrelevant argument, because the House of Lords did not have any power. That is a mistake. Power is exercised when people are compelled to do things that they would not otherwise do or when they are compelled not to do what they would otherwise do. In the case of the House of Lords vis-à-vis the House of Commons or vis-à-vis the Government, the House of Lords does exercise power in that way. There are endless examples of government legislation that has been modified to accommodate the Lords. Usually the Government have not made those modifications because they are convinced by the intellectual case deployed on the Floor of the House; they have usually been convinced because they have lost the vote in the Division Lobbies. Compared with how often they give in over Divisions, how often have the Government said that they will do such and such because they believe that the House of Lords has figured out an argument that they had not fully accepted previously? I do not think that the score would be all that high compared with how they react to losing in the Division Lobbies. When I was a Front-Bench spokesman in the early 1990s, Baroness Blatch, who was the junior education Minister, introduced a large Bill—I cannot remember its name—containing a lot of clauses about university student unions that, given the hostility of this House, were jettisoned. That is power; it may not be fantastically great power, but it is power. It should be subject to consent, which seems to me to be a basic democratic principle. People will say that expertise itself confers authority, and that legitimacy or authority can come through the exercise of expertise and is not just given by consent. Despite being an argument that goes back to Plato, it is a mistake. To be an authority or an expert on something does not put you in authority in relation to anything without someone consenting to it. My cardiologist is an expert, but he is only in authority, so far as he is, over my life because I want to get my heart fixed. I choose to endow him with authority relating to his expertise. Consent is ubiquitous. I consent to the exercise of the authority. Authority and expertise are important, but expertise does not create authority in the sense of being in authority; being an authority does not make you in authority over anything without the consent of those over whom the authority is exercised. Nevertheless, if we move towards an elected House, which would have to happen over quite a long period, there are issues that the Government will have to take very seriously. First, there is the relationship between the two Houses. When I was working on the material for Neil Kinnock, the committee that I chaired took the view that the relationship between an elected House of Lords and an elected House of Commons would have to be based on statute. If it is based on statute, that would have to embody precisely defined accounts of the various powers of the two Houses and, when push comes to shove, as it undoubtedly would, it would have to be interpreted by a judge. I am in favour of that and of a more codified constitution than we have, but it would be entirely fanciful to think that an elected House of Lords would stick with the powers that it has. We would have to have a statutory relationship between both Houses. Eventually that would mean judicial interpretation of the meaning of that statute. I suspect that many of those who voted for 100 per cent election last week did not contemplate that, but it is an inevitable consequence. I echo my noble friend Lady Quin about engaging experts in other aspects of the legislative process—in committee work and in pre-legislative scrutiny.You do not need permanent experts with seats inthe House. You can engage current and diverse expertise in much more creative ways through, for example, committee mechanisms and pre-legislative scrutiny. As my noble friend Lord Tomlinson said, there are big questions to be asked about the length of time that elected Members would serve. It does not seem all that plausible to think that it should be 15 years, partly for the reasons that he mentioned. There is a very good article in the London Review of Books by Bruce Ackerman, the American philosopher, about why accountability has to do with getting rid of people as well as electing people. On the proposed basis, they would not be got rid of, because they would have tenure for 15 years and go at that point without the possibility of re-election. That is a serious point. There is another point. The House would be elected by a form of PR, which means that members of small parties would get elected, which is a jolly good thing. However, small parties are extremely vulnerable financially, as we discovered in the case of UKIP and Veritas, if it still exists at all. People could be elected for a 15-year period, yet within nine months or so the party that they represented could have imploded, because its financial basis was tenuous. That would be a serious problem. Also, to pick up a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, small parties can be vulnerable to ideological change and takeover, because they do not have many members and the leader or whoever could push the party in one way or another. Again, one could be elected for 15 years on one platform, while the party could represent something different after a very few years. So there could be major problems, both with the relationship between the two Houses and the length of time to be served by elected Members. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that the only way forward is that of elections to this House, although we must be open-eyed about the fact that that will require a much more codified constitution.