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House of Lords: Reform

My Lords, I have enormous respect for this House, I value many of its conventions and traditions, the high calibre of many of its Members and, above all, its traditions of tolerance. I think that by the time I sit down, it will be the tradition of tolerance that I shall most want to hang on to. In the years to come, we shall look back on this and similar debates about reform and wonder not how we ever came to change things but why it took so long to get there. After every major reform, when we look back, we say that it was so obvious that it was amazing there was any discussion. A number of noble Lords have asked what the added value of the change is. If that question had been asked in 1832, 1911, when life Peers were first introduced or when many hereditaries were taken away, I wonder whether anybody would have answered it or whether the answer was so obvious that nobody bothered to ask it. I shall address two issues in particular. The first is why we are here. We are here because we are part of Parliament and we want it to work well. Why is Parliament here? It is here to serve the people. If the people of Britain want us to stay as we are, that would be an argument. I appreciate that this is not the burning issue that people are talking about in pubs all over the country, but in so far as ordinary people are consulted, they overwhelmingly tend to want us to be elected. They opt for that in opinion poll after opinion poll. In an ICM poll taken about a week ago, 63 per cent of people wanted the Lords elected and 26 per cent did not. That is the most recent poll I have. The other reason for no change is if the House of Commons says that there shall be no change. That is what happened four years ago, and nothing happened. This time, the House of Commons seems to have said clearly that it wants changes. Either the people of this country or the House of Commons want change, but if neither of them does, we should not change things. However, they are both relevant. If we had no powers, it would not matter very much. Some people argue that we have no powers, but we do have some. We have exercised them, and it is therefore important for us to come to terms with how they are exercised and whether they are exercised in the right way by the right people. I shall probably vote for all the options from 60 per cent to 100 per cent elected. I noted what the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, said about my right honourable friend Jack Straw. I think that Jack was worried that the Commons would reject all the options like last time, and he worked hard to persuade people that they should vote for elected options. In the event, he was much more persuasive than he had expected to be. While this House must make up its own mind, and will do so, I hope we shall still take note of what the House of Commons did last week because we ignore it at our peril. We want this House to have a healthy independence from the Executive. That will be helped by ensuring that no one party dominates in a reformed House. However, it is curious that, if I felt unconvinced by the Government’s arguments on an issue, I would find it easier to break the party Whip if I had the backing of local people or my local constituency party. One has much more strength in ignoring a party Whip than if one simply says, ““Well, I feel like it, so I am not voting the party line””. At least, that is my experience of both local government and the House of Commons. We have a party system here. Anybody who gets a weekly Whip will see what it means. We must have a party system if Governments are going to get their legislation through. Our job traditionally has been to make the Government think again—I hope not again and again. I would argue that we already are a hybrid House. We have the Cross-Benchers who play a valuable part in our deliberations. Then there are those of us who are involved in election campaigns for our parties and after a general election we come back here. Some of us have been campaigning and knocking on doors and have the battle of election ringing in our ears, while others wonder what all the fuss is about. Obviously, they were on holiday while we were doing that. Some years ago there was a parliamentary by-election. I went and spent the day knocking on doors. All day I was assailed with arguments about housing, jobs, schools, hospitals, transport and planning. When I returned to the House in the evening for Divisions, I reflected that while I had been subjected to all this, as had some other Members of this House, there were many people who had not had that criticism. It may not have made me a more effective Member of this House, but it certainly gave me much pause to think about what ordinary people were saying, from which we are rather sheltered. I agree with my noble friend Lord Tomlinson in one respect: I do not like closed lists. They give party machines too much power over the individuals on them. That is wrong; it would be against the traditions of this House; and it is unhealthy. I also favour smaller constituencies as they give local people more chance to select the people they want to stand for them. If their constituencies are as large as is suggested in the White Paper, I fear that the party machines will dominate. Again that is not healthy. I also wonder about a 15-year term. I believe in accountability; and a 15-year term with no further re-election is not really accountability. It is a neat way of doing it, but I do not think it is right. My most important argument is that I believe in accountability. Being accountable makes people into a different sort of politician. Anyone who has represented a constituency at a local or national level will be aware of the relationship with ordinary people who put them there, and the need to justify why one votes in a particular way. One may not vote the party line, but one needs to justify why one has done what one has done. Here we do not have to justify it at all. We can go home; we have done it; and so on. The process of having to justify how one votes to local people—whether to one’s local party or to the local electors—is a key element of democracy. It is, after all, what distinguishes democracies from other sorts of country. Because we make decisions which involve ordinary people’s lives, it is right that we should have that accountability. Therefore, I believe that an element of election—a pretty large one—is the right way forward for this House, for Parliament and for the country.