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House of Lords: Reform

My Lords, the question I should like to pose is this: should those of us who would like to keep an appointed second Chamber now modify or abandon our position in the light of the vote in the House of Commons last Wednesday? I think not. First, how robust is that vote? Surely there is some unreality in the House of Commons voting to establish a second Chamber in the form most likely to challenge its own authority, so there is at least room for doubt whether the vote would be maintained when it came to votes on actual legislation. But we are in any case a very long way from being presented with legislation. It is quite easy to imagine scenarios in which legislation never does get presented. Neither major party now knows how to craft proposals that will ensure the support of its own Back Benchers. Will a Government with a small majority attempt to introduce legislation on so contentious and peripheral a subject? Are a fresh Conservative Government really likely to begin their career fishing in these unpromising and unnatural waters? With the future so clouded, it seems quite wrong for those who believe in an appointed House to throw in the towel at this stage. I turn to the merits of the case. I cannot see the point of incurring colossal expense for the sake of creating a second Chamber that is very likely to challenge the primacy of the House of Commons and in no way likely to do a better job of legislative revision than the present House. The fact is that we have now very much the sort of second Chamber that the Government and most other people say they want. Indeed, the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor today could hardly find a bad word to say about the present House of Lords. It has wide expertise and a high degree of independence among its Members. It is not dominated by any one party. It is complementary to, not a duplication of, the House of Commons. It has continuity of membership. Even the question of its representativeness has been addressed by the Appointments Commission, which has also acted to clean up the process of Prime Ministerial appointments. It has the confidence to challenge the Government on details of legislation, but the good sense and experience to abide by the conventions and not press things too far. It functions very well as a political House of Parliament, with the opposition parties and the House as a whole able to call on the Government to explain and defend their policies on a daily basis. The only thing wrong with it is that this admirable and widely desired result has been reached apparently by the wrong means. The House of Lords is working fine in practice, but it does not work in theory, so it must be replaced. But of course, in trying to replace it, you risk producing quite a different result. It is in the nature of a second Chamber that it walks a tightrope, if I may put it like that. Too little legitimacy, and it fails to be a sufficient challenge to the Government of the day. That was the weakness of the pre-1999 House of Lords. The issue was addressed by this Government and this House has manifestly more legitimacy and functions as a much better check on a Labour Government than the unreformed House could ever have done. But give it too much legitimacy, as an 80 per cent or 100 per cent elected element would surely be bound to do, seems to be a recipe for constitutional chaos, and for that to be handled it might well require a written constitution. The Commons votes last week also make a nonsense in other respects of the Government’s White Paper. With a House that is 100 per cent elected on party lists, there would be very little expertise among the membership, no independence of party whatever, no role at all for the Appointments Commission, and no place for the great and the good. In an 80 per cent elected House, there would be a little of all that, but the 20 per cent would have to accommodate whatever Bishops room could be found for and whatever other faith leaders it was found necessary to balance them with, and every other worthy candidate for appointment, including the ministerial appointments. Also, I very much doubt whether a House of Commons calling for a House that was 80 per cent or 100 per cent elected would have the patience to permit life Peers to continue here for as long as they wished or as long as they lived, a process which would span itself out over the next 50 years. I do not believe at all that the push for legislation is proceeding from a demand by the general public for more say over the composition of this House any more than I hear calls for the election of judges, company chairmen, newspaper editors, television producers or radio interviewers. Yet many of those figures can acquire huge political influence far more than most Members of your Lordships' House. I hope that the Appointments Commission will not be given powers—or, at any rate, exclusive powers—over party political appointments. Vetting for propriety is one thing, and the commission has been effective in that area, but it seems a step too far to propose that ministerial appointments should be made by the commission rather than by the Prime Minister and other party leaders. Surely it is they who should decide who should speak and act on their behalf in this House. To conclude, those of us who would like to keep an appointed House—devotees of pragmatism, not dogmatism—should take heart. We should remind ourselves what a very long road there still is to travel before any further major ““reform”” is likely to be attempted, let alone enacted. We should signal very clearly on Wednesday that it will happen only in the face of the most determined resistance by your Lordships' House.