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House of Lords: Reform

My Lords, 10 years ago I was one of a small band of 45 Labour Peers, to whom my noble friend Lord Graham referred, created under a Conservative Government. In those 10 years, I have not only enjoyed being a Minister in this House—well, mostly—but come to respect the experience, the wisdom and the quality of the debates in this House, the reports that our Select Committees produce and our influence over legislation presented to us from the Commons. Often that legislation has not been fully thought through and has required a revising Chamber. However, I have to say that I have not been impressed sufficiently to change my basic view: that anyone who makes laws to govern the people in some way has to have the consent of the people. There has been some lamentation in this debate that colleagues in another place, the public and the commentators do not fully understand what goes on in this House. That is undoubtedly true, but I gently have to say to the House that there is the reciprocal point of view: that some of the speeches today and some of the chatter around the bars since the decision last week show that we sometimes fail to see ourselves as others see us. The fact of the matter is that politicians in another place, media commentators, the general public and foreign commentators all find it difficult to see any justification for a fully appointed body exerting the legislative influence that we do. In addition, I am afraid that many of them see us as the beneficiaries either of birth or of patronage—or, more recently, of buying our way into this House. It is not impossible that the same people on occasion applaud the way in which we stand up to the Government, but they do not see any legitimacy in the basis of that power and influence. As my noble friends Lord Plant and Lord Dubs said, they want to know that anyone involved in legislation has, one way or another, directly or indirectly, the consent of the people. It is an old principle: no legislation without representation. There is another point that I hesitate to make, but I will gently say it. The impressive piece of work by the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, to which my noble friends Lady Quin and Lord Graham referred, sets out the interests and the backgrounds of people in this House. But I draw exactly the opposite conclusion to the one that the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, did: his work underlines what an elitist and metropolitan group we are. So we are neither representative of the people nor the people’s chosen representatives, and we now have the opportunity, at least in part, to change that situation. I shall therefore vote for both the propositions that were accepted by the House of Commons and I shall oppose all others. Like many other noble Lords, I should have preferred it if we did not focus quite so much on composition; I should have preferred it if we equally, and possibly as a priority, focused on the role and function of this House. There is a lot to be said about that and, of course, the two issues are interrelated—if we change the composition, the balance of power changes, as many noble Lords have said. Under the current proposals, we would become more legitimate but we would not have quite the equivalent legitimacy. As my noble friend Lord Tomlinson said in his polemic, accountability is also part of democracy. This House will undoubtedly be more legitimate if it is elected and, although we may not be accountable in the sense of having to seek re-election, it is no part of democracy to say that those who have been elected should have no respect for their democratic credentials simply because they will not be re-elected. On that basis, the most powerful elected politician in the world would at present have no legitimacy. Although the President’s legitimacy has been queried in certain respects, his democratic credentials have not been. So the balance of power would change. We also need to change the conventions and to build on the work done by the Cunningham committee in setting out those conventions to see how they would apply and how they would need to be modified for a wholly or largely elected body. There are a number of other issues relating to a fully or predominantly elected Chamber that the White Paper does not adequately address. That is largely because the White Paper was written in the expectation that we would have a 50:50 or a 60:40 hybrid House. The outcome of the Commons votes is likely to be somewhat different from that. We need to return to a number of those issues—for example, size and composition. The figure of 540 was chosen to reflect, in part, the degree of hybridity. I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Palmer: I think that 540 is far too high a number. In fact, this House is run with a maximum of 350 people, and that is all that is needed for it to do its job. I am glad to see some right reverend Prelates in their place, as the contentious issue of the position of the Bishops of the Church of England also arises. I have a hereditary position on this matter. My grandfather, good socialist though he was, ranted against the House of Lords not because of the fox-hunting landowners or the grasping plutocrats represented here in 1910, but because of the representation of the Church of England. He was a Methodist before he was a Marxist, and I run in that same dissenting tradition. We should perhaps also query whether we will need Ministers in the House of Lords under the new proposal. After all, there will be no appointed political hacks such as me and my noble friend on the Front Bench; all Members will be elected. If we want a slightly different sort of House that does a somewhat different job—a job that entails scrutiny and revision and asking the Commons to think again—rather than it being a ladder to political appointments and ministerial office, will we need Ministers? I think not. We will need business managers but will we need executive Ministers? It would help the proceedings of this House and the relations between the two Houses if Commons Ministers were required to come and explain themselves here. That might be something that we could address during the course of the reform. There is also the question of whether the elections should be held in precisely the form suggested in the White Paper. There are many objections to that. You could have a PR system based on regions smaller than the standard ones but not on a closed system and not even on a partially open system, as proposed in the White Paper. Some of these issues need to be revisited. So although I fully approve of the general direction that the Government are taking and will support in terms the decisions taken in the House of Commons, a number of key issues need to be returned to. To that extent, I agree that we should review them and reconvene the various bodies that have been looking at this matter—both the cross-party body and the Cunningham committee or something very like it. This is an opportunity to make this House more representative. In those circumstances, I do not think that the guarantee for life, for those of us who sit here now, will be valid, but we should support, not oppose, a gradual process of change to a more representative House.