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House of Lords: Reform

My Lords, I intervene in this debate to focus only on one issue: the issue of the hybrid principle and practice. I have been around all the tracks about fully elected Houses and fully appointed Houses but, in recent years, I have come to the conclusion that the principle and practice of a hybrid House is exactly what we need in the United Kingdom, which does not have a written constitution. In our situation, the case is strong. I want to make that case because one problem that has bedevilled our arguments both here and elsewhere for many months has been the assumption that a hybrid principle is somehow, on the one hand, a fudge or a compromise or, on the other, a stepping-stone to a fully elected House. My view is clear that the principle is right. A number of other countries, great democracies, have hybrid Houses—India and France to take two for example. They do not drift towards fully elected Chambers, so the assumption that that must happen is wrong. I also take the view that, as long as the fully elected first Chamber, the House of Commons, can override everything that is done by this Chamber, there is no question of democratic legitimacy. Where I disagree with my noble friend Lord Whitty is that if you go down the purist principle and say, ““Any influence on the legislative process must mean that you should be elected””, you must also elect judges. Judges have an enormous effect on people’s lives and interpret the law with far more latitude than we have in here. So we move towards the situation where—I understand the principled argument in favour of this—everyone in public sector jobs of that type must be fully elected. I think that a fully elected first Chamber—the House of Commons, in our case—and an appointed second Chamber is good. But there is something missing in this Chamber: the hybrid part. I want to talk about how that could be done in practice to benefit the structure and functioning of the United Kingdom. Just before I do that, I say that one of the great principles bound up in this would be that this would have to be the second Chamber. Anything that is hybrid is bound to be less legitimate than the fully elected Chamber. Therefore, we would always have that secondary role. The principle of hybridity makes it clear that we are the second Chamber, not the first. I also make the point that the great strength of this place is, as many Members have said, that many of those appointed here are appointed not just as experts but also as genuine voices of a wider community. They are very valuable in their own right. That is a great source of strength. That adds to the democratic principle because it informs the legitimate, fully elected first Chamber. The other side to the problem of having general voices who are appointed—I noticed this as a recently appointed ex-MP—is that you do not hear the voice of the street as effectively as you do in a fully elected Chamber. Nothing brings you up to the hard-edge issues like knocking on people's doors and asking for their votes to get elected again.