---

House of Lords: Reform

My Lords, we have now had two attempts to reach agreement on the composition of a hybrid House of Lords—partly elected and partly appointed. It seems to me that, as a result of the proceedings in another place last week, many of the speeches here yesterday and two very notable speeches today—from the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, and the noble Lord, Lord Higgins—the search for a hybrid solution has reached a dead end. It would be most useful for our discussion if we were now to put on one side discussion about hybrids, even a hybrid with 80 per cent elected Members, to which, in any case, at least 80 per cent of the pros and cons of 100 per cent election apply, and to continue the discussion in terms of a choice between wholly elected and wholly appointed. As the noble Lord who has just spoken said, before we try to make that choice, there is, or should be, a prior question: what do we want a second Chamber to do? That question is barely touched on in the White Paper. The general assumption seems to be that we want it to do pretty well what the House of Lords does now—certainly not to have greater powers, and to be if anything slightly more restricted than now. If that is our position, it is one of the factors that affect the choice between wholly appointed and wholly elected. To make the second Chamber a wholly elected body would be a profound and fundamental change in our parliamentary constitution—a change with many consequences and ramifications, many still unforeseen, that need to be thought through over a considerable period. At this moment do we really want or need to undertake such a change, if there are to be no significant changes in the functions of the second Chamber? It is suggested that a wholly elected Chamber could be subject to rules and conventions similar to those by which this House is content to be bound, so as to protect the primacy of the other place. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, on that. I doubt whether the Members of such a Chamber would be content to submit to such constraints. Before long they would surely come to feel that they had as good a democratic mandate as the other place and should have the same or very similar functions and powers. There would inevitably be unremitting pressure to stretch the rules and conventions, and constant unproductive tensions between the two Chambers. Thus the second Chamber would soon in effect constantly be challenging the primacy of the first. The White Paper has more to say about the disadvantages of and objections to a wholly elected Chamber than about its advantages and benefits, and it does not succeed in arguing away all those disadvantages and objections. I am not convinced that membership of a wholly elected second Chamber, constrained as we are content to be, would attract people of the standing and capacity that we should wish for. Why should such people be prepared to subject themselves to the process of submitting for election to such a Chamber? Whatever the process by which Members were elected, I wonder whether the British voting public would have sufficient enthusiasm for electing the Members of a second Chamber to go out and vote for them. I suspect that the British public are beginning to suffer from a surfeit of elections—from election fatigue. A second Chamber elected on the votes of only about a quarter of the electorate would lack the democratic mandate and the degree of democratic representativeness and authority that such a Chamber ought to have. A wholly elected second Chamber would not have room for the independent element that those who sit on these Benches provide, and by which all those who have discussed these matters set great store. Our all-appointed House is thought to be deficient in representativeness, so we should be searching for a way of making it more broadly representative. I suggest that other ways than a process of direct election could deliver this objective. ““Legitimacy”” is not and should not be used as a synonym for ““direct election””. The proposed independent statutory Appointments Commission could be given instructions as to the balance that it should seek to preserve between the representatives of the various political parties and between those representatives and independent non-political members. It could be instructed to invite nominations for the appointment of members representing the various social partners—for example, from the political parties, from the world of local government and regional communities, from the world of industry and commerce, from the trade union movement, from the financial world, from agriculture, from the churches, from non-government organisations, and from the world of charities. Nominations could also be invited from the professional bodies representing, for instance, the health professions, the legal professions, the academic and educational professions, and the media professions. The people so nominated would not need to be politically independent. Some no doubt would be; others would be supporters of one or other of the political parties. The political affiliations of nominees would have to be declared so that the commission’s recommendations could take into account the balances of representation in the House. The commission could put forward lists of recommendations once or twice a year. Its recommendations would be made to the Prime Minister, who would be expected to put them unaltered to the Queen. The Prime Minister might need to retain residual powers to make his own recommendations to the Queen, for instance when he wanted to appoint as a Minister someone who was not a Member of the other place. In other cases—senior public servants on retirement from the armed services or the Civil Service, for example—he would send his nominations to the commission for consideration by it. We should no doubt continue to examine the pros and cons of a wholly elected second Chamber, and the means by which we might seek to differentiate an elected second Chamber from the other place and so maintain the primacy of the other place. But that would be a profoundly radical, even revolutionary, change in our constitutional parliamentary arrangements—a great leap into the unknown, with unforeseeable consequences. This is a field in which, if we want to press forward to make early proposals, we should do better to proceed by a process of gradual reform. I suggest that the time has come when we should concentrate on building and improving what we have, on reform which would give us a more broadly representative House and which would be achievable and manageable within a reasonable period.