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House of Lords Bill [HL]

My Lords, I have long been a supporter of a part-elected, part-appointed House. That dates back to when Margaret Thatcher was Leader of the Opposition and she appointed me to a committee under Alec Douglas-Home to come up with proposals to reform this House. We came up with quite a good package: part-elected, part-appointed, part-hereditary. Alec had an ingenious method for culling the hereditaries. It was a Scottish system, whereby all the Scottish Peers would go to the Assembly in Edinburgh. Lord Stair would take the chair as the oldest and all the names would be read out in alphabetical order, receiving the acclamation ““Yes”” or ““No””. During that process, various derogatory remarks would be shouted out, such as, ““No, we couldn’t have him, he cheated at Eton””. That was not the system that was eventually used for culling the hereditary Peers, but they were culled. Margaret did absolutely nothing about that report. The only comment that she ever made to me about the House of Lords was that she was rather sad that the people whom she appointed to take the Conservative Whip rarely supported her. She wisely did not do anything on constitutional reform. We should now park the possibility of a part-elected House for a number of years. I say that to be realistic. The Government do not have time to bring in a Bill. Whatever the White Paper says, it is academic; it really is for the birds. The Government have neither the power nor the time to implement it. Come the next Parliament, a small majority one way or the other way will lead to a hung Parliament, so there will be no constitutional measure in the next Parliament. It is absurd to believe that there will be. The hustings are not remotely interested in reform of the House of Lords. You get not to 2010 but to 2015. By then, a whole new factor will have entered the debate; by then, this House will have to recognise that it has two roles. It is the upper Chamber for England, because we no longer have any influence on Scottish, Welsh or Northern Ireland matters. It is also a federal Parliament for non-devolved matters. That is very strange body indeed. It will lead to a great debate on who should be the Members of that extraordinary body. I do not believe that there will be fundamental change to the composition of this House for 20 years. Therefore, I conclude that there should be small, incremental change. I support entirely what the former Speaker of the House of Commons said in her very wise speech. This is a small, incremental measure that will make this House better. I strongly support an independent Appointments Commission and I strongly support the idea of phasing Members out slowly. Those who speak in favour of an elected part of this House have a wish list. Let me say one thing about leave of absence and the size of the House. When the hereditary Peers were Members of this House, there were 1,200 to 1,300 Members. When they left, that fell to 600. We have now expanded to 700. The Appointments Commission is a ratchet for increasing that. The Reaper takes only 17 of us a year, but the commission will appoint more than 17 a year—and in the year after an election probably rather more. There must be a system for descaling the House. We do not need 700 Members, rising to 800 Members. I would like the measures in Clause 12 to be slightly strengthened. I advocate a system whereby all new life Peers should be appointed for 15 years and existing life and hereditary Peers should be offered either another 15 years or compensation. We can certainly determine compensation for this House. The department with responsibility for environmental affairs has devised an extraordinarily generous system of compensation for disposing of middle-ranking and senior civil servants. If we put our mind to it and use the right actuaries, I am quite sure that we can do the same. I very much support this Bill. Perhaps I may say to my Front Bench that I hope that the leader of the Tories in this House will go to the shadow Cabinet and persuade it, too, to support the Bill in the Commons. This is all that we are going to get, so let us take it.