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House of Lords Reform

I very much welcome the statement and the White Paper. Does the Secretary of State agree, however, that alongside discussion of the issues in the White Paper it is important that we discuss the mechanisms that the political parties will adopt to select candidates for a reformed second Chamber? It would be most unfortunate, and certainly not the wish of this House, to substitute one form of patronage with an even less transparent one. It is important that the second Chamber is not full of centrally appointed party apparatchiks and has only a thin veneer of democratic accountability.