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House of Lords Reform

The noble Lord’s party membership is going up—I am happy to hear it—by three in a month, probably. There are fewer members of all political parties than members of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. I do not believe that the kind of people who inhabit this House now would want the rigours of an election. Certainly they would not want the constituency work that would follow from being elected for a regional constituency. The notion that Members could come to this place and devote all their energies to legislation and so on is cloud-cuckoo-loud. They would have a massive constituency load and would be prevented from spending the overwhelming part of their energies and imagination on the legislative work for which this House is rightly renowned. As to the 20 per cent appointed in the mixed, hybrid system—full-time, fully-paid appointed Members—I do not think that many sitting in this House now would contemplate that position. I do not think either that the tenor of this House, which is so important to the enjoyment of Members here, would be retained in a partisan House that was 80 per cent elected and which would swiftly become a shadow of the other place. The appointed Members would be second-class Members; they would not have elective legitimacy and they would be a much older cadre. The Commons might use the fact that 20 per cent of the House was appointed as an excuse for refusing to cede any further powers to this place. The statement of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that the powers in an elected House would be unchanged from what they are now is surely a certain recipe for not only the constitutional inferiority that we now have, and readily accept, but for a qualitative inferiority. Let us be blunt: who but second-rate Members would want to be elected to this House, with its inferior powers, when they might seek to be elected to the other place? I refute the assumption of the noble Lord, Lord Richard, and others that election would increase the power and influence of the House for the reasons I have attempted to summarise. The present wonderful complementarity of this House would be shattered in one fell swoop. It would lose both its storehouse of remarkable experience and expertise and its independent spirit by the act of election. In the last four Sessions of this House in the three and a half years up until last November, there were 349 whipped votes; the Government were defeated in 113 of them, or 32 per cent. Over the same period in the Commons, fewer than 1 per cent of the votes led to government defeats; indeed, in the first 10 years of the Blair Government, they lost a single vote. I feel that we cannot abandon the historic, organic evolution of the powers of this place, and I hope very much that we will support my noble friend Lord Steel in his sensible reforms today.