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House of Lords Reform

My Lords, I thank noble Lords on the Front Bench for providing us with the opportunity for this debate. I thank them also for the firm leadership which they are giving the House. They have recognised that the electorate this year have spoken with quite a different voice from what we have normally heard, and have been endeavouring to respond as best they could to the will of the people and to try to win back support and trust in the ways that they are exploring these issues. When reflecting on the debate, I share the view of the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, who is no longer in his place—there has been an element of disconnect from what is happening out there in political terms and in real life. It is important that we endeavour, as we work through this issue, to ensure that we are connected. It is worth reminding ourselves that all three parties went to the electorate with manifestos seeking either an elected or a partially elected Chamber. For the first time, the issue came up regularly before 8 million to 10 million people in the leaders’ debates, which we had never had before. I suspect that for the first time people knew more about the House of Lords and the attempt to reform it. I ask myself what right I have as an appointed Member of this Chamber to override and ignore those facts. If we are about rebuilding trust, we have to look for the areas in which we can do it. We should listen to what people have said. It does not do us a great deal of justice or help us if we start ignoring manifesto promises. I say that as much to my own side as to colleagues on the other side. In my opinion—I am sure that this view is not commonly held—where the Government may have gone wrong is that they lost their radical credentials marginally by not immediately moving to hold a referendum on the coalition’s programme for action. Had they done that, we would not have been having this debate today; without such a referendum, many of the debates that they will run into will also be problematic for them. I have raised this issue with my party, arguing that, if we go into a coalition, we should seek the electorate’s support in a referendum. Indeed, I shall be asking the prospective leaders of my party where they stand on this issue. We have to tackle some of the fundamental changes that have taken place in society. One of them relates to involving the wider public through referenda to a degree. I come back to the question that the Leader raised at the beginning of the debate. The Government have an opportunity to redeem themselves. They could commit themselves to taking the Bill, after we have finished with it, back to the public, just as they said in their document that they want a referendum on other changes. I ask the noble Lord to reflect on that, as I believe that that would be the right thing to do and I suspect that he would get the right answer if he did it. My next point is on an entirely different issue. Will the noble Lord say whether the Government will consider breaking the linkage between the honours system and appointment to this Chamber? That is a fundamental issue, which I do not think has been raised today, and it needs to be looked at. I shall come back to that point later. I come to the general approach. If the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, had been bolder at the beginning and had stated where the Government stand on the use of the Parliament Act, we might have had a rather different debate today. I understand that we are starting gently down the route, but I believe that we need to focus minds. I believe that the Government would have taken away a lot more useful information from this debate if we had known whether they intend to use the Parliament Act. I ask the noble Lord to clarify the Government’s position on that. Where do I stand on this issue? I broadly fall in line with my noble friend Lord Butler. We have to deal with reality and I suspect that we will not be far off the mark of what he said might happen. I support an 80:20 per cent hybrid House. We can make that work if we want it to. I would go for 500 Members initially, possibly changing that further down the line, with the constituencies the same as for the European elections, with open lists and preferably with primaries—the Conservative Party was exploring that idea, which I hope has not been forgotten. We need new systems for selecting people to be elected to this Chamber. I hope that the views expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, will be taken into account by my friends on the other side, as what he said was very useful. There are ways in which we can identify people of the right calibre from around the country who are prepared to stand and who could come here and give the kind of performance whose possible loss concerns so many people. I come now to the unanswered question of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, who asked what difference and improvement elections would make. First, we would have an element of accountability. I would go for eight-year terms, subject to re-election for a further eight years, making 16 in total. Here I differ from what was suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Butler: I would go for re-election after eight years. What would also be different—this has hardly been mentioned, which is fascinating—is that tonight we have 12 women out of about 64 speakers in the Chamber. The problems that we have with the underrepresentation of women in Parliament have not been mentioned. We should have quotas and we should go for substantial increases in the number of women who would be eligible for election to the House of Lords. Similarly with ethnic minorities, we should look for substantial changes so that we end up with a different-looking Parliament entirely. The issue of the absence of geographical spread has already been mentioned, so I will not pursue it, but perhaps we should look for a few Roman Catholics from Northern Ireland. Would they not make this Chamber better than it is at the moment? The noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, clearly demonstrated how the quality of the House has changed over recent years. There is a case for it to continue to change—and for the better—in order to become more accountable and more democratic. My noble friend Lord Rooker raised the issue of the relationship with the Commons. This is not beyond solution. I suggest to noble Lords on the Front Bench opposite that they dust down the work that was done by the 2003 Joint Committee and look at the ideas on the codification of our conventions. They should move quickly on that to kill all the counterarguments that have come from many quarters. Our work and procedures would stay broadly in line with what we do at the moment, although my preference would be to look at the way in which, at the other end, they deal so inadequately with European legislation. That is something that could come to the House of Lords. There are answers to many issues that have been raised today about quality; and there is an answer to the potential conflict between us and the Commons. Finally, I refer to the committee that will be established under the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and suggest, not without jocularity, that perhaps he should consider whether we could offer a conversion from life peerages to hereditary peerages—maybe for one or two generations and then they would disappear. In that way, either we would give substance to, increase and improve the aristocracy, or possibly provide the final nail in the coffin that will undermine it.