---

Coalition Government

My Lords, I do not know if I can really explain that. Maybe it is part of the learning process, one that we will have to take on the chin. I put it like this. When tuition fees were first introduced by the noble Baroness’s party, I opened a bank account for my daughter to pay her tuition fees. I looked to what was coming and listened to the academics, who were lobbying very hard for increases even then, saying that the fees were too low. That was what I thought the reality was. My own party made other judgments, and they were not ones I agreed with. To conclude, this House is going to have to learn to behave slightly differently, or bring in an outside authority, if we cannot behave ourselves and take our practices from another place, which are determined by an outside authority. We will have to accept that we as a House are stuck with our history, which means that we are here for life at the moment, and there is always going to be a time lag, and we cannot change our membership with elections.