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House of Lords Reform (Draft Bill)

I remind the right hon. Gentleman that the insight that it is best to have long non-renewable terms in the other place in a reformed House of Lords precisely to avoid such conflict with the other place was not established by the present Government or the cross-party committee I chaired; rather, it is an idea that has enjoyed consensus from the days of the Wakeham commission onwards. If we look at the proposals from a cross-party group of MPs, which were given considerable support by the previous Labour Government in 2005—the ““Breaking the Deadlock”” proposals—we find that a preference was made not only for non-renewable terms of between 12 and 14 years, but for the single transferable vote. These are not new proposals: they are drawn from a lot of insights identified by others from all parties in the past.