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House of Lords: Reform

My Lords, the draft Bill soon to be considered by the Joint Committee starts from the proposition that, in a parliamentary democracy, the Parliament is elected by the people. Whatever the status of this House relative to the other place, your Lordships’ House is an integral and fully functional part of our Parliament. We may be the subordinate Chamber in a bicameral legislature and our role may primarily comprise scrutiny and revision, but no one can argue that we are not a fully functioning Chamber of Parliament. To use Bagehot’s classification, we are, now at least, fundamentally an efficient rather than a dignified component of our constitution. That being the case, fundamental democratic principle demands that this should be an elected House, whose composition is determined by the people. Yet while we argue and even fight for the principles of democracy internationally, our own out-of-date and largely haphazard composition derives from a historical mixture of political patronage, merit-based appointment, birth and office in the established church. If ““democratic deficit”” is the phrase for a failure to live up to the principles of democracy, our composition is paradigmatic of democratic deficit. The weightiest argument that is said to outweigh democratic principle in this field—a matter alluded to by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, who personally supports an elected House—is that an elected House would undermine the primacy of the House of Commons. That is the principal argument that I will seek to address, but before I do so it is worth reminding ourselves that this argument is about the primacy of the House of Commons, not about its supremacy. The whole point of this House is to act as a legitimate check on the powers of the other place. The argument about primacy starts from the proposition that an elected House of Lords would have greater democratic legitimacy than the present House and it is said to follow that a reformed House would feel unrestrained by the conventions that limit the exercise of its powers. It goes without saying that this argument starts from the important concession that the composition of the present House indeed lacks democratic legitimacy. However, the argument about primacy does not take sufficiently into account the law governing the powers of the House of Lords, which is to remain unchanged, nor does it take into account the substantial difference in composition—