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House of Lords: Reform

I would say two things to the noble Lord. First, I am not absolutely sure that he is completely right about that. If I recall rightly, for example, in Australia there have been moments of considerable difficulty between the two Houses. Secondly, at the time of the royal commission, if I remember rightly we looked into a number of different systems in different parts of the world and concluded that most of them had much more to do with the traditions and history of their own countries than they did with some more academic system. I do not therefore accept the view that this House should be fully elected although, as the House will remember, our royal commission recommended an element of elected Members. We were not absolutely certain. It was partly elected—a much lower part than the Government’s proposal—but partly appointed. The real worry is that if we have a substantially or wholly elected House, we will have politicians coming here with a view to undermining the position of Members in the House of Commons. I tried to say in the royal commission that anybody who ever served in this House could never serve subsequently in the House of Commons. I was told by the lawyers that that would now be ruled to be a breach of their human rights, so would not happen. We did not think that it was a very good idea to have too many elected Members. Frankly, the sort of House that I envisage is a revising Chamber with, in the final analysis, an advisory role and with the House of Commons always having to be supreme in the end. The most important part of that advisory role is that we have people here capable of giving advice of value. The House of Lords has of course been reformed many times in the past 100 years and will continue to be reformed if it sets about it in the right way. In my view, one of the most constructive tasks that the all-party committee ought to consider is the way that parliamentary procedure should operate in order to reform this House. We have the example of the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Steel, which is a perfectly good and acceptable measure, but no business manager—I have spent a lot of my life being a business manager—would ever dream of bringing it in because of the chaos it would cause to the parliamentary timetable in view of all the amendments that would be added to it. If one accepts that this measure will probably not be achieved because it is a wholesale reform, we should continue with gradual, piecemeal reform. We should look at how to set about doing that because I do not believe that the present parliamentary procedures are adequate for the task of dealing with incremental changes to this House, which in the past we were able to negotiate and agree. I think it would be very difficult at present.