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House of Lords Reform Bill [HL]

I am not in favour of this at all, due to certain bad experiences in my life. The noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, will recall that we were both joint treasurers of the Conservative Group for Europe when the European referendum took place. I ended up having to raise very substantial amounts of money because, although the referendum went through, it was very difficult to explain to people what this European lark was all about. In general, people were slightly anti-European. The Labour Party was totally anti-European; when the referendum said that we should go into the EU, it refused to send a delegation to the European Parliament. My concern about these matters is that it is very difficult to explain things. I speak in my capacity as a member of the Information Committee. We have a major problem, even though we have the outreach programme, in explaining to the outside world what we actually do. It is easier to explain it to young children than it is to those of teenage or later years. I shall use my grandson as an example. He sums it up very brilliantly, by saying that we work at Big Ben and we make rules. That is easier for people to understand—but what does the House of Lords do? In the outreach programme, when you talk to different people, it is very difficult because they all think that we are a bunch of old fogies who do nothing but sit on our backsides and drink tea. This explanation of what we do is very important if a referendum comes up. At the moment, if you were to have another referendum on the EU, you might have some very interesting results. So I am totally opposed to introducing to this Bill the referendum concept at this stage.