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Draft House of Lords Reform Bill

My Lords, I join those who have congratulated the noble Lord, Lord Richard, and his committee on all the hard work that they have done and, more particularly, those who have worked even harder and more extensively on the committee that is supplementing the work of the Richard committee. My problem is that the Richard committee was asked to undertake pre-legislative scrutiny of a Bill that is fundamentally flawed. The argument is very simple and is put forward by the Liberal Democrats and others: namely, if we have an elected House, Britain will be more democratic. I do not believe that that will be the case. We are already 100 per cent democratic and that democratic legitimacy rests in the House of Commons. If both Chambers were elected, that legitimacy would inevitably be divided and, I believe, would be less effective. Therefore, there is a very real problem here. The committee faced up to it and decided as follows. The report states: "““The Committee, on a majority””—" I stress ““on a majority””— "““agrees that the reformed second chamber of legislature should have an electoral mandate provided it has commensurate powers””." It seems to me clear that ““commensurate”” is the wrong word. If both Chambers are elected, the wording ought to be ““equal powers””. More particularly in that context, if the upper Chamber is elected on proportional representation, which Mr Clegg tells us is more legitimate than first past the post, we would end up with an upper Chamber that is more legitimate, and ought to have more powers, than the House of Commons. This, clearly, would be a pretty absurd position in which to get ourselves. I must say that, after the events of the past 10 days, I am more and more convinced that the priority is not reform of this end of the building but reform of the other end. We have had the appalling use of programming at the other end, not only in the initial stages of a Bill, where major issues are not debated at all, but the effective guillotining—not in the old efficient way, but by programming—of amendments from this House, whereby the time allocated for consideration of four amendments was barely as much as the time that this House had spent voting on them. We therefore clearly need reform as far as that end of the building is concerned. However, it is not true to say, as the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown said, that we are creatures of the Executive. We have certainly not been so in recent days, but if we were an elected Chamber we would be much more likely to be heavily whipped, to be creatures of the Executive and to lose the technical expertise that we have at present. I hope that those who were so anxious that we should hear their views on many subjects in the past few days will realise that electing this Chamber is not in their interests and that they will campaign on it, whether or not it be done in a referendum or more generally. They are the kind of interest groups that we have been defending and I hope that they will campaign.