House of Lords: Reform — Motion to Take Note (Continued)

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 7:50 pm on 21 June 2011.

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Photo of Lord Low of Dalston Lord Low of Dalston Crossbench 7:50, 21 June 2011

My Lords, debate on House of Lords reform is apt to be somewhat polarised and the present one has not disappointed-if one can call a score of something like 23 to four against the Bill "polarised" as opposed to "a walkover". Either election is all good and appointment all bad or vice versa. Ed Miliband probably got it right when he said to Cross-Bench Peers that both systems had pluses and minuses and that ultimately it was a matter of judgment which side one came down on. In a debate that can all too easily become shanghaied by polemic, that seems a balanced and sensible point of view that one can disagree with only if one has given up thinking.

The Government's proposals are manifestly unsatisfactory. They contain more holes than a Gruyère cheese. The number of unresolved questions and matters open to challenge is legion-from the name, to the reduction to as few as 300 Members, to the system of election and whether one could get the requisite coverage of expertise with only 60 independents, to the 15-year non-renewable term and to the 20 per cent appointed or hybrid element, with all its implications for legitimacy and accountability. More fundamentally, the big bang approach to dealing with the problems of the House of Lords by abolishing it completely fails to go with the grain of constitutional development and ignores the British genius for bringing about necessary change in the evolutionary and organic fashion that the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, spoke about without courting the dangers inherent in taking a sledgehammer to the delicate mechanisms of the British constitution, with unintended consequences that one can only guess at.

I have not come across a serious commentator-pace the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown-who believes that the abolition of the present House of Lords and its replacement with a wholly new second Chamber populated largely by a new breed of senators elected on long, non-renewable terms by a system of proportional representation will not upset the balance between the two Houses of Parliament. As the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, made clear, Clause 2 of the Bill may insist to its heart's content that nothing in the Bill affects the conventions governing the relationship between the two Houses of Parliament, the primacy of the House of Commons or the powers of each House, but one might as well prescribe that the sun shall not rise in the morning or set at night.

There is enough trouble at the moment when Cross-Benchers appear to sway a key vote, but this is as nothing compared with what it will be like when the appointed element overturns a majority among elected Members. We are essentially in the realms of speculation here, but it is a reasonable bet that the whole dynamic of the second Chamber-which makes the House of Lords so good as a revising Chamber, with its more measured, independent and objective approach-would be transformed by the election of senators on a party ticket once the parties had got their hands on the process. The noble Lord, Lord Jopling, confirmed this when he spoke earlier.

Whatever the deficiencies of the Government's proposals, it ill behoves us simply to stand pat on the status quo. Even the much vaunted expertise of this place-from which its defenders derive its legitimacy-is contested. The noble Lord, Lord Steel, quoted the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, writing in the Guardian. I will quote another passage from that article-so if quotation in the debate is a mark of authority, the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, will get the prize today. The noble Lord wrote:

"Most self-satisfied of all is the idea that members of the Lords are all so expert and representative: in fact, most of us are either ex-politicians or ex-experts, and our average age is 69 ... The idea ... that an expert embryologist or eminent constitutional academic should be given the automatic right to vote on immigration, education, transport, and every other area of public policy is palpably ludicrous".

That is a serious argument that requires a robust answer and cannot just be waved away with a rhetorical flourish. I say that it is experience as much as expertise that is the unique selling point of this place and gives it its unique value across the waterfront on matters of public policy.

I remember an economic debate in which the Minister winding up for the Government said how much the debate had benefited from the participation of three former Chancellors, six former Treasury Ministers or spokespersons, four economists and six leaders of business. One could marshal a similar line-up of those who know from doing it how it is done for nearly every debate in this House. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, marshalled another few line-ups of that kind for our inspection. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, says that the draft Bill will create a second Chamber with real democratic legitimacy. However, I very much doubt whether the voice of civil society would get as good a hearing in such a place as it does here at the moment once the party machines had got a grip on a more politicised House.

We should not be complacent or self-satisfied. We all know that there are issues with the House that need addressing as a matter of urgency. The Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Steel, has offered for a good four years now a framework for doing so, and it is a great pity that successive Governments have failed to pick it up-although I noted what the noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon, said earlier about the previous Government's wish to pick up the majority of its provisions in their Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill. If the proposals had been picked up, we would be a lot further forward. However, it is still not too late and I will certainly support the Motion in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, when we come to the end of the debate tomorrow night.

I will go further. There may not be a democratic deficit, but as the think tank ResPublica argued, there may be a perceived democratic deficit. To address this, it proposes a House that is one-third elected, one-third appointed from civil society and one-third nominated by political parties. This would have the disadvantages of the hybrid model in which-pace the noble Lord, Wakeham-election and appointment are in conflict. I have alluded to this already. It also has a lot of ground to make up. A ComRes poll of a representative cross-section of 121 Peers-if 121 Peers can ever constitute a representative cross-section-found that 68 per cent were against the proposal, only 20 per cent were in favour and 13 per cent did not know.

My approach to remedying any perceived democratic deficit would be to refresh the system of appointment to this place and render it more broadly based by putting in place a system of nomination from the major departments of civil society-what might be termed "constituencies of expertise" such as the law, medicine, the arts, sport, education, the armed services, business, trade unions, the third sector and so on. It would be a House of Lords of civil society. These constituencies could be treated as electoral colleges that would nominate directly to a reformed House of Lords: or, as I believe happened in Malaysia, they could submit their nominations to a statutory appointments commission that would make the final selection.

All I would stay at this stage is that although the joint scrutiny committee will obviously take the draft Bill as its starting point, there is a wide range of alternative approaches. Along with the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, and others, I very much hope that the Joint Committee will take the time necessary to explore all these alternative approaches as thoroughly as possible.