House of Lords Reform

I am going to make some more progress. Two parallel processes have been undertaken over the past year towards establishing a consensus on this issue. One has been the Joint Committee on Conventions under the Chairmanship of my noble Friend Lord Cunningham of Felling, and the other has been the cross-party group on Lords reform that I have chaired. Good progress has been made in both groups. The Cunningham Committee reported last November. Its conclusions are an invaluable template, setting out very clearly its current understanding of the powers of this place that established its primacy, and the conventions that ensure that that primacy is delivered. The Committee’s conclusions were unanimous, and were subsequently endorsed by both the Houses without Division. In shorthand, the primacy of this House depends on three key elements: first, the exclusive right of this House to determine who forms a Government; secondly, this House’s exclusive right to raise taxation and to allocate public spending; thirdly, the right of this House to the final—and pretty prompt—say over any legislation that is the subject of dispute between the two Houses. The Cunningham Committee made it clear that its conclusions—not on those powers, which were a given, but on the conventions underpinning them—related to the Lords as it is currently constituted. However, the House will be reassured that all members of the cross-party group that I chaired were agreed on the fundamental principle of the primacy of the Commons, and that any reformed Lords should be a complement to this House, and not a rival to it. That echoes similar key conclusions of the royal commission, the Public Administration Select Committee, and the Breaking the Deadlock reports. The cross-party working group met eight times between July 2006 and January this year. I hope very much that, if we reach clear conclusions tomorrow, it can be reconstituted.