House of Lords Reform

I was going to say that the sort of people who will run for election to the House of Lords, the Senate or whatever it is called will be people who cannot enter the Commons. I say this with modesty and as much graciousness as I can: the standards of intelligence, talent and ability needed to get into this House are not superhuman or of Olympic proportions. So if the other House consists of people who are not smart enough or good enough to get into this place, what will be up there? Who will want to run for the other House? It will have no power. It will not be a Chamber of talented, independent people holding the Government to account. It will be made up of people who cannot get into this place. What we will lose in the process is the independence and experience of people in the Lords. I know that many Members are party politicians, but a defence debate or a foreign affairs debate in the House of Lords is very well informed by people who have been senior diplomats or senior military officers. That will go. Such people will not run for election to some organisation that has no power, and anyway, they probably do not want to run on a party ticket. The only way to get elected—the only way one can get elected to anything in this country, with the very odd exception—is by being a party candidate in an election. Once people have been elected to the other House, they will start interfering on our turf as Members of Parliament. They will pick up constituency cases and local issues because they will want to get into the papers, just like we do. People will go to them and ask for their help, and we will have competition, just as I understand our Scottish colleagues do now, in an extremely inconvenient and annoying way. I suppose Members of the other place will want offices, secretaries, researchers and large office buildings with atriums and rented trees in them. The cost will go through the roof, and there is no evidence at all that people want more expensive Government than they have at present. I reserve whatever vitriol I can muster in the debate for the ghastly appointments commission. We are all agreed that hereditary peers should go from that place. It is nonsense that because his ancestor fought with the Black Prince at the battle of Crecy, the great-great-great-great-grandson should have powers of legislation, just as much nonsense as if the great-great-grandfather had given some money to Lloyd George, the great-great-grandson should have legislative powers. But if those are not reasons for having legislative powers, why is being appointed by some statutory commission a reason for having legislative power? Who will be on the commission? It looks tailor-made for my good friend Sir Hayden Phillips, and a more admirable public servant I cannot envisage. But that Hayden Phillips and a committee of people like him should have the power to decide who should be legislators and who should not, I find nonsense and abhorrent. I would much rather the Prime Minister had that power, because when the Prime Minister exercises the power, we know who has exercised it, the public knows who has exercised it, we know who is responsible for it and we can see it being done openly. If we have a commission, it will sit in private. The Appointments Commission sometimes comes up with extremely odd recommendations. On the first lot that it came up with, it said, ““We wanted to make sure that all these people felt comfortable in here,”” because it had appointed a lot of people just like its own members. That is what a statutory commission would do. No—let us have the Prime Minister of the day make appointments. If he wants to appoint 359 cronies or donors or whatever this Prime Minister has done, we know who did it. The electorate can hold him to account for that and so can the press. When my party is in power, as I sincerely hope it will be soon, our leader will be accountable for the exercise of that power. Let us have it out in the open, where we can see it being exercised. The problem is that we have set incompatible objectives for the House of Lords. We want it, apparently, to have democratic legitimacy, and to be representative but to have independence and expertise. It requires only a moment’s thought to realise that one cannot find all four qualities in an individual, and certainly not in a body of individuals. At present there is a great deal of independence and expertise in the Lords, but no democratic legitimacy and precious little representativeness. If we go to an elected House, we will have a great deal of legitimacy and representativeness, but very little expertise and virtually no independence. We will not have the sort of expertise that we get from the retired diplomats and generals whom I mentioned, speaking in foreign affairs and defence debates, and we will not get independence because the only way to be elected will be on a party ticket. Today’s debate has a great ring of familiarity about it. It is like coming in on a movie that one has seen three times before being repeated on BBC4, and I confess that I am making much the same speech as I made before, as the right hon. Member for Swansea, West said he did. Perhaps we should leave the debate to those who were elected at the last election, to see whether they have different opinions. They may be the people who change the vote. I very much doubt whether anybody except the Leader of the House, who is standing on his head on the issue, will have changed their mind about it. Most of us thought about it very seriously indeed. Last time the House voted for no change, which I thought was a sensible decision. I rather hope that it will do so again. What we have is something that works. The problem of the House of Lords is that although it works in practice, it does not work in some arbitrary theory. It works, so let us not try to fix it.