House of Lords Reform

In considering this debate and listening to the many speeches that we have heard today, I am still no further forward as to exactly what the House of Lords is expected to do, what functions it performs, whether it represents value for money and whether it is necessary at all. We live cheek by jowl with our be-ermined Friends, who exist a few hundred metres along the corridor. We refer to the House of Lords as the other place, but to me it is totally other-worldly. Look who inhabits that place. We have the landed gentry, the bishops, the odd ex-MP bumped off to make way for Cabinet Ministers and boundary reviews, but more than anything else we have those who are described as ““the great and the good””—the appointed peers. We appoint them as our betters and expect them to ensure that our legislation is improved. It strikes me at times that all the people who inhabit that place are, first, incredibly wealthy. They are unrepresentative of our general community. I do not know how many multimillionaires there are in the communities of hon. Members here, but there is certainly a number of them down the road. At times it seems to me that the House of Lords exists to emphasise class difference, to suggest a separateness. This belief that we should expect our betters to help us legislate suggests a throwback to a pre-democratic age, and it should have no place in a modern 21st-century legislature. For what it is worth, I believe that the House of Lords is an unnecessary, underworked, overpriced institution whose standing in the eyes of the public, contrary to what has been said here, has never been lower as a result of how the public have observed the House of Lords in the past year through the cash for peerages scandal.