House of Lords Reform

I have come to a conclusion that is similar to that of the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow); it is not quite the same. I believe that the upper House has to be 100 per cent. elected, and my reasons are very similar to those given by the right hon. and learned Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg) and the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd). The central point is that the primacy of the House of Commons comes down to its power to make and break Governments, and to decide who the Government shall be. However, that source of strength is also its source of weakness. The Government depend for their existence on the confidence of the Commons, but that very fact renders the Commons not very good at scrutinising legislation. That job needs a second Chamber. Several hon. Members have talked about the power of the House of Commons over supply. I am a new Member of the House, but I am struck by how weak our power over supply has become. Formerly, the House was able to control expenditure, but that power has been reduced to a series of formal debates. Decisions about where money should or not be spent are at the heart of policy, but the House cannot now debate different spending plans. There is no way that we can debate in this Chamber, as council chambers can up and down the country, what the Government want to spend taxpayers’ money on as opposed to the Opposition parties. That is the reality of the situation of supply, rather than the form. We need a second Chamber to carry out those tasks, but it has been argued that this Chamber can be reformed to produce similar results. Reforms are necessary, but they will never be enough. The Government of the day depend for their existence on the confidence of the House, so the power of the Whips will always be with us. That power will always be necessary to ensure that the House is run in the way that it has to be in order that its functions are carried out. As a result, we will never be able to hold the Government to account to the extent that a fully independent House of Commons could. The issue in the end comes down to why we want a second Chamber in the first place. While the hon. Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) was speaking about the 17th century, it occurred to me that, as the successor to Oliver Cromwell as the Member for Cambridge I might have something to say about that. This House in 1649 passed a resolution:"““That the House of Peers is useless and dangerous and ought to be abolished””," but I have come to the conclusion that we should not follow through on that 1649 resolution and that a second Chamber is necessary. The big question for me is why. Why is a second Chamber necessary? The argument in the White Paper, which my hon. Friend the Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) repeated, was simply to do with the size and complexity of the task that faces us. I am afraid that I am not quite convinced by that argument. It would imply, for example, that we should look for a second Chamber for the European Parliament—a proposition that would chill the blood of most hon. Members and most citizens of the European Union. The real reasons why we need a second Chamber come down to two. One is the need for revision and the other is the need for a political check and balance. I have to say that the role of a revising Chamber by itself is not quite enough, if by ““revising Chamber”” one means a Chamber of suggestions, which can improve legislation but without challenging the underlying policy. That strikes me as a council of state function, and if we want the Chamber to have such a function and be made up of experts, the best way to deal with that is the way the French do it. They have competitive examinations to decide who should sit in that body. It is a purely expert function, not the sort of function that the House of Lords has been carrying out. The present structure of the House of Lords—a Chamber based on patronage—does not seem to me to be one that can carry out such a function very well. The expertise in the House of Lords is patchy. I sat on the Committee that considered the Companies Bill. It struck me that, although there are many renowned lawyers and business people in the House of Lords, the great experts in company law in this country—with one exception, who studied company law and researched it with great distinction until the 1960s—do not sit in the House of Lords. If we want a Chamber based on expertise, we have to look elsewhere for the experts. The fundamental question is: why those experts, not other experts? Why do we have the experts in the House of Lords whom we have? The answer to that is patronage rather than inherent ability.