House of Lords (Amendment) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. It may well be true that one cannot introduce major constitutional changes by means of a Private Member’s Bill, but I hope that it is not the case with the very small change that I propose in this Bill. In its 1997 manifesto, the Labour Party undertook to end the right of hereditary Peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords, and in the Queen’s Speech of 1998 the Bill to give effect to that proposal, introducing new arrangements for the appointment of life Peers—which need not concern us today—was announced. Although Parliament had agreed 88 years earlier that the House of Lords should be constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis, and although the Labour and Liberal Democrat Parties were agreed that the time had arrived to implement those words from the preamble to the 1911 Act, the Government lost their nerve and accepted a compromise put together by a small group of Cross-Benchers. The late Lord Weatherill told me in a conversation that I had with him on 15 February 1999 that the compromise was the work of the usual channels, but we were not consulted. The then leader of the Liberal Democrats, the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, was told about it after the matter had been settled, as my noble friend Lord Rodgers records in his autobiography, and we abstained when it came to the vote on what my noble friend called, "““a thoroughly unsatisfactory dog’s breakfast of a deal””." Lord Weatherill added, when I asked him whether the proposal was open to discussion, that any attempt to ““unpick”” an agreement of this kind would ““make it fall apart””. He said it had been agreed, though it was not in the note on the amendment, that there could be some Labour and Liberal Democrat creations to redress the unfairness inherent in the arithmetic—which was not carried through as far as the Liberal Democrats were was concerned. He added that, since the scheme had been worked out, there had been a large increase in the number of Cross-Benchers because many Peers who had previously taken no Whip at all had signed up, no doubt hoping to be included inter oves, but it had been decided not to increase the allocation of Cross-Benchers from the original number. At about that time, I wrote to the then Leader of the House, the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, setting out an alternative to the Weatherill amendment. In her reply, without attempting to defend it in substance, she said that it would be, "““only of a temporary, transitional nature””," and that was the basis on which it was agreed. If it had been made clear at the time that the 92 hereditaries would remain for at least the next nine years andthat during that period there would be two nearest-runner-up successions, followed by eight by-elections to maintain the number at its original level, there might have been far greater difficulty in reaching agreement across the House. The purpose of this very modest Bill is to enable your Lordships to revisit the decision to freeze the number in accordance with that private deal that was made between the former Lord Chancellor and the former Leader of the Opposition. Apart from the Tories’ lingering attachment to the hereditary principle, which can still be detected occasionally, an argument for the retention of the92 was that it provided an incentive to get on with stage 2. In that, it was manifestly ineffective, and the 92 themselves have not sought to block the road to reform, as this debate shows. Judging from the experience of the past eight years, to say nothing of the previous 88 years, it may not be too easy to reach agreement across the parties and between the two Houses about the final composition of a revised second Chamber. The last time I spoke on House of Lords reform was just over 38 years ago, in another place, and I well remember the frustration on all sides of a Committee stage that lasted 21 days on the Floor of the other place before Mr Wilson’s legislation was finally abandoned. It would be rash to bank on the early implementation of a Commons vote in favour of an all-elected House, considering that a substantial minority down the Corridor were still opposed to that solution. Inevitably, a great deal of parliamentary time would still be consumed in both Houses by any attempt at more comprehensive legislation. It may be objected that the Long Title of the Bill would also open up wider debate, and I acknowledge that the only way in which it will get through is if your Lordships will refrain from using it as a lever to prise open other issues on which there might be extended argument. If amendments are tabled, I am sorry to say that it would have to be dropped. I am hoping that if your Lordships agree to this Second Reading, you might also send a message to our colleagues that we hope that there will be no need for a Committee stage, and if any noble Lord does table amendments he will do so in the full knowledge that an amendment would scupper the Bill. Presumably over the next two years Mr Gordon Brown will prefer to concentrate on electorally popular measures and will have regard to the fact that, however interesting we may find Lords reform, it is not something that ever crops up on the doorsteps. The Bill is simply intended to tide us over until after the general election, and perhaps even a bit longer than that if Lords reform is not a priority for the next Government. If the Weatherill amendment had not provided for the 92 hereditaries to be topped up, first by the runners up in the original election and then after November 2002 by election from the ranks of the excluded Peers or their successors, the number would by now be reduced to 82, and in the process of time the hereditaries would have disappeared through mortality without the need for further legislation. That simplification would not have made it either easier or harder to reach stage 2, but it would have avoided absurd situations in which a small number of voters, who themselves derive their franchise from being hereditary Peers, elected a new Peer from the ranks of the hereditaries who had been unsuccessful in the original election. The eight who joined this House by that extraordinary process are no doubt making a valuable contribution, but as a method of replenishing the House of Lords it does not seem to be altogether appropriate in the 21st century. Before 1832, there were the rotten boroughs, of which perhaps the most notorious was Old Sarum in Wiltshire, where there were 11 voters, though Gatton in Surrey was the smallest, with an electorate of seven. Perhaps an even better analogy would be the pocket boroughs, where the representation was controlled by one or more patrons. Buckingham, which was controlled by the eponymous duke, had11 voters, as did Winchilsea, which was controlledby the Marquis of Cleveland. In the by-election at Silverbridge, still under the control of the Duke of Omnium in 1875, if he had wished to exercise it43 years after the Reform Act, 623 votes were cast. Though pocket boroughs were a recurring theme in Trollope, he could never have imagined the bizarre process that we invented in 1999. In the two Conservative by-elections, there were43 and 42 voters. In the single Cross-Bench election, there were 19. The Liberal Democrats had four voters, and Labour had three. This is a process by which a very small number of people could decide on a member of the legislature, a process that has seen no parallel for the past 175 years. In the many discussions that I have had with colleagues, none has defended the status quo on its merits. They argue that under the 1999 compromise, it was agreed that the92 would remain inviolate until stage 2, however long that might be. But that bargain was only approved by the House to the extent that the number should appear in the 1999 Act. Parliament could not and did not say that a private deal made to ensure that the progress of the Bill was not unreasonably impeded should remain in force until a hypothetical stage 2 was enacted. The minority outside Westminster who do take an interest in constitutional reform probably consider that the legitimacy of this House was enhanced by the 1999 Act and by the moves towards a more politically balanced Chamber over the past 10 years. We have been more effective in judiciously challenging unwise government policies, as the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor observed the other day. This Bill does not in any way inhibit this or the next Government’s freedom to propose wider reforms, but it does remove a serious and dysfunctional error in the Weatherill arrangements, which continues to undermine our credibility. I commend the Bill to the House. Moved, that the Bill be now read a second time.—(Lord Avebury.)