House of Lords Bill [HL]

My Lords, I, too, warmly support the Bill. In view of the shortness of time, I will not elaborate any further on the details, except to say that some of the comments I have heard on them, particularly Clauses 1 to 5, are for the Committee stage or the later stage of the second Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Steel. I hope that those who hold those views will put them to him. I want to dwell on the wider reforms, and make two points following on from what my noble and learned friend Lord Howe said. First, there is that general agreement that this House should be complementary to, and not a clone of, the other place. Those of us who have spent many years in the other place are the first to recognise the merits of that argument, and this is probably the best place to understand them. In coming to this place, we understand that the wider expertise available in this House on all the key issues—such as scrutiny of legislation, which this House is increasingly taking on where the other place does not, Select Committees and many of our debates—makes it so different from the other place and one of the great merits of our parliamentary system. I fear that a wholly or largely elected House would become, in many ways, a clone of the other place. Those of us who fight and have fought elections at local level are well aware of that kind of pressure, and our expertise would be lost. It is myth to argue that the political parties will select people who are prepared to work full time on a salaried basis in this House to replace the expertise that would be lost. They would not do it. The Cunningham Commission itself recognised that a wholly or largely elected House would mean that the powers would have to change. It is inevitable that there would be a challenge from this place because of its so-called democratic accountability. That brings to me to my second point. Stripped down to it, the advocates of a wholly or largely elected House have one argument: election brings democratic accountability. However, they are also increasingly recognising, including in the other place, the point of my noble and learned friend Lord Howe: at the local level there would be considerable competition, challenge and difficulty if Members were elected to this House, whatever the constituency arrangements, as well as to the other place. The experience of Scottish MPs underlines that very point. To address this, the Government, in their previous proposals, came forward with the argument that the election system should be different and that Members to this place should be elected for 15 years without the possibility of election after that. That proposal immediately destroys the argument of democratic accountability, because there is nothing to prevent a Member being elected and ignoring his constituency from then on. It is not a proper democratic accountability argument. That brings me to two of the important points referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, in his admirable speech. The election system and the powers of both Houses, with a wholly elected House, are not detailed points of implementation but fundamental. They will take time and it will be extremely difficult to reach consensus for a workable solution on those sorts of issues. That is why, meanwhile, I believe that this Bill strengthens the complementary nature and authority of this House. That is why it should be supported.