House of Lords Bill [HL]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to speak once again in support of this Bill and I hope that this time it will make further progress. Stage 1 of House of Lords reform took place in 1999 and on the whole has been a great success. This Bill, as has been stated by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, has four main purposes, which are aimed at tidying up a few perceived weaknesses in the present structure. The Bill in no way seeks to influence the debate on whether the House of Lords should remain a fully appointed House, as I hope most of us would wish, or whether it should be abolished in favour of an 80 per cent or 100 per cent elected senate. That is a battle for another day. Given the large number of speakers in this debate, I wish to raise only one issue, which I raised at Second Reading last year. The Bill expresses, ""the need to achieve a membership not exceeding that of the House of Commons"." Given that we are all living longer, it will be difficult to achieve this while still catering for a reasonable number of new annual appointments. With the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, I agree that the best way of dealing with this problem would be to institute for all Members of the House a fixed period of service of, say, 20 years. A transitional timetable spread over four or five years would need to be put in place for existing Members in order to avoid a mass exodus of the 190 or so existing Members who have already served more than 20 years. But this matter is for the Committee stage and I will raise it again on that occasion. One final point: while accepting that the present system of elections for hereditary Peers to fill vacancies should be ended, I support the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, that a special case should be made for the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain. We are accused of being unrepresentative, but the great strength of the House of Lords is that its Members have first-hand experience and expertise in a very wide range of subjects and that they represent the interests of those subjects in the House. The Bill seeks to strengthen further the workings of the House and it deserves our support.