House of Lords Bill [HL]

My Lords, this match has now entered its second half and the current score is 18-2 to the noble Lord, Lord Steel, and his supporters, and I have no reason to believe that the balance will change very much as we go to the end of the debate. I congratulate him very warmly on at last winning over your Lordships' House with his perseverance and patience and with the excellent speech that he made in introducing the Bill earlier. I should like to take your Lordships back 10 years, to the passage of the House of Lords Act 1999—which, coincidentally, was about the time when I joined your Lordships. The House then was about to embark on changes to its composition which were more profound than at any time in its recent history except for the passing of the Life Peerages Act 1958. It is fair to say that nobody seemed sure then, including my friends on the government Front Bench, what the 1999 Act would mean for the effectiveness, legitimacy and standing of this House. The concept of a House in which no one party or grouping had anything approaching a majority, or indeed even a third of the membership, was a novelty, as was the idea that the Government would sometimes need to win the argument before winning a vote to get their business through. Those novelties have now become established principles for this House and for future Houses. For as long as we remain a revising Chamber, subsidiary to the ultimate will of the House of Commons, no political party can dominate its membership. That principle is enshrined in Clause 8(2)(b) of the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Steel. The Bill also has the merit of tidying up a number of the loose ends left around since the 1999 reform. It deals with what I think we must regard as the quaint hereditary by-election provisions. When I go to schools on the Lord Speaker’s outreach programme, I have to confess that I find it hard to justify that it is possible, as has happened with vacancies in the ranks of Liberal Democrat and Labour hereditaries, for a contest to take place where there may be 11 candidates for a seat in the House of Lords but just three voters. The Bill also makes secure the lifetime membership in this House of the 92 hereditaries, and I have no problem with that. But I am equally convinced that heredity should no longer be a criterion for membership of this legislature or, indeed, of any legislature. As we heard earlier from the noble Lord, Lord Norton, there is no bar to hereditary Peers being appointed to this House in future. Indeed, it is worth making the point that the other place has among its ranks—elected ranks—a marquis and two viscounts who, prior to 1999, would have been Members of this House. The 1999 Act established another important principle, which this Bill takes forward, and that is to separate the peerage of the United Kingdom from membership of this House. Outside Parliament, it is up to each of us individually to decide whether to use the titles bestowed on us by heredity or appointment. It should also be possible for us to choose whether to remain Members of this House. I therefore welcome the provisions in Part 3 which allow for retirement. There are powerful practical reasons for this, too. Apart from the intervention of the Grim Reaper, voluntary retirement provides the only means of reducing the size of the House and creating space for new appointments. I shall not make the point that I was going to make about what will happen after the general election, because the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, and the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, have both covered it. However, if we have a retirement provision, it will at least make some room for new creations post the election. The latest White Paper has not had a very good press in this House, or indeed anywhere else. Nothing would give me more pleasure than to hear in this debate that the cosy consensus among the Front Benches which led to its production has at last fallen apart. It would have been helpful to know how such an impressive group of highly intelligent and distinguished men and women in both Houses and from all three parties could possibly have produced such a dismally unimpressive document. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, points out, we are not being allowed to find out, because the Government rejected my Freedom of Information Act request for the minutes of the working party to be published. What we do know is that the noble Baroness, Lady D'Souza, can be exempted from any criticism for her part in those proceedings. It is now apparent that it was she who best represented the views of the Back Benches in all parts of this House, and I thank her for it. I am really looking forward to the speech of my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, to whom this rather toxic chalice seems again to have passed. I shall not mind hearing him say that the Government wish to keep open the possibility that, at some future date when a consensus has been achieved that encompasses both this House and the other place, there will be a serious debate on the future of Parliament. That debate will need to embrace such matters as the role of Parliament in its relations with the devolved Parliament and Assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; the relationship between the House of Commons and the House of Lords; and the strengthening of parliamentary arrangements for scrutinising and calling the Executive to account. It may be that at the end of that process there is an agreement that there should be a new constitutional settlement between the two Houses and that this House is replaced by an elected senate with new powers of scrutiny and, I suspect, supply. But that is all some way off. The fact that we may have such a debate at some point in the future is no reason for not proceeding now with this Bill, the provisions of which are long overdue.