House of Lords Bill [HL]

My Lords, I think we all agree that we have had a remarkably good and, indeed, enjoyable debate. I thank everybody who participated. Indeed, there is a remarkably large attendance for a Friday. Many noble Lords have suggested amendments to the Bill which I do not propose to go through now. Further to the remarks of my noble friend Lord McNally, although I appreciate that I have 40 minutes in which to reply to the debate, I think that I would do the House a service if I did not speak for that length of time. I shall simply say that I agree with many of the suggested amendments or criticisms. I believe that the Bill will be substantially improved in Committee, but it will have a much better chance of being improved if the Government will take it on. I shall come back to that in a moment. If the Government took it on, they would be wise to incorporate in it my noble friend Lord Oakeshott’s Bill. That seemed to be one of the Minister’s concerns. It is significant that in this long and anxious debate, there have been 27 speeches in favour of the Bill and five against. I admit that I have not included in those figures the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, because on the one hand he said he was so enthusiastic about the Bill that he wanted it debated every year for the next 10 years, and I thought that that meant he was a supporter, but because he suggested that I should introduce it for the next 10 years, I put him down as a personal enemy. I know that we are all equal in this place, but it is important and significant that among the contributors who were strongly in favour of the Bill was the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, who, after all, was responsible for the 1999 reforms and is a former Leader of the House. There was also the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, who until recently was the Government Chief Whip. These are two people who have been responsible for the operation and workings of this House on a day-to-day basis and they know more than the rest of us about the weaknesses of the present House. Their contributions should be taken particularly seriously by the Government, although all contributions have been most welcome. It was significant that the noble Lord, Lord Jay, who is chair of the Appointments Commission, added weight to the case for turning the commission into a statutory body, which, as I have said, has been a manifesto commitment of the Government for nearly 10 years. The noble Lord, Lord Lea, made a very valid point when he asked why we should believe future manifesto commitments, on which the Minister has just been relying, when these old ones, which are much smaller in scope, have still to be put into effect. It has been significant, too, that there have been noble Lords, particularly on these Benches, who said that they had changed their minds. Whereas previously they were lukewarm or hostile to these measures, they are now in favour. All of these points must be taken on board by the Government when they consider the course of this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Warner, who only recently left the Government, was right to talk about the increasing frustration in the House about the failure to move on with Lords reform. Part 4, which deals with the exclusion of Peers, is a potential vehicle for dealing with the current preoccupations. It deals only with permanent exclusion, as several Members have said. I should assure the noble Lord, Lord Northbrook, that there is nothing retrospective on that in the Bill and there could not be. However, it is right that that part needs to be expanded and amended to take account of the issue that the Minister rightly dealt with, awaiting the outcome of our inquiries. It is extraordinary that the Government are seriously saying that they want to take up Part 4, which frankly we added quite late as an extra point, pick it out of the Bill and move forward with it. Why? Not because it is more important than the other three parts; it just happens to be topical. That is not the way in which we should decided the priorities of legislation. The case for Part 4 is no stronger than the case for the other three parts, and the Government should look again at the possibility of taking over the whole Bill. They have a huge majority in the other House, and the Administration sub-committee is impatient at the lack of progress. The Government’s position is difficult to understand. The Minister was right to say that if the Bill proceeded as a Private Member’s Bill it would get bogged down, but if the Government take it over there is no reason why these four issues could not be dealt with satisfactorily in this Session. That is my cause. The noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, and many others made it clear that there is no impediment in this Bill to the Government’s plans which they continue to advocate. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, very fairly put forward what he would see as the priorities of an incoming Conservative Government. I have made no criticism of Mr Cameron for his forthright comment that Lords reform is not a priority. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, rightly pointed to what would be that Government’s priority. I beg to suggest that they would be the priorities of whichever Government happen to be elected after the next election. That is exactly our point. We are not going to get to stage 3, as I call it, of Lords reform for many years. That is why there is anxiety that we should proceed now to do what we can. On the argument about undertakings given in 1999, I am sorry that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine, is not in his place and I hope that he will not mind my repeating what he said to me. He pointed out that the undertaking that he gave was not set in any context; it was simply that until future reform took place, the 92 hereditary Peers would remain. If the Government take over the Bill, that would become stage 2, with stage 3 in waiting for a future Government. That is the way in which it should operate. The noble Lord, Lord Higgins, made the valid point that if the reason for keeping the 92 was to act as a spur to reform, it had clearly failed. We cannot continue to justify the process of hereditary Peers’ by-elections. The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, was forthright on the subject of retirement. She made a valid point about Members who are a little elderly or frail feeling that they are letting the side down if they do not turn up. That is true. My noble friend Lord Mackie of Benshie, who is in his late 80s, said to me on the telephone the other day that I should make the point that Members such as him, who walk round here with sticks, should be able to leave knowing that their place will be taken by a new person. The noble Baroness also made that point, and it is clearly set out in the Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, seems to have joined the Selsdon party; he wants a debate every year on this subject. I believe that he has a good chance of securing that. That is exactly my worry—that we could go on debating House of Lords reform for ever. There is nothing mechanistic in the Bill; he was wrong to pull it apart on the grounds of the arithmetic involved. The phrase in the Bill is about the Appointments Commission "having regard" to certain things. There is no automatic mechanism, nor could there be. The House has always evolved according to what happens in general elections. I understand that there has been agreement between the political parties that we should no longer have a situation in which the Government of the day have an overall majority. That is relatively new but we could make it work sensibly, and I have every confidence that the Appointments Commission would make it work sensibly. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, said that he felt awkward supporting the government Front Bench. I suggest that the feeling should be the other way round: the government Front Bench should feel jolly awkward that its support lies in the hands of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, and the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, perhaps partly supported by the opposition Front Bench. It does not seem to me to be a very dignified position for the Government to be in. It is extraordinary that support for their line has been so limited in this debate. The noble Earl, Lord Caithness, teased me at the beginning by saying that I had been volunteered to undertake to introduce this Bill but that he had no doubt I was now becoming enthusiastic about it. He is right: I am enthusiastic about it. I care about the work of Parliament. I have been involved in major constitutional changes. As everyone knows, I was heavily involved in the creation of the Scottish Parliament. I care about this place, and it is intolerable that we keep putting off sensible reforms on the basis that, at some time in the future, there might be more substantial reform. I think that the mood of the House has changed; this debate has shown it. Pressure is also coming from the House of Commons through its Administration Sub-Committee. Therefore, I hope very much that the Government will take on the Bill. When we last debated the Bill, it went to Committee. However, we had only less than half a day on that stage and I did not press the Bill further. The reason was simply that I felt I would not be doing the House a service if I kept bringing forward a measure that was clearly opposed by a small minority, as that would clog up the work of the House. The position is now different. I think that I would be doing the House a disservice if I did not take the Bill forward to the Committee stage and say repeatedly to the Government that they really should take this matter over. In that spirit, and the spirit of this debate, I ask that the Bill be given a Second Reading. Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.