House of Lords Bill [HL]

My noble friend Lord Tyler was absolutely right. I can listen to debates in the House and be moved by them. When it came to the votes on the composition of the House, I voted against the mixed House, but I accepted that an elected House was probably the will of the House. However, the point that I want to make today in tabling the amendment is that we have moved on from the discussion about whether we have an appointed or an elected House. This amendment would unite those who are in favour of maintaining the House as it is and those who are in favour of an elected House. This can be done by accepting the four points in the amendment. Amendment A1 is aptly named because it is a first-class amendment, supported by all four quarters of the Chamber. It is right that, before we get into the detail of 95 debatable amendments to the Bill, the Committee is provided with an opportunity—and this is a perfectly open and transparent device—to come to a specific view on whether it wants to see these measures brought into effect. It is clear that there has been a major shift in opinion from our debate in the previous Session of Parliament to that of the other Friday, when we had 27 speeches in favour of the Bill and only five against. If the Committee carries the amendment, as I hope it will, it will be a clear signal to the Government either to take over the Bill and thereby introduce the four measures into the legislative programme or to introduce them into the constitutional renewal Bill, which we expect in the next few weeks. In either case, there would have to be a carry-over, but I think that we are all agreed, whatever our views on the merits of the Bill, that it would be far better conducted by the Government than by a private Member. Therefore, perhaps I may spell out briefly again the four purposes of the Bill and remove any confusion in the mind of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. First, on the creation of a statutory Appointments Commission, we had the welcome support at Second Reading of the noble Lord, Lord Jay, the new chairman of the Appointments Commission, who is very strongly in favour of a statutory basis. We know that it was a pledge in the Labour election manifesto of 2001 that there should be a statutory Appointments Commission. We look forward to the Minister of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who has the task of replying to this debate, telling us how much work has been done in Government since that manifesto commitment was made. We hope that some work has been done and that they will take over this section of the legislation, with their own views as to how the statutory Appointments Commission should work. The second part involves an end to the by-elections for hereditary Peers. I am indebted to an academic who sent me an advance article to appear in next month’s Political Quarterly, which pointed out that we have experienced in this House the only election of a Member to the British Parliament in which the number of voters was exceeded by the number of candidates. There were 11 candidates and three voters in one election. As for the promise made in 1999 that the 92 hereditary Peers would remain until stage 2 of Lords reform, nothing was said at the time about what stage 2 would consist of. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, who made the commitment as the Lord Chancellor at the time, regards the four proposals in this Bill as constituting stage 2 and therefore an acceptance of that promise. We are, in this Bill, being much kinder to the hereditary Peers than was envisaged in 1999. We are not saying that the 92 should disappear; we are saying simply that they should not be replenished and that, therefore, the hereditary Peers would become de facto life Peers, unable to be succeeded either by their heirs or by election of new Members. That seems a sensible provision in this day and age. It means an end to entry into this Parliament by heredity. The third part enables Peers to retire. I think that we have all agreed that the House is too large, at more than 700, and that numbers should be reduced. Of course, there can be legitimate argument, under the amendments tabled, about whether there should be a fixed age limit, a fixed length of service or a mixture of the two, as they have in the Senate in Canada. I think that it is agreed that Members who never come should be taken off the list and that an effort should be made to reduce the size of the House. That is what the third part of the Bill allows for. The fourth part enables the House of Lords to do what the House of Commons can do, which is to suspend or expel its Members. Even if those accused of wrongdoing at the present time turn out to be completely blameless, the fact is that the press coverage has exposed a weakness in our constitution that ought to be remedied. In fairness to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, he accepted that at Second Reading. In spite of the merits of these four proposals, there is still an attitude of "let’s do nothing until something more major happens". I have two objections to that. First, what is the something major? We have the White Paper, which has never yet been debated. It is not even a White Paper; it looks like the tail fin of a British Airways plane. In fact, that is entirely appropriate, because that is all it is: it is a tail fin; it has no body and no wings. We do not know whether it will be 100 per cent elected, or 80 per cent elected; we do not know how it is going to be elected or whether the Cunningham committee recommendations for a complete change of the conventions between the two Houses are going to be accepted. We do not even know what it is going to be called. It has no body and there are certainly no wings, because we have no date for the take-off of this project at all. In fairness to the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, I thought he made a very valid point at the end of Second Reading in spelling out what he thought would be the priorities of an incoming Government—and I think that applies to whatever Government is created after the next election. They will not include the replacement of the House of Lords. We are in an extraordinary situation in which it is clear that opinion in the House does not coincide with the opinion of the two Front Benches. They are united in a new mañana party, which reminds me of the tale in 1588 of the shipwreck of part of the Spanish Armada in the Western Isles of Scotland. One of the ships was wrecked off a very small island with a population of 100—a part of the country where the pace of life is much slower than in the rest of the United Kingdom. There was only one survivor. He came ashore and the islanders decided that the only thing they could do was to teach him how to speak Gaelic and he would teach them how to speak Spanish. After about a month of this exchange, they said to him, "What is this word ‘mañana’ that you keep using?" "Well", he explained to them, "it means tomorrow, maybe, at some time, in due course—that sort of thing". They nodded. He said "What is the Gaelic word for ‘mañana’?" He got the reply, "There is no word in the Gaelic language to convey such a sense of urgency". There is no word in the English language to convey the sense of urgency that impels the two Front Benches on this issue. They ask us to sit back and do nothing: to wait for a big bang whose explosive composition and date are totally unknown. At this point, I was going to inject a party-political note and say that at least we on these Benches have a printed blueprint for an elected House of Lords, but that invites the response, "So you should; you have been at it for 99 years". It may be that the other parties will start a 99-year course. In the mean time, to be perfectly serious, the House has an opportunity to vote for what the Administration Committee in the Commons called "running repairs". We are proud of the institution of this House. We are proud of the way that it is regarded by the public. We have suffered from bad publicity in recent years and recent weeks. That can be put aside because it is possible to drag this House into the 21st century before the next election if the House votes so to do today.