Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

My Lords, I hope to get the support of your Lordships’ House by undershooting my time by at least a third. As the Minister said in opening the debate, this is a major Bill. As has been instanced in every speech so far, there is a great deal that most people would support in almost every clause, but I am afraid that I must side with the general view of the House that it is simply not right to bring a Bill such as this to Second Reading with only a few days left in the legislative programme. Government managers must recognise that, when they introduced quite so much legislation in the Queen’s Speech, with only half a Session to debate it, they were tempting providence. Frankly, to do it with a constitutional measure of this significance is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, said, treating Parliament with contempt. I am worried about wash-ups becoming stitch-ups. It is not that I do not trust the government Front Benches, although we all know what happened in the case of House of Lords reform, when Mr Straw managed to get the agreement of the Front Benches to a lot of what he was doing; it was only when, I am glad to say, the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, broke ranks and indicated that there was not a consensus that that collapsed. The fact is that Front Benches, with the best will in the world, do not have a monopoly on wisdom. I have only to think back to the Digital Economy Bill, in which I played a bit of a part. A lot of the best contributions to that debate came from the Back Benches. I think, particularly, of the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. A lot of the information that they brought forward led the Government to introduce amendments quite fundamentally changing parts of the Bill. The right way to deal with this is for the Government to say, "How much legislative time do we have and what can we reasonably get through?", relying on the good will of the House to perhaps put things through with a degree of urgency and then tailoring the Bill to that amount of time. The rest of it is too important to be rushed. I will concentrate on one other item: the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, on the statutory Appointments Commission. He rehearsed the number of times that the Labour Party has pledged itself to this in election manifestos, so one simply asks: why is it not in the Bill? The answer, I am afraid, without being unduly cynical, is quite clear, certainly to me. It simply does not sit well with the Government, in the form of Mr Straw, producing in the next few days, we are assured, his recipe for an elected senate of 300 seats or so. It would look as though the Government did not really believe in it. So, once again, the possibility of incremental improvement in the workings of Parliament has been sacrificed for gestural politics that, frankly, will not come to reality in any foreseeable timescale, I am glad to say. As some noble Lords may know, in all debates I have supported a wholly appointed House of Lords, which I regard as a legitimate second stage of reform, and for that reason I do not agree with the points made by various hereditary Peers that it would be a breach of the undertakings given by my noble and learned friend, Lord Irvine. That stance can be taken by people who support an appointed House. It is less easy for Mr Straw to justify it, because if he regards reform only as requiring an elected House—I have never equated reform with election—arguably his expulsion of the hereditaries, or allowing them to wither on the vine, should wait for that as well. I have three observations on the possibility of this becoming an elected House, which affects the statutory Appointments Commission. First, I hope that the House authorities will ignore it. We should bear in mind the fact that planning for office accommodation for us is a long-term business. If they take their foot off the pedal and start saying that they need not worry about any more offices for Peers because there will be only 300 of them in a month or so, we will face a major problem. Secondly, it should not be forgotten that when the House of Commons debated this in 2007, which was at the height of the cash for peerages scandal, there was none the less still a majority of Labour and Conservative MPs voting against the proposal for 80 per cent election. I confidently predict that, when Mr Straw publishes his draft clauses for election, that majority will increase when people realise the systems that may be proposed. Surely any electoral system that he proposes will be an improvement on the present and, if it is an improvement, an elected senate will be superior to the House of Commons because it will be elected on a superior system. Finally, if the Government include this in their manifesto and win an election convincingly, they will claim an electoral mandate for it and use the Parliament Act to force it through in the next Parliament. I hope that they will recognise that the converse should also be true: if there is a swing against the Government, they should equally accept that mandate from the electorate and drop the proposal.