House of Lords Reform Bill [HL]

My Lords, I suppose that I should thank the noble Lord, Lord Steel, for the opportunity to put one’s thoughts on the record. I am sorry not to have done so before now but I always felt that there were quite enough people on the list to speak in these debates. I am not sure why we are discussing this Bill when the three parties with a democratic mandate are going to put forward their ideas in the near future. Perhaps it is so that, long into the future when everything has gone wrong, some researcher will be able to look at your Lordships’ comments and say, ““What wise words of wisdom were uttered by that noble Lord””. The trouble with the Bill is that it attempts to preserve the appointed life Peers through a pre-emptive strike, but that is not what Parliament intended. It removes several incentives for change. I am one of the hereditary Peers who was elected to stay here, and I accepted that because the purpose was to make sure that proper reform would take place in the future. The hereditary element left was the incentive for change. The trouble is that, when you remove the incentives, people stop moving in the direction in which you want them to go. If we allow the hereditary Peers to die out, steadily and slowly the whole House will become under the control of unaccountable people who appoint those who come here—a theme that has cropped up throughout these debates. Perhaps we could look, first, at the future of an appointed House. As I said, people are driven by incentives. We also know the mantra that, if you have no democratic authority, all power will be removed, and therefore there will be no purpose in people coming to sit in this House. If people sit and debate in this House without the power to affect legislation, they will simply stop bothering to come, and this place will just be a club for those who like waffling on. The wise people will walk away and that will be sad, because we will not get the sort of people who are being appointed at the moment. The trouble is that in our constitution there is nothing to prevent that happening, although we thought that there was. The closest thing to it is in the oath of a privy counsellor on the Front Bench. That oath is supposed to be binding, yet there have been attempts to overturn it on many occasions—in fact, this Bill seeks to do just that. Therefore, one realises that our constitution provides no way of binding any future Parliament, so that, whatever we do, it can be changed, and that is the real problem. We cannot put in proper protections. The Commons supremacists welcome this. They think it is a very good idea to have a House of Lords with all its powers removed because it is a nuisance to them. However, democracy is not a unicameral system, especially when the Executive sits in that one elected Chamber, which is supposed to have primacy when it comes to legislation. The problem is that, when a large party has a majority, Prime Ministers sometimes forget that they are the Prime Minister not of Parliament but of the majority party, as leader. They are Prime Ministers of the Executive, which Parliament is supposed to control. The number of Members of another place who had some form of Executive appointment in the previous Parliament was astonishing. I believe that it was in three figures—and it has got bigger. That is not how the legislature should be behaving. It is there to set the controls and boundaries for the Executive. We must have a balance. We need a bicameral system and must keep the checks and balances in it. I do not know how we would do that if we were to start appointing in this place. We know that Ministers in the Commons are already irritated by us; they do not even bother to read our debates when we get into that ping-pong session. We do not send things back to the Commons lightly but they cannot be bothered to find out the reasons. We will be completely ignored. The other thing that worries me is that the Bill, rightly, tries to set out the concept of the Appointments Commission, make it independent and give it the right objectives. But the real control is who you put into it, and the real problem then comes as the commission will tend to appoint the great and the good. I am sorry that the rebels are slowly disappearing. We get very wise people but we also need the rebels and agents for change—those who will push the boundaries or resist what sounds terribly sensible on the surface but has hidden dangers. We must have checks and balances. If we are to have an appointed House we must separate powers in the other place. We should look at the American model far more closely. I never thought that I would say that. It would have been anathema 15 years ago but I am very worried about the consolidation of power now. If we opt for an elected House, we assume that we will get failed politicians, or whatever, but why? America seems to survive, which another noble Lord said earlier. Maybe we might for a while, but do we assume that the public will permanently be idiots? I am certain that something good will come out of it. There are lots of different ways of electing Lords. People think about it and I am sure that we can achieve something that is not a mere mirror of another place. I do not want to lose the expertise or the independence but we must have that democratic authority to survive. Otherwise all residual power will have been removed or stifled within the next 10 to 20 years. If we want to preserve some places for experts the 80:20 model—80 per cent elected, 20 per cent appointed—looks quite attractive. As a Cross-Bencher I would say that, wouldn’t I? That is always the trouble. I shall refer briefly to some other bits in the Bill. On ex-prisoners and people who have been to prison being Members of your Lordships’ House, I always thought that we had a principle of rehabilitation and that after a while people have paid their debt to society. We should remember that when putting something like this together. As we are about to give votes to prisoners should they not have someone in Parliament to represent them since they cannot sit in the other place? Why are there so many new Peers; why this huge influx? It really worries me. Is it because they do not matter; is it because they are seen as Lobby fodder; or is it because they will be abolished quite soon? I do not understand what is going on. It is ridiculous. On the other hand I have great hopes. It is amazing how independent people can become once they are no longer beholden to a master, so I look forward to welcoming a huge number of recruits to the cause of a truly bicameral Parliament with power balanced properly between the two Houses, exercising proper control of the Executive through legislation and scrutiny.