Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, I agree with my noble friend Lord Knight of Weymouth that it is not sensible to set about reforming the House of Commons without considering the implications for your Lordships' House and for the relationship between the two Houses in our bicameral Parliament. For example, if membership of the House of Commons is to be reduced by 50 MPs, and its already all-too-feeble capacity to scrutinise legislation and to hold the Government to account is yet further enfeebled by the reduction in its forces, there must be implications for the workload of your Lordships' House. It will be even more incumbent on us to ensure that there is a check on the Executive, that legislation is genuinely scrutinised and seriously challenged when it ought to be. That will be very awkward within the pattern of our Parliament, in which the other place is elected but this place is not. We are always diffident about challenging the propositions of the elected Government, particularly propositions that have been approved by the elected Chamber. None the less, if the elected Chamber itself becomes that much less capable of doing the job that the people of this country expect it to do, the duty falls the more on your Lordships' House. These are difficult, sensitive and contentious issues, but we need to think about reform of one House in relationship to the role of and possible reforms to the other. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, is wrong to suggest that we are thereby in some sort of vicious circle so that you cannot do anything: you cannot reform one House until you have reformed the other. The logic of this conundrum is that we have to think about reform of the two Houses together. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Knight of Weymouth for introducing that dimension to our debate. Whether you consider the constitution of our country as an organism or a mechanism—whichever metaphor you prefer—the fact is that its parts are interdependent. It is not just the two Houses of Parliament which are interdependent; there are relationships with other parts of our constitution which equally stand to be destabilised if you attempt to reform one part on its own without considering the wider implications. I do not think that you can set about a programme of reform of the Westminster Parliament without also thinking about the responsibilities of those who are elected by our fellow citizens to represent them in the European Parliament and what the working relationships between those two Parliaments should be. I am even more sure that you cannot think about reform of either House of this Parliament without also thinking about the relationship between the Houses of this Parliament and the devolved institutions of government in Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and, if the Liberal Democrats were to have their way, possibly a devolved assembly in England too. We should always be mindful of the implications of what we do here for local government and the role of local authorities, which has been so much attenuated and enfeebled over the years. As we think about constitutional reform in a constructive and responsible way, we need to think not only about what we expect the devolved institutions—the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly—to do but about what we expect elected local government to do. All these pieces of the constitution need to be understood in relationship to each other. The best is the enemy of the good. If you try to design some grand masterplan for constitutional reform, you will fail—it will not work. No one is possessed of such wisdom that they can devise the ideal scheme and, even if they were able to do so, there would be politicians who did not share that idealism and would not be agreeable to the reforms that were intended. You have to proceed with constitutional reform pragmatically, incrementally, respectfully, sensitively and gradually. That is the way that you get progress towards constitutional reform in this country. That does not mean that you should think about only one piece of the constitution at a time; you have to think about the pattern of relationships. If we were to have an elected House of Lords—I would not call it a House of Lords; it would be an elected second Chamber, and the existing House of Lords would have been abolished—along the lines that my noble friend Lord Knight of Weymouth would like, the consequences for the other place would be seismic. Colossal changes would inevitably follow. We cannot predict what they would be, but we can be certain that the conventions that govern the relations between the two Houses at the moment would be out of the window. Indeed, the report of the committee on conventions chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Cunningham, a report that was endorsed by both Houses of Parliament, stated fairly and squarely that we should not expect the existing conventions to survive the creation of an elected second Chamber. We have seen in the past 15 or 17 hours, or however many hours it has been, that the existing conventions are already under some stress and strain. We could not expect them to survive. I do not say that the relationship between two elected Houses in the United Kingdom would become exactly similar to the relationship of stress, frequent antagonism and impasse that we see between the House of Representatives in the American Congress and the US Senate, but it would be much more similar because, of course, an elected second Chamber would be seen to have legitimacy, it would be proud of it and anyone elected to it who was worth their salt would certainly want to exercise the authority that electoral legitimacy gave to an elected House. We need to realise that there is much more instability, and there are much larger implications, that would potentially arise even from the carrying of the reform of the House of Commons alone that the coalition Government have embarked upon. I am also grateful to my noble friend Lord Grocott for focusing our attention particularly on the size of this House, appointed as it is and as I personally hope it will remain, because the relative sizes of the two Houses are going to be important. If we continue with an appointed House of Lords and its role is advisory, it is perhaps less significant if it is larger in numbers than if you have an elected second Chamber. Possibly, arguably, an appointed House of Lords with a role to advise benefits from having a large membership, because there are more people within an appointed House who have the ability to offer advice that will be useful to the parliamentary system and to the country as a whole. None the less, I take the point that my noble friend Lord Grocott has put forward: there has to be some limitation to this accretion of patronage, this growth willy-nilly of an appointed House, based upon no principle at all. Well, there is a spurious principle, as I believe it to be, that has been adumbrated by the coalition; in the coalition agreement it put forward as a constitutional principle that it would be right for the membership of an appointed House increasingly to be reflective of the political strengths of the parties following the previous election in the other place. That is a very dangerous doctrine and it ought to be questioned. While it apparently has a kind of democratic legitimacy about it, in practice it would mean that the power of the government Whips, which in the opinion of many of us is already excessive in the elected House, would increasingly be extended into the appointed House. We have already seen that process through the creation of the coalition. We have seen the unfortunate state of affairs, deeply damaging to the character, to the deliberation and to the capacity of this House to do its job, when the coalition parties together have a majority that they are willing to use ruthlessly, as we have seen in the proceedings on this Bill. I do not think that we want to legitimise that unfortunate development any further. We ought not to accept the doctrine offered in the coalition agreement; it needs to be considered very sceptically, and I personally take a pretty jaundiced view of it. If the second Chamber were to be elected, there would be a frontal challenge to the other place on the part of the newly elected and democratically legitimised second Chamber. That would be the case even under my noble friend Lord Knight’s scheme whereby the elected second Chamber was elected by thirds—the challenge would mount cumulatively. It would also be the case even if we were to have an only partially elected second Chamber. As all noble Lords who have thought about this very knotty question of Lords reform know well, we are playing with fire and we need to think carefully about what we are doing. For the time being, though, and in the context of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, I take the wise counsel of my noble friends Lord Knight and Lord Grocott that you cannot sensibly or profitably attempt to think about reform of the House of Commons in isolation from the reform of this House and without also considering the implications for the relationship between the two Houses.