Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

I support my noble friend Lord Knight of Weymouth, but sadly for different reasons. His advocacy for his amendment was characteristically persuasive, but uncharacteristically wrong. I hope that he will forgive me if I back the content but try to offer some different reasons. He was right for the most powerful reason that form always follows function. That is as true when one is designing a parliamentary system as it is when one is designing a chair. If that is the case, we need to understand, as my noble friend Lord Howarth explained so well, the relative functions of both Houses without trying to conceive a grand plan that would re-engineer the entire British constitution on a piece of paper, and seek to enact that. At the very least, we need to understand the purpose of the two places and particularly their distinct roles. Then we can understand what their composition and size should be. Unlike many of my colleagues, I am a reformer, but possibly in a different way. I should like a much broader conversation about the way that this House functions and is composed, and an understanding about what is different about this place. I had an interesting conversation recently with an academic from King’s College, who described the other place as being there to represent geographical communities, but that this place was a House which represented other kinds of communities of interest. There were vocational communities and communities of a whole range of expertise and perspective, and that crystallised for me what was so powerful about debates in your Lordships’ House. When an issue came up, instead of people simply saying—although this is valuable—““This is how it will affect the people of Bristol”” or, in my case, the people of Durham, someone would say, ““This is the perspective of someone who has worked in this field for 40 years””, or, ““This is the perspective of a judge who oversaw the making of the law in this area””, ““This is the perspective of a bishop who has had to deal with some of the fallout when things have gone wrong””, ““Here is the perspective of someone who has been a trade unionist for 40 years and who campaigned and worked for those at the very bottom””, or, ““This is the perspective of someone who has been working in business trying to create jobs and understand the consequences for their community of changes in the law””. That way of viewing what your Lordships’ House does is a very different way of considering what communities of interest are. If we go on to have a conversation about this issue, I should like us to consider in that kind of creative and imaginative fashion the ways in which the two Houses might contribute to the wisdom of this nation and, in particular, how they might go about properly representing the communities of interest in the United Kingdom. One of the most powerful things about being human is that we only really come to life in relationships. We naturally form communities in all kinds of different ways. I know that noble Lords on all sides of the House will appreciate that wise Governments know that you cannot make communities; the most you can hope to do is to support them, enable them, help them to grow and allow them to flourish. Certainly, if the party opposite wants to promote the big society, I am sure that it will have discovered by now that the best thing it can do is not to try to create communities—they have a nasty way of falling over when you turn your back on them—but to work with the natural communities that exist, and there needs to be a very clear view on both sides of the House about how that should be done. You start with the principle that the Houses should be created in a way that respects the natural communities. Therefore, in another place, if we are looking at the way in which communities or constituencies are formed, we should go with the way that history, geography, culture and a sense of identity have naturally created constituencies. In this place, again, there should be a natural way of looking at how we represent the non-geographical communities of interest where the voices should still be heard, and we should make sure that the two things can be reconciled. However, if we start jumping in now with numbers, we will have missed a step. The point of these Houses is not the people in them but the job that they do. In reflecting on this matter, we have to consider what that job is and how the Houses may be best constructed to enable them to do it. I very much hope that we will not consider specific numbers. I want to share some of my experience with noble Lords. My background is in the voluntary sector. I certainly have not had the experience of many Members of this House who spent many years in another place or indeed here—I am a new girl in this House too—but I spent a lot of years representing and working with some of the most marginalised people in Britain. I ran the Refugee Council, as did my noble friend Lord Dubs, and before that I ran a single-parent charity. Both groups took turns at being national scapegoats. When I came to Parliament and tried to raise issues of manifest injustice, I found that it was in this House that I was listened to by people on all sides. I cannot help thinking that that must have something to do with the way that your Lordships came to be here and how they might one day cease to be here. That is something that I would like to see considered. My noble friend Lady Smith of Basildon mentioned the growing casework problem experienced by Members of another place, and I suspect that it will get considerably worse. At the moment, the only place that citizens can go for help is either to their Member of Parliament or to an advice agency. Most of those agencies are funded by legal aid and many across the country are going to close. I suspect we will find that more and more people who have welfare or other problems will have nowhere else to go other than to their Member of Parliament, and therefore it seems likely that that role will grow, not shrink. I do not for a moment suggest that Members of another place should simply turn into social workers or advocates. However, they play an important role by being there to act, when necessary, between the individual and the state. They represent the state to the individual but they also represent the individual to the state. Their job is sometimes to be the person who breaks through when the state appears not to act appropriately. They have to try to crack open the system and ensure that justice is done. I have lost track of the number of cases where someone would bring me a judgment that was not only demonstrably unfair but clearly not in accordance with the law. Sometimes it would take only a letter or a phone call from a Member of Parliament and the matter would be looked at again. I would never want to see the role being one of simple advocacy or special pleading, but the job of making sure that you hold the state to account for the individual, as well as going out to advocate for it, seems to be fundamental. I thank my noble friend Lord Knight for bringing forward for consideration the importance of the order in which we do things, and I hope that the Government will consider it.