What a great pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I congratulate the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully), who did great credit to both the petition and the Petitions Committee in leading this debate. He managed to present the arguments, and as
well as giving some of his personal views, which he is entitled to do, in a fair and balanced way, he talked about the advantages of Lords reform and of a Lords with external expertise and experience. He used a phrase that particularly struck me—“the House of Lords does things that the House of Commons does less of”—suggesting that there is a complementary function.
The hon. Gentleman also outlined different options for reform, which I found interesting. There can be an academic as well as a political debate about how we proceed. Do we have an elected, an appointed or a hybrid Chamber? He suggested that one of the blocks to reform is lack of consensus on what to replace the House of Lords with, and I suggest that we have seen that in today’s debate. There is no real consensus on how we proceed, which is one of the reasons why we are not proceeding at all.
Is there not a real danger that the legitimacy of the Lords will continue to decline? My concern is that if it does, it will drag down the whole of Parliament and therefore this House as well. I was particularly interested in the responses the hon. Gentleman spoke about, from students at the University of Strathclyde and—was it Stelling grammar school?