My Lords, this has been a very high-quality debate, and I am enormously grateful to all those who have spoken, and indeed those who have attended. I do not know whether this is the normal attendance on a Friday morning, but I think that all those who have listened to the debate as well as contributed will agree that this has been the House of Lords at its best.
We are sometimes slightly complacent about the quality of our debates, so I should perhaps draw to your Lordships’ attention that the other place on 24 January voted by 119 MPs to 46 in support of a similar Motion to this—so they are not quite as retrograde as we sometimes think.
Your Lordships have demonstrated a maturity of judgment this morning, but also that we are young at heart. I am grateful to all those who have taken part. I do not propose to comment on all the contributions, because there are other important Bills to follow, but I want to take up one or two points very quickly. I am delighted that my noble friend Lord Lexden is joining the team at the Hansard Society, in which I am also involved. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and my noble friend Lord Goodhart pointed out that one of our problems about disengagement is that people get out of the habit of voting before they even start. That is a strong argument for combining this proposal with the natural thread of the citizenship programme.
I am particularly grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, for her commitment. She said honestly that she had changed her mind on this issue through a combination of principle and practical experience. Many of us are in the same position. I must say to my noble friend Lord Wallace that I suspect that his official brief was rather less equivocal than he was, because he is obviously having to tread a very careful path. I say to him, as a fellow historian, imagine if the great Whig Government of 1832 had said in preparing for the Reform Bill, “We will seek a consensus”. A very distinguished constitutional historian in my former college, Exeter College, Oxford, said recently apropos of the Lords reform process—I paraphrase, because I do not have his book before me, but I recommend it—that the search for consensus is a shortcut to a dead end. My noble friends should beware of the idea that we must always go at the speed of the slowest, with the lowest common denominator.
I shall not say more. I am very grateful to all those who have contributed but, in the interests of brevity and those who are to speak in the later debates, I now invite your Lordships’ House to give the Bill a Second Reading.