House of Lords Reform

Debate between Lord Rooker and Lord Wright of Richmond

Tuesday 29th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker]

My theme is very much along the lines of my intervention on the Leader of the House earlier. I agreed very much with the speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Cope and Lord Higgins. The Tory, Lib Dem and Labour manifestos and the coalition programme exclusively refer to the words “second Chamber” and deal only with the issue of composition. I do not seek to support the status quo. Giving my maiden speech at that Box some nine years ago, I reminded this House that in 1980 I moved a 10-minute rule Bill in the other place to abolish your Lordships' House. That enabled me to get away with a lot at that Dispatch Box over the years.

The manifesto lines of the parties are obsessed with composition. Not one asked what we are for, what we do and how we do it. The functions and powers of the second Chamber should be known before starting on the composition, if only on the basis that if we are expecting good, honest, professional citizens outside to want to get elected here, they will want to know what their powers and functions are beforehand, not afterwards. There is a real problem, as the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, has just said. After 27 years in the Commons, the last four as a Minister, I will admit that I was very ignorant about your Lordships' House. Not any more—but as a transferring Minister from one House to the other, fresh from the Commons, in my first seven years in this place, in my four departmental roles as a Minister, I genuinely felt under greater scrutiny than I ever was in the Commons. There is no question about that in my mind and I have thought about that a lot. The scrutiny level here is much greater—and my experience ranges across six departments.

On more than one occasion as a Minister, I found myself in Cabinet committees explaining, not defending, the way in which the Lords works, to be met by the accusation from the senior Cabinet Minister in the chair, “You’ve gone native!”. That was the level of debate. My noble friend Lord Grocott was with me on one occasion when that was said. I am entitled to ask whether the present Deputy Prime Minister is any less ignorant than his shadows in that position beforehand, because so far I have not seen any evidence that he is. Many of your Lordships have served in the other place, but there is only one Member of the other place who has served in this place. So the level of knowledge of this place is incredibly shallow in the other place. You can make a damn good cheap conference platform speech, however, at the expense of your Lordships' House. It will always get a cheer. So there is that shallowness in the debate.

My other point is this—I do not see how we can escape a review of the conventions. If I came in here elected, I would not be interested in conventions, because I would have been elected. Where is the book of powers for the Lords? People have talked about our having fewer powers, but we do not; we have very substantial powers, but we choose not to use them because we are not elected. That is what the conventions report was all about. The refusal to give a Second Reading, the time delay, how we treat secondary legislation and the challenge on financial privilege will all go by the board by elected Members of this House. Why should they obey the conventions? Therefore, if we do not legislate on the conventions on a statutory basis, which means by definition legislating to reduce the powers of the Lords by law, we will suffer the consequences of massive conflict between the two Houses as elected Members here test the powers. If the second Chamber is to get more power, that can come from the Commons alone. We have to appreciate that—there is only one central, finite power, and any more coming here means that some has come from there. So it is make your mind up time. We have to fix the role of the second Chamber, fix the powers and the numbers before we do that—and only then do we start to make a sensible arrangement that will stand the test of time about the composition of your Lordships' House. I do not believe that these aspects will go away when we get to the detail of Bills. It will be an absolute disgrace if the Long Title of any Bill rules out discussion of the powers and functions, if the Bill does not deal with them itself, and we will insist on them being dealt with.

To finish, I want to be a little bit more positive. I have some personal views about how a second Chamber should work, although I cannot go through them in detail here. We should concentrate on revision and scrutiny rather than repetition, which we do so much of. There is far too much repetition in this place and not enough revision and scrutiny. I do not think that Bills should start here and we should be half the size of a much smaller Commons than is planned, with no more than 500. I do not think that Ministers should be here, but we should be able to send for them to come and explain and then scrutinise what they are doing and revise the legislation in the light of what they say. That would be a much better role. We must not be a mirror of the Commons—and we do not want people queuing up to get in here because they could not get into the Commons. I guarantee that that is what will happen.

The upshot of all this—and it has been a theme of many speeches—is that to function on behalf of our fellow citizens, as a second Chamber of Parliament, the powers that we have are not dependent on how people arrive here. I could make a case for an all-elected House or an all-appointed House, but one case that I will never make is for a hybrid House of some elected and some appointed. That is completely and utterly unsustainable and, if any Bill comes forward with that, we will end up wasting months of time, because it will not get anywhere. It is better that those points are taken on board and we have a much wider debate before we are faced with a fait accompli.

[Lord Wright of Richmond]

I intervene very briefly to remind the House that I am the only surviving Cross-Bench member of the conventions committee. We came under strong pressure from the then Government to make it clear that the conventions as they existed at that time would continue. In response, we made it very clear that under an elected House—