Proposed Changes to the Standing Orders of the House of Commons

Lord True Excerpts

Tuesday 21st July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cunningham of Felling (Lab)]

My Lords, briefly, I support the Motion in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Butler. I have had the honour to chair two Joint Committees of Parliament. The report of the first was unanimously rejected by both Houses. However, the second report, Conventions of the UK Parliament, was unanimously adopted by both Houses of Parliament. It contained a number of matters of relevance to this issue—not least the fact that electing your Lordships’ House would inevitably lead to a constitutional confrontation between an elected House of Commons and an elected House of Lords.

However, that is not the point that I want to make in support of the noble Lord, Lord Butler. A change in the Standing Orders is a cleverly thought-up device—whether by a politician, an adviser or a lawyer advising the Government, I do not know—to enable this matter to proceed. But it does two things. First, it has as yet unknown and perhaps profound implications for the constitution and the governance of our country. Secondly, de facto it prevents this House having any say in the matter. We can debate it, of course, as we are doing now, but we cannot have any impact on it.

A Joint Committee of both Houses is the best and most sensible way forward, rather than rushing into decisions which change the constitutional relationships between the two Houses. As my noble friend has just pointed out: who knows where they will lead? We have just had some examples of where they could lead. My strong belief is based on my personal experience in both Houses. Many Members present served on the committees that I had the honour to chair—not least the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, but many others, too. We reached our conclusions in the committee unanimously and without a vote—no divisions of any kind took place. That report, Conventions of the UK Parliament, has some lessons to teach us about what is now proposed.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, we are one Parliament but two Houses. That is symbolised in the Messages that go forth between green and red ribbon. As the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, said, comity between the two Houses may sound arcane but it is actually an extremely important principle of the way in which we conduct ourselves.

I believe that we should confine ourselves to looking at the Motion that is before us. I may agree with some of the things that are said about the underlying policy, but the Motion before us is that we should seek to set up a Joint Committee that would presume to report on what the House of Commons should do in its Standing Orders.

It would be a move which was not invited by the House of Commons nor sought by the Joint Committee on Conventions for your Lordships to say that we in this House presume to say to the House of Commons how it should conduct its internal affairs. Questions on House of Commons matters are by convention not permitted in this Chamber; we do not ask them. It is a principle that we do not seek to construe the internal matters of the House of Commons.

Standing Orders are quite important. A very important principle in parliamentary law is the provision that prevents tacking. Tacking was the abuse by the House of Commons of financial measures to add things to them that the House of Lords could not amend because of financial privilege. It is not in any statute; it started as a Motion passed by your Lordships’ House and it now sits as a Standing Order in this House that the House of Commons should not do that. The House of Commons has respected that for 300 years—it is just a Standing Order in this House. It is an example of the importance of preserving. We may have a wider interest in preserving the principle that one House does not presume to construe the internal proceedings of another. We can have all the consideration in the Constitution Committee; we can have debates; we can have discussions. But for us to vote to set up a committee which presumes to tell the House of Commons what its Standing Orders should be—

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane (Lab)]

When the noble Lord makes that statement, I think he fails to take account of the wording of the Motion and the opening remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Butler, which are expressly that it is expedient that a Joint Committee be set up—not that this House sets one up, simply that it is expedient that it be set up. That is surely rather important.

[Lord True]

My Lords, if it is simply a question of expediency, one can make a declaratory statement in a debate. This Motion is intended to send a message to the House of Commons and there is no question about it. The committee is invited in the Motion to report specifically on the proposals for changes in the Standing Orders of another place.

We would not care for it very much if we heard from the House of Commons that they had had a debate and were sending us some suggestions as to how we should change the internal proceedings of your Lordships’ House, or if we should be told by people from the House of Commons who might vote on a particular measure.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan]

May I ask the noble Lord to read the Motion again? It is not to inquire into the Standing Orders; it is to inquire into the constitutional implications of the change. In that sense, in what way would it be improper for this House to consider the implications for the constitution of this country?

[Lord True]

My Lords, I have the greatest respect for the noble Lord, Lord Reid, but I have read the Motion, which proposes that the committee should,

“consider and report on the constitutional implications of the Government’s … revised proposals to change the Standing Orders of the House of Commons … and that the committee should report on the proposals”,

not on the constitutional implications. It is a specific invitation to report on the Standing Orders of another place. I do not think that is wise; I do not think that we should invite the House of Commons to interfere in our affairs and our Standing Orders. We can make clear the concerns and feelings that we may have about these proposals in many other ways, but I urge your Lordships not to trench into the privilege of the Commons and to hold back. Whatever we may think, if the noble Lord, Lord Butler, were to put this Motion to a Division—I hope he will not—it would be construed as a challenge not just to the policy but to the right of the House of Commons to direct its own affairs. I do not think that would be a sensible procedure for this House.

[Lord Wills (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Butler, has done Parliament a great service by bringing forward this Motion. As he and many others have said, the Government’s proposals are of profound constitutional significance and, as such, they deserve the kind of deliberative scrutiny that this Motion envisages and which the Government are so far refusing to allow.

The arguments in favour of the Motion have been made so extensively and so well that I do not intend to repeat them except to say that I agree with all of them. But several noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord True, who has just spoken, have rightly been wary about intervening in the proper concerns of the House of Commons. As a former Member of the other place, I understand that and I think they are right to be wary. But in pursuing his proposal, the noble Lord, Lord Butler, is doing no more than seeking to implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords so ably presided over by the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham. That said that one of the key functions of your Lordships’ House is to act as a constitutional longstop. The noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, may recall the words of his royal commission, which stated that the key purpose of your Lordships’ House is to act as a constitutional longstop to ensure that,

“changes are not made to the Constitution without full and open debate and an awareness of the consequences”.

That seems, purely and simply, what the noble Lord, Lord Butler, seeks to do with this proposal. I hope this House will support him in pursuing it.

House of Lords: Size

Lord True Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, and I agree wholeheartedly with what he said about arbitrary solutions. I thank, as have other noble Lords, my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth for initiating this important debate. However, sometimes, and increasingly, it seems that debates about our own future are becoming like the story of Penelope’s tapestry in Homer’s Odyssey: great labour, ingenious designs, but of it there never comes an end.

That this House should be comfortable with itself is important. But if the belt fits a little tightly at some times and in some places, is that the end of the world? We did not need too many sharp elbows to get to our places this afternoon; some looking on will be bemused at the idea that a House so allegedly overcrowded looks so empty. What is so urgent or damaging about this alleged problem that it claims our monthly attention? Surely it cannot be that some, as well as not wanting hereditary peers any more, do not want too many more like ourselves. I express my unqualified welcome to new Members of the House on all sides—I am sure they will enrich our work.

Most of your Lordships have recently rejected a reduction in the size of the other place. The House also set its teeth, as my noble friend Lord Tyler said, against the solution of election of a set number of Peers to stock the political Benches of this House. That would be the easiest way to set a cap on the political sides of the House, while preserving through appointment the independent expertise of the Cross-Benchers.

This House is still one of the cheapest in the world. Why are we agonising so much about cost? It continues to be a House of expertise, unpaid and part-time. Few here want to change that. Such a House inevitably needs a larger pool of Members from which to draw to do its work. There are high hopes of proposals for permanent retirement, and I welcome them, although I could not support a payment to leave. Voluntary retirement would be preferable to compulsory ejection of Members who reach a certain age—and I agree fully with the comments of my noble friend in the report of the Commons Select Committee on this issue.

In a country where policy-making and comment on it is ever more dominated by people under 45, while the growing majority of the electorate is—and will continue to be for the foreseeable future—over 45, it seems highly eccentric to seek out one of the few parts of our constitution where the voices of older, more experienced people are regularly heard and to force them out. It is often a little more experience and a much longer view we need in the counsels of the state, not less. So I am against age limits.

The arguments for a formal cap on the size of an appointed House raged three centuries ago over the Peerage Bill in 1719, and were skewered very effectively by Robert Walpole in debates on that legislation, not only by frightening his fellow MPs that, if they voted to limit the size of the House of Lords, a pleasant retirement home would be denied them, but on the more serious basis that a firmly capped unelected House could not be overborne by new creations if it brought a government to deadlock. Creation to secure the Crown’s business was needed or threatened in 1711, 1832 and 1911, and some of us are old enough to remember hearing Tony Benn call for 1,000 Peers to carry Labour’s programme of 1976. Even with the cumbersome blunderbuss of the Parliament Act, an unelected House can still disrupt business, as we all recently experienced. There needs to be an ability to break a cap, and defining that would be difficult.

Nor is a moratorium reasonable for obvious reasons of renewal and political balance. Roughly half the existing life peerages were recommended under the Blair Governments of 1997 to 2007. It is a little chary, in this light, to chunter that my right honourable friend the Prime Minister is overegging it. Mr Blair allowed only 49 Conservative Peers in his first two Governments; my right honourable friend has allowed 44 additions to a Labour Party that was already the largest in the House in one as yet uncompleted term. In his first three years, Mr Blair appointed Labour Peers at a rate 50% faster than that allowed himself by Mr Cameron in appointing Conservative Peers. Mr Cameron has, by contrast, been actually restrained.

We have been through a stage of exceptional creation—a missile-building period—and the House will take time to get over the hump of those massive creations. But I think that it can return progressively, as I hope that it will, to the lower rates of creation that were standard in the past. There may well need to be a steady decommissioning of the stacks of Back-Bench ICBMs, waiting in the Bishops’ Bar to come into Divisions—but with patience and a will, it can be done. Even in the quarter century from 1905 to 1929, which included the Lloyd George era, the average was 11 creations a year. In 1929 to 1955, with many changes of Government, it was 12. Those figures are less than the number of those leaving the House in every year so far this century—and, with an average age of 70, sadly, the number of leavers is likely to be steady in the years ahead.

We should be far more relaxed on this score, stop constantly fussing about the matter and turn our attention to other affairs of state, although I think that ingenious heads might come together in the usual channels to consider the active House and the escalating size of Divisions, the main reason why many are called to the House day by day. Pairing would be extremely difficult in this House, partly because of the coalition but also because of the existence of Cross-Benchers. However, a search for a START treaty in the usual channels might bear fruit, if searched for. If some of the Peers who do not intend to take part in proceedings could be slipped from the duty to vote, the House could keep, and draw on, the pool of their wisdom while not flooding the byways of the House for the more humdrum Divisions that punctuate our lives. That task would be difficult but I hope that the Front Benches might rise to that challenge and prefer it to mechanistic and legislative solutions.