House of Lords Reform and Size of the House of Commons

Desmond Swayne Excerpts

Wednesday 19th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)]

Following the right hon. Gentleman’s point on gender balance, may I help the hon. Gentleman by saying that, among the hereditary peers, there are currently 91 men and one woman?

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

rose—

[Pete Wishart]

I give way to the right hon. Gentleman.

[Sir Desmond Swayne]

I disagree with the hon. Gentleman. The new creations are exactly the savvy sort of people that we should have in the House of Lords. However, the reason why we are in this position of an unreformed House of Lords is that there was insufficient consensus in this place on how to replace it. Is he going to set out his plan for the other place?

[Pete Wishart]

If anything, that sounds like a manifesto from the right hon. Gentleman to get himself a good place in the House of Lords, and I wish him all the best in that ambition.

I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) for mentioning the hereditaries, because that brings me on to my next point. Although the new appointees are bad enough, there are some other cracking undemocratic horrors skulking in the corridors down the road. They are the aristocrats, the 91 Members of Parliament who have the opportunity to design, fashion, shape, issue and supervise our laws because of birthright—because they are the first son of a family that won a decisive battle in the middle ages. The one thing I do like about the hereditaries is that they bring an element of democracy to the House of Lords—did Members know that? It is the surreal and bizarre contest that they have when one of their number dies. The earls, the counts, the barons, the lords and the ladies of the land get together to replenish their numbers. It is the weirdest electorate in the world. It may be the poshest and most exclusive electorate that can be found anywhere, but at least there is that element of democracy in the House of Lords.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ian Lavery]

If the hon. Gentleman looked at the statistics on trade unionists, he would find that appointments by the former Prime Minister were completely different.

The bloated Lords now has over 800 Members and leaves the UK noticeably as the only bicameral country in the world where the second Chamber is larger than the first. Indeed, as mentioned by the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), the only Chamber that is bigger is the national assembly of China. It is an absolute outrage. Let us be honest about it: we are a laughing stock in this regard. It is worth remembering, of course, that China’s population is 28 times the size of the United Kingdom’s.

[Sir Desmond Swayne]

I think that my hon. Friend the Deputy Leader of the House may have misremembered. It was not that there was no consensus; there was a Bill on which we all agreed, or which certainly had the support of the House, but it was the hon. Gentleman’s party that withdrew support for the programme motion. We could have had a reformed House of Lords, had it not been for the machinations of the Labour party.

[Ian Lavery]

I think there is more to the history of that than blaming the Labour party. I think it was the coalition Government that suffered a slight hiccup in their relationship at that point.

While what I have described was clearly bad enough, it came at the same time as the Government sought to reduce the number of elected Members of Parliament from 650 to 600. That was done under the guise of making politics cheaper, but it barely scraped the surface of the additional costs of the unelected Lords. Just where is the logic in reducing the size of the democratically elected Commons? If we want consensus, we can all agree to abolish the Boundary Commission review. We are being asked for consensus by the Minister, and that is fine, but if we want consensus in relation to certain issues, we should have consensus in relation to democracy. That is simple.

During the last Parliament, the attempt to rig democracy in favour of continuous Conservative control failed only because the Conservatives’ coalition partners, the threatened Liberal Democrats, rebelled—a point that I made to the right hon. Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne). They did not rebel over the much trumpeted 2010 anti-austerity policies. They were not terribly interested in opposing in-year spending cuts, increased tuition fees, or even the fundamentally illiberal “gagging Bill”. The truth is that the Liberal Democrats spat out the proverbial dummy because of the Government’s failure to back their poor compromise on reform of the Lords, which they themselves sought to stuff with their own peers. [Hon. Members: “Where are they?”] Absolutely. I was waiting for an intervention then, but, looking around the Chamber, I see that there is no one from the Liberal Democrats here to intervene.

The coalition agreement on Lords appointments would have meant an additional 186 peers, costing an estimated £24 million. All of them would have been Liberal Democrats or Conservatives. Interestingly, the Dissolution honours list contained more Liberal Democrats than their current parliamentary cohort. I hear people say that that is not hard to achieve, but it is nevertheless an important point.

Although the Liberal Democrat rebellion scuppered the 2013 review, the legislation was never repealed, and the unfettered Conservative Government have returned to the task. Their proposals to redraw constituency boundaries are grossly unfair, unjust, undemocratic and wholly unacceptable. They are based on an out-of-date version of the electoral register with nearly 2 million voters missing, a disproportionately high number of whom are transient and poorer voters: students, and families forced to move as a result of changes in the benefit system. The changes fail to take any account of the myriad bits of additional work that the vote to leave the European Union and a return of powers would bring.