Lord Burns
Main Page: Lord Burns (Crossbench - Life peer)House of Lords: Lord Speaker’s Committee Report
Lord Burns Excerpts
Lord Burns
That this House takes note of the Report of the Lord Speaker’s committee on the size of the House.
Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
My Lords, I note that there is no one on the Government Front Bench who is connected with the Burns report. I will reiterate the point that has been made by many noble Lords that there are two main reasons this report is able to command such a consensus—and they have consequences, I think, for the way we go forward from the acceptance of the report and, I hope, the buy-in to the report from the Prime Minister. I think that the secret was, first, the excellence of the report itself. I will name not only the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and his colleagues but the clerk, Tom Wilson, who I am sure played a very active part in making it a readable and very coherent presentation. It is a model of its type. I also join in the thanks to my noble friend Lady Crawley, and the noble Lord, Lord Newby, for their statesmanlike contributions. I hope that that accolade does neither of them any harm.
I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. The secret comes also from the fact that the Cormack group, for quite a long period of time, showed considerable statesmanship in being ready for the moment when the constellation of the stars was such that a request to the Speaker to progress this matter was acted upon. The key in my view, and it comes to the operational side of the implementation of this, is that the leapfrogging between the three parties—the two major parties in particular—was becoming an embarrassment. No one could keep on asserting that somehow the increase in the size of the House had anything to do with the Members. Clearly, that would be a preposterous argument.
As a former TUC employee, I feel I should mention that the phrase “package deal” is something that people take to mean that you have to say yes or no to the totality of what you are presented with and take a view on it. On that basis, I have no doubt that this package will command overwhelming support. To use a popular phrase in the current debate about Europe, it cannot be cherry picked; it is a bit like the European internal market—I am the only speaker so far to have got Brexit into my speech.
It is very bold in some ways. I will ask the following question to anybody in the House who is competent to respond to it. In some ways, this report signals the end of the dissolution honours. Unless the numbers stack up at the time, there will be severe limitation on the prime ministerial prerogative, not just as a principle but in practice. I stress that because I think that it would be impertinent, almost, of the House to say that we want to see the end of the dissolution honours. However, as I understand it—perhaps someone could comment on whether I have understood the implementation arithmetic—there cannot be a dissolution honours in the traditional sense if the numbers do not make provision for that. It is against that background, but only against that background, that I have a limited degree of sympathy for the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, who made the comment that he thinks that any new year list for 2018, in a couple of weeks’ time, could be seen as a legacy issue. That is not to move the goalposts, but the Labour/Conservative gap in the House is 50—250 versus 200—which is 25% if you do the arithmetic that way round, or 20% the other way around, and it is obviously bigger than the gap at the last general election. I just make that point.
I will make one more point about how, in the implementation period—a point touched upon by one or two other speakers—it is a coincidence that the reference to 15 years is the period of three Parliaments. It has other connotations, but in this case I think it would be useful for somebody to take on board the fact that there needs to be an implementation group, in some way or other, to see how and when the arithmetic would be done for the changeover of each new Parliament—if Parliaments are, in fact, averaging four years rather than five.
Lord Burns (CB)
My Lords, I am enormously grateful for the very kind words that have been said about the report, and the number of noble Lords who have taken part in the debate. I have watched some of my close friends and people I have worked with in the past, sitting beside me, squirming with irritation at some of the things that have been said about me—I come from a very competitive background.
A lot of good points have been made which would need to be considered in any implementation. We set out a number of these in the report. We could not solve all the problems. We are reasonably confident that they are not severe problems and that they can be coped with, with a certain amount of good will. I am very grateful for the summary that the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, made of some of the points. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, covered a number of the issues that I was going to cover.
First, I will make a point about diversity, culture, et cetera. It is perfectly clear that there is more to having a successful second Chamber than the issues covered in our report. There are issues of diversity, about the regions and nations, about the health of people and fitness to practise, but these were not in our remit. They are things which can be conducted in parallel with what we are proposing here. They are not necessary for it. They are good things to have and they could be done in parallel. They are very important. When I said they are not for today, I did not mean that we should put them off for ever. Instead, I sought to say that we should not mix them up with these proposals—the most important thing is to get the kind of structure suggested here in place first, and then it would be possible to deal with many of these issues. I share the views of those who said that under these circumstances we will have to move to being a more professional House, and I am confident that we can move in that direction.
The second issue that came up a lot was size. We were told that we had tried to solve the wrong problem because the issue is not the size of this House. I have repeatedly argued in all the presentations I have made, and it is something that the committee came to agree quite quickly, that size is only one aspect of this. The cap on numbers was by far the most important issue. I think almost everybody who criticised the concentration on the size of the House neglected to address the cap and what happens when the system is unbounded, as was pointed out earlier this afternoon. It is the combination of a lack of a cap on the size of the House and a lifelong ability to sit in this House that has created the enormous difficulty that we have and all the inflationary pressures that come from it. If people are appointed at, say, 55, which is the sort of trend that we are seeing, and live to 85 on average—and that is going up—we have people here for 30 years, so what size of House do we need in order to get a reasonable amount of turnover? What size of House do you need in order to rebalance it after a change of Government? The arithmetic of this is really very difficult. It is not just the size; if you have an unbounded system and the possibility of people being in this House for 30 years on average, you have a set of circumstances which is very difficult to solve without simply seeing the size of the House continue to grow. I regard that as a very dangerous situation.
A number of noble Lords made points about age. Certainly the committee had no problem with the idea of age being a factor in determining who should leave during the transition period, or possibly age combined with time served when we were going through the process of trying to adjust from the present House of 800 plus down to 600, but we have to bear in mind that under the present arrangements, and we believe that it is very difficult to avoid it, this would have to be a voluntary process. It is not something that can be imposed upon people who came into the House in different circumstances. We have seen no legal evidence as yet that the House has the power to impose a retirement age upon Members. If people can demonstrate that it does have the power, that raises a different set of issues, but we were working on the basis that the House does not have that power.
The real problem is that we cannot use age for the steady-state solution because it does not produce the stream of retirements that is needed in a regular pattern and it certainly does not produce them on an equal basis across all parties to result in what we described as a fair system. The point at which we will die and leave under those circumstances has quite a lot of randomness about it. The beauty of the term system is that it produces a regular flow of opportunities to make new appointments and it can be designed so that it is fair to all parties.
We spent hours on the subject of legislation. We did not simply decide at our first meeting that we had to do this without legislation. We looked at a lot of different options, but we were very conscious of the Government’s position on this and of the competing legislation that was likely to be around. Nothing prevents any of the changes that people have suggested with regard to the Bishops, the hereditaries and some of the other aspects if legislation is possible, but there is nothing to stop those things being subject to legislation after this system is in place and we have got agreement about the structure. A number of things could follow. I said this morning that it is possible that it might be sensible to have legislation for some of these things at a subsequent time when everyone was satisfied that the system had bedded down and there was the opportunity for legislation.
The question I asked myself and members of the committee asked themselves was whether we should wait to make any progress on these other issues until we had a slot for legislation, or should try to put together a system that could be worked on on a non-legislative basis, but which legislation could be brought to bear on at a later point. That certainly remains my position, having heard the points that have been made today.
It was pointed out that under our proposals there would be a rather slow adjustment to changes of government, and that under our formula, the Labour Party would have been at its peak in 2009. Well, that is scarcely surprising, as by then it had been in office for 12 years, and of course that was the actual position. We tried to show in the report that the calculations in the model produced results not that different from the actual results. The Labour Party came into office in 1997, but was not the largest party for quite some years after that point.
The noble Lords, Lord Sherbourne and Lord Tyler, made the point that this House would be deciding the formula for party size et cetera, whereas the House of Commons should be doing it. My impression was that the House of Commons has no impact at all on the size or the composition of the House of Lords. That is entirely in the hands of a series of Prime Ministers. This is not something that anybody has decided. Indeed, our proposal is that this would be part and parcel of an agreement, so the Prime Minister would still be in the same position, certainly regarding influencing the size, because this agreement, as many noble Lords pointed out, cannot carry on without the agreement of the Government.
My interpretation of today—and I feel very encouraged by it—is that there is a substantial consensus about the need for reform and that there is a lot of support for the proposals. Our rough calculation is that 80% of speakers said that they thought this was a sensible way of moving forward. My hope is that the noble Baroness the Leader of the House can now take a very strong message back to the Prime Minister. Of course, it requires the support of the Prime Minister, which we have made clear from the beginning. Without that, it really cannot go anywhere. This is in its essence an agreement between the party leaders, and the Prime Minister is in the key position here as the person who will giving up most of the flexibility and has to be able to agree with this.
I hope that our Leader will be able to exercise her powers of persuasion and to explain what has happened in this House today and the amount of support for this, so that we can possibly move forward to a next stage where we look at implementation in a great deal more detail, come together to try to form an agreement between the parties and clear up some of the other issues that have been raised. Meanwhile, I beg to move.