House of Lords: Reform

Lord Howe of Aberavon Excerpts

Tuesday 21st June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howe of Aberavon]

My Lords, the tone with which the noble Lord has just concluded his most interesting address reflects an observation made by our Prime Minister, before he achieved that office, when speaking to the entire party of both halves of this building. He said, “We keep what is good and we change what needs to be changed”. That strikes me as a sensible foundation on which to address this matter. Our constitution is not written, but it is there and it has worked not too badly with gradual change for a long time. The burden of making the case for change rests on those who propose it.

In many ways we have a very eccentric structure. Our two Houses are different from each other. The other place can be told that the Prime Minister is dissolving it, or the other place can, by taking the right voting decision, dissolve the Prime Minister. In this House, none of those facilities is open to us. We are very different but—I hope I will be forgiven for sounding conceited on our behalf—we seem to be working increasingly well with some of the moderate changes that have taken place. Ping-pong works. In a brief intervention on my noble friend Lord Strathclyde the other day, I said that the right analysis of the way in which this system works is that we in this House are rather like the trial judge and the other place is like the jury. Members of this House have a diversity of experience—I do not want to use the word “expertise” too frequently—and a diversity of background, so that we are able to analyse in a way not driven by pure politics. We then present that analysis to the other place saying, as though one was addressing the jury, “This is entirely a matter for you, the Members of the Commons”. That gives us the best of both worlds and does not cry out for change.

If one asks people specifically what fault they think will be corrected by the admission of elected Members, one gets no real answer. If one asks what improvement will be brought about by the simple admission of elected Members, one gets no positive answer. One goes back to an early analysis of reform of this House, in the Jay White Paper, which was published in 1999. It summarised the most valued features of the present House using the following words: “distinctive”, “expertise”, “well regarded”, “distinguished” and “particularly valuable”. Our strength is based on our diversity, which is itself a consequence of our not being elected.

I looked at a couple of representative debates some time ago to see just what we contributed to the subject. In a debate on the National Health Service in November 2001, the 19 speakers included two former deans of university medical schools, a practising dentist, a consultant obstetrician, a consultant paediatrician, a former GP, a former professor of nursing, a former director of Age Concern and the president of Mencap. What wider complement of expertise and analysis would one get if one exposed this House to election? In a debate on 24 September 2002, when the Iraq problem arose, the speakers included three former Chiefs of the Defence Staff, three former Foreign Secretaries—for what they are worth—two former Home Secretaries, six Bishops, two former ambassadors, two former Defence Secretaries and many others with service experience. It is a treasure to have that diversity of expertise available in the institution as it now stands. One has to be very cautious, therefore, about steaming ahead with major change.

Several people today have said that there may be a lack of confidence, that eggs may be broken, that there is disenchantment with the existing structure and that change is therefore necessary. I go back to the analysis made by the Wright committee in the fifth report of the Commons Public Administration Committee, from which I have quoted before. It found that the principal cause of today’s widespread public disillusionment with our political system is the virtually untrammelled control by the Executive of the elected House. It came to two conclusions. The first was that there is a need to ensure that the dominance of Parliament by the Executive, including the political party machines, is reduced, not increased—one would not achieve that by introducing the party machines directly to the composition of this House by elections. Secondly, it said that the second Chamber must be neither rival nor replica but genuinely complementary to the Commons and therefore as different as possible. That leads one to the conclusion that we would be taking a significant and not well proven risk by opening the doors of this House to elected Members in a shrunken senate, with less representation of a diversity of expertise than we have now.

In the present structure, Cross-Benchers make up about 200 of the 800 Members in very general terms. If one reduced the House to 300 Members in total, one would have 30 Cross-Benchers and 30 Members from other parties. We would be looking pretty anxiously to try to find anything resembling the diversity of experience that is available if we were to shrink this organisation in that way.

I come back to the conservative proposition with which I started: we keep what is good and we change what needs to be changed. The reduction in the House’s size needs to be kept under control, or we will reduce the chances of it containing very much, if any, of the talent that it contains today. The burden of proof for making such a fundamental change is on those who seek to achieve it. In my respectful judgment, they have not begun to do so to the satisfaction of the people of this country.