House of Lords Reform Bill [HL]

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Friday 3rd December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, for my noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood and perhaps a number of other noble Lords present, this really must feel like “Groundhog Day”. With his usual eloquence and good humour, my noble friend has today moved the Second Reading of more or less the same Bill for the fourth time since July 2007, or what he says feel like, “for the umpteenth time”. We must all admire his persistence in promoting some good principles in relation to reform of this place, while many of us also hope for the promises made by people in all parties in relation to other reforms of your Lordships’ House to be delivered sooner rather than later. We hear a lot in politics about pledges. Today, we should remind ourselves of Mr Asquith’s pledge in 1910 to abolish the hereditary principle for membership of this House. One hundred years later, this Bill offers us a further small step towards the eventual implementation of that pledge.

Like many noble lords, I take great pleasure in occasionally being able to show visitors around this place. Sometimes they are parliamentarians from other countries. Often they ask, “How do you become a Lord?”. When you begin by explaining that perhaps your ancestors fought with the king in battle hundreds of years ago, or perhaps that they were what have been called “special friends” of the King, these visitors look at you in amazement. Then I find that they ask, “How did you come to be here?”. I have to explain that I was appointed on the recommendation of my noble friend Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon. I have to explain that his motive was to keep me working for the election of candidates from my party to the other place and that he did not want me to pursue my ambition to enter what must be called the other place, because that would have prevented me doing my job of electing people from my party to the other place. I tell them that there are three ways in which he could legally have prevented me from standing for election to the other place. I could have been declared insane, I could have been sent to prison, or I could become a Member of your Lordships’ House. So I say that I was quite lucky, really, with the route that he pursued.

But visitors to what many consider to be the mother of parliaments simply cannot understand that we either inherit our titles or we are appointed mostly by party leaders. Sometimes I illustrate the progress of reform when I meet visitors in the cloakroom. I can tell them that when I first came here in 1999, there were more than 1,400 Peers and that it was one coat peg between two. With the removal of all but 92 of the hereditary Peers, I can proudly show them that we now have our own coat pegs. But I think that they expect rather more in the way of reform.

This Bill takes some very modest steps towards reform that I believe should command the greatest degree of consensus. There is possibly nobody in this country who has loved by-elections more than I have over the past 30 years. But the farcical process we have in this House of holding by-elections to elect hereditary Peers brings the House into disrepute. These by-elections have little more resemblance to democracy than the campaign run by Lord Blackadder when he ran the by-election campaign to elect Baldrick in the rotten borough of Dunny-on-the-Wold, where Blackadder was the only elector.

In the new year of 2011 we will see a draft Bill for fundamental reform of your Lordships’ House, and I believe that we will see a Bill for reform of this House included in the Queens Speech in May 2012. Then we will see the first Members elected to it by 2015. If a new House becomes fully elected, then, as my noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood, said, there will be no need for an appointments commission along the lines put forward in this Bill. But if there is a non-elected element, I believe that this proposal has much to commend it, and I hope in particular that such a commission would help to ensure that there is proper regard to the need for diversity in any new House. The proposal to end the by-elections for hereditary Peers may make us a little less subject to ridicule in future. This proposal was, of course, in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill of the previous Parliament.

Those in your Lordships’ House who have become my noble friends as a result of the coalition may care to explain today why this sensible measure and other measures were blocked in the rather absurd process of the so-called “wash-up” of legislation at the end of the previous Parliament. As the noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon, said, it could and should have been agreed at that point.

Provision to exclude Members who never attend is simply common sense. There is provision for members of local authorities to be excluded from membership of them if they fail to attend council meetings, without good reason, for six months. If Members of your Lordships’ House break the law in serious ways, then, just as for Members of the other place, they should cease in future to be law makers.

The provisions in the Bill should have been passed some years ago. However, much more substantial reform must follow if we are to be able to say to visitors in future that we have a democratic system in this country of which we can all be proud.