House of Lords: Labour Peers’ Working Group Report

Lord Richard Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Richard (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I declare an interest as the former chairman of the Joint Committee. Secondly, I very much regret the absence of my friend Lord Grenfell from this debate. He is a person of vigorous views—on this we do not agree—but I would like to have heard his voice today.

The Labour Peers’ report, The Future of the House of Lords and its Place in a Wider Constitution, is a useful contribution to the debate. We have been round and round this course many times. There is not a great deal new that can be said about it but at least the report gives us a new focus for the discussion and recognises that some reform has to take place and that it should take place now.

I am grateful to the authors of the report, particularly for paragraph 1.8, which says:

“Labour peers as a group do not necessarily agree on every issue relating to the future of the House of Lords”—

how true. The report continues:

“Such a spectrum of views, with many points in between, often crystallises around the issue of whether the House of Lords should be elected”.

The report then says:

“We know that opinions on this issue are very often passionately held”—

that is certainly true—

“and that those holding such strong opinions are unlikely to be moved from them”.

That seems true as well. The report continues:

“Our judgement is that a majority of Labour peers do not support an elected House of Lords. However, we know too that a substantial number of Labour peers do support an elected Lords. We respect both views, and we recognise that on this issue, and no doubt others, there is unlikely to be clear agreement across the board”.

Those are rather wise words, if I may say so. I certainly commend that lot to the House.

Noble Lords will know which side of the argument I am on.

[A noble Lord]

Both!

[Lord Richard]

I stand where I was and nothing has caused me to modify my views. I believe in an elected House. I believe that in the long term it will be seen as not only right but inevitable. There is a fairly obvious lacuna in the report that I should point out, which is that it calls for progress and reform as part of the process—progress towards what? What is the end of the process? The answer can be only an elected and reformed second Chamber. If that is the ultimate aim, viewed in that context the report is indeed useful. If viewed as an end in itself, the report is not.

Since we are talking about Labour Party views, we should be clear about what the Labour Party commitment was at the previous election—and indeed, I hope, remains. We set it out very clearly in our manifesto. With the leave of the House, I will quote it:

“We will ensure that the hereditary principle is removed from the House of Lords. Further democratic reform”—

the House will note these words—

“to create a fully elected Second Chamber will then be achieved in stages. At the end of the next Parliament one third of the House of Lords will be elected; a further one third of members will be elected at the general election after that. Until the final stage, the representation of all groups should be maintained in equal proportions to now. We will consult widely on these proposals, and on an open-list proportional representation electoral system for the Second Chamber, before putting them to the people in a referendum”.

That seems perfectly clear. I would be very disappointed indeed if at the next general election we were not equally forthright.

Moreover, in considering the whole issue yet again, one should not forget that when the House of Lords Reform Bill was debated in the House of Commons, it was passed by a majority of no less than 338, which in anyone’s figures is a pretty hefty majority.

The Labour Party voted very firmly in favour of giving the Bill a Second Reading. Again, we should look at the arithmetic. Of Conservative MPs, 193 voted in favour of a Second Reading, 89 voted against. As far as the Labour Party was concerned, 202 were in favour, 26 against. The Liberal Democrats scored 53 in favour and zero against. I hope that there is no suggestion that as a party we should resile from the principles of the position that we took in the House of Commons. One of the dangers in this whole argument is that the House of Lords will come to the conclusion that it is in favour of a non-elected House and the House of Commons will come to the conclusion that it is in favour of an elected House. That is an unhealthy result to look forward to.

Having said all that, however, I want to look at the common ground between us on the report. The report says that the House of Lords should have 450 Members and be smaller than the House of Commons. I totally agree with that. It says that the hereditary principle should be ended and that all remaining hereditary peerages should be abolished. I totally agree with that. It says that no political party or coalition of parties should seek a Lords majority. I agree. All Peers should be working Peers. I certainly agree with that. The House of Lords Appointments Commission should be established in statute. I agree with that. Attendance should be set at an average of three-fifths of Lords sitting days. That seems to me to be unexceptionable. Disqualification from the Lords should be in line with such arrangements as apply in the Commons. All legislation should start in the Commons. The ceremonial wearing of robes should end. The role of the Lord Speaker should be reviewed. With all of that, I think I could agree. I am bound to say that that is a substantial measure of agreement on any view of this issue. I am sure that it goes rather too far for many people on the other side of the House.

Finally, the report calls for a constitutional commission to consider Britain's evolving constitutional settlement as a whole. This will apparently include devolution, the outcome of the Scottish referendum and questions concerning English governance—whatever that may mean—including regional government. It says that all those provide the context within which wider questions of the place of the second Chamber within the constitution will fall to be determined. These questions are apparently to include the functions and composition of the House, including the question of election, the relationship with the House of Commons, the implications for the formation of Governments, legislative activity, scrutiny of the Executive and representation of the people.

I have to say that is one of the longest and least mowable pieces of grass that I have seen cultivated into which a political football can be successfully kicked. The agenda is enormous and the idea that you could produce results on that in 24 months is, with great respect to the authors of the report, somewhat fanciful.

I see no reason why the reform of this House should have to wait for the resolution of all the problems related to the British constitution. I am very strongly in favour of a long look at the relationship between the devolved Administrations and the centre. I am strongly in favour of taking a long look at the possibilities of regionalisation for England, but I am very much against using the constitutional commission as the excuse for continued inaction on the central issue of the reform of this House.

I am conscious of the time, but I have two other points that I want to make. I will do so very briefly. Looking at the history of this country, we see that many of the great constitutional advances that have been made have been made not by consensus but very much in its absence. If we go back to the 17th century—let alone Magna Carta, that was hardly consensual—and the disputes between Parliament and the Crown, to the Great Reform Bill, or to the Parliament Act 1911, none of them was consensual. They all took place because the Government decided that that is what was right and that was what they were going to do. I would wish future Governments to do that too.

[Baroness Northover (LD)]

My Lords, I remind noble Lords that we are in a time-limited debate. When the clock reaches eight, noble Lords have had eight minutes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Haskel]

Secondly, I add my thanks to my noble friends who wrote this report. As they say, the House needs reform.

The noble Viscount, Lord Tenby, reminded us that reform of this House has been debated for more than 100 years. Until 1949 the debate was about the powers of the House. From 1950 onwards the debate was about membership, and in 1999 this was settled to some extent. The reform debate should again turn to powers. Surely the question is: what are we for? Are we here to make the law or to check it over, to revise it? Are we here to hold the Government and perhaps the House of Commons to account? What is our relationship with the House of Commons and does it need to change, as other noble Lords have suggested? This decision is central to whether we have an elected House of Lords or not. As the paper points out, it is important to carry out these reforms while maintaining the primacy of the House of Commons.

Perhaps I may say to my noble friend Lord Richard that those of us who have been visitors to the United States over the past 20 years will have witnessed Congress, with two elected Houses, slowly disintegrating into pointless partisanship. It is where political debate has been marginalised in favour of last-minute deals—even on important matters such as the budget. That is no way to run a country and I join my noble friend Lord Howarth in thinking that there is a warning for us there.

[Lord Richard]

My Lords, my noble friend was kind enough to refer to me. Perhaps he would answer a question from me? He has observed the United States, as I have done. Does he really think that it would have been better governed in the past 20 years if the Senate had been nominated by political parties?

[Lord Haskel]

The answer is: that is beside the point.

We have been struggling with reform since the hereditary Peers left. We have had a royal commission, four White Papers, two Bills at attempted reform of the House and reports from several Select Committees, academics and think tanks. One must also not forget the very sensible proposals made by the Clerk of the Parliaments in December 2012. Little progress has been made because there has been very little consensus. That is why the working group’s paper is valuable. It makes sensible proposals for full reforms, around which it is possible to build consensus. My noble friend Lady Taylor told us how, the more the committee debated, the more consensus emerged. I agree with the proposed constitutional committee to look at the wider constitutional picture and say where we are, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton, put it. I also agree with most of the recommendations regarding composition, size, membership, appointment, political balance, and rules for attendance, retirement and procedure. These are all sensible suggestions, but the question is the practical one: how do we put them into effect?

In view of the lack of consensus, I see absolutely nothing wrong with slow and careful incremental reform, taking one thing at a time. One follows logically from the other: each reform will lead to a further reform—the “inevitability of gradualism”, as Fabians would say. The Steel Act is one such step. We need further steps. For instance, the Government could announce, without legislation, a numbers cap and a timetable for reduction of Members. We cannot go on just growing like this. Reduction could then be achieved perhaps by using the same procedure as when the hereditaries left: each group deciding on who would stay and who would go. That would lead to a formula for sharing new appointments between the parties and the Cross-Benchers. The formula would be managed by a strengthened Lords Appointments Commission and in this way the political balance of the House would be maintained.

All this touches on the funding of political parties. A reform of House of Lords membership may even help precipitate a reform of funding. Procedural reforms lie in our own hands and there are very sensible recommendations before us to consider.

This step-by-step reform has to be brought together in a narrative that explains what we are trying to do and why this has become important. It has to be part of our outreach. My noble friends Lady McIntosh and Lady Bakewell both referred to the importance of this, and they are right. In fact, we are quite progressive on outreach in this House: we were the first House to let TV in; we have a Chamber event for non-Members each year; and Parliament Week leads to public engagement and events where people learn about Parliament. We have an excellent website and we are active in all the social media.

As unelected legislators, I have always felt it is part of our duty to explain who we are and what we do, through not only the excellent work of the Information Office staff through their website and social media, but personal contact. People like to meet Peers. Some of us speak at regional meetings of organisations, such as the WI or Rotary. Peers in Schools is flourishing—my noble friend Lady Bakewell spoke of this and she is right. The 150 of us who do visits get the impression that there is little appetite for increasing the number of elected politicians in Westminster after we explain what we do. Indeed, I find that people welcome this House giving Government the opportunity to bring people into government from outside Parliament. However, we have to be a lot more effective in holding the Prime Minister to account for his choice, be it good or bad.

If we are effective in harnessing all this work to explain the narrative of our reform and how we are doing it step by step, it will help lead to consensus in the House and a better informed and more supportive public outside the House. Most importantly, we have to persuade our political leaders to get away from the adrenalin of big reform Bills and be satisfied with a narrative of small reform Bills, which in the end will achieve the same objective.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, when I first heard that we were to have another five-hour debate on Lords reform, my heart sank. After the long series of debates that we had on Lords reform in 2011-12, I had a nightmare that I had been condemned to wind up a Lords debate once a week. The person sitting opposite me was rather fuzzy in my nightmare but I fear that it was probably the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, whom I was responding to on each occasion.

However, this is a constructive, useful and modest report, which makes a number of, on the whole, rather conservative proposals. I note that the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, said that it is a report to, and not from, the Labour Party. Yesterday, I looked at the speech that Stephen Twigg had made to the Electoral Reform Society last month. On Lords reform, he said:

“What I can say is this: Labour is committed to a democratic second-chamber. Ed Miliband has shown that he is a leader with a radical zeal—and this will be true for Lords reform”.

I think that this report is a little bit like Talleyrand’s remark, “Pas trop de zèle”.

Stephen Twigg also said in his interesting speech that one problem with the Lords as currently constructed is that more than 40% of the Peers who regularly attend the House are based in London or the south-east, compared with some 2% in the West Midlands and some 4% in Yorkshire. We all recognise that the Lords, as currently constituted, has a range of problems and that it does not, as the report says, reflect in very many ways the diversity of the United Kingdom. We also recognise, as the noble Lord, Lord Gordon, remarked, that that is partly because it is so much cheaper and more convenient if one is based in London. Therefore, there is an incentive to move to London once appointed.

I had the great advantage of having been offered a post in the London School of Economics three months before my party leader suggested that he might nominate me for the Lords. It was therefore possible to combine a career with membership of the House of Lords. The noble Lord, Lord Sewel, was appointed on the same day as me. He was vice-principal of the University of Aberdeen and found arranging his life to fit in with Lords business a little more difficult than I did.

The report states that,

“reform of the Lords is not an issue that can be tackled in isolation from other constitutional issues”.

I strongly agree with that, and a number of noble Lords said it in this debate. Before commenting on the specific proposals, I shall address some of the broader contexts of constitutional change within the United Kingdom. The other day, a number of us had a useful debate in the Moses Room on exactly that issue. I hope that I will not embarrass the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, if I tell him that my opinion of his expertise on constitutional issues continues to rise every time I hear him speak. That will do him no good at all with his colleagues, but never mind.

A new all-party group chaired by my noble friend Lord Purvis, and the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, is looking at the implications of devolution for the overall constitution. That is exactly the sort of thing we all need to address and will have to address after the Scottish referendum when, as we hope, the Scots vote against independence but expect further devolution, as the Silk commission promises the Welsh—and indeed, there are questions on Northern Ireland.

The English question has come up a number of times in this House. I regard the English question as partly the London question and a question for the whole of the United Kingdom. How do we counterbalance the economic, political and social dominance of London? If you do your politics in Yorkshire, you are acutely aware that the north of England loses out very heavily from the extent to which the devolved Parliaments have begun to establish their independent voice. I go to meetings inside government in which I hear the Scottish dimension, the Northern Irish dimension and the Welsh dimension, but no one mentions the Yorkshire, north-western or south-western dimensions. That is a problem which we all face and which we all have to address.

I hope that all noble Lords will have noted the Government’s various proposals on city deals and the attempts being made, starting with Manchester and following on with Leeds and others, to devolve and decentralise to the major city regions within England financial powers and powers over economic growth. If that is carried through, that would begin to resolve some parts of the English question. Furthermore, it would carry further implications for the governance of the United Kingdom. If the centralisation of England is reduced, we will need fewer departments and fewer civil servants in London. We may then perhaps need fewer Ministers in Parliament. Therefore, perhaps there would be a House of Commons that sees its job less as preparing for service in government and perhaps a little more as checking and controlling the Executive.

We are now engaged on a whole set of questions. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act also has implications. There have been some rather interesting reports from parliamentary committees and from the Institute for Government on how we might use the last year of government to prepare for the next Session. It could be along the lines already adopted on national security strategy where we have agreed—the previous Labour Government set this out—that each new Government should define a national security strategy on the basis of work conducted in the last year of the previous Parliament.

The Institute for Government’s report suggests that in the last year of a Parliament, we should not rush through great masses of additional legislation, as I recall the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, demanding that we do, but that we should discuss some of the dilemmas that whoever is elected will have to face—for example, the rising costs of the National Health Service and how it is funded and some of the other huge questions that will face any Government—and look therefore at a scrutinising role.

Public disengagement was mentioned in the report and by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, in her opening speech, as well as by the noble Lord, Lord Phillips. When I read the Hansard Society’s recent Audit of Political Engagement I was shocked that only 24% of 18 to 25 year-olds think that politics has any relevance to them.

[Lord Richard]

The noble Lord is describing a constitutional process that clearly will be lengthy. The agenda he has given to the Constitution Committee is long. It will take a lot of examination and discussion. There will be a lot of evidence and thinking. Does he really think that House of Lords reform should wait until all that is done?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I have in my notes that I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Richard, that further progress in Lords reform does not have to wait for the conclusions of any constitutional convention. However, I would just make the point that we are moving into a situation where various dimensions of British politics are changing, and we need to discuss how they relate to each other.

Public engagement very much concerns us. The decline in the reputation of the House of Commons should also concern us. I love listening to the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. He is a romantic for the House of Commons as it should be, and he was one of the best House of Commons men that we had. I fear that the new generation does not produce as many House of Commons men who are as good as he was.

We have the decline of the two-party system and of parties as such. All political parties now are small compared with where we were some 20 years ago. It is quite possible that the outcome of this coming election, as has been suggested, will not be a two or three-party system but a four or five-party system. With the Northern Irish and Scottish parties, there are already multiple parties in the House of Commons. We could have an awkward situation after the next election in which Labour emerges with the most seats and the Conservatives emerge with the most votes, and no two parties alone would be able to form a majority. That is getting into very uncharted territory as to how we would then proceed. I read the New Statesman and listen to Labour people talking about a Labour mandate and how Labour could form a minority Government with a clear mandate. A mandate on, say, 33% of a 60% turnout is not exactly clear.

The case for a commission or convention is out there. There was an excellent report by the House of Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee last year which suggested that the Government have no view on this issue at present. However, personally and as a Minister, this is a question that we ought to be debating in the last year of this Parliament. I welcome what the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, and others are doing. It is one that we all need to consider because we need to look at how all of this runs together.

Recommendation 1 of this proposal is that we need to think about a constitutional commission or convention. There is not time within the next three months or even nine months to define exactly what we want, but it is precisely the sort of thing to which we might return in future debates between now and the election.

On Lords reform, we have been here for a long time. The noble Lord, Lord Richard, after all, chaired the Joint Committee and the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, reminded us that he was on the Wakeham commission. The Government remain committed to comprehensive reform, as indeed does the Labour Party officially. The noble Lord, Lord Stephen, remarked that the 2012 Bill, criticised sharply from the Labour Benches, closely followed Jack Straw’s White Paper.

The Byles/Steel Act has now introduced some useful interim reforms, and if we accept the proposals in this report as interim and not intended to avoid more comprehensive reform, there are a number of useful and constructive proposals for the interim, some of which are familiar and some of which are relatively new. Quite a number of them can be agreed by this House without requiring further legislation through the normal procedures and usual channels. We are of course open to further discussion on that. On the proposals in the report—