House of Lords: Reform

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Tuesday 21st June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, it may come as some very slight relief to the noble Lord the Leader of the House that I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, and that I am, in principle, in favour of the objectives of the Bill. Having said that, I also voted yes in the AV referendum and I start every football season thinking that Millwall are going to win the cup.

The Bill has a highly desirable democratic objective, but the way that the Government have brought it forward and the way it has been handled mean that it is unlikely to fly. As with electoral reform, and as with a football club, you need to do some more work before you can succeed in this difficult area of constitutional reform. The central principle of the Bill, which I support, is that those who make laws which bind the people should be chosen by the people. Although we in this House have a secondary role in legislation—that of scrutiny, revising and questioning the Executive rather than proposing legislation—it is a very important role. No other democracy in the world has the basis of appointment that we have to provide for the delivery of legislation that governs the people.

The roles that we perform are important, and it is important that they transit to the new House, as and when we eventually agree to have one. The talk that the Bill is primarily about abolition is wrong. It is about transition of the strengths and expertise of this House, particularly in legislative matters, to a new era. The key is how a second Chamber can effectively influence legislation proposed in the first Chamber by a Government in a parliamentary system where the role of the Executive and the role of the legislature are not clearly differentiated.

I support the principle behind the legislation. Despite this issue having been around for 100 years, and despite the many abortive attempts by the previous Government and previous Governments to resolve the issue, much of the groundwork has not been done. Not a lot of the constitutional groundwork has been done, but it is important to recognise that the political groundwork has not been done either. For a major change of this nature, you need at least one form of consensus, whatever consensus means in this context. There is no consensus between parties; there is no consensus within parties; and there is no consensus between the Houses. To proceed, the Government need to work to create at least one of those dimensions of consensus. We are not yet there. Without that, the Bill will not happen.

The constitutional groundwork also needs to be done, in particular, on the nature of the relationship between the two Houses, as many noble Lords have said. Clause 2, which suggests that there is no change in the relationship, is absurd, as many noble Lords have said. That does not necessarily mean that, with a democratically based Chamber, we will be faced with a constant power struggle. At present, the role of this House in holding the Government to account is different and done in a different way from that in the House of Commons. We need to build on that differentiation, rather than deny it. However, there will be disputes and we will need to have, as the Bill does not have, methods to negotiate and resolve disputes between the two Houses.

The work of this House on scrutiny, revising and committee work has been invaluable, and everyone, from whatever point of view they take in this Chamber, always praises that. It should be extended. It should be extended even in an unreformed House. However, expertise, the ability to question and knowledge of subject are not confined to the kind of elite that we, whether we like it or not, represent. All of us, one way or another, arrived here by patronage. We arrived here after a career somewhere else in which we managed to succeed, or nearly succeed, and were deemed by the great and the good to be worthy of a place in this House. That is not a sufficient basis for a democracy; nor is it a sufficient basis for questioning the Government in a way that they are bound to take account of.

We have a lot of expertise in this place, but you can co-opt expertise. You cannot co-opt democratic legitimacy. Our very elite status means that we are neither representative of the people in a demographic sense nor chosen by them as their representatives. That is the fatal flaw in the status quo. How much we need to democratise is perhaps a matter for query. After all, the proposals before us allow for only 80 per cent of us to be democratically elected. They also have only one wing of full democratic representation. We would be elected but we would not be allowed to be re-elected. We would therefore be representative but not accountable. Perhaps that is sufficient to provide a reflection of the people’s will in this House but not sufficient to be able to challenge the primacy of the first Chamber. That may be deliberate but at no point in the justification for this legislation is it spelt out as being deliberate. It would be a big leap in our democratic base but, whatever the system of election, which also is not yet clear, it would not be quite as effective and absolute a democratic base as occurs in the House of Commons.

Perhaps we need other differentiations, too. For example, in a Chamber whose main role was revision and scrutiny, why would we need Ministers in this House? Why would not all Ministers come from the elected Chamber, which would have the democratic primacy, with Ministers being allowed right of audience in this House? That would get away from the issue of placemen, which has been opposed.

There are other ways in which we could change and more greatly differentiate the role of this House from that of another place. However, the essential point of the Bill—and it is why, despite all my queries and reservations, I strongly support the Government in bringing it forward—is that we should move from what we are now and what we have been at various stages over the past 100 years to a Chamber which is truly and clearly democratically based. We need not do that all in one go. These proposals suggest a transition, with the strengths and expertise of this House being carried forward over a period. The role of this House would not be abolished. The holding of the Executive to account would not be abolished. The ability of this House to act in a less than partisan way because there would never be a single-party majority in the new House would not be abolished. We are therefore not talking about abolition.

Those who run scare stories about abolition ought to stop doing that and think. The proposal that we are looking at and that I hope we can significantly improve but whose principle I strongly support would mean that the strengths of this House were carried forward in a democratically legitimate way. We could therefore say to the people that, when we expressed a view on a law, we would at least have some democratic legitimacy. That is what we lack at present and the Bill at least attempts to give the prospect of that.