HOUSE OF LORDS DEBATE, 21 JANUARY 2003.

ROBIN COOK:

Mr Speaker

As the first person to speak who is not a member of the Joint Committee, I want to begin by expressing the thanks of the Government, and I hope the whole of the House, for their work in producing their interim Report.

It is not an easy task to get twenty-four politicians to agree on the time of day.  It is even more difficult to get that many members to sign up to an agreed report of substance and authority.  It says much for the patience and skill of my Rt. Hon Friend the member for Copeland that he has achieved consensus in his Committee with only two divisions on the entire text.

House of Lords reform is frequently presented as an issue of white heat controversy.  There are indeed some difficult questions and I promise I will come to them - later.  But the report of the Joint Committee once again confirms that there is a broad range of consensus on the second Chamber of the future.  The Joint Committee has identified three fundamental areas of agreement.

First, there is broad agreement on the role of the second Chamber.  It should be a Chamber charged with the revision of legislation, the independent scrutiny of executive decisions, and the deliberation of public policy.

Second, there is also broad agreement on the relative status of the two Chambers.  It has been a feature of repeated reports on Reform that they accept the pre-eminence of the Commons.  It is common ground of all Members of this House, that the right to form a Government must depend on the ability to command a majority in this place.  This Chamber must remain the crucible in which governments are forged and reputations are made or broken.

The Joint Committee helpfully sets out the conventions which buttress the relative status of the two Houses.  These provide the House of Lords with the right to question and to delay legislation but not to veto legislation.  Nor to challenge any part of the mandate in the manifesto on which the Government was elected.  I welcome the commitment of the Joint Committee that they will return to the detailed matter of how these conventions might best be entrenched in a new constitutional settlement.

The third area of agreement is comparatively recent, but, as I understand it, is now common ground between the two front benches.  Both sides of the Chamber agree that the hereditary principle has no place in a modern parliament.  Whatever principle of composition may be adopted, few people are now arguing that it should be based on privilege from birth.

There are a few who have not yet recognised that this argument is over.  Last month Lord Trefgarne, who is the Chairman of the Conservative Peers in the other place, chided the Joint Committee for ignoring the case for the hereditary principle, which he claimed "represents the best random selection process".  The case against the hereditary principle is that it is not at all random but highly exclusive.  I do hope that when the Rt. Hon. Gentleman opposite me comes to speak, he will take the opportunity of telling Conservative peers that even the Conservative Party has finally given up on the hereditary principle.

One key objective of reform must be to remove the remaining 92 hereditary peers who remain in the Lords as a sort of vestigial remnant of its mediaeval origins.  But the Joint Committee points out other ways in which all reasonable people might conclude that the present House of Lords is not representative.

I am not sure that I will entirely carry the Opposition benches with me on this point, but for the best part of a century the clearest measure of the unrepresentativeness of the House of Lords has been what the Joint Committee describes as "the massive imbalance of the political parties in the House".  Even today, the House of Lords remains a rare corner of modern Britain in which the Conservative Party is the largest single party. 

This Government fully accepts the principle set out by the Joint Committee that no one party should dominate the second Chamber.  I understand that the Conservative Party also support that principle now that they are in Opposition.  It is no doubt a matter of deep regret to them that they never chose to put that principle into practice over eighteen years.  In that time, they packed it with a majority of Conservative life peers when they already had a vast majority of Conservative hereditary peers.

The Joint Committee has produced options for a more representative second Chamber.  I do not think that anybody can fairly accuse them of not giving us enough options.  Indeed they have given us seven different options from which to chose covering the entire spectrum of alternatives for a reformed Chamber.

It may be helpful if I say a word here on procedure.  As the Joint Committee requested, the Government has provided today an opportunity for a general debate on the principles canvassed in the interim Report.  This will be followed by an opportunity on 4th February for the House to chose between all the options on a free vote.  We will follow precisely the recommendations of the Joint Committee on how those votes should be organised.  Each option will be put to the vote in turn, and all options will be put to the vote.  It is important for Members to recognise that it is possible for them to vote for their second or third preference without prejudicing their preferred option.  Voting will not stop just because one option has secured a majority.

They will be free votes - certainly for all Members on this side of the Chamber, and I would hope on the other side as well.  The Government will not be expressing a collective view on which option should be chosen, nor will we be canvassing support for any specific option.  This is an issue which has profound implications for the future of Parliament as a whole and it is therefore right that it should be Parliament which resolves what a reformed second Chamber would look like.

I see that EDM 529 records that ninety members regret that they are not offered the Guy Fawkes option of doing away with the House of Lords in its entirety.  I have some sympathy with their impatience with the never ending saga over reform, but before they send out for the thirty-six barrels of gunpowder I would remind them that each of us fought the last election on a manifesto commitment "to make the Second Chamber more representative and democratic".  We do not have a mandate to abolish it.  I do not believe it would be proper for us to even toy with abolition without first seeking the support of the electorate, which would mean no progress for the rest of this Parliament.

I understand that some abolitionists intend to express their view by voting against every option.  This will not secure an end to the Second Chamber for which we have no mandate.  It could though guarantee the end to reform of the House of Lords by denying any option a commanding majority.  I would therefore urge all Members who do not want the House of Lords to continue in its present form, including all those who might privately prefer to do away with it altogether, to express their preference between the broad range of options put forward by the Joint Committee.   

Most of those options would result in a mixed membership of both elected and appointed members. Perhaps I could offer some comfort to those Members who are troubled by the idea of a mixed membership of a reformed second Chamber.

First of all, as the Joint Committee itself observes, the House of Lords has always had a mixed membership.  It has happily rubbed along with a mixed membership of hereditary peers and life peers for half a century.  No one has argued that the co-existence of hereditary peers and life peers has resulted in discrimination or a sense of first class and second class members.  Indeed the current House of Lords is a rich kaleidoscope of mixed members, embracing life peers, hereditary peers, bishops and law lords.  And both peers who take a party whip and a substantial number of cross-benchers who take none.

There is also, encouragement on mixed membership from second Chambers around the world.  About a third of all second Chambers have a mixed membership of elected and appointed members.

The Joint Committee has set out five principles for the composition of a second Chamber.  It would be difficult to come up with an option which meets all those principles without it resulting in some form of mixed membership.

The first two principles identified by the Joint Committee are legitimacy and representativeness.

In a democratic society it is commonly held that legitimacy flows from the accountability and authority that arises from election.  That, no doubt, explains the public's response to the consultation on the Government's White Paper.  89% of responses called for a second Chamber in which at least the majority of its members were elected.

Perhaps I may remind the House of how we ended up with the current process, particularly as every step along the way is imprinted on my memory.  The proposal in the White Paper for an elected proportion of 20% did not command public confidence because it was widely seen as too little.  I personally am deeply sceptical whether we will capture public confidence by the simple device of removing from the package even the twenty percent that was to be elected.  Indeed I notice that yesterday's YouGov poll found that a mere three percent of their respondents favoured an all-appointed second Chamber.

Respect for the principle of election is so powerful in our nation that even the hereditary peers have adopted it to fill vacancies among the ranks of their survivors.  As a result of the death of Viscount Oxfuird, there is to be a by-election.  The essential qualification for candidates is to have been born a hereditary peer, and the right to vote is confined to those who are already peers.  In order that their choice is popular among the circles in which hereditary peers move, Country Life is helpfully carrying out a poll of their readers on whom they want to see elected.  This may be democracy, but not as we know it.  It does seem to me that we will have difficulty carrying the public with us unless our reforms introduce a more substantial democratic element to the second Chamber on a rather wider franchise.

I know that some of my friends are concerned that if we let any elected members into the second Chamber it will start to get above itself.  And the more elected Members who appear there, the more uppity the Chamber as a whole will get.  Yet as the Public Administration Select Committee pointed out, three quarters of the second Chambers around the world are largely or wholly elected.  Almost invariably the second Chamber remains the subordinate chamber, and invariably it remains so in systems of parliamentary government, where the administration is formed from the majority in the first Chamber.   

What I do not believe is sustainable is to keep the second Chamber subordinate by denying it legitimacy.  That does not just weaken the second Chamber, but undermines Parliament. 

The Joint Committee pointed out that there are other qualities desirable in the second Chamber as well as legitimacy and representativeness.  These include independence from the Party machine, particularly among the cross-benchers, and the expertise brought to its deliberations by members who have achieved distinction in professions outside politics.

The Joint Committee repeatedly makes the point that if we are to preserve the independent members in the second Chamber and experts with distinction in other walks of life, it is desirable not to make election the sole route of entry to the second Chamber.  I know all of us have difficulty comprehending why it should be the case, but it is a fact of life that only a minority of the population relish standing in elections.  Personally, I think it would be a mistake if we were to close entirely the door on access to the second Chamber to people who have acquired a lifetime of expertise and authority in their field, but are not attracted by the robust exchanges of the electoral hustings.

The Royal Commission, the White Paper, and the Public Administration Select Committee all concluded that twenty percent of seats in the second Chamber should be filled by independent appointment from outside the political parties.  As the last of these reports pointed out "a wholly elected Chamber would leave little or no room for people who are independent of party". 

The next stage will be for the Joint Committee to work up a more detailed package in light of these votes in two weeks time.

As this debate will help inform those future deliberations of the Joint Committee I want to take this opportunity before I conclude to invite them to reflect further on a couple of the observations which are included in their Report.

The first of these is their proposal that the reformed Chamber should comprise about six hundred members.  I am glad that the Joint Committee have said that they will wish to give further consideration to its eventual size as I have my doubts whether it is desirable to have a second Chamber which is broadly of the same size as the first Chamber.

Personally I, and I suspect many members of the public will take some convincing that we require a cast of more than a thousand for membership of Commons and Lords together.  I fully understand that some temporary increase in the membership of the Lords may be inevitable during the process of transition, but I would tempt the Joint Committee to think more boldly about the eventual reduction in the size of the second Chamber.  In every other country with a bi-cameral parliament, the second Chamber is smaller than the first and often significantly smaller.  Indeed there are only five second Chambers in the world with a membership of over 200.

My second reservation is on the conclusion of the Joint Committee that the period of membership of the reformed Chamber should be for twelve years.  This does strike me as rather on the generous side.

In the White Paper we noted that the longest period of membership of any second Chamber was the nine-year period for the French senate.  I can see merit in a period of membership which roughly corresponds to two full Parliaments, but I am not attracted to us setting a new world record for length of membership for a second Chamber.  As this was one of the only two matters on which the Joint Committee divided, I am encouraged that a number of its members were not attracted by it either.
Mr Speaker,

Let me end though on a point where I find myself in enthusiastic agreement with the Joint Committee. Their interim Report commences with a warning that for a century attempts at reform of the House of Lords have foundered on the lack of agreement over what should replace it.  It is a sad lesson of the ninety years since the Parliament Act of 1911 that often the greatest enemies of reform have been those most committed to reform.  The more strongly members feel about the case for reform, the more passionately they are inclined to demand agreement to their version of reform.  If the current attempt at reform is to succeed, it will be essential that all those who want reform show flexibility in supporting whatever option can command the greatest support as the centre of gravity.

It is for members themselves to decide which option, and how many options, they are willing to support.  I would hope though that we can all agree that what is least acceptable is the eighth option of no reform at all.  The House now has the chance to set in hand the steps that will lead to a modern, representative second Chamber.  A Chamber that will be capable of acting as a partner to the Commons in an effective Parliament.  I tell the House frankly that I cannot face the prospect of carrying this interminable issue forward into yet another Parliament.  I urge, I beg all Members to make sure that in two weeks' time we establish the option which will secure the most support in this House.  Which will command the broadest possible confidence among the public outside.  And which will enable us to stop arguing over which option for reform and get on with delivering reform of the House of Lords.