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Computer Millennium Non-compliance (Contingency Plans)

Mr. David Atkinson accordingly presented a Bill to require organisations responsible for the provision of essential public services and critical infrastructure to draw up contingency plans in the event of their computer systems failing to deal with calendar dates after 31st December 1999; to require such plans and the names of those responsible for them to be notified to an appropriate authority; to require the plans to be made available on demand; and for connected purposes: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time on Friday 26 February, and to be printed [Bill 39].

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Point of Order

4.22 pm

Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow): On a point of order, Madam Speaker. You will have noticed the fine body of parliamentary persons who sponsor the Bill promoted by the hon. Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Atkinson). By dint of queueing, I promoted a ten-minute Bill last Tuesday. Parts of my speech were played on "The World This Weekend". I was put out when asked on that programme which Minister listened to my speech, because no Minister, either from the Ministry of Defence or the Foreign Office, was on the Front Bench to do so. I noticed that there was no one from the Department of Trade and Industry to listen to the hon. Gentleman's speech today. I shall be very blunt: if the Government of the day had listened years ago to the House of Commons and the hon. Gentleman when he promoted his previous Bills--I served on the Committee that considered one of them--we would not be in the bloody mess that we are today about the millennium bug. That applies to both Governments concerned.

Madam Speaker: That is barely a point of order. I see on the Front Bench not only the Leader of the House, who is responsible for the subject of the ten-minute Bill, but a galaxy of Ministers, all of whom I know share some responsibility for the subject.

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Orders of the Day

House of Lords Bill

Order read for resuming adjourned debate on amendment to Question [1 February], That the Bill be now read a Second Time.

Which amendment was, to leave out from "That" to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:

"this House declines to give a Second Reading to the House of Lords Bill as it fails to address the role of the Second Chamber, its relationship to this House and its long term composition and hence, rather than improving the governance of the United Kingdom by establishing a sustainable, balanced and effective constitution, it merely adds to the incoherence of Her Majesty's Government's piecemeal constitutional changes."--[Dr Fox.]

Question again proposed, That the amendment be made.

4.23 pm

The Minister of State, Lord Chancellor's Department (Mr. Geoffrey Hoon): I quote:

"The idea of hereditary legislation is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man, and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureate".

When Tom Paine wrote that in "The Rights of Man", which was first published in the early part of February 1791, he could scarcely have imagined that, almost exactly 208 years later, his criticism of the hereditary Members of the House of Lords would still be relevant, and would still be opposed by the Conservatives.

What exactly is the Conservatives' view of the hereditary principle in the legislature? Even after careful scrutiny of the speeches that they made yesterday, it is difficult to say with any confidence. Indeed, the Conservatives still seem to believe that membership of the legislature should be determined by what happened in a previous lifetime. The only other person who seems to believe in that principle is the England football manager. Perhaps the hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) is already exhausted by the unequal struggle of trying to reconcile the conflicting wings of his team, and is even now sending his application to be the next England manager. He will plan, no doubt, to select a hereditary England football team, presumably with lots of players on the right wing, little ability up front, and an open goal at the back.

My hon. Friend the Member for Corby (Mr. Hope) did sterling service for the House yesterday in seeking to establish precisely the views of the Conservatives on the hereditary principle. In his opening speech, the hon. Member for Woodspring stated:

"We have made it perfectly clear that the hereditary principle in itself is not something that we challenge."--[Official Report,1 February 1999; Vol. 324, c. 620.]

However, in winding up, the hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) stated that the Conservatives did not oppose the abolition of the hereditary peers' right to vote, in principle. We are growing accustomed to the Conservatives changing their policies from day to day, but we shall have to get used to them changing their principles from hour to hour.

I shall give the Conservatives an opportunity now to dispel our doubts. In a few weeks they will have the chance to make their views known to the royal

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commission. I look forward to hearing whether they will propose retaining a hereditary element for the future, long-term composition of the House of Lords.

I welcome the Conservatives' recent conversion to the cause of constitutional change. We did not hear a great deal about that during their 18 years in government. Indeed, the boast of the hon. Member for West Dorset last night that the Conservatives will make serious and radical proposals for reform, not only of the House of Lords but of the constitution of Parliament as a whole, sits uncomfortably with the Conservative manifesto on which he was elected. At page 49 the manifesto dismisses the need for radical change, and at page 50 it states:

"We do not believe there is a case for more radical reform".

The hon. Member for Woodspring, perhaps unconsciously, gave away the real reason for his conversion to the cause of radical constitutional change, when he said that we needed a stronger Parliament because of all the different trends that had emerged in our recent history. I suspect that his grasp of recent history stretches all the way back to the early hours of 2 May 1997, when a radically different trend among the electorate produced a radically different Government.

Since "The Rights of Man" was published, there has been a series of unsuccessful attempts to reform the House of Lords. The Roseberry proposals of 1908 were drawn up by a Committee of the House of Lords chaired by Lord Roseberry. The Committee concluded

"at an early stage in their proceedings"

that

"it was undesirable that the possession of a Peerage should of itself give the right to sit and vote in the House of Lords, and that the dignity of a peer and of a Lord of Parliament should be separated".

In March 1910, the House of Commons passed by 175 votes to 17 a resolution accepting that

"a necessary preliminary of reform and reconstitution is the acceptance of the principle that the possession of a peerage should no longer of itself give the right to sit and vote in the House of Lords".

I repeat:

"a necessary preliminary of reform".

The 1917 Bryce conference was the first serious attempt to develop the preamble to the 1911 Act that

"it is intended to substitute for the House of Lords as it at present exists a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis".

It proposed that the membership of the hereditary peerage would gradually be phased out, with the existing peers electing a reducing number of seats in the House. The justification for retaining the rapidly reducing hereditary element was to provide continuity with the existing House of Lords.

The 1948 party leaders' conference was called to discuss the possibility that a more comprehensive reform of the powers and composition of the House of Lords could be achieved. It was agreed that

"the present right to attend and vote based solely on heredity should not by itself constitute a qualification for admission to a reformed second chamber".

Instead, personal distinction and public service should be the criteria, to be applied to the hereditary peerage in the same way as to everyone else.

The 1968 proposals had their origins in a joint committee of Labour and Conservatives, to which official support was given, with its inspiration coming from

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Richard Crossman. The proposals had largely been agreed when co-operation broke down between the two sides over the Lords' rejection of the Rhodesian sanctions order. As a result, they were published in a White Paper in the name of the Government alone. However, hon. Members on the Conservative Opposition Front Bench in the Commons spoke in favour of the ideas when the White Paper was debated in the Commons. In the other place, the White Paper was approved by 251 votes to 56, including a majority of 108 to 43 among Conservative Peers.

It was agreed, in principle, that the hereditary peerage, and the in-built Conservative bias that resulted, undermined the legitimacy of the House of Lords. In volume 2 of his diaries, Dick Crossman wrote of the all-party consultations at the time:

"We really got an astonishing amount of agreement in a very short time. It is clear that the Tories and the Liberals really believe in a House of life peers . . . the vital thing is that they are willing to abandon the hereditary principle as a reason for membership of the reformed House of Lords".

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