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Mr. Fallon: The following might be one test of participation. Would my right hon. Friend say that he had been participating in a debate on these new clauses if he were able to vote for them? Is he participating in this Committee to that extent?
Mr. Forth: That raises a series of issues, which my hon. Friend is right to raise. Is the mere act of voting a sufficient indication of participation to satisfy the criteria?
I do not want to labour the point; I wanted to reinforce the remarks of the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, South, which were worth reinforcing, so that my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset will--I hope--seek to satisfy the Committee on them before we vote. I hope that he can, because I want to support the new clause. However, I shall need further persuading before being able to do so.
Mrs. Beckett:
The hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) opened the debate with an echo of our Second Reading debate in which, having accused the Government of wanting to kick the reform of stage 2 into the long grass, he came up with a long list of things that should have been considered before we did anything at all, which would probably have taken at least 10 years. In tonight's debate, he again said that he thought that this process should have begun with careful consideration, from first principles, of the role of Parliament. He then said that, having given the matter some such consideration, the Opposition strongly believed that there should indeed be a second Chamber.
In that, as in several other matters, there is not much dispute between hon. Members on opposite sides of the Chamber. Much earlier in our debates on the subject, I understood an hon. Member--I shall have to rely on Hansard to bring his proper description--to say in an intervention that he was in principle a unicameralist.
Mr. Garnier:
I believe that it was my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells).
Mrs. Beckett:
The hon. and learned Gentleman may well be right, and I am grateful to him. Many Labour Members have said that they are unicameralists, but the Government are not making that case any more than the Opposition are doing so. We therefore begin with common ground in that all or most of us take the view that, to perform its role properly, Parliament needs not only this Chamber, but a second Chamber.
It is slightly sad that we then entered more contentious territory, with the ritual--usually ill-founded--denunciations of the Government, based on dubious statistics or none. However, it would be wise not to detain the Committee on that subject, because it was not germane to the debate; I even wondered whether the denunciations had been put in to flesh out a not very long contribution.
In the course of that ritual denunciation, the hon. Member for Woodspring asserted that the Government should have focused from the outset not on the composition of a second Chamber, but on its role and functions. On Second Reading, my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Garston (Maria Eagle) pointed out that, throughout the decades-long history of discussions on reform of the House of Lords, when proposals were made to reform its role or powers, it was suggested that the composition should be reformed first--and when proposals were made to reform the composition, it was said that we should start with its role and functions, so it seems impossible to satisfy those who are nervous about all reform. We then moved on to the issue of the basic points made--or purported to be made--in the new clauses and the amendment, all of which, as the hon. Member for Woodspring identified, have the same theme, although in slightly different contexts.
Most of us would not disagree with much of what has been said in the debate. The Government are as anxious as Conservative Members to have an effective transitional House and to have a second Chamber of genuine working peers, and I do not believe that anything that has been said from the Labour Benches in these debates or on any other occasion could in any way suggest that the Government do not want an effective second Chamber.
I now make a confession to the Committee that I thought never to make, which may not fall very pleasantly on the ears of the hon. Member for Woodspring. For the first time in my life, I agreed with most of what the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) said. I hope that I do not hurt the right hon. Gentleman's feelings too much by saying so, but I entirely concur with his argument, which I fear is that, however unexceptionable may be some of the basic points made in the context of these new clauses, they are pointless because they are completely ineffectual.
Dr. Fox:
I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way. She speaks about an active second Chamber. As guidance to the Committee, can she say whether the Government believe that such a Chamber should be less powerful than the current one, as powerful as the current one, or have more powers than the current second Chamber?
Mrs. Beckett:
I think that I referred to an effective second Chamber--although the hon. Gentleman may be right, I may have used the word "active" as well. I do not quarrel with it.
The current situation is anomalous in so many ways that it would take a tedious length of time to delineate them. The anomaly rests not only in the composition, but in the fact that the House of Lords, as it is constituted, has a panoply of powers, which it feels impelled to obey a self-denying ordinance not to exercise. All that seems potentially worthy of reform.
The precise nature of those reforms, as the hon. Gentleman knows, is a matter for another day and for another stage of discussion of these matters. I do not
propose to be diverted into them now, even if you allowed me to do so, Mr. Martin, and I am pretty confident that you would not.
Mr. Tyrie:
Does the right hon. Lady think that the interim House is more likely to be able to exercise the powers in respect of which she says that peers are exercising a self-denying ordinance, or less likely to exercise those powers than the present Chamber? Specifically, does she think that the introduction of more than 100 new Labour peers at four times the average annual rate of appointment this century is likely to lead that Chamber to be more effective in independent scrutiny of the Government, or less?
Mrs. Beckett:
Yet again, we have an example of the nonsense talked by Opposition Members about these matters, although the hon. Gentleman strays even further than most of the debate has done. I do not envisage the transitional Chamber behaving in any particularly different way from the way in which the second Chamber behaves now.
The hon. Gentleman's second point is ludicrous. First, I am sure that as he has clearly spent some time studying these matters, he is extremely conscious of the fact that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has created a number of new peers, only half of whom were creations of our party. The rest were creations on behalf of other parties. Secondly, the hon. Gentleman must be equally aware that, if there were a proposal to make a large number of creations, it would be only in an attempt to remedy the gross imbalance created by decades of Conservative Prime Ministers creating twice as many peers from their own party as from our party, despite their enormous in-built majority among hereditary peers.
Mrs. Beckett:
I do not intend to stray much longer on this point, and I am not sure that you will let us do this, Mr. Martin, but I shall give way again.
Mr. Tyrie:
What the right hon. Lady says is factually incorrect. Since the introduction of life peers in 1958, no Prime Minister has ever appointed more than half from his own side. It has always been less than half. The present Prime Minister is the first Prime Minister ever to appoint more than half. The current rate is 53 per cent. Is that not a gross breach of all precedent in the appointment of life peers?
Mrs. Beckett:
I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is well aware of the facts, and I do not know why he is twisting about to deny them. Of the creations that have been made, 40 to 48 per cent. were creations of his party, and about half that for our party, despite the fact that the Conservatives already have an enormous in-built majority among the hereditary peers.
I am conscious of the demands on the Chamber and of the other brief points that I want to make. The provisions in the new clauses are not unworthy, but it would be pretty pointless to put them into effect as legislation because they are ineffectual and they raise as many questions as they answer.
How is the willingness of a Member to serve to be defined? The hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon) raised that matter. There is no mechanism to check
whether the declaration is genuine or just a passport to membership. How would the required standard of involvement be judged on an objective basis? There is nothing in the new clause about that.
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