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8.21 pm
Mr. Christopher Fraser (Mid-Dorset and North Poole): Five months have passed since the royal commission reported, and today is our first opportunity to debate the issue, but still the Government have not
presented their proposals on stage 2 reform of the House of Lords. There is no excuse for such a delay in improvements to the running of Parliament.The day after the royal commission report was published, The Daily Telegraph reported, accurately:
- Mr. Blair told the Cabinet that the report was a sensible way forward. He is understood to be pleased it recommended the elected element should be a "minority". His official spokesman denied that the Government planned to shelve the report.
- I open this debate . . . with great enthusiasm, confident that because of it we will make progress to achieve full-scale reform of this House far more rapidly in this century than we did in the last one.
- I hope that there is no one either in Parliament or outside who is sceptical of the Government's intentions to act further on reform.--[Official Report, House of Lords, 7 March 2000; Vol. 610, c. 910-17.]
- give an undertaking to the House and to the country that, well before the general election, the Labour party will come clean about what it intends to do by way of long-term reform of the House of Lords;
- the Labour party will of course make its position at the next election clear in its manifesto.--[Official Report, 14 June 2000; Vol. 115, c. 939-40.]
Such reticence prompts two questions: what is stopping the Government telling us their plans, and why did they have to get rid of the hereditary peers with such unseemly haste when doing so served no purpose, given the lack of knowledge about what was to come after? On the first question, my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir G. Young) has made the point about the Government introducing politically correct legislation, but finding no time for important constitutional legislation such as House of Lords reform. On the second question, if there is to be no progress toward stage 2 reform until after the general election, how can the Government explain their action in rushing through the House of Lords Act 1999 to remove most of the hereditary peers without telling the House of Commons what they intended to do afterwards?
How disappointed the Government must be, now that it has become clear that the removal of the hereditary peers and the appointment of a flood of new Labour life peers has not made the Government's life easier in the upper House. In making the case for the removal of most of the hereditary peers under the House of Lords Act, the Government were quick to lay the blame for their legislative defeats in the upper House at the feet of Conservative hereditary peers. That was an inaccurate charge. In the old House of Lords, Conservatives had an overall majority neither of all peers, nor of hereditary peers--a fact that I attempted, unsuccessfully, to tease out of the Leader of the House earlier today. The Government would have won several of the votes that they lost if more
of the peers that they have appointed to the Lords had turned up to vote. The current Prime Minister has appointed more life peers than any other in history--191 in only three years, the majority of whom are new Labour acolytes and, in many cases, donors. It is a matter of fact that many of those peers have a poor voting record.The reforms offer no democracy and no more accountability to the people, and that is something of which the Prime Minister should be mindful. How telling is it that the Government have continued to lose key votes in the Lords after the expulsion of the hereditary peers? The list of lost votes is endless, including on, to name but a few, the Local Government Bill, the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, the Criminal Justice (Mode of Trial) Bill, the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Bill, the Representation of the People Act 2000, the Learning and Skills Bill, the Teaching and Higher Education Bill and the Welfare Reform and Pensions Act 1999. Those defeats have happened, not because any one political party enjoys an in-built advantage in the House of Lords, but because peers have drawn on their vast pool of experience and expertise, spotted the fact that key aspects of Government legislation are deeply flawed, and stuck to their guns accordingly.
Other key Bills, such as the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Bill and the Freedom of Information Bill have disappeared in front of our very eyes, not to be seen again in the other place, because the Government, recognising that those measures are systematically flawed, prefer to lose them than to introduce them in the other place and see them voted down. That has helped to ensure that the Government have such a sorry record that one must question their propriety in terms of their behaviour and representation of the people in the House of Commons. It is clear that Ministers were never principally set on strengthening Parliament or making it more relevant to the people, as their hacking about of the House of Lords demonstrates. The longer the Government continue to delay announcing their plans for the full reform of the Lords, the more they compound their error.
It is absolutely clear that the end result of the full reform of the House of Lords must be to strengthen Parliament as a whole. Ministers have systematically attempted to reduce the ability of Parliament to keep a check on the activities of the Government. They routinely make major policy announcements to the media before doing so to Parliament. They have admitted receiving leaked Select Committee reports in advance of publication. They have massively increased the number of political advisers to Ministers paid for out of the public purse, and they have eroded the political neutrality of the civil service. Now they want to "reform" the way in which the House of Commons operates because it does not suit the domestic requirements of some Labour Members of Parliament.
These developments have been hugely detrimental to the vigour of Parliament, and it is time to reverse the trend. Stage 2 reform of the House of Lords is a key element in achieving that. The second Chamber must be there to undertake detailed and effective scrutiny of legislation, both domestic and European, and of the Executive. It must be able to act as an effective safety valve.
Surely it is logical to say that only after we have decided what we want the House of Lords to do can we decide the best composition of the House to deliver those objectives. To determine its composition before setting the objectives of the House is rather like building a factory and equipping it with machines before deciding what products the factory is to make. None the less, many of those who will decide the fate of the second Chamber have already declared their preferences as to its composition, without setting out a clear vision of what they want the House of Lords to do. Lady Jay is one such person: she announced that she had come to accept the idea of a small elected element in the Lords. One can only assume that that is an endorsement of what has come to be known as Wakeham B--that is, a token presence of 87 elected peers. Is that now official Government policy? If so, why has that preference been stated without the Government setting out their full intentions in respect of House of Lords reform? If it is the Government's preferred option, what further details can the Government give us today, particularly as the Leader of the House says that the Government are still consulting?
What electoral system will be used? Will it be the same closed-list proportional representation system as was used to elect the 87 Members of the European Parliament, or will the Government specifically rule out that method of election? Will the Government accept that it was widely pilloried during the 1999 European elections and, if ever used for the House of Lords, it would simply be a mechanism for Millbank to reward more of Tony's cronies, as we have heard ad infinitum, and one-term Labour Members who may be thrown out of this place at the next election?
I was hugely concerned to hear from an hon. Member, in a discussion that took place outside the Chamber, about the Government's plans for a closed-list style of PR for electing the Lords. That would surely mean more patronage appointments of the type that we have seen during this Parliament--peers such as the noble Lords Bragg, Warner and Haskins, who have been no less disparaging of the work of the upper House than some Labour Members have been about this House.
I shall give two quick examples. The noble Lord Warner said that he had difficulty with the principle that the great majority of Bills in Committee are taken on the Floor of the other place. He stated:
- That simply ties up a large number of people unnecessarily in the House in order to keep the Government on edge by playing the voting game."
- Try to work out a difficult contract with international musicians, as I was doing the other day, while a metre away a noble Lord, whose name will never escape my mind or my mouth, read out in full, fortissimo and with feeling the entire menu of that evening's fare in the Barry Room. . . It was interminable. I abandoned my contractual negotiations, retreated to the Library and came back some minutes later to find all the phones occupied. Miffed!
- It really will not do. If we are invited to come here as working Peers, our outside work should also be taken seriously; more and better phones, faxes, e-mails, privacy and the message system.--[Official Report, House of Lords, 10 May 2000; Vol. 612, c. 1591-1604.]
That leads me to the topic of the appointments commission. The Government announced in early May this year the names of the members of the appointments commission who will propose new peers. The sad fact is that the commission will be a smokescreen behind which the Prime Minister will continue to wield wide powers of patronage. It will not be an independent body. The Prime Minister will be responsible for appointing the majority of the members, including its chairman--a point that has been sadly missed this evening. I hope that the Parliamentary Secretary can assure me that that will not be the case, but I doubt whether he can.
Both for appointments to the interim House and for any appointed element of the fully reformed House, we should implement the royal commission's proposal for a statutory commission set up by the House of Lords. No mechanism other than a strong and independent appointments commission that is responsible to Parliament will avoid patronage appointments by the back stairs.
A further piece of evidence that leads me to doubt the Government's intentions with regard to full reform of the House of Lords is the fact that their manifesto pledge to establish a Joint Committee of both Houses to consider full reform of the upper House has vanished into the ether.
We have come to realise, of course, that the Government's election pledges were not worth the mugs they were written on. However, Labour's 1997 manifesto was quite explicit on the subject:
- A committee of both Houses of Parliament will be appointed to undertake a wide-ranging review of possible further change and then to bring forward proposals for reform.
The Lord Chancellor seems to think that any such Committee should examine only the procedural aspects of implementing stage 2. That is not good enough. It is surely time that Members of Parliament in both Houses were given the opportunity to propose and consider full-scale reforms of the upper House.
Where is the evidence that there is to be a constitutional Committee of both Houses that will report on the effect of the constitutional changes made by the Government? When will we see that Committee in place? How will it operate? Peers from all parts of the House supported the principle of creating such a Committee, and the Government have accepted it. The Official Report records that Baroness Jay commented:
- The Government are attracted by recommendations for a special constitutional Select Committee.--[Official Report, House of Lords, 7 March 2000; Vol. 610, c. 913.]
The absence of Government proposals for stage 2 reform of the House of Lords is inexcusable. The longer they remain silent on the issue, the more it appears that they have no intention of introducing further reform, but wish to retain permanently an interim House of career politicians and representatives of what my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition has so accurately defined as "the liberal elite".
Is the Government's objective to extend their own power and reduce the ability of Parliament to hold them to account? If the Government are not to go down in history as a gang of constitutional vandals, stage 2 House of Lords reform must be brought forward to end the uncertainty. After deliberating for five months, the Government must now come off the fence. If they do not, to answer Baroness Jay, yes, there will be many in Parliament and outside who are rightly sceptical of the Government's intentions to act on reform.
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