Memorandum by The Rt Hon Lord Jenkin of
Roding (LR 15)
In response to your letter to Members of the
House of Lords dated 21 November, may I offer a few thoughts.
1. I believe the Government has made a great
mistake in deciding, contrary to previous understandings, against
establishing a Joint Committee of both Houses to examine their
proposals set out in the White Paper. I firmly believe that major
constitutional change should only be undertaken with a wide measure
of agreement in Parliament. It is my belief that with proper discussion
in a Joint Committee, it would be possible to arrive at proposals
which would command a good deal of support in both Houses. If
the Government persists with putting forward its own proposals
and leaving it to the legislative process to deal with them, I
would guess that such a Bill might have a great difficulty in
making progress. I believe your Select Committee Inquiry could
usefully explore and pronounce upon this issue.
2. I note that your Inquiry proposes to
examine the broader issues raised by the Government's proposals
for reform of the House of Lords. There are others better qualified
than I to discuss the proposals in detail, but it may be helpful
to your Committee if I reiterate a point which I made to the Wakeham
Commission and which I still believe to be of the greatest importance.
3. Having served 23 years in the House of
Commons and now, some 14 years in the House of Lords, I think
I can usefully comment on what many people recognise as the two
very different cultures of the two Houses. Whereas the culture
of the House of Commons is dominated by the party battle and is
therefore confrontational and often noisy, the culture of the
House of Lords seems much more driven by the wish to see the widest
possible consensus and to seek ways of achieving that. The presence
in the Lords of the Crossbenchers has a profound influence on
the style of debate; those who come up from the Commons and have
not yet understood this are sometimes chagrined to find that their
party political quips go down badly! In the Lords, the style of
debate is almost always reasoned and reasonable, peers do not
usually seek to score points, they are constantly seeking to persuade
by argument, and Ministers, for their part do best when they respond
to debates in like vein.
4. The point I made to the Wakeham Commission
and would repeat to your Inquiry is that I believe that in the
reformed Upper House it will be very important that we try to
retain the best of this House of Lords culture into the future.
Everyone agrees that the role of the House is as a revising chamber
and somewhere where the great issues of the day can be debated
largely free from party rancour. If these qualities are to be
retained, it really is essential that there should be the highest
possible level of continuity in the membership of the Upper House
during the process of reform. A big bang that brought in very
large numbers of new, perhaps, elected, members and saw the departure
of a large number of existing members at one time could do great
damage to the culture I have been describing. That it did not
happen after the House of Lords Act owes itself to the fact that,
apart from the departure of most of the hereditary Peers, the
membership of the House continued substantially as before, with
the retention of 92 hereditary Peers despite the addition of a
fair number of new Labour and other Peers. In my view it will
be of the highest importance that this process of gradual change
should be continued as, without it, there is a real risk that
the separate and distinctive culture of the House of Lords will
be lost.
5. Happily, Lord Wakeham's Commission appears
to have taken full cognisance of this point and the Wakeham proposals
provide for a very gradual process of change spread over a number
of years. I hope that your Select Committee, in examining the
Government's proposals, may feel it right to endorse this point
and to recommend accordingly.
November 2001
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