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21 Jan 2003 : Column 246—continued
5.24 pm
Mr. John Maples (Stratford-on-Avon): I share many of the misgivings that the hon. Member for Western Isles (Mr. MacDonald) expressed about an elected second Chamber, which I oppose. We have heard many interesting speeches, but almost all have a ring of familiarity. Nearly all were made in the previous debate on the House of Lords and they will doubtless be made again. I fear that my speech is about to fall into that category. Whatever the achievements of the Joint Committee that the right hon. Member for Copeland (Dr. Cunningham) chaired, it does not appear to have changed anybody's mind. The Committee members who spoke in the debate and were so anxious to hear the House's views on their proposals have not hung around to listen to them.
Joyce Quin: There are exceptions.
Mr. Maples: I exempt the right hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Joyce Quin). I thought up the line when she was absent from the Chamber and I could not resist using it.
I believed that I was in a small and rather beleaguered minority in opposing an elected House of Lords, which reflects the zeitgeist, but I took comfort today from an article in The Times. It reported that the Prime Minister was joining my side—or, at least, that I was about to be on his side. I shall put renewed effort into the cause because the Prime Minister's presidential style of government has given a new meaning to the phrase, "one man, one vote". If he casts it in the way in which The Times reports, our cause is won. Indeed, he will not need me to help him on his way.
An elected House of Lords is a bad idea because it will challenge the authority of the House of Commons. That is inevitable. It already has considerable powers that it does not exercise, for example, to delay Government business and oppose business in the governing party's manifesto. If it is elected, there is no reason to abide by self-restraining conventions. It is highly unlikely that a group of 300, 400 or 500 elected politicians will issue the self-denying ordinance of not becoming interested in subjects above their station about which they are supposed to show no curiosity.
On some occasions, the democratic legitimacy of an elected House of Lords could be greater than ours, for example, at the fag-end of an unpopular Government who were about to lose the next election and used their dying days to ram through an unpopular measure. The House of Lords might be right to oppose it; it might have the public on its side and be more representative of views outside. That clash would come—in a month, a year or 800 years. I suspect that it would happen before 800 years had passed.
Mr. Savidge: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Maples: I want to finish the point. My right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague)
rightly said that unless we accept that an elected House of Lords will be stronger and more assertive, we should not embark on that course. Sooner or later, the Government in the House of Commons would have to negotiate with an elected second Chamber to get its business through.
Mr. Bryant: They do that already.
Mr. Maples: Not for long, because of the Parliament Acts and the self-denying ordinances.
We must ask a few more questions. What sort of people would be elected to the second Chamber? They would comprise those who cannot get into the House of Commons. The intelligence and ability hurdle for entering the House of Commons is not of Olympic proportions. The people who cannot even surmount that hurdle—those who cannot get selected or elected—will run for the second Chamber.
We must also consider who would vote for the second Chamber. The council tax in my county of Warwickshire is on average £1,000 a year and one third of the electorate bothers to vote in county council elections. The county council has genuine power: it runs the education system and social services. A second Chamber will hold little interest for electors, especially if elections are conducted on the basis of proportional representation. The numbers that turn out to vote will resemble those for parish council elections.
We must also consider the sort of people who will be elected. Under a system of proportional representation, we will get a bunch of party politicians. A party list is guaranteed to weed out independents and mavericks. The few independents and mavericks in this place get in by slipping through the net. However, they will not slip through the net of a party list, which will be full of professional party hacks who are not good enough to get in here.
Those elected will get ideas above their station. They will want secretaries, researchers, salaries and office costs allowances. Soon they will want a pleasant building with an atrium and rented trees suitable to their status. They will then, heaven forbid, begin to clutter up the Pugin Room, where they will give their constituents tea. We will not be able to get in there. [Hon. Members: "Oh!"] That is the clincher.
The Joint Committee set five criteria: legitimacy, being representative, no dominance by one party, independence and expertise. They are mutually incompatible. How can a party list provide independence and expertise? It might grant legitimacy, however, and mean that the elected person is representative. At present, we have a good deal of independence and expertise in the House of Lords, and, I agree, precious little legitimacy or representativeness, but we are living in cloud cuckoo land if we think that we are going to get all five by some magic formula. We will not get that; we will have to settle for one system or the other.
We cannot have a part-elected House. It must be either elected or not. We could leave it roughly the way it is, although I would take out the remaining hereditary peers and detach it from titles. I do not care what we
call it; it could be called the House of Lords or not. I certainly have enough of the moderniser in me to see that there is absolutely no legitimacy in hereditary voting rights in Parliament. If, however, the House of Lords is to have limited powers, as is proposed, nominations are the way to go. I hate the idea of an appointments commission. The idea that we are reforming the second Chamber by taking away hereditary voting rights and putting the rights of nomination into some super-quango of the super-good and great is anathema to me.I would like the Prime Minister to have that right, because he is accountable to this House and to the public. Traditionally, there has been a kind of self-denying ordinance on the exercise of that power, too, in that many in the House of Lords are people of genuine distinction, and the Opposition parties get a few people in there as well. I want this power to be out in the open where we can see it being exercised. No Prime Minister is here for ever, and one of the ways in which they destroy their reputation is by abusing their ability to put people into the House of Lords. Two or three of them have done this. I am not saying that the present Prime Minister will fall into that trap, although he has appointed some pretty odd people, but we need to see that power out in the open. I find it absolutely inconceivable that we should accept the idea of some quango with a couple of retired permanent secretaries, a diplomat, the master of a university college and the senior partner of McKinsey and Company, for example, deciding who will have the right to vote on legislation. I would rather have someone who was democratically accountable to this House, namely the Prime Minister, making that decision.
If, as I suspect will happen, the Prime Minister and I lose this argument—or, if not the argument, at least the vote—and end up with an elected second Chamber, I would like to make a suggestion. If we want to make it really different, let us have no Ministers in there. Let us make a rule that there should be no Ministers and no party patronage. There would then be a really good chance of the upper House behaving more like one of the American Houses of Congress and being a genuine check on the Government. It would be a genuine House of Parliament that could scrutinise the Government and whose Members would not be worried about their careers or what the Whips might tell them to do. That would provide something different. It would be my second choice, but it would almost be worth paying that price.
I say to those hon. Members who are in favour of a second House: do not elect a pale imitation of this one, with people who are half as good, who are hacks, elected on some party list, while getting rid of all the independents, the mavericks and the people who really know about things. Let us at least create a House that will scrutinise the Government.
To return to my main point, I am happy to remove the hereditary peers, but, apart from that, I would like to see the House remain pretty much as it is, with pretty much the same powers as it has now. A change to an elected House will lead to a demand for greater powers, but if we want to keep it as a revising Chamber we should do so. I do not know who first said that to every great problem in politics there was an answer that was simple, obvious and wrong, but this is a case of that.
5.33 pm
Mr. David Clelland (Tyne Bridge): There seems to be a preconception among some hon. Members that elections confer legitimacy whereas appointments do not. I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maples), because I hope to show that an appointment system can satisfy all the five points relating to desirable qualities described in the report, while elections would not. I shall remind the House of those five qualities: legitimacy; representativeness; no domination by any one party; independence; and expertise. To those, I would add a sixth, which I was surprised to find missing from a report that seems to have been dominated by Members wanting an elected House: accountability. That is not on the list, but I would add it to the qualities needed in the system that I propose, because it is an essential element.
I am not going to be told that I am somehow not a democrat because I oppose elections. As has been pointed out in this debate, we are not a 100 per cent. pure democracy in the United Kingdom. In fact, we believe that democracy is so important that we should not dilute or devalue it by applying it to every aspect of public life. It is reserved for decision-making bodies such as local government, the devolved Assemblies and the House of Commons. They are the democratic institutions. In my view, a second Chamber of Parliament should not be put into that category. As has been said, people would be reluctant to come out and vote for such a Chamber if they were not electing a Government, so we would have all the problems of low turnout and dissatisfaction that apply to other institutions now.
I should explain why I oppose elections, because I count myself as a democrat. Elections for a wholly elected second House would inevitably be fought along political lines, whatever electoral system we might invent for it, and it would therefore divide along political lines. In other words, we would be creating another House of Commons. Much loved though this institution is out there, I see no great demand among the electorate for the creation of another House of Commons.
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