Happy New Year. As all the political ‘look back at 2011’ newspaper supplements make their way to the recycling bin, I am risking a bold prediction that their ‘look back at 2012’ successors will report the first serious attempt by any Government to introduce elections to the House of Lords.
When David Cameron and Nick Clegg published their draft Bill back in May last year, the reaction was predictable. Snorts of derision from the refuseniks, cavilling about detail, accusations of plain stupidity. You know when people are losing an argument if they claim that those who disagree simply don’t understand. In the case of the Lords, this takes on a particularly self congratulatory complacency. There is barely any better epitome of smugness than a debate in the Lords on its own reform. Peers love to condescend to elected MPs, opining that they just don’t appreciate how marvellous the House of Lords is.
These noises off were
inevitable but they are also largely irrelevant. Peers cannot be allowed a veto on their future. However, the Joint Committee which was set up to conduct serious pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill was, and is, pivotal to progress. My mid-term report from its ranks is largely positive. It has been thorough and workmanlike throughout. There are, of course, a fair few members who are fundamentally hostile to all reform. However, a slim majority seem receptive to the Bill’s basic principles and provisions, and genuinely committed to offering suggestions for improvement.
No one will be able to say that the Committee has not considered the matter long and hard. We have taken evidence from everyone from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Lord (Patrick) Cormack, as well as some 4,000 members of the public who have written in.
As the transcripts of our public sessions reveal, the considerable weight of evidence suggests that a House of 300 members proposed by the Government will be too small. Seasoned psephologists among LDV’s readership will appreciate that since the new chamber is to be elected in thirds, only 100 members would be chosen at once. And if, as is quite likely, only 80% are elected at all, just 80 would be chosen each time.
This would make for quite small numbers being elected in each region, or sub-region, and could severely affect the capacity of the new chamber to be genuinely representative. This is most starkly obvious in terms of political representation – the results will struggle to be proportional at only 300 members. Yet the problem is wider than that, since it is likely to constrain the capacity of the new chamber to achieve gender and ethnic balance.
It is also a particular aim of reformers across the parties that Senators should not be like MPs, and the reformed House should not be like the Commons. Senators will not take on substantial constituency duties and it follows that for 20 weeks of the year they might be largely unoccupied. It therefore makes sense to have the job constructed so that maintaining outside interests (fully declared, of course) is tenable for at least some Senators. Going up to 450 will ensure the total membership is large enough to sustain occasional absences, and thereby to maintain up-to-date professional expertise among elected members.
The present House is full of ex-experts, with only four members aged less than 40 and nineteen over 90!
The Committee is also considering carefully how to ensure the continued ‘primacy’ of the House of Commons. There is clearly room for improvement on the Government’s proposals in this area, so we must be constructive about this when our final report is released before Easter. Watch this space!
* Lord Tyler is the Liberal Democrat Lords Spokesperson for Political and Constitutional Reform.
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9 Comments
Some years ago one of the think tanks, DEMOS I believe, suggested a pre-legislative scrutiny stage for all bills using select committees and taking evidence from the public. One of the reasons for this was to ensure that everyone would have a chance to influence legislation and not just professional lobbyists hired by vested interests. I can imagine that governments would not generally welcome delay in processing bills and I don’t expect the Commons to adopt such a plan any time soon. However, I note that David Cameron has called for less but better legislation. Perhaps a reformed House of Lords could provide the ideal forum for such pre-legislative scrutiny.
I don’t understand why there’s a problem about “how to ensure the continued ‘primacy’ of the House of Commons” — the Parliament Act allows the Commons to override the Lords but not vice versa, and to pass money bills with only a month’s delay. We can talk about how to organise things differently if you like — looking at delay periods, parliamentary session rules, whether it should remain possible to introduce legislation in the Lords first, etc. — but there’s no need to do anything at this point: the Parliament Acts do the job.
Malcolm Todd
And the Commons will always be more recently fully elected than the Senate, and therefore democratically more legitimate in spite of the relative merits of the different voting systems, providing the Senate is elected one third every five years.
“Going up to 450 will ensure the total membership is large enough to sustain occasional absences, and thereby to maintain up-to-date professional expertise among elected members.”
Perfectly reasonable argument.
“Yet the problem is wider than that, since it is likely to constrain the capacity of the new chamber to achieve gender and ethnic balance.”
Utter trivia.
There is no need to mess with term lengths, constuencies etc – we can all tell the Lords is the Lords. The Euro MPs don’t challenge the commons for supremacy despite being more democratically elected.
Please allow the voter a modicum of capcity for thought. If we want the non-elected experts – we would vote for them.
Scrap electing the Lords by thirds – elect them instead by STV on the basis of 8 new parliamentary seats electing 6 Lords. Hey presto 450 Lords – elected every 5 years and if we don’t like them, we can vote them out again. 15 year terms are a nightmare.
I’m afraid I find this rather unconvincing. I see no principled reason why the upper house should have 450 instead of 300 members (or indeed 300 instead of 200).
If we look at things comparatively from around the world, the 300 figure seems a reasonable compromise.
I’m not especially opposed to the idea of a 450-sized house, particularly if it’s one of the compromises that has to be made to get the damn thing passed, but I am unconvinced by the logic of the argument.
“Caracatus”
We are talking of a two chamber UK government, so an EU alternative government of the UK is not relevant to the argument. A second chamber of the EU – perish the thought! – would be.
Electing a Senate of 450 Senators every five years by STV would immediately make them more democratically legitimate than a Commons elected at the same time on First Past the Post X Voting, or even AV Plus. because STV is more proportional.
I have to agree with Nick Thornsby, although I see no principled reason either against more members or less members for a reformed upper house.
If representativeness is the quality we seek then we need a broader representative base.
If greater expertise is the quality we seek then we need a more specialised base.
The two are far from incompatible, but that would require we open up politics and introduce more democracy across society generally to set higher standards of accountability for those individuals who seek to be representatives – something I’m all for!
For me the key is for a reformed Lords to have a different “geometry” from the Commons. By this I mean that, as far as reasonably possible, the Lords should be elected on a different basis, for different constituencies (perhaps not all geographical), for different terms (perhaps life or near life) and above all, in some way that avoids it collecting a significant number of second rate rejects from the Commons or other party hacks and loyalists (although a proportion of semi-retired senior politicians are obviously a benefit) and which draws the majority of its members from outside politics and has a substantial number of independents, not beholden to party managers.
Curiously, for all its democratic deficit, the existing Lords measures up rather well on this basis and has actually performed rather well in stopping or at least delaying some of the dafter ideas coming from government front benches in recent years.
If a reformed Lords fails to have a sufficiently different geometry it may fail to achieve the diversity of opinion that a revising chamer should contribute and could easily degenerate into a captive tool of party leaders. The risk is that we trade diversity and proper dissent for merely token democracy..