It usually takes a scandal to produce reform. So it is now with the House of Lords. Whatever its long-term future – and I have consistently argued the case for a mixture of election and appointment – some reforms are clearly needed now.
The Lords matters. We need it to improve scrutiny of the executive power. Even in its half-reformed state it has acquired greater legitimacy and confidence, but this makes it even more important to sort out its more obvious problems.
It is no good waiting for a big bang reform that, even on an optimistic view, is still many years away. That is just a fact. If a Labour government with a big majority committed to constitutional reform could not deliver comprehensive Lords reform, then we may assume it will continue to prove elusive.
This is because there is no real agreement on a reform package, which is perhaps not surprising in view of its genuine difficulties. Public opinion says it wants an elected house, but it also says it wants an independent house. These may be inconsistent preferences. Votes in the Commons on the issue conceal more than they reveal. A second chamber that was a clone of the Commons would be the worst possible outcome. That is why institutional design matters. It is also why I favour combining election (to secure legitimacy) with appointment (to ensure independence and expertise). But all that is for another day.
The task now is to get an immediate reform measure which deals with those aspects of the Lords that everybody agrees need attention, whatever differences there might be about future composition and wider reform. This could, and should, be done on a cross-party basis, and quickly. Some of its ingredients are obvious and inescapable, such as enabling the Lords to evict criminals and insisting that its members are UK residents for tax purposes. There is an issue about whether these provisions can be made retrospective, but they certainly ought to be.
Beyond this, there are likely to be disagreements about how much more an interim reform package should contain. The minimalists will want it to stay very narrow, while the maximalists will want to push wider. I am a maximalist, not in the sense of wanting to open up the wider issues of Lords reform (that would simply sink any reform measure), but in wanting interim reform to go as far as it realistically can. If it is going to be done at all, then it should at least be done properly.
This means putting the Lords appointments commission on a statutory basis. The job of picking non-party peers, and checking all peerage nominations for propriety, is too important to be left to a non-statutory body. The government is formally committed to this, so it should be done now. It should go further, as the public administration committee argued after the peerages for donations affair, and curb patronage by giving the appointments commission the power to select party nominees from a list supplied by the parties. This would clean up patronage at a stroke.
There is also the need to enable peers to retire, and indeed to encourage some of them to do so. Without this the Lords will continue to grow, when what is required is a reduction in numbers. Some more stringent regulation of standards and interests is clearly necessary too, and most people would think it sensible if the role of the parliamentary commission for standards was extended to cover the Lords as well as the Commons.
Crucially, too, the time is long overdue to separate out the honours system from service in the second chamber of the legislature. This confusion about what a peerage is (and why it might be wanted) has been the source of many of our difficulties. Retain the peerage and all its paraphernalia in the honours system if we must, but make it something entirely different from membership of the second chamber.
All of this is worth doing, and would make a valuable reform package. It would leave open the question of further and wider reform in the future. It would also encourage the Commons and the Lords to work together much better than they do now in checking executive power and holding governments to account.
Tony, while I agree that Lords reform is necessary and long over due, there are many points in this article that I am inclined to strongly disagree with.
The first issue is your statement that the Blair/Brown governments and were committed to constitutional reform. I know they abolished most hereditary peers, and introduced devolution, but as a voter outside Parliament, my impression was that support for wider electoral reform, both within the Government and in the Parliamentary Labour Party, was tepid at best. It is therefore not surprising that you do not believe that a “big bang reform” is possible at the current time. Unfortunately, I worry that the minor changes that you advocate will so placate many of those who may be persuaded to support real reform now, that it will be another hundred years before we get round to implementing anything truly radical.
For those in the Labour Party currently opposed to constitutional reform I would make two points. The first is if we had implemented PR in the Commons or Lords when we had the chance, we wouldn’t need to worry so much about the prospect of a future Tory government. The second is that our position in the seventeenth century as the world leader in radical democratic thinking was usurped over two hundred years ago by the USA and France, and we have still not caught up. Moreover, we have subsequently been overtaken by a host of other nations. For the country with the so-called Mother of Parliaments that is both embarrassing and shameful.
It also disappoints me that many are still clinging to the concept of appointees. The problem with appointees is that it always comes down to a question of who appoints them, and how representative they are, either of society or the bodies and opinions that they claim to represent. There are better ways of doing it.
If you want appointees, why not use the Party List method of PR? Then each party could decide whether to nominate appointees to its list or elect them by the NEC or wider party membership. If you want peers to retire and their numbers to be conserved, electing them would be the obvious solution. If you want them to be more independent-minded than MPs, ban them from standing for re-election when their term ends. If you want a radically different mix from the Commons, elect them a third at a time every two years like the US Senate. The composition of the Lords would then be a time average of public opinion, not an arbitrary (and possibly unrepresentative) snapshot.
Such measures would also allow the composition of Parliament to be become more representative of the social and ethnic mix of the country. There are many people who are currently put off standing for the Commons because the election process favours (and attracts) extroverts. Wouldn’t a wider spectrum of personality traits be more welcome in Parliament? Isn’t that what many women have been demanding for years? And because each peer would only sit for six years, many more people would have the opportunity to participate in the upper chamber.
I agree that an elected second chamber that was a clone of the Commons would be no great advance, but if each chamber were elected by a different mechanism (PR for one, first-past-the-post for the other), at a different time, then that would not happen. The other question that you haven’t address is will the Commons ever accept an elected upper house as a democratic equal? Basically, will MPs ever agree to repeal the Parliament Act? If the answer is no, then reform of the Lords is a waste of time as all real power and decision-making will continue to reside in the Commons?
Finally, the issues of criminal behaviour of peers and their expenses that have galvanised this debate will not be corrected solely by reforming the composition of the Lords. For that Parliament needs set rules. That can only come with a full written constitution.