John Redwood on House of Lords Reform
Posted by John Redwood, MP for Wokingham, at 16:12, Fri 23 February 2007:
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Next week we will be talking about reform of the House of Lords. The government always knew what it didn’t like – hereditary peers – but has spent ten years wrestling with what it would prefer in their place. When Parliament last debated the issue, the government invited us to choose between different mixtures of elected and selected peers, without telling us much about what the House would do and how the elections might work. The result was no single proposal attracted a majority. We carried on with the selected House we currently have, minus the hereditary peers that Labour expelled.
I will say that we first need to decide what an Upper House is for, and then it is easier to decide who could do the job. An Upper House should act as a revising chamber, asking the Commons to think again, delaying matters which do not seem to be well thought through. I also think we now need a body which can settle constitutional arguments between Parliament and the devolved Assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and between the UK and the EU, by deciding where on any issue power should rest.
I do not think we need another Commons. If we elect the Lords at the same times as the Commons then it will just duplicate the Commons. If we elect it at a different time, there could be endless conflict between two elected bodies with different mandates.
If there is general agreement that the Lords should be a beefed up version of what we have had for the last hundred years, then we should conclude that we do not want to elect party politicians to it every four or five years like the Commons. It seems to me there are two models that could work well. One is to carry on with a selected House, the other to elect peers for a single term of ten years each, electing one tenth each year at the time of the local elections.
Either way I would suggest a House of say 200 peers. There is no need for more than 600 as at present. Each person becoming a peer should be told that there are minimum requirements annually for attendance and participation, to overcome the absentee problem of the current Lords. If the peers are to be selected there is a case for setting out some broad categories where there would always be representation – the Churches, the legal profession, charities, business, trade unions ,the armed services on a non party basis – and allocations to the main political parties. The aim should be to avoid any party ever having a majority.
If the peers are to be elected, you would have to allow the main parties to put up candidates, but we should also allow and encourage independents. There should be a very strict limit on what someone could spend advertising themselves. The winners would be the ones who attracted most votes in the nationwide poll.
Unfortunately, the government is unlikely to want to change its mind on how peers should be elected. They favour shorter terms, the right to stand again, and party list systems. This will put many people off, by strengthening the grip of the party machines over the last part of the UK constitution which sometimes shows some independence and commonsense.
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