Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

We have made it absolutely clear that if there is an opportunity to have a referendum on the Lisbon treaty before ratification, we will do it. The Government promised to have a referendum on the Lisbon treaty not after, but before ratification. I hope very much that we can honour the pledge that the Government will have broken. We support measures to remove the Prime Minister from the process of appointing judges, and magistrates from the very complex processes of the Judicial Appointments Commission. That seems to be a step in the right direction. I also say to the Secretary of State that I look forward to the review of the operation of the commission, and whether a simplified process could be provided. I listened very carefully to what he had to say about that. As I think he knows, he will have our interest and co-operation—in so far as we can clearly maintain judicial independence—if there are ways of improving the existing system. We support measures to reform the National Audit Office and to amend Government accounts. However, with the Prime Minister's once golden rules not just broken but shattered, surely the real problem lies not in disjunctions between departmental expenditure limits and resource accounts, but goes much deeper; it is one of fiscal credibility. That is why we propose an independent office of budgetary oversight to oversee compliance in connection with the Government's economic promises. Then we come to the House of Lords. Just to make our position clear—yet again—the Conservative party supports the creation of a predominantly elected House of Lords. But there is nothing about that in the Bill. It contains two measures that will fundamentally change the nature of the House of Lords, without making it one ounce more democratic. First, the Justice Secretary wants to remove the remaining hereditary peers. The Government agreed to the retention of the hereditaries as a mark of their good faith—good faith creeps into consideration of the Bill quite a lot—that further reform to put the House of Lords on a democratic footing would follow. It was said at the time that if those hereditary peers went, real reform would never happen—and it has not. As the late Member for Livingston, Robin Cook, said, all that has been achieved so far is to replace a 15th-century principle of hereditary peers with an 18th-century principle of patronage. The Justice Secretary has made democratic reform of the House of Lords a fourth-term issue—something else for Labour's manifesto. He promises a Bill on the House of Lords, which he says is imminent, so why is he trying to remove the remaining hereditaries in today's Bill, before that Bill is published?