Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

If I may say so, it is nitpicking, particularly coming from the Secretary of State, given the Government's consistent pledge over a long period to get rid of the existing House of Lords and complete its reform, and their not having completed it, or even started its completion. I am prepared to take lessons from some quarters, but on this issue I am not prepared to take them from the Secretary of State. Of course the remaining hereditaries are an anomaly, and of course they are undemocratic. I accept all that, but they are no less democratic than the appointees who will replace them. Furthermore, why are there measures in the Bill to allow peers to resign or retire? Are those measures intended for the reformed House or are they supposed to cover the transitional House, or are they for the halfway house that we have at the moment? Remove the anomaly—that is, the hereditaries—and the prospect of reform will recede. Only last year, the Prime Minister said that there would be no by-elections among hereditary peers during the transition to the fully reformed second Chamber, but that transition has not yet begun. Only last year, he said that he would avoid gratuitously cutting the Conservative party's representation in the House of Lords, but now that stance is being reversed. As I have explained, although Conservatives are only the third largest grouping in the House of Lords, more hereditaries are Conservative than belong to any other party. The Prime Minister's naked partisanship in those utterances is laid bare for everyone to see. The proposals are not about making the upper House more democratic or more representative, but about shifting the party balance still further in favour of the governing party. Frankly, that is a pretty dangerous and unwelcome precedent, but one that ties in with the entire way in which the Prime Minister has treated Opposition parties over the House of Lords since he took office. This is a question of trust. The Secretary of State's predecessor Lord Irvine made a promise—I remind him of this, as he referred to Lord Salisbury and all those great moments in the first Parliament after 1997. What did Lord Irvine say? He talked about""a compromise…between Privy Councillors on Privy Council terms and binding in honour on all those who have come to give it their assent."—[Official Report, House of Lords, 30 March 1999; Vol. 599, c. 207.]" One of the people who participated in that assenting process, as it were, was the Secretary of State for Justice. He was one of the Privy Counsellors who gave his assent to that compromise, and so was the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister has broken his promise on the Lisbon treaty and now I think that he proposes to break another promise. I therefore ask the Secretary of State again: why should we see the proposals as a way of restoring public trust in the political system? I want proper reform, but the relevant clauses make this less likely, not more likely. For that reason, we will oppose the measure to prevent hereditary peers from being elected. I do not want to see life peers in this House either. The Secretary of State is right that under the Peerage Act 1963, peers who swiftly choose to forgo a hereditary peerage should be free to stand for election to this House, just as it is right that peers who were removed in 1999 should now be free to seek election here. If Parliament allows the House of Lords to expel Members for misconduct, they too should be free to argue their case in public and, indeed, stand for election to this House, because their peerages will effectively have been removed. However, the position is very different for those who have chosen to accept a life peerage in the full understanding that they will forgo the opportunity of standing for, or for that matter returning to, the House of Commons. In a reformed House of Lords, that would lead to that House becoming a stepping stone to a career as an MP—and in an unreformed House, it would put the Prime Minister in charge of that stepping stone and vastly increase his patronage. That step would turn the House of Lords into the departure lounge for special advisers. Yet again the Justice Secretary, who as I recollect went from arch-Blairite to the present Prime Minister's campaign manager, finds that the tectonic plates are shifting, when suddenly such proposals come up. I suspect that whichever way he looks is uncomfortable: one way lies Foy in the county of Herefordshire and the other way Hartlepool in the county of Durham. So let me make it easier for him. We will table an amendment to give effect to the Government's policy on the issue. I look forward to the Secretary of State, and perhaps even the Minister of State, joining us in the Lobby on that. In his White Paper last year, the Justice Secretary proposed a cooling-off period of five years between someone ceasing their membership of the second Chamber and their being eligible for election to the House of Commons. That would prevent membership of the second Chamber from being used as an immediate launch pad for a career as an MP. We support the Justice Secretary's policy on that, although his Cabinet colleagues do not seem to be very enthusiastic. There is much in the Bill that we can support, but what we have is trimmings and not very much meat. What is missing is genuine constitutional reform and the transfer of power to the people, so let me make some suggestions of what the Justice Secretary should add to the Bill. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition has laid out a series of proposals that would really change the relationship between citizen and state. If the Justice Secretary is serious, he will follow our lead and introduce citizens' initiatives and a right for local residents to veto excessive council tax rises, allow 100,000 voters to demand a debate in this place on any issue, let 1 million citizens table legislation in Parliament, and introduce a public reading stage for Bills. The Justice Secretary could follow our lead and let local communities elect police commissioners or give voters the right to recall their MP where serious misconduct has taken place, regardless of any penalty imposed in the House. If he really wants to improve the audit of Government accounts, he might like to start by publishing every item of Government spending over £25,000. He would be amazed at the number of people who would spend hours trawling through those accounts to supply their MPs with ammunition with which to ask questions. And if he is serious about public engagement, will he follow our lead and ensure that any treaty to increase the powers of the European Union will be subject to that referendum? The British public have had plenty of broken promises from this Government. They certainly want reform. The evidence from opinion polling shows that this place is held in very poor estimation generally, and that there is a deep desire to see our legislature function properly and for confidence in the way in which government is conducted to be restored. We will give the Bill its Second Reading, but if the Secretary of State thinks that these measures alone will restore that trust, I have to say to him that he is deluded. That is not something that I would ever say of him, however, because I think that he knows the reality very well. He knows that, at the moment, our political system is broken up, and that this Bill does not begin to scratch the surface of the change required—because I am afraid that the Prime Minister will not let him do that.