Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

If I did not know the hon. Gentleman better, I might believe that he was a convert to the hereditary principle, but I presume that he is not. Appointment is, by a short head, better than heredity, but democracy is far better than both. I shall come to that in a moment. The Labour deficit that existed in 1997 has been replaced with a Labour majority over the Conservatives of a little under 10 per cent. in the House of Lords. The third reason why size is such a problem is that that has inadvertently created a ratchet. I do not think Labour intended that. When the Conservatives come in, whether now or later, we will not let matters rest. We will rightly want to match Labour's number with new creations, then we will probably want to create a modest majority of our own. So in an effort to achieve parity and beyond, the overall size of the Lords will increase, because those will be life peerages, and so it will go on. Each time there is a change of Government, there will be tit for tat. We cannot carry on like that, with an ever expanding House of Lords. There is one radical solution, to which I referred a moment ago and for which I have argued since I was first elected to the Commons. Let us have a smaller, democratically elected second Chamber. This view is strongly held across the House of Commons—59 per cent. of Conservative MPs voted in the 2007 Divisions for at least one of the options for a largely or wholly elected second Chamber. The equivalent figures for Labour were 76 per cent. and for the Liberal Democrats 98 per cent. Furthermore, as the Lord Chancellor suggested earlier, when it comes to much of the detail, there is a striking amount of agreement about the type of elected Chamber that we should put in place. I was initially sceptical about the work being done on the basis of the White Paper that was published, but I am now much more optimistic that it has made a considerable contribution to the debate. However, if the chances of securing democracy in the near future were already relatively slim, they can now be considered virtually non-existent, as a consequence of the economic crisis. That has changed everything. Any Government who tried to make such a change in such an economic climate would be accused of having the wrong priorities, and the accusation would probably stick. People would become all the more vitriolic if, as I suspect would happen and a number of Members have implied would happen, introducing such a Bill precipitated a constitutional crisis. There are a good number of last ditchers in the other place and they will throw out such a Bill. We will be into a constitutional crisis, with huge amounts of parliamentary time, energy and activity taken up with trying to get it through. It will be a rerun of what happened 100 years ago. Can we afford to engage in that while we are trying to tackle the biggest economic recession since the war, when the debt-to-GDP ratio has just doubled and we are running a deficit unprecedented in peacetime history? I do not think the country would understand that, and any party that tried to achieve it would be making a huge political and governmental mistake. However, the choice need not be between the measures in part 3, on the one hand, and full democracy on the other. There is another measure, very limited and with immediate effect, which could control the ratchet on the number of peerages created, improve the working of the existing House, and at the same time lay the foundations for a more radical democratic House, should a subsequent Parliament decide to go down that route. That measure would be the introduction of term peerages: peerages conferred for a fixed period. I have held to the view for some years that it might be necessary as an interim measure. My right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) is now the shadow Leader of the House, but earlier in the year, when he was still a Back Bencher, he and I published a paper setting out the proposal, with some detail attached to it. Term peerages would adopt the approach, already agreed between the parties, that a predominantly elected second Chamber would comprise those serving a single, non-renewable term of three Parliaments. The term of those appointments would therefore be the same as that which we would eventually introduce for a democratic second Chamber: three Parliaments. I do not support varying the term to take account of a Government's particular needs at a particular time to put in a Minister whom they might want for a short period. The term should be fixed and, perhaps, salaried, and it should be understood that getting a place in that Chamber would involve work and commitment. It would not be a status appointment. The advantages of the measure would be apparent very quickly. It would end the ratchet and emphasise that those people were active working politicians. Lord Jay, the Chairman of the House of Lords Appointments Commission, recently emphasised that the appointments process should""move further along that curve from honour to job."" I agree, as I think most people do. Another reason why we should support the proposal is that, unlike most proposals for democracy, it would leave existing life peers unaffected. One might find it surprising that I should say that, but any proposal that would fundamentally alter the life peerage will meet such a wall of opposition that proceedings on it will take over this place for a year or two at a time. By agreement between the parties, however, new life peerages could be brought to an end, and we could restrict appointments to interim peerages—much as, over time, hereditary peerages were largely but not entirely replaced by life peerages after the 1958 change. Almost everyone agrees that the current arrangements for the House of Lords are unsatisfactory to say the least—almost everyone, that is, except a majority in the House of Lords itself, who are a somewhat interested party in this matter. However, an increasing number acknowledge my earlier point that an early move to democracy is unrealistic in this economic climate, so term peerages would be a practical means of invigorating the Lords while addressing many of its current problems, strengthening our Parliament and constitution and retaining some continuity with the best of the current House. I shall table an amendment in Committee to give effect to term peerages. In doing so, I should very much like the support of my Front Benchers and, I hope, Labour Members as well as Liberal Members. I hope and believe that it is an idea whose time has come. There has been a great deal of gloom, some of which we have heard today, about the British constitution, about Parliament and about the public's loss of confidence in us. The proposal that I have outlined will not overturn all that, but by demonstrating that we can work together on a relatively modest, yet in the long run far-reaching, change, we will do something to show that we in this Chamber are working for the common weal, and we will do just a little bit to help restore the public's confidence in us.