Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

So that we understand what the Conservative party is seeking to defend, it is seeking to defend by-elections. There have been 10 in the past eight years, so we are not undertaking a huge reform. In any event, the other 90 hereditaries will remain until they pass away, and some of them are quite youthful, so it will take quite a long time before the grim reaper reduces the number or eliminates hereditaries altogether. Let us be clear about that. The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. What has happened in the intervening 10 years? We set up a royal commission under the noble Lord Wakeham, which did great work but, itself, was relatively divided. My late friend, the former Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House, Robin Cook, as Leader of the House in February 2003 organised a debate and a series of votes on the future composition of the House of Lords, and those who were Members at the time will recall that every single proposition was defeated. When I went on the customary transition from Foreign Secretary to Leader of the House, a well trodden path, I was given by Tony Blair—as the then Prime Minister generously said to me—not one but two hospital passes in addition to the normal responsibilities: one was party funding and the other was House of Lords reform. Anyway, we got the cross-party group going, and one Green Paper was published. That culminated in our debates of March 2007, when for the first time ever the Commons, on free votes, came to some very clear decisions. It rejected an all-appointed second Chamber; it rejected any mixed proportion of appointed and elected peers, up to but excluding 80 per cent.; and it voted in favour, first, of an 80 per cent.-elected Chamber and then, by a bigger majority, in favour of a 100 per cent.-elected Chamber, which has been accepted as the policy of this House. I reconvened the working party, and we produced in July 2008 a further White Paper, which drew on a great deal of work, including that of the Wakeham commission, about how Members would be elected, the terms that they would serve and so on. Quite shortly, I intend to publish what will amount to the basic contents of a Bill fully to reform the House of Lords. Those contents are currently being drafted. So, a huge amount of work is being done on the matter.