Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I have just two points to make. The references to Lord Irvine give me a certain nostalgic pleasure, as they remind me that the apotheosis of my parliamentary career was being the Parliamentary Private Secretary to Lord Irvine during the period in question. I remember well much of what is being discussed. I have also spent more time than I care to remember deliberating on reform of the House of Lords. Until today, I had taken a vow that I would not deliberate further on the matter. I have come to the rather dismal conclusion, fortified by more than a century of history, that there will not be a big bang as far as House of Lords reform is concerned. At the very least, there will be a series of rather minor bangs, which will be entirely in the tradition of how we do things: we shall muddle along, we shall deal with problems as they arise, we shall do a bit of tidying up, and, in any foreseeable future, we shall probably not do a great deal more than that. We shall go on having such debates at great length, with great interest, into a very pleasant infinity. That has always been the nature of House of Lords issues, and I am sure that it will be ever thus. It could have been different. I never quite understood why a reforming Government with a large majority treated the reform of the House of Lords differently from other major constitutional issues. We had a settled position on freedom of information, devolution and a range of constitutional reform issues. We used our majority in the House to implement such proposals. In the case of House of Lords reform, we did not. We sought to construct what was never there; a majority for a consensus position in the House. The late Robin Cook worked tirelessly to achieve that end and it collapsed around him. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor has spent more parts of his life than he probably cares to acknowledge trying to work towards some sort of solution. There will not be a solution in any near future. A great reforming moment may come again in a different political cycle but that moment in this cycle has gone. The answer to the question posed by the hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) is to say that it was not intended to be like this, although what was intended was never very clear. There was to be a kind of amorphous stage 2 that was going to do things of a rather more significant kind to the House of Lords, but the mountain has turned out to be a mouse. There is nothing exceptional about that; that is often the way of these things. The truth is that the various provisions of the Bill are looking at a kind of stage 2. There will probably be a stage 3, a stage 4 and probably a lot of other stages along the way. That will not be because anyone intended that to be the case; as I said, the late Robin Cook tried heroically to forge a stage 2 of a rather major kind and to persuade the House to move in a big reforming direction. The House instead preferred to play games and the whole thing collapsed. There was a good intention to try to move the House towards a serious reform position but the House was not to be moved on a consensus basis in that way. What we have is a stage 2 that deals with a number of immediate problems. It does a bit of tidying up of a necessary kind. It deals with the absurdity of elections of the hereditary peers. It deals with resignations and with removals. I wish it also dealt with putting the House of Lords Appointments Commission on a statutory basis; that would be a sensible bit of tidying up. That is what stage 2 is; if it is seen in that way, it is a recognition of political reality, which indicates that we will go on having further stages beyond this.