Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I appreciate that the Lord Chancellor's memory may be failing him as to the events of 2002 and 2003—at least that is how it appears from the Chilcot inquiry—but we need to remind him of the reason for some of the 1999 safeguards that he is now seeking to remove. I entirely agree with the sentiments of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) in that regard. Crucially, there is a bloc of 92 remaining hereditary peers, who are kept in place pending stage 2 of House of Lords reform, to which the current Administration have notionally been committed since 1997. I listened with great interest to the passionate speeches from the hon. Members for City of York (Hugh Bayley) and for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick), but one must ask why so little progress has been made, given that we have had a Labour Government for the past 13 years who have been committed throughout to a democratic House of Lords, and who have had a huge parliamentary majority during the first eight years and a very satisfactory one in the past five. We had an interesting contribution from the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright), which went into some of the detail of that history. It is perverse—given the radical reforms made in relation to Scottish and Welsh devolution, for example—that the Government have not moved more quickly on this issue, even as a second-term issue. An integral part of the present system is the superficially anomalous by-election procedures that have been ridiculed in this debate. However, without such procedures—and we have seen some 12 deaths and 10 by-elections since the 1999 arrangements were put in place—we would see the dying off of all hereditaries and with them the safeguard to which I referred. The history of this issue is clear. As the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) pointed out, House of Lords reform often sees a short and intense burst of activity followed by many decades in which not much else happens. The worry is that Labour would have zero commitment to stage 2 reform if we did not have this safeguard in place. This proposal is the worst sort of partisan gesture by the Government. Weeks before an election, they are dragging up the issue to try to draw a dividing line and portray my party as the party of privilege for the few and not the many.