Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I say this with genuine regret, but I am afraid that I am going to break the consensus and tell the Committee that, unfortunately, the Government cannot support the amendment. My regret is genuine, as the hon. Member for Chichester (Mr. Tyrie) has done the Committee a real service. My thanks go as well to the right hon. and learned Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg) and to my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), whose name also appears on some of the proposals. The amendments are serious, imaginative and constructive, and they deal with an issue of real importance in our national life. I am particularly sorry that we cannot support them, as I think that there is real consensus across the Committee—and I include myself in that—about the three main objectives and premises that I have discerned to be driving the proposals. First, everyone who has spoken is, like me, in favour of comprehensive reform of the House of Lords on a democratic basis. I think that we can take it for granted that we all want a wholly elected House of Lords Secondly, I see all the merits for term limits, for all the reasons that have been set out. I shall not rehearse them, but I would like to sign up to all the arguments put forward by hon. Members on both sides of the Committee in favour of term limits. Finally, I think that everyone can agree that the House of Lords is too large and is growing even larger, for all the reasons that have been advanced so cogently. That is regrettable, and the trend needs to be reversed. On all those grounds, I think that the Committee is in agreement. However, the problem with the amendments is that they are based on a fundamental premise with which the Government must disagree. That premise is that the comprehensive reform of the House of Lords is not going to happen in the near future. I understand why people may say that, as the process has been going on for 100 years or more. I also understand that there is a certain cynicism or weariness about the matter, so I completely understand the motivation behind the amendments, but we have to look at the arguments a little more closely. The Member for Chichester advanced two main reasons for why he thinks that reform of the House of Lords remains a distant prospect. The first was that the next Parliament, whoever forms the Government, will be wholly preoccupied with dealing with the current crisis in the economy. As a result, he said, radical constitutional change will simply not be an option. I fundamentally disagree with that proposition. We can all accept that there are real pressing challenges in the economy that need to be dealt with, but it is manifestly not true that the House will be able to concentrate only on that one thing. It was not true at the height of the second world war: the nation faced one of the biggest challenges to its existence that it has ever faced, but wholesale programmes of economic and social reform were driven through. The foundations of the national health service were put in place, as were radical reforms of the educational system, and so on. Of course this House, and Parliament as a whole, can do more than one thing at a time.