My Lords, I am not absolutely certain that the Labour Party has a position on this. However, as it has never called for a written constitution, I am going to take it that the Labour Party is against a written constitution—or at least, I am. As I said at Second Reading, I had a lovely cartoon from the New Yorker showing bewigged, 18th-century gents writing the American constitution and then putting at the end, “And no one will ever alter this”.
I do not support my noble friend on this amendment. However, had he used the word “concordat”—something to get the relationship between the two Houses agreed, which in some sense goes to what the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, said earlier about function; that we should agree what the role of the two Houses are—I would have thought that this was a brilliant amendment. The idea of us having that serious conversation is one that I absolutely support. There are really big questions about that. It is not just about whether we get to vote on statutory instruments. It is about the relative roles in that and how often it is used. Particularly when we think of our size, if we become smaller and still have no retirement age, we will have an increasingly older and smaller group of people doing that diligent work
on statutory instruments. Those are important discussions. I like one part of the amendment, which is to give some serious thought as to the function of both Houses. But please, while we may not be bewigged we should not be setting in stone the way in which we work in the short term.