There was a good debate yesterday on the House of Lords Bill, designed to introduce changes to strengthen the House. There were thirty-five speakers. Given the number, each back-bench speech was limited to six minutes. So effective were members in making their points succinctly that we finished ahead of time. You can read the debate here.
The Bill was supported by the overwhelming majority of speakers, by a margin of more than five to one. Support for putting the Appointments Commission on a statutory footing came from the chairman of the Commission, Lord Jay of Ewelme. Senior members arguing the case for the Bill included the former Labour Leader of the House, Baroness Jay, the convenor of the cross-bench peers, Baroness d’Souza, and former Conservative Deputy Prime Minister, Lord Howe of Aberavon. The Bill was moved by Lord Steel of Aikwood, a former Leader of the Liberal Party and the first presiding officer of the Scottish Parliament.
Of the few peers to argue against the Bill, most raised what were essentially committee points, querying particular provisions. Even then, some of the comments suggested they had misunderstood the Bill or read last year’s version. One or two hereditary peers claimed it went against the deal agreed in 1999 to retain 92 hereditary peers until stage two of reform was achieved. As some speakers pointed out, enactment of the Bill could be deemed to represent stage two. One could debate then whether there was a case for a stage three. The minister, Lord Hunt of King’s Heath, largely ignoring what had been said in debate, continued to insist that more fundamental reform was achievable in the near future and that we could wait for that rather than implement this Bill now. As I pointed out in the debate, the choice was not between the Bill and the Government’s plans in its White Paper. The choice was between the Bill and doing nothing.
The scale of the support, from all parts of the House, was remarkable. The minister in resisting the Bill was friendless on his own benches. All the cross-bench peers to speak supported the Bill. The same applied in the case of the Liberal Democrats, with peers who had previously opposed the Bill acknowledging that they now saw the case for implementing its provisions.
It will be interesting to see whether the scale of support impacts upon the Government’s consciousness.
Fantastic news, and I certainly like the look of this bill. I do have a question about the Commission though: does it’s method as described in the bill differ at all from the current set up? I’m not very knowledgeable on the appointments system, but I had assumed that the party leaders’ appointments did not have to be vetted by the Commission.
I can but wonder how this will fair in the Commons…
I have to disagree with Baroness Finlay and others in the debate when they said that there should be a mandatory retirement age for the HoL. There are many members who are well over eighty and they add to debate enamoursly with their knowledge, wisdom and their ability to put events into context. If the house does get rid of many elderly people it will loose a huge pool of knowledge and people who have lived through events we can only dream of, therefore they can put modern day events in context. Also keeping these members in the house keeps themselves active they have to walk to and from the house and walk round the palace to get from a to b its stops them coming frail and infirm because it keeps there body’s ticking over. Secondly it keeps their brain going because often they are applying themselves to serious political issues off the day therefore its stops members from getting dementia or other slowing of the memory. However if members wish to leave the house because they are too frail and infirm they should be allowed to, but they should not be forced to just because they are over eighty.
This all part played out in another thread however.
I think the public and certainly the H of Commons expected Lords reform to involve a change in composition – with an implicit assumption of at least an elected element.
Personally that always seemed to me a cart before the horse scenario as the more fundamental question was – what is the house supposed to do? From that flowed what powers would it need to do this. Options included a co-equal chamber as in the US, a weak regional based moderating chamber as in Germany or any of several other possibilities. The answer to that question seemed to me to answer the composition question. A co-equal chamber would have to be all elected, a revising chamber could probably stay as it is. Some grumble at this kicking things into the long grass but it seems fundamental – you really have to decided where you’re going to work out how to get there. The Commons and the Lords, at least by their voting last year, seem to have two quite different views which hardly bodes well.
Btw – was I the only person listening to Lord Steel who had the resist mumbling at the TV that the (usually assumed person behind) the Grand Old Duke of York wasn’t (very) grand, old and didn’t have 10,000 men and few hills to march up or down 😉
(As it’s a Lord’s reform thread and today was quiz answers day I’ll risk denying Lord Norton a future question by noting that unless I and a few others have miscalculated Lord Townshend (who left the house in ’99) has today become the longest holder of a peerage at 87 years 105 days beating the 13th Lord Sinclair.)
The continued discussion over limiting appointments to 15 years should be thwarted, once and for all. Thanks very much, off you go without a pension or transitional pay-off. Nobody is seriously suggesting that MPs should serve for an arbitary time limit and it would be awkward if one of the Lords Spiritual was to be booted out for this reason.
Another change from this Bill will require HoL members to be removed if they are jailed for more than a year, similar to the barrier of becoming an MP. I would prefer that members of parliament be removed if they, as law makers, are imprisoned for any length of time (suspended at first, upon appeal being granted). This might have saved Lord Ahmed from being used as a free gvt ad against texting whilst driving.
Enjoyable reading.
I did have a couple of questions, just from glancing through the text of the bill. Firstly:
So if a person has been found guilty of some offence, in some other country, they aren’t eligable to sit in the Lords? Is there an assumption that there must be an equivalent law in the UK for the law under which the person was convicted?
It also worries me that this clause could be used as an excuse to bar dissenters, or people who were once activists for worthy causes. Not that people like Conrad Black, or Jeffrey Archer should be allowed to sit in the Lords, but shouldn’t the range of offenses be limited?
Secondly: the text of this bill seems admirably simple, easy to understand, and lacking in jargon. Is there a philosophy behind such well written legislation, something like the Unix philosophy?
If not, one should be written, in my humble opinion. after all the efficiency of government and the courts rests on the quality of the legislation passed.
I should note that my quibble on point 15 above, really falls under the UNIX principle of Worse is Better. 🙂
Len: On the provisions governing the Appointments Commission, the Bill seeks to provide a clearer framework for its work. At the moment, there are too many grey areas and too much uncertainty (of the sort reflected in your final question). The Bill tries to provide greater certainty but without placing the Commission in a straitjacket. Thus, for example, it has to have regard to certain principles in determining how many peerages to recommend. The provision ‘to have regard to’ requires it consider them, and to be able to show that it has considered them, but it can depart from them if it feels it is justified to do so. The Bill thus imposes greater rigour than the existing arrangements but does not constrict the Commission to the extent that one or two peers asserted in the debate on Friday.
Tory Boy: I agree completely. I am against age limits and, indeed, such a proposal runs counter to present thinking in relation to age. We should be wary of attempting to tackle ageism in other areas only to introduce it in respect of the Lords. At least one peer who spoke in Friday’s debate advocated term limits rather than age limits, but on term limits I am with ladytizzy.
On the provision governing expulsion if convicted of an offence and ordered to be detained indefinitely or for more than one year, this mirrors the Commons. It does not have to do so, but it seemed reasonable to do so. Ladytizzy favours a much stricter limit, so that any peers convicted of an offence is expelled. Liam raises the question as to whether it should move in the other direction and not automatically provide that a peer convicted of a serious offence abroad is expelled. These are points we are certainly willing to consider in relation to the Bill. However, limiting the range of offences may create far more problems than stipulating the length of the sentence. The latter is not amenable to much dispute. Trying to provide categories of offences may pose problems in ensuring comprehensive coverage of what you want to encompass.
Croft: I agree completely. I have argued that we need to start from first principles in terms of our constitution and what role we expect Parliament to fulfil. Once we have determined that, we can then discuss how best to craft the second chamber to deliver on those basic principles. Engaging in such an exercise is an essential starting point, albeit rather difficult – which is why many people revert to engaging in the simple exercise of coming up with a pet scheme for Lords reform (electing X proportion, reserving so many places for Y etc). They do not seem to realise that developing such a structure is a consequence of determining what we expect of our constitution and not some free-standing exercise.
Liam: On your point about drafting, parliamentary counsel try to express legislation in as comprehensible a form as possible, consistent with rendering it a form that delivers legal certainty. Parliamentary counsel, though, work (with few exceptions) on Government legislation. Private members have to make their own arrangements. In the case of the House of Lords Bill, I drafted it – so your comments are much appreciated!
Thank you, Lord Norton. For the sake of clarification on law makers being removed from parliamentary office after being handed down a prison sentence, I was not making a specific point about Peers.
Generally, I consider the Commons to be the law makers, and the Lords to be the scrutineers.
Proof again of how poor I am in providing the measure of eloquence with clarity that you and your colleagues bring.
ladytizzy: It could be me missing the point!
Lord Norton can you inform me do all ministers get a car including ministers in the lords or is it just secretaries of state. Do ministers have an office in parliament and an office in their ministries?
Tory Boy: All ministers, including those in the Lords, are entitled to a ministerial car. (Occasionally, a minister upsets the ministerial driving pool by deciding to use public transport!) Ministers also have offices in Parliament as well as in their ministries.
It doesn’t seem an unreasonable requirement that if the house votes to have a bill read and printed that this could trigger some level of assistance by the parliamentary draughtsmen.
Liam makes many of the points I did previously. I don’t particularly have an issue with a specific length of sentence but it seems crucial – that some means must be found for those convicted of foreign jurisdiction offences to have the protections of our principles of justice. To my mind this means that no sanction should apply unless they have received a fair trial, free and fair appeals and that the sentence must be for a crime (or a direct equivalent) that is an offence in the UK. I’m sure the Attorney General or similar could give a certification in such cases.
Nearly all countries define the internet as falling within their legal jurisdiction even where the actions are by persons outside of their country. As a pure exercise of the above problems I searched Hansard for speeches about the Armenian Genocide. It’s perfectly easy to find members of the Lords and Commons who have made speeches either in the house, on their websites and/or in the press that clearly broke/break Turkish penal codes (301/312) for which the sentence exceeds the one year we are talking about. With the advent of the European arrest warrant we have already seen people sent to other European countries for speech offences not existing in the UK.
Why only exclude peers who have been sentenced to a year or more in prison? Any imprisonable crime is serious. A year’s sentence requires an extremely serious crime. Such a measure is essential in the Lords: in the Commons, voters can always get rid of a criminal MP at the next election if the rules don’t exclude him or her automatically.
It barely made it into the news, but last week yet another peer joined the “role of honour” of imprisoned peers when Lord Ahmed was finally sentenced to 12 weeks in prison for dangerous driving.
As for hereditary peers, surely the point of “Stage 1” was to avoid a 100% appointed house until “Stage 2” brought in a new method of selecting peers. If the Stage 1 provisions are phased out, that leaves the Lords in the position it would have been in had the compromise not been made in the first place. It does nothing to address the issue of composition of the house.
There has to be some cut-off point in respect of sentences (any sentence, six-months, one year) and, as I mentioned, we have followed the provision that applies in the Commons. It seems at least reasonable and has not generated any particular difficulties. However, I take the point that Croft makes. The provisions of the Bill are not set in stone – we are quite prepared to consider amendments – so I will reflect on whether some change may be desirable to cover the point.
Jonathan: As was argued in the Second Reading debate, this Bill could be seen to deliver Stage 2 as it creates an independent appointments commission for the selection of peers. The existing 92 hereditary peers would remain and new peers would be chosen by a process independent of government.