You might have thought, after the experience of the AV referendum, that the Government in general and Nick Clegg in particular would fight shy of proposing further constitutional reform. Not at all. On Tuesday, the Deputy Prime Minister presented MPs with plans for radical reform of the House of Lords. Are they a good idea? And do they have any better chance than voting reform proved to have of actually happening?
Reform of the House of Lords has been a recurrent political issue for at least a century, if not longer. It’s not that over that time there has been no change: on the contrary. The powers of the Lords have gradually been considerably curbed so that now the second chamber is really just a revising part of the legislature, with powers to modify and hold up what the House of Commons wants but not to defy it in any fundamental way.
Its membership has changed too. Introduction of life peers in the 1950s meant that most new peers came to the house by appointment rather than through inheritance. And the number of hereditary peers who could vote was sharply reduced by the last Labour government.
But for many people these changes were never enough. To them a fundamental affront remains: the House of Lords is not democratic. In their view Britain cannot regard itself as a proper democracy if one of its two houses of parliament is unelected. That is the anomaly they insist needs removing.
At the last General Election all three parties advocated some measure of election to the House of Lords. Labour said it wanted to move towards a fully elected second chamber over time. The Liberal Democrats said they too wanted a fully elected house. And the Tories proposed a mainly elected chamber.
It’s in this context that Nick Clegg brought the Government’s ideas to the Commons this week. He came with two documents: a white paper and a draft bill. A committee of MPs will consider both over the next year when the Government will then decide how to proceed.
The white paper makes the case for 100% election of peers. The draft bill, reflecting a Coalition compromise, proposes election for only 80% of peers, the remaining 20% consisting of bishops and appointed peers. The idea is that the number of peers will be reduced from the current 789 to around 300. The elected peers will be elected by proportional representation and serve a single term of fifteen years. The first election, for a third of these, will be held in 2015 and the remaining elected peers will be elected in two subsequent elections over the following ten years. So the new system will be fully functioning by 2025. The second chamber will probably be renamed the Senate.
The essential case Mr Clegg made for his ideas was the democratic one: legislators in a modern democracy should be elected by the people. He said that having these additional elected representatives at Westminster would help constituents have their practical concerns, such as health and education, better dealt with. And he defended the 80% compromise on the grounds of not making the best the enemy of the good.
But he had a rough ride in the Commons, notwithstanding the fact that all parties had backed an elected element in the Lords at the last election. That is partly because, after his trouncing in the AV referendum, Mr Clegg was always bound to get a rough ride. But it’s also because many MPs (among others) are sceptical about the wisdom of an elected second chamber. There are several grounds for their doubts.
Some are wary of electing the Lords because they fear that the very democratic credentials this would bestow on the second chamber would make it better able to challenge the Commons. This might especially be the case if the Lords were elected, as proposed, by proportional representation. In any dispute between the Commons and the Lords, some peers might start to claim that they were democratically more legitimate than the Commons. This could create a constitutional conflict.
Furthermore, such a conflict might risk reopening the issue of the relative powers of the two chambers. If the Lords could start to claim it was more democratic than the Commons, then it could claim it ought to have greater powers.
To avoid this, then, some people argue it is better to live with the anomaly of an undemocratic second chamber but one that recognises it should have only limited powers. Paradoxically, they argue, it is better for democracy.
There is a further argument against reform along the lines of ‘if it works, why fix it?’ The case here is that the existing House of Lords has in it many highly qualified and expert people, such as distinguished scientists, former diplomats, civil servants and military leaders, successful businessmen and former leading politicians who are there through appointment and who, at the end of their careers, would certainly not want to go through the bother of getting elected. Their contribution, it’s argued, is immense and would simply be lost. In their place would come party hacks who had wormed their way on to the party lists that the parties themselves would draw up in PR elections.
So, as always with Lords reform, there is still a lot of argument ahead. Will Mr Clegg’s plan happen? There is reason to doubt it. Although the Lib Dem leader has the support in principle for elected peers among senior Tories in the cabinet, including the Chancellor, the Home Secretary and the Defence Secretary, it is not thought to be a high priority of theirs. During the election, David Cameron said that though he backed the idea, he thought a Tory government would get round to it only in its third term. Labour is unlikely to give it a clear run, not only because it is its job to oppose, but because it is itself divided on the issue.
Perhaps most important of all, there is no evidence that this is a burning issue among the public. That is likely to be exploited by peers themselves who are not going to acquiesce in such radical change without a lot of time-consuming discussion.
It’s this which may prove the greatest threat to Mr Clegg’s plans. Once the committee of MPs has given its verdict on them, the Prime Minister will have to decide whether or not the Government should expend a great deal of parliamentary time on getting its reforms through. In the past, the prospect of such a long parliamentary slog has tended to deter governments from pursuing Lords reform. Will it be different this time?
What’s your view?
- Do you think Lords reform is an important issue or not?
- Do you think it matters or not that one of the chambers of our legislature is unelected?
- What do you make of Mr Clegg’s proposals?
- Do you think a second chamber should be 100% elected, 80% elected, or remain appointed as now?
- Are you concerned or not that an elected second chamber could end up challenging the Commons?
- How persuaded are you by the argument that the presence of experienced and expert peers, albeit appointed, makes the Lords a better revising chamber than an elected one would be?
- And what likelihood do you think there is that Mr Clegg’s plans will be put into practice?
