House of Lords Reform and Size of the House of Commons — House of Commons, 2016-10-19
Topic: Government Operations
Stewart Jackson (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a pleasure to contribute to this very interesting debate. It is disappointing that SNP Members set their face against what could have been quite a consensual motion. I cannot support it because it conflates boundary changes with House of Lords reform, but we could have developed a consensus in the debate The House of Lords is of course an anachronism in a modern liberal democracy. We would not chose to invent it from scratch, were we able to do so, but we must nevertheless concede that its Members have the skills, knowledge and experience that we need. Because they have more time—they do not have the guillotine—and are not whipped so hard as we are, they can in some ways do the work of scrutiny, overview and improvement better than we can in this House. We must also concede that the royal prerogative of absolute medieval monarchy has been transferred over the centuries from the king or queen through the House of Lords to the Executive of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, so there has been an accretion of powers. Under such an incremental approach, which was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), powers have been given away so that the upper House cannot vote against the Finance Bill —following the people’s Budget of 1909, and the Parliament Act 1911—and its powers have been otherwise circumscribed The flaw in that argument is that we had an opportunity for a once-in-a-generation change. As I mentioned earlier, because of the ludicrous proposals put forward by the Liberal Democrats—the 15-year, non-renewable terms would have meant that authority was contested between the mandates of the two Houses—that opportunity was wasted, as most Government Members would never have supported them. The issue about the authority of the two Houses is still a problem. I do not buy the argument that unicameral Parliaments are therefore better. The reason why so many EU countries have them is that so much legislation, policy making and governance is done by the European Union rather than in their own countries, but that will end very soon—because Brexit does mean Brexit I am an agnostic on the House of Lords—I have not made up my mind one way or the other—but my concern is that it is beginning to infringe some basic constitutional proprieties, such as the Salisbury convention. Its Members have taken it upon themselves to cut across the views of the elected Government as set out in their manifesto, which is absolutely wrong and unacceptable. Of course, we have moved on in other ways. We no longer recruit the Executive from the House of Lords but mainly from the House of Commons I put to the House this prospectus. It is not necessarily for the Government to bring forward legislation to reform the House of Lords. It is for the Lords themselves to do that—mention has been made of Lord Fowler’s views. I believe that the Lords are potentially in the last chance saloon, certainly with regard to their authority and the belief, faith and trust of the greater public in the system of which the Lords are a part. The challenge is for the Lords to reform themselves as they have done in the past. If they do not, I fear that another Government—although perhaps not one of my own political persuasion or political colour—will take drastic, draconian action. That will be damaging to the constitutional firmament and settlement of this country, in which to a certain extent the Lords have played an important role over many hundreds of years.