| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Hoon: If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I must make progress.
I shall deal, first, with the principle. We have publicly committed ourselves not to seek more than broad parity between the Government and the main Opposition party. Consistency with our manifesto would have allowed us to seek about 40 per cent. more seats than the Conservatives have in the other place. We have, therefore, gone much further in restraining the Prime Minister's powers than we had to. Consistent with our commitment to maintain an independent Cross-Bench presence, we have undertaken to allow peers to be created in proportion to the numbers of the other parties.
Secondly, the appointments commission will be an advisory, non-departmental public body. As such, it will be accountable to Parliament, through Ministers, in the usual way. That answers one of the points raised yesterday by the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Sir N. Lyell). The Prime Minister will relinquish entirely his power to recommend nominations to the Cross Benches, giving up that power to an independent appointments commission. There are two important aspects of this to draw to the House's attention. The first is that the very act of setting up the commission is an indication of the Government's continuing commitment to the retention of independent Members of the House of Lords. The second is the reduction in patronage that will follow.
The commission will be set up later this year. It will begin to operate when the transitional House comes into existence. It will include members of the three main
parties, together with a majority of independent members. The appointment of the independent members will be "Nolanised" in accordance with the relevant rules of the Commissioner for Public Appointments. As those rules were drawn up under the previous Government, I am sure that Opposition Members will not be tempted to claim that the body in question will not be properly independent.
Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow):
Exactly how are they to be "Nolanised"? What will be the process?
Mr. Hoon:
The appointments will be subject to precisely the procedures that the Nolan Committee expects such bodies to use--right hon. and hon. Members are becoming familiar with those procedures.
The appointments commission will be encouraged to seek nominations from a wide field, and will be able to consider nominations from members of the public. It will take over the role of the Political Honours Scrutiny Committee in vetting all peerage nominations for propriety, for example to ensure that they are not proposed in return for party donations instead of public service. That, after all, is how we came by so many hereditary peers earlier this century.
Thirdly, control over names will be relinquished. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has committed himself not to interfere in the detail of other parties' nominations. Within the agreed numbers, and subject to approval by the appointments commission, the Prime Minister will pass on any names submitted to him by the other political parties.
Taking the Government's proposals together, the Prime Minister will in future have less influence than any of his predecessors over appointments and over the composition of the House of Lords.
Mr. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold):
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way as I wish to raise an important point. Does what he has just said mean that the Prime Minister will have ultimate control over who is appointed to the commission? Everybody who is appointed to the commission is bound to have a political view, so how will the political balance be maintained?
Mr. Hoon:
On the contrary, the position is precisely the opposite. As we set out in the White Paper, the chairman will be an entirely independent figure.
The question was raised yesterday about what guarantees the Government could give that the transitional arrangements would actually be put in place. Having set out commitments for a transitional House in our White Paper, it seems clear that, if we had then included them in the Bill, we would have been accused of wanting to make the transitional House permanent. Our intention is to move on from the transitional House as soon as we can. The Government were elected on a clear and unequivocal commitment to reform the House of Lords, with a specific first stage of ending the rights of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords.
Whenever efforts have been made previously to remove the hereditary peers' rights to sit and vote, and at the same time to deal with the powers and the composition of the House of Lords, they have failed. Taking the process step by step makes it more, not less, likely that real reform will actually take place. Removing the hereditary peers first removes a first real obstacle to reform and change.
Mr. Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley):
To follow the Minister's Glenn Hoddle analogy, I am not sure what he did in a previous life, but it must have been quite dreadful for him to be given today's hot potato.
In opening the debate for the official Opposition, let me first pay tribute to the dedication and commitment of the many hereditary and life peers who have served Parliament well--the life peers since 1958 and the hereditary peers over several centuries. I know that the Leader of the House meant to say that yesterday, but she inadvertently completely omitted it from her speech.
Mr. Gordon Prentice (Pendle):
Does that extend to the 200 hereditary peers who could not be bothered to turn up in the last Session?
Mr. Evans:
I was paying tribute to those who had given great service, dedication and commitment. If the hon. Gentleman looks at the attendance record of some of the life peers--even some appointed by the current Prime Minister--he will find it wanting.
At a recent conference on Lords reform, the Liberal Democrat peer Lord McNally spoke of the difficulty of getting life peers to serve on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link Bill Committee in 1996. Only one life peer served on the Committee, to six hereditary peers.
I enjoyed hearing the right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn) referring yesterday to the modernising policy of previous Administrations. Even the introduction of the hereditary principle for peerages was a modernising move at the time. The right hon. Gentleman pointed out that, even after the passage of the Bill, the second Chamber will lack democratic authority. The White Paper refers to all sorts of mechanisms to determine the composition of the future House of Lords and talks specifically about the down side of having a body that is wholly democratically elected.
There is no perfect model that would suit all systems of government. As hon. Members have pointed out, the composition depends on what we want the second Chamber to do. The Government have already decided, in the remit that they have given the royal commission, that this Chamber should remain the pre-eminent Chamber of Parliament, so they do not want a solely elected second Chamber. The new House will want to use all the powers at its disposal and may demand more, depending on how often its elections are and what form of electoral system is used if there is an elected element.
The unfinished business of 1911 will remain unfinished if the Bill is enacted. It leaves too many unanswered questions. The manifesto commitment has already been
sacrificed. The Labour manifesto "New Labour Because Britain Deserves Better"--pause for laughter--says:
Will the new House be more democratic? As the right hon. Member for Chesterfield said clearly yesterday, the answer is no. Leaving a House of nominated peers is not more democratic, as Viscount Cranborne said during a conference on the future of the House of Lords last year. He said:
Mr. Beard:
The House of Lords has consisted of hereditary peers and life peers for 40 years. I have never heard the Conservatives question its legitimacy. Do they believe that the hereditary peers gave the House of Lords a mark of respectability that will be removed when it is left with people who are nominated for what they have done during their life time?
Mr. Evans:
Viscount Cranborne put it succinctly. Why should a House full of nominated peers who owe their positions to the current Prime Minister and previous Prime Ministers--I think that the White Paper mentions eight--be any more democratic than the current House? We are not arguing for the preservation of the second Chamber as it is currently constituted. In his tour de force covering historical approaches to such reforms, the Minister said that the Conservative Front Bench supported the 1968 proposals to remove the hereditary principle. We are not arguing with that. We simply want a more effective approach to the reform of the second Chamber.
"As an initial, self-contained reform, not dependent on further reform in the future, the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords will be ended by statute."
So much for that promise, because we have already moved to a two-stage process.
"Why is it that a nominated peer is more democratic than an hereditary peer? I would say that neither of them is particularly democratic, but at least people like me do not owe our places to the living, but merely to the long dead."
Mr. Nigel Beard (Bexleyheath and Crayford)
rose--
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |