Will the saga of the Lords end with the House that Jack built?

The saga of Lords reform continues, though it will no longer be Tony Blair who oversees the implementation of further change. The Queen’s Speech promises that proposals will be brought forward to provide a second chamber that will ‘better serve a modern democracy’. To this end, efforts are being made to reach a consensus before the white paper on reform is published within the next month.

This is one strand to the reform process. Another has been provided by the report of the Joint Select Committee on Conventions made at the beginning of November. And a third strand is provided by the deepening shadow cast over the final months of the Blair government by the police inquiries into ‘cash for peerages’.

The Joint Committee was set up to try and formalise the practices of self-restraint that the existing House has developed. Ministers hoped these ‘conventions’ could be codified in some way, so that they could be enforced even if (especially if?) the composition of the House was altered and the whole place given greater legitimacy.

But the unanimous verdict of the Select Committee is that the present practices of self-restraint are working well, and that there are no advantages to be gained from any significant form of codification.

The so-called Salisbury-Addison convention on manifesto bills has not been breached, but should be re-named the Government Bills convention, and could be expressed in a resolution passed by both Houses.

On the proposed 60-day time limit for bills in the House, the Committee believe there is no problem that would be solved by setting a time limit. There is no scope for codification of practices relating to parliamentary ping-pong, and it would not be possible or right to codify any conventions relating to secondary legislation.

However, the Committee emphasises that if the composition of the House were to be changed the conventions would have to be re-examined. The report therefore ensures that any future debate about reform will have to include the question of powers.

Such a reform is exactly what Jack Straw is planning. Newspaper leaks have indicated the proposals he has in mind. They include the abolition of life peerages, a reduction in the size of the House to some 450 (from the 740 to which membership has now swollen), and a House half-elected and half appointed, with all members serving 12 year non-renewable terms.

This is the kind of scheme that the Public Administration Select Committee recommended in 2002, claiming that at the time it represented the centre of gravity of opinion within the Commons. But parliamentary support ebbed away, with the prime minister indicating his opposition to any elected element in the second chamber, and an all-party campaign extolling the virtues of an appointed House — a view which readily commanded the support of an overwhelming majority of the present appointed House.

The tide of opinion might easily change again. In any serious debate about change, attention would have to focus not simply on the crude proportion elected or appointed, but on the manner of election and of appointment.

This is where the third strand to thinking about the Lords comes into play. Whatever the outcome of the current police investigations are, the credibility of appointment as a method of composing the second chamber — even in part — has been undermined. The Stevenson-led Appointments Commission has been ineffective in countering public scepticism, though ironically it was the persistence of some members of the Commission that opened the door to the present police inquiries.

Possibly a new mechanism for appointments could be devised which would slowly regain public credibility — and produce valuable contributors to the work of the second chamber. But if so, party leaders will have to be kept at arms length. But it would be ironic if, just as party leaders were distanced from the process of appointment, they were given the power effectively to determine who was elected to the House.

A lively debate can be anticipated. As usual it will cross party lines, and the result is far from certain. Is it pessimistic to suggest that the most likely outcome is maintenance of the status quo?

The present House does work quite well as a revising chamber. Its composition is more mixed than hitherto, and in some respects more representative than that of the Commons. The House complements the work of the Commons quite effectively, sometimes by giving MPs the chance to discomfort the government on details of bills bounced back in amended form to the elected chamber.

Debate about the future of the second chamber ought to become debate about the future of parliament. Retaining the primacy of the Commons may be a necessity, but the real argument should be about how to shift the balance between the executive and parliament as a whole — both Houses.

Donald Shell is Senior Lecturer in Politics, Bristol University.