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Mr. Howarth: I shall give way to the hon. Gentleman in a moment. He said that the Conservatives intend to state, in due course, what they would do. At this stage, we still do not know their approach to this matter. We know only that they are opposed to our approach. I now give way to the hon. Gentleman, but briefly, because I want to make progress.
Mr. Letwin: I am grateful to the Minister, who is always courteous. I wonder whether he was listening when I said that I thought that there were grave defects in the constitution, admittedly exacerbated by the present Government, but also, alas, inherited by them.
Mr. Howarth: The problem with the hon. Gentleman's approach is that he proposes no solution. He and his hon. Friends oppose every proposal that we make to improve our constitution. Although they may say that there is a case for change, they always oppose specific change.
The hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) also is always courteous, but I take issue with him quoting--correctly--a sentence from paragraph 7 on page 36 of the White Paper, which says:
By contrast, Labour Members and, to be fair, the Liberal Democrat representative, put forward a very different view. We recognise that there are strengths in our constitutional arrangements, but we intend to build on them and adapt them to the times in which we live rather than the halcyon days of the past. I make no apologies for saying that we want to modernise our constitution so that it more closely reflects the needs of the country as it moves towards a new century, rather than its needs of a century or more ago.
It is time that we got on with making such changes. There could be no better illustration of that than our approach to the reform of the House of Lords. Some backtracking is now occurring, but I am astonished that anybody could stand up and seriously argue that people should have the right to serve as members of a legislature on the basis of nothing but an accident of birth. At least the hon. Member for West Dorset accepted that clause 1 and the first phase were supportable. I shall come on to the flaw in the rest of his argument in a moment.
We have made progress today in that the official Opposition are not prepared, at least not publicly, to defend the right of privilege in the legislative arrangements for hereditary peers. Yet despite that step forward, in 1999, in one of the world's oldest and proudest democracies, the majority of members of one of the Chambers of Parliament is comprised of those who sit there, not by virtue of their own merits, but simply because one of their ancestors may have performed a service, small or large, for a monarch many hundreds of years ago.
That is an absurdity that cannot be allowed to continue. It is not as if hereditary peers are a benign, decorative aberration, as some would like us to believe and as Conservative Members have claimed tonight. In this Parliament alone, we have witnessed at first hand how hereditary peers wilfully and repeatedly sought to overturn the clearly expressed wishes of this democratically elected House.
Perhaps we should not be surprised by that. The simple fact, which probably goes a long way towards explaining the stance taken by Conservative Members on the Bill, is that throughout the past three quarters of a century the House of Lords has regularly inflicted defeats on measures introduced by Labour Governments.
The statistics are striking. I shall quote from research paper 98/104 produced by the Library, from which the right hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Island quoted earlier. [Hon. Members: "Easter Ross."] I am sorry, I meant the right hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Mr. Maclennan). If I stick to the simple formula "Caithness and much else", it will probably serve us well.
The research paper states:
The hereditary peers, whose right to sit and vote in the upper House will be removed by the Bill, are not a cross-section of society who, by some accident of birth, express views that are benign and non-partisan. The evidence suggests the opposite.
Sir Nicholas Lyell:
The hon. Gentleman is making the point that his right hon. Friend the President of the Council made--that a higher proportion of defeats has
Mr. Howarth:
The right hon. and learned Gentleman fails to address the fact that in this Parliament and in previous Parliaments, Labour manifesto commitments were overturned by the House of Lords. In the last Session, the European Parliamentary Elections Bill, which I freely grant that Opposition Members did not like, was a manifesto commitment by the Government. That was sent back no fewer than five times--or was it seven?--by the House of Lords.
Mr. Cash:
On the European Parliamentary Elections Bill, I freely admit that under no circumstances would I vote for our position on that, because as far as I was concerned, proportional representation was out of the question, and the House of Lords should never have agreed to it, as a matter of principle.
That is just a minor matter. On the subject of defeats in the House of Lords, before I entered the House I happen to have been involved in the legal process in the House of Lords regarding the Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Bill, which was one of the flagships of the Labour Government of the time. I can tell the Minister, if he does not know, that the Lord Chancellor, the late Lord Elwyn-Jones, was on the Committee that ditched the Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Bill because the House of Lords was prepared to listen to the arguments on hybridity, which I say--some people may recognise this when I say it--may yet return in relation to this Bill.
Mr. Howarth:
That was a long intervention. I made the mistake of mentioning the word "Europe", at which point the hon. Gentleman sprang to his feet. My right hon. Friend made it clear that the arrangements in the House of Lords are different from those that the hon. Gentleman describes.
Those who sit in the House of Lords by accident of birth overwhelmingly represent and vote for one political interest. They have shamelessly ensured that the Conservative party has a built-in 3:1 majority over other parties in another place. It does not matter to them how the electorate may have voted or what measures it wants them to support. Even when the Conservative party has been decisively rejected as it was on 1 May 1997, it has still been able to count on its built-in majority in the upper House, and has had neither shame nor compunction about using that majority.
The sorry combination of Conservative Members and hereditary peers makes our case more compellingly than any speech in this Chamber tonight.
Dr. Fox:
Will the Minister give way?
Mr. Howarth:
I shall not give way because I have only five minutes left.
I shall now deal with some of the questions that the hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) asked in his opening speech. He asked whether we would have the chance fully to debate that Weatherill amendment, as it will not be introduced until the Bill reaches the Lords. The hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) gave the transitional House argument for that. The House will have an opportunity to debate amendments passed in the other place when the Bill returns to the Commons. As my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House said earlier, the Government have made it clear that they are minded to accept such an amendment, but only if it enables matters to proceed by consensus. We will not know whether that is the amendment's effect until the Bill is in the House of Lords.
The hon. Gentleman also asked what guarantees there were that there would be a second stage. We have set the royal commission an extremely demanding timetable, but it is realistic and it guarantees continued momentum. The White Paper made it clear that if we can get a consensus and if the commission meets the timetable, we shall make every effort to ensure that the second stage of reform is approved by Parliament by the next general election.
Several Opposition Members asked why the royal commission had not been set up 20 months ago. The simple answer is that the royal commission's terms of reference are that part of its remit is to take into account the wider context of devolution, human rights and developing relations with the European Union. That simply would not have been possible 20 months ago because all those matters remained to be considered--[Interruption.] I presume that the hon. Member for Woodspring would have preferred those matters to have reached the statute book before a royal commission took them into account.
The hon. Gentleman asked whether the Government had ruled out a fully elected second Chamber. We think that it would be wrong to pre-empt the consideration that the royal commission will give. To indicate a preference at this stage would be to clip the royal commission's wings. Frankly, it would be insulting to ask it to consider all those matters having stated what the end of the process should be.
The hon. Gentleman asked whether the Labour party will give evidence to the royal commission, and whether that evidence will be taken in public. It is a matter for the Labour party, but I should imagine that it will. Certainly, it will be for the royal commission to decide whether it conducts its proceedings in public or otherwise. I am sure that at least some of its proceedings will be in public. He also asks how long the joint Committee will last. That will be a matter for both Houses of Parliament, but the Government have made it clear that the joint Committee will meet after the royal commission has reported. We hope that it will be possible to ensure that the second stage of reform has been approved by the general election.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn) and one or two others asked why we do not
go for what one of my hon. Friends called "the big bang". The obvious answer is that every previous attempt at a single-stage solution has failed, usually because the then Conservative party took the view that, although change was necessary, that particular change was not. While that position is allowed to prevail, we shall never get reform the House of Lords through Parliament.
"The role of the second chamber should continue to complement rather than duplicate the role of the House of Commons."
The hon. Gentleman described those words as complacent, but he did not quote the rest of the paragraph, which continues:
"The House of Lords provides a valuable function of scrutiny without which the burden on the House of Commons would be greater and the quality of government legislation diminished. As has previously been noted, over the past ten years the House of Lords has made nearly 2,000 amendments a year to government legislation. These are most often government amendments, frequently brought forward in response to points made in both Houses. Legislative scrutiny will continue to be an important purpose of a reformed second chamber."
The hon. Gentleman should not quote only one sentence from a paragraph. It would be as well for the House to hear the whole paragraph, which, I glad to say, it now has.
"From 1970-71 to 1997-98 the average number of Government defeats"--
in the House of Lords--
"per session is 63"--
for Labour--
"compared with 8 for Conservative Governments."
That statistic has been independently calculated and is incontrovertible.
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