7: HOUSE OF LORDS REFORM

22nd February 1999

My Lords, I congratulate the Government on producing a White Paper which answers nearly all our questions with regard to a reformed second chamber; and it lays down encouraging guidelines on the prospects for further modernisation. It is on this latter subject, however, that I wish to speak.

I take the line that the nation will be best served by a second chamber which stands in complete contrast to the first chamber. I envisage that its members will be appointed in part by an all-party committee, to select peers with the broadest possible expertise and the widest range of professional qualifications. I would like to see them sitting for a ten year period of office, with the committee holding the option to renew their peerages for an additional term, or for half a term, according to what the committee might think best; but with an upper age limit of 75 as the threshold for automatic retirement.

While these might account for half of the peers in the second chamber, I remain anxious that the additional half of your Lordships’ house will accurately reflect the regional diversity in this land. I feel encouraged that the government has set up Regional Development Agencies, which will probably emerge as the initial nuclei for the future English Regions: although the creation of Regional Assemblies will also be essential before they can possibly feel that each is emerging in control of its particular quality of life.

I sincerely hope that the Government will encourage these Regions to appear, each within a territory soon to be defined, and of sufficient geographical size to warrant this sense of emergent identity. If they were too small, the purpose would not be served. The smallest region should perhaps be the size of Yorkshire, but in most cases a whole group of counties would be involved, until England might finally consist of nine regions of a similar size in terms of their population. This will furnish the map of England which I envisage will find its place, at the heart of European political evolution towards a United Regions of Europe.

But these Regions do require cosseting and governmental care in their emergence upon our political scene. And they must surely be given representation within the proposed second chamber; and with each of them sending up a delegation of peers, who should be selected by a method parallel to that used for the selection of the other peers, although not by the same all-party committee for the appointment of peers on a national basis. So in order to reinforce the idea that these latter are regional nominations, the appointments should be made conjointly by the County Councils of each Region, with it being a matter for themselves to decide the character of peers that should form their own delegation.

This would constitute a second chamber appointed by those who have been directly elected: in the first case chosen by our elected Members of Parliament to sit on the all-party committee for selecting peers on a national basis; and in the second case chosen by the elected County Councillors, to represent their particular Region. So peers of both variety will have been indirectly elected to the second chamber, with equal authority and similar duration of office: a unity of purpose and responsibility that should create no psychological division between the two groups, and without any of them having been directly elected.

The two elements that would still be missing from such a second chamber would be the European and the spiritual dimensions. The appointment of lords spiritual could well continue on the existing basis, but in participation perhaps with the all-party committee’s quota for appointees. And I would hope that representatives of all the faiths which are to be found within this nation would find themselves nominated on a basis proportional to the prevalence of each faith within our society.

With regard to the European dimension, this should emerge as the special responsibility of the regional peers, to establish cultural bonds with regions elsewhere throughout Europe: discovering where in Europe they might be doing things better than us, and assisting them to learn from us where that might be applicable. For it is largely by these methods that the Europe of Regions will finally emerge.