The Lecture was hosted by the School of Political, Social and Intellectual Studies at the University of East Anglia.
Baroness Hayman
Helene Hayman’s political career began in 1974, when she fought Enoch Powell’s seat in Wolverhampton, South West, prior to being elected as MP for Welwyn and Hatfield (1974-79).
She was the youngest member of the House of Commons and one of 27 women MPs at the time.
After leaving the House of Commons in 1979, she undertook a number of roles in the healthcare sector, while raising her family. In 1996 she became a member of the House of Lords.
As Lord Speaker, Baroness Hayman took part in a series of outreach activities and was responsible for developing a programme which engaged people with the House of Lords and its members, with a particular focus on young people
Lecture transcript
Baroness Hayman: Naomi, thank you very much for that introduction, and thank you, too, for coming along and evincing interest in a subject which, I have to say, it's quite difficult to get parliamentarians engaged with at the present time - let alone members of the public - so I'm delighted to be here.
I'm always slightly intimidated, particularly at a University, to be told that I am 'delivering a lecture'. I don't actually deliver lectures; I can do talks, but I don't deliver lectures. It always sounds a little grandiose to me. And equally grandiose is the title that I've been given: 'Ending the Deadlock'. I'm not sure that I want to suggest that I have a formula for navigating through what Professor Peter Hennessey, historian at Queen Mary College - and now a colleague of mine in the House of Lords - has described as “the Bermuda Triangle of British Politics: an area that it’s perilous to enter and from which many never return.”
And for a hundred years or so, ministers and governments have sent ships of state into the waters of House of Lords reform, only to see them, indeed, disappear without trace. Nick Clegg's recent experience is only one of many and, in fact, next week we may see that the Prime Minister also experiences the swell from the Bermuda Triangle, and sees how House of Lords reform can actually sink other legislation as well if, indeed, he loses the boundary changes as a result of Liberal Democrat anger at the behaviour of Conservative Members of Parliament about the ‘Clegg Bill’.
Actually, almost exactly the same thing happened to Richard Crossman; when his proposed reforms in the late 1960's got into trouble he was persuaded to 'pull' the Parliament (No. 2) Bill, as it was, from the House of Commons. It was that great Enoch Powell/Michael Foot combination to defeat the Bill, both opposing it from diametrically different directions.
He did it in order to find time for the Industrial Relations Bill, which he then lost as well. So he ended up rather like Lady Bracknell: 'Losing one Bill is a misfortune; losing two looks like carelessness..'.
But what I did want to do today was, not necessarily to crack the problem of House of Lords reform, but to, first of all, examine the paradox of why - given the conventional wisdom that every attempt at reform over the last century has failed - if that is so, why the House of Lords is so diametrically different from the House of Lords of 100 years ago, firstly in terms of its powers - not quite 100 years - I'm talking about just before the 1911 Parliament Act and those changes.
Before then, the House of Lords was losing a bit of power over financial legislation, but still had that tremendous ‘blocking’ power which came to the fore during the Liberal Government's proposals: the Budget, Irish Home Rule - all those issues which led to the Constitutional Crisis: resolved, first of all, by the threat of the creation of hundreds of new peers, but then by the 1911 Act, which curtailed the powers of the House of Lords so that it only had powers of delay.
Except - always useful to remember this - one area; one bit of legislation where the power to block is complete, and that is legislation to extend the life of a parliament. It doesn't always do it: during the war, the life of a Parliament was extended with the consent of the House of Lords. But it can't be done without the consent of the House of Lords.
But basically, the constrained nature of the powers of the House was changed, in 1911, to powers of delay for 2 years and then, in 1949, to delay for one year.
But, much more significantly, is the change in the composition and the nature of the House .
When I was taking my 11 plus, in Wolverhampton in 1958, just before the 1958 Life Peerages Act, the House was, apart from a few Law Lords, and the Bishops, entirely an hereditary House. There were no women. The average attendance actually fell below 100. It was dying on its feet. It was un-influential and ill-respected. And it didn't do a job of work as a proper House in a bicameral Parliament.
Since that time there has been a complete revolution, starting from very small beginnings, and not with everyone's agreement. Interestingly, the Labour Party did not support the Life Peerages Act. Even feminists in the Labour Party - because this was the opportunity, to get women in - there had been no woman, not even one who had been entitled to inherit their peerage - they still weren't entitled to sit in the House of Lords. There had been not a single woman in the House of Lords.
But people like Jenny Lee fought tooth and nail - she said: "I don't want women in the House of Lords, because I don't want anybody in the House of Lords - I want to abolish it completely and have a unicameral parliament.” It has to be said, she did amend her view in due course, became Baroness Lee, and was a very active parliamentarian. But prior to 1958, she and the Labour Party did not support the creation of Life Peers.
But, in fact ,it was what was then considered a minor reform - added later, in 1999, to the expulsion of the vast majority of the Hereditaries - that has created the House as we know it today: the House that has the same proportion of women as the House of Commons, and actually a higher proportion of active women members, because more of the women members have come in more recently. Just over 40% of Appointments Commission appointees have been women, so they tend to be more active. The attendance in the House of Lords today - I looked up these figures earlier - the average attendance is 475. As I say, before 1958 it was hovering below 100.
In terms of ethnicity, we have a higher - almost double - the proportion of ethnic minority peers than there are ethnic minority Members of the House of Commons. In terms of religion, we have of course 26 Bishops of the Church of England; the Bishops bench is the only place not to be infiltrated by women yet.
But we have Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs; we have Catholics and Methodists and Wee Frees, and lots of other Christian denominations. We have Buddhists, we have Zoroastrian Parsi and we have some very vocal Humanists in the House.
We have people who are gay, who are HIV positive; we have people who are in Civil Partnerships; we have people from a far greater range of backgrounds, educational institutions than that ‘pale, male, stale’ image of the House of Lords.
I used to go into schools a lot and ask the children:“What's your word-association - what do think of when you think of a member of the House of Lords?”.
"Posh”, “Old”, “Male”, “Christian”, “Public School"- Did I say old? Did I say men? Yes, all those things.
I can bust, pretty well, every one of those stereotypes. I have a difficulty with 'old' - alright?
But ‘old’, in a way, comes with Senates - with second chambers of a particular sort. You know it comes from the Latin: ‘senex’ - meaning ‘old man’. If you're looking for second thoughts from second chambers, you're looking for people with experience. And not all our members are as old as the average - not all our members are as old as me. I'm younger than the average – right? Just remember that.
And it is fascinating - we do have some young members in their 30’s and early 40’s – but it’s also fascinating to listen to people in their 90’s, who - my God, if I have the marbles of Professor Lord Walton of Detchant when I'm 90, I shall be a very happy camper, I can tell you: an eminent neuro-physician, ex -chairman of the General Medical Council and a fantastic contributor to debate. We all have to be very careful about age discrimination these days.
So the House of Lords has changed enormously, partly because of those early beginnings : those first half a dozen life peers, the first 3 women who came in - most of whom were actually very posh women, I have to tell you. But it has changed.
And then we've seen, with the 1999 Act, and the ending, in all but 90 cases -there's always a wrinkle in House of Lords reform - the ending of the hereditary principle: the fact that no one now goes into the House of Lords because they have inherited that position. We have seen a huge change.
And it's interesting that one of the arguments in 1999, about the change, was that you would end up, actually, with an appointed House that had no credibility, and that therefore had no contribution to make to Parliament. In fact the opposite has happened.
Because of the range of background and expertise: I talked about ethnicity and gender and sexuality, but if you look at the things that people have done before - their backgrounds in Business, or in the Trades Unions, or in Education, or in Social work, or in Nursing, or in Medicine, you –
[Interruption - Lights Failed]
We have developed a House of expertise and, in some ways, of independence: independence that comes, not only because the House has around 20 percent of members who take no party-political whip - the Crossbenchers, the Independent peers.
You know, the House of Lords is different from the House of Commons: the set up. It is not totally confrontational. It does have those benches that go across - the crossbenches - where people who vote on the issue, rather than on a whip - sit. So it does have that measure of independence, but interestingly, the whips - even in the party-political peers - are much less influential than they are in the House of Commons. And that's where, in some ways, the age factor becomes attractive and a positive: because most people in the House of Lords are past ambition - OK?
So the line: “Don't rock the boat - don't vote against this, you know, you've got a bright future in front of you, but..” - is not an argument for those of us with our bright futures behind us.
Equally there is security of tenure – ‘Life means Life’ in the House of Lords. So what actual punishment...? There are very few carrots, very few sticks, which means that people tend to vote more according to their views and less rigidly on party lines.
[Interruption - Lights Restored]
So the House is very, very different.
So my argument would be that there is this paradox between those who say 'Reform has not happened – it’s the great unfinished business since 1911’, and the facts on the ground, which show that there hasn't just been reform since 1911, there's actually been revolution.
For those of you who want to become as ‘anorak-y’ as I am on House of Lords reform, there's a very good new book published, just last year, by Chris Ballinger, an academic in Oxford. It's called: The House of Lords 1911 to 2011: A Century of Non-Reform. But, of course, he only manages that by defining 'reform' as 'election' - and I will come on to that in a minute. But his conclusion, which I thought was interesting, was that:
“The sense that House of Lords reform has been an ever-present issue is at risk of masking the considerable change that's happened across the century. In a century in which reform has proved elusive, many changes - both legislative and procedural - have, never the less, been achieved.
The House of Lords, in its activity, operation, culture and membership has been transformed. A century after the Parliament Act reached the statute book, there remains a widespread feeling that reform has still to be achieved. The House of Lords remains unreformed, yet it is in every way changed."
In my view you have to use language quite broadly to say there has been ‘no reform’. What there has been, has been an attempt to introduce elections into the House of Lords - to have a second chamber, like many other bicameral chambers, that is elected. And that is what has always failed.
And I think it's worth spending a little time thinking about why it's always failed. In my view, you can put this down to two more sets of paradoxes if you like: there is, on the face of it, widespread public support for an elected House of Lords. If you posed the question in a MORI Poll: “Do you think the House of Lords should be elected?” - about 80-85% of people will say, “Yes”. So it looks as if there's a huge amount of public support.
Unfortunately, someone tried a few years ago posing the question: “Do you think the House of Lords should have in it people who are free from party-political influence and experts in their field?”. 85% of people said: 'Yeah - I'll buy into that as well'. People are capable of carrying two different ideas in their head at the same time.
And the number of MPs who I have encountered - and indeed, I only had a short time in the House of Commons, but it was absolutely true for me - who say that they never in their lives have been asked by a constituent: “What are you going to do about creating an elected House of Lords?” - means that no Government will ever really have that electoral push to create an elected House.
The second reason - the second paradox - is that the push for an elected House - not for a changed House, not for what I would call a ‘reformed House’, to which I am passionately committed - comes from those who believe in principle that no one should be involved in the legislative process if they don't have a democratic mandate so to be.
The paradox comes in two ways: one is that most proposals for House of Lords reform end up compromising - not being 100% elected; Nick Clegg said, don't let the best be the enemy of the good - we'll have 80-20%. Well, if it is a principle that no one should take part in the legislative process who's not elected, why is 20% alright? You've already lost your battle of principle, and now you're talking practicalities.
Another problem - and this is the reason most of these proposals founder, - is that the original 1911 solution, that came out of the Liberal Government, was to limit powers - to assert the primacy of the Commons, the elected chamber which drew its authority from a popular mandate. That had to be done. And because the House of Lords, with it aristocratic hereditary membership, didn't have that legitimacy, it should no longer have the powers that it had.
So ‘limitation of veto’ was what the Liberals decided to do. They left that preamble in the Act: "It is intended to substitute for the House of Lords as it at present exists a second chamber constituted on a popular instead of a hereditary basis" - they left that, but that was actually the scrap that was thrown to those who wanted an elected House. What the policy was, was: reduce the power of veto - turn into delay, make sure that Finance Bills were completely out of it, finish with being able to interfere in taxation and to truncate the powers of the House, because of the lack of legitimacy of the membership.
A hundred years on, that extract from the preamble to the 1911 act is still quoted: David Steel was very funny - he said: “It's the only political pledge that actually qualifies for a telegram from the Queen.”
It still haunts - it undoubtedly was the motivation for Nick Clegg's wish in his latest bill that failed last year. But, if you make the House of Lords more electorally legitimate, democratically based, then why do you constrain its powers? Its powers are based on it not being legitimate, not being elected. How do you enshrine the primacy of the House of Commons?
And Members of the House of Commons, who had been generally in favour of House of Lords reform, dropped off like flies during the course of the passage of this Bill because they understood that someone else would be elected in their constituency, on their patch - a bigger constituency but still an elected representative. What stops their constituents going to them? What stops them interfering on their patch? And more significantly, if you have a PR system, to differentiate from 'First-Past-the-Post' - if I'm an elected member of the House of Lords, I can say: “Excuse me - my mandate's better than your mandate. It's fairer - it's based on Proportional Representation. Therefore next time we come to a crunch issue between the Commons and the Lords, why should I back down?”
At the moment, the House of Lords knows its place - it very, very rarely ends up confronting the House of Commons - and when it does, it loses. All it can do is delay, but actually, a lot of that is conventional rather than because of legislative constraint. And even delaying legislation a year - if you do it several times in a session - can absolutely destroy a Government's programme.
So MPs began to worry that the primacy of the House of Commons could not be intellectually defended, or practically enshrined by Clause 2 of the Bill we saw last year, which simply said: "Nothing in this bill affects the primacy of the House of Commons over the House of Lords".
Well, that is legislation-by-assertion, but it doesn't actually do anything and it was one the great weaknesses of the Bill.
So we get to the position that this issue about primacy - and the relationship between the two Houses - becomes absolutely central.
Now, those who support an elected second chamber, quite rightly, say: “Other countries manage it: they have bicameral parliaments, both Houses of which are elected” - and of course they do. But one thing I learnt from being Lord Speaker, and having a lot to do with second chambers from across the world, is that it’s like Tolstoyan ‘happy and unhappy families’: all Lower Houses are the same - they're all elected, representation by population – simple, straight-forward, clear. Second Chambers vary enormously. There's always an argument about powers and composition - they tend to be the result of political history or political geography. In federal countries - in the US, in Germany - you can see what the second House is there for. Much more difficult in countries that don't have that federal basis.
And yes, you can have two elected Houses, but you have to have a mechanism for resolving disputes between them. I don't think there's anywhere and there may be a very bright student who'll tell me I'm wrong - but I don't think there's a country in the world that has two elected Houses in a bicameral parliament, that doesn't have a written constitution -
because of that need to write down: what are the powers? Who resolves disputes? How they're resolved? Whether the courts are involved in looking at it? All those things.
Now, there may not be a lot of appetite for House of Lords reform, I tell you there's a lot less appetite for embarking on a written constitution – and, by the way, probably disestablishment of the Church of England as well, because of the role of the Anglican Bishops.
People then start looking at this and saying: "What do we gain from it?". We gain a democratic legitimacy, and I respect those for whom that is the Holy Grail - the important thing. But you cause a lot of other difficulties, and you also run the risk of completely, by accident...
The House of Lords gives more credence to the Theory of Evolution than that of Intelligent Design, I have to say. By accident, by evolution, we've ended up with a House of Lords that actually does rather a useful job; that is populated by people able to do that job - some of whom are sort of 'B Movie' politicians, some of whom are tremendous - the Nobel Prize winners, the absolute experts in their field.
So when you have a House of Commons, as we do at the moment, with very few scientists in it, you know that in the House of Lords you've got members of the Royal Society, you've got people who are doing Stem Cell research, people who can actually contribute on nanotechnology, or whatever the next issue is that's going to be presented to us.
Because of the convention that's grown up, that Governments should not have a political majority in the House of Lords, you do have somewhere where the lower House - or more rightly the Government - because we sometimes confuse Parliament and Government in a way that isn't helpful.
But in the House of Commons, in our system, the Government will always have a majority in the House of Commons. It won't have a majority in the House of Lords.
Time is a weapon in Parliament, so you will have that constraint, that ability - and the House of Lords dealt with something like 10,000 amendments in the last session. Some of those were to pieces of legislation that, because of timetabling in the House of Commons, had never, ever been considered at any stage in the House of Commons.
Timetabling has had a big, big effect on how the House of Commons scrutinises legislation, and the House of Lords has come into that gap to do the line-by-line scrutiny, and it's now where changes are actually made to legislation. Not these big, confrontational ‘reversing-a-policy’ changes, but actually the ‘getting-it-right’ - the listening to the pressure groups, the listening to the academic sector, listening to Business - the changes that make legislation fit for purpose.
So the House does a useful job, and I think that's one of the reasons why people have found it very difficult to enthuse the population about change and about elections - because it's all been posited on - yes – ‘legitimacy of output’, if you want to put it that way: ‘The House of Lords does a useful job, but we want the people who are doing it to be different and to be more legitimate.’
But that, as I've said earlier, brings in a huge number of other problems. And I'm afraid, for many of our population they fall back on the old saying: that: “If the answer is more elected politicians, you're asking the wrong question”.
So it's a very difficult 'sell' to a Government, to spend a huge amount of political capital and time in pushing through House of Lords reform. And that, of course, was how the ‘Clegg Bill’ failed: not on principal - it got a second reading in the House of Commons - but on the timetable motion. Because the only way you could get it through was by ramroading it through - railroading/ramrodding, whatever the word is - through the Commons, under a timetable motion.
The Labour Party wouldn't support that. Lots of Tory rebels wouldn't support that. It was a no-go area, because then you get into the Richard Crossman situation and you have to give up other pieces of legislation that really do matter to people, really are central.
So I would argue that those who want an elected Second Chamber really do have to tackle the issue of ‘powers’ first.
All the time we put ‘form’ before ‘function’ and we should put function before form. If you really want a House of Lords that does exactly what it does now, or even, perhaps, has less power in relation to the Commons in some areas, and is even more of a revising, rather than a legislating, chamber then you've got to decide and settle the issue of powers first, before you get into the issue of ‘how do the elected - how do the party politicians - get there?’.
And I was really interested, in the House Magazine this week, Jeff Rooker, who believes in - Jeff has always been sui generis: he was a wonderful member of the House of Commons, he was a wonderful minister in the Lords, and always said it was much more difficult being a minister in the Lords than it was being a minister in the Commons, because in the Commons you can get away with it - if you're a good party-political debater. In the House of Lords, if you've got a real expert, week-after-week, pushing you on things, you've got to know what the answers are.
But Jeff is arguing in the House Magazine this week that you should actually be looking at reducing the ‘power of veto’ - back to the 1911 language - reducing that ability to hold up legislation completely. But looking much more at the things where there's great frustration - such as secondary legislation.
Nowadays, huge change is made by secondary legislation. In the Lords we have a convention that we don't reject secondary legislation - it's broken sometimes - the Manchester Casino Order, and recently, on Legal Aid - that convention was broken. But, basically, you can't amend secondary legislation. That's a very bad position, actually, in terms of Governance of the country.
And he's suggesting that we should have more power to offer amendments in areas like secondary legislation and, indeed, on financial legislation: there's huge frustration in the Lords over issues like Social Security Bills, where we have tremendous expertise - you know, people with disability. It’s one of the things I left out of my list of people in the House of Lords, but we have members with disabilities who contribute across the range of activities - not just because they're Colin Low, who chaired the RNIB, or Tanni Grey-Thompson who was a Paralympian. I think the House of Lords is as good as any legislative chamber in the world, in giving people with disabilities the ability to be legislators, across the board. It also makes us very good in terms of legislation about disability.
But I'm moving away from that. The issue, really, is whether we could look at ways in which to change the Lords, that made it more defensible - more transparent in terms of membership and how people get there - and that allowed us to do our job, as a revising chamber, better.
And that really is the baby that's been thrown out with some of the bathwater in all the debate about House of Lords reform.
So, my formula for doing that: how we get out of the position we're in at the moment, which is that fingers have been so comprehensively burnt that we're not going to have all-singing-all-dancing Lords reform, as Chris Ballinger would frame it, in the near future.
But we have, actually, an unsustainable situation. I've said some of the things about the good work that the House does, the good people who are in it, it's utility and its importance as a check and a balance on the Executive as well as on the Lower House.
But we have an enormous problem: I got the latest figures for membership of the House from the Information Department today. Membership of the House - formal membership – is, at the moment, 800. Forty are on leave of absence - but that's 760 people who are entitled to come in and vote, and we have votes going up to 600 on important legislation. And the average attendance everyday last session: 475. The chamber was not built for 475. The offices certainly weren't built for 475. The committee structure does not accommodate 475.
When I was Lord Speaker, I went around like some demented hostess, saying: “But where will they all sit? Where will they all sit?”, and we actually have people sitting now in what used to be visitors' accommodation - on the same level as the House - who cannot participate in debate because they can't get to a microphone. Now that's no way to run a parliament. It really isn't.
So we have a problem of these large numbers - and that average attendance, 475, is way higher than it was in 1998, when the ‘paper’ membership of the House was over a thousand – was nearly 1,100 - with the hereditary peers. Because most of them – I think, around 60% - have been appointed in the last ten years. They are, by definition, active. They want to participate. So we have a real problem with the size of the House.
If the United States of America can manage with 100 in its Senate, why we really need - even in a part-time House - 800? You have to ask yourself...
The size is a real problem - and it's a problem that can only get worse because of the Coalition Agreement, which said that they would make appointments to the House in proportion to votes cast in the last General Election. Now, it was a mad pledge - it wasn't thought through.
I keep putting down these parliamentary questions that say: “Excuse me, but to which of the parties that fought the last General Election does this pledge apply?” - Because at the moment you're applying it to Liberal Democrat, Conservative and Labour.
Where are the 17 UKIP members of the House of Lords that we should have? Where are the 9 BNP members that we should have?
I might not have those figures quite right, but they are 'Ball-Park'.
You never said what the threshold was. And that formula, if carried forward, is completely unsustainable because after every General Election, you'll be adding more and more members to the House. It's costly. It's impractical. It is unsustainable. So what do we do?
Where's my shopping list of reform with a small 'r' - not with Chris Ballinger's large 'R'?
Well, I would start with a 'cap' on the size of the House - achieved over time - but we have to get down to manageable numbers. The Bill suggested 450 - it's going to be somewhere between 450 to 550 - something like that.
How do we do that?
We're going to have to do it by having a scheme for retirement. It's going to be difficult: I've been defending the 90 year olds who make a contribution. Purely on age is going to be difficult; purely on length of service is going to be difficult. Purely on attendance is going to be difficult - if you're Paddy Ashdown and you go off to Kosovo for 18 months to do a job for Government.
So we're going to have to be careful about how we do that, but we're going to have to do it.
We're going to have to find a way of dealing with proportionality. We're going to have to find a way of giving, probably to the Appointments Commission - and I'll come back to that in a minute, because too much of this is Prime Ministerial patronage at the moment. We're going to have to find a way of finding what the proportion between the parties should be in this capped House and how, after a General Election, new appointments are made proportionately - in terms of the new batch- but not in terms of trying to upset the whole apple-cart.
I believe it's very important to maintain the position that the Government doesn't have political majority in the House of Lords so that it does have to be, as Geoffrey Howe always describes it, ‘convincing a jury,’ there. You do that partly by the Cross-benchers - but it's made much more difficult, I have to tell you, in Coalition.
It was easier when there was only one party: the Labour Government lost something like 500 votes in the House of Lords during the course of that Labour Government. The Liberal Democrats actually held the balance of power, because Cross-benchers tended to split fairly evenly.
When you've got a Coalition, then you've got a much more monolithic group on the Government side. Having said that, I saw something I thought I'd never see in my political life last week: I saw Liberal Democrat members of the Coalition in the House of Lords, whipped to vote against Government policy. So, you live long enough, you see everything.
But back to my proportionality point - I do think it's very, very important that we find a way that the parties can agree on, for that.
Going forward, I think we have to have Term appointments, rather than Life appointments: 15 years is probably the basic time. If you look at the House of Commons, a lot of members of the House of Commons have been there more than 15 years and contribute a lot because of that mix. So I think I would look at some way in which there was a possibility to renew - maybe, for 10 years - but again, I'd give power to the Appointments Commission to approve that, rather than the party whips.
Which takes me to another reform, which is that creation of an Appointments Commission on a Statutory basis, with a transparent remit; with responsibility for looking at diversity, whether that was geographical, gender, background, whatever. But also, I would take away some of the patronage from the Prime Minister and Party leaders, and say to parties: you can nominate - just as you have a list of approved parliamentary candidates for the House of Commons, you can have an approved list of candidates for the House of Lords.
But the Appointments Commission, having decided on the numbers according to a proportionality formula, then says:”‘Actually, we're looking for people from the North East, we're looking for people with a teaching background, we're looking for people from ethnic minorities...” - so that it can put that overall principle of diversity into place.
And then there are the smaller things: we need to end the nonsense of the hereditary by-elections; it would be really nice to stop the wearing of the ermine.
I spend years of my life trying to get newspapers to print photographs, when they have a story about the House of Lords, of ordinary people in ordinary clothes, doing their business as legislators. They don't do it, because it’s a wonderful picture of people in red dressing-gowns. But it does reinforce all those stereotypes that, I would argue, are not true.
We need to have the ability to expel members when they have misbehaved according to the Code of Conduct, and we need the ability to bar people from coming back when they've had serious criminal convictions, which we don't have at the moment.
And my last bit of radicalism - I would end the link with the Peerage completely. There is no reason why people couldn't be appointed to a 15 year term as a member of the House of Lords and there's no reason why you shouldn't keep a peerage for the summit of the honours system for people who'd been hugely distinguished in the Arts or in Music or in Public Life, but who are not be legislators. You can split the functions.
And, in that way, you end that last vestige of principle and aristocracy that is not a reality for people's lives.
I think, if we could get on with that agenda, we would be carrying forward evolutionary change and the only reform that's been proved to work, in terms of the House of Lords and be effective: step-by-step, gradual change. We would make the House much more fit for purpose in the 21st century. And, most of all, it would allow us to start thinking about all the ways in which we could improve our performance as a legislative chamber.
How we could better hold Government to account; how we could have a Legislative Standards Committee; how we could ensure that we debate things that are very current and topical, by having a Backbench Business Committee; how we could actually scrutinise how well we have done, in legislative terms, by having post-legislative scrutiny; how we could ensure that we had evidence-taking for bills that start in the House of Lords.
So that we, actually, together with the House of Commons - and often we're like the ‘Sharks’ and the ‘Jets’: two completely different sets of animals inhabiting the same territory - we could come together to make sure that we more effectively did what Parliament is there for, and that is to hold the Government to account.
Thank you very much.
[Applause]