Lord (Paul) Tyler has been a key member of the Joint Committee on Conventions, set up to examine the relationship between the two Houses of Parliament.  Alongside that process, the Liberal Democrats have been forming their response to Jack Straw's recent initiative to progress reform of the Lords.

Paul Tyler reports:

The Government’s 2005 manifesto promised that “following a review conducted by a committee of both Houses”, Ministers would “seek agreement on codifying the key conventions of the Lords.”  Unusually for a manifesto commitment on reform of the Lords, the Committee was duly set up.  It was clear that in asking the assembled MPs and Peers to codify a number of so-called ‘conventions’, Ministers hoped substantially to clip the wings of what has become quite an assertive Second Chamber. 

The ‘conventions’ the Committee was asked to examine were:

• a ban on the Lords rejecting ‘manifesto legislation’ (whatever that is);
• a ban on rejecting secondary legislation;
• a ban on the Lords keeping a Bill for more than 60 days;
• and some undefined musings about the mechanics of “parliamentary ping-pong” (where the Commons and Lords disagree over the detail of legislation).

In providing this remit, Ministers took a tin-opener to the proverbial can of worms by asking us to examine some perceived habits of the House, which cannot possibly be said to be agreed conventions.  As the Government said it its own evidence, ‘a contested convention is not a convention at all.’  Ministers hoped that the Committee would recommend that the powers of the Lords would be ‘circumscribed’, but the burden of all the evidence given to the Committee militates strongly against that prospect.

Meanwhile, Jack Straw is stirring the composition cauldron once again in a cross-party consultation paper on the future of the House of Lords.   Straw's opening gambit is for a House which is 50% elected and 50% appointed.  Liberal Democrats believe this would both mean that many party loyalists would be nominated and the half-way house would be unstable.  

We have accepted the case for a small proportion of appointees, to underpin the developing convention that the new Second Chamber should have no majority for any party.   However, once that proportion becomes more than, say, 20% it becomes inevitable that the parties will still end up nominating some appointees.  This would undermine utterly the principle that the majority membership of the new Chamber should be based on the legitimacy conferred by votes in a ballot box, not on patronage by party leaders.  The whole momentum for reforming the Lords was reinvigorated by the so called "cash-for-peerages" scandal.  How perverse that the Government answer to the controversy might not even resolve the very problem out of which it arose.

We favour a new Senate, with members elected or appointed for a fixed, non-renewable period of 12 years.  We believe this will make for a reformed Second Chamber whose members' roles will be sufficiently distinct from those of MPs that nobody can credibly argue that the much-vaunted 'primacy of the Commons' will be undermined by the advent of legitimacy at the other end of the building. 

We argue strongly, too, that the primacy of the Commons is predicated most critically on the principle that governments gain and retain their mandates from the Commons, not from the Second Chamber, however it is composed.  We also envisage that the Prime Minister and most senior ministers would still come from the Commons.  Of course, the Commons' supremacy is, in any event, enshrined in the Parliament Acts, and we would anticipate any change to these arrangements. 

We will continue to argue for a substantially-elected Senate, whose members gain their seats not by 18th Century heredity, or 19th Century patronage but by 21st century democracy.  We will insist the Second Chamber should not gain legitimacy only as a quid pro quo for consigning itself to irreversible impotence.  I am personally determined - after so many false starts -t hat we take this opportunity to create a more effective partnership between the two Houses of Parliament to hold the Government to account.