 Neremi, ddweud i chi'n ddweud i chi'n ddweudio ar y dyfodol a ddweudio gwirio i chi gennych'i gael gyda'i. Mae'r ffordd yn y ddweudio ar y dyfodol. Mae'n ddweud i chi'n ddweudio'n ddweudio polymonau ar gyfer y dyfodol, lle mae'r ffodol yma yn ddweudio. Felly, mae'n ddweud i chi i gael y bydd. Mae'n ddweud i chi'n ddweudio i chi'n ddweudio. especially 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 Hennessy, 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 100 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 and 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 anger, 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 1960s got into trouble. He was persuaded to pull the Parliament number two bill as it was from the House of Commons. You know it was that great Enoch Powell-Michael Fort 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 you know 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 a hundred years ago both in terms of its powers not quite a hundred years I'm talking about just before the 1911 Parliament Act and those changes. Whereas 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 which was 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, life of a Parliament was in fact 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 two 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 Pierages Act, the House was apart from a few law lords, bishops, entirely a hereditary house. There were no women, the average attendance actually fell below 100, it was dying on its feet, it was uninfluential 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 Pierages 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 Pierages. In fact it was what was then considered a minor reform added later in 1999 with the expulsion of the vast majority of the hereditary 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, the Appointments Commission actually has appointed 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. We have in terms of ethnicity we have a higher almost double 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. 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 we freeze 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 you 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? All those things. I can bust pretty well every one of those stereotypes. I have a difficulty with old. But old in a way comes with Senets, with second chambers of a particular sort. It comes from the Latin, Senets, old man. If you're looking for second thoughts from second chambers you're looking from 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. So we do have some young members in their 30s and early 40s. But it's also fascinating to listen to people in their 90s who, my God, if I have the marbles of Professor Lord Walton of Detchent when I'm 90, I shall be a very happy camper, I tell you. An eminent neurophysician, ex-chairman of the GMC, 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 three 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 actually what we have seen was one of the arguments in 1999 about the change was that actually you would end up with an appointed house that had no credibility and therefore that had no contribution to make to Parliament. In fact the opposite has happened because the range of backgrounds 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 trade unions or in education or in social work or in nursing or in medicine. Gosh, I think what I said was that impressive. Now do you want me to stop Naomi? Very good. That we have developed a house of expertise and in some ways of independence. Independence that comes not only because the house has around 20% of members who take no party political whip. The cross benches, the independent peers. 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 cross benches 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. So the don't rock the boat, don't vote against this, 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 actually punishment? Very few carrots, very few sticks, which means that people tend to vote more according to their views and less rigidly on party lines. Brilliant. We're back in business. I hope we're not going to have that all the time though. 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. And for those of you who want to become as anoraki as I am on House of Lords reform was 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 onto that in a minute. But his conclusion, which I thought was interesting, was the sense that the 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 nevertheless been achieved. The House of Lords, 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. Well 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. And 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 pose the question in a moray 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 yes 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 I think 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. 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 will 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% all right. You've already lost your battle of principle and now you're talking practicalities. Other 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 its 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 you know it is intended to substitute for the House of Lords as it is 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 it into delay make sure that finance bills were completely out of it finished 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 of congratulations from the Queen. It's 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 favor 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 be 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 the next time we come to a crunch issue between the Commons and the Lords why should I back down. 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 program. So MPs began to worry that the primacy of the House of Commons could not be intellectually defended or practically enshrined by clause two 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 of the great weaknesses of the bill so we get to the position that this issue about primacy becomes 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 across the world is that you know it's like Tolstoy and Happy and Unhappy families all lower houses are the same you know they're all elected representation by population simple straightforward 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 you know in in in federal countries in the United States in Germany you can see what the second house is there for much more difficult. Second 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 that 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 so I don't 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 what do we gain we gain democratic legitimacy which you know and I respect those who who for whom that is the holy grail and the important thing. But you cause a lot of other difficulties and you also run the risk of you know completely by accident the House of Lords doesn't 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 called be movie politicians some of whom are tremendous you know the Nobel Prize winners the absolute experts in their fields. 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 world society you've got people who are doing stem cell research people who can actually contribute on nanotechnology or whatever the next issue that's going to be presented to us. You do because of the the the convention that's grown up that the government 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 in the House of Commons in our system the government will always have a majority in the House of Commons 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 House of Lords dealt with something like 10,000 amendments in the last session. Some of those were two 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 Law how the House of Commons scrutinizes 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 you know reversing a policy changes but actually the getting it right the listening to the pressure groups listening to the academic sector listening to business the 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 infuse the population about change and about elections because it's all been posited on yes there's 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 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 Bale failed. Not on principle 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 that's a railroading Ramroading whatever the word is it through the commons under a timetable motion. 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 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 party politicians get there. And I was really interested that in the House magazine this week Jeff Rooker who believes in Jeff has always been Suei Generous he was a wonderful member of the House of Commons he was a wonderful minister in the Lords always said it was much more difficult being a minister in the Lords than it was in the commons because in the commons you can get away 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 today that 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 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 is broken. But basically you can't amend secondary legislation. That's a very bad position actually for 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 huge frustration in the Lords over issues like social security bills where we have tremendous expertise people with disability 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 Lowe who chaired the Royal National Institute for the Blind or Tanny Grey Thompson who was a Paralympian. People who 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. I'm moving away from that and 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 it. 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, its 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, 40 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. That, the average attendance every day in the last session, 475. 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 about 200 of which, 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 1100 with the hereditary peers because most of them, I think around 60%, have been appointed in the last 10 years. They are by definition active. They want to participate. So we have a real problem with the size of the House nowhere in the world. You know, 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 at 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 we should have? Where are the nine BNP members that we should have? I might not cut those figures quite right but they're ballpark. 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, 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. We have to get down to manageable numbers. The Bill suggested 450, you know it's going to be somewhere between 450, 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. You know, I've been defending the 90 year olds who make a contribution. Age, 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 Ash down and you go off to Cosovo 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 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 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 that position that the government doesn't have a political majority in the House of Lords so that it does have to be, as Geoffrey Howell describes it, convincing a jury there. You do that partly by the cross benches, but it's made much more difficult, I have to tell you, in coalition. It was easier when there's only one party. Labour Party, 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 benches 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 never thought I'd 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 transparent remit with responsibility for looking at diversity, whether that was geographical, gender, background, whatever. But also I would take again taking away some of the patronage from the Prime Minister and from 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 a list of approved candidates for the House of Lords. But the Appointments Commission, having decided on the numbers, when the numbers according to proportionality formula, that the Appointments Commission then says actually we're looking for people from the northeast. We're looking for people with a teaching background. We're looking for people from ethnic minorities so that it can put that overall theory and 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 spent years of my life trying to get newspapers to print photographs when they had the story of the House of Lords of ordinary people in ordinary clothes doing their business as legislators that 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. And 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 mass 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 you wanted who'd been hugely distinguished in the arts or in music or in public life but who were not to 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 prove 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 back meant 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 started in the House of Lords so that we actually together with the House of Commons and often you know we're like the sharks and the jets, two completely different sets of animals inhabiting the same territory, how 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.