 Felly fod yn gweld sut yn ystod, wrth digwydd, fastan ddifu'n gweld. Rwy'n yn ymweld criticiaethchedd y cael ei hynny. Rwy'n ei ddiwedd y ddifwnod o'r einydd, oherwydd amser cofnodd, rwy'n rhaid i gael yyawn i'r lechau lleoedd a'r bar watery ar gyfer. Rwy'n rhaid iddo rhaid i'r lechau lleoedd, nid ddim yn ei ddifwyl ar gael, ac rydw i'r gyn paradigmêl Andrew Kennan, rwy'n ei edrych ar gyfer y Cymru. I'm delighted to welcome David Beamish, Carch of the Parliaments, to deliver our next open lecture for us. This series is part of a new project from Parliament's Outreach Service, which is about giving universities new resources and services to support them to learn and teach about how Parliament works. Parliament's Outreach Service is a part of Parliament. We come out and we do free training workshops and talks about how Parliament works and we run other projects like this as well to open up Parliament to the public. A couple of very brief things. We are filming the lecture today which you should have been told on your way in and hopefully if you prefer not to be filmed you've sat at the back or at the sides. The film will be available on the Parliament website quite soon after today and I will send everyone out a link to that so you can pass it on to your friends who are not lucky enough to come or watch it again because I'm sure you will want to recapture everything. David will deliver his lecture and then we're going to have a quite extended question and answer session so don't be shy during that. We'll have a few roving microphones and we should have a chance to give you all the information that you want about the House of Lords. We will stop filming at that point. You can draw your own inferences for why we're going to do that. Without further ado I'd like to introduce you to David Beamish and thank you very much for coming. Well good morning everybody. It's great to see so many of you here and thank you very much for coming. As my first slide shows my name is David Beamish and my rather uninformative job title is Clarke of the Parliament. That means I'm the head of the administration, chief executive if you like of the House of Lords. I'm afraid I started there in 1974 so I've been working here rather a long time. Hence the title of this talk, an insider's guide. Obviously I've seen quite a lot change over those years and I hope during question time you'll be able to elicit information about any aspects you're particularly interested in. I'm going to try and avoid bombarding you with facts but we do have some handouts at the back. The House of Lords information office produced some very useful materials including hot off the press, the latest figures for membership of the House but a lot of other useful material. There's also I've noticed pens from the parliamentary outreach service which do have a particular use. They've got on them the website address www.parliament.uk which I commend to you as a useful source of all sorts of information. I'm afraid because there's so much it can be a little bit hard to find your way around. But those two things mean that I don't feel I've got to sort of give you a chronicle of lots of facts and figures but do ask me for them if you want to when we get on to the question session. Just to set the scene, we're in Port Cullis House. The House of Lords occupies the far end of the Palace of Westminster. Here's Port Cullis House on the right. We're in the area at the end. We acquired ten years or so ago one serious outbuilding which, sorry, there's a view from the other side, my office being here and the chamber behind there. But one serious outbuilding, Milbank House but rather less than the House of Commons who've got this splendid building that we're in now, Port Cullis House. Milbank House is used for offices for well over 150 members and over 200 of my 500 staff. So it's as much a place of work for us as the main Palace of Westminster. Turning to the chamber, the centre of the action so to speak. There's me in the middle in my Wigan gown. If you watch Question Time, you'll find it's my job to call on the questions and there I am at the far end of the road. So that's setting the scene now. In recent weeks there's been quite a lot of publicity about the government's plans for reforming the House of Lords. So I thought with that backdrop to this talk, I ought to talk about that a fair bit and set what's going on now and what the House does in the context of what might happen in the future. So my next couple of slides are just to introduce where we've got to. Now I must apologise for the fact that the writing is spilling over. I've used our nice Gil Sands font that we use in the House of Lords and it's not loaded on this computer so it substituted a slightly bigger font which is spilling off the end but I hope you can read it none the same. Now I suppose the key message from this slide is that talk of House of Lords reform has been going on for a long time and some things indeed have happened. Till 1876 all the members were hereditary apart from the bishops. In 1911 they curtailed the powers of the House for the first time until then the House could block any act of parliament. In 1949 they reduced the powers further by reducing the power of delay from crude terms two years to one year. 1958 they introduced life peerages more generally so there's been a bit of a continuous process with perhaps the biggest single change being in 1999 when all but 100 or so of the then 750 members who had inherited their titles nearly all male I'm afraid were removed from the House and it went down from nearly 1300 members to more like 700 it's now back near the 800 mark. And there have been a whole lot of enquiries in recent years and I suppose the story of reform starts in the mid 90s when the Labour Party grasped the issue of House of Lords reform and came to power in 1997 I'll say a little bit more about this later with a commitment to remove the hereditary peers as happened in 1999 but that was the first stage of a two stage reform to replace the House by a democratically or largely democratically elected chamber something that had been envisaged as long ago as the preamble to the 1911 Parliament Act. So alongside the House of Lords bill in 1999 which removed the hereditary members though as a result of a compromise amendment 92 of them stayed on and a few more were given life peerages hence my figure of around 100 or so but alongside that they appointed a Royal Commission which started in March 1999 and reported in January 2000 and they produced as you can see quite a fat volume but I think has tended to be largely forgotten. Where they ended up with was a recommendation for a largely appointed House with a smallish proportion of elected members and I can't give you a figure because there were three different models I think the one that most members favoured had 87 elected members elected regionally and that didn't really find much favours so things have moved on since then but what's quite interesting about this report is they did a pretty thorough job and started from first principles and they looked at what you want your second chamber to do so then what powers you need to give it and finally how you should constitute it to deliver that and the interesting thing for me is that now the argument is really purely about the third of those things I think the key message there was that the first two we were somewhere near right people liked the functions that the House of Lords does which you can broadly classify as a combination of scrutiny of legislation both to tide it up and to make the Commons think again on some big issues scrutiny of the government through questions and debates and detailed study of subjects through committees and debates on the floor of the House those are sort of the main things that happen and this report had one or two suggestions for example that a reformed House ought to have a constitution committee to look at constitutional issues well you didn't need reform to deliver that and within a year or two of the report coming out we'd set one up and it's now very well established so that was their approach I'll come back to powers later because there's a bit of an issue there but as you'll be aware part of the concern of both Labour and the present coalition government has been to preserve what ten years ago and this was being debated they talked about the preeminence of the House of Commons the favourite term now is primacy and obviously once you've got an elected second chamber that becomes a little bit different because at the moment with an entirely appointed House the members recognise when it comes to the crunch that decisions of the Commons have a democratic mandate which the House doesn't have now another thing that the Royal Commission did was to have a look at other chambers, second chambers around the world to see if there were any lessons to be learnt one interesting thing was that on the whole the answer was not many the biggest single factor that second chambers had in common was that they were what the report called contested institutions in other words their nature, their future were a bit controversial and there are a number of countries that have abolished their second chambers in the past I've been embarrassed occasionally to sit in conferences in what described as the former second chamber in Budapest, Hungary abolished theirs, Sweden abolished theirs New Zealand theirs but there's still quite a lot and most of the big countries of the world have them and it's quite interesting to see how in some ways the laws is similar but in others different from other chambers I mean starting close to home here's the chamber of the House of Commons and certainly the layout, the size are reasonably close there's sort of a lot in common so we're not out on a limb with what we've got now I thought I'd just do a quick count around a few other second chambers of the world just to sort of see what's the same and what's different I don't know if anyone wants to join in and guess which they are tell me which they are today, any idea which this one is? this is the French Senate, a rather opulent chamber as you might expect from the French now by world standards that's a pretty big second chamber 348 members but that's pretty small compared with our nearly 800 instead of the number of members on the Assemble national in France it's 577 so substantially more same is true of this next one possibly even more opulent that's the Italian Senate they have 321 members against 630 in the lower house next one very similar indeed the Rajya Saba that's the upper house of the Indian Parliament 245 members as against 545 in the lower house and you'll notice all three of those have a hemicycle arrangement it's interesting in India because quite a lot of Commonwealth countries have the sort of facing each other layout that we are used to at Westminster which is sort of sometimes regarded as the model of certainly all other parliaments in the form of British Empire and you'll doubtless have heard the expression of England being the mother of parliaments it's then either the design of this committee room which is in common with most other select committee rooms is quite an interesting sort of mixture of the two we have the horseshoe table so you've got the facing each other but also an element of the hemicycle and indeed for investigative type committees which you may well see video coverage of their interrogation of witnesses on the whole we don't have the adversarial facing each other layout now here's a rather smaller second chamber anyone like to guess which this one is? give you a clue big country another clue it's got exactly 100 members see it's the sort of team photo for the US Senate a few years ago they've got a reason for having 100 members they've got a federal structure with 50 states and unlike the House of Representatives where they have 3, hang on I've got this written down 432 members they have equal representation from all the states whether it be sort of Delaware with a small population or California with 20 million plus so they've got a sort of reason to have a particular type of chamber but it is quite interesting that they get away with only 100 this one's got labels if you see the writing which you probably can't most it's even got Black Rod marked over on the left that's the Australian Senate elected but by different means from their House of Representatives 76 members against 150 in the lower house finally in my little sort of world tour that's the Canadian Senate now I've put that last because my colleagues in the Canadian Senate think that we are the sort of two most similar upper houses in the world we're both appointed they used to be appointed for life they now have to retire at 75 but an important difference they've only got just over 100 members and as you could see there's room for each of them to have an individual seat which incidentally is true of most parliaments including I think the European Parliament even though they've got 700 or whatever but a huge hemicycle we certainly haven't got room for that their House of Commons has 300 members so again much smaller than the lower house which is therefore a bit of a contrast with the House of Lords where these days the benches are rather crowded we've had about 120 new members appointed since the election in 2010 and indeed some seats below bar at the top of this picture which until 2010 were seats for visitors had to be allocated to members during quest of time in that photo they're not quite full but they often are so we do have a seriously large chamber now I suppose one reason why we're as we are is historical and it's quite interesting how striking the similarities are if you go back in time these two pictures show on the left Queen Anne in Parliament in other words the beginning of the 18th century I'm afraid it's much easier to get pictures of the opening of Parliament with everybody in their robes than of normal sittings but you get the idea that the layout is similar this is a different room in the old palace that was burnt down in 1834 this one's from the early 19th century I think it claims to be a debate in the House of Lords but I don't think the artists could have been there because they've all got robes on which they certainly wouldn't have worn except for the state opening slightly bigger room because in 1801 Ireland became part of the United Kingdom and they acquired 28 extra members from the Irish House of Lords so they moved to a different room but as you can see it's all pretty similar here is the last state opening from 2010 we get rather fed up here when the press love using pictures like this to illustrate Parliament because you only get that once a year and we've had it for two years but that will be the next sitting incidentally 9th of May next Wednesday next state opening I'm lucky I get a sort of reserved seat about there so the members who arrive early get a good seat there but I get one reserved and the commons of course stand at the bar with the speaker here and the Prime Minister here just behind his members but that is not the typical seat this one rather is one that always amuses me just again to show you how far it goes back this is Henry VIII in Parliament a Herald's drawing and the bit in the middle I've enlarged on the right to show we get slightly better treatment as clerks these days they're kneeling on the floor there with their quill pens at least I have a seat I need a laptop at the table to work from and talking of laptops here's a thing from the Daily Telegraph about a year ago which amused me the article is called Apple iPad enters the House of Lords and there's been stuff in the media recently about the extent to which iPads are entering but they've slightly messed up with their choice of photo anyone know what that photo shows it's not a normal sitting of the house because you can see all some furniture down in the foreground what this actually is it was taken in September 2009 and was one of the final judicial sittings of the House of Lords there's another bit of history that you should be aware of for most of my time working in the House of Lords one of its roles was the final court of appeal of the United Kingdom which therefore amused to be able to mention in talks is quite a significant role but here is the actual final judgments they took a photo of it on a historic occasion at the end of September before they all went off to the Supreme Court so to that extent we've lost a few members but hasn't made a significant difference obviously because of all the others appointed so going back to the House and a little bit about how things operate now you'll find sort of maps of the layout in the handouts that you can have but like the Commons the government are on one side at the bottom of this picture the opposition on the other a difference is we have a corner for the bishops over to the left of the government side and of course the Lord Speaker is not in a chair but on a wall sack there's quite a bit of a practical issue for people like me in the Commons the clerks are just in front of the Speaker and can turn around and give him advice here as you can see we're rather a long way so it tends to be loud stage whispers from me or passing notes or whatever since 2010 of course we've had a coalition government and that picture shows the leader and the deputy leader I don't know whether they deliberately warn those colours of ties because it gives you a bit of help in sorting out who to Lord Strathclyde is the Conservative leader of the House Lord McNally who's also Minister of State and the Ministry of Justice is the deputy leader and leader of the Liberal Democrats and the I've shown you this in the previous slide sorry it doesn't show but the Liberal Democrats sit over on the right of the government in fact they first went into coalition in opposition the Liberal Democrats sat near the throne end on the opposition side they moved across but then found they didn't have enough space because the front two bases were needed for the bishops so they moved after a few months to the far end a significant difference from both the House of Commons and probably pretty well much any other parliament is we have a significant number of what we call cross ventures independent members I don't know if anyone can recognise any of those here's Michael Martin now Lord Martin of Springburn former Speaker of the House of Commons who in accordance with tradition has abandoned his party allegiance next to him is Baroness Heyman who was a Labour minister in the early years of the Blair government but in 2006 became the first chief Lord Speaker for a five-year period and now she's stepped down she's on the cross benches next to her is Lord Carlswell who's a retired law lord so we only get to legal expertise for those who've now retired and finally at this end is Lord Leaming who recently became convener of the cross benches they're a sufficiently organised group with nearly 200 of them that they have a convener and there's only obviously room for about 15 of them on the actual cross benches so they also occupy a large area over here with the exception of the front bench which tends to be for former senior ministers from the Labour party so here on the right for example is John Reid now Lord Reid of Cardow and the former Home Secretary if those of you who are near might recognise Lord Banside formerly Ian Paisley and his wife in the back visible row there a number of Ulster politicians sit on the cross benches rather than join the other mainstream parties though Lord Trimble is an exception who's joined the Conservatives another significant difference from almost anywhere else is we do have an Episcopal presence 26 Archbishops and Bishops are members of the House of Lords by happy coincidence that they are photographers in the Archbishop of Canterbury no less was there he's not that regular attended but both he and the Archbishop of York and a bishop always reads prayers and on any significant debate where you might expect a church view you'll get one so that's quite a striking special feature of the House which is one of the things being debated in the context of reform I mentioned the Lord Speaker that's Baroness de Souza who had previously been convener of the cross benches until last summer and was elected as Lord Speaker but an important difference from the House of Commons almost anywhere else is that in the Chamber her role is pretty limited she will put the question at the end of a debate but she doesn't call people to speak on the whole the House hears who it wants to hear and if people are fighting to speak then the leader of the House is the person who helps to sort out the decision who to hear next it may sound chaotic at question time it perhaps is but most of the time if there's a set piece debate there will be an informal list of speakers that everybody knows who's coming next she's the second Lord Speaker I mentioned Baroness Hayman who was elected in 2006 before that we had the Lord Chancellor on the wallsack which was a slightly curious constitutional arrangement anyone remember who the last Lord Chancellor to preside over the House of Lords was there is Lord Faulkner of Thoroton and in those days you'll see he wore a full bottomed wig I still have to wear a short wig as you've seen but we decided when the speaker was elected that a wig was not right in this day and age anyone remember who followed Lord Faulkner as Lord Chancellor just thought you might be used to be reminded the first Lord Chancellor in modern times to sit in the House of Commons Jack Straw he was willing to wear the gown but not the wig looking at this picture whereas the present Lord Chancellor Kenneth Clark has gone back to the wig but sadly he doesn't get the opportunity to wear it in the House of Lords except at the beginning of a new parliament when the Lord Chancellor sits in just in front of where the Queen would sit for the state opening for the initiating proceedings now we've been concentrating on what goes on in the chamber but that's perhaps misleading so it's worth just having a couple of slides just to remind you that quite a lot goes on below behind the scenes if you like is a meeting of the committee rooms and indeed nowadays pretty much any meeting of a committee which is public will also be available at any rate with a sound feed or in some cases with a webcam www.parliamentlive old one word dot tv is the place to go to and you can not only get them live but also retrospectively this one actually is one of our more modern committee rooms and it's a bit hard to see it shows the information committee at work that's one of our domestic committees which would normally look at things like library facilities, IT, the website and here they were looking at how parliament engages with the public which is something they're increasingly interested in and I guess the fact that I'm here today is an example of how we try and do what we can to make sure people outside who wish to be informed can be next one is our communications committee again if you were close by you could probably recognise I think there's John Humphries and Nick Robinson and I think Adam Bolton being quizzed so one of the more traditional rooms overlooking the river but there's perhaps an area where the similarity between the two houses is very strong and the sort of things you often see film of typically in this room or a similar one are similar in the Lords as in the Commons so I think we'd like to think that in the Lords the interrogation is less John Humphries like shall we say you more often get witnesses being interrogated in the Commons committees than the Lords it's mostly fairly civilised now coming back to looking at reforms I mentioned it started in the mid 90s with the Labour Party and this is the sort of key thing that they put in their manifesto as an initial self-contained reform the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords would be ended by statute that was quite a clever move making such a specific statement because by then there was a well understood doctrine known as the Salisbury doctrine that the House of Lords will not throw out a bill for which the government has a mandate a democratic mandate if you like so by putting a clear statement in their manifesto and then being elected with a substantial majority they were ready to go and for phase two this was phase one for phase two they initially said they were going to appoint a committee they subsequently as I mentioned earlier decided to have a royal commission but meanwhile things carried on and during his ten years as Prime Minister Tony Blair nominated no fewer than 386 new peers to sit in the House of Lords and that compares with almost exactly the same number in the 18 years of the Conservatives so there was quite a sort of I suppose you could say with the departure of 650 hereditary peers there was some topping up to be done Gordon Brown by contrast was rather sparing and only nominated 36 but in the just under two years since David Cameron took over 120 most of them in the first year in fact now during that time as my earlier slide with the list of inquiries showed consideration has been given but not much has happened on what the House of Lords should look like in future and indeed it was in 2007 that there were votes in both houses when the House of Commons supported 100% elected second chamber and also 80% elected second chamber now the nature of these elections is something that some thought has been given to anyone know who this gentleman is Billy Bragg is the name I think he's best known as a singer-songwriter but he also has some interesting ideas about House of Lords reform I think they rather lost favour now but I just mentioned this as an example of how there are different ways of doing it his scheme was for what he called a secondary mandate it didn't mean people going out to vote separately at all basically you take all the votes cast in a general election for the House of Commons aggregate constituencies into regional groups and appoint people of party lists by reference to the number of votes cast for that party so you'd introduce an element of more proportional representation small parties like the Green Party that might not get many seats nevertheless by this aggregation get a reasonable representation in the upper house I think one reason it didn't find favour was perhaps the corollary of what I've just said that might mean that people are encouraged to vote for parties which won't win in the local constituency in the hope of getting them into the second chamber and therefore might distort the elections and for whatever reason he hasn't done as well as he might in persuading people Rellon Porth to 2010 an interesting thing about the present setup is although the proposals for reform are extremely controversial actually all three parties put stuff in their manifesto at the last election proposing reform so here's the Labour one we need fundamental reform of our politics and we will let the British people decide on whether to make Parliament more democratic and accountable in referenda on reform at the House of Commons and House of Lords so they were interested in House of Lords reform too further reform, democratic reform to create a fully elected second chamber will be achieved in stages the Liberal Democrats they've for a long time been very keen on a democratic second chamber and they're pretty clear replace the House of Lords with a fully elected second chamber with considerably fewer members than the current House and finally the Conservative one manifesto title invitation to join the Government of Britain we will seek to build a consensus for a mainly elected second chamber when of course what we've actually got is a coalition and what they came up with was a House of Lords reform draft bill that was published in May last year and that was then referred to a joint committee and their report was published only a week or two ago on the 23rd of April and got quite a splash broadly this offers 80% 300 member House the committee prefers 450 which is still a substantial reduction quite a lot of votes if you look at the record of discussions at the back of the report there were a lot of divisions and the unanimous by any means the clearest single message is that this is controversial and indeed when it was agreed that there would be a debate in the House of Lords on the subject before the end of the session they arranged to hold one last Monday they then had to spill over into Tuesday because there were 70 or more members wishing to speak that report was then from a committee chaired by Lord Richard a former Labour leader of the House in the days of the Blair Government who's there he's an enthusiast of reform does anyone recognise anyone else in that picture if anyone thought that Alan Sugar was too busy hiring and firing apprentices to take part in the House of Lords this is Lord Sugar immediately behind Lord Richard now that's where we are and where we go from here is anybody's guess the Queen's speech will tell us whether there will be an actual bill as opposed to a draft bill to reform the House of Lords in the next session people on the whole expect that there will be though there was stuff in the media a day or two ago suggesting it might be something less than a full bill because all they promise to do is put proposals forward it will undoubtedly start in the House of Commons and I'll just explain a practical reason why in a moment but media coverage of discussions in backbench conservative meetings the other week suggested it will be pretty controversial there a possible reason for that is that the question of primacy is much harder to maintain if you've got two democratically elected chambers and I think when I was young we used to think MPs wouldn't want a fully elected second chamber because their lives would become more difficult if it ever disagreed with them it would be fighting that much harder and we've had one or two bills in the last rather long session a welfare reform bill was one example where a number of Lords amendments which would have cost money were rejected by the Commons giving what's known in the trade as a privilege reason raising and spending public money for centuries being regarded as the prerogative of the House of Commons as the elected House and the Lords can offer a view but they have to yield to the Commons so any amendment that would cost money the Commons can plead privilege and reject it and that was quite controversial as it was but if you imagine an elected second chamber being told to pipe down on that account they might well say we're entitled to our view you've got the Parliament Act provisions which according to this bill will continue to say that if a bill is reintroduced in the same form in the following session in the House of Commons it can become law without the consent of the upper House if you've got that then you can use it so you could have a much more combative sort of politics and I think there is a worry that as the saying goes be careful what you wish for that that may be the outcome so if you follow these things there's a very interesting debate to be had the practical reason why this bill is bound to start in the Commons is that if you don't start it in the Commons there's no way you've got the provisions of the Parliament Act to force it through and the House of Lords having decisively rejected in votes on several occasions the idea of a mainly elected second chamber plainly it would be doomed if it began in the House of Lords we could perhaps talk more about that over questions if you want to I thought at end with just a few slides the House of Lords may be rooted in history but has done a few things to modernise you can't see it very well but I chose this slide because on the left you could see one of the television cameras we were actually first to be broadcast on television in 1985 and the Commons didn't follow until 1989 that was quite a good period for us because I think the TV companies were keen to show they were responsible broadcasters so they gave us quite a lot of coverage in those four years as a way of persuading the Commons they were fit to be allowed into the Commons as well and as I've said it eventually happened four years later now here I don't know if anyone could see what's different about this picture from the others I've shown you this was to yep actually you're right but that actually is relatively recent innovation but we now have it all the time so these screens you can see them in this room either side at each end tell people what's going on and we've always had them in the galleries and interestingly the one thing I haven't mentioned but I'm sure you're all aware you could typically tell which part of the building you're in by the colour scheme so anything in the Commons is green so the green screen there tells you what's going on in the Commons and the deep red screen there tells you what's going on in the Laws then the members decided four years ago that it would be useful for them to know what was going on as well so it helps you to see who's speaking if you don't know so we've got those but no it's the nature of the people here they're a rather different crew from usual this is actually the finals of the international schools debating competition of the English speaking union in May 2007 a Saturday afternoon the first time people other than members had been allowed to sit on the red benches I picked this picture because actually that's me with my wife and daughter sitting in the officials box watching quite a big new innovation to be at and we did it again a year later this is the UK Youth Parliament meeting in the House of Lords Chamber in 2008 we actually stole a march on the Commons there I think when Gordon Brown came to power in the context of his governance of Britain agenda he announced a proposal that the UK Youth Parliament should meet in the House of Commons Chamber and they did a year or two later but they met in ours first so we stole the march now whether that's a model of a future reform second chamber your guess is at least as good as mine but I thought that was a good note to end on so I'll stop there and open it up to questions