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…earlier on the reform questions. So I was going to try and very quickly address three questions. Why has the House of Lords not been reformed? If we're thinking about reform, what can we learn from two chamber parliaments in other countries? And where might we go next with reform?
Robert, as an excellent historian, has actually stolen some of my best lines at the outset about how House of Lords reform is always with us;it's rare that you have a government that doesn't have a House of Lords reform agenda. And that wonderful line about the BermudaTriangle of British politics,which I believe comes from the founder of the Mile End Institute, Peter Hennessy, who always has a fantastic turn of phrase. So Lords reform is always with us and it never goes away. Why is this? I would say, one thing is important, and you also referred to this Robert to an extent, that actually the House of Lords has been reformed quite often. It's just been reformed in very small steps. So the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949, which removed the veto and then reduced the delaying power. The Life Peerages Act 1958, which allowed people to be appointed for their lifetimes without passing their titles on to their children. The House of Lords Act 1999, which removed the great majority of hereditary peers. And then the 2014 Act, which Philip Norton referred to, allowing people to retire. So we have actually seen quite a lot of reform. If we look at the House of Lords now, it is a very, very different institution to what it was at the beginning of the 20th century, when it was full of men who were inheriting their titles, and who would pass those titles on to others. It's a much more diverse institution now.
But I think that the sense that it hasn't been reformed is reinforced by some of the failed larger reforms. So we have had various attempts at large scale reform. Harold Wilson back in the 1960s - complete failure. And more recently after the 1999 reform, we had a whole stream of white papers coming from the government:we had a Royal Commission, that you referred to; we've had joint committees with both chambers thinking about what the next step should be and nothing ever happening. And why is that? At the beginning, the Royal Commission's proposals, which were for a minority elected house, majority appointed, were seen as too timid, not democratic enough. And so gradually there was a sort of bidding war upwards for how, what proportion of the house should be elected until we got to a point under Nick Clegg, where it was going to be—David Cameron and Nick Clegg— it was going to be eighty to a hundred percent elected. At which point people said, ‘No, no, no, that's too democratic. That's too legitimate. We don't want that.’So there's lots of disagreements within political parties and between political parties about the direction that we should take. One of the confounding factors I think, is that the last small-scale reform we saw in 99 to remove the hereditary peers, slightly unexpectedly, made the House of Lords feel much more confident in challenging the government. It felt more legitimate because it was more party balanced despite being entirely unelected. It caused the government quite a lot of headaches and that made them cautious about pushing in the direction of giving it greater kind of legitimacy and democratic underpinning.
What can we learn from other countries? Well, one of the crucial things I learnt when, you know, some of these things are completely unexpected and it's very good to widen your horizons in this way. The House of Lords is not by any means the only controversial second chamber in the world. In fact, nearly all second chambers are controversial and that's not just the unelected ones. It's the elected ones as well. And we're not the only people to be embroiled in an endless conversation about how to reform the second chamber. These reform debates are going on in countries all over the world with all sorts of differently constructed second chambers. So this, right, takes you to the question on what a second chamber is for. Why do we have them at all? Well I think they're really important institutions, particularly in large and complex and diverse democracies. They avoid us taking political decisions too quickly without thinking them through. They require a second thought in the policy process, and they also bring different perspectives to bear in the policy process. They bring contrast to the voice of the first chamber. But that takes you to a central conundrum about bicameralism: two chamber parliaments. If you have two chambers that agree, that seems fairly pointless. But if you have two chambers that disagree, that's clearly problematic. And it's often the second chamber that gets the blame in both cases. Second chambers are what Patterson and Mughan, two academics in a nice book published about 20 years ago, referred to as ‘essentially contested institutions’.
So if we're designing a second chamber, if we're thinking about reform, we want one which is different to the first chamber. There's no point simply replicating the first chamber. It needs to, in some sense, represent a different dimension of legitimacy, a different kind of logic to have a competing legitimacy. And what sort of thing could that be? Well, if you look around the world and you think about what might be applicable in the UK case, one alternative logic would be a logic of proportionality. So we have a majoritarian House of Commons, and people complain quite often that the electoral system isn't proportional. If you look to Australia, the House of Representatives in Australia is rather similar to the House of Commons, and they elect their second chamber on a proportional basis. That gives you a nice contrast and a nice kind of tension. That's been the basis partly for some of the reform proposals in the UK, but one of the problems there I think is that we actually have a very contested electoral system, and it does raise the possibility that the second chamber being proportional would be seen as more legitimate than the first chamber, which doesn't really happen in Australia.
Another logic is the territorial logic. We've heard a lot of talk in the UK about the possibility of a second chamber of the nations and regions that reflects devolution in some way. There are lots of examples of that around the world. The classic one is Germany, where the second chamber represents the governments. But you also got lots of other countries where the second chamber represents the parliaments, or the people of different geographic areas. That's a possibility for the UK, but our devolution settlement is very untidy and you get into awkward questions about who would represent England, how you would represent it. And also the difficult questions that you see in countries such as Spain, that the separatist parties really don't want to go along with this kind of model. So I don't think the SNP wants to sign up to a stronger kind of federal second chamber. They want Scottish independence. The third kind of logic you might apply is the one that we currently have, of expertise. I think there's a lot of room for improvement there. And an interesting example is Canada, where the Canadian Senate is also appointed by the prime minister, but its size is strictly limited. And in recent years, the prime minister has handed over his appointment powers to an independent commission, which appoints only people who are free from political party. And I think that's done the Canadian Senate a lot of good so there are things that we can learn there. You can also, of course, mix these formulas up. You can have part elected, part appointed, part territorial, part experts. And this is what some of the proposals in the UK over the years have sought to do. But the risk there is, of course, you end up pleasing nobody. So in short, thinking about the House of Lords reform requires you to confront some quite big questions about the constitution, electoral systems, territorial representation, et cetera. To do that job properly requires a big thinking process, sitting down with a blank piece of paper, some quite deep thinking, ideally, a lotof public engagement through maybe something like a citizens' assembly. That is a big job. Until then, until we've sorted that out I do think there are other things that we can do. And if you look back at the history of Lords reform, what has happened has been small, incremental steps;those have succeeded, while large-scale reform never has.
So I think the thing we need to do is ask ourselves what is the urgent next step now? It's already been referred to:the one I think is the most urgent next step is the size of the House of Lords, which is ever spiraling upwards, and the unregulated appointment power of the prime minister. We passed a rather depressing anniversary last year. It was 300 years since the first bill that sought to restrict the number of peers that could be appointed by the Monarch. I think it's well past time that we did that. Another thing that we could do is end the hereditary peer by-elections which we thinkdon't do the reputation of the House of Lords any good. But there is a conundrum here. If you ask yourself, where are the campaign groups calling for these changes? They don't actually exist. Because people see small scale reform as a threat to achieving the large scale reform that they want. When in fact, small scale reform is the only thing that has ever happened. And if you think that you should sit and wait while the House of Lords gets less legitimate and less respected because you're waiting for the perfect reform to come along, I think you're making a huge mistake. Because if we consistently see the legitimacy and the reputation of the House of Lords eroded, we are eroding the effectiveness of Parliament. Thank you.