Lord Burns (CB)

My Lords, I am very grateful for all the comments that have been made about the Lord Speaker’s Committee’s report and in response to the amendment. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hain, who been supportive throughout this process; that has been important to ensure that we did really have cross-party support. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, raised the allocation of places. I thought I mentioned this in my remarks, and it was certainly set out in some detail in the Lords Speaker’s Committee’s report. New appointments should be allocated according to the proportion of the votes in the previous general election. That would certainly be reflected in the number of Liberal Democrats. I appreciate there would be a problem if there was suddenly a very big shift in the voting behaviour in the country—for example, if a new party emerged. Then, of course, there would be some issues about balance. The noble Baroness, Lady Finn, emphasised the whole question of whether it really matters what size the House is—it needs to come and go according to the rhythm of the place. But the reality is that without a ceiling on the House, the numbers have gone up and up over the whole period since there have been life peerages. There is no control mechanism with these arrangements. Whatever we do in the short term to bring down the numbers, if we do not have a commitment on what we want the size of the House to be and a mechanism for keeping it there, I can see nothing other than that the numbers will continue to rise.