Lord Strathclyde (Con)

My Lords, the night is young and there is still plenty of time, so it is a real delight to move Amendment 90A in front of an audience of the Labour Party on its Benches. I have to tell noble Lords opposite that their own Front Bench has been working valiantly during the days we have spent on this Bill with near-deserted Back Benches. It has been rather depressing, in just the last few minutes, to see the Government Chief Whip going around tapping the odd folk on the shoulder and sending them home just as I was about to get to my feet and get into my stride. But that will not put me off. This amendment is not a probing amendment; it is a helpful amendment, designed at a problem that has been haunting the House of Lords for many years. My noble friend Lord Fowler, and the noble Lords, Lord Burns and Lord Butler, have referred to it this evening in looking for imaginative ways of dealing with the issue of the numbers in the House. At a stroke, this amendment finds the solution to that, and it does so in several ways. This is an amendment that is already in statute law in the House of Lords Act 1999. It is therefore extremely well precedented; we have demonstrated that it can work. Perhaps noble Lords who were around 25 years ago will remember that the then Convenor of the Cross Benches, Lord Weatherill, moved an amendment—which became known as the Weatherill amendment—to reduce the number of hereditary Peers to the 92 that exist at the moment. This amendment seeks to reduce the size of the whole House to some 600-odd people—the Bishops, incidentally, are supernumerary to that. It would do so by election—a well-tested method of reducing the size of the House that worked extremely well in 1999. Tonight, I offer it up to the Committee, not just as one amendment but as three in one. It is a solution to a problem, it is already in law, and it is already well precedented. I know that the noble Baroness the Leader of the House will find the amendment very difficult to accept, but perhaps she will indicate that she finds real attraction in finding an electoral way of reducing the size of the House without relying on the kinds of formula that so many noble Lords tried to introduce in the past. I offer it to the Committee, and I very much hope that it might be brought forward in a future Bill in due course. I beg to move.