Member

Having spent 27 years in the elected House—which I found to be very largely controlled by the Executive, and in which the majority of Members are either Ministers or shadow Ministers or are seeking, often very hard, to become Ministers or shadow Ministers—I saw that patronage exerts huge control. My amendment seeks to probe the question of whether the Commons should and could benefit from more challenge, and whether Governments could benefit from a greater capacity for Parliament to hold them to account. Crucially, it would avoid the danger of moving to an elected House chosen in a way that increases the power of Prime Ministers, such as PR systems using a party list, which might lead to even more power of patronage in our Parliament. My purpose, fundamentally, is simply to ask noble Lords to reflect on the question of whether the House of Commons does its job well enough to have earned the absolute assumption that it should have primacy in our Parliament.