Lord Kakkar (CB)

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, and, in so doing, join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, for the very thoughtful way in which she introduced this important report and the work of her committee. I want to follow the noble Lord, Lord Norton, by building on the question of appointments—I declare a former interest as chair of the House of Lords Appointments Commission. In the proposals that your Lordships are considering today, it is clear that on 8 July 2029 as many as 135 vacancies could be created. From recent experience, we have seen that some 50% of all Peers appointed by a Prime Minister are appointed in the first two years of an Administration. There might well be a temptation and a perceived opportunity for a new Prime Minister to make a substantial number of appointments to your Lordships’ House. The point has been well made that this will have an impact on achieving the objective of reducing the size of your Lordships’ House and may have important implications for the effectiveness of the scrutiny that your Lordships’ House can deliver. There is another, more important, fundamental constitutional risk: a jeopardy associated with continuing to provide the unfettered opportunity for more appointments to your Lordships’ House. This rests on Clause 2(1) of the Parliament Act 1911, which reserves for your Lordships’ House a unique, retained veto over measures passed by the other place to prevent the other place passing a measure that would extend the life of a Parliament beyond five years. It is the only veto that your Lordships’ House retains. The importance of this matter was considered in a case by your Lordships’ Appellate Committee at the time—the case of Jackson v Attorney-General—which examined whether the Parliament Act procedure could be used to force the House of Lords, despite that restriction in the 1911 Act, to ensure that a measure could be passed to extend the life of a Parliament beyond five years without the consent of your Lordships’ House. At that time, your Lordships’ Appellate Committee decided by a majority that this measure could not be applied to overcome the restriction in the 1911 Act. The only way that a Prime Minister, having a majority in the other place, could proceed with extending the life of a Parliament beyond five years would be to ensure an effective majority in your Lordships’ House. Therefore, the independence of your Lordships’ House is absolutely critical. It could be argued that that could have happened at any time since the passage of the Life Peerages Act 1958, but we are now in a process of continuously changing the composition of this House, in particular the way and the number of Peers who might leave it at any given time. It must therefore be a real concern that we take ourselves to a position where there could be an effective majority in your Lordships’ House matching the majority in the other place, and a Government who decided to do so could pass a measure extending the life of a Parliament beyond five years. In so doing, they would deny the electorate the opportunity to give their view on the performance and behaviour of that Government, potentially for an indefinite period. It might be argued that the courts could intervene at that stage and protect democracy. The problem is that Article 9 of the Bill of Rights 1689 would potentially prevent that happening because the measure had been passed on the proper bicameral procedure. I ask the Leader—in considering all the measures carefully laid out in the report led by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton—how constitutional safeguards will be maintained so that we do not find ourselves in a position where an effective majority might be secured in your Lordships’ House in such a way that a Government might proceed as I have described.