John Slinger

Thank you, Sir John; it is a pleasure to serve under your chairship. I praise my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Dr Opher) for securing this debate. I am glad that our new Prime Minister has referred to the importance of rewiring the state. We should absolutely rewire this place, and I offer a solution. I, too, have my doubts about an elected upper Chamber, for reasons that hon. Members have already rehearsed. I think we can preserve the best elements of the other place and also improve on its deficiencies. The best elements are obviously its expertise and its ability to scrutinise and revise—although I must note that the behaviour of a minority of peers during the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was absolutely shameful. The deficiencies are its patchy expertise, an opaque selection process, a lack of legitimacy and democracy, and its unrepresentative nature when it comes to demography, geography and ethnicity. I would rename the other place and call it a senate. Fifty per cent. of its Members would be experts, the other 50% being citizen senators—a point already made by the hon. Members for St Ives (Andrew George) and for North Herefordshire (Dr Chowns). The House of Lords Appointments Commission does a good job in difficult circumstances, but we need a more transparent and open system. I would recommend that experts are appointed from across the range of sectors in our society and given a limited 10-year tenure in office. If the President of the United States can get a lot done in eight years then I am sure that expert senators would be able to do a lot in 10. The more interesting half of the upper Chamber, as I am envisioning it, would be citizen senators. They should be selected by sortition, which is a form of democracy. They would serve under the same principles as juries: they forgo their political and other biases and serve in the national interest to scrutinise legislation that comes to them from the elected Chamber, which must have primacy. Let us rewire this place, starting with the other place. Let us inject more expertise, fairly and transparently appointed, and bring people into the heart of this Parliament through a system of citizen senators to improve, not block, legislation, through the lens of national, not party, interest.