The debate over House of Lords reform needs to be based in evidence

Alan Renwick

My new briefing paper on House of Lords reform will be published by the Political Studies Association on Monday.  I will be writing here shortly after that on some of its core conclusions.  But for now I’d like to say why such a paper is necessary.  In short, it’s because the standard of debate about reform of the second chamber is currently far too low.

The main problem is that all sorts of claims are made without any evidence to back them up.  Take the two-day debate on the government’s reform proposals held in the House of Lords last month.  The former Commons Speaker, Baroness Boothroyd, made a barnstorming and widely cheered speech in which she declared:

If this draft Bill becomes law in any shape or form, it will wreck this place as a deliberative assembly and tear up the roots that make it the most effective revising Chamber in the world. Worse still, the balance between our two Houses, which has already been touched on by many of your Lordships, on which our democracy and the rule of law depends, will be lost for ever.

We can identify four concrete claims here: first, the government’s proposals would “wreck this place as a deliberative assembly”; second, the House of Lords is “the most effective revising Chamber in the world”; third, the proposals would destroy “the balance between our two Houses”; fourth, that balance is a necessary foundation for “our democracy and the rule of law”.

What is the evidence for these claims?  The first claim is a prediction, so it is impossible to know whether it is correct, despite the certainty that Baroness Boothroyd evinces.  We might hope for some evidence – or some compelling logic – to persuade us that this is the best prediction available.  But no evidence or explanatory logic is forthcoming.  The implicit logic appears to be that election harms deliberation: many peers drew comparisons between the Commons and the Lords in order to make this point.  But the mode of election proposed for the House of Lords is totally different from that used for the Commons.  Indeed, because of the long, non-renewable terms, it is totally different from the arrangements used for every other legislative chamber on the planet.  As I’ll suggest on Monday, when we start to consider these unique provisions, it becomes far from clear that the Boothroyd inference is the most plausible one.

Baroness Boothroyd’s second claim – that the Lords is “the most effective revising Chamber in the world” is a factual one, so we might hope to find firmer ground here.  But upon what is the claim based?  Has Baroness Boothroyd looked at all the other revising chambers?  Does she even know which they are?  Her claim is certainly not uncontroversial.  Comparing the upper houses in the UK, Canada, and Australia, for example, the political scientist Richard Mulgan says:

Arguably, the Australian version provides the most effective parliamentary review because the review function is carried out mainly by an elected chamber in which the government does not have a majority.

He explains that election confers a legitimacy that allows the Australian Senate to make a more significant contribution than would otherwise be possible.

Of course, it could well be that Boothroyd is right and Mulgan wrong.  But my point is that no evidence for the claim has been given, without which it is entirely worthless.

We could go through Baroness Boothroyd’s third and fourth claims and reach similar conclusions.  But I don’t want to give the impression that only the opponents of reform are at fault: supporters of the government’s proposals often commit just the same sins.

Among the few speeches made in the Lords in favour of the draft Bill, it was Lord Ashdown’s that received most praise.  One of Lord Ashdown’s core claims was that “In a democracy, power should derive from the ballot box and nowhere else”.  Really?  As Lord Lawson pointed out, we do not elect judges or the members of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, though they certainly wield considerable power.  What we require – and what no speaker in the debate provided – is an account of where in a democracy the dividing line should lie between those positions that are elected and those that are appointed.

Lord Ashdown also claimed several times that there are sixty-one elected second chambers in the world and that “in not one is the primacy of the lower Chamber challenged”.  As Meg Russell pointed out in a letter in The Times, this is simply nonsense.  According to Dr Russell’s figures, there are only twenty-one second chambers that are directly elected by the people.  Indeed, if we look just at democratic countries, there are only fifteen.  In eleven of these, the two chambers are in fact co-equal, so the notion of primacy does not apply.  There are therefore in fact only four relevant comparators – Australia, Japan, the Czech Republic, and Poland – not sixty-one.

All of this inaccuracy and bluster might be excused on the basis that the House of Lords is a parliamentary chamber, not an academic colloquium: we cannot, it might be said, expect the same standards of evidence.

But that defence is not available to the House of Lords.  Peers constantly praise themselves for the quality of their debates.  Lord Dobbs eulogized that, upon entering the Lords, he found he “had fallen into the finest place of learning that I have ever attended”.  Lord Higgins said he had “listened [during the debate] to one remarkable speech after another”.  The Marquess of Lothian (formerly the Conservative MP Michael Ancram) said the debate had been “superb”.

The degree of self-satisfaction manifested by these and many other comments is, frankly, disgraceful.  The debate was not “superb”.  Speaker after speaker made claim after claim without any substantive justification.  No one showed any sign of considering whether their perfectly natural human desire to feel good about themselves might bias their perceptions of the chamber’s qualities.

What we need is a measured debate based on critical analysis and on evidence.  The government’s draft Bill is a serious proposal borne of very careful thinking.  That does not mean that it necessarily gets things right.  But we can only come to a well grounded view on its merits if we debate it with care.  The paper that will come out on Monday aims in some small way to help achieve that goal.