Stephen Pollard
when Lords buying support. So, for example, any number of nonentity MPs were kicked upstairs into the Lords to make space for favoured candidates to take over their Commons seats.
Some of the new appointments are well merited and add greatly to the quality of the second chamber. But if you take a look at the list of peers, I’d be astonished if you’d ever heard of at least half of them.
And not just heard of but heard from. Because another scandal is how many peers take the title (and, in some cases, the money) while saying or doing nothing.
Take Baroness Mone. Appointed by David Cameron in 2015, entrepreneur Michelle Mone has attended on 89 of the 457 days in which the Lords has sat since. She has only spoken three times.
But she’s not been so shy about taking the money on offer, claiming more than £3,000 for turning up at the Lords 11 times in the first six months of this year.
And she’s been even less shy about using her title Baroness Mone of Mayfair OBE as she jets around on business.
It’s certainly important to have people with business experience in the Lords but they do actually have to be present to make a difference.
As for politicians who want to become a peer: the evidence is that you should join the Lib Dems. In 2015 the party’s Commons representation crashed from 57 MPs to eight. But in the Lords 11 Lib Dems were appointed life peers. They now have 94.
Or you could just try a bit of hypocrisy. In 2008, Tony Blair’s former deputy prime minister John Prescott said unambiguously, “I don’t want to be a member of the House of Lords. I will not accept it.” Two years later, he became Baron Prescott, of Kingston upon Hull in the County of East Yorkshire.
Almost everyone agrees that there is a vital role in Parliament for a second chamber.
In theory, that’s what the House of Lords is – a revising chamber which looks at legislation
IN ITS report the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee tries to get a grip on this. As they put it: “Addressing the size of the Chamber is now an indispensable imperative. Addressing the size of the House of Lords is an urgent political priority which must not be delayed.”
Its other recommendations are modest, such as scrutinising appointments before they are confirmed and trying better to “reflect the make-up of the UK, in areas such as gender, region, ethnicity and religion”.
But modest as they are, they are also radical – because they would turn the Lords into a functional arm of our democracy and change its character completely – for the better.
Anyone not involved in the gravy train can see this. But the problem is that prime ministers of all parties have, since Tony Blair, relied on appointments to the Lords as a reward. And without determination from the top, nothing will change, however necessary and obvious.
It’s vital that the Lords changes. We need a revising chamber that is suitable for the 21st century. But I wouldn’t bet even a tenner on that happening in the foreseeable future.