LORDS TEMPORAL and TEMPORARY

The appointment of thirty new peers this week has raised once again the concurrent debates about the undemocratic nature of the upper house, the dubious nature of political preferment for favours bestowed, the habit of successive governments of packing the benches with their placemen and women, the stalled nature of Lords reform and the absurdity that the chamber is nowhere near sufficiently capacious to seat every member on those occasions when most of them wish to attend simultaneously (for instance, at the state opening of parliament).

It will be no matter of surprise to my regular readers if I inform them that I have a solution to these problems that is practical and, as befitting the thrust of this blog, commonsensical. Here is that solution.

The Lords host the state opening

There remains a great deal to be said for a public body to which useful members of society may be appointed and where such people may avail themselves of a public platform and indeed of a vote on matters that are important to them. Ed Miliband’s raising of Doreen Lawrence to the peerage has been widely hailed and is considered a valuable widening of the upper house’s constituency far beyond the narrow considerations of party advantage. Many more of the new additions, however, look like unmerited rewards for donations and for party line-toeing.

So let party leaders continue to raise worthy individuals to the peerage, though under much stricter conditions – I will return to those. Meanwhile, let all members of the upper house submit themselves to election in the following manner. Once every five years – preferably at a mid-point between general elections – let all members of the upper house (including the Law Lords and the Lords Spiritual, but with exceptions that I will explain) be listed on a website, each one illustrated with a standardised face-on portrait and each permitted a short statement (with a strict word limit) as to why she or he should remain in the house.

Their party allegiance (or crossbench or other status) would be listed, along with their full baronial title and, where appropriate, a name by which they are more widely known. Their attendance and voting records should also be listed. Those not required so to submit themselves would be those peers recruited since the previous Lords ballot, so that no one would be obliged to submit to a vote whose service had been of less than five years.

Doreen Lawrence, now a baroness

Voters would be allowed to place a vote against, say, up to twenty individuals on the list. Then the votes would be counted and the members whose names appeared among, say, the bottom one hundred of the list would lose their seats. The number being rejected could be adjusted until the composition of the house was more suitable, though the five-yearly vote ought still to eliminate a significant number of the least popular members. During the years between votes, party leaders would be permitted to appoint new members, but without exceeding the overall limit that has been agreed and – a crucial point, this one – without altering by a single member the balance of allegiance that was achieved in the previous vote.

To make the upper house an elective assembly in this unprecedented manner has many strong points. Peers would know that they do not enjoy a ticket for life and that they will need to be seen to be useful members. The elections would not be the costly affairs that conventional localised ballots cannot avoid being; indeed, there is no advantage to be had in making the lords a second chamber of constituency-representing delegates. People who would be ornaments to the house but who have no appetite for jumping through the cost, time, media and abuse hoops that conventional election campaigns impose will still be able to enter the house easily and through a merit that may not be perceived by a wide public (because of specialist expertise, for instance); five and more years in the Lords would allow them to make their mark if they are so minded and to earn continued membership.

The upper house full and in session

Voting via the internet is a practical solution to the lack of local campaigning and local ballot boxes, but of course it would have to be rigorously policed. Voters would need to register on the election site, though they ought then to be able to vote anonymously. Some mechanism would have to be set up to prevent multiple voting, not so much by large numbers of people as from the same computer.

So it would have to be contrived that no more than (say) twenty votes (for twenty different candidates) can be cast from one source. No doubt every computer at Tory Central Office would be used to cast twenty votes for Tory peers, but these votes would be counter-balanced by the votes cast from the other party HQs. In any case, it would be a fine judgment how to configure dozens of votes among, in the Tory party’s present case, nearly 230 candidates. The size of the field would help to neutralise attempts to pack the vote.

This solution would be cost-effective, democratic (certainly more democratic than the arrangements obtaining now) and useful in challenging peers to justify their sinecures. But it retains – and indeed enhances – those characteristics of the upper chamber that make it an important foil for the Commons. I commend this proposal to the house.