The first challenge for Jack Straw's senators

IN THESE fiscally strained times, all political parties are looking for election-winning policies that lack a price-tag. Against that background, constitutional reform policies are likely to feature more prominently in election manifestos. It should be no surprise, therefore, that one of the big ideas for Labour's manifesto given advance media billing over recent days has been Jack Straw's plan to finally replace the House of Lords with a democratically elected "senate".

Replacing the Lords is not a new policy for Labour; it is an old idea that has been espoused with on-and-off enthusiasm over many decades by Labour in opposition.

The abolition of voting rights for most hereditary peers during 1998 was the most radical reform of the Lords since the creation of Life Peerages in 1958. In the intervening 40 years, the fiasco of Labour's attempt to reform the Lords during the 1960s discouraged politicians from meddling with the status quo however much they were tempted.

Once, there might have been nine Lords a-leaping. But by 1998, when most of the hereditary peers were debarred, the House of Lords had grown to nearly 1,200 members, making it the largest parliamentary chamber in the western world. It is easy to forget how discredited it had become.

Many of its members, the famous "backwoodsmen" who gave the Con-servative Party an in-built majority, never attended debates and only turned up to vote when the whips asked nicely. Indeed its size belied its stature. Its democratic illegitimacy had led to its powers being successively curtailed. It lost the power to veto the Commons after 1911 and its powers to delay legislation were to be halved from two years during the 1920s to a mere year after 1949. The Blair reforms did not change that. This is because they were never intended to be permanent – they were a stop-gap pending cross-party consensus on what a second cham-ber should look like. It is a consen- sus that has never materialised. This is because the debate has been defined by the perceived self-interest of MPs and their parties.

Supporters of an appointed second chamber have claimed an elected senate would simply second-guess the Commons. Supporters of an elected senate have themselves split over the method of election: different electoral systems are likely to benefit different parties.

It will be these arguments that will dominate debate over whether Straw's proposal is a good idea.

But this will be to miss a more important point: of far greater significance than the issue of how our largely impotent second chamber is selected, is the question of what it should actually do.

That is a question that can have no adequate answer without considering the central purpose of MPs in the Commons. Thirty years ago the Labour MP and Scotsman columnist John P Mackintosh persuaded some of the greatest parliamentarians of his age to join him in a debate on the future of parliament entitled "Are MPs too ignorant to do their job?". Mackintosh highlighted how MPs had too little chance to delve into the detail of legislation and policy to either hold government properly to account or to ensure the quality of legislation. His solution, the introduction of a system of parliamentary select committees (which until the 1980s barely existed) has improved things but not nearly enough. They do not, for example, actually scrutinise legislation. That job is done by so-called "standing committees" which are controlled by the Party whips.

What few realise is that more and more legislation that the Commons does scrutinise is in effect merely "enabling" legislation, which deals with issues in the broadest of brush-strokes. It is left to "Statutory Instruments", in effect laws that don't get properly debated and voted on by parliament, to fill in the detail.

Some of these are drafted to implement EU "laws" but they have much the same role in giving effect to domestic legislation too.

It is with this process of secondary legislation that a lot of the problems lie. The Commons lacks the time to properly debate and scrutinise all this detailed law, and the Lords, which does have more time, is not, by convention, allowed to vote it down or indeed properly amend it. Parliament is hobbled, leaving ministers as the only effective quality control on legislation.

The result is that more and more Westminster legislation is ill-drafted and ill-scrutinised. The need to cater for the media's 24-hour appetite means they have much less time to focus on the detail of government than they did 20 years ago. Also, there is a growing expectation that they will be a "good constituency MP".

If the new senate is to attract politicians of expertise and insight it will need greater powers than the Lords enjoys at present. But to give it that will challenge the primacy of the Commons which no party leader appears keen to do.

If the focus of debate over Straw's senatorial plan remains entirely on making the processes by which the second chamber is selected "fair" and "modern" rather than looking at the problems afflicting Westminster government as a whole, we will miss the fundamental point that Labour's plan could actually entrench the flaws of the current system.