Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I'm sorry that we weren't able to have this discussion a week ago when I would have had with me Lord Tyler, who is a member of the House rather than an official and would have been free to express views more trenchantly than I can, but I'll do my best.
Perhaps at this stage I should briefly explain my own involvement with the election process we use in the House of Lords for our Lord Speaker.
Until 2006 the Lord Chancellor, who is a cabinet minister, was ex officio presiding officer in the House of Lords, albeit in a rather ceremonial role. In June 2003 proposals were announced for initially the abolition, and later the reform of the office of Lord Chancellor, and the House of Lords was invited to choose its own Speaker. In July 2003 a select committee was appointed. I was clerk of the journals at the time and therefore served as clerk of that committee, which in November 2003 recommended the system of election which we've now used twice. The election of a Lord Speaker was then put on hold for awhile because there was controversy about removing the Lord Chancellor as presiding officer until the future of his post had been resolved. Following the passage in 2005 of our Constitutional Reform Act, a similar committee was reappointed and reported again in December 2005, basically with the same recommendation in relation to the method of election. Once again I was the clerk of the committee.
The only reason the committee gave for adopting the alternative vote was the statement that it had been “successfully used in the first by-election to elect a hereditary peer, in March 2003”. As clerk of the journals I was the official mainly responsible for running that byelection and indeed for running the first eight byelections. When the first election came in 2006, again as clerk of the journals, I was the official principally responsible for running the election, and then we used it again in 2011. By then I was holding my present post of Clerk of the Parliaments, the equivalent of Clerk of the House, and was returning officer. I've been very closely involved in both elections and in the use of the alternative vote for electing hereditary peers.
I hope this is helpful to the committee. I put in a two-page note with some background, including a rather curious history of how we have come to elect hereditary peers, which I hope will provide a basis for your questions. I won't try to summarize what's in the note, but I'll be delighted to answer any questions the committee may have.