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Baroness Smith of Basildon
That this House takes note of House of Lords reform.
The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Smith of Basildon) (Lab)
My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to open today’s debate on Lords reform. It is an issue that is often discussed and debated by noble Lords across the House, because we take great pride in our responsibilities as a scrutiny and advisory Chamber. Through tabling this important debate, I welcome the opportunity to listen to the considered views of your Lordships. That follows the engagement I have undertaken since I became the Leader of your Lordships’ House and, indeed, previously as Leader of the Opposition.
Like other noble Lords, I value the work that we do, and it is of great pride to me to have been appointed as Lord Privy Seal and Leader of your Lordships’ House. It is not a role I ever anticipated holding when I was introduced to this place 14 years ago. I also recognise that this position is different from others in Cabinet because, as the Leader of the House of Lords, I am the Government’s representative in this Chamber but, just as importantly, it is my responsibility to ensure that our voice is heard in government. We—that is, your Lordships’ House—are all custodians of the principles and customs that make this House unique. I take the responsibility of representing the interests of the Lords seriously. I also consider that, at its best, this House is not just complementary to the other place but an asset. It is because of my respect for the work we do that I share the view that this House should continue to evolve and is not merely preserved in aspic. I want to ensure that we are seen as a part of our Parliament that is both highly relevant and highly regarded.
We offered this debate today not just because of the legislation in the other place but because the Government’s manifesto commitments in this area have brought about a renewed focus, inside and outside the House, on Lords reform more generally. There is growing consensus on the need for a smaller Chamber, with a greater focus on active contribution and which is more representative of the country we serve. My sense is that many share that vision. Of course, there are a range of views on how those objectives might be achieved. That is why I have facilitated today’s debate: to provide an opportunity to discuss these issues and to listen to the views of this House. I am grateful to those noble Lords who have already shared their thoughts and ideas with me.
We are more than aware that, when it comes to meaningful reform of this place, there is a track record of stagnation and stalled attempts. There are those who argue that we should not do anything until we do everything but, with no common consensus or agreement on what “everything” means, we have ended up doing nothing. That is why a more incremental approach is an appropriate way forward.
It is why the Government introduced the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill, delivering on the first of our manifesto commitments, to remove the right of the remaining hereditary Peers to sit and to vote. This ends the transitional arrangements and completes part of the reform that we started a quarter of a century ago. I want to be very clear that this in no way diminishes the respect for individual colleagues or the recognition of the valuable contributions that many hereditary Peers and their predecessors have made.
I admit that I am slightly uncomfortable about singling out individuals, but I am sure we can all agree that, in particular, the noble Earl, Lord Howe—
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
I will finish the sentence. The noble Earl, Lord Howe, has been a distinguished servant of this House, serving on the Front Benches in government and in opposition since 1991. I also pay tribute to the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, who has diligently served as Convenor of the Cross Benches and as chair of various committees of this House. These noble Lords are just two of the many hereditary Peers who have served the House so well.
The Bill that is due to complete its passage through the other place later today is very specific and focused. It will come before this House to be scrutinised in due course. The Government set out plans for further reforms to the House of Lords in their election manifesto. As I have said, there is an acknowledgement across the Chamber that the House has become too large. At almost every meeting I have had with noble Lords, this has been raised. I have had very thoughtful conversations with the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and with a number of other colleagues, on this matter quite recently. That is partly why our election manifesto referenced a retirement age.
That manifesto included a commitment to strengthen the circumstances in which disgraced Members can be removed and to introduce a new participation requirement, to encourage active participation among Members to support our scrutiny and revising functions. There was also a long-term commitment for an alternative second Chamber that is more representative of the nations and regions.
Given the nature and potential scale of these reforms, the Government will consult further. We will continue to listen to and engage with the views of the House on these proposals; that is why we are having this debate today. I appreciate that there is a range of views, as the manifesto has focused minds on this issue. I think I am right in saying that our manifesto may have been the first to recognise the importance of the work of your Lordships’ House. How we deliver these commitments is important. Some have preferred to express their views to me privately, while others did so during the debate on the King’s Speech. Today’s debate is a further opportunity to hear those views.
In addition to points that noble Lords wish to raise, I would welcome comments on a number of other issues, including how we ensure that all those who sit in this place participate sufficiently in our proceedings. We all have an instinctive view of what participation should involve—and a number of suggestions have been made to me of what that should be—but these views can quite reasonably differ from one noble Lord to another. Obviously, not everybody has to be here all day every day, but we all recognise and expect a commitment to the work of this House. Leave of absence is another area where we can consider whether the rules are currently fit for purpose or there is a case for change.
I would appreciate views on how the House welcomes incoming Members and treats departing Members following retirement. For example, we should consider how we can best introduce new colleagues to our work. We may also wish to consider how best to recognise the contributions of outgoing Members and how to ensure that former Members who wish to do so remain connected to each other and to the House more generally. I have already sought opinions from a number of colleagues as to whether we should set up an association of former Members, as they have in the other place.
I have always felt that this House is at its best when noble Lords, using their experience and professional expertise, often of national or international standing, work together to scrutinise and improve legislation for the betterment of the country and the people we seek to serve. This House has deep historical roots. Our role of scrutinising and revising legislation, holding the Executive to account, has developed over centuries. Change has not always been legislative. This is a House that is also built on norms and conventions, such as the Salisbury/Addison convention and the convention not to veto secondary legislation. There is widespread agreement on the ongoing importance of these conventions, which are recognised and respected by all Members.
It is important that this House continues to reflect on our role as the second Chamber in a legislature that continues to evolve and adapt to reflect the country we serve. It is a collective endeavour to ensure that Members enter this House with the desire to make a valuable contribution and that they are supported to play an active role. We need to ensure that the House is able to replenish the breadth and depth of skills and expertise, and, crucially, that newer Members are given the opportunity to develop their skills and experience as legislators. There will be further discussion about these issues, but the central question is about purpose. How do we ensure that this House can do its best work in complementing the role of the elected Chamber?
Although we should always avoid the temptation of change just for the sake of it, that does not justify endless stagnation or drift. There are careful balances on all these issues. I look forward to hearing what will probably be a range of views and suggestions. I am confident that some will be very ambitious and that others will perhaps be more cautious, but I am sure that this will be a spirited and interesting debate. I hope it will also be useful. I beg to move.
Lord True (Con)
My Lords—or perhaps in this new era I should say, “Fellow working people”, because we are fellow hard-working Peers—I am grateful to the noble Baroness the Leader of the House for the opportunity of this debate. It was the right thing to do, and I am grateful for the way she opened it. Like her, I will listen carefully to everything people say. However, it is regrettable that the business managers in another place have chosen to schedule the passage of a Bill to expel 92 of our fellow Peers on this very same day. How much better, I submit, would we be governed—even, candidly, under Governments in which I served—if those in another place sometimes listened to the advice and opinions of those in this one before they rushed into action.
In my response to the gracious Speech, I spoke about the plans that the Labour Party sprang—that is probably the word—on your Lordships in its manifesto. I need not repeat all I said then, but I stand by it. The plans have three broad characteristics. First, they are sweeping. Overall, between the excepted Peers and those over 80 in 2029, they would remove 375 Members of your Lordships’ House and 60% of the independent Cross-Benchers, and they would increase the weight of prime ministerial patronage.
Secondly, the plans are ill-thought-through. There is no clear statement about what the Government want this House to be or to do, although there is a declaration that the replacement of the whole House is the intended destination, with broad hints that the new House should be an elected one.
Finally, frankly, they are partisan in intent. That is quite legitimate, whether we like it or not. The aim of the Bill now in another place is partisan—it is to remove 88 Peers who do not align themselves with Labour and four who do. We should at least be honest about that. Declared principle cannot mask deep political purpose.
Aside from the partisan, another aspect is notable. It will be unpleasant and some may not like to hear it, but there is no evading it: the execution will have to be done at close quarters, brushing shoulders in the Lobbies as we go to vote for the removal of much-respected colleagues. You can just imagine it—seeing the Long Table and sidling down the other side to avoid sitting next to a colleague we have just voted to expel. That is not who we have ever been. It is not who we are.
There can be no doubt that the Bill being discussed in another place will cause some great hurt, and it will almost inevitably issue in conflict—conflict that may well spill out in quite unpredictable directions. All that is avoidable; there must be a better way. If the pretext for throwing out colleagues who are here under the 1999 Act or those born in the 1940s is not, in fact, partisan, it is often said to be—and has been said again today to be—related to numbers. As noble Lords know, I am not a believer in the numbers crisis; in the quarter century since 1999, there have been only 40 Divisions in the House where more than 500 Peers were here to vote. The average vote in whipped Divisions so far this Session has been 283, with a maximum of 419. Average daily attendance has never surpassed 500 in any Session in the post-1999 House—so call me a sceptic on overcrowding as a pretext for expulsion.
Even supposing that I am wrong and that we should aim for the number of 600, which many have advocated, would any sensible institution wanting that do it by expelling some of the most hard-working and effective Members in its ranks? How will that improve our effectiveness? Out among the 1999 Act Peers are the Strathclydes, the Kinnoulls, the Addingtons, the Howes, the Vauxes—I do not know how you say the plural of Vaux—the Courtowns and the Grantchesters, and out among those born in the 1940s are the Jays, the Blunketts, the Howards of Lympne, the Reids and the Winstons. These are all Peers with a proven capacity for hard work over many years, and there are dozens more on all sides.
If numbers are the issue, there must be a more discerning way than this. Of course, as I have said before, I believe that the fundamental answer is convention—the route that enabled Clem Attlee, outnumbered 10 to one here, to transform Britain for Labour in the 1940s. Perhaps participation is another route, as some have argued—although I would hate to see a House where worth was measured in quantity rather than quality of speeches. My problem is that Labour has never explained how its participation requirement would work and who would measure it—and the noble Baroness did not do that today. When she sums up, will she say what measure of participation was planned when Labour wrote this into its manifesto? She must at least know that. I can see that, if one wanted to reduce numbers, participation would potentially be a more fruitful basis for consideration than removing the best and most active. But both on exclusion—all exclusion—and on participation, it is clear that we would benefit from further reflection and discussion.
This great House is no longer the deposit of ages in which hereditary Peers once inherited a right to sit; it is a House that we created, with massive majorities in both Houses, by an Act of Parliament in 1999. It was created then with an understanding that it should subsist until agreement on reform of the House should be reached. No such reform proposal is on the table. Of course, the Labour Party has a political right to remove former hereditary Peers and people born in the 1940s, but I believe it has a constitutional responsibility to say what follows. It did not do so in 1999 and still has not done so today. All we have is an indeterminate commitment to replace all your Lordships with an alternative House. The implication, clearly stated by the Prime Minister in December 2022, was that this should be “democratically elected”. Sir Keir then said that it should be done quickly. There has been some back-pedalling since, with the Leader of the House back-pedalling particularly furiously—particularly, I understand, in private conversations. But that is still the proposition before us in Labour’s manifesto.
As it happens, having fought seven elections as a candidate in my life and, I regret to say to my Liberal colleagues, having won them all, I have no particular issue with the election principle, and nor does it trouble most other advanced democracies. But there are many, perhaps a majority in this House, who do not want to see that and who believe that nominating Peers under the 1958 Act is the most effective way to constitute a revising Chamber. I think everyone, including me, who knows and loves this great House thinks that, curious though it may seem to others, this House of experience complements the House of Commons and does the vital job that the other place has relinquished over time of scrutinising and revising legislation. Would the exclusion of these Members in the two proposals put forward by the party opposite improve our ability to perform that role? I doubt it.
Whatever one’s view, we can surely agree on one thing: this House is part of our sovereign Parliament and a vital, indeed profound, part of our ancient parliamentary constitution. It has protected many liberties and safeguarded countless citizens from hasty and ill thought-out law. Do we alone not deserve to be safeguarded from hasty and ill thought-out law? Should we not know the details of the fate the Government intend for our House and our Parliament before we begin to vote parts of it through? Should constitutional reform on the scale involved in Labour’s proposals—the progressive purging of this House and its planned replacement by we do not know what—not be the subject of cross-party consideration, whether in a Joint Committee or another consultative process? I submit that it should.
Labour says, “Trust us. Once you agree, albeit with kind words, to remove the noble Earls, Lord Kinnoull and Lord Howe, and 90 others like them, then we will discuss with you. We will discuss with you abandoning our manifesto promise to throw out everyone born in the 1940s at the end of this Parliament. Trust us. If you behave and ease the passing of the 92, then we will consult you on whether we will really implement our manifesto commitment to replace everyone in this House with an alternative Chamber”. What kind of constitutional principle or good practice is that? I am not the totally trusting kind as were, perhaps, the farmers, small businesses, savers, charities, nurseries, shopkeepers and care homes. They were the trusting kind and, in a matter of months, they found their trust broken by the Labour Government. I think we should see the colour of all Labour’s constitutional money before we accept some of its silver.
There must be a better way, a way that satisfies the wish of the Labour and Liberal Democrat Benches to prevent anyone coming here in future under the 1999 Act. This has always been a House of consensus, compromise and convention. When the Irish peerage was removed from your Lordships’ House in 1922, those who were already Members were allowed to stay. When the appellate jurisdiction legislation was passed in 2009, existing Peers under the 1876 Act were allowed to stay. That is why we continued to have among us the late lamented Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood or the continuing presence of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, and others. The House denied a category of Peer future entry but retained its valued Members, valued their experience and continued to benefit from it. That gradualism, I submit, and not the guillotine, is the House of Lords way. It has served us before and it could serve us again.
After the election, the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and I made an offer, in the spirit of compromise, that the process of by-elections under the 1999 Act should be suspended for this Session, given the Labour Party’s mandate. We have both been criticised for that by some in our groups, but it was intended to recognise the mandate of the new Government to close the gate to new entry under the 1999 Act, but also to create space for constructive discussion about a consensual way forward in which the Government could be assured that their programme would not be disrupted and in which the House would retain the benefit of its best.
The response so far from the party opposite on the 92 has been to offer no compromise and to stampede to build a guillotine. They are at it down the Corridor as we speak. We can surely do better. What guarantees that a Government’s programme passes is not numbers but convention. As I said on the gracious Speech, I thought it wrong that this House defeated the last Government on record numbers of occasions and with record rounds of ping-pong. Equally, I would think it wrong that the Labour Government should suffer in such a way. In normal circumstances, it would be wrong under this Government.
Lord Fowler (CB)
I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord. He has gone on for a long time about consensus. I agree with him on that. Will he therefore explain why he did not support the very good 2016-17 report of the noble Lord, Lord Burns, which would have reduced numbers on a two-out, one-in basis and was approved by the House in a debate? That was consensus. Why did he not support it?
Lord True (Con)
I am speaking of numbers at present. I have addressed that question. The noble Lord understands the principles of collective responsibility; I was a member of the Government and successive Prime Ministers—the noble Baroness, Lady May, and her successors—all made it clear that the Government could not assent to those proposals. Our urgent need is to address the future of this House and potential threats to it. There is shared ground across the House to find the best way out of this impasse which will secure the continuation of service to it of the best people here.
I have been slightly distracted. I will reach a conclusion. When I was Leader, I reached out, as did the Convenor of the Cross Benches, in a valuable series of papers on conventions, to suggest discussions to refresh the conventions that guide this House—as the noble Lord, Lord Cunningham, did in 2006—to preserve your Lordships’ freedoms and give security to all Governments. I believe that to be the best course. Once again, I ask the Leader, who has intimated that this might be possible, and perhaps those in Whitehall behind her, to move off the narrow ground of composition and on to a broader discussion about how we keep the best of this House and how the conduct of His Majesty’s Government will be guaranteed by convention, as it properly should.
Lord Newby (LD)
My Lords, politicians and political parties are often accused of being inconsistent and opportunistic. It is sometimes difficult to rebut such charges, but on House of Lords reform these Benches have been steadfastly consistent for over a century. I cite as supporting evidence the preamble of the Parliament Act 1911, passed under a Liberal Government, which states:
“And whereas it is intended to substitute for the House of Lords as it at present exists a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis, but such substitution cannot be immediately brought into operation”.
That stated policy of having an elected second Chamber has been Liberal, and now Liberal Democrat, policy for the intervening 113 years. It is arguably the longest-lasting piece of party policy that has never been implemented, and it is still a live issue. Sadly, the assertion that such substitution cannot immediately be brought into operation remains as true now as it was in 1911.
I reassert the Liberal Democrat position that the House of Lords should be elected. It should be elected on the basis that, in a democracy, laws should be passed by people chosen by the people to act on their behalf. It should be elected because the unelected House leads to a geographical imbalance of membership, in which London and the south-east are greatly over- represented, and the north, Scotland and Wales are underrepresented. It should be elected because it would then almost certainly be more representative of the ethnic diversity of the United Kingdom. It should be elected because it would then be more politically representative. It would contain members of the SNP and almost certainly more members of the smaller parties.
Lord Newby (LD)
Even Reform—what arrogance that we think that, because we dislike a party, it does not deserve to be in your Lordships’ House. I would welcome the opportunity to have Reform in your Lordships’ House and to debate with its members, rather than them sniping from the sidelines.
This House should be elected because it would then be more effective in holding the Government to account and strengthening Parliament in relation to an overpowerful Executive. There was a chance during the coalition to achieve an elected House of Lords—probably the best chance since 1911—but that was cynically scuppered by the Labour Party, which refused to back a guillotine Motion on the Bill, and many Conservatives, who were genuinely hostile to the principle of an elected second Chamber, whatever their manifesto said. The chances of moving to an elected Lords in this Parliament are nil. There was a point when, with the appointment of the Brown commission, it looked as though Labour might move towards a firm plan for such a fundamental reform. But the Brown proposals were so half-baked that no one in the Labour Party supported them, and no other elected alternative was then even contemplated by the party.
For the remainder of this Parliament, we are faced with the imminent Bill to remove the remaining hereditaries, and a consultation, to be followed by legislation on a retirement age. We unambiguously support the proposals to remove the remaining hereditaries. We have huge respect for the part that individual hereditaries continue to play in our proceedings, and we hope that the Government will find a way to enable some of those who do so to return as life Peers. However, in our view, the hereditary principle itself can no longer be justified. Of course, it was not justified by the Blair Government, but the compromise deal negotiated by the wily Viscount Cranborne leaves us with the current unsatisfactory situation.
I was a new Member of your Lordships’ House in 1999 and served as the Liberal Democrat Whip on the then House of Lords reform Bill. A lot has been made of the commitments at that time about the future of the remaining hereditaries. One thing that was made crystal clear by the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, whom I am pleased to see in her place, as the then Leader of the House, was that the Government saw no long-term role for the remaining hereditaries and envisaged that they would be removed at the next stage of reform. We are now at that next stage of reform, and although it does not introduce an elected house, it ends an anomaly shared only, among all the parliaments of the world, with the constitution of Lesotho, in having a hereditary element in the second Chamber. In the case of Lesotho, the hereditary element is drawn from the tribal chiefs, and while many of our remaining hereditaries would make splendid tribal chiefs—although I am not sure there is a Strathclyde tribe—this is not the basis on which we organise society.
The other principal measure of reform we are promised in this Parliament is a retirement age. Again, we support this principle. Other professionals in the UK have a retirement age, including lawyers and bishops, and there are good reasons for it. That is not to say that many extremely elderly Peers do not make a valuable contribution to proceedings in your Lordships’ House; they obviously do, but many more do not, and the lack of a retirement age inevitably means that the House is denied much relevant contemporary experience which a younger House would bring.
These two reforms in themselves, of course, do not address the issue of the eventual size of the House and the balance of parties across it. What is the Government’s view on this? Do they, for example, still support the principle that we should move towards equality of representation between Labour and the Conservatives, despite the Conservatives’ current shrunken Commons representation, and if so, over what time period? Do they think that the Burns principle of two out, one in should be pursued, or that a combination of the abolition of the hereditaries and a retirement age will, by themselves, get the House down to a satisfactory size? Do they have any plans to reduce the number of Bishops in your Lordships’ House? However much one might value the contribution of the Bishops’ Benches—I certainly do—it surely would be perverse in our increasingly secular age if the only group whose proportionate size increased as a result of the proposed reforms was the Lords spiritual.
When the relevant reform legislation comes before your Lordships’ House, we on these Benches will not seek to delay it or to bog the debates down with unnecessary amendments. There is one area, however, where the system could be strengthened within the spirit of the upcoming legislation. This relates to the role of the House of Lords Appointments Commission. At the moment, the commission can recommend against the appointment of an individual, but this objection can be overridden by the Prime Minister, as it has been in recent years. That seems to us unacceptable and could easily be rectified.
There are times when I think that it could be another 113 years before the Lords is truly reformed in the spirit of the 1911 Act. We on these Benches, however, remain optimists and will continue to push for this. In the meantime, the measures the Government propose to bring forward in this Parliament will go some way to improving the composition of your Lordships’ House, and on that basis, they deserve our support.
The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)
My Lords, I too add my thanks to the noble Baroness the Leader of the House for bringing this important debate to the House today, and for her warm words personally to me just now.
As I have remarked before, the British constitution is a three-legged stool, one each for the Executive, Parliament and the judiciary. Major change by the Executive to the legs of the stool needs to be undertaken with great care, especially if the net effect of those changes is that more power is accrued to one or other of the legs. I underline also the importance of ensuring that, following any major change, the Salisbury convention runs smoothly. I will come to that in greater detail shortly.
The constitutional reform section of the Government’s manifesto contains six separate propositions that involve this House. The first two are in the same paragraph, and are the proposals to remove the hereditaries and restrict the age of Members of the House. This second proposition says:
“Labour will also introduce a mandatory retirement age. At the end of the Parliament in which a member reaches 80 years of age, they will be required to retire from the House of Lords”.
I remind people that, if enacted, these two propositions would see the departure by the end of this Parliament of about half the Peers present at the start of it—by any measure, a major change. The number for the Cross Benches, given our slightly older average age, is closer to 60%.
In giving evidence to the PACAC committee in the Commons in May, I commented that there were three unfairnesses in the current make-up of the membership of this House: the hereditaries, the Bishops, and the unlimited and unfettered power the Prime Minister has to make appointments to this House. The greatest unfairness, I continue to feel, is this last one, which is both very powerful and vested in one person. The changes proposed in the Government’s manifesto would add power to the Prime Minister, so that what is already a very large power without precedent in any other liberal democracy is increased. Indeed, the vesting of great power in one person is at the core of the problems we face with authoritarian regimes around the world. However comfortable we might feel with our freshly elected Government today, this is not a satisfactory state of affairs going forward for a major liberal democracy.
In 2017, the noble Lord, Lord Burns—he says, looking for the noble Lord—and his committee produced their seminal report about the size of the House and, by implication, some sort of conventional cap on the Prime Minister’s prerogative powers. We unanimously endorsed it. Many of those who were part of that endorsement are on the Front Benches of the major groupings present today. In any event, we all remember our agreed target of 600. We will hear from the noble Lord, Lord Burns, shortly.
The third Labour proposition concerns addressing participation. My office estimates that changing the requirement for Members to attend from at least one day per Session, which is pursuant to Section 2 of the House of Lords Reform Act 2014, to 10% of the days sat in a Session would affect around 20% of the House. Some Peers would choose to sit a few extra days, clearly, but I still believe that such a new required level would reduce our numbers—and quickly—by at least 12.5%, or 100 Peers. I am in favour of this.
I feel that the introduction of an age limit for newly created Peers would be a good idea. It would mean amending Section 1 of the Life Peerages Act 1958. As my figures on the percentage of the existing membership of the House who would be affected show, introducing age limits on the existing membership would be a large organisational shock that is not necessary and should be avoided. A transitional arrangement is clearly called for.
For similar reasons, this route of implementing a new retirement age on newcomers only was chosen by the England and Wales judiciary 40 years or so ago. In that case, only newly promoted senior judges had the new retirement age; existing judges were unaffected. The exercise was deemed a success. It turned out that some of those who could have continued retired at the new limit in any event, and I would expect that to happen here. If only one in five of those protected stood back, I estimate that an additional 50 colleagues might retire in this Parliament. The three changes—participation, age limits and the hereditaries Bill—could thus represent 240 or so Members leaving this Parliament. We would have a House at or below our target of 600.
I turn to conventions. Last year, my office produced a series of papers on the Salisbury/Addison convention, which is at the core of a successful relationship between the Lords and the Executive. The modern version of this convention came into being post war to assist a Labour Administration facing a non-Labour House of Lords. It has served us well, but it will need to be renewed as part of our reform process, in particular to address the upwards trend in ping-pong. We have been playing ping-pong on more Bills, with more balls and longer rallies. It is a trend, and the trend is still rising. We must tackle it.
For Parliament to come willingly into this programme of reform, the Prime Minister’s power of appointment must also be addressed. The proportionate thing would be for the Prime Minister to enter into a new convention whereby 600 Members was our conventional limit and the Prime Minister agreed to take advice on propriety and suitability from HOLAC. I know that others will develop the theme of HOLAC, and I will listen with great interest; but I believe that there is an appetite here in the House today for an ambitious programme of reform along my four lines—hereditaries, participation, age limits and conventions—and we should grasp the opportunity. However, as we seek to navigate these difficult waters, we must at all times balance constitutional security, the proper relationship between Parliament and the Executive, and the words of the Government’s manifesto.
The Lord Bishop of Sheffield
My Lords, I welcome the opportunity for a meaningful debate on this matter. The Lords spiritual have a long history of constructive engagement on the question of reform. I pay tribute especially to the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, who served on the Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords, which produced the Wakeham report in 2000. That commission encouraged
“a broadening and deepening of religious representation in the second chamber”
to reflect the diversity of our multifaith society, a principle that these Benches have supported before and since. We stand ready to assist any future appointments commission in that task.
The Lords spiritual see our role in your Lordships’ House as bringing an independent and non-partisan presence, and a voice for faith and for our local communities. It is an expression of our vocation to service in all communities that is core to our constitutional status as an established Church. Our presence in this House is only one component of the wider Church-state relationship. Service in Parliament on the one side is matched by our accountability to Parliament on the other, epitomised by the weekly opportunity for Questions specifically about the Church of England to the Second Church Estates Commissioner in the other place.
I suggest that this House makes three specific contributions to our parliamentary democracy: independence, expertise and a voice from civil society. First, as perhaps the most significant performer of checks and balances on Government, it must not become merely a mirror to reflect the all too familiar landscape of political parties. Secondly, this House must continue to provide a forum for measured, evidence-driven legislative scrutiny. As Wakeham put it:
“The second chamber should engender second thoughts”.
For that purpose, it must maintain the high calibre of professional expertise across all sectors for which its Members are renowned. That is a core strength. Thirdly, your Lordships’ House is composed of voices from across the breadth of civil society which might otherwise not be easily heard. We especially celebrate the opportunity to learn from our colleagues whose distinguished careers and excellence in their respective fields have earned them a place in this Chamber. This House achieves its work not least because it is not composed exclusively of the partisan.
These Benches have no single view on reform except to agree that some reform is overdue, not least to deal with the increasing size of the House and the exercise of patronage. I welcome this debate and the opportunity to hear a diversity of views.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, I speak partly as co-chair, with the noble Lord, Lord Norton, of the Campaign for an Effective Second Chamber. That should be our starting point. What is our function and how can we best fulfil that?
I regret that the Leader of the Opposition failed to follow the noble Lord, Lord Burns, who sought to bring the House together. Instead, we had a catalogue of words such as “sweeping”, “purging”, “hasty”, “expulsion”, “guillotine”, “stampede” and “great hurt”. I do not think that that is the way to approach a serious discussion on constitutional change. He says that cross-party talks or even a convention might have been better, yet he did no such thing as bringing that together when he was Leader of the House, and he failed to ensure that the Burns report was implemented, as noted by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler.
The noble Lord, Lord True, does not think that size is a problem, but look at the membership of second Chambers around the world. The House of Lords has 827 Members, which is higher than every other second Chamber, and it is the only one with more Members than the first House. We are not the same as those. We do a different job, we are not paid and we are part-time Members of a full-time House. However, it might be worth listening to what seems fit for another country.
Looking at political imbalance, the noble Lord says that what we are doing is for partisan reasons. I put it to him that he ought to take a look at what this House is at the moment: the main opposition parties have 350 Members, to just 186 for the party of government. Indeed, the government side has 86 fewer than the Conservatives—a position never met in the Conservatives’ term of office and an imbalance that will not disappear completely even with the loss of the hereditary Members. Unless we continue to grow, the party of government will remain much smaller than the main party of opposition.
Talking about the hereditaries, I have to say that all of us in this House, particularly my noble friend Lord Grocott, warned time and again that if the Grocott Bill were not accepted then this would be the only way forward. Had we moved at the pace that my noble friend would have suggested, there would be very few noble Lords who are hereditaries on the Benches at the moment. Indeed, the majority of today’s hereditaries were not here in 1999, when the temporary by-election deal was agreed. Everyone accepts that it was pro tem, although we may have had some difficulties about exactly when pro tem would be ended. The principle of ending the hereditary membership was accepted in 1999, and only its full implementation awaited.
I find the ad hominem excuses not valid, despite the great names that have been mentioned. This is partly because I think it is slightly distasteful for those not mentioned, but also because basing constitutional changes on how we value particular numbers of our colleagues is not a good way of making changes. Importantly, even with the changes for hereditary Peers that we will see, any hereditary is eligible—just like the rest of the population—to then be appointed a life Peer. But like the rest of us, they should be here on their own merit. I am certain that a number of them would return, albeit with perhaps a different title.
It is quite hard to know what the noble Lord, Lord True, wants from the change. Does he want to keep a large number of elderly people here to reduce the chance of refreshing our membership, something which in the past he has often discussed on a positive note? Despite complaining how many would leave under the age criteria, it is really only a symptom of the fact that we have too few people here now in their 50s and 60s. I am feeling old at 75 and am contemplating retirement—why should the rest of us stand in the way of the coming generation?
It is hard to know the Conservatives’ view of the role of this House. Perhaps it is that of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, who, responding to his very first Prime Minister’s Question in the other place, said that he had always supported a predominantly elected House of Lords. Is that the position now?
Today, I believe that we as a House should recommit ourselves to the function we currently perform and then support moves to a composition that makes that function easier to fulfil and enables our membership to better reflect the range of interests, experience, age, diversity and commitment to the work of this House. I hope membership will be seen as a working role, not just an honour.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, whom I respect very much. I thought my noble friend the shadow Leader of the House made a very restrained speech and that his language was very moderate. I have to tell her that, if the party opposite continues with this act of constitutional vandalism, it ain’t seen nothing yet.
The Labour manifesto promised both to remove the right of hereditary Peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords and to introduce a mandatory retirement age. The first proposal has proved popular with Labour Peers in the Lords, but the forced retirement at the end of a Parliament in which Peers reach the age of 80 has, surprisingly, encountered strong opposition on the Benches opposite.
The recent welcome nomination for peerages by Sir Keir Starmer for the noble Baronesses, Lady Hodge of Barking and Lady Beckett, both of whom have a great contribution to make to this House but are aged over 80, suggests that the Prime Minister has had second thoughts on that proposition. Perhaps he realised, on my reckoning, that his proposals would result in 369 Peers —of whom 70 are women—being kicked out of the Lords. This would reduce the size of the House to 435, decimate the Cross Benches, as the Convenor pointed out in his excellent speech, and remove many of the hardest-working and experienced Peers, such as our former distinguished Leader of the House, the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, the former Deputy Leader of the House, the noble Earl, Lord Howe, and the Convenor of the Cross Benches himself.
As to the noble Baroness’s suggestion that this is ad hominem, it is not ad hominem; we are concerned about maintaining the talent and expertise that lies in these and other hereditary Peers’ contributions. The Leader of the House of Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, pays tribute to them. Well, fine words, but it is somewhat late, if I may so, to invite our thoughts on how this problem could be resolved despite it being a manifesto promise.
The expulsion of the exempted hereditary Peers will weaken the ability of the Opposition and the Cross Benches to hold the Government to account and create a second Chamber of Parliament where every single Member owes their position to the patronage of one person—one Prime Minister. The Bishops also require the nomination to be put forward by the Prime Minister. Removing the exempted hereditaries will focus attention on the position of the remaining life Peers and set in train a process for an elected House, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Newby, that will challenge the supremacy of the House of Commons itself.
History tells us that, once the penny drops, MPs will lose their enthusiasm for House of Lords reform. Those Peers tempted to go along with accepting so-called incremental or piecemeal reform should look at the documents on display just down the Corridor in the Royal Gallery and note that many of those who thought that they were signing the death warrant of Charles I were actually signing their own.
The House of Lords Act 1999 removed 666 hereditary Peers. The Act allowed 92 to remain as exempted hereditaries following a “solemn and binding” promise by the then Lord Chancellor, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, and the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, that they would remain as Members until a comprehensive reform of the House of Lords had taken place. By bringing forward legislation now to expel just the exempted hereditaries, Sir Keir Starmer has broken that promise in a disgraceful piece of political gerrymandering aimed at weakening scrutiny of his Government by the House of Lords.
The convention is that constitutional reform is done on an all-party basis after consultation, and by consensus and agreement. It seems the recklessness of this Government knows no bounds, with the legislation to expel some of our brightest, dedicated and non-party political Peers being rushed through the Commons, as my noble friend pointed out, this very day, and completed before we have even finished debating this matter in this House. That hardly chimes in with the honeyed words of the Leader of the House of Lords.
The Cabinet Office Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds has said:
“The hereditary principle in law-making has lasted for too long and is out of step with modern Britain … people should not be voting on our laws in parliament by an accident of birth”.
Someone might tell him that no laws are made without Royal Assent.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
The speaking time is advisory. The noble Lord should know that.
Mr Thomas-Symonds has as his ministerial colleague in the Cabinet Office, Georgia Anne Rebuck Gould, the daughter of the late Lord Gould and the noble Baroness, Lady Rebuck. The son of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, Hamish, is a Minister in the Foreign Office. Both were elected to the Commons for the first time in July and immediately made Ministers. I bet that went down well on the Labour Benches.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
I will not give way to the noble Baroness. I am out of time.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
Well, if the House will allow me, I will give way to her.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
The noble Lord just referred to someone who has been leader of Camden Council. I find the idea that that person is here because of her mother or father rather than for her own abilities deeply distasteful.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
I was not questioning her abilities; I was simply pointing out that support for patronage and the hereditary principle is alive and well in the other place.
Poorly thought-out policy and hypocrisy have proved to be the hallmarks of this Government; “party before country and constitutional convention” turned out to be their mantra. We need a comprehensive approach to reform of Parliament. The truth is that the House of Lords is working well and doing an essential duty scrutinising legislation which is not even debated in the House of Commons, as every Bill is timetabled there. The other place needs to put its own House in order. This House has a constitutional duty which we cannot shirk. Labour needs to think again.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Twycross) (Lab)
My Lords, the advisory speaking time is five minutes. There is an advisory speaking time out of courtesy to other Members. I urge all noble Lords to keep remarks within this time so that the debate may finish at a reasonable time.
Lord Burns (CB)
My Lords, reflecting my role with the Lord Speaker’s committee, I will speak about controlling the size of the House. The Lord Speaker’s committee started by trying to understand why the size of the House had risen in the way that it has and the pressures that have emerged on membership to bring about this increase over time. It has sometimes been a quite rapid increase. The committee concluded that there are several features of our existing arrangements that generate this problem, leading, of course, to the adverse publicity the House often receives. To solve the problem, we need to identify the outcome we seek and implement a package of measures that addresses these features.
The first feature is the absence of a limit on the size of the House, which makes the House of Lords almost unique among legislative Chambers. The second, which has already been mentioned, is that Prime Ministers can make any number of appointments and to whichever party they choose. It is a quite astonishing situation. It is not surprising that appointments during a Parliament have tended to be predominantly to the Prime Minister’s own party, and that decisions on appointments are not always based on the likely contribution a Member will make to the business of the House. Thirdly, there is no retirement age or term limit. The number of leavers is not predictable and generally it is less than the number of appointments Prime Ministers wish to make.
The consequence of these three features is constant “leap-frogging” when there is a change of Government, as successive Governments seek to change the balance of the House in their favour. Over time, as this is repeated, we see an inevitable increase in overall numbers. Putting this right is likely to require changing each of these features. I do not believe that there is any single measure that would in isolation sustainably solve the problem we have identified. Simply getting the number down today is not enough; it is also about keeping them down.
For me, the most important change remains that there should be a limit on the size of the House. It should probably be no larger than the House of Commons. When the Lord Speaker’s committee undertook its work, it was proposed that the House of Commons would come down to 600 Members. Of course, it has remained at 650, so we have more generalised this to say that we are looking for a House that has a membership no larger than the House of Commons.
On that basis, and if we had a limit, appointments would be made only when there are vacancies. This would go a long way to providing incentives for sensible appointments and departures. To avoid leap-frogging, there needs to be a fair balance of appointments between the parties so that, when there is a change of government, the new Government do not need to make a rush of appointments to catch up. The committee recommended that this should be based on an average of the percentage of votes and seats at the most recent general election.
Finally, there should be a term limit, an age limit or some combination of the two. This would ensure a steady flow of leavers to make way for refreshment and adjustment to the composition when it is needed.
What does this mean in practice for our present situation? First we need an agreement on these principles, and then we need agreement on a transition from where we are today.
For the purposes of my remarks and thinking about this, I assume that the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill becomes law, although I recognise from listening to the debate that this remains a very contentious issue. Today, including those on leave of absence or disqualified, there are 716 life Peers. Getting the numbers down to 650 during this Parliament probably requires introducing an age limit. Again, rather like the leader of the Liberal Democrats, I am not averse to age or retirement limits. They apply in almost every other activity that I have been associated with and are an essential part of the refreshment of organisations.
However, the Government’s manifesto proposal is to introduce a retirement age of 80, which would mean some 300 of the present life Peers retiring by 2029, if the Parliament runs its full course. This goes further than needed to have a House smaller than the House of Commons or to create space for rebalancing the numbers between the parties. On its own, my fear is that without a cap on the size at the same time, we will be back in the same place before long, despite having gone through this process. A higher retirement age of, say, 84 or 85 coming in following any legislation and then every year afterwards would be a more gradual process and could get us close to 650 Members by the end of the Parliament.
At some point there will have to be legislation, or agreement between the parties, on a fair allocation of future appointments between them along with a continuing proportion to the Cross Benches. I hope that within these principles, identifying what the problem has been about size, the Government are able to come forward with the kind of co-ordinated action I have described today rather than this emphasis upon one or two measures.
Lord Grocott (Lab)
My Lords, the subject of this debate is very wide—reform of the House of Lords—but the reason we are having it is extremely narrow. It is, of course, focused specifically on the Bill currently going through the other House about the removal of hereditary Peers. I am a strong supporter of the Bill, but I shall reserve my main arguments in favour of it until Second Reading. I intend to use my time today to make a couple of observations about the Bill that I think are relevant to any future plans for reform of this House.
The current Bill is unfinished business; it is business that should have been completed 25 years ago. At that time, a Labour Government with a huge majority of 179 in the Commons had a clear election mandate to remove all the hereditary Peers. When it came to the House of Lords, the Government found it impossible to fulfil the promise they had made to the electorate. It is a long and strong convention that it is this House’s responsibility to allow the passage, within a reasonable time, of manifesto commitments, but it was not possible back in 1999 for reasons that I will describe at Second Reading. So here we are again, with another Labour Government with another huge majority—this time of 174—and the clearest possible general election mandate to remove the remaining 92 hereditaries from the House.
It is a simple five-clause Bill with the simplest of objectives. It has been carried in the Commons by huge majorities. It is a clear manifesto commitment from a general election held just four months ago. What I conclude from this is that by all precedent and convention—and we have heard a lot about that, particularly from the noble Lord, Lord True—the Bill should have a simple, safe passage through this House. To put it more negatively, it would be very bad indeed for this House and we would make ourselves look ridiculous in the eyes of the public if any behaviour took place that was in any way comparable to that which happened 25 years ago.
I remind the House that the fundamental principle of the 1999 Act is clearly stated in law. Clause 1 of that Act says:
“No-one shall be a member of the House of Lords by virtue of a hereditary peerage”,
or, to put it more colloquially, you cannot inherit the right to legislate. In all my years in this House and in the Commons, I cannot remember many people publicly challenging that principle—although I have to say I recall one Conservative saying to me, I hope in jest, that he did not like constitutional change and in fact was not too keen on the Reform Act 1832—so, for me, unfinished business is a powerful reason for being enthusiastic about the Bill.
The other reason is that it means the end, never to return, of those risible, farcical, indefensible hereditary Peer by-elections. The zenith of absurdity was reached in 2016 when, for a new Liberal Democrat Peer, there were seven candidates and an electorate of three—more than twice as many candidates as electors. The winning candidate got all three votes and the remaining six got none. As they say, you could not make it up. Of all the proposals for Lords reform, I thought that scrapping these by-elections would surely be easy, but I did not at all allow for the determined filibustering of a tiny minority of hereditary Peers—although I believe the majority of hereditary Peers supported the Bill.
I also have to mention the determination of the Conservative Government of the time to block the Bill. During the passage of the current Bill, those who blocked the previous ones can perhaps tell us why they thought it was a good idea to do that and whether they are still of the same opinion.
I take two lessons from my attempts and those of others who have tried to initiate Lords reform since the 1999 Act. First, if we in this House do not deal with the reforms that are clearly necessary then someone else will do the job for us. Secondly, the way to Lords reform is not one that tries to change powers, composition, electoral systems and the relationship with the Commons all in one grandiose scheme. The overwhelming evidence of the last 100 years is that attempts at wholesale reform all in one go will, slowly and inexorably, grind into the sand. The reforms that will succeed are those which are short, simple and focused.
I have one final reminder. We are entertained and fascinated by these issues and happy to spend hours discussing them, as today’s debate with 80 speakers clearly demonstrates. However, it is an enthusiasm that is not shared by the British public. While reform is important—I do not doubt that—other issues are far more important to most people, and far more deserving of debate and parliamentary time. When we debate the hereditary Peers Bill, and indeed any future reforms to the Lords, we need to keep that perspective firmly in mind.
Lord Wakeham (Con)
My Lords, it is well over 50 years since I first got into the House of Commons, but I do not think I have ever sat in a debate and heard reports that I had written 25 years ago quoted as freely as some have quoted them this afternoon. The first thing I ought to do is declare an interest as a former chairman of the royal commission that was set up after the last reform of the House of Lords, to think about the future. We spent a long time discussing it, and some of the things that have been said reflect well on that and some do not. I do not intend to go any further than that, except to say that—sorry, I have not made a speech for a long time, and there is a new factor in my life that I have not noticed before: I cannot even read my own writing.
Nevertheless, the royal commission that I chaired is a very old feature of Parliament but a dying one. Mine, nearly 30 years ago, was the last one to be set up. I hope that was not a reflection on me, but I think it is a reflection of the view of the Civil Service and the Government that royal commissions cause more trouble to the Government than they like, so they are disappearing from the scene. They have been going a long time. As a matter of fact, I suspect no one here will know that King William I had a royal commission that set up the Domesday Book.
The second interest I declare is that I have been a member of the Lord Speaker’s committee on the size of the House, chaired so ably by the noble Lord, Lord Burns. He has already expressed a lot of the views of our committee, so I do not have to. What I want to say, in the few words I have, is that, in spite of all the faults that everybody likes to talk about, the House of Lords does an extremely good job of work and none of us should ever feel ashamed of the work that we do. We look at Bills in detail, which the House of Commons gave up doing a long time ago, as far as I can make out. We are proud of what we do; the problem is what the future composition of the House should be.
I know what I would do. If I was the Leader of the House, I would set up a committee and say to the House, “You tell me what you think it ought to be”. You would almost certainly get a surprisingly good report as each party recognises that it has a responsibility but not overall command of the situation. I would certainly continue the reduction of the size of the House of Lords to 600. The size is not absolutely important; the important thing is that it will stop any future Prime Minister pushing in a lot of people without the agreement of the House. It is not the actual number, but that it is a limited number, that is important.
I believe the Lords ought to have a big say in the way the House of Lords conducts its business, because I think we are the ones who know best. A number of the things that have been said by others are right. I would find agreement within the House on how it should be divided up by party and how many places each party should have. That should be fixed and take account of, probably, the total vote of the electorate at the last general election. In my view, new Members should have 15 years. I argued for 20 years in the committee but I had to agree with the rest that 15 years was probably about long enough to keep the right flow in the new Chamber.
Those are the main changes that I would want to see. There are a whole range of changes that I would like to see in the way the House of Lords conducts its work, in spite of the fact that it does a good job. For example, quite a lot of time is spent passing resolutions when there is not the slightest chance of them ever going through the House of Commons. We are all here for hours when there are much more constructive things to do.
I welcome where we have got to. The Government are right to try to do something about these things, and I think they should take a great deal of notice of what the House of Lords says.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
My Lords, I rise briefly to support the Government’s plan to remove hereditaries, finally, from this House. My preference—I would certainly have thought this a few years ago—would have been for a wide-ranging programme of constitutional reform in the first Parliament of a Labour Government. But I came to accept the argument, made strongly, that when faith in our democracy and politics has reached such a low point, it is right for us to prioritise the domestic agenda relevant to ordinary people’s lives—doing something about living standards, about the health service and about immigration, rather than spending lots of time on constitutional reform.
My reaction to the hereditary Peers Bill is that it is long overdue. I was in No. 10 in 1998-99 and I still remember the sense of shock when we learned that the compromise deal had been done, because we thought it was obvious that the hereditaries should go as part of a wider reform of the House.
Historically, when I think of a hereditary House, I think of the House that tried to block the reform Act in the 1830s or the House that voted against Irish home rule in the 1880s, leading to a century of trouble. I think of the House that defeated the Lloyd George Budget in 1910. Lloyd George actually made the best case against the hereditary principle that there has ever been, when he talked about this random group of a thousand people drawn
“from the ranks of the unemployed”
in one of his great attacks. He also went on to undermine the legitimacy of the hereditary House of Lords, of course, by selling lots of peerages to augment his political fund.
It was the Life Peerages Act that restored the reputation of this House by bringing in Cross-Benchers and people from a wide variety of backgrounds. That helped the Lords to become the Chamber that it is today, one that is very good at reviewing legislation and doing a job that the House of Commons no longer does properly, as the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, said.
Of course it is sad; I have got to know many hereditary Peers well, and for some of them I have the greatest respect. The speech by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, was a wonderful example from someone who has given very distinguished public service in this House. I hope that his points will be taken on board by our further consideration of what may follow the hereditary Peers Act.
We should still think in terms of a wider reform of this place, but there is a lot happening. There is going to be a much broader devolution of power in England and, once that process of establishing devolved power in England is complete, it will become possible to think of the second Chamber as a body representative of the regions and nations. However, when this wider reform takes place, I hope it also does something that I feel strongly about: people who sit in the second Chamber should no longer have a title. That gives completely the wrong incentive for people to want to be in this Chamber. I would like to think that, before I die, people might perhaps refer to “that Roger Liddle who was once a Member of the upper House”, and not to Lord Liddle.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
My Lords, any debate about Lords reform should start with identifying the problem that we are trying to fix, and there is none more serious than the rapid decline of public trust in the political class, in Parliament and in our democratic system. That signals the democratic deficit that this House has a duty to address. Keir Starmer promised to restore public trust during the general election campaign. I am not going to rehearse all that he has presided over since July to make matters worse, but I do want to highlight the Prime Minister’s misplaced belief that the Conservatives alone caused this widespread public disaffection.
We Conservatives certainly deserve our fair share of the blame but, if we are to address the cause of public distrust, the Labour Party must also acknowledge its role in creating this sorry state, as should all sides of this House. Trust nosedived in the years after 2016 because of our collective reaction to the public’s verdict on our collective failures as a political class. If campaigning for a second referendum and frustrating Brexit legislation was not bad enough, Labour, the Lib Dems, many Cross-Benchers, the Bishops and even some of my noble friends sought to frustrate and dilute legislation designed to control immigration and strengthen our borders, which flew in the face of what the majority had voted for.
In every one of the five Sessions of Parliament after the 2017 general election, this House defeated the Conservative Government in more than 60% of Divisions. In four out of five of those Sessions, the rate of government defeats almost topped 70%. That was unprecedented. I know that there were some improvements to Bills because of this House’s scrutiny and that it is not the role of the House of Lords to make life easier for the Government of the day, whichever party is in power. But it is the role of this House of Lords not to add to the public’s impression that they are being condescended to and looked down on by a bunch of unelected elites. As much as it pains me to say so, that is how we appeared to many of the people we exist to serve.
What is ironic, bearing in mind what we are discussing, is that in the Division Lobbies, the majority of hereditary Peers voted in step with the public on Brexit and immigration. Contrary to Labour’s description of them as indefensible, based on their actions—which is how I was brought up to judge people who were born different from me—the viscounts, earls and hereditary barons of this House were the only category of Peers that the majority of the British people could rely on for their support.
This brings me to the Government’s proposed interim reforms of this House while an elected second Chamber remains a promise on the never-never. I personally have little objection to a retirement age, and I am all for us doing more to remove any Peer who does not pull their weight. However, I have concerns about a participation requirement because it risks either being meaningless or creating perverse incentives. Giving the House of Lords Appointments Commission more powers over prime ministerial nominations worries me because anything in that direction would dilute yet further democratic accountability.
As to removing the remaining hereditary Peers, as a democrat I accept that the Government have a mandate to do that and, if they succeed, no future Government will reverse their removal. But not only will their departure not improve our democratic deficit, none of the Government’s proposed measures to reform the House of Lords will make any difference to what really matters in the eyes of the public. Indeed, they add up to displacement activity without meaningful change to how we go about some of our business.
The electorate deserve respect and for their legitimate demands to be taken seriously, especially when the majority of Peers disagree. They need to know that we will apply our best efforts to meeting their objectives, not our own. That is the real democratic deficit that exists between Parliament and the public we serve, and it is the problem they need us to fix. Addressing it is how this House can contribute to democracy and secure its own future for the long term.
Lord Jay of Ewelme (CB)
My Lords, it is always a pleasure and something of a challenge to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell.
I think we will all be conscious of the gap between the perception—often, alas, negative—of the House of Lords, focused on its size and the methods of its appointments, and the reality of an effective hard-working second Chamber which complements and challenges, but does not compete with, the House of Commons.
I think the Government are right to seek to close that gap but that will inevitably require change, and change is seldom easy. I agree with the Government that the time has come to complete the 1999 reforms and to remove the right of hereditary Peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. I expect to vote for the Bill when it comes to us. However, I hope that a way can be found to enable at least some hereditary Peers, many of whom have played and are playing an important role in the work of the House, to be appointed life Peers.
I also welcome the Government’s aim to reduce the size of the House. I have always thought that the Lords could carry out its constitutional duties with, say, 450 Members, but the proposals in the Burns report of an upper limit of 600 now have a certain status. A reduction to that number would be achieved by the Government’s proposal for retirement at 80—but this is a blunt instrument. There should be proper consultation on other ways to achieve the same end, and I hope that those consultations can begin on an all-party basis soon and will include participation. I hope they succeed, so that a reduced and more focused House of Lords can come into effect quickly—ideally, after the next election. If they do not succeed, I imagine that the Government will push ahead with retirement at 80 anyway—in which case, I, along with many others, will trip lightly away from your Lordships’ House. But let us hope that we can together find another way forward.
The aim, of course, is not just to reduce the House of Lords to, say, 600, but to ensure that it stays at that size. In my view, that will require a reinforced House of Lords Appointments Commission, which I used to chair, with more powers and with the emphasis on the suitability, not just the propriety, of those nominated by the political parties. It will also require an effective self-denying ordinance on the part of the present Prime Minister and future Prime Ministers.
I have in the past voted in your Lordships’ House for an at least partially elected House. It did not find favour with your Lordships. I do not now believe that a wholly or partially elected Chamber would be acceptable to the Commons, so I understand but do not support the views of the Liberal Democrats.
In conclusion, the Government’s approach is on the right lines. We have waited long enough, and we now need to move forward—not in due course, or even at pace, but immediately.
Lord Saatchi (Con)
My Lords, I take your Lordships back to the occasion in the White House when President Nixon was discussing a particularly troublesome affair of state with Henry Kissinger. Mr Nixon made a proposal to solve the problem and Dr Kissinger disapproved, saying, “Mr President, I must remind you of the famous saying, ‘You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time’”. President Nixon leaned back in his chair, thought carefully for a few moments and then said, “Henry, those sound like pretty good odds to me”. But they are not good odds, are they? On the contrary, as we have just seen in Britain and America, when a Government take people for granted, catastrophic election defeat follows.
In Britain, certainly, has there not been a growing acknowledgement of a disconnect between people and Parliament—a sense of disappointment and disillusionment with what the democratic system has provided? Apparently, British people of all ages and demographics feel underrepresented by an elite political class that sometimes seems neither to hear them or to care what they say—exactly as my noble friend Lady Stowell said when she described the “democratic deficit”. Therefore, I put the case to the House that something needs to be done to bridge this social divide, and that it could be us. Yes, surprisingly, our House of Lords, the pinnacle of the elite establishment, can play a significant role to achieve that.
I propose that we lead the way to reconnect people with Parliament, to offer them more participation and consultation—new ways, granted to us by AI technology, to allow people to express their thoughts and see a connection between their views and what is happening here. I put the case that, if we led in that, it would greatly enhance our public reputation. Your Lordships may ask what technology has to do with our time-honoured practices, but please consider this: any one of the seven top American technology companies is now worth more than the entire UK stock market.
At the moment, the phrase “listening to the people” has achieved the status of meaningless waffle. The closest we get is when the House of Commons receives 100,000 petitions, and a little-known body called the Petitions Committee will “consider scheduling this petition for debate in Parliament at a future date”. That is not democracy—it is bureaucracy, and it is patronising. Times change, and this is not the era of Cardinal Wolsey or Henry VIII, and the people are not petitioners. Do we need to be reminded—of course, we do not—that the Government do not actually have any money? It is all the people’s money; they pay for everything—the heating, the lighting, the staff, the cleaning, the Library and the security. They pay the bills, and they are the owners, and to ignore the owners is not only rude but illogical.
In the 1960s, 4% of the people went to university; now it is 50%. They do not have to rely on the BBC to tell them what is going on—they know it all in seconds. Call me sad, but I have probably seen more British public opinion research than any living person, and there is only one conclusion: the British people are the most intelligent, aware and sophisticated electorate in the world. With apologies to the Leader of the House, the people have more knowledge with ChatGPT and their phone than the entire Government Front Bench put together. Nobody understands this better than the team in No. 10, which is why it asks people’s opinion on everything every minute of every day—they just do it in private, so let us try doing it in public so everyone can see what people are saying.
Noble Lords will hear many objections, which I shall recite very quickly. People will say, “People aren’t ready; people don’t have the skills to be involved—they’re not informed”. Well, somehow, they manage to do perfectly well. You may hear it said that the people lack the interest, time or motivation to be involved in lawmaking and that they will be influenced by lobbyists and special interests—but is not that what happens in Parliament now? Or it may be said that the people’s modesty means that they are willing to rely on officials who are better qualified, and willing to doff their cap to the passing horsedrawn carriage. If there are such people, I have never met them.
I shall finish with this—let us consider our House. I put it to noble Lords that, if this House of Lords had a logo, it would be a light under a bushel. It is time to awaken our sleeping beauty. These days, the House of Lords is a body that receives very little praise; there is usually offhand criticism of our motives or behaviour. But for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, the Hansards of the well-mannered and illuminating debates in the Lords bear witness that this place is overwhelmingly occupied by intelligent, reasonable and responsible people, honestly striving by their own best lights to prospect for real ideas with the unremitting zeal of a prospector hunting gold.
I have to summarise now to stay in time—
Lord Saatchi (Con)
Yes, I am going to end. With regard to the participative democracy that I describe, the Government, while they are attempting what they call immediate modernisation of the Lords, might consider modernising the Lords in a true sense, in terms of our relationship with the people and the people’s ability to influence what we do.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
My Lords, as previously said, the advisory speaking time is five minutes. For every 30 seconds that people go over, we add on half an hour to the debate—so I draw your Lordships’ attention to that matter.
Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)
My Lords, that advice was certainly relevant yesterday, when 80 people spoke in the debate and I was 71st. But it gave me time to reflect on the nature of yesterday’s debate on the Budget. It was weighty, informed, very impressive and very civilised. In the 40 years that I have been in Parliament, 10 of them here, I have been deeply impressed by the level of debate and of course by the level of revision and scrutiny of legislation that comes before us, but we do need reform. It seems to me that the House is too big. Perhaps the ideas of the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, today could be looked at by my noble friend the Leader of the House as to how we could do that. Naturally, as someone who was born in 1948, I prefer the idea of participation rather than of age, but I say to the party opposite that there were two occasions during the last Parliament when we could have partly resolved that. One was through what my noble friend Lord Grocott was doing in terms of by-elections for hereditary peerages and the second was what the noble Lord, Lord Burns, did with his report. Had we adopted both those suggestions, perhaps it would not be quite so difficult today.
I was privileged to be a member of Gordon Brown’s Labour Party commission on the constitution. He came up with some excellent recommendations on how to tackle the overcentralised state that we are in at the moment and to deal with devolution. I have to agree with my noble friend Mr Roger Liddle about where we go in the political landscape we currently have, which is different from what it was when I entered Parliament a long time ago. We now have devolved Parliaments in Wales and Scotland, and happily now too in Northern Ireland. Great areas of England are governed by mayors, and there is a very strong case for this House to be able to reflect and represent the nations and regions of our United Kingdom—partly, incidentally, to ensure that it remains a United Kingdom by having such representation here. I will give my noble friend the Lord Privy Seal an idea: in the meantime, while we discuss these things in the months and years ahead, is it possible, for example, that former First Ministers of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland could be offered peerages in order to come here and give their experience? A lot might not want to do that, but the offer should nevertheless be made.
One of the recommendations of Gordon Brown’s commission regarded the House of Lords. Ultimately, after a lot of deliberation, he came to the conclusion, which I did not share, that the House of Lords should be completely directly elected. I gave a dissenting opinion, which was that, in my view—and only mine—the House could be partly elected but that an overwhelmingly elected House would be wrong. I believe that it would be wrong because it would be a rival to the House of Commons. I say that not as a Member of the House of Lords but as someone who was in the House of Commons for 30 years. If we elect a House of Lords, particularly if it is elected by a method of proportional representation, inevitably those who are elected to this place in those circumstances will argue that their mandate is greater and more democratic than that of Members of the House of Commons.
Power in this country must reside in the elected House of Commons entirely. We of course should complement that, in the way we do now and in different, reformed ways to come. That, in my view, is the bottom line. However, I see that there are many cases for reform. It has taken 113 years to get to where we are, and I hope it will not take 113 years to reform. Many ideas will flow from this debate today but ultimately, our position as a revising Chamber, a Chamber for scrutiny and debate, remains unparalleled.
Lord Mancroft (Con)
My Lords, I feel a sense of déjà vu enveloping me as I listen to this debate. I well remember an almost identical debate that I took part in once before. A Labour Government had been elected by a landslide, led by a pale, male, north London lawyer. His party had a manifesto commitment to reform the House of Lords, but apparently any reform was impossible while there were hereditary Peers in it. The Government did a deal with those hereditary Peers whereby they agreed to leave the House on the understanding that full reform would be enacted as soon as possible and, in the meantime, they would leave 92 of their number to ensure that it took place.
The hereditary Peers agreed to leave the House but, astonishingly, that manifesto commitment evaporated without any hint of reform and the Government forgot about it for the remainder of their 10 years in office, so it cannot have been that important after all. Thanks to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, who is sadly not in his place today, now we know that no such reform was ever planned or intended. We had been played for fools.
Twenty-five years later, we are back where we started. Now we have another Labour Government, also led by a pale, male, north London lawyer—although not such a popular one—with a manifesto commitment to reform this House. Apparently, the handful of hereditary Peers who it was agreed would remain in this House until reform took place and have dutifully fulfilled their side of the bargain are now themselves the block to any substantive reform and must be cast into outer darkness to enable it to take place. What a load of rubbish. This Labour Government stand by their promises to their union paymasters but conveniently forget their promises to those hereditary Peers, to this House and to the House of Commons, which voted for that deal as set out in Section 2 of the 1999 Act.
There is a strong case for a fully elected House, as set out by the noble Lord, Lord Newby, and Second Reading on the Government’s Bill in the House of Commons in October clearly shows, rather extraordinarily, that this now appears to be the model favoured by the present House of Commons. As we have heard, an elected House presents significant problems. It seems inevitable that an elected second Chamber would, rather as the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, was talking about, press for the repeal of the Parliament Acts. A new distribution of powers between the two Houses would be needed, along with a new set of conventions to resolve disputes between them, unless we are to see the sort of deadlock that happens in the United States Congress, which would inevitably occur more with an invigorated second Chamber.
Our difficulty is that we have no real idea what the Government are planning, no White Paper and nothing from the Prime Minister—understandably, as he spends so little time here and is so busy abroad—but we know that Gordon Brown’s commission, of which the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, was such a distinguished member, favoured an elected House representative of the nations and regions, even if he did not. I am not sure how much more representative we could be, although I accept that north London is somewhat overrepresented on the Benches opposite. We know that the Prime Minister favours an elected House, which makes it all the more bizarre that we are shortly to consider a Bill that establishes a fully appointed one.
While there would be less risk of conflict with the other House, an appointed House does not come without problems. As we have heard, the Salisbury/Addison convention has enabled this House to operate efficiently since 1945, but if the remaining hereditary Peers go it will become obsolete. Nor is it within the Government’s power to enforce it, and they can therefore expect Divisions on their Bills at Second Reading and Third Reading. It is even less likely that the convention on secondary legislation will hold for long, as it has been increasingly challenged in recent years.
There is one problem that this Bill creates above all others, and not one speaker in the House of Commons addressed it. While there are arguments in favour of an elected House and an appointed House, there is no credible case for an appointed House where the Executive, in the form of the Prime Minister, who controls the majority in the first Chamber, has sole power of appointment to and thus ultimate control of the second Chamber.
We frequently have to listen to rather silly, childish comparisons between the size of this House and the Chinese National People’s Congress. Anyone with even the most basic knowledge cannot compare a chamber of placemen set up 42 years ago in a communist dictatorship with one political party and a population of 1.4 billion to an 800-year old second Chamber of a highly developed legislature in a multiparty democracy of 68 million. Or can they? While many countries around the world now have bicameral legislatures, many of which are based on the Westminster model, there is only one in which the head of the Executive has complete control. Not even the most powerful Executive in Europe—the President of France—nor President-elect Trump, with his party’s control of the Senate, will have the power that Sir Keir Starmer is giving himself under this Bill. The Government are proposing to give the Prime Minister the same powers of appointment that President Xi has. That silly joke is about to become reality. With the Bill the Government now propose, this House and Parliament will become like the toothless farce that is the Chinese National People’s Congress.
Whatever the Government say, we all know from bitter experience that the Bill that will shortly come before this House is very unlikely to be followed by any further reform. Our constitution is the bedrock of our nation’s freedoms and success. It is like a beautiful, priceless piece of porcelain, but it is very fragile. The previous Labour Government treated it thoughtlessly and cracked it. We cannot allow this Government to break it, because it will be almost impossible to glue it back together again.
Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab) [V]
My Lords, recently, the invariably interesting if not controversial noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, moved an amendment on fisheries regulations. I supported the amendment in Committee and was about to sign up on Report, but then stopped to reflect that my name in support was irrelevant. House approval for his amendment was likely to be decided on a three-line Conservative Whip. Conservatives can win almost any amendment they choose—they have the numbers. Indeed, I suspect that the Conservative leaders, having loaded the House with their Peers, while being reduced to a rump in the Commons, are now having to manage their majorities to avoid a constitutional backlash. With a growing number of former Conservative MPs who have sought and pleaded for peerages, while starving Labour of peerages—a third of our Members are over 80, with many too frail to attend, while only one in nearly six Conservatives is over 80—the Conservatives have created a disproportionate House of 829. Even with the exclusion of every hereditary, 740 would remain. The truth is that they have completely undermined the reforms proposed by the noble Lords, Lord Burns and Lord Fowler. With just over 120 Labour Peers regularly in our Lobbies, we simply do not stand a chance.
House votes are no longer credible as, more often than not, they are managed by a Conservative Front Bench who have honourably forsaken earnings in favour of public service. That does not mean that our debates lack value: on the contrary, our debates are the envy of a worldwide audience; it is our votes that now lack all credibility. What worries me is wider obstruction over reform. It is with that in mind that I offer an option—an interim arrangement on which we could build. Why not move to a second Chamber with a two-tier membership? It would feature Peers with votes and Peers without votes. All would be entitled to attend and speak. Political-party Peers reflecting the general election percentage turnout results would be the voting Peers, alongside the Cross-Benchers, comprising 20% to 25% of a total House of 500. That is a departure from the 600 proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, but it would then be staged. Peers would be remunerated under a two-tier allowance regime. Under such arrangements, voting and non-voting Peers could be nominated pending longer-term reform. These are the reforms proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, revisited and tweaked, with perhaps even a salaried voting membership.
What are the problems? I am told that there are constitutional difficulties over a two-tier membership, but Parliament can decide that. I understand that there are no special procedures required for changing the UK constitution. There is no clear concept of higher law. One advantage of a two-tier membership is that, with a residual managed decline to a non-voting House, we could have movement between voting and non-voting Members. We could also, in the Fowler House of 600, maintain a declining membership of 100 non-voting Peers available for ministerial appointments. That would see us through a difficult period of reform to an ultimate, indirectly elected House. I hesitate suggesting arrangements for designating the voting Peers; I leave that to the usual channels. When designing the supplementary vote in the 1990s, I kept it simple, leaving it open for being built on in future. It worked well for 20 years, until Johnson abolished it for perceived political advantage. The irony is that, if we had maintained the original idea and extended it to general elections, the Conservatives would not have lost so many seats at the previous election. It was designed to avoid violent swings—but, more importantly, it would have avoided exposing the gross anomaly now of a totally disproportionate House of Lords.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)
I cannot match the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, for ingenuity—very few of us can.
As I listened to the noble Lord, Lord True, and indeed to the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth—if he would care to listen—I was struck by the thought that it might be quite difficult to persuade the public outside that, because of something said in this Chamber 25 years ago, the mandate of the Labour Party set out in its manifesto should be put to one side, and nothing more can be done to reform the House of Lords because some commitment was given by somebody 25 years ago in this House. I think that would sell with some difficulty in the Dog and Duck.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)
My concern is that the Bill has to pass. Obstructing it would be to obstruct the result of the general election. I am convinced that it will pass. It is a pity that we will lose so many of our friends, although I have a hunch that some of them will be miraculously reincarnated as life Peers on New Year’s Day—I certainly hope so.
I have three points to make. First, the Government are right to want to pause and draw breath after this first Bill. It seems sensible because the country needs a national debate.
The role of the Lords is not clearly understood. China and North Korea get by without a second Chamber but I think that most of us, and certainly most democracies, seem to think that there is an advantage in having an institution to keep a check on what a majoritarian Government can do in the primary assembly, to improve their legislation and to look out for regional concerns. I agree, but that case has to be made to the country because right now, it is not widely understood.
If we are honest, we also have to admit that we as a House could do our job better. These debates tend to be full of self-congratulation. Of course, it is a tremendous privilege to be here, and we do work hard—on primary legislation we do a much more thorough job than does the other place. But our scrutiny of secondary legislation is, like the other place’s, superficial and spasmodic, and we are too London-centric to cover the regional dimension optimally. To me, that points to wanting a House with more expertise relevant to legislation and drawn from a wider pool.
What does that mean for composition? Like the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, I am wary of direct elections. I lived in the United States and saw how having two Chambers which see themselves as equally legitimate all too often results in deadlock. That would be a more serious problem in a parliamentary than a presidential system. It is also the case that politicisation tends to squeeze out expertise, and we need expertise.
Indirect elections could be an answer. As a Scottish unionist, I like the Bundesrat model, at least for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; how best to provide for English regional representation is not for a Scot to tackle. But seats are allocated in the Bundesrat on the basis of degressive proportionality, favouring the smaller and more distant states, and copying that would reinforce our role as the cement of the union. But our legislative performance would not necessarily be improved at all.
So, are we stuck with an all-appointed House, as in Canada? Not necessarily: hybridity could be a good thing. Certainly, if our main task is to write good law, it will be a pity for us if we lose the expertise and experience of those who have had to apply the bad laws we have written.
My last point is this: let us at least correct the most glaring anomaly in the appointments system, as highlighted by Mr Johnson’s insouciant exuberance about convention. Most countries have honours systems but very few conflate recognition of past service with qualification for future work on legislation. Some of us are unqualified, frankly, and the House is mocked for its excessive notional size. The answer is simple, surely: follow precedent. Most Peers already have no right to sit here. If there are to be more life Peers, let us have two categories: those simply honoured with a title; and those who are willing to do, and well-suited to doing, a legislative job—and found to be such by the appointments commission, with a wider remit. Category 2 could be drawn from all parts of the kingdom. Degressive proportionality applies. There could —indeed, there should—be a ceiling on their number with a retirement age or term limits, after which they would transfer to category 1, but let us not drain away the current expertise until we have found a way of ensuring that we tap into more, and do so more systematically.
So, here are my four points.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)
I am concluding. First, we need an informed debate led by a government Green Paper. Secondly, the House should be more fit for purpose, perform better and better reflect national and regional disparities—that should be our aim. Thirdly, it is high time that we distinguish between recognising past service and conferring a future right to legislate. Fourthly, this issue should not be rushed; it is dangerous nonsense to suggest that, until it is settled, the Government cannot do what their manifesto promised.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
My Lords, on the basis of how quickly we are currently getting through Members’ contributions, we are likely to sit until 11.30 pm. If that is what Members wish, so be it, but I note the advisory speaking time of five minutes.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, is it possible for the Government Whip to stand up and stop people sooner?
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
Given that it is an advisory time, I am choosing to stand up between speeches, but I can do that if the House so wishes.
Lord Rennard (LD)
My Lords, we are hearing in this Chamber from some Members—often hereditary Members—who are unhappy that we are considering ending completely the principle of hereditary membership of this House. Other members, such as those on these Benches, are unhappy that we have made such little progress on reforming the House. All of us should reflect on the failure by previous Conservative Prime Ministers—I exempt the noble Baroness, Lady May, from this criticism—to stick to the one-in, two-out principle, which has caused the embarrassing expansion in the size of the House. We should also reflect on the failure to bring an end to the process of holding by-elections to replace hereditary Peers—despite the wishes of the House and the great efforts of the noble Lord, Lord Grocott—caused by filibustering by a handful of hereditary Peers, who have now forced a more radical proposal on themselves.
Then there is the failure of the Labour Party—for purely tactical reasons, based on opposition to the form of parliamentary boundary reorganisation that was then being proposed—to agree any form of timetable Motion for the House of Lords Reform Bill 2012. That Bill received overwhelming support in the House of Commons: it passed by 462 votes to 124, with 90% of Labour MPs supporting it—including every single member of the current Cabinet who was an MP in 2012. It was based on promises made in all three main parties’ manifestos in the 2010 general election.
As my noble friend Lord Newby said, we will always point out that the aim of replacing membership based on the hereditary principle with membership based on the popular principle was included in the preamble to the Liberal Government’s 1911 House of Lords reform Act. Only in this place could 113 years be considered too short a time to agree the details.
In a recent article in the Times, Melanie Phillips said:
“Hereditary peers are essential: don’t ditch them”.
But this is not about all the people; it is about the principle of hereditary membership, which we should ditch. An arrangement for some hereditary Members to be re-appointed based on merit could again be made.
The 92 hereditary Peers are not an essential safeguard against an appointed House because hereditary peers are now effectively appointed when they are chosen by a very small number of their fellow Peers in the extraordinary process that we call hereditary by-elections. This is not, as is sometimes suggested, a superior way of becoming a Member of this House to that of being appointed by a party leader. Party leaders have at least been elected as an MP by their constituents and as a leader by their party members.
We should remember in our debate that we are the only legislature in the world to reserve seats for a particular religious group, apart from Iran. We are the only legislature in the world to reserve seats for people on a hereditary basis, apart from Lesotho. But we are probably not the only legislature in the world in which principles of patronage can sometimes have a corrupting influence on its composition. UK Prime Ministers can, in the present arrangements, dangle nominations in front of people, some of whom may suddenly change their principles and become compliant with that Prime Minister’s wishes, while others who may hold worthy but more critical views are blocked by them or by their own party leaders.
In the present arrangements, therefore, the House of Lords Appointments Commission should be able to vet suitability and propriety, without any prime ministerial veto of their decisions. The commission should be able to make nominations according to a quota determined by the number of Peers appointed by other routes. We must move on from 1911.
Lord Dobbs (Con)
My Lords—and “Rog”, if I may —I offer a different view of the House. If it were a classic car, we would be in awe of its extraordinary lines and enduring value; it would be a thing of elegance, and remarkably cheap to run. It would not be the fastest in the world, but a point of our House is to go through the gears a little more slowly than the other place, sometimes even to disengage the clutch—and very occasionally to overheat and blow a gasket.
As a child of north London, it has been the greatest privilege of my life to be a Member of this place. I have a very clear view of this House and our own individual participation. We are here to serve it—not the other way round. This House does not exist for our individual convenience. However, neither is the House of Lords simply here to serve the convenience of the Government of the day.
We should be discussing how to close the door on those who rarely attend and doing away with hereditary by-elections, asking whether the Bishops’ presence is still appropriate, and other matters that the Leader of the House so elegantly outlined earlier in the debate. Instead, we have a rushed, stand-alone Bill about hereditaries—a bit of constitutional clickbait.
To mangle the words of Stanley Baldwin, being a hereditary Peer right now is rather like standing between a dog and a lamppost—an uncomfortable place to be. We all know how hard so many hereditaries have worked and how much they have contributed, yet the Government propose to cut off their noble bells and balls and cast their bodies into the ditch, as if they were guilty of some great personal wickedness. It is not so much the Salisbury convention as the Cromwell convention—I beg the forgiveness of the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, who will have his moment in a few minutes. Surely we can do things differently. How much better would it be for the proper order of things, for the smell of the matter, to make any changes to the status of hereditary Peers part of a wider settlement, as we were promised?
I cannot help but notice that the idea to force Peers to retire at the age of 80 seems to have gone rather quiet. Is that because Labour Party colleagues belatedly realised that they have just as many old lags as we have? I see the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, nodding his head vigorously.
Let us try to do the Burns, Kinnoull, Hayman and Norton thing—try consensus before confrontation and, as a package, get the balance right. At the very least we should allow hereditary Peers to continue sitting and contributing to this House until the end of this Parliament, rather than the end of a Session. That would make little practical difficulty to the work of the Government, but it would be a mark of respect. Our hereditary colleagues should be allowed to leave with their heads held high, not stuck on the end of a pike. Let them go with grace.
The Government have an opportunity to show themselves as stronger or to come across as narrow-minded and vindictive. I know that the Labour Party, in this House at least, is better than that. When Brutus discussed doing away with Julius Caesar, he knew that it had to be done with a sense of justice:
“Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods,
Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds”.
Our hereditary colleagues have done nothing but their duty, and the rest of us, I suggest, have a duty to remember that.
Baroness Bryan of Partick (Lab)
My Lords, it is a real pleasure to follow the hyperbole of the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, but I would like to bring us back down to practical things.
The information in the very helpful Library briefing for this debate includes a list of Peers and their group affiliations. I think the contents would probably shock many electors. Most people would want to know why the Conservative Party has so many Peers, how the Lib Dems have so many in proportion to their numbers in the Commons, why Bishops of the Church of England are represented in our Parliament, and who chooses the Cross-Bench Peers. If we added to that the age, geographical spread and class background of Peers, they would be positively amazed if not downright angry. And that is before even mentioning that there are still Members of the House who are here on a hereditary basis.
There is a danger that, as Members of this Chamber, we suffer a type of institutionalisation where we cease to see ourselves as others see us, admiring the positive elements and overlooking the negatives. Most rational people will accept the removal of hereditary Peers. It is so obvious that it is unbelievable that it did not happen more than a century ago. What is less clear from this and other discussions is what to do with the remaining Members of the House and the Chamber itself. As my noble friend the Leader of the House said, it should not be set in aspic.
A second Chamber is usually one of checks and balances on central government, normally charged with one or both of two tasks: to protect the constitution and, as was described earlier, to represent nations and regions. To carry out these functions effectively, it needs political legitimacy. Without that, its powers will and should be limited, and with limited powers it can be reduced to a talking shop.
I am sure that many Peers became increasingly concerned at the last Government’s introduction of legislation that called into question the rule of law and the place of long-standing international treaties and removed powers from the devolved Administrations without their consent. Those last few years should have convinced Members of this Chamber that we desperately need a constitutional review. I appreciate the difficulties, and I do not think there is any easy, off-the-peg solution, but we need to make a start. Constant prevarication will eventually incur the wrath of voters.
The Labour Party manifesto stated that, in government, we
“will consult on proposals, seeking the input of the British public on how politics can best serve them”.
Gordon Brown’s most recent contribution to the debate on the constitution was not his first. As student rector of Edinburgh University 50 years ago, he edited the Red Paper on Scotland and wrote:
“The question is not how men and women can be fitted to the needs of the system—but how the system can be fitted to the needs of men and women”.
He warned against
“resisting change until it becomes inevitable—but by deploying every available level of government to increase the control working people have over their lives”.
I hope that, 50 years later, we can dispatch the forthcoming Bill as quickly as possible and begin the job of discussing more fundamental change.
Lord Cromwell (CB)
My Lords, we are promised a substantial reform of the House of Lords. It is most certainly needed, but I wonder whether we will get it. The age cap may end up in the long grass but, as a mere youth compared with the average age of the House, much less the possible cap at 80 years old, I leave it to others to suggest solutions—indeed, a number already have.
The participation basis may suffer the same fate, which I think would be very regrettable. It is easy to complicate this discussion—choosing what metric, triggering overparticipation for the sake of it and so on—but it is too easy to say that it is too difficult. This is a place of work, and I can think of no other line of work where it would be considered acceptable not to turn up or to turn up occasionally—in some cases just once per parliamentary Session, for lunch, and going away again, or turning up but not participating in the work of the Chamber, in committees or in other ways. Such Peers boost the apparent size of the House to levels that give a wholly false impression of the numbers engaged in the work here.
We claim to be a House of experts, yet we balk at the idea of developing a system that uses the data already collected on participation and following through by, courteously but firmly, saying goodbye to non-contributors. Removing Members across the House of any type who turn up and participate no more than 10% of the time—which I believe the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, referred to earlier—would reduce our numbers by more than 100. I hope that this Government will tackle the participation issue rather than it languishing in the “too difficult” box. If it does, we will drift into a membership of more than 1,000.
The way people get to this House is crying out for reform, as many have already expressed and as has been expressed on all sides of the House at one time or another. A great amount of the good work that this House delivers is getting lost in the drift to an ever-larger House packed by party leaders who appoint their mates. This has brought the House into disrepute and makes the often-mocked hereditary by-elections look like models of transparency. If the time has come to end the hereditary by-elections—and it has—it most certainly has also come to end the ability of leaders, like feudal kings, simply to appoint a list of their pals, donors and loyalists.
An elected House has its supporters but, on balance, I support an appointed House for all the usual reasons. But that brings the challenge of who does the appointing and the danger of the establishment simply appointing itself from among its own social and professional circles, and mainly in London. As a first step towards a thought-out appointments process, HOLAC should go on to a statutory footing and play a role beyond that of its currently advisory status, including nurturing a House that is socially and geographically inclusive, clear in its demands and made up of committed participants.
I also support the idea of 15-year terms and the two-out, one-in principle suggested in the report by the noble Lord, Lord Burns. This would enable better forward planning for representation, numbers and specialist knowledge. I would be very interested to hear from the Leader of the House whether and when any of this is anticipated from the Government.
Finally, we know—and seem to have spent a lot of time today discussing—that the hereditary elections, which are already suspended, are over, and that the remaining so-called hereditary Members are on the cusp of being ejected. I have spoken on this before and will not tire the House with a detailed repetition. In short, it is a matter of babies and bath-water. Simply throwing the supposed toffs to the populist lions would ignore, at least on the Cross Benches, the fact that the so-called hereditaries are some of the most active and diligent Members giving service to the House. There are, of course, Peers of all types who are diligent and hard-working but, on the Cross Benches in particular, there is a strong service ethos, as we do not have any party position to advance, nor any prospect of, for example, ministerial positions.
While I believe most Members, and probably most people, agree that the hereditary tag, which is often forgotten in our day-to-day work, is well past its use- by date, I have been struck by the number of life Peers I speak to who think that the so-called hereditaries will simply be converted into life Peers. I have not seen any indication of that from the Government. My view —and I declare my obvious interest here—is that Peers who have a track record of contribution, have experience, expertise and energy to offer, and are committed to further public service in this House should be converted. That would end the hereditary issue once and for all, meeting the Government’s manifesto commitment—job done. Then we can get on to fuller reform and the other pressing matters before us.
Viscount Astor (Con)
My Lords, I wonder how many times over the last century a noble Lord has started a speech by saying, “Reform of this Chamber is long overdue”, and how many times the Government Minister of the day has positively responded but the Government have then done little to implement any serious changes.
We will hear this evening from the Leader of the House about the proposed demise of the last remaining hereditary Peers. To be fair to the Labour Government, the Blair Government enacted a major change with the cull of hereditary Peers in 1999, leading to what was described as a transition period. Well, transition has lasted rather longer than intended, and that is the fault of not the hereditary Peers but the Labour and Conservative Governments.
Sadly, rather than serious reform, we will be offered a House that will be dependent on the whim and patronage of the Prime Minister. We all agree that there are too many Peers, but the Government have not come up with a solution. Has a retirement age of 80 been ditched, or a length of service of, say, 35 years? We do not know: the Government have not told us.
What is really important is that the Government had the opportunity to endorse the proposals put forward by Gordon Brown but quickly backed off, preferring to use this House as a repository for former Members of another place and those to whom it owes favours, following, I am afraid, the example of the last two Conservative Prime Ministers—I hope noble Lords remember that I said two, because I absolve my noble friend Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton of any such behaviour.
The Brown plans offered a real reform. Following devolution, it is not sustainable to have a second Chamber that does not relate to and properly reflect the devolved Administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We cannot have a second Chamber that relates largely to England—it should bring together the regions and nations of this country. We cannot have a second Chamber that does not include representatives of other faiths. Prayers should be said not just by the Bishops but by those representing other faiths.
A second Chamber could be constituted by election or, indeed, appointment. We need to look at what size any new Chamber should be, but that is a subsidiary question to what its role and powers should be. I follow my noble friend Lord Wakeham in saying that a constitutional convention should be put in place to look at all these issues, including how a reformed second Chamber relates in its powers to the primacy of the House of Commons. It is important to remember that without a second Chamber a Government can keep voting themselves into office.
It is often said that this House works in spite of its composition rather than because of it—that is true. I believe that the House of Lords is well regarded in this country as an important revising Chamber holding the Government to account. Any reform must ensure that that remains a core part of the House’s duty.
My time may be up in a year, so I want to address just a couple of points that have been made by noble Lords opposite. One of the main arguments against hereditary Peers is that no women are represented among our number. The fault for that lies just as much with the Government as it does with our side. The Labour Party, while in opposition or in government, has never supported any Bill that would give the right to the firstborn to succeed to a title. If it had, there would be many more mixed Members of the hereditary peerage.
The Government owe a duty to this House and to the country to announce what reforms they are considering, what reforms they now wish to impose, and what the timetable will be.
In the 50 years that I have sat in this House, it has changed. All ethnic communities are represented; nearly all religious denominations are represented, and noble Lords come from different parts of this country and from many different backgrounds. We have had in our ranks those who have been to jail, and perhaps a few who should have gone to jail. We are perhaps more representative of the nation than we ever realise.
Over the years, I have heard many good speeches from those who attend frequently and those who attend infrequently, and, occasionally, very bad speeches from those who attend all the time and never stop speaking. This House has a tendency to be pompous and often self-congratulatory. We often hear long speeches on foreign policy or important issues of the day, but I am afraid that our debates work only when they are narrowly focused. Too often, wide-ranging debates are for the benefit of the speaker and not the audience. I hope I have not fallen into that trap today.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, it has been a very revealing debate. The speeches by the noble Lord, Lord True, and particularly by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, remind me that the Tories fight like tigers to protect their privileges. My noble friend the Leader of the House rightly said in her excellent speech when she started the debate that we are talking principally about the purpose of the second Chamber and not the composition—although, following the seventh Lord Cromwell and the fourth Viscount Astor, it is tempting for me to go into the composition.
We are talking about the purpose, and the purpose is as the second Chamber of a legislature, and we do not have any legitimacy. Some countries are unicameral and have only one Chamber, but having seen the experience in Scotland, where some of the legislation is really awful, I think a second Chamber is important. That second Chamber, however, must have democratic legitimacy, and this one does not—manifestly so.
We need to find some way of achieving that democratic legitimacy. The Liberal Democrats, as we heard earlier, are in favour of direct elections. I agree with those who have criticised that—the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, and others—and who have said that it would result in some kind of confrontation between the two Houses, with the primacy of the Commons no longer guaranteed. In fact, if this Chamber was elected by proportional representation, it might challenge that primacy by claiming greater legitimacy. So I am against direct elections.
I am in favour of a senate of the nations and regions. I like the French system, where the members of the Senate are elected by grands électeurs in every region of France. But there are others—some noble Lords mentioned the Bundesrat—and we should look at other senates and second Chambers around the world and take some examples.
Meanwhile, we have to proceed bit by bit. The most egregious example of why we are unrepresentative is the hereditary Peers, some of them the descendants of robber barons and people who killed and worse—is there any worse?—to get the titles they got from the kings.
Some noble Lords have suggested that we should get rid of the Bishops—I see they have gone already. I agree. They represent just one religion in one part of the United Kingdom and that is indefensible, but that should be dealt with separately. The Bill, when we get to it, deals with the worst part of the way in which we are unrepresentative.
I agree with some other noble Lords that there is a difference—a confusion—in the concept of a peerage. Some people think of it just as an honour and we end up with people like the noble Lord, Lord Botham, who never turn up and are in Australia all the time making money from foot massages and things like that. They are not here. As other noble Lords have said, we need to separate the idea of the honour—one above a knighthood—and the working Peer. We should be working Peers. I have said privately, and I have said it before to my noble friend, that this is something we might be able to do without legislation—by a decision of this House or an agreement of the monarchy. I hope we will look into that.
Finally, if noble Lords look back at this debate so far in Hansard, they will find that the best speeches—the ones that are to be paid more attention to—are those made by the noble Lord, Lord Jay, which was a brilliant speech, and the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, although he did go over his time. That is something I am not going to do, because the one thing I have learned in my time here is to keep on the right side of your own Whips.
Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)
My Lords, ever since my early days, I have thought it anomalous to have hereditary legislators. But here I am, in the Chamber of the House of Lords, an excepted hereditary Peer. I suppose, ignobly, I have to say that in this life you have to play the cards you are dealt, and it was clear early on that I would not be a good professional footballer.
Obviously, as an individual, I am disappointed by the prospect of ejection, but that is the way of the wicked world in which we live, and the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, is quite right that it is indifferent to my private grief.
For me, the real issue is not what happens to me but the process, and the consequences of those processes for the world more widely. In reading and thinking about these issues and their history, I was initially surprised that the Parliament Acts appeared to pay so little attention to the question of the transition from the old House to the new one. Then I realised that it is almost certainly because the Life Peerages Act 1958 had not been passed, so at that point the whole thing was not really an issue.
We now appear to be in a constitutional world where so long as the Executive control the House of Commons, which they invariably do, they have the capacity to abolish the second Chamber, and, if they wish, to fill it with creatures and lackeys, for which there will be clear precedent that they can be removed at will. We risk seeing a second Chamber that becomes entirely impotent and, indeed, Parliament as a whole will have no direct say in all this. So much for bicameralism, of which I am a strong supporter—and checks and balances equally so.
The fact that nothing like this has happened has to do as much as anything else with what the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, has called the “good chaps” theory of government. It has generally, though unfortunately, become accepted that this is becoming discredited. I was recently ticked off by a fellow Peer outside the Chamber for making this point. I can see the point she was making. She said, “Don’t be silly; it couldn’t happen here”. Couldn’t it?
When I was elected a Member of the European Parliament in 1989, just before I came here, I had many colleagues who had themselves, or their colleagues, family or friends had, been locked up and tortured by authoritarian regimes. The father of the then chair of the legal affairs committee, Ludwig von Stauffenberg, was one of the heroes of the July plot and had been shot by firing squad on Hitler’s orders. One of my British colleagues told me of a Member whom he got to know who never wore a tie because he had been condemned to death and taken to the gallows, and reprieved only after the noose had been placed round his neck.
For five years, I sat on the European Parliament’s constitutional affairs committee and I was struck by how many other countries had approaches to constitutional law and the courts that were quite different from ours. No doubt that is because they had been under authoritarian rule quite recently. In this country, there was no German officer on a white horse riding down Whitehall, as happened on the Champs-Élysées. That is not that far away, in either time or space.
In those days, bliss it was to be alive in the political world; now, there is volatility and even darkness in the wider political atmosphere. There are international conflicts of a kind we have not seen since the Second World War. Only a few months ago, in this very Chamber, we debated whether the Government of the day should remove the scrutiny of the courts from some of their activities. Since then, we have seen a number of extremist riots in our streets. I believe that “It couldn’t happen here” are some of the most dangerous words in politics. We should remember that we take out fire insurance not because our house will burn down but because it might.
At the conclusion of the consideration of the forthcoming Bill, I believe we will need to have a definitive restatement of how the Parliament Acts, the Life Peerages Act, the Bill itself and the sovereignty of Parliament all fit together in the interests of freedom, democracy and the rule of law, and what if any safe- guards might be needed to underpin them. For all of us here, I believe this is a case of ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Baroness Hooper (Con)
My Lords, I really should say that it was the father of the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, who congratulated me when I made my maiden speech 40 years ago. In approaching this debate, I declare my bias in favour of history, tradition and something that works.
In the House of Lords, we have a unique institution that I believe creates a sense of continuity and stability because it has evolved over hundreds of years and, apart from the brief Oliver Cromwell period, has contributed conscientiously and seriously to the well-being of our people and the reputation of our Parliament. The role has evolved, and the work done by our unsalaried second Chamber, giving detailed scrutiny to legislation, holding the Government to account and not having the last word, is, I find, envied in many other countries. I am not happy, therefore, with the proposals contemplated by the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill.
The obsession with numbers is something I do not understand. We all know that attendance on a daily basis rarely exceeds 500, and that the norm is between 300 and 400. If we did not, my noble friend Lord True reminded us of that earlier. That is in part because we are not paid a salary, so it does not cost anything if somebody does not turn up. The important thing to realise and to explain is that, apart from a small hard core of regular Members, it is not always the same people who constitute those 300 to 400 people a day. If there is a debate on education, health, energy or any other subject, it is the people who know about that topic who attend. That is what gives the House of Lords a reputation for expertise.
Of course, if you want to scrap the present system entirely and start again from scratch, you would not start from here. I sometimes wonder whether in the future, and with the increasing trend to devolved government, both the present House of Commons and the House of Lords should go and the Palace of Westminster could serve as the seat of a federal Parliament. Of course, we would need a separate English Parliament before that.
I am not happy with the Government’s proposals as outlined by the noble Baroness the Leader, in spite of the very reasonable way she put them across. First, I have yet to meet anybody in any political party or on the doorstep who lists the abolition of the rights of the few remaining hereditary Peers to sit in your Lordships’ House as one of their top 10 policy priorities—with, of course, the notable exception of the noble Lord, Lord Grocott. Secondly, if a manifesto commitment is so sacrosanct, how and why has it become possible for the Government to drop or at least delay, as has been widely rumoured, the inclusion of the over-80s in the expulsion? Of course, I must admit to a particular personal interest in that. Thirdly, if the argument is that it is undemocratic to have hereditary Peers as Members, how can it possibly be democratic to have a wholly appointed House, which is what we would be left with?
I am probably one of the few people still here who voted against the so-called reform Bill in 1999. We were also assured then that this was just the first step. Subsequently, I had the opportunity to vote in favour of a fully elected House of Lords, as did a number of hereditary Peers—but that, of course, was much too democratic.
Since I became a Member of your Lordships’ House in 1985, I was able to enjoy 14 years in a mixed House of hereditaries and life Peers. I can honestly say that the present House of Lords performs its role well, but no better than the previously mixed House and at a far greater cost—daily allowances zoomed up after 1999.
If it were not for the ancestors of hereditary Peers, we would not have the Magna Carta or a House of Lords. So, in my final few seconds and as a final plea, please will the Government think again?
Lord Rooker (Lab)
My Lords, to seriously take note of Lords reform, we really need to be aware of our role and function. It is not to be the Executive’s little helpers but to hold them to account. As such, it is Commons reform that we need to look at. Having been there for 27 years, I am entitled to be a critical supporter. I was sent here not to undermine the elected House but to help with scrutiny and revision.
Our big mistake in 1997 was effectively to guillotine every Bill in the Commons. Okay, we called it timetabling, but it has exactly the same effect. Bills arrive here in the Lords not properly scrutinised by the elected House. I once suggested that all the Bills that arrive here should come with a Speaker’s certificate, pointing out what parts of the Bill had not been scrutinised, but I was told this was not practical when it was looked at. But it remains the case that we have to clean up the Commons’ failure to do its job properly, and it annoys those down there, who are ignorant about our function.
I always start sessions of the Peers in Schools programme—now Learn with the Lords—as I will do again in a couple of weeks, by saying that the Lords is, in effect, a large sub-committee of the Commons, with the role of asking it to think again. The elected House always has the last word, but we are the thinking Chamber, which thinks for itself rather than being told by the business managers what to think. We ask the Commons to think again and maybe again.
I think the Learn with the Lords programme needs to be extended from schools and colleges to Whitehall and the Commons. We need to confront the sheer ignorance—which I shared until I came here—in Whitehall and the Commons about our role and function. The obsession is always with composition and numbers. They are important but not the key event. I will never forget the day when, as a Minister, I went with my noble friend Lord Grocott, who was then the Government Chief Whip, to a senior Cabinet committee in charge of legislation. We were there merely to explain the rules and conventions here in the Lords. The chair of the committee wagged his finger at us and said, “You’ve gone native, you two”, based on his ignorance of what we were trying to explain. So far, that ex-Cabinet Minister has not arrived in your Lordships’ House. Ministers need the odd session, particularly if they have been only a Minister on the bridge, rather than, as I was, a Minister of State, always in the engine room. Those Cabinet Ministers who have never done any other jobs have not got a clue, and need to be better informed.
I am coming to the end now. We are not a threat, but we are here to stop the executive takeover of Parliament. Having served for nearly three years on the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, I know that the move continues bit by bit as the Executive take more power from Parliament for Ministers at the expense of scrutiny. There is no question but that—people on all sides have seen it—and it continues today. It has continued since the general election; that committee broke a precedent recently and summoned Ministers about an appalling Bill taking powers from Parliament. In my three years it never felt the need to summon Ministers, but it has since the last election.
Yes, we need to reduce our numbers, but kicking out the superactive noble Lord, Lord Dubs, and keeping the once-a-year Russian is not the sensible way to do it. I wait for a big defence of that from the Prime Minister. We should revisit the Commons and Lords Joint Committee on conventions of the UK Parliament. It was chaired by my noble friend Lord Cunningham, and its report was published in November 2006. After it was published, it was agreed by both Houses. If you are going to argue about changes in the conventions, both Houses have ownership. There should be a specific form of agreement. What better time to revisit it?
Baroness Goldie (Con)
My Lords, what a pleasure to follow such a feisty and articulate octogenarian as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. May he continue to entertain us for many years to come. I shall try to reduce this contribution to simple components: purpose, presence, pragmatism.
The purpose of this House is to scrutinise legislation from the other place, improve it—sadly, a frequent requirement—and, by our Chamber and committee activity, better inform public debate. By any assessment, we discharge that responsibility very well. The presence within this House of political parties, Cross-Benchers, Bishops and a number of non-affiliated Peers reflects an impressive array of experience, talent and expertise. That explains without need for further enlargement why we discharge our responsibilities so effectively. To be fair, the noble Baroness the Leader of the House acknowledged that. Pragmatism largely explains how we work. We make bad law good and good law better. The raucous exchanges familiar to elected Chambers are mercifully mostly absent from this one. By contrast, there is a discernible and collaborative desire to analyse and get to the heart of any issue, legislative or otherwise, and a House with the aggregate talent to be able to do that. I accept that to many onlookers the wonder is that this works at all, but it does, and those of us who attend regularly know that.
Pragmatism, I suggest, should be the overriding consideration in any attempt to reform this House. I see the House of Lords like an intricate tapestry. How many of us spotting a thread hanging down from a jacket or pair of trousers have tugged at it to find that the entire hem falls down or the seam falls apart, or have pulled an annoying thread sticking out of a button only to lose the button altogether? Let me make two general observations. If in the main this House functions satisfactorily, we should be cautious about embarking on change. That is not advocating for no change at all—very far from it—but rather urging clear analysis and identification of what the problems are before we try to solve them.
Secondly, if after such analysis change is considered necessary, it must be approached in a holistic manner with regard to how the House operates as a whole. If we do not do that, we neither understand the threads we are pulling out nor what the unintended consequences may be. What is unworkable is tinkering with the structure, removing a bit here and there, and hoping that the rest will somehow stumble along. The noble Baroness the Leader of the House calls that incremental, but I call it disjointed.
The Government are committed to addressing the issue of hereditary Peers in this House, and in their manifesto they also deployed ageism, opining that by the age of 80 you are past it and should get out. That is discrimination. We have just seen at first hand the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, and there are sterling contributions made by Peers in their 80s whose experience is relevant, whose expertise informs and whose acuity is breathtaking. The proposal also drives a cart and horse through female representation in this House. I hope that the Government have begun to see the light, having recently appointed some imminent or actual octogenarians of their own, and they are very welcome. I would like to think that I am still good for a few years to go.
Baroness Goldie (Con)
Thank you, my Lords. What the Government’s ageism experiment has demonstrated is that a disjointed approach to reform does not work. On the principle of hereditary Peers, we hit the same buffers. It is difficult to argue for the retention of such a system in a 21st-century democracy, but what is not workable is taking a machete to the hereditaries, culling 88 Peers from the membership of this House and expecting it still to be able to do its job. That is a constitutional onslaught. If at a stroke we lose these 88 Peers, who reflect a welcome age span, a geographical spread and diversity of experience and expertise, how do the Government expect proper scrutiny of legislation, adequate manning of committees, not to mention support for the Lord Speaker and his department and servicing the Woolsack? At present, our proceedings are not just enhanced by the hereditaries; the hereditaries are critical to getting the business done. That void cannot be filled by prime ministerial appointments. That takes the constitutional unacceptable to the constitutional repugnant.
This all goes much deeper than disquiet about the hereditary principle. It strikes at the heart of our British constitutional governance, our distinct and different role from the elected House and the largely unwritten but workable parliamentary equilibrium which has evolved over decades. I urge the Government to reflect very carefully before they start pulling out individual threads of the intricate tapestry. Intelligent change requires reflection, consultation, understanding of the implications of change and the wisdom of seeking consensus.
Lord Hacking (Lab)
My Lords, it is great fun following the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie. I stand before your Lordships as a very rare species: I am a hereditary Labour Peer. There are only four of us altogether, and I am a bit more rare because I am the only Labour hereditary Peer speaking in this debate. More than that, I have more experience than other noble Lords, except for the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, who has enormous experience in House of Lords reform. Indeed, shortly before I joined this House, in the first Wilson Government, there was a serious attempt to reform the House of Lords. It was defeated by an unholy alliance between Michael Foot on one side and Enoch Powell on the other. I then experienced the 1999 Lords Bill—but I had better be careful because at the height of the debates I came into the House with an enormous black eye. The rumour was that I had been duffed by an angry hereditary Peer for disloyalty towards other hereditary Peers.
It has always been my position that, as we are the mother of Parliaments worldwide, we should not have in our membership those who have got here by accident of birth, including myself. Clearly all of us hereditary Peers must go, whatever fine contribution we are making.
My noble friend the Privy Seal has invited us to provide comment about reform. My answer to that is twofold. First, there should be in place a House commission with full, unrestricted powers for the choice of new Members. Secondly, we should be an appointed House, not an elected one. The basic problem with an elected House—I know I am disagreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Newby—is that there will be two elected Houses in Parliament, and that is a constitutional problem. In the legislation there may be great attempts to fetter the electoral powers of this House but we will still be an elected Chamber, and there will still be a serious risk of a constitutional clash between the two Houses of Parliament. That will bring about the inevitable problems that, as our constitution is structured, we will be ill-equipped to handle. The United States of America has two Houses, each of electoral power, but there is a President in the United States of America who can try to find a solution between them. We have a constitutional monarch, and we do not want to bring a constitutional monarch into a constitutional crisis.
That brings me to the end of my speech. Having rather a reputation of going over time, I hope my Whips will note that I have gone under time.
Lord Birt (CB)
My Lords, at its best, the House of Lords is an unrivalled repository of experience and expertise that can challenge the first Chamber to think again, as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, said, and our very limited power if we cannot persuade is to delay legislation for a short and limited period—a power hardly ever used. That is no argument for retaining the status quo, for this House is certainly in need of reform.
First, mainly thanks to successive Prime Ministers, the size of the House has been steadily increasing and is far too large. On 22 October, we had 829 Members. We should reduce to 600 Members, and, importantly, that 600 should be a hard cap not to be exceeded. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Burns, on both counts.
Secondly, whereas the majority in this Chamber have had distinguished careers and bring extraordinary expertise and experience to our discussions of policy and legislation, some do not. There are a number of examples of unwarranted appointments, but I shall mention just one category: no donor to any political party should be able to buy their way into this House. As others have said, a second element of reform needs to be a broad-based statutory body, a new HOLAC that validates the quality of anyone put forward for membership of this House by whatever route.
Thirdly, we need a formula to establish the appropriate size of the political parties and Cross-Benchers in a reduced House. For the parties, it could be the share of the popular vote in the last two elections—not one—with Cross-Benchers, bringing a non-politically partisan perspective, taking up something like 25% of the 600 seats. Under that formulation, both main parties today would be virtually equal in size, with the rest of the House holding the balance.
Fourthly, to allow that to happen, we obviously need measures to bring down the size of the House from today’s 800-plus to 600. There is wide agreement that many hereditaries and Bishops make invaluable individual contributions, but their participation in this House by right is an historic anomaly not mirrored anywhere else in the democratic world, and it should end. That said, many individual hereditaries and Bishops have a strong claim, which I completely support, to be reappointed as Cross-Benchers, and I hope they will be. However, removing the hereditaries and Bishops would reduce the numbers by only 114. Removing the minority of Peers, around 150, whose participation is limited and who attended fewer than 20% of the sittings in the whole of the last Parliament would reduce the total number close to target.
Labour’s manifesto also trails the idea of Peers stepping down who are 80 or over at the end of a Parliament. Assuming an election in autumn 2028, that principle would produce 303 exits. I am conflicted, but losing at one go 300 of many of the most active and effective Peers in this House would be brutal, to say the least. No organisation of any kind could afford easily to recover its competence after such a scale of loss, and, to put it very politely, the idea that some of the most active should give way to the least active appears perverse.
Fifthly, every part of this House needs to be more diverse, more systematically representative of every kind of interest, whether by gender, ethnicity, experience, nation or region. I do not think enough people have said that. One role of a redesigned HOLAC should be to foster diversity, as well as to validate the appropriateness of individual appointments on all sides.
I conclude by saying to the Leader of the House: please do not kick the can down the road. Partial reform does not work in any setting. If we do not deal resoundingly with all these issues, an institution that has evolved over centuries into something of unique constitutional value will come under existential threat.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, I surprise myself by taking as my starting point agreement with the noble Lords, Lord Newby and Lord Foulkes, that in a democratic society there is always a case for a democratically elected legislature—and that is to understate the matter, I would have thought. Legitimacy in a democratic society is derived primarily from election but, for a conservative, legitimacy can also be derived from history and from tradition. It might sound a little quixotic to say that, but large numbers of people in this country completely understand it; that is why they have as much respect as they do for the monarchy.
It is the presence of hereditary Peers in this House that maintains that strand of legitimacy. Being appointed gives you no legitimacy at all. For the majority of people, it just looks like cronyism and, if I may say so with respect to the noble Lord, Lord Birt, who has just spoken, and to others, that is not addressed by having a statutory HOLAC. If that is not elected—if it is not in itself a form of electoral college—where does the electoral legitimacy reside that justifies its appointment of the people whom it would appoint to the legislature? One ends up in an infinite regress. There is no legitimacy.
Those who say you cannot have two democratic Chambers seem to have missed what has happened in at least 100 countries that I can think of. Even the United States manages to pass a huge amount of legislation, and that is a country where people deliberately designed the legislature to have a degree of conservatism, shall we say—a degree of holding back. That needs to be our starting point. Why should we not be a democratic House? Where does our legitimacy derive from?
There is a large measure of agreement among us on the need for reform. The passing of the hereditaries has always been part of that—there has been a consensus about that for the last 25 years—but that is not what this argument is about. This argument is not about the passage of the hereditaries as such; it is about the context in which that happens. That context is meant to be, and has been pledged to be, a reform of this House. I am not going back to what Tony Blair may have said to somebody in a corridor or behind the Woolsack or whatever in the past. I am going to this Labour Party’s manifesto.
The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, said there were six proposals in it; I have identified seven. They come under the heading: “Immediate reform of the House of Lords”. Those are the words in the manifesto, a copy of which I have been careful to bring with me in case there is any dispute about it. They are removing the hereditaries. There is mandatory retirement at 80. There is a revision of the code of standards. There is the removal of disgraced Members. There is a requirement for participation. There is a reform of the appointments process and a commitment to addressing national and regional balance. All of those come under the heading of “These things will be done immediately”. They are not being done immediately. That is the problem. The democratisation of the House, which is also mentioned in the manifesto, is something that they say will be consulted on. It is not to be done immediately but the seven things I have read out are—and they are not.
This Government, in my view, have no mandate to introduce one of them outside that context—to revert to the argument that getting rid of the hereditaries is what it is all about when in fact it is not. For the last 25 years, it has always been about the reform of the House of Lords and removing the hereditaries only in a context that provides a new form of legitimacy. We all know in practice that nothing is going to be done about those things. We know that they are being kicked into the long grass and we are very unlikely to see them again, except possibly for a few administrative matters which can be dealt with fairly easily.
We have had arguments over the last century about reform of the House of Lords and I join others in saying this or something along these lines. In 1910 and 1948 constitutional conferences were held between both Houses of Parliament on precisely this type of question. We should do that again. Neither conference succeeded but they had the great merit that they informed the legislation the Government then brought forward so that it was much more acceptable and turned out to work. We need to see this in its proper context. We need to find a compromise. A conference of that character would be the best way forward while the Bill is withdrawn.
Lord Hain (Lab)
My Lords, seven years ago, on 19 December 2017, I said in your Lordships’ House—and I apologise for quoting myself but there is a reason—that
“we all know that things cannot continue as they are. We number over 800 and rising … we have become not so much an embarrassment but, many say, a scandal. At a time of austerity, when everything else is cut, our numbers rise inexorably”.
I concluded:
“Things have reached a point where change is unavoidable. The question is therefore not whether there is change, but who makes it. Either this House takes responsibility or it will pass to the Commons and the Government. Either we reform ourselves or others will reform us”.—[Official Report, 19/12/17; cols. 1979-80.]
I mention this because we did not take responsibility. We did not do anything. Rather, the last Tory Governments did not allow us to do anything, despite—as the former Lord Speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, said very aptly earlier in the debate—universal cross-party support for the plans in the report by the noble Lord, Lord Burns, to reduce our numbers. Now we have this Bill, about which Tory Peers such as the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, have pumped themselves up into an absolute fury. Yet we could have done something sensible. My noble friend Lord Grocott introduced Bills to abolish hereditary by-elections in every parliamentary Session from 2016-17, apart from the current Session and the short 2019 Session. That makes a total of five occasions. Had his Bill not been repeatedly blocked by the Conservative Government of the day, there would now be 26 fewer excepted hereditary Peers.
This Labour Government were elected with a clear manifesto commitment to introduce legislation to remove the right of the remaining hereditary Peers to sit in the Lords. The current tightly drafted Bill, now going through its remaining stages in the Commons, will end what were always transitional arrangements. The United Kingdom is one of only two countries that still have a hereditary element in their legislatures. The Bill is not about individuals or personalities but a 21st century Parliament which should not be reserving places for lawmakers just because of the families they were born into.
Many hereditary Peers—on all Benches—have made important contributions to public life, within and beyond the House. This reform is not targeted at them but rather at ending the transitional arrangements put in place after the 1999 Act and resolving a 25-year anomaly. As others have already said in this debate—rightly—should a hereditary Peer be thought fit and valued to be appointed a life Peer, as many clearly are, there is no reason to stop that happening through the existing mechanisms.
Labour’s manifesto was clear on the intention to remove the right of hereditary Peers to sit in your Lordships’ House and there should be no unnecessary delay once the legislation goes through. I trust that the Official Opposition will continue to abide by our usual conventions. I look at the Leader of the Opposition as I say that. I ask my noble friend the Leader of the House to send a letter to all Peers—or to arrange for one to be sent—reminding colleagues around the House why abiding by the historic Salisbury/Addison convention which respects government election manifesto commitments is so important. Will she look at that, please?
I am concerned that some noble Lords opposite are gearing up for a filibuster once the hereditary Peers Bill begins its passage through your Lordships’ House. Some were part of the Official Opposition in this House the last time a Labour Government ended up having to use the Parliament Act. I trust history is not going to repeat itself any time soon, certainly not during the current parliamentary Session. Given the Conservative Party’s dire defeat at the recent general election, it is weird that a number of noble Lords opposite have decided that this is the political hill they are ready to die on. This House is drinking in the last chance saloon. It is the biggest legislative Chamber in the world apart from the Chinese National People’s Congress. Is that really a benchmark to stand proudly by and fight to the end?
Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate (Con)
My Lords, I have no wish to say anything about the reform of the House of Lords, but I think it is worth reflecting that when considering the future of institutions one should first engage in a process which carries out a review of the efficacy of the institution. We have already had many reviews, including, in particular, the review of the noble Lord, Lord Burns. Following a review there must normally be a full consultation process to see how acceptable any proposals might be and then if a legislative change is needed there is often a wider review, with Green and White Papers. Only then would legislation be pursued and preferably with full consensus. That is not currently quite the case.
In considering changes to our structures and processes we need to fully appreciate why we are doing this, and our major concern must be to maintain and enhance our reputation to the wider world while not negatively affecting our important role as a scrutinising second Chamber, which I believe is in general being well performed. Those who call for wide reform or an elected Chamber—as my noble friend Lord Moylan has referred to—should always remember that our constitution is headed by a monarch without executive powers, unlike most other bicameral parliaments, where the Head of State usually does have an executive role, however limited.
Nevertheless, I want to briefly make a few suggestions. First, any policy to reduce numbers must apply equally to removals and appointments. I believe that only by dealing with both together can we be seen as producing something credible and fair. On appointments, restraint by Prime Ministers is absolutely necessary. History has shown that that has been a problem. Secondly, HOLAC must be reformed to have a stronger say in appointments. I do not favour a statutory basis as this has knock-on effects but at least there should be a convention—whether it is written or not is another matter—and its advice should be followed and all names put forward must be accompanied by a full set of reasoning as to why a person should be appointed to this House.
The writ under which new Members would serve could include clear obligations to attend the House and carry out legislative duties. Consideration might well be given, relating to new Members, of a time limit on their appointment or even a minimum, as well as a maximum, age for service. The United States Senate, for instance, has a minimum age of 30. But if so, it must be clear in the new terms of service when they are offered an appointment, so that their contract can be legitimately enforced. I offer my support to the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull: a requirement that Peers attend, say, 10% or 15% of sittings in any Session to maintain their positions should also be considered.
As for the numbers, from my point of view it seems clear that, beginning with the Tony Blair changes, it is sadly inevitable that hereditaries will lose their rights. However, we know there are a notable number of Peers in this category whose service to the House has been, and still is, enormously important and whose contributions should not be lost. I hope that a compromise can be reached to allow life peerages to be created to cover that issue.
Looking at the Life Peerages Act 1958, I consider my appointment to the House to be for life and, like others, I committed myself to serve for as long as I have the mental and physical capacity to do so. A change to those obligations for current Peers would be difficult to accept, both legally and morally. I hope that those who are already in place might be allowed to choose to retire gracefully at their own chosen time, but obviously in appropriate cases with gentle advice.
We should look at the attendance of current Members and require proof of attendance for them, perhaps in the same percentage as we might require of new Members. The leave of absence provisions are being abused. I hope that we make a change. In future, leave of absence should be restricted to specific reasons and not be constantly repeatable or extendable. The time approved should be capped. Clearly, Peers who have illnesses or who wish to complete studies or professional development should be allowed to do so.
Each year, a number of Peers choose to retire for a number of reasons, not just age, and those who do are thanked. Perhaps we should look at a package enhancing our gratitude. I realise that we have no spare cash to offer an honorarium, but we might look at other benefits or an ongoing relationship—I think the Leader of the House referred to this earlier—to make departure more congenial. This House is a hard-working and effective institution, so whatever is proposed must not be permitted to harm that.
Viscount Thurso (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness the Leader of the House for having brought forward this debate, which has been thoughtful and an immensely valuable contribution to deliberations on the future of your Lordships’ House. However, for me, it has brought on a slight Groundhog Day feeling, since I have been taking part in such debates since my first incarnation in this House, in the other place, and again in this House for nearly 30 years now.
The first debate was in 1996, when I was struck for ever by the contribution of my late great friend Lord Mackie of Benshie, who rose and, in his stentorian voice, said, “I believe wholeheartedly in the hereditary principle”, and then after a pause said, “For breeding cattle”. He went on to describe the policy of these Benches, which was not about hereditaries. I have remained absolutely convinced since those days that a reformed House, based mostly, if not entirely, upon election, is the proper way to go forward.
I accept that that is not going to happen in a hurry. When we failed to get the 2012 Bill, which got its Second Reading, through to its other stages we missed a real trick for proper reform. In the short term, two things are absolutely imperative, both of which are in the report of the noble Lord, Lord Burns.
The first is size. We have to agree a size and agree it even before we have worked out how to get there. We have to say a number—I am not going to put a number on it, but numbers have been floated—and then we can agree how to get there. Until we have decided on the size, nothing else can really work. The second is limits. I am not in favour of an age limit. There is no age limit down the other end and I know lots of people can come into this House at a later stage in life and make a valuable contribution. I am against people being here for ever; it is ridiculous that we would look at a young person aged 30 being able to sit for 50 years while a highly confident 75 year-old had to go after five. I am in favour of term limits rather than age limits.
Why reform? The House works extremely well: its committees work excellently, the quality of debate is very good, and the way in which legislation is improved is excellent. Unfortunately, for all that great work—and I have nothing but admiration and respect for every Member of this House—there is one fundamental defect. It is the one that the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, referred to: it does not have legitimacy. At the end of the day, when you are at the other end and voting out whatever has been done at this end, you will not have heard the debate. You just troop through the Lobby and the Minister’s phrase will be, “We’re the elected House”.
We are not legitimate in the eyes of the press, except on those very rare occasions when we come up with something that they happen to agree with, and we are not legitimate in the eyes of the public. I disagree here with the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, for whom I have great affection and respect, notwithstanding his regular name-checking of my election to this place the second time around. I have regularly discussed the House of Lords and our constitution with people on the doorsteps in Caithness. I do not pretend that Caithnesians are cleverer than those anywhere else; it is just that people actually care. Without that legitimacy, which I believe will ultimately come only from election, we are always going to have a problem.
I am not that keen on a commission doing everything, because the commission will be composed of the metropolitan Oxbridge elite. Where will the crofters, the carers, the binmen and the fishermen come from? That is what representative democracy actually delivers.
I remain convinced that, ultimately, we should have an elected House. Being elected for one term, with one-third elected every three elections, so that people would be here for 15 years, is the best way to do it, but I recognise that it will not happen in a hurry. Most of all, I am a parliamentarian and I want this House to be strengthened—to strengthen Parliament against the Executive. In a liberal democracy, at the point where we are under threat as never before from the algorithms that are driving us into silos of agreement and taking away from the great market of ideas, we need this House more than ever to function well.
Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)
My Lords, it is a privilege to participate in this important and timely debate. I am not sure whether I am at an advantage or a disadvantage, but I do not have the sense of déjà vu that the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, just commented on, alongside a number of other noble Lords. This is my first debate on Lords reform.
Many of today’s interventions, and many comments in the public sphere, focus on the size of the House. I accept that size is an important question and that, in particular, our size relative to the other place may contribute to negative perceptions. However, we should not allow perceptions to take over reality, and we should not lose sight of what that reality is. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, put it, we are a full-time House made up of part-time Members. Moreover, the fact that we have careers outside the House is crucial to our ability to discharge our core constitutional function, which is to provide supervision and scrutiny through expertise and experience. So yes, there seems to be a public perception about there being too many of us, but let us not frame the debate about Lords reform in a way that amplifies that perception. Let us not accept it, at least without some context, and certainly let us avoid the pejorative comparisons that are often made.
There is a separate question that is even more important than size. How far can a Government go in changing the composition of the House without undermining its legitimacy? In theory, there are no set limits to the number of new Peers that a Prime Minister can appoint; by the same theory, a new Government could come in and fundamentally alter the composition of the House. Lloyd George famously threatened to do so. If that threat ever came to pass, this House would lose its legitimacy almost immediately.
The British constitution has various examples of things that can happen in theory but just do not happen in practice, of powers that are subject to few or almost no limits in theory, but that are in practice limited by constitutional conventions, political self-restraint and past practice—even where that past practice does not have the legal force of a binding precedent.
Using the very helpful data dashboard produced by the Library, I had a look at the most recent practice. In the 1990s, the average number of peerages created per year was 34. In the 2000s, it was 24. It was 31 in the 2010s and in the current decade it is so far 38. I am one of the beneficiaries of the largesse of this decade. Prime Minister Blair appointed about 36 Peers per year. Prime Minister Cameron appointed about 39 per year, and Prime Minister Johnson appointed about 35 per year. If one factors in the size of the House, which of course varied under these premierships, the average impact ratio—if we can call it that—of each of these PMs on the composition of the House ranged from 3% to 5% a year. Of course there were years, typically at the beginning of a Parliament, where most of the appointments would have been made.
The decision that had the biggest impact on the composition of the House was the removal of the hereditary Peers in the first term of the Blair Government, but that removal, as we have heard, was not done unilaterally by the Government of the day. There was a compromise to ensure wider political support. This suggests that it would be very unwise for the Government to dig in their heels on the hereditary Peers Bill without seeking to secure all-party support and without striking some compromise.
It is not difficult to see what that compromise might look like. The noble Lord, Lord Jay, and I think the noble Lord, Lord Newby, alluded to the possibility of at least some hereditary peerages being transformed into life peerages. There was also considerable support—perhaps even overwhelming support—for the proposals contained in the Burns report and the proposals made by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull. Why not build on that consensus?
What must be avoided is a situation in which the expulsion of 92 Peers is done in a fractious way and is followed by the appointment of very large numbers of new Peers, perhaps also in order to fill the vacuum created by the introduction of a retirement age. If this is the direction of travel, I am afraid that any improvement in public perception deriving from a reduction in size would be far outweighed by the perception that our composition has been so fundamentally altered by one Government that we can no longer be credible as a Chamber of wise and independent counsel and scrutiny.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I want to make it clear what my attitude to this Bill is. In a race between the Grim Reaper and this Government to see the back of me, I hope that the Government win. In 1999, we stayed on to secure the further reform of the House of Lords; I believe that we should make a further attempt to do that.
The current arrangements, with the Prime Minister’s unfettered power of appointment, will not do. What the Leader of the House described as incremental change is no change at all: a few Members gone but the basic structure of the House staying the same. The dangers of that were very well illustrated by the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood.
It is really not difficult to do stage two. The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, set out one way of doing it and other Peers have set out others. They all focus on an element of quality control, but I do not think we need to create institutions to do that. As long as whoever brings in incoming Peers has to say why and how they will enhance the House, bringing in people who will not do that will reflect on the reputation of that party. One way or another, we will see fewer bad appointments.
If Peers who are still in the House have to commit, on our honour, to playing a proper part in this House and say that we have the capacity and intention to do that, then it will be quite easy to remove Peers who fail that test. We will have an ability under that sort of system to control our own quality. We can tie it back in to what my noble friend Lord Norton will doubtless refer to as being “assessed against purpose”. I am a follower of my noble friend and, after this evening, of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, also. He was a superb Minister in his day. It was always a huge pleasure to find oneself opposite him because he listened. If he agreed with you, he would take it back to the department and you knew that he would be effective in his arguments there, even if he did not always win.
Another change we should make, as has been said a lot this evening, is to numbers. We need to agree how many Peers are in this House and what proportions should be linked to the Government, Opposition and Cross Benches. It is not a difficult change to make. If that causes problems around an election, when the basis for assessing the numbers changes, as has been suggested by the noble Lords, Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Foulkes, we can de-link peerages and the right to sit in this House. It has been done for hereditary Peers and it can be done for life Peers also. That, in a way, might be a useful change so that the people who have really earned a peerage but do not want to serve in this House can be given that honour, and membership of this House can be confined to people who really want to make a contribution.
I add that I very much support what my noble friend Lord Astor said about self-evaluation and improvement. We need to become a more reflective House. I would like to see us publishing proper independent research on our effectiveness and looking at ways in which we can do better. I would very much like to see us covering secondary legislation better. As other Peers have said, we are seeing much more of it. We need to get more control of it.
Lastly, when it comes to retirement age, one of my early memories of being on the Government Bench as a Whip and taking a Bill through is being thoroughly defeated by three speeches, mostly from the Cross Benches, from Peers whose total age when added together was 286. I do not think age should be the criterion. We live in an ageing society. We have to make the best use of all the good years that we have, and we should not set the contrary example in this House.
Lord Parekh (Lab)
My Lords, when we embark on this momentous task of reforming the House of Lords, we ought to be very clear about what we are interested in. For me as a philosopher, the question is to be clear about the questions we want to ask and answer. I will propose the questions that we ought to be asking and prioritising. As far as reform of the House of Lords is concerned, I would list the following four questions as those we are all concerned to answer.
First, there are questions about the composition of the House of Lords. Who belongs to it: how many, how often and who appoints? There are questions relating to its structure. Secondly, there are questions relating to its function. What should it be doing? Is scrutinising legislation, organising short questions and debates all that it does? What else? Is it not possible to organise these debates periodically and reproduce them as pamphlets to be distributed to schools and colleges in our country where they can contribute to public education?
The third question is: what about the language we use? Are we happy to retain the titles “Lords” and “Ladies”, or are we uneasy about them? I certainly am and have said so on many occasions.
Likewise, on the internal procedures of the House, I have faced many occasions when there were far too many speakers—let us say 50—for the time allocated, so each one was given one minute. This one-minute wisdom escaped even Moses and the prophets of great religions. What do I say in one minute? It has occurred to me to ask: why should it not be possible to say, “The minimum time is three to four minutes for everyone, and those who fall outside that range can submit their speeches”. After all, what is the point of Hansard? It is not simply for those who are sitting here and listening; the point is for it to be read. Why cannot those who cannot deliver their speeches submit them to be published in the following day’s Hansard?
My final question is about language—not just “Lords” and “Ladies” but the language in which we talk about the House, inside and outside. For example, observe words such as “second Chamber” in today’s debate. What does that mean and what does it convey? It is a historical legacy. It is basically an abbreviation of “secondary Chamber”; it does not have the power or the functions. I suggest that the first important thing is to list those questions, to recognise those that are crucial and to find answers for them consensually.
In the few minutes I have, I will contribute my thoughts on two or three questions. I have floated one of them, although I have not had any takers so far. I have often thought that we are one of the most internationally minded countries in the world. Why should it not be possible for us to set an example by inviting an eminent outsider—it could be Clinton, Nelson Mandela or the Commonwealth secretary-general—as a kind of visiting professor in a university. He could spend three weeks with us and, during that time, interact with us and provide his perspective on the global issues in which we are interested. I should have thought that that kind of thing would set an example to other countries and might become a wonderful project.
Likewise—before the Chief Whip loses patience with me—it is also important to think of an alternative vocabulary, as I said. The third and the most important thing for me is to make sure that we are clear about the constitutional function of the House of Lords. What is its place in our political system? That place has yet to be determined.
Lord Norton of Louth (Con)
My Lords, I begin with two propositions that, in my view, should form the basis for determining reform of this House. The first is that form should follow function—we need to determine what purpose an institution serves. What is the principal purpose of this House, as a second Chamber of Parliament? The second proposition is that good law is a public good. If one accepts that, that helps determine the principal role of this House. It is a House of legislative scrutiny. That is not its only role, but it is the one that establishes it as a necessary part of our constitutional system.
The House of Commons is the elected Chamber, and the fact that it is elected ensures that it enjoys primacy. The fact of election also creates political imperatives for its Members. They need to be elected and re-elected, and they focus on activities that enhance their chance of re-election. They devote time to constituents’ demands, which have become more onerous decade by decade. They focus on outward-looking activities that bolster their political profiles. The quest for electoral success drives them to put the interests of party ahead of the institution of which they are Members. Focusing on detailed scrutiny of legislation does not come high on their list of political imperatives.
That shapes the relationship between the two Houses. The House of Commons determines the ends of legislation, and we accept that. We focus on the means. If one accepts that good law is a public good, that is a necessary role, and this House is ideally placed to fulfil it. The fact of being an appointed Chamber is a benefit—we lack the political imperatives facing MPs. We have the benefit of the experience and expertise of the membership, and the benefit of procedure: we do not utilise programme Motions, there is no selection of amendments by the chair and we do not normally employ closure Motions. We devote as much time as is needed to considering all the amendments tabled to Bills. This House makes a significant difference to the detail of Bills, and its changes are generally acknowledged by government as having improved the legislation. The law of the land would be significantly diminished without the work of this House.
Those two propositions should therefore form the basis of reform. We should avoid big bang reforms that destroy the complementary role of this House as a Chamber of legislative scrutiny. There is a democratic argument for an appointed second Chamber—those familiar with the literature will be aware of that. We should equally avoid discrete reforms that are detached from the purpose of the House. An arbitrary age limit, for example, may remove some of the experience and expertise that contributes to the work of the House, but removing Members who may have made little or no contribution would not have such an effect.
To bolster the capacity of the House to fulfil its key function necessitates focusing on how Members reach this House. We need to ensure that those qualified to contribute to the work of the House are nominated. We need to enhance our structures and procedures to reinforce what we do. That means looking not just at how we deal with Bills once introduced—should we consider, for example, taking evidence on Bills?—but also at the legislative process holistically. Expanding pre-legislative and post-legislative scrutiny would likely contribute to better Bills and would play to the strengths of the House. We are ideally placed to enhance post-legislative scrutiny. Such changes would enable us to engage more with those outside the House who wish to contribute their knowledge on a particular measure.
There is scope for reform, but we need to ensure that it derives from our understanding of what this House exists to do. In my view, we already do a good job of legislative scrutiny. We can take steps to ensure that we do it even better—that should be our focus, and that should drive reform.
Lord Curry of Kirkharle (CB)
My Lords, I very much welcome this debate in advance of considering the Government’s legislative plans. I hope the Government are willing to reflect on the views of the House and prepared to amend their thinking if there is a consensus of views as a consequence of this debate.
I agree that we need to reform the House of Lords—that is long overdue. However, I have a number of serious concerns about the Government’s current plans. First, I am unhappy with the planned piecemeal and incremental approach of removing hereditary Peers first and then moving on to other measures such as an age limit, et cetera. In my view, this is a half-baked way to reform this House. I accept that this was in the manifesto and the King’s Speech, but we should have a Bill that incorporates full-blown reforms so that we can have an opportunity, such as today’s, to consider the implications of a range of measures and the comprehensive impact they would have.
Secondly, like the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, I have a real concern about legislation to reform this House being generated in an immature House of Commons that has very limited knowledge about the role of this House and how it functions. We in the Lords should be bold and brave in proposing reforms for the Government to consider, as the Leader stated. We have tried in the past, but either we were not courageous enough or we failed to be taken seriously by the Government.
Let me comment on some of the specifics of the Government’s plans. To remove hard-working hereditary Peers, as a first step, looks rather vindictive to me. Even if their presence is something of an anomaly in today’s world, and a remnant of the 1999 reforms, it smacks of an attack on privilege. It would be much better for this to be considered as an element in a whole package of measures.
Let me be absolutely clear: I have no axe to grind on these issues. I have now reached the age of maturity, according to the Government, and am happy to step down if necessary—and may do so before being sacked. I am not interested in self-preservation. However, I am still a relative new boy compared with some, having been appointed in 2011 by HOLAC, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Jay. It is an immense privilege to be here, but none of us is immortal and I would support a 15-year term.
As has been stated, there are dozens of Peers who never turn up and do not contribute to the working of the House, so why do we not sack them as a first step, rather than these hard-working noble friends of mine—sandwiched as I am on these Benches between hereditary Peers—who put in a real stint?
I propose that we should reform this House by considering the following measures. As suggested by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, in his excellent speech, we should change the embarrassing appointments process by which Prime Ministers can, at a whim, appoint another dollop of Members into the House without any real challenge or consideration of the impact. We should give the House of Lords Appointments Commission responsibility for appointments, if appropriate with statutory powers, to ensure political balance, professional balance, diversity balance and geographic balance. We should introduce either a limited term in office or a retirement age, or both. We should also introduce a clear participation requirement and a minimal obligation on attendance and, yes, bring the current hereditary replacement process to an end, but allow existing hereditary Peers to serve their term and be ultimately impacted by an age limit or length of term.
Finally, I am concerned about the longer term, and phrases in the Government’s briefing documents such as “electoral legitimacy” and
“replacing the … House of Lords with a … democratically elected second chamber”.
Unlike our Lib Dem colleagues, I do not believe that the role of this House as a revising Chamber will be enhanced or improved by having an elected House, or even a partially elected House. It would create tension and conflict with the Commons and be a retrograde step. What is needed is an effective appointments process through HOLAC.
In conclusion, let us work on a plan that proposes comprehensive reform of this House, rather than the piecemeal approach that is currently being proposed.
Baroness Buscombe (Con)
My Lords, I recall a few years ago being asked by a senior member of the Royal Family for my view on the continued presence in our House of hereditary Peers. I replied, “Your Royal Highness, it’s simple—they are a one-way street. They are only here to serve, with honour and extraordinary commitment. They are beholden to no one. They stand up for what they believe and, no matter where they sit in your Lordships’ House, they follow their conscience. Their diverse interests, experience and expertise, together with their geographical spread among the nations and regions, remain incomparable, and they respect our conventions and gently remind us of our collective privileges”.
While the wretched Bill makes its passage, hereditary Peers continue to serve here and work harder than a large number of life Peers who show scant commitment to their membership and use this place and their title to further their outside interests. How many of the newer appointees pay their respects to the remarkable books of remembrance in the Royal Gallery—page after page of loyal servants to our whole United Kingdom, and their sons, slaughtered in defence of this realm in just two world wars?
We appointees are largely here by some luck and hopefully some attributes and skills, being in the right place at the right time and chosen for a particular reason. Recent appointments may have little to do with merit but suit the cultural mores of the moment—or they may have written large cheques.
I could accept this spiteful measure more if there was a morsel of logic that demands that the Bishops, originally here because of their vast estates, at the very least reduce their numbers. While their presence is firmly embedded in our constitution, they are now highly politicised and lecture us all while being entirely unaccountable, keeping their employees in penury while choosing to spend £100 million on reparations from the coffers of their dedicated and now tiny flock. The Bishops have argued that their work in the House is an extension of their service to the nation in parishes, schools and charitable work. Well, that exactly describes what hereditary Peers do as a matter of course: their duty, although they do not see it as such because it comes naturally to them. Just read the recent obituary of the late Marquess of Lothian.
We are told that a second stage of reform will follow. I promise noble Lords that it will not. We were told that last time in 1999, when the big argument for reform was all around “modernising Parliament”. Blair’s Government did not even have the guts during the following 11 years to end the nonsense of handing the title “Lady” to their wives, for fear of upsetting their missus.
As for those in another place, the Commons no longer functions. Members there arrive on a Monday afternoon and are largely gone by Wednesday evening, having failed to turn up to meetings—or, if they do, they rarely stay the course. We are lucky if they scrutinise even 25% of the legislation before them. Though accepting that ignorance can be a powerful tool, perhaps the nation is lucky to avoid scrutiny by some who clearly do not even understand our constitution.
Meanwhile, we are to be presented with a Bill for increased workers’ rights. How do the Government square that with their intention to just throw out hard- working and loyal individuals who have given great service, as much as 55 years in one case, without compensation or a care? How unkind are this Government? Truly unkind.
There is an expectation on the Government Benches that we should have calm debate and just let go. I have a good memory: in 1999, the then Leader of the House showed not a shred of grace, humility or understanding in her quest to kick out noble Lords. Fortunately, the late and learned Lord Williams of Mostyn was much more dignified as he sought to justify that Bill. From our Benches, the late Lord MacKay of Ardbrecknish also fought with dignity and reason for noble Lords. Both those noble Lords, while fit and on brilliant form in 1999, died within a couple of years of those debates, both aged 62. My Lords, you have been warned.
Lord Scriven (LD)
My Lords, if I was watching this debate many miles away from your Lordships’ House, coming home after a long, hard day, I might be astonished to see a House of patronage telling itself that it was doing a relatively good job at improving my life, and that it was going to get better by tinkering with that House of patronage at the edges. I also might look around at the Members taking part in the debate and ask myself these questions: do these people represent me, do they understand me and my community, and do they look like me?
The answer to those questions would, I think, be predominantly no. The reason is that 51% of people in the UK are female. On the Conservative Benches, 25% are female. On the Labour Benches, it is 39%. On the Cross Benches, it is 26%. The Liberal Democrats are on 41% and the Bishops are on 28%. They may also look at the age of this House—age is important to understand where the world is and where it is going. The average age in the UK is 40; the average age in your Lordships’ House is 70. One-third of the Members are between 70 and 79; one-quarter are between 60 and 69; and one-fifth are between 80 and 89. When I came to this House 10 years ago, some of the staff used to refer to me, at the age of 48, as “one of the baby Lords”. Only in the House of Lords can you be 50 and still be called a baby.
The ethnic mix of the House is also disproportionate to the UK. Fourteen per cent of the UK’s population are ethnic minority, but only 6% of this House. Outside this House, regardless of what we say here, for the last decade the vast majority of people say that they wish to see a fully democratically elected House of Lords, because that is the way they think this House will represent them, understand them and look more like them. It is a matter of principle that I support that radical change.
I disagree with the argument that if we have a democratically elected House, there will be words such as “constitutional vandalism” and “crisis”. That argument needs unpicking, not least because electing a second Chamber does not itself lead to conflict. Rather, a whole range of factors, including the distribution of powers, the methods for resolving disputes and the conventions that affect the relationships between both Houses and the progress of legislation need to be addressed. It is not a foregone conclusion that an elected second Chamber leads to constitutional crisis or automatic conflict.
If the Government are going to continue the drip-drip reform of this House, there is one issue that the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, commented on: the role of the Bishops. I notice my friend, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Sheffield, sitting there. I promise I will be a little more gentle on him than the noble Baroness was, but I believe that the role of the Bishops has to be part of the reform agenda, in terms of the historical role of the Bishops, which no longer reflects modern Britain. Take a look at the numbers who call themselves Anglican, the number of people who attend church or who would even call themselves religious or Christian in the UK. I believe that having Bishops in this House is not just about a system of representing their parishes. They have a special place as the established Church, to defend that established Church and mingle in legislation on such issues as education, the curriculum and social matters, which I think are outstanding with modern Britain. Therefore, I ask the noble Baroness, the Leader of the House, what is the Government’s thinking on reform of the Bishops’ Benches in this House?
Lord Reay (Con)
My Lords, democracy is a strange animal: an animal of which no perfect specimen exists anywhere, nor ever has or ever could. It is an animal that is different from one country to the next, because countries have different histories, social and cultural characteristics, strengths and weaknesses, peoples and peculiarities. It is an animal that is different, too, from one moment to the next. Who would have thought that one-third of the popular vote in a British general election, on a turnout of 60% of the electorate, could generate, for the party concerned, nearly two-thirds of the seats in the other place and a majority of 174? Not I—yet that is what happened in July of this year.
As I say, democracy is a strange animal and at some moments, it is stranger than at others. Of course, politicians are strange and imperfect animals too. On the whole, whatever they themselves may fondly believe, they are very much stranger than most of those they represent. One might think that a truly freak election result, such as that of 2024, would necessarily lend a certain humility to the MPs, the party, the Government concerned, and therefore a certain openness and flexibility of mind, and a certain caution, not least on constitutional matters, such as the composition of this House. One might think that, and think it only normal, which it would be—but strange as it may seem, if one did, one would be disappointed.
That brings me to the topic before us today. I have three questions. We are, all of us—however we come to be here, by whatever strange route—Members of a revising Chamber. My first question is therefore this: would the loss of its hereditary Members make this place a better or a worse revising Chamber, or would it make no difference at all? I believe that it would make it a worse one, and that a majority of your Lordships, on all sides, know this full well and know why. Forgive me if that sounds vainglorious, but this is too important a moment for false collective modesty. We box, in this place, above our weight, and everyone knows it.
My second question is, would the loss of its hereditaries make this a more democratic and thus a more representative Chamber? At first glance, perhaps it would. After all, what could be less democratic than a hereditary legislator? Or, to speak of my own case, what could be less democratic than to owe your membership of this House to a title created, as the Daily Mirror put it, because your
“great-grandad’s cousin’s dad’s fourth cousin’s dad’s cousin’s great-great-great-grandad was made a Lord in 1628”?
Who could be less representative of the general population than the bearer of such a title?
Yet it is not quite that simple, is it? Not when one considers the underlying political, constitutional, cultural and human realities. To begin with, we have—all of us hereditaries—been elected, and some of us by the whole House. King Charles might be the King, and most of his subjects British, by virtue of an accident of birth, but it is not by accident of birth alone that we sit here. By contrast, the vast majority of Peers, all but the Lords Spiritual and ourselves, owe their place on these Benches to patronage. I have looked hard at this system of patronage—looked, so to speak, in its mouth, under its bonnet, in its nooks and crannies—and for the life of me, I can find nothing very democratic about it.
There is then the little matter of those cultural and human, flesh, blood and temperamental realities: the kind of people we are, individually and collectively; or more to the point, the kind we are not. We are not politicians or political players—or not of a conventional sort. We are of a conventionally strange sort, perhaps. Of course, this is something we have in common with most members of the public we seek to represent. I believe it to be something rather important.
My third and last question has to do with timing. Is this the right moment for such reform? There were negotiations. There was clear agreement to postpone our removal, if removal there must sadly be, until wider and deeper reform of this House. Present proposals seem premature, peremptory and unworthy of Parliament. So to my three questions: would the loss of its hereditary Members make this place a better revising Chamber? It would make it worse. Would our removal make this a more democratic and representative Chamber? No, it would not. Is this the right moment? If agreements mean anything, it is not.
Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)
My Lords, it should not need repeating that an unelected Chamber should not exist in 2024. I am grateful to the Leader of the House for bringing forward this debate and I hope that this is a sign that reforming Parliament is a priority for His Majesty’s Government.
First, I would like to speak about the relationship between Westminster and Wales. Westminster has never worked for Wales. I believe that, in my lifetime, we will have an independent Wales where all decisions about Wales are made in Wales. Until that is the case, Plaid Cymru Members of Parliament and Peers will be here in both Chambers, standing up for the people of our nation. We will be in the room and around the table wherever decisions are made that affect the people of Wales.
Until we have an elected Chamber, political parties should have representation in proportion to their numbers in the other place. Plaid Cymru is underrepresented in this Chamber. We have consistently had four MPs in the other place; this should be reflected here. The wider point about political imbalance has been eloquently pressed by the noble Lords, Lord Murphy of Torfaen and Lord Burns, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter.
I record my support for the hereditary Peers Bill as a first step on this reform journey, although it does not go far enough. The comments made by noble Lords on what the Bill does not do should not be used as arguments against it. Instead, this energy should be channelled into the next reforms that we should be pressing on with. This is not a question of if but when. His Majesty’s Government have said that this is their “immediate first step” in reforming this Chamber. Therefore, we must not delay progress for greater reform. These reforms should at their heart be about how we ensure that Parliament best serves the people it represents. When I speak of representation, I do not just mean improved regional representation or a 50:50 gender-equal Parliament; I mean diversity of lived experiences and a rotation of new voices in this Parliament.
I will not repeat the well-made arguments from a number of noble Lords about why certain reforms are necessary, but instead I add my support to some of the suggested reforms for the next stage of this journey. I have two simple reforms. First, we should introduce a participation requirement, as referenced by many. I view our roles here as jobs, not honours. As the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, put it, I do not know of many jobs that you can decide not to turn up to, and a revising second Chamber has a job of work to do. Secondly, we should introduce term limits, for which a number of noble Lords have highlighted their support today. As we move to agreeing that nobody should be born into a job, we should also agree that nobody should have a job for life. If your Lordships do not mind me saying, as the youngest Member of this House I would be the one to benefit most from a job for life. That should not be the case for me or anybody else. I share the views expressed earlier on that.
So where do we go from here? For this momentum to be continued, a timetable should be published promptly for the next stage of reform, before Second Reading of the hereditary Peers Bill, to avoid conflating other reform agendas with this singular but necessary step. I ask His Majesty’s Government to be bold in this regard and set a timetable that will commit to additional reforms in this Session to deliver on the commitment outlined in His Majesty’s Speech to
“encourage wide participation in the democratic process”.
I see no need for a drawn-out timetable. The work has to be done, as report after report has told us is the case. It is time to see the final proposal and start the next chapter of our democracy—a Parliament fit for the 21st century. Diolch yn fawr iawn.
Baroness Sanderson of Welton (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness. I was going to admit that I am slightly nervous of speaking in this debate because I see myself as quite a new Member, so I congratulate her on leaping in where I fear to tread. Along with everyone else in this Chamber, I care very much about this place, so I would feel remiss in not taking part in the latest conversation about its reform and the wider issue of our standing and reputation.
As has been said, we all know the valuable work that we do in this place, yet the chasm between the public perception and the reality of what we do is vast. Our Press Gallery is rarely frequented and the public’s view of us is not exactly positive. A while back, I had a call from a journalist colleague whom I had not spoken to for some years. He was doing a story on the House of Lords. “Oh dear”, I said. “I suppose it’s not good news?” He laughed. “No, Liz. It’s never good news when it’s the House of Lords”.
Why is that? It is partly because that is the way it has always been. In truth, the Lords has always had an image problem. For centuries, right through to the 1950s, the reputational threat came from non-attending Peers. In more recent years, as we have heard, criticism has been focused on the increasing size of the House. However, as others have asked, is that the root cause of the problems we face? It certainly does not help but, as my noble friend Lord Wakeham said, when you get down to it, I am not sure this is about the numbers.
As we know, there are currently just over 800 Members. This compares to similar numbers for most of the last half of last century. For part of that time, attendance was indeed low—in the 1953-54 Session there was a daily average of just 97 Peers. More recently, average attendance has stayed constant: an average of 418 in 2006-07 and 396 in 2022-23. I mention this because, contrary to received wisdom, we need those people to keep turning up week in, week out, roll up their sleeves and get on with the work of this House. On a purely practical level, I disagree with the Government’s proposed reform of removing the hereditary Peers given how they box above their weight, as my noble friend Lord Reay rightly said.
It is not just numbers; the Government say the reform will bring “immediate modernisation”. It will show that we are different now. Perhaps it will in the short term, but really it will just reinforce that discrepancy between the public perception and the reality of what happens in this place. I genuinely believe that the knowledge and insight that our hereditary colleagues bring to legislation is unique and valuable. Is it born of privilege? Yes, but in all honesty I do not have a problem with that. The hereditaries have chosen to put that privilege to good use by putting themselves forward for a by-election. I do not care if they are a Duke or an Earl. So many want to work just like the rest of us and it would be wrong to throw away the benefit of their experience.
In addition, removing them will not address the fundamental problem of accountability. Personally, I am far more interested in the Government’s proposal for a participation requirement, which could bring about more meaningful change. As it stands, the public think we get paid with their money to swan in and out and do very little along the way. This view is usually reinforced by the Sunday Times, which often writes about X Peer who has spoken only X number of times in the Chamber while taking X amount of money. As the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, said, such examples damage us all, even if in some instances they do not always give the full picture.
There are so many ways that people contribute to the work of this place, be that voting, taking part in legislation, advocacy or membership of committees. I would be in favour of some kind of metric to assess the participation of Peers. Those who do not wish to take part should not be able to claim expenses, but it is reasonable for those who do to be paid for their time and effort. It is necessary work and we should not be ashamed of that. Such a proposal would need careful thought and proper consultation, but to my mind it would be of far greater value than the reforms currently on the table.
Lord Jones (Lab)
My Lords, the debate is the better for hearing the noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson. I thought the Leader of the House made a very well- judged and apposite speech.
The villainous butler to Lord Meldrum, Stokes, in the situation comedy “You Rang, M’Lord?” would opine below stairs that every Member of the House of Lords should be given a shovel and sent down the mines. Centuries earlier, there was a more drastic solution. In January 1649, the Commonwealth executed our monarch, and very soon after the monarchy itself and then the House of Lords were abolished—our House was no more.
Should it be a free vote, I would not vote for an elected House of Lords. My fears would be for the other place—the Commons. It has low public esteem, it could not bear an elected rival and our powerful free press, social media and professional, committed investigative journalism has exposed Westminster’s feet of clay. The constant searchlight is so severe, and even your Lordships’ House is, occasionally, not free of taint.
An elected second Chamber blessed by the secret ballot would always challenge, criticise, frustrate and rival the Commons, whomever the constitutionalists might devise to hold the ring. Never underestimate the contempt of the Commons for the second Chamber; it is in the mood for change. By 1657, the then Lord Protector Cromwell, still a regicide, found it necessary to bring back the House of Lords. His Council of State hit upon a House of 63 nominations—Cromwell, of course, would do the nominating—but no more than 42 accepted, and on the first day only 37 arrived.
My summary is that this House works: do not fix it; keep it. Its imminent reforms will surely be piecemeal. There is a template in existence—the noble Lord, Lord Burns, fashioned it quite some time ago. Octogenarians such as myself—I am in my 86th year—should go, and perhaps even septuagenarians.
Consideration of an elected House brings to mind a Westminster event for university chancellors. Our chief guest was Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal. She was, as ever, smart in her splendid admiral uniform. Opening her persuasive remarks, we chancellors heard the Princess Royal state, “I stood for election once and I won”—and of course London gained. It seems that we are on course for elections for everything. Where shall it end? In surprising places, I would think.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow another Jones.
Before I was appointed to the House of Lords as a Green Party Peer, I was born and raised on a council estate in Brighton. I was born in the 1940s and I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. I cannot remember when I found out about the House of Lords and how it is constituted—it might have been much later—but I was shocked that there was still a feudal element going through what I thought was a democratic system. It represented a reminder of how the UK is still struggling to emerge from a past where a select group of people—almost all public-school-educated white men—were born to rule. Getting rid of this ridiculous anomaly, as Labour has announced it will do, is a long-overdue reform, but this particular move is pandering to a populist dislike of elitism and makes no real sense.
One crucial example of the value of hereditary Peers was around the issue of sewage. It was the Lords that reflected the public’s anger at the water companies making billions of pounds for their shareholders by dumping sewage into our rivers. I found myself getting behind a major rebellion led, extremely politely, by the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, an Eton-educated hereditary Peer and landowner, and friend to the Royal Family. His key amendment led to a government shift, but, more importantly, it forced sewage as an issue into every MP’s inbox as the public demanded better. Even during the general election, people on the doorsteps were still talking about sewage.
I am not mounting a defence of privilege; that offends me deeply. I am a firm believer in a wholly elected second Chamber, which has been Green Party policy since I tabled a Bill on this in 2014. My noble friend Lady Bennett of Manor Castle tabled the same Bill on arrival. We Greens want radical change—but sensible, logical change. Therefore, I find this rather meagre reform from Labour slightly puzzling. Why pick on hereditary Peers while leaving the corrupt system of prime ministerial patronage? One effect of that cronyism is that the House has far too many non-attenders, who just take the title and run off—I find that very offensive.
Meanwhile, the cash-for-peerages scandal, along with a long list of dubious appointments, particularly by Boris Johnson, show that our system is still open to exploitation by Prime Ministers, who can give titles to party donors and those who have provided political favours. It is a terrible process, and that is where Labour should have started, if it was really serious about positive change here.
Why get rid of the hereditary Peers but leave the 26 Bishops in place? I like the moral authority that Bishops bring to debates, often raising the vital issues of poverty, discrimination and deprivation that perhaps others do not, but why should they vote on legislation? How does that make sense in a country where we are not even Christian any more and fewer than two out of 100 people regularly attend Church of England services?
There are as many former Prime Ministers sitting in your Lordships’ House who have granted peerages to the Green Party as there are Green Party Peers: two. The Greens and other smaller parties, even Reform UK, are still woefully underrepresented in the Lords. The decisions by Prime Ministers to appoint peerages are totally opaque, and there does not seem to be any political will to ensure that smaller parties are properly represented in the Lords. If the Government insist on retaining an elected second Chamber, they should make the appointments process much more transparent, ensure smaller parties are treated fairly and stop appointing people who have done nothing other than donate money to a political party. Getting rid of the hereditaries is a tweak; it is petty, and in some ways cruel.
When we have a House that is undemocratic, overcrowded, dominated by silly archaic practices and unrepresentative of the British population, we should be careful about which changes we make. We need a smaller House and a second Chamber that is representative of the regions, elected by a form of proportional representation and operating in a modern parliamentary building, rather than a 200 year-old museum that threatens either to fall down or to burn down. We should have term limits, all be elected and be limited in size very carefully. Honestly, I will vote for the rubbish Bill, but it is wrong.
Viscount Hailsham (Con)
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. To our mutual embarrassment, I think we agree more often than we care to admit in public.
In the available five minutes, I shall focus on my conclusions; my reasons will follow in future debates. First, I have always supported an elected second Chamber. The Executive, through their ability to dominate the House of Commons, is far too powerful. To balance that, we need a second Chamber with much greater powers than this House possesses. In the contemporary world, that means an elected House. However, I recognise that at the moment there is no appetite for such radical change.
Secondly, I agree that the size of this House is too large. I would seek to reduce it to around 600 by the end of this Parliament, although I do not think that it is a first-order issue.
Thirdly, as regards the appointed Peers, it is undesirable that they should be appointed for life. I suggest a term of, say, 10 or 15 years.
Fourthly, on the Bishops—I apologise to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Sheffield—I think that 26 is too many. I noted what the noble Baroness said but five is quite sufficient: the two archbishops and the bishops of Durham, Winchester and London. However, I would not insist on an immediate episcopal cull and would hope to have retirement at the conventional retirement age.
Fifthly, it is reasonable to impose a retirement age on sitting Peers. The age of 80 or so sounds reasonable to me although, if the Labour Party’s manifesto proposal is implemented, the actual age of retirement in many cases will be somewhat greater. Both my wife—the noble Baroness, Lady Hogg—and I fall into that category.
Sixthly, there should be an effective filter on the appointment of Peers. Independent scrutiny of suitability and intended participation is highly desirable although, in respect of sitting Peers, I would be very cautious about too rigorous a test as to participation, otherwise, in order to satisfy scrutineers, there could be an excess of interventions by the hitherto largely silent.
Lastly, on the hereditary Peers, in my view their proposed exclusion is highly regrettable. For Labour, the proposal is largely totemic, like the ban on fox hunting or VAT on private school fees. Many hereditaries have contributed hugely to the business of Parliament. Moreover, I question whether their presence in this House raises any more issues of principle than those raised by the presence of the rest of us—for we, the appointed Peers, are after all sent here in a wholly unaccountable manner, whereas the Conservative hereditary Peers seeking a place in this House have generally to appear at hustings, answering questions from an often critical electorate, which is not a filter that the rest of us have to face.
I agree that the by-elections should be abolished with immediate effect. Having failed in two such by-elections, I sit as a life Peer. But as to the hereditary Peers themselves, if they are to be removed, I suggest that it should be at the end of this Parliament. By that time the Government will have had ample time to come forward with a range of considered and comprehensive proposals.
The early removal of the hereditary Peers will be a serious loss to both country and Parliament. It will do a very grave injustice to individuals, many of whom have served with great distinction—and we may then find that no further reforms are brought forward.
Baroness Mallalieu (Lab)
My Lords, I very much appreciate the way in which the noble Baroness the Leader of the House introduced this debate in a conciliatory tone. Having been here during the 1990s, I remember the unpleasantness at that time, which I hope we can avoid. I will not weary the House with my view of what should happen to it, because there have been so many different views and very little agreement, except perhaps that we think on the whole that it is too large and, in my view, too full of prime ministerial appointments, and we need a much stronger and independent commission to make the appointments. I will just concentrate on the Bill that is being debated in the other place.
The Prime Minister has wisely, for now at least, backed off from some of the wider proposals made earlier. It is not to be an elected House, at any rate yet, nor is he going to cull the aged as yet. But the other place, ironically, has decided to start the process to remove those who, ironically, are the only elected Peers in this House.
The current by-election system is a farce, and it was cobbled together only as reform legislation became bogged down—as it always does—to get out of a hole temporarily and to stop more legislative time being spent on an issue which, as others have suggested, except for the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, is not really of interest to the electorate. It was never intended to go on as it has, or for so long. But—there is always a but—if a promise was made by a Labour Government that the deal would not be changed without proper reform, are we not bound, if we cannot honour it now, to produce a proposal which is acceptable to the remaining hereditary Peers and to the House? Ironically, as a group they are statistically harder-working than the rest of us life Peers. They give the time, they turn up, and they make important contributions to the running of this place and its committees. Some bring particular expertise which is in short supply in the House. Some have given invaluable service over many years, and others—some of the more recent younger Peers in particular—have already made outstanding contributions. Some of the 92 remaining are ready to go and have told me so, but surely we should be both honourable and generous. All should be offered life peerages. There are 40 or so Bills scheduled for this Session. Let us do that, get this Bill out of the way, and get on with governing.
Lord Horam (Con)
Like the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, I too welcome the conciliatory tone in which the Leader of the House introduced this debate. I welcome this debate, which is obviously looking at the whole area of the second Chamber, not just this particular Bill, judgment on which is taking place in the other Chamber this evening.
I am a long-standing member of the Campaign for an Effective Second Chamber, which has for a long time been well chaired by my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth, and now also by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town. The point of that group is that we believe not in an elected second Chamber but that this Chamber and all its valuable work can be improved. Various schemes have come forward over the last few years—the noble Lord, Lord Burns, for example, had a notable example of what can be done—to do to improve the working of the Chamber in many respects.
One of them, of course, has been the question of the numbers. Although the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, pointed out that it is not necessarily a first-order issue, it is an issue, and it is certainly one with the public. Again, a lot of work has gone into that, and in particular the idea that it should be targeted on the question of participation—the extent to which people are active in the second Chamber—has been a very important issue.
However, over the last 14 years, the Conservative Party was in power and very little was achieved—almost nothing. There was a certain amount of optimism during the period of the noble Baroness, Lady May—fortunately now in this Chamber—but very little otherwise, and we are stuck with the fact that there are now more Peers than there ever were before.
We have to face the fact, realistically, as politicians or not politicians—whichever you like to call us—that we now have a Labour Government who have a clear mandate and a very clear policy in this area: first, to remove the hereditary Peers, and secondly, to look also at the people over 80. I am 85 so am in that category. The numbers are very similar. We in the Campaign for an Effective Second Chamber have always talked of about 600 or so; that would be the right sort of level for the second Chamber. The numbers for the Government’s approach will be rather smaller than that; it could well get down to 450 or 500. That is the sort of level they are talking about.
I am opposed in principle to hereditary Peers being elected, and I would like to carry on rather longer myself even though I am 85. However, the fact is that we cannot argue with the end result, which is a smaller Chamber. We are not in a position to dispute that, given that we had our opportunity to go about it in one way we thought best. We have to accept that the objective is the same: a smaller Chamber. It is not the way I would have done it but sometimes, frankly, one should not allow the best to be the enemy of the good, and the good is a smaller Chamber. I think that if, as usual, the House behaved itself very well and made generous offers to those who were removed from the Chamber, that would be a very sensible way forward.
The other point I would like to make is that one thing the campaign has looked at over the years is the regional balance in the Chamber—an issue that has come up in this debate. The fact is that, according to the stats from the Library, 24% of us are registered as living in London and 22% in the south-east, so 46% of the whole Chamber is of a London orientation. Only 3% or 4% are registered in the north-west, 3% or 4% in the north-east and only about 5% in Scotland, for heaven’s sake. I cannot remember the figure for Wales, which has been mentioned in previous remarks.
All this means that people perceive us as being out of touch with people in the rest of the country—in the provinces of England. That looks bad, is bad and detracts from our authority because the House of Commons could always say, “It’s all very well listening to you but you do not reflect the people as we do”. That makes it more difficult for us. At the end of the day, if we get to a significantly smaller Chamber with a better regional balance and that is the end result of what the Government do, I will applaud it.
Lord Desai (CB)
My Lords, as the 50th speaker in this debate, I have to say something different from everybody else—I will try.
There are two problems here. First, people think it is an anomalous thing that we are an appointed Chamber. I do not think it is anomalous at all because the entire British constitution is an anomaly. There is no reason why we should not be what we are. Other countries have followed our constitution and arrangement of Parliament but, obviously, they have not had an appointed Chamber. We have one because that is what we have always had. I do not see that there is necessarily any point in changing that.
The second problem is that whenever the Labour Party comes into power, it realises that it does not have enough people in the House of Lords. That is because it does not have enough hereditary Peers. That is the way it is. I have one simple way to solve the problem: on election, create 100 hereditary Peers. Problem solved. Then it will have the numbers here and it will get its things passed. I am sure there are eager people on the Labour Benches and in the Labour membership who would, much as they hate the hereditary system, love to be here. Really, the problem is a ruling Government not having the numbers and hereditary powers to be able to pass their legislation. We have discussed things around this, but those are the two problems.
Look at the history, as some people have done, of every time the Labour Party has come to power. I especially remember what Harold Wilson tried to do. He tried to find some way of, as it were, deactivating the hereditary element in the House of Lords. He said, “Let’s make a distinction between the right to come and discuss matters and the right to vote”. As a noble Lord said, it was sabotaged by Michael Foot and Enoch Powell. Michael Foot thought he wanted to abolish the House of Lords and Enoch Powell said, “Over my dead body”. Basically, that union frustrated that reform.
Then, of course, in the period between 1974 and 1979, the majority of the Labour Party was much too small to do any such thing. When we came back to power under new Labour, we made another attempt; I say “we” because, at that time, I was in the Labour Party. Obviously, that attempt was halted half way through, and 99 or 100 hereditary Peers were left behind.
I always thought that we would solve the problem of numbers—along with reforming the House of Lords in terms of hereditary peerages—but, somehow, a decision has been made that we cannot do that. It is a pity because one thing I thought we would do is an analysis of all the existing Members—who has been working, coming regularly and making contributions. It is simple: those who are inactive should be thrown out, not on the grounds of age but on the grounds that they were appointed here but did not do the work. The noble Lord, Lord Birt, gave some numbers. We could reduce the total number by quite a bit if we used rules like that, but a decision has been made not to do that.
Instead, a decision has been made to get rid of the hereditary Peers. It is class envy, and I do not like that. There is no other reason to get rid of hereditary Peers except that some people think they have no right to sit here. Once we abolish by-elections, they will be de facto life Peers anyway, so what is the problem? As I said before, if they work, let them be here; if they do not work, throw them out along with the other life Peers.
Lord Northbrook (Con)
My Lords, I will focus on one aspect of House of Lords reform: the Bill to remove the remaining 92 hereditary Peers from the House, thus eliminating many centuries of tradition and a golden thread back to the 13th century. I will also suggest further reform that should be included in the Bill.
In March 1999, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, stood at the Dispatch Box and said that the 1999 Bill to abolish the majority of the hereditary Peers
“reflects a compromise negotiated between Privy Councillors on Privy Council terms and binding in honour on all those who have come to give it their assent”.
He continued by saying, in the most carefully worded statement, that the 10%—that is, the 92—
“will go only when stage two has taken place. So it is a guarantee that it will take place”.—[Official Report, 30/3/1999; col. 207.]
The words could not have been more unequivocal. Some 650 Peers left quietly on the basis of that promise. It has now been broken so why, in consequence, should we honour the Salisbury convention on this Bill?
Also, in 1998, the Opposition Front Bench spokesman, Lord Kingsland, said:
“As I understand it, we shall be faced with a Bill which seeks to replace a House based on a mixture of nominated Peers and hereditary Peers by a purely nominated House. That proposal does not go as far as the preamble of the Parliament Act 1911: it is a proposal that looks backwards rather than forwards and one which reduces the independence of this House without adding to its legitimacy. It is a solution to a problem that I do not recognise. Therefore, in my submission, the Opposition would be entitled to think most carefully about whether or not the Salisbury Convention applied to the Bill.
Perhaps I may put it in another way. We are talking about a constitutional Bill. It is not a Bill which seeks to change the law; it is a Bill which seeks to change the way in which we change the law. It goes to the composition of the sovereign Parliament, of the Queen in Parliament. The Salisbury Convention applies to a settled set of relationships between Commons and Lords, but this Bill seeks to change the nature of one of the two component parts of that relationship. In those circumstances, does the Salisbury Convention apply?”—[Official Report, 15/10/1998; cols. 1053-54.]
I believe that it is the responsibility of the remaining 92, as well as those colleagues who believe that the former Lord Chancellor’s promise should be adhered to, to make sure that the proposed legislation includes provision to move to stage two, as promised. I will highlight areas that need to be discussed in more detail in the Bill.
There should be a referendum to ask the public what sort of second Chamber they would prefer. There should be measures to restrict the size of the House. It cannot be right that the number of Peers keeps increasing so that only the National People’s Congress of of China has more members. The right size of the House should reflect the political balance of the parties at each general election. Measures proposed by the Burns commission on retirement and new Peer creations should be included in the Bill.
There should be an attendance and contribution minimum. There should also be a retirement age of 80, which is already proposed. However, this should not be mandatory; it would be fairer to have a secret ballot of the whole House once a year to decide whether a Peer over the age of 80 should continue. The current retirement procedure works well, but unfortunately its effect is totally negated by the more-than-compensating appointments of new Peers. Slightly confusingly, the Prime Minister has already appointed three Peers over the age of 80. The only Prime Minister to limit appointments was Theresa May. More should follow her example.
Next, the Appointments Commission should be put on a statutory basis and be firmly applied to all new appointments, political included, thus controlling the quality of prime ministerial patronage. Amendments should be considered to the structure of the membership of the House. It should be debated whether the Chamber should be elected. As the noble Baroness, Lady Jay of Paddington, opined in the interesting TV programme “The Lady and the Lords”, this is what the public would expect. I would like to consider the rebalance of the 25 Bishops to include representatives of all faiths. We should consider changing the name of the House to “the Senate”, as it would not allow hereditary Peers to be Members.
Another issue that should be looked at is the powers of the House. We should be able to amend the realms of secondary legislation. Also, on Finance Bills, we should have the power to amend badly drafted legislation, particularly where, due to the guillotine procedure, the clauses are not even discussed in the other place. Finally, how will certain business mechanics work when the hereditary Peers have gone? Can there be exemptions for shadow Ministers and Whips on the Front Bench? Will there be enough noble Lords to sit on the Woolsack?
I understand that a key reason for the proposed Bill is removing a number of Conservative Peers from the House, meaning that the Government will not have to create the equivalent number of new Labour Peers. However, Cross-Bench hereditary Peers have been caught in the crossfire, necessarily. Very often in the last Administration they supported Labour and Lib Dem amendments and so are no major threat to the Government getting their business through. The convenor in particular should be spared abolition. What will happen to the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain? Can the Government make an amendment to the Bill to make it clear that they can still carry on their ceremonial duties at the State Opening of Parliament?
In conclusion, I am sure that the proposed legislation will need the most thorough scrutiny so that it honours the promise made by the then Lord Chancellor in 1999 and includes the additional issues that I have mentioned.
Lord Mann (Lab)
My oh my, democracy is a bit of a pain, is it not? This Palace has been here for 1,000 years. Eventually women were given the vote, and by 1970, 18 year-olds were given the vote. It took a bit of time. We have been patient.
The preamble to the Parliament Act 1911 had something else in it. It described it as an interim measure until the second Chamber could be
“constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis”.
We have had plenty of opportunities since 1911 and plenty of manifestos—including from the Labour Party. I was elected in the Commons by the people in 2001. I had a look today to see how many people still in the Commons were there before I was. There are 33. All the rest, the vast majority—diligent, hard-working, decent people—were slung out. The electorate removed them. Some constituencies removed many in that period and some did so in pretty much every recent election. That is democracy: decent people removed by the people.
Should any noble Lords ever choose to go on the many parliamentary tours that I do, they may not approve of my explanation of the history of this country. Succinctly put, I explain how our democracy emerged. We had kings. They wanted to be king of France as well. Our democracy basically emerged as kings fought wars with France to grab a bit of France and then fought wars to keep that bit of France. To fight wars, they needed taxes and soldiers, so they got soldiers—or money for soldiers—saying in return, “We’ll give you a title. You can have Scotland or Lancashire as well as part of the deal”. That is a simplification, but it is not an exaggeration of how this place built up over the years, with a few scandals built in as well—we were not in the days then of DNA testing to prove who had the entitlement.
That has passed on down the generations to determine the laws of the country. It might have been good enough for 900 years, but in the last century we started to evolve into something called democracy: that the people choose. I caution against referendums. Extra questions should be added. “Should the House of Lords be abolished immediately?” I am not sure that it is in the interests of our sustainability to put that question to the people. We could decide each to fight our own by-elections with the people but have “none of the above as an option”, but there might not be many left if we went down that route. So the move towards democracy also includes someone winning an election on a manifesto and saying, “Here is what we are going to do”.
I put it to the House that people are a bit fed up with politicians who win elections and then do not do what they have promised to do and that people have voted for. It may not suit people in here that the people of this country have voted for the abolition of hereditary Peers and an age limit in here, but they have.
There are weaknesses in democracy, and people argue and say, “Ah, they voted for other things”. If we want the people of this country to trust our Parliament, it gets quite simple when there are simple propositions. Therefore, if there are alternatives, those alternatives have to be absolutely in the spirit of what was in the Labour manifesto, not washing it away and pretending or negotiating but delivering it or coming up with something equally good as an argument. I am not hearing those alternative arguments today: I am hearing special pleading. We have had hundreds of years of special pleading, and, for democracy, that is not good enough.
The Earl of Devon (CB)
My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Mann—he set me up quite well. I declare an interest as the Earl of Devon, one of the more hereditary of our hereditary peerages. The title dates from our tribal Saxon days: Ordwulf defended Devon from Viking invaders and served scones, cream and jam to the rebuilders of Tavistock Abbey. In modern times, the earldom was granted to Baldwin in 1142 for supporting our first female sovereign, Empress Matilda. I am the 38th Earl of Devon since then, a line broken only by a handful of attainders and beheadings, most recently by Thomas Cromwell and soon to be televised on the BBC—better to be in “Wolf Hall” than “Rivals”. The title I hold was restored for the fifth and final time by our second female sovereign, Mary I.
We sat in your Lordships’ House long before it had a home in this Palace; founding Knights of the Garter, we fought at Crécy, Poitiers, Agincourt and Bosworth; we tilted for Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and we welcomed William of Orange to dinner on the first night of his Glorious Revolution. My grandfather was one of the last on the beaches at Dunkirk, before taking a bullet through his helmet in north Africa. I sit here, less violently, as champion of Devon in Westminster and of Westminster in Devon, a conduit between local and national, like Baldwin nearly 900 years ago.
Labour suggests that hereditaries are “indefensible”. That is ironic given how consistently we have defended this island nation. Not here for personal gain nor for anything we have done, we are here due to an antiquated sense of duty, which is not only defensible but a key characteristic of our constitutional fabric. We rend that fabric at our peril: Britain will be poorer without it.
Just because Labour says that it is “indefensible” does not make it so—that is Trump-speak. An hereditary thread runs through our society, from our sovereign Head of State to our basic freedom to inherit private property. Our national identity is inherited, particularly in the regions. Some sneer with colonialist prejudice that, outside Westminster, only Lesotho has hereditary seats in Parliament, as if Lesotho, being African, is somehow less. Lesotho reserves places for tribal chieftains in recognition of their cultural and regional leadership; the United States, Canada and others constitutionally recognise such leadership too. Why should we not?
The presence of hereditary Peers in the mother of all Parliaments is a distinction of which we should be proud. No other parliament can boast an unbroken link to its liberal feudal roots in Magna Carta and habeas corpus. Our presence is proof positive of the resilience of our parliamentary system.
The Government suggest that public opinion justifies their constitutional vandalism. Where is the evidence for this? The Government should put the hereditary presence to a referendum, alongside that of the Bishops and of the life Peers appointed by prime ministerial patronage. Given the furore over the institutional sheltering of child abusers, scandals over prime ministerial curtains, spectacles and suits, and the preferential procurement of pandemic PPE, hereditaries may do well in a Lordly beauty parade, second perhaps only to the angels of HOLAC.
We see no demonstrations over our hereditary presence. Indeed, our most serious public unrest was motivated by those preying on a deep-rooted dislocation among those who consider themselves traditionally English. The riots of last summer were ghastly, but they were not a call for constitutional reform and the removal of a moderating and hard-working hereditary presence in Parliament.
Further, our hereditary Members are disparaged for our gender—that is a protected characteristic. While we are all male, this is not our choice but the choice of successive Governments, happy to alter the succession to the Crown and to offer parliamentary time to promote female Bishops but reluctant to accommodate female succession to hereditary peerages. As the youngest of four, whose father and grandfather were the only sons among many sisters, I have long felt shame in male primogeniture and have sought to change this, with no success. This is discrimination—refuse to permit female succession and then deride our lack of diversity. If I were offered one final wish for a condemned Peer, it would be to amend this legislation to allow any gender to succeed to hereditary peerages. I know the Labour Party has yet to come around to the merits of female leadership—some 880 years after Baldwin—but I am sure it can be convinced, and I thank the noble Baroness the Leader of the House for her encouraging letter to me on this issue. I trust that she will join me to overcome the patriarchal barriers she identified.
Many commentators agree that this House is the most effective body of our politics, recently tempering the extremes of the other place over Brexit and Rwanda. Removing hereditary Peers will not improve that function: it will politicise and patronise this House and make your Lordships no more defensible, and I worry particularly that it will leave our sovereign with no hereditary partner—who will go toe-to-toe with the Crown over feudal rights to the Isle of Wight? His Majesty will be isolated and vulnerable to republican attack.
In conclusion, I note the wise words of Robin Cook on a similarly tepid reform proposed in 2005:
“This would limit modernisation to moving from the 15th-century principle of heredity to the 18th-century principle of patronage. The result would not be a chamber bursting with the independent, colourful figures necessary if we are to restore public interest in parliament, but a chamber stuffed with that bane of modern political life, the loyal, safe pair of hands”.
The Earls of Devon’s previous executions have been in noble cause. This short-term, partisan political mugging is, regrettably, not that.
Lord Shipley (LD)
The noble Earl, Lord Devon, in his support for the principle of hereditary Peers, talked of his sense of duty. I understand that, but I make the point to him that ending hereditary Peers’ membership of the House means ending it as a hereditary Peer—they could, of course, become life Peers, and I hope that many will.
This has been an excellent debate so far and has covered virtually every aspect that I could think of. The tone was set well at the very start by the Lord Privy Seal and the Leader of the Opposition. The Lord Privy Seal talked of this House as being “unique”; that is a very important word. It is an asset, she said—and it is an asset. The noble Lord, Lord True, talked about the need to discuss what we are to be and what we will do. Between those two contributions I think there is a debate that we can have.
I remember well the 2012 Bill that got through Second Reading in the House of Commons only for us to discover that the House of Commons was not keen on an elected second Chamber duplicating its work and then claiming an electoral mandate to do so. The Commons prefers scrutiny and revision to be the job of the second Chamber.
The Government should build on our strengths as a Chamber. The House of Lords is very good indeed at scrutinising Bills and at holding the Executive and the Commons to account. It is also very effective in its Select Committee work, getting into the detail of complex topics and making proposals for change based on evidence.
I accept that the 1999 Act was seen as a transitional arrangement. I accept too that the 2024 Labour manifesto said that reform was essential, and promised an immediate modernisation of the House and, in the longer term, an alternative second Chamber that is more representative of the regions and nations. That would be in line with the recommendations of the Labour Party commission of two years ago, led by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, who said that he wanted a senate of the nations and regions—that is what I want. The point that we must have a discussion about is whether they are to be nominated based on their election to another body or whether they are to be directly elected. The process that the Government are proposing sounds right to me. I agree that there has to be a stage modernisation.
We have talked about ending hereditary Peers’ membership of the House and about reducing the size of the House. The point has been made that, if all noble Lords aged over 80 and all hereditary Peers left, it would, by 2029, reduce the size of the House to 420. That would be a huge loss of expertise, so I have concluded that we need a more appropriate pace. Further, the question of the level of participation has come through to me as an issue in this debate.
As the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, suggested, an age cap would be too arbitrary. Like him, I would prefer a fixed term of 15 years, with one-third of the House elected every five years. For those who believe in a wholly elected chamber, you cannot have that and an age limit of 80 at the same time. The electorate has to have the power to vote for somebody over the age of 80.
We have heard about the dangers of competition between the two Chambers around who has the most recent mandate, but the existing Parliament Acts limit the powers of the House of Lords and that situation can continue.
The noble Lord, Lord Horam, referred to the Library brief, which reminded us that 45% of Members of this House have addresses in London and the south-east. Only 21% of the Members of this House have addresses in the regions of Yorkshire and Humberside, the east Midlands, West Midlands, and the north-west and north-east of England. There is an imbalance that we have to address.
Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)
My Lords, it is 25 years yesterday that the House of Lords Bill reached the statute book. Many noble Lords have pointed out that the exception which permitted 92 hereditary Peers to remain was agreed because Peers of all parties did not want their unconditional abolition. They therefore secured a down payment on the Blair Government’s promise of full reform. As the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, very eloquently pointed out, that promise was not fulfilled. Now, however, the down payment is being grabbed back.
We are offered only the plain proposition in the forthcoming Bill that we should:
“Remove the remaining connection between hereditary peerage and membership of the House of Lords”.
So we must ask: why? To a certain type of mind, the answer seems blindingly obvious. It is that the hereditary right of Peers to sit in this House is, to quote the relevant Minister, Nick Thomas-Symonds, “outdated and indefensible”. Actually, this is by no means as self-evidently true as the Government suppose. After all, the succession to this Throne, which watches over our proceedings every day, is based on a hereditary right—that of one family to produce our Head of State. That right is strongly supported, I believe, by the majority of the King’s subjects.
It is not our task today to debate the hereditary principle; we need to debate the present practice and how it helps or hinders the work of Parliament. We must ask how that work would be improved if the 92 departed. We would be a wholly appointed House, as other noble Lords have said. Would that be better? Some 25 years ago, it meant more of what were called “Tony’s cronies”; today, it will mean more of Keir’s Peers. I am a defender, and indeed a beneficiary, of prime ministerial patronage, but can we honestly claim that a House composed by that means alone will add value to what we have today?
Is there something bad, not in principle but in practice, about the 92 hereditary Peers who are currently Members of this House? The 92 are in a difficulty here, because they are well brought up people and reluctant to blow their own trumpets—although I am delighted that the noble Earl, Lord Devon, blew his in the most tremendous way. If this Bill passes, it will be their duty to go in dignified silence to the scaffold. I rather feel that it falls to the rest of us to defend not the individual merits of individual hereditary Peers but the collective merits of their being here, until, at least, a better replacement is agreed.
I am still fairly new to your Lordships’ House, but I venture to observe much that is valuable. One is that the hereditaries are usually modest and courteous. They know, to use Lord Melbourne’s phrase about the Order of the Garter, that there is no damned merit about their right to be here, so they are not self-assertive; they know that they must serve. For similar reasons, I think the hereditaries are, on the whole, rarely creatures of party. They bring to bear on legislation independent judgment of the sort that the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, praised. I do not think it a coincidence that the 1999 amendment that kept them here is called the Weatherill amendment. The late Lord Weatherill was the Convenor of the Cross Benches, and in that capacity he wisely discerned the value of the public-spirited hereditary presence. He did not want that element cut out without proper reform. His attitude lives on today on the Cross Benches under its distinguished, and, as it happens, hereditary, convener. I believe it is appreciated right across your Lordships’ House.
Another fact concerns the wider balance of power in this country. It has been said, and many believe, that we are overly governed by London-based elites—mostly people on the public payroll. These are sometimes disparagingly referred to nowadays as the blob. The hereditary presence in our midst seems distinctly unblobby. The 92 are frequently not London-based; they have strong territorial connections with most parts of the United Kingdom. This makes them well-informed on matters from which Whitehall is sadly distant, such as farming, many environmental issues, and practical economic matters such as the effects of tax and regulation on small entrepreneurs and small businesses. Overwhelmingly, the hereditary Peers come from the private sector, and it is shocking how untrue that is of the other place nowadays. It is a clear benefit of their presence here.
When we debate the legislation, I hope we will not throw away an identifiable good on an ideological speculation about some better system which no one has yet devised.
The Duke of Wellington (CB)
My Lords, I thank the Leader of the House for proposing this debate. From the debate, it is quite clear that many in this House desire to reform the House of Lords, particularly the process by which Members arrive here. I wish to limit my remarks purely to the hereditary Peers Bill, which is still passing through the House of Commons and which will probably arrive here in the New Year.
I feel extremely privileged to be here and have very much enjoyed my service—I do indeed consider it a public service—and I understand that it is difficult to justify that a seat in this House can be obtained by inheritance. However, I cannot allow this debate to pass without saying that seats in this House obtained through donations to political parties are even more difficult to justify, and I think that the political parties ought to address that problem as well.
I know that there are some noble Lords who consider that it might be possible to resist, filibuster or in some way delay the hereditary Peers Bill when it arrives. I am not of that view. The Bill was in the Labour Party manifesto. It was in the speech from the Throne. It will pass in the House of Commons with a large majority. For the House of Lords to be seen to be in any way opposing or delaying it would be unseemly and would not reflect well on the reputation of this House.
In recent years, we have amended various pieces of legislation and have often had the public on our side, but on this one, if the public are remotely interested, I do not believe they will support the continuation of hereditary Peers in this House. I will personally be very sad to leave, and I believe that many hereditary Peers have rendered dutiful, selfless and hard-working service, but the general election has elected a Government with a huge majority to remove us, and they must have their way.
It might interest noble Lords if I quote from a speech made in this House in May 1846 by the first Duke of Wellington. The subject of the debate was the repeal of the corn laws. The first Duke was at the time the Leader of the House of Lords. He stated that the measure was in the speech from the Throne and had been passed by a majority of the House of Commons. He further stated that it had
“been agreed to by the other two branches of the Legislature”.
In such a situation, he declared, the House of Lords is
“entirely powerless; without the House of Commons and the Crown, the House of Lords can do nothing ”.—[Official Report, 28/5/1846; col. 1404.]
So in 1846, long before the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949 and long before the Salisbury/Addison convention, the first Duke as Leader of the House believed that the House should pass that particular Bill whatever the personal preferences of the ultras on the right wing of the Conservative Party. That is more or less my view today on the hereditary Peers Bill. When it comes to us, I will react accordingly, and I hope that those Members wishing in any way to obstruct the Bill will allow it to pass.
Lord Sandhurst (Con)
My Lords, it was a privilege to listen to that last speech and indeed to many others we have heard today. I am grateful to the noble Baroness for initiating this debate.
In considering the role of this House, our history is important. The Glorious Revolution of 1689 led to our constitutional monarchy as we understand it. Since then, we have been blessed: our constitution has developed and evolved without revolution. The first half of the 19th century saw much social unrest, but ultimately the emancipation of the Catholics and the first Great Reform Act—not least through the ultimate wisdom of the first Duke of Wellington, who persuaded the ultras that they had to give way.
Two more reform Acts followed and the franchise was extended. The Parliament Act 1911 asserted the supremacy of the other place. That was strengthened and further embedded by the Parliament Act 1949. Since 1945 we have continued to proceed peacefully under the Salisbury convention.
The year 1999 saw further major reform. The removal of most hereditary Peers was followed by my noble friend Lord Wakeham’s royal commission in 2000. It produced 132 recommendations but probably half a dozen heavyweight recommendations. These included a reduction in numbers and a partially elected House. Significantly, it recommended an improved appointment system and was against a wholly or predominantly elected Chamber. Subsequent Governments, of both political complexions, have made no attempt to enact any such changes in the following 24 years. That is regrettable.
The last Parliament saw the Government challenged hard in this House on Rwanda and other serious Bills. There were many rounds of ping-pong. Despite everything, we have an effective second Chamber. Previous Labour Governments have got their legislation through Parliament. The conventions work.
We know that debates in Committee and meetings with Lords Ministers achieve important changes to Bills. That is the product of our collective expertise and rational debate. Too many Bills arrive here undigested and ill-crafted. In the other place, as we have heard from others, Bills are not examined or debated in anything like the same detail or with the same care. We improve them greatly.
The Bill before Parliament is directed only at hereditary Peers, of whom of course I am one. We should be thankful that the Government have not brought forward further substantive proposals. That is not to say we should do nothing. I would like to see a proper consultation. The appointment system certainly needs strengthening. I would not take it away entirely from the Prime Minister, but I would leave even prime ministerial appointments subject to veto by the commission.
We need other protections. If I have one concern, it is the risk of elective dictatorship. We have to trust that the Executive—the Crown in Parliament, the second limb or the second leg of the stool—will respect the interests of the nation as a whole. We have to hope that the Supreme Court, the third leg of that constitutional stool, does not have to be involved again. The Crown in Parliament, the Executive, in considering the role of this House, must respect the boundaries.
However, why have we not had a White Paper to address the core issues: our role and our powers, appointments, partial elections, the age of appointed Members, numbers and other subsidiary issues? In saying that, I am not expressing a conclusion, but we need a White Paper with serious suggestions. In this, I commend the speech of my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth, who emphasised that above all we have to define our purpose. We think we know what it is, but it has to be clear.
As for hereditary Peers, I say only this. We know there will be no more by-elections, that is a given, but summary expulsion in short order by the end of the Session shows a lack of magnanimity. Worse, it is not part of a package. Will it actually improve the quality of this House? We have heard others explain that 92 of us will just leave summarily. That will be a real hit because, almost without exception, we are all real workers who are seriously involved in this House.
I ask in all sincerity for a serious White Paper, and I ask for it now, before Christmas, so we can consult on it and act on it after Christmas. Then, we can get something done in the next three or four years of this Parliament—better late than never.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, I have heard most of the speeches either in the Chamber or on the monitor and I am very pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst. The title of this debate is about reform of the House of Lords yet 90% of the contributions have been about the composition. We ought to be talking about what the House of Lords is for and how we best deliver it. A few noble Lords such as the noble Lords, Lord Sandhurst and Lord Norton, and my noble friend Lord Rooker made these wider constitutional points but most have ignored them. Frankly, we need a separate debate about the future of the House of Lords, maybe on the basis of a White Paper. Meanwhile, I am going to revert to the norm and follow everybody else and talk about composition.
This is a long-running story. Just before the last general election I was asked by somebody if it was really true that a Labour Government were going to democratise the House of Lords, and I assured them that it was absolutely clear and that Keir had committed us to it. I meant Keir Hardie, of course, because in those days we were supporting the Liberal Government in 1911 and, as the noble Lord, Lord Newby, reminded us we are now 113 years on.
We need now to recognise the part of the Labour Party manifesto not in the Bill now in the Commons. We are not only abolishing hereditary Peers but abolishing life Peers, as we all have to retire at 80. I do not object to that. I would have preferred a fixed-term cut-off point but we ought to enact that proposition at the same time as we are getting rid of the hereditaries or shortly thereafter. I do not object to it although it will get rid of me and a lot of my colleagues here and across the House.
It is actually 31 years since I joined the House— John Major was the Prime Minister—and the reason I am here is that Tony Blair wanted me moved from a previous position. He then gave me a number of very decent jobs in this House and I have very much enjoyed it. But that indicates that not only the hereditaries but every single one of us has no legitimacy in a way that would be understood in any other democratic country in the world. We are all here on historic anomalies, and if we are going to change this we need to change the lot of it and do that fairly rapidly.
I remember when I first came into the House, I thought it was going to be done fairly quickly. I saw that my first pass went into the 21st century and thought I would not need it that long because the Labour Government would clearly enact a new form of the House of Lords within their first or second term. But when it came to 1999 I was very disappointed—my noble friend Lord Liddle referred to this—when the deal was done to retain a proportion of the hereditaries and follow that up with by-elections. I remember the phone call from my noble friend Lady Jay, who was then Leader, and being astounded that we had made such a deal; we are still living with the consequences of it.
There have been various possibilities for change. I supported Jack Straw and the Labour Government’s proposition that it be a partly elected House. I supported the coalition’s proposals for a partly elected House and Nick Clegg’s proposals then, but nothing has happened. I have been deeply impressed by the contributions from a lot of hereditary Lords and from a lot of other noble Lords who came into the House of Lords through various nefarious ways; I have been friends and admirers of many of them. But we do not have the basic legitimacy of a Chamber in a modern democracy, and we need to work out what the second Chamber does.
In that time, we have also moved to being a quasi-federal state, plus having a degree of devolution within England as well. Most second Chambers in most democracies reflect the lower tiers of government within those democracies. The bulk of the membership of this House needs to be elected, directly or indirectly, by the chambers and regions of Britain. The time for that debate is not just to talk about hereditaries; it is to see what the role of this Chamber is in the long term, how our democracy is going to develop and where we are going. That will take a longer period. I will vote for the Bill when it comes through but it is only a partial solution, and we need a bigger-picture solution.
Lord Ranger of Northwood (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, who lives up to his name in his speech. I rise in this Chamber, first, to acknowledge both the immense contribution of many Peers—including earls, dukes and viscounts—who are here today and have given many years of service to your Lordships’ House, as I do for those who have in the past.
Being still a newbie to this Chamber, it is with immense humility that I engage in a debate about reform of this House, which I appreciate has been ongoing for many years. However, I will lean on my personal experience, having joined this House just over a year ago. Since then, one question above all others has continuously been posed to me by family, friends and members of the public: “What do you do in the House of Lords?” To be honest, at first I was rather flummoxed by that question too. Yes, there are generic answers: we are the second Chamber; we are described as the best think tank in the world, due to the breadth and depth of expertise we all share. There is even the straight-bat response: we scrutinise the Government and improve legislation.
These answers more than miss the point. We expect that most people understand the detail of what Parliament does and so should have a general understanding of what we do—that they appreciate the detail and difference between the responsibility we carry in this Chamber and that of the other place. This is, sadly, wrong. Most people do not have a depth of understanding of this place. Why should they, for we have spent relatively precious little time explaining it? Again, I base my view on my own experience. So many people have a vague sense of who a Peer may be and what they may do, but where have they got those views from?
I suggest that, over decades, inaccurate assumptions, media reporting—some misreporting—and the occasional noteworthy achievement in legislation may have enabled this House to be visible in glimpses to broader society, but in an extremely patchy light. Ask a member of the general public what we do and generally they are flummoxed too. There are thousands of hours of debate—much more, I may add, than in the other place —hundreds of amendments to Bills and numerous evidence sessions and committee meetings, painstakingly reviewing Bills line by line, with sincere passion. We have cases made on knowledge gleaned over decades, in a vast array of industries and professions. I appreciate that, in speaking here, we do our best to shine a light on the efforts that we put in, but have we really done enough to project outwards the work done in this Chamber, and this House, so that the British people can genuinely feel aware of the role that we play?
We speak of reform. Do we speak from the basis of saying, “The public understand what we do; they want it, and who does it, changed”? I appreciate that all institutions should seek, for their own good, to assess their relevance, governance and structures on an ongoing basis—and yes, there are areas of this House that need to change. But let us also do the work of this House justice by doing more to bring people closer to what we do, why we do it and who we are. For example, we have heard about the size of this House many times in debate today. The figure of 800 is used to demonstrate how large or bloated this Chamber is but we are not all here each day, as has been acknowledged. If we are knowledgeable in our subjects and areas, we seek to invest time and effort on those topics, which means that, like subject-matter experts, we will take part in those activities. Is that so hard for us to explain?
There may be those whose attendance is less, but are we going to judge value by an attendance record or by the quality of the input when attending? I appreciate that there are more nuances to this debate, but we must do more to explain how this Chamber is meant to work, not how people assume it works.
I reiterate that my time here has been short so far, but I highlight the work of the Lord Speaker in leading and championing numerous engagement activities on behalf of this House, and the work of the communications team and its ever-increasing efforts using social media to raise awareness of our activities. But this is the tip of the iceberg, and we need to do much more.
The pace of change, the speed with which the digital world moves and the ways and means in which society adopts, adapts and understands have changed and will continue to do so, so we must change too. We should reform the House of Lords. As the noble Lord, Lord Saatchi, suggested so eloquently, we should use more technology to engage, to be more digital, to be more open and to have our work more visible. Then, if there is a case to change or even remove some or all of us, at least we can say it was done with full and best knowledge of the efforts we all put in to serve the people.
Baroness Freeman of Steventon (CB)
Before I joined your Lordships’ House this year, I had little understanding of its role—like most people in this country, as the noble Lord, Lord Ranger, said. I thought for a moment I was going to be enlightened by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, but I think I am still slightly in the dark.
To make decisions on reform of this House, we need to think about exactly what the House’s role is and how it can complement the work of MPs in the other place and the civil servants who support government. I have been thinking, as people ask me what we do, about what in the last few months of my time in this House I have seen that we do really well. Where can we provide something that the other place does not? What are its problems and why are they occurring? What can we do to resolve them?
To start with the strengths—and there are some—the ability to go into depth and convene expertise in Select Committees is incredibly impressive. The House goes through legislation in real detail, as others have already said. People speak out about concerns and issues openly, respectfully and constructively in this Chamber. There is also the breadth of expertise and experience that Members of this House bring. When I talk to people and describe how Members range from farmers to pharmacologists, and from filmmakers to financial experts, they are genuinely surprised. We need to talk more about what we do and who we are in this Chamber. They are appreciative of what those different experiences can bring.
Members of the other place are chosen by local communities to represent the country geographically. That is not the purpose of your Lordships’ Chamber. This membership is representative of—or at least seeks to represent in different ways—professional and other life experiences. Of course, I recognise that we are in no way representative of life experience and professions in this country, but we can bring diverse experience. As the noble Lord, Lord Norton, said, at its best this place brings a huge breadth of experience to help ensure that the Government’s legislation achieves its aims, is joined up and does not have unforeseen consequences for some people.
We have Members with very deep experience and long memories, some of which I have been benefiting from this evening, to help us learn from the past. With appointments that can last decades, we can take responsibility for considering long-term risks and planning. We do not seek short-term popularity. I was going to say that there is no incentive to kick the can down the road but, having heard this debate, I fear that there is one subject where we kick the can down the road.
What about problems? Everybody today has talked about the size of the House. I think that is linked to the way in which Members are appointed. It seems that every time a different party comes into government, it feels the need to appoint new Members to your Lordships’ House to achieve a majority. With lifelong membership, the result is obvious.
In order to solve that, while enhancing the benefits of long appointments and breadth of experience and expertise, my suggestion is to remove party politics from this Chamber altogether—to allow every Member to be a Cross-Bencher, and to speak and vote as they feel appropriate having listened to and considered the representations of other Members and the wider public. I realise that getting to speaker number 61 without anybody before me having mentioned this means that I am probably saying the unthinkable.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Saatchi. I am very interested in bringing more opinions from outside this House into its workings in a formalised way, learning from things that have been done in countries such as Taiwan. That way, we can truly listen more directly to the voices of the people we serve. If we have a non-party-political House, with only Government Ministers having a formal political position in the Chamber for the duration of their ministerial appointment, this removes the incentive for the continual growth of the House through political necessity.
On appointments to this Chamber, a lot can be learned from the study of the basis of trust—the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, mentioned trust. When you ask people why they do or do not trust a particular person, they regularly talk about a few things: competence, reliability, honesty and motivation. Do they have your best interests at heart, or their own? Those four criteria are not bad ones to use to guide the selection of those who serve in this House. An independent appointments board that keeps an eye on the representativeness of this House’s experience could help to ensure that we have a second Chamber that can fulfil an important and trusted role within our democracy. But we should also formally and properly consult the public on different proposals for the reform of this House, just as we should on all issues that we debate.
Earl Attlee (Con)
My Lords, I too am grateful to the Leader of the House for introducing the debate. She and I have always had the most cordial of relations. I have been in this situation before, in the 1997 Parliament, but I survived it by becoming an elected hereditary Peer—although, of course, I had a plan B. Now, in the face of not just the Bill but a constant stream of very unfair comments about the House and its membership generally, all my motivation to undertake the role of Peer of the realm and Member of your Lordships’ House has been steadily corroded away, to the extent that I have now decided that I want to retire in the spring—and I am two years younger than the average age in your Lordships’ House. I need a lot of persuasion to do otherwise.
It is no good my friends around the House saying, “Don’t worry, you’ll pick up a life peerage”, as has been suggested in the debate. The chances of that happening to me are inversely proportional to the size of my independent streak and my lack of admiration of post-2016 Conservative Administrations—even though I think I am a proper Tory. As pointed out by many noble Lords, many outside comment on the composition of the House of Lords without considering its role, which is largely accepted to be to revise legislation, to be an additional check on the Executive and to be a source of expertise—that last part is extremely important.
When we read the post-US election analysis, we see that the Democrats failed to grasp that the US electorate were fed up with professional politicians who have limited experience of the real world and who inhabit only the Washington beltway. In the House of Commons, a minority of members of the Government, and perhaps even the House generally, have ever had a proper revenue-earning job.
The international security situation is dire—we now have state-on-state conflict in Europe. But research from your Lordships’ Library indicates that only about 17 Members of the House of Commons have any military experience, and only three have operational overseas aid experience. Only one MP, Alex Ballinger, has both. Of course, several of the current hereditary Peers have military experience, and one has both. No prizes, but it is sometimes said that Attlees are modest people with much to be modest about—but when the Bill comes into effect we will have no one in this House with both operational military and operational international aid experience.
It is curious to me that, in 32 years in your Lordships’ House, I have never been asked by the media what I am actually doing or working on. One current issue is prison reform, which, with the arrival of the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, is going rather well. The other is very niche, so far as Parliament is concerned. We have about 600,000 professional lorry drivers in the UK, and 400,000 heavy goods vehicles. The problem that I am dealing with is that a very few police forces are harassing the heavy haulage industry in circumstances where other police forces do no such thing. To do this work, I need to bring to bear practical experience of heavy road haulage operations—and this is important. It is something that no one else in Parliament possesses.
Once the remaining hereditary Peers are eliminated, the remaining life Peers will find themselves coming under increasing pressure in terms of composition of the House—a point raised by my noble friend Lord Forsyth and others. This is because the political Benches will be filled largely with party apparatchiks with varying levels of experience, party donors, and MPs who have left the House of Commons in a variety of circumstances. Most importantly, they will all owe their position in the Lords to knowing someone in the Westminster bubble, something that is not necessary for a hereditary. No wonder the House of Lords has been described as being “hideously London-centric”.
Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)
My Lords, I assure the noble Earl that I shall not apply for an HGV licence—I am getting a little too crabbed with age for that.
It is difficult to add anything new to the debate that we have had since 1999, and of course today’s debate shows it. Having waited so long, I am tempted to intervene at least briefly. During that period, all options have been considered, and of course rejected, since the big bang of 1999. There have been some minor changes, with proposals on retirement, expulsion and so on, but even when there has been a consensus in your Lordships’ House and generally, such as on the Burns report, it has been rejected. I have heard many pleas this evening for yet further delay.
While we debate, numbers have increased, of course. Your Lordships’ House now has 804 Members, and the Conservatives have 86 more than the government party, Labour. I warned Mr Johnson’s Government that by recklessly increasing numbers he would provoke a counterreaction, and that perhaps is now the danger.
Even when I was in the House of Commons I voted against an elected Chamber. Why? I saw it as a recipe for conflict and that both legitimacies would challenge one another. There would be the danger of losing some expertise. I hear what the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, said about what the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, called the “warriors’ Bench”. There is too little practical military experience in your Lordships’ House, and we should seek to retain that.
The problem also is, if there were to be elections, we would be unlikely to see professionals wishing to join and seeking places on a party list. An elected House would be more partisan because of the process of election, and more parochial. I note that, when the Labour Peers’ working group produced a report in 2014, it suggested that there should be a referendum on an elected Chamber. They also talked about a constitutional convention. What is the Government’s policy on that?
Currently, the Government have brought forward very limited changes. They can of course make some hereditaries life Peers, or even delay their expulsion, but their removal is likely, which will reduce overall numbers and the imbalance for the Conservatives. As for the retirement age, why not combine this with a fixed term, particularly now that we are seeing more appointments at the age of 30 or so?
What are the principles for moving forward? We wish to retain the expertise and quality of scrutiny, particularly, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton, mentioned, post-legislative scrutiny. We must deal with the inflation of numbers, perhaps using the Burns formula. We must reform the appointments procedures, perhaps again following the Norton Bill of 2022. We must eliminate the bias in favour of London and the south-east, and perhaps bring the devolved Administrations into the process. Diversity means that we should reduce the number of Bishops and add other faiths and denominations, but we should be careful of unintended consequences, such as an unthinking move to disestablishment or to a written constitution.
Overall, I support the Government’s gradualist approach, which is a step on the road to what I concede is an unknown destination, broadening down from precedent to precedent, as the old adage goes. As someone who is likely to die, at least politically, as a result of the Bill, and likely to be a victim of the process, I salute the Government’s proposals.
Baroness Lawlor (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the Lord Privy Seal for her introduction and for the opportunity to consider House of Lords reform. There are many matters to which a new Government might apply reformist zeal: the public services, the public finances and the UK immigration and asylum system could all do with structural reform, as people from across the political divide agree. But the arrangements for Britain’s separate constitutional powers are not of the same order. They have evolved over time, like a tapestry reworked and mended to fulfil a clear purpose—a function, as has been mentioned—and, in doing so, to protect the democratic freedoms of this country and the liberty of its people.
As we have heard today, there are three powers. There is the legislature, a Parliament of two Houses, of which this House is one and the other is a directly elected Chamber. There is a judiciary recognised for its independence and expertise. It, with this Chamber, is the watchdog of the third power, the Executive—the Government of the day, accountable to the electorate, through the ballot box, and indirectly through Parliament, under arrangements for each House, which, with their functions, have also evolved. Innocuous as they may seem, these arrangements ensure not only that people are governed under laws they have a say in making, by a Parliament and representatives they elect, but that those who govern are accountable and the laws are properly made. Changing the composition of this Chamber, removing certain categories of Peer without simultaneous plans for the alternative, opens the way for a House of Lords packed by the Government and unlikely to hold them to account. We would be back full circle to the cry of Lloyd George and the Liberals when they described the House of Lords as “Mr Balfour’s poodle” only this time it will be Sir Keir’s, and we have had a flavour of how executive power will be used.
This country has slipped into each century as if by accident, evolving gradually and, from the 18th century, without the violence, civil war or bloody revolutions to which our European neighbours have too often been victim. Nor has it suffered totalitarian rule, to which some neighbours have been subject in our own hundred years. The costs of that were great, not only to ordered government but in the assault on liberty and property rights. By contrast, this country, through its separate constitutional powers, extended the franchise, moved to religious and democratic arrangements and accommodated the replacement of the main opposition party, the Liberals, with the Labour Party as one of the main parties of government. When it came to govern, the Labour Party put country before ideology, accepted the arrangements under which it was governed and sought to work with the constitution, guaranteeing freedoms and liberty, not against it.
The Prime Minister has already mentioned regret at some of the failings evident in his first 100 days. Let him now turn the corner and be true to a better Labour tradition, rather than make an assault without due process on how we are governed and why. I hope he will think again before making this reckless move.
Lord Hampton (CB)
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor.
On 13 October 2022, I won a Cross-Bench by-election by one vote, causing the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, to describe me as the least safe seat in the country. I think he followed that by saying you could not make it up. There was 70% turnout and single transferable vote—democracy at its finest. Unfortunately, I was keenly aware that all 12 candidates and the electorate of 30 were all men, not exactly representative of the UK as a whole. Like my noble friend Lord Devon, I was also keenly aware that, as the seventh Baron Hampton—I am the youngest of three and my father was the youngest of four—an estimated 16 females had been bypassed in the passing on of the title.
It is difficult to justify, although some noble Lords have made a pretty good fist of it. However, it is the only way that a working secondary school teacher could get into the House of Lords. The head of an academy trust? Yes. An ex-Education Minister? Certainly. That is what I do, as do many of my noble friends among the hereditaries. We have some quite real jobs.
The House of Lords fundamentally works but needs a few tweaks. The age debate is strange to me. Why would you get rid of all this expertise? As many noble Lords have said, why not give HOLAC more power and let it decide? Obviously, the hereditary Peer by-elections would have to go, but those deemed useful and who had done good work could be turned into life Peers. This fulfils the manifesto pledge. As the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and others have said, all prime ministerial and party appointments should be stopped. HOLAC should have powers over who gets appointed. New appointments could be capped—two out, one in, perhaps—to bring the numbers down under the Burns principle. The numbers could be judged on the last general election. Cross-Bench numbers could be in line with the Official Opposition. Also, as we have said many times, all those who commit serious breaches should go.
Regardless of age, every Peer should have a seven-year fixed term, but they can reapply to HOLAC, if it feels that they have been useful. That decision is based on expertise and performance in committees and legislation, rather than just speeches—because let us face it, we do not necessarily need to encourage more speeches. This might get rid of the captains of industry, the captains of England and the party donors who turn up only one day a year to retain their right to sit.
The House of Lords is a House of experts. These changes that will weaken the House are driven by some doctrinal need to please an electorate that really do not know or care about reform of the House. Strangely, they are also being touted as a way of cleaning up politics. This is not stagnation—only 59.7% of the electorate bothered to turn up to vote in the last general election to get rid of a deeply unpopular Government. The interest in this House is negligible. As the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, asked, “Do you hear the people sing, my Lords?” Me neither.
Lord Lee of Trafford (LD)
My Lords, I am very much in a minority on these Benches, in that I very much oppose an elected House of Lords for a whole host of reasons. It would destroy the relationship between both Houses, where we acknowledge the primacy of the other House. It would inevitably cost more and become much more party-political, certainly around candidate selection.
I favour an appointed House, but with a major change. My change would satisfy the urging by the Leader of the House for us to be ambitious and would satisfy my leader, who in his excellent opening speech—although I did not agree with elements of it—suggested bringing in contemporary expertise. My approach would be to reduce substantially the number of political appointments and to look to our national institutions and professional bodies—perhaps the top 50 or 100, such as the Royal College of Surgeons, the Institute of Chartered Accountants, the National Farmers’ Union, the TUC, the Museums Association, the Howard League for Penal Reform, et cetera—to nominate one of their senior members to sit for a limited period in this House for, say, five years as an unaffiliated or Cross-Bench Peer. They not only would speak on their area of expertise but would agree to take part in the wider debates and activities of our House. At the end of five years, the respective bodies would then nominate someone to succeed that person.
This system would have two advantages. First, it would bring in, almost by definition, current expertise. Secondly, it would also bring in an element of democracy, as the individuals chosen by those institutions and professional bodies would by definition have been chosen by their peers. I believe that this major change would satisfy so many of the weaknesses that currently apply to your Lordships’ House.
Lord Wrottesley (Con)
My Lords, I declare an interest as an excepted hereditary Peer who already suffered the fate of expulsion from this House in 1999.
At the risk of incurring the wrath of my fellow hereditaries—although I think that we are broad-minded enough to agree—and at the risk of agreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, and the Labour Party manifesto, in my view the principle of heredity is indefensible. However, what I am afraid I do not agree with, as many of your Lordships do not, is the “incremental” change that the Leader of the House described. It seems that many of your Lordships feel that this sort of change is politically motivated.
We have heard comments that it is clumsy, heavy-handed, cruel and unkind in not recognising the valuable contribution that existing hereditaries make and should continue to make. We have also heard that it is not what was agreed by the previous Labour Government 25 years ago: that removing the remaining hereditaries would not be done incrementally. What was, in effect, agreed by large majorities in both Houses in 1999 was that it would not be done until a complete alternative had been agreed on.
The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, went on to say that the nation is not interested in what we are debating today. First of all, nor is the nation interested in much of the business that your Lordships carry out, but nevertheless we do that unglamorous work because it has to be done, and we do it in more detail and with more diligence because the other place cannot. One thing I can say with certainty is that there is not the fascination across the nation that the party opposite has with wholesale reform of this House. I heard a parliamentary colleague comment to me just today that in his whole career he had knocked on over 60,000 doors, and not once was House of Lords reform mentioned.
The Labour manifesto also went on to say, as was reiterated by the Leader in her opening statement, that:
“Labour will consult on proposals, seeking the input of the British public on how politics can best serve them”.
Many of your Lordships are deeply troubled that there has not been any consultation on the Bill now before Parliament, and that it has effectively been signed, sealed and delivered in the other place.
I will use this opportunity to try and take this all back to first principles: what is the House of Lords for? Does the nation want your Lordships to carry on the principle that has been built up over centuries, in a way that can happen only in a nation that relies on a constitution founded on convention and common law? Does it want the House to be a Chamber, often free of political bias, to review and revise legislation passed to it by the Government and the other place? That is effective check and balance, the cornerstone of democratic structures.
I now turn to the process of change and how should one go about managing change, and offer just a couple of observations. Here I turn to the corporate world and governance in public bodies. Boards are convened according to a skills matrix. In my view, that is how a second Chamber should be constituted, through a properly established and empowered appointments commission, free from political influence. However, with a board of effectively 600 people, far deeper and broader expertise can be sought, and to address the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and other noble Lords’ suggestions around term limits, I suggest that any limits should take into account a desire not to lose deep corporate memory, something that besets every corporate and public board.
Then, as many of your Lordships have also addressed, we have to look at how that body is constituted: elected or appointed? Many of your Lordships have grave concerns that having another elected and therefore politicised Chamber will lead only to further short-termism at the heart of our legislative process. The other advantage that this House has in a long-term appointment—in this case, life—is the ability to think long-term, also bringing with it a lifetime’s experience and deep expertise. We could also opt for a hybrid Chamber, part elected and part appointed, to enable deep knowledge and experience to be woven into what might otherwise be highly politicised decision-making. The issue then is what transitional arrangements would need to be undertaken.
I conclude by echoing what many other noble Lords have said: that when brought before this House, it will be the wrong Bill for the wrong time. We need more time to analyse what the nation actually wants. I respectfully request that the noble Baroness the Leader of the House takes back to her colleagues in Cabinet these and other concerns that your Lordships have brought before this House in this often lively but deeply informative debate.
Baroness Crawley (Lab)
My Lords, in a debate where roles and conventions have been constantly referred to, I know my role as the penultimate Back-Bench speaker: to get on with it.
I support my Government’s policy and Lords reform, and I congratulate the Leader of the House on her elegant introduction. However, as the third member of the Lord Speaker’s Committee on the Size of the House —we have already heard from the chairman the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham—I have to say that I am disappointed that, as a House, we could not have taken this reform into our own hands years ago. The report from the Lord Speaker’s Committee on the Size of the House was published in 2017 and has been updated every year since. As noble Lords have said, it concluded that, if the House agreed, we would work to
“reduce the size of the House”—
two out, one in—
“and maintain a cap of 600 members into the future”.
It went on to say that the proposal would have provided
“sufficient turnover of members to refresh the House and rebalance it in line with general elections over time, while also guaranteeing a sizeable fixed proportion of independent Crossbench peers”,
as well as a beefed-up HOLAC.
These proposals were supported by a significant majority of the House and would have gradually reformed it without the need for legislation. However, the then Conservative Government’s response was unenthusiastic, to say the least, and ultimately unhelpful. With the honourable exception of the noble Baroness, Lady May of Maidenhead, Conservative Prime Ministers were unwilling to open up the discussion on the prime ministerial prerogative in appointments to this House. I really do think that, had the previous Government agreed to support the logic of the Lord Speaker’s proposals and my noble friend Lord Grocott’s Private Member’s Bill, we would not find ourselves in the present situation, as my noble friend Lord Murphy said.
We all have friends and colleagues across party and non-party lines in this House. We will of course be sorry to see people whom we like, respect and look forward to seeing each week leave us. However, the Labour Party’s manifesto, on which a decisive electoral victory was won, could not have been clearer, as was alluded to by the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington: it was to introduce legislation immediately to remove the right of hereditary Peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. I hope that, despite feelings running high—I understand this—the Government’s right to enact that manifesto commitment will be respected in this House.
I acknowledge that the noble Lord, Lord True, said that he respects manifesto commitments. Looking to future legislation, I say that it will be important for this House to work together, across party lines, on new reform; this was said by the noble Lords, Lord Jay and Lord Norton of Louth. I look forward to that collaboration very soon.
Lord Strathclyde (Con)
My Lords, from the perspective of being at the tail-end on the Back Benches, I can truly say that this has been a far more interesting debate than I thought it would be when I saw the speakers’ list this morning. This debate is about a great House of Parliament—one that has, I would argue, held its reputation for seriousness, scrutiny and revision. Today’s debate has proven that. As my noble friend Lord Wakeham said earlier this afternoon, the House of Lords does what it is supposed to do; we have done that today in debating this issue.
As the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, said earlier, we are here today only because of the Bill before another place, but what he sees as a virtue I see as a dismal failure—namely, the failure of the Government to keep their word to the House, made 25 years ago, that the remaining hereditary Peers would leave when a proper reform was enacted. I clearly remember the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, happily agreeing to the by-elections because, as he said then, they would never happen because the Government would bring forward a proper reform Bill early in the new Parliament; that is why the by-elections would not take place until the second Session of the subsequent Parliament. Of course, as we all now know, there was no second reform Bill.
Here we are, 25 years later, with Labour’s tired old ideological song about removing the right of the hereditary Peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords, yet there is still no proper reform, and no thought, and Labour seeks to blame us for its failure.
What is the way forward? I am one of the few people in Parliament who was part of a process that successfully brought a full reform Bill before another place. In 2012, the House of Lords Reform Bill passed its Second Reading on an overwhelming vote, as the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, reminded us, but fell because Labour would not co-operate on a timetable Motion. I sat on two Joint Committees, one chaired by Jack Straw and one successfully by Nick Clegg, building on straw. It was cross-party, both Houses were represented, it was focused, and it came ultimately to an agreement that was reflected in the Bill that was presented.
I believe that the only credible motivator for reform is the existence of hereditary Peers. I urge the Government to reconvene a Joint Committee of both Houses—we have seen how it worked in the past—to sit and come up with a proper plan that reflects well on democracy and our democratic traditions, and maintains the House’s reputation for excellence. So much has changed since 1999 that we can take account of—the new devolved Administrations in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, the new metro mayors in England and the GLA. We should look at the case for direct or indirect elections from these bodies and see how representation in the Lords can be improved.
I sense a dilemma at the heart of the speech by the noble Baroness the Leader of the House. She said that the Lords is complementary and an asset to the Commons—and I agree—and that it has deep historical roots. But she was afraid of being seen to do nothing. Surely doing nothing is better than deeply damaging the Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Birt, warned. Of course, the noble Baroness the Leader of the House promised further reform—participation, age limits, tighter appointment systems and so on—but I have no faith whatever that any of that will happen once the Bill has passed. I am with my noble friend Lord Forsyth on that.
Surely there are better ways of going forward, such as the example set in 1922 when the new Irish Peers were stopped from coming here but the old ones could stay on until they died.
On that note, from time to time we hear that there will be life peerages for some hereditary Peers, such as the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, the Convenor of the Cross Benches, and my noble friend Lord Howe, but why is all this secret? Why can the Minister not tell us, in this quiet of the night, exactly what the Labour Party has planned and remove the threat of immediate execution from these Peers?
The Bill has passed in another place this evening without any serious debate. We shall have to wait for the Bill to come to our House to give it proper and full scrutiny. I finish with a plea to the noble Baroness. If we have 50-plus speakers at Second Reading, can we please have a two-day debate and not be limited to five minutes?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde—the second Lord Strathclyde—who has the distinction of having one of the last hereditary peerages created, which was in 1955 for his grandfather. This was three years before the Life Peerages Act and nine years before Governments stopped providing hereditary peerages. A little later and his grandfather would have been a life Peer, and he would be a very distinguished commoner.
We have to be careful not to romanticise our hereditary peerages. There are Courtenays and Wellesleys, but only 29 Peers survived the Wars of the Roses—the noble Earl’s family was lucky—and the majority of extant Peers have been created since 1832, and nearly half since 1900. What distinguishes life Peers from hereditary Peers is that we have received direct prime ministerial patronage, while most hereditary Peers have received patronage from their grandfathers or great-grandfathers.
There is a wider context which we need to consider: the depth of public disillusionment with Westminster politics as a whole and with democratic politics, as we see in this country, have just seen in the United States and are seeing on the European continent. Public trust, as measured by polls, has sunk to between and 5% and 10% of the public, which is the lowest ever recorded since polling began. In July’s election, as other Peers have remarked, more than four out of every 10 registered voters did not bother to turn up and vote. Of those who did, 40% voted for parties other than the two on which our entrenched two-party system is built. That is dangerous, and means that we all need to think about how we rebuild public trust.
As for the Lords, as YouGov polled recently, 14% of people had a positive view of the House, 42% had a negative view, and 33% did not bother. Asked what reform of the House of Lords they preferred, 16% said that it should remain as now, 39% said that a partly elected and partly appointed House would do, and 55% said that they wanted an entirely elected House.
We need to recognise what public legitimacy means for Parliament as a whole. We need to think about Parliament as a whole, and I regret that we keep hearing these arguments about the primacy of the House of Commons. I was listening to a newly elected Labour MP last week, who told me how appalled he is by the way he is treated by his Whips and by how Ministers patronise him and his colleagues. Prime ministerial primacy is what we have, disguised as the primacy of the Commons. If we are going have a strong democracy, we will need a stronger Parliament—both Houses together, not just maintaining prime ministerial primacy of the Commons and then Commons primacy over the Lords.
If we are going to discuss broader reform, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, that we have an awful lot of material—I still have a lot of it in my study from the 2010 to 2012 period. It is good that the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, has reminded us just how much work we put in and—I say this to the noble Lord, Lord True—how much was done jointly through various Joint Committees. There were wide consultations. The proposals were for a statutory appointments commission; an end to the link between the honour, title and membership of the Lords; and 360 elected Members, with 90 appointed, 12 Bishops, 8 Ministers and a 15-year term.
We can start from there; that is a good foundation on which there is, I suspect, general agreement. We are more likely to get something like that by compromising consensus than most of the alternatives. Some people would say no to direct election, but indirect election, which several Members here have suggested, might be an alternative. The Gordon Brown proposals touched on this also.
As I spend my time commuting between Yorkshire and London, I am deeply conscious of the London dominance of British politics and the weakness of the English regions in representation in Parliament and in government. A second Chamber which represents the nations and regions would be extremely beneficial for the quality of our government.
We talk about balance, but no one has really tackled the question of the imbalance of party representation, which is a legacy of the last Government. We have, after all, nearly 100 more Conservative Peers in this House than Labour. I had half hoped that the Leader of the Opposition would start informal discussions with the Government about some scheme for voluntary retirement of some of the older Conservatives, just to come back towards a balance. Part of the agreement we came to in 1999, which I was on the edges of as part of my party, was not just that we would have temporary by-elections and then further reform but that, in the interim, neither of the major parties would seek to have an overall majority of Peers. That part of the agreement has now clearly been broken, and that is part of the justification for the current proposals.
That is where we are, and we now have a very modest first step. I say to the Leader of the House: we need to be reassured. We on these Benches want to go a great deal further towards a fully reformed second Chamber, and want to know where we are going next. We are told that there will be consultation, that we will perhaps move towards term limits for new appointments, and that there will be a stronger HOLAC, as many noble Lords have said, and we are willing to support much of that. We certainly wish to be involved in conversations on it, but we need to keep going. The sense from this debate is that most of us accept that this is a necessary next step, but it should not be the only step for the next 20 years. It should be the first step in a number of things that will take place not in this Session but in this Parliament.
Lord Keen of Elie (Con)
My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, for making this debate possible.
I quote:
“There is a place with a proud record of standing up to government. It works diligently and thanklessly to improve legislation. It applies expertise to policy … It acts with a seriousness that is absent almost anywhere else in the political system. It is the House of Lords … through a strange combination of circumstances, the Lords has developed into something unusual in the British political landscape: a functioning chamber. It is, simply put, one of the only aspects of our constitutional arrangements that actually works”.
I am, as some noble Lords will be aware, quoting the recent work of the political commentator Ian Dunt—not known for his conservative tendencies.
Can the House of Lords be improved? Of course it can. There is no part of our political system that could not lend itself to improvement in the face of carefully conceived and properly considered examination.
This Government’s expressed intention is to replace the House of Lords with a second Chamber of the regions and nations. A number of your Lordships have alluded to this proposal. I will not spend too much time on it, principally because it is not going to happen during the life of this Parliament and is unlikely to happen during my own lifetime, assuming that to be a longer timeline. I observe, however, that the House of Lords is an integral part of the legislature for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and not an assembly of regions and nations, all of which have their own devolved competence. Of course we should be representative of our whole United Kingdom, but not just in terms of geography.
Pending its plan to replace the House of Lords, the Labour Party set out in its manifesto its proposal for immediate reform, which it described as “essential”. This has been touched on during this debate and is expressed by the Government as the requirements for “immediate modernisation”. I believe it important to actually look at the terms of that manifesto, because the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, quoted only one part of the immediate proposal for reform, and repeated references have been made to the importance of the Salisbury/Addison convention.
As noble Lords will be aware, at page 108 of its manifesto the Labour Party stated its proposal for “immediate modernisation” and followed it with this comment:
“Whilst this action to modernise the House of Lords will be an improvement, Labour is committed to replacing the House of Lords”.
So what is this “action to modernise”? I quote:
“The next Labour government will therefore bring about an immediate modernisation, by introducing legislation to remove the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. Labour will also introduce a mandatory retirement age. At the end of the Parliament in which a member reaches 80 years of age, they will be required to retire from the House of Lords.
Labour will ensure all peers meet the high standards the public expect of them, and we will introduce a new participation requirement as well as strengthening the circumstances in which disgraced members can be removed. We will reform the appointments process to ensure the quality of new appointments and will seek to improve the national and regional balance of the second chamber”.
That is the manifesto proposal for immediate reform of the House of Lords, pending the longer-term proposal —not simply the removal of the excepted Peers. What we have is the removal of the right of the excepted Peers, who are otherwise here for life, to sit in the House of Lords, a mandatory retirement age of 80, a new participation requirement, the removal of disgraced Members—I do not note any noble Lord having spoken against that proposal, so I do not see why it should not go ahead immediately—and reform of the appointments process to ensure the quality of appointments. I acknowledge that all the foregoing are capable of being done immediately, and the implication that they can be done together is, of course, compelling. As the previous Labour Government repeatedly asserted when faced with Private Members’ Bills such as those of Lord Steel, which addressed only some of these issues, the removal of excepted Peers or their elections could take place only as part of wider reform of the House of Lords.
In order of importance, the list from the Labour manifesto must surely begin with the urgent need to reform the appointments process. Where else in the world does the Executive, in the form of the Prime Minister, effectively determine the membership of the legislature? Montesquieu would be spinning in his grave. There are minor appointments that do not rely on the Prime Minister’s direct control—the Lords spiritual, the excepted Peers and the people’s Peers—but otherwise our Prime Minister is free to reward political success in the other place. Our Prime Minister is free to reward political failure in the other place. Our Prime Minister is free to reward anything that he puts his mind to, without us being able to essentially discover the underlying reason.
Consequently, how can you dispel the shadow of nepotism and the hint of cronyism—far greater, if unspoken, an issue than the excepted Peers? This point was touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, when he referred to the appointment of mates and pals, and by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, when he talked about the executive takeover of Parliament. So we have an essential and important step to take immediately: how we deal with the appointment process.
The most immediate and urgent of Labour’s manifesto proposals is the modernisation of the Appointments Commission in order that it can effectively challenge Executive appointments. I note that one Prime Minister alone, Tony Blair, made 374 appointments to this House.
I used the word “reward”, and as the noble Lords, Lord Liddle and Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, observed, that is not the purpose of this House. We are not here to see people arrive simply because they have been rewarded for whatever service they may have given. They should be here in order that they can participate in an important part of the legislature of the United Kingdom, and our objective should be to secure those who are able and, indeed, willing to participate in that legislative process. I notice in passing that in the past five years the highest rate of participation of any cohort in the House, whether attendance or participation in committees, has been that of the excepted Peers.
However, there is an urgent problem that needs to be immediately addressed. As expressed in the Labour manifesto:
“Too many peers do not play a proper role in our democracy”.
This, like the present system of appointment, is liable to bring the House into disrepute in the eyes of the public. It could be remedied immediately. We could adopt the policy of the Scottish Parliament Act 1572. If I might remind some of your Lordships who have forgotten its terms, this provided that every noble, every elected baron of the shire, and every elected commissioner of the royal burghs would be subject to a daily fine if they failed to attend Parliament without reasonable excuse. So, instead of a daily allowance, we might have a daily disallowance. More seriously, it would be a simple matter to immediately require all Peers upon appointment or already in the House to give a solemn undertaking of participation. If they declined, they should not be able to take a seat in this House, and they should not be able to vote. If they fail to adhere to the undertaking, again they should no longer be able to take their seat in this House, and they should not be able to vote. If noble Lords wish, as many do, to reduce the numbers who may sit in this House, I suggest that such an immediate move would probably reduce the numbers by hundreds almost overnight.
The matter of a retirement age is clearly regarded as controversial—I note the number of noble Lords who did not mention it in their contributions. Of course, it does not exist in the other place, and it would clearly remove some talent prematurely. I have to observe that we adhere to the notion that our judges are not competent to interpret and apply the law once they reach the age of 75, while we consider ourselves capable of making the law without any limit of time, so there may be an issue there for us to consider.
What has exercised people more than anything else is apparently the hereditary principle, which was only one part of the immediate reform proposed in the Labour manifesto. One noble Baroness referred to it as “ridiculous” and another noble Lord as “indefensible”. I simply notice that the hereditary principle is the pillar upon which sits our constitutional monarchy, so we must be a little careful about such generalisations as we have heard during this debate.
Why is it so criticised? The noble Baroness, Lady Bryan of Partick, referred to the work of Gordon Brown, and his report of 2022 lies behind much of what has been proposed here. His report concluded that the 92 excepted Peers could not remain as they were merely the representatives of the landowning class. He raises an interesting point about the idea of a particular class being represented in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Noble Lords may recall that Sidney Webb drafted the constitution of the Labour Party. When doing so, and in particular when drafting Clause 1, he was determined that workers should receive the proper reward for their labour, and that in order to do so they would have to secure representation in Parliament. That was the objective of the constitution of the Labour Party. So he intended that a class, the labouring class, should secure representation in Parliament. I wonder how that differs from the idea of the landowning class achieving representation in Parliament.
Lord Keen of Elie (Con)
The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, suggests that there are more of the workers. He may be right, but of course we are a democracy, so we all have the right to be represented in Parliament.
Not a lot has changed since Sidney Webb drafted that constitution. I can think of only two changes. One was when Tony Blair sought the amendment of Clause 4 and the second was when the present Prime Minister could not remember what a worker was. On that second point, he might have gone back and read Sidney Webb, who made it very clear that a worker was someone who not only laboured with their muscle but laboured with their brain. So there is a definition out there that we can fall back on and use. In passing, I always thought it was interesting that Sidney Webb became the first Baron Passfield and therefore entered this House as a hereditary Peer.
The issues that we have debated, and which the Labour manifesto identifies as a prelude to the replacement of the House of Lords, are, as I say, capable of immediate and simple implementation. Why then have the Government departed from what their own manifesto described as the requirements for “immediate modernisation”, to contradict their own previous judgment and put forward only one, albeit pending, replacement of this House?
For example, do we need to delay strengthening the circumstances in which disgraced Members can be removed? I ask the noble Baroness the Leader of the House: if so, why? Do we need to delay reforming the appointments process in order that it is less opaque and open to abuse by the Executive? I ask the noble Baroness: if so, why? Do we need to delay the introduction of a much-needed participation requirement? I ask the noble Baroness: if so, why? Do we need to ignore the previous Labour Government’s stricture that the removal of excepted Peers should only be part of this wider reform and modernisation? I ask the noble Baroness: if so, why?
As many noble Lords observed, including the noble Lords, Lord Birt, Lord Jones and Lord Curry, and my noble friend Lord Wrottesley, we are threatened with piecemeal reform. We have been threatened with that in the past; it is not an inviting proposition. All the points raised as essential and immediate in the Labour Party manifesto are capable of almost immediate and joint implementation. So I ask the noble Baroness the Leader: why is it that only one aspect of that essential Labour manifesto commitment is taken in the Bill? Would it be so difficult to address the issue of disgraced Peers, the issue of participation and the issue of appointment, which is so critical to the independence of this House as part of the legislature rather than as the poodle of the Executive?
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
My Lords, first, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in today’s rather long debate. It has been a significant debate. It has been wide-ranging and largely very thoughtful. We have also had a very wide range of views. I am aware that some noble Lords are fairly new to the debate and new to the House, but others have been round this circle a number of times and have enormous expertise. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, for his contribution today, given the expertise he has brought to this issue, and I know the work he has done the past.
I want to try and address as many of the points raised by noble Lords in the time I have. I stress, as I did in my opening comments, that this is not the end of the conversation or the debate on this and we are listening to comments made. I will address first why the hereditary Peers Bill, which has been introduced and now passed in the other place, was the first item. A number of noble Lords misquoted the manifesto today but the immediate issues brought up were the legislation around the right of hereditary Peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. The manifesto then went on talk about what has also happened. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, can shake his head, but that is exactly true: it is what is in the manifesto. It is very clear in the manifesto that the first stage is about hereditary Peers. Why would that be the case? Why would that be the first item to be addressed? The reason is that the principle on that issue has already been established and acted on back in 1999 when the legislation went through.
Transitional arrangements were put in place a quarter of a century ago. I heard the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, and others say how there was a really engaging process at the time. I think others remember it slightly differently. Viscount Cranborne managed to do a deal—I have to say I admire his negotiating skills—where 92 hereditary Peers remained, and not only did they remain but if they left there was a by-election to replace them. That is extraordinary and I pay tribute to him. I have to say that his party did not really like it and he did not last very long after that. I think the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, was a beneficiary of his departing from his position. That is where we are at the moment. But in the idea that this would not be the first step in the current reforms when the principle is already established, I think the noble and learned Lord is being a little bit mischievous and he knows it.
I will comment first on the opening speakers from the main groups. I thank the noble Lord, Lord True, for his comments about the spirit of compromise. I do wish, when I had come to see him before on the Grocott Bill in the spirit of compromise, he had taken that same line there. We may not be where we are today had that been the case. He will recall, as will previous Leaders, that I offered to co-operate on that and help the Government see that legislation removing the by-elections through.
By not doing that, we get to the point where we take the same position. We have heard this time and again from the party opposite tonight: “Do not do anything unless you do everything. We do not know what everything is so let us do nothing”. I am sorry but that is not a sustainable position and—
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
On this occasion, I will take one more intervention, given even the lateness of the hour and the lack of opportunity to progress with my argument.
Lord True (Con)
I was really trying to help the noble Baroness guide her argument because it is not the first step that the House is interested in; it is the final step. What do the Government propose that this House should do and what should it be? Will she please tell the House?
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
I have to urge patience on the noble Lord. I am at the start of my comments on the debate and the noble Lord seeks to intervene on me within a few minutes. I would urge him to have a bit of caution and patience, but I want to raise another point. He said that this was sprung on us; how utterly ridiculous. It has been 25 years; it was in the manifesto; it was a major part of his comments and those of others on the King’s Speech. This was not sprung. I wrote an article saying, as I have said in the House on many occasions, that if the by-elections continued this would have been a consequence of that. The option was there to stop the by-elections. One noble Lord—I cannot remember who—said that we have stopped the by-elections now. No, we have only paused them until the conclusion of this legislation.
The noble Lord, Lord Newby, had great strength in his arguments. There was consistency of principle but pragmatism as well. He asked whether I still held the view that the House worked best when there were roughly equal numbers between the government party and the Opposition. That is a personal view which I expressed in a Select Committee that he and I both attended. It is hard to get to those exact numbers, but when you have such a great imbalance as there has been over the last few years, the House does not do its best work. I think the House works better with roughly equal numbers. I will return to that in a moment.
I thank the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, for his very thoughtful and helpful comments. He has been instrumental in bringing forward papers to look at the conventions of the House over the last year or so, and I am grateful to him for his time on that. He was also the first to try to put some detail on the issue of participation. As I said when I opened, I think we all have an innate understanding of what we mean but quantifying that is quite difficult. I am grateful to him for looking to do so and for his comments on laws and conventions.
A number of noble Lords—including the noble Lords, Lord True, Lord Forsyth, Lord Mancroft and Lord Inglewood—talked about there being a power grab for parties on this. It is quite right that, in recent times, no political party has had an overall majority in this House. That is the right way for us to operate; it will not be changed at all by the Bill that has now been completed in the other place. That will not change as a result. If we look at the statistics of how we operate, currently the Conservatives have 34% of your Lordships’ House; after the Bill being implemented, that would be 32%. On my side, currently 22% of the House are Labour Peers; after the hereditary Peers are removed, it will be just 24%. In fact, the party that gets closest to being reflected most accurately is the Liberal Democrats. There will be very little difference between that party’s representation here and in the other place.
I also gently—or perhaps not so gently—remind noble Lords that after 12 years of a Labour Government, there were 24 more Labour Peers than the Conservative Party had. After 14 years of the Conservative Party in government, there were over 100 more Conservative Peers than Labour had. When I hear weaselly words such as, “We’ve got to stop this Prime Minister making appointments”, I ask: why was that never considered prior to the Bill being introduced?
The noble Lord, Lord Newby, also asked what the Government’s view is of the size and composition. He was right to raise that but the noble Lord, Lord Burns, made a very valid point, which I accept. There is little sense in the House reducing its size, by whatever means, if that is not a sustainable position to hold. I will take that away and reflect on it because the noble Lord is right.
We also have to ask: why do we think a smaller House would be the right thing? There has to be the purpose first, which is not having a smaller House. The purpose is to be more effective in how we operate and what we do. The representations I have had from across the House, from almost every noble Lord who has been to see me, is that they think we would do this better with a smaller House. Indeed, some noble Lords who have since departed said to me that they felt as the House got bigger, they were less able to make the contributions that they wanted to make. It is absolutely right that if Members leave the House, that should not necessarily be to create a vacancy for more appointments.
The manifesto talked about retirement age and participation. I am keen to engage further on this and I am grateful to noble Lords who commented on how that could be implemented. A number of issues were raised and I will take those forward. A point made by the noble Lord, Lord Burns, was that one reason the House has become so large is that you have Members coming in but not departing. He sought to look at that at the time of his report. I think that the noble Lords, Lord Hampton and Lord Inglewood, made similar comments.
Several noble Lords, including the noble Lords, Lord Kerr and Lord Liddle, raised something that has been raised before: decoupling the title and the membership of the second Chamber. There is no doubt that, when noble Lords are given a title, it is recognition of work they have done in the past. But it also has to be an expectation of what they are going to do in the future and the contributions they will make. The two go hand in hand. We want to see an active membership. As I said, that does not mean that every Peer has to be here all day every day. We are a full-time House. Not every Member has to be full-time, but they have to make a commitment to the work of this place.
The noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, raised the issue—I think it is an interesting point—of devolved Governments’ First Ministers being offered peerages. The SNP of course does not nominate people to this House. The point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, was that, where there are institutions in which you can make your voice heard, you should do so. I think her party takes a very different position from—I say this in the loosest form—its sister party in Scotland on that one. The noble Lord, Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale, was the First Minister of Scotland: currently he is the only one from our party. Other parties have made nominations as well. But I think it is a point well made. We want a more diverse House, in terms of a whole range of characteristics, including geography but also age, gender, ethnicity, religion and other issues as well.
A number of noble Lords raised participation. I thank the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, for his initial comments on this. I would quite like to have further discussions around the House on this as I do not think there is a consensus on how to move forward. My impression, from the conversations I have had, is that most noble Lords think that this is important, but no one can actually quantify it. What you do not want—I think the noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson, said this—is a perverse incentive to encourage people to turn up or speak when they do not need to speak. But you do want to know that someone is serious about being here.
All of us have expressed concern about those noble Lords—albeit a small number of them—who come in here, sign the book to retain their membership and then walk out and leave. That is not being serious about this House.
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
It is good to have some encouragement from the noble Lord; it is not always forthcoming.
This comes back to the point the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, made about whether there could be two kinds of title. There are difficulties with that, but I think it is something noble Lords might want to consider. In the manifesto we deliberately were not exact or precise about that. We thought it was something to be discussed by the House and for the House to come forward with something on that. It is about striking the right balance.
I think most noble Lords have spoken in support of the Bill that is going through the House of Commons but have made a number of other comments. Some want us to go further, some sense that it is a first step in the current programme and some are not comfortable with it.
The issue of some Conservative hereditary Peers becoming life Peers was raised. The noble Lord, Lord Northbrook, raised the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain. He is absolutely right; we have to ensure they can properly fulfil all their duties. I have already raised this with the Lord Speaker to ensure that that can happen. We will do nothing that makes it difficult for them to fulfil their responsibilities and constitutional roles. He does not have to table an amendment: we will ensure that happens. I can give him a guarantee already on that one. They will continue to exercise their functions.
The noble Viscount, Lord Astor—who has explained to me why he is unable to be with us for the wind-ups today—the noble Earl, Lord Devon, and the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, raised female succession to hereditary titles. The noble Earl and I have been in correspondence on this. I am sympathetic to his points. It is more complex than I had anticipated. I have made some initial inquiries in this area, and part of the problem is that the original writs of summons—his is much older than anybody else’s—specify that it is through the male line. There are all kinds of issues, including adoption and the expectations of existing heirs. As I say, I am looking into the matter, as he raised it with me, because I know he is interested in it.
The noble Lord, Lord Hampton, said that the removal of the hereditary Peers in that Bill was to clean up politics—that is absolutely not the case. Those are two very different issues, and no one is casting aspersions on individual hereditary Peers.
HOLAC was mentioned by the noble Lords, Lord Rennard and Lord Cromwell. They are absolutely right that there are issues with how HOLAC operates. I am not content to leave this entirely to HOLAC; the political parties have to take responsibility for their appointments and the checks that they are supposed to do. There may be something about HOLAC asking for assurances that those checks have been done. There are discussions to be had on that. HOLAC has an important role for the Cross Benches, which have not always had the appointments that they should have in that regard—even though they are currently larger than the Labour group in this place. The point about the quality of new appointments was well made, but political parties have to take some responsibility for that as well, or face the consequences.
The noble Lord, Lord Birt, mentioned diversity and the composition of the House. He and I have discussed this. If we are diverse as a House, the public can look to the House and see that it better represents the country. I do not know where the noble Lord got the idea of a senate of nations and regions. Our longer-term plans say that:
“Labour is committed to replacing the House of Lords with an alternative second chamber that is more representative of the regions and nations”.
In the meantime, we seek to improve the national and regional balance of the second Chamber. That is a worthy objective and one that we should take seriously. We will take it forward.
A number of noble Lords, including the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, asked why we should not bring in a new age limit for the House of Lords now. On the manifesto commitment about Members retiring at the end of the Parliament in which they reach 80, I have to thank my noble friend Lord Foulkes for that suggestion in the first place. He and other noble Lords from the Labour group put that forward.
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
He may have been younger but he certainly was not more foolish.
I take on board the comments of the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, in particular about the cliff edge, and I am happy to discuss that with him further. We want to ensure that, when new Peers come in, they have the opportunity and the time to gain the expertise that others did, so that they can take on those roles as well.
On appointing Peers over 80, there is nothing to say that somebody over 80 cannot play a full part in the role of the House—that is not the issue. It is about ensuring that we reduce the size of the House and that a mix of Members can come in. That is the kind of implementation issue that we will discuss with noble Lords. Some noble Lords clearly were not listening to my opening speech if they thought I did not mention that.
The noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, mentioned party-political donations and said that some may have bought peerages. This is a serious issue. There is a difference between somebody who makes donations and somebody who is a donor, if that makes sense. Lots of people in political parties make small contributions through their membership, but it would be of concern if somebody were appointed only because they were a significant donor, rather than because they had made a wider contribution to society or because of the contribution they would make in this House. I take the noble Duke’s point on that.
On the point from the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, by-elections have not been ended—they have only been suspended for the passage of the legislation. I would have loved them to be ended; we tried many times, but the then Government would not support that.
The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, is right that he and I have always had a good relationship. It is not just because he reminds me so much of his grandfather, but that is not a bad reason to hold him in high esteem as well.
On a final point, a number of comments and criticisms were made of Members in the other place. The amount of time spent on legislation in the other place has gone down, and I regret that, but I urge noble Lords to think about the pressures on Members of Parliament who are elected, the work that they do and the range of their responsibilities. We have one job in your Lordships’ House: to scrutinise and revise legislation. They have a multifaceted job, and I feel uncomfortable when there are criticisms of them that I feel are unjustified.
I am out of time and do not want to detain the House, but a number of Members raised points about looking for a consensual way forward. The hereditary Peers Bill will make its way here, and I hope we have fruitful discussions on it—but going forward beyond that, I am very happy to have further discussions with noble Lords on the kinds of issues that we have raised tonight. It has been a really helpful and mostly thoughtful and respectful debate, although there were a couple of comments that were not. This is one of those instances when we have largely seen this House working at its best. I assure the House that we will put our best foot forward in shaping the reform agenda for this Parliament, and I look forward to hearing more from noble Lords on the issues that have been raised this evening.