House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Committee stage
Monday 3rd March 2025 Lords Chamber

Committee (1st Day)

Relevant document: 5th Report from the Constitution Committee

15:37

Amendment 1

Moved by

[Lord True]

1: Before Clause 1, insert the following new Clause—
“PurposeThe purpose of this Act is to end the connection between the possession of a hereditary peerage and obtaining membership of the House of Lords.”

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, the effect of Amendment 1 is to underline the purpose of this Bill as ending entry here by the hereditary principle, but which does not endorse the wholesale removal of colleagues who are already here. There thus falls to me the lamentable duty to open Committee on this Bill, whose purpose is, as my amendment has just declared, to end the hereditary principle as a route of entry to Parliament. Some will find that regrettable; others will rejoice, rejoice. But most of us, however, will have feelings in which the elements are very mixed—where the wish the Bill might be stopped is checked by a proper understanding of the conventions; and, on the other hand, where partisan zeal is leavened with the personal respect owed to familiar and valued colleagues.

I submit that this great House draws its strength from that mixing of elements: from an ancestral, indeed very British, wisdom that does not view every question as black or white or insist that every victory must be total. That moderation is symbolised by the presence of those Cross Benchers, untainted by party. In what sense will culling and cutting those independent ranks ever benefit our House?

It is a paradox little understood outside that most of the myriad improvements we make to Bills are won not in the Division Lobby but through discussion and shared reflection. Our Chamber is unique in the world in conducting its business in order and courtesy without anyone to discipline us. That is possible only because we are a House of consensus, courtesy and compromise, of decency and humanity. I trust those qualities will inform us on this Bill in the weeks ahead, including in how we treat fellow Members.

We will hear that this is a simple Bill that brooks no amendment. Indeed, we are told no amendment will be allowed. Since when did this revising Chamber accept such an instruction from any Executive? It is in fact a Bill of the greatest constitutional significance. It says that a passing political Executive may scoop their hand into your Lordships’ House and chuck out any group of us that is not to the taste or political convenience of the Government of the day. I spoke of this at Second Reading as a very dangerous precedent, and I will address it again on Amendment 9. Once used, it will inevitably—inevitably—be copied.

The Bill is also of the greatest constitutional significance for what it does not say. It launches, without any checks on executive power or the number and nature of appointments, an all-appointed temporal House stocked at the direction of the Prime Minister of the day, of whatever party. Had that model for a legislature arrived in some capsule brought back from Mars by Elon Musk, we might well look askance at it.

The Government, in my submission, have a duty to set out in detail their plans for this all-appointed House. After all, in 1999, hundreds of hereditary Peers agreed to leave this place on the understanding, said then by Labour to be binding in honour, that 92 would remain until a final reform was agreed. Now it is said that that was some funny old deal of which we now know nothing, past its sell-by date, ready to be tossed aside like some embarrassing piece of mouldy cheese we find at the back of the fridge. It is even said that honour is some old-fashioned, even risible, concept of centuries past. I beg to differ, but I do recognise the raw realities of power. I see this new world around us where the strong may browbeat the weak, but that does not dispense with the constitutional duty of a Government to set out their plans and, as is normal in constitutional reform, seek some consensus across parties and beyond.

No such consensus has been sought. There have been no cross-party discussions, as led by Jack Straw in 2006 and 2007; no draft Bill, as in 2011; no Joint Committee of the Houses, as in 2002, 2003 or 2011; no royal commission, as under my noble friend Lord Wakeham in 1999; not even a White Paper, as in 2001, 2007, 2008 and 2011. At present, your Lordships have as clear a sense of what direction is planned for us beyond this Bill by Labour as Vikings on a longship becalmed in a mid-Atlantic fog without a lodestone.

That is no way to treat a House of Parliament. I ask the noble Baroness the Leader of the House, who always has the interests of this House at heart, whether she will share with us at some point during Committee—it need not be today—when we will see a White Paper on the Government’s future plans beyond this Bill. It should really come before Report. Your Lordships have a right in considering this Bill to ask how the all-appointed House will work and how it will be safeguarded. There have been many thoughtful amendments laid—and some I am perhaps not so fond of—but I look forward to all the discussions. Let no one say that they are filibustering or shenanigans. As I said at Second Reading, who will care for the future of this House if we do not?

Let me turn from what is left out of the Bill, which we must explore in Committee, to the narrow purpose within it, which is addressed in this amendment. Much has been said around this House about what I think and what my party thinks. Let me spell it out again. There are four elements of a sensible settlement that I believe could avert unnecessary conflict and damage to our House. The first is for all of us on this side to accept that the Government have a mandate to end the hereditary principle as a route of entry here. That is recognised in my amendment. This House should not block this Bill, though amend it it may.

The second is to address the danger of unilateral political expulsions of Members from this House by an Executive, with the attendant increase in power of prime ministerial patronage. When the Labour Government closed the gate to the Law Lords into 2009, they gave grandfather rights—acquired rights—to those already here, the same right that we all have: to stay for life. That showed due respect to those valued fellow Members and was of great benefit to the House. The Government say that is impossible in this case. It is not; it is perfectly possible. It is a political choice and a choice for this House, of whether to expel all existing Members of our House in scope of this Bill or treat them more generously. Were the Leader of the House to act generously, as I know is her normal instinct, and sign my Amendment 9 in its present form, or some mutually agreed modified form at a later stage, then all manner of resentment and difficulty would at once fall away.

15:45

The third element is the question of numbers. That is not conclusive. The Attlee Government changed Britain while outnumbered here by 10:1. You cannot build a majority here by appointments alone, as the last Parliament showed. My colleagues in another place never seem to understand this basic point. I suspect that the Lord Privy Seal may have the same problem.

However, I recognise the Government’s concern on this, so I can tell the House today that if the Government were to meet us on the second part of this package and permit existing former hereditary Peers in some numbers to continue their service here, consultations with my colleagues suggest that we could come forward with a significant number of voluntary retirements to address concern about numbers. I cannot speak for the Cross Benches, but it may be possible there too. On numbers, we will also consider what might be done on whipping arrangements and look with interest on other amendments tabled on this Bill, including those on participation. Surely, if we are to exclude anyone it should be those who do not take part, not those who do. Many on all sides would agree with that.

The fourth element is the crucial question of the conventions in this House and those between this House and the other place. These were considered by the noble Lord, Lord Cunningham of Felling, in a brilliant report in 2006, but experience of the last Parliament suggests that these need to be polished up. The fundamental principle of our constitution is that the King’s Government must be carried on. Of course, this House should observe the Salisbury convention, though most Governments are wise enough not to die for every last dot and comma of a manifesto.

With respect and good will, I believe that we could go further on conventions. There is too much ping-pong and it goes on too long. We should check its growth. Attempts to seize control of the agenda of the House are undesirable. We could revisit agreements that were reached when Lord Williams of Mostyn was Leader of the House and temper efforts to overload the Order Paper or to force late sittings of the House, which no-one on either side enjoys. We are ready to talk on that. Reinforcing conventions with full protection of the freedoms of the House would do more for business progress, frankly, than the expulsion of 88 Peers and the appointment of many more, however much we welcome our new colleagues. Without consent and convention, this House cannot be managed.

The Government coming clean on the timing and nature of their future plans for the House after this Bill is a necessary component of confidence building. But it is not, as I presently see it, a prior requirement to agree a package along the lines that I propose: acceptance of the ending of the hereditary principle as a route into Parliament; a stay to the enforced expulsion of a whole group of our colleagues; some voluntary retirements, and potentially other measures, to address concern about numbers; and reinforcement of conventions by agreed undertakings given at these Dispatch Boxes on the Floor of the House, to give every Government confidence that their measures will not be unreasonably delayed. This is a package which could bring peace and benefit to your Lordships’ House, and avoid rancour which would last far beyond this Session. I have my party’s authority to negotiate this and to deliver it, and we should seek to do so before Report, at the very least to dispel the doubts in the minds of colleagues facing expulsion. That is the human thing to do.

I am ready to continue the cordial discussions I have been having with the noble Baroness the Lord Privy Seal, whose pragmatism and good sense have been proved over nine years. I appreciated her support when I was Leader, and I support her in other constructive initiatives she has in mind for the House. Indeed, I am ready to meet her or anyone else she suggests, in a bilateral or with an independent mediator, assuming they have the same authority as I have to settle.

Speaking as your Lordships’ former Leader, I firmly believe that these proposals, which would comprise concessions by and advantages for both sides, are in the interests of the Government and the House. We have seen in recent days—

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord True (Con)]

If I may: this is Committee. The noble Lord can come in. I am concluding my remarks, but I will answer him later. We have seen in recent days the nature of negotiation with a big stick. That is not the House of Lords way, nor is it the way in which the noble Baroness leads us. I urge her not to reject these proposals or any part of them when she responds, but to agree to take them away. Let the Government block entry of new hereditary Peers, as my amendment accepts and as the House should accept, but otherwise let us together pursue the path of peace with expedition, and with honour and justice. I beg to move.

[Lord Howard of Lympne (Con)]

My Lords, in considering the purposes of this Bill, it is necessary to remind ourselves of the circumstances in which our hereditary colleagues continue to sit in your Lordships’ House. They are here because of an agreement which was reached in 1999 that they would continue to sit in your Lordships’ House until stage 2 of the projected reform had taken place. The late Lord Irvine said that that agreement was binding in honour; he said it was a guarantee. He gave those undertakings as—

[The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Smith of Basildon) (Lab)]

I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord, but I think he said “the late Lord Irvine”; I remind him that the noble and learned Lord is not late.

[Lord Howard of Lympne (Con)]

I apologise, both to the Committee and to the noble and learned Lord. I am delighted to hear that he is still with us. I am most grateful to the Leader.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine, gave those undertakings as Lord Chancellor—an office which then occupied a rather higher position in our firmament of distinction than it has since. “Binding in honour”: those were the words he used. Honour is not, to our collective regret, a characteristic much associated these days with politicians, or even with legislators who do not regard themselves as politicians, so it behoves those of us who regret this lamentable state of affairs to do what we can to remedy it. That means honouring commitments, such as those given by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine. This Bill dishonours those solemn assurances, so the conclusion is inescapable, as my noble friend Lord Hannan said at Second Reading, that this is a dishonourable Bill.

Some of your Lordships may argue that those assurances were given more than a quarter of a century ago and we cannot therefore continue to be bound by them. But honour is not time limited. Indeed, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine, could have said, had that been his intention, that his assurances were not intended to last for more than a quarter of a century. He could have said it, but he did not. Some of your Lordships may argue that those assurances are trumped—I use the word advisedly—by commitments in an election manifesto. If that had been his intention then the noble and learned Lord could have said so, but he did not.

There is, as I have said, no escaping the fact that this is a dishonourable Bill, and any votes cast for it are dishonourable votes. I suggest that your Lordships bear these facts in mind when assessing the purposes of the Bill.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

My Lords, I do not know if I am alone in having a sense of fear and anxiety about the state of the world at the present time. The fact that we are debating ourselves when, at the other end of the Corridor, they are considering the issues of security that are so central to our country’s future and the future of our alliances, makes me wonder whether perhaps we have got our priorities wrong in this place that we should be talking about ourselves and that we should be so divided when we can easily be united, as my noble friend Lord True has so clearly set out. He has offered us an opportunity to avoid any further conflict and dislocation of the great work that this House does.

In recent days, the conduct by the Prime Minister of our affairs as a nation has been exemplary. He has shown great courage in dealing with very difficult circumstances. He has said that he wants to be a bridge between our closest ally, the United States, and Europe. I ask him and the Leader of the House: could they not be a bridge between us and the House of Commons? The Commons is filled with a large number of Labour MPs who won the election fair and square on a clear manifesto commitment to end the process by which hereditary Peers could come to this House and take part in legislation. That is accepted, as my noble friend said in moving this amendment.

I mean no disrespect to any of my colleagues, but I look at these not quite hundreds but dozens of amendments, some of which are a little on the absurd side, and I ask whether this the way in which this House should carry out constitutional reform, in this kind of manner. Constitutional reform should be done, as my noble friend has said, on the basis of consensus. It should be carefully considered, and the consequences and the unintended consequences of one thing relative to another should be taken account of. This is no way to deal with this proud and important House, which plays an increasingly crucial part as the Commons has increasingly used timetable Motions to avoid doing the work carried out in this place.

I ask the Leader of the House, whom I have always held in the highest regard, is there not a better way? Can we not accept that the hereditary principle is dead? Can we not recognise that among the hereditaries in this House are some of the most talented and able people? That may sound like a partisan comment because quite a lot of them are, of course, Tories, but are we really going to say goodbye to the Convener of the Cross Benches? Forgive me for naming individuals. Are we going to say goodbye to the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, who serves on my Financial Services Regulation Committee, has great expertise and knowledge, and has done great work on the equally intractable problem of the restoration and renewal of these buildings? Are we going to throw out my noble friend Lord Moynihan, an Olympian, with his great experience and knowledge of sport? Are we really going to dispense of the services of my noble friend Lord Howe, who can take any issue, no matter how controversial and divided, and make us all think, “Why did we not think of that in the first place?” Are we going to throw out people like my noble friend Lord Strathclyde, who led this House with such distinction?

As he demonstrated earlier today, sometimes the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, gets a bit carried away with himself. We have a duty to try to work together. There has been some criticism of some of the appointments that have been made by the Prime Minister. I understand why the Prime Minister wants to have a reasonable number of Labour Peers in this House. There have been some people who have said, “Why are we getting all these trade unionists? Why are we getting all these Labour MPs?” Some people have even put down amendments suggesting that there should be a quota on the number of MPs in this House. Speaking as a former MP, I think that is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. The response to that is that they are being rewarded for their duty in public service—and quite right too.

16:00

Some of my noble friends who are hereditaries, if not all of them, deserve to be recognised for the duty and public service they have given. So I just ask: is it not possible for the Front Benches and the leaders of the Cross Benches to get together and work out a deal that will provide what the Government want—the end of the hereditary principle—but will enable those people who have made such a contribution and have so much to offer to this House the ability to continue to make a contribution by offering them life peerages? Then we get into the numbers game. As far as I can see, it is from zero to 88. I am no great negotiator, but I can see that 88 is not going to be a realistic proposal, and I can see that zero is going to create a great deal of rancour, so it would be somewhere in between, looking at the talents and abilities that are needed in this House in order to do our duty. Our duty is to hold the Government to account—that includes all Benches; I certainly did when I was on the other Benches with the previous Government, much to the irritation of some of my noble friends. We have a duty to do that.

I plead with the House. I think this is probably the only amendment that I will speak on. The amendment by my noble friend Lord True, the shadow Leader of the House, and his speech offer a way forward that could end this wrangle and enable us to apply our minds to the important issues facing our country, and my goodness me, in all of our lifetimes—well, perhaps not all of our lifetimes, but certainly in my lifetime—I cannot remember greater challenges on the economy, our security and our future as a nation. So let us get down to business, reach an agreement on this and move forward with due speed.

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, because I agree with his starting point, which is that we find ourselves as a nation in a more perilous position, arguably, than we have been in in my lifetime and, in those circumstances, the prospect of your Lordships’ House spending days and days discussing ourselves is immensely unappealing in every possible way.

However, I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, about the extent to which any measure of House of Lords reform can be dealt with by consensus. I sat through all the debates on the original proposals that led to the removal of the majority of hereditaries and have sat through most debates in your Lordships’ House in the intervening period dealing with proposals for reform. Consensus there has been none. There will not be consensus, and the sooner we accept that, the better.

The noble Lord, Lord True, said that this Bill is of the greatest constitutional significance. I beg to differ. I do not believe this Bill is of the greatest constitutional significance. I think that it deals with an issue that should have been dealt with originally. It is a freestanding Bill. It is a simple Bill, and it should proceed.

There is, as the noble Lord, Lord True, alluded to, a whole range of issues that need addressing as well. We need to deal with the retirement age, we need to deal with participation levels, and there will be consequences for the Bishops. There is a whole raft of other things relating to the way in which your Lordships’ House is constituted and operates which need to change. However, we will not change anything if we seek to change everything at once. That is one of the lessons of reform in your Lordships’ House. My view is that to change something at this point is better than running the risk of changing nothing.

Where I agree with the noble Lord, Lord True, is that the Government have manifesto commitments that go beyond this Bill, not least around the retirement age and participation levels. It would be to the benefit of the Committee to know how the Government intend to proceed on those things. The Government say that they are very clear in wanting these thing to happen, but, as we are about to discover as we debate them, there are lot of wrinkles and complications. The sooner we get round to the consultation on those other things—which will lead to a definitive proposal—the better. I cannot see why the Government cannot just tell us what is in their mind; that would be extremely helpful.

Beyond that, at this stage in the nation’s affairs, I think we should deal with this Bill expeditiously. Frankly, having 46 groups of amendments to this Bill is ridiculous. Having spent nine days on the football regulator Bill, the prospect of a repeat of that sort of pettifogging argument, going on for days and days, at this point in the nation’s fortunes, seems to me completely unacceptable. I hope that all noble Lords will adopt that position as they approach these debates. Certainly, let us hear from the Government on what they want to do next, but, as far as this Bill is concerned, let us simply get on with it.

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord. As ever, he spoke with a lot of logic, and I agree with so much of what he said—not quite everything—as I have with so many other people.

I want to comment on only one or two issues that arose from the speech of the noble Lord, Lord True. Clearly, the genesis of this Bill goes to the very heart of the noble Lord’s amendment, but I would not want the amendment itself, which is quite narrowly drafted, to prevent the House from discussing the Bill in the round. I said at Second Reading that I thought it was important for the House to have this opportunity; House of Lords reform Bills come so rarely—as I pointed out, it is 10 years since the last one—and we need to discuss all the issues in the round. I am aware of the external pressures on the use of our time, and I would certainly like us to handle this expeditiously as we go through Committee. I will not detain noble Lords now or elsewhere in Committee.

I think the other discussions referred to by the noble Lord, Lord True, are incredibly important. It is important for the House to be able to settle its own reform package, with due regard to the Executive and to the most important document: the Government’s manifesto. I would very much like these discussions to come forward rapidly. I have been describing this as the thorn in the paw, because it is causing difficulties in all our work at the moment, and in the spirit in which we go about that work. I think everyone here would like that thorn to be drawn rapidly from the paw.

Before I move on from that topic to two final ones, I want to go on the record as citing just how open the Leader’s door has been. I have been watching it and I know how many people—over 40 at the last count—the Leader has engaged with, and the courtesy that there has been during this process. I value that a lot; it has been very helpful. Drawing the thorn from the paw is important.

The first of my two final topics relates to the propensity for Cross-Bench colleagues to retire. I thought that I should think about that, and I have had many conversations over the last two years with many Cross-Benchers. I feel it would be possible for a package of reform to set up an environment where quite a number of Cross-Benchers might want to retire. I say that knowing that our average age is 73, which is rather older than that of the House, and therefore we have quite a lot of people who are over 80 and who would, I believe, consider retiring.

The second relates to the Cross-Bench view—remember that we are sole traders—on reinforcing the conventions and dealing with the trend in ping-pong where more balls and longer rallies are being played. I have not yet met a Cross-Bencher who does not believe that reaffirming these conventions is in the interest of the Cross Bench and of the House. I think it goes to dealing with the ping-pong issue as well.

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

My Lords, I much enjoyed the speech of my noble friend Lord Forsyth, particularly when my name was mentioned and the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, started murmuring on his Back Benches. What is less well known is that the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, used to represent an important part of Strathclyde. Indeed, for many years he was my MP—some people thought it too long, but I thought it was just about right. It was a pleasure when he joined this House of Lords and long may he continue.

Less pleasurable was the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Newby, where he said there could be no consensus and no cross-party agreement. Yet I look back to 1958, when there was a consensus, and even in 1998 there was cross-party agreement to a Bill to remove nearly 90% of hereditary Peers. In 2012, in the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition, there was agreement on a Bill that was brought before the House of Commons. Unfortunately, that was kiboshed by the Labour Party, but there was otherwise broad cross-party agreement, as there was again in 2014 on retirement from the House of Lords—and there could be again in 2025. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Newby, that there is plenty of room for consensus and cross-party agreement on this Bill, as there has been on so many others. Nobody is trying to change everything in your Lordships’ House; we want incremental change.

I have said before that I do not much like this Bill, and I do not, but I understand the political dynamics and the motivation that brings it before us. For that reason, I repeat what my noble friends Lord Forsyth and Lord True have said, in that I accept the end of heredity as being a means of entering the House of Lords. After 800 years of hereditary Peers in this House, that era is now over and it will not return. This Bill is therefore the creation of a wholly appointed House, with those appointments in the hands of the Prime Minister, which is in itself an odd concept for a Government seeking to look modern and dispassionate. As we wave goodbye to those who were not brought here by patronage, we should spare a thought for this small part of the British constitution—around 10% of the House today—which existed through a combination of heredity and election.

The Government have a choice in bringing this Bill forward: to engage constructively with the House to find an equitable and unifying way forward or to put their heads down, listen to no one and carry on. The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, explained how gracious and generous the noble Baroness the Leader of the House has been in taking advice and trying to reach a consensus. We will now see what happens over the next few weeks; how the noble Baroness the Leader of the House responds will tell us how she means this debate to continue.

There is a difficult route to get the Bill onto the statute book—but there is also an easy one, with full co-operation from all parts of the House. I urge the noble Baroness to choose the latter. It will pay dividends for the reputation of this House and for all of us in the future.

My noble friend Lord True has put forward an extremely thoughtful range of suggestions on the way forward. It accepts the end of heredity. What it does not accept is the removal of some 45 Conservatives and 33 Cross-Benchers, many of whom have had years of service in this House and to numerous Governments. I suspect I am not alone when I say I find it extraordinary that the Convenor of the Cross Benches himself, chosen by the Cross-Benchers for his intelligence and calmness to represent them in the House and beyond, has not even been told or signalled, formally or informally, officially or unofficially, that he might be able to stay on. Should he lay down his burden as Convenor now or simply wait for the executioner’s blow? It seems a cruel way for the Government to carry on their business and it leaves everyone affected with a deep sense of unease and uncertainty.

16:15

Nor, again as my noble friend Lord True said, is it in keeping with precedent. Look at 1922—when Ireland left the United Kingdom, the Irish Peers were allowed to stay behind—or earlier on this century with the Law Lords. Even in 1998, an agreement was reached between the various parties. Of course, there are going to be retirements from my noble friends the hereditary Peers, some of whom have held back from doing so while they wait to see what the Government’s plans are.

Over many years, the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, introduced Bills to abolish the by-elections. Having spent a lifetime being elected, he wanted to spare the rest of us from being so. Fair enough, but the real reason so many of us objected to his Bills was in fact, as my noble friend Lord Howard explained so well, to preserve the Labour Party’s integrity when it came to the agreement struck, in 1998, of honour. However, 25 years has passed and we have a very blank sheet of paper when it comes to seeing what the future holds for this House—no ideas and no White Paper or anything else.

Grandfather rights are a well-understood concept, not just in the commercial world but in the public sector. The noble Baroness will need to be very clear as to why she wants to fling out me and my colleagues, many of whom represent a most active part of the House, when there are so many Members who hardly bother attending at all.

My noble friend Lord Forsyth made a plea, not just to the noble Baroness but to the whole House, that collectively there must be a better way forward. My noble friend Lord True has laid out a carefully thought-through plan for how that could be achieved. I hope that the noble Baroness the Leader of the House will take particular care to reply in a positive manner to the suggestions that have been made, so that we can move on in a constructive way and on a cross-party basis.

[The Earl of Devon (CB)]

My Lords, I rise somewhat reluctantly to speak as an elected hereditary who defends the hereditary principle—but we will debate that in response to my Amendment 3, not now. However, I also accept that, if our time is up and we are to leave this House, as I said at Second Reading, we should do so with our heads held high. We should not be horse trading or otherwise frustrating the Government’s legislative programme.

Those who want to continue to serve in your Lordships’ House can lobby for a seat or can apply to become an angel of HOLAC in the normal manner, just like everybody else who is not an hereditary Peer. The privilege of our hereditary positions should not be sullied in a party-political or petty political way. I believe we should accept our abolition, or our execution, with honour.

[Lord Mancroft (Con)]

My Lords, I must admit that the thought of the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, representing my noble friend Lord Strathclyde has slightly set me aside for a moment. I was wondering which particular bit he represented. Was it the bit from the neck up, from the waist down or everything in the middle? I am sure we will learn that over time.

The Government explain this Bill on the basis that it fulfils their manifesto commitment to end the right of Peers to sit and vote in this House by dint of an hereditary peerage. That commitment is apparently sacrosanct. In truth, that measure is already clearly set out in Section 1 of the 1999 Act. The principle was accepted then and is accepted now. This Bill neither affects nor improves on it—but is selective. The Labour Party manifesto also included a commitment to implement a retirement age of 80, but the Government have, at least temporarily, resiled from that part of their commitment, because they have quite rightly concluded that most turkeys, particularly those on their own Back Benches, will not vote for Christmas. It seems, therefore, that the manifesto is not sacrosanct after all.

The Bill breaches, as we have heard, the commitment made in honour that my noble friend Lord Howard talked about and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, made with Lord Cranborne in the 1999 Act. It is argued that, with the passage of time, this agreement has become obsolete and, furthermore, that no Parliament can bind its successors. But no agreement of this kind does fall away simply by the passage of time. I am afraid things just simply are as not as easy as that. Nor did it and nor does it bind a future Parliament. It was an agreement willingly entered into by both parties and it still stands, so, without the agreement of both parties, it cannot be changed—although, of course, one party can breach it and thus demonstrate its dishonour, as my noble friend Lord Howard suggested. That is the Government’s choice.

I accept that the obvious solution to the Government’s dilemma is not easy, but nor is it that complicated either. The condition of that agreement was that Labour would embark on a full second-stage reform of this House, as we have heard. But, despite 14 years in opposition and now seven months in government, Labour does not appear to be able to do that. Although in opposition Sir Keir Starmer seemed to favour an elected second Chamber, in government he has clearly moved in the opposite direction.

We will debate that in the next amendment, in the name of my noble friend Lord Caithness, and later after Clause 1 in the amendment in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Newby and Lord Wallace of Saltaire, and my noble friend Lord Strathclyde. I will be supporting that, although I am very much looking forward to the Liberal Democrats explaining exactly how supporting a Bill that establishes an appointed House is the best route to achieving an elected House.

If the Government wish to explain what plans they have for the future of this House and even to start to implement those plans, it would be difficult to object to this Bill. But they have not. An alternative, and the simplest way to achieve the Government’s objective, would be, as has been suggested, to enact the measure contained in the various Private Members’ Bills from the noble Lord, Grocott, which, again, the House will examine later in this Committee. Suffice to say that, regardless of the merits or otherwise of that proposal, for some obscure reason the Government believe that the proposal from the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has passed its sell-by date and can no longer be enacted, although I have been unable to find anyone who can explain exactly why this is so. I rather think it merely suits the Government’s purpose to advance that theory, but it is clearly not the case.

It is also worth pointing out that, although the Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, may be familiar to some of us, it was last debated in this House some four years ago and only got beyond Second Reading six years ago. Subsequently, over 160 new Members have joined this House who will never have had the chance to debate, discuss or understand that Bill. Perhaps it might help the House if they were able to do so now.

This Bill seeks to achieve an object that has already been achieved. It is currently divisive, unpleasant and wholly unnecessary, but that could all be avoided. Like my noble friend Lord True, I hope that, rather than spending a long time arguing every point, the Lord Privy Seal and my noble friend might find a way upon which the whole House could agree.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the comments that have been made and for the different tone from the noble Lord, Lord True, which I welcome. I will just say one thing. The noble Lord spoke about a passing political Executive. He will know, as I do, that that is actually known as the Government, in all cases. I think it was beneath him to make a comment such as that and I am sorry he did. His other comments were welcome, and I am grateful to him for making them.

The noble Lord’s amendment, as he said, seeks to provide a description of the purpose of the Bill. He will know, as I know, that a similar amendment was debated in the other place. It was rejected by a majority of 277 because it is an unnecessary amendment, as we have seen.

We have heard a couple of repeats of Second Reading speeches. The noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, repeated some of his comments from Second Reading, as did the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. I am not going to go into another Second Reading speech, but I will comment on what they have said. I will, of course, clarify the purpose of this legislation, which I think will be helpful.

I spoke at Second Reading—and we have heard from noble Lords opposite—about the agreements put in place by the House of Lords Act 1999, which were then expected to be temporary arrangements for 90 remaining hereditary Peers, with a system of by-elections. There would be 92 in total but by-elections for the 90, with the exceptions being the Earl Marshal and Lord Great Chamberlain. Those arrangements were never expected to still be here a quarter of a century later, but they are.

I looked at the amendments and listened to the comments made by noble Lords. I expect my noble friend Lord Grocott will be possibly delighted but also somewhat dismayed by the sudden conversion of so many noble Lords to a Bill he tried so many times to bring forward. There were numerous debates on those Bills and noble Lords who sat through them will recall them well. In those Bills, my noble friend said that he wanted to bring an end to the system of by-elections but would allow those hereditary Peers among us, particularly those who have contributed to this House, to remain in the House for life as life Peers.

For some reason that I do not understand, those who now say that that was a good Bill and ask why we cannot go back to it put so much effort into destroying that Bill that it never got on to the statute book. Had that Bill been agreed then, we would not be here now. What we would be doing is having the discussions the noble Lord and I have had on other occasions about the other issues in our manifesto and finding a way forward that would benefit the House. However, there was a small number of noble Lords who frustrated the passage of that Bill and got us to this point, and I regret that.

The principle that we should not do anything until we do everything—and, in effect, do nothing—is not an acceptable position to hold. That time has gone. I remind noble Lords that this was a manifesto commitment, but I also say, as noble Lords have heard me say time and again, there is nothing at all that is a barrier to those in your Lordships’ House who are here as hereditary Peers to having life peerages. I have said that time and again. I appreciate that the route for that is different for the Cross-Benchers from how it is for the political parties. I am sorry that has come up again, but I have to make the point that there is no barrier to them returning as life Peers. Therefore, the purpose in the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord True, is not necessary in the Bill.

16:30

To return to some of the other points that were made and to the issues that the noble Lord, Lord True, wants to debate, he knows that my door is always open; we have had many discussions. But I have also said to him that the basis for that discussion has to be a guarantee that the Government will get their business through. He will know how disappointed I have been at some of the tactics deployed by the party opposite. I called them procedural shenanigans—I know he was offended by that comment, but I think it is the case.

When the list of amendments for this Bill was published there were 18 groups of amendments. There are probably about nine or 10 different themes that Members will want to discuss on the Bill. When I came in this morning, there were 43 groups of amendments. I do not know why Members chose to degroup their amendments, but it does imply that a longer debate was required. Good faith has to go both ways, and any discussions have to be in good faith. We currently have six groups of amendments—three of them of just one amendment—on the commencement procedures of the Bill. That is not a very sensible way to proceed. If the noble Lord is suggesting that there are more sensible ways to proceed, I am happy to have those discussions. I would welcome them, and I am grateful for the tone he set.

The noble Lord, Lord Newby, did not say that consensus was not possible, but was rather disillusioned about the attempts to get to consensus. I would have liked to have consensus; we tried that with the Grocott Bill. I am open to discussions with noble Lords, but the backdrop to that has to be a guarantee that this House behaves in a sensible and proper way when dealing with legislation and respects the existing conventions of this House, which are all-important. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that he would have one advantage if he was not a Member of your Lordships’ House: he would be able to vote in elections and could vote for or against the successor of the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, but I appreciate that he does not want to take that opportunity.

The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, also spoke about this being a House appointed wholly by the Prime Minister. He knows as well as I do that appointments go through the Prime Minister. I think we showed good faith on this side of the House when, in the last round of appointments, a number of appointments were given to the party opposite—and I spoke to the noble Lord about this. We were not playing games on numbers, as we have seen from the party opposite over the last 10 years, excepting under the noble Baroness, Lady May, who behaved with integrity at all times in her appointments. It would be a bit cheeky, I suppose, to say to the noble Lord that those who have hereditary peerages are themselves recipients of a form of patronage from the Prime Minister or the monarch of the time. It is just a question of when they were awarded.

The noble Lord talks about a deal; I am more inclined to talk about a way forward. If he is saying that his party will behave in a different way and will not degroup amendments, and that it wants to have a proper discussion about the Bill, my door is and will remain open. I will continue those discussions during the passage of the Bill, but for the time being I urge the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment. We will continue to have those further discussions going forward.

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, noble Lords with long memories will recall that my arrival in this House was somewhat unusual and speaks directly to both parts of my noble friend’s amendment. As the then Minister for Energy, I was taking a Bill through a Commons Committee shortly before the 1992 general election when I was summoned by the Chief Whip. We had both learned from the Foreign Office that Tony Moynihan, my somewhat wayward and much older half-brother, had died in Manila. At the time, Tony was the holder of the Moynihan peerage, first awarded to my grandfather—the leading surgeon of his day—and thereafter put to good use by my father as treasurer of the Liberal Party in this House.

In his young days, Tony, who sat on the Liberal Benches, was a colourful character. On his last day in this country he went to Berkeley Square, ordered a Bentley at Jack Barclay, demanded changes to be made by the afternoon, came to this House to make an impromptu speech from the Liberal Benches that Gibraltar should belong to the Spanish, returned to Berkeley Square, presented a forged cheque for the car and, accompanied by his third wife, Shirin—an Indian belly dancer for whom he used to play the bongos in nightclubs—evaded Scotland Yard and drove to Madrid, where he befriended a young Juan Carlos, later to become King. He never legally returned to these shores.

I finally arrived following five long years of legal proceedings. The case reached its denouement in the Moses Room in 1997, when a memorable and rare sitting of the Committee for Privileges finally resolved this most protracted of peerage cases. Two notable hereditary Peers, Lord Cranborne and my noble friend Lord Strathclyde, asked me to take on the responsibility of senior foreign affairs spokesman, when I had the privilege of shadowing the outstanding Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean. So began the honour of serving in your Lordships’ House.

Few Peers have arrived here with as complicated and colourful a backstory as mine. The best and the worst of the hereditary principle can be found in my family, and if anything gives my words weight, this should. I am clear that reform of this House is not only long overdue but essential. Indeed, I go further: the former Foreign Secretary and Secretary-General of NATO, the sixth Baron Carrington, advocated for an entirely elected House and I personally fully agree with him, although I would seek a means to offer the finest minds in this country—presidents of the royal colleges, recently retired senior ambassadors, and our most eminent scientists and artists, for example—the opportunity to contribute to our proceedings.

My chief criticism of the Bill is the piecemeal and disruptive approach chosen by the Government. Let me be clear: to me the Bill is a short-term political numbers game. It is certainly long overdue, but it should be about the future role and function of this House, to ensure that it is fit for the 21st century. It should be about this House’s structure and—

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord—I always enjoy listening to his entertaining contributions—but we are discussing a specific amendment at the moment. He is making comments on things we will come to later in considering other amendments. This seems to be a Second Reading speech. I do not want to be discourteous, but I see that he has a lot of notes and I wonder whether he wants to address the amendment, rather than giving a wider speech.

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

I am doing precisely that by talking about the hereditary principle and the removal of the hereditaries. Both are central to what I am speaking about. I gave my experience from the point of view of a hereditary, and I am now addressing the key point about the Bill being very narrow with regard to the future of the hereditaries. My argument is simple and clear: it should be wider. My view is that by narrowing it as much as we have, it becomes a political numbers game Bill. I am much more in favour of looking at how best this House can fully scrutinise, shape and improve legislation for the Government of the day, and challenge them to think again when necessary.

The point has been made already that this House operates best through consensus, yet the much-heralded usual channels have regrettably become frayed and fractious of late. There must be a way for the leaders of the four main groupings in your Lordships’ House—the Government, the Opposition, the Liberal Democrats and, critically, the Cross-Benchers—to consider how the Government’s objective of numerical majority, for example, over His Majesty’s Opposition, with which I largely agree, can be achieved. For there is a better way to achieve the outcome that is sought in this Bill. There are many Peers, as has been mentioned, who have announced either their intention or willingness to retire, or who would do so if approached on the basis that if they remained, they would henceforth be required to participate actively in this House. The latter could be judged by criteria in a Bill which addressed minimum levels of attendance and contribution. This would also remove the sitting rights of those many life Peers who, at the time of their elevation, promised their respective leaders that they would be active in this Chamber and these Committee Rooms, but who all too soon became notable only by their absence.

So, it is possible to achieve the outcome by combining the end of the sitting rights of the hereditary peerage with the implementation of a decision to reduce the size of this House and still leave the Government with a majority over the Opposition. This solution, based on the principle of self-determination, is surely better than one which vests in the Prime Minister of the day the authority to approve each and every Member of this House, creating the worst of all worlds: a second Chamber without democratic legitimacy, built on short-term, present-day political patronage but shorn of the independence, the reputation and the authority that it currently enjoys. That is why I support this amendment.

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

My Lords, I think it is a little bit much for the noble Baroness to give my noble friend Lord Moynihan a hard time for making what she said was a Second Reading speech. The fact is that we had Second Reading nearly three months ago—there is no reason for the delay. Why were we not dealing with this Bill in January and February? Why has it taken so much time? I began to think that the Government had forgotten about this Bill or had changed their minds and were not taking it forward.

The noble Baroness in her reply—also a reply to a Second Reading speech—did not really look at the merits of the amendment itself, which concerns the

“connection between the possession of a hereditary peerage and obtaining membership of the House of Lords”.

When the noble Baroness said that she is happy for discussions to take place, she said discussions with conditions, and that this Bill has to be passed and agreed to in all aspects before there can be a discussion. That is not a sensible or equitable way to have a discussion—

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

I hate to intervene on noble Lords, but I do so because I do not like to be misrepresented by the noble Lord, or any other noble Lord in this House. I did not say that noble Lords have to pass the Bill before any discussions take place. I said that I was happy to have ongoing discussions, but that I did not want to see any procedural shenanigans. I need to see some good faith on the part of the Opposition, as well. I say to the noble Lords, Lord Strathclyde and Lord True, that I did answer the amendment. I said that it was unnecessary—it is actually pretty much contained in the Long Title anyway—but if he is going to describe what I have said, he should at least get it right.

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

I am more than happy to agree with the noble Baroness on procedural shenanigans, which I must say I do not recognise at all over the course of the last few months. I am not doing any procedural shenanigans; I am actually replying to the noble Baroness, but I have made the point I wish to make. Are there no procedural shenanigans from anybody in the Labour Party actually engaging in the debate just started by my noble friend Lord True? I certainly give way to the noble Lord, Lord Grocott.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

Has the noble Lord finished his remarks, because I do not want to encourage him to go on at length? I wish to respond to the point about why Labour Members have not spoken, but is he wishing to get up again? I do not want to intervene on him, I just want to—

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

Feel free.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

Well, I have been waiting to say this for a long time, but I have managed to keep quiet. It was nine years ago that I first brought in a Bill to end the system of by-elections, which, had it been enacted, would have substantially solved the problem—and I think it is a problem—of people coming to this House by means of heredity.

I find it deeply ironic that the now apparently passionate advocates of my Bill include the noble Lords, Lord True and Lord Strathclyde, both of whom were among those who did all within their power to block it; that is not to mention the noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, of course. When I brought the Bill in, the majority of hereditary Peers, as far as I could judge, were in favour of it. However, time and again a small group of people, four of five of whom—probably more— are here today, managed to filibuster in ways incredibly similar to those going on today: degrouping amendments, and putting down amendments at the last minute when there is barely time to respond to them. I would just like to know at what point in their political development this Damascene conversion occurred: from doing all within their power to block my Bill—satisfactorily, of course—to now thinking that it is the golden solution to finding consensus between the two sides of the House.

Perhaps, at some stage, the noble Lords could take this opportunity not only to explain why they have completely changed their mind but to apologise to the hereditary Peers who will be removed as a result of this—in the full knowledge that, if they had listened to my earlier Bill and not filibustered it, this debate would not be happening on anything like the scale that we have at the moment.

As we are taking a slight trip down memory lane, I could go even further if I wanted to, but I will stick to just nine years—mind you, I am tempted to go back 31 years, when I first introduced to the House of Commons a Bill to end the right of hereditary Peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. One of its sponsors was my good and noble friend Lord Foulkes, alongside my noble friend Lord Rooker—we have stayed together over many years—but of course that was not successful either, so there is a certain satisfaction with where we are now.

16:45

However, can we please not repeat arguments that we have heard ad nauseam, including the idea that it is a breathtakingly revolutionary and new proposal that perhaps the hereditary principle was not the right basis on which to be in the House of Lords? The noble Lords, Lord True and Lord Forsyth, went through the arguments that, somehow or other, there were more important things to do. The former’s amendment—which I will speak to, in case I get in trouble with my Leader—states, quite simply, that the purpose of this Bill is to end the link between hereditary Peers and membership of the House of Lords. I agree with him that that is the purpose of the Bill; that is why it is called the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill. I ask him, not necessarily now but at some stage, to reply to the following question: if that is the sole purpose, does he agree with me about amendments that go down all sorts of alleyways and byways? Can someone explain to me what the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill has to do with the rights or otherwise of Bishops to sit in the House of Lords? It seems that almost any amendment to this Bill is possible and will no doubt be debated at length. Many of them are worthy amendments—although I shall vote against them all, in case there should be any doubt—but they do not come under the title of the Bill. I am staggered that we are able to debate this in the way that we are.

I want to lay to rest one final idea—I have said it so many times in the past; it is trouble when you start getting bored of your own speeches: that there was some wondrous, unprecedented, novel occurrence at the time of the 1999 Bill when honourable people got together and gave an undertaking, and that dishonourable people such as me are not prepared to live by it 25 years later. That idea omits the central fact of that agreement: that it was made under duress. I am happy to say that it was an agreement that Viscount Cranborne made and that he has said since—I do not carry his sayings around with me, but, my word, they ring in my ears—that he “threatened” the Government

“with the Somme and Passchendaele”.

I do not regard that as a particularly tasteful way of describing it, but he was illustrating how he planned to wreck the whole of the Labour Government’s legislative programme—his words, not mine—a Government who had the same huge majority as we have now, which was of no consequence to him. There are many lawyers here. Is an agreement on the basis of which huge threats were being made to one party to it an honourable one? Would that be an agreement in law? I do not know the answer to those questions, but I can pretty well guess them, because it is true—

[Lord Howard of Lympne (Con)]

If the noble Lord is correct, why did the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine, use the words “binding in honour”?

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

I cannot possibly interpret at this juncture the views of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine—I know that the noble Lord, Lord Howard, has resurrected him during this debate. I really do not know precisely why he used the wording, but I know the context in which that “agreement” took place. I was working in No. 10 at the time. We were told by the then Chief Whip, my predecessor, that he feared for the whole legislative programme if we did not concede to the 92 hereditary Peers remaining. I do not feel in any way guilty or dishonourable by regarding that as an agreement that is not valid.

[Lord Northbrook (Con)]

I am grateful for the noble Lord giving way. Does he recognise Alastair Campbell’s book when he said that he was very astonished that Viscount Cranborne did the deal and that it was only going to end in tears for him?

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

One person asked me to answer for Viscount Cranborne and I am now expected to answer for Alastair Campbell. The noble Lord needs to ask my good friend Alastair Campbell about that, but I know the facts are precisely as I described. Please do not take my word for it; take it from Viscount Cranborne. We are going to have a long debate, and I know that I have gone on far too long, but I hope that no one will again use that tired, dishonourable excuse that somehow a crucial agreement was reached which was binding to all subsequent Governments, when it was reached under duress.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

I totally understand why the noble Lord cannot be expected to answer for the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine, or anyone else, but perhaps he could answer for himself. He is quite right—magnanimity in victory—that he has got what he was asking for. If he thought that it was in the interests of this House when he introduced his Bill—well known as the Grocott Bill—to end the hereditary principle but to allow the Peers to remain in this House, what has changed? Why has he changed his view?

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

What has changed is that there was a general election, and this was a manifesto commitment. Broadly speaking, it is a good idea to obey manifesto commitments. The longer answer to the noble Lord’s question is that I was not the first to introduce such a Bill; Eric Lubbock was the first Member of this House to propose that there should be no more by-elections. Had it been agreed at the time that the Lubbock Bill, which I will call it, was introduced, there would be only about 25 hereditary Peers left. Due to the constant refusal of people to accept the end of the by-elections, a whole new generation of hereditary Peers has arrived, so that, for the objective of ending the hereditary principle in this House to be concluded, it would take another 40 or 50 years. It is spilt milk. I respect noble Lord, Lord Forsyth: he occasionally made the odd favourable comment towards my Bill, for which I am very grateful; it was an all-party Bill supported by all parties and in huge numbers. But times have changed. It is the time for apologies from Messrs True, Mancroft and Strathclyde to their colleagues for blocking the Bill in the way that they did. Along with the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, who we will have the pleasure of hearing from in the next amendment, they are the ones who have the explaining to do, not me.

[Lord Swire (Con)]

Does the noble Lord, who should be a little more cheerful having achieved what he set out to do, not accept that there were many of us who were not in this House and therefore unable to support his Bill or otherwise?

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

Order! I do not think that the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, was giving way; he had sat down. The time had already been exceeded under the rules of the Companion. In terms of the Companion, is it not time that the noble Lord, Lord True, indicated whether he was pressing his amendment.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, I just want to make a comment. At the moment, the Prime Minister is on his feet at the other end, as the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, pointed out, talking about issues of national security and the defence of the nation. Our debate does not hold up terribly well against that. The noble Lord opened it in a moderate and helpful way. If noble Lords wish to continue debating the amendment, they are at liberty to do so; I just ask them to reflect on how the world outside sees the debate.

[Lord Swire (Con)]

Hear, hear to that—I could not agree more with the Leader of the House. We should not be debating this at this time at all, and we are in risk of rendering ourselves irrelevant and foolish by debating these matters when things of far greater importance are going on. But I just say to the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, that he must accept that the composition of this House is very different from that of the time when he first introduced his Bill. Many of those who are now in this House would have supported it at that time. Surely it is only right that we have the ability to debate these matters, for the first time in many cases, now.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, made reference to me. I want to put it on the record, because he has said it before, that the amount of time that I spoke during the debates on his Bill in 2018—a Bill which had six hours of debate—was under twice as long as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has spoken today. In those six hours of debate, I spoke for 16 minutes; that was all. It was not a prevarication at all.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I think it is right for me to intervene. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, who asked me for an apology, that I make no apology for carrying out the policy of my Government when I was a Government Minister. The policy of the Government was that we should not remove the 92 until a stage 2 reform came forward. Our Government, in coalition, in 2011-12, brought forward a Bill which would have led to the removal of hereditary Peers from your Lordships’ House. As was said earlier by others, that was frustrated by a group of Conservative Back-Benchers and the Labour Party in the other place. So, the Conservative Party did address that question, and I say to the noble Lord that I will never apologise for carrying out the policy of my Government.

So far as the noble Lord’s other remarks are concerned, there is a difference between this Bill and his Bill. We have another amendment on this later, so I do not want to protract this discussion now, but the difference was that his Bill allowed for the continuation of valued Members of this House—indeed, it was commended by a number of people who spoke on his Bill for that reason—while this Bill provides for the total expulsion of Peers who are here under the 1999 Act. There is a profound difference between those two Bills.

In the proposals I put forward to the Leader of the House—I am grateful to her for the manner in which she responded, and I hope we can return to that conduct of affairs—I said that part of the discussions we have will have to address what will be, in this moment when partisan zeal runs fairly high, a wound to the House—many people on the other side may accept what I say. If some of the very skilled, experienced and long-serving hereditary Peers whom we have among us are excluded, that will be a wound to the House, and it is right that the House should address that and consider it collectively. The noble Earl, Lord Devon, draws his own conclusion, but it certainly goes beyond horse-trading between parties as regards what the future of Members of this House should be. It is perfectly legitimate in Committee for us to consider the implications of legislation for the future of the House.

I was grateful for what the noble Lord, Lord Newby, said. I do not agree with the noble Lord that consensus is impossible—indeed, the coalition agreement demonstrates that that is not the case—but I am grateful for his agreement with me that it is important. I think the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and my noble friend Lord Forsyth and others said that it would be helpful as we go forward if we could have some understanding about the timing and nature of the Government’s proposals beyond the Bill, because they are material to the future of the House.

17:00

I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, that the authorities in both Houses consider that the kind of amendments that have been put down—I am not referring to specific amendments, but there are amendments probing issues such as participation, age limits and the prospect of democratisation of the House—are within scope. It would seem to me utterly incredible, having been provided no opportunity to this date, that the House of Lords should not consider some of those things. Who better? If there is no White Paper, no discussion, no royal commission and no Joint Committee, who better than the Members of your Lordships’ House to bring our collective experience to bear and assist the Government in their reflections on how the House should go forward?

I agree, of course, with what my noble friend Lord Howard said. I cannot agree that honour can be discarded. I was involved in the discussions, admittedly only at an official level, in 1999. The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, was of course involved as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Prime Minister at the time, but recollections may vary as to the purport of honour in those discussions.

I agree profoundly with what my noble friend Lord Forsyth of Drumlean said, not least in what he said about the role of the Prime Minister in recent days. There needs to be a way, and I hope that, whether it is by the noble Baroness the Leader of the House herself, or us collectively, we can find a way of bridging the difference between this House and the House of Commons on all these questions—including, I have to say, and we will discuss it later on Amendment 9—on whether some of those here should be allowed to stay.

The fact that the House of Commons has considered the matter before it came here is not something that has ever deterred the House of Lords from addressing a Bill that has come to this place from the House of Commons. The House of Lords is perfectly entitled to take a view on a Bill that is sent from the House of Commons, and the House of Lords is perfectly entitled to ask the House of Commons to think again. That is a perfectly reasonable constitutional principle.

I am grateful to those who welcomed the purport of my remarks. I always tried to be constructive when I had the honour of being Leader, and I enjoyed our constructive partnership when we were in different places. I think that consensus is always possible, and I hope that, in the days and weeks that come, we can get there.

I am grateful for the support from the noble Earl the convenor for some of the propositions I put forward. As I said to the noble Baroness the Leader, I did not expect anybody to respond immediately, and I know that the noble Earl will probably want to reflect on them as well. He made a simple human point that I made. Whether you have the view that “We have won now, and now we can get rid of them”, or whether you think that there is still value in keeping people here, these are human beings. These are our friends and our colleagues, these are great public servants and I think we owe it to our friends and colleagues to come to a clear decision, a clear approach about their future, and not wait for months and months until this Bill may become law. I hope we can bring greater clarity in a shorter period than some have suggested, and I think that was a very constructive point from the noble Earl.

With those remarks I apologise if I have not referred to everybody who spoke in the debate. My noble friend Lord Moynihan made precisely the point I made that it is perfectly reasonable for the House to look at the wider matters, and we will have a chance to look at them. I again thank the noble Baroness for her constructive remarks, although I disagree with her that we cannot ask the Commons to think again. I certainly repledge myself to work with her to seek some form of consensus.

The noble Baroness always worries that someone is misinterpreting, but I am not. If I have misspoken, I apologise. I think what the noble Baroness said was, “Well, the House of Commons has voted on this, so there is no point in sending it back to them”.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

It may be pedantic to point out that it was rejected in the other place by 277. I never said that it was not in the ability of this House to send back an amendment if it chose to do so. I pointed out what happened in the House of Commons. The only Front-Bencher whom I have heard say that the House of Lords should not pass an amendment to a Bill from the House of Commons was the noble Lord during the Elections Bill.

[Lord True (Con)]

If I may borrow a phrase from a more prominent person than I, did I really say that? The joys of social media and smartphones are very wonderful. I stand corrected by the noble Baroness, but the point remains that there resides great wisdom in this House and there remains the opportunity to reach an agreement which serves all parties and none, but the House collectively.

If such an approach were agreed, it would be easy for someone as formidable and dedicated as the Lord Privy Seal to persuade her colleagues in Cabinet that a generous and thoughtful approach, which offers advantage to all parties, should be followed. I sincerely hope that is what may happen in the days and weeks ahead. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 1 withdrawn.

Amendment 2

Moved by

[The Earl of Caithness]

2: Before Clause 1, insert the following new Clause—
“OverviewThis Act makes the House of Lords a second chamber whose membership is wholly nominated by the Prime Minister.”

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, we might think that we know what most of the consequences of this Bill will be for the British constitution, but they are far from clear to anyone who does not take a close interest in these matters, and they are not to be found in the Bill before us. This amendment aims to puts into the Bill what at least one consequence will be.

The membership of this second Chamber of Parliament is unique in the world in how it is constituted and for how long we serve. It is composed of a relatively small number of hereditary Peers, while the Lords spiritual are nominated and life Peers are appointed on the recommendation of the Prime Minister to the monarch. Except for the bishops, who must retire when aged 70, once one is a Member we have the right to a seat, place and voice here for our lifetimes.

The most similar appointment system is that of the Canadian Senate. Although there are no hereditary members there, all its members are appointed by their Prime Minister. There, the similarities end. There is a fixed size of 105 and a mandatory retirement age of 75. That means that a new senator can be appointed only when a vacancy arises. New appointments must also be made on a regional basis, with each province holding a fixed number of seats. We will come on to whether similar constraints should apply here; I make no further comment on that now.

As in Canada, there is considerable adverse comment in this country on how the appointment system works. However, this Bill is about to make the situation much worse. For the first time ever the Prime Minister, on his or her whim, will have an unprecedented power of control over all the appointments to the membership of this House. That is a very dangerous extension of prime ministerial power. It is such a fundamental change to our constitution that it needs careful consideration and justification. I firmly believe that it must be clearly spelled out in legislation.

Of course, our constitution can evolve to meet this new situation, but it has already been clearly demonstrated that Prime Ministers have a less rigorous appointment process than the House of Lords Appointments Commission, which Prime Ministers can and have overruled. A paper by the London School of Economics in November 2023 tells us:

“Party leaders sometimes appoint experts, but they regularly appoint loyalists”.


It goes on to say that

“about a quarter of appointees over the last decade”

to this House

“have been donors to political parties”.

I cannot but agree with the noble Lord, Lord McFall of Alcluith, our Lord Speaker, when he said in an interview that this House is in danger of becoming “out of sync” with its balance of legislators. He went on to say that this House, too full of politicians and former political aides rather than people with outside experience, risked jeopardising the Chamber’s crucial role in taking a broader view on legislation and wider national policy. Those criticisms should be taken seriously. They were made before this Bill could take effect; it hands the Prime Minister untrammelled power to appoint whom he likes, when he likes. Everyone in the country should know about this. Once us hereditaries are forced out, there will be no screen for the life Peers to hide behind when the criticism comes thick and fast. A system so open to abuse cannot last long.

My amendment has three merits: it is concise, it does not affect the Bill’s wording or intention, and the principle has already been accepted by the Labour Party. On 23 March 2018, I moved a similar amendment to the Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, which sought to abolish the hereditary Peer by-elections. The amendment was drafted to be inserted before Clause 1 and read:

“Overview


This Act amends section 2 of the House of Lords Act 1999 to end the process of by-elections for hereditary peers, thereby making the House of Lords a wholly appointed Second Chamber”.


The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, intervened early in the few words that I was going to say and told the House,

“I am happy to accept his amendment”.—[Official Report, 23/3/18; cols. 547-48.]

It was indeed accepted by the whole House, including the Labour Party’s Front Bench. I hope the noble Baroness the Leader of the House will now do the same. I beg to move.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I read this amendment with some surprise, because the noble Earl says that everybody is going to be nominated by the Prime Minister. I was not nominated by the Prime Minister and there remains, I think, 20% of this House who were not. As far as I know, this Government have no intention of getting rid of the way in which we are appointed. As I understand the noble Earl to have said, the wording of the Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, was different. Of course we are appointed, but the noble Earl has limited it to the Prime Minister. To that extent, I profoundly disagree and I hope noble Lords will at least support the Cross-Benchers.

I recognise the manifesto and that this Bill must go through. I regret that there are so many amendments to slow it down. There are a large number of issues that need to be dealt with. I am not at all sure that this is the best place for them to be discussed when there is really a single issue occupying the Committee.

I hope that the Government will look at those whom they are removing and compare them with the Members of this House—at least 200—who virtually never come. I can speak as someone who is not a hereditary Peer but has been here for quite a long time. I have observed the enormous work done by hereditary Peers, who have been of invaluable use to the legislation that has been passed. For us to lose them and keep those who do not come and do not work seems profoundly wrong.

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I was going to speak to the last amendment. I will say very quickly now that it needed a little bit inserted to say, “Also to remove the power of the Prime Minister to have total control over the membership of this House”.

I remember and was very involved in the whole debate in 1998-99. In fact I and a bunch of Cross-Benchers produced a report on it at the time. The real problem with the whole thing is that it put the Prime Minister in total control of everything. He is the Prime Minister of the Civil Service and therefore the supreme person there. He is the leader of the majority party in the House of Commons and therefore controls that. The judges are also no longer separate and are now a Civil Service department, the Ministry of Justice. There were a lot of promises about independence, but it is no longer a third pillar of our constitution in the way it was.

17:15

The House of Lords had the only writ that was not under prime ministerial control. It was a Privy Council oath from the Front Bench, in this House and in the Commons. The point about a Privy Council oath—yes, they are described as binding in honour—is that, and we were assured of this, it went across Parliaments. Parliament cannot bind a successive Parliament, but we were told that a Privy Council oath would, because all the privy counsellors, and there are quite a lot of them, should be bound by that oath from the Front Bench.

The point is that we were put here as a poison pill to ensure further democratic reform of the Lords, because it was realised that, if this House did not get some democratic legitimacy, it therefore, in many people’s eyes, should not have legitimacy to pass or interfere with legislation. Therefore, it was important to inject a proportion of democratic authority to this Chamber, so that it would not then be removed by another place on the grounds that we had no democratic legitimacy. That is what those of us who stayed all signed up to: that a second stage would happen.

Then, as we have just heard, we put forward some proposals. The Commons could not agree because the Commons supremacists wanted to remove all our residual powers. The democrats in the House of Commons would like us to be completely democratically elected. The two cannot agree and, under both propositions, the Prime Minister loses his huge power of influence in the power of patronage, which is one of the powers that was left with King John at the signing of the Magna Carta. When his power of taxation was taken away, they unfortunately left with him the power to make nobles and also to wage war and sign treaties. That has recently been modified, because Parliament felt it was unacceptable. It is very good that that has been modified.

I just wanted to quickly point that out, because the danger of passing the Bill unmodified is that we have no limitation. I would like to see something go in that says that, within a certain amount of time, limiting or removing the powers of the Prime Minister to appoint people to the Lords must go as part of the rump of us going. That was the deal. I promise you that, if you do not really believe that, you are not democratic.

[The Earl of Dundee (Con)]

My Lords, along with others, I share the concerns of my noble friend Lord Caithness, as I also much appreciate the comments of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss.

As already indicated, the priority aim for a reformed House of Lords must be its quality of function as a revising Chamber and, therefore, the continuation of its present very high standard of legislative and government scrutiny.

In a later amendment, it is proposed that, within a reformed House of 600 temporal members, the non-political Cross-Benchers should be in the majority with 200 members, while the Government and Opposition have exactly 150 each and the Liberal Democrats, and others, 100. Compared with others, this formula can far better protect our present legislative scrutiny high standard, otherwise threatened and undermined if, instead, the Government of the day, whoever that might be, were to be the largest group within a reformed House.

Political patronage to create non-parliamentary peerages would continue. However, its current ability to appoint members of this House would be abolished, becoming replaced by two processes: first, as already indicated, by the Appointments Commission appointing 200 non-political temporal Peers and, secondly, by an electoral college representative of all parts of the United Kingdom indirectly electing 400 political temporal Peers.

For the necessary transitional period, as your Lordships are well aware, the noble Lord, Lord Burns, indicates a very good, workable system, which is this: in a given year, the collective total of life Peers who retire or die are replaced at 50%. That means that, in a natural way and over not too many years, the current number of temporal Peers, which is now just under 800, will have come down to about 600.

Obviously, it would come down more quickly if life Peers were coerced to retire at 80 or 85. Yet it would be much wiser not to enforce that. Instead, with the retirement age of 90, the transitional period can be expected to be a bit more than five years, with the advantage of enabling some new Peers in the reformed House when they first begin to serve their 15 years to do so alongside existing life Peers, thereby being all the more able to develop and uphold the skills, usefulness and democratic efficacy of this House as a revising Chamber.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, has just indicated the difficulty of discussing some of the broader issues that this Bill raises when we have so many different groupings. I suggest, in the very constructive spirit of the noble Lord, Lord True, when he opened the debate on the first amendment, that it would be wiser, if we are going to discuss as we go through this Committee stage some of the longer-term issues that it raises, that we should group the large number of amendments we have together, rather than have a constant repetition of broader points from one amendment to another. This certainly this cannot be done today, but I suggest that, before the second day of Committee, the usual channels have a constructive conversation about the number of groupings that we need. I say to the noble Lord, Lord True, that I think that it is the consensus of the House that we would have a more constructive Committee stage if there was a much smaller number of groupings into which the major themes are contained.

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

On the question of groupings, I understand that the Opposition put forward some suggestions for groupings to the Government Whips’ Office at the end of last week, and they were rejected without even being looked at until the Government had put forward their own proposals. That is my understanding.

I think that the whole question of groupings is important and useful, but we are only on the second amendment of the day and I do not know what the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, was suggesting that this amendment should be grouped with. I am happy to listen to him.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

The first four separate amendments seem to me to have a very natural linkage, and it would have been much more sensible to debate them in a group, for example.

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

My Lords, let me carry on on the groupings that we have and on the speech in introducing his amendment of my noble friend—

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)]

We are on the second amendment of the day and this is the sixth speech from the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. I think we can all draw our own conclusions.

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

My Lords, I fancy that, if this Bill dealt with the expulsion of all Peers over 80, the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, would be a leading light in opposition to that legislation. I am simply carrying out my duty as a Member of this House to hold the Government to account and ask the questions that need to be asked. If the Labour Party choose not to turn up to this debate, that is entirely up to them.

I also point out that this Bill excludes by law 45 members of the Conservative Party. It excludes four members of the Labour Party, who almost certainly will be given life peerages, as precedent has demonstrated in the past. So it is hardly surprising that, as a group and a party in the House of Lords, we take a great deal of interest in what this Bill says and what it is attempting to achieve.

My noble friend Lord Caithness made a good point about what this Bill does. It does not just remove the hereditary Peers but creates a wholly appointed House. Some noble Lords will take exception to that fact. I know that the noble Lords on my left, the Liberal Democrats, would rather see a democratic House, and I have a great deal of sympathy with that, and there are other noble Lords who are very happy to see a wholly appointed House—but that appointment is almost entirely in the hands of the Prime Minister.

It is worth mentioning HOLAC. I know there will be amendments on HOLAC later on, but they are not directly relevant to the amendment before us. HOLAC is itself a creature of the Executive. There is no statute that has created HOLAC. It is there because the Prime Minister has decreed that it should be so. It could be snuffed out immediately. Therefore, it is right when we say that the appointment system is entirely in the hands of the Prime Minister. HOLAC reserves for itself a small number of independent Cross-Benchers. They are a delightful addition to this House. I very much agree with what the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, said, particularly in respect of the hereditary Peers.

I therefore support my noble friend’s amendment. I have no idea why the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, accepted this amendment some years ago during a debate on his Bill. It may well have been that he got so bored of the debate that he thought he should just accept an amendment to make a difference. I think the noble Lord is trying to get in. I have come to the end of my remarks, so I am happy for him to speak if he wishes to do so.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

I can respond in one sentence. The reason that I caved in on that amendment, on that particular day, is that we had already been rambling on for about an hour and a half on the subject and anything to shorten it was to my advantage. That principle could perhaps be applied to the current Bill.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My noble friend Lord Caithness is right to point out that the effect of this Bill is to make your Lordships’ House a second Chamber almost entirely nominated by the Prime Minister. I say “almost” because his amendment refers only to the Lords temporal; as noble Lords know, the Lords spiritual come here by a different means. As the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, has reminded us, a small number of Cross-Bench Peers have come in through nomination by the House of Lords Appointments Commission and what was at one time called the “people’s Peers” process.

Having served as a political secretary to a former Prime Minister, my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead, I know that even those recommendations made by the independent commission are laid before the Prime Minister. It is at a time of the Prime Minister’s choosing—not the commission’s choosing—when those nominations are made. The rate and regularity with which those nominations can be made is often a cause of some consternation between the commission and the Government.

When the noble Baroness the Lord Privy Seal stands up, she can perhaps say a little bit about that. I think that the noble and learned Baroness, indeed many of us, would be delighted if there were some commitments on codifying that process a bit more formally, or at least a commitment to the number or regularity—

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

In view of what my noble friend, Lord Strathclyde, and, indeed, the Minister have said, is there not a case for putting HOLAC on a statutory basis, as relating both to its existence and to its manner of appointment?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My noble friend asks a very good question, but that is a question for a different group. The question of the House of Lords Appointments Commission is, rightly, worthy of a debate in a group of its own. If the noble Baroness wants to respond to my noble friend’s question when she rises, she can do so, but I will not anticipate the debate that we will have on HOLAC.

The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, is of course right in what she pointed out about Amendment 2 from my noble friend Lord Caithness. In broad terms, however, he has done us a useful service by reminding us that what is being proposed in this Bill is out of keeping with the history of our Parliament and almost without precedent among other legislative bodies around the world. My noble friend dealt with the similarities and differences with the Canadian Senate; that is about the only other example—in a much smaller House, with term limits—that one can find of a House of Parliament that is entirely nominated by the head of the Executive.

What is before us today is a Bill that will weaken the legislature and strengthen the Executive, tilting the balance of power away from those who believe that power ought to be held very robustly to account, and it will leave those scales unbalanced for as long as the Government see fit, for there is nothing in this Bill to compel them to set those scales right again or even to fulfil the promises of further reform that they made in their most recent manifesto. What we are debating today is an incomplete job.

At Second Reading the Lord Privy Seal spoke at perhaps surprising length about a full stop in the Government’s manifesto. Never has so much constitutional weight been placed on such a small punctuation mark. The same punctuation was used in Labour’s 1997 manifesto, on which the noble Baroness was first elected to Parliament. In that instance, it meant a very full stop indeed. The Blair Government fulfilled their commitment that, to quote from their manifesto,

“the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords will be ended by statute”.

That sentence, like all sentences in the English language eventually do, ended with a full stop and we did not think very much about it at the time. But, after that full stop, the next sentence in the 1997 manifesto promised:

“This will be the first stage in a process of reform to make the House of Lords more democratic and representative”.


For more than a decade later in that Labour Government, however, the legislative pen was stuck on that spherical stumbling block. Stage 2 never followed.

17:30

The noble Baroness will remember this well. I am sure she has a well-thumbed copy of the 1997 manifesto at home. She was a Parliamentary Private Secretary to one of the Prime Ministers in that Labour Government and a Minister at the Cabinet Office, so perhaps she can shed more light than others on why stage 2 was never brought forward. But there are many of us who worry that the full stop that she has encouraged us to mark with a highlighter in the Government’s recent manifesto will result in a similarly long hiatus. A quarter of a century after the last Labour Government’s reforms ended up stranded on a full stop, it is only right to leave a legislative reminder in this Bill that this Bill represents an unfinished job.

The deal that was done in 1999, “binding in honour”, as my noble friend Lord Howard of Lympne reminded us in the previous group, left a small number of hereditary Peers behind so that they could speak up here in your Lordships’ House and serve as a living reminder that the Government had not fulfilled their manifesto promises, as the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, pointed out in his contribution. Now, another Labour Government want to rid themselves of that inconvenient reminder and repeat the same trick.

The noble Baroness told us at Second Reading:

“To continue to assert that wider reforms must be implemented alongside this Bill is a wilful misinterpretation of the manifesto”.—[Official Report, 11/12/24; col. 1722.]

She undoubtedly understands better than most of us what the Labour Party really meant by the words and the punctuation it put in its manifesto, but those who are interested in its other commitments to introduce a mandatory retirement age, to introduce a new participation requirement, to reform the appointments process and to seek to improve the national and regional balance of the second Chamber do not want to see those plans scuppered by punctuation and inaction once again.

I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, that this is the reason why there are so many amendments down to the Bill: because it is entirely silent on all those other promises, not just on the detail of them but the timing of when we might expect them. If we had had a White Paper, a draft Bill or even the consultations that the Labour manifesto promised, we would be able to talk about them, rather than have to try to bring them to the debate now.

[Lord Swire (Con)]

For clarification, the Government pray in aid their manifesto and talk about the grammar of where the full stop falls, but it is worth looking at their latest manifesto. In the same paragraph, where they talks about immediate modernisation and legislation to remove the right of hereditary Peers, they go on to say:

“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”.


It is not an add-on; it is the same paragraph.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

It is indeed. Whether the grammar matters or not, these are clearly linked, and as for those colleagues we are going to lose through this Bill, who were kept here as surety, as a reminder, to make sure that the deal was followed through, surely we owe it to them to answer the question, before they are ushered out of your Lordships’ House, of whether the Government intend to fulfil the rest of their manifesto and what their plans for the future of this House are. If we cannot have that dignified and eloquent reminder through the presence of our hereditary colleagues, let us write very clearly in this Bill, in words and punctuation that should act as a perpetual reminder, that the Government are once again giving us a half-baked reform.

The limbo in which it leaves your Lordships’ House is unquestionably worse than the status quo. This Bill removes 88 hard-working Members, drawn from all corners of the House but predominantly from outwith the Government’s own Benches, and places the sole power to replace them and to appoint the temporal Members of this House in the hands of the Prime Minister. It gives him an unlimited power with no statutory limitations—not even modest guidance of the sort that noble Lords such as the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and others suggested would be helpful when we discussed this at Second Reading.

In this group and later, I hope the noble Baroness will be able to address the questions that are left unanswered through this Bill. Would she be open to an annual cap on the number of nominations that the Prime Minister can make? What does she think of a formula such as that proposed by the noble Lords, Lord Fowler and Lord Burns, in the Lord Speaker’s committee? I was very grateful for her generous words about my former boss, my noble friend Lady May, who adhered roughly to a two-out, one-in process—I crunched the numbers—as proposed by the Lord Speaker’s committee, but subsequent Prime Ministers have not, not least the present Prime Minister, whom this Bill will make even more powerful.

In 2022, Sir Keir Starmer endorsed proposals from former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown to transfer power from Westminster to the British people. He said:

“I think the House of Lords is indefensible”,


and said he wanted to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with an elected chamber with a really strong mission. That reformist zeal is not fully reflected in the Bill before us. The Prime Minister in fact has appointed a more Peers in his first 200 days than three Prime Ministers—my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak—put together. He has appointed more even than Sir Tony Blair, who was not known for his restraint when handing out ermine robes. He has already appointed more Labour Peers than the number of Cross-Benchers that this Bill will purge from your Lordships’ House.

And the people he has put forward, although we welcome them all to this House and do not denigrate the role that they will play, are drawn from a rather narrow cadre. Instead of the knowledge of nuclear engineering held by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, or the professional experience of the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, as a chartered surveyor, or the passionate campaigning for our creative industries that I see from the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, and the noble Lords, Lord Aberdare and Lord Freyberg, we have, since the start of this Parliament—

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

It would be useful to know how this actually relates to the wording of the amendment.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I think very directly, because this is an amendment to remind your Lordships’ House and future Governments that the Bill gives Prime Ministers greater power than ever before to nominate people to this House, and the present Prime Minister, whom this will empower and embolden, has sent us, since he became Prime Minister, 18 former Labour MPs, his former chief of staff and his director of strategy. He is entitled to do that, and it is no insult to any of them or to the contribution that I know they will make to your Lordships’ House to point out that they are unlikely to give the same breadth of independent scrutiny to legislation as the Cross-Bench Peers whom they outnumber.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

The speaker’s own background is exactly the one that he is now criticising others for. He also has forgotten the people that Boris Johnson put in. So could we just have a little humility?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I draw the noble Baroness’s attention to my own amendment, which I hope has been brought forward in a spirit of humility, suggesting that there be a cap on the number of special advisers that Prime Ministers can nominate. The reason I have tabled that amendment, and the one which I see did not find favour from my noble friend Lord Forsyth of Drumlean about former Members of Parliament, is that I worry that a Bill that empowers Prime Ministers to make the sole decision about who scrutinises them and the Government they lead in one of our Houses of Parliament ought not to give such an open-ended power to them.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, we started the debate today with a conciliatory and constructive tone from the Front Benches, which I found optimistic and encouraging. I fear that things have gone pretty steeply downhill since that time, and they have also gone way off track from the amendments under discussion. I have Amendment 63: I am beginning to wonder whether I will live long enough to ever reach it.

For all the shadow-boxing and enjoyable eloquence that we have had, this really seems to come down to a numbers question. That is the real horse-trading that is needed here. It is a number between 0 and 88, and I really wish we could lock the noble Baroness the Leader of the House, the Front-Bench leaders and our Convenor in a room, adjourn for the afternoon and see whether they can hammer out that number. If they could, I suspect that a lot of these amendments would fall away. If they could not, battle could recommence.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I respectfully disagree with the noble Lord. I think this is about more than numbers; it is about a constitutional principle. It is right, as my noble friend Lord Caithness has done, to point out the powers that the Bill will give to the Prime Minister in the interim, and for those of us who remember how long the interim was after the 1999 reforms to caution the House about accepting a promise that ends with a full stop and says no more. However, what the noble Lord says about the spirit of consensus is important and, in that spirit, I shall conclude my remarks there and allow the noble Baroness to respond to the debate.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Earl for proposing his amendment. I will come back to the comments made in the debate, but basically the noble Earl seeks to put an overview of the Bill in the Bill. I make the same comment that I made to the noble Lord, Lord True: I am happy to provide that overview.

There will probably be some repetition in what I say about this amendment and the previous one, a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace. Yes, the Bill seeks to remove the right of hereditary Peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. That is why we feel that the amendment is unnecessary, because that is quite clear.

I dispute the noble Earl’s overview, which does not fairly reflect the situation; nor do I accept the comments made on this by the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson. The noble Earl and the noble Lord are right that for the Lords temporal, appointed under the Life Peerages Act 1958, it is for the Prime Minister, as the King’s principal adviser, to make recommendations to the sovereign on life Peers. However, by convention, the Prime Minister invites those nominations from other parties—although perhaps we saw fewer from some Prime Ministers on the other side than we had done in previous years—and it is party leaders who consider who is best placed to represent their party in the House of Lords, and choose who to nominate.

If we are looking at Prime Ministers’ appointments, my noble friend Lord Collins and I were both appointed by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, because he happened to be Prime Minister at the time. My noble friend Lady Anderson was appointed by Liz Truss, who was a fairly short-lived Prime Minister but still had time to appoint my noble friend. So I do not accept the idea that the Prime Minister of the day has this absolute power that they channel by funnelling hundreds of their own appointments into the House.

In terms of numbers, I remind noble Lords that when the Labour Party left office in 2010, we had, I think, 12 more Peers than the party opposite. When the party opposite left office in 2024, there were over 100 more Conservative Peers than Labour ones. In that respect, the point made by the noble Earl has some merit: although most Prime Ministers have behaved and treated the system with the dignity and honour that it deserves, that cannot be said for all of them.

The Prime Minister also invites the House of Lords Appointments Commission to make nominations to the Cross Benches. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, made the point that just over 20% are Cross-Benchers, and she is right; I think it is slightly more at the moment, 23% or so. I have always said I think that is a fair figure, and that would not change. The commission then accepts those applications from across the UK and nominates individuals that it believes bring depth and merit to the House of Lords.

I take issue with some of the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, I think, about the background of Members and who should come into the House. It is not just about what people have done in the past; it is what they are prepared to do when they are here that really matters. We all want those noble Lords who are appointed to this place to play a full and proper role.

17:45

The noble Lord’s comments appeared to make the point that hereditary Peers contribute far more and better than life Peers. I have never, in anything I have said—and I challenge noble Lords who have said otherwise—denigrated any noble Lord in this House, by whichever route they have come to this House. However, if we are trying to make a case, as some have done, that somehow it is a better route because they are more independent and more active, the average time of speaking contributions, in days, by Peer type are as follows: life Peers 70, hereditary Peers 48. As a proportion of days attended, the figures are: life Peers 18%, hereditary Peers 14%, judicial 14%. Those figures are for the 2019-24 Parliament. So there is really little difference; it is not much to crow about, and it is probably disingenuous to stress it.

There are many hard-working hereditary Peers. There are also those who we do not see very often, although we might be seeing them a bit more at the moment, but my point is that there is not a great deal of difference. There is a marginal difference in speaking days. I have not looked at the voting record, so perhaps I should look at that as well. Life Peers ask more Questions than hereditary Peers. So there are different ways that we can look at this. The point is that I am not going to accept that life Peers are not as good as their colleagues or playing as active a role, or that without the hereditary Peers the House could not continue its work. I do not think that is the case. I am not going to denigrate the work of any Peer whatever the route by which they came.

There are a number of amendments about appointments to the House but I do not want to go into all of them now; we will deal with them as we go forward. However, there is no need for this amendment, and it is not entirely accurate, as others have pointed out.

I turn to other points that were made in the debate. There is a point that the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, who I am sure we will hear from further during the passage of the Bill, has not addressed in his contributions: every Member of this House has somehow come here by appointment. In the case of hereditary Peers, it may have been an ancestor of theirs and it may have been many generations ago, but all peerages started with appointments. The current system of by-elections means that there is a very small number of families across the country who have a fast-tracked route to a small number of seats, and the noble Earl would be wise to recognise that.

The noble Earl is also at odds with some of the other comments from his party. The noble Lord, Lord True, was talking about a deal basically to convert hereditary Peers into life Peers, if I have understood correctly, so we would not have the by-elections, Others in the House are now convinced—after years of trying—by my noble friend Lord Grocott’s proposal that the by-elections should stop, and indeed we have paused them, but the noble Earl’s proposal does nothing at all to address that. His proposal is at odds with what those Members are saying. They accept that the appropriate and proper route is through the Prime Minister from political parties, with Cross-Benchers being different, as we have heard. The noble Earl makes a statement of fact, but it is an incorrect fact.

The noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, challenged me on a number of issues about appointments and what happens next. I have been really clear on this, as is the manifesto. There are three stages in the manifesto—I do not know how many times I am going to have to say this during the passage of the Bill—and the first is the immediate reform, which I would have thought was the non-controversial part. A quarter of a century ago, the principle was established that hereditary Peers would leave the House. A deal was done at the time for some to remain in perpetuity for by-elections, but the principle was established, and the Bill completes that part of the reform. That is why there are no Green Papers, White Papers or further consultation on this; it has been debated for many years.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

Does the noble Baroness the Leader of the House accept the arguments from the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, that if his Bill had been passed we would now be left with 25 hereditaries? That would be a decent number and you would not need to get rid of them. Can I get it from there that the noble Baroness would actually agree to 25 life peerages?

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

I do not always admire the noble Lord’s ingenuity, but I do on this occasion. I think the point the noble Lord was making was that had that been accepted at the time, we would not have any hereditary Peers, in effect, because all would be here as life Peers. I do not know whether the numbers that would have remained was an accurate figure; it was a sort of a guesstimate.

That was the first stage. On the second part, I am grateful to noble Lords around the House who have engaged with me on this issue already. I have a number of thoughts on how it might be achieved, going forward, and there are some helpful amendments in the course of the Bill. It would be nice, would it not, to find a way that gained some kind of consensus around the issues that others mentioned, such as participation and the retirement age? If there was consensus around the House prior to legislation, it would be a helpful way forward, so I am grateful to those who have engaged with that and come forward with suggestions already.

Then there is a longer-term proposal, which is also in the manifesto. It says that in the longer term to look for a way to have a “more representative”—and I think it says an alternative—second Chamber. It was quite clear that there are those three stages.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

Is that “longer term” during this Parliament?

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

I do not know. It has to be when the policy is determined but I would certainly have thought that the second part of it, around participation and retirement, is something that we can look at quickly. If the House came to an agreement, it could be done quickly as well.

I turn to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, about the grouping of amendments, as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, raised this. The normal process is that the Government suggest groupings, as we did. In this case, the Opposition said they had their own groupings. They cannot speak for anyone else around the House but had their own groupings. I think there were originally around 18 government groups. The Official Opposition did not accept that and wanted—I think, the latest is—about 46 groups of amendments. The Government have accepted that, because we accept it if Members wish to degroup and have more groups.

My point was—as I think the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, has understood correctly—that a number of themes run through this legislation and if it is possible to debate those in groups, it is easier. At the moment, we have six groups of amendments on the commencement of the Bill. If it is what the House wishes, I would not deny it the opportunity to have those debates, but that seems to be quite a lot. I think three of those groups are single amendments but if that is how the House wishes to debate it, it is open to the House to do so. The Government did not deny the Official Opposition the right to have as many groups they wanted. I have to admit to being a bit surprised at how many there were, given the themes that run through the Bill, but we will see if that was helpful or not going forward.

The noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, wants to lock me in a room with the noble Lord, Lord True—

[Lord True (Con)]

That is not fair to the Leader.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

The noble Lord is resisting that temptation but I say to him, as I say to all noble Lords, that I have always been open to discussions. But I need assurances, so when we see degroupings, filibustering and threats on different things, that does not give the confidence that allows me to have those kinds of discussions. To have them, I need some confidence that the Opposition want to do this in a proper way.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness the Leader of the House for her reply. We have some useful additional information from her. However, I would take issue with her, just as she took issue with anybody who tried to misrepresent her in the debate. I did not in any way imply that the hereditaries were better than the life Peers or the life Peers better than the hereditaries. The purport of my amendment was solely that once you get rid of the hereditaries, there is increased power to the Prime Minister on appointments and nominations to this House, because the element of the hereditaries has gone.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

I do not accept that at all. There is no change whatever in the powers of the Prime Minister at that point. I have explained the process. I think the noble Earl is saying that it is not everybody in the House. Currently 88 Members are here because of their ancestors being here, on the hereditary basis. The Prime Minister cannot appoint those now and there will not be those places in the future, but it does not increase his actual power at all.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

As a result of this Bill, there will be a greater percentage of the House appointed by the Prime Minister than now.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords—

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

Can I just finish? My point was that this could be abused. If I recall rightly the noble Baroness said, and I agree with her, that most Prime Ministers have behaved very responsibly, but on some occasions it has not been quite as we would have hoped. I am grateful for her support on that.

I am grateful for what the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, did. As she will have noted, the amendment is carefully drafted to say nominations—nominated by the Prime Minister—rather than appointments. I focused on appointments rather than nominations, but I think I covered the point that she raised.

The memory of the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, seems to have failed him a little, I fear. He said in response to my noble friend Lord Strathclyde that he had wanted to get on with his Bill and was in a hurry to proceed. That is slightly contradicted by the fact that a few minutes earlier he had taken the House to a Division and appointed Tellers for both the Contents and Not Contents, after the amendment had been withdrawn, and wasted a considerable amount of the House’s time. I think his memory is not quite as good as it used to be.

I am grateful to all those who took part in this debate and beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 2 withdrawn.

Clause 1: Exclusion of remaining hereditary peers

Amendment 3

Moved by

[The Earl of Devon]

3: Clause 1, page 1, line 1, at end insert—
“(A1) In section 1 of the House of Lords Act 1999 (exclusion of hereditary peers), at end insert “, except for a child or grandchild of the Sovereign”.”Member's explanatory statement
This probing amendment invites the House to consider the role of the hereditary principle within Parliament and our constitution in the context of membership of the House of Lords.

[The Earl of Devon (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak to Amendment 3 in my name. It is a probing amendment aimed at focusing upon the hereditary principle in general, and its ongoing role within our constitution and this Parliament in the context of the sovereign in particular.

The Labour Party manifesto asserted that the hereditary presence within Parliament is “indefensible”. The Government also state that in the 21st century, there should be no places in our Parliament reserved for those from certain families. Likewise, the Liberal Democrats state that there should be no space in a modern democracy for hereditary privilege. I respectfully disagree but, having listened to earlier contributions, I am aware that it is a rather lonely furrow that I plough.

For the purposes of this debate and for the entirety of this Committee, I should note my interest as an elected hereditary. I am the 38th Earl of Devon, albeit merely the 19th of the fifth creation. It is a feudal role that my family has had the privilege of undertaking for some nearly 900 years, barring various attainders, executions and abeyances. On the basis of tenure and length of service, the hereditary principle is entirely defensible. It is a key part of what got us here and a bright thread which colours our rich constitutional tapestry. Rather that replead ancient history on this point, I refer your Lordships to my contributions at Second Reading and my speech in defence of the indefensible when we debated Lords reform back in November.

However, the hereditary principle is particularly defensible on the basis that it is the principle by which we select our sovereign head of state, whose presence in this Parliament is symbolised by the Mace, to which we all bow, and around whose seat, the Throne, we are all arrayed. The concern that I wish to raise by proposing this amendment is that without an hereditary presence in your Lordships’ House, the sovereign, who was once a first among equals, will be isolated as the sole hereditary presence within our constitutional system and thus increasingly vulnerable to republican attack.

18:00

Once the hereditary Peers, who have literally defended our sovereign for centuries, are removed from your Lordships’ House, who will stand up for the ongoing role of our monarch? If intellectually we agree that there is no place for hereditary privilege in a modern democracy, then we must surely become a republic and elect our Head of State just like the United States of America does.

To that point, and in case we need any reminder of the importance of this principle to our global standing and our international soft power in particular, last week we saw the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, visit the Oval Office, bending his knee to the leader of the free world in a brave effort to secure support for the war in Ukraine among other things.

[Lord Brennan of Canton (Lab)]

I too come from a long line of parents. My parents were the ones who were actually ploughing the lonely furrows that he referred to—probably on his ancestors’ lands. If he asks who will stand up for the monarch, I will, and my colleagues will. We all swore an oath to do so in this House.

[The Earl of Devon (CB)]

I thank the noble Lord for his intervention. That is the point of this amendment, and I am very pleased to hear it. I look forward to the Front Benches from each of our parties repeating exactly the same point.

As I said, Sir Keir Starmer was bending his knee to the leader of the free world. In that rarefied context, he offered the President of the United States just about the only thing that Donald Trump and his billionaire acolytes cannot purchase: an invitation from His Majesty to a state visit at Windsor Castle. Whatever one may think of the complex geopolitics that surrounded that visit and the remarkable events that have followed, it is readily apparent that the hereditary principle, as embodied by our sovereign Head of State—it is exactly the same hereditary principle by which I find myself here in your Lordships’ House—is of considerable ongoing importance. We weaken and abandon that at our peril.

The observant among your Lordships may note that the language of my proposed Amendment 3 does not explicitly address the hereditary principle as applied to our sovereign himself. This is because such an amendment would fall foul of the scope and relevance principles. Therefore, I express my huge thanks to the team of the Public Bill Office, who worked so patiently with me to craft an amendment that is admissible, if slightly idiosyncratic; it at least provides a hook upon which to hang this important debate. I am sure that His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Sussex and their children would appreciate the opportunity to debate the minutiae of product safety and metrology until the wee small hours with your Lordships’ company.

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

I do trust that the noble Earl is not suggesting that members of the Royal Family should participate in debates. That would be wholly disastrous.

[The Earl of Devon (CB)]

If the noble Viscount listens to my next paragraph, I will clarify that point.

I should also note, for the record, that we have a recent precedent for a grandchild of a sovereign seeking to join your Lordships’ House as an elected hereditary. In 2018, when I stood for a Cross-Bench vacancy upon the retirement of Earl Baldwin, one of the other 19 hereditary Peers to stand against me was the second Earl of Snowdon, previously Viscount Linley, who is a grandson of His late Majesty King George VI. I believe he withdrew his candidacy before the voting took place—obviously cowed by the strength of the other candidates. The publicly proffered reasoning for his withdrawal was that, as a member of the Royal Family, he should not sit in Parliament by convention—a reason which may indeed render my amendment dead in the water.

This aside reminds us that the only Members of your Lordships’ House that have any democratic legitimacy whatsoever happen to be the hereditary Peers. While we may be tainted by our hereditary privilege, we have at least vanquished multiple highly qualified competitors in transparent elections to obtain our seats. Indeed, I think we fulfil the second sentence in Labour’s 1997 manifesto, highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, by increasing the democratic legitimacy of this House. It is, I submit, a pity that we cannot fill other seats in your Lordships’ House by equivalent means.

I look forward to the debate on this topic. I am particularly interested to hear the views of the Front Benches of each of the main political parties, including the Minister, as this offers an opportunity for them all to clarify for posterity exactly how they view the role of the hereditary principle in the context of our monarch and how they expect to protect and support His Majesty the King in this House once we hereditary Peers have left the building.

In parting, I note that in earlier debates on this Bill, both the Government and the Liberal Democrats have pointed to the King’s legitimacy being based not upon the hereditary principle but upon his popularity and how well he does his job. This is transparently not the case. The monarch is not a competitor in a reality television show; he is our sovereign Head of State. He is born to his position and anointed, for those with Anglican faith, by God by the Archbishop of Canterbury. We all watched the Coronation, and I hope that is a fact we can all agree to. I beg to move.

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak in support of the amendment from the noble Earl, Lord Devon. This Bill is about not just the future of hereditary Peers but the stability of our entire constitutional order. Hereditary Peers are not relics of feudal privilege, as the Government claim; they are a vital link between our past, present and future. Remove them and we take another step towards dismantling the traditions that have kept this country stable for centuries.

Make no mistakes: this Bill disregards our history, weakens the House of Lords and ultimately paves the way for abolishing the monarchy itself. If hereditary Peers are obsolete, how long before the same argument is made against the Crown? For generations, hereditary Peers have served the Crown, upholding duty, service and continuity. Strip them away and the Lords becomes a Chamber of political appointees. Once it loses its independence, the monarchy loses its natural defenders.

Britain has never been a nation of radical upheaval. We have adapted, not abolished; we have evolved, not revolted. That careful, deliberate reform has kept our constitutions intact. Contrast and compare this with Russia and France, the two nations of my heritage. Both believed that radical change would bring stability, but instead they have suffered instability and disorder. In Russia’s case, it led to a regime even more oppressive than the one it had overthrown, including my grandparents. Why would we throw the baby out with the bath-water?

This Bill is ill-judged: it overturns the 1999 constitutional settlement; it ignores consensus; and it disrupts the balance that has protected us from political chaos. The path from abolishing hereditary Peers to dismantling the monarchy may not happen overnight, but it will set a precedent. Let us be clear: those who cheer the removal of hereditary Peers today will be the same voices calling for the end of the monarchy tomorrow. This Government reassure us that they support the monarchy, but how can we trust them? If they can remove hereditary Peers today, what stops them targeting the monarchy tomorrow?

History teaches us that, once safeguards are eroded, they are rarely restored. The monarchy is not just a symbol of our national unity but a powerhouse of soft diplomacy and economic strength. It generates billions for the UK. What greater demonstration of its soft power than the Prime Minister presenting the King’s invitation to President Trump—a move that could actually place Britain apart from the European Union in negotiations over tariffs, despite Brexit.

This is not outdated tradition; it is a vital asset for our future. We must stand firm against this misguided attack on the traditions that define our nation. That is why this amendment is crucial. It will protect the delicate balance of our constitution and safeguard the stability, continuity and integrity of our institution. That is why I support this amendment.

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I rise to support the amendment tabled by the noble Earl, Lord Devon, which is very creative and imaginative. For anybody who thinks this is beside the point, I certainly would not want to press the issue too hard—it is somewhat absurd to suggest that the removal of 92 hereditaries will turn the British constitution completely upside down—but the point is important.

It is said by those who call for the abolition of the remaining hereditaries that the hereditary principle is indefensible. That is often said, and then not really argued—it is simply stated. If it is indefensible, that must apply to other aspects of the hereditary principle, of which the monarchy is the most prominent. One point I would make to the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, is that he is, in fact, mistaken. The present King did make a speech in the House of Lords, when he was Prince of Wales: he made his maiden speech here and was entirely entitled to do so. I remember no parliamentary crisis arising from it.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, that this must be quite annoying because there are so many things flying around; could it not all be grouped? This is the problem with the Bill: it raises a very big issue and then tries to make it very narrow. Masses of issues come out of this which we need to think about, and heredity is one of them.

Heredity is a very important principle in life. It is for our monarchy, which is much respected around the world and here, for all the reasons the noble Earl, Lord Devon, said. It is also very largely the principle on which our citizenship and all families are based. What are families other than hereditary? It answers a very important aspect of people’s way of thinking about things. It may well be appropriate in modern times to remove that from a parliamentary chamber, and that is what is very likely to happen. But we need to understand that this may reflect badly upon us if we get it wrong; that it may expose this House to lots of questioning about what we really are and whether we deserve to be here; and that it may make people feel that our history and our understanding of ourselves is diminished.

Last week I was in Ukraine. I was taken out to Zaporizhzhia, right by the front, by a very nice Ukrainian driver who had previously been a rock star, or at least in a rock band, but harder times had come upon him—as they often do with rock stars. As we parted, he said, “I am so pleased. First time I ever meet real Lord”. I felt very ashamed because I am not a real Lord: I am a Boris creation. I said that to him, but that only made me rise in his estimation, because in Ukraine, Boris is an immensely popular figure. It is interesting that over there in that snowbound, war-torn place, the idea of a Lord means something to an ordinary person. It is a universal idea, and it is an idea which is essentially British and retains a certain importance. All that can be done away with, and it probably will be in legislative terms, but let us think about the way this is being done and be cautious.

Andrew Marvell, the great poet—who was a Parliamentarian, by the way, not a Cavalier—wrote a famous poem about Oliver Cromwell’s return from Ireland. He warned Cromwell about the danger of ruining what he called

“the great work of time”.

That is something we need to think about. This Bill is Cromwellian, and therefore is dangerous.

[Viscount Thurso (LD)]

My Lords, I have bitten my tongue for the first two or three groups our Committee has considered, but I feel obliged to make a quick comment on the amendment tabled by the noble Earl, Lord Devon—and also because my gluteus maximus has gone to sleep.

We have a constitution, which is the Crown in Parliament. The Crown, based on heredity, works extremely well. Parliamentary democracy, based on heredity, works extremely badly, and I can make the difference between the two. We need a second chamber that is either selected or elected—my preference is elected—and I will stand with the noble Lord, Lord Brennan, in defence of our King.

[Lord Northbrook (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to say that, as the royal representatives and great offices of state—the Lord Great Chamberlain and the Earl Marshall—are being removed from the House, is it reasonable not to sever the Royal Family’s link entirely with the Floor of the House? I might draw the line at the Duke of York or the Duke of Sussex, but I could tolerate some others.

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

I think the noble Lord is speaking to the amendment in the next group. While I am on my feet, I will say very quickly, because this has made me think of it, that if the King does get removed, we will end up with something very close to the constitution of the People’s Republic of China.

18:15

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I will just make a couple of points. First, we are not abolishing hereditary Peers; we are abolishing the right of hereditary Peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. Secondly, 26 years ago we removed 667 hereditary Peers and as far as I can judge, that has not had a devastating impact on the monarchy; in fact, the monarchy seems to have survived quite well. Thirdly, the fundamental difference between the hereditary principle as applied to sitting and voting here, and the hereditary principle as applied to the monarchy—like my noble friend Lord Brennan, I support the constitutional monarchy very strongly—is that if the monarch started to do what hereditary Peers in this House do, which is to express, as they are quite within their rights to do, detailed arguments in favour of one political party or another, I do not think the monarchy would last very long. There is a fundamental difference between the political role of hereditaries in this House, and the wholly significant and important non-political, head-of-state role of the monarchy at a national level.

[Lord Swire (Con)]

With that in mind, I invite the noble Lord to have a word with those who drafted the Labour manifesto, which says, as a standalone sentence: “Hereditary peers remain indefensible”.

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, I associate myself with the comments of both the noble Lord, Lord Brennan, and my noble friend Lord Thurso. There is not, and never has been, the sort of link between the hereditary Peers and the monarch that I suspect the noble Earl, Lord Devon, was suggesting. We have one period of worked examples of this, and I am afraid it was a little while ago. In 1649, when Charles I was condemned, he was condemned not just by Members of the House of Commons but by hereditary Members of the House of Lords.

A decade later, there was a House of Lords, but it was not called the House of Lords. It was called the Other Place—capital “O”, capital “P”—because the Parliamentarians, led by Oliver Cromwell, recognised the need for a revising chamber but did not like the concept of heredity. Therefore, Oliver Cromwell appointed a House of Lords. That House of Lords did not last very long, and the hereditary principle came back with Charles II. So it was not the case that a hereditary House of Lords meant that we were done with monarchy for ever. The two were just different things, and different considerations applied.

The lesson of Charles I—which is still relevant—is that, at the end of the day, Kings and Queens in this country rule by the consent of the people. If they go outwith the conventions, they will find themselves in difficulties again. With the current King and Prince of Wales, this seems an impossibly unlikely scenario, but it is still a theoretical possibility.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Newby, that I seem to remember that in the House of Lords which, to its shame, agreed to the execution of the King, there were only about six Peers who still sat, because of the exigencies of the Civil War and purges afterward, only two of whom, to their lasting shame, actually watched the execution of their King. A few days later, the House of Lords was abolished by the House of Commons as a “useless” place. The other irony was that, when Cromwell produced his own equivalent of the House of Lords, there were only about 30 people in it, of which a high percentage were relatives either of Cromwell or of his leading marshals. These things can take you down many funny roads. It was in fact the House of Lords that reassembled in 1660 that recalled the House of Commons into being—a very significant constitutional moment.

Before I go on, I will respond to the comments made about groupings. Of course we should proceed in an orderly fashion; the difficulty, as the noble Lord, Lord Moore of Etchingham, said, is that so much is left out of the Bill which is germane to the future that we have to discuss a range of subjects, and I defend our right to do so. I would not personally have put down this amendment on the Royal Family, but since it is down it is clearly a subject that has to be addressed and should be addressed separately.

The noble Baroness referred to a group of amendments on commencement, but the amendments are very different: one proposes a referendum, which I would not support; one wants to move the date earlier and get rid of hereditary Peers very swiftly; another is a delaying amendment; one calls for a review before the thing is taken forward; and another says that there should be no enactment until after stage 2 proposals have been produced. These may lock around commencement, because of the short nature of the Bill, but the idea of having a referendum on the removal of 90 hereditary Peers, is, frankly, with all due respect to my noble friend, nonsensical. To spend tens of millions of pounds on a referendum on whether hereditary Peers should leave the House of Lords is not a case I would argue on “Newsnight”, to put it that way.

These are very different subjects, so we should be careful not to run away. Peers have great freedom in this House to group and degroup. I accept that I asked for my first amendment to be stand-alone; that was because, as Leader of the Opposition and former Leader of the House, I wanted to say something that I hoped the Committee would listen to, heed and reflect upon, and I did not want that to be complicated with other discussions. I apologise if that tried the patience of the Committee, but I did ask for that amendment to be taken separately.

On the amendment, I appreciate the concerns raised by many noble Lords, starting with the noble Earl. I do not think his concerns needed to be laughed at—they are concerns that some people legitimately have. Equally, I totally agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Brennan, said. The great Labour Party has always been a patriotic party and the overwhelming number of members of the Labour Party, like the overwhelming number of members of my party, are strong supporters of the monarchy, although there are republican Conservatives and republican Labour Party members. The only thing I would wish to see happen, which I fear is not that likely—I hope it could still be accomplished, and I have great hope that we will be able to carry it forward—is that, in the years to come, the noble Lord, Lord Brennan, and the noble Earl are still here, arguing the case together, for the retention of the monarchy.

The last thing I would want is for the monarchy ever to be brought into the situation that your Lordships’ House is now in, where the hereditary principle is overtly rejected, but the reasons and reasoning, as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, said, are very different. I do not intend to argue that the removal of hereditary Peers from your Lordships’ House would have that effect on the monarchy. With all due respect to my noble friend Lady Meyer, I understand absolutely what she said about the appalling consequences for the people of France and of Russia when they thought that removing the monarchy would lead somewhere, but we are not there. I do not believe that there is a connection between the hereditary principle in this place and the hereditary principle of the monarchy.

However, as the amendment of the noble Earl, Lord Devon, shows, debate around his concern about the decision to expel hereditary Peers from the House of Lords, and what that might say about the hereditary principle, is one of several things that will always prompt debate and reflection about the importance of inheritance in wider society.

The noble Lord, Lord Moore of Etchingham, said that every family is inheritance. The instinct that families should be able to pass on what they have to the next generation is deeply imbued in our society—it is one of its absolutes, the root and the bedrock. One has to look only at the sympathy of so many people for the plight of family farms and family businesses: many people are responding to that, not because of particular views about farmers but because they feel it is unfair that a family cannot pass on its farm to the next generation because of levies on inheritance.

Noble Lords may think that I never have any leisure time, but occasionally I watch that charming BBC programme, “The Repair Shop”. I do not know whether anybody ever looks at that, but you can imagine me sitting sometimes watching it over my Marmite sandwich. Week after week, that programme throws up example after moving example of the natural instinct of ordinary people to preserve what their forebears left them and pass that on to their children and grandchildren, often amid tears and the deepest emotions. The hereditary principle is one of the most basic and honourable instincts of mankind and we should cherish it.

This is the instinct that I recognise gives birth to the sense of duty and responsibility displayed by the noble Earl in his speech, as it does for members of the Royal Family. I think everyone in the Committee agrees with those who have spoken that it is vital that we keep our Head of State hereditary and outside politics. Our monarchy provides a sense of continuity and stability that is unparalleled in any other form of governance. The English monarchy has endured for well over 1,100 years, long before Parliament, and the Scottish monarchy for close to 1,200 years, weathering countless political storms and societal changes as it evolved into our constitutional monarchy. In times of upheaval, the monarchy is there as a stay—a constant, unchanging presence that transcends transient party politics.

Further, the hereditary nature of the monarchy insulates the Head of State from the partisan struggles of politics that characterise a democratic system. It allows our monarch to represent our whole nation, or set of nations, serving as a unifying figure and bridging the divides that often stress our society, and indeed our counsels in your Lordships’ House. It plays a crucial role in preserving our cultural heritage and national identity, steeped in tradition. We here play our own part in the pomp and ceremony around monarchy. The noble Baroness opposite and I have both held the Cap of Maintenance—which is heavier than you might think—at the State Opening. Through this sense of ceremony and by maintaining these traditions, the monarchy helps to preserve Britain’s unique character, ensuring that our cultural heritage is passed down the generations.

I can say to the noble Earl that we absolutely believe in a hereditary monarchy. I know that the noble Baroness, when she speaks, will say the same thing from the point of view of the Labour Party. It serves as a powerful symbol of continuity and resilience on the global stage.

I was amused when the noble Lord, Lord Moore of Etchingham, referred to the maiden speech of His Majesty the King, then the Prince of Wales. I cannot claim to have been here, but there was a kerfuffle about it at the time and a great deal of excitement. Over 50 years ago, he made a delightful maiden speech on the subject of recreation and the importance of sport. I point out to noble Lords that his maiden speech lasted about 14 minutes. Whether that would go down well these days, I do not know.

One thing that he referred to in making his maiden speech was an occasion nearly 150 years earlier, I think it was in 1829, when three Royal Dukes—Clarence, Sussex and Cumberland—who were brothers, had, as His Majesty then put it in his speech,

“got up one after the other and attacked each other so vehemently and used such bad language that the House was shocked into silence”.

You could never imagine such a thing happening these days.

18:30

The response from the second Lord Shepherd, a fondly remembered Labour hereditary Peer, who many of us here will remember and who was then the Leader of the House, was equally delightful. He said:

“I do not recall a speech of such character and so beautifully delivered. I suspect that one will have to wait very many years before hearing another of its kind”.—[Official Report, 13/6/1974; cols. 624-30.]

Of course, we will never hear another of its kind. The noble Earl is perhaps right to say that it is poignant that we may never again hear such a speech, but those days are gone.

When attacking the hereditary principle, I do not conceive that anybody is directly attacking the monarchy. We must never forget the incomparable role that our monarchy fills for our nation, and it is precisely because it is hereditary that it is able to perform the role that it does.

[The Attorney-General (Lord Hermer) (Lab)]

I am very sorry to disappoint the noble Lord, Lord True, because I am standing to speak to Amendment 3 rather than my noble friend the Leader of the House. I thank the noble Earl for his amendment and also for his transparency in explaining that this is indeed a probing amendment to test the Government’s position on the hereditary principle more generally within our constitution. I hope that the noble Earl will not take it as a discourtesy if my response is brief, not because the constitutional points raised are not of importance, but because we say with respect that the position is quite straightforward.

In explaining why we do not accept the noble Earl’s amendment, it is important, with respect, to disarticulate two principles. The first is that, since 1999, we have recognised that it is no longer appropriate in a modern democracy for direct participation in Parliament to be premised on a generational family entitlement. This Bill seeks to complete that process in line with our manifesto commitment and, by doing so, will end an anomaly that is replicated in only one other country around the globe. The second principle is that we are, and shall remain, a constitutional monarchy. Constitutional monarchy, in contrast to hereditary entitlement in Parliaments, is not a global anomaly but represents a system of governance replicated in very many countries, few—if any—of which require participation of the children or grandchildren of the monarch in their parliamentary process.

I therefore respectfully disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Moore, that there is any form of tension, constitutional or otherwise, in considering it inappropriate for hereditary entitlement to apply to being able to vote on the laws of our land in Parliament on one hand, while being fully supportive of the role of the Royal Family in our constitutional framework on the other. Our constitutional monarchy has time and again proved to be the anchor of stability in this country. The Royal Family are able to galvanise our nation and provide the consistency required for our democratic values to be protected and for this nation to flourish.

The noble Earl asked: without the hereditaries, who is there in this House to stand up for the monarchy? That point was echoed by the noble Baroness, Lady Meyer. My noble friend Lord Brennan answered that he is; so am I, and so, I anticipate, is every one of your Lordships who swore their oath in this House.

As noble Lords will be aware, all hereditary Peers, including those in the Royal Family, lost their automatic right to sit and vote in the House as a result of the 1999 Act. That did not and has not proved to undermine our model of constitutional monarchy and nor does this Bill. The purpose of this Bill, no more, no less, is about delivering the principle settled by the 1999 Act to remove the rights of all hereditary Peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords, and there are no exclusions in this. As my noble friend Lord Grocott pointed out, it does not affect hereditary titles and lands, which will continue to be passed down in the normal way.

This reform does not relate to the sovereign nor the Royal Family. As I have said, there is a fundamental difference between the position of hereditary Peers in the legislature being able to vote on laws by virtue of their families, and a constitutional monarch who acts as the head of our state, providing, as His Majesty does, stability and continuity.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, made the point that the monarchy had certainly survived the departure of 600-plus hereditary Peers in 1998-99, but does the Minister accept that we are now breaking the link between hereditary Peers in Parliament in its entirety if we get rid of the hereditary Peers now?

[Lord Hermer (Lab)]

Yes, I do—that is the intention of the Bill. My point is that it does not impact at all the principle of our constitutional monarchy. It has no bearing on it whatever, and it is for those reasons that I respectfully ask the noble Earl to consider withdrawing his amendment.

[Lord Hardie (CB)]

Before the noble and learned Lord sits down, my recollection of 1999 was that the royal Princes specifically indicated that they would not wish to sit in this House. My further recollection is that, in the cloakroom, there were very grand coat hooks for the Prince of Wales and other Royal Princes which were then removed.

[Lord Hermer (Lab)]

I thank the noble and learned Lord for the little bit of history—I am very grateful.

[The Earl of Devon (CB)]

I thank the Minister very much for his words and particularly for being so brief, because I did not mean for this amendment to try your Lordships’ patience. I am very grateful to all who contributed to the debate. It is an amendment that deserved to stand alone, and I hope that the Committee will agree that the opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to a hereditary monarchy is worthy of a stand-alone debate.

I had in fact degrouped this amendment from two other amendments. The only reason why I think they were grouped together was that they all happened to be in my name. The other two amendments pertained to the issue of female succession to hereditary peerages, which we will come back to—probably on day seven or eight of Committee.

Before I close, I should admit that there is some personal animus in noting the importance of our hereditary peerage in support of our sovereign, as it was novel that the peerage was excluded from His Majesty’s recent Coronation. The writing was maybe on the wall at that stage. With the peerage having attended almost every Coronation since that of Henry II in the 12th century, it felt like the monarch himself was severing the connection between the hereditary peerage and the Coronation and was perhaps losing touch with his core base.

I am heartened to hear across the Committee the resounding support for our hereditary monarchy. The noble Baroness, Lady Meyer, in particular noted a strong connection between the hereditary Peers and the monarch. The noble Lord, Lord Moore, similarly noted how, globally, people note the importance of our hereditary principle. I thank the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, and the noble Lords, Lord Grocott and Lord Brennan, very much for all reaffirming the principle that I was hoping would be stated in this short debate.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Newby, for the history lesson. He will perhaps recall that at the end of that rather disastrous Stuart monarchy, we were able to welcome William of Orange in the Glorious Revolution. Of course, he came to dinner with Sir William Courtenay of Powderham on his first night on English soil, so the hereditary peerage was again somewhat responsible for that change in monarchy.

With the resounding support for the hereditary principle, as embodied within the hereditary peerage, the purpose of my probing amendment has been fulfilled. I do not think that we have heard a single republican voice from across the House. I gave the republicans an opportunity to speak; they did not. I therefore beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 3 withdrawn.

Amendment 4

Moved by

[Lord Strathclyde]

4: Clause 1, page 1, line 1, at end insert—
“(A1) In section 1 of the House of Lords Act 1999 (exclusion of hereditary peers), at end insert “, except for the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain”.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would retain the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain as members of the House of Lords with the right to sit and vote.

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 4 is a short amendment with a very small impact on two Members of this House. It is less a probing amendment and more one that I very much hope the Front Bench will be able to accept. The Leader of the House, at Second Reading and other points of the debate, has mentioned these royal officeholders and said that there would be some sort of arrangement to allow them to continue to come into Parliament. But I think they should be treated even better than that. They are obviously apolitical Members and do not play a great part in political debate, so would it not be right and proper to allow them to remain as full Members of your Lordships’ House to carry out their tasks?

The Lord Great Chamberlain carries a responsibility for the royal parts of the Palace of Westminster—which are on the other side of the Prince’s Chamber, including the Royal Gallery, the Robing Room and everything else in that direction—through Black Rod. The noble Duke, the Duke of Norfolk, as Earl Marshal, has been responsible for all the great occasions of state, some of sadness and others of great celebration, over the past few years. Most importantly, and of greatest effect in this House, the Earl Marshal is responsible for the State Opening of Parliament; the noble Duke forms part of the procession and signals to Black Rod to start the great walk between the House of Lords and the House of Commons. My amendment simply allows them to continue as Members of the House of Lords; it is very humble.

Some Peers have asked me if I know whether the Lord Great Chamberlain and the Earl Marshal actually want to stay. Whether they want to stay is not, strictly speaking, relevant. They do not have to come often, apart from the very few occasions when they are required to come. I hope that the Leader of the House will find favour in this principle and that, even if the amendment is incorrectly drafted, she might come forward with her own on Report. I beg to move.

[Lord Northbrook (Con)]

My Lords, I too have put my name to this amendment. These two Great Officers of State have been in existence since 1386, in the case of the Earl Marshal, and 1130, in the case of Lord Great Chamberlain. It was intended that they were required not only to perform their constitutional duties at the State Opening of Parliament and other events related to the sovereign but to be a vital link between the Crown and Parliament. To sever that link is a severe challenge to the monarch and deeply regrettable. Therefore, they should be allowed to remain as Members of the House.

I have it on reasonable authority that, originally, the Cabinet Office informed the officeholders that their positions were safe. Apparently, two weeks later, the change of mind was made. I highlight the contributions over the years, and since I have been in the House, of the noble Duke, the Duke of Norfolk, and the current Lord Great Chamberlain.

The Leader of the House has issued conflicting messages on how the officeholders will continue to have access to the House of Lords. She concluded at Second Reading:

“On the specific issue of access … for the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain, I completely recognise that they need access. I have written to the commission to ask that they keep their access passes, and the usual channels have agreed that … There is nothing that impedes the work they do or their roles in this House”.—[Official Report, 11/12/24; col. 1861.]


However, in opening that debate, she had stated:

“I have already raised this with the Lord Speaker to ensure that necessary arrangements can be made”.—[Official Report, 11/12/24; col. 1723.]


Quite apart from the lack of clarity as to whether these two officeholders have to rely on the approval of the commission or the Lord Speaker, what would happen if one refused to give them access? I therefore propose that, if the Government cannot agree to this amendment, there should be an alternative one in the Bill to guarantee that they have access to the Chamber to perform their ceremonial duties.

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

My Lords, I too put my name to the amendment. My point is wholly pragmatic. It seems that the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain would be better placed to perform their functions, which they have to perform, if they were entitled to come here on a regular basis and were familiar with this place and the staff. To deny them that opportunity makes it more difficult for them to perform the functions that they will be required to perform.

18:45

[Lord Swire (Con)]

My Lords, first, retaining the connection between these two Great Officers of State and this place would reassure those who are concerned about the weakening link between this place and the monarch. Secondly, what does the Lord Privy Seal say about the role of the Lord Great Chamberlain? As she will be aware, he has joint control, with the Lord Speaker and the Speaker of the other place, over Westminster Hall and the crypt chapel.

[Lord Howard of Rising (Con)]

My Lords, these two Great Officers of State are part of the framework that governs the Government and how they function. It would be humiliating for them to have to apply to something such as the commission to be able to come in here and fulfil their roles, which are part of our collective memory and the way we do things. Can you imagine going to the commission and asking, “Excuse me, I want to come in to help with the State Opening of Parliament tomorrow. Please, can I have a pass?” It is beyond reason.

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

My Lords, it is with reverence for our traditions and institutions that I support the amendment in the names of my noble friend Lord Strathclyde and others, and to defend the continued membership of this House of the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain. This is not merely to defend two historic offices but to uphold the enduring wisdom of our constitutional framework, as my noble friend Lord Howard just pointed out.

The ancient offices of the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain are not relics of a bygone age; they are pillars of our constitutional order, deeply woven into the fabric of our United Kingdom. Their removal from this Chamber would be an act not of modernisation but of heedless vandalism. From the solemnity of a monarch’s funeral to the grandeur of a Coronation, the Earl Marshal is responsible for orchestrating the great state occasions that define our nation’s story. The funeral of Her late Majesty the Queen was not only a moment of national mourning but a masterclass in dignity and order. This was in no small part due to the office of the Earl Marshal and his own tireless efforts to ensure that it was so. Indeed, as my noble friend Lord Strathclyde reminded us, the Earl Marshal also oversees the State Opening of Parliament in this place.

There has been an unbroken line of Lords Great Chamberlain from 1138 to the present. The office has changed over time, but for hundreds of years they have attended this House with the right to sit and vote. The Lord Great Chamberlain ensures that this very Palace functions with the decorum and tradition that befit the mother of Parliaments. Together, they are not merely witnesses to history but actors within it. Together, they ensure that the solemnity and dignity of our state endure beyond the politics of the moment. Together, they have active responsibilities that demand knowledge, experience and deep engagement with the institutions of the state. As my noble friend Lord Northbrook said, they are a vital link between the monarch and Parliament.

To exile these officers from this Chamber is to diminish their ability to discharge their duties effectively. Yet this Bill would remove them from this Chamber, as if their roles could be executed in absentia and as if their knowledge and service could be distilled into a parliamentary pass and a seat in the Public Gallery. The Lord Privy Seal has assured us that this Bill will not affect their ability to carry out their functions, stating that

“there is no legal or procedural requirement for either officeholder to be a Member of this House in order to be able to carry out their functions”.—[Official Report, 11/12/24; col. 1723.]

However, there is a profound difference between what is legally permissible and what is constitutionally sound. While statute may not require their presence here, precedent, wisdom and good governance do.

These offices are not purely symbolic; they require ongoing engagement with the legislative process to ensure the seamless operation of state functions. Without a seat in this House, they will be unable to contribute their unique expertise to debates on matters directly affecting their responsibilities, the Crown and Parliament. This was reinforced by my noble friend Lord Hailsham. Would we insist that the Lord Chief Justice never enter a courtroom, the Archbishop of Canterbury conduct his duties from a lay pew and the Speaker of the Commons be heard only from the corridors?

The holders of these offices have a range of functions. I will not detain the House by setting these out in full, but I will set out just two examples to demonstrate why their presence in your Lordships’ House is both useful and important. The Lord Great Chamberlain is entrusted with custody of the Palace of Westminster, and he is one of the three keyholders of Westminster Hall, who decide who may address both Houses of Parliament in Westminster Hall—the others being the Speaker of the Commons and the Lord Speaker. These decisions have been high profile, with international significance in the past. Would it not be odd for decisions about who may address Parliament be made by a Peer who is not a Member of either House?

Turning to the Earl Marshal, in addition to his duties at funerals and coronations, he oversees the College of Arms. The college is the organisation responsible for heraldry in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and across the Commonwealth. Occasionally, issues pertaining to heraldry come up in your Lordships’ House, most recently during Committee on the Football Governance Bill, during which my noble friend Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay expertly argued that the Government had made an error in their drafting. The noble Duke, the Duke of Norfolk, was following the debate closely, as was the college itself. There is something to be said for retaining the person responsible for overseeing our heraldry in the House, so we can draw on their knowledge and experience in the future.

This artificial separation risks creating a situation where those responsible for key constitutional duties are sidelined from the very discussions that shape them, diminishing the effectiveness of both their roles and this Chamber. The argument for reform is often cloaked in the language of modernisation, but modernisation must not be pursued at the cost of effective governance. These hereditary offices play a crucial role in the functioning of our state, and their direct experience, knowledge and responsibilities make their presence in this House a matter of practical good sense. The Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain do not just inherit their positions; they assume great responsibilities that require them to be familiar with the traditions and mechanisms of governance. The offices are defined by responsibility, not mere title. That responsibility is sharpened, not diluted, by a seat in this House.

Let us not ignore the precedent this sets. Reform, when done without care, rarely stops at a single step. What is dismissed as a minor adjustment today becomes the justification for wholesale destruction tomorrow. We must be wary of any proposal that makes our institutions less effective, less informed and less rooted in the traditions that give them strength.

Beyond our domestic affairs, there is also Britain’s international standing. Our constitutional system is admired worldwide, precisely because it blends continuity with progress. Our state occasions—the Coronation, royal weddings and funerals of heads of state—are watched by billions across the globe. They are not just moments of ceremony, they are demonstrations of national unity and the continuity of the state. The Earl Marshal is responsible for ensuring these moments are executed flawlessly, reinforcing Britain’s soft power and global influence. Denying him a seat in this House would not just be a symbolic loss; it would strip him of the access, authority and insight that enable him to perform his role at the highest level, weakening the very institution he is tasked with upholding on the world stage.

The Earl Marshal and Lord Great Chamberlain must retain their places in this House, not as anachronisms but as a vital component of our constitutional heritage. Let us not mistake removal for reform and let us not diminish this House. Let us say with conviction that those who have served this nation’s highest traditions shall not be dismissed, but upheld, valued and entrusted to continue their vital work. In preserving their place, we preserve the dignity, continuity and wisdom that have long guided both this House and this nation.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords for their amendments and for the comments that have been made. I think I can offer some of the reassurance that is sought. Certainly, in response to the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, I can say that we respect and regard the work that they do. We do not wish to hamper that all.

At Second Reading, I addressed some of the concerns raised. There is no contradiction with what I said at the time. I spoke to the Lord Speaker—it is a courtesy to do so, given the role that he plays—and I have spoken to the commission as well. I should clarify that the Bill will not affect the offices themselves and neither does it affect the ability of the officeholders to fulfil their important functions. I have gained the agreement of the commission and I have written to both the noble Earl and the noble Lord to confirm that they will have access. I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising, that it certainly will not be a case of seeking permission from the commission. That permission has been granted. They will have full access to the Palace to carry out their functions. There will not be an issue there. I wrote to them both today.

[Lord Howard of Rising (Con)]

I think they should have it by right, not by permission.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

If agreed by the House, it will be a right. There has been some misunderstanding that the only way they can fulfil their functions is by being a Member of this House and having the right to speak and vote in the Chamber. That is not the case. If we go back in time, there have been cases where neither officeholder was a Member of your Lordships’ House. Peter Burrell was the Lord Great Chamberlain from 1781 to 1820. He was not a Peer until 1796. More recently, William Legge was the Lord Great Chamberlain from 1928 to 1936, but only inherited his title at the end of his time as Lord Great Chamberlain in 1936. Hugh Cholmondeley performed the office of Lord Great Chamberlain from 1966 due to his father’s ill-health. He succeeded to his father’s peerage in 1968. The current Earl Marshal took leave of absence from your Lordships’ House from 18 January 2021 for the remainder of that parliamentary Session—and we know that was a very important parliamentary Session in terms of the monarchy.

So I am confident that both noble Lords will be treated with the respect they deserve—and have earned— and they and their officeholders will be granted access to your Lordships’ House. It will not, in any way, impinge on their responsibilities and duties. I respectfully ask noble Lords to withdraw their amendment.

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Finn, who spoke with great authority and skill. The more she spoke, the more convinced I was that I was right to move the amendment in the first place. Her knowledge of history and precedent in this matter is exemplary.

I am also very grateful to the noble Viscount and the noble Lord who signed the amendment—the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, and my noble friend Lord Northbrook—and for what they raised, and the question that my noble friend Lord Howard of Rising raised. It does seem absurd that these great officers of state, who have a role in Parliament, will be able to come into the House only when they go to the pass office and ask for their pass, which is no doubt countersigned.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

They will have access to the House, however that is arranged. They are not going to have to troll up to the pass office and get a daily pass that they stick on them. They will have the access that is required for this House. All Members of the House would want to show that respect. The only loss will be that they will not be in your Lordships’ House to take part in debates and to vote. They will not be in the Chamber to participate in the proceedings of the House.

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

My Lords, I am reminded of the debates that took place many years ago on the future of the Lord Chancellor, when he was removed from your Lordships’ House. It was the law of unintended consequences. There was much work undertaken to try to keep all of that and I predict that the same will happen again. But I think the noble Baroness has heard what we have had to say. She will no doubt consider, with the Clerk of the Parliaments, what needs to be put in place in order for these two great officeholders to continue to do the work that they are required to do in Parliament. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 4 withdrawn.

19:00

Amendment 5

Moved by

[Lord Soames of Fletching]

5: Clause 1, page 1, line 1, at end insert—
“(A1) In section 1 of the House of Lords Act 1999 (exclusion of hereditary peers), at end insert “except for peers who are members of the House of Lords on the day on which the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2025 is passed and who are currently serving or have previously served as—(a) a Minister of the Crown,(b) a Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords,(c) a Convenor of the Crossbench Peers, or(d) a Chair of a House of Lords or joint select committee.””Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would retain hereditary peers who have served the House of Lords as ministers, Deputy Speakers, Convenor of the Crossbench Peers, or Chairs of committees.

[Lord Soames of Fletching (Con)]

My Lords, in moving the amendment in my name, may I say first, without sounding too much like Lord Copper, what a great privilege it is to take part in this debate, and to have listened in particular to two magnificent speeches from my noble friends Lord True and Lord Forsyth? These matters are not just events and things to be trifled with; they matter. As my noble friend Lord Strathclyde said, English legislation in particular is bedevilled with the law of unintended consequences, so these things matter.

I do not want to detain the House unduly and I have no doubt that other noble Lords will wish to say a few words. I wanted to put down this amendment just to urge the House to recognise the extraordinary service that has been given. I absolutely accept what the Leader of the House said about not differentiating between life Peers and hereditary Peer, which both make a very important contribution to the House. But if you look at the Opposition Front Bench today, of the 33 Peers currently serving on it nine, or 27%, are hereditary Peers. Of the 24 Deputy Speakers currently serving, there are the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, the noble Lord, Lord Ashton of Hyde, the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, and the noble Lords, Lord Russell and Lord Geddes; many more have served as Deputy Speakers in the past. I suggest that that is a staunch reminder of what a significant contribution the hereditary Peers make to this House.

There has been a lot of talk about hereditaries and life Peers. I am still not sure how I got here—which list I was on—because I was fired by the Prime Minister who I thought had promoted me to this House. Whatever it was, I very fortunately made my way here and was lucky to do so, but I recognise the extraordinary role that the hereditaries play, considering their numbers.

I do not wish to sound controversial but while this is a constitutional Bill, obviously of the first importance, it is also a mean Bill. That meanness can be unleavened by my amendment, which will particularly cover the question that the noble Lords, Lord Forsyth and Lord True, asked about honour and justice. The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, said at the beginning of this debate that the world is falling about our ears, and here we are debating reform of the House of Lords. But a sense of certainty and tradition is now more important than ever, and that is represented in this House in a very meaningful and formidable way by the hereditary Peers. I beg to move.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Soames and agree with everything he said, particularly his praise for the two excellent speeches we had at the beginning.

We are removing the 88 hereditaries, but in the first 234 days of the Government’s existence the Prime Minister has created 45 life Peers, which creates a record, and in this Bill, we are removing some of the hardest-working Members in the House. Hereditaries have a better attendance record than we life Peers, they have a better turnout record at Divisions and they participate fully in all aspects of the work of the House. My noble friend talked in general terms about the contribution they make. I think it is time, if the House will permit me, just to briefly name names. Who would we be chucking out?

According to my noble friend’s amendment—I am grateful to the Library for producing this for me at rather short notice—we will be chucking out: my noble friends Lord Ashton of Hyde, Lord Bethell and Lord Camrose, who were also Ministers; the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, a Deputy Speaker; my noble friend Lord De Mauley, a committee chair and a former Minister; my noble friend Lord Courtown, a Deputy Chief Whip since 2016; the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, a Deputy Speaker, Convenor of the Cross Benches and a committee chair; my noble friend Lord Minto, a former Minister; my noble friend Lord Geddes, a Deputy Speaker; my noble friend Lord Harlech, currently a Whip; my noble friend Lord Henley, a committee chair, former Chief Whip and former Minister; and my noble friend Lord Howe, who is currently deputy shadow Leader, and who has been continuously on the Front Bench since 1991.

I do not know whether noble Peers remember the great Raymond Baxter, who was the best-ever commentator at the Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance. He used to introduce the Chelsea pensioners during it; I can imagine that if my noble friend Lord Howe were there, he would have said, “And now we have the great Earl Howe, known to his mates as ‘Freddie’ and 34 years with the colours”.

Of course, there is also the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, a committee chair and former Minister; my noble friend Lord Peel, the Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Household for almost 20 years, and a superb Lord Chamberlain he was; my noble friend Lord Roborough, a shadow Minister; the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, a Deputy Speaker; and, of course, the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, a Deputy Speaker, who has graced us with his presence for the last hour.

Then there is my noble friend Lord Trefgarne, a committee chair and former Minister; the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, the former finance committee chair—he did a superb job there; my noble friend Lord Younger of Leckie, almost continuously in ministerial office since 2013; and my noble friend Lord Effingham, currently a Whip. Last but not least, there is my noble friend Lord Strathclyde, a Minister and Leader of the House, who was an absolutely superb junior Environment Minister under my command as Minister. I would like to say that I taught him all he knows, but that would not be the case.

Those are the colleagues—the hereditaries—who will be slung out by the Government and who are on the list in my noble friend Lord Soames’s amendment. But, very briefly, that is not the full story; his amendment does not go far enough. Many other hereditaries who do a superb job chairing other committees of this House and doing other work are not included in my noble friend’s amendment. If the House will permit me, I will run through them briefly; I will not use titles, such as “my noble friend” or “the noble Lord” but simply list the names which the Library has kindly circulated in a superb Excel spreadsheet.

Those Peers are: Lord Aberdare, Lord Altrincham, the Earl of Arran, Lord Borwick, Viscount Bridgeman, the Earl of Clancarty, Lord Colgrain, the Earl of Cork and Orrery, Lord Crathorne, Lord Cromwell—I know that the noble Lord was in Georgia, heading up the OSCE delegation that observed the elections; I was with the Council of Europe delegation, and he did a superb job there—and the Earl of Devon, who has also chaired committees. In the main, these are hereditaries who have served on committees or are currently serving on them.

To continue: the Earl of Dundee, who served for many years on the Council of Europe as well and did a superb job, Viscount Eccles, Lord Fairfax of Cameron, Lord Glenarthur, Lord Grantchester, Lord Hacking, Lord Hampton, Viscount Hanworth—we are halfway through.

[A noble Lord]

Oh!

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

But it is worth knowing the names of all those hereditaries who have been working their socks off in this place for years and will be thrown out. There is the Earl of Leicester, the Earl of Lindsay, Lord Londesborough, Lord Lucas, the Earl of Lytton, Lord Mancroft, Lord Meston, the Duke of Montrose, Lord Mountevans, Lord Moynihan —whom I see in his place in front of me, and who has already been rightly praised—Lord Ravensdale, Lord Reay, Earl Russell, Lord Sandhurst, the Earl of Stair, Lord Thurlow, Viscount Thurso, who has already spoken —I think that he welcomed his own demise—and Lord Trefgarne, also a former Minister, Viscount Trenchard, Lord Trevethin and Oaksey, Lord Vaux of Harrowden, and finally, the Duke of Wellington.

I make no apology for reading out those names; I have not taken very long to do so—less than six minutes. If the Committee is going to go ahead with ejecting hereditaries, we simply need to know all of those colleagues, the work they have been doing in this House and the expertise we will lose. We will not only lose their expertise but be doing them a disservice by rejecting all the work they have done over the last few years by saying, “You’re just a hereditary, you can now be slung out.” I think that is an insult to the hard work they have been doing.

[Viscount Astor (Con)]

My Lords, I knew that I was unimportant when my noble friend Lord Blencathra omitted me from his list, but now it has been confirmed. I am very grateful to him for doing that. As we approach the dinner hour, it is obviously time for very long speeches, and I intend for my speech to be very long and to cover a number of hugely important issues. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Soames on his amendment, because it would actually affect me, as a former Minister of the Crown, by inserting proposed new subsection (A1)(a). I thank my noble friend and support his amendment.

[Lord Brennan of Canton (Lab)]

I observe briefly to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, that he is partial in his recollection of the career of the great Raymond Baxter. The other programme that he was famous for was called, “Tomorrow’s World”. I was an avid watcher of that programme as a young boy, and I never remember a prediction on “Tomorrow’s World” that, 50 years later, people would still be sitting in Parliament by virtue of the hereditary principle. On his list and his partial recollection of Raymond Baxter, I point out to the noble Lord that we live in tomorrow’s world, not yesterday’s.

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

My Lords, Walter Bagehot once observed that the British constitution derives its strength not from rigid design but from its adaptability. Its value lies in its ability to preserve what is valuable while reforming what is necessary. It is in that spirit, and not in defiance of reform but in defence of wisdom, that I support Amendment 5 in this group, in the name of my noble friend Lord Soames.

We are debating the fate of those who have committed themselves to the service of this House, as my noble friend Lord Blencathra has pointed out so brilliantly, and who have earned their place not by entitlement but by endeavour. The amendment before us seeks not to enshrine privilege but to preserve expertise. It does not defend hereditary peerage as principle; it defends the experience of those who, having risen above the circumstances of their birth, have dedicated their careers to the betterment of our legislative process.

Some would have us believe that the mere fact of a hereditary Peer holding office is an anachronism, but I ask this: what is more outdated, a Chamber that recognises merit in all its forms or one that would dismiss its most dedicated servants on the basis of an ideological formula? The numbers tell their own story. Despite comprising only 12% of this House in the last Parliament, hereditary Peers held 20% of government roles and 26% of Deputy Speakerships. This is not a symbol of idleness; it is a testament to diligence.

To those who believe that experience and institutional memory can simply be swept away and replaced at will, I say look at history. When institutions strip themselves of wisdom, when they discard those who have mastered their craft, they do not modernise but wither. There is a reason we do not empty the judiciary of its most seasoned jurists, nor the military of its most battle-hardened commanders. Why, then, should we purge this House of those who have proved their worth in government, scrutiny and debate? We do not strengthen Parliament by weakening its collective intelligence.

Those who propose the indiscriminate removal of hereditary Peers do so in the name of reform, but reform must be guided by the principle that what works should be preserved and what fails should be improved. The amendment before us today embodies that principle. It seeks not to halt the tide of change but to channel it wisely. It recognises that Ministers, Deputy Speakers, convenors and Chairs of Committees are not relics of the past but pillars of the present. To discard those who have upheld the dignity and function of your Lordships’ House is not reform; it is amputation.

Let us keep the best of what we have rather than discard it blindly. Let us not mistake destruction for progress. This amendment supports the very principles that have kept this House a vital force in British public life.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, at the risk of repeating what I said at Second Reading, I have always been totally confused as to why, for some reason, we who are appointed Peers are somehow superior to hereditary Peers—who, let us face it, as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has never failed to point out, may be elected by a very small electorate, if they happen to be Labour or Liberal Democrat Peers, but are at least elected. That is not something any of us who are appointed can say about ourselves at all. We are put here because the leader of our party or the Prime Minister of the day put our names forward. Does that make us superior to hereditary Peers, who have, let us face it, been elected by their own number and chosen to be the best people who they can choose at the time? That must give them an edge, I should have thought, over we who are appointed to this House, because at least they have gone through the process of election.

19:15

As has been said by my noble friend Lady Finn, these people have, on the whole, dedicated themselves more to our House than the collection of appointed Peers, such as me, have done. It is extraordinary that we have to pick on these people in this way.

I go back to the point I was making about the link now being broken, if this Bill passes and we get rid of all hereditary Peers, with the hereditary principle. This is the critical thing about the monarchy. The monarchy is hereditary, and having hereditary Peers in your Lordships’ House gives a link between the hereditary principle and the monarchy. This is something that we should certainly value.

It is extraordinary that we have picked out this group of people who, in my view, have more legitimacy in your Lordships’ House than appointed Peers, and decided to get rid of them. It is quite clear that they have given much more of their time and effort and skills to the effectiveness of your Lordships’ House than the great majority of us who have been appointed to it have managed to do.

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend’s amendment. The exceptions to whom his amendment would apply are people who contain and are characterised by many qualities, but I mention only four here: experience, knowledge, constancy and loyalty to this Chamber, and a non-political aspect. This may seem strange coming from the Conservative Bench, but for many of us who have not been part of a party-political machine, it is very important to see how a non-political Front Bench can work to reach out across the Chamber to all sides of this House. It is these qualities of experience, knowledge, constancy and a type of non-politicalness which allows this House to do the work it does, and which brings it respect right across the world, as has been mentioned today. I commend my noble friend for tabling this amendment, and I hope it will be listened to with sympathy.

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, I think this amendment shows the problem that we were discussing earlier with the groupings, because we have actually been discussing, along with this amendment, Amendment 9 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord True, and they both deal with the question of the future of those hereditaries who play a major part in your Lordships’ House.

The noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, told us what he finds extraordinary. I think the vast majority of the country would find it extraordinary, if they realised it, that 10% of the legislature derives from fewer than 800 families in the country. Most people do not really realise that; if they did, they would be very surprised and most of them, frankly, would be appalled.

I looked at the hereditaries as a group one wet, sad afternoon. I divided them not into sheep and goats but into three: those who were active, those who were partially active, and those who were inactive. In response to the list of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, of those who are very active, I could, but will not, read out to the Committee a list of equal length, if not longer, of hereditaries who are virtually inactive. This is not a criticism of them more than it is of any other group. However, it is the case that some Members in the hereditary group are very active and well respected, but, like in all other groups, there are others who, frankly, are not.

Therefore, if we are looking to what should happen next and whether we should seek to retain some of the expertise that the hereditaries have, surely the way to do it is not as proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Soames, nor by the noble Lord, Lord True, but to encourage the parties to appoint those hereditaries who are very active and eminent in their groups to life peerages as those numbers come up. I hope very much that we will do so in respect of the Liberal Democrats—we have fewer hereditaries than some of the other groups—but that seems to me to be the logical way of doing it. It is what we did, to a certain extent, in our party after the vast bulk of hereditaries left in 1999. That is the precedent that we should seek to follow now, rather than having a broader category of exemptions, as the noble Lord suggests, or a complete continuation along the lines previously proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, which the noble Lord, Lord True, is about to suggest.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

Can I correct the noble Lord on one factual error that he has made—quite inadvertently, I am sure. According to the Library list, leaving aside the one mistake in the case of my noble friend Lord Astor, there are fewer than 20 hereditaries who do not participate in the work of the House or who are, as he said, doing nothing. The vast majority have served the House, are working in the House on committees or have been Ministers.

[Lord Newby (LD)]

If the noble Lord looks down the list, he will see that there may be some people who come twice a year and vote three times a year, but I did not include those in the list of people whom I consider to be active. I am happy to go down the list with him; I did not do it with the intention of proving anything but wanted to satisfy myself as to the true position.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, the difficulty with the noble Lord’s suggestion, in my case, is that I would be relying upon knowing the leader of my party. I do not properly know any of the party leaders, and they do not know me either, so I would have as much chance as a snowflake in a blast furnace of getting a life peerage.

[Lord Wolfson of Tredegar (Con)]

My Lords, I am sorry to disappoint the noble Lord, Lord Newby, but I am responding on Amendment 5, moved by my noble friend Lord Soames of Fletching from these Benches. In speaking to this amendment, I take the opportunity to recognise the significant and invaluable contribution that hereditary Peers have made to your Lordships’ House. With respect to the noble Lord, Lord Newby, this amendment is a different point conceptually from Amendment 9, tabled by my noble friend Lord True, which is essentially, if I may put it without any disrespect, the Grocott approach.

As my noble friend Lord True said earlier this evening, if we are to exclude anyone from the House, it should be those who do not contribute rather than those who have contributed and do contribute. To introduce a personal perspective, I say that as someone who makes every effort to play a proper part in the business of your Lordships’ House while maintaining a full practice at the Bar. That sometimes means that I miss the odd vote—may I record in Hansard for posterity my entirely sycophantic and appallingly oleaginous thanks to my Whip for his constant understanding? More seriously, that cuts into my downtime. I do not really have any downtime because of my work at the Bar and my obligations here. If I can use this rather demotic phrase, it does hack me off when some people do not contribute at all.

I therefore share the concern of my noble friend Lord Soames that we are removing people who contribute while leaving people who play very little, if any, part in the House. The key to a sensible approach, I suggest, while recognising that the hereditary principle has come to an end—like the noble Lord, Lord Brennan, I also enjoyed “Tomorrow’s World” in its day, and what was innovative then is commonplace now—is to retain those who have demonstrated over many years their commitment to public service and duty to the House. She is no longer in her place, but I respect fully agree with what the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, said in an earlier group. She expressly invited the Government to just look, to use what I think was her phrase, at those whom the Government are removing. She said that the approach in this Bill, which removes the fully involved and the truly indolent alike, was “profoundly wrong”. She is right about that.

Turning to the text of this amendment, I know that there are many ways in which noble Lords can contribute to the business of the House, but those who currently serve or have previously served as Ministers and Whips, Deputy Speakers, chairs of committees or as Convenor of the Cross Benches have made a determined and determinable contribution. Their institutional knowledge and dedication to public service has made them indispensable, I suggest, to the functioning of the House and thus to the functioning of Parliament. The positions which they have undertaken in the House have been earned through merit and service. To remove these noble Lords would be to discard a wealth of experience that simply cannot be replaced. I therefore agree with the points made by my noble friend Lady Finn in that regard.

We have had some stats thrown at us; let me try to identify what the position actually is. During the 2019-24 Parliament, 168 Members had official roles. This includes government and Opposition ministerial posts and parliamentary positions such as the Lord Speaker and Deputy Speakers. Life Peers filled 143 of these roles, 23 were filled by hereditary Peers and two by Bishops. About 18% of life Peers served in an official role compared with 26% of hereditary Peers. Despite making up only 12% of the total membership of the House, in the last Session hereditary Peers made up 20% of government posts and 26% of Deputy Speakers. My noble friend Lord Hamilton of Epsom rightly made the point that hereditary Peers as a group have contributed very significantly.

I will not read out my Excel spreadsheet, but do we really want, I ask rhetorically, to lose people such as my noble friends Lord Courtown and Lord Howe—who, as your Lordships have heard, has provided simply incredible service to the House? My noble friend Lord Strathclyde serves as chair of our Constitution Committee is a former Leader of the House and a former Chief Whip. He has served as a Minister over four departments. The noble Lord, Lord Ashton of Hyde, is a serving Deputy Speaker and Deputy Chair of Committees. His CV in the House reads for several pages.

I am not sufficiently brave to stand for much longer between your Lordships and your Lordships’ dinners, so I will not refer to every hereditary Peer, but I trust that noble Lords recognise the expertise, experience and dedication that those individuals have brought to our parliamentary system.

I make one final point. Some years ago, the House removed a number of Peers. The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, gave us the correct figure, which I think was 667. Yes, I was listening. I always do to the noble Lord, indeed to all noble Lords but especially the noble Lord, Lord Grocott on this topic. Does removing the final 88, or however many are left now, make any difference? Of course, the difference goes to the heart of this amendment. Those who remained some years ago were chosen wholly, or in the vast majority of cases, because they were contributing. That is why they remained. That is what this amendment seeks to do.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

They were actually elected; they were not chosen.

[Lord Wolfson of Tredegar (Con)]

Sorry, I was using “chosen” as a short form for “elected”. They were elected. My noble friend was here, and I was not, but when the elections took place, the electorate was keen to ensure that experience was not lost. That is exactly the point of this amendment—to retain those who have contributed, are contributing and will undoubtedly contribute more in the future.

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Collins of Highbury) (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful for this debate and to the noble Lord, Lord Soames of Fletching, for raising these issues. One thing that concerns me is that, although I do not think that anyone in this Chamber would deny the valuable work of individuals, particularly of the hereditary Peers, the problem with this debate is that it is about selecting people for congratulations on their hard work. That diminishes the work of some of the others. The noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, talked about the period from 2019 to 2024, when 143 of the officeholders that the noble Lord, Lord Soames, talked about were life Peers and 23 were hereditaries, so a huge amount of the work that kept this House going was undertaken by life Peers.

19:30

It is important to understand that those people who came into this House from other occupations have huge amounts of life experience. We have had a nurse come in today, and we have had doctors, solicitors, trade unionists—a whole range of people have come in as life Peers. I am not denying the experience of the hereditary Peers in the offices that they have held—in fact, I have sat on committees with many of them—but those offices have not always been held by hereditaries. With the list that the noble Lord points to, if someone served on the Front Bench of the Labour Opposition for 12 years their experience would not be considered appropriate for being maintained if they were hereditary, so I think there is something partisan about how these have been selected.

The simple fact is, though, having gone from a debate about the principle of hereditaries to one about specific contributions made by noble Lords, that no one can deny that the Government have a clear mandate to deliver this Bill through their manifesto commitment to remove the right of hereditary Peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. That means all hereditary Peers. That is what the manifesto commitment said. To concede this amendment would breach that manifesto commitment and retain dozens of Peers, which would severely undermine the intention of the Bill. The work of the House of Lords will not be diminished—

[Lord Mancroft (Con)]

The manifesto commitment, as the noble Lord has just quoted, is to “remove the right” of hereditary Peers to sit and vote in this House. That right was removed in 1999. We are discussing removing not the right but hereditary Peers from this House. The noble Lord quite rightly said that there is not a lot of difference in working between one hereditary Peer and another, or one hereditary Peer and a life Peer, but there is one crucial difference: life Peers cannot just be thrown out. We are just about to be thrown out.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

Of course, the principle was established in 1999, and we are now dealing with that remaining temporary arrangement that has gone on for 25 years or longer. That is the reality. No one can deny that that remaining element—that temporary arrangement—is specifically addressed in the Labour manifesto for the last general election. It specifically addressed it in the way that this Bill seeks to implement it, so there can be no doubt about that.

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

I am sorry to intervene on the noble Lord, but he is making much store about the manifesto, which also says that Peers who are over the age of 80 by the end of this Parliament should also be slung out. Does the noble Lord think that is really going to happen?

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

As my noble friend the Leader of the House has reminded me, she will be consulting on that and looking at ways for it to be implemented—she is already doing so, as she reminds me. The fact of the matter is that we have a clear commitment. The Government have a right to determine when and how they implement their commitments. The noble Lord knows that. I have heard speeches from him telling me that we should not push amendments because the democratic House has laid something down in the manifesto. He has made those points to me over the past 12 years, so this does not really wash with me.

The simple fact is that we established in 1999 that the hereditary principle would no longer apply. We put in temporary arrangements and we have now addressed that in our manifesto. Solutions were put forward in 1999. I say to the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, that his contribution is well known. Leaders know it. I certainly assume that the leader of his party knows the contribution that he has made, both outside and inside Parliament. Why would he not be considered worthy of a life peerage? I do not see why not. It is really important that we can establish a principle—

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

I am grateful for the kind things the noble Lord said to me, but the fact of the matter is that I do not know any of the leaders of my party. I do not know David Cameron—my noble friend Lord Cameron—or any of his successors. I simply will not be able to get a life peerage. They do not know me. I am not known. None of the special advisers know me. I am nowhere.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

I do not accept that for one moment. The noble Earl is well known. His contributions are well known and valued—he must not undersell himself. The important thing is that there was an opportunity in 1999, when people left this House because they were hereditary Peers, for some to be made life Peers. That certainly is the case in relation to this last act, contained in our manifesto, to ensure that the temporary arrangements agreed 25 years ago no longer continue. I do not think that people would understand this amendment breaching that commitment in the outside world, but it is wrong to—

[Lord Howard of Rising (Con)]

The noble Lord keeps mentioning the manifesto. Would he agree that, if I had a pound for every promise that had been in a manifesto from the Labour Party and the Conservative Party, I would be a billionaire?

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

The noble Lord must be happy that at least one manifesto commitment is being kept, and it is this one. We will deliver on it.

I conclude by saying that it is wrong to single out Peers for their contribution. All Peers have made a tremendous contribution to the work of this House, and no one is undermining that. However, this is a commitment that we have made to the electorate, and it is one that we will keep and deliver on.

[Lord Soames of Fletching (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Wolfson and the noble Lord, Lord Collins, for their contributions. I particularly express my thanks for another wonderful speech from my noble friend Lady Finn, who, to my mind, absolutely nailed it. I thank my noble friend Lord Blencathra in particular for his encyclopaedic knowledge of the committees and the very important points that he made. I am delighted to be party to the support for my noble friend Lord Astor’s job application and will do what I can to help. I say to my noble friend Lord Attlee to make himself known to my noble friend Lord Hamilton, who acts as a marriage agency in these matters, and would be delighted to introduce him to all the former leaders of my party—it may take some time.

This is an important matter and there is no point in pretending that, manifesto or no manifesto, we are not cutting out a great reservoir of expertise, knowledge, steadiness and experience, and the guardians of the traditions and principles of this House. There is no question about the argument, which is dead and buried—it is gone; it is going to happen—but there is a way to make it happen in a less aggressive and disagreeable manner. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 5 withdrawn.

House resumed. Committee to begin again not before 8.20 pm.