House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

3rd reading
Monday 21st July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I am afraid I am going to break the melancholy mood that we have heard from previous speakers. I thought that this day, when this Bill do now pass, would never come. It is a Bill that removes the hereditary principle as a basis for membership of this House, which is now apparently supported by everyone all the way across the House, of all political persuasions. That is news to me, and I wish someone had told me that a long time ago—it would have saved me a lot of time and trouble over many years.

There is an idea that, somehow or other, this is being rushed and the House is being bounced, so perhaps I could be allowed a trip back a little way, to 1994, when a Bill to remove the hereditary principle from the House of Lords was introduced in the Commons by an obscure Labour Back-Bencher—modesty prevents me mentioning his name. For over three decades, at various levels, this reform, which we are undertaking today, has been gestating, if that is the right word. There is nothing surprising about the fact it has happened as it has; it has been debated ad nauseam, and that is why some of the speeches that we have heard even today surprise me.

I may fall out with my own side over this point, but this is, essentially, a conservative change to the constitution. It is incremental. It has taken place over many years. It was already done in substance, with no hurt to anyone, so far as I can discover, when over 600 hereditary Peers were removed from the House 25 years ago. I am not aware of any threat to our democracy that was occasioned by that change. I saw no amendments to the Bill—I was waiting for them—from some of the advocates of no change over the years, which they easily could have done, seeking to reinstate the 600. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, is generous enough to perhaps regret he did not do it.

All I can say is that, for 31 years, this has been coming around very gradually and far too slowly. I think many Members of the House can understand the frustration I have felt, but, at last, we are at this day when there will be no more ludicrous, farcical, unbelievable, absurd—I cannot find the adjectives, I have run out of them—hereditary Peers’ by-elections. The title is silly enough without going into any detail.

I hope that we can learn two lessons in particular from this whole episode. As I say, I rejoice that the Bill is at last going on the statute book. Of course, people will be missed. They are after general elections. People come and go in Parliaments. But there are two things we should have learned. One, I am afraid, the Lib Dems have not quite learned, and neither have many Conservatives from recent speeches that I have heard. It is this: if you want reform of the House of Lords and go about it on the basis of changing everything—if your objective is an all-singing, all-dancing reform of the Lords, the electoral system, powers and the relationship with the Commons—you will fail. It has failed repeatedly. How many times do we have to prove the obvious? Since 1911, all attempts to effect that kind of change have failed.

The only way to do it—I have been amazed by the number of leading Tories who have said, “Oh, we cannot do that: it is not a thoroughgoing reform of the Lords”—and to effect reform is the way that the Bill does. It is a long-considered, specifically focused change that is pretty well unarguable, as we have demonstrated from the abundant support that now exists for the end of the hereditary principle. If your Lordships want change, do it incrementally; do it a bit at a time, as this Select Committee is, in essence, proposing.

I tried in vain to make changes, over four Private Members’ Bills, numerous debates, interventions and the like. We could have made the kinds of changes that my simple two-clause Bills to end the by-elections offered, on our own, were it not for the hostility of a small number of unreformable Conservatives. I cannot resist saying that, at one point, one of the people opposing a Bill of mine said that he did not like the fact that the Bill was being considered because he was a proper Conservative and he did not like change; in fact, he was not too keen on the 1832 Reform Act. That was a step too far for the most conservative, in those times. The second lesson is to recognise that, if we do not make simple, straightforward, unarguable changes ourselves, then other people will do it for us. That is what will happen.

I strongly recommend that, if we do nothing else as a result of this—about which I am not in the least bit sombre—we learn those two lessons: do it a bit at a time and do it before anyone else does it for you. With that, it is just to say how thrilled I am to say, though not to move, that this Bill do now pass.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I feel impelled to make just a very brief point. I very much support the idea of a Select Committee to look at the future of the House but, before any steps are taken to look at voting and the right to elect Peers, will the Select Committee discuss with the Commons how the Commons sees it and what sort of second Chamber there will be if Peers are elected and have rights that we do not have at the moment?

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I promise not to give as long a speech as my noble friend Lord Grocott. I am speaking on this Bill for the first time, deliberately, having not voted. I think I am the only person in the House who is a card-carrying geneticist. I have been through this during previous Bills, when I made fun of some of the people in the Chamber.

I deeply regret to see friends leaving us, mostly from the Benches opposite but from other places as well. I do not want to get into the reasons for that but to suggest one lesson that we might learn from this. We are in a society that massively respects DNA, heredity and inbuilt virtues, talent and so on. We have to recognise that, in some ways, the lesson from this Bill is a lesson for the Labour Party. The Labour Party has to understand that we cannot change our genes—irrespective of what people might be saying in the health service at the moment—but we have to change our environment. Although this may not be important at the moment, it certainly applies to the whole of our legislation, the whole of Parliament, the whole of our law. The message must surely be that, irrespective of how we have dealt with the hereditary peerage, we need to provide a better environment.