House of Lords Reform

Baroness Goldie Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

My Lords, what a pleasure to follow such a feisty and articulate octogenarian as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. May he continue to entertain us for many years to come. I shall try to reduce this contribution to simple components: purpose, presence, pragmatism.

The purpose of this House is to scrutinise legislation from the other place, improve it—sadly, a frequent requirement—and, by our Chamber and committee activity, better inform public debate. By any assessment, we discharge that responsibility very well. The presence within this House of political parties, Cross-Benchers, Bishops and a number of non-affiliated Peers reflects an impressive array of experience, talent and expertise. That explains without need for further enlargement why we discharge our responsibilities so effectively. To be fair, the noble Baroness the Leader of the House acknowledged that. Pragmatism largely explains how we work. We make bad law good and good law better. The raucous exchanges familiar to elected Chambers are mercifully mostly absent from this one. By contrast, there is a discernible and collaborative desire to analyse and get to the heart of any issue, legislative or otherwise, and a House with the aggregate talent to be able to do that. I accept that to many onlookers the wonder is that this works at all, but it does, and those of us who attend regularly know that.

Pragmatism, I suggest, should be the overriding consideration in any attempt to reform this House. I see the House of Lords like an intricate tapestry. How many of us spotting a thread hanging down from a jacket or pair of trousers have tugged at it to find that the entire hem falls down or the seam falls apart, or have pulled an annoying thread sticking out of a button only to lose the button altogether? Let me make two general observations. If in the main this House functions satisfactorily, we should be cautious about embarking on change. That is not advocating for no change at all—very far from it—but rather urging clear analysis and identification of what the problems are before we try to solve them.

Secondly, if after such analysis change is considered necessary, it must be approached in a holistic manner with regard to how the House operates as a whole. If we do not do that, we neither understand the threads we are pulling out nor what the unintended consequences may be. What is unworkable is tinkering with the structure, removing a bit here and there, and hoping that the rest will somehow stumble along. The noble Baroness the Leader of the House calls that incremental, but I call it disjointed.

The Government are committed to addressing the issue of hereditary Peers in this House, and in their manifesto they also deployed ageism, opining that by the age of 80 you are past it and should get out. That is discrimination. We have just seen at first hand the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, and there are sterling contributions made by Peers in their 80s whose experience is relevant, whose expertise informs and whose acuity is breathtaking. The proposal also drives a cart and horse through female representation in this House. I hope that the Government have begun to see the light, having recently appointed some imminent or actual octogenarians of their own, and they are very welcome. I would like to think that I am still good for a few years to go.

[Noble Lords]

Hear, hear.

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

Thank you, my Lords. What the Government’s ageism experiment has demonstrated is that a disjointed approach to reform does not work. On the principle of hereditary Peers, we hit the same buffers. It is difficult to argue for the retention of such a system in a 21st-century democracy, but what is not workable is taking a machete to the hereditaries, culling 88 Peers from the membership of this House and expecting it still to be able to do its job. That is a constitutional onslaught. If at a stroke we lose these 88 Peers, who reflect a welcome age span, a geographical spread and diversity of experience and expertise, how do the Government expect proper scrutiny of legislation, adequate manning of committees, not to mention support for the Lord Speaker and his department and servicing the Woolsack? At present, our proceedings are not just enhanced by the hereditaries; the hereditaries are critical to getting the business done. That void cannot be filled by prime ministerial appointments. That takes the constitutional unacceptable to the constitutional repugnant.

This all goes much deeper than disquiet about the hereditary principle. It strikes at the heart of our British constitutional governance, our distinct and different role from the elected House and the largely unwritten but workable parliamentary equilibrium which has evolved over decades. I urge the Government to reflect very carefully before they start pulling out individual threads of the intricate tapestry. Intelligent change requires reflection, consultation, understanding of the implications of change and the wisdom of seeking consensus.