House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Desai

Committee stage
Wednesday 12th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (CB)]

My Lords, there are many dimensions in which participation can be measured. We have two problems. As the noble Lord, Lord Swire, said, we do not know the quality of the participation but we know the quantity. These different dimensions are sort of related.

I was a statistician all my life—not a good one, but I was one. There are techniques to combine those dimensions in one single measure, and I urge the Government and the people in charge to use them. It is called principal component analysis—noble Lords can ask me, and I can find out more about it for them. That will give you a more or less objective way of measuring different people’s performance across a number of dimensions. This has been done many times; it is reliable. There is no doubt that quality is difficult to measure, but quantity can be measured, and I urge the decision-makers to use this to be able to sort out who is in and who is out. That would be helpful.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, given the comments of the noble Lords, Lord Grocott and Lord Swire, I will keep my comments short. Although I am reading from a piece of paper, I am reading from my scribbles, not a full text. I hope that is all right. I co-signed Amendment 26 from the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra. I do not think he needed any real encouragement, but I think it is very sensible. In fact, Amendment 63 from the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, has real value. If he took that to a vote, I would probably support it. I absolutely hate Amendment 28 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay. It might as well say, in brackets afterwards, “Kick the Greens out”.

I suggest that we could have got around this debate—all these days, hours and repetitions. We could have just made all the hereditaries life Peers, which would have removed all this. I understand that there is an issue about kicking them out but, personally, I think we will miss them. Making them all life Peers would have just shut them up, and we would be free to go and have an early supper.