House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Baroness Mallalieu Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 1st April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I very much endorse what the right reverend Prelate said in his—to use a religious word—irenic speech, which I hope will help. I think we all want to address this subject without prejudice and, if we do, I think we will see how strong this amendment is.

By the way, one of the objections to the hereditary Peers remaining in this House is that they are all men, but I notice that four noble Baronesses have put their name to this amendment. If it is good enough for them, it should be good enough for the rest of us.

In my career as an employer, I have sometimes had the misfortune to sack people, and to feel that I had to sack them. I am afraid that one sometimes gets into a situation when one is sacking people when, in order not to hurt their feelings, one keeps telling them how marvellous they are. Sometimes, reasonably enough, they ask, “Well, why are you sacking me, then?”, and it can be difficult to say. Usually, the reason is that actually you do not think they are very marvellous. This amendment teases out the real motive of the Government here. That is what we want to know. We are all agreed, and the Government themselves seem to be agreed, that the hereditary Peers are marvellous as individuals, which is all that is being proposed here—not the hereditary principle but the actual hereditary Peers. So what is it—why do they all have to go? If you press and press, the underlying thought that the Government cannot express is what people used to say in other prejudiced situations. They are saying, “We don’t like your sort”, and that is a bad way to make a law in this House.

[Baroness Mallalieu (Lab)]

My Lords, I have not spoken on the Bill before, but I hope the Committee will forgive me if I do so very briefly now. I do not support the actual wording of this amendment, but I so strongly support the underlying principle behind it, and most particularly what the right reverend Prelate said. Why are we still sitting here? Why are people not sitting down in a room, privately sorting this out?

This amendment would give the Whips the power to decide who they are to choose. It raises the question of the future administration of this House and the numbers after the hereditary Peers have gone, which they undoubtedly will under the Bill. Something far bigger has arisen from the way in which this Bill has been debated—when I have not been in the Chamber, I have been watching it on the screen—and a great many ideas, some of them new to me, have come up about what needs to be done. It is clear that it needs to be major. There needs to be major restructuring, because otherwise we are going to have the power to send people to this House concentrated in one pair of hands, and that cannot be right.

Those Peers currently in the House who wish to remain, who contribute regularly and who are able and willing to continue to do so should, in my view, be offered life peerages. I am told that the number would be nearer to 30 than 90, so we would reduce the size of the House to a degree by just that move. We all come to this House by myriad different routes; sometimes they are strange or unorthodox. We are proposing to remove just those who have come by heredity, and of course the Bill will go through. Very few people, other than Sir Michael Ellis in the other place, would argue that it is wrong to insist on a right to sit in this Parliament because of heredity.

House of Lords Reform

Baroness Mallalieu Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Mallalieu (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much appreciate the way in which the noble Baroness the Leader of the House introduced this debate in a conciliatory tone. Having been here during the 1990s, I remember the unpleasantness at that time, which I hope we can avoid. I will not weary the House with my view of what should happen to it, because there have been so many different views and very little agreement, except perhaps that we think on the whole that it is too large and, in my view, too full of prime ministerial appointments, and we need a much stronger and independent commission to make the appointments. I will just concentrate on the Bill that is being debated in the other place.

The Prime Minister has wisely, for now at least, backed off from some of the wider proposals made earlier. It is not to be an elected House, at any rate yet, nor is he going to cull the aged as yet. But the other place, ironically, has decided to start the process to remove those who, ironically, are the only elected Peers in this House.

The current by-election system is a farce, and it was cobbled together only as reform legislation became bogged down—as it always does—to get out of a hole temporarily and to stop more legislative time being spent on an issue which, as others have suggested, except for the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, is not really of interest to the electorate. It was never intended to go on as it has, or for so long. But—there is always a but—if a promise was made by a Labour Government that the deal would not be changed without proper reform, are we not bound, if we cannot honour it now, to produce a proposal which is acceptable to the remaining hereditary Peers and to the House? Ironically, as a group they are statistically harder-working than the rest of us life Peers. They give the time, they turn up, and they make important contributions to the running of this place and its committees. Some bring particular expertise which is in short supply in the House. Some have given invaluable service over many years, and others—some of the more recent younger Peers in particular—have already made outstanding contributions. Some of the 92 remaining are ready to go and have told me so, but surely we should be both honourable and generous. All should be offered life peerages. There are 40 or so Bills scheduled for this Session. Let us do that, get this Bill out of the way, and get on with governing.