House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Baroness Smith of Llanfaes and Lord Wrottesley

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 97, which I have signed, in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Devon. The amendment invites consideration of the suitability of the name “House of Lords” after the removal of the hereditary Peers from Parliament. “Lords” is a word associated with aristocracy and a class-based society that stems from our feudal system. The name of this House and the use of titles bridges a further gap between citizens and Parliament.

If we are removing the rights of hereditary Peers to sit in the House—this Bill does that, and I support doing so—the name of the second Chamber should reflect that. When further reform takes place, the name of the second Chamber should also reflect the make-up and composition of that Chamber. As of March 2025, the Inter-Parliamentary Union database contained details of 187 active parliaments worldwide, 81 of them being bicameral. Names of second Chambers worldwide include “Senate”, “National Council”, “House of Councillors”, “National Council of Regions and Districts”—and then us, the “House of Lords”. “Senate” is the most popular, with 54 countries choosing that name for their second Chamber. The Labour Party’s own work in the past favoured the name “The Council of Regions and Nations”.

The name “House of Lords” is also discriminatory with regard to gender. Although the name does not reflect the make-up of the Chamber, with women being allowed to be Peers, it feeds into a narrative that places of power are reserved for men—specifically, men of important social status. This comes back to my other argument about achieving further reform that would give people from every kind of background and walk of life the opportunity to be seated in a second Chamber. While renaming alone would not address deeper concerns about democratic legitimacy and accountability, it could serve as a symbolic and meaningful step towards broader constitutional reform. That is why I urge the House to support Amendment 97.

[Lord Wrottesley (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 62 in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas. I shall make a few comments in support of his amendment, and I am grateful to him for tabling it. I declare an interest: I am an excepted—or, as the noble Earl, Lord Devon, calls us, elected—hereditary.

I shall build on the analysis that my noble friend Lord Blencathra presented earlier in Committee. As I mentioned at Second Reading, I feel that the issue of the composition of this House needs serious consideration. Few, I expect, would disagree, but what has always troubled me in our discussions is that far too often, measures in the Bill may have been drafted and defended based on partisan grounds, not principle.

I believe that this House deserves better. That is why I wholeheartedly support a review of the composition of the House of Lords. My understanding, based on what the Leader of the House has said during the passage of the Bill thus far, is that the Labour Party believes that, currently, it is not represented fairly in this House. I would like to look at the numbers to see whether the Labour Party’s claim about the House being weighted against it stands up to scrutiny. At Second Reading, I suggested that the House’s composition should be based on a weighted average of the composition of the parties in the other place over 25 years, which is the period I suggested as a term limit and is also in line with what is widely recognised as a generation. Perhaps a review, as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, suggests, could consider this as a metric.

Some simple maths: since the Life Peerages Act 1958, the Conservatives have been in government for 42 years, and Labour for 24 years, which breaks down as 64% and 36% respectively. Over the same period, the parties appointed 924 and 745 Peers respectively—incidentally, 374 were appointed by Sir Tony Blair, after the hereditary principle was done away with—which breaks down as 55% and 45%. So in fact, Labour Governments have appointed far more Peers, proportionately, in their years in power.

Even if we use the current composition of the House, the Conservatives hold 34% of the seats, and when the hereditaries are expelled this will drop to 31%. Meanwhile, the proportion of seats held by Labour will rise from 25% to 28%. Some noble Lords opposite may consider many of the Cross-Benchers to be conservative with a small “c”, but the reality is that they are very much of an independent mind. You just have to ask the last Government, who rarely won votes when, more often than not, the Cross-Benchers were massed against them. Under these proposals the proportion of Cross-Benchers will also drop slightly, from 22% to 20%.

Through this analysis, which is pretty simple maths, really, under current plans the Labour Party is with one hand demanding balance and with the other tipping the scales. By expelling the hereditaries, this Labour Government will be redressing the balance—in their favour. But this does not seem like rebalancing; it seems more like gerrymandering, as we have heard before in Committee. By getting rid of 85 Peers who are in opposition to them—all the non-Labour hereditary Peers—they will once again skew the numbers even further in their direction, and who is to say they will not take other measures to achieve more? Far from modernising and improving our institution, this would seem little more than a way to consolidate power. It is the constitutional equivalent of bulldozing down one of the walls in our great Chamber and insisting that the roof will stay up. What wall, what group of Peers, will be demolished next under this Labour Government’s plans? That is the main issue here: no one really knows what is coming next. No one will tell us.

My noble friend Lord Lucas’s amendment is a sound one: let us please carefully review who is here, who will remain here and whom they represent. We must be sure that this evolution—maybe the revolution the Labour Government speak of—in our House and our democracy does not descend, as I fear it might, into an erosion of our great House. We must protect this place from plans which I believe are designed deliberately to diminish this place, a place that has supported our democracy for centuries.

With all that is going on in the world today, we must not let any Government, now or in future, use the guise of constitutional reform or modernisation to remove dissenting voices. We know it is too late for all, or the majority, of us hereditary Peers—to paraphrase Lord Byron, I am not long for this House. But I believe that a proper review by those who understand this place could offer some protection against what seems to be the Labour Party’s modus operandi, which is— I hate to say this, having just paraphrased one of our greatest poets, but, to quote a Taylor Swift song—“Death By A Thousand Cuts”.