House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill [HL]

Debate between Earl of Erroll and Lord Northbrook

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 7th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Northbrook]

That is beyond the terms of my amendment.

The Peerage Act 1963 gave all hereditary Peers of Scotland the right to sit in the House of Lords, instead of requiring them to elect 16 of their number, as had been the case since the union with Scotland in 1707. But no similar measure was introduced for the Peers of Ireland.

We move on to 1965. A number of Irish Peers, led by the Earl of Antrim, petitioned the House of Lords for recognition of their rights to elect 28 representative Peers to sit in the House of Lords. This was referred to our Committee for Privileges. The committee concluded that as there was no longer one Ireland, the Act of Union 1800 provision for 28 representative Peers no longer applied. However, Lord Wilberforce, dissenting in part, made a crucial point. He said as follows: because the office of Lord Chancellor of Ireland, as well as other offices such as the Clerk of the Crown in Parliament, which enabled the election of Irish representative Peers, had been abolished in 1922, it made it impossible to follow the procedures laid down in the Act of Union 1800 for a replacement when one of them died.

The Committee for Privileges’ verdict, in my layman’s view, is unsatisfactory because it failed to recognise, first, that the Irish representative Peers represented the Peers of Ireland and not Ireland as a whole. As a result, any change in Ireland was irrelevant. It also ignored the continued existence of part of Ireland—Northern Ireland—in the United Kingdom. Lord Wilberforce also expressed doubts that an Act of such constitutional importance as the Act of Union with Ireland could be repealed by implication or obsolescence.

Returning to the Scottish peerage, I cannot fail to mention the challenge of the House of Lords Act 1999, which stated that there should be 16 Scottish hereditary Peers in perpetuity in the House of Lords and that their abolition was contrary to Article 22 of the Treaty of Union between England and Scotland.

This is therefore an excellent opportunity to redress the scarcity of elected hereditary Northern Ireland Peers and maintain the number of elected Scottish hereditary Peers.

[The Earl of Erroll]

I wish to say—very quickly, because we have just had a history lecture—that, under the Peerage Act 1963, hereditary Peeresses, Peers in their own right, could sit for the first time in the House of Lords. My mother was one of the 16 elected Scottish representative Peers to sit, and one of the first five hereditary Peeresses to sit in the House of Lords—so we did get a bit of female representation. The answer to the Wales question is that of course it was not a kingdom. The issue of the Scots Peers was around the merging of two kingdoms under a Scottish king.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Northbrook]

My Lords, as far as I am aware, this is a new amendment which has not been moved before. It suggests that any excepted person under the House of Lords Act would, once the Burns commission report has been adopted, remain a Member of the House for a fixed term of 15 years, as other Members will be after the Burns report is implemented. However, until the legislation changes, a by-election could still be held at the end of 15 years after the first hereditary Peer had been elected. I beg to move.

[The Earl of Erroll]

This amendment sounds quite sensible as it brings us into line with the spirit of the Burns report.