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

Debate between Earl of Erroll and Lord Trefgarne

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

[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.

[Lord Trefgarne]

My Lords, to refer to the point made in my noble friend Lord Northbrook’s amendment, the question of the Scottish Peers was of course addressed when what became the 1999 Act went through your Lordships’ House. As I recall, although it is now a long time ago, the Scottish Peers petitioned the House for exclusion from the provisions of the 1999 Act. They were represented by none other than the then Mr Richard Keen—now none other than my noble and learned friend Lord Keen of Elie himself. His petition did not succeed.

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

Debate between Earl of Erroll and Lord Trefgarne

Friday 23rd March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trefgarne]

My Lords, there are arrangements for declaring interests set out in Standing Orders. I do not think that what the noble Lord proposes is required by Standing Orders. If he would like to arrange for the Standing Orders to be changed, that, of course, would be another matter.

As I was saying, I believe there is a powerful argument for running all by-elections on an all-House basis, as those for the so-called officeholders are at present. Also, the list of candidates for hereditary Peer by-elections has, I think, only one female on it. I have a Private Member’s Bill waiting in the list behind the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, to change all that. I hope your Lordships will support it.

[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, this is all about the by-election process. If the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, would like to declare how he got here and what he did to get here, I would be very happy.

House of Lords Act 1999 (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Debate between Earl of Erroll and Lord Trefgarne

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 9th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trefgarne]

I do not intend to detain your Lordships. I am slightly reassured, and assisted, by the most recent remarks of my noble friend the Minister, when she said that this Bill does not have government support. Can she assure me, therefore, that the Bill will be objected to in the Commons by the Government, when and if it were to go there? I beg to move.

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I wish to make a quick point and not detain noble Lords. This series of amendments—from Amendment 5 onwards—is about trying to modify the electoral system to make it more sensible. That is something I do not object to at all. If one wants to have a debate about the hereditary Peers election system, one should probably at some point do something. I am not sure that this Bill is the right place to do it but there is an effort here to have a more sensible system. The reason I voted previously in the way that I did was because until we remove the power of the head of the Executive—in other words, the Prime Minister—to appoint everyone, either directly or indirectly, to the Chamber that is passing laws to control that process, I think we must resist any reform. If you change the powers of the Prime Minister to appoint people to the Lords, then I am with you and we can move forward as a democracy.

Equality (Titles) Bill [HL]

Debate between Earl of Erroll and Lord Trefgarne

Friday 6th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll]

Amendment 3 should be dealt with separately within the Bill because there are complications around it. My wife, Isabelle Astell, is English and is armigerous. She is the heir to the Astell place and to the Astell arms. As far as I know, she still bears her own arms and I hope she will pass them to one of our sons. It happens to be that way round but, given that she inherited them, they could presumably be passed to a daughter. This issue needs looking at and thinking about but the point is well taken. At a later stage of the Bill, perhaps something could be inserted to cover just arms, leaving it separate from peerages and baronetcies—things that have come from the Crown directly.

[Lord Trefgarne]

My Lords, I presume I am right in thinking that we are considering the amendment in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and not that in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Erroll.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Trefgarne]

My Lords, I am afraid that this amendment seems to suffer from some of the difficulties that we have been discussing; namely, the possibility that there is a hybrid element within it. There seem to be a number of possible areas of hybridity in this Bill, which makes the whole Bill very difficult to proceed with. The proper way to proceed with a Bill that might or might not be hybrid is for it to be referred to the Examiners. I hope that if the Bill proceeds further after today, that will happen—it will have to happen; it will not be up to me alone, of course.

Has the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, considered this question? It is an important one, which will have to be raised time and again if it cannot be clarified.

[The Earl of Erroll]

Is that the question of hybridity? I do not think I am qualified to speak on hybridity, which I seem to remember is the question of whether a Public Bill affects the rights of a subset of people differently from the general class of people. I do not think my amendment does that because I have spoken just in terms of general classes: hereditary peerage, baronetcy and officers of the Crown and state. Those are generic classes, with no special definitions, unlike the House of Lords Bill, which discriminated in favour of only English hereditary great offices of state and not Scottish ones.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Trefgarne]

My Lords, I will not extend this discussion too long but the problem is if you have a category that you describe as “hereditary titles” but some hereditary titles are not included, by definition you have a hybrid Bill.

[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, I think the answer is that this is about English. For the purposes of the Bill, one might restrict the term “hereditary titles”; for instance, a description of “the incumbent” does not mean to say the incumbent of every parish or the incumbent of everything. Some of these are generic words in English. The wording “hereditary titles” is used merely within the Bill: a restricted class of hereditary titles is used in the Bill and called “hereditary titles”. That does not mean we are trying to affect the terminology of hereditary titles for the English language as a whole outside.

I have to admit that I had hoped the first amendment would not have been negatived and therefore we would have taken all these away and sat down and got them logical as a whole in the Bill, with the help of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. However, that has not happened. Perhaps we can just clean it up on Report if necessary, but certainly Amendment 6 is needed in order to make sense of Amendment 2, so I suggest that we accept that one and if we then miss some of the other ones later, to make it logical we bring it back on Report and do a massive amount of tidying-up.

Certainly, Amendments 6, 28, 31—off the top of my head—35, 39 and 43 are all the same. You can work through them: they are the amendments in my name only. I had added my name to the alternative amendment in the names of the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, and the noble Lady, Lady Saltoun, because I wanted to show that I also supported those and that it was a question of which of them we should tidy up. However, now that that has been negated, I think that we have to drive forwards with mine for the moment and tidy it up on Report.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, since there is nobody else wishing to speak, I might as well speak to my Amendment 85, which is grouped with this lot. It seeks to leave out lines 13 and 14 on page 4. These say:

“Future holders of a hereditary peerage or hereditary title may not apply for a special remainder under this section”.

I wondered why we were blocking change for the future; is this just to be a one-off change and then it does not change again? Given the complexity of it all, I can see some families taking a while to get their heads around the whole thing and finding it difficult to work out. It may be that the incumbents are very old or do not want to talk about it, so I could not quite see why it had to be a one generation hit only. I may be reading the whole thing wrongly, but it struck me as I was reading it through. I will probably be told that it does not apply to any section that is useful, but I do not know. That is why I put down Amendment 85: to tease out why we are limiting it to the current generation.

[Lord Trefgarne]

My Lords, I will make a brief intervention. As my noble friend Lord Jopling mentioned a little while ago, all of this started last year when we changed the law with regard to the succession to the Crown. I remember saying at the end of the proceedings on that Bill that the Government had started the hare running as far as the hereditary peerage was concerned. I subsequently learned that a group of young ladies desirous of inheriting titles had formed themselves into a group called the Hares and had lunches every week. With a bit of luck, they will invite me to one of them shortly.

Be that as it may, this is a hugely complicated matter; surely the debates this afternoon have shown that, if nothing else. This amendment is par excellence a huge example of the complications to which I have referred.

House of Lords Reform Bill [HL]

Debate between Earl of Erroll and Lord Trefgarne

Friday 21st October 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, my comments apply to all the amendments to this clause and I will not make them again—although the amendments are not grouped. I entirely agree with all the comments about rehabilitation. That is the whole point. What if someone does something very silly when they are young—they get into a big fight and are locked up—but in their 20s they become very sensible people and pillars of the community? Why are we disbarring them for the rest of their lives? There is no rehabilitation provision in this clause, and that is obnoxious in a civilised and democratic society.

We could also easily fall foul of the EU and the Human Rights Act. There is a big argument at the moment about whether prisoners should be able to vote. Equally, I do not see why ex-prisoners who are rehabilitated should not contribute to the legislative process. They would probably give us insights that we would not otherwise have. Things can go on in certain institutions that we would not otherwise know about. That could be useful experience. I cannot see any reason for being so punitive as to have a lifetime ban. If we do not have an element of rehabilitation, the entire provision should be struck out.

Incidentally, if someone serves a long enough sentence, the term that they serve means that they are resident in the jail, so they will be given permanent leave of absence by reason of failure to attend the House under Clause 12(1). In the light of what we may decide about rehabilitation, that may need to be rewritten for someone who is here already.

[Lord Trefgarne]

I do not disagree in principle that in certain circumstances noble Lords convicted of an offence should be excluded from your Lordships' House—in serious cases, perhaps even permanently. However, there was a case quite recently when a noble Lord was convicted and sentenced to a rather long sentence which was rapidly reduced on appeal to a much shorter sentence. That noble Lord quickly returned to your Lordships' House. Where sentences change rapidly on appeal, that should act in the favour of the noble Lord concerned. What does my noble friend think about that?