House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Lord Vaizey of Didcot

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Laing of Elderslie (Con)]

I thank my honourable—I am sorry, he is not my honourable friend; he has stopped being honourable. I thank my noble friend for giving way. I was trying to be brief in my initial remarks, so I did not go into great detail. This amendment would not apply to all Ministers; it would simply give the Prime Minister the ability to appoint some Ministers on a temporary basis. It would not oblige the Prime Minister to make all ministerial appointments to this House on a temporary basis. I hope that reassures my noble friend.

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

The noble Baroness was effectively my first employer, when I was 21 years old, and we have this telepathic understanding: she has seamlessly introduced the main point I wish to make.

I want to turn this round and pick up precisely on what the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, was saying. Moving to a system where the Government of the day could appoint temporary Ministers to this place would give the Prime Minister and the Government a huge amount of flexibility to fill government posts with genuine experts with, effectively, executive ministerial power to carry out their functions. There must be a small, niggling doubt when a Prime Minister is filling positions. Even with the very distinguished people appointed in recent months, he—and it is “he” in this case—must be thinking, “Am I appointing too many people to fill these Benches; people who are going be here for the rest of their lives?” If he had the freedom, for example, to appoint 12 or 13 experts in the field to fill specific ministerial roles, knowing that at the end of those roles they will leave this House, that would sit better with public opinion and give him more freedom. It would serve the country better if he were able to appoint such experts to carry out these functions—by definition, almost certainly as junior Ministers—and help the Government of the day. That is a very powerful argument.

As I say, there would be discretion to convert those Ministers into life peers at the end. In fact, I had not considered the question of whether they should have a peerage when they enter this House. My conclusion is that they should not. They should be called MILs—Ministers in the Lords—and then they can aspire, based on their service as Ministers and their contribution to the House, to a peerage after they have served as Ministers here.

Finally, I turn to the question, raised by one of my noble friends, of how many people would be attracted to the unpaid role of a Minister in the Lords. First, it does not necessarily need to be unpaid. It is a matter for the Government of the day as to whether they have the courage to face down public opinion and expand the number of paid ministerial positions. But this House should certainly seriously consider giving the Prime Minister and the Government of the day the freedom to appoint temporary MILs to help service its business.