House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Bethell Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support my noble friend, who is absolutely right. If I have got my figures correct this time, this Labour Government are abusing only four Lords Ministers, while the last Conservative Government, disgracefully, abused 11 Lords Ministers, by not paying them. That is simply not right.

Part of the problem is that Prime Ministers like to stuff their departments full of paid MPs and, of course, they have their PPSs as well to help them. The larger the payroll of MPs in the Commons, the less likely there is to be a rebellion. So it pays for any Government to have as many paid Members of Parliament as possible, and their PPSs.

About 35 years ago, as a junior Whip, I encountered a colleague who was very concerned that that he was not fully involved in policy development in his department. He said to his Secretary of State that he would like to be more fully involved. The Secretary of state told him, “You’re just a PUS. Your job is to reply to all the letters from people whingeing about not getting their bypass”. That rather put him in his place.

My noble friend is right: there has been a large expansion of the roles of PUSs and others. I personally think that that is wrong. There is also a view that Peers can afford to do it for free: “Let’s have as many paid MPs as we can within the ceiling of the allowance, and then get Peers to do it for free”. That is utterly wrong. Many of them cannot do it for free. Noble Lords in this House who have been doing it for free have been doing it out of a sense of duty, not because they can afford it.

On that note, I see my noble friend Lord Younger of Leckie in his place. He and my noble friend Earl Howe were Ministers for 30 or 40 years between them. I doubt if they got paid for two or three years of that. There were those who did job after job unpaid. It is not right that any Government, whether Conservative or Labour, should abuse Peers in that way.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, public service in the old days used to be quite a different thing. My forebear, Admiral Robert Barlow, used to be the superintendent of the Chatham Shipyards. He ran the shipyards through his personal account and took quite a lot of the Government’s money to build large houses for himself and his family. But we are now in the 21st century, and we should be doing things in a different way. We should not be relying on public servants to pocket cash. We should have a modern, meritocratic form of government. It is therefore completely and utterly wrong that we expect Ministers to work hard for no pay at all.

I pay tribute to the noble Lords, Lord Hanson of Flint, Lord Timpson, Lord Ponsonby, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and Lord Hendy, and the noble Baroness, Lady Gustafsson, all of whom are on the ministerial list with the word “unpaid” underneath their names. I was one of those Ministers. I had my name on the ministerial list with the word “unpaid” underneath it, and it was a complete humiliation. I found it completely undermining that it was thought in government that I was someone who was not worth the salary that others were paid. I was not worth the £81,000 that a Minister of State got; I was not worth the £71,000 that a PUS got. It hit me that I was not taken seriously in my department in that respect.

This is an old-fashioned system that we need to end. The 1975 Act was well-intentioned, but it is out of date. We should be supporting a meritocracy. I have seen in my own Government some of our finest people walk out of government because they could not afford to hold down the job. Instead, the people who could afford the job got the place. In this day and age, this is quite wrong. I know that the Leader is very keen not to amend the Bill, but this is such a ripe opportunity to undo a serious injustice in the way we do government. I beg the Leader to take this opportunity and accept this amendment.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I declare a personal interest, in that my son-in-law, my noble friend Lord Johnson of Lainston, acted as an unpaid Minister of State in the previous Government. I am grateful that he did not look to his father-in-law to subsidise him, and that he managed to survive without doing so. But the fact is that it is all to do with the number of paid jobs there are in any Government and the reluctance of government to extend that number of jobs. It is a hard decision, I accept, but one that I have always been assured government is prepared to take.

The sooner the Government get on with it, the better. As has been pointed out by my noble friends, it is a complete iniquity that people should be asked to serve for nothing. As has been pointed out by my noble friend Lord Bethell, people often give up the job that they are very good at doing, and somebody less adequate takes over because they are prepared to do it for nothing. This is all completely wrong, and we should change it as soon as possible.