House of Lords Appointments Commission

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Monday 6th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, in my priceless two minutes I will raise a couple of issues that I believe any statutory appointments commission would need to address. The first is the question of political balance. Since the House of Lords Act 1999, which removed most of the hereditaries, it has always been assumed that the governing party should never have an overall majority of those taking a party Whip. There was never any possibility of the last Labour Government dominating politics in the Lords. Indeed, for eight of Labour’s 13 years in office, the Conservative Opposition had more Members than the Labour Government. Even at its highest point in 2010, the number of Labour Peers was 235 and the number of Tories was 214. How different things are today, after 11 years of Tory Government. There are now 263 Tories and just 173 Members of the Labour Opposition.

Perhaps even more significant is the balance between the Government’s supporters on the one hand and the main opposition parties on the other. Today, for the first time since the 1999 Act, the Conservative Party in the Lords has a majority over Labour and the Liberal Democrats combined—something no one thought was ever likely to happen under any Government. That is why I believe that any appointments commission should have a remit to report on the effects of its decisions on the political balance in the House—not to make those decisions, but to report on their effect.

Very briefly, I cannot make reference to a possible statutory appointments commission without mentioning its impact on the system of by-elections for hereditary Peers. The noble Lord, Lord Norton, in his excellent Bill says that

“the Commission must have regard to the diversity of the United Kingdom population.”

I, of course, want the by-elections to end, but any statutory appointments commission must surely apply that principle of diversity to the hereditaries as well as to the life Peers. I remind the House that the 92 hereditaries include no women and no ethnic minorities—and that, to put the icing on the cake, 50% of the hereditaries elected under the by-election system went to Eton. So I would require the Appointments Commission to report on the extent to which the register of hereditary Peers meets the requirement of having regard to the diversity of the United Kingdom—and all I can say is good luck in doing that.