King’s Speech

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall focus on Lords reform. I congratulate the Government on avoiding the temptation to embark on wholesale reform of the Lords and instead approaching the issue on the basis of incremental change. I also congratulate the Labour Government on completing the promise of the 1997 Labour Government, who said that they would remove the hereditary principle as a qualification for membership of the legislature.

Section 1 of the 1999 Act states:

“No-one shall be a member of the House of Lords by virtue of a hereditary peerage”.


During the passage of the Act, as many in this House know and as described well recently by the Marquess of Salisbury, the Lords threatened to disrupt the Labour Government’s whole legislative programme and forced them to retain 90 hereditary Peers, together with an undertaking that any vacancies would be filled by by-elections in which only hereditary Peers could stand, and in which, for the most part, only hereditary Peers could vote. As it has turned out, all 92 are men.

I have tried in vain over eight years, and with four identical Private Member’s Bills, to scrap this ridiculous procedure. All my efforts, despite having the support of the overwhelming majority of the House, were in vain. The Bills were filibustered by half a dozen Peers and blocked by the Tory Government. Had I been listened to back in 2016, there would now be 27 fewer hereditary Peers, and the whole issue would have been well on the way to being resolved.

I understand, of course, the upset that many will feel, in all parts of the House, about 90 colleagues facing the prospect of ending their membership of Parliament. I certainly understand it; it happened to me. In my case it was at 3 am, announced by the returning officer and received in some parts of the hall with great rejoicing. But times change in any parliamentary system, and membership of Parliament carries no guarantee of permanence, as the 250-odd Members who lost their seats three weeks ago will testify.

When the Bill comes to the Lords, I hope we will recognise the context in which it will be presented. First, the Government have a clear and specific manifesto commitment to remove the right of hereditary Peers to sit and vote in this House. Secondly, that manifesto commitment was contained in the King’s Speech as a first Session legislative promise. Thirdly, when it comes to us, it will have been passed by the Commons with a parliamentary majority probably in excess of 200. No Bill could come to this House with greater weight and authority behind it.

We of course have a constitutional duty to scrutinise the Bill, but we also have a constitutional and democratic duty to ensure that this Labour Government, with their commitment on hereditary Peers, are not subject to the same treatment by the Lords as their predecessors were in 1999.

I make one final plea on this subject to the usual channels. The House may not have noticed that, in a quirk of fate and timing, in the same week that the King’s Speech announced the planned ending of the right of hereditary Peers to sit and vote here, it has become apparent, would you believe, that two more by-elections are pending. Our Standing Orders require that these by-elections, one Conservative and the other Cross Bench, must take place within three months. The electorate for the Conservatives consists of 46 hereditary Peers, all men, and for the Cross Benches it is 33, also all men.

I appeal to the Front Benches: surely it would be pure farce to allow these by-elections to take place at the same time that a Bill was passing through Parliament that would scrap them once and for all. To go ahead would be a gift to critics of this House, as well as providing a spectacle whereby someone was introduced as a new Peer, only to be removed in a matter of weeks.

There is a simple solution, which is to suspend the Standing Order that governs these by-elections, and there is a recent precedent when the then Leader, the noble Baroness, Lady Evans of Bowes Park, on 23 March 2020 successfully moved a Motion to do just that. I appeal to the usual channels to spare the House and any potential candidate the risible prospect of these by-elections going ahead by proposing the appropriate Motion before the Summer Recess.

In conclusion, I reiterate my support for the Government’s approach to Lords reform, which avoids the black hole of a grandiose comprehensive reform—which all precedents tell us would end in time-consuming failure. I hope that during the course of this Parliament, there will be further incremental reform to deal with the size of the House. I particularly welcome the Bill on the hereditaries; I often wondered whether it would ever happen in my lifetime. It will now take place as an early Act of the current Labour Government, and in so doing complete after 25 years the work of the previous one.