Public Sector Productivity

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe for introducing the debate and I am acutely conscious of the expertise and experience that others have brought to bear.

I will begin with a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, about the difficulty of measuring productivity. Of course, that is absolutely true, but as a rough guide for a ballpark figure I looked at what the OBR had to say. It produced a report in 2022, which found that in the private sector productivity was back to 1.6% above where it had been on the eve of the pandemic, but in the public sector it was still down by 7.4%. If we carry on losing productivity in the public sector at this rate, we will suffer a further 20% decline within a decade, which the Centre for Economics and Business Research says would be the equivalent of £73 billion per year of extra spending. Think for a second about that: £73 billion per year. Think of the rows we have in this Chamber about the relatively trivial sums involved in the winter fuel payments or VAT on school fees.

Why is that happening? There are structural reasons why there is greater productivity when there is a profit motive; I think we all accept that. But why is the gap widening? What has changed recently? I think my noble friend Lord Patten was exactly on the button. About a year after the pandemic, when everything was supposed to have got back to normal and when my right honourable friend Jacob Rees-Mogg was a Minister, he was presented with a fait accompli by his officials. They said that he absolutely had to sign the lease on a building for a government agency or an arm’s-length agency in central London. He said, “Why do they need to be in this expensive place?” and they said, “Oh it is absolutely vital, Minister. It is actually walking distance from here: let’s go and have a look”. Of course, he found that there was nobody there. Hence, he began the campaign of dropping his—I thought rather polite—calling cards saying, “Sorry you weren’t at work”, which of course created a furious backlash from the Civil Service trade unions. But there are jobs that require you to be there.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, I used to work in newspapers. In fact, for a while I worked for the noble Baroness. I am sure she will agree that there were jobs, even then, long before the pandemic, that obviously could have been done from home. If you are doing the sudoku or writing the pets column or something, there is absolutely no reason to come into the office. It struck me even 20 years ago as slightly wasteful that people were doing that. But, equally, there were an awful lot of jobs, particularly the editorial jobs, where you really had to be there talking to people. How many of the civil servants absent from their desks are in the second category? I think there are rather a lot.

I think we can all see the impact on productivity. I was certainly struck by it when I walked around the cavernous, echoing and rather beautiful corridors of the Old Admiralty Building when I was involved with the Department for Business and Trade. It is extraordinary how immediately the impact is felt of people not being there for meetings, not talking about things and not sparking ideas off each other in the fallow times.

The point I really want to make—I will make it very briefly in deference to the Minister’s throat—is that this is a choice. There are problems the Government cannot avoid, such as the ageing population and the changing ratio of workers to pensioners, but this is a choice. You can give large pay rises to public sector workers, but you are then left with less money to grow the rest of the economy. What you cannot do is keep giving these pay rises at the same time as increasing their numbers.

There were two very large increases in the Civil Service that both had a temporary and contingent cause. One was the repatriations of powers after Brexit, which required people to do them at home because they were no longer being done in Brussels. The other was the pandemic, which required more people to be brought in for testing and for vaccination and so on. Both of those bumps are now in the rear-view mirror. Under the plans of the previous Government, numbers were supposed to fall back towards where they had been and there was a scheduled loss of 66,000 personnel. That was quietly reversed as almost the first thing the new Government did.

There was a time when the arguments were about economics and taking from the haves to give to the have-nots. What we cannot have is simply an argument about taking from the private sector to give to the public. Private sector workers already have worse pension deals. They are already required to be in the office more and they already work longer hours. We cannot keep squeezing the revenue-generating bits of the economy to fund increases in the revenue-consuming bit.

Conversion Therapy Prohibition (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) Bill [HL]

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Friday 9th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, to what problem is this specific Bill a remedy? We already have strong and effective laws against quackery and mis-selling, against coercion and control, and, of course, against harassment and physical abuse. Some are ancient common-law guarantees, some legislative. The Public Order Act 1986 defines harassment in a way that I think would cover the concerns raised by most of the supporters of the legislation in this debate. The Serious Crimes Act 2015 deals with coercion and control within families. So I am bound to ask: is this Bill a proportionate remedy to an identified problem or a way of sending a signal? Is it a form of declaratory legislation? If it is the latter, it opens the door to all manner of unintended consequences.

Given that we live in an age when people often struggle to distinguish general principles from the specific case, I ought to add that I have always been something of an outlier in pushing for gay equality. When the noble Lord, Lord Moore of Etchingham, was against Section 28, I was a teenager and strongly in favour of it. In fact, I was in favour even when it started life as Section 27, which some will remember before it was amended in legislation. I then went on in the 1990s—again very unusually as a Conservative—to be an outlying supporter of civil partnerships and the equalisation of the age of consent.

At that time I was, in fact, working for the noble Lord, Lord Moore of Etchingham. I was a leader writer at the Daily Telegraph. He is the politest and most civil of men so he did not show any sign that he thought that I was a complete lunatic but, courteous as he was, I could tell that he thought I was quite an extremist on the subject. None the less, I stand by what I thought then, partly because equality before the law is an important principle but mainly because privacy, the recognition of a private space and the dignity of individuals is a key principle, whether we are talking about gay people or about people with religious convictions. What they do is their business unless it becomes harassment or coercion of somebody else.

The noble Baroness, Lady Burt, introduced this Bill by saying that we do not want to trample on free speech but we do want to prevent these abuses. That, it seems to me, is exactly where the law stands now. So, before rushing to legislate further, we need to ask: have we exhausted every existing remedy? We heard some lurid stories from the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, about electric shock therapy and so on. I have never heard any suggestion that that is happening in this country. Are we legislating against something that does not happen in order to send a signal? If we are, that is almost a definition of laws that have unintended consequences.

Legislation should be our last resort, not our first. As Tacitus put it:

“Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges”;


that is, “The more rotten the state, the more laws it passes”. I believe, like our former Member, the third Viscount Falkland, that

“if it is not necessary to legislate, it is necessary not to legislate”.

Elgin Marbles

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, if there were a way of returning the marbles to the Parthenon itself, there would be no debate. It would have happened years ago. What Byron called the “wanton and useless defacement” would have been undone. Who could resist seeing those magnificent artefacts in their proper place—their solidity combined with this ethereal feel of their bare, bleached, marmoreal splendour; their realism, the flowing robes and flared horses’ nostrils none the less combining with this idealised beauty? But the argument is about moving them from one museum to another, and therefore it seems that this debate turns on what a museum is for. The clue is in the etymology—museums are there to channel the Muses, to elevate and ennoble the condition of visitors. The most pertinent questions to ask, with the display of any artefacts, are: where will they best be looked after? Where will they be most accessible to specialists, scholars and students? Where will people most appreciate their cultural impact? Where will the greatest number of people get to see them?

I think that I am right in saying the British Museum was the first public institution to use “British” in its title, yet it never saw its aspiration as being national. It always saw its role as being encyclopaedic—a collection of curios from every continent. This is more unusual than you might think; if you go to the museums in Copenhagen, Budapest or Prague you will find museums that tell the story of a particular nation and people. If you go to the museums in Washington DC you find even more ethnic particularism—a Chinese American Museum, an African American museum, a Museum of the American Indian and so on—but the British Museum never saw itself in those terms. Confident, at least in the 18th century in its foundation, it saw itself as a repository for the greatest works of mankind. Neil MacGregor, the museum’s director between 2002 and 2015, put it like this:

“The museum remains a unique repository for the achievements of human endeavour, and there is no culture, past or present, that is not represented within its walls. It is truly the memory of mankind”.


What overrides that claim? The main argument that one hears, and we have heard it in the debate now, is one of, if you like, a communal cultural claim—“We live in a particular area and therefore we have a right”. That is a notion that is difficult to reconcile with ownership and contract. Even if it were true—and I actually do not think that we are remotely connected to whatever Neanderthal people made the hand-axe that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, was talking about; there was an ice age in between and the place was completely depopulated—I have no idea whether the Greeks of today are related to the Greeks of the time of the Parthenon. We are told by Constantine Porphyrogenitus that there was massive demographic displacement in the meantime, but even if they are—even if the Greek Prime Minister could claim personal lineal descent from Phidias—so what? If the noble Baroness’s great-grandmother had bought her house from mine I would not be able to turf her out because of some prior claim, because contract and ownership count for something.

I happen to agree with what my noble friend Lord Lexden quoted Professor Mary Beard as saying—that if you want to play the game of identity politics, then 200 years of being debated in this Chamber and revered, argued over, sketched and painted in this country also establishes some claim—but I do not think that is really the relevant criterion. The relevant criterion is one of ownership and if, as my noble friend Lord Frost says, these are the foundation of western art, then free contract is surely the foundation of western civilisation.

Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland: Follow-up Report (European Affairs Committee)

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Monday 11th September 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, as always, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme, and his staff for these reports. I could give my whole five minutes over entirely to paeans and panegyrics, to odes and oratorios, to acclamations and encomiums, but I have done it before, as have the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, and the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, so shall we just take it all as read? It is a great achievement to have balanced the orange/green, remain/leave and left/right tensions three-dimensionally.

I agree with the thrust of the report’s conclusion: the Windsor Framework makes a few things a bit better and in a smaller number of areas it makes things slightly worse than the status quo plus the grace periods. The report is really an example of the importance of compromise, cool-headed temperance and the ability to talk things through in detail. I hope the Grand Committee will forgive me if I extend that logic, especially given the timing of the reconciliation Bill that we have just debated, and look at what is happening in the Province in terms of compromise.

One of the rather beautiful and underreported facts during the Troubles was the extent to which both communities consistently rejected violence. There was a Northern Ireland Life and Times survey in 1998, at the time of the Belfast agreement, and 70% of people who supported a united Ireland had no sympathy with physical force terrorism; only 8% supported it. Come forward one generation and 69% of people in that community now agree with Michelle O’Neill when she says that there was no alternative to IRA violence. Of course, this is partly just the passage of time, the sanitising effect of not being there with the funerals and the body parts and the physical destruction, but it also says something alarming about the readiness to compromise, to let the other side feel that they can live with something, on which all our deliberations, the amended Windsor Framework and the Belfast agreement itself rest.

Do not get me wrong: there has been immense progress in those 25 years—I do not think anyone will disagree with that—such as the Belfast dockyards and the Titanic quarter. The Corn Market, which I remember as a dingy and dangerous place, is now as beautiful a piece of street architecture as you will find anywhere in these islands. The sectarian murals have become tourist attractions. I hope it goes without saying that all of that is desirable and to be praised, but it all rests ultimately on a willingness to, if you like, elevate process over outcome, to accept that sometimes you are going to lose and that sometimes the other side is going to win and that that is not a threat to your whole identity. This point has been historically aimed at unionists, and not always without reason. I was amused by Senator Mitchell’s recollection at the 25th anniversary of David Trimble having said to him “You need to understand about my lot that they will travel hours out of their way to take an insult”, and we have all met politicians like that, but it applies equally to both sides.

Let me put it like this: if I were chiefly motivated by wanting a 32-county state in Ireland—whether I were on either side of the border—I would do things very differently. I would engage with British people in Northern Ireland as Brits rather than as misguided Irish protestants. I would have done a lot of things differently: I would not have left the Commonwealth; I would not have had a different foreign policy in the wars; I would not have made the Irish language a requirement. Those are water under the bridge, but going forward now is about finding a compromise that both sides can live with. We are in a world where we have a general retreat from liberal democracy, a general rise of populism and a “winner takes all” attitude even in countries that are old and established democracies—these are alarming tendencies. If there is one thing that we in this Chamber can do, perhaps it is to spread our irenic influence and to encourage people that, in the Windsor Framework and in everything else, we are never going to get 100% of what we want. That is the essence of any functioning open society.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 15th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, my name is on both of these amendments and I am happy to support them both. The proposers will be pleased to know that I do not intend to speak for long, because I have heard two excellent speeches that set out the reasons why supporting these amendments is important.

The noble Lord, Lord Hendy, talked about the danger of back-door watering down of legislation. It may not be this Government; once this is in statute, it could be any Government going forward. We do not necessarily have to distrust the people we see before us—I personally do not—but we do not know who in future will be able to use these measures.

If the Government want to water down workers’ conditions, that should be done through primary legislation, straight up, and negotiated and scrutinised properly. It should not be put through the backdoor, which could happen here. Throughout the process of the Bill, the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, has said over and over again that it is not the Government’s intention to water down workers’ rights. By supporting Amendment 50, the Government can make sure that they are absolutely as good as their word.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, one of the worst objections that I had when I was a Member of the European Parliament was to the doctrine of the occupied field—the idea that you could never withdraw from a field in which you had once legislated. So the acquis communautaire can only ever grow; it could go only in in one direction. You could call it a ratchet, a one-way street or, as its supporters did, a bicycle that has to go forward, but the objection was fundamentally the same: it lifted certain issues out of the democratic field and made them immune to the political process.

For what it is worth, I have never had much time for the idea that our workers’ rights come from the EU—the EU did not travel back in time and pass Barbara Castle’s Equal Pay Act 1970 or Neville Chamberlain’s Holidays with Pay Act 1938—but, whatever view you take of it, these are precisely the sorts of issues that ought to be determined by our national democratic mechanisms and procedures. You can take the view, as the noble Lords, Lord Collins and Lord Hendy, did, that this is wonderful, helps employers and all the rest of it, which is a perfectly respectable position, or you can take the view that there comes a point where too many workers’ rights means fewer workers—but surely that is a debate that ought to be had here and in another place, not something that is effectively made invulnerable to the ballot box.

[Noble Lords]

Then support the amendment!

Parliamentary Democracy in the United Kingdom

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lichfield. He brings to an implausible nine the number of alumni of Oriel College, Oxford. I say “implausible” because, as I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, will agree, it was a rather philistine place, yet it is punching rather above its weight at this end.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, for broadening and enlivening the breadth and nature of our debates. She knows how fond I am of her and how fond my children are of her delicious homemade jam. I agree with much of what she said about the overmighty Executive. I do not dissent from that by one iota, but I urge her not to catastrophise and to be careful about the language that we use in this legislature. If you have disagreements with this Government, it does not follow that they are a moral sewer comparable to 1930s Germany. Using language of that kind can imperil the very democracy which we are debating, because democracy depends on a measure of self-restraint. It depends on losers being prepared to accept the outcome and on winners being prepared not to take a winner-takes-all attitude. Above all, democracy depends on treating the other side as opponents rather than enemies and accepting that people with whom we disagree might still have one or two useful things to tell us. We have to give a lead.

Let me give the example of how quickly we descend to cancel culture and destroy people over one slip or one clumsy phrase. I will aim this more at people on these Benches. Thinking of cases such as Rupa Huq’s unfortunate comments about Kwasi Kwarteng, Gary Lineker on 1930s Germany or, most recently, Diane Abbott’s asinine remarks about whether Jews could suffer from racism, I ask, without defending any of those things: is it not better to live in a world where we have second chances, where there is the possibility of atonement and forgiveness?

“Use every man according to his desert and who should ‘scape whipping?”


If your Lordships’ response is that the other side started it: maybe so. But me? I am more interested in ending it.

Negotiating Objectives for a Free Trade Agreement with India

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Tuesday 6th September 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by declaring an interest as an adviser to the board of JCB. I mention it because it has really become, in practical terms, an Anglo-Indian company. Since my noble friend Lord Bamford made at that time a rather countercyclical decision in the 1970s to invest heavily in India, JCB has become an immense employer there, to the point that many Indians think of it as an Indian company or, at the very least, in the same sense that they think of cricket—it may technically happen to have been invented in the United Kingdom but it is essentially, in all practical senses, a largely Indian institution. That company seems to me a symbol of what I would like to talk about: the opportunities for both our countries and why we need to seize the moment.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, asked whether we are getting the timing right. I put it to the Committee that we are getting the timing right both directly and in a more macro sense. For a long time, India was very slow to open its markets at all. Protectionism cast a very long shadow there. Think of the Indian flag, with the blue wheel—the chakra—in its middle. That was a stylised form, as you see very clearly in the flag of the old Congress Party, of the handloom. It is the kind that Gandhi used to carry around with him because, in his mind, independence and self-sufficiency were aspects of the same concept—swaraj. Because of the moral stature of Gandhi, protectionist and mercantilist thinking lasted in India for decades longer than it would otherwise have done, greatly to the detriment of Indian citizens, particularly those on low incomes.

It was really only in this century that India began properly to open its markets and join the global economy, starting in its own region and then signing deals with ASEAN and, more recently, with Japan. As a result, our share of Indian trade has fallen as those other countries have taken our place. In the years since the turn of the century, as a share of the Indian total our goods exports have fallen from 6% to 1.3% and our services exports from 11% to 2.1%.

This is a remediable problem; there are institutional solutions to it. Indeed, I would argue that there is no country, certainly no western country, better placed than ours to have a comprehensive and mutually beneficial trade deal with India. It has become commonplace in politics, almost a cliché, to talk about every group of migrants as enterprising, but in this case it is difficult to think of any migrant group anywhere in history that has been more enterprising, more business focused, and has added more to the economy of the welcoming country than the 1.5 million Brits of Indian origin, dominating, as they do, our lists of successful entrepreneurs.

There are also plenty of reverse JCBs; British brands have been extremely popular, from Jaguar to Tetley, as targets for Indian investors. That two-way investment rests on the most obvious congruities of language and law, habit and history, culture and kinship. What has not yet followed is the trade, because we have artificial government-imposed barriers to what would otherwise be a very natural commercial flow. If he was still alive, Gandhi would be astonished to discover that on the question of textiles it is now the other way around; it is not Lancashire dominating the handloom industries of India but now Britain imposing tariffs against Indian textiles, or having at least inherited those tariffs from the EU, including a 9.3% tariff on men’s shirts.

There are, of course, tariffs the other way around, as the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, reminded us, including on whisky, on which there is an extraordinary 150% tariff. We should always remember that tariffs do the most damage to the country that applies them. Yes, they do some incidental damage to the exporters of the other country, but the cost is paid by the citizens whose Government impose them.

Removing these tariffs is an easy and demonstrable game, but that is not where the biggest opportunities lie. We have to think like a 21st-century economy, not a 19th-century economy. The big gains are in tech, engineering and coding, and in the mutual recognition of credentials and professional qualifications, which will mean changes to our visa regime. I cannot believe that there is no deal to be done there. What has tended to slow it up is that Britain has been pushing for more flexibility from the Indian Government on taking back failed, or illegal, entrants into this country, while India has been pressing for more work permits, more tier 3 visas. Surely there is a landing zone there. It must be possible to hammer out a deal whereby it is easier for Indians to come here legally but not so easy for them to come here illegally. Both Governments could easily trumpet that as a victory.

As for doing it by Diwali and whether we are being too hasty, the best answer I heard was from my Board of Trade colleague Tony Abbott, the former Australian Prime Minister. He was Prime Minister of that country fairly briefly—for 18 months or so—yet in those 18 months he managed to sign fairly ambitious trade deals with China, South Korea and Japan. When I asked him the secret, he said that it was imposing an iron deadline because otherwise the trade negotiators on both sides would string it out indefinitely; they like process and being part of the process, and there is no incentive on them. As my noble friend Lord Frost adds, there is then a constant open door to domestic lobbies to push for further additions or accretions to the deal. It is extremely important to have a deadline, even if it is a deadline by which to have concluded the bulk of the talks rather than one for ratification, which of course is a different question.

Finally, a number of noble Lords have raised the wider geopolitical orientation of India and the disappointing refusal of the Indian Government to take sides on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. I share that disappointment—by the way, it is a policy common to every south Asian Government; I think that they have all taken exactly the same position on the Russia-Ukraine war—but it is especially disappointing from a state that tends to self-define as a democracy. Indians take justified pride in the fact that, unlike some of their neighbours, they have remained a law-based democracy since independence. Elections happen without anyone being exiled or shot; the army does not step in and take power. It is therefore somewhat disappointing that India did not take a stronger line on the Ukraine war—not as a favour to the West, but in accordance with its own values. But whereas some noble Lords seem to see that as a reason to hang back or hesitate, I see it as the opposite. The orientation of India is perhaps the key geopolitical question of this century. If India sees itself primarily as an English-speaking democracy rather than just as an Asian superpower, then the world is an altogether brighter and warmer place.

We have been through a great deal together. The two largest volunteer armies in the history of the human race were the Indian armies in the First and Second World Wars, respectively 1.5 million and 2.5 million volunteers. There was no conscription on either occasion. We have a living link made of the extraordinary enterprise brought here and the extraordinary contributions across our national life made by British people of Indian origin. I am certain that, coming together as free and sovereign equals, we can restore what should be the natural traffic in commerce between two countries bound by what my friend, Professor Madhav Das Nalapat, calls the blood of the mind—a shared habit, a shared way of looking at property and at commerce. I am sure that, in that spirit, the best is to come.

Elections Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

I crave your Lordships’ indulgence on two fronts. First, I was in a Select Committee which removed me from the Chamber for a large part of your Lordships’ deliberations. Secondly, I am going to be the umpteenth speaker to welcome the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Moore of Etchingham. My grounds for being the umpteenth such speaker is that he was my editor nearly 30 years ago at the Daily Telegraph. If that strikes your Lordships as an implausibly long time ago, I can only say that he was something of a Mozartian child protégé in the world of journalism. He edited the Spectator when he was, I think, nine; the Sunday Telegraph when he was 11 or so; and the Daily Telegraph when he was 14. He was an absolutely model editor, fearless in his criticism of those in high places and absolutely impervious to praise from those beneath. Annoyingly, he now writes a column in the Saturday Telegraph. I say annoyingly, because I write one in the Sunday Telegraph and again and again I find that he has said what I was planning to say but much better—and today’s debate is no exception. He has covered most of the points that I had in mind, so I will confine myself to making just one.

I think the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, quoted John Major on the “fragility of the democratic system”. Those words come very easily, but let us ponder for a second how unnatural, how counterintuitive is the system which we have all taken for granted and about which we have become a little blasé. How odd that we elevate process over outcome. How odd that huge human populations care more about the honouring of a set of abstract rules, something that cannot be seen, or touched or heard or smell, rather than about the victory of their candidate—their tribe. Yet it is that counterintuitive and necessarily acculturated, learned notion that has made possible all the freedoms and personal liberties and comforts that we take for granted in modern liberal societies. Because it is unnatural, it is under constant pressure. If we look even at the United States, perhaps the first country founded in the ideal of popular sovereignty, we see how quickly people have moved back to taking a contingent, provisional view of elections. Almost without fail, every election is met by a series of acts of lawfare by whichever party happened to lose. That should not surprise us at all. The surprising thing is that they went for so long without that happening.

That is why I say that the act of voting needs to be enchanted—it needs to be given a little bit of magic and made to feel precious. After all, our vote, statistically, is unlikely to change very much. If noble Lords think back to the last time they cast a vote—not putting themselves in the shoes of a prospective imaginary voter but thinking of the last time they let a ballot drop from their fingers into that big black tin box—did they really think that the consequence of their vote would be more or less parking, or more or less housing or higher or lower council tax? Were they not doing it, at least on some level, out of a sense of civic obligation—a sense of duty?

It is terrifically important, if democracy is to be made to work, that the act of voting be magnified, dignified, almost sanctified, and given a sense of importance beyond the chances of one particular vote in one constituency making a major impact on policy. That is why, when there is a question of balance between potential fraud or devaluation of the vote and extra procedure, however minimal, our instinct should always be towards ensuring that people have absolute confidence in the integrity of the process.

By the way, I do not think it is that big a deal. Personation may not be a big deal, but neither is presenting identification. Most countries in the world do it. Countries with largely illiterate populations manage it. I rather agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Desai, who said that it was particularly patronising to suggest that somehow minorities were not able to vote in the same way as everybody else. In fact, if anything, I would have thought ethnic minorities in this country are more likely to have passports than the general population. It is a bizarre idea that being asked to demonstrate who you are is somehow off-putting. That is not the experience of pretty much anywhere else.

I am glad that the Front Bench opposite agreed on what I think are bigger issues in this Bill: the measures against harassment of candidates and those to crack down on some aspects of postal and proxy fraud. But I come back to saying that if we want people to vote and if we want to get away from the situation in which every recent election has been won by the stay-at-home party—in other words, the group of people who took the trouble to register to vote and then did not bother to vote on the day is always bigger than the single number of votes for any of the other parties—then we have to restore a sense that casting your vote is a thing of importance and dignity.

Of course, that will require some substantive changes. I would like to see a significant shift of power from Whitehall to town halls and from unelected functionaries to elected representatives. But it also involves making people feel that there was something special about that trip and that presenting their ID and casting their ballot was a civic act, one that dignified and elevated the process. If we do not do that, we are giving up on restoring honour, purpose and meaning to the act of casting a ballot.

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

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 3rd December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, this is very exciting for me. Some of your Lordships have sat through these Grocott Bills many times, but this is my first one. I feel as if your first House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill is a milestone, like getting your first pay cheque or having your first kiss—or maybe I should say, in deference to my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Health, your first safety-conscious and careful snog.

I have to thank the noble Lord, Lord Grocott. He put forward the argument in a very light-touch, witty and courteous way. Of course, it is difficult to disagree with the central thrust of what he is saying. It is ludicrous and absurd that you should be a legislator on the basis of being descended from one of Charles II’s mistresses or whatever it is.

On one hand, what counts is what works. All sorts of things are irrational; we would not invent them today, but we keep them. I was struck that many of the arguments that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, made against the hereditary principle would work equally well against the monarchy, yet as far as I can see there is broad support in the country for keeping a system that works.

More pertinently, if we are being consistent in our application of these rational principles, then, as my noble friend Lord Lilley just said, the whole composition of this Chamber is indefensible, ludicrous, absurd and all the epithets just applied by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott. After all, what is the function of Parliament? What are we here for, in an elemental sense? It is not to debate in this Chamber, sit on committees or go on parliamentary delegations. The fundamental purpose of the legislature is to hold the Executive to account, and it must be debilitated in that role if one of the two legislative Houses is appointed by that Executive.

It seems to me that this fundamental indefensibility is why we are debating this at all. The existence of the 92 hereditary Peers and the by-election process was precisely intended to be the pebble in the shoe—the thing that drew our attention to the indefensibility of concentrating these powers in the hands of one person and thereby ensured that we moved to a completion of stage 2 reform.

By the way, on the idea we have heard in this debate that the real problem is size and that if only we could trim the numbers, that would make a difference—getting rid of the by-elections would be one way of doing this—it is intrinsic in having an upper House appointed by the Prime Minister that it will keep growing. That is the reality. If a new Prime Minister comes in, he or she will want a majority and will therefore make use of the extraordinary patronage powers that he or she has under the existing dispensation.

In fact, I sometimes wonder whether the whole country is not going to end up here sooner or later. People in this Chamber often quote the Gilbert and Sullivan line about the House of Peers doing “nothing in particular” and doing it “very well”, but I wonder whether an apter song might be the one from “The Gondoliers” about everyone becoming a Peer and Dukes being “three a penny”. Perhaps the long-term plan is to put almost the entire country here and then concentrate real oligarchic power in the hands of the last few hundred people who still retain the right to vote for another place.

I do not see how we can get out of that constant growth unless we tackle reform properly. My noble friend Lord Lilley recalled the sequence of events that led to the deal. I was not around, but some of your Lordships were; I think the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, was involved. When Tony Blair came in, this was still a largely hereditary and overwhelmingly Conservative Chamber. He had a perfectly good and justifiable case for wanting change. As I recall, William Hague—my noble friend Lord Hague—was not a big fan of the hereditary principle. He said, “I don’t mind change, but it has to be to something better. We can’t end up in a situation where you, the Prime Minister, can appoint whomever you like.” Blair said, “Well, no, we’ll do stage 1 first, and then we’ll get around to that.” Hague said, “I don’t really trust you”—correctly, as it turned out, because here we still are.

If we want to change the indefensible element of the by-elections, we have to be consistent and change the indefensible element of having a House appointed by the Head of Government of the time. I am very open-minded about how we do it. I would settle for a lengthy non-renewable term, a partly elected element or the selection by lot that my noble friend just proposed. Almost any system is surely better than this huge quango state we already have in which the Head of Government can appoint whom he likes.

The idea that it is delayed and that the deal is therefore defunct is not how contracts work. This contract was deliberately designed to have in it this correction mechanism that would hasten the end. We can often wait for a long time. What was it that our Lord said about his second coming in Mark, chapter 13, verse 30? It was:

“Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done.”


We are still waiting for these things to come about after two millennia. There can often be a delay, but if we are serious about making this change it must be to something appreciably and demonstrably better.

This always goes down badly on all sides, but I personally favour an elected Chamber—but I am open to almost anything that would be a permanent settlement. I am not open to going back on the deal in order to try to preserve a fundamentally indefensible status quo. Either we believe in keeping our word or we do not. Pacta sunt servanda.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, began in a rather understated way, by making a very important point that my noble friend Lord Lilley completely missed, as indeed did my noble friend Lord Hannan: no Parliament can bind its successors. My noble friend Lord Lilley, for whom I have great affection and regard, did a wonderful somersault when he suggested in introducing his argument on the Northern Ireland protocol that a Parliament cannot bind itself. That is an argument that we will doubtless come to yet again, but the fact is that no Parliament can bind its successor.

We are dealing with several Parliaments past. The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, is to be thanked for his courageous persistence, and he certainly has my support. As well as thanking him, however, I slightly rebuke him today. I thank him most warmly for accepting the argument of the continuity of the two, the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain, who do not form part of this Bill, although they did form part of an earlier Bill that my friend the noble Lord introduced. However, I have to rebuke him on behalf of poor old King Canute, who went to show that he could not turn back the tide, not that he could. The misreading of history by such a wonderful historian as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, must be of profound regret to us all. I hope that he will do due obeisance to King Canute—the most realistic of our early monarchs—at an appropriate moment.

We are, as we say, here again. Much as I have a high regard for many of our hereditary Peers—the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, made this point and I think we would all make it—the fact is that none of them is in danger. This is not a Bill to exclude hereditary Peers, nor one that prevents life Peerages being conferred upon hereditary Peers. All it is saying is that the by-election system has become an absurdity. How anyone with a grasp of logic and the forensic skills of a Lord Hannan cannot accept either that a Parliament cannot bind its successors or the absurdity of this system, I find, frankly, incredible. He is going to intervene —of course he is.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, the point is that we can pass primary legislation. The deal was enshrined in parliamentary legislation and, if that happens, we can, of course, move to stage two reform but, in the meantime, we should not be nibbling at the edges.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

What an extraordinary point to make in this week of all weeks—which began with the Bill that repeals the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. You cannot have it both ways. He will try very hard of course, as will my dear and noble friend Lord Mancroft, but the plain, blunt fact of the matter is that when an election, as we had a couple of years ago for the replacement of a hereditary Liberal Democrat, has more candidates than electors, it is made a tad odd, we might say. What we can and should do is respect the will of the majority. It has been quite plain and manifest when we have had votes on some of the ridiculous, convoluted amendments produced to this Bill—it has demonstrated beyond any peradventure that the vast majority in your Lordships’ House are embarrassed by this system.

If those who have put up a superficially clever defence this morning could only reflect on the logic of their own basic arguments, they must surely see that if the majority of your Lordships’ House—Conservative, Labour, Liberal, Cross-Bench, an overwhelming majority —feel that we ought to get rid of this embarrassing absurdity then we should do so. If your Lordships’ House is to show a real respect for democracy, then this Bill should go through its remaining stages quickly and go to the other House.

I believe very strongly in what my noble friend Lord Attlee said about an appointed House; I have always defended an appointed House. We are too large; let us do something about that. We should, for instance, prevent those who attend less than 20% of the time from coming. Those who take leave of absence in consecutive years, unless it is for reasons of illness, should forfeit their membership. We can do all sorts of things to bring down the size. We can and should accept the arguments of the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Burns. The Prime Minister’s profligacy in the distribution of peerages, unlike his predecessor, Theresa May, has done no service at all to parliamentary democracy or our constitution. I hope that he can be persuaded to be a little more circumspect—

House of Lords: Appointments Process

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I am afraid that what I am about to say is going to be very unpopular on all sides. I console myself with the thought that I am used to this; I was in the European Parliament as a Eurosceptic. I console myself also with the thought that your Lordships are much more decorous, polite, kind and generous than my former colleagues.

None the less, here goes: I do not believe that it is sustainable for us to have a Chamber of the legislature appointed by the Executive. If this were happening in North Korea or South Sudan we would regard it as absolutely intolerable. The primary function of Parliament —if the other place traces its ancestry back to 1265, I think we can trace ours back to the Great Charter itself in 1215—is to hold the Government to account. That task must be enfeebled if the Executive of the day can nominate one of the two Chambers.

I would like there to be not a revolutionary change, as the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, says, but a considered and serious overhaul. I am afraid that I do not believe that nibbling at the edges makes any difference. I do not think that the view of this Chamber outside is affected by the number of people here; in fact, it was not the point he was trying to make but when my noble friend Lord Balfe quoted the numbers in the Division Lobbies he showed that it was about the right size in practice, if not in theory. Nor do I really think it is about the kinds of people coming in. We all have our own ideas about what kinds of people should not be here. Some might say that there are too many donors, quango-crats, white people or ex-MPs, but no two people will agree on those criteria and, unless we are prepared to go all the way and have some kind of more directly representative or elected Chamber, we are never going to get an answer.

I would like us to look at this properly in the form of a royal commission: a trusty if somewhat staid instrument that can take into account a number of other considerations to do with the balance between devolved and central institutions, the voting system and all the rest of it, and then come to a considered and measured conclusion.