House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Harries of Pentregarth Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 10th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

My Lords, in the interests of institutional memory, I will add a footnote to that. I was very surprised to see the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, as I know his passion for democracy in this House and the way he has pursued it in the Delegated Powers Committee. His explanation was more than welcome.

It occurs to me that in the historical palimpsest that the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, offered, the one thing he omitted was the report from the Joint Committee of both Houses in 2011-12 on the coalition Bill. Had the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, served on that Joint Committee, it would have taken two weeks rather than 18 months to write our report. We would have had infinitely more fun and would have come to conclusions that were infinitely crisper and more persuasive. In that report, we took exhaustive evidence from the authors of the Bill, from Ministers, from all the usual suspects and beyond, and—I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, takes some comfort from this—we came to exactly the same conclusions as the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, has about the dysfunctional relationship that would be set up automatically with the House of Commons.

As we worked through our list of Ministers giving evidence, it became perfectly clear that none of them had asked themselves those questions about the implications it would have for the House of Commons, its legitimacy, its effectiveness and its relationship with the House of Lords. They had not considered whether there would be constituents who had competing notions of what was right or what would happen if we had different parties in command in the two Houses. It was an exhaustive review and there were differences of opinion—the chair was Lord Richard—but it was conclusive in its recommendations: the House of Commons must think again about the Bill it had been presented. It was the last time that either House looked at this issue in depth with any sophistication.

My point is simply—just as the noble Lords, Lord Blencathra and Lord Strathclyde, have said—that this is a constitutional issue of massive significance. It can hardly be dealt with through an amendment to such a narrow Bill on such a narrow point and where, frankly, these amendments have no place anyway. We should be addressing the substance of the Bill. Since the issue has been raised, however, we are right to remember that we had worked out our proper views on the implications of this subject separately in 2012. I wonder what happened to that Bill: why was it ever withdrawn? Unfortunately, the Prime Minister at the time is not in his place; otherwise, we might have been able to get an answer after all these years.

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)]

My Lords, there is one assumption in the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Newby, that needs to be questioned, and that is the total identification of democracy with direct elections. There are other forms of democracy that include indirect elections. I was particularly glad to hear the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, bring this up. The debate has moved on since the time of a great standoff between those in favour of a totally elected House and those in favour of a totally appointed House. Ideas were floated by the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, for example, about a House that truly represents the nations and the regions. You can imagine a House that was indirectly elected by the Scottish Parliament, the Senedd, the Northern Ireland Assembly and the English regions. I am not arguing for or against it at the moment; I am just questioning the assumption that the only form of democracy is direct elections. You could have a form of democracy with the indirect elections by the nations and the regions.

I have just one other small point in relation to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra. He mentioned the royal commission chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, which I had the great privilege to be a member of. The noble Lord suggested that we had recommended that the elected element would be only a third—150, I think. But, in fact, that commission recommended a series of stages in which the elected element would grow. I think on the commission’s recommendations, it would eventually grow to a majority. It is only a small point but that is what it envisaged.

[Lord Brady of Altrincham (Con)]

My Lords, in speaking to the amendment that stands in my name, I reassure your Lordships that I neither seek nor anticipate achieving consensus on this point but rather hope to stimulate the kind of debate and discussion that we are already starting to hear in the Chamber this afternoon.

To the noble Lord, Lord Newby, I say that my proposal of geographical constituencies would ensure the kind of geographical spread that he would like to see, possibly more effectively than a PR system would. I am not wedded to a membership of 200, although I think it is reasonable for the House to be smaller, and I suspect it could be a lot smaller.

Unsurprisingly, I agree with a great deal of what my noble friend Lord Blencathra had to say. Perhaps my concern comes down to his central point, which I think we usually fail to address and tackle sufficiently in this discussion: this House does a very limited and specific job and does it very well. The point I made at Second Reading is that the hereditaries are actually at the forefront of that and, on average, contribute more than life Peers do. But given that the Government are determined to change the composition of a House that works so well in that limited and specific function, should we not take a moment to reflect on wider questions, not just how the House should be composed but whether our function should be so tightly confined?

We might also pause to reflect for a moment on what the public think of this House. I note from a YouGov poll just a few months ago that 42% of the public have a negative view of the House of Lords and 49% think it is not useful. By a margin of 62% to 16%, there is support for having no hereditaries. But, also, interestingly, 50% of the public, compared with 22%, say that they oppose a wholly appointed Chamber.

We are moving the composition of the House—I have no doubt that the Bill will become an Act—but we are moving to something that is already disliked and disapproved of by the wider public, and to something that possibly has even less legitimacy than a House of Lords comprising jointly life Peers and elected hereditaries. The justification for the current composition, or indeed for moving to a wholly appointed House, is circular and, in many ways, peculiar. It is deemed essential that the House should lack legitimacy and that its composition should be hard to defend, precisely and deliberately to ensure the primacy of a House of Commons that does have legitimacy, derived from elections.

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Moved by

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth]

13: After Clause 1, insert the following new Clause—
“15 year terms for life peers(1) A member of the House of Lords who has sat in the House by virtue of a life peerage for 15 years or more ceases to be a member of the House of Lords at the end of that Session of Parliament, subject to subsection (2).(2) A member of the House of Lords who has sat in the House by virtue of a life peerage for 15 years or more may apply to the House of Lords Appointments Commission for reappointment for a further five or more years up to a maximum of 15 years, but no member may sit in the House of Lords by virtue of a life peerage for more than 30 years in total.”

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)]

My Lords, the first and most important point to make about this amendment is that it was not dreamed up by me. It is one of the key recommendations of the royal commission on House of Lords reform. This commission, which reported in 2000 and of which I was privileged to be a member, was chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham. It had representatives on it of all political parties and came to unanimous conclusions.

The commission argued for a mixture of appointed and elected elements, and this proposal for a 15-year term was designed for both kinds of Member. The point was that Members of the House of Lords should not be driven by short-term considerations or looming elections but should be able to take the long view, and 15 years was considered appropriate.

As proposed new subsection (2) of the amendment indicates, this term could be extended in the case of a particular Peer by the independent Appointments Commission. When a 15-year term came to an end, a Peer might find themselves a Minister, chair of a key committee, or deeply involved in an important piece of legislation or some other work that was deeply appreciated by the House. Their term could be renewed, in the first instance for a further five years, but such instances would, perhaps, become the exception. Most Peers would expect to serve 15 years.

Like others of your Lordships, I am very disappointed that the Bill as set out deals only with hereditary Peers and not with the wider issue of Lords reform. I entirely accept the Government’s good faith that they want to bring forward some further reforms but I am deeply sceptical as to whether they will ever be able to get round to doing it. This is because, as the noble Lord, Lord Newby, stressed earlier, Parliament is still deeply divided as to what form major reform should take. Furthermore, other ideas about reform have come forward since the royal commission, notably from the former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, for a second Chamber representing the nations and regions. Building a consensus for that or for any major reform could take decades.

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Amendment 15 (to Amendment 13) not moved.

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)]

I thank everyone who has supported this amendment. Despite the opposition of the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, to it in principle, there is quite a lot of support for it in the Committee, with different age limits proposed, from five years to 20 years. All I would say in favour of the 15-year limit is that it was proposed by the royal commission and in the report of the noble Lord, Lord Burns. The noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, referred to the huge loss of numbers from the House, but that ignores the second part of my amendment, which allows people to apply for another five, 10 or 15 years. One imagines there would be a great deal of sympathy in HOLAC if people wanted to stay on when their 15 years were up. Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 13 withdrawn.

Democratic Republic of the Congo: M23 Group

Lord Harries of Pentregarth Excerpts

Tuesday 25th February 2025 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what is their response to reports that Rwandan troops are supporting the M23 group in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Collins of Highbury) (Lab)]

My Lords, the United Kingdom condemns the recent M23 and Rwandan Defence Force advances in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo as an unacceptable breach of DRC’s sovereignty. On 22 February the Foreign Secretary met with President Kagame and was clear that there can be no military solution. The United Kingdom today announced several policy measures, which we will maintain until there is a withdrawal of all RDF from the Congolese territory.

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)]

I thank the Minister for his reply. It has recently been reported that 7,000 people were killed during January, and 450,000 people have been displaced from about 90 camps. According to reports, the M23 intends to advance right across to Kinshasa. Is it not totally unacceptable for one country to support a rebel group in a neighbouring country? What steps are the Government taking in relation to the United Nations and the African Union to bring this conflict under control before it gets totally out of hand and engulfs the whole of an already fragile DRC?

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

Noble Lords will appreciate what I have reported before. Right from day one, we have been engaged with President Lourenço of Angola to ensure that there is a process to achieve long-lasting peace in the region. That is long overdue, because the internally displaced people are numerous and suffering hugely. These recent advances create an even worse situation.

On Friday I was pleased to talk to the Ministers in Dar es Salaam who were hosting the EAC-SADC summit, which produced a communiqué towards peace in the region and set out a very clear road map to achieve the withdrawal. Our concern is that the Rwandans have not fully complied with that, which is why we have made the announcement today of the measures we are taking, along with our allies, to ensure that they respond to that African-led peace process.

Middle East

Lord Harries of Pentregarth Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

I tried to answer that in the Oral Question. This is an obligation on the Palestinian Authority. We have been supporting the Palestinian Authority security services through training. We have also urged the Israeli Government and the IDF to protect the distribution of humanitarian aid to ensure that it reaches those people who need it. We are absolutely determined to work with all parties to ensure the effective distribution of humanitarian aid—it is vital that it gets to the people who need it most.

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)]

Following the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed, I shall focus briefly on what is happening in the West Bank, which is a potential conflagration. We know that Hamas is represented there, and it can become only more embittered if settler attacks on Palestinian villages continue. It was good to hear the Minister say that the British Government are going to maintain sanctions against settlers who attack those villages. As we know, President Trump has said that he is no longer going to keep up those sanctions. Will the Minister encourage the Government to make it perfectly clear, publicly, that we are going to continue to maintain those sanctions?

Georgia

Lord Harries of Pentregarth Excerpts

Tuesday 17th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

My noble friend is absolutely right and we are in regular contact with international partners, including the EU and the US. We are collaborating multilaterally, including on support for joint statements through the OSCE, the Council of Europe and the United Nations, where we have consistently called for human rights to be respected. We will work in consultation and in collaboration with our allies, because that is the most effective way we can ensure that they listen to us.

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)]

The scores of thousands of people peacefully protesting on the streets of Tbilisi are very impressive. They include religious leaders—Jewish, Muslim and Christian—walking together. Does the Minister agree that Georgia is a crucial tipping point and that Putin is doing all he can to manipulate the situation there? I was very glad to hear that His Majesty’s Government are prepared to do “all” things. Will he please keep us informed of what those things might be? We must keep on as hard as we can, as the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, asserted.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

The noble and right reverend Lord is right. The people of Georgia are making absolutely clear their opposition to Georgian Dream’s decision to pause the country’s further moves towards a European future—a decision that directly undermines the constitution of Georgia. By the way, the Georgian people are making their position clear not just in Tbilisi but throughout the country. We will offer whatever support we can. I will keep the House informed of all our actions and ensure that we convey very strongly how we are co-operating with others to make our position clear. Russia and Putin have a reputation of interfering in democratic processes, and we need to challenge that.

Parliamentary Democracy and Standards in Public Life

Lord Harries of Pentregarth Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)]

My Lords, the Motion before us contains two key words: democracy and standards. I hope to say something briefly about each of them, and then to show they are fundamentally linked. Democracy is a precarious and precious achievement which is under threat in many places around the world—not just overt dictatorships but managed democracies, which have elections but then lock up political opponents, and which have a media, but one largely controlled by the Government or Government supporters.

We need to rediscover a real belief in the system we have in this country, because it actually allows us to express the better side of our nature—the desire for the common good—but also takes fully into account the darker side of our nature: our desire too often to pursue our own interests at the expense of other people, particularly organised groups pursuing their interests. As a great American theologian and political thinker, Reinhold Neibuhr, put it, the human

“capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary”.

People should be learning about this in schools, but the trouble is that citizenship education, which ought to be taught, is in a “parlous state”. Those are the words of your Lordships’ committee report, The Ties that Bind, which we have brought before the House a number of times. It says that citizenship education in schools has been degraded to a parlous state and needs to be radically and totally revised. I very much hope it is not too late for the present Government once again to look at citizenship education in schools, so that pupils come out of schools actually believing in the society in which we live and willing to take part in it.

Secondly, I will say something about standards. Even in a dictatorship, some moral principles are possible. There is a limit to the degree of corruption that even a dictatorship can put up with, but there is an integral link between moral principles and democracy. In much the same way that Adam Smith argued that moral principles were fundamental to the proper working of a free market, so they are absolutely fundamental to the proper working of democracy, quite simply because the people who rule us are elected. When we elect people, we do so because we desire to trust them: we want them to be trustworthy. We want them actually to try to put into practice the policies on which we have elected them. Unfortunately, as we have heard so often around the House today, that fundamental trustworthiness is no longer believed in by many people in our society—sadly and wrongly, perhaps, but that is the case.

I wonder whether, perhaps at the beginning of the new Parliament, the Lord Speaker in this House and the Speaker in the House of Commons might call a meeting in Westminster Hall where we can once again look at and think through those wonderful Nolan principles.

His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh

Lord Harries of Pentregarth Excerpts

Monday 12th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB) [V]]

What we have heard today has been truly remarkable and deeply moving. I shall briefly mention two aspects of His Royal Highness’s remarkable work that have not so far been emphasised, but before I do so I want to say something of a more general nature about his role.

We are honouring not just an outstanding individual, truly outstanding though he was, but someone who had a very special role within and relationship to the monarchy. I respect republicans—I was once a teenage republican myself, annoying my mother by refusing to stand up for the national anthem, which in those days was played at the end of films—but I underwent a genuine intellectual conversion during my 20s. The difficulty with having a president as Head of State is that because he is elected he can never be totally above politics. Our sovereign can; she can genuinely stand for the nation as a whole, whichever political party a person might belong to. More than that: because she is anointed as Queen by the Archbishop of Canterbury at Westminster Abbey, she also stands for the nation before God in a very special way. That is why the constitution of this country is not just parliamentary democracy per se but the Queen in Parliament under God. That is of course reflected in our daily prayers.

That leads me to the two special ways in which His Royal Highness supported the Queen in this role. One was the international interfaith group, which he founded with Prince Hassan of Jordan and Sir Evelyn Rothschild. The difference between that and other groups was not only that it was international, but that it brought together clergy as well as distinguished lay people, ambassadors and senior businesspeople to meet in different parts of the world. They met over a number of years, with the Duke, as a key founder member, always present.

Prince Philip clearly had a keen interest in religion, and I understand that his personal library was absolutely chock-full of books on religions of one kind or another. However, it is his public role to which we pay tribute here, where we know that he wanted to make a difference. He saw that one way of doing that was by helping religious institutions relate better to one another through their senior lay people.

The other contribution that I want to mention is his key role in the founding and ongoing work of St George’s House, Windsor. As is well known, he had a good relationship with successive deans of Windsor, and a very special friendship with Robin Woods, later the Bishop of Worcester. Robin Woods and the Duke founded the house, first as a place for clergy to meet for a long period of reflection and study, then as a place for senior or rising people in the secular world from all professions to come together for shorter periods to reflect on their fundamental values and beliefs and how these should be reflected in the modern world. We should not believe everything that we see and hear on “The Crown”, but there was a particularly good episode about the Duke and St George’s House.

The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury mentioned the Duke’s seriousness about the Christian faith, shown in the sharp questioning which he gave bishops at their weekends in Sandringham, but I remember his willingness to help nervous bishops be at ease. After dinner on the Saturday, when we had all had enough of making conversation of one kind or another, he invited them simply to relax with him, watching a film on a comfy sofa.

Today we honour not only a man who would be distinguished in any walk or life, especially the Royal Navy, his first love, but someone who strengthened the role of the monarchy over a long, rapidly changing period. He was a man who sought to relate that institution to the modern world in a way that made a real difference for good. I remember with particular gratitude his role in relation to religion in general, and the Church of England in particular.

Covid-19 Update

Lord Harries of Pentregarth Excerpts

Thursday 7th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for his questions. He is absolutely right. We entirely agree that schools and colleges are the best place for children and young people to be, not just for education but for their health and well-being, which is why we tried so hard to keep them open. Unfortunately, as my noble friend said, we just could not do it. It was not that schools themselves were unsafe for either children or pupils; it is that, with the new variant, we need to use every lever at our disposal to reduce community transmission and contact. It was for that reason that schools were closed; it was not because teachers have not done fantastic work. My brother and sister-in-law, who are both teachers, spent Christmas trying to make their schools Covid secure, but we still had to close them. We will certainly keep this position under review; we will certainly try to bring back schools as soon as we can. Of course, regular testing will be at the centre of our plans. All that hard work will not be in vain; it will just be used slightly further away than we may have hoped.

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB) [V]]

As the Leader of the House knows, it is not yet clear whether a person who has been vaccinated is still able to transmit the virus; it is quite possible in theory for them to have no symptoms themselves and yet to pass it on. I understand that a group of scientists is working on this issue. Is the Leader of the House able to indicate when those scientists might be able to report? Clearly, this is vital information which we need to have sooner rather than later.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

I can assure the noble and right reverend Lord that PHE will be employing existing surveillance systems and enhanced follow-up of cases to monitor how effective the vaccine is in protecting against a range of outcomes, including infections, symptomatic disease, hospitalisations, mortality and onward transmission. I can assure him that that work is in progress, but I cannot give him a timescale. He will understand that we will need time to gather sufficient data to get a clear picture, but he is right that it will be critical.