House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Hogan-Howe Excerpts

Monday 10th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, I support the principle behind terms, but I cannot support and would not vote for any of these amendments. The idea behind terms is a great one because it limits our contributions to while we are fresh. I do not agree with prejudice as expressed by age, which I think is irrelevant and hard to justify. Even murderers do not get life any longer, so I think “life” is an inappropriate term.

Finally, as with many of the speeches on the amendments we have heard today, this is not the time nor the Bill to be debating these issues. They need to be referred to and considered in the round, but that is for another day. There are many issues about our constitution that deserve attention. Should we have an established Church? In what relation is the Supreme Court held to Parliament? Many things have yet to be remedied, but not in this Bill. For that reason, I would not vote for these amendments. These are worthy issues that should be debated in another place when we have the time, but not in the time we are taking to debate this Bill.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this and the next three groups are about related issues, and we cannot avoid moving from one on to the other. They are about limiting the conditions under which one becomes a Member of this House.

When I was appointed to this House 29 years ago, the majority of Members clearly saw this as a part-time job. It was explained to me that it was a part-time job. I managed to go on being a full-time professor at the LSE for another nine years. Now we have a more professional House. We are expected to commit ourselves to working hard while we are here. Life expectancy has risen and more of us have some expectation of living well into our 90s. I am told that my life expectancy, given my parents and my elder sisters, is around 98, so I can perhaps look for many years to come. Clearly, we need to take this on board and the Government need to give us some indication of how they are going to moderate the lifetime rights to sit in this House.

As we have become a professional second Chamber, do we think that retirement, life terms, participation or attendance is the most useful way to do it? I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, that term limits are the easiest way. The 2012 Bill proposed for the elected Members a single term of 15 years, elected in thirds, and a 15-year term for those who were appointed. That, at the time, commanded widespread support. I suggest that the Government look back to this; we have been around this circuit before.

I will also say briefly that we have to remember the context in which we are discussing this. Popular disillusionment with politics in Britain is high; respect for both the Commons and the Lords is low. We have, outside Britain, much that we dislike in populist politics, anti-democratic tendencies, the belief that strong men make politics easier, and we see the problems of systems where checks and balances built into their constitutions are being ignored. We cannot entirely ignore that, as limited outside opinion looks at the way that we as a second Chamber behave. If the Government are going to push this limited Bill through, they must also respond to that for the longer term. The sort of second Chamber to which we might slowly shuffle is one in which term limits are perhaps one of the ways in which one limits the life cycle of Members.