House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 12th March 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

35: After Clause 1, insert the following new Clause—
“Rights of life peers to sit in the House of Lords(1) Section 1 of the Life Peerages Act 1958 (power to confer life peerages) is amended as follows.(2) At the end of subsection (1) insert “, and, as the case may be, the incidents specified in subsection (2A) of this section”.(3) Omit from “and” in subsection (2)(a) to the end of subsection (2)(b).(4) After subsection (2), insert—“(2A) A peerage conferred under this section may, if the letters patent so state, during the life of the person on whom it is conferred, entitle him, subject to subsection (4) of this section, to receive writs of summons to attend the House of Lords and sit and vote therein accordingly, and shall expire on his death.””

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, it would be a really useful flexibility in our system if life Peers could be appointed without the right to sit in the House of Lords. Frankly, there are people who deserve a peerage but who do not want the obligations, which we have been discussing today, to attend here and deal with the minutiae of legislation. In particular there are those who have grown senior and grand enough that arguing whether a comma should be moved one word to the right is not how they want to spend their life—unlike me.

So this would be a useful addition to the structure of our life peerage. It would enable people to be honoured properly and to be given a seat in this House only if that is what they really want and they intend to make full use of it. I beg to move.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I support the sentiment of this amendment. Again, this is a longer-term issue, but separating the honour from the obligation is an important part of how we should be moving forward. We know that a number of people have desperately wanted peerages—I am one of the many who found, after my appointment to this House, that the number of people who wished to invite me out to lunch to tell me what excellent Peers they would make increased very considerably.

This House has—happily—become much more professional in the past 20 years. We do now recognise this as a job, but we do not necessarily need to be Peers to do the job. Perhaps if we were called “Senators” or whatever, that would work quite as well. I immensely enjoy my title, in the sense that Saltaire is a very special village. It is now a world heritage site. It has a Hockney gallery, and I suspect that no one apart from me in this House knows that Paul Hockney, David’s elder brother, was a Liberal Democrat councillor and the Mayor of Bradford.

The more important thing for the long-term interest of this House is that we have good people appointed to the second Chamber, and that this is thought of first as a second Chamber and not so much as a House of Lords. Those who wish to have titles could perhaps have titles that do not have the obligations that we all now willingly accept to examine legislation, to debate difficult issues and to play a part in the governance of this country.

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[Lord Hermer (Lab)]

Yes, of course, I will.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I understand what the Government’s policy is; I think it is profoundly mistaken. As my noble friend on the Front Bench said, I do not think that people perceive someone who is Lord Hermer to be different from any other species of Lord Hermer who might have appeared as a hereditary Peer or, indeed, a Law Lord. It is a title, and the fact that these things come from different directions would not cause a problem. I think that all of us who have been in this place for a while are aware of people who have come here and are totally unsuited to the job we do and the life we lead but who have, in every way, deserved the honour of a peerage—I will not name names, but it is easy to think of lots of them. I can also think of those who have not taken up a peerage, when they obviously deserve one, because of the obligations that being a Member of this House brings and which they personally would wish to avoid.

I think that something along these lines would be good. I share my noble friend Lord True’s frustration at having been unable to persuade the previous Government of various things, but I did have hopes of this reforming Government, and I am sorry that they have been disappointed. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 35 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

36: After Clause 1, insert the following new Clause—
“No majority for one party in the House of LordsAfter section 1 of the Life Peerages Act 1958, insert—“1A No majority for one party in the House of Lords(1) An appointment may not be made to the House of Lords if it would have the effect of taking the total number of peers from parties forming part of the Government to more than 40% of the total members of that House.(2) If at any time the number of peers from parties forming part of the Government exceeds 40% of the total members of the House of Lords, no appointments to the parties forming part of the Government may be made until that number is reduced below 40% either by resignation, new appointments or leave of absence.””

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, it seems to me—and this is certainly something that I would want to take through to Report—that, if we are to have a House that is totally appointed by the Prime Minister, one of the really important things is to have some control of the consequences of that for the House of Lords. It is in our memories the threat that was made in 1911 to flood the House with Peers to support the Government. I think that would be a disaster. I am glad we avoided it at the time. The Lord Lucas at the time was a Liberal, and therefore sensible.

I do not think it is the right basis for a second Chamber in a democratic country that the Prime Minister can, if they are sufficiently upset with the second House, effectively flood it with their own supporters and have done with it. Moving, as we are, to a House where the Prime Minister has total control over who comes in, we ought to have some recognition of the current settlement, which is that the Government do not have a majority in this House. I beg to move.

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend does the Committee a significant service by putting forward this amendment. It encapsulates the arguments around a fully appointed House and this extraordinary situation that we find ourselves heading towards—a fully appointed House, with all appointments made by the Prime Minister, and a ratchet, in effect, in numbers, going upwards and upwards, when there is a change of Government. I think my noble friend’s amendment, which sounds so simple and straightforward, throws up any number of difficulties, and we could spend the next two or three days of Committee, if such things existed, talking about how this mechanism might work.

My noble friend Lord Lucas is absolutely right to raise the question of the balance between the parties and the Prime Minister’s ability to introduce, unchecked, large numbers of Peers into the House. I was very taken —on Monday, I think it was—when we were talking about the question of elections, when a hushed silence went through the Committee and there were some shocked faces. I felt like I was in a Bateman cartoon: the man who dared to mention elections in the House of Lords—shock, horror. But here we are, discussing one version of an archaic situation versus another.

It is quite clear that there is no rational defence of the Prime Minister being able to appoint, without any check on numbers, to this House. The question of coalitions—parties that might come together and then split apart, parties that might themselves divide—would cause all sorts of difficulties. I suspect that this amendment that my noble friend has put forward is a legislative hand grenade, designed to illustrate the difficulties rather than necessarily put forward a carefully worked through solution.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

The noble Lord tempts me—I wonder whether he is trying to tempt me against a future Cameron or Johnson premiership, because that was the time when the numbers were increased. I have had the same pressure from some of my own colleagues after the behaviour of previous Conservative Governments. I would hope that there would not be a need for it, but I think it is something we would look at in future, if Prime Ministers were behaving in a way that was inappropriate in terms of appointments. However, we are not at that point at the moment and it would be wrong at the moment to put that in.

The Norton Bill also talked about 20% for the Cross Benches. While I think that that is a fair and appropriate percentage of the House for the Cross Benches, I would not define that in statute, because defining only one party or group in statute does not help the balance of the House—it is rather mixed, then. In saying that the governing party cannot have more than 40%, you then have to look at the balance for the rest of the House and not just at one particular group.

I agree with the noble Lord on conventions; they are important and have stood the test of time. I remind him that it is not just the Salisbury convention—it is the Salisbury/Addison convention, because there was a Labour and a Conservative leader at the time who agreed on conventions that have served this House well. They served us through the 1999 legislation and will serve us well in future. I think that we would all want to abide by them, because we do our best work when we abide by the conventions, as we did in opposition.

So I understand the sentiments behind the noble Lord’s amendment and have a lot of sympathy with it. I think that the House works best in that way—but the amendment is too restrictive at present and I respectfully ask that he withdraw it.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Lord Privy Seal for that comprehensive answer. We clearly agree on the state of parties that makes this House work best. We also agree as to who has pushed those percentages in a way that perhaps they should not have done, and it has not been the Labour Party. My concern is to produce a system which preserves the sort of balance that she and I agree we need in the face of a future Prime Minister who does not behave well—of whatever colour; probably our party given the precedence—but, either way, my concern is for the House more than party. For now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 36 withdrawn.

Succession to the Crown Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 14th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I wholeheartedly welcome every aspect of the Bill. My peerages currently descend on the same pattern as the monarchy. My grandmother, who held the titles, was a campaigner for gender equality, as was my mother, who held the titles after her, and, indeed, my father, so it is not surprising that I think that it is wonderful to have lived the past 60 years in a period of such change and progress. We clearly have some way to go yet and I do not think we have yet realised what the full consequences of gender equality will be, but we have made great progress. It is wonderful to be standing here at last contemplating the change to the succession of the Crown, which means that our head of state will now enjoy the same gender equality that the rest of us expect in the course of our ordinary lives.

It is important to focus also on the tidying up that follows this crucial change. Generally, it is never good enough to think that we have got 80% of the way on gender equality and we should be satisfied with that. The Church of England will be aware of how difficult it is to tidy up some of the difficult corners of this matter. None the less, we must do it because until the symbolism of male dominance is gone we will not have granted gender equality.

Several of my noble friends have touched on the subject of the hereditary peerage. I have a Bill on this subject sitting in the Printed Papers Office. It will not be debated in this Session but I hope that we will get around to it in the next. This is a difficult area, as several noble Lords have mentioned, not least because one is dealing with a succession of expectations. This Bill is well timed for the monarchy because we know exactly what the expectations are, but you cannot spread that over 1,000 plus hereditary peerages, let alone the baronetage, which probably ought to be wound up in it too. There are also in many cases, but, sadly, not mine, substantial properties tied up with titles. One does not want to do something which means that those diverge any more than we want the hereditary titles to diverge from the monarchy.

I suspected that we would reform this House a couple of years after 1999. I have been proved very wrong on that and perhaps the present system will see me out, but eventually we will get around to it. Even if hereditary Peers have no place in this House as of right, it is still a considerable thing to be called “Lord” or “Sir” because so many people now have these titles through their own virtue. For that matter, I imagine that it is a great thing to be called a duke, too. It is useful. It opens doors. On one occasion my wife rang The Ivy to see whether there was a table. She used her maiden name of Rubinstein and they said no, so she got her assistant to ring up five minutes later and ask whether Lord Lucas might have a table. The answer was yes, so titles, even those which are unearned, are not without consequence in this world. They are part of the historical pattern of the nation. As someone who enjoys having a title but also appreciates that in others, I think it is a nice part of the fabric of the nation which should not be largely restricted to men. This is a reform which we should seek to make. The imperfection in the Bill, in that it does not deal with the royal hereditary titles, gives me hope that the Government may find the motivation to support my Bill, or something like it, in the next Session.