House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 9th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I will briefly respond to a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Newby. If we voted for this amendment now, it would probably apply from this Session, because of Section 2(6). We would probably have to amend that to ensure that it applied from the next Session.

Has the Leader of the House considered whether any change of the rule of non-attendance would necessarily require a legislative change? At the moment, that rule is provided for in statute.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, for his amendment and the time that he has devoted to considering this issue, not just since our debates in Committee but over many years. It is an issue that has occupied his mind and those of many of his predecessors as Convenors of the Cross Benches—we heard from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, as well.

--- Later in debate ---

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

This is the problem, though. When I was running an NGO in Africa, if I had taken a leave of absence and come back to the UK on R&R —some opportunity—but there was a debate about Rwanda, I would not have been able to take part.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

That is true, but it would have been open to my noble friend to make the decision that he felt was best in terms of how he could best serve his country: by continuing the work or by bringing that experience to the debates that were present before your Lordships’ House. This is why we have the leave of absence provision. Those who serve in the Diplomatic Service make use of it at the moment.

As I said in Committee, we understand the no-less-noble demands on the time of our colleagues who serve as husbands and wives, as parents and grandparents, and as carers—they help reflect the population we all serve—but the Government and the House are right to insist that we all take our duties here seriously and that we are seen to be doing so. We already have a minimum attendance requirement through Section 2 of the House of Lords Reform Act 2014. That, as the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, said, requires just one day of attendance per Session, which he and others have rightly argued is not really commensurate with the command that we have received from our sovereign.

That Act became law in 2014 thanks to a consensus and an initiative taken here in your Lordships’ House. Incidentally, the initiative was taken by a former leader of the Liberal Democrats, Lord Steel of Aikwood, who would, I think, be staggered to hear the argument advanced by the leader of the Liberal Democrats here today that he supports the principle but does not want to take this opportunity to make this change. If that is the pace of change favoured by the Liberal Democrats, it is no wonder that they have not finished the job they set out to do in 1911.

Under the 2014 Act, which your Lordships decided, 16 noble Lords have been removed for failing to clear the very low hurdle that it established. We do not criticise them; we know that some of them were seriously ill. Perhaps that Act helped them take a decision that it would have been rather painful for them to take more actively. However, it still leaves a large number of people who, in the words of the Government’s manifesto,

“do not play a proper role in our democracy”.

In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Newby, reminded us that we are summoned here to give counsel not just on the topics on which we consider ourselves experts but on the certain arduous and urgent affairs that change throughout the course of a Parliament. Also in Committee, my noble friend Lord Bethell reminded us how the collective deliberative act of parleying that we all undertake here requires getting to know one another and establishing bonds of trust and understanding—not just turning up and disappearing into rival Division Lobbies. That is how we establish the consensus that the Leader of the House rightly wants us to achieve.

There is, I think, an emerging consensus in your Lordships’ House that the current attendance requirement of a single day per Session, without having to speak, vote or sit on a committee, is too low. Thanks to the spreadsheets compiled by the Library at the request of my noble friend Lord Blencathra, we know who we are talking about without having to name names or point fingers. We can proceed calmly and empirically. The Convenor of the Cross Benches is among those who have looked very closely at those numbers and been satisfied that a 10% requirement would not affect what he called in Committee the

“low-frequency, high-impact Members”—[Official Report, 12/3/25; col. 719.]

who bring sparing but specialist experience, particularly to the Cross Benches.

I have to say to my noble friend Lord Gove—sadly, he was not yet among us in Committee, so he missed my quoting “Evita” in citing the example of our noble friend Lord Lloyd-Webber—that I have much sympathy for what he says. Lord Lloyd-Webber was driven from your Lordships’ House and attacked for being a composer first and a politician second; as I said in Committee, I found it disappointing that he was not able to be here with us, when the pandemic hit, to give his experience on behalf of our performing arts, the West End and the theatres around the country that were facing plight. I must say, the 10% threshold that the Convenor of the Cross Benches has looked at would raise the bar slightly but would not prevent us having the expertise of people like Lord Lloyd-Webber joining us sparingly, but importantly, for our debates. I think that my noble friend Lord Gove will find that our noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead will clear that bar quite easily.

There are certainly some further questions that the House will need to address in future—for instance, how we turn attendance into more active participation so that we are not encouraging people to game the system by simply making speeches for the sake of appearing in Hansard, and so that people are not just turning up and reciting speeches written by lobby groups into the pages of the Official Report. We are all embarrassed by our colleagues from all corners of the House who turn up to lurk below the Bar for a few paltry minutes or skulk off after the first Division of the day—it would be a disgrace for us to expel hard-working Members from your Lordships’ House and not address that problem—but we can do this in bite-sized chunks, as the Leader of the House said.

There is no reason why proper consideration of those issues, whether through a Select Committee or future debates on the Floor of the House, should prevent us taking this initiative today, saying that we expect better and raising the bar a little higher. As the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, put it earlier, here is another mischief that we can rectify through this Bill. I think that this amendment, in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, would be a sensible and timely upgrade to the 2014 Act. We have seen that Act in operation for a decade now. We can strengthen it in the light of what we have seen over the past 11 years. It would provide the authority that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, says will be necessary if we are to make progress on this important issue. We can allow ourselves the time to consider other matters without delaying taking a step that would, I think, genuinely improve the standing and function of your Lordships’ House.

I do hope that the noble Earl will press his amendment when the debate is concluded and that we can all embrace this important, timely and modest improvement to the functions of your Lordships’ House.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, for raising this issue again today. I am grateful for the discussions that we have had on it and, indeed, for the discussions that we have had in your Lordships’ House on a number of occasions. My sense is that there is a lot of support—I have been encouraged by it—for a participation requirement, although I do not think that there is consensus on what the level should be. The noble Earl seems happy with 10% but, in our previous debates, a number of noble Lords have been against 10% and been concerned that attending once a fortnight, as it would turn to be, might cause ridicule to the House. I have to say, I do not know what the appropriate figure is, but it is right that we discuss it and look at what it could look like.

Noble Lords have raised a number of issues in this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and others said, requiring attendance once in a Session does not really invite participation. There is an issue here: we all think that we know what we mean when we talk about participation and what levels are appropriate, but quantifying that is different. This is why I think that having a debate around one particular field—in this case, the figure of 10%—is very helpful.

The noble Lord, Lord Gove, said that it would reduce the range of voices. It does not reduce the range of voices if they are the voices of people who do not attend this House. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, that the noble Baroness, Lady May, would easily score on that point as well. We have to consider how best to address this issue.

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, asked an important question about something that I raised last time— I just want to emphasise that. I have said a number of times that if the House can take responsibility for its own behaviour and actions then it should do so. As for what the House could do with its Standing Orders, that is not 100% clear. There are lots of things that we can do via Standing Orders and, where we can, we should take responsibility and do it. However, it would be appropriate for a Select Committee to look at participation/attendance and retirement in the round and to find an appropriate way forward, and at what needs legislation and what could be done prior to or without legislation. That would be a valid way to move forward and one that I could commit to.

The noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, is very keen to set a figure in stone and in statute. I am not keen to do that. I have gone round the houses a little on this and said it before, but this Bill is before the House as it is because the principle of this was discussed 25 years ago, and the Bill completes that part of the reform. On attendance and participation, particularly the areas that have been discussed, there is consensus that something should be done, but I have not seen consensus around the House on a particular number. It would be worthwhile for Members across the House to look at this and see how it could be done. It may be that 10% is the appropriate figure, but we have not said what it should be for participation. That is something which the House needs to look at. How do we do it? Should it be in statute?

The noble Lord, Lord Newby, raised what might happen at the other end. If we sent an amendment to the other place saying that we want 10% attendance, those in the other place who attend a lot more regularly might think that 10% was difficult to justify and might have other views on it.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The other place did pass the 2014 Act, which requires us to turn up only once per Session.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

That was a long time ago. I do not think that it anticipated that people would turn up just once per Session.

Despite the inventive proposal from the noble Lord, Lord True, to have Peers who do not have to attend at all, as the Prime Minister stated recently—the Opposition have said something similar—our expectation is that Members of this House want to play a role in this House, participate in our activities and engage, as the noble Lord said, with other Members. It is not just about sitting here listening to other people debating but about playing a full role. The point about expertise is an important one, though we are not all here just for our expertise, as we do not have an expert on every single issue. We are here for the judgment we bring, having listened to debates.

The timescale for a committee of the House to look at these issues is important. If we let the momentum drop when so many noble Lords are keen to progress on this, we would be failing in our duty. I anticipate setting up such a committee very soon after Royal Assent, to look at these issues in the round and make proposals for your Lordships’ House to consider, and to consider whether we can move more quickly on things that can be done without or prior to legislation.

I assure the noble Earl that I am very keen that we make progress and deal with these issues as quickly as possible. I hope that reassures him that I have no intention of putting this issue on the back burner. All the points that he has raised are entirely valid. It is not just the reputation of the House we are concerned about but the value of the work that we do. It is impossible to do that work if somebody turns up only occasionally, possibly just to vote or to be here for only one amendment. If we are dealing with legislation, they probably should see that legislation through in its entirety, as a number of noble Lords do.

I am grateful to the noble Earl for raising this and hope that it is a view that he will put to the committee when it discusses these issues. I respectfully ask that he withdraw his amendment.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 9th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Burns, for his amendment and the way he introduced it. He raised four very substantial issues—much more substantial than most of the issues we have spent most of the day debating. Should there be a maximum size of the House? How do we get there? How do we then stop recidivist Governments breaching it? Once we have got there, how do we balance the new appointments between the various parties?

The first and third questions are very straightforward. Yes, there should be a limit. Yes, it will mean that no Prime Minister can then threaten to flood the House with 100 new Peers, but the last time that was tried was over 110 years ago, and it has not proved to be a necessary part of public policy-making in the interim. Is the noble Lord, Lord Gove, right when he says the more voices, the better? Clearly, there is a point at which that ceases to be the case, and what we are arguing about is where that should be. If there were 5,000 people here, there would clearly be too many voices, and we would not be able to do anything. Those of us who have spent many hours debating here, including everybody who has been involved with the Burns amendment, have formed the view that the place would be better if it had a cap on its numbers. So, yes, there should be a cap on the numbers. It should be a legislative cap. If we have that, it solves the problem of how we stop future Prime Ministers ratcheting up the numbers again—they will not be allowed to do it by law.

How do we get to that number, 650 or whatever it is? Actually, if we do what we say we are going to do in terms of retirement and participation, we get beyond that number; we get below it. In fact, one of the arguments about having a straightforward retirement age is that we are taking out too many people, so I do not think that the bit of the noble Lord’s amendment that deals with how we get to the number would be needed in practice.

If we agree that there should be a limit and that it means you cannot ratchet up again, and if we say that we get to the limit by the combination of retirement and participation limits, the difficult question that remains is: once you have got below the limit, how do you decide on the balance of appointments? The noble Lord says there is a convention that the Labour Party and the Conservative Party should have broad parity of numbers. That may be fine, but there are some others of us here, both on these Benches and the noble Lord’s. What are we going to do about all that?

In his original report, the noble Lord came up with an elegant proposal to deal with the balance that related to votes and seats over a period of three general elections. It would have had the advantage of being a stabilising force while still reflecting the fact that the House has to move with the country. I supported that at the time, as I think the Government did, and would support it again.

On how we implement all this, if we could agree on it all, given that the debate about retirement is in part a debate about numbers, one of the issues will be how quickly we do it. If we require primary legislation to deal with retirement, I do not see why it would be illogical to include something about numbers in that.

How you deal with my point about how you rebalance over time once you have got below the cap, whether you do that by convention or statute, is a matter for another day. The only thing that worries me slightly is that framing a statute that could not be amended in the light of changing political circumstances might be quite difficult.

These are hugely important issues. There is quite a lot of consensus on some of them, but I hope we are able to debate them sensibly and make progress on them during the course of the Parliament and in the context of the other debates we are having, not least on retirement.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, in many ways this is the most important amendment we are considering today, because it is the only attempt to curb the power of the Executive over Parliament. The Bill, as the Government drafted it, shifts the scales rather dangerously in their favour. It leaves the Prime Minister the sole person responsible for deciding who comes to this House and who leaves it. If we were to throw out the small number of excepted hereditary Peers in the way that the Bill as originally drafted put it, which the House has now voted against, every Member of this House would be appointed by, or subject to the approval of, the Prime Minister of the day—a situation found in no other democratic Chamber.

As we have heard from our debates in Committee and last week, the House of Lords Appointments Commission, HOLAC, has no power to insist on the nominations it makes, and no guaranteed number or guaranteed timescale. While this Parliament has already seen the introduction of 45 Labour Peers, 21 Conservatives and three Liberal Democrats, the independent commission has not been permitted to make any nominations under the present Prime Minister.

In our debate last week, the Leader of the House confirmed that the four Cross-Bench Peers announced last month were people of the Prime Minister’s own selection, not the House of Lords Appointments Commission’s. Moreover, in the statement the Prime Minister made alongside that announcement, he made clear that, like his predecessors, he would be prepared to overrule HOLAC in exceptional circumstances if it objected to one of his nominations on the grounds of propriety.

Even the Lords spiritual, notwithstanding the changes made under that great Presbyterian Gordon Brown, pass through Downing Street on the way to their episcopal throne. Crucially, the procedural changes made by Mr Brown are not set in statute and so could be undone by a future Prime Minister with a snap of their fingers.

I have served in government in different capacities under four Prime Ministers. I have seen the power of patronage and the seductive temptations it offers to Prime Ministers as their other powers wane. We have seen the current Prime Minister wielding that power already—that is not new and not unique to him, but the Bill he has sent us would leave him more powerful than any of his predecessors and leave him and those who follow him free to succumb to those temptations without, as noble Lords have put it, any guard-rails.

At the beginning of his premiership, Sir Keir Starmer began by appointing new Peers at a faster rate than any Prime Minister for three decades. I am glad that he has now slowed down, but he could change speed again whenever he wants. The Leader of the House has argued, and I can see will argue again, that that is because of the profligacy of his predecessors—following the argument made by the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, about the ratchet effect that leaves us in this situation after every general election. In doing so, she and the Prime Minister have given the game away that the Bill is not just about ending the hereditary peerage but about removing a large number of Peers from beyond the Government Benches.

The Leader has told us repeatedly that, even with that excision, the Labour Party will form only 28% of the seats in your Lordships’ House. Can she tell us today, with the same clarity, that she expects and intends the Labour Party to form the same proportion by the end of this Parliament, or does she see why so many of us, like Elvis Presley, have “Suspicious Minds” about that?

More worryingly still, we have seen the power of executive patronage in action throughout our debates on the Bill. I am sure I am not the only one to have noticed the conspicuous number of abstentions in some of the Divisions so far, or to have been surprised by the arguments of noble Lords who are usually so robust in asserting our role as a revising Chamber advising that on this Bill, which has such profound consequences not just for your Lordships’ House but for our constitutional settlement, we should not make any amendment at all or disagree with the House of Commons, who have still—the majority of them—sat for only 170 days. I detect a certain nervousness, not just among our hereditary colleagues or those over or approaching the age of 80, about voting for things that might annoy the present Government. I know the Leader will want every Member of your Lordships’ House to know that they can and should perform their legislative scrutiny on this Bill, as on any other, without fear or favour, so I hope she can reassure us that no one, even those who would vote on the Bill in a way that she would rather they did not, will suffer any ill feeling or consequence from the Government.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

This is the first time I have been angry in this debate. The noble Lord is casting malign intent on me and others in my party about the Bill. I hope he will retract and rethink what he said.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I am sorry if I have angered the Leader, but this comes from conversations I have had with noble Lords in other corners of the House about amendments on the Bill. They worry—and I know she will take this seriously, because she will not want them to worry—about the consequences of how they vote and how they are perceived to vote, particularly hereditary Peers sitting on other Benches with their future uncertain. I am sorry if that has angered her. It should anger and concern us all. I know she will say it should not need saying, but I know she will also not want any noble Lord to have that fear as they approach this Bill or any other.

The noble Lord, Lord Burns—who, as my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham has pointed out, performs his duties here without any fear or favour—has been asked to look at many important issues for our nation. He has worked harder and longer than anyone to find a way to tackle the question of the size of your Lordships’ House, not least in chairing the Lord Speaker’s committee established by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler. The recommendations that he and his colleagues from across the House made show that it is possible to address the size of the House without changing the law, and the Prime Minister at the time, my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead, showed that it was possible too with the restraint that she exercised. The actions of subsequent Prime Ministers of both parties show that not all occupants of No. 10 have been persuaded to do that, and the current occupant of No. 10 has not made any commitment, notwithstanding the words that the noble Baroness used when she was Leader of the Opposition in winding the debate on the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Burns.

If the House is serious about reducing its size and asserting its independence in the face of the Executive, I hope the noble Lord will continue to press the matter that he has been pressing on behalf of a House that asked him to do it for so long, and I hope the noble Baroness will be able to give us the reassurances that I know we all want to hear. I am sorry if it has angered her to ask for them, but I think it is important that she is able to reassure noble Lords on that point.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, I can reassure noble Lords on a number of items, but I will say that that is the first time in this debate that we have had such discourtesy from a Member of the party opposite, with his allegation that somehow I will punish those who take a different view on this. He should look at his words again and rethink them, because the tone of the debate has not been like that throughout. I am sorry that he descended to that level.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Burns, for bringing this forward. He has been consistent throughout about the issues of the size of the House and prime ministerial patronage. Others are perhaps more recent converts on those issues, but he has had consistency. He and his committee looked at these issues forensically in a way that the House could respect, because it was based on facts and numbers, and they looked at this in a sensible way.

On hearing what the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, said earlier, I am tempted to ask whether perhaps he was thinking that I should say we should do it “My Way” and no other way. For the final time, to follow a theme, “A Little Less Conversation” sometimes could be more helpful—I just like to lighten the mood.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Burns, in addressing some of the other comments that have been made, that I think it would be completely wrong if departures from this House, whether by hereditaries or due to retirements or participation, should merely create vacancies to be filled. We have manifesto commitments, and I think it has been the will of this House, that we should reduce the size of the House—not because of the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Gove, and the things he put forward, but because we are all looking at how we as a House do our best work. How do we properly contribute to debates? How do we ensure voices are heard around the House? When the House gets too large, there are concerns that not all Members are playing a role. When he talks about reducing the size of the House, he is right to say that temporary reductions are not what the House is looking for.

I have reflected on the comments I made when I responded to my noble friend Lady Hayter previously. I have a concern that if the Select Committee becomes a kitchen sink of issues, it becomes a talking shop and no progress is made. I think everybody is trying to avoid that happening. But I do think—and I spoke to her and the noble Lord, Lord Burns, on this—that retirement and participation are obviously two major drivers for reducing the size of the House. It is implicit in that that, if we are looking to reduce the size of the House, we do not then seek to merely create vacancies to be filled. It is an opportunity to reflect on the ideal size and look forward to that.

There is always an issue about how much you constrain the Prime Minister’s patronage, and that has to be taken into account in the committee as well. The noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, said the Prime Minister is the sole person who proposes Members for this House. He knows that is wrong, as I know that is wrong, as the Prime Minister passes on the nominations from other parties. It was made clear in the Statement—which I think the noble Lord was quite disparaging about—that the ability to nominate Cross-Benchers will remain and, through the Prime Minister, those nominations of people who have first-rate public service can also come to the Cross Benches as well.

I will address some of the other points. The noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, said—and I may have misunderstood her when she was speaking, so she can correct me—that it has always been accepted that the Government would be the largest party but not the overall majority. My party is not the largest party, though we are in government. I have used these figures before in your Lordships’ House, and I think it is part of the reason we are now discussing the size of the House. The relative size of the parties—the relative numbers across the board, including the Liberal Democrats—is as important as the size of the House. After about 12.5 years of a Labour Government, my party, the then government party, left office with, I think, fewer than 30 more Peers than the Conservative Party. When the Conservative Party left office in 2024, there were over 100 more Conservative Peers than Labour. I find that totally unacceptable. It has never happened before in that way, and the disparity between parties is partly why we are discussing these issues now.

The noble Lord made it as a party-political point about hereditary Peers; it long predates that. The Grocott Bill that we tried to put forward previously was rejected by the party opposite—not by everybody, as I had several noble Lords today ask why their party did not take advantage of this before. There has to be an issue about how you get a balance of numbers across the House. I have the view that this House does its best work when the two parties of government—the main party of government and the opposition party—have roughly equal numbers and we abide by the conventions of the House. That is when I think we have the most respect, we work at our best and that works well. The only other time—

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The Leader of the House has been consistent in saying this in opposition and in government. Is that therefore a firm commitment that she does not want to see the Labour Party outnumbering the main party of opposition in this Parliament?

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

I am not in a position to make a firm commitment. The House absolutely does its best work when the two main parties have roughly equal numbers, but it also depends on the House fulfilling its responsibilities and abiding by the conventions of the House. The noble Lord will know that, when we were in opposition, we would never have got up to the shenanigans that we have seen from the party opposite. I do not think, for example, that we ever proposed a closure Motion halfway through discussing an amendment—that was the first time I had seen that happen—so we do abide by the conventions. The noble Lord, Lord True, used to say to me regularly that what goes around comes around; I think he was right in principle, but perhaps not in action these days.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 2nd July 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay]

2: Leave out Clause 1 and insert the following new Clause—
“Abolition of by-elections for hereditary peers(1) Section 2 of the House of Lords Act 1999 (exception from section 1) is amended as follows.(2) For subsection (2) substitute—“(2) No more than 87 people at any one time shall be excepted from section 1.” (3) For subsection (4) substitute—“(4) Any vacancy resulting from the death, retirement, resignation or expulsion of an excepted person under subsection (2) after the day on which the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2025 comes into force is not to be filled by further exception.””Member's explanatory statement
This amendment would amend the House of Lords Act 1999 to abolish the system of by-elections for hereditary peers. This would prevent any new hereditary peers from joining the House, while allowing those who are presently serving in the House to remain. It follows the proposals of the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, many sensible ways of improving this Bill were discussed in Committee, but perhaps the most sensible was one which has been discussed many times before. Amendment 2, which I am delighted to say is supported by the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, and my noble friend Lady Laing of Elderslie, among many others, seeks to abolish the by-elections through which hereditary Peers may join your Lordships’ House, while allowing those who have come here by that route or who still sit here through the ballot which followed the House of Lords Act 1999 to continue to do so until, like the rest of us, they choose to retire or leave by some other means. The amendment would ensure that, although we all come here by varied routes and for different reasons, we are all treated equally in our moment of departure.

This amendment was debated rather late in the evening in Committee and given slightly short shrift. I can quite understand the frustration of many, particularly on the Benches opposite, who have spent far longer than I have debating this matter, but I felt it was important to bring back on Report, not least because so many of us have not had that opportunity. It also seemed to me that the sudden opposition to it by those who have previously supported this solution was based on a few false assumptions.

The first assumption or claim is that these by-elections were never intended to be around for so long. In a sense, that is correct, but only because they were intended to ensure that further reform of your Lordships’ House would follow. The preservation of a small number of hereditary Peers, maintained through by-elections, came about as a result of a compromise agreed before Second Reading of what is now the House of Lords Act 1999. Then, as now, a Labour Government had been elected with a large majority in another place on a manifesto proposing reform of your Lordships’ House. Then, as now, there was some scepticism about whether they intended to carry out both stages of that reform with equal alacrity, or whether they sought simply to remove a large number of parliamentarians from Benches other than their own.

The Lord Chancellor at the time, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, said that he was not offended by such scepticism. That is why he accepted the comprise proposed by the Convener of the Cross Benches, Lord Weatherill, to keep a small number of hereditary Peers here by way of surety. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine, explained at Second Reading,

“a compromise in these terms would guarantee that stage two would take place, because the Government with their great popular majority and their manifesto pledge would not tolerate 10 per cent. of the hereditary peerage remaining for long. But the 10 per cent. will go only when stage two has taken place. So it is a guarantee that it will take place”.—[Official Report, 30/3/1999; col. 207.]

The noble and learned Lord gave that guarantee from that Dispatch Box.

Noble Lords will note that stage two did not take place. The Labour Government carried on in power for more than a decade, but the only further reform they enacted was the removal of the Lord Chancellor from the Woolsack and the abolition of the Law Lords. In doing so, incidentally, they allowed those judges who had come here under the Appellate Jurisdiction Act 1876 to continue to do so for as long as they wished. That is why we in your Lordships’ House still benefit from the wisdom and experience of the noble and learned Lords, Lord Woolf, Lord Hoffmann, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, Lord Mance, Lord Neuberger, Lord Collins of Mapesbury, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale of Richmond.

Towards the end of his time in office, Gordon Brown proposed in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act to end the by-elections. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine, predicted, Mr Brown could not tolerate 10% of the hereditary peerage remaining for so long. But the Bill did not contain measures for stage two reforms, so Parliament rejected that part of it shortly before Dissolution in 2010. What we have before us today is a proposal not only to abolish the by-elections, but to remove the remaining hereditary Peers from this House at the end of the current Session, without fulfilling the guarantee the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine, gave. The noble and learned Lord told your Lordships, when he gave it in 1999, that it

“reflects a compromise negotiated between Privy Councillors on Privy Council terms and binding in honour on all those who have come to give it their assent”.—[Official Report, 30/3/1999; col. 207.]

Whatever else we may think of the Bill before us, we have the opportunity to defend that honour today.

The second claim or assumption is that the by-elections are somehow eccentric, alien or embarrassing to your Lordships’ House. In fact, they are not an unusual feature. Following the Acts of Union in 1707 and 1801, elections were held among Scottish and then Irish Peers to elect representatives of their number to sit in Parliament. When the Irish Free State was established in 1922, the Irish elections were discontinued but those who were already in the House were allowed to stay and continue their work. The Scottish elections continued until 1963, when the Peerage Act permitted all Scottish Peers, male and female, to take their place among the Barons. So apart from a 36-year gap between 1963 and 1999, there have been elected Members of your Lordships’ House for the last 318 years.

Like many other elements of our organic constitution, the by-elections of recent years have been easy to pillory, but so too are by-elections to other legislative chambers. Noble Lords may recall the Haltemprice and Howden by-election of 2008, which attracted 26 candidates, none of them from Labour or the Liberal Democrat parties; or the contest in Fermanagh and South Tyrone in 1981, which attracted just two, the winner being a convicted criminal on hunger strike who died 26 days after his election, provoking a change in the law.

The present leader of the House of Commons was first elected in a by-election with a turnout of 18.2%. The present Foreign Secretary and the Minister of State for Europe were elected at by-elections on a 25% turnout. The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Hilary Benn, came to Parliament in a by-election where just 19.9% of the electorate turned out to vote. I am not sure that stands in such stark contrast to the by-election which brought his brother to the Labour Benches of your Lordships’ House.

It is easy to pillory by-elections, but we should not denigrate those who win them under the rules we have collectively devised. Just as no one would question the legitimacy of those members of the Cabinet who came to Parliament in those lacklustre contests, nor does it follow that seeking to end the by-elections to your Lordships’ House should be accompanied by the expulsion of those who have won them.

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[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

Is my noble friend in a position to give an assurance to your Lordships’ House that, if this amendment were to carry, it would be part of a wider package of reform, some of which is indicated in the amendments and has been touched on by the noble Baroness? Those of us who have doubts about this amendment would be much happier about supporting it if we thought that it was part of a wider package to which the Tory Front Bench is party.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I think my noble friend’s question is directed more to the Government, who have the opportunity to say what they will do on stage 2 reforms. But I will come to my noble friend’s question in a moment, because it is important. In fact, it reflects a conversation that I had with a wise colleague from the Cross Benches who, when I told him I was intending to move this amendment, said, “I hope we will see some humility from those who have previously resisted it”. I hope the fact that I stand here at the opposition Dispatch Box to move this amendment is an expression of that humility.

I remind your Lordships that my noble friend Lord True, along with the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, suggested, as soon as the Government were elected, that the by-elections be discontinued in recognition of the Government’s manifesto commitment and in anticipation of the debates on this Bill. But I can be humbler yet. I say to the Government and to noble Lords in every corner of the House: on this, we give in. We will not hold the present Government to the guarantee, binding in honour, made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg. We yield to the mandate that they won at the ballot box and will take them at their word that further reform will follow. I welcome what the Leader of the House has said about the establishment of a Select Committee to look into some—not all—of the rest of the Government’s manifesto. I note that the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, is in his place. Ohers will remember the royal commission—rather weightier than a Select Committee—that was set up by a previous Labour Government to seek a way forward on stage 2 reforms then. I wish the Select Committee far greater success on this occasion. We will reserve our scepticism and hope to be proved wrong.

But, in return, we urge your Lordships to show the same clemency and generosity afforded to the Law Lords and the Irish representative Peers in days past to our friends and colleagues who sit here by accident of birth and who work just as hard as the rest of us in the service of the country that they love. I beg to move.

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I added my name in support of this amendment, which has been so admirably introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay. I agree that the opportunity to adopt this solution should have been seized earlier. Those who tried but failed are right to be frustrated, and the Conservatives deserve the criticism they are getting. But these are not good enough reasons for us to fail to seize this opportunity now.

To begin with, a large number of us never had the chance to vote, as the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, said. As for those who did, it is true that some of them are supporting today what they opposed a few years ago. It is also true that others are opposing today what they supported only a few years ago. Consistency does not serve many well. Everyone is better served by returning to first principles and judging this issue on its merits. This amendment was a good idea when the Bill on which it is modelled was last given a Second Reading in December 2021, and it remains a good idea today.

To put things in some numerical perspective, since December 2021, 13 new hereditary Peers have come to this House through the route of Section 2 of the House of Lords Act 1999. If the proponents of those proposals in 2021 had had their way then, as I wish they had—I was not here—we would have 74 former hereditaries today, instead of 87. The difference is just 13.

It is certainly the case that the party that gained the most from the excepted hereditary route to this House was the Conservative Party, and there is no doubt that the biggest loser was the Labour Party. This is not fair because it has resulted in a political imbalance in favour of the Conservatives. However, as the numbers that I have just mentioned show, this is an imbalance that can be corrected. Indeed, this correction is already under way: 49 new Labour Peers were created since January 2024, with 45 since the election. Importantly, this political imbalance did not become a constitutional imbalance. In spite of the number of Conservative Peers, the House remained very effective at scrutinising legislation and holding the previous Conservative Governments to account.

Since 1911, significant changes to the make-up of this House, and to its legislative conventions defining our role relative to the other place, have generally travelled with the chief Opposition on board. We break this habit at our peril. We have often considered the hypothetical scenario of a Prime Minister coming in and appointing large numbers of new Peers to control this House—Lloyd George was not the only one to be so tempted. What stands between us and this scenario is the fact that we are not an elective dictatorship. We are a representative democracy with a complex system of checks and balances that has made it very difficult for a Prime Minister, even with a large majority in the other place, to effect a power grab. Each of the three main political parties with experience of government has historically acted as a check and balance. No party leader has ever achieved full control of his or her party. Indeed, a few of them were humiliated by their party—ask Jeremy Corbyn or Liz Truss.

But what if the next Prime Minister is not the leader of one of these political parties with experience of government? What if he is the leader of a movement that he set up and controls? That the scenario that has to be in our minds for the next election. Reform’s manifesto in 2024 said:

“Replace the crony-filled House of Lords with a much smaller, more democratic second chamber. Structure to be debated”.


I doubt that elections will be his priority. He will want an upper House that he controls in the way that he controls his party. He will seek to achieve this objective through a mixture of removals, appointments and, perhaps, some elections. If this scenario came to pass, we would have to accept the principle that the party that won the election needs a sufficient number of Peers to govern. But we would also be perfectly entitled—indeed, constitutionally mandated—to insist that there should not be removal of Peers en masse unless there is agreement with the main Opposition on the basis of a clear, fair, principled and transparent approach.

On a different note, one hereditary Peer told me that he was not going to vote because he did not think it right for him to do so. I respectfully urge him and anyone in a similar position to reconsider. The idea that we should not vote on constitutional rules affecting the composition of the House because we belong to the affected category of Peers is wrong and would create a bad precedent. Should Peers over 80 abstain on amendments seeking to impose an age limit of 80? Should Peers who might be excluded by a participation threshold abstain on those amendments? Of course not. In all these situations, Peers should vote on the basis of principle rather than personal interest. If our conscience tells us that our personal interest prevents us from fairly assessing the principle, then we should abstain, but if we are genuinely convinced that the principle is right, it is our duty to vote in a way that upholds that principle.

I went back to the Second Reading speeches. It is clear that many of your Lordships expected that, by now, there would be some compromise on the question of the transitional arrangements for the 87 hereditary Peers. Those who expressed such an expectation included many who were fully supportive of the Bill and deeply critical of the attitude of the main Opposition. The key principle is that the resolution of this issue must be clear, fair and transparent. To say, “Vote for this now and we will see later” is none of those things. We are already being asked to pass the Bill and leave for later fundamental questions about the reform of the House foreshadowed in the Labour manifesto, although I welcome the announcement by the Leader of the House earlier.

We cannot be asked to pass this legislation while remaining blind to the transitional arrangements for the 87 Peers. It would not be a good outcome for this House and its credibility if some of the 87 reappeared on a basis that is neither clear nor transparent and does not reflect any prior consensus. The question of what happens to them must be resolved in this House and before this House. This could have been achieved with a firm assurance on the basis of cross-party agreement. We have received no such assurance. It is now our duty to fix this problem by voting for this amendment.

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[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, there was an opportunity for this House. Had we not had the by-elections since 1999, there would have been far fewer hereditary Peers in this House then. Since my noble friend Lord Grocott introduced his Bill, there have been a number of by-elections and there are now 28 hereditary Peers who are here through those by-elections. I think the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, referred in his comments to them being here by an accident of birth.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

Does the noble Baroness also recognise that there are 257 of us who have also arrived here since the last time there was a vote on this and who would really like the opportunity to take the offer that was not given to us?

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

The noble Lord has tabled an amendment and is offering it at this point now, although, had he been in the House when this was debated, I doubt he would have voted differently at the time from the leader of his party, who was very much against it.

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[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

Members of my party would have supported that Bill in the House of Commons. The noble Lord has little faith in the House of Commons, but I take his point. I think the noble Lord, Lord Newby, made the point in a previous debate —I know the noble Lord has been here for a number of debates on this issue—that when we send amendments to the House of Commons, how it responds to them is a matter for the House of Commons.

I was actually paying the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, a compliment, praising him for his consistency—he should take them while he can.

I want to move on to a number of the issues raised in this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, tried to depart from the view of the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, of an accident of birth being the route by which hereditary Peers have moved here. He said it was accident of birth and a by-election. Even taking the amendment from his Front Bench today, I think those elections have been discredited.

I know that the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, looked at by-elections in the House of Commons, but I would probably liken the by-elections to this House to those from Dunny-on-the-Wold in “Blackadder”. They brought discredit to the House and Members were embarrassed by them.

The noble Lord, Lord True, said that he and the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, came to me with the proposal to end the by-elections. They did but that was after the manifesto was published and after the King’s Speech. I was grateful to them; I think it was the sensible thing for the House to do, but the by-elections are just suspended, not ended. If the Bill does not become law, we would return to having the by-elections and the House would have to take a separate decision to stop them. They were just suspended—I think the noble Lord was quite keen that they should be suspended—because we do not really have the power in current legislation to end them.

The noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, made the point that we should not be seen to be looking after our friends. There are many hereditary Peers in your Lordships’ House whom I regard as friends; they might not regard me in the same way at the moment, but I have regarded them as friends for a long time. That is not the issue here; it is a matter of principle, which the Labour Party set out clearly before the election. It is not a criticism of any noble Lord in your Lordships’ House. It is a criticism of the system that has been allowed to continue for so long.

I often agree with the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, but I shall take issue with him on a number of things. He said that Labour has brought in 45 new Peers since the general election; his party have had 21 new Peers since the election. Another statistic that I think is helpful to your Lordships’ House concerns the appointments. Like others, I exclude the noble Baroness, Lady May, from this. When we left office as the previous Labour Government in 2010, the difference between the party of government, as we had been, and the Official Opposition, which then became the Government—the Conservative Party—was fewer than 30 Members. When we came into government in 2024, the difference between the two political parties was over 100.

It is a point made very well by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman. This is not just about exits; all leaders should exercise restraint. I am on record as saying— I stand by it—that this House works at its best when the main government party and the main opposition party have roughly equal numbers and we abide by the conventions of the House. That is when this House does its best work.

The Opposition have 286 Peers but the noble Lord thinks that when the hereditaries leave this House—and, contrary to what a noble Baroness said, they will not be expelled immediately but at the end of this Session of Parliament—his party will not be able to field a Front Bench from the remaining Members. My party had to field an Opposition with far fewer than that—probably about 100 fewer—and I think we were a pretty effective Opposition. It is not always about numbers.

This argument that if the hereditaries leave we will then come for other groups of people is utterly ridiculous. I think the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, made that point. We are talking about legislation that was in the manifesto and trailed by the manifesto. Which other groups are we talking about: everybody with red hair or those who wear the wrong-coloured jacket? It is a nonsense. This was clearly defined. The noble Lord is chuntering at me from a sedentary position. He had a long time to speak but he wants to jump up again.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

It is only because the noble Baroness the Leader of the House said that she would take no further interventions. The current government manifesto commits to excluding the over-80s at some point, so we know that this Government intend to remove further Members from your Lordships’ House. The examples given in the debate were about future Governments, of neither of our parties, who might come for more of us for other reasons.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, that is always in the hands of the electorate when they have the manifesto published before them. But again, on the retirement age, we have set that out as a clearly stated manifesto commitment. I have said, and have been clear, that the House should come to a decision on that as a House. We ought to be taking far more responsibility for, and ownership of, matters that affect the House. We tried to do that under the Grocott Bill but, for various reasons, the party opposite would not support it and we did not get that far.

The noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, raised the issue of Members not speaking on different issues. I have to say to him that all Members of the House, when they are here as Members, are equal and can speak or vote on issues as they wish, and should do so within the Code of Conduct. When Members declare an interest or their interests preclude their participating, that is in the Code of Conduct; otherwise, we are in the same place.

There is a real issue here. We are talking about the principle, established 25 years ago, that the hereditary principle would not be a route into your Lordships’ House. That does not decry any individual Member who has arrived by that route, but the time has come to an end. The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, who I cannot see in his place at the moment, said in an earlier debate that he was surprised it had lasted so long. It was trailed in our manifesto. I said from the Dispatch Box many times, as Leader of the Opposition on the other side, that if the House failed to pass the Bill that my noble friend Lord Grocott was suggesting to end the by-elections, the consequence would be a Bill of this kind.

This is where we are now. It is a chance—the noble Lord, Lord True, is absolutely right. Members of your Lordships’ House have an opportunity today to make a decision. Do they accept the words of the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, about an accident of birth followed by a by-election, as the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, says, or do they think that now this has to end? We are not criticising any individual Member—

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

Those are exactly the words I wrote; we can check Hansard later. The noble Lord’s amendment is a way to slow down the process so that all those Members remain here. I speak to my party’s manifesto commitment, which was made quite clear before the election, and urge the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness and all who have spoken in this debate. I will not detain the House much longer; we have debated this for many years. I am grateful to the noble Baroness for the interventions she has taken.

Frustratingly, however, today’s debate has rather missed the point. My Amendment 2, like the Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, is titled

“Abolition of by-elections for hereditary peers”.

If we pass this amendment, those by-elections will be permanently abolished. We have already discontinued them. There will be no new people coming to your Lordships’ House because they have inherited their title and won a hereditary Peers by-election. The noble Baroness takes exception to the phrase “accident of birth”; others have used other phrases. The principle is that, if we pass this amendment, the Government’s manifesto pledge to remove the right of hereditary Peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords can be fulfilled, but it can be fulfilled in a way that is kinder.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

I took interventions, so the noble Lord can accept one and be helpful. He is wrong in his premise. Hereditary Peers would remain as hereditary Peers because all that happens in his amendment is that the by-elections will end permanently.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

But we will have ended their right to sit and vote in the Lords and they will leave in the same way as the rest of us, including the over 80s, who at some point, following the recommendations of a Select Committee, may leave your Lordships’ House as well. They will leave in a way that is consistent with the way the Law Lords continue to sit here until they choose to retire or leave through another means. They will leave in a way that is consistent with the way the Irish representative Peers left, after rendering great service to this country. This will be the first time that a category of Peer has been removed with no exceptions and no way back. The proposal is to do it at the end of this Session.

I am happy to continue to call this the Grocott No. 2 Bill, and I was glad that the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, spoke. We saved a space in the list of supporters in case he could be tempted to add his name. I understand why, after many years of campaigning, he is frustrated and has chosen not to. He said that he prefers the No. 2 Bill because it does the job more effectively. The question is: what is that job?

If the job is to expel the remaining hereditary Peers from your Lordships’ House as quickly as possible and to move on from the guarantee given by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, in 1999 without any further reminder of it—we heard not a mention of it from the Leader of the House in her winding speech —then the No. 2 Bill does that job better. However, if the job is to improve the standing and function of your Lordships’ House, and to keep some of the expertise—not just on the Opposition Front Bench but those who serve as Chairmen of Committees and Deputy Speakers on the Woolsack; those who are the custodians of the conventions and kindnesses of this House—then the proposition put forward for many years by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, and many other noble Lords from all corners of the House, is a better way of doing it.

I was raised to believe that it is never too late to do the right thing. If you are someone who, like the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, is exasperated that we have taken so long, or someone who has previously opposed it and rues that and repents now at leisure or if, like me, you are one of those 257 noble Lords who have never had the opportunity to vote for this kind of modest change that would allow us to say farewell to our colleagues in a more organic way, then I hope you will join me in the Division Lobby and support this amendment. I would like to test the opinion of the House on this matter; it has been too long since we last had that chance.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 2nd July 2025 Lords Chamber

I note the noble Earl’s amendment with his proposal for a specific number. Of course, my noble friend has already said that, in previous times, Prime Ministers had limited the number of Cross-Bench peerages that HOLAC could create. I think that I am right in saying that HOLAC has yet to appoint any new Cross-Bench Peer this year but, in the past few weeks alone, the Prime Minister has appointed four Cross-Bench Peers. I therefore ask the noble Baroness the Leader: what are her views about the risk of, in effect, two-tier Cross-Bench Peers? We have those who are judged on their suitability versus those who are not. Can she confirm—if I have understood the Prime Minister’s Statement correctly—that the Prime Minister could ignore any HOLAC concerns about the suitability of a Peer who he nominates directly to the Cross Benches and that, to go back to my original concern, we could therefore have directly appointed Cross-Bench Peers who are supposedly not obliged in any way to the Prime Minister, who HOLAC may have thought to be potentially not suitable, if they had come through its processes, but the Prime Minister could decide that they are suitable and appoint them directly? I would be grateful for her views on that.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Stowell of Beeston, who has asked some pertinent questions about a topic that also caught my eye. Since this Bill was in Committee, there have been two significant developments in terms of the Cross Benches. As my noble friend has just alluded to, there was, on 17 June, a list of four nominations to the Cross Benches. They are four very eminent people: Sir Tim Barrow, Dr Simon Case, Dame Katherine Grainger and Dame Sharon White; we look forward to welcoming them all to the House and the work that they will do. The announcement of their peerages was accompanied by short citations; I have previously paid tribute to the Government for introducing those citations, as they are very helpful. They set out the great distinctions that people have had in their careers and the expertise they will bring to your Lordships’ House. It was not made clear, however, whether these four worthy people were nominated by the House of Lords Appointments Commission or directly by the Prime Minister.

There was a doctrine in the 1990s, under Sir Tony Blair—he wrote a Written Ministerial Statement to Parliament outlining it—that he would nominate a small number of distinguished people who, for reasons of their former career, were understandably not suitable to be partisan Peers, directly to the Cross Benches. At the time he set that out, he said it would be around 10 people per Parliament: they were known in Whitehall as the “Cross-Bench exemptions”. Are the four people nominated on 17 June Cross-Bench exemptions nominated by the Prime Minister, or were some of them nominated by the House of Lords Appointments Commission? Was my noble friend Lady Stowell correct just now that the House of Lords Appointments Commission has yet to make recommendations for the Cross-Bench Peers that it suggests, quite separately from the Prime Minister of the day?

Like my noble friend Lady Stowell, I was interested in the Written Ministerial Statement that the Prime Minister made to Parliament on 19 June, as well as in the questions that she asked about HOLAC’s role in assessing suitability. The Prime Minister said in that Statement of 19 June:

“The Commission can decline to support a nomination on propriety grounds and will inform the relevant political party if this is the case. It is a matter for the Prime Minister to decide whether to recommend an individual to the Sovereign”—


echoing the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell. He went on:

“In the unlikely event I, as Prime Minister, were to proceed with a nomination against HOLAC’s advice on propriety I would write to the Commission and this letter would be published on gov.uk”.


That happened under previous Prime Ministers. The current Prime Minister, the noble Baroness and others were extremely critical of that. Is it the case, as the Prime Minister has said to Parliament, unlikely though he says it will be, that he now agrees he may need to exercise that judgment, to disagree with HOLAC and to appoint people to your Lordships’ House against its recommendations on propriety? I would be grateful if the noble Baroness could clarify that.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, again I feel that I am slightly swimming against the tide in opposing this amendment, which seems to me rooted in the outlook that I think of as “good chappery”— I am borrowing the nomenclature of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, in introducing it. It is the idea that when you are appointed to a public body, in some presumably painful operation, your opinion glands are cauterised and you suddenly become a wise, disinterested, neutral person who is uniquely capable of raising your eyes above the partisan scrum and descrying the true national interest.

The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, asked, “What if the Prime Minister isn’t a good chap or a good chapess?”, the implication being that, if you are appointed to HOLAC, you must by definition have these virtues. But who appoints you to HOLAC? How is it that you suddenly, by virtue of getting there, drop all your assumptions and prejudices and become this kind of idealised platonic guardian? I have to say that it is a doctrine that has debilitated and delegitimised successive Governments, because it has widened the gap between government and governed.

I called it “good chappery”, but actually a more accurate word would be oligarchy: it is a way of taking a group of people and putting them in a privileged position. It is an oligarchy based now not on birth so much as on outlook. How many HOLAC nominees, for example, would have voted with the majority in the 2016 referendum, just to take the one thing where we actually have an exact measure of how the country at large felt about one specific issue?

The idea that we can, in making these changes to the composition of this House, in effect narrow the way of coming here, put in another filter, strain the nomination through some sort of handkerchief of good chappery, strikes me as utterly inconsistent with the times and almost certainly unacceptable to public opinion. It is also, by the way, very much at odds with the previous amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Newby. I was one of the small number who supported it. It is one of those funny things where everyone spoke in favour of it and then everyone voted against it. It was rather like the Holocaust education centre thing: all the speeches were one way; all the votes were the other way.

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[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, there is a whole issue around this because the SNP has no representation in your Lordships’ House either. The noble Lord has spoken about Nigel Farage being offered a role. Given that Mr Farage’s policy is now to abolish the House of Lords, he may not have been willing to accept that role. The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, made this point well. There should be a diversity of opinion. The noble Baroness, Lady Bull, made the same point. There are a range of diversity issues that we should look at, including diversity of opinion. We make better decisions because of that. However, as my noble friend Lord Rooker said earlier—I have used this line, having heard him use it in debates here—in many ways we are a sub-committee of the House of Commons. We can only recommend suggestions and changes to the House of Commons. We bring our judgment to those decisions.

To finish the point that I was making beforehand, we do not believe that the amendment for 20 new life Peers is necessary. The number of nominations is a matter for the Prime Minister, but he will take into account the political balance of the House when making those decisions. It is essential for the House. The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, was a little cross with the Cross-Benchers, perhaps because they have not invited her to join, although they may reconsider that now. A Private Member’s Bill tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Norton, proposed the Cross Benches being roughly 20% of the House. That is a fair figure for the House. The noble Lord has heard me say time and again that the House works best with those kinds of figures, with roughly equal numbers of both political parties of government and when we abide by the conventions of the House. That is when we do our best work.

In some ways, I appreciated the honesty of the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, in his amendment about removing the Prime Minister from the process and having HOLAC deal with this, but he also spoke about participation and the role that we expect Members to play. He is absolutely right that we should expect all Peers to participate in support of the core functions of this House. That means not just turning up to vote occasionally but taking the role as a Member of your Lordships’ House seriously. That is one of the qualities mentioned in the Prime Minister’s Statement—willingness to contribute and play an active role in the House. It matters how Peers get here, but it matters more what Peers do when they are here and how seriously they take that role. Although participation is not a matter for this Bill, I have set out—we will discuss this later—a proposal that may allow us to take that forward.

The noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, talked about the independence of the Cross-Benchers. I think there is a role both for independents and for party politics in your Lordships’ House. I do not think any of us would say that we slavishly follow our party. I think sometimes we wish more did, and I am sure the Opposition Front Bench may say the same, but we do bring judgment. I just keep coming back to that point. Our judgment and integrity are important on these issues.

My final point is on the suggestion from the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, of a new oath for all appointments. I think I understand why he has raised that, and it is a thoughtful approach, but we do not consider it necessary. When a Peer takes the oath in this House and they sign as a Member of this House, that includes a commitment to uphold the Nolan principles of public life so, in a sense, that oath is already there. The Nolan principles are important, and I trust noble Lords to take that commitment to the Nolan principles as seriously as they would take any extra oath, so I do not think it is necessary.

I understand why the proposals have been put forward. The noble Lords, Lord Newby and Lord Wallace, have been sincere in this, but I wonder whether it is a stretch too far. There has been only one case where a Prime Minister has overridden the propriety advice of HOLAC. I think it is wrong to do that. It is hard to envisage circumstances where it would be appropriate, but I think that ensuring absolute transparency, if it were to happen, is the appropriate way forward. I see the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, is about to leap to his feet, so I will give way before he asks.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

Before the Minister sits down—literally in this rare instance—I am grateful to her for the comments she made about the Prime Minister’s Statement and the clarification she gave. She alluded to it, but, just for clarity, is she saying that our four new Cross-Bench colleagues are Cross-Bench Peers selected by the Prime Minister rather than Cross-Bench Peers recommended by HOLAC? I think that is what she was alluding to, but it would be good to have that.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

Those four Cross-Benchers have come through the route of public service, and there is still obviously the expectation that HOLAC would have its appointments done separately. I think that was quite clear in the Statement. I am sorry that that was not clear to the noble Lord before.

Having answered questions again, I respectfully ask the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.

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[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

I cannot resist responding to that, because I agree with it. One of the problems we have is that the Whips do not have sufficient power to tap people on the shoulder and tell them it is really time, whatever age they are, if they are infirm. From that point of view, I agree: it is a matter not of age but of capability, and I think participation is the way to go to address that.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, those final comments compel me to draw your Lordships’ attention to the amendment coming up later on power of attorney, which tries to look at the problem that we have all seen of some colleagues whose mental faculties, sadly, decline at earlier ages and who need to be encouraged to retire from your Lordships’ House.

I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Hailsham and the noble Earl, Lord Devon, for their Amendments 7 and 20, which refer to other commitments in the Labour manifesto that are not in this Bill. We were told that they are not in this Bill because of a piece of punctuation in the manifesto—a full stop, which got a lot of attention in Committee and on which I shall not dwell tonight. This touches on the anxiety of many noble Lords to understand what stage 2 might look like and when it might come, and to ensure that, if we are to remove some of our colleagues from your Lordships’ House, the House they leave behind will be improved in lots of other ways, as we have discussed repeatedly.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Earl of Devon (CB)]

I should note that the term limit I propose is only for those who join the House after the age of 70.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I thank the noble Earl for the clarification. On the difference in ages, neither outlined why they had selected the ages that they chose, but I note that the noble Earl remains, until August, a member of the under-50s club in your Lordships’ House and I congratulate my noble friend Lord Hailsham on his 80th birthday this February.

These are matters that the House or the Select Committee will have to consider carefully in the light of the very wise comments of the noble Lord, Lord Winston. We are an ageing society and hope that we will all live many years longer and be able to contribute to civic life, family life and many other things in different ways. It is inherently arbitrary. My noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern was mentioned and the noble Lord, Lord Winston, is a great example of somebody in his mid-80s still playing a very active part in your Lordships’ House. I responded to the debate on VE Day, when we were all moved to have among us the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, who is very active in your Lordships’ House in his 90s and a living reminder of some of the things this country and others have been through. It is very valuable to have people of all ages in your Lordships’ House.

The other significant difference between the two amendments is that the noble Earl’s would apply only to new entrants to your Lordships’ House. Following on from debates that we have had, can the noble Baroness the Leader of the House say something about her attitude to participation thresholds and retirement ages? Does she envisage those applying to current Members of the House or to new entrants? She was opposed to grandfather rights for people who are here as hereditary Peers, but would she afford grandfather rights to those here over the age of 80 presently who came to your Lordships’ House with a certain understanding and who have arranged their lives, houses and so forth on the expectation that they would play a full part until they choose to retire? If the hereditary Peers are to find their basis here changed at the end of the Session, should the same apply on the basis of age?

I note what the noble Baroness said in an earlier group about the Select Committee and we are grateful for that information. She said that she would discuss it in the usual channels and I appreciate that there are details to be ironed out, but can she say a bit more about her thinking on its composition? What would the party breakdown be? How many Cross-Benchers might there be? Would there be a mixture of hereditary and life colleagues? Obviously there would be no hereditaries if it is set up after Royal Assent, but might former hereditary Members be able to play a role in its work? Who should chair it? From which party or none would they come? Would Bishops sit on it?

The noble Baroness said a little about timeframes and hoped that the Select Committee could be set up within three months of this Bill achieving Royal Assent, although she was a little less ambitious on the conclusion of its work. She said:

“It has been 25 years since the first stage of this reform, and I think the House would be somewhat intolerant if we took another 25 years to bring anything further forward”.


I know that that is a figure of speech, but would the Select Committee report in this Session? If the work was not completed in this Parliament, could the Select Committee be carried over into future Parliaments?

I appreciate that this is flurry of questions, even by my standards. However, what the noble Baroness said earlier begs a number of questions about how this Select Committee is going to be constituted, how it will work, and how it can really deliver on the points that my noble friend Lord Hailsham, the noble Earl and others have touched on in this group. I look forward to her response.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 1st April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

I do not mind being interrupted, but what is the point?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The Deputy Leader of the House knows that that is not the case. The leader of the Opposition can make nominations when the Prime Minister graciously allows her to do so. It is entirely up to the Prime Minister when and how many.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

Correct, and you have just had six; you could have nominated hereditary Peers as life Peers. There was nothing stopping you—nothing. The important point is that we have had opportunities to deal with this issue over the last 25 years and have not done so. As a consequence, Labour put in its manifesto a clear commitment to deal with the hereditary principle once and for all, which is what we have before us in this very short, simple Bill.

Let me just address this point. The Prime Minister also invites the House of Lords Appointments Commission to make nominations to the Cross Benches. In deciding the number of these nominations, the Prime Minister considers a range of factors, of course, including the political balance of the House. Certainly, retirements and other departures mean that new Peers will always be needed to ensure the House has appropriate expertise and, as has been said before, there is no reason why hereditary Peers cannot be nominated in future lists. Political parties have the opportunity to do that. My noble friend the Leader has recognised the special position of Cross-Benchers and committed to discuss it with the relevant parties. That is the commitment she has made.

If the noble Baroness, Lady Mobarik, is concerned with the party balance of the House, I remind your Lordships that even if this Bill is passed the Government Benches will make up 28% of this Chamber, compared to 31% for the party opposite. As my noble friend the Leader has said before to your Lordships, this House functions best when there are roughly equal numbers between the two main parties; I stand by that. As I have said to the noble Baroness, there are many occasions when we operate on a cross-party basis. I do not see that this Bill will change that one bit—far from it. It will bring about a more sensible balance in this House.

With respect to the noble Baroness, Lady Mobarik, this amendment is unnecessary. It is not appropriate for this Bill and I respectfully request that she withdraws it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, I disagree with all these amendments because I believe they are based on a misconception that the change we are discussing is a fundamental change. It is not; it is a tidying-up measure. It does not affect the powers of the Lords or our relationship with the Commons, far less our relationship with the regions and nations of the United Kingdom. The amendments which say we need to institute a new process to evaluate the impact on all these broader things is totally pointless, because it will have virtually zero influence on all those things.

There are two areas of further change which we have spent lots of time debating which have nothing to do directly with the Bill. One has to do with how the current House of Lords improves the way it operates, whether that is by having a retirement age, participation levels or all the other things that we have spent a lot of time discussing that the Government have in their manifesto. We can possibly discuss how to achieve it in the next group.

The second question, which is certainly beyond the purview of this Bill, has to do with whether you have long-term democratic reform. Clearly, from these Benches we think we should. Clearly, the House of Commons in the coalition Government thought by a massive majority that we should. That is not a revolutionary change which has not been discussed and where MPs have not thought about the issues which concern the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, so much. They were discussed and a conclusion was reached—but whether the Bill proceeded had everything to do with politics and nothing to do with the principle behind it.

So these amendments would get us nowhere. As for a constitutional conference, as the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, has said, in the past they have reached no conclusion, because you do not reach a total consensus on this. If anybody thinks that, frankly, they have not been listening at all, and anybody who hears the words “constitutional royal commission” thinks “years of delay”—and whatever we need, we do not need that.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I must disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Newby. If there is a misconception here, it is about the continuing presence of our hereditary colleagues in your Lordships’ House. They were not kept here by some form of transition, as the Deputy Leader of the House put it in an earlier debate; they were kept here because, in the debates at the end of the last century, nobody could answer the fundamentally important question of what this House is for, how it ought to be constituted and whether there was a better route to come here than the route by which we have all come, in our different ways. We were kept here as surety to ensure that the reform process that the then Labour Government embarked on would continue. They had a further decade in power after 1999 and brought forward no further measures, which is why so many of us on this side are sceptical about the speed with which they will bring forward the further reforms that they proposed in their most recent manifesto. So this is a very important group of amendments because, as Amendment 95 puts it, it is about the impact of this Bill on the effectiveness of the House of Lords.

The Government, like the noble Lord, Lord Newby, have cast this Bill very narrowly and argued that this is a tightly focused Bill. In some ways it is too narrowly cast and too tightly focused. It ducks the questions of what this House is for and the questions that flow from it about how it should best be composed. But, although narrow, the Bill will have serious and sweeping impacts on this House of Parliament. As my noble friends Lord Hamilton of Epsom and Lord Swire put it, this Bill puts the cart before the horse. It avoids those questions and seeks to enact a very important change based on a misunderstanding of the position from the late 1990s.

Throughout this Committee, we have heard concerns raised from all corners of your Lordships’ House that this Bill will leave us a less effective legislative Chamber. Ministers have disagreed with the concerns that have been raised. Well, here is their chance to prove it. If those of us who have expressed our concerns are wrong, these reviews will be the opportunity to prove us wrong.

I believe that the fears we have heard in this Committee are well-founded. Our hereditary colleagues attend your Lordships’ House more frequently than life Peers. They play a more active role, not just in the Division Lobbies and in the Chamber but in our committees, on the Woolsack and in convening the Cross Benches. As my noble friend Lord Shinkwin put it in our debate on the first group, armed with the data that the Library has provided him, our hereditary colleagues play a valuable and active role in the functioning of your Lordships’ House. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, said in that debate, “Why are we thinking of removing those who work the hardest while leaving those who do not?”

I am sure the Deputy Leader will say that all these questions about participation and activity can be addressed later. Again, these amendments are an opportunity for him to do that. At no point in this Committee have we had any commitment from the Government about when they plan to turn to the next parts of the reforms that they proposed in their manifesto. Ministers have not even committed to do so by the end of this Parliament. So I share the concerns that my noble friend Lord Hailsham has raised: that we will be waiting another decade or longer to see the further reforms that noble Lords have called for throughout the course of these debates.

My noble friends’ amendments in these groups would give us the opportunity to review progress after 12 months, on the timetable proposed by my noble friend Lord Dundee, or two years, in the timeframe proposed by my noble friend Lord Lucas. It would also be an opportunity for us to review what we have lost. We have heard in the course of these debates how our hereditary colleagues bring valuable experience from their work in business and agriculture, two areas where on the Government’s record it is clear that they have something of a blind spot, and it is important to have those voices raised in this scrutinising House of Parliament.

I am sure the Deputy Leader will seek to persuade us that, once again, our fears are misplaced and that these amendments are unnecessary, but I urge him to look seriously at these amendments, which call for modest but important reviews. The Government listened to the concerns that were raised in your Lordships’ House in our debate on the Football Governance Bill and gave us a statutory review of that new regulator after five years. I know football is something that attracts a lot more attention than reform of the House of Lords, but I think the constitution of our second legislative Chamber is about as important as the beautiful game. I hope the Deputy Leader will look at this and consider giving us a review in this Bill as well.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

I do not think the Arsenal kick-off is quite yet; I have another half an hour or so.

I am not going to repeat all the arguments from the first group. We had an extensive debate about that, so I am not going to go through it. But, in relation to the challenge that the noble Lord has just made, we have had a transition for over 25 years. As the noble Lord, Lord Newby, said, there were attempts to make fundamental changes, but they all hit the fundamental problem of “Don’t do anything until you do everything”. That is the problem here, and it is not going to be resolved by royal commissions and other bodies. I have seen those royal commissions, and they tend to mean long grass and do not build consensus.

The amendments in this group relate to types of formal review. In some cases, they would make commencement of the substantive provisions in the Bill conditional on such a review. I note that the Committee has discussed similar amendments in previous groups. Given that, I hope noble Lords will forgive me for repeating the words of my noble friend the Attorney-General: these amendments are unnecessary and disproportionate.

Amendments 95, 96, 98, 99 and 102 are concerned with the imposition of a duty to review the impact of the Bill following implementation. I stress again that the impact of the Bill is straightforward—no one can see it as complicated—and post-legislative scrutiny would likely not yield any more meaningful conclusions.

Amendment 95, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would require the Secretary of State, within two years of this Act being passed and annually thereafter, to publish

“a report on the impact of this Act on the effectiveness of the House of Lords”

at discharging its functions. As my noble friend the Attorney-General pointed out last week on a similar amendment to this, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, placing a duty on the Government to undertake reviews until the end of time feels disproportionate in these circumstances. There is also an implication that our hereditary colleagues are intrinsically better able than life Peers to help the House to carry out its functions. As I said on a previous Committee day, who are we judging here? Are we judging life Peers as being inferior, not able or not committed?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

It is empirical. The data show that our hereditary colleagues currently come here more often and participate more. That is not a slight on those of us who are here as life Peers, but does the Deputy Leader not accept that the data show the valuable contribution that they make to the work of this House?

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

I do not think the data show what the noble Lord is suggesting. It is a marginal change—1% or 2%. The simple fact is that, when you start implying that some noble Lords are better than others, I am afraid you are implying that life Peers somehow make less of a contribution. They do not, and that does not help us in terms of what we are trying to achieve here. The idea that our hereditary colleagues are intrinsically better does not help the House to carry out its functions. It does a disservice to the contribution made by life Peers on all sides of the Chamber, particularly our Cross-Bench Peers.

It is important to point out that there was no legislative scrutiny following the passage of the 1999 Act, despite that legislation removing a significantly higher number of Members from your Lordships’ House. This was because it was not necessary. The House continued—

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The reason why a certain number of hereditary Peers were kept here in your Lordships’ House was to perform that post-legislative scrutiny. Again, the Deputy Leader has suggested that this is the ending of a transitional phase, removing those who were kept here to try to keep the last Labour Government on their toes about reform. If this is the end of a transition, can the Deputy Leader tell us what we are transitioning to?

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

As I said, the Leader of the House and others have acknowledged that what we did in 1999 was remove the hereditary principle. As my noble friend Lord Grocott has said on a number of occasions, that was not simply a mechanism to ensure transition; it was about saying to the Labour Government, “You won’t get your business through if you don’t keep these hereditaries here”. That was the reality, as my noble friend made clear in previous debates.

We have had over 25 years since the removal of the hereditary principle while maintaining 92. The Opposition had the opportunity on many occasions to support my noble friend so that those hereditary Peers could have stayed, but no: we ended up electing further hereditary Peers who were much younger and had no record of experience—as the noble Lord suggested—prior to their election by a very small number of people. The reality is that we are trying to defend the indefensible. We have a clear commitment in our manifesto.

By the way, there was no legislative scrutiny—I will come on to other commitments in our manifesto—but it is disingenuous of noble Lords to say that somehow they do not believe what we are saying. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating. I assure noble Lords that we will commit to that.

Amendment 96 from the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, would place a duty on the Government within 12 months of the Bill coming into force to produce a report dealing with its effects, including on devolved Governments, the Commonwealth, members of the Council of Europe and the rest of the world. As I have said, the impact of the Bill is very clear and I submit that, contrary to our propensity to talk about ourselves, the implications of the Bill are unlikely to be felt substantively throughout the international community.

I say to the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham—I have said this many times before—that the Government are committed to reforming the House of Lords, as set out in our manifesto. As my noble friend the Leader of the House has said in previous debates, the Government are keen to engage on how best to implement the other manifesto commitments by building consensus and understanding the needs of this House. She will come forward with proposals for doing this in a structured way.

Noble Lords are also aware of our longer-term commitment to consult the public on an alternative second Chamber. In light of this comment, I ask the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 1st April 2025 Lords Chamber

When we get to Report—I am particularly addressing noble Lords on the other side of the Committee—we will have had all the discussions about the future constitution and role of the House of Lords. So could we on Report, partly out of kindness—there is kindness from all sides of the House toward my noble friend the Lord Privy Seal—leave her undertakings to consider many of these constitutional features of the House and bring forward the necessary legislation or the changing of the rules of the House? Can we have a thoroughly shortened Report stage and not another elongated stage, like this Committee?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I do not know if it is a sentiment shared by the Ministers opposite, but I for one think that the 39 hours we have spent in Committee on this Bill has been time well spent—maybe 39.5 hours now, I suppose.

The Government chose to affect this part of the reform that they set out in their manifesto not through a royal commission or constitutional convention but on the Floor of your Lordships’ House, in a Bill they drafted knowing, through their experience, all the downsides of that when it comes to the scope and role of your Lordships’ House to scrutinise and ask questions. They chose to do it that way. I am glad that the five days we have spent in Committee have afforded the Lord Privy Seal the opportunity to hear the consensus, enthusiasm and anxiety of many noble Lords to see the Government turn to those other parts of their manifesto commitments on the reform of this House as swiftly as possible.

The points covered in these amendments echo questions that were left unanswered in 1999 and in the decade of Labour Government that followed that Act. If the remaining hereditary Peers are to be expelled before these questions are answered, we owe it to them at least to set out a timetable within which these matters will be turned to. We would not have needed five days in Committee if answers were a bit more forthcoming to some of the questions that noble Lords raised. I hope that the Leader of the House is able to address the questions that underly these amendments and to set out, with a bit more certainty, when the Government propose to turn to the second stage of their reform of your Lordships’ House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, Amendments 107 and 113 in my name seek to postpone the removal of the hereditary Peers to the end of the next Session, rather than the end of this one. For the record, I have never sought to have my amendments degrouped from any others.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, earlier on today, this is the first time I have spoken on the Bill, though I have, of course, followed the proceedings. I support other amendments that would postpone the removal of the hereditary Peers, but I believe mine has the best chance of getting the support of other parties, because the postponement is relatively modest and so does the least injury to the haste with which the Government have committed themselves in their manifesto.

The real criticism of this Bill is not that it is gerrymandering or prosecuting a class war. There are perfectly respectable arguments for removing the hereditaries. The substantial criticism of the Bill is that it will undermine the capacity of the House of Lords to hold the Government to account by removing some of its most active Members—that is its Achilles heel.

The House of Lords is not a place where sheep may safely graze. It is a key part of our constitution, improving the quality of legislation and giving the other place an opportunity to think again. We have repeatedly heard of the disproportionate amount of heavy lifting done by the hereditary Peers; I will not repeat those arguments, but not only have they gone unchallenged but Government Ministers have gone out of their way to heap praise upon the hereditaries for the work they do.

The Government’s public response to this criticism is to say that it is an insult to the rest of us to imply that we cannot backfill the void. But in their hearts, they know that the House will be weaker. I believe they plan to do something about it, but they will not acknowledge this publicly, or begin to discuss what their response might be, until the Bill is safely on the statute book. My amendment seeks to allow more space for that discussion and more space for the subsequent response than is provided for at the moment by postponing their departure until the end of the next Session. It would give more time for ranks to be replenished and capacity to be retained, possibly by the retention of some of those due to leave.

As we have heard, many hereditary Peers sit on Select Committees, the work of which goes on from one Session to the next. We heard from my noble friend Lord Forsyth about the five Deputy Speakers. We need a longer transition if the work of the House is not to be disrupted. The amendment is perfectly consistent with the manifesto, and it actually addresses the weakness in the Government’s defence.

I believe there is a further argument for more time: we should treat fairly those who have given up careers outside and give them more time to adjust. I note what the noble Lord, Lord Burns, said on Second Reading on 11 December:

“My first reservation is the implication that all excepted hereditary Peers should be required to retire once the Bill becomes law”.


He went on to say:

“Often, they have given up alternative careers to join this House”.—[Official Report, 11/12/24; col. 1736.]


I was relieved to hear that the Government will not support Amendment 103, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter.

Here, I will refer to what happened last time. In June 1993, the Labour Party committed itself to a two-stage process of reform, removing the hereditaries in the first stage. After the election in 1997, they actually left in 1999—six years after the commitment and two years after the election.

By contrast, there has been dramatically less notice this time. There had been reports in the last Parliament that, following the publication of the Brown report in 2022, the House of Lords would be abolished and replaced with a form of regional representation. In February 2024, it was reported that wholesale reform would not be a priority for the first term; then there were reports that a Labour Government would confine themselves to implementing the Grocott Bill. It was not until 13 June last year that the Labour Party committed itself to the abolition of the hereditary Peers, leaving some 18 months before removal.

The Government sometimes point to the contrast with MPs, who lose their job overnight. But there is an important difference. Every MP knows that there will be a day of reckoning every five years or less: that is the deal. But it is not the case with Peers. Also, for every MP who is removed, a new one takes his or her place—an important distinction.

In 1997, there was a key difference. The two groups of Peers principally affected, the Conservatives and the Cross-Benchers, were allowed to choose their share of the 92 remaining. That meant that the capacity of the House to hold the Government to account was affected only marginally. There is no such safety net this time round, and the time in which to rebuild that capacity, as in the Bill, is much less.

I end with a final reason. It is important to avoid the ungracious way in which the hereditary Peers were made to depart in 1997: “Thank you and goodbye”, with T-shirts celebrating their departure. There was an absence of generosity of spirit last time, which I know the current Administration are anxious to avoid.

This amendment is moderate and sensible. It deserves serious consideration from the Lib Dems and Cross Benches, on whom its fate will depend.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, who set out some wise and compelling reasons for his amendment. I hope that the Government will consider it as seriously as it deserves to be taken.

My Amendment 106 in this group is not so much about timing as about ensuring that proper bicameral consideration has been given to the Bill before it becomes an Act of Parliament. It seeks for commencement to take place not at the end of this Parliament but at the end of the Parliament after this. This follows the point that I raised at Second Reading, when I pointed out that we have a very new House of Commons: more than half the Members of another place were elected for the first time in July last year. When I spoke at Second Reading, I pointed out that the other place had sat for only 62 days; with their greater experience by the end of this Committee, they have now sat for 115 days—still not a great deal of time.

In this Parliament, we have so far passed only three Acts of Parliament. Two were money Bills and one was about renationalising the railways. At Second Reading, I wondered how many MPs had had the chance to experience effective working between the Houses and across the parties to see how we make laws better by working between the two Chambers. There has still been little opportunity for them to do so; on the whole, they are still a rather green bunch on the green Benches.

That is why, while I and all noble Lords respect the primacy of the elected House and the mandate on which the Government were elected, we would find it disappointing if this Bill, which seeks to make such profound changes to your Lordships’ House, has to be rammed through with no amendments from your Lordships’ House; and why I find it disappointing to hear again from the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, and others that we should not dare to put an amendment that we know will be overturned in another place. With a majority of 174, that argument could apply to every piece of legislation brought before us in the rest of this Parliament. That is not the role of your Lordships’ House. I hope that it does not become it.

Not by seeking to lengthen the time before commencement but by asking that greater thought is given to this by both Houses of Parliament, full of people who have experience of legislating for the better interests of our country—and sharing some of the concerns that were set out by the noble Lord, Lord Newby, about becoming a House regulated by the lower House—I hope noble Lords will look at my Amendment 106 with seriousness as well.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness (LD)]

My Lords, I want to speak to my Amendments 58A and 59B. I have a lot of sympathy for what the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has just said. I tabled these amendments against a background of also aspiring to a wholly elected House, where appointments would not come into it.

What prompted my amendments was that Amendment 57 recommends that

“the Lord Chief Justice, Master of the Rolls and Lord President of the Court of Session be granted a life peerage”.

In the interests of the union, we should not forget one part of the United Kingdom, and that is why I have sought to add the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland. I do not know the present Lady Chief Justice, Dame Siobhan Keegan, but I know her predecessor, Sir Declan Morgan, who would make excellent contributions to your Lordships’ House—and may yet do so for all that I know. If we are passing legislation for some parts of the United Kingdom, there is no logic at all to why Northern Ireland should be omitted.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, has said. Like him, I spotted the omission of the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland and note that we have not had a holder of that office since Lord Kerr of Tonaghmore, who was the last person to receive a peerage under the Appellate Jurisdiction Act 1876, so I welcome the noble and learned Lord’s amendment.

My Amendments 58 and 59 are designed not to disagree with the proposition that senior lawyers are very important and useful people but simply to point out that useful and important people can be found in other walks of life as well. There is much sense in the amendments that my noble friend Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, my noble and learned friend Lord Keen of Elie and my noble friends Lord Murray of Blidworth and Lord Banner have tabled.

I agree with what my noble friend Lord Wolfson said: a lot of the mess that we are in stems from the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. The fact that we are still, 20 years on, debating some of the questions that were left unanswered, perhaps even unopposed, at the time of the passage of that Act, answers the point that the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, raised. It is important when embarking on constitutional reform to try to think of the implications, and that is why I welcome noble Lords scrutinising this Bill and its knock-on effects in many other areas. I know the noble Lord regrets that we are debating it at such length, but this is a very important Bill with serious consequences, and we do not want in 20 years’ time to find ourselves with the sorts of problems that were not properly addressed during the debates on the Constitutional Reform Act.

From my experience working in Downing Street under my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead, I can say a little bit about a more recent chapter. Noble Lords know that, when he was Lord Speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, established a committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Burns, to look at the size of the House and propose non-legislative ways that it could be reduced. Not everyone agreed that the size of the House was a problem, but a clear majority did, including those who spoke in a well-attended debate held on the committee’s report on 19 December 2017. As Prime Minister at the time, it fell to my noble friend Lady May to respond to this initiative, which had been taken by your Lordships’ House to reduce its size. She wrote to Lord Fowler on 20 February 2018, responding to the report, as well as to the points that were made in the debate in December about it.

My noble friend Lady May acknowledged that, if noble Lords were to be persuaded to embrace retirement, an innovation which at that point had only recently been brought about through the House of Lords Reform Act 2014, they would need an assurance of restraint from the Prime Minister. In her letter to the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, my noble friend gave that assurance, and she stuck to it: she and Gordon Brown are the only Prime Ministers in modern times under whom the size of the House of Lords has gone down rather than up. As part of her policy of restraint, my noble friend said that she would

“operate on the basis that there is no automatic entitlement to a peerage for any holder of high office in public life”.

That is the reason, in addition to the Parliamentary Answer that was highlighted by my noble friend Lord Murray a few moments ago, why senior judges have not, as they might have expected, come to your Lordships’ House automatically.

This has certainly been disappointing to them, and it has denied your Lordships’ House the valuable contributions that they would all undoubtedly have made. In his memoir, Lord Dyson records with very good grace his understandable disappointment at being the first Master of the Rolls for, I think, two centuries not to sit in your Lordships’ House; only death prevented others from doing so. His successor, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, has come here and plays a very valuable role indeed in the work of this House.

As my noble friend Lord Murray says, Lord Dyson was also the first Justice of the Supreme Court not to come to this House. The first cohort were, of course, Lords of Appeal in Ordinary, so entitled to return to this House on their retirement. Unlike my noble friend Lord Banner, I am among those who regret their removal from your Lordships’ House. I tend to the view that cases like some of those that we saw in the Brexit years would have been less politicised had they been decided in this building, rather than pitting two institutions on opposite sides of Parliament Square against one another and asking them to settle the matter over the heads of protesting crowds standing between them.

But if all Justices of the Supreme Court were to come here on retirement, as my noble friends Lord Murray and Lord Banner suggest, we would be adding a tally of 20 new Cross-Benchers—nine former justices and 11 current ones—on current numbers alone. It would also seem to run counter to the argument that was made by those who supported the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 that the judiciary and Parliament should be more separate.

My noble friend Lord Wolfson and others, in their Amendment 56, suggest that there should be peerages ex officio only for the President and Deputy President of the Supreme Court. Stepping aside from the debate on numbers, they crucially and sensibly suggest that the peerage should be granted on appointment and not at the end of their time on the judicial bench. As I said at Second Reading, there are dangers in allowing politicians to pick the judges on whom they wish to bestow favour; but that same danger relates to other key public servants, such as Chiefs of the Defence Staff, Commissioners of Police of the Metropolis, heads of the intelligence agencies, Cabinet Secretaries and many more.

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[Lord Hermer (Lab)]

The constitutional tension is between judges who sit on cases that may often concern government legislation also sitting in the legislature. The distinction I seek to draw simply seeks to exemplify the merits and demerits of a debate that may well take place during consultation. It is not meant to reflect any firm view of the Government as to where that may ultimately land.

I make one final point on the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, drawing on the wider point that I made a moment ago about the merits of looking at this in the round. It is worth reflecting that, if this were to come into effect today, it would create a significant number of new Members of your Lordships’ House. Putting aside judicial Members, of that large number, only five would be women. It is also right to remind ourselves that, in the long history of the Appellate Committee of your Lordships’ House and then the creation of the Supreme Court in 2010, there have been only four women judges or members of that committee.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The point I was making with my amendment was not necessarily to make the case for all—I take the arguments that the Minister and others have made about a slippery slope—but to tease out the distinction between the constitutional point that the Minister identified, on the necessity of appointing judges on appointment, and maintaining the independence of action of senior public servants who might want to curry favour with Prime Ministers who have the power to put them in the House of Lords after they complete their jobs.

[Lord Hermer (Lab)]

The noble Lord’s intervention exemplifies the important conversations that lie ahead as we try to unpick those tensions.

As I have just alluded to, there are wider questions around the future composition of this House. The Government are committed to other reforms, not least the alternative second Chamber set out in our manifesto. There is no doubt that this House will continue to be blessed with legal expertise. There is also no doubt that, with any appointment to your Lordships’ House now or in future, the expertise offered by former members of the senior judiciary will be a blessing to your Lordships’ House. Although noble Lords have pressed an important point and this has been an important conversation, I respectfully ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

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[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

The noble Baroness was effectively my first employer, when I was 21 years old, and we have this telepathic understanding: she has seamlessly introduced the main point I wish to make.

I want to turn this round and pick up precisely on what the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, was saying. Moving to a system where the Government of the day could appoint temporary Ministers to this place would give the Prime Minister and the Government a huge amount of flexibility to fill government posts with genuine experts with, effectively, executive ministerial power to carry out their functions. There must be a small, niggling doubt when a Prime Minister is filling positions. Even with the very distinguished people appointed in recent months, he—and it is “he” in this case—must be thinking, “Am I appointing too many people to fill these Benches; people who are going be here for the rest of their lives?” If he had the freedom, for example, to appoint 12 or 13 experts in the field to fill specific ministerial roles, knowing that at the end of those roles they will leave this House, that would sit better with public opinion and give him more freedom. It would serve the country better if he were able to appoint such experts to carry out these functions—by definition, almost certainly as junior Ministers—and help the Government of the day. That is a very powerful argument.

As I say, there would be discretion to convert those Ministers into life peers at the end. In fact, I had not considered the question of whether they should have a peerage when they enter this House. My conclusion is that they should not. They should be called MILs—Ministers in the Lords—and then they can aspire, based on their service as Ministers and their contribution to the House, to a peerage after they have served as Ministers here.

Finally, I turn to the question, raised by one of my noble friends, of how many people would be attracted to the unpaid role of a Minister in the Lords. First, it does not necessarily need to be unpaid. It is a matter for the Government of the day as to whether they have the courage to face down public opinion and expand the number of paid ministerial positions. But this House should certainly seriously consider giving the Prime Minister and the Government of the day the freedom to appoint temporary MILs to help service its business.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friends Lady Laing of Elderslie and Lord Brady of Altrincham for their amendments. My noble friend Lord Brady seems to have pulled off the ingenious feat of engineering a debate on an amendment he did not want to move or speak about himself. So I will not say very much about his Amendment 90C, other than to note that the answers that noble Lords get to their questions would be far less satisfactory if the people responding had less authority to seek or determine the answers, and that our scrutiny of legislation would be diminished if the Ministers responding did not have the authority to make changes and compromises based on the arguments they have heard. We live in hope that we might be able to persuade Ministers of the need for some changes to and compromises on the Bill before the Committee.

I will focus on my noble friend Lady Laing’s Amendment 67, which has far more going for it. It is certainly valuable to be able to bring people into government who might not have had the inclination or the opportunity to stand for election. The present Government have made good use of that. Mention has already been made, rightly, of the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, who had a distinguished career in business but also helped those who had been in the penal system. More pertinent examples are people such as the noble Lords, Lord Vallance of Balham and Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill, who were distinguished public servants in their fields before they dipped their toes into more political waters. Similarly, the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General stepped away from a successful career at the Bar to provide counsel and public service in government. Governments of all colours have been able to persuade distinguished people from all sorts of walks of life to pause or sometimes abandon their careers in order to serve the country. What my noble friend says is right: they could perhaps persuade more if it were not accompanied by a life sentence in the legislature.

Although some noble Lords who have given service in government remain active members of your Lordships’ House, drawing on the expertise they have added in office, others do not. I was struck by the figures that the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, quoted on the rate of continuing participation of former Ministers. Indeed, when I look down the list of those who served in the Conservative-led Governments of the previous 14 years, I am struck by the number who have chosen no longer to sit on these Benches. I remember one difficult conversation with a noble Lord, who will remain nameless, who was anxious to step down as a Minister, having already served for longer than the late Lord Heywood of Whitehall had promised them they would have to in return for their life peerage.

So, although I am firmly of the view that Ministers of the Crown should be represented in both Houses of our bicameral system, my noble friend Lady Laing’s suggestion that temporary service in government should be separated from perpetual service here in the legislature is worthy of consideration. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Collins of Highbury) (Lab)]

This has been a really interesting debate. I will not address the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Brady, because he has not moved it, which makes life a bit easier. However, he supported Amendment 67, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Laing, which seeks to allow individuals to be appointed as temporary Peers so that they can serve as Ministers, after which they would depart this House.

Although the Government see the reasoning behind this amendment, we do not think it is the best way of achieving our objective of a smaller, more active Chamber. Ministers are appointed to the Government because of the experience and expertise they bring to this House, and the House benefits hugely from that. Some Ministers appointed to this House who were Members of Parliament bring both an intrinsic understanding of the other place and valuable experience of particular government departments. I have said before that in my view, both Houses work most effectively when we understand each other’s day-to-day workings. That is a really important point.

Others have been appointed as Ministers in recognition of the value of their experience outside of government, in the private sector and in other areas of public service. As noble Lords have said, we are lucky enough to have a number of such experts on the Benches with us. My noble and learned friend Lord Hermer and my noble friend Lord Timpson were recently appointed to this House to serve as Ministers, as was the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, in the last Parliament.

Whatever the precise reasons for their appointment, I think noble Lords would agree that these individuals proved valuable to the House long after they ceased to be Ministers. This amendment risks depriving the House of often considerable experience.

I understand the sentiment of this amendment. New Peers, whether appointed as Ministers or not, increase the size of this House, because appointments are for life, and the House has become too big. What the House has found frustrating is that, often, when Ministers are appointed and come into this House, they leave their ministerial posts quite quickly and make no further contribution. That is not the case for the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, and certainly not for the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, and the noble Lord, Lord Agnew. All three of them resigned from government on a matter of principle, but they have continued to participate.

We would not have had the benefit of the noble Lord in the debate today if he had been subject to the noble Baroness’s amendment. This is an important point to make. The noble Lord, Lord Agnew, has continued to contribute. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, has been contributing to today’s debate. I hear what the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, says, but I suspect that they do not have his unique skills in persuading the Prime Minister to keep them in.

The noble Baroness’s amendment is not the way to address the problem of the size of our House. Our objective is to create a smaller, more active Chamber that represents the country it serves. As we have said throughout Committee, the Government believe that a mandatory retirement age is the most effective way to do this. It is right that we take time, as a House, to continue the dialogue on how best we can implement these manifesto commitments, and this amendment would pre-empt that dialogue.

I have heard what the noble Baroness has to say, but the evidence is here before us. It is not for the first time that I have congratulated the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, on his participation, and it would be terrible if we did not have him here in today’s debate. I ask the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th March 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay]

87: After Clause 1, insert the following new Clause—
“Former Members of the House of Commons and special advisersThe Prime Minister must not make a recommendation to His Majesty for the granting of a life peerage under section 1 of the Life Peerages Act 1958 (power to confer life peerages) to any former Members of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, or to special advisers to the Government of the United Kingdom, the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government, or the Northern Irish Executive, until at least two years have passed since the end of their service.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to delay the appointment of former MPs and special advisers to the House of Lords until at least two years have passed.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 87 I will also speak to my Amendments 88 and 89. These amendments have elicited a lot of attention from my noble friends since I tabled them. My noble friend Lord Forsyth of Drumlean singled them out during our debate on Amendment 1, when he promised that he would not speak on them. It is good to see him in his place to fulfil that promise this evening.

I make it clear from the outset that I have nothing against Members of Parliament. Some of my best friends are Members of Parliament. For a long time, I wanted to be a Member of Parliament, and I tried—with conspicuous lack of success. However, the role of a Member of your Lordships’ House is different. This House is calmer, quieter and more consensual than the other place. It respects the primacy of the elected House and recognises that with nobody in the majority here, the way to get things done is by constructive debate and compromise.

Some of the best advice that I received when I took my place in your Lordships’ House was to hold off making a maiden speech and to spend some time in the Chamber learning not only the rules of the House but its ways and its tone. It is very easy for those who have watched too many of the proceedings of the House of Commons to assume that that is how we behave here as well, but it is not. We are less partisan, less pointed and less pugnacious, although it is very easy to slip into those habits. I have done so myself on too many occasions. Those habits are even harder to give up for noble Lords who have served for many years with distinction in another place, as are the more innocuous but still alien habits such as repeatedly intervening on each other, thanking the Lord Speaker for calling us or referring to “honourable Members” rather than “noble Lords”.

We are a self-regulating House. Our ways and procedures are set and policed by how we choose to behave. Even in my short time here, I have seen those ways evolving. A great deal was lost during the challenging months of the pandemic, when we had to do things differently. Some, but not all, of that has been clawed back. We are in a constant state of flux, with new Members arriving all the time, bringing new perspectives and new ways of doing things. As a self-regulating House, it falls to all of us to protect those courtesies and conventions that we think important. That is why I lament the way that this Bill will expel so many long-standing Members who know how important those conventions are, and many more recent arrivals who learned by watching them as apprentices before they were elected.

I overlapped here only briefly with the Countess of Mar, but it was long enough to know how valuable a role she played, keeping us all on the straight and narrow. Lady Mar was a Deputy Speaker of your Lordships’ House for many years, and of the two dozen Deputy Speakers we have today, five are hereditary Peers drawn from the Labour, Tory and Cross Benches. Many others have served on the Woolsack previously. If they are to go, as this Bill proposes, we will have to work even harder to hold on to some of those subtle traditions that make this House such a pleasant and productive place to legislate.

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[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

—although I may be slightly too young for the retirement home for ex-Members that the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, referred to.

Since I joined your Lordships’ House, I have had an unusual aspiration: to get “chutzpah” into Hansard—I look forward to seeing its spelling. I believe that the noble Lord’s amendments have given me such an opportunity. We are very lucky in your Lordships’ House to draw on a range of expertise from across public life, law, science, academia and the arts and cultural sector. We have former Permanent Secretaries of government departments, former or current vice-chancellors of universities, news editors and a number of former presidents of esteemed institutions, as outlined in the last group, and we even have BAFTA winners among us.

It is true that a significant proportion in this Chamber are former Members of Parliament: at the last count, it was 21%. We also have a number of former special advisers in this place—some are sitting on the Benches opposite me. I should declare at this point that I have many friends who are current and former special and political advisers. I do not think that is such a bad thing. Your Lordships’ House is predominantly a political house. The Prime Minister invites party leaders to nominate individuals to this place, and party leaders choose who should best represent them. It is likely that many of the people they nominate have a political background as special advisers or former Members of Parliament, Members of the Scottish Parliament, the Senedd or the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Both Houses work most effectively when we understand the day-to-day workings of the other. As a former MP, I have certainly found the experience of the other place very useful as we consider how this House can work best—and how much more effective we can be than some of my former colleagues in the other place. In addition, a number of noble Lords who have been Members of Parliament have also been Ministers. They have a deep understanding of departments and how the work we do here affects government and the delivery of public services.

Former special advisers, recent or otherwise, too have valuable experience to bring to your Lordships’ House. For some Peers, their time as a special adviser or political adviser was one role among many that have led to their appointment to your Lordships’ House and is not necessarily the reason they were appointed. The noble Lord, Lord Cameron, is an obvious example. He was a special adviser before he became an MP, but I do not believe that that is the reason he was appointed to your Lordships’ House. The same could be said on my Benches for my noble friend Lord Reid, who was also an adviser but held many posts in government.

There are many other former special advisers from across the House who bring valuable insights to our work, both from their days as special advisers but also often from outside this experience. Such perspectives are incredibly valuable in this place. They deepen and enrich our ability to scrutinise legislation and hold the Government to account. As someone who regularly signs off a significant number of Written Parliamentary Questions, I often reflect—to my genuine concern—on the insight held by former Ministers and special advisers about the mechanisms of government. They bring a genuine level of scrutiny and insight.

It is, of course, important that we maintain a non-party political element to the House of Lords. The Cross-Benchers especially provide specialist expertise and insights that we would not always find on the political Benches. As the Government have said repeatedly during these debates, it is just as much about what Peers bring to this House and their willingness to contribute to proceedings as about their experiences and achievements before they came to this place. After all, I note that the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, is truly proving his worth with his extensive contributions throughout Committee.

It is up to party leaders, including the Prime Minister, to decide who best represents their political parties in the House of Lords. It is right that they are able to choose who is most suitable. Restricting party leaders’ ability to choose knowledgeable, experienced figures to sit in this House just because they have a political background would be a disservice to us all. I respectfully request that the noble Lord withdraws his amendment.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that reply and for the most generous defence of special advisers that I have heard outside of the Thursday evening drinks we used to have at the Two Chairmen pub when I was in government, when the special advisers used to get together for a chinwag. I accept all the points she made, not just about special advisers but about Members of Parliament and the great contribution they bring, as I acknowledged in my speech. I see that as well.

--- Later in debate ---

[A noble Baroness]

There is still time.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I note that I did not hear an answer to my question about the Government’s view on the ideal number of former special advisers and Members of Parliament. As we pass this Bill, which gives such unbridled powers to the Prime Minister to appoint whomever he wishes to your Lordships’ House, we should be mindful of the growing and accelerating trend to put former Members of Parliament and special advisers here. With that, and with thanks to the Minister, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 87 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay]

90: After Clause 1, insert the following new Clause—
“Unsalaried MinistersNo one who is a Minister of the Crown shall be eligible for membership of the House of Lords unless they are in receipt of, or have been offered, a salary under the Ministerial and Other Salaries Act 1975.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would mean that unpaid Ministers would not be eligible for membership of the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, after what I acknowledge was not a popular measure, I hope that this one will find more support on both principal Benches of your Lordships’ House.

My Amendment 90 seeks to address the long-running problem we all acknowledge of the number of Ministers serving in this House who are not salaried. When I had the privilege of being a Minister in the previous Conservative Government, I was lucky enough to be in receipt of a salary that was important, principally, for the pension contributions and the national insurance contributions it allowed me to pay. But some 40% of my colleagues on the Front Bench in the previous Conservative Government were unsalaried. That meant that not only were they not taking home a salary cheque at the end of the month, they were also not paying into their pension, their national insurance contributions were not being made and, in some cases, because of this and because of their age, they were not in receipt of severance pay when the general election put an end to their time as Ministers.

This is a problem that affects both the major parties when they are in government. It dates from the Ministerial and Other Salaries Act of 1975, which was written with a noble aim to ensure that the Executive does not grow too large by comparison to the legislature and that the cost to the public purse should be limited, but it was drawn in an age when Ministers in the House of Lords were assumed to be drawn from the landed gentry. We are not anymore, and, in the absence of baronial lands in Whitley Bay being granted to me, I was very grateful for the salary that allowed me to carry out my work as a Minister.

This is a problem that my noble friend Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and many others have raised in previous Parliaments and in this one. I know that it is one that draws the attention of the noble Baroness the Leader of the House. I hope that, much as in the debate on power of attorney, this may be an opportunity for us to solve a long-running problem that causes problems for Governments’ ability to find Front-Benchers and to draw people from all walks of life, from modest backgrounds, to serve their country in government. I beg to move.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support my noble friend, who is absolutely right. If I have got my figures correct this time, this Labour Government are abusing only four Lords Ministers, while the last Conservative Government, disgracefully, abused 11 Lords Ministers, by not paying them. That is simply not right.

Part of the problem is that Prime Ministers like to stuff their departments full of paid MPs and, of course, they have their PPSs as well to help them. The larger the payroll of MPs in the Commons, the less likely there is to be a rebellion. So it pays for any Government to have as many paid Members of Parliament as possible, and their PPSs.

About 35 years ago, as a junior Whip, I encountered a colleague who was very concerned that that he was not fully involved in policy development in his department. He said to his Secretary of State that he would like to be more fully involved. The Secretary of state told him, “You’re just a PUS. Your job is to reply to all the letters from people whingeing about not getting their bypass”. That rather put him in his place.

My noble friend is right: there has been a large expansion of the roles of PUSs and others. I personally think that that is wrong. There is also a view that Peers can afford to do it for free: “Let’s have as many paid MPs as we can within the ceiling of the allowance, and then get Peers to do it for free”. That is utterly wrong. Many of them cannot do it for free. Noble Lords in this House who have been doing it for free have been doing it out of a sense of duty, not because they can afford it.

On that note, I see my noble friend Lord Younger of Leckie in his place. He and my noble friend Earl Howe were Ministers for 30 or 40 years between them. I doubt if they got paid for two or three years of that. There were those who did job after job unpaid. It is not right that any Government, whether Conservative or Labour, should abuse Peers in that way.

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[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right: if there was agreement across both Houses—if he could persuade the leader of the Opposition to support this in the other place as well—I would certainly talk to the Prime Minister. But this is something that has to be done cross-party and not with party-political capital made out of it. We also need to say a bit more about the work that our Lords Ministers do. There is nobody in this House who does not hold Lords Ministers in the highest regard. Perhaps we ought to be saying that to our colleagues in the other place as well.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I very much agree with the final words of the Leader of the House and what she says about Ministers. I see how hard-working her team of Lords Ministers are. When they go into their departments tomorrow bleary-eyed after these long debates, they will have diaries full of meetings and boxes full of papers—prepared without the expectation that they should have been here at nearly 11 pm the evening before, so I very much agree with her.

I particularly welcome the noble Baroness’s willingness to look at this issue on a cross-party basis. I know that there is never a good time to legislate to pay politicians more, but this is a problem that has been kicked down the path for half a century. It is causing problems to the social composition and the sense of fairness about Governments. I hope we might be able to act on it. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord True for his candour about the efforts that he made as Leader of your Lordships’ House, and the sense of shame and frustration he feels that he was not able to persuade our colleagues in government to do it.

With this Bill there is an opportunity to right this wrong. I hope the noble Baroness and my noble friend Lord True will take this away and continue those discussions. If not, I see there is an employment Bill coming down the line and we will be able to assert our trade union rights in the future. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 90 withdrawn.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 12th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, we are all here to bring different things, and I am not sure that participation rates are the best way of going about reform. Peers contribute differently. They bring their counsel, as we were reminded from the Cross Benches. Some bring their expertise or knowledge of a particular subject, and most bring their judgment on all subjects.

The options being proposed as we debate this short Bill are very different. Because there really is no agreement on the best way to proceed, I urge the Leader of the House to consider trying to find a consensus across the House to get some agreement, given the extraordinary differences we hear about how best we should proceed.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I am glad that we are debating this question of attendance separately from the question of participation, because they are materially different. I share the scepticism of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, about the Government’s willingness to accept amendments to this Bill and, indeed, his salutary warning about being careful of what we say now and remembering that it is taken down in the official record. These other issues are being raised because we all care very deeply about the future of this House, and one of the great tragedies of this Bill is that some of the people who care most deeply will not be here to give their opinions on the further stages of reform or the Government’s adherence to the rest of their manifesto once the Bill is passed. I know he will understand why they are getting their arguments in early.

As the Convenor of the Cross Benches reminded us, our presence here is not thanks to a democratic mandate of our own or any of our achievements but in answer to a call. We sit here in response to a Writ of Summons from our sovereign, who has commanded us, waiving all excuses, to be at the Parliament holden here at Westminster, to treat and give our counsel on certain arduous and urgent affairs. I agree with the noble Lords who have said that we are invited and treated to give our opinions on arduous affairs, even if they are outwith our own areas of expertise.

It is up to each of us to decide how we answer that call, and it is clear that noble Lords across the House do so in different ways. But we have some insights into how they do so thanks to the spreadsheets of my noble friend Lord Blencathra and to the data dashboard provided by the House of Lords Library. That shows that during the last Parliament your Lordships’ House sat for 701 days. On average, noble Lords attended on just under half—46%—of the days that they were eligible to attend. Of the 966 people who were eligible to attend at least some of the last Parliament in your Lordships’ House, 28 Members did not attend at all. More than 100 Members—116—attended on less than 10% of the days that they were eligible to be here, which is the threshold that many noble Lords have mentioned.

Further interrogation of these data by the Library reveals some interesting points. During our last day in Committee, we debated the ideal age of Peers. The data from the last Parliament show that the younger Peers are more likely to attend than older ones. Noble Lords aged 59 and under attended on more than half of our sitting days in the last Parliament. Noble Lords aged 60 or above were absent for most. While noble Lords in their 80s were with us on 45% of sitting days and those in their 90s managed 31%, those in their 30s were here on 55% of sitting days and the sole noble Lord in her 20s—the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes—was here 78% of the time, despite travelling from much further afield than most.

Perhaps most pertinently for this Bill, average attendance rates were highest for our hereditary colleagues, at 49%. For life Peers it was 47%. For the Lords spiritual it was 14%, although we know that the right reverend Prelates have many other duties in tending to their flocks. Our remaining Law Lords were here on just 12% of sitting days that they could have been. These statistics, interesting though they may be, should not be taken at face value. Some may very well think it is better to have 12% of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale of Richmond, than it is to have half of a thirtysomething.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I am 41. We benefit from having busy people who are active in many areas of civic life and who bring their experience to bear on our deliberations as they see fit. As my noble friends Lord Blencathra and Lord Hailsham said, they contribute with great expertise on esoteric topics.

There are many good reasons for noble Lords’ absence. Many are still active in business and charities. Some serve as chancellors and vice-chancellors, or as ambassadors and high commissioners. Others serve in the no less noble roles of husbands, wives, grandparents and carers. Some are suffering the illnesses and ailments that afflict us all, and they speak very movingly about it when they do. Most of those people would, I think, still be able to meet the modest requirements of Amendment 64 in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Devon, particularly if combined with some of the leniency expressed by my noble friend Lord Lucas in his Amendment 37.

As my noble friend Lord Hannan of Kingsclere reminded us, a very important point is often forgotten when we look at attendance. If noble Lords choose not to be here or cannot be here, they cost the taxpayer nothing. They do not cancel out the votes of noble Lords who have chosen to express their view in a Division. I share my noble friend Lord Astor’s concern about stuffing your Lordships’ House with Lobby fodder. The people who are not here do not take up a seat in the Chamber or force us to queue longer for our sandwich at lunchtime—although, as we have heard, it is rarely a problem. What harm do they do? I am glad that my noble friend Lord Bethell picked up the point of history to correct our noble friend Lord Hannan, pointing out that, in some of the early English Parliaments, those who ignored their Writs of Summons found themselves fined. Perhaps that is an idea we should return to.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, before the birthday boy, the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, begins to wind up for the Front Benches, I will speak very briefly to my Amendment 28, which seeks to provide for a maximum participation threshold, as well as a minimum. I do so with the humility and self-awareness of one who is speaking on the Bill from both the Front Benches and the Back Benches.

My amendment is an important flip side to the debate and there are some salutary examples from what happened in another place. A few years ago, there was the invention of a number of websites and journalistic tools, such as TheyWorkForYou, which track the participation levels of Members of Parliament in the House of Commons. That encouraged some to game the system by making lots of short speeches or interrupting others with great frequency, preferring quantity over quality.

There is value in restraint. I was struck by what the noble Lord, Lord Desai, said about what we can learn from academic theory. The Swiss-American psychologist and pioneer of organisational development, Edgar Schein, set out the concept of humble inquiry. He said that those in public life or leadership positions should ask themselves three questions before making a speech. Does it need to be said? If so, does it need to be said by me? If so, does it need to be said by me now? I should say that I was put on to the work of Professor Schein by one of our more taciturn and thoughtful colleagues in your Lordships’ House.

I have often suspected that, if one looked at the top 10% of speakers and the bottom 10%, it would serve as an interesting competition about those who one would rather hear from. I asked the Library to crunch the numbers for me relating to the last Session. It is not as large or interesting reading as the now famous spreadsheets of my noble friend Lord Blencathra, but it certainly reveals some interesting points.

I am sure we can all guess some of the names that appear in the top 10%, so I will not name names, other than to confirm to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, that the Green Party is the group from which we hear most frequently. We have the pleasure of hearing from the noble Baroness on 68% of the days that she can speak. Personally, I find the other 32% of days to be days of great sadness.

All of us who miss our late noble friend Lord Cormack will be impressed to hear that he still made it into the top 5% of speakers, even though he was sadly taken from us before the end of that Session.

By contrast, 106 noble Lords spoke on only 1% of the days that they could have done. If one glances down that list, which is available from the Library, one sees many examples of what the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, has rightly described as low-frequency, high-impact Members. One sees the names of three former Cabinet Secretaries, a former Governor of the Bank of England, former Leaders of your Lordships’ House from both sides of the House, a director-general of the Security Service rendered quiet by his service in the Royal Household as Lord Chamberlain, and fellows, and indeed the next president, of the British Academy. I see some of them in their places today—I see them in their places frequently—and I am glad that they are using their brains more than they are using their mouths.

I agree with what my noble friend Lord Swire said about the dangers of debate that just repeats verbatim the briefings we are given from lobby groups. I agree with what the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, says about the many other valuable ways that Members of your Lordships’ House can influence the way that we are governed in this country. With that, I shall take my own advice and shut up.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, beneath the wide-ranging and sometimes unfocused discussion we have had on these amendments, there is a degree of limited consensus that we should build on. The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, shows us the way we should go. I hope that between Committee and Report, we will have a number of discussions, off the Floor, about where we go from here that will build on that limited consensus. I hope that the Government will consider accepting a limited number of amendments, which would show us the direction in which we go further, as well as committing to make some clear statements about how they would see further developments.

On the questions of attendance, participation and retirement, I agree strongly with my noble friend Lord Newby that some of this can be done through Standing Orders and agreements of the House and does not require legislation. That is part of the way that we may go forward.

I suggest that we all know pretty well what we mean by a minimum level of attendance and participation, and can name quietly, but we will not, some of the people who fail to fulfil it. I recall some years ago being invited to an office in the City of London to brief the CEO of a rather major operation on how to make a maiden speech. He had been a Member of the House for almost a year and I do not think that he had attended more than two or three times. He did not understand the House and he felt that he ought to make a maiden speech. That is clearly below the level of attendance and commitment.

This is a Parliament in which we are supposed to parley with each other—to exchange ideas, to listen and to learn. I have learned a lot through taking part in Bill Committees. I look at the noble Lord, Lord Vaux of Harrowden, and I remember the Procurement Bill, which we worked through in the previous Session. It was not my area of expertise, but I learned a great deal from him and from a number of other participants. We are here to examine in detail proposals that the Government make and to discuss difficult issues that the Government sometimes do not want to grapple with. That requires a minimum level of attendance and interaction between us. That is part of what we are here for.

Having said that, I hope that we will now be able in the rest of this evening to get through several more amendments, much more rapidly. I hope that the Government will think about what assurances they need to give us in order that we can make greater speed on Report. We should never forget that how this House is seen from the outside is something that we all need to be conscious of. The size of our House and those who come in for just 20 minutes and go out again are an embarrassment, and are picked up by the media. Honours and obligations need to be balanced. A later amendment suggests that we should be moving towards separating honours from the obligation to attend and participate, but these are all questions for the longer term. Dividing what we think this Bill can achieve from what we need to commit ourselves to discuss for the future is part of what we need to discuss between Committee and Report. I hope that this amendment will be withdrawn, but we should bear in mind that the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, is offering us a very useful way forward.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

My Lords, I think the Committee would agree that disqualification from membership of this House should follow only a serious conviction. My suggestion is that a better indicator of the gravity of the conviction lies in the sentence rather than simply in the fact of conviction. That is why I have tabled an amendment whereby disqualification should follow the imposition of an immediate custodial sentence or a suspended sentence of at least six months. I suggest that that is a better mark of the gravity of the offence than simply the fact of a conviction, albeit on indictment.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I want to make sure that in this debate we do not forget the case of our late noble friend, Lord Montague of Beaulieu, who was imprisoned for 12 months for homosexual acts and would have fallen foul of my noble friend’s amendment, even as amended by my noble friend Lord Hailsham. He was charged under the same Act of Parliament as Oscar Wilde and many other gay men. The Montague case of 1954 gave direct rise to the Wolfenden report of 1957 and the decriminalisation of homosexuality 10 years later—a campaign led in your Lordships’ House, incidentally, by a Conservative hereditary Peer, the eighth Earl Arran, following the sad suicide of his brother.

On his release from prison, Lord Montague of Beaulieu returned to your Lordships’ House and remained an active and greatly esteemed Member, as well as highly engaged in civic life. He chaired the Historic Houses Association and English Heritage. He was elected to remain in your Lordships’ House in 1999 and announced his plans to retire only in 2015, the year that he died. So, while I agree with the sentiment that lawmakers should not be lawbreakers, it is important to remember that what constitutes a criminal offence is a question for legislation, and I for one am glad that the late Lord Montague was able to remain a legislator.

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

I would like to add to what the noble Lord has just said. Some 53 years ago, when I first entered the House, there was a Cross-Bencher who had been convicted and served his penal sentence. I have forgotten where it was. He was greatly respected and was treated as an expert in your Lordships’ House on penal matters.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 10th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I very much agree with the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford, that we are extremely unlikely to see any further opportunity of Lords reform in the lifetime of this Government. It would be the first Government that had ever managed to achieve that in my 35 years in this House, and I do not see why the rules should have changed again, so it is really important that we get the discussion done now and move things forward a bit.

I like the amendment in the name of the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, very much. It has the virtue of creating a big change at the end of a Parliament, just when you need a big change so that you can alter the balance of the House a bit and bring in Ministers. In my experience of this place, I think that 20 years is the right time; 15 years feels too short. It takes a good long while to embed yourself, and then one does have a decent, useful life after that, so 20 years feels better to me. I agree with the noble Viscount that we should go for a proper way of remunerating Members of this House. The sooner that pensionable, taxable remuneration comes in, the better. There is no excuse for the current system.

I can comfort the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes: if she ever feels powerful in this place, she will be immensely lucky. We are like waves breaking on the rocks of the seashore. Most of the time, we just bounce off. Occasionally, we manage to shift a grain of sand, and very occasionally, somehow, we all come together and shuffle a rock down the slope and into the deep, as with the unlamented Schools Bill in the last Parliament, or as my noble friend Lady Owen has achieved with her ambitions in this Parliament.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, the problem with any debate on House of Lords reform is that it very quickly descends into self-interest. As a relatively youthful Member of your Lordships’ House, who is already more than one-third of his way through what would be a 15-year term, it may not surprise your Lordships to hear that I am not especially attracted to this idea. By contrast, I am sure that some octogenarian colleagues on the Government Benches, some but not all of whom are in their places today, are perhaps keener on this potential reform than they would be about implementing that part of the Government’s manifesto which relates to a retirement age, but I think that it has been worthy of separate consideration.

When my noble friend Lord Remnant was speaking, I was struck by the fact that age is of course a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010, which the last Labour Government brought in, whereas length of tenure is a question of good governance. My noble friend spoke from his own experience in the private sector in making his points. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, that I have asked for one of my later amendments to be grouped with the others in the next group, so I am keen to make good progress.

I note that both the Minister responding and I are in what I suppose would be called in the terms of the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, our primary working years—I am glad to see her in her place responding. I was struck by the question of the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, “What then?” not so much from the employment rights angle, although noble Lords have raised some pertinent points about the way that active Members of your Lordships’ House are remunerated, but more from the point that, if we were to be ushered out at the end of a term, those of us who have come in at a younger age would be thinking about what comes next in terms of our careers. In government, we have put in place a sensible mechanism, through the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, to make sure that Ministers are not abusing their position to line up their next gig. I would worry slightly that, if we were to have limited terms here, people who were looking to serve in your Lordships’ House and then leave and do something next, in the next chapter of their career, would be thinking about “What next?” and lining up some lucrative opportunities, whether in financial or political ways.

My noble friend Lord Attlee rightly drew attention to the fact that we have less interest in media coverage or the clips that we might put on social media. I often say, when talking to friends outside the House about our work here, that we do not, unlike another place, play to the Gallery. That is mostly because there are very few people in the Gallery watching debates in your Lordships’ House, but I think that a lot of us are dispassionate, by virtue of the fact that we have taken an oath, as the noble Lord, Lord Desai, reminded us, to sit here and give our dispassionate views for the rest of our service here, and that is something that is worth holding on to. I am grateful to the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, for bringing this amendment before us for consideration and for highlighting its origins in the royal commission chaired by my noble friend Lord Wakeham under the last Labour Government.