House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Strathclyde Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 12th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)]

My Lords, I extend my sincere thanks to the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, for tabling Amendments 48 and 49, which I am pleased to be supporting today. I rise in strong support of both amendments, which offer an opportunity for meaningful reform.

Plaid Cymru has long advocated an end to the automatic provision of legislative seats to Bishops, a change that these amendments would help to realise. Currently, 26 seats are guaranteed to Bishops of the Church of England, yet, as we have just heard from the noble Lord, no guaranteed seats exist for the Church in Wales, the Church of Scotland or for any other faith group. This disparity reflects a deeper issue: the exclusion of Wales and Scotland from representation within the Lords spiritual. It is, regrettably, another example of the UK Parliament’s continuing disproportionate focus on England.

Beyond the Vatican City and Iran, most countries do not grant automatic seats as lawmakers to religious leaders. While some Members of your Lordships’ House may propose the inclusion of representatives from other faiths, I firmly believe that this is not a viable solution. The complexity of deciding which faiths, denominations or non-religious organisations should be represented alongside the constantly shifting demographic of the UK make such a proposal impossible. This is why I cannot support Amendments 33 and 78; they do not differ significantly from our current system, which already grants 26 Bishops automatic seats. As such, they fail to address the issue of representation in a meaningful way.

Polling data from a YouGov survey conducted last September reveals the depth of public sentiment on this matter. Only 22% of respondents believed that the House of Lords should continue reserving places for Church of England Bishops. This consensus spans political divides, age groups, gender and regions. Across the board, the public support an end to reserved places for the Lords spiritual.

Let me be clear: this is not a reflection of the valuable work done by individual Lords spiritual. On the contrary, many Bishops have made significant contributions, particularly on prison reform, contributing to debates on overcrowding and offender treatment; and through their efforts to support migrants and refugees, including their vocal opposition to the Rwanda Bill, which should be commended. However, these accomplishments speak to the individuals involved, not the system that automatically grants them a place in the House of Lords. In a reformed second Chamber, such individuals could, and should, be elected on the merit of their work and dedication, not based on their religious office.

Therefore, I urge the Committee to support Amendments 48 and 49, which represent a clear and necessary step towards a more equitable and representative House of Lords.

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

My Lords, as somebody who is about to be expelled from the House of Lords, I cannot help feeling a little bit sorry for the right reverend Prelates on the Spiritual Bench. At the moment, they are, fashionably, everybody’s whipping-boy or girl. Everybody is rather against the Church of England at the moment. It is leaderless, with no Archbishop of Canterbury. So it is a pretty rotten way of attacking the Church, when they are down.

There are so many good reasons to have a spiritual side to the House of Lords. There are hardly ever more than three or four Bishops in the House at any one time, and usually there is only one. So they hardly make an enormous amount of difference to our voting, but they do make a difference to how we are seen and to the tone of our general debates. I do not think one should decry that spiritual side of the House and its important links as part of the established Church.

One of the reasons why I hate this Bill so much is that it takes a very piecemeal approach—flinging out just one cohort of the House without caring whether it does any good or what will happen when it is missed. I feel exactly the same way about the Bishops; they should be preserved until there is proper thought given to the kind of House we want. I know the Leader of the House will say, “If you want to wait for everything to be agreed, nothing will be agreed”, but that is not necessarily the case at all. It is not about everything being agreed but making sure that the worst aspects of this removal of various Peers are taken into account.

There has been much mention of other faiths, and I agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness. As a member of the Church of Scotland, it would be quite nice to hear from a fellow member of that church, and the noble and learned Lord is himself a distinguished former moderator of the Church of Scotland. There is obviously room for other faiths, and during the time I have been here there have been many occasions when representatives of other faiths have been present and played a useful part. Particularly when we deal with great moral issues of the day, whether on embryology, abortion or—no doubt soon if the Bill passes the House of Commons—assisted dying, the voice of the spiritual side of the House is very much to be welcomed.

When I came here, the noble Duke, the Duke of Norfolk, was the senior lay member of the Roman Catholic Church, and I spoke regularly against him. I think the current Duke does not want to take up that role—and in any case, he is going to be expelled as well. Less well known is that, over the last few years, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishops have been offered places in the House of Lords, and often have wanted them, but have been denied the opportunity because of an issue with the Pope in Rome. I have got no idea what that is, but it is an interesting point about how this House is perceived and the importance with which it is perceived by other faiths.

On balance, this has been a very good debate, and one that no doubt we shall return to, and I hope that my noble friends will withdraw their amendments when the time comes.

[Lord Northbrook (Con)]

My Lords, times have changed for the Church of England since my ancestor in the 19th century demolished the small village church to build a larger one to accommodate increased demand.

I support Amendment 90B, in the name of my friend Lady Berridge, about some sort of quality control on the appointment of Bishops. I am afraid to say I have to use Tim Dakin, the previous Bishop of Winchester, as an example of where quality control should have been exercised. His predecessor, Michael Scott-Joynt, was absolutely outstanding and made tremendous contributions in the House. Unfortunately, Tim Dakin did not live up to the standard of that previous Bishop. There were queries even about whether he was properly ordained—perhaps the Appointments Commission might have been able to inquire into that more seriously. The Bishop, who managed to alienate his own clergy, commissioned a report on alleged abuse by the Channel Islands clergy—who are actually part of the Diocese of Winchester—and the Archbishop of Canterbury had to issue an apology to the Dean of Jersey for the hurt and treatment they had received.

The Church of England was sadly missing in action during Covid by closing the churches. There was no real danger of getting Covid in the larger churches due to the lack of attendance, and I do not recall many inspiring contributions in the House, apart from the Archbishop of Canterbury remotely celebrating communion in his kitchen.

I have to disagree with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Sheffield, who said that the Bishops’ Benches are non-political. The Archbishop of Canterbury got very political during the passage of the previous Government’s immigration Bill and criticised it seriously. Generally, the Church seems to be keener on giving reparations to apologise for slavery than supporting rural parishes.

On the other amendments, I do not really agree with them. We should keep 25 religious Members of the House of Lords but have a multifaith membership of the House.

King’s Speech

Lord Strathclyde Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

My Lords, I echo my noble and learned friend Lord Keen of Elie in welcoming and congratulating the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General on his excellent maiden speech. I know we will hear from him a great deal in future, and I for one look forward to that.

On 11 July, the Lord Speaker wrote to all of us and sent us an email in which he said:

“We will, as always, continue our detailed scrutiny of legislation and debate the key issues of the day, while maintaining the respectful and thoughtful tone that characterises the work of this House”.


Those were good and noble sentiments from the Lord Speaker, yet within days the Government were planning a consultation to remove Peers over 80 and fling out Peers such as the Convenor of the Cross Benches, the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull; the deputy Leader of the Opposition, my noble friend Lord Howe; several shadow Ministers; the Deputy Chief Whip, my noble friend Lord Courtown; and many former Ministers who have served in Governments and served the nation over many years—I should perhaps declare an interest. A respectful and thoughtful tone? I think not, even though the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General did his best to sugarcoat the pill.

Why are the Government proposing this? Some say it is because the House is too big, and there was an echo of that from the most reverend Primate who just spoke, but a reduction from 800 Peers to 710 is hardly going to have them cheering in the streets of Islington. Furthermore, the numbers in the House are not an obvious problem. In the last Session of Parliament, over 450 Peers voted on 16 occasions, nearly all of which were on the Rwanda Bill. That does not sound to me like an overcrowded House.

There are also many better ways of reducing the numbers if you really want to: by age, by failure to attend or by electing those to remain in party groups. It is all quite simple, really, and it has been done before. History tells us that Labour Governments have managed to get their business through quite easily within the existing conventions and normal practices that have governed our House’s behaviour since 1945. Just look at Attlee’s radical agenda in the late 1940s, Wilson and Callaghan in the 1960s and 1970s and Blair and Brown this century.

I am told that, for Labour, this is all unfinished business. It is unfinished business, but not in the way that Labour now means. The Government’s predecessors struck an important and worthy agreement, negotiated by the then Lord Chancellor, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, to let the former hereditaries remain in the House until a proper stage two reform was enacted. So I ask: is this really it? It is thin gruel indeed and not much to show for 25 years of thought or, more properly, lack of ambition.

Labour’s manifesto is more ambitious—age limits, tougher scrutiny through the appointments process and attendance or participation hurdles—but, as soon as Labour is in government, all that is conveniently put to one side. As for elections or even indirect elections, there is not a glimmer.

In 2012, another place voted overwhelmingly in favour of a genuinely democratic House of Lords Reform Bill that included an 80:20 split of elected Members. The Bill foundered for lack of agreement on a timetable Motion. Perhaps we should ask this House of Commons whether they have become more flexible.

The hereditary peerage was abolished in 1999. As my noble and learned friend Lord Keen of Elie said, no right of succession has existed since then. I accept that heredity is a qualification for the excellent by-elections, but even I can see that the intention is that they will not remain for long.

So I ask the Minister: why on earth are the Government continuing some strange vendetta against a small group of Peers who are generally younger, more regular attenders and better participators in the House than the average, yet the Government are still unable to tell us their long-term vision for the House? We should not accept more bungled piecemeal reform until we have the certainty of proper reform that has been promised for so long.