House of Lords

Debate between Lord Trefgarne and Lord Jopling

Tuesday 6th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jopling]

If the UKIP vote at the next election matches the Liberal vote—as the public opinion polls suggest it might—it would mean that neither of them would have very many Members down the corridor. But let us leave that just to the side for the moment.

A third scenario is that it is not impossible, as I have said to your Lordships before, that a new party could sweep to power. My old friend, the noble Lord, Lord Richard, mentioned UKIP. I do not think that UKIP will do it, but politicians are not popular creatures at the moment, and there is the opportunity for a new party to sweep to power in this country at some time. We have seen it happen in Turkey and in Italy in recent years, with a new party suddenly appearing from nowhere, and this House would look particularly stupid if you had a Government with virtually no support in your Lordships’ House.

These things can be done quickly; it is not impossible to do them. I have discussed this and circulated my plan before. If any of my noble friends wish to see it, I should be very glad to send them a copy of the solution for the construction of the House of Lords which, as I say, I have been peddling for over 12 years.

[Lord Trefgarne (Con)]

My Lords, before my noble friend sits down, could he say what place he proposes in his scheme for the 26 Bishops sitting in this House at the present time?

[Lord Jopling]

I once wrote a letter to the Times years ago after we had a debate here on blasphemy. I remember suggesting in that letter that three right reverend Prelates had come for, I think, Report stage: one disappeared before the vote and the other two voted in opposite Lobbies. I am not really sure quite what I would suggest now, but I did suggest then that we were being overgenerous giving them 26 places. But there are none here currently, so I think I had better say no more.

Equality (Titles) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Trefgarne and Lord Jopling

Friday 6th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jopling]

I think we have to understand that the Bill as it stands does not have a hope in hell of getting on to the statute book. I say that as one who, down at the other end of the building, killed more Bills than most people you will ever meet. It would need fresh legislation. We are embarked on a discussion of the issue, but those of us who are realists realise that the Bill will not go through.

[Lord Trefgarne]

If a Bill were to come forward simply to deal with my noble friend Lord Shrewsbury—or to deal among other things with my noble friend Lord Shrewsbury—it would be a hybrid Bill. Does my noble friend recall the difficulties of getting hybrid—

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[Lord Jopling]

My Lords, I must apologise to the House that I was not able to take part at Second Reading. I was keen to be here but it was impossible. I warmly support the general purpose of the Bill, principally because I feel very strongly that the law which covers the Crown should have close parallel with those laws which cover the peerage. Now that the eldest female child of the Crown can inherit the Crown, I believe that we should move in the same way so far as the peerage is concerned. That is why I congratulate my noble friend Lord Lucas on aiming to do this. As he told us a few minutes ago, I approach this issue purely because of gender equality rather than because of all these quirks of the law about titles in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Those are mysteries to me; I am concerned with the gender equality aspects.

I said in an earlier intervention that we have to accept—I hope that my noble friend Lord Lucas and everybody else accepts this—that the chances of this Bill coming into law are nil. As the House may know, I had experience in another place as a party manager and a business manager. There is no way that the Bill will move into law and therefore, as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, quite correctly said earlier, we ought to regard this as a discussion on this matter rather than a detailed way of passing it into law.

[Lord Trefgarne]

My noble friend referred to his time as a business manager in the other place. As I recall, he came to be known as the lord high executioner. Is he proud of that?

[Lord Jopling]

I am really very proud of having blocked a lot of particularly senseless Bills which came before the other House. I am certainly very proud of that aspect of being an executioner.

I hope that when the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, has recovered from this discussion, he will make representations to the Government that we ought to have a government Bill in the very near future dealing with this whole aspect of the law on titles, so that gender equality can be established.

Having congratulated my noble friend Lord Lucas, I am bound to say that I am extremely unhappy that there should be a discretionary element in the way that an eldest female child can inherit a peerage. When the eldest child is a girl, I believe that her succession to a peerage should be automatic. The Bill as it stands makes it discretionary. Given everything that that implies about attempts to get agreement within a family, I cannot think of a surer way of causing disagreement and resentment within families than by making it discretionary.

I fully support Amendment 10, moved by the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty. At the same time, I want to make some remarks about Amendment 34 in my name, which is taken with this general grouping. I well recognise that in some families arrangements have already been made, and expectations already exist, about the inheritance of a title. I have no interests to declare—my title makes me a day-boy, if I may call it that, in your Lordships’ House—but it would be very unfortunate if we were to pass laws about the inheritance of titles that took away from living people expectations that they may have and led to the aborting of arrangements that will have been made and that will be almost impossible to take back.

I believe that the Bill should be effected only for children born after the Bill becomes an Act of Parliament. By doing that, we would not take away any expectation of succession or arrangements that had been made for living people, and it would mean that from the day when the Bill became law it applied to children born after that date. I hope that the House will accept that amendment, and I am most pleased to be able to support the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, in his efforts to achieve a much fairer method of gender equality.

[Lord Trefgarne]

My Lords, during the course of our discussion in this Committee stage so far, I have made a number of light-hearted interventions that I dare say have irritated your Lordships, and I apologise for that. May I now make a serious intervention and give a serious response to the Bill proposed by my noble friend Lord Lucas? Like my noble friends Lord Jopling and Lord Caithness, I was not able to be here at Second Reading although I was aware of what was happening. Like my noble friend, I read the Hansard and wished that I had been here.

I very much support the principle that the succession of hereditary peerages should go to the eldest child, not the eldest son, and I would support a change in the law that achieved that. Like my noble friend Lord Jopling, though, I also believe that it is something that cannot be arranged to take place immediately because it would upset all sorts of family arrangements of a very complicated and legal kind, which would be highly undesirable. A number of noble Lords—indeed, my hereditary colleagues—have spoken to me about that, although obviously I will not mention their names. They have family trusts that have been arranged to take account of the fact that their second child, for example, is going to succeed to the peerage. Indeed, I do not mind saying that in my own father’s will he made special provision for the peerage and made it clear that certain things in his estate were to go to the holder of it. As it happened, his eldest son was me so that was fine.

I support the principles of what the Bill proposes. However, I fear there are a number of real difficulties, which have been suggested. I genuinely fear that the Bill is hybrid in one way or another, and I regret that very much. Hybrid Bills cause all sorts of difficulties; my noble friend Lord Jopling will remember that only too well from the distant past. Indeed, when the House of Lords Act 1999 came before Parliament all those years ago, it was thought at some point to be hybrid, although we did not in fact press that argument—other considerations were thought to be more relevant. Whether the amendments now being considered improve matters is a matter of open debate, and I look forward to hearing the further views of noble Lords.

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[Lord Jopling]

The noble Baroness may recall that I was heavily involved in the 1990 Act following a constituency case, which I mentioned earlier. The law was changed so that in the case of a surrogacy the genetic mother could get an order from the High Court that she be deemed to be the full mother, not the surrogate mother. In this case, no doubt, the same procedure would have to be followed, as in the High Court ruling. At that stage, the genetic mother would be fully the mother.

[Lord Trefgarne]

I am far from an expert in these matters but, as I understand them, these things can be determined by analysis these days. It is therefore perfectly straightforward to satisfy or solve a dispute as to who was the mother or father. The amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Jopling goes the right way and I support it.

Succession to the Crown Bill

Debate between Lord Trefgarne and Lord Jopling

Wednesday 13th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trefgarne]

My Lords, I broadly support my noble friend Lord True in his amendment. Indeed, at an earlier stage of my deliberations about today’s proceedings, I thought of tabling an amendment to do something similar to what he is now proposing. Having read my noble friend’s amendment, however, I thought better of it and withdrew my amendment for the time being.

My only reservation about my noble friend’s amendment is proposed new subsection (3) of the new clause, which says that the proposed new section,

“should not apply in any case where both Houses of Parliament pass a resolution to the effect that it shall not apply”.

I would have thought that proposed new subsections (1) and (2) were absolute considerations, thought to apply willy-nilly, and Parliament ought not to have the right to overturn them. However, that is a small point compared to the principle of what he is proposing, which, in general, I support.

[Lord Jopling]

My Lords, I am afraid that I have not been able to play a part in the earlier consideration of this Bill. However, I looked at proposed new subsection (2) of my noble friend Lord True’s amendment, which says:

“A person is disqualified from succeeding to the Crown as an heir to the body of a Royal Marriage if they are not the offspring of both parties to that Marriage”.

That takes me back 20 years when, in another place down the Corridor, I had cause to study the embryology Bill, which was going through the Commons at that time. A constituency case came to me of a couple who had found that they could not have a child; the lady had no uterus, but she ovulated. They therefore found a surrogate mother and had the egg from the wife, which was fertilised by the husband, implanted in the surrogate mother. In this case, the surrogate mother gave birth to twins. My constituents brought the twins back to have them registered, and the registrar of births, deaths and marriages said, “Sorry, although you may be the genetic parents of these children, you are going to have to adopt them”. They said, “Don’t be so stupid—we are the genetic parents. Why should we have to adopt our own children?”. This was an anomaly that I took up and caused that Bill to be changed with the help of my right honourable friend Kenneth Clarke, who was the Home Secretary at the time. The change meant that in a case such as that, if an application were made to the High Court, a judge could deem that parents of children who were the genetic offspring of those parents were full parents by an order of the judge in the High Court. That, as far as I understand it, is still the law.

My question to the Minister, thinking of my noble friend’s amendment, is: what would happen in a case like that, where the offspring of both parents are created in circumstances such as the ones I just described? Would it be necessary for the royal parents to apply to the High Court? Surrogacy is becoming much more common and it is not impossible that this could happen in the future. In this sort of circumstance, when the child of a royal marriage was created in this way, would it be necessary to apply to the High Court for that child to be deemed, in the words of the amendment, the “offspring of both parties”? It is rather important that this should be clarified now because it could give rise to considerable difficulties in the future.