House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Lord Tugendhat and Earl of Erroll

Committee stage
Monday 10th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I thoroughly support Amendment 11. People have tried picking holes in it, but it does not say that all have to be elected. It says:

“introducing directly elected members in the House of Lords”.

The proposals, which would be thought through and brought with a Bill within 18 months, could contain all sorts of different proposals, which I know everyone wants to debate in a moment. I will leave that to everybody else because there are some very good ideas in there.

The whole point about Amendment 11 is that it gives voice to that promise of Privy Council oath, given from the two Front Benches, that there would be further democratic reform of the House of Lords. That is what Amendment 11 states, and it puts a time limit on it. Therefore, the Secretary of State has to do something about it, not just kick it into the long grass. We will not be here, but those who follow us will be here to see proper further reform of the Lords, introducing a democratic bit to it. As I said before, without that democratic element, it will eventually have all its powers removed because it will have no democratic legitimacy.

[Lord Tugendhat (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Brady spoke very eloquently, but he did not refer to his Amendment 90C:

“A person can only be a member of the House of Lords if they are not a Minister of the Crown”.


I do not know why he did not refer to that, but it is a very bad idea.

One of the most striking features of politics in the more than 50 years since I was elected to the House of Commons is that as the diversity in gender and ethnicity has widened—which is a good thing—the diversity of life experience has narrowed considerably. When I was first elected to the House of Commons, there were people who had a lot of business experience, people who had been active in trade unions—