House of Lords Reform

Lord Verdirame Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to participate in this important and timely debate. I am not sure whether I am at an advantage or a disadvantage, but I do not have the sense of déjà vu that the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, just commented on, alongside a number of other noble Lords. This is my first debate on Lords reform.

Many of today’s interventions, and many comments in the public sphere, focus on the size of the House. I accept that size is an important question and that, in particular, our size relative to the other place may contribute to negative perceptions. However, we should not allow perceptions to take over reality, and we should not lose sight of what that reality is. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, put it, we are a full-time House made up of part-time Members. Moreover, the fact that we have careers outside the House is crucial to our ability to discharge our core constitutional function, which is to provide supervision and scrutiny through expertise and experience. So yes, there seems to be a public perception about there being too many of us, but let us not frame the debate about Lords reform in a way that amplifies that perception. Let us not accept it, at least without some context, and certainly let us avoid the pejorative comparisons that are often made.

There is a separate question that is even more important than size. How far can a Government go in changing the composition of the House without undermining its legitimacy? In theory, there are no set limits to the number of new Peers that a Prime Minister can appoint; by the same theory, a new Government could come in and fundamentally alter the composition of the House. Lloyd George famously threatened to do so. If that threat ever came to pass, this House would lose its legitimacy almost immediately.

The British constitution has various examples of things that can happen in theory but just do not happen in practice, of powers that are subject to few or almost no limits in theory, but that are in practice limited by constitutional conventions, political self-restraint and past practice—even where that past practice does not have the legal force of a binding precedent.

Using the very helpful data dashboard produced by the Library, I had a look at the most recent practice. In the 1990s, the average number of peerages created per year was 34. In the 2000s, it was 24. It was 31 in the 2010s and in the current decade it is so far 38. I am one of the beneficiaries of the largesse of this decade. Prime Minister Blair appointed about 36 Peers per year. Prime Minister Cameron appointed about 39 per year, and Prime Minister Johnson appointed about 35 per year. If one factors in the size of the House, which of course varied under these premierships, the average impact ratio—if we can call it that—of each of these PMs on the composition of the House ranged from 3% to 5% a year. Of course there were years, typically at the beginning of a Parliament, where most of the appointments would have been made.

The decision that had the biggest impact on the composition of the House was the removal of the hereditary Peers in the first term of the Blair Government, but that removal, as we have heard, was not done unilaterally by the Government of the day. There was a compromise to ensure wider political support. This suggests that it would be very unwise for the Government to dig in their heels on the hereditary Peers Bill without seeking to secure all-party support and without striking some compromise.

It is not difficult to see what that compromise might look like. The noble Lord, Lord Jay, and I think the noble Lord, Lord Newby, alluded to the possibility of at least some hereditary peerages being transformed into life peerages. There was also considerable support—perhaps even overwhelming support—for the proposals contained in the Burns report and the proposals made by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull. Why not build on that consensus?

What must be avoided is a situation in which the expulsion of 92 Peers is done in a fractious way and is followed by the appointment of very large numbers of new Peers, perhaps also in order to fill the vacuum created by the introduction of a retirement age. If this is the direction of travel, I am afraid that any improvement in public perception deriving from a reduction in size would be far outweighed by the perception that our composition has been so fundamentally altered by one Government that we can no longer be credible as a Chamber of wise and independent counsel and scrutiny.