House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Wakeham Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wakeham (Con)]

My Lords, although it is almost certain this Bill will become law, we have heard enough from a good part of the House to say that it is unwise to try to reform the House piecemeal in the way that the Government propose. It is a serious mistake. When I spoke in the recent debate on the future of the House of Lords, I declared two interests. I was for some years the chairman of a royal commission on the future of the House of Lords, invited by the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair. I am also a member of the committee set up by the Lord Speaker to find ways to reduce the size of the House. We have heard from the chairman of that committee, the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and I do not need to repeat what he said, because I agreed with it almost entirely.

I declare these interests again, but I have one important thing to say which is relevant to our ongoing discussions. During the early stages of the royal commission, the senior Conservative on the royal commission came to me and said, “Unless the commission proposes an element of elected Members, I shall resign and I will not sign the report”. This was a bit of a blow. But it was followed the following week by the senior Labour member of the commission, who came to see me quite separately, and said that if the commission proposed and recommended elected elements of the House of Lords, he would not attend a further meeting and would resign. If you are chairman of a committee of that sort, and your two senior members come to you and tell you that they are going to resign right at the beginning of the proceedings, it is a bit of a shock. I persuaded both of them to stay on the commission, to argue their point of view and to see what we came up with at the end of over a year of discussions on these matters. In the end, both of them agreed and signed the report. But it was, I have to say, a tricky moment at the time.

The first point that I want to make is that what happens to the House of Lords for the future needs a lot of thinking about. Snap answers by this group or that group, and easy solutions, will be a disservice.

My second point is that, as the only living person who has been both Leader of the House of Commons and Leader of the House of Lords, I just want to say that the Leader of the House of Lords has, in one respect, a wider responsibility than any other Cabinet Minister, in the sense that they are responsible for the whole House of Lords and how it is run in the interests of our nation and democracy.

The Leader of the House was a very successful Leader of the Opposition of the House of Lords for 10 years and is highly regarded by everybody on all sides of the House. She has a very special responsibility at this stage to bring forward proposals, to listen to the arguments and to see whether she can end up with a proposal that is accepted by all Members of the House. If she does that, we will all be proud of what she has achieved, and our successors will look back in 100 years from now and say that the modernisation of the House of Lords was effectively achieved and the noble Baroness, the Leader of the House, will get the credit.

House of Lords Reform

Lord Wakeham Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wakeham (Con)]

My Lords, it is well over 50 years since I first got into the House of Commons, but I do not think I have ever sat in a debate and heard reports that I had written 25 years ago quoted as freely as some have quoted them this afternoon. The first thing I ought to do is declare an interest as a former chairman of the royal commission that was set up after the last reform of the House of Lords, to think about the future. We spent a long time discussing it, and some of the things that have been said reflect well on that and some do not. I do not intend to go any further than that, except to say that—sorry, I have not made a speech for a long time, and there is a new factor in my life that I have not noticed before: I cannot even read my own writing.

Nevertheless, the royal commission that I chaired is a very old feature of Parliament but a dying one. Mine, nearly 30 years ago, was the last one to be set up. I hope that was not a reflection on me, but I think it is a reflection of the view of the Civil Service and the Government that royal commissions cause more trouble to the Government than they like, so they are disappearing from the scene. They have been going a long time. As a matter of fact, I suspect no one here will know that King William I had a royal commission that set up the Domesday Book.

The second interest I declare is that I have been a member of the Lord Speaker’s committee on the size of the House, chaired so ably by the noble Lord, Lord Burns. He has already expressed a lot of the views of our committee, so I do not have to. What I want to say, in the few words I have, is that, in spite of all the faults that everybody likes to talk about, the House of Lords does an extremely good job of work and none of us should ever feel ashamed of the work that we do. We look at Bills in detail, which the House of Commons gave up doing a long time ago, as far as I can make out. We are proud of what we do; the problem is what the future composition of the House should be.

I know what I would do. If I was the Leader of the House, I would set up a committee and say to the House, “You tell me what you think it ought to be”. You would almost certainly get a surprisingly good report as each party recognises that it has a responsibility but not overall command of the situation. I would certainly continue the reduction of the size of the House of Lords to 600. The size is not absolutely important; the important thing is that it will stop any future Prime Minister pushing in a lot of people without the agreement of the House. It is not the actual number, but that it is a limited number, that is important.

I believe the Lords ought to have a big say in the way the House of Lords conducts its business, because I think we are the ones who know best. A number of the things that have been said by others are right. I would find agreement within the House on how it should be divided up by party and how many places each party should have. That should be fixed and take account of, probably, the total vote of the electorate at the last general election. In my view, new Members should have 15 years. I argued for 20 years in the committee but I had to agree with the rest that 15 years was probably about long enough to keep the right flow in the new Chamber.

Those are the main changes that I would want to see. There are a whole range of changes that I would like to see in the way the House of Lords conducts its work, in spite of the fact that it does a good job. For example, quite a lot of time is spent passing resolutions when there is not the slightest chance of them ever going through the House of Commons. We are all here for hours when there are much more constructive things to do.

I welcome where we have got to. The Government are right to try to do something about these things, and I think they should take a great deal of notice of what the House of Lords says.