House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Lucas

Committee stage
Wednesday 12th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, it would be a really useful flexibility in our system if life Peers could be appointed without the right to sit in the House of Lords. Frankly, there are people who deserve a peerage but who do not want the obligations, which we have been discussing today, to attend here and deal with the minutiae of legislation. In particular there are those who have grown senior and grand enough that arguing whether a comma should be moved one word to the right is not how they want to spend their life—unlike me.

So this would be a useful addition to the structure of our life peerage. It would enable people to be honoured properly and to be given a seat in this House only if that is what they really want and they intend to make full use of it. I beg to move.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I support the sentiment of this amendment. Again, this is a longer-term issue, but separating the honour from the obligation is an important part of how we should be moving forward. We know that a number of people have desperately wanted peerages—I am one of the many who found, after my appointment to this House, that the number of people who wished to invite me out to lunch to tell me what excellent Peers they would make increased very considerably.

This House has—happily—become much more professional in the past 20 years. We do now recognise this as a job, but we do not necessarily need to be Peers to do the job. Perhaps if we were called “Senators” or whatever, that would work quite as well. I immensely enjoy my title, in the sense that Saltaire is a very special village. It is now a world heritage site. It has a Hockney gallery, and I suspect that no one apart from me in this House knows that Paul Hockney, David’s elder brother, was a Liberal Democrat councillor and the Mayor of Bradford.

The more important thing for the long-term interest of this House is that we have good people appointed to the second Chamber, and that this is thought of first as a second Chamber and not so much as a House of Lords. Those who wish to have titles could perhaps have titles that do not have the obligations that we all now willingly accept to examine legislation, to debate difficult issues and to play a part in the governance of this country.