House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Viscount Hailsham

Report stage
Wednesday 2nd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My apologies. The Prime Minister in future would have to justify overriding the House of Lords Appointments Commission. This perhaps is some control mechanism on the Prime Minister’s power of appointment, but we have lived through a difficult period in which we have had Prime Ministers who did not particularly pay attention to constitutional conventions and did override the advice on the integrity and suitability of nominations presented by the Prime Minister.

I think the long-term answer to this is clear: we change the way in which this House is constituted. The Bill we presented when we were in the coalition in 2011 and 2012 suggested that we would do much better to have a second Chamber elected in thirds for 15-year terms. That would resolve a lot of these problems, but in the meantime, with the very slow pace of partial reform that we have on these occasions, we need a number of interim measures to limit the Prime Minister’s prerogative and to guard against the real risk that we might again have a Prime Minister who is not a good chap or chapess.

Over the last 30 or 40 years the British have constructed a number of what are called constitutional guard-rails to limit the Prime Minister’s untrammelled prerogative power. We have the Committee on Standards in Public Life, the Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests and the House of Lords Appointments Commission itself. The Labour Party’s manifesto committed to construct a new ethics and integrity commission that will also be a means, yet undefined by the Government, of checking the Prime Minister’s untrammelled authority and holding the Prime Minister to account.

We are all painfully conscious that not all Prime Ministers or presidents respect constitutional or ethical constraints. We have experience in this country, the United States has an extremely painful experience at the moment, and we might again have the experience after the next election, so this interim measure seems to many of us necessary and highly desirable. I beg to move.

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

My Lords, I put my name to Amendments 5 and 6. I very much support enhancing the powers of HOLAC, largely for the reasons explained by the noble Lord. Too many appointments made by previous Prime Ministers have been of people who I rather doubt were in any sense appropriate. That, I am afraid, has happened on too many occasions.

In Committee I tabled an amendment which did not find favour with my noble friend Lord Howard of Lympne. It would have required HOLAC to state its reasons for not approving an individual and allowed that individual the opportunity to make representations. I did that because I was very conscious that injustices can happen, and I think natural justice requires some form of remedy. My noble friend argued very persuasively, as he always does, that this would open up the prospect of judicial review. I am bound to say that I think he was unduly pessimistic; I do not agree with him. But I took the sense of the House, and I have not repeated that part of my amendment.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Viscount Hailsham

Committee: 11th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 28th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hailsham]

My Lords, I have a brief observation on Amendment 355. I agree entirely with the points of principle that have been articulated by my noble friend Lord Cormack, by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, and by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler. Let me make a practical point. If the Minister makes an exception and gets it wrong, people dealing with the European Union may find themselves non-compliant with regulations that are in force and thereby exposed to some form of penalty or disadvantage. The advantage of the amendment is that it would reduce that possibility by a small degree. It is worth guarding against the risk if we can.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister remarked that the previous amendment was slightly nerdish and that we were dealing with technical issues. That is absolutely the role of this House. We are intended to deal with the details of Bills. We have already spent more time on the Bill, before we have reached the end of the Committee stage, than the House of Commons spent on all stages. That is appropriate—and necessary.

We should not underestimate how far these technical, constitutional, nerdish issues have resonance outside. I have seen the term “Henry VIII powers” in the columns of the Yorkshire Post. I should tell the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, that I found myself last Saturday addressing several thousand people in Leeds on a Stop Brexit march. In a short speech, I mentioned in passing that the House of Lords had just defeated the Government on a question relating to Euratom. A great cheer went up from the crowd. Until that point, I would have thought that there were at most 200 people in Yorkshire who understood what Euratom was—most of them medical doctors of one sort or another. If several thousand people think that the question of Euratom is important, we should not underestimate the public and those who care about detailed issues in the Bill, in particular executive control versus parliamentary sovereignty and the extent to which the Government may be taking powers in the Bill that a future Government of a different complexion might use and abuse. These are not entirely nerdish and technical matters; they are actually rather important politically.