House of Lords Reform

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I have heard most of the speeches either in the Chamber or on the monitor and I am very pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst. The title of this debate is about reform of the House of Lords yet 90% of the contributions have been about the composition. We ought to be talking about what the House of Lords is for and how we best deliver it. A few noble Lords such as the noble Lords, Lord Sandhurst and Lord Norton, and my noble friend Lord Rooker made these wider constitutional points but most have ignored them. Frankly, we need a separate debate about the future of the House of Lords, maybe on the basis of a White Paper. Meanwhile, I am going to revert to the norm and follow everybody else and talk about composition.

This is a long-running story. Just before the last general election I was asked by somebody if it was really true that a Labour Government were going to democratise the House of Lords, and I assured them that it was absolutely clear and that Keir had committed us to it. I meant Keir Hardie, of course, because in those days we were supporting the Liberal Government in 1911 and, as the noble Lord, Lord Newby, reminded us we are now 113 years on.

We need now to recognise the part of the Labour Party manifesto not in the Bill now in the Commons. We are not only abolishing hereditary Peers but abolishing life Peers, as we all have to retire at 80. I do not object to that. I would have preferred a fixed-term cut-off point but we ought to enact that proposition at the same time as we are getting rid of the hereditaries or shortly thereafter. I do not object to it although it will get rid of me and a lot of my colleagues here and across the House.

It is actually 31 years since I joined the House— John Major was the Prime Minister—and the reason I am here is that Tony Blair wanted me moved from a previous position. He then gave me a number of very decent jobs in this House and I have very much enjoyed it. But that indicates that not only the hereditaries but every single one of us has no legitimacy in a way that would be understood in any other democratic country in the world. We are all here on historic anomalies, and if we are going to change this we need to change the lot of it and do that fairly rapidly.

I remember when I first came into the House, I thought it was going to be done fairly quickly. I saw that my first pass went into the 21st century and thought I would not need it that long because the Labour Government would clearly enact a new form of the House of Lords within their first or second term. But when it came to 1999 I was very disappointed—my noble friend Lord Liddle referred to this—when the deal was done to retain a proportion of the hereditaries and follow that up with by-elections. I remember the phone call from my noble friend Lady Jay, who was then Leader, and being astounded that we had made such a deal; we are still living with the consequences of it.

There have been various possibilities for change. I supported Jack Straw and the Labour Government’s proposition that it be a partly elected House. I supported the coalition’s proposals for a partly elected House and Nick Clegg’s proposals then, but nothing has happened. I have been deeply impressed by the contributions from a lot of hereditary Lords and from a lot of other noble Lords who came into the House of Lords through various nefarious ways; I have been friends and admirers of many of them. But we do not have the basic legitimacy of a Chamber in a modern democracy, and we need to work out what the second Chamber does.

In that time, we have also moved to being a quasi-federal state, plus having a degree of devolution within England as well. Most second Chambers in most democracies reflect the lower tiers of government within those democracies. The bulk of the membership of this House needs to be elected, directly or indirectly, by the chambers and regions of Britain. The time for that debate is not just to talk about hereditaries; it is to see what the role of this Chamber is in the long term, how our democracy is going to develop and where we are going. That will take a longer period. I will vote for the Bill when it comes through but it is only a partial solution, and we need a bigger-picture solution.