House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Winston Excerpts

3rd reading
Monday 21st July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I feel impelled to make just a very brief point. I very much support the idea of a Select Committee to look at the future of the House but, before any steps are taken to look at voting and the right to elect Peers, will the Select Committee discuss with the Commons how the Commons sees it and what sort of second Chamber there will be if Peers are elected and have rights that we do not have at the moment?

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I promise not to give as long a speech as my noble friend Lord Grocott. I am speaking on this Bill for the first time, deliberately, having not voted. I think I am the only person in the House who is a card-carrying geneticist. I have been through this during previous Bills, when I made fun of some of the people in the Chamber.

I deeply regret to see friends leaving us, mostly from the Benches opposite but from other places as well. I do not want to get into the reasons for that but to suggest one lesson that we might learn from this. We are in a society that massively respects DNA, heredity and inbuilt virtues, talent and so on. We have to recognise that, in some ways, the lesson from this Bill is a lesson for the Labour Party. The Labour Party has to understand that we cannot change our genes—irrespective of what people might be saying in the health service at the moment—but we have to change our environment. Although this may not be important at the moment, it certainly applies to the whole of our legislation, the whole of Parliament, the whole of our law. The message must surely be that, irrespective of how we have dealt with the hereditary peerage, we need to provide a better environment.