House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Viscount Astor Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 12th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Dundee (Con)]

My Lords, as is proposed in Amendment 37 by my noble friend Lord Lucas, this matter ought to be dealt with proactively; for, as may be inferred from that amendment, individual Peers should make their own commitments in the first place. Therefore, at the beginning of every Session of Parliament, each House of Lords Member would sign a declaration of intent to attend more than a certain proportion of sitting days during that Session. Nevertheless, a key question obviously remains: what should this minimum number of days be?

Here, once more, my noble friend Lord Blencathra assists our thinking and comes to the rescue. He has just done so by gently nudging imprecision and indecisive conjecture towards mathematical certainty. For, as he points out, if there had been a 20% attendance stipulation between 2019 and 2024, we would have lost 154 Peers; if there had there been a 15% attendance stipulation, we would have lost 118 Peers; and, through a 10% attendance stipulation, 70 Peers would have been asked to leave.

Yet, having got thus far, mathematics then slightly escapes and retreats back towards conjecture; for, given that there was no minimum percentage attendance requirement between 2019 and 2024—and given that these years would not suddenly come to penalise Peers retrospectively—that leaves us guessing, of course, as to the number of Peers who, in the knowledge that they would be expelled if they did not meet that requirement, would have in fact failed the attendance test. Obviously, these numbers of failures would not be the same as —instead, almost certainly be much less than—those figures between 2019 and 2024, as has already been quoted, when Peers knew that there was no minimum attendance requirement as high as 10% that they had to consider at all.

Included in this grouping is Amendment 64 in the names of the noble Earl, Lord Devon, and my noble friend Lord Dobbs, to which the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, has referred. A minimum attendance requirement of 10% of House of Lords sittings is stipulated. Your Lordships may agree with that for two reasons, the amendment works efficiently and strikes a good balance when taken in conjunction with my noble friend Lord Lucas’s Amendment 37, as other speakers have said. First, following Amendment 64, Members would then know that if they do not adjust their diaries to a known quantity of 10% attendance, they will be asked to leave. Secondly, following Amendment 37, their necessary advance commitments to dates at the beginning of parliamentary Sessions would more than likely be made responsibly and, therefore, to well exceed a statutory minimum of 10% in any case.

[Viscount Astor (Con)]

My Lords, I offer a different opinion—perhaps a dissenting voice. My noble friend Lord Blencathra’s amendment is terrible. It is a bad amendment to a bad Bill. What he has not said is why, when he tabled it, he chose, for example, five years. What was the purpose of that? Was it one Parliament? Why not 10 years? Why not 15 years, as some noble Lords would like the Session to be? Why not go back further? In my case, the noble Lord could have gone back 50 years. I do not know what my attendance record would look like over that period—pretty shoddy, I suspect, but never mind.

It is a mistake to have this principle, because if it is carried forward we will find ourselves encouraging Lobby fodder—my noble friend is a former Chief Whip. Everybody would be here all the time to vote and get their name down but they would not participate in your Lordships’ House; they would just be here for the benefit of the Chief Whip. That is a bad thing. Also, if we are going to attract some younger Members to your Lordships’ House, they will have careers and other jobs, and maybe would not be able to attend all the time. Some noble Lords are retired and do not have other jobs to do.

This is a dangerous and bad precedent. It should be discarded and it should not be in this Bill. I welcome and look forward to hearing my noble friend’s response.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Viscount Astor Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 3rd March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

But it is worth knowing the names of all those hereditaries who have been working their socks off in this place for years and will be thrown out. There is the Earl of Leicester, the Earl of Lindsay, Lord Londesborough, Lord Lucas, the Earl of Lytton, Lord Mancroft, Lord Meston, the Duke of Montrose, Lord Mountevans, Lord Moynihan —whom I see in his place in front of me, and who has already been rightly praised—Lord Ravensdale, Lord Reay, Earl Russell, Lord Sandhurst, the Earl of Stair, Lord Thurlow, Viscount Thurso, who has already spoken —I think that he welcomed his own demise—and Lord Trefgarne, also a former Minister, Viscount Trenchard, Lord Trevethin and Oaksey, Lord Vaux of Harrowden, and finally, the Duke of Wellington.

I make no apology for reading out those names; I have not taken very long to do so—less than six minutes. If the Committee is going to go ahead with ejecting hereditaries, we simply need to know all of those colleagues, the work they have been doing in this House and the expertise we will lose. We will not only lose their expertise but be doing them a disservice by rejecting all the work they have done over the last few years by saying, “You’re just a hereditary, you can now be slung out.” I think that is an insult to the hard work they have been doing.

[Viscount Astor (Con)]

My Lords, I knew that I was unimportant when my noble friend Lord Blencathra omitted me from his list, but now it has been confirmed. I am very grateful to him for doing that. As we approach the dinner hour, it is obviously time for very long speeches, and I intend for my speech to be very long and to cover a number of hugely important issues. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Soames on his amendment, because it would actually affect me, as a former Minister of the Crown, by inserting proposed new subsection (A1)(a). I thank my noble friend and support his amendment.

[Lord Brennan of Canton (Lab)]

I observe briefly to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, that he is partial in his recollection of the career of the great Raymond Baxter. The other programme that he was famous for was called, “Tomorrow’s World”. I was an avid watcher of that programme as a young boy, and I never remember a prediction on “Tomorrow’s World” that, 50 years later, people would still be sitting in Parliament by virtue of the hereditary principle. On his list and his partial recollection of Raymond Baxter, I point out to the noble Lord that we live in tomorrow’s world, not yesterday’s.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Viscount Astor Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Astor (Con)]

My Lords, it is a certain pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, because when he first came to this House, he did not sit on the Labour Benches but was on this side of the House. He has played a very successful game of musical chairs around the House in a clockwise motion, going from here to the Cross Benches to the Labour Party. With his ability to do that, after the Bill has passed he will probably pop up on the Bishops’ Bench.

The Bill is notable not for what is in it but for what is not in it. It is a Bill of missed opportunities to reform this House. It does not represent the Government’s own manifesto. Our fear is that there will be no further reform or follow-up of Gordon Brown’s idea for a Chamber that will be fit for the future, representing all the nations of this country. As drafted, it is an opportunity for this Government to enable the Prime Minister to pay off friends and donors. More Prime Ministers’ bag carriers will receive peerages, sadly, following the example of the last two Conservative Prime Ministers. I hope that noble Lords note that I said “two”— I absolve my noble friend Lord Cameron of any such behaviour.

In the recent debate we had on reform, the Leader of the House did not tell us what she believes the future of this House will be or even what options the Government are considering. However, looking at the amendments that were laid in the Commons, we have the opportunity to prise out the Government’s thinking on the future of the second Chamber. The Labour Party’s general election manifesto committed to removing the right of excepted hereditary Peers to sit and vote in this Chamber. The commitment was made alongside other proposals to reform the House of Lords. The manifesto proposed the introduction of a “mandatory retirement age” that would require Members to retire from the House of Lords at the end of the Parliament in which they reached the age of 80. It also proposed establishing

“a new participation requirement as well as strengthening the circumstances in which disgraced members can be removed”,

reforming

“the appointments process to ensure the quality of new appointments”,

and seeking

“to improve the national and regional balance”.

The Labour manifesto also proposed

“replacing the House of Lords with an alternative second chamber that is more representative of the regions and nations”.

Finally, it said that the Government would consult on these proposals. When will they start consulting? Who will they consult? We want to know what the Government’s view is on retirement age and length of service. Is 80 going to be the retirement age? If so, why did the Prime Minister appoint two new Peers to this House who are already over 80? It was somewhat surprising.

A lot of us do not want to get rid of the Bishops or disestablish the Church of England, but after looking at the debates in another place we should consider looking at other faiths taking part in Prayers in this House. On Remembrance Sunday, all the denominations were included. I looked up the list: the Chief Rabbi, the director of the Sikh Network, representatives from the Roman Catholic Church, the Methodist Church, the United Reform Church, the Baptist Union, unitarian churches, Greek Orthodox churches and the Church of Scotland, and Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist representatives. If they can attend that important service, why can they not attend Prayers in your Lordships’ House?

Do the Government believe that in the future, large donors or those who represent large donors should be excluded from consideration for peerages? Should there be a participation threshold? I note, as other noble Lords have, that in the previous Session, the largest vote was 515 Peers and the largest in recent years was just over 600, on the European withdrawal Bill. That was out of a possible 805. However, if we exclude some who are unable to attend due to illness or not being in the country, that leaves about 200 further Members of your Lordships’ House who could have attended. Where were they? If the Government really want to cut down the size of the Chamber, they should identify those who do not attend, and those Peers should retire. It is also noticeable that 53 of your Lordships have not spoken in the last five years. Do they really deserve to carry on taking part in your Lordships’ House without making more of an effort to attend?

There will be amendments to the Bill. They will not be, as some have claimed, a delaying tactic but a chance to discuss the issues around reform. I recognise that the Bill is a manifesto commitment and that at the end of the day it must pass, although not without proper scrutiny. To those who object to the scrutiny ahead of us, in Committee and on Report, all I can say is that if we do not properly scrutinise the Bill, what is the point in having a second Chamber at all? If this happens, the danger is that since most MPs already do not see the point of a second Chamber, their preferred reform will be a unicameral Parliament. That would be a terrible mistake and an unintended consequence of a bad Bill.

House of Lords Reform

Viscount Astor Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Astor (Con)]

My Lords, I wonder how many times over the last century a noble Lord has started a speech by saying, “Reform of this Chamber is long overdue”, and how many times the Government Minister of the day has positively responded but the Government have then done little to implement any serious changes.

We will hear this evening from the Leader of the House about the proposed demise of the last remaining hereditary Peers. To be fair to the Labour Government, the Blair Government enacted a major change with the cull of hereditary Peers in 1999, leading to what was described as a transition period. Well, transition has lasted rather longer than intended, and that is the fault of not the hereditary Peers but the Labour and Conservative Governments.

Sadly, rather than serious reform, we will be offered a House that will be dependent on the whim and patronage of the Prime Minister. We all agree that there are too many Peers, but the Government have not come up with a solution. Has a retirement age of 80 been ditched, or a length of service of, say, 35 years? We do not know: the Government have not told us.

What is really important is that the Government had the opportunity to endorse the proposals put forward by Gordon Brown but quickly backed off, preferring to use this House as a repository for former Members of another place and those to whom it owes favours, following, I am afraid, the example of the last two Conservative Prime Ministers—I hope noble Lords remember that I said two, because I absolve my noble friend Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton of any such behaviour.

The Brown plans offered a real reform. Following devolution, it is not sustainable to have a second Chamber that does not relate to and properly reflect the devolved Administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We cannot have a second Chamber that relates largely to England—it should bring together the regions and nations of this country. We cannot have a second Chamber that does not include representatives of other faiths. Prayers should be said not just by the Bishops but by those representing other faiths.

A second Chamber could be constituted by election or, indeed, appointment. We need to look at what size any new Chamber should be, but that is a subsidiary question to what its role and powers should be. I follow my noble friend Lord Wakeham in saying that a constitutional convention should be put in place to look at all these issues, including how a reformed second Chamber relates in its powers to the primacy of the House of Commons. It is important to remember that without a second Chamber a Government can keep voting themselves into office.

It is often said that this House works in spite of its composition rather than because of it—that is true. I believe that the House of Lords is well regarded in this country as an important revising Chamber holding the Government to account. Any reform must ensure that that remains a core part of the House’s duty.

My time may be up in a year, so I want to address just a couple of points that have been made by noble Lords opposite. One of the main arguments against hereditary Peers is that no women are represented among our number. The fault for that lies just as much with the Government as it does with our side. The Labour Party, while in opposition or in government, has never supported any Bill that would give the right to the firstborn to succeed to a title. If it had, there would be many more mixed Members of the hereditary peerage.

The Government owe a duty to this House and to the country to announce what reforms they are considering, what reforms they now wish to impose, and what the timetable will be.

In the 50 years that I have sat in this House, it has changed. All ethnic communities are represented; nearly all religious denominations are represented, and noble Lords come from different parts of this country and from many different backgrounds. We have had in our ranks those who have been to jail, and perhaps a few who should have gone to jail. We are perhaps more representative of the nation than we ever realise.

Over the years, I have heard many good speeches from those who attend frequently and those who attend infrequently, and, occasionally, very bad speeches from those who attend all the time and never stop speaking. This House has a tendency to be pompous and often self-congratulatory. We often hear long speeches on foreign policy or important issues of the day, but I am afraid that our debates work only when they are narrowly focused. Too often, wide-ranging debates are for the benefit of the speaker and not the audience. I hope I have not fallen into that trap today.