House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Viscount Goschen Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 12th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, it seems to me—and this is certainly something that I would want to take through to Report—that, if we are to have a House that is totally appointed by the Prime Minister, one of the really important things is to have some control of the consequences of that for the House of Lords. It is in our memories the threat that was made in 1911 to flood the House with Peers to support the Government. I think that would be a disaster. I am glad we avoided it at the time. The Lord Lucas at the time was a Liberal, and therefore sensible.

I do not think it is the right basis for a second Chamber in a democratic country that the Prime Minister can, if they are sufficiently upset with the second House, effectively flood it with their own supporters and have done with it. Moving, as we are, to a House where the Prime Minister has total control over who comes in, we ought to have some recognition of the current settlement, which is that the Government do not have a majority in this House. I beg to move.

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend does the Committee a significant service by putting forward this amendment. It encapsulates the arguments around a fully appointed House and this extraordinary situation that we find ourselves heading towards—a fully appointed House, with all appointments made by the Prime Minister, and a ratchet, in effect, in numbers, going upwards and upwards, when there is a change of Government. I think my noble friend’s amendment, which sounds so simple and straightforward, throws up any number of difficulties, and we could spend the next two or three days of Committee, if such things existed, talking about how this mechanism might work.

My noble friend Lord Lucas is absolutely right to raise the question of the balance between the parties and the Prime Minister’s ability to introduce, unchecked, large numbers of Peers into the House. I was very taken —on Monday, I think it was—when we were talking about the question of elections, when a hushed silence went through the Committee and there were some shocked faces. I felt like I was in a Bateman cartoon: the man who dared to mention elections in the House of Lords—shock, horror. But here we are, discussing one version of an archaic situation versus another.

It is quite clear that there is no rational defence of the Prime Minister being able to appoint, without any check on numbers, to this House. The question of coalitions—parties that might come together and then split apart, parties that might themselves divide—would cause all sorts of difficulties. I suspect that this amendment that my noble friend has put forward is a legislative hand grenade, designed to illustrate the difficulties rather than necessarily put forward a carefully worked through solution.

[Lord Newby (LD)]

The noble Viscount will not be surprised at me saying again that the only way to deal with the problem that this amendment seeks to address is to have an election.

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

I quite agree with the noble Lord.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My noble friend’s amendment to ensure that no one party has a majority in the House of Lords is a relatively new idea. In the pre-1999 House of more than 1,000 noble Lords, there was often a majority well-disposed to the Government of the day. I remember observing, as an adviser in the Conservative Government after 2015, that this was perhaps the first Conservative Government in history who did not enjoy a majority in the House of Lords. What we are confronting here is a relatively new phenomenon.

Of course, it was a problem that the Labour Party faced much earlier, and had to contend with under the leadership of my noble friend Lord Attlee’s grandfather, after 1945. Out of that arose what we know as the Salisbury convention, though really it should not be called that. Viscount Cranborne had not acceded to the marquisate at that time, and poor old Viscount Addison never gets remembered.

Under that convention, your Lordships’ House agreed that it would not seek to thwart the main lines of Labour’s legislation provided it derived from the party’s manifesto for the previous election. Sadly, the then-future fifth Marquess did not tell us what to do about full stops or other punctuation in Labour manifestos, but it was a convention that certainly helped the Attlee Government get its business through and make all the changes that it did to this country. It echoed the referendal theory, which was developed under the third Marquess, in relation to legislation that was brought forward by Liberal Governments, but it is clear there was a lack of clarity on this convention.

I remember the noble Baroness the Lord Privy Seal arguing to your Lordships’ Committee on the Constitution, when I was in Downing Street advising my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead, that it was far from clear that the Salisbury-Addison convention was ever intended to apply to minority Governments and that was not an eventuality that was foreseen by the Marquess of Salisbury in the 1940s.

There are clearly a lot of gaps to fill. There was an attempt by your Lordships’ House—indeed, there was a Joint Committee—to look at the conventions and the two Houses’ understanding of how they operated, back in 2006. I wonder whether the noble Baroness or the present Government have any intention of repeating that exercise, in looking to codify or clarify the convention or to point out other unforeseen circumstances, such as minority Governments in another place.

In the 1997 Labour manifesto, there was a sentence that said:

“No one political party should seek a majority in the House of Lords”.


There was no such statement or commitment in the 2024 manifesto. I think the noble Baroness the Lord Privy Seal has been clear from the Dispatch Box before that it is her view that no party should seek a majority in your Lordships’ House, and I would be grateful if she would expand on that in a moment.

But I think my noble friend Lord Hailsham, who has spoken a few times—