House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Viscount Hailsham Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 12th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 33 in my name, which would reduce the number of Bishops in the House from 26 to five: the most reverend Primates the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and three other right reverend Prelates nominated by the synod of the Church of England. I am delighted to see the right reverend Prelate in his place—he has booked his slot among my remaining three by being here tonight.

I accept that this is not in the Bill, and nor was it in the Labour Party manifesto, but spending perhaps 20 or 30 minutes on this will be worthwhile, and I cannot see any other way to raise the topic. Naturally, I expect all Front Benches to keep a million miles away from this subject. I shall be very brief and leave it to other noble Lords to speak in favour of or against this probing amendment.

I shall give the House some statistics for consideration. The number of Church of England baptisms in 2023 was 67,800. The average Sunday attendance is about 700,000. The average Christmas attendance is about 2.3 million. Of course, we have 26 Bishops and an electorate of 48.2 million people, as of the last election. Therefore, there is one Bishop per 27,000 people at attending church on Sunday. There is one Bishop per 88,500 people at Christmas attendance. The maximum size of a constituency is 77,000.

Last year, the daily attendance in this House was 397. Of course, we do not have constituencies and neither do the Bishops, but the number of Peers who attend divided into the electorate would mean one Peer for every 121,000 electors. But, even with Christmas attendance, we have one Bishop for every 88,000 Church of England attendees.

I accept that it would not take an expert statistician to find fault with my conclusions from these statistics, which I admit are highly flawed, but it seems to me that we are overrepresented by Bishops in this House and I leave it to other noble Lords to offer a view for or against that view. I beg to move.

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 48 in my name and the consequential Amendment 49. Perhaps I might begin by saying that I am not making any personal criticism of any of the present Lords spiritual. Most, and perhaps almost all, are important contributors to our debates. However, in a debate of this kind, we have to ask the question: on what basis do the Lords spiritual sit here? My suggestion to the House is that we should examine the criteria and ask ourselves whether they are well founded.

The objection to hereditary Peers is very similar to the objection to the Lords spiritual. In the case of hereditary Peers, while both the pool of candidates and the electorate are small, there are, at least on the Conservative Benches, both hustings and elections. But the way in which individuals become Bishops is very far from transparent, and there is no filter of elections and hustings. Moreover, the pool of candidates for the episcopacy is a very small one, and indeed the selectorate is even smaller. The process itself is very discreet.

Once an individual becomes a fully fledged bishop, that person, subject to gender preferences, has a very good chance of becoming a Member of this House. It is, in short, a case of the Rt Rev Buggins. In the case of the two Archbishops and the Bishops of London, Westminster and Durham, membership of this House is automatic—a self-perpetuating oligarchy. That is obviously not a good way to constitute our legislature.

So one has to ask: what about the tests of suitability and propriety? Most of the Committee agree that such tests are important. These debates—the last three days—have shown that the Committee values the role of HOLAC. Some of us, in fact, want to enhance its role. But HOLAC has no role to play in assessing the propriety or suitability of individual bishops to become Members of this House. I note, incidentally, that my noble friend Lady Berridge’s Amendment 90B addresses this matter. I know of no scrutiny—certainly none of a publicly transparent kind—that addresses the question of the propriety or suitability of appointment.

Then there is regional representation. Again, that is an issue viewed as important by most of this Committee. The Lords spiritual are drawn exclusively from dioceses in England—there are none from Scotland, none from Wales and none from Northern Ireland. So one has to ask: on what basis are the Lords spiritual here? As with the hereditaries, it is historic. The Bishops once represented a landed interest—no longer. The Lords spiritual once reflected the pre-eminent national Church—no longer, I say with regret, as an Anglican who regularly attends my local church. This country is now a secular society and, to the extent that it is not, Anglicanism is no longer pre-eminent.

Then there is the question of numbers: 24 Bishops and two Archbishops—not, I acknowledge at once, a large proportion of the House. But, once we embark on a serious attempt to reduce numbers and refresh our membership—and if, as I suggest, it is very hard to discern reasons of principle to justify the presence of the Lords spiritual in this House—I am afraid that the occupants of the episcopal Bench become candidates for removal. I know that will not be the consequence of the Bill, but I hope that we will be prepared to debate the issue with honesty and candour.

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I must say that I am a little distressed to hear from Conservative Benches the nature of this criticism of the Bishops. It is unfortunate. I understand, however, that people get cross with the Bishops for all sorts of reasons—I certainly frequently do in columns that I write.

I also hesitate to speak on this subject because these are high and complicated matters. But I do feel that somebody has to speak for the Bishops here, because they will not speak for themselves. After all, our Lord said,

“let this cup pass from me”,

and that is more or less so for the Bishops. They cannot say, “No, I want to keep the cup. I want to go on and have another pint in the Bishops’ Bar”. They have to express a becoming humility, which basically means that they have to shut up on this subject—or so they will tend to feel.

Of course, we feel cross about this sometimes and I believe that there is a problem with the Bishops in this period. I will illustrate it with an example. I had a very lovely, pious aunt, who, as a child, attended her parish church. Two clergy preached there: one was very good at it and one was very bad. She said to her parents, “When Mr X preaches, I listen, and when Mr Y preaches, I keep my mind on higher things”. Sometimes, with some of the episcopal utterances we hear nowadays, we need to keep our minds on higher things.

--- Later in debate ---

[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—

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

Briefly.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My noble friend, who has spoken briefly and enjoyably on every occasion, is keen to hear from the Lord Privy Seal, as are we all, so I leave it to her.

King’s Speech

Viscount Hailsham Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by congratulating the Government on their victory at the general election—although I hope it will not be thought churlish of me if I say that, as in 2019, the Government’s victory had as much to do with the electorate’s distaste for its immediate predecessors as for its own merits. I also strongly welcome the speech made by the noble and learned Lord the new Attorney-General. It was a very constructive speech and I hope very much that our exchanges will always be constructive.

Like so many of your Lordships, I want to address the question of the composition of the House of Lords. I myself have always favoured an elected Chamber, but my intention today is to focus on some of the major areas of current concern. First, I make a declaration of interest: I will be 80 next year. I have stood in two hereditary by-elections unsuccessfully. My wife has been a Member of this House for almost 30 years and, inevitably, any change will impact on us both.

There is, of course, a widespread belief that the House is too large. There are, in fact, 818 Peers, including those on the episcopal Bench. I do not wholly agree with that view. It is certainly uncomfortable, but a large House has the advantage of providing a wide and deep pool of expertise on which to draw. We have to remember, too, that many of your Lordships who make the most constructive contributions to debates are either over 80 or have served in this House for a very long time. The noble Lord, Lord Fowler, is 86. I am going to be succeeded in this debate by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, who is 86, and I was preceded by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, who came into this House in 1997. So we should be very careful not to deprive the House of serious legislators.

That said, I do think that the Government are bound to introduce some form of change, but I hope that it will be preceded by careful consultation—and in the context of that consultation I will make a few brief suggestions. First, on the creation of life Peers, I suggest that no life peerage should be created for more than 15 years. Secondly, on mandatory retirement, I do not think that getting rid of hereditary Peers addresses the problem in a very satisfactory way. I believe that the Government will come forward with proposals for mandatory retirement, but we need to keep in mind that 178 life Peers are over 80 years of age and 206 life Peers have served more than 20 years. So we are at serious risk of depriving this House of quality. Any change should be evolutionary and, in my view, should be introduced either at the conclusion of this Parliament or during this Parliament incrementally, or both.

I will make two further comments. On the hereditary peerage. I agree with much of what my noble friend Lord Strathclyde and my noble and learned friend Lord Keen said. However, I do not think that hereditary Peers should sit in the House beyond the conclusion of this Parliament. I would not make a differential between them and other Peers during the lifetime of this Parliament, save this: I would abolish the by-elections. I have come to those general conclusions because I admire the contributions that hereditary Peers have made. Also, what is the difference, in principle, in a democratic society between unaccountable appointments —for example, by the Prime Minister—and an election from a hereditary pool? I suggest that they are not very different.

Finally, and notwithstanding the distinguished speech from the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York, I do think there is scope for reducing the size of the episcopal Bench. There are now 26 bishops capable of sitting on the episcopal Bench. Why not reduce them to five: the most reverend Primates the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and the right reverend Prelates the Bishops of Durham, Winchester and London? That would be quite sufficient.

So I suggest pausing and further reflection—and I hope that, as a result of such reflection and indeed consultation, we might have serious proposals for an elected second Chamber or, at the very least, for the appointment and limitation of life Peers.