House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Viscount Hailsham and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Committee stage
Tuesday 1st April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 101, which calls for a constitutional conference. We have spent much time debating what the composition of your Lordships’ House should be in the future, but I am afraid that we have the cart before the horse: before you decide on how you would like to reconstitute the membership of your Lordships’ House, you have to decide what they are going to do.

This is the problem that we have at the moment: the Bill does not address the question of the powers of your Lordships’ House. However, until you have decided on the powers of your Lordships’ House, you cannot really decide how you are going to change the membership. At that point, you will get completely bogged down, because you will not then be able to tell people who are elected to your Lordships’ House that they cannot vote at Second Reading, that there is a limit on the amount of ping-pong you can play with the elected House, and so forth.

I sincerely hope that the Government will institute a constitutional conference on the relative powers, because that will be a vexed and difficult issue. I am sure that the other place rather revels in the fact that this House is so illegitimate. Since it can claim that it is legitimate and has a democratic mandate, it can basically overrule what happens in your Lordships’ House, which is reduced to the role of a revising Chamber. On the other hand, the Government have to decide what this House really does. I suggest that it would be very sensible to set up a constitutional conference to work on the relative powers, which could be introduced to your Lordships’ House as it stands today. The Government could then see the results of the decisions made by a constitutional conference on what should and should not happen in this House with the existing membership before they perhaps decide to change the membership overall.

The composition of your Lordships’ House is an extremely complicated issue as well, because there are many different facets to your Lordships’ House, not least the Cross Benches, which play a very valuable role in the deliberations of your Lordships’ House in revising legislation. On the other hand, it is very difficult to see how you can combine the Cross Benches with an elected House; I do not see how you elect independent Members. The political parties would have something to say about elections. It is complicated. Perhaps you could appoint Members of the Cross Benches and have other Members elected, but this is all quite difficult. What happens to the Lords spiritual? Are we to continue to have them in this House if it becomes elected?

Many different issues are raised on the whole question of the composition of your Lordships’ House, not least the issue of elections. Are you going to have elections on the same day as you have a general election for the other place, or at a different time? Do you want the composition of this House politically to be different from that of the House of Commons, or do you want it to be the same?

There are many different issues that come up on this, and it needs a lot of deliberation and cross-party discussions, and we have to give serious thought to how this will all work out in the future. Unless we do think through all this, we will get ourselves into a terrible muddle. It is no good people just getting up saying, “I believe in an elected House”, as the Prime Minister did the other day. You have to think through the ramifications of having an elected House. Would an elected House challenge the House of Commons? I suspect it would. Therefore, you come back to the relative powers of each House.

We are in grave danger of getting into a complete muddle over all this. If we want clear thinking into the future, we will have to work these things out with cross-party consensus, and through constitutional conferences, to arrive at some form of system for the future. This is nothing other than very complicated; we should be giving serious thought to it now.

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly on Amendments 95 and 96 to which I have put my name. In doing so, I have basically three concerns. First, I have a strong suspicion that the Government will bring no further proposal for the reform of the House of Lords during the lifetime of this Parliament. Secondly, related to that, a review would act as a spur, so there is just a chance that a review might encourage them to do so. Thirdly, I think the public should know that many of us in this House favour a much more radical solution to the composition and powers of this House. I am one of those: I believe in an elected Chamber.

That takes me to the point made by my noble friend Lord Hamilton. I entirely agree with him that fundamental to any debate should be the powers of this House, because from a decision on the powers stems the decision as to composition. If you are content with being but a revising Chamber, then a process very similar to what we now have is perfectly appropriate. But if, as I believe, you need to have a Chamber which has powers commensurate with the House of Commons and can face the House of Commons down in appropriate cases, then it has got to be elected. I have always believed that, to stand against the elective dictatorship of which my father wrote and spoke, we need an elected House with powers similar to those in the House of Commons.