House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Viscount Hailsham and Lord Murray of Blidworth

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

My Lords, I sympathise with a very great deal of what my noble friend said. I speak with a certain family background, and I too regret the diminution of the role and status of the Lord Chancellor. That said, we are where we are and we cannot sensibly address this amendment without asking ourselves what the role of the Lord Chancellor is and should be. Since 2007, the Lord Chancellor has also been Secretary of State for Justice, sitting in the House of Commons. The Secretary of State for Justice has a very large number of responsibilities that touch on the constituency interests of Members of Parliament. I find it very difficult to believe that Members of Parliament would accept the Secretary of State for Justice sitting in the House of Lords.

That takes one directly to the role. Are we to separate the role of the Lord Chancellor from that of Secretary of State for Justice? That is certainly possible; it could be done. But what other departmental responsibility would the Lord Chancellor then have? I accept that there are some senior offices that can be represented in this House—if I may say so, the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General does so with distinction. He has been preceded by other Attorneys-General in this House, and I regard that as perfectly proper because there are a relatively few constituency interests that would engage Members of the House of Commons.

That, to a lesser extent, was also true of the Foreign Secretary. My noble friend Lord Cameron occupied the role of Foreign Secretary with great distinction. It caused real problems in the House of Commons, as indeed did the role of Lord Carrington at the time of Lady Thatcher’s Government. In both cases, this had to be met by having a very effective deputy. But, again, the Foreign Secretary’s role, although hugely important, raised relatively few constituency interests.

My point is this: if the Lord Chancellor is to have a serious departmental responsibility, which has constituency interests engaged so far as Members of the House of Commons are concerned, that Lord Chancellor, Secretary of State for Justice or whatever, has to be in the House of Commons. If this Committee accepts that, one is then driven to ask: what, if any, departmental role would a new Lord Chancellor have? I find it very difficult to identify one. If that is the case, we are diminishing and not enhancing the role of the Lord Chancellor. So, while I agreed with an awful lot of the underlying sentiments expressed by my noble friend, I cannot back him on this one.

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

I have my name on Amendment 60. It seems to me that the proposal of the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, in this regard—the Lord Chancellor having by law to be a Member of your Lordships’ House—is sensible. My noble friend Lord Hailsham’s point is easy to answer. Part of the constitutional pottage made by the Blair Government when they passed the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 was the creation of the Ministry of Justice, with its Orwellian-sounding name. It has not been a happy experience melding the operation of the prison system with the court system, and I suggest that the answer is that that is broken up and the Prison Service returned to the Home Office. Accordingly, there would be no need for a separate Secretary of State for Justice, thus answering my noble friend Lord Hailsham’s point, and the Lord Chancellor could therefore return to this House and protect the interests of the judiciary in the Cabinet. He could indeed also return to being Speaker of this House, which would further guarantee his independence from the Government of the day. That, of course, is for another day, but, at the moment, I strongly support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson.