House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Viscount Thurso Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 9th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

I am rightly castigated by the Leader of the House. I did not mean what I said about being a part-time House; I meant a House that does not have Members who are expected to be full-time in performing their parliamentary duties.

I very much believe that the elegant solution that the noble Lord, Lord Burns, has put before us is the right way forward. However, alongside other issues we have debated in the course of this narrow Bill, these are very wide and important issues. I also recognise that the noble Baroness the Leader of the House wants, to use her phrase, to take this in bite-size chunks, and I very much welcome the setting up of the Select Committee. But it is incumbent on us all to recognise that, with the effects of the Bill, which will reduce the numbers and the membership of the House, and the effects of anything done on retirement—whether that is based on 10%, 5% or 20% attendance, and whether it is done by age or by term limits—we will be reducing the size of the House. That is an opportunity to get down to a rational and defensible size while, at the same time, putting right the imbalance that currently exists between the opposition party and the government party in their party-political representation.

It is a big opportunity but it will be short-lived if we do not take on the responsibility of looking to the future and at how we stop ourselves getting into this situation again, whether by the unbridled use of the prerogative by a Prime Minister or because of the electoral effects of a big change at a single general election. It is incumbent on us to take that into account when we look at those other two measures that the noble Baroness has suggested the Select Committee consider. They will have an impact on the size of the House and that impact should not be short-term but enduring. We saw that the very principled and welcome attitude of the noble Baroness, Lady May, had a short-term effect, but it did not last because it could simply be reversed by the next incumbent. We need some guardrails, and I hope that if the House does not decide tonight to adopt the details of this amendment, the Select Committee will look at the issue in some detail.

[Viscount Thurso (LD)]

My Lords, briefly, I support the noble Lord, Lord Burns, having added my name to this amendment. The noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, expressed perfectly my views, therefore I will not rehearse them again.

On an earlier amendment I listened with interest to the noble Lord, Lord Gove, who expressed a view which, if taken to its logical conclusion, would mean that you could go on putting people into the House more or less for as long as you like. There has to be a limit at some point; we do not want a House of 1,000, 1,500 or 2,000. Therefore, at some point, there has to be a mechanism that puts some brake on, such that what goes out and what comes in are in balance.

As the noble Lord, Lord Burns, set out so well in introducing his amendment, the problem is that each incoming Government find themselves at a disadvantage, having been in opposition, compared with what has gone before. Therefore, they have to do something to restore that imbalance if they are to come remotely close to getting their business through. I therefore think that tackling the size of the House is one of the most important things we can do.

I would make one small suggestion—it is not a quibble—to the noble Lord, Lord Burns. I might have left out proposed new subsection (1) in his amendment, which is what is happening over this Parliament. That will not come as a surprise, since my previous amendment sought to put it into the next Parliament. As I said in that debate, it would be rather unfair if we were to change the rules at half-time, as it were. I think the current Government deserve to have a reasonable number of Peers, but that simply underlines the necessity of having the guard-rails in place to ensure that, going forward, the House cannot go beyond a certain size and should be reduced, with something like the size of the Commons being broadly appropriate.

I do not know whether the noble Lord will press his amendment. If he did, I would happily support him, but I suspect that, like me, he might take a more pragmatic decision. In that case, I very much hope the Select Committee will be able to do its job, although my doubts previously expressed—that it will not be able to do enough—remain.

[Lord Butler of Brockwell (CB)]

My Lords, I will briefly add one argument in support of my noble friend’s amendment. There is widespread criticism of the competence and indeed the commitment of some of those who have been appointed to this House. Many of us think that some of those criticisms have been justified. If there is a limit on the size of the House, the leaders of the political parties will be concerned to ensure that the people whom they recommend for appointment will pull their weight in the House and do stuff for their party. That can be achieved only if there is a constraint on those appointments.

The criticisms of some of the appointments that have been made have been bad for the reputation of the House, as has been the concern about numbers. My noble friend’s amendment would deal with both these aspects, but the aspect of ensuring that party leaders want their appointments to be of good quality is another very important argument in favour of a constraint.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Viscount Thurso Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 9th July 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Viscount Thurso]

21: After Clause 1, insert the following new Clause—
“Expiry of right to receive writ of summons(1) The Life Peerages Act 1958 is amended as follows.(2) In section 1(2)(b) omit “subsection (4)” and insert “subsections (4) and (5).”(3) After subsection (4) insert—“(5) For peerages granted after the end of the Parliament in which the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2025 is passed, the right to receive a writ of summons expires on the twentieth anniversary of the introduction of the person holding the peerage into the House of Lords.”.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment introduces a term limit for peerages created after the end of this Parliament by limiting the right to receive a writ of summons to 20 years. It has no effect on existing peerages.

[Viscount Thurso (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 21 is substantially the same amendment that I tabled in Committee and seeks to achieve the same purpose but with one substantive difference, which is in timing. The amendment I tabled in Committee would have come into effect during this Parliament, whereas this amendment would come into effect in the next Parliament. I will explain briefly in a moment why I came to the decision to change that.

The amendment itself is the same, so I will not repeat the explanation, save that it seeks to create term limits of 20 years. I am not hugely hung up on 20 years, 15 years or 25 years. I am concerned with the principle that nobody should have the right to sit in this place for ever. There is obviously a discussion to be had around retirement, which we have had. I listened very carefully to the comments of the Lord Privy Seal in that debate last week, and think that around that the Select Committee will do a good job. However, I am not sure that it will entirely be able to do the job that is required.

The reasons why I have gone for a new timing are, first, that it would be only fair to allow the current Government the freedom to do what they wish during the lifetime of this Parliament and to perhaps make up for some of the more egregious excesses that happened in the last Parliament. It is a little unfair to remove the current system and, as it were, at half-time change all the rules. That was the first reason, which may just be me being a bit overly fair, but I thought that it was. Secondly, if during this Parliament there is further reform, and if the Government are able to take through legislation which gives us a different landscape, this amendment coming into force in the next Parliament could be got rid of or scrapped.

I want to make it clear at the outset that my primary choice would be a democratically constituted House of Lords, which is what I have said in many of our debates and, on and off, in different guises for the best part of 30 years. I took part in the debates in the other place in 2012 and the consideration of the draft legislation and was happy to vote with the majority in the House of Commons for that Bill to achieve a Second Reading. But I recognise that having got that far up to the hill and been marched back down again by our then leader, there is little chance of anything substantive happening. I rather suspect that the Select Committee will do its work and discussions will continue, but that at the end of this Parliament we will not be greatly further forward than we are now.

The amendment is a real longstop in the sense of if we arrive at that situation, and if, as has been pointed out by a number of noble Lords, the electoral results for the next Parliament are somewhat more surprising than they might have been at the last general election. Indeed, one poll I saw showed that what would be the largest party in the House of Commons would have no representation in this House—although there were one or two speeches last week that sounded remarkably like a job application from the Benches across—while the largest party in this House would be the fourth party in the Commons, which is a completely ridiculous situation. My amendment does not solve that in any way, shape or form, but it would put a burr under the saddle and make sure that if we were in that circumstance, the Government of the day would need to do something about it.

My amendment very much ties in with Amendment 23 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Burns, which I hope to speak to briefly later, with one exception which I will leave to that point. However, there is an opportunity in this legislation, which may be the only legislation that would affect no one in your Lordships’ House during this Parliament or any of the operation of this Parliament or fetter the Prime Minister in any way during this Parliament but that, if none of the hoped-for reforms came through, would in the next Parliament take effect and oblige, I rather suspect, some action.

I will say two other things in moving the amendment. The first is in response to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and his comments earlier about how function should come before form. I take the diametrically opposite view and always have done, and it was a point that was thrashed out in the Committee of both Houses when we looked at it in 2012. I think the function comes from the form; if you introduce a democratic element, the form will change. That also follows the history of what has happened in the relationship between the two Houses over the years. If you have long discussions about the function, you will end up never changing anything and never changing the form. But, most of all, what I would say is—

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I cannot resist intervening. How on earth can one go ahead and say we will elect the House of Lords without looking at the powers the House would have? We have the conventions, which, in essence, are voluntary constraints on what we do. The conventions would not last one second with an elected House. It would be wholly irresponsible to simply go ahead with an elected House without sorting out the powers, and particularly what we do when there is a dispute between the two Houses. Would the courts have to be involved? What other mechanism would you have to decide on? You cannot go for an elected House without sorting that out.

[Viscount Thurso (LD)]

My Lords, one of the great joys of being a chalk stream trout fisherman is to land a fly on top of the fish and watch it take with such vigour. I am very grateful to the noble Lord for having done so. I am not going to engage with him in this debate on my amendment, because it is not part of it, as I did not engage when he made the point earlier. If he would like to meet me in the Bishops’ Bar at any time, I will take him through the detail with the greatest of pleasure.

I say to the Lord Privy Seal that if by any chance she were to make me an offer as generous as that which she made to the noble Lord, Lord Ashton, earlier, she would not have to repeat it and I would grab it with both hands. I genuinely hope that the Government might reflect on this. It has been put to me that this is not necessary because if we get our elected House, we will not need to have this form of term limit. That is absolutely true, but my amendment is not about if we get an elected House; it is about if we do not get an elected House.

Finally, I agreed with the Lord Privy Seal when she said, as she once agreed with me when I said it, that we are here not for our expertise but for our judgment. I do not have vast expertise other than in running hotels and trout fishing, but I think I have good judgment. My judgment is that if we fail to do this at this juncture, we may well end up regretting it and not having the kind of reform that we all really would want to have. I beg to move.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Pitkeathley) (Lab)]

I must point out to your Lordships that the new clause proposed by Amendment 21 would be in substitution for the new clause “Rights of life peers to sit in the House of Lords” agreed by the House earlier today in Amendment 17.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendment 21 tabled by the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, is similar to his amendment in Committee. With regard to a term limit of 20 years, it may be of interest to your Lordships’ House to know that the current average length of service for noble Lords is 13.7 years, which suggests that 20 years may or may not be something the House will want to consider.

The Government agree with the principle that membership of this House should not be for life but respectfully disagree with this approach. As set out in our manifesto, the Government believe that a retirement age is the most effective way of realising this principle while also achieving the objective of reducing the size of your Lordships’ House.

As the Leader of the House set out at the beginning of Report, we want to see further reform of your Lordships’ House, and we are determined to maintain the House’s enthusiasm and determination to implement the manifesto proposals on retirement age and participation. We think this can best be achieved by establishing a Select Committee, and we will work with the usual channels to put forward a proposal for the House’s approval. We believe that looking at these matters in bite-sized chunks is the best way to progress reform of your Lordships’ House.

I also reiterate that that your Lordships’ House should feel confident to take greater ownership over the management of our affairs. That means we should consider where we can implement solutions without the need for further legislation, if that sort of approach has the agreement of the House. Of course, if there is an agreed view that legislation is a better route forward, the findings of the commission may help pave the way to take the relevant legislation forward, because we will have agreed that view. With all these issues in mind, I respectfully ask that the noble Viscount withdraw his amendment.

[Viscount Thurso (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to all those who have taken part in this short debate, which highlights the important issue of the size of your Lordships’ House and the fact that, if more people are constantly coming in than are going out, it is always going to get bigger. I rather disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Blackwell, that people should be enabled to come here for as long as they wish; a time limit of a certain length is a fair way of ensuring current expertise and not having the bed blocking that would otherwise happen.

I am grateful for the comments from the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman. I knew she was not going to support me, but I am grateful for the sympathy that she generously gave to the point that I was making. The noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, and I were co-conspirators in the other place on many attempts to get a democratic outcome. It was very nice to have his support, notwithstanding the comments of his Front Bench here today.

As always, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Newby for his comments. I respect his faith in the Select Committee; I have to say that my faith is not quite as strong as his, but we will see where we go with that.

The noble Baroness, Lady Finn, missed the point with considerable style. It is not about 15 years; my whole point is that this was about laying it in the next Parliament to allow people to look at it there.

I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson, that, yes indeed, if you are going to eat an elephant, it is best to do it in bite-sized chunks. However, this elephant has been around for 114 years or whatever it is, and I have a strong suspicion that it will still be galloping around in another 114. However, with that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 21 withdrawn.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Viscount Thurso Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 2nd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Thurso (LD)]

My Lords, I support my noble friends on the Front Bench in Amendment 5, to which I have added my name. I say in passing to the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, that the theory of good chaps in government was a wonderful theory of the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, whom we do not see now as much as we used to, which depends on the fact that we all actually like to do the right thing. Unfortunately, as I think he said, we have discovered that we do not always do the right thing.

I support my noble friend on the Front Bench exactly because some check and balance on probity is required. The desire for probity in public life has been there as long as people have been in public life, but the desire to codify it began with the cash for questions scandal. It has grown over the years and today we have the Committee on Standards in Public Life and the Seven Principles of Public Life. If you stand for and are appointed to a public body, as I was in Scotland, you are required to indicate that you know what these are and agree to uphold them.

My noble friend’s amendment simply ensures that, where HOLAC has made a recommendation to the Prime Minister by informing him that it does not think someone has that required probity, the Prime Minister should not make the appointment. In this I rather disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, although I have the greatest respect for him. Under his argument, if a Prime Minister decides that the ultimate rogue on the planet should get a life peerage, he should get it. I disagree fundamentally with that. There should be a check and balance.

I regard this amendment as a negative rather than an affirmative instrument. The other amendments are more affirmative instruments, which I disagree with. Under this amendment, the Prime Minister puts forward a name and HOLAC looks at it—I think, generally, we can accept that they are people of good will, as good as we get in terms of neutrality in this House—says whether there is a fairly major problem and advises the Prime Minister of it. The idea that HOLAC is overridden on the person it has considered—Lord knows what they might have done; they could have fiddled their taxes or done all sorts of things—and the Prime Minister goes ahead is wrong.

This happens already. The Honours Committee receives nominations and goes through the probity. If the person it looks at is not thought, for whatever reason, to be fit, the recommendation does not go forward. This is very much in that vein. I will happily support my noble friend in his amendment because it is a simple, small buttress for probity in public life.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I oppose Amendments 5, 6 and 31. Noble Lords will probably realise that we are reprising the very excellent debate we had on 14 March about my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth’s Private Member’s Bill, which essentially sought to put HOLAC on a statutory footing.

This debate prompts us to address Tony Benn’s five questions about power, because this debate is about power and putting Members into the upper House of the UK legislature, and it is a very important issue. His five questions are: what power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interest do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? How can we get rid of you? In some respects, these questions are unanswerable, because the effect of the amendments is to put HOLAC on a statutory footing. I believe that would embed semi-permanently an already closed and opaque system of appointment.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Viscount Thurso Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 2nd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I shall say just a few words about Amendment 4, which I support wholeheartedly. It is a move in the right direction. The problem is that if this House does not have some democratic authority, it will lose the powers that it has left. In this modern day and age, we must have some democratic legitimacy, as has often been referred to, in particular on the previous amendments. To survive, we must have a democratic element. I am not here to talk about exactly what that should be. The whole point about this amendment is that it does not specify what it should look like, despite some comments from across the House that seem to presuppose what the outcome of this consultation would be. If moving in the right direction is starting to implement the promise given by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, all those years ago then we might be moving in the right direction, but we have to get some democracy into this Chamber or it will not survive into the future.

[Viscount Thurso (LD)]

My Lords, I support the amendment from my noble friend on the Front Bench and I very much echo the noble Earl’s thoughts. I have spent 30-something years, between this House’s first incarnation, the other place and this House’s second incarnation, arguing for a democratically elected upper Chamber. I do so because I believe wholeheartedly that we need and deserve a strong Parliament, which requires two Houses, both of which can exercise complementary authority to give parliamentary activities what the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, described as legitimacy. This House as it is currently composed, even after we hereditaries have all gone, still lacks the legitimacy necessary for a strong Parliament.

My support for my noble friend is because this amendment offers a route map to getting consultation without prescribing the exact manner of how that democratic legitimacy can be achieved. I am not going to be tempted into a long speech on what I think: if anybody is remotely interested, they can find it in Hansard. What I will say is that the principle of a democratically elected second Chamber is essential for a legitimate Parliament. As I think I said at Second Reading, I am a parliamentarian first and foremost. Therefore, I hope that my noble friend will seek the opinion of the House, and I will certainly support him.

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

My Lords, my support for this amendment is largely symbolic, but at least it is consistent with things that I have said and stood for in the past. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, talked about my Amendment 32, which we will come to late next week. Its purpose is to provide an echo of the Parliament Act 1911, that there is still a requirement for a democratic element to House of Lords reform, and to remind not just the House but the people of this country that democratic reform was a worthwhile stage 2 objective, which has been sadly missed by this Government in this Parliament, and that is the greatest missed opportunity of this entire Bill.

Of course, a wholly appointed House in itself has no democratic legitimacy, or very little. The argument I favoured and supported in 2012 under the Cameron-Clegg Bill of that year was precisely to provide the case for an elected House which included an unelected element—the great Cross Benches—which provided a good, tempering role on the whole of the House of Lords. At present, the House of Lords does an excellent job. It revises and scrutinises legislation, and it debates the great issues of the day. It does not overdo the power that it has. The noble Lords, Lord Rooker and Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, are entirely correct in saying that we are governed by conventions. The fear some of us have had, if we change the composition of the House of Lords, is: would those conventions exist and continue to provide that slight softening of the attitude of your Lordships’ House?

Of course constituencies are important, and I join my noble friend Lord Hailsham in saying that the only way of doing it—here I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Newby—is to have constituencies, perhaps based loosely on the old 80 or so European constituencies in the country, with voting in perhaps a third of them every five years to get the kind of difference that this House needs.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Viscount Thurso Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 82 only. I spoke in November in our debate on House of Lords reform and, in December, at the Second Reading of this Bill. I said I felt that there were three unfairnesses in the make-up of our House: the hereditary Peers, the Bishops and—the biggest one—the prerogative powers of the Prime Minister to make unlimited appointments to a legislature in a western liberal democracy. That is a very big power without precedent in any other western liberal democracy.

I am not going to repeat anything that has been said already, but for me Amendment 82 does two things. It patrols the size of the House—that is important, although I know there are people who have other views—and, most importantly, it puts a cap on the prerogative powers of the Prime Minister. I fully admit that our current Government are fully and transparently democratic, but that will not necessarily be the case for ever more. Future Governments may not have that make-up, so I feel this is a safety mechanism as well.

As we go forward from here, I feel strongly—here I agree very much with the noble Lord, Lord Hain—that the thrust of this amendment is important, and I commend the noble Lords, Lord Burns and Lord Hain, for bringing it forward.

[Viscount Thurso (LD)]

My Lords, I offer my support to the noble Lord, Lord Burns, in this amendment. The key point is that his report was based on a situation where there was unlikely to be any legislation possible in the foreseeable future. There is now the possibility of legislation, because we are debating it. I think it is agreed on in all parts of the House that a limit is necessary.

I was very struck by the noble Lord’s comments that the principle is more important than the number, and his move from 600 to 650 simply to get the principle in. It seems to me that there are a few things in our debate on which we agree which could be accepted by the Government, while there are a vast number of things which are completely out of scope and require a full debate on the future of the House. In this respect, this is something that the House would do well to listen to and I hope the Government, when it comes to Report, will look favourably on whatever the noble Lord might bring forward at that point.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Thurso (LD)]

My Lords, agreeing with the noble Lords, Lord Taylor and Lord Davies, that we are here for judgment, not experience, I would ask the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra: what has he got against the hospitality industry, which is not on his list? I speak as the president of the Institute of Hospitality.

[The Earl of Leicester (Con)]

My Lords, I have some sympathy with the thrust of my noble friend Lord Blencathra’s amendment. Indeed, a number of the professions that he has suggested would, ironically, replace the gifted amateurs—those we may be about to lose—the hereditary Peers.

I scribbled down, in the past few minutes, the number of hereditary Peers with valuable experience in finance, banking and investment, foreign exchange, accountancy and insurance. On top of that, we have engineers, vets and property managers, as well as those representing the agriculture and forestry industry, transportation and logistics, the law, human resources and public relations. Indeed, we even have an ex-diplomat. Of those 90 hereditary Peers, I am pretty certain that 89 have come from the private sector, and nearly all have valuable experience of wealth creation. I will stop there, but I must ask what we are being replaced by.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Viscount Thurso Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 10th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

The noble Baroness made a very passionate speech in favour of democratic accountability. Why then did she not stand for the House of Commons instead of coming here?

[Viscount Thurso (LD)]

My Lords, I do not think the noble Baroness wishes to answer the noble Lord’s question, and she has every right to do that.

I rise very briefly to support my noble friend Lord Newby. This is a very straightforward and simple amendment that seeks to place a duty on the Government to do something after this Bill has passed.

Some of us have spent a great deal of time on Lords reform. I started in this place just under 30 years ago and had 27 years between the two places, and one of the things I have observed in that time is that chances to do something to reform this place do not come along too often, and legislation comes along very rarely.

I greatly enjoyed the eloquence and oratory of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, although I have to say that he has once again convinced me that the more eloquent he is, the more incorrect his arguments are. I very much appreciated the way in which the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, with grace and gentleness, rebutted them.

The key point in all that—I am desperately trying not to give a history lesson—is that, when we did the draft Joint Committee of both Houses in 2011-2012, so ably chaired by the late Lord Richards, we came to a compromise position that addressed every single one of the points the noble Lord put forward, and they went into the draft Bill that went before the Commons. That Bill had a Second Reading and, had it had not been for a slightly sneaky operation by Jesse Norman on the programme Motion, it would have gone through and been discussed by both Houses.

So I support my noble friend simply because there needs to be reform. There needs to be reform because we need more legitimacy. In 1832, we were powerful and the Commons was not. From 1832 onwards, the power has moved to the Commons. We now need to regain some legitimacy so that we can again be a powerful part of a Parliament that holds the Executive to account. In asking for this amendment, my noble friend is simply saying, “Let’s hold our feet to the fire and get it done”.

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, on the eloquence of her speech. But she put forward a point of view about this House that I think is mistaken when she said that it is supposed to be representative of the people. It absolutely is not and it never has been. It has other purposes, for better or for worse, and we all sit here as representatives of nobody but ourselves. That is particularly true of Cross Benchers and the non-affiliated, but actually it is true of all party Members as well, and there are important reasons for that. We are well placed to bring to bear on the proceedings of Parliament as a whole a disinterested point of view, in the proper sense of “disinterested”: in other words, not representing an interest but trying to think as hard as we can about what is right.

The speech by the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, was very important here, because, if we think about the function of this House, we may come to realise that its current composition is not so idiotic. Its function is to scrutinise, and the type of people that want to scrutinise are not the type of people who want to get on in life. The people who want to get on in life are those in the other place who are, as was eloquently pointed out by the noble Lord and others, trying to get the next position, higher marks on social media, more likes and jobs. Most of us have gone beyond that stage of life. That is obviously not true of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, because she is very young, but she disinterestedly and kindly sits here in order to contribute her wisdom.

The trouble with the Bill is that we are not thinking about function but droning on about composition. As long as we think that it is a good thing to have a powerful House of Commons that forms most of the Government of the day, it is perfectly reasonable to have a not-very-strong House of Lords that tries to scrutinise. If we think that that is perfectly reasonable, we might consider that perhaps we should not be mucking around with our composition.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I have added my name to the amendment from the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, although, with apologies to the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, it does not actually mention hereditary Peers. This debate has ranged much more widely. At some stage we will need to discuss the next steps for reform. I hope that we will not overlook the work of either the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, or the noble Lord, Lord Burns, who had some very sound proposals in his report that we somehow seem to have swept under the carpet.

I have been here for nearly 18 years and I have no wish to retire, but it is possible that, if I still have my marbles in another 12 years, I would be grateful for an honourable way to go. Most of us are appointed because we have expertise in a particular field, but it is quite possible that, after 15 years, our expertise is not quite as lively as it was when we first came in, so having this sort of term seems to make quite a lot of sense.

I cannot understand why noble Lords have not grouped more amendments in this debate. This seems an unnecessary waste of your Lordships’ time and, I fear, the sort of thing that brings this House into disrepute. I note that the ungrouped amendments all seem to come from the Conservative Benches. I wonder why.

[Viscount Thurso (LD)]

My Lords, my Amendment 66 has been grouped with these amendments. I will briefly explain what the amendment does and then make a valiant, though likely unsuccessful, attempt to persuade the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, that it would be worth accepting.

My amendment seeks to address the fact that there is broad agreement across the House that in some way, shape or form the length of time that people sit in the House should not be indefinite. The concept of a seat for life has no more validity than a seat for life that has been inherited. The report from the noble Lord, Lord Burns, suggested 15 years, as referred to in Amendment 13. I have chosen a term of 20 years precisely because 15 years sounds like something I can imagine, whereas 20 years sounds somewhat more gentle. The number has been chosen so as not to frighten the horses.

The amendment would amend the Life Peerages Act such that the right to receive a Writ of Summons would be limited to 20 years from the moment someone took their seat in the House. That would mean that if somebody happened to be just under the 20 years when an election was called, they would get a Writ of Summons and could get up to 24 years. If they were lucky—or unlucky, depending on your point of view—to have sat for 20 years when an election was called, that would be their lot. By referring to a Writ of Summons, the amendment has the merit of meaning that anyone who was limited would get to the end of the Parliament they were sitting in so that if they were chairing a committee or running a Bill, they would be able to complete their work.

The amendment is deliberately designed to affect peerages granted after the passage of this Bill. There is quite a lot of feeling, one way or another, about the concept of changing the terms of employment, as it were, for people who are already here. Therefore, people given a peerage in the future would know precisely what they would be doing and the length of time they would serve.

An alternative for terms of reference, which will be debated later, is a retirement age. I do not favour retirement ages because I have met people of considerable age with great faculties and abilities and some people of not very great age who do not have great faculties and abilities. I would rather have, as happens in the other place, a term limit based on moment of arrival and moment of departure, rather than an arbitrary one based on age.

The key difference between this amendment and virtually any other that will be tabled is that it does not affect anybody who is currently sitting in the House. Why, therefore, have I brought it forward? I hope to persuade the Leader of the House that it may be worth considering and possibly accepting.

As I mentioned in the debate on the last group, I have been around the houses on Lords reform for the best part of 30 years, across two Houses. Apart from the fact that anybody who engages in that requires a certain degree of stamina, I have noticed that progress has been remarkably small and often barely incremental. The amendment therefore seeks to put in a longstop. If it is accepted, it would change nothing at the moment. If the Government go ahead, as promised, and bring something forward in the remainder of this Parliament, nothing has changed; this is perfectly reversible and whatever changes might be thought appropriate by the Government can go ahead. It has no impact on anything that might be discussed. But if the circumstance arises—and the odds are probably in favour of this circumstance—that for one reason or another, such as international affairs or all sorts of different reasons, time is not found in this Parliament for any further reform, and the electoral maths changes so that the next term might be more difficult, we would be back to having another 10 or 15 years before something happens.

If, therefore, we are really interested in the size of the House coming down—I think we all wish to see that—and if some form of limited term is appropriate, the amendment puts this out into the distance. It is exactly like crown green bowls, where you put one ball right at the back, just in case. If nothing happens, there would be a longstop that would start to see a reduction in the numbers.

I would like to think that my amendment has been drafted in a way that has some elegance and grace and would solve a problem that I hope we will not have and therefore could be disregarded. But in case we do have the problem, it is a mechanism planted into the future that would have some control over the size of your Lordships’ House. For those reasons, I hope the Government might consider this amendment, or something very like it, as a workable proposition, and use the Bill for this tiny addition that would have no impact on the vast bulk of what they are seeking to achieve.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, instinctively, I like limited terms. It is like running a board: you know who is leaving, when they are leaving and what skills they have, and you recruit to replace them in an orderly way rather than relying on the grim reaper to do it for you. I often say about 15-year terms that it is five years to learn the job, five years to be effective and five years to go out of date. I fear that I may offend a few in the Chamber today by making that mathematical assertion.

In practice, there is one point that we need to consider with regard to limited terms: what then? If people have spent their peak career earning years in this House and then leave at 50 or 60—with no pension from this employer, by the way—are we in danger of putting people off from joining us because they have nothing to look forward to as a support beyond the time they spend here? I worry that your Lordships’ House would become more attractive to people of independent means and less attractive to people who are not in that lucky position.

[Viscount Thurso (LD)]

May I respond to the noble Lord briefly, as we are in Committee? If one looks at the average age at which people come into this House, it is at the end of their careers, just below or above 60. Therefore, 20 years takes most people who come into this House from mid-50s to mid-70s or early 60s to early 80s. Under the current arrangements, there are relatively few people who come into the House as a full-time occupation who are in their primary working years. I know that there are exceptions, and exceptions always prove the rule. However, if we wish to have some longstop, my amendment takes care of most of the points he has made. If people know in advance that they are being offered something for 20 years, they always have the choice of declining.

[Lord Desai (CB)]

My Lords, I have many things to declare. One is that I came here not as a hereditary Peer but was appointed by John Major, who conspired with Neil Kinnock—the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock—to get me here. Secondly, I have been here for 34 years, so I obviously do not qualify to be a sane, sensible person, because I am too old. I am 85, and after 34 years I am clearly not qualified to be here at all—so I have to fight for my life, because I actually like this place.

When I came here I did not swear an oath, not being a believer, but I affirmed one. I affirmed an oath to serve Her Majesty the Queen, her heirs and successors. I did not say “Till death do us part” but I definitely came on the promise that I was appointed for life. I was not appointed on whether I was qualified, whether I was sane, whether I was solvent, or anything like that. Okay—if I violate the rules of conduct, I may get thrown out. Apart from that, given the logic of your Lordships’ House, I do not see any reason whatever to have age limits and term limits retrospectively. Yes, have a Bill which is not to do with the hereditary Peers but with House of Lords reform. If you want to reform the House and reduce the number of people and so on, then say that normally at such and such an age you would qualify.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

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Committee stage
Monday 3rd March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I rise to support the amendment tabled by the noble Earl, Lord Devon, which is very creative and imaginative. For anybody who thinks this is beside the point, I certainly would not want to press the issue too hard—it is somewhat absurd to suggest that the removal of 92 hereditaries will turn the British constitution completely upside down—but the point is important.

It is said by those who call for the abolition of the remaining hereditaries that the hereditary principle is indefensible. That is often said, and then not really argued—it is simply stated. If it is indefensible, that must apply to other aspects of the hereditary principle, of which the monarchy is the most prominent. One point I would make to the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, is that he is, in fact, mistaken. The present King did make a speech in the House of Lords, when he was Prince of Wales: he made his maiden speech here and was entirely entitled to do so. I remember no parliamentary crisis arising from it.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, that this must be quite annoying because there are so many things flying around; could it not all be grouped? This is the problem with the Bill: it raises a very big issue and then tries to make it very narrow. Masses of issues come out of this which we need to think about, and heredity is one of them.

Heredity is a very important principle in life. It is for our monarchy, which is much respected around the world and here, for all the reasons the noble Earl, Lord Devon, said. It is also very largely the principle on which our citizenship and all families are based. What are families other than hereditary? It answers a very important aspect of people’s way of thinking about things. It may well be appropriate in modern times to remove that from a parliamentary chamber, and that is what is very likely to happen. But we need to understand that this may reflect badly upon us if we get it wrong; that it may expose this House to lots of questioning about what we really are and whether we deserve to be here; and that it may make people feel that our history and our understanding of ourselves is diminished.

Last week I was in Ukraine. I was taken out to Zaporizhzhia, right by the front, by a very nice Ukrainian driver who had previously been a rock star, or at least in a rock band, but harder times had come upon him—as they often do with rock stars. As we parted, he said, “I am so pleased. First time I ever meet real Lord”. I felt very ashamed because I am not a real Lord: I am a Boris creation. I said that to him, but that only made me rise in his estimation, because in Ukraine, Boris is an immensely popular figure. It is interesting that over there in that snowbound, war-torn place, the idea of a Lord means something to an ordinary person. It is a universal idea, and it is an idea which is essentially British and retains a certain importance. All that can be done away with, and it probably will be in legislative terms, but let us think about the way this is being done and be cautious.

Andrew Marvell, the great poet—who was a Parliamentarian, by the way, not a Cavalier—wrote a famous poem about Oliver Cromwell’s return from Ireland. He warned Cromwell about the danger of ruining what he called

“the great work of time”.

That is something we need to think about. This Bill is Cromwellian, and therefore is dangerous.

[Viscount Thurso (LD)]

My Lords, I have bitten my tongue for the first two or three groups our Committee has considered, but I feel obliged to make a quick comment on the amendment tabled by the noble Earl, Lord Devon—and also because my gluteus maximus has gone to sleep.

We have a constitution, which is the Crown in Parliament. The Crown, based on heredity, works extremely well. Parliamentary democracy, based on heredity, works extremely badly, and I can make the difference between the two. We need a second chamber that is either selected or elected—my preference is elected—and I will stand with the noble Lord, Lord Brennan, in defence of our King.

[Lord Northbrook (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to say that, as the royal representatives and great offices of state—the Lord Great Chamberlain and the Earl Marshall—are being removed from the House, is it reasonable not to sever the Royal Family’s link entirely with the Floor of the House? I might draw the line at the Duke of York or the Duke of Sussex, but I could tolerate some others.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

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2nd reading
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Thurso (LD)]

My Lords, we have reached that point in the debate when pretty much everything that can be said has been said, but not yet by me. I will confine myself to one observation and one suggestion but, before I do that, I offer my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Brady. I served with him on the Treasury Select Committee in another place. Of course, he has gone on to great things as a hirer and firer of Prime Ministers, while I just sort of went on. I also pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, for her exemplary valedictory. Lastly, I thank the Leader of the House for her courteous tone and the way in which she introduced the debate. I hope to follow her example.

The Bill is rather small, containing five clauses, or four if you leave out the one about the short title. It has to be said that rarely can so much have been said by so many about so few clauses. It is a remarkably simple Bill that has at the heart of it one basic proposition, which is the removal of us hereditaries. Since I have spent my whole time talking about reform of this House from the point of view of a wholly elected House, it would be odd if I had to oppose that principle, so I will not. However, equally pernicious as the hereditary principle is the principle of life tenure. We need to confront that and come up with some way in which terms are limited, and I will come to that in my suggestion.

Frankly, I never expected to arrive in your Lordships’ House, because my father assured me that reform would have taken place before it came to me. Unfortunately, 29 years ago he died, and I arrived here having never had any interest in politics as something I should do. I came to enjoy and respect what happened, but I also learned how much the reform of this House could add to the strength of Parliament, a theme that I have spoken about on many occasions.

So in 1999 I was happy to go, by which time Lord Maclennan had persuaded me that I should try for the other House. I duly ended up as the elected Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross, and I had a very happy 14 years when I got more job satisfaction after looking after my constituents and doing other things, such as sitting on the Treasury Select Committee, than I have had in many other walks of life. I never expected to come back here because I thought the job would have been done by then but, lo and behold, there was an election and I got back here in 2016. Now I am off again, adding to my remarkable collection of political P45s.

My observation from that is that House of Lords reform does not happen, or, rather, it happens in very small chunks with large amounts of time between them. That leads me to my suggestion, based on something in the report by the noble Lord, Lord Burns: to look at introducing term limits, not for anyone who is in the House at the moment but by a simple amendment in the Bill to the 1958 Act saying that anyone coming in the future would be limited to a term. It could be 15 years or 20, I do not really mind; it is simply about the principle that people should not be here for their life. That would be a modest and simple thing to do. I am trying desperately not to cut across the desire of my leader, my noble friend Lord Newby, not to create a Christmas tree, but I think this would be a very small bauble that would have no great effect on the other major events but would have a strong effect on the future of the House.

That is my observation and my suggestion. Above all, as I said in our debate on 12 November, I am a parliamentarian and I believe in the strength of Parliament. We need a strong second Chamber that is legitimate in the eyes of all its stakeholders so that it strengthens Parliament, in order that Parliament can continue to hold the Executive to account. The threat we face of a public who are becoming ever more disconnected from the parliamentary process would be reduced by a stronger Parliament.

House of Lords Reform

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Tuesday 12th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Thurso (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness the Leader of the House for having brought forward this debate, which has been thoughtful and an immensely valuable contribution to deliberations on the future of your Lordships’ House. However, for me, it has brought on a slight Groundhog Day feeling, since I have been taking part in such debates since my first incarnation in this House, in the other place, and again in this House for nearly 30 years now.

The first debate was in 1996, when I was struck for ever by the contribution of my late great friend Lord Mackie of Benshie, who rose and, in his stentorian voice, said, “I believe wholeheartedly in the hereditary principle”, and then after a pause said, “For breeding cattle”. He went on to describe the policy of these Benches, which was not about hereditaries. I have remained absolutely convinced since those days that a reformed House, based mostly, if not entirely, upon election, is the proper way to go forward.

I accept that that is not going to happen in a hurry. When we failed to get the 2012 Bill, which got its Second Reading, through to its other stages we missed a real trick for proper reform. In the short term, two things are absolutely imperative, both of which are in the report of the noble Lord, Lord Burns.

The first is size. We have to agree a size and agree it even before we have worked out how to get there. We have to say a number—I am not going to put a number on it, but numbers have been floated—and then we can agree how to get there. Until we have decided on the size, nothing else can really work. The second is limits. I am not in favour of an age limit. There is no age limit down the other end and I know lots of people can come into this House at a later stage in life and make a valuable contribution. I am against people being here for ever; it is ridiculous that we would look at a young person aged 30 being able to sit for 50 years while a highly confident 75 year-old had to go after five. I am in favour of term limits rather than age limits.

Why reform? The House works extremely well: its committees work excellently, the quality of debate is very good, and the way in which legislation is improved is excellent. Unfortunately, for all that great work—and I have nothing but admiration and respect for every Member of this House—there is one fundamental defect. It is the one that the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, referred to: it does not have legitimacy. At the end of the day, when you are at the other end and voting out whatever has been done at this end, you will not have heard the debate. You just troop through the Lobby and the Minister’s phrase will be, “We’re the elected House”.

We are not legitimate in the eyes of the press, except on those very rare occasions when we come up with something that they happen to agree with, and we are not legitimate in the eyes of the public. I disagree here with the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, for whom I have great affection and respect, notwithstanding his regular name-checking of my election to this place the second time around. I have regularly discussed the House of Lords and our constitution with people on the doorsteps in Caithness. I do not pretend that Caithnesians are cleverer than those anywhere else; it is just that people actually care. Without that legitimacy, which I believe will ultimately come only from election, we are always going to have a problem.

I am not that keen on a commission doing everything, because the commission will be composed of the metropolitan Oxbridge elite. Where will the crofters, the carers, the binmen and the fishermen come from? That is what representative democracy actually delivers.

I remain convinced that, ultimately, we should have an elected House. Being elected for one term, with one-third elected every three elections, so that people would be here for 15 years, is the best way to do it, but I recognise that it will not happen in a hurry. Most of all, I am a parliamentarian and I want this House to be strengthened—to strengthen Parliament against the Executive. In a liberal democracy, at the point where we are under threat as never before from the algorithms that are driving us into silos of agreement and taking away from the great market of ideas, we need this House more than ever to function well.

Elections Bill

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Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Monday 28th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

My Lords, I have a question—and I did not come in to speak either. Since I have been a Member of this House, which is 20 years, there is at least one Member—I think only one—who was here when I arrived, subsequently got elected to the other place and is now back here. Yes, he is here today. At the time that he left this place and got elected to the other place, was he able to vote in the election he stood in? I am not sure what his status would have been.

[Viscount Thurso (LD)]

Yes, I was allowed to vote.

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

Well, that is the answer to my question.