House of Lords: Lord Speaker’s Committee Report

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the Lord Speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and his committee for the report, which makes eminently sensible reading. I wholeheartedly support the proposed changes but there are further significant changes that the introduction of this system of 15-year appointments will require. While scrutiny of legislation is a key role of this House, in our unwritten constitution this Chamber is one of the checks and balances on executive power; the others being judicial review, civil society, a free media and, at the moment, a wafer-thin majority in the other place.

Your Lordships’ House will continue to be effective or even to exist only if our level of public support and therefore our legitimacy increase. Your Lordships need only to glance over the pond to see how vital the institutions that check executive power are. This reform at this time is crucial, and while this Chamber is rightly known for its wisdom and experience, the tectonic plates of culture and technology are shifting so rapidly that a Chamber that is appointed in this new way will have legitimacy only if it continues to include a range of ages in its membership.

I am pleased that the committee recognises, in paragraph 31, that this system of 15-year appointments provides,

“a disincentive for prospective members to accept appointment to the House at a relatively young age”.

This disincentive is not further explored in the report, nor is it assessed in relation to the expenses system. Quite how a person in their late 30s, as I was, who has a career in the voluntary sector and who lives in the north-east, will be attracted to a 15-year appointment needs careful consideration. If the Lords will be a part-time role, perhaps this will work, but there seems to be an inconsistency between the briefings outlining that the party groups will consider more carefully whom they select as they will need a ministerial team, with all the time commitments that that entails, and paragraph 14 of the report, which states:

“Continuing to allow members to undertake careers and activities outside politics is necessary if they are to maintain and update their expertise”.


A further committee is needed to consider whether your Lordships’ House will be full-time or part-time, whether it will be salaried, whether there will be support staff, and how to ensure that younger Peers can still join.

I look forward to welcoming the new Bishop of London, the Right Reverend Sarah Mullally, and commend the fact that 10% of the Anglican presence in your Lordships’ House will soon be female. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Birmingham is correct that there is a cap on the Lords spiritual but there are four more on the Cross Bench. Thirty-plus Bishops or former Bishops is too many and arguably squeezes out nonconformist church leadership and the black and minority ethnic church, whose absence from your Lordships’ House is an obvious gap, which I hope the commission will see fit to resolve.

This further committee would, I hope, not have to consider the hereditary peerage system as this is Her Majesty’s Government’s responsibility alone. This House and the other place overwhelmingly want change but the Government, who control the legislative agenda, are stalling. So I trust that my noble friend the Leader of the House, as the only Member of your Lordships’ House to be in the Cabinet, will inform her colleagues that the racially and gender-biased selection system for the legislature needs to go. The pool of hereditary candidates is almost exclusively male and all white. I am afraid I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Burns, that this is not a problem for today, as it should have been a problem of yesterday. Her Majesty’s Government’s position risks undermining next year’s celebrations of a century of women’s suffrage, and the admirable leadership of the Prime Minister in tackling racial inequality. It is ironic that today, the Ministry of Justice adopted the recommendation from David Lammy’s “explain or change” review concerning racial bias in the justice system, and yet the Government’s legislative inertia is endorsing the racially biased hereditary peerage system. I ask my noble friend the Leader of the House to please write to noble Lords to explain or change Her Majesty’s Government’s position on this.