House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 3rd March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

It is indeed. Whether the grammar matters or not, these are clearly linked, and as for those colleagues we are going to lose through this Bill, who were kept here as surety, as a reminder, to make sure that the deal was followed through, surely we owe it to them to answer the question, before they are ushered out of your Lordships’ House, of whether the Government intend to fulfil the rest of their manifesto and what their plans for the future of this House are. If we cannot have that dignified and eloquent reminder through the presence of our hereditary colleagues, let us write very clearly in this Bill, in words and punctuation that should act as a perpetual reminder, that the Government are once again giving us a half-baked reform.

The limbo in which it leaves your Lordships’ House is unquestionably worse than the status quo. This Bill removes 88 hard-working Members, drawn from all corners of the House but predominantly from outwith the Government’s own Benches, and places the sole power to replace them and to appoint the temporal Members of this House in the hands of the Prime Minister. It gives him an unlimited power with no statutory limitations—not even modest guidance of the sort that noble Lords such as the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and others suggested would be helpful when we discussed this at Second Reading.

In this group and later, I hope the noble Baroness will be able to address the questions that are left unanswered through this Bill. Would she be open to an annual cap on the number of nominations that the Prime Minister can make? What does she think of a formula such as that proposed by the noble Lords, Lord Fowler and Lord Burns, in the Lord Speaker’s committee? I was very grateful for her generous words about my former boss, my noble friend Lady May, who adhered roughly to a two-out, one-in process—I crunched the numbers—as proposed by the Lord Speaker’s committee, but subsequent Prime Ministers have not, not least the present Prime Minister, whom this Bill will make even more powerful.

In 2022, Sir Keir Starmer endorsed proposals from former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown to transfer power from Westminster to the British people. He said:

“I think the House of Lords is indefensible”,


and said he wanted to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with an elected chamber with a really strong mission. That reformist zeal is not fully reflected in the Bill before us. The Prime Minister in fact has appointed a more Peers in his first 200 days than three Prime Ministers—my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak—put together. He has appointed more even than Sir Tony Blair, who was not known for his restraint when handing out ermine robes. He has already appointed more Labour Peers than the number of Cross-Benchers that this Bill will purge from your Lordships’ House.

And the people he has put forward, although we welcome them all to this House and do not denigrate the role that they will play, are drawn from a rather narrow cadre. Instead of the knowledge of nuclear engineering held by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, or the professional experience of the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, as a chartered surveyor, or the passionate campaigning for our creative industries that I see from the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, and the noble Lords, Lord Aberdare and Lord Freyberg, we have, since the start of this Parliament—

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

It would be useful to know how this actually relates to the wording of the amendment.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I think very directly, because this is an amendment to remind your Lordships’ House and future Governments that the Bill gives Prime Ministers greater power than ever before to nominate people to this House, and the present Prime Minister, whom this will empower and embolden, has sent us, since he became Prime Minister, 18 former Labour MPs, his former chief of staff and his director of strategy. He is entitled to do that, and it is no insult to any of them or to the contribution that I know they will make to your Lordships’ House to point out that they are unlikely to give the same breadth of independent scrutiny to legislation as the Cross-Bench Peers whom they outnumber.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

The speaker’s own background is exactly the one that he is now criticising others for. He also has forgotten the people that Boris Johnson put in. So could we just have a little humility?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I draw the noble Baroness’s attention to my own amendment, which I hope has been brought forward in a spirit of humility, suggesting that there be a cap on the number of special advisers that Prime Ministers can nominate. The reason I have tabled that amendment, and the one which I see did not find favour from my noble friend Lord Forsyth of Drumlean about former Members of Parliament, is that I worry that a Bill that empowers Prime Ministers to make the sole decision about who scrutinises them and the Government they lead in one of our Houses of Parliament ought not to give such an open-ended power to them.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 1st April 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

103: Clause 4, page 2, line 16, leave out from “force” to “which” and insert “on the day on”

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendment 103 has generated quite a lot of interest across the House. It is a very simple and easy to understand amendment. It effectively activates what would then be an Act of Parliament on Royal Assent.

Colleagues may not be surprised that I tabled it after the Opposition, most unusually, moved the adjournment of the House, all as part of their attempt to frustrate the legitimate work of a newly elected Government. They won that vote by a majority smaller than the number of hereditary Peers who voted with them. We saw men who sit in the House by virtue of appointment by an earlier Prime Minister—something which they now seem to decry about today’s Prime Minister—stop a newly elected Government continuing with its business that day.

That adjournment may not have been on this Bill, but it was behaviour which is not normally witnessed in your Lordships’ House and which we had hoped would not be seen again. However, I see from the Guardian that something similar has been suggested for trying to stop the Renters’ Rights Bill. I hope that the Guardian is wrong.

With regard to this Bill, we have had to sit through a tsunami of amendments that have no relevance to the purpose of the content of the Bill and which everyone knows will never be part of the Act. It may well be that the clerks said that such amendments were acceptable, but that does not mean that they had to be tabled. Just because you can do something, it does not mean that you should do something. I was particularly surprised to find that His Majesty’s Opposition had tabled amendments on future appointments to this House, which they know have got nothing to do with the Bill and will not find their way into the Act. The mover of that amendment is shaking his head. I think he knows jolly well that they are not to do with the hereditaries and that they will not find their way into this Act. That is not the action of a responsible Opposition.

There are also amendments, some perfectly within scope, tabled by hereditary Peers without the customary signal of a declaration of interest. The Code of Conduct says that we should all act solely in terms of the public interest and act and take decisions impartially. Peers

“should not act or take decisions in order to gain financial or other material benefits for themselves”,

and should

“conduct themselves in a manner which will tend to maintain and strengthen the public’s trust and confidence in the integrity of the House of Lords”.

Importantly, the Code of Conduct says that, when speaking, any financial interest must be declared where relevant to the matter under discussion. Given that the privilege of membership of this House affects every hereditary Peer and that they have an interest in whether they are to lose their ability to be here, I would have thought that, even if it was only a perceived interest, they would have declared it when speaking or tabling any amendments.

In relation to our excellent hereditary colleagues in this House, I remind them that, contrary to what has been said, this has not been rushed and they have had enough notice about their future. When I was on the Opposition Benches, I spoke to many Bills from my noble friend Lord Grocott, and he and I warned your Lordships’ House, particularly the then Government, that failure to accept his Bill, which would simply have stopped new entrants, would mean that more drastic action was likely to follow in due course.

That would have been heard by all the hereditaries at that time and would have been known by any who joined since. Indeed, had we stopped the by-elections a decade ago, I am confident that this Bill would not be before us today, and those of our colleagues present at that time would have been able to see out their lives as full Members of this House, as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, said in an earlier amendment today. So those who will be leaving as a result of this Bill, and who were here a decade ago, really have only the Conservatives to blame for what is happening now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

I was trying to aid the Committee, but I think the noble Lord would agree that in previous debates the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, was congratulated on her ingenuity but that had very little to do with the Bill. It is entirely appropriate for Ministers to respond in the way that they wish, and to speak to the amendment is the usual way forward. I have broadened my comments out to be helpful to the Committee, but we would normally expect the Committee to speak to the amendment and the Minister to do the same.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank all those who have spoken in the debate. I particularly welcome not just the support but the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, which was even more ingenious than some of the others that we have heard. Maybe we can make a little list of which two of us should go out with the hereditaries.

My noble friend the Leader of the House clearly understood exactly what I was saying, which is: if we are not careful then this will be on Royal Assent, because if we go much further then it will be at the end of the Session. That was the point of this debate. I think colleagues know I am not ill-minded or—what were the other words used about me?

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

Nasty and brutal.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

I am slightly surprised to be called that, I have to say.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

I did not say that the noble Baroness was nasty and brutal. I said her amendment was nasty and brutal.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

“Hairs”, “fine” and “splitting” come to mind.

There are two major issues: we have been warned about having these long debates and about amendments that, frankly, are never going to be accepted, because even if they go through here on opposition votes then they will be overturned down there. So what are we doing debating Motions that are never going to be in the Bill and probably should never have been tabled?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

I do not disagree with the noble Lord, but I remember him saying the opposite from this Dispatch Box.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

Surely the issue is good advice. If I am trying to say anything, it is: can we get on with it? That is really what the amendment is about. We should not be tabling amendments that are out of scope. I am sorry to do this in front of the clerks but, honestly, some of them are not pertinent to the issue. The advice is: can we please get on with this?

I think my noble friend will want to take forward the wider suggestion, but she is clearly not going to do that until we have moved on this issue. So to all those who want more done, my advice—and this was the purpose of the amendment—is not to leave it too long, or it will be the end of the Session by the time this comes in.

I would have loved to have had this amendment debated with the rest. I kept getting draft lists that said “degroup”, and people have clearly been asked to degroup their amendments. I do not know why mine fell out, but I would have much preferred the whole of the idea of commencement to be in one group. Still, frankly, if we are going to have amendments tabled saying that it should go to the end of the Parliament five years on, then of course it must be possible to say, “Are there other dates as well?”

So the purpose of the amendment was to say two things. First, please can we not go on until basically the end of the Session before this comes in? Otherwise, the hereditaries will have no notice of it and the House will have no time to make adjustments. Secondly, can we get it done for the sake of this House moving on? We heard earlier about constitutional amendments. That was in the Conservative manifesto for the election before last, but it never happened. The noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, quite often used to ask about it at Question Time: “Where is this promised thing?” It did not happen.

I have an answer for the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson of Tredegar. What has changed since 2021 is that at that point it had not been accepted. In 2021, we said, “Can we please just stop the by-elections and keep the people in?” That was rejected by the noble Lord’s Government. That is what changed. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 103 withdrawn.