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.