House of Lords: Lord Speaker’s Committee Report

Baroness Meacher Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I express my thanks to the Lord Speaker for initiating this incredibly important piece of work, and of course to the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and his committee for their report. I strongly support their recommendations. Although all of us might want to tweak the odd one here or there, I strongly support the report.

I am sure everyone would be delighted if I just sat down at this point, but I want to focus on just one issue. It seems that the underpinning for all other proposals in the report is provided by the proposed fixed cap on the total number of Peers with the right to sit in the House of Lords. Without that reform, the rest of the proposals will probably fall or achieve very little. Fears have been expressed that the Prime Minister will be reluctant to lose her complete freedom to exercise her powers of patronage. I understand those fears. But if the Prime Minister agrees that this House should better reflect the political balance across the country over time, and that the public would not accept an increase in the size of this House to 1,000 or more Peers, I hope she can be convinced of the need for the reforms presented by the noble Lord, Lord Burns.

The big question is whether Theresa May accepts that it is impractical, self-defeating over time and offensive to the British public for successive Prime Ministers of both political parties to pack the House with their own appointees, to seek to rebalance the numbers of Peers on each side. That is, of course, a zero-sum game.

If we can assume the Prime Minister’s support on these issues, an answer to the patronage problem surely lies, as others have said, on page 13 of the report, which makes it clear that,

“the monarch is empowered to appoint life peers other than under the Life Peerages Act 1958”.

This power was confirmed by RP Gadd in Peerage Law, published in 1985—albeit that the power has not been used very recently. Importantly, Peers appointed in that way would not be entitled to a seat in this House. The Prime Minister would thus have complete freedom to appoint any number of Peers, if she really wished to, but she would need to decide which of those Peers could best serve your Lordships’ House. Others would have the honour of a peerage anyway, and if they were suited to sit in this House they could surely apply to the House of Lords Appointments Commission so that when a place became available they could have a position in this House.

As the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, said—I find this interesting, as I had not worked it out for myself—the Burns report would, anyway, enable a Prime Minister to create roughly the same number of Peers with a position in this House as have tended to be created, on average, by Prime Ministers over the years. What the Burns report would prevent is the creation of vast numbers of Peers for political purposes—and I very strongly support bringing an end to that type of activity. On this basis, I hope that the Prime Minister and the leaders of the opposition parties can support the report.