House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Baroness Smith of Basildon Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

Before I turn to the substance of the amendments, I will interrogate the premise that this House is too large and should be made smaller. Time and again in this debate, noble Lords have invoked the total number of Members, drawing unfavourable comparisons with other second Chambers around the world. But before we lose ourselves in the arithmetic of armchairs, let us consider a few rather more revealing figures.

Since 1999, the average daily attendance has never exceeded 497 Members. Last year the figure was just 397 Peers—barely 51% of the total membership. Even in our most heavily attended vote, on the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill, just 634 Members took part. These are not the numbers of a bloated, overbearing assembly; they are the numbers of a House that flexes with the rhythm of expertise and interest—that breathes in and out according to the demands of scrutiny.

We are not and were never meant to be a full-time House. It is neither expected nor desirable that every Peer attends every day. Many noble Lords bring with them outstanding commitments rooted in their industries and fields of expertise. This is not a weakness; it is our strength. It is the very foundation of our ability to scrutinise, revise and improve legislation. Some of us are generalists and able to contribute widely. Others are specialists, drawn in when their knowledge is most needed. That blend is not accidental; it is essential.

To fix an arbitrary cap on our numbers, particularly one tied to the size of the House of Commons, would not enhance our function; it would potentially diminish it. It would risk leaving gaps in our collective knowledge, stifling the very expertise on which this House depends. Without a mandatory retirement age to generate vacancies, restrictions on appointments could become a blunt instrument, blocking the arrival of fresh insight while leaving the door shut to renewal.

Although I maintain that, in itself, size does not matter, I can see that the perception of size is an issue. Public confidence and trust in this House matter, and I do not blame the public for misunderstanding what we do—how could they when so much of our work is invisible, unbroadcast and uncelebrated? We all bear the responsibility for explaining it better, proving our value and showing that the presence of hundreds of Members does not mean hundreds of voices speaking at once but is rather a reservoir of wisdom summoned when needed.

I look forward with great interest to the Lord Privy Seal’s reply to this debate, but I will close with a question: do the Government believe that it is the size of the House that matters, or is it merely a convenient fig leaf to cover a more political ambition—the removal of over 80 hereditary Peers, the vast majority of whom do not take the Government Whip?

[The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Smith of Basildon) (Lab)]

My Lords, this was a short but interesting debate. I thank the noble Baroness for injecting some humour into it. It seemed that the female Members of the House found it funnier than—if I dare say it—the male Members of the House. Perhaps I will pass over that quite quickly and move on.

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Collins of Highbury) (Lab)]

You need a fig leaf.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

It continues.

There have been some interesting discussions. The noble Lord, Lord Burns, used his amendment to refer back to the Lord Speaker’s Committee, when he looked at the size of the House and how related issues might be addressed. His amendment focuses on the idea of two out, one in, although he spoke more widely on the report, which was very helpful. I will come to that in a moment.

The noble Lord, Lord Northbrook, wants to delay the commencement of the Bill, which is why he tabled his amendment. He seemed to think we should have a draft Bill first to implement the Burns committee’s report. I looked into his interest in the Burns committee, and I was surprised, given that he thought it so important to delay this Bill until there is a draft Bill on the Burns committee, that he did not speak on the Burns committee when it was debated in your Lordships’ House. I think he referred to it in debate on my noble friend Lord Grocott’s Bill. It is an interesting point but not one that we would be able to accept, because it would just delay this Bill.

The noble Lord, Lord Burns, raised some interesting issues. When we debated the Burns committee report there was widespread support around the House for it. Looking back, I was not sure during the debate that every Member was fully signed up to every part of the report, but there was a real view that something had to be done and that this was going in the right direction of how we might address the issue.

The noble Baroness made a point about size and how we are not a full-time House. We are very much a full-time House. We sit longer and later than the other place, but we do not expect every Member of your Lordships’ House to be full-time. Members have outside interests, and we do not expect everybody to be here all day, every day—and neither should we. It would be unhelpful to the House if every Member was always here and we were all full-time politicians. We bring different experiences and different issues to the House.

I think we agree that the size of the House should come down. This is a bit about perception. We regularly read about the size and the bloat of the House, and how we are the second-largest assembly in the world, but we are not. If we look at the active membership—Members who attend reasonably regularly—then the House is not that size; it is much smaller. The two measures we are looking at, on retirement and participation, go a long way towards addressing some of the criticisms that are made. That is why I am so keen—and I have said that I will come back to the House on this—to have a mechanism that Members can input into so that we can see if the House can reach agreement on what that might look like in practice. We have had some discussions about that already.

The noble Lord, Lord Newby, made some points about allocation. We discussed this before on the Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Norton, which suggested that 20% of the House should be Cross-Benchers. Although that is a pretty fair figure for the Cross-Benchers, having a mechanism within your Lordships’ House that, in effect, determines what the size of one group should be does nothing about the relative size of other groups. One of the things I have looked at with some dismay over the years is how the government party has grown and grown. The noble Lord said his party had had only three new Members, most of them very recently. To come back to an earlier debate, at one point I think more new Ministers were appointed—in some cases for very short terms in office—to this side of the House than we had appointments in the whole of that time in opposition. We therefore need to get a better balance between the two parties.

The noble Lord, Lord Burns, is absolutely right. The House does some of its best work when we do not play the numbers game and say, “We’ve got more than you, we can win a vote”. We got into bad habits during some of the coalition years, when there was an automatic majority. We saw large numbers come in under Boris Johnson in particular: when the Government lost votes, their answer was to appoint more Peers. That did not have the effect that the Government wanted it to have. The House does its best work when there are roughly equal numbers between the Government and opposition parties, and when we are more deliberative in our approach rather than thinking that everything has to be resolved by voting. The House was designed to take that sort of approach. But the House is larger than it needs to be and it does not reflect the work we do or how we operate.

The noble Lord, Lord Burns, did the House a great service with his report; he focused minds. These are issues that we will return to, but he established an important principle that the House should look at dealing with some of these issues. It is very important that we do, because our views on how we should operate matter. This goes back to earlier debates about the skills and experience required, and about the make-up of the House that we want to see. We will have that debate in a moment, I am sure, on the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra. This has been an important debate and I am grateful to both noble Lords for their amendments, but I would respectfully urge them not to press them.

[Lord Burns (CB)]

My Lords, I am very grateful for all the comments that have been made about the Lord Speaker’s Committee’s report and in response to the amendment. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hain, who been supportive throughout this process; that has been important to ensure that we did really have cross-party support.

The noble Lord, Lord Newby, raised the allocation of places. I thought I mentioned this in my remarks, and it was certainly set out in some detail in the Lords Speaker’s Committee’s report. New appointments should be allocated according to the proportion of the votes in the previous general election. That would certainly be reflected in the number of Liberal Democrats. I appreciate there would be a problem if there was suddenly a very big shift in the voting behaviour in the country—for example, if a new party emerged. Then, of course, there would be some issues about balance.

The noble Baroness, Lady Finn, emphasised the whole question of whether it really matters what size the House is—it needs to come and go according to the rhythm of the place. But the reality is that without a ceiling on the House, the numbers have gone up and up over the whole period since there have been life peerages. There is no control mechanism with these arrangements. Whatever we do in the short term to bring down the numbers, if we do not have a commitment on what we want the size of the House to be and a mechanism for keeping it there, I can see nothing other than that the numbers will continue to rise.

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[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I am very touched by the determination of the noble Lord, Lord Harris, to hear from me. I am very happy to act as a performing seal to keep the noble Lord happy for hours on end, if he wishes, but that has never been the intention of the party on this side. If he looks carefully in Hansard, he will see me having said, from this Dispatch Box, that there was no question of our Front Bench dividing this House at any stage in Committee, and I hope that that message has been relayed to Members opposite.

My noble friend Lord Blencathra raised an interesting issue in his typically creative way. Like others, I flinched when I saw the long list of bodies in his amendment, although it underlines the depth and range of skills that there are still in this great country. Having listened to his arguments, I realise that he has put forward a probing—or perhaps more a scattergun—amendment. My noble friend is right that it is vital that we have a wide range of expertise to be called on as and when it is needed. That expertise, or the ability to analyse and deploy it, is one reason why your Lordships’ House has the authority that it has. It is why—although this is not germane to this amendment—I am rather more sympathetic to the occasional expert contributors we have among us than some who measure participation by quantity only.

The ingenious proposal from my noble friend Lord Blencathra, which does not seem to have found favour, is that temporary peerages be granted for representatives from each chartered professional body. We also heard another interesting proposal earlier from my noble friend Lady Laing on temporary Ministers, which I found fascinating. One might even moderate those proposals to consider: if we are a modern Chamber, and if we wish to be modern and we speak about reform, can we not think of doing things in different ways from all the other boring assemblies around the world? We are an interesting place. That area near the Throne is where the judges come at State Opening, on writs of assistance, to be present in the Chamber; it is not technically part of the Chamber. Could we not moderate the kind of proposal that my noble friend Lord Blencathra has put forward, so that if we are discussing something highly technical, we occasionally have people come here to advise and respond in our Chamber to inform our proceedings? It is just an idea.

If we are thinking of the future, let us be open without necessarily having to call people here for a long period with permanent peerages, as my noble friend said. Certainly, if we were ever to consider anything along my noble friend’s lines, he is surely right in proposing that any such appointment be temporary, to keep people at their most relevant and to allow a degree of flexibility within each sector to propose their representatives.

I admire my noble friend’s ingenuity in asking us to reflect on the expertise that we have, the expertise that we need and the expertise that we stand to lose, as my noble friend Lord Leicester said, if the proposal to exclude all hereditary Peers and all Peers over 80 were to go forward. We should have in mind the expertise we might lose as we consider any proposals for change and transition. However, my noble friend and the Committee will not be surprised when I say that, despite my great respect for his intentions and ingenuity, I am afraid that we on this Front Bench cannot support his specific proposals.

Appointing representatives from all chartered professional bodies in this way would make our House a bit too corporatist for my liking, and my noble friend leaves out other great institutions of the land. That said, we should reflect on whether there are other ways in which we could have witnesses occasionally to advise us on technical matters when we are considering important legislation. If we are to have this great modernisation, let us also consider innovative ways in which we might draw on the great wisdom of the British people.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been an interesting debate, and there has not been very much support for the noble Lord’s proposal. One thing that impressed me—he may have gained a record, at least so far on this Bill—was that he managed to produce an amendment longer than the Bill itself. I do not recall that happening before.

It is clear that the different backgrounds, experiences and knowledge of noble Lords from around the House are really valuable in our deliberations. There are indeed past presidents of societies sitting in the House at the moment. The noble Lord, Lord Rees, has been president of the Royal Astronomical Society. The noble Baronesses, Lady Rafferty and Lady Finlay, have been presidents of the Royal College of Nursing and the Royal Society of Medicine respectively, and the noble Lord, Lord Trees, was president of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. They have enhanced the debates—the noble Baroness, Lady Rafferty, has not been here very long but we look forward to more contributions from her; she has proved herself already—and these appointments are always welcome to your Lordships’ House. I think the noble Lord gets that.

Where I struggle with the noble Lord’s amendment is with regard to all the other organisations. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, got it absolutely right: once you get a list, you look at the things you are excluding, and I do not think the chartered institutes and royal societies are the only groups that can provide such expertise. I also note that, had all the appointments been made that the noble Lord speaks of, they would make up about 30% of the House as Cross-Benchers. I think the noble Lord, Lord Norton, said that the Cross Benches should make up around 20%, which is roughly what most people were talking about, and this amendment would take it well over that. They would probably be larger than either of the two parties of government.

The noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, made the point that I would have made, but he got there first—obviously, it is a very good point to make, because it was what I was thinking. Why are we here? We are here for our experience, our knowledge and the contributions we make, but basically, we are here for our judgment. We listen to people who are experts and those who are not experts, and we listen to the public. We take on board all those things, and ultimately, we all have to act on our honour and make a judgment on the information before us.

The noble Lord, Lord Davies, pointed out how much the expertise that Members bring to this House would cost if it came from outside this place. But I do not really want a House just of experts, and I do not know where the noble Lord got that from. We are not a House of experts; we are a House that comes together to reach an expert opinion. We have experts among us, but not all of us have an expertise. Many do, but others are here, as the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, said, to exercise judgment. We want Members to speak not just on one issue in which they have expertise; we expect them to look at a range of issues while they are here.

I am also uncomfortable with the idea of temporary membership of the House, which the noble Baroness, Lady Laing, raised earlier as well. We want all Members to be equal and to have equal status here; we do not want some Members who are temporary and some who are not.

I am sure that the noble Lord tabled his amendment with the best of intentions, but I ask him to withdraw it.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, my political antenna detects that my suggestion has not received universal acclaim. I say to my noble friend Lord Taylor of Holbeach, who was my superb Chief Whip, that I am sorry if I missed out the royal agricultural societies of Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland. That would put my list up to 130, from 129. He does not like lists, but the Bill is nothing but a list of 88 people to chuck out, so I suggest that it is a list as well.

The esteemed organisation of the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, is not a chartered institute or a royal society. I say to the Leader of the House that one has to create a cut-off somewhere. There are lots of other able organisations, but I wanted to pick those that were officially chartered institutes and royal societies, and which had therefore reached a certain level of acknowledged expertise, possibly among their peers. I note the points made by my noble friend Lord Leicester, and I largely concur.

The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, was quite strongly against my amendment. He did not want these experts in here; he would prefer to pay them to speak to us. Suppose that, over the next few years, HOLAC had nominated each of these individuals. Why would it nominate them? It would nominate them because they were experts in their field. We would say, “Jolly good, welcome here; we need your expertise”. Of course this House needs experts and expertise. I say to the Leader of the House that I am not suggesting having 650 technical experts; I am suggesting 129 experts, plus any others we may have, which would leave another 400 or 500 Peers to exercise our judgment. I agree with my noble friend Lord True that we need to look at innovative ways. I said that I had the germ of an idea here. Most people think that this germ should be disinfected and done away with immediately, I suspect, but there is a possibility here to do things differently. He said that my plans were too corporatist. I thought that he said that they were too corpulent, which the House rather is at the moment; it is too large.

I am clearly not going to succeed. I do not intend to bring this back on Report. I was floating an idea and in five years’ time, say, the House may wish to look at it. I am grateful for the Minister’s response. In view of the attitude tonight, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

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I wanted to put on record the shame I felt at the situation that occurred while I was Leader of the House. I hope that we may find a collective way forward to open the ability to serve as a Minister in your Lordships’ House in the 21st century to every one of our Members, irrespective of their private means.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, for raising this issue. It has been raised in your Lordships’ House previously, and the noble Lord the Leader of the Official Opposition has raised some of the legal issues around the legislation that causes part of the problem.

I have to say—and I think the noble Lord would say the same—that I am immensely proud of the work that my ministerial colleagues do. If you look across Parliament, you find that there are few Ministers who work as hard as Lords Ministers. Partly that it is because Lords Ministers—as I look at the team, I think, “What a team!”—have to cover a range of issues, including for their colleagues. They will answer any issue raised across their department. I have enormous respect for the work they do.

The problem lies with legislation that is 50 years old that limits the number of Ministers overall: it limits the number in the House of Commons and then it limits the number of different categories of Minister. As the noble Lord says, it has been the case for a number of years that there have been a small number of unpaid Ministers. I am pleased to say we have made some progress. We have five paid Ministers of State in your Lordships’ House now and significantly fewer unpaid Ministers. However, I take the point; I do not think that any Minister should be unpaid. It is not just the issue of pay; it is the respect that we gain in doing the role.

The noble Lord refers to arrangements that he tried to come to with his Government and failed to do so, and how he and I spoke. I have to say that the reason we did not reach agreement was that the arrangements did not address all the issues that I think need to be addressed. I considered that it was a stopgap measure that would get us through a short period, but I did not think it was a long-term solution. This is something that is very much on my agenda, and my colleagues know it is on my agenda. It is a good old trade union principle that people should get paid for the job they do, and that should be the case.

I have to say, though, that it is not related to this Bill. It is quite a stretch to get it in the Bill, and I admire the noble Lord’s ingenuity. However, the effect of his amendment if it were to pass would either be immediately to reduce the number of Ministers in the Commons or to lose Ministers from this place. The third option would be to change the legislation, which is probably a bit above my pay grade for now. I can say that these matters are under discussion, and I will do what I can with my colleagues to ensure that all of them get the proper support that they should get when doing their jobs. For now, I ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

Surely it would be possible, if the noble Baroness is not prepared to accept my noble friend’s amendment, to have a one-clause Bill which simply alters the number and is agreed between the usual channels, which could pass through both Houses. It is very hard to understand why this could not be done. The noble Baroness may say, “When you were in government you did not do it”, but the former Leader of the House, my noble friend Lord True, made perfectly clear the effort that was put in. I would have thought a Labour Government would stand for the principle that everyone should receive equal pay for equal labour.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right: if there was agreement across both Houses—if he could persuade the leader of the Opposition to support this in the other place as well—I would certainly talk to the Prime Minister. But this is something that has to be done cross-party and not with party-political capital made out of it. We also need to say a bit more about the work that our Lords Ministers do. There is nobody in this House who does not hold Lords Ministers in the highest regard. Perhaps we ought to be saying that to our colleagues in the other place as well.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I very much agree with the final words of the Leader of the House and what she says about Ministers. I see how hard-working her team of Lords Ministers are. When they go into their departments tomorrow bleary-eyed after these long debates, they will have diaries full of meetings and boxes full of papers—prepared without the expectation that they should have been here at nearly 11 pm the evening before, so I very much agree with her.

I particularly welcome the noble Baroness’s willingness to look at this issue on a cross-party basis. I know that there is never a good time to legislate to pay politicians more, but this is a problem that has been kicked down the path for half a century. It is causing problems to the social composition and the sense of fairness about Governments. I hope we might be able to act on it. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord True for his candour about the efforts that he made as Leader of your Lordships’ House, and the sense of shame and frustration he feels that he was not able to persuade our colleagues in government to do it.

With this Bill there is an opportunity to right this wrong. I hope the noble Baroness and my noble friend Lord True will take this away and continue those discussions. If not, I see there is an employment Bill coming down the line and we will be able to assert our trade union rights in the future. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

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[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, it is unfortunate, in a way, that my noble friend’s carefully thought-out amendment has come forward at this hour and at this time. It draws on existing practice, as was done in 1999; it provides a way to get towards a number that the House of Lords might be content with; and it addresses issues of party balance—I take what the convenor has just said about the specific interests and concerns of the Cross Benches.

We are not going to have a serious or thoughtful examination of this significant amendment at this hour on this particular day. What it does do, however, is remind us that there is a lot in the Bill about a finality and an alleged completion of unfinished business. There are differences about what bit of business is being finished or left unfinished, but what is absolutely clear—as I said at the start of our debate—is that the future of the House remains a fog. We have to bend our thoughts and consideration to the future; considerations were put forward for us by the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, and others in earlier amendments. We cannot have ease or security in this House without the kind of arrangements and patterns of governance and composition—the kind of things that are addressed in my noble friend’s amendment. By the way, I always thought he was a passionate advocate of an elected House, and he may well still be under the surface; I do not know. But we really have to find a way.

The noble Baroness was talking earlier about consultation, and no specific timescale was given in response to any of the amendments—from the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, or the noble Duke—for when we might see some of the fog about our future lifted. There has to be some model or mechanism; it might be close to what we have now or something nearer to what my noble friend Lord Strathclyde suggests. We cannot have closure unless we have an opening to the future—a better one than we have heard in our debates on the Bill so far.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, again, this is an ingenious amendment, and I congratulate the noble Lord. I am not sure whether he or the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, wins the prize tonight, but both amendments are longer than the Bill, which is something of an achievement when drafting amendments to legislation.

On the point that the noble Lord opposite has just made, I will say something I have reiterated several times: there is a three-stage process from the manifesto. The first stage is this, which is the completion of the reform started in 1999 around hereditary Peers. The second is the issues we have debated tonight and voted on many times—they are not for this Bill but for moving forward—on issues like participation and retirement. There is not an exact timetable, but we will get clearer to that in the process as we get to Report. Then there is a longer-term objective for consultation with the wider public on an alternative second Chamber. It is not rocket science; I have been quite clear around that.

This amendment would create a House of 600 Members—and I am not sure that that figure has been raised before by the noble Lord, but I am happy to be corrected on that—we would have self-perpetuating elections by Members of this House at the beginning of each Parliament, and the only people who could vote would be Members of this House. It would also completely undermine the purpose of this Bill, because hereditary Peers would be able to take part in those elections, stand for them and vote.

The noble Lord’s proposals for future composition are interesting, but I take into account the points made by the noble Earl the Convenor. It does not address the wider issues of the House, but I know the issues that he is trying to get to. We will continue that dialogue and formalise that in due course around other issues that have been raised, and I gave a commitment to that earlier on tonight. But this amendment would undermine that dialogue and engagement, and I ask the noble Lord to withdraw it.

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken. I can tell the noble Lord, Lord Newby, that I have not given up on the idea of an elected House, but I am a realist, and I do not think that there is much thirst for it in this House—and I am not entirely convinced that there is very much thirst for it in another place either. The fact that it did not appear in the manifesto of the Labour Party rather indicates that view. We are still relying on the preamble to the 1911 Act. I join the noble Lord, Lord Newby, in trying to encourage a long-term solution around that.

The noble Lord, Lord True, is right. At some stage we need to find a real solution. Of course, there are age limits and all sorts of other things that you can bring in, but none of those is popular either. The idea of an election works; it has been tried and tested, and I hope that, on reflection, the Leader of the House will feel that there is some purpose in this kind of amendment, which would change the whole debate about the size and numbers in the House, and keep people in who have the support of other Peers to remain in the House for the rest of their lives.

Having heard what everybody has said, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.