House of Lords Reform (No. 2) Bill

Dennis Skinner Excerpts

Friday 28th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. My preference is for amendment 3, as it would ensure that people retired from Parliament when they were coming to the end of their working career. It is wrong for people to use membership of the House of Lords as a point on their CV. It is not an internship that people do for a little while to get a bit of work experience before taking on another job. It is such an exciting and great honour to have—why would these people wish to give it up? I recall that when Disraeli went to the House of Lords, he said that he was not dead

“but in the Elysian fields.”

Who, having entered the Elysian fields, wants to come back down to earth? It seems extraordinary in the first place that anyone would want to leave those glorious red Benches and the gilt around the throne—the magnificence that the House of Lords shows to the world—and trot out into the humdrum life in front of them. [Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles) asks whether this is a job application. I am by no means grand enough to enter their lordships’ House. I like representing the British people—vox populi, vox Dei—through this illustrious Chamber rather than in their lordships’ noble House. Given the question of why anybody would want to leave, they ought to live up to the commitment they have made. Ten years seems reasonable; I would have been happy with 15 or 20 years.

Moreover, crucially, when Ministers go into the House of Lords they may want to be there only while they are in ministerial office. That is not a proper way of treating the constitution. Ministers who go into the House of Lords ought to stay there for an extended period to show a commitment to the legislature, not just to being appointees of the Executive who are here today, gone tomorrow. These amendments are important and would improve the Bill. Had we been debating them in a Committee of the whole House, it is likely that some of these changes would have been made.

Amendment 4 is about the witnessing of the peer’s statement that he wishes to retire or resign. The statement may be witnessed by anybody, but I think that it should be witnessed by two people, both of whom must be peers of the same degree. Is that because I think that lots of fraudulent certificates will be issued by random people wandering around signing things and pretending to be witnesses to statements that peers have not made? No, I do not think that, but these resignations are essentially proceedings in Parliament, and they should be a formal parliamentary proceeding registered by people who are also Members of Parliament. This would be a safeguard to ensure that somebody did not resign in a light moment and then regret it, or have the statement signed in their office and send it in having been pushed into doing it by offers of who knows what—perhaps an offer of becoming a European commissioner or something grand and fancy such as that, although I know that there is a special way for such people to stay in the House of Lords with a formal leave of absence. We should ensure that the grave and important decision to leave the upper Chamber is made properly and thoughtfully and that there is a formal process by which to register that decision.

That ties in with amendment 6, which says:

“after the date specified in 2(a) above”.

The problem with reading out amendments without reading out the relevant part of the Bill is that they sound rather obscure, so it may be sensible to explain. The Bill says that if somebody signs a form resigning from the House of Lords, that notice is irrevocable from the point at which it has been signed, even if it is a long-post-dated cheque. So if a peer entered the House of Lords and said that he intended to resign in eight years’ time, the document would be irrevocable, even though all sorts of things may change. That person would then be ineligible to be a peer again in future. I think that that is a mistake. There should be an ability to withdraw the notice prior to its becoming effective; otherwise, appointments to the House of Lords are opened up to abuse.

I have heard former Leaders of the House of Lords—noble Lords themselves—talk about what happens when people ask for peerages. It may shock you, Mr Speaker, that people ask for peerages. I would have thought it was an enormous impertinence for anybody to say to the Prime Minister or to the Leader of the House of Lords that they would like a peerage, but people do. Apparently, they knock on their doors to ask to be given a peerage; they queue up outside their offices as though they were waiting for an omnibus. When they do so—I really have heard Leaders of the House of Lords make speeches along these lines—they say anything that the people dishing the peerage out may wish to hear. They say, “I’ll always vote with the Government line, I’ll never disobey, I’ll do what I’m told”, and so on and so forth.

[Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)]

Why don’t you name a couple?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Sadly, I have heard Leaders of the House of Lords talk only in general terms—they have not named names—so the hon. Gentleman cannot lead me down that route, and if I did I might be out of order because saying anything critical of a noble peer is against the forms of this House, and neither would I wish to do so.

There is the risk that peers, before they are appointed—therefore, of course, they are not yet peers—are in the position of asking for something that they want that is in the Government’s gift, and the Government want to have some leverage over them to ensure that they behave in the way the Government want when they are appointed. One of the glories of the House of Lords is that once people are there, they are independent because they are there for life. That preserves them from the terrors of the Whips. We in this House live in daily terror of the fierce power the Whips have whereby they may do all sorts of extraordinary things to us with any amount of instruments of torture that are maintained in the bowels of the Palace of Westminster, but in their lordships’ House those instruments are ineffective—they have rusted away because the peers are there for life. That is a great protection for them. If somebody could give a post-dated cheque—if someone could say, “I will leave the House a few years after going in”—that protection would begin to ebb away. But if they had the power to rescind the notice, whatever they said at the point at which they were grubbing round for the peerage, they would be able to withdraw it, and the independence of being a peer for life would be maintained.

This flexibility ought to be added to the Bill because it would allow peers to maintain that which is the essence of the success of our revising Chamber. What makes the House of Lords successful, and different from this House, is that because peers are not standing for re-election and do not need to be readopted by their parties, and because very few of them are Ministers, there are many fewer baubles that may be offered to them to maintain party discipline.

Party discipline is very important. It is important that a Government are able to get their business through, but party discipline in a revising Chamber is unhelpful, because instead of doing its job of revising it tends simply to go along with what is asked of it by the party managers. That is damaging both ways: it is damaging if Governments do it, because it means that they are not necessarily putting through Bills that have had the wisdom and benefit of the proper revising process, and it is equally bad when Oppositions do it simply to oppose what the Government are doing. We have seen that on a number of occasions in the House of Lords when, out of party loyalty, rather than according to the argument, the will of the House of Commons has been thwarted.