House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Iqbal Mohamed Excerpts

Committee of the whole House
Tuesday 12th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Julian Lewis]

The elements that make up the House of Lords consist of different groups of people: some have got there by accident of birth and are now going to leave; some have got there as the result of political horse-trading of some sort, and perhaps should not have been put there in the first place; but a great many have got there, as I said earlier, by having reached the heights of their various professions and having proved themselves to be outstanding intellectuals who can bring a level of specialisation to the scrutiny of legislation. Even if we in this House were on exactly their same level of accumulated knowledge, we cannot bring that same level of scrutiny because of the demands we face on our time and in looking after our constituents, which inevitably works to the cost of the amount of attention we could give purely to focusing on improving legislation.

I wish to place on record that the reason why I became an ardent advocate of an unelected second Chamber—and why I would rather have no second Chamber at all than two elected Chambers—is precisely that it is impossible to whip such a Chamber to prevent people with good ideas from persuading peers of the virtue of those ideas. Members of an unelected second Chamber are able to have at least a sporting chance of amending legislation in good ways that would not get beyond first base in this House, because the elected Members, for the most part, almost all the time, obey the whipping.

Before I was an MP, when I was a political activist, I and my colleagues managed to get four pieces of legislation into law. Since I have been an MP, I have got only one, on the privacy of Members’ home addresses, on to the statute book, because, exceptionally, that was a free vote. How many free votes happen in this House? Hardly any. The equivalent of free votes in the upper House happen all the time.

We required postal ballots for trade union elections, which was incorporated into the Trade Union Act 1984 and the Employment Act 1988. We outlawed political indoctrination in schools, which was incorporated into the Education Act 1986 and carried forward in the Education Act 1996. We prohibited local councils from publishing material that

“promotes or opposes a point of view on a question of political controversy which is identifiable as the view of one political party and not of another”,

which was incorporated into section 27 of the Local Government Act 1988. Finally, we more strictly defined the concept of “due impartiality” in the coverage of politically contentious issues on television and radio, which was incorporated into the Broadcasting Act 1990.

Every one of those measures was got through the House of Lords first, and then either adopted in the House of Commons directly or brought forward by the Government in their alternative proposals. We do away with the expertise of the House of Lords at our peril. All we will be left with are machine politicians, whether they are in one elected House or two elected Houses, and that is to the detriment of our democracy, not to its enhancement.

[Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)]

Thank you for calling me to speak, Madam Chair. I am honoured to serve under your chairmanship.

Before I begin my prepared remarks, I wish to commend and pay tribute to right hon. and hon. Members across the House for their skills of oratory and persuasion and their education and ability to entertain. It has been an absolute privilege to hear Members with such experience speak, so well-informed are they on such topics.

I also wish to speak to new Labour Members who, like me, are finding their feet and learning the ways of the world in this place. I am pleased to hear that they are passionate about pushing and challenging their party to implement the laws and changes that the constituents and the country demand. but I remind them of the consequences of that. Rebellion, as I have seen in this short time, is rewarded with sanction or suspension, so it is better to get as much as possible into this Bill now than to hope that they may ever get a chance to do so again.

The House has been made aware that faith in political parties and institutions is at a low ebb—perhaps the lowest in my lifetime. We have been told that only 12% of the British public say that they trust politicians; political parties are the least trusted of any UK public institution, and trust in Parliament is on the decline. Any measure that helps to rebuild that trust is to be supported, which is why I support this Government Bill to remove hereditary peers. The anachronistic nature of hereditary peerage contributes to the sense not only that the House of Lords is out of touch, but that all our political institutions are out of touch. It feeds a disconnect between the people and their systems of governance and reinforces a belief that politics is the preserve of another elite, the political elite, that lives in its own bubble in Westminster.

Given this urgency to rebuild faith in politics and the need for radical change to that end, it is disappointing that the Government have chosen to be so timid in their ambition. I understand that further changes could be introduced further down the road. Indeed, hon. Members have said that they will try to push for more changes. For instance, perhaps they could remove the over-80s from the Lords, or retire the 26 bishops who are automatically given a seat.

The Lords themselves have raised the idea of removing those Members who rarely, if ever, attend. But even these tame reforms appear to be too much for this Government at this stage. We need much bolder action.

[Phil Brickell]

I thank the hon. Member for giving way. Does he accept that this is the first immediate measure of modernisation of the other House and that there are a number of other commitments that are enshrined in the manifesto of this Government, which will be seen to in due course in this Parliament?

[Iqbal Mohamed]

I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. I agree that the Bill is a positive step, but it is the smallest of the steps that could have been taken by this Government. As we all know in this place, the promise of jam tomorrow is just a promise and hardly ever materialises. We need much bolder action now. It is bad enough that we are alone in Europe in having a fully unelected second Chamber. It is frankly ridiculous that, with more than 800 Members, it is so large. I will put that into some perspective: the US Senate has 100 elected members, who serve a six-year term, and a third of the membership is elected every two years; the Canadian Senate has 105 members and a mandatory retirement age of 75; and the French Senate has 348 elected members, who serve six-year terms, half of whom are up for election every three years.

The fact that our second Chamber has been allowed to balloon out of all proportion looks more sinister when we consider that last year Lords appointees donated over £50 million to political parties. When it looks like our political institutions are up for grabs to the highest bidder, with jobs for life, is it any wonder that people see it as another private members’ club?

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir John Hayes]

The hon. Gentleman seems to be making a case for an elected second Chamber. Does he imagine that that Chamber would be elected at the same time as this one, in which case it would be a duplicate because the electorate are very unlikely to vote in different ways on the same day, or is he suggesting that it would be elected at a different time, in which case the Chamber that was elected most recently would surely claim greater legitimacy and therefore greater authority?

[Iqbal Mohamed]

The right hon. Member makes a very important point. I, as a new Member of Parliament, am not educated or informed enough to answer it immediately, and I would defer to the House to define how that process would work.

[Dr Murrison]

I am listening with the greatest of respect and interest to the hon. Member. Does he think that there would be virtue and merit in having a unicameral system, a bit like the plan B suggested by my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis), rather than having a competing elected upper House—because this is the primary Chamber in our system?

[Iqbal Mohamed]

Again, I will confess to my lack of knowledge on the detail around the alternative proposed by the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis). I would defer to the House to select an appropriate working model that best represented the people of our country.

[Stephen Gethins (Arbroath and Broughty Ferry) (SNP)]

The hon. Member makes a powerful point about listening and having the best system. However, does he agree that having all the power located in one Chamber and not having a division of powers—as exists in other countries—is an idea with merit, which should be looked at? The principle of sovereignty, of course, differs between English law and Scots law, and therefore we need to have a good and proper look at our governance mechanisms.

[Iqbal Mohamed]

That is a very important point. I agree that representation across the four nations is key, and that the balance between the two Houses and how they work together is also very important.

We have seen what happens when people feel alienated from their political system: they can gravitate to those with divisive answers. Unaddressed political grievances combined with a lack of faith in political institutions can be a toxic combination. Reforming the House of Lords so that it is fit and proper is not the sole solution to that problem, but is a key part of the solution. We in this House, as elected officials, have a duty to do the right thing at the right time in the right way to deliver the right outcome for our constituents and our country, and the right thing is to adopt the sensible and democratic amendments that have been tabled, and the right time to do that is now.

[The Chairman of Ways and Means (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call the Minister.