House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Jamie Stone Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Thursday 4th September 2025 Commons Chamber

It is not wrong to say that it is clearly easier for somebody to be a Lord and serve in the other place if they already have a base in London, and the figures bear that out. If we look at the Lords’ own surveys, we see that they show the breakdown of where each Lord comes from. About a quarter of them come from London, about 20% come from the south-east and only around 5% come from Yorkshire and the Humber, despite my region being home to 9% of the population—I am rounding up there, so forgive me for that.

[Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

What about Scotland?

[Mark Sewards]

The hon. Gentleman chunters from a sedentary position. When it comes to Scotland, the figure is about 2% or 3%—I cannot recall the actual figures, but I will check.

The point remains that we have to make the House of Lords more representative of our nations and regions. We could address this issue in a piecemeal way, in the same way that we have addressed the hereditary issue over many decades. We could slowly introduce reform after reform on who gets appointed, where they come from, what proportion have to come from Yorkshire and so on, but I am not a fan of that approach. We should be as bold as possible and do the difficult work now, because we were elected to do the difficult work in this term and set out an ambitious plan for the wholesale replacement of the other Chamber, ready to be made up of people from all our nations and regions. It should be a truly democratic body that draws on the same golden thread that should always exist between the people we serve in this place and those who should sit in a second elected Chamber. [Interruption.] Hon. Members chunter that this point is off topic; I probably agree, because the Bill does not cover that.

I will draw my remarks to a close. The Bill in front of us will remove the archaic right of somebody to sit in Parliament because of the family they were born into; I find that principle very hard to disagree with. The Bill shows our determination to make our democracy stronger and more representative, and it should be just the start of our commitment to reform the other place and improve our ability to do what we were all sent here to do: serve the public.