Procedure and Privileges

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Monday 22nd February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Senior Deputy Speaker for producing this report, and for being the Senior Deputy Speaker who is regularly criticised for not going as far as we would like but probably not as far as he can go anyway.

As usual, I will make myself somewhat unpopular with this side of the House, because I fundamentally agree with the noble Lords, Lord Grocott and Lord Foulkes. I do so on a very good, historical basis. Our noble friends the hereditary Peers have said that this was part of the 1999 settlement, and it cannot be undone until there is a final settlement, but there will never be a final settlement. We had the Lloyd George/Asquith reforms, the Attlee reforms, the Macmillan reforms of hereditary peerages, and the Blair reform. Let us not kid ourselves: the 90 hereditary Peers—we can discount the extra two who are royal warrant holders—were part of a deal which, if I remember rightly, cost the then Leader of the Conservative group his job. He fell out with William Hague, who was then the leader of the Opposition, because the latter felt that the deal should not have been done in the way that it was, but it was done, and we have now moved on 20-odd years. To my mind, it is now time for some more reform.

In the run-up to the last election, after it had been called, I spoke to a very senior member of the Labour Party in the other House about the Grocott Bill. I asked, “Do you think you’ll support it?” This person said, “We don’t need to support it. They’ll be gone within three months. It’ll be a great idea because we could even up the numbers of the House by cutting down the number of Peers in the Conservative Party, and no one is going to get up to defend the Lords. We’ll be popular all round.”

We need to step back. We keep going on about being a self-regulating House, yet we cannot even manage to get Bruce’s Bill debated. That is how self-regulating we are, and we need to look at that. It would be easy to abolish the 90, and to reform the Lords. The one thing I can project and predict is that this side of the House would not like it. We would be the ones who would lose out, because if we do not get down to reforming the institution in such a way that broadly commands support, we will find it thrust upon us, and there will be no hereditary Peers. As my friend—I still have the odd friend in the Labour Party—said, “We’ll have them all out within three months”.

I hope that the Senior Deputy Speaker continues with his zeal for reform, and I would make a practical suggestion. The Grocott Bill has never really been tested. I suggest that the Senior Deputy Speaker put it to the committee that by-elections be suspended until the Grocott Bill has been disposed of. It is as simple as that, and it is a challenge to the Government Front Bench to make it possible. We all know that it could be made possible. What have we been doing this afternoon? We have been debating the Suella Braverman maternity Bill, which came out of nowhere, because it is needed. If the devil drives, you can find solutions. That solution could be found. If we look at the numbers, we see that for the first full-House selection of an hereditary Peer on 27 March 2003 there were 661 eligible voters. By March 2017, the figure had gone up to 803. It then went down in January 2019 to 785 because of the restraint of Theresa May, but we are now back to 840.

There has got to be reform, and it will have to go much further than hereditary Peers. We must find a way of reducing the size of the House without stopping new people coming in. I see my noble friend Lord Hannan sitting next to me, and he is going to play a valuable role in this House, and we have to have a series of reforms which enable retirements so that the Benches can be refreshed. It is no good pulling up the drawbridge and saying that no one else can come in.

If we are a self-regulating House, let us get down to doing it, and let the Senior Deputy Speaker and his committee look at some creative ways of doing it. I have already pointed out to him that I have been given some very good legal advice that we could ration the entry of Members into the House. The Queen creates Peers, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, but it is the House that seats new Peers. Let us explore it. It was done in Victorian England, incidentally, which is where the legal precedent comes from. I ask for some creative thinking. I applaud the Senior Deputy Speaker and all his work, and I hope that before too long we can get around to doing what we should be doing. A self-regulating House should be a “self-sort it out a bit better” House.