House of Lords (Cessation of Membership) Bill [HL]

Lord Bates Excerpts

Friday 29th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord on bringing forward this Bill, and I want to support it. It is in the nature of these things that the legislation is seeking to tidy up some anomalies. My only concern is to ensure that we are not laying down future anomalies that successive Parliaments will have to deal with. My noble friend Lord Fowler has highlighted one that relates to the definition of non-attendance. The notion that someone might attend once during a Session and therefore be deemed to have reached the threshold might need to be looked at a little more carefully, lest we find that the 72 Members who were quoted as not having attended during the last Session may have been substantially reduced in number because they came in once in order to keep their membership alive, as it were.

The proposal on retirement is long overdue: people ought not only to be able to leave the House through retirement but to seek election to another place. The Inter-Parliamentary Union database indicated that, as of 28 May 2012 in a survey of 190 countries, the UK is the only country where Members of the second Chamber are disqualified from voting in elections to the lower Chamber. As my noble friend Lord Norton has pointed out, since the 1999 Act there has been a break in the link so that hereditary Peers who no longer sit in this House are now able to vote and, one presumes, to stand for election to the other place as well.

There are other anomalies that relate to the role of the Lords Spiritual because they are not Peers of the Realm, a point already made by the right reverend Prelate in his contribution—

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

What the noble Lord said just a few moments ago has already happened. My good friend Viscount Thurso, who is still a hereditary Peer, is now the Member of Parliament for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross. I think he owns most of it as well.

--- Later in debate ---

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Bates]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for that clarification. However, I shall return to the point about the Lords Spiritual. They are not deemed to be Peers of the Realm and, as a consequence, have the right to vote in general elections, although by convention they do not exercise the right. However, there have been certain instances such as in 1983 when the then Archbishop of Canterbury indicated that he had exercised his right to vote. I mention this simply because, as we are given these opportunities to clear up certain anomalies, it would be a sensible thing to do.

There is an opportunity in the other place for people to leave the House of Commons by assuming the office of the Chiltern Hundreds. Doing so disqualifies them from membership of that House and thus frees them up. It is like a Trivial Pursuit question: which office has been held by the noble Lords, Lord Bannside and Lord Mandelson, Boris Johnson and Gerry Adams? The answer is, of course, the office of the Chiltern Hundreds, followed by stewardship of the Manor of Northstead, although I am sure it would be a mercy if they did not all assume those offices at the same time. The point is that there is a mechanism for people to leave the other place, but there is no equivalent for Members to leave this House. It is therefore absolutely right that there should be one.

We have mentioned the anomaly of hereditary Peers, but another one relates to service in the European Parliament. By virtue of the law when it was changed in 2008, the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, from the Liberal Democrat Benches, is no longer allowed to sit or vote in this Chamber while she serves in the European Parliament. There are mechanisms that disqualify certain people and extend certain rights to others. Given that, during the progress of this Bill we ought to look at ways of tidying up these anomalies while we wait for the greater reforms to come. However, in a broad sense I strongly support the Bill as a step in the right direction.