House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Beith Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, I gladly if slightly sadly extend my good wishes to the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, as she looks forward to a Northumbrian retirement. I hope I shall see quite a bit of her. She has done excellent public work in so many capacities. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Brady of Altrincham, on an excellent and very interesting maiden speech—interesting not least in his support for an elected second Chamber. That is the position of my party and has been since we put it in the 1911 Act, as well as pursuing it during the coalition Government.

I support this Bill. It will lead to our losing some much-valued and able colleagues, but we will have won the principle that ancestry confers no place in the legislature. Of course, the Bill takes no steps towards wider and more fundamental reforms, such as the creation of an elected House, which my party and I want, but blocking the Bill would not do so, either, and the notion that keeping the 92 Peers would somehow make it more likely for wider reform to take place has been shown to be quite false. The Government are talking a bit about consultation on time limits, participation and age limits, but no fundamental change will come before this Parliament under the present Government. They would have to be a very different Government for that to be the case.

There are two particular reasons for this. One is that it is difficult to the point of impossibility to get legislation through the House to make fundamental changes to the composition of this Chamber. Even this Bill might have a few difficulties, but a fundamental Bill would have considerable ones. Secondly, and more importantly, the Government—any Government—like the situation we have now. What is not to like if you are the Executive in having a second Chamber that does all the spade work on legislation but, if it says, “This is going too far and needs to be reconsidered”, can be denounced and dismissed as having no mandate as an unelected House? It puts the second Chamber in a weak position that we have to address, and having an elected House would be one way of addressing it—elected not in an identical way to the House of Commons or on the same timescale, but under a different procedure.

Since we are up against what I see as a severe barrier to radical reform, certainly for the time being, it would be quite wrong for us to say, “Because everything can’t be done, nothing should be done”. That applies not only to this Bill. I took part in the Burns committee, set up by the then Lord Speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, to consider ways of controlling the ever-growing size of the House. We proposed an agreement between the parties and groups, to be matched by restraint on the part of the Prime Minister, to limit the number of new appointments on a two-out, one-in basis, which would have allowed for retirement and refreshment of the various groups by bringing in new Peers with much-needed skills and experience, with a formula reflecting past election results.

Of course, the noble Baroness, Lady May, showed restraint during her time as Prime Minister. Her successors did not, and that pretty much torpedoed progress on the Burns proposals. At the moment, we are preserving a situation in which the occupant of No. 10 Downing Street can send whomever they like to this House: special advisers, lawyers to fill law officer posts, donors, celebrities and people, mentioned several times today, who think they are getting an honour and do not seem to realise that they are getting a job with duties and responsibilities.

The House of Lords is at its most popular when it challenges the Executive on some matter of great public importance. It is at its most unpopular when attention is drawn to the methods by which people are appointed to it. Over the years, this House has, by agreement, made quite significant changes and adjustments to cope with a changing world and expectations, and the need to be less distant from those whom we serve. We have a capacity, perhaps to a greater extent than the Commons, to reach agreement and resolve disagreement pragmatically and achieve results. Since we are not going to get radical legislation in the very near future, that kind of reform seems to be barred for the moment. Surely, we can make some progress rather than persisting with a broken appointments system. Once this Bill has passed, we should look again at the potential of the agreement, which the House supported, in the Burns proposals and the means that they suggested for achieving a better representation in this House and a dignity which the House deserves for the work that it does.