House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Bishop of Leeds Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Leeds]

My Lords, I rise to speak in the gap because there was a clerical error. My name should have been on the list and was not, so the remarks about Bishops being strangely mute are perhaps unmerited. I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Brady, on his maiden speech. All I can say to the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, is that the end is now more nigh than when this debate began, but I wish her well in the future. We heard Jesus quoted earlier:

“Greater love hath no man than this, than to lay down his life for his friends”.


Your Lordships will remember that Jeremy Thorpe famously said of Macmillan, after the night of the long knives:

“Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life”.


That might provide another lens through which to see this debate.

I have heard the observations about the Lords spiritual. I listened carefully to them and there were few surprises. But if we are going to look at reform in any way, we have to be a bit cannier about some of the facts. It has been said here today that we are all Peers. The Lords spiritual are not Peers; we are Lords of Parliament and that is different. If your Lordships do not know what that means, it is legitimacy for being here. The Lords spiritual have no illusions about the need for changes. We are behind that, but we need to be wiser about the nature of what we are doing.

We do not see our establishment as privilege but as obligation to serve. My life would be considerably easier if I did not have to do the day job, which is demanding enough, and this is an obligation to serve. The Lords spiritual were not born in dog collars, so we bring other stuff as well. In my own case, it was Soviet military intelligence as a multilinguist at GCHQ. That is not a reason for not kicking us out, but let us be a bit more nuanced about what we say. We bring experience and expertise.

We are also regional. We have heard a lot about the need to represent regions. Probably some of the best connected people in this country are diocesan bishops who oversee and engage with the whole of civil society, at just about every level in the regions. We are not whipped; we are independently minded, which is why we vote in different directions. Most importantly, as the current Government will find, we retire at the age of 70, so what one or two noble Lords have asked for is guaranteed: a turnover to bring in fresh blood. For one part of the House, that seems to me to be quite helpful.

The major thing I want to say is that I agree with what was said earlier—I cannot remember who said it now—about form following function. That is an important principle and I wonder if we have got the questions in the wrong order. If this reform is to go through, and no doubt it will, we have to look at how we guarantee the basic functions that this House is here to fulfil—and then what expertise and qualifications we need to enable the House to function properly. We will otherwise be left with the law of unintended consequences, where you pick at one bit and then the whole lot comes apart.

I am an advocate for wholesale change, not piecemeal. My fear is that you cannot look at reform of the House of Lords without looking at the whole picture of the constitution. I know that this has been rubbished in the course of this debate as the way of putting off any change, and that you have to start and do it bit by bit. I ask the noble Baroness the Leader of the House in her response to address the question of whether, if this is going to go ahead piecemeal—one element which might be approved or disapproved of by many—can it be in the context of the Government establishing a constitutional commission to look at the whole picture? Even as this element is being looked at, it should form part of a greater whole that then gives the assurance that there is a sense of direction in which all the different elements that have been raised here today can be looked at. Then we can have the confidence that the further changes will be rational, properly thought through and credible.