King’s Speech

Lord Burns Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Burns (CB)]

My Lords, I begin by welcoming the noble Lord, Lord Booth, and I congratulate him on his speech. He said that he was born in the mining town of Houghton-le-Spring, in the Durham coalfields. I was born in Hetton-le-Hole, two miles away; I went to school at Houghton-le-Spring and my father worked at Houghton colliery for the best part of 50 years, so I look forward to hearing from the noble Lord in the future as he brings his wisdom, both from Houghton-le-Spring and from all of the other things that he has done.

I will devote my remarks to the paragraph in the gracious Speech relating to constitutional reform and reducing the size of the House of Lords. In principle, I welcome the Government’s proposal to remove the right of hereditary Peers to sit and vote in the Lords. However, I have several regrets. I regret that the proposal for hereditary Members would mean that we would lose some of the valued and diligent Members who I have worked with on committees in this House. I regret that the outgoing Government did not take advantage of the attempt made by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, to abolish the hereditary by-elections and help to bring about reform earlier and more gradually—we would have been in a much better position if that had happened—and I regret the persistent increase over the past 14 years in the appointment of Conservative Peers relative to the appointment of Labour Peers. This has resulted in fewer Labour Members today than in 2010. It has brought us this imbalance in numbers and is, no doubt, one of the factors which is leading to the urgency of the Bill on hereditary Peers.

Of course, the previous Government were not unique in how they dealt with appointments to this House or in putting upward pressure on House of Lords numbers. For some time, Prime Ministers have appointed disproportionately to their own party. There is no control on this by either law or convention. Generally, appointments to the government party or parties have been between two and three times the number of appointments to the main opposition party. This has applied whether we have had a Conservative or Labour Administration, or a coalition. It is also the case that since 1979, whichever of the main party groups has been in opposition has seen its numbers fall. This is not a recent problem: the number of Labour life Peers also fell between 1979 and 1997; the number of Conservative life Peers fell between 1997 and 2010; and, of course, the number of Labour Peers has fallen since 2010.

This is what produced what we discussed in the Lord Speaker’s Committee on the Size of the House as the process of leapfrogging. With each change of governing party, the new Government find themselves with fewer Members than the new main Opposition. The only way of restoring balance in the number of seats is to have a significant number of new appointments and therefore an increase in the size of the House. After the elections in both 1997 and 2010, the size of the House quickly increased by over 100 life Members. This has become the process by which the House has steadily risen in size, the largest steps taking place when there has been a change of government. Of course, this leapfrogging can take place only because Prime Ministers can make any number of appointments that they wish to the House, as well as to whichever party they choose, and because there is no cap on the size of the House of Lords, unlike probably all other legislative chambers. These fundamental problems were the background to the proposals that the Lord Speaker’s committee, of which I have been very pleased to be the chair, looked at.

Looking at our proposals, I think that they are still as relevant today as when we made them several years ago. The first proposal, and for me the most important, is that there should be a cap on the size of the House. We suggested that the cap should be 600. Without a cap, there are no constraints on appointments and a cap on size will incentivise much more careful scrutiny of the nominations and who is chosen to be sent here.

Our second proposal was that the balance of appointments between parties during a Parliament should reflect the results of the most recent general election. We opted for the average of the percentage of the national vote and the percentage of seats in the Commons. This would constrain the current practice of over-appointment by the governing party and the relative neglect of appointments to the opposition parties. It would be another very important step in removing this need for leapfrogging, which brings with it the increasing size of the House.

Our third proposal was that appointments should be for a limited term. This would create room for refreshment of the membership without increasing the size of the House. With a House of 600 Members, a 20-year term would generate an average of 30 vacancies a year, enough to cover the historic number of appointments that we see; a 15-year term would generate even more.

This takes me to the proposal in the Labour Party manifesto of an age limit of 80. I declare an interest in this limit, as I have already passed it. Nevertheless, in my view an age limit has a useful part to play in getting numbers down. However, on its own it is unlikely to be sufficient to prevent the same problems emerging in the future. It does not resolve the problem of leapfrogging. The age limit needs to be buttressed by the sorts of changes that I have mentioned. If they were introduced, the need for an age limit would actually disappear.