House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, the Bill ends the so-called hereditary aspect of this House. Christmas is approaching, and while, as one of the so-called turkeys directly affected by the Bill, I might abstain on it, I certainly do not propose to obstruct or delay it. However, I note the suggestion of quite a number in this House, including life Peers, that, in ending the hereditary aspect of the House, useful so-called hereditary contributors should be converted to life Peers. We shall see.

I turn to wider reforms, some of which were trailed in the Government’s manifesto. The Minister has had many informal representations, and I think we all admire her for her openness to those. Nevertheless, there comes a point when discussion ends and action follows. I realise that asking “When?” in a Parliament is typically an exercise in futility. However, the hereditaries shortly departing this House in the good faith expectation of wider reform without delay deserve a specific assurance that the Government have a timeframe in mind that they can share with the House. [Interruption.] If the noble Lord could stop gesturing in front of me, that would be very helpful. I therefore ask the Minister to indicate in summing up how and when any formal structured consultations will be organised, over what period they will occur and when legislation for further reform will be brought forward.

Many speeches today include suggestions to the Government, and I shall make two that I believe will be fundamental to successful reform. First, the unrestrained ability of party leaders to dangle peerages as rewards before, and then to appoint, their mates, their loyalists and their donors is both a numerical disaster and a reputational cancer at the heart of this place. I welcome the recent announcement that party leaders must explain their nominations, but that is a long way short of a proper selection and appointment process. Crucially, such appointments must be subject to a tight numerical limit that cannot be exceeded. That would at least put a lid on the inflows from that source.

Secondly, on participation, this is a place of work—of public service. If we can produce legislation to discard some of the most engaged and hard-working Members of this House, surely we can summon up the courage to send on their way those who do not engage or put the work in. I do not take the “everything or nothing” line—I agree with the Government on that—but the participation element should have been part of this Bill, and it would have accelerated progress towards a resized House with active Members. Failure to include that is not only unjust to those who do engage but also has two ongoing negative consequences: first, it tells new, and current, Peers that non-engagement is perfectly acceptable; secondly, it ducks the only meaningful way to reduce the membership both at scale and on a logical basis.

I hear some say that it is too difficult to construct a metric or criterion for that. It is not difficult: we already collect the data; we just need to have the guts to use them. I am talking not about an automated process but about a factual basis for discussions, giving ample opportunity to understand an individual Member’s situation. But Members unable or unwilling to engage sufficiently should resign or, failing that, have their membership ended—courteously but firmly.

No system is without its challenges, but the current lack of any real system to remove non-contributors is exactly why we are where we are today, in terms of both size and engagement. Some others say that this might lead to performative participation, for the sake of it. But engagement with the work of the House, in debates, speeches, committees and so on, requires time, effort and turning up regularly, so I believe that such performative behaviours would die back pretty quickly.

If we are genuinely serious about reducing numbers, and if a peerage does mean turning up and participating, we need to get on with making that the case. The alternative is the continuation of the current culture—something that the removal of the so-called hereditaries by the Bill does nothing to address. Indeed, ejecting engaged Members while leaving untouched the disengaged is an insult to the former and would simply ingrain the behaviours of the latter.

To conclude, I take on trust the manifesto promises of further reform, but I hope that the Government will do four things. First, look again at the “babies and bath-water” aspect of removing useful so-called hereditary Members of this House. Secondly, limit numerically the patronage of party leaders in appointing new Members. Thirdly, commit themselves, within a given timeframe, to implementing an effective participation requirement as a condition of a peerage for both new and existing Peers. Finally, look seriously at limited terms and at enforcing the “two out, one in” principle.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

I believe the noble Baroness just quoted me as saying something about the number of Cross-Benchers. I did not say any such thing; I just said that I hope that some useful hereditary Members would be retained as life Peers. That is all I said.

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord. I said that I understood the noble Lord’s understanding to be that there would be some Cross-Bench Peers who could be converted to life Peers.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

I hope that there will be some; I did not give any number, I believe.

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord. If the Government accept that some excepted Peers deserve to stay, why not extend that principle to all those who have contributed so much to the work of this House? Does the Lord Privy Seal accept that an unwillingness on the part of the Government to make such a concession gives rise to the impression that the motivations for presenting the Bill are not as principled as the Government would wish us to accept?

If the Bill passes in its current form, the result will be a disproportionate reduction in the number of Cross-Bench and Opposition Peers. We will say goodbye to over 80 noble Lords who come here to scrutinise the Government’s legislation, while the Executive will lose just four of their Peers in this House. If the Bill were seeking to remove any other group of Peers, everyone would see it for what it is. So does the Lord Privy Seal accept that it would be altogether better for the Government to offer life peerages to all those excepted Peers who wish to continue to serve, as my noble friend Lady Goldie has suggested, rather than cherry-pick excepted Peers who may receive life Peerages after the passage of the Bill?

Such an approach would, at the very least, help assuage concerns that many of us have about the Government’s motivations for presenting the Bill. Let us not pretend otherwise: this is not neutral reform. This is about neutering the ability of this House to hold the Government to account, a concern raised by my noble friend Lord Parkinson in relation to the passage of the Football Governance Bill.

The constitutional role of this House can be justified only by the quality of the contribution that we, collectively, are able to make to public life. In the absence of any electoral mandate, we must justify our work through the care with which assist, oppose, scrutinise and amend. Excluding an entire category of Members is profound and fundamentally alters the balance and collective experience of the House. The Bill proposes the removal of many dedicated noble Lords based not on the quality of their contributions but on their collective legal status. It places far greater power for the Prime Minister alone to determine the legislature, a point made by my noble and learned friend Lord Keen of Elie, my noble friend Lord Murray, the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and the noble Lord, Lord Burns. Judged by legal status alone, none of us can be secure that our future in this place will not be cut short at the whim of the Executive.

This Bill does not honour the past, nor does it secure the future. It weakens this House, betrays constitutional commitments and serves no public good. Reform is necessary, but it must be principled and founded in consultation and consensus. Reform must strengthen Parliament, not diminish it. A Government who fear scrutiny are not strong; they are insecure. A House that loses its independence is not modern; it is diminished. I urge this House and this Government to reflect on the path we are taking. Let us find a better way forward that respects our history, honours our promises and secures the integrity of this Chamber for generations to come.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 3rd March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I draw the noble Baroness’s attention to my own amendment, which I hope has been brought forward in a spirit of humility, suggesting that there be a cap on the number of special advisers that Prime Ministers can nominate. The reason I have tabled that amendment, and the one which I see did not find favour from my noble friend Lord Forsyth of Drumlean about former Members of Parliament, is that I worry that a Bill that empowers Prime Ministers to make the sole decision about who scrutinises them and the Government they lead in one of our Houses of Parliament ought not to give such an open-ended power to them.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, we started the debate today with a conciliatory and constructive tone from the Front Benches, which I found optimistic and encouraging. I fear that things have gone pretty steeply downhill since that time, and they have also gone way off track from the amendments under discussion. I have Amendment 63: I am beginning to wonder whether I will live long enough to ever reach it.

For all the shadow-boxing and enjoyable eloquence that we have had, this really seems to come down to a numbers question. That is the real horse-trading that is needed here. It is a number between 0 and 88, and I really wish we could lock the noble Baroness the Leader of the House, the Front-Bench leaders and our Convenor in a room, adjourn for the afternoon and see whether they can hammer out that number. If they could, I suspect that a lot of these amendments would fall away. If they could not, battle could recommence.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I respectfully disagree with the noble Lord. I think this is about more than numbers; it is about a constitutional principle. It is right, as my noble friend Lord Caithness has done, to point out the powers that the Bill will give to the Prime Minister in the interim, and for those of us who remember how long the interim was after the 1999 reforms to caution the House about accepting a promise that ends with a full stop and says no more. However, what the noble Lord says about the spirit of consensus is important and, in that spirit, I shall conclude my remarks there and allow the noble Baroness to respond to the debate.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 3rd March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to all who have spoken, and particularly my noble friend Lord Trenchard for his amendment, which is a very useful contribution to considering how to take this idea forward. I think my noble friend Lord Strathcarron is quite right that the elections process produces candidates who have staying power and determination over time, bringing us closer to democracy—not a huge amount closer to democracy, but at least it is a move in the right direction. I share the wish of my noble friend Lord Moylan to be much more radical in that. However, nothing in my experience of the House suggests that we will get there. It never seems to appeal to our colleagues down the other end.

As to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, asking whether we would vote for a ballerina, the noble Lord needs to look at the background of the hereditary Peers that we have elected. We have artists, we have film producers and we have a number of other people whose hearts are very much in the arts. There is a notorious propensity for hereditary Peers to marry ballerinas, so I do not believe that there is any prejudice inherent in us against that particular profession.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

Apart from my curiosity about the noble Lord’s earlier remark about hairdressers, I cannot resist pointing out that my great-great-grandmother was in the Ballets Russes.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

There we have it, and a very fine great-great-grandchild she has, too.

I am grateful for the support from my noble friends Lord Murray of Blidworth and Lord Strathclyde, who quite rightly said that, if we are to believe that the Government as a whole, as opposed to any individual, are actually determined on giving us another House of Lords Bill within this Parliament or the next, a Green Paper would be the least of our expectations. Get the proposals out there for discussion. Let us get this process on the road. Without that, all history says that this will run into the sand. Those who, like me, have tried through Governments of both colours to move changes to this House and have never succeeded know just how hard it is. It really is extremely difficult to get the machinery of government to spend time contemplating what should be done with the House of Lords.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 10th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Thurso (LD)]

My Lords, my Amendment 66 has been grouped with these amendments. I will briefly explain what the amendment does and then make a valiant, though likely unsuccessful, attempt to persuade the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, that it would be worth accepting.

My amendment seeks to address the fact that there is broad agreement across the House that in some way, shape or form the length of time that people sit in the House should not be indefinite. The concept of a seat for life has no more validity than a seat for life that has been inherited. The report from the noble Lord, Lord Burns, suggested 15 years, as referred to in Amendment 13. I have chosen a term of 20 years precisely because 15 years sounds like something I can imagine, whereas 20 years sounds somewhat more gentle. The number has been chosen so as not to frighten the horses.

The amendment would amend the Life Peerages Act such that the right to receive a Writ of Summons would be limited to 20 years from the moment someone took their seat in the House. That would mean that if somebody happened to be just under the 20 years when an election was called, they would get a Writ of Summons and could get up to 24 years. If they were lucky—or unlucky, depending on your point of view—to have sat for 20 years when an election was called, that would be their lot. By referring to a Writ of Summons, the amendment has the merit of meaning that anyone who was limited would get to the end of the Parliament they were sitting in so that if they were chairing a committee or running a Bill, they would be able to complete their work.

The amendment is deliberately designed to affect peerages granted after the passage of this Bill. There is quite a lot of feeling, one way or another, about the concept of changing the terms of employment, as it were, for people who are already here. Therefore, people given a peerage in the future would know precisely what they would be doing and the length of time they would serve.

An alternative for terms of reference, which will be debated later, is a retirement age. I do not favour retirement ages because I have met people of considerable age with great faculties and abilities and some people of not very great age who do not have great faculties and abilities. I would rather have, as happens in the other place, a term limit based on moment of arrival and moment of departure, rather than an arbitrary one based on age.

The key difference between this amendment and virtually any other that will be tabled is that it does not affect anybody who is currently sitting in the House. Why, therefore, have I brought it forward? I hope to persuade the Leader of the House that it may be worth considering and possibly accepting.

As I mentioned in the debate on the last group, I have been around the houses on Lords reform for the best part of 30 years, across two Houses. Apart from the fact that anybody who engages in that requires a certain degree of stamina, I have noticed that progress has been remarkably small and often barely incremental. The amendment therefore seeks to put in a longstop. If it is accepted, it would change nothing at the moment. If the Government go ahead, as promised, and bring something forward in the remainder of this Parliament, nothing has changed; this is perfectly reversible and whatever changes might be thought appropriate by the Government can go ahead. It has no impact on anything that might be discussed. But if the circumstance arises—and the odds are probably in favour of this circumstance—that for one reason or another, such as international affairs or all sorts of different reasons, time is not found in this Parliament for any further reform, and the electoral maths changes so that the next term might be more difficult, we would be back to having another 10 or 15 years before something happens.

If, therefore, we are really interested in the size of the House coming down—I think we all wish to see that—and if some form of limited term is appropriate, the amendment puts this out into the distance. It is exactly like crown green bowls, where you put one ball right at the back, just in case. If nothing happens, there would be a longstop that would start to see a reduction in the numbers.

I would like to think that my amendment has been drafted in a way that has some elegance and grace and would solve a problem that I hope we will not have and therefore could be disregarded. But in case we do have the problem, it is a mechanism planted into the future that would have some control over the size of your Lordships’ House. For those reasons, I hope the Government might consider this amendment, or something very like it, as a workable proposition, and use the Bill for this tiny addition that would have no impact on the vast bulk of what they are seeking to achieve.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, instinctively, I like limited terms. It is like running a board: you know who is leaving, when they are leaving and what skills they have, and you recruit to replace them in an orderly way rather than relying on the grim reaper to do it for you. I often say about 15-year terms that it is five years to learn the job, five years to be effective and five years to go out of date. I fear that I may offend a few in the Chamber today by making that mathematical assertion.

In practice, there is one point that we need to consider with regard to limited terms: what then? If people have spent their peak career earning years in this House and then leave at 50 or 60—with no pension from this employer, by the way—are we in danger of putting people off from joining us because they have nothing to look forward to as a support beyond the time they spend here? I worry that your Lordships’ House would become more attractive to people of independent means and less attractive to people who are not in that lucky position.

[Viscount Thurso (LD)]

May I respond to the noble Lord briefly, as we are in Committee? If one looks at the average age at which people come into this House, it is at the end of their careers, just below or above 60. Therefore, 20 years takes most people who come into this House from mid-50s to mid-70s or early 60s to early 80s. Under the current arrangements, there are relatively few people who come into the House as a full-time occupation who are in their primary working years. I know that there are exceptions, and exceptions always prove the rule. However, if we wish to have some longstop, my amendment takes care of most of the points he has made. If people know in advance that they are being offered something for 20 years, they always have the choice of declining.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 12th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

My Lords, my amendment is very technical. It provides simply that the sanction should not apply if the Member has good reason for not participating.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I have Amendment 63 in this group. If we can help the Front Bench with musical lyrics, it is surely:

“Oh what a circus, oh what a show”.


I declare my interest as a so-called hereditary Peer. I will make two general points before I turn to the detail of my amendment.

First, as earlier speeches from right across the House have made clear, it is accepted that the hereditary principle is no longer suitable and that the suspension of by-elections should become permanent. The Bill achieves that, full stop—a piece of punctuation that seems to have taken on unparalleled significance in our debates on this Bill.

Secondly, on Monday some noble Lords stated either on their feet or in not very sotto voce sedentary mutterings that all amendments are irrelevant, because this is a single-objective Bill. While I understand that view and share the intense frustration with the speed of the debate, some of the degrouping and the gratuitous rudeness to the Leader of the House, particularly on the first day, I nevertheless understand that amendments have been put down and marshalled in the usual way. Most are probing and, while they may seek to go beyond the tight circumference of the current text of the Bill, I am not sure that they can simply be dismissed as irrelevant. Such amendments have arisen because there is a widely expressed concern that, once the expulsion of the hereditaries is done, all further reform will again grind to a halt and the House will sink quietly back into a pattern of prime ministerial patronage and ever-growing size, neither of which enhance its reputation or credibility.

My amendment does not seek to obstruct the purpose of the Bill, but it does invite the Government to take some practical steps to enable the further reform to which their manifesto commits them. Amendment 63, like some others, addresses the issue of participation, but not by prescribing in advance and in detail exactly what such reform should comprise—rather, by seeking simply to put in place a process and timeline to progress it, something that speaker after speaker has been calling for over the days of this debate. It is thus complementary to the single purpose of the Bill and could be added to it without obstructing that purpose in any way.

The focus of this amendment is participation, for the following reasons. First, it is a Member’s participation and contributions, be they aged 91 or 21, that most affect both the quality and the reputation of this House. To touch briefly on a related point of age limits, I understand the convincing argument for imposing an age limit as a matter of public perception, and a wide range of dates was suggested in the debate on Monday and examples given of very competent individuals who would be lost at each gradation. I am not against an age limit, but what the debate on Monday actually highlighted was the inability of Whips to require Members to retire when—and there is no point tiptoeing around this—participation in the work of the House has become too challenging for them. Maybe that is the problem that needs to be addressed.

Secondly, a participation requirement is a commitment that needs to be transformed from a manifesto statement to an implementable set of actions. Finally, and I apologise for introducing a personal note, it does rather sting to be dismissed en bloc but leave behind some Peers—and there is no shortage—who do not attend, or who attend, claim their allowances and then do not participate.

The amendment has three key features. First, it requires, within six months of the Bill becoming an Act, that a cross-party group be set up to consult, to define participation and to establish suitable metrics to measure it. I have been told that defining participation is too difficult. It is not. The “too difficult” mantra has been given as an excuse for far too long. No doubt a range of views will be contributed to the cross-party group, as other amendments in this group illustrate, and account should be taken of previous work in this area. This amendment embraces both those factors. We already collect most of the necessary data, but previous Governments have, I am afraid to say, simply lacked the firmness of purpose to act on it.

This brings me to the amendment’s second feature: it enables the setting up of the processes required to implement the participation requirement as a basis for continued membership. Not all aspects of the outcome will please everyone completely, but we need to move beyond the wringing of hands and the gnashing of gums in order to resolve the participation gap in a practical way.

Some time ago we had the excellent Burns report, which made recommendations that Members across the House supported, but these have not been implemented. Other speakers on Monday recited a long list of failures to implement change. We need to do better. That is why the third and final feature of this amendment is to require the Government to bring forward measures to ensure that the findings are implemented. While the amendment as drafted anticipates the Government getting a grip on this, the House might itself, if it has the powers to do so, take responsibility for setting up the group, ensuring its work is done and carrying it forward to implementation. That is certainly worthy of consideration, so long as it does not become yet another consultation that, in the best traditions of Sir Humphrey, in “Yes Minister”, simply delays and dissolves what actually needs to be done.

In conclusion, this amendment does not—and I underline this—seek in any way to thwart the single-minded purpose of the Bill. It does not prescribe how participation should be defined, quantified or implemented, but it does put in place a process and a timeframe of 20 months for reform, based on participation, once the Bill is passed. For a Government who are serious about reforming this House, it is an opportunity to address its size, effectiveness, cost and reputation—all things that most Members agree are not currently what they should be. I therefore hope that the Minister will seize on this amendment, both as a means to move forward with the Bill and to demonstrate in practical terms the Government’s absolute commitment to resolving the participation issue: not in a general, aspirational sense, or as something that, in a phrase heard earlier in the debate, “we are working on”, but with a structure and a timetable so that the House can both understand and benefit from long-overdue change. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, given the comments of the noble Lords, Lord Grocott and Lord Swire, I will keep my comments short. Although I am reading from a piece of paper, I am reading from my scribbles, not a full text. I hope that is all right. I co-signed Amendment 26 from the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra. I do not think he needed any real encouragement, but I think it is very sensible. In fact, Amendment 63 from the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, has real value. If he took that to a vote, I would probably support it. I absolutely hate Amendment 28 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay. It might as well say, in brackets afterwards, “Kick the Greens out”.

I suggest that we could have got around this debate—all these days, hours and repetitions. We could have just made all the hereditaries life Peers, which would have removed all this. I understand that there is an issue about kicking them out but, personally, I think we will miss them. Making them all life Peers would have just shut them up, and we would be free to go and have an early supper.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

The rest of us are not blessed with the eloquence and wit that the noble Lord, Lord Swire, feels he has, but I think he has missed the point of my amendment and that, as a Committee, we are now trying to do all the detail on the Floor of the House. That is impossible. My amendment tries to establish that after this Bill a system is put in place to define these issues, to which we can all contribute usefully and sensibly—or foolishly, as we wish. That is the way to take this forward, not putting it into the Bill in detail. We need a system for the Government to show a bit of an ankle here and show us that they are really going to do this by putting this amendment into the Bill, not trying to work out the minutiae of percentages here. That is completely pointless.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

I have Amendment 40 in this group. I find myself very much in agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, which is a travesty of history. My route forward would be by Amendment 32, because I think it leaves the initiative much more with this House than with the Government. I would say, if the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, were in his place, that St Matthew recorded some excellent advice about getting to grips with your adversary as soon as possible as the best way to deal with something. I think it is rather more likely that the next four and a half years will see the second coming of our Lord than a second Bill on the House of Lords, so to have something like Amendment 32 would be a great advantage.

The thing that unites us all is a determination to improve the way this House serves the public. There are many aspects in which we can work on this. The amendments we have in front of us are restricted by the nature of the Bill, but I absolutely think that this is the right moment to bring them forward and discuss them.

In my years in the House, I can remember one occasion when a Starred Question made a difference to government policy, which was when the Government were asked what their plans were to celebrate the 50th anniversary of El Alamein, in 1992. The answer was, “There are no such plans; it is the Germans’ turn to celebrate anniversaries this year”. With a House full of veterans, that led to a fairly rapid reverse of policy. I cannot recall one since. Much as we enjoy Questions, I think we should be much more critical about whether what we are doing actually has a function. I believe we should commission outside research, be self-critical, try to self-improve as a House and find ways of doing better.

When it comes to looking at our expectations of participation, I very much understand what the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, and my noble friend Lord Attlee were saying. There are many ways in which this happens. The form in proposed new Section 2A(1) in my amendment, asking people to sign a declaration to, as it were, say on their honour that they are participating fully in the business of the House, may be a good way forward. What the noble Lord, Lord Desai, suggests as a way of measuring that is certainly something to explore. We could also explore following the advice of Elon Musk and each week writing a postcard to the leader of our groups naming five achievements. I think that would put some of us on the spot.

In thinking about the worthwhile work this House does, we should focus on committees in all their various forms. That is where I have seen most value delivered and, in terms of what my noble friend Lord Norton says about fitting our membership to our function, that is very much the direction in which we should be trying to go.