House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 1st April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, first, as the strictures tell us and for anyone who does not know, I declare that I am a hereditary Peer.

I support this pair of amendments—Amendments 103 and 112—which may come as a surprise to some noble Lords. I do so for two reasons. The first is that, although I would like to stay on, as some amendments have kindly hinted, the Bill is going through. The hereditaries have now been waiting on the parliamentary equivalent of death row for months, so perhaps it is time just to get on with it. Secondly, I have been thinking about how we hereditaries can render one last service to this House on our way out and, perhaps, give our ejection some greater meaning, or even honour. Then it hit me: the noble Baroness’s amendment might be improved by adding, perhaps on Report, a consequential amendment that states that each so-called hereditary being ejected takes with them one Peer who does not attend, or who does attend but does not participate.

Some noble Lords, on this April Fools’ Day, might think that this is merely a light-hearted suggestion to lighten the mood after some rather sharp words earlier, but I invite the Committee to consider the benefits of such an amendment. Not only would it accelerate the end of the hereditary element—something which, with apologies to Hamlet, some Peers feel is

“a consummation

Devoutly to be wished”—

but it would, and not before time, cull the free-riders, improve the external perception of the House and even reduce costs.

There are plenty of such non-participating Peers from which to choose. Indeed, it has been suggested to me that every hereditary should take two such companions with them to the scaffold. More gallows humour perhaps, but I cannot help noticing that, if adopted, this would go a long way to reducing the size of the House closer to that of the Commons, which many in this House support. It would also enhance the reputation for Member participation and significantly increase productivity per capita—an issue which I know the Government are very committed to those outside Parliament achieving.

Although I have no realistic expectation that this suggestion will be accepted today, I have spoken previously on the need to address participation. My Amendment 63 —which proposed that, after this Bill becomes an Act, an effective group be convened, with a short timescale, to receive evidence, define a benchmark and get it implemented—received fulsome cross-party support. Perhaps the findings of this group should be called “second-degree burns”, in honour of the previous Burns report—I’m here all week; settle down, please—which the House warmly supported but then signally failed to act on.

Where I am very serious is that, if my suggested consequential amendment to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, is not supported, after the Bill is passed and the hereditaries are sent into oblivion, I hope that the House itself will at last insist on achieving such reform. We shall see. That would, at least in part, give some validity to the much-quoted promise that the end of the so-called hereditaries would coincide with a fuller reform of this House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

My Lords, I think that I am the only Member of the House, except for the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, who was here in 1999 for the first expulsion—

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

I was.

[Lord Wrottesley (Con)]

I was.