House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, it is a real privilege to follow my noble friend Lady Quin, although it is tinged with sadness that this is the last time we will share her wisdom in this Chamber. We are really grateful for what she has said today, but also for what she has done over the years.

I have known my friend, Joyce—if I can use her name for once in this Chamber—for many years. I have followed her stellar career with awe and great admiration. She spent 10 years in the European Parliament, which is a life sentence for some people. She did a wonderful job there. Then, as she said, she had 18 years in the other place and was a Minister of State in three separate departments: the Home Office, which sounded an interesting job; Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, which was even more interesting; and, above all, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, where she was Minister for Europe—and a really great one. She has also had 18 years in this place, and we have all benefited from her wisdom and enjoyed her company. We are really sorry that she is leaving us. We look forward to taking up her invitation to be shown around the north-east. If we had had a north-east assembly, as we should have, my noble friend would have stood for that and would have done a really great job as a member of such an assembly. Sadly, we did not have it. We wish her well, we thank her greatly for her service and wish her a very long and happy retirement.

I turn now to the Bill, in fact to Lords’ reform more generally, on which my noble friend Baroness Quin and I agree. With no disrespect to the great work that this House has done, which I acknowledge, it is unacceptable that the second Chamber in a 21st-century legislature is not in some way accountable to the people. My long-term preference, and that of my noble friend Baroness Quin, is for a senate of the nations and region, indirectly elected and so accountable, but not a challenge to the primacy of the House of Commons. Meanwhile, we need to sort out, as others have said earlier, some of the worst aspects of our current system.

The first, and most outrageous, one that needs to be dealt with is the fact that 92 men are here solely by an accident of birth. This is why I wholeheartedly support this Bill, which is long overdue. I nevertheless join in the plea that others have made to the Leader of the House—the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, made it very effectively in his outstanding speech earlier —that we should look at some of the other aspects that need to be dealt with.

First, the House of Lords Appointments Commission needs to be reformed and, as others have said, given more powers. Secondly, we need to deal—again, as others have said—with the geographical imbalance. It is unacceptable that more than half the Members of this House are resident in London and the south-east of England. That is not a representation of the nation as a whole. Thirdly, we need to consider whether an age limit is needed, particularly, as some have said, on new appointments.

Fourthly, as I have argued on two previous occasions, we need to separate seeing the peerage as an honour, on one hand, and as a working peerage on the other. That confuses everything. As I said the other day, when I attacked the noble Lord, Lord Botham, for not turning up, I was attacked in return by his daughter, but we need to understand the difference between an honour and a working peerage. Then, fifthly, as others have said, we should set participation criteria for working peers. It is in our manifesto, and we should take that up. Sixthly, if we have working Peers and we accept that they are working, then there should be proper support to enable them to do their job properly. We do not have that at the moment. Finally, I say with a great deal of trepidation that we need to consider whether it is right that members from one Church—as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, said, from one country—should have an automatic right to membership of this Chamber.

We must plan ahead for the long term as well, including, I would suggest, looking at the senates in western democracies such as France, Italy and Spain and the German Bundestag, so that we can at last move to a second Chamber that is fit for a 21st-century democracy. That also is long overdue.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 3rd March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

My Lords, let me carry on on the groupings that we have and on the speech in introducing his amendment of my noble friend—

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)]

We are on the second amendment of the day and this is the sixth speech from the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. I think we can all draw our own conclusions.

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

My Lords, I fancy that, if this Bill dealt with the expulsion of all Peers over 80, the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, would be a leading light in opposition to that legislation. I am simply carrying out my duty as a Member of this House to hold the Government to account and ask the questions that need to be asked. If the Labour Party choose not to turn up to this debate, that is entirely up to them.

I also point out that this Bill excludes by law 45 members of the Conservative Party. It excludes four members of the Labour Party, who almost certainly will be given life peerages, as precedent has demonstrated in the past. So it is hardly surprising that, as a group and a party in the House of Lords, we take a great deal of interest in what this Bill says and what it is attempting to achieve.

My noble friend Lord Caithness made a good point about what this Bill does. It does not just remove the hereditary Peers but creates a wholly appointed House. Some noble Lords will take exception to that fact. I know that the noble Lords on my left, the Liberal Democrats, would rather see a democratic House, and I have a great deal of sympathy with that, and there are other noble Lords who are very happy to see a wholly appointed House—but that appointment is almost entirely in the hands of the Prime Minister.

It is worth mentioning HOLAC. I know there will be amendments on HOLAC later on, but they are not directly relevant to the amendment before us. HOLAC is itself a creature of the Executive. There is no statute that has created HOLAC. It is there because the Prime Minister has decreed that it should be so. It could be snuffed out immediately. Therefore, it is right when we say that the appointment system is entirely in the hands of the Prime Minister. HOLAC reserves for itself a small number of independent Cross-Benchers. They are a delightful addition to this House. I very much agree with what the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, said, particularly in respect of the hereditary Peers.

I therefore support my noble friend’s amendment. I have no idea why the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, accepted this amendment some years ago during a debate on his Bill. It may well have been that he got so bored of the debate that he thought he should just accept an amendment to make a difference. I think the noble Lord is trying to get in. I have come to the end of my remarks, so I am happy for him to speak if he wishes to do so.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th March 2025 Lords Chamber

Given that we are removing with this legislation once and for all the feudal vestiges of the hereditary peerage, which is said to be indefensible, how can we not also remove the feudal and lordly pretensions of this Chamber and simply change its name? I do not presume to suggest what it might be changed to—it is not for a feudal Plantagenet Earl to suggest alternatives—but I am sure that your Lordships, with public-spirited, well-informed wisdom, can come up with something suitably catchy that does not venerate a paternalistic feudal power structure of which we apparently are so ashamed.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, there can be no doubt from the very witty speech by the noble Earl, Lord Devon, that he is a hereditary Peer—but it is not always clear. Did we know when the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, spoke? Do we know when others speak? I would have thought that every hereditary Peer would be obliged to declare that interest at the beginning of their speech. If I was in the other place, I could ask the Speaker to rule on that, but that does not apply here. I hope the Leader of the House might indicate in her reply that it would be helpful not just for the House but for the public outside to know whether the Member speaking has a vested interest.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, that is an interesting concept, but I do not think there is a vested interest of mine in this set of amendments. I very much support what the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, said. I think this is a good direction to go down. Of course, I support the first two amendments from the noble Earl, Lord Devon. I was a supporter of Lord Diamond on those Benches in the days of John Major’s Government, when he tried twice to abolish the male exclusiveness of the hereditary peerage. I have promoted Bills to that effect, and it has never appealed to the Government of the day.

However, I rather like the noble Earl’s formulation, which puts a duty on the Privy Council to sort things out. I think leaving bits of sex discrimination lying around in prominent places matters. It is only a label, but I do not think it should be allowed to continue. It is not that hard to make a change, as the noble Earl shows, and I very much hope that the Government will feel inclined to consign one of the last bits of formal sex discrimination in our constitutional arrangements to the dustbin.

Amendment 62, like the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, is a device to get my proposed new subsections (2)(a) and (2)(b) discussed. My interest in participating in the Bill is to make sure that, if we can, we use it to make sure that, going forward, the House without us will be in a better place and able to function better than it does now.

The first barrier that needs to be removed is that the Government should not only let us but positively encourage us to innovate and improve. We ought to have that motivation too. Things stay the same and change only slowly in this place, but we need to do better. We are sure of the effectiveness of our scrutiny when it comes to legislation, but I have never seen it really examined. Where are the research reports and the independent investigations? Where are the committees looking into this and proposing how things might be done better? We ought to be in a condition of constant improvement.

To my mind, the same applies to our interface with the public. For a long time, we have been limited by the fact that it is only us and that there are no staff. What we can do is throttled by that and by the need to work in this Chamber, but artificial intelligence is in the process of changing that and making it possible for someone in our position to engage with a great deal more information and conversation than was ever possible in the past. It also makes it much easier for people outside this Chamber to have a connection with and understanding of us and what we are doing, in a way we can join in with, without overwhelming ourselves. We ought as a House to be determined to give the public the benefit of these technological changes.

I am not particularly attached to the mechanism in my proposed new clause. It will take some rethinking before Report to produce something that gives the House the initiative, but also the duty, to improve, that allows it to push forward and that encourages the Government to support that. Obviously, big changes need a Commons veto, but we can move so that most of this goes via Standing Orders, while the bits that cannot should go via secondary legislation. We would need the approval of the Commons but would not need to go through the rigmarole of a Bill. House of Lords Bills happen very occasionally, but our process of improvement ought to be constant.