House of Lords: Register of Hereditary Peers

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Wednesday 25th October 2017 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Grocott]

To ask Her Majesty's Government what is their assessment of the legislative arrangements giving rise to the Register of Hereditary Peers who wish to stand for election to the House of Lords.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, the House of Lords Act 1999 provides for Standing Orders of the House to make arrangements for the replacement, by elections, of hereditary Peers who are Members of this House. The Standing Orders provide for the register of hereditary Peers. Therefore, these arrangements are a matter for this House.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

That was not really an Answer to the Question. I just ask the Minister to confirm that, of the 198 names on the register of those who are eligible to stand for by-elections for vacancies among hereditary Peers, just one is a woman and none is from any of the ethnic minorities. Should not those two facts alone convince us all that this system is not just ludicrous but totally indefensible? I have a very simple question for the Minister and, if he could just answer with a yes, we could move on to the next Question. Will the Government do something that will hurt no one and cost nothing—that is, back my Bill, which would scrap this whole ludicrous system?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for that question. Moving on to the next Question would not help me at all, as I have to answer that one as well. As he will know, when I replied to the Second Reading debate on his Bill, I said, referring to the specific anomaly that he referred to, that as a consequence of the current arrangements we have a system that is very difficult to defend in equality terms, and that reflected the views expressed. However, I went on to say that there is an exemption from the Equality Act for this arrangement. The Equality Act 2010 provides that neither a life peerage nor a hereditary peerage, as a dignity or honour conferred by the Crown, is a public or personal office for the purposes of the Act. So Parliament specifically exempted these provisions when it passed that piece of legislation.