House of Lords: Appointments Process

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I will not even try to follow that. In two minutes, there is virtually nothing one can say; no great points can be made and I am certainly not going to enter a discussion of wholesale reform of the Lords, although we should by all means have a proper debate on that.

I want to restrict myself to just three conditions that would be required for any new statutory appointments commission to function in an acceptable way. The first has already been mentioned several times, and is the size of the House. An appointments commission must have a structure in terms of how many appointments it can make, and 600 should be the maximum.

The second condition addresses itself to the question of this being a working Chamber. For people appointed to the House, we still have not resolved the issue of whether getting a peerage is an honour or a job. To me, it has always been a job. It is, of course, an honour as well, but the prime function is to come here and work.

We talk about ourselves being a working House. We are a very effective working House in the scrutiny of legislation, which is detailed and hard work, but a working House needs workers. It is difficult to find an easy solution, but any Appointments Commission would need at the very least to have a written public undertaking from anyone appointed that they would give the time and energy required to being a proper Member of a working second Chamber. There also needs to be a mechanism whereby, for those not fulfilling that responsibility, the commission would have the power to state that that was the case, and some action could be taken.

Finally, I want to thank the three Peers, the noble Lords, Lord Fowler and Lord Dubs, and the noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, who have mentioned the absurdity of the hereditary by-election. Hereditary Peers are not vetted by the House; they are not vetted for propriety and at the very least that should happen. Of course, the best thing would be to get rid of it completely. Sooner or later, the noble Lord, Lord True, despite the long history of his position on this, must realise that he is playing King Canute by refusing to move on the absurd system of hereditary by-elections.