House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Hamilton of Epsom Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, public service in the old days used to be quite a different thing. My forebear, Admiral Robert Barlow, used to be the superintendent of the Chatham Shipyards. He ran the shipyards through his personal account and took quite a lot of the Government’s money to build large houses for himself and his family. But we are now in the 21st century, and we should be doing things in a different way. We should not be relying on public servants to pocket cash. We should have a modern, meritocratic form of government. It is therefore completely and utterly wrong that we expect Ministers to work hard for no pay at all.

I pay tribute to the noble Lords, Lord Hanson of Flint, Lord Timpson, Lord Ponsonby, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and Lord Hendy, and the noble Baroness, Lady Gustafsson, all of whom are on the ministerial list with the word “unpaid” underneath their names. I was one of those Ministers. I had my name on the ministerial list with the word “unpaid” underneath it, and it was a complete humiliation. I found it completely undermining that it was thought in government that I was someone who was not worth the salary that others were paid. I was not worth the £81,000 that a Minister of State got; I was not worth the £71,000 that a PUS got. It hit me that I was not taken seriously in my department in that respect.

This is an old-fashioned system that we need to end. The 1975 Act was well-intentioned, but it is out of date. We should be supporting a meritocracy. I have seen in my own Government some of our finest people walk out of government because they could not afford to hold down the job. Instead, the people who could afford the job got the place. In this day and age, this is quite wrong. I know that the Leader is very keen not to amend the Bill, but this is such a ripe opportunity to undo a serious injustice in the way we do government. I beg the Leader to take this opportunity and accept this amendment.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I declare a personal interest, in that my son-in-law, my noble friend Lord Johnson of Lainston, acted as an unpaid Minister of State in the previous Government. I am grateful that he did not look to his father-in-law to subsidise him, and that he managed to survive without doing so. But the fact is that it is all to do with the number of paid jobs there are in any Government and the reluctance of government to extend that number of jobs. It is a hard decision, I accept, but one that I have always been assured government is prepared to take.

The sooner the Government get on with it, the better. As has been pointed out by my noble friends, it is a complete iniquity that people should be asked to serve for nothing. As has been pointed out by my noble friend Lord Bethell, people often give up the job that they are very good at doing, and somebody less adequate takes over because they are prepared to do it for nothing. This is all completely wrong, and we should change it as soon as possible.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Parkinson, in his ever-ingenious way, has found a route to raise the question of ministerial salaries in the House of Lords. Having heard the strong feelings expressed, I think it is a matter that needs to be dealt with. There are a number of issues involved—as some touched on, there are matters in relation to pension and severance pay as well—but my noble friend’s amendment relates to salaries.

This is one of a number of issues—power of attorney, which we discussed earlier, being another—that the existence of the Bill has brought to the surface, and which go beyond the vexed and divisive issues of composition that are raised in the Bill and indeed in the Government’s manifesto. Surely if we can address any of these issues, for the good of the House, the Government or the country, we should find a way to do so.

Of course, Government Ministers in the House of Lords, whatever party is in office, should be paid. I give particular thought, although he is not here in his place, to people such as my noble friend Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, a truly outstanding servant of this House and of his country who, because he was not able to attend the House in the conduct of his normal duties, lost out doubly as being unpaid and unable to claim an allowance.

Frankly, when I had the honour to be Leader of this House, I was deeply troubled by the fact that I had colleagues who were asked to work without pay. No one in any workplace would tolerate that as a decent way to carry on. The problem, as we have been told, arises from the interrelation between two 50 year-old statutes—we are often told that old law should be re-examined. Those are the Ministerial and other Salaries Act 1975, which limits the total number of paid Ministers to 109, and the House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975, which limits the number of Ministers in the House of Commons to 95. If the Commons takes up its allocation of 95 then the effective limit for paid Ministers in your Lordships’ House under the limit of 109 is just 14. That is clearly not enough. Between 1979 and 2019 the total number of Lords Ministers and Whips fluctuated between 21 and 27. There are further complications arising from overall limits on the numbers of Ministers of State.

The system needs review. When I was Leader of this House, I had discussions in the usual channels with other parties on this, and it was clear then that there was broad agreement that the injustice should be attended to—that it surely could not be right in the 21st century that you should need private means in order to serve as a Minister of the Crown. In saying that, I take nothing away from the high sense of public duty that led many noble Lords under successive Governments—including, I thought, some under this one—to undertake public service without reward.

When a number was given, the noble Baroness indicated that it was not true, but I had thought that there were some in this Government who were unpaid. Whether or not that is true, under any Government the self-sacrifice and public sense of duty of those people should be honoured, respected and remembered. However, it need not be for ever replicated, Government after Government. In the context of a reasonable settlement for the future of this House, as we go forward from this Bill, this matter might again be usefully discussed across party lines.

In March 2024, towards the end of the last Government, there were 14 Ministers and Whips in your Lordships’ House who were working unpaid. They included all six Ministers of State in this House, as the House of Commons wanted all paid posts then as Ministers of State for MPs. If that is not happening today under this Government, it will happen in due course as the demands on patronage grow. The unpaid Ministers included my noble friends Lord Howe, Lord Minto, Lord Camrose and Lord Roborough, whose public service now is to be requited by the current Bill as drafted by being expelled from Parliament. As we have heard, others had previously performed for nothing.