House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 3rd March 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

6: Leave out Clause 1 and insert the following new Clause—
“By-elections and life peerages for hereditary peer vacancies(1) Section 2 of the House of Lords Act 1999 (exception to exclusion of hereditary peers from membership of House of Lords) is amended as follows.(2) In subsection (2), after “time” insert “no more than”.(3) For subsection (4), substitute—“(4) In any case where a person excepted from section 1 dies or ceases to be a member of the House of Lords, an election must be held in which anyone on the register of electors anywhere in the United Kingdom may stand, and in which all members of the House of Lords may vote. (4A) Any person selected as a result of an election held under subsection (4) must be recommended by the Prime Minister for a life peerage.””Member's explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to probe whether hereditary peer vacancies could be filled by members of the public who would be elected by members of the House and recommended to the Prime Minister for a life peerage.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I shall also speak to my Amendment 7. My objective in this amendment, and indeed in all my others, is to improve the Bill, not upset it. I am not intending to immerse myself in the argument as to whether we should be Grocotted or garrotted. This amendment is written as if we were being Grocotted, but it works just as well if we follow the Government’s intentions and we all leave at once.

In this amendment, I am interested in the opportunity that the Bill presents to improve the House going forward without hereditary Peers. The history of Lords reform shows that this opportunity will not be back in any short order. In the time that I have been in this House, there were opportunities for reform in 1992, which did not come about because of the election; in 1999, when we were promised stage 2 but it did not happen; and in 2012, when the coalition’s Bill did not go through.

Opportunities to reform come along once a decade, and there never is a stage 2 because this is a really hard reform to do. There is no big constituency for it—not for getting rid of the hereditary Peers but for reforming the Lords generally—and those in charge of parliamentary time never find time for it. Why do your Lordships think we as a Government never reformed the Lords? Because there were always better things to do. The same is going to be true of this Government, and the silence of the noble Baroness the Lord Privy Seal is testament to that. There is no worked-out proposal for how the Lords should be reformed, only a thought that there may be discussions in the future.

Everything we know about Lords reform says that this will come to nothing, so we really need to use this Bill to see how we can improve the House. Amendment 6 says, “Don’t throw away by-elections. We can use them to improve the House”. They are a system that works. Look at the flow of talented, hard-working Peers who have come in over the last 25 years through by-elections. None of us expected things to go on anything like this long, and the noble Baroness and her colleagues are quite right that it is ridiculous how long they have gone on; none the less, they have resulted in the acquisition in this House of some very excellent Peers. That was no mean feat, given the smallness of the pool in which we had to fish.

As my noble friend Lord Hamilton of Epsom said, we were a set of voters who cared. We cared for the House. We did not want to bring people in here who would not come up to scratch. Perhaps we also cared a good deal for ourselves; we did not want to be seen to be bringing rubbish into this place. So we did well, and there is no reason why the House as a whole would not do just as well if it had this mechanism open to it.

Amendment 6 throws open the doors so anyone can apply to be in this House. We get round the problem of the aversion to hairdressers which has plagued the Cross Benches. But anyway, this is political Peers. This is not for the Cross Benches; this is for the politicians. The 90 or so places currently occupied by hereditary Peers would be shared among the political parties and would form a different way of becoming chosen to be in the House of Lords, other than the patronage of the political leaders at the time.

We can see from my Benches that this is not destructive of the force of the political party. We have been able to absorb a continued flow of independent-minded hereditary Peers within the Conservative Party on these Benches and it has not harmed our performance. Indeed, many of my colleagues have been chosen to serve on the Front Bench. It has been a success from that point of view. By having another source of recommendations other than the party leadership, we get some diversity in views, outlook and background, which can be quite hard to get when you are operating from within the Westminster bubble.

If we keep the by-elections going, we should have the ability to set the rules for whom we wish to apply, experiment with them, let them evolve, and learn how we can become a more open House. Something along these lines lays the ground in a controllable way for the sort of ambitions the Liberal Democrats have in their Amendment 11. They would like to see a much wider franchise for getting into this House, but with added legitimacy. That did not work in 2012 and I do not think it is going to work in the foreseeable future, but we can reach towards it by using the mechanism of by-elections.

Amendment 7 says that maybe Amendment 6 is a bit wide and that maybe throwing it open to everybody would be quite hard to operate. But we have a government ambition to give a voice to the Council of the Nations and Regions, and through repurposing the by-elections we have the chance to do that straightaway. We do not have to wait for this whole thing to grind through a fresh set of legislative machinery; we can just repurpose what we have and allow members of the Council of the Nations and Regions to nominate people to this place, subject to us being the people who choose, in the way that by-elections work at the moment.

That would allow us to experiment, to find out how this works, to find out what the right questions are to ask of the politically nominated, so that we get a flow of people who really work in this place. We would achieve the Government’s ambition, which would otherwise have to wait for the next reform in a decade’s time. We could combine the by-elections with other improvements. This might work quite well with having a 15-year term in this place, and other proposals that we reach later in the Bill.

My proposal is that we be realistic: that we recognise that we are not going to get another Bill, that we are not going to get further reform from this Government, and maybe not from the next one. We need to use this Bill to give ourselves the opportunity to improve the House as it goes forward, and not just to say goodbye—as my noble friend Lord True says we all accept—to the hereditary Peers. I beg to move.

Amendment 7 (to Amendment 6)

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

7: In subsection (3), inserted subsection (4), after “stand” insert “if they have been recommended in accordance with procedures to be determined by the House of Lords by a member of the Council of the Nations and the Regions”

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to all who have spoken, and particularly my noble friend Lord Trenchard for his amendment, which is a very useful contribution to considering how to take this idea forward. I think my noble friend Lord Strathcarron is quite right that the elections process produces candidates who have staying power and determination over time, bringing us closer to democracy—not a huge amount closer to democracy, but at least it is a move in the right direction. I share the wish of my noble friend Lord Moylan to be much more radical in that. However, nothing in my experience of the House suggests that we will get there. It never seems to appeal to our colleagues down the other end.

As to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, asking whether we would vote for a ballerina, the noble Lord needs to look at the background of the hereditary Peers that we have elected. We have artists, we have film producers and we have a number of other people whose hearts are very much in the arts. There is a notorious propensity for hereditary Peers to marry ballerinas, so I do not believe that there is any prejudice inherent in us against that particular profession.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

Apart from my curiosity about the noble Lord’s earlier remark about hairdressers, I cannot resist pointing out that my great-great-grandmother was in the Ballets Russes.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

There we have it, and a very fine great-great-grandchild she has, too.

I am grateful for the support from my noble friends Lord Murray of Blidworth and Lord Strathclyde, who quite rightly said that, if we are to believe that the Government as a whole, as opposed to any individual, are actually determined on giving us another House of Lords Bill within this Parliament or the next, a Green Paper would be the least of our expectations. Get the proposals out there for discussion. Let us get this process on the road. Without that, all history says that this will run into the sand. Those who, like me, have tried through Governments of both colours to move changes to this House and have never succeeded know just how hard it is. It really is extremely difficult to get the machinery of government to spend time contemplating what should be done with the House of Lords.