House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Mancroft Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mancroft (Con)]

My Lords, what a pleasure it is to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Smith. I can remember when I spoke in this House at the age that she is now, and I think she did a great deal better job than I did then. I suspect there may be a reason that she is less worried about the prospect of a retirement age than some of the other speakers today.

We are told that the Bill before us is the first step of several leading to comprehensive reform of this House. The reasons we have been given that the other small steps cannot be done at the same time are not really credible, and of the comprehensive reform there is no more sign now than there was 25 years ago.

It is difficult to see how removing a small number of the most experienced and hard-working Members will improve this House—and that assumes that the objective of reform is indeed to improve the House. I think it is probably simpler than that. The Bill is just the first step in gerrymandering the membership to ensure that the Government have a majority. Labour is simply putting its party interests before those of the country.

The Government pray in aid their manifesto, but the removal of former hereditary Peers is a cherry-picking commitment. The primary commitment is to reduce the size of the House, and that can be achieved in a meaningful way only if the Government introduce an age limit. Unfortunately, this needs the turkeys to vote for Christmas. Having spoken to quite a lot of turkeys on all sides of the House, it is clear to me that this is not going to happen. That is why the Government have shelved their commitment to enact an age limit of 80 in favour of “further consultation”. They can consult as much as they like, but the over-80s are not going to vote for it.

The commitment to remove former hereditary Peers is coupled not only with an age restriction but with a commitment to a participation test. The Leader has suggested that this is complicated and requires further thought and consultation. It really does not. There is a great deal of resentment among Peers from all parts of the House towards those who are neither willing nor able to devote sufficient time to their parliamentary duties. A requirement to attend at least 10% of our sittings, as the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, suggested, would be widely supported. The only objections to such a measure are from the Government Front Bench.

There is even more resentment towards those noble Lords who are clearly physically incapable of participating, yet who we see turn up in the House—whether to collect their allowance or for some other reason—without participating in our work in any meaningful way. The Bill should include measures to address that. If anything damages the reputation of politics in general, and this House in particular, it is that—it should be dealt with. Failure to do so in the Bill will show whether the Government really want to reform this House, or whether they are just playing to their gallery.

The Government’s main justification for the Bill is that it is a question of principle to remove the hereditary Peers, but it is not the purpose of legislation to keep going back over old ground. The right of hereditary Peers to sit and vote in this House was removed in 1999 and is clearly set out in Section 1 of the 1999 Act. There is therefore no issue of principle to be resolved, and to claim otherwise is wrong.

The primary objective of the Bill can therefore only be to reduce the size of the House. Removing hereditary Peers is one way to achieve this; it is also the least effective and most disruptive. A participation requirement is another simpler and more effective way, and I expect we will have a chance to debate that in Committee. Another way, as the noble Lord, Lord Birt, said, is to partially or completely remove the Lords spiritual from the House. I am sure that we will get an opportunity to debate that in the future, and it seems to me that overwhelming support is moving in that direction.

It is a bit rich for the Leader of the House to claim that these measures are too complicated to resolve in the Bill and require further consultation. It is the Government who have set these hares running. Although Labour does not seem to have had an original thought in the last 15 years, this House is far ahead of the Government on these matters—as this debate is revealing —and the Bill is the perfect vehicle in which to resolve them.

If the Bill is not a question of principle—because it has already been resolved—and is only one small part of a manifesto commitment, and the Government intend to squirm out of their other commitments, what does it really seek to achieve? The Leader of the House has gone out of her way to explain—with great courtesy, I may add—that the expulsion of the last of the hereditary Peers is not personal. The noble lord, Lord Grocott, has made that point repeatedly, both on the Floor of the House and outside it. I am quite sure they are quite sincere in saying that. But whether noble Lords opposite like it or not, what is now being proposed is personal—it is very personal.

We are all colleagues and friends, and we are all equal in this House. We know each other well: we work together, debate with each other, eat side by side in the dining room, drink together, laugh, joke and even commiserate with each other. The way the Bill treats former hereditary Peers is inescapably personal and offensive.

One advantage in being a hereditary Peer is that I had the advantage of learning about this House before I came here from my father, who was a Member for 45 years and a Minister for eight. One of the things he taught me was that all Governments legislate incompetently because that, I am afraid, is the nature of government, but that Labour Governments also legislate vindictively, which means not in favour of a particular policy but against particular groups of people. This Bill is a classic example. The Bill is not part of a carefully thought-out policy of constitutional reform. Not only are our precious constitutional arrangements to be put at risk by the Government’s plan but, as with the imposition of VAT on private schools and inheritance tax on family farms, sheer vindictiveness is to take priority over common sense and decent government.

This Bill will not improve this House. It risks starting a process towards unravelling the conventions that bind our constitution, altering the delicate relationship between the two Houses and weakening the link with the Crown in Parliament. It will do nothing to improve the reputation of Parliament or our body politic. It will, however, serve as a useful reminder of what a nasty, vindictive and destructive party Labour has become.