House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Moore of Etchingham Excerpts

Monday 10th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Thurso (LD)]

My Lords, I do not think the noble Baroness wishes to answer the noble Lord’s question, and she has every right to do that.

I rise very briefly to support my noble friend Lord Newby. This is a very straightforward and simple amendment that seeks to place a duty on the Government to do something after this Bill has passed.

Some of us have spent a great deal of time on Lords reform. I started in this place just under 30 years ago and had 27 years between the two places, and one of the things I have observed in that time is that chances to do something to reform this place do not come along too often, and legislation comes along very rarely.

I greatly enjoyed the eloquence and oratory of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, although I have to say that he has once again convinced me that the more eloquent he is, the more incorrect his arguments are. I very much appreciated the way in which the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, with grace and gentleness, rebutted them.

The key point in all that—I am desperately trying not to give a history lesson—is that, when we did the draft Joint Committee of both Houses in 2011-2012, so ably chaired by the late Lord Richards, we came to a compromise position that addressed every single one of the points the noble Lord put forward, and they went into the draft Bill that went before the Commons. That Bill had a Second Reading and, had it had not been for a slightly sneaky operation by Jesse Norman on the programme Motion, it would have gone through and been discussed by both Houses.

So I support my noble friend simply because there needs to be reform. There needs to be reform because we need more legitimacy. In 1832, we were powerful and the Commons was not. From 1832 onwards, the power has moved to the Commons. We now need to regain some legitimacy so that we can again be a powerful part of a Parliament that holds the Executive to account. In asking for this amendment, my noble friend is simply saying, “Let’s hold our feet to the fire and get it done”.

[Lord Moore of Etchingham (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, on the eloquence of her speech. But she put forward a point of view about this House that I think is mistaken when she said that it is supposed to be representative of the people. It absolutely is not and it never has been. It has other purposes, for better or for worse, and we all sit here as representatives of nobody but ourselves. That is particularly true of Cross Benchers and the non-affiliated, but actually it is true of all party Members as well, and there are important reasons for that. We are well placed to bring to bear on the proceedings of Parliament as a whole a disinterested point of view, in the proper sense of “disinterested”: in other words, not representing an interest but trying to think as hard as we can about what is right.

The speech by the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, was very important here, because, if we think about the function of this House, we may come to realise that its current composition is not so idiotic. Its function is to scrutinise, and the type of people that want to scrutinise are not the type of people who want to get on in life. The people who want to get on in life are those in the other place who are, as was eloquently pointed out by the noble Lord and others, trying to get the next position, higher marks on social media, more likes and jobs. Most of us have gone beyond that stage of life. That is obviously not true of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, because she is very young, but she disinterestedly and kindly sits here in order to contribute her wisdom.

The trouble with the Bill is that we are not thinking about function but droning on about composition. As long as we think that it is a good thing to have a powerful House of Commons that forms most of the Government of the day, it is perfectly reasonable to have a not-very-strong House of Lords that tries to scrutinise. If we think that that is perfectly reasonable, we might consider that perhaps we should not be mucking around with our composition.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, we have already spent more than an hour on this and I do not intend to prolong that for more than two or three minutes. However, I am getting a bit alarmed by the breadth of the discussion we are having.

I remind the House—maybe the Procedure Committee needs to look at this—that the Bill is the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill. From looking at the amendments, of which this is a particularly bad example, not in the quality of the argument but in the dangers it presents for anyone looking for Lords reform in the future, we can apparently have absolutely any amendment whatever so long as it conceivably, by some long-stretched argument, has some effect on the future composition of the Lords.

A lot of people have been saying that we need to do more things once this Bill has become an Act, but, my word, I have been very much put off thinking that is a good idea having listened to today’s debate, because any one of the other issues—whether it is the age of retirement, the length of service, or the number of Bishops, for example— could apparently lead to precisely the same kind of debate that we have had today on amendments to this Bill. I have to say—and probably anyone could say it about me—that it is very unusual that you hear any new arguments in these debates, of which we have had many in the past.