House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Monday 10th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, my first point in response to the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, is that the Bill will pass—the noble Lord does not need to worry about that. Secondly, simple constitutional changes can have very serious consequences. We have only to think about a simple change that my noble friend Lord Cameron introduced, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, which created a disaster.

I think it would be helpful to the Committee if the noble Lord, Lord Newby, could tell us what he thinks the role of the House of Lords is now, and what he thinks it will be in the future. My noble friend Lord Blencathra touched on that. The noble Baroness said that there was mistrust from the public, and I think that arises largely from extremely misleading reporting in the media, which little is done to counter. I would ask the same question about the role of the House of Lords of the Leader of the House, but I expect she would be quite cautious, especially as regards the future. I remind the House that I intend to retire in the spring, so I am fairly neutral.

Many noble Lords—and others inside and outside the House—fall into the trap of proposing to alter the composition of the House of Lords without first considering its role, both now and in the future. I thought that the Labour Government had already studied this matter carefully by means of the Wakeham commission, to which the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, and other noble Lords referred. There is a solution very carefully worked out by my noble friend Lord Wakeham and his commission.

I have always believed that the role of the House of Lords is to revise legislation—and I mean revise, not just scrutinise. In the last Parliament, the House revised the Rwanda Bill: it did not merely scrutinise it. It should be an additional check on the Executive but not determine who the Prime Minister is or financial matters. Most importantly, it should be a source of expertise.

The noble Lord, Lord Newby, pointed out that we have a difficulty in that we are hideously London-centric, but getting rid of the hereditary Peers who are chained to their castles and estates up and down the country will make the situation worse, and it is not clear to me how being elected, either in whole or in part, will make us any better at performing our role—a point touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Moore. Of course, it may make us much less willing to give way to the elected House. Many advocates of an elected House suggest that we would be more effective and legitimate if elected. I suggest that being elected can be a disadvantage. For instance, about two years ago, I was dealing with a problem with a high street bank debanking a business in the wider defence industry—noble Lords will recall that recently the Secretary of State for Defence was forcefully raising this issue in public. I needed to have a meeting with senior executives of the bank in circumstances where a Member of another place would be blanked by the bank; they would get nowhere. Why was I able to secure the meeting and then understand what the problem was? The answer is that the bank trusted me. It could be sure that I was not getting involved in order to burnish my local credentials, my media profile or anything else.

I have a question for noble Lords proposing a change to the role of the House or introducing an elected element. In their proposed reformed House, would it be intended that the Government of the day could still easily be defeated? If it was, surely the House would claim democratic credentials and be far more challenging to the House of Commons, as noble Lords have already pointed out. However, if the new House could only very rarely defeat the Government, then in the case of something such as the Rwanda Bill, surely the courts would step in to fill the vacuum.

Finally, can the Leader of the House say whether she agrees with my view of the current role of the House of Lords? I appreciate that she cannot comment about its future role, which is a much more difficult question. When in the 2010 Parliament the Conservative-led Government tried to reform the House, I gleefully went around my friends in the House of Commons saying that I was looking forward to being Senator Attlee of South Hampshire. They obviously got the message.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, when we debated the role of the House of Lords last November and on every occasion that we have debated the subject to which I have contributed, I have started by saying, as I say again today, that in a modern, 21st-century democracy there must be a case that the legislature should be elected. Although it puts me therefore to some extent at odds with friends of mine on different sides of the House, I have to say that I generally support, not necessarily every detail, the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Newby.

If that was all I had to say, I probably would not have bothered saying it, because I think the Lord Privy Seal must have grasped that there is support for the noble Lord’s amendment from different parts of the House, and all I would be doing is adding my name to that. However, I want to go a little further into the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Newby, and point out that it is really very clever and has a lot of lot in it that should attract noble Lords, because although it sets a clear destination, it is very non-specific about the details of how we should end up and what the new House of Lords would look like in its elected form. What he is doing in his amendment instead is putting in place a process.

I think we all know what a process looks like. It has the sort of things that we find in this amendment: steps that need to be taken, in a certain order, and dates by which those steps should ideally be taken. The Lord Privy Seal seems to have some difficulty with the word “process”. She used it in Committee last week, when we talked about various matters to do with the future of this House beyond this Bill. She said that we were in a process, but the Lord Privy Seal is not actually in a process. She may think she is, but she is not, because if she were she would be able to tell us the steps, the milestones and the target dates that we find in the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Newby.

The only thing we know for certain about the process in which the Labour Government are engaged—the process that so is so important not only to this House, but to anyone who takes an interest in our constitutional balance—is that her door is always open. That is the process as far as the Labour Front Bench is concerned. There is no timetable, there are no milestones and there are no commitments as to what is going to happen, in what order or when. While it is perfectly legitimate for the Lord Privy Seal to say that she does not support the process proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Newby, it now becomes almost impossible for her, given what she has said before, both to oppose the noble Lord and to fail to come forward with a process of her own—which is what so many noble Lords in this House would like to hear. Otherwise, she will show that she is not being wholly candid with us in the way that we would hope.

The essential point about Labour’s sense of direction is that it came forward in its manifesto with a package of measures and obtained a mandate for a package of measures. Some of those measures were to be taken at an early stage—the Lord Privy Seal and I have had this argument about the weight of the full stop, and I am not going to go through that now—and at least one was going to be taken later. It was going to be a consultation involving the democratic character of the House and the representation of the nations and regions and so on. Clearly, anyone reading the Labour Party manifesto would say that that was something to be done in the latter half of the Parliament. It also explains to the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, why these issues arise in what appears to be a very narrow Bill: it is because that very narrow Bill sits in a context of a manifesto commitment and a mandate which is very much broader. It cannot be separated out; those threads cannot be pulled apart without having an effect on the rest of the fabric.

I will come to a close very quickly. If I tremble to find myself in agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Newby, I tremble even more to find myself in disagreement with my noble friend Lord Blencathra. While any new system or composition of the Lords is absolutely bound to require a crunching of gears as the two Chambers find a way of working together, the notion that this is impossible—that two democratic chambers cannot work together—is, as I have said before, simply belied. One can look round the rest of the democratic world, where it does work, with crunching of gears and not always ideally, and sometimes with surprises and unexpected turns of events—but of course it is possible to have two democratic chambers.

I agree with my noble friend Lord Blencathra that these matters are so weighty that there is a strong case for a referendum. I am rather more sympathetic to referendums than many people here and in the other place, and I find myself rather out on the extreme wing on this, but I certainly think there is a strong case for a referendum on the constitutional future of your Lordships’ House.

Coming back to my original point, I very much hope that the Lord Privy Seal will stop hiding behind her open door—if that is not too much of a mixed metaphor—and come out into the West Front corridor and tell us, if not in this Chamber today, if she does not like the process proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Newby, what process she has to offer us.