General Elections: Peers’ Exclusion from Voting

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Monday 23rd March 2015 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Naseby]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what proposals they have to review the exclusion of life Peers from voting at general elections.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Government have no plans to review in this Parliament the long-established legal incapacity that prevents Peers who are Members of the House of Lords voting in a general election.

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

Is this not extraordinary when society is calling for votes at 16 and for felons; when every single Member who is a life Peer in your Lordships’ House has already voted in a general election; and when not one of the 189 upper Houses in the IPU precludes Members from voting? Has not the time come for my noble friend to recognise that it is time for a change? The claim that a Member of the House of Lords already has a voice in Parliament, and that therefore it is right to deprive him or her of having that voice heard through an elected representative in the Commons, no longer has validity as we do not have a voice on money Bills—the very central feature of our democracy, epitomised by “no taxation without representation”.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, is a Conservative and has taken very Conservative views on the reform of this House. I would have hoped that he would therefore agree with the statement of Lord Campbell, as Lord Chief Justice in 1858, that by,

“an ancient, immemorial law of England … Peers sat in their own right in their own House, and had no privilege whatsoever to vote for Members to sit in the other House of Parliament”.—[Official Report, 5/7/1858; col. 928.]