House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Newby Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, I am looking forward to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Brady, and the valedictory speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Quin.

The Bill before us is limited in scope and, in our view, long overdue and we support it. When we debated the future of the House of Lords on 12 November, I set out why we on these Benches believe that fundamental reform is required, involving the election of Members of your Lordships’ House. I also set out why we believe the time has come to remove the remaining hereditary Members. Noble Lords will be pleased to know that I do not intend to repeat those arguments today. Instead, I shall examine the arguments made on 12 November against the Bill. I carefully reread the November debate and listed no fewer than 30 arguments deployed against it. The noble Lord, Lord True, has helpfully repeated some today—although in many years in your Lordships’ House, where I have been called many things, I have never before been called a cuckoo.

The arguments fell into two broad categories. First, there were arguments about procedure—basically, that it was the wrong Bill at the wrong time. Then there were arguments of substance: that the qualities that hereditary Peers brought to the House were unique and substantial, and therefore their removal would weaken the House and the constitution more generally.

I shall address the procedural issues first. It was repeatedly asserted that the Labour Party was effectively stopped from removing the remaining hereditaries because in 1999 Ministers had said they would not do so before more fundamental reform. That is a curious argument because we have a convention in this country that no Parliament can bind its successor. The acceptance that Parliament and parties can change their minds is particularly relevant on the issue of Lords reform, because there has been no consistency from the largest parties on what they propose to do on the matter from Parliament to Parliament. The Conservatives, for example, were in favour of an elected House in 2012 and voted at Second Reading for the Clegg Bill, but are not in favour of it now. They are allowed to change their minds, so it is no constitutional outrage when Labour does the same.

It is then argued that this reform should not be pursued except, as we have heard, as part of the simultaneous implementation of all the other proposals for Lords reform set out in the Labour Party manifesto, and that to do so in isolation is somehow improper. Surely it is for a Government to decide in which order and at what pace to implement their manifesto. They will be judged at the next election on how far they have done so, not after five months in office—something that the Government at the moment will be very relieved about. Anyone with an understanding of the history of Lords reform will understand why they have chosen to do so in an incremental manner.

We were told that the proposal was ill thought-out and hasty, and that a constitutional convention or conference should be held before moving forward. Over the years there have been umpteen reports on the size and composition of your Lordships’ House. Not a single argument now is even vaguely new. The doctrine of unripe time is typically a cover for basic opposition to the proposal under debate, and this is what is happening with this Bill.

It was further, and lyrically, suggested that the constitution was a priceless piece of porcelain that the Government planned to break with the Bill, never to be put back together again. The truth is that no other components of the constitution will be affected, for good or ill, by the Bill. It is far too modest for that.

Those were the procedural arguments. The substantive arguments related to what were seen as the hereditary Peers’ unique contributions to our lawmaking and the deleterious consequences of their departure. Central to that line of argument were what were described as the unique qualities that the hereditaries brought to your Lordships’ House. It was variously claimed that the hereditaries worked harder, had a higher sense of public duty, were able to follow their conscience and be independent, had more in common with the country than the remainder of the House because they supported Brexit, have unique knowledge and insight, were not self-assertive and represented the whole of the UK.

Like everyone else, I have huge respect for the hereditary Peers currently in your Lordships’ House. They are often model public servants: hard-working, thoughtful and diligent. However, those qualities are not unique to them, and frankly it is unfair and inaccurate to the rest of the House to claim that mere life Peers do not show the same qualities in equal measure.

I particularly smiled at the suggestion that hereditaries had a unique independence of spirit as I contemplated the number of extremely loyal hereditary Front-Benchers who, over many years, have never broken the whip. I thought how I, when I was Chief Whip, would have treated an outburst of independence amongst Liberal Democrat hereditaries purely on the basis of their hereditary nature. Cross-Bench hereditaries are indeed independent, but so are their lifer colleagues.

In terms of representing the country as a whole, I merely point out that all hereditaries are male, all are white and virtually all come from similar backgrounds. Diversity is not among their strengths.

On the back of the unique qualities that hereditaries were said to possess, several constitutional consequences were said to flow. It was argued that they formed a link with Magna Carta, that they maintained a strand of legitimacy without which Parliament would become “a toothless farce”, like the Chinese national congress, and that the country as a whole, if given the choice, would back them. However, the link with Magna Carta is formed by Parliament and the courts, and an ongoing commitment to the rule of law and basic freedoms that Parliament and the courts uphold. The lack of legitimacy of your Lordships’ House flows from the lack of elections, not from the absence, or presence, of a small minority of hereditary Peers.

As for public opinion, recent polling by YouGov showed that, of those who had a view at all, some 79% thought that hereditaries should not continue to have places in your Lordships’ House. Incidentally, the same poll showed that 71% of those who had a view thought that the House should be wholly elected.

A final constitutional argument advanced in our last debate was that the exclusion of the hereditaries would leave the King without an hereditary partner, isolated and vulnerable to republican attack. I have no doubt that His Majesty takes daily comfort from the presence of hereditary Peers, but his fate depends on the way he does his job, not on the knowledge that he has the support of the Captain of the King’s Bodyguard of the Yeoman of the Guard and his hereditary colleagues if things get tricky. So I do not believe that the arguments advanced against the Bill undermine it—quite the opposite.

Nor do I think that that the House should seek to use this Bill as a Christmas tree on which to dangle every other possible reform to the composition of your Lordships’ House. There are a small number of amendments —for example, those relating to the independence of the House of Lords Appointments Commission—which could usefully be made, and the Bill should, of course, be properly debated. But it should then be passed, as a small but necessary contribution to the broader reforms we need to make this Chamber fit for the future.