House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Newby Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 1st April 2025 Lords Chamber

So the offer made by the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton of Epsom, is something the Government should look at very seriously, given the customs, traditions and broad amity which have tended to be the basis on which your Lordships’ House has operated in the past and which we would not wish to see lost. At the end of the six months, the Bill would come into operation, even if there was no agreement, but it would give a chance for a consensus to be found. The Front Bench is not placing as much value on the opportunity for consensus as many other noble Lords in the House believe it merits.

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, I disagree with all these amendments because I believe they are based on a misconception that the change we are discussing is a fundamental change. It is not; it is a tidying-up measure. It does not affect the powers of the Lords or our relationship with the Commons, far less our relationship with the regions and nations of the United Kingdom. The amendments which say we need to institute a new process to evaluate the impact on all these broader things is totally pointless, because it will have virtually zero influence on all those things.

There are two areas of further change which we have spent lots of time debating which have nothing to do directly with the Bill. One has to do with how the current House of Lords improves the way it operates, whether that is by having a retirement age, participation levels or all the other things that we have spent a lot of time discussing that the Government have in their manifesto. We can possibly discuss how to achieve it in the next group.

The second question, which is certainly beyond the purview of this Bill, has to do with whether you have long-term democratic reform. Clearly, from these Benches we think we should. Clearly, the House of Commons in the coalition Government thought by a massive majority that we should. That is not a revolutionary change which has not been discussed and where MPs have not thought about the issues which concern the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, so much. They were discussed and a conclusion was reached—but whether the Bill proceeded had everything to do with politics and nothing to do with the principle behind it.

So these amendments would get us nowhere. As for a constitutional conference, as the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, has said, in the past they have reached no conclusion, because you do not reach a total consensus on this. If anybody thinks that, frankly, they have not been listening at all, and anybody who hears the words “constitutional royal commission” thinks “years of delay”—and whatever we need, we do not need that.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I must disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Newby. If there is a misconception here, it is about the continuing presence of our hereditary colleagues in your Lordships’ House. They were not kept here by some form of transition, as the Deputy Leader of the House put it in an earlier debate; they were kept here because, in the debates at the end of the last century, nobody could answer the fundamentally important question of what this House is for, how it ought to be constituted and whether there was a better route to come here than the route by which we have all come, in our different ways. We were kept here as surety to ensure that the reform process that the then Labour Government embarked on would continue. They had a further decade in power after 1999 and brought forward no further measures, which is why so many of us on this side are sceptical about the speed with which they will bring forward the further reforms that they proposed in their most recent manifesto. So this is a very important group of amendments because, as Amendment 95 puts it, it is about the impact of this Bill on the effectiveness of the House of Lords.

The Government, like the noble Lord, Lord Newby, have cast this Bill very narrowly and argued that this is a tightly focused Bill. In some ways it is too narrowly cast and too tightly focused. It ducks the questions of what this House is for and the questions that flow from it about how it should best be composed. But, although narrow, the Bill will have serious and sweeping impacts on this House of Parliament. As my noble friends Lord Hamilton of Epsom and Lord Swire put it, this Bill puts the cart before the horse. It avoids those questions and seeks to enact a very important change based on a misunderstanding of the position from the late 1990s.

Throughout this Committee, we have heard concerns raised from all corners of your Lordships’ House that this Bill will leave us a less effective legislative Chamber. Ministers have disagreed with the concerns that have been raised. Well, here is their chance to prove it. If those of us who have expressed our concerns are wrong, these reviews will be the opportunity to prove us wrong.

I believe that the fears we have heard in this Committee are well-founded. Our hereditary colleagues attend your Lordships’ House more frequently than life Peers. They play a more active role, not just in the Division Lobbies and in the Chamber but in our committees, on the Woolsack and in convening the Cross Benches. As my noble friend Lord Shinkwin put it in our debate on the first group, armed with the data that the Library has provided him, our hereditary colleagues play a valuable and active role in the functioning of your Lordships’ House. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, said in that debate, “Why are we thinking of removing those who work the hardest while leaving those who do not?”

I am sure the Deputy Leader will say that all these questions about participation and activity can be addressed later. Again, these amendments are an opportunity for him to do that. At no point in this Committee have we had any commitment from the Government about when they plan to turn to the next parts of the reforms that they proposed in their manifesto. Ministers have not even committed to do so by the end of this Parliament. So I share the concerns that my noble friend Lord Hailsham has raised: that we will be waiting another decade or longer to see the further reforms that noble Lords have called for throughout the course of these debates.

My noble friends’ amendments in these groups would give us the opportunity to review progress after 12 months, on the timetable proposed by my noble friend Lord Dundee, or two years, in the timeframe proposed by my noble friend Lord Lucas. It would also be an opportunity for us to review what we have lost. We have heard in the course of these debates how our hereditary colleagues bring valuable experience from their work in business and agriculture, two areas where on the Government’s record it is clear that they have something of a blind spot, and it is important to have those voices raised in this scrutinising House of Parliament.

I am sure the Deputy Leader will seek to persuade us that, once again, our fears are misplaced and that these amendments are unnecessary, but I urge him to look seriously at these amendments, which call for modest but important reviews. The Government listened to the concerns that were raised in your Lordships’ House in our debate on the Football Governance Bill and gave us a statutory review of that new regulator after five years. I know football is something that attracts a lot more attention than reform of the House of Lords, but I think the constitution of our second legislative Chamber is about as important as the beautiful game. I hope the Deputy Leader will look at this and consider giving us a review in this Bill as well.