House of Lords Reform

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, we are hearing in this Chamber from some Members—often hereditary Members—who are unhappy that we are considering ending completely the principle of hereditary membership of this House. Other members, such as those on these Benches, are unhappy that we have made such little progress on reforming the House. All of us should reflect on the failure by previous Conservative Prime Ministers—I exempt the noble Baroness, Lady May, from this criticism—to stick to the one-in, two-out principle, which has caused the embarrassing expansion in the size of the House. We should also reflect on the failure to bring an end to the process of holding by-elections to replace hereditary Peers—despite the wishes of the House and the great efforts of the noble Lord, Lord Grocott—caused by filibustering by a handful of hereditary Peers, who have now forced a more radical proposal on themselves.

Then there is the failure of the Labour Party—for purely tactical reasons, based on opposition to the form of parliamentary boundary reorganisation that was then being proposed—to agree any form of timetable Motion for the House of Lords Reform Bill 2012. That Bill received overwhelming support in the House of Commons: it passed by 462 votes to 124, with 90% of Labour MPs supporting it—including every single member of the current Cabinet who was an MP in 2012. It was based on promises made in all three main parties’ manifestos in the 2010 general election.

As my noble friend Lord Newby said, we will always point out that the aim of replacing membership based on the hereditary principle with membership based on the popular principle was included in the preamble to the Liberal Government’s 1911 House of Lords reform Act. Only in this place could 113 years be considered too short a time to agree the details.

In a recent article in the Times, Melanie Phillips said:

“Hereditary peers are essential: don’t ditch them”.


But this is not about all the people; it is about the principle of hereditary membership, which we should ditch. An arrangement for some hereditary Members to be re-appointed based on merit could again be made.

The 92 hereditary Peers are not an essential safeguard against an appointed House because hereditary peers are now effectively appointed when they are chosen by a very small number of their fellow Peers in the extraordinary process that we call hereditary by-elections. This is not, as is sometimes suggested, a superior way of becoming a Member of this House to that of being appointed by a party leader. Party leaders have at least been elected as an MP by their constituents and as a leader by their party members.

We should remember in our debate that we are the only legislature in the world to reserve seats for a particular religious group, apart from Iran. We are the only legislature in the world to reserve seats for people on a hereditary basis, apart from Lesotho. But we are probably not the only legislature in the world in which principles of patronage can sometimes have a corrupting influence on its composition. UK Prime Ministers can, in the present arrangements, dangle nominations in front of people, some of whom may suddenly change their principles and become compliant with that Prime Minister’s wishes, while others who may hold worthy but more critical views are blocked by them or by their own party leaders.

In the present arrangements, therefore, the House of Lords Appointments Commission should be able to vet suitability and propriety, without any prime ministerial veto of their decisions. The commission should be able to make nominations according to a quota determined by the number of Peers appointed by other routes. We must move on from 1911.