House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Rennard Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, this Bill is a very modest measure from a Government that so far, in terms of constitutional reform, have much to be modest about. The Bill is a long way away from proposing an elected House, which Labour supported overwhelmingly in 2012, and from previous Labour manifestos, such as that in 2010, when it was previously in government. However, the modest nature of the Bill is not a reason to reject it today.

Some Members of your Lordships’ House were here, as I was, through every stage of all the attempts to end the farcical process of holding by-elections to elect new hereditary Peers. But for the by-elections since 1999 topping up the number of hereditary Peers by 57, the modest measure before us today would therefore have involved only around 31 Peers. I am not sure that, in those circumstances, this Government would have felt it necessary to proceed with this Bill.

The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, who opposed the gentle measure of ending those by-elections, said today that this is a “nasty little Bill”, and suggested that Members of your Lordships’ House do not know who is a hereditary and who is a life Peer. He needs only to look at the UK Parliament website if he is in any doubt. From his Front Bench, we heard the noble Lord, Lord True, promise full-blooded opposition to this Bill, as the Conservatives fight to preserve the position of hereditary Peers, but his party’s position will be seen as blue-blooded opposition. If his party delays the Bill, the question then asked will be why they do not have other priorities that matter more to people in this country.

The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, appeared to consider that removing the hereditary basis for membership here is somehow a democratic outrage, while the noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, accused those of us supporting the Bill of gerrymandering. However, the arguments about democratic outrage are a bit rich from those who abused their power in the last Parliament to gerrymander every possible election rule in their favour. The noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, want to postpone the Bill taking effect until the end of this Parliament, which is the classic approach of Saint Augustine’s prayer:

“Lord, make me pure, but not yet”.


We need not spend much time on this Bill, but will we see numerous, barely relevant amendments and unnecessary de-groupings that ensure we spend many more days debating it? We hear often that ending the hereditary basis for membership of the House is a breach of a gentlemen’s agreement made in 1999, but as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, made clear, this agreement was based on blackmail; agreements made under duress should not be considered binding. In any event, no gentlemen’s agreement carries more weight than the legislative process, and as my noble friend Lord Newby said earlier, no Parliament can bind its successors. I wonder how some noble Lords would feel if Brexit had been blocked in 2020 simply because Parliament agreed on membership in 1972 and that could not be changed.

In the last 25 years, only Peers have been able to vote for Peers, and only from a very limited pool comprising only men who have inherited their position through their fathers. This Bill does not provide for what should really be done in relation to Lords reform, far from it, but that is not a reason to block a modest reform now. What we want to follow is more fundamental reform.

The Leader of the House explained how this Bill will make a modest contribution to moving the House in a more proportional direction in terms of voting. I hope therefore that this is a first step towards proportional representation more generally, as most of her Labour colleagues in the House of Commons voted recently in support of Sarah Olney’s Bill providing for PR, which was passed by two votes.