House of Lords: Membership

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Wednesday 10th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

As the noble Baroness said, my noble friend sat through nearly all the speeches in that debate. I can say that she will be having a discussion with the Prime Minister to discuss both the Burns report and the debate that we had in this House, and the Government’s recommendations or views will be known in due course. I hope the House will understand that there were only three sitting days after the debate on 19 December. We have been back after Christmas for only three days. The Prime Minister has had personnel matters on her mind in the meantime. So I think the Government are entitled to a little bit of time before they come out with their views.

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

In the discussion to which the Minister has just referred, will he and his colleagues make it absolutely clear to the Prime Minister that a very large majority of the speakers in that debate on 19 December made it absolutely clear that the proposals of the Lord Speaker’s committee are wholly dependent on the Prime Minister accepting the principle that was inherent right through the report that there must be two out before there can be one in? Will the Ministers on the Front Bench make that clear to the Prime Minister? If she is not prepared to respect that, how can we expect anything to come from this exercise?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

In the analysis of the speeches in that debate, by my calculation, only nine out of 95 contributors were opposed to what was in the recommendations. I think that is as near a consensus as you are ever going to get in this House. I have to say that I thought the noble Lord struck a slightly different tone in his wind-up speech from that of his noble friend Lord Newby. Winding up for the Liberal Democrats —despite what the noble Lord has just said—he referred to Burns as,

“a temporary expedient … a process appropriate for the membership of a gentlemen’s club”—[Official Report, 19/12/17; col. 2100]—

and an “incestuous” process that runs the risk of leading to our abolition. That does not sound to me like wholehearted support for Burns.