House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak slightly earlier than I expected.

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, on her well-earned retirement, having given such great service to both Houses. I also congratulate my noble friend Lord Brady on his excellent maiden speech, although that is slightly through gritted teeth because he takes a huge sideswipe at me in his autobiography, where he unfairly accuses me of having been to school at Eton. I have to tell your Lordships that that is fake news and disinformation of the worst kind. Still, I assure noble Lords that they can listen to my noble friend in future and be assured that he will speak truth unto power, having learned his lesson.

I have some skin in the game in this Bill. I inhabit a very small office with five of us in it, but after the Bill there will only be three of us. Noble Lords might expect me to vote for it and have some self-interest, but I have decided to put my self-interest aside and talk more objectively about the Bill.

I think it goes without saying that the hereditary peerage cannot be intellectually justified, as others have said, but neither can the hereditary monarchy be justified, nor, really, an appointed Chamber. We in this House all know that we are looking at an institution and an organisation that works, in its quirky and eccentric way. In some ways, it is rather like an old banger in the garage: we cannot quite work out which bits of the rubber bands are keeping the show on the road, but it is working.

I therefore approached this whole issue with a very open mind. Obviously, I like to be seen as a modernising, hip and trendy Conservative and would therefore like to say that hereditary Peers are unjustified, but I wanted to listen to the argument. The most persuasive argument, echoing what was said just now about the Bill being put forward in haste, is the need for wider reform.

I have often thought that you could incrementally reform this House easily with sensible changes. We have talked about a retirement age, and it cannot be beyond the wit of man or Peers to work out a proper one. We have talked about perhaps limiting the size of the House. Amendments may even be put down—dare I say it?—about the Lords spiritual and their future. A personal bugbear of mine is the appointment of Ministers who are then put into the Lords; they can resign a week later and stay here for life. Why not give the Government the opportunity to appoint people to the Lords to serve as Ministers and then leave once that job is done? There are so many changes that could make the work of this House not just as effective but appear more effective to those who look on our work.

However, it is also true that, having been in this House now for four or five years, I have become a fully paid-up member of our inchoate trade union. All those in the Chamber today arguing for the virtues of the hereditary peerage have at least provided clear and unequivocal evidence of the astonishing work rate of our hereditary colleagues—people who come here with a great sense of obligation, knowing that they are here partly by a quirk of fate, although paradoxically they are the only people in this Chamber who are actually elected to serve in it, however quirky that electoral system may be. They serve not only as Ministers, shadow Ministers and Whips but on our committees as well.

With the greatest respect to the Leader of the House, who pointed out some compelling statistics about how the make-up of the House will be barely changed when our hereditary colleagues depart, she failed to mention the impending New Year Honours List, and the appearance, no doubt, of many new Labour Peers, which will skew the balance further.

That goes to the fundamental point. Once the hereditary Peers go, this House will be fully appointed on the whim, effectively, of the Prime Minister, or the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, of the day. That will inevitably shape the character of the House. It will remove not only people who work extremely hard in this place but, as has been pointed out—this is an argument I had not heard before—people who have, by and large, had to make their way in the private sector before coming here, unlike people such as me, who have been career politicians and have a narrow, blinkered view of the country.

There are so many compelling arguments that should give us pause for thought. Somebody earlier said, “Be careful what you wish for. What next?” There are so many parts of our constitution where the beacon of democracy does not shine. Judges are appointed, effectively, behind closed doors, and they exercise powers almost as great as those of this Chamber and this Parliament. I urge the Government to hear those arguments and to think again about a wider case for reform and changes to this House, which would give the public the confidence that it is updating itself but not losing the best of itself.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

I could not resist having a pop at my noble friend.

My noble friend Lady Laing mentioned the 36th direct ministerial appointment, and the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, in his important contribution, said more about that. The underlying cause of that is that Prime Ministers have been offering peerages, rather than attractive salaries, to fill ministerial vacancies in your Lordships’ House.

My noble friend Lady Laing’s amendment would have a very serious and adverse effect on the culture of the House. In all my time in your Lordships’ House, I have looked decades ahead. I will give an example. In the 2001 Parliament, we had a perfectly decent, hard-working and effective Minister for Defence Procurement as our Lords Defence Minister. At the time, we were militarily overcommitted, and at Question Time I asked for how many years we had operated outside the defence planning assumptions. He misled the House by saying, “My Lords, none”, and sat down. Unfortunately, that was the wrong answer. I could have wickedly arranged for him to come to the Dispatch Box, immediately after Prayers, to apologise to the House for misleading it—but I did no such thing. Instead, I located the crestfallen Minister and said, “Don’t worry, Willy, just put a Ministerial Statement in the back of Hansard and it will be fine”. Nine years later, when I accidentally cut a £1.7 billion railway electrification scheme, it was my pals in the Labour Party, including the noble Lord on the Woolsack, who said, “Don’t worry, John, you have another Question tomorrow and you can clarify the situation then”.

In the past, I have worked very closely with parachuted-in Ministers, and I am doing so now. I am working very closely with the noble Lord, Lord Timpson —who is a parachuted-in Minister—on prison reform. This is the House of Lords, and our role is to revise legislation and to be an additional check on the Executive and a source of expertise. We cannot perform this role unless other Members of the House and Ministers work together collegiately, with mutual trust and in accordance with the Nolan principles.

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak in support of my noble friend Lady Laing’s amendment.

I begin by pointing out two problems with her proposal before I give her my unwavering support. I call the first the “Wolfson problem”, or perhaps the “Timpson problem”, whereby we appoint extremely experienced and able people to fill a ministerial role and then discover, when they leave that ministerial role, that they will be extremely distinguished and able Members of our House for the rest of their lives.

I gave three cheers when my noble friend Lord Wolfson came into this House, and I gave three cheers for the three excellent Ministers appointed by the new Government to the Front Bench, each with huge expertise in their areas. I invidiously agree with my noble friend Lord Attlee that one of them is the noble Lord, Lord Timpson. I have absolutely no doubt that they will continue to make extremely distinguished contributions to the House long after they have left their ministerial posts. The “Wolfson problem” is easily solved by converting those temporary Ministers into full-time life Peers at the discretion of the Prime Minister of the day.

The second issue is the element of—

[Lord Wolfson of Tredegar (Con)]

The only problem with that is that I left my ministerial office because I resigned from it. The prospect of the Prime Minister of the day thereafter appointing me as a life Peer might be regarded as somewhat remote.

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

As somebody who left the Whip because of the capriciousness of the then Prime Minister, and then managed to get the Whip restored and to be put into this House, I know that there are ways around the problem, particularly with extremely clever arguments put forward on one’s own behalf. But I digress.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Laing of Elderslie (Con)]

I thank my honourable—I am sorry, he is not my honourable friend; he has stopped being honourable. I thank my noble friend for giving way. I was trying to be brief in my initial remarks, so I did not go into great detail. This amendment would not apply to all Ministers; it would simply give the Prime Minister the ability to appoint some Ministers on a temporary basis. It would not oblige the Prime Minister to make all ministerial appointments to this House on a temporary basis. I hope that reassures my noble friend.

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

The noble Baroness was effectively my first employer, when I was 21 years old, and we have this telepathic understanding: she has seamlessly introduced the main point I wish to make.

I want to turn this round and pick up precisely on what the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, was saying. Moving to a system where the Government of the day could appoint temporary Ministers to this place would give the Prime Minister and the Government a huge amount of flexibility to fill government posts with genuine experts with, effectively, executive ministerial power to carry out their functions. There must be a small, niggling doubt when a Prime Minister is filling positions. Even with the very distinguished people appointed in recent months, he—and it is “he” in this case—must be thinking, “Am I appointing too many people to fill these Benches; people who are going be here for the rest of their lives?” If he had the freedom, for example, to appoint 12 or 13 experts in the field to fill specific ministerial roles, knowing that at the end of those roles they will leave this House, that would sit better with public opinion and give him more freedom. It would serve the country better if he were able to appoint such experts to carry out these functions—by definition, almost certainly as junior Ministers—and help the Government of the day. That is a very powerful argument.

As I say, there would be discretion to convert those Ministers into life peers at the end. In fact, I had not considered the question of whether they should have a peerage when they enter this House. My conclusion is that they should not. They should be called MILs—Ministers in the Lords—and then they can aspire, based on their service as Ministers and their contribution to the House, to a peerage after they have served as Ministers here.

Finally, I turn to the question, raised by one of my noble friends, of how many people would be attracted to the unpaid role of a Minister in the Lords. First, it does not necessarily need to be unpaid. It is a matter for the Government of the day as to whether they have the courage to face down public opinion and expand the number of paid ministerial positions. But this House should certainly seriously consider giving the Prime Minister and the Government of the day the freedom to appoint temporary MILs to help service its business.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friends Lady Laing of Elderslie and Lord Brady of Altrincham for their amendments. My noble friend Lord Brady seems to have pulled off the ingenious feat of engineering a debate on an amendment he did not want to move or speak about himself. So I will not say very much about his Amendment 90C, other than to note that the answers that noble Lords get to their questions would be far less satisfactory if the people responding had less authority to seek or determine the answers, and that our scrutiny of legislation would be diminished if the Ministers responding did not have the authority to make changes and compromises based on the arguments they have heard. We live in hope that we might be able to persuade Ministers of the need for some changes to and compromises on the Bill before the Committee.

I will focus on my noble friend Lady Laing’s Amendment 67, which has far more going for it. It is certainly valuable to be able to bring people into government who might not have had the inclination or the opportunity to stand for election. The present Government have made good use of that. Mention has already been made, rightly, of the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, who had a distinguished career in business but also helped those who had been in the penal system. More pertinent examples are people such as the noble Lords, Lord Vallance of Balham and Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill, who were distinguished public servants in their fields before they dipped their toes into more political waters. Similarly, the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General stepped away from a successful career at the Bar to provide counsel and public service in government. Governments of all colours have been able to persuade distinguished people from all sorts of walks of life to pause or sometimes abandon their careers in order to serve the country. What my noble friend says is right: they could perhaps persuade more if it were not accompanied by a life sentence in the legislature.

Although some noble Lords who have given service in government remain active members of your Lordships’ House, drawing on the expertise they have added in office, others do not. I was struck by the figures that the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, quoted on the rate of continuing participation of former Ministers. Indeed, when I look down the list of those who served in the Conservative-led Governments of the previous 14 years, I am struck by the number who have chosen no longer to sit on these Benches. I remember one difficult conversation with a noble Lord, who will remain nameless, who was anxious to step down as a Minister, having already served for longer than the late Lord Heywood of Whitehall had promised them they would have to in return for their life peerage.

So, although I am firmly of the view that Ministers of the Crown should be represented in both Houses of our bicameral system, my noble friend Lady Laing’s suggestion that temporary service in government should be separated from perpetual service here in the legislature is worthy of consideration. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.