House of Lords (Peerage Nominations) Bill [HL]

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 18th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, most of those who have spoken have welcomed the Bill and spoken about the importance of this modest reform to the reputation of the House and, in effect, to restoring public trust in our parliamentary democracy.

Several people have spoken about how they were appointed to this House, so I had better come clean too. I was phoned up by Paddy Ashdown shortly after Mark Bonham Carter, then my party’s foreign policy spokesman, had suddenly died. I was told that the party needed an active specialist on foreign policy in the House. It was made quite clear to me that it wanted me, if appointed, to be a working Peer. That seems an appropriate way to appoint party nominees.

Since I was appointed in 1996, I remember the negotiations around the move towards the transitional House we are now in. Indeed, I was with Paddy Ashdown during some of those negotiations. I remind the Minister of what the White Paper of January 1999 said about the composition of the House, in paragraph 19:

“For the transitional House, the Government will ensure that no one political party commands a majority in the Lords. The Government presently plans to seek only broad parity with the Conservatives.”


The noble Baroness, Lady Jay of Paddington, then Leader of the Lords, repeated in this Chamber that

“the Government have always made clear the view that no political party should seek a majority in your Lordships’ House. … We shall … ensure a fair representation for all other parties and for the Cross-Benches. The Government intend that the principles of a broad parity and proportionate creations for the other political parties and the Cross-Benches should be maintained throughout the period of the transitional House.”—[Official Report, 20/1/1999; col. 584]

I quote this at length because, in the last two days, the Minister has twice disagreed with that. Indeed, she said yesterday that the Conservative Party, despite winning successive elections, still has only 34% of the seats in the House of Lords. I remind the Minister that, if one takes away the 20% of Cross-Benchers, the substantial number of non-affiliated Peers and the Bishops, it is 45% of the political nominees in this House—and that after the current potential extra nominees, it will be over 50% and we will then be in a very different position. Does the Minister intend that what she said should mark a major shift in the Government’s position on the composition of the Lords? If that is the case, will the Leader of the House come to the House and explain why the Government have changed that established position and what they think the implications will be for the composition of the House after the next change of Government?

Having said that, there is a range of other issues that we need to consider. I was struck, in the Accession Oath made by King Charles, by his commitment to constitutional government. We are all aware that the last but one in our series of Prime Ministers broke the constitution and its conventions in a number of ways, on a number of occasions. The Conservative Party used to call itself the constitutional party; it is in danger of becoming the “unconstitutional party”. Rishi Sunak is the second new Prime Minister we have had this year who has not been elected by the people—I point this out to the Minister, who seems to think that we have a semi-presidential system—but one rather hoped that, under Rishi Sunak, we would begin to return to respect for the rules of the constitution.

Many years ago, Lord Hailsham spoke about “elective dictatorship”, meaning Governments who get their way without Parliament getting in the way. As we all know, what Boris Johnson objected to most about the House of Lords was that we changed some of the things that he proposed. The idea of getting a majority of Conservatives in this House is to stop the House of Lords changing what the Government propose. The Minister knows well, from some of the Bills that she has herself been concerned with, that we have been facing some extremely badly drafted Bills, which, after their introduction, are substantially amended by the Government themselves. Clause 1 of the Procurement Bill is about to have its second government amendment since it was introduced. We have a Government who increasingly have been resisting reasoned amendments in this House and resisting the sorts of discussions between Committee and Report that help to improve legislation.

Holding the Executive to account is the function of this amending House. In the 1999 discussions, it was made entirely clear that this transitional House was intended to be a revising House with a different composition from the House of Commons. This Bill spells out those principles in rather more detail. It strengthens the role of the House of Lords Appointments Commission. There are indeed one or two minor amendments that some of us might like to propose, but I hope that the Minister will be willing to give this at least a half-welcome, to demonstrate that, with the arrival of Prime Minister Sunak, we are returning to a rather more constitutional, reasoned form of government, and that we will therefore begin to move to the next stage of the long and slow process of Lords reform.