House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Wallace of Tankerness Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I will make one brief contribution to this debate, which is likely to go on for some time. I enjoyed listening to the contributions entirely from lawyers except for the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. They had one thing clearly in common: none of them had any reference whatsoever to the subject of hereditary Peers being removed from this House. They are entitled to have made their amendments because of some ruling, which came from somewhere that I have not yet discovered, that under remote circumstances hereditary Peer membership could relate to other parts of the constitution. I accept that this might be the case in some remote circumstances. However, it is very difficult for me to understand, in any sensible conversation, what relevance adding, through these amendments, 25 protected places in the House of Lords has to the subject of this Bill.

I do not want to prolong it because I do not want to promote debate. However, with such a loose definition of what is included and what is not, on the same logic if you had a Bill to reduce class sizes in infant classes it would be entirely within the scope of the Bill to discuss university admissions processes—because, obviously, if you reduce class sizes, that gives an opportunity for children to develop more effectively and stand a better chance of getting into university. Lawyers can do that but, in the interests of common sense and as a general principle, if an amendment has nothing whatsoever to do with the subject of the Bill, it would be a good idea to determine that it is out of order.

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness (LD)]

My Lords, I want to speak to my Amendments 58A and 59B. I have a lot of sympathy for what the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has just said. I tabled these amendments against a background of also aspiring to a wholly elected House, where appointments would not come into it.

What prompted my amendments was that Amendment 57 recommends that

“the Lord Chief Justice, Master of the Rolls and Lord President of the Court of Session be granted a life peerage”.

In the interests of the union, we should not forget one part of the United Kingdom, and that is why I have sought to add the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland. I do not know the present Lady Chief Justice, Dame Siobhan Keegan, but I know her predecessor, Sir Declan Morgan, who would make excellent contributions to your Lordships’ House—and may yet do so for all that I know. If we are passing legislation for some parts of the United Kingdom, there is no logic at all to why Northern Ireland should be omitted.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, has said. Like him, I spotted the omission of the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland and note that we have not had a holder of that office since Lord Kerr of Tonaghmore, who was the last person to receive a peerage under the Appellate Jurisdiction Act 1876, so I welcome the noble and learned Lord’s amendment.

My Amendments 58 and 59 are designed not to disagree with the proposition that senior lawyers are very important and useful people but simply to point out that useful and important people can be found in other walks of life as well. There is much sense in the amendments that my noble friend Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, my noble and learned friend Lord Keen of Elie and my noble friends Lord Murray of Blidworth and Lord Banner have tabled.

I agree with what my noble friend Lord Wolfson said: a lot of the mess that we are in stems from the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. The fact that we are still, 20 years on, debating some of the questions that were left unanswered, perhaps even unopposed, at the time of the passage of that Act, answers the point that the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, raised. It is important when embarking on constitutional reform to try to think of the implications, and that is why I welcome noble Lords scrutinising this Bill and its knock-on effects in many other areas. I know the noble Lord regrets that we are debating it at such length, but this is a very important Bill with serious consequences, and we do not want in 20 years’ time to find ourselves with the sorts of problems that were not properly addressed during the debates on the Constitutional Reform Act.

From my experience working in Downing Street under my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead, I can say a little bit about a more recent chapter. Noble Lords know that, when he was Lord Speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, established a committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Burns, to look at the size of the House and propose non-legislative ways that it could be reduced. Not everyone agreed that the size of the House was a problem, but a clear majority did, including those who spoke in a well-attended debate held on the committee’s report on 19 December 2017. As Prime Minister at the time, it fell to my noble friend Lady May to respond to this initiative, which had been taken by your Lordships’ House to reduce its size. She wrote to Lord Fowler on 20 February 2018, responding to the report, as well as to the points that were made in the debate in December about it.

My noble friend Lady May acknowledged that, if noble Lords were to be persuaded to embrace retirement, an innovation which at that point had only recently been brought about through the House of Lords Reform Act 2014, they would need an assurance of restraint from the Prime Minister. In her letter to the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, my noble friend gave that assurance, and she stuck to it: she and Gordon Brown are the only Prime Ministers in modern times under whom the size of the House of Lords has gone down rather than up. As part of her policy of restraint, my noble friend said that she would

“operate on the basis that there is no automatic entitlement to a peerage for any holder of high office in public life”.

That is the reason, in addition to the Parliamentary Answer that was highlighted by my noble friend Lord Murray a few moments ago, why senior judges have not, as they might have expected, come to your Lordships’ House automatically.

This has certainly been disappointing to them, and it has denied your Lordships’ House the valuable contributions that they would all undoubtedly have made. In his memoir, Lord Dyson records with very good grace his understandable disappointment at being the first Master of the Rolls for, I think, two centuries not to sit in your Lordships’ House; only death prevented others from doing so. His successor, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, has come here and plays a very valuable role indeed in the work of this House.

As my noble friend Lord Murray says, Lord Dyson was also the first Justice of the Supreme Court not to come to this House. The first cohort were, of course, Lords of Appeal in Ordinary, so entitled to return to this House on their retirement. Unlike my noble friend Lord Banner, I am among those who regret their removal from your Lordships’ House. I tend to the view that cases like some of those that we saw in the Brexit years would have been less politicised had they been decided in this building, rather than pitting two institutions on opposite sides of Parliament Square against one another and asking them to settle the matter over the heads of protesting crowds standing between them.

But if all Justices of the Supreme Court were to come here on retirement, as my noble friends Lord Murray and Lord Banner suggest, we would be adding a tally of 20 new Cross-Benchers—nine former justices and 11 current ones—on current numbers alone. It would also seem to run counter to the argument that was made by those who supported the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 that the judiciary and Parliament should be more separate.

My noble friend Lord Wolfson and others, in their Amendment 56, suggest that there should be peerages ex officio only for the President and Deputy President of the Supreme Court. Stepping aside from the debate on numbers, they crucially and sensibly suggest that the peerage should be granted on appointment and not at the end of their time on the judicial bench. As I said at Second Reading, there are dangers in allowing politicians to pick the judges on whom they wish to bestow favour; but that same danger relates to other key public servants, such as Chiefs of the Defence Staff, Commissioners of Police of the Metropolis, heads of the intelligence agencies, Cabinet Secretaries and many more.