House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Paul Waugh Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for your guidance on acceptable conduct in this place. I think it is very important, and I am grateful to be able to make what I hope will be a relatively brief contribution to the debate on this Bill.

It will come as no surprise to Conservative Members that I fully support the Bill in front of us, which I think is a sensible, rational and timely first step towards reform of the other place in a way that gives us time—as the right hon. Member for Hertsmere (Sir Oliver Dowden) has so eloquently argued for—to consider other things as we go along. There is a time for evolution and a time for revolution, and at the moment, it is time for evolution in how we amend the House of Lords. It is a question of how we take the first steps towards removing the most indefensible part of that House and of our constitution, while allowing ourselves the time and space to consider the other issues that have been raised and the commitments we made in our manifesto. I gently remind Conservative Members that that manifesto delivered a majority Government—you could say that consultation was had, and therefore we enact our policies.

I enjoyed the contribution of the right hon. Member for Hertsmere. I do not ask him to speak for his party because it is in flux. However, I ask Conservative Members not just to complain about the scope of the Bill, especially the lack of reform—I welcome their support for reform of the upper House; it has been a long time coming, but better late than never—but to consider whether they can defend the right of 92 people to sit in the upper House by virtue of their birth.

Those 92 peers have been almost exclusively white men. When the House of Lords Act 1999 was passed, five women were allowed to continue as hereditary peers in the House of Lords, the last being the Countess of Mar, who retired in 2020. As my hon. Friend the Member for Telford (Shaun Davies) said, whenever the opportunity for a by-election arose for one of the seats held by women, the woman was replaced by a man. More than 200 candidates are on the roll of eligible peers who could stand in by-elections for those seats, had the House of Lords not amended its Standing Orders. I will take an intervention from any Conservative Member who can tell me how many of those on that roll are women. Anyone? No. The answer is two. Fewer than 1% of those eligible to fill those hereditary seats are women.

I have no doubt that Conservative Members share my concern about the inequality that arises if we say that a white man has a potential privilege when he is one of the 92 or when he is a member of the 200 families who, by 100-year-old letters patent, have been in a position to secure one of those seats. To me, that is the most indefensible aspect. It is not necessarily about who those people are. I do not doubt that every single member of the hereditary peers group, whether in my party or not, has expertise and a skillset that they can bring to bear. However, if, upon their expulsion, they wish to continue to contribute to public life, all parties will have nomination lists during this Parliament. They can use them, if they wish, to bring back their best and their brightest. Of course, when those hereditary peers are no longer Members of the House of Lords, they are entitled to do what we have all done and present themselves to the public for election to this place, with a mandate.

[Paul Waugh (Rochdale) (Lab/Co-op)]

Conservative Members are clearly unembarrassed by the total lack of women among the hereditary peers. Does my hon. Friend agree that they should be embarrassed by the total lack of women on their Benches right now?

[Gareth Snell]

I am not sure that any Labour Member needs to quantify Conservative Members’ embarrassment; they do it for themselves.

The hon. Gentlemen seem to be confused about whether they want more or less reform. I think we know that the answer is that they do not want any reform, but they create a smokescreen of wanting to act faster and with more zeal than Labour Members simply because they wish to ruin the Bill. They want to press amendments that are not relevant and not in the Bill’s scope. They want to make arguments about retirement ages. When the right hon. Member for Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge (Sir Gavin Williamson) argued that there should be a retirement age of 80, I am sure that he had not spoken to his right hon. Friend the Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich (Sir Roger Gale), who is 81, although, to look at him, one would not think he was a day over 60.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir John Hayes]

Of course my right hon. Friend is right that change is inevitable and change is constant, in the words of Disraeli, but that change needs to be built on an understanding of what has gone before, exactly as my right hon. Friend says. Evolution in our thinking builds on what we know and adds to it incrementally. For the most part, constitutional change is better when it is incremental and when it is founded on consistent and measured dialogue between people across the House—the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Sir Oliver Dowden).

[Paul Waugh]

rose—

[Sir John Hayes]

I give way to the hon. Gentleman, who was an admirer of mine in his previous life. I wonder whether that admiration is constant, too.

[Paul Waugh]

I was indeed. I was going to share with the House the secret that I used one of my references in a report to endorse the right hon. Gentleman as a candidate. He makes the point, in agreement with the right hon. Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman), that incrementalism is a good thing; surely this is an incremental Bill that takes the first step towards a bigger reform.

[Sir John Hayes]

This is why I do not agree with the radicals on the Opposition Benches. This will come as a surprise, but I am not, by temperament or politics, a radical. One of my great political heroes, Joe Chamberlain, began life as a radical, but like most sensible people, he moved to the right over his life, and in the end became a Tory, or at least a supporter and member of a Tory Government. I do not share the view that we can conjure some kind of ideal system by throwing all the balls up in the air and seeing where they land. As the hon. Gentleman implies, incremental change is born of an understanding that gradual alterations to our constitutional settlement are, by and large, better. That is what most Governments have done over time; indeed, the Blair Government, to which the hon. Member for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Claire Hazelgrove) referred, took exactly that view when they reformed the House of Lords, retaining the hereditaries on the basis of the very sort of incrementalism for which I argue.