House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Phil Brickell and Iqbal Mohamed

Committee of the whole House
Tuesday 12th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)]

Thank you for calling me to speak, Madam Chair. I am honoured to serve under your chairmanship.

Before I begin my prepared remarks, I wish to commend and pay tribute to right hon. and hon. Members across the House for their skills of oratory and persuasion and their education and ability to entertain. It has been an absolute privilege to hear Members with such experience speak, so well-informed are they on such topics.

I also wish to speak to new Labour Members who, like me, are finding their feet and learning the ways of the world in this place. I am pleased to hear that they are passionate about pushing and challenging their party to implement the laws and changes that the constituents and the country demand. but I remind them of the consequences of that. Rebellion, as I have seen in this short time, is rewarded with sanction or suspension, so it is better to get as much as possible into this Bill now than to hope that they may ever get a chance to do so again.

The House has been made aware that faith in political parties and institutions is at a low ebb—perhaps the lowest in my lifetime. We have been told that only 12% of the British public say that they trust politicians; political parties are the least trusted of any UK public institution, and trust in Parliament is on the decline. Any measure that helps to rebuild that trust is to be supported, which is why I support this Government Bill to remove hereditary peers. The anachronistic nature of hereditary peerage contributes to the sense not only that the House of Lords is out of touch, but that all our political institutions are out of touch. It feeds a disconnect between the people and their systems of governance and reinforces a belief that politics is the preserve of another elite, the political elite, that lives in its own bubble in Westminster.

Given this urgency to rebuild faith in politics and the need for radical change to that end, it is disappointing that the Government have chosen to be so timid in their ambition. I understand that further changes could be introduced further down the road. Indeed, hon. Members have said that they will try to push for more changes. For instance, perhaps they could remove the over-80s from the Lords, or retire the 26 bishops who are automatically given a seat.

The Lords themselves have raised the idea of removing those Members who rarely, if ever, attend. But even these tame reforms appear to be too much for this Government at this stage. We need much bolder action.

[Phil Brickell]

I thank the hon. Member for giving way. Does he accept that this is the first immediate measure of modernisation of the other House and that there are a number of other commitments that are enshrined in the manifesto of this Government, which will be seen to in due course in this Parliament?

[Iqbal Mohamed]

I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. I agree that the Bill is a positive step, but it is the smallest of the steps that could have been taken by this Government. As we all know in this place, the promise of jam tomorrow is just a promise and hardly ever materialises. We need much bolder action now. It is bad enough that we are alone in Europe in having a fully unelected second Chamber. It is frankly ridiculous that, with more than 800 Members, it is so large. I will put that into some perspective: the US Senate has 100 elected members, who serve a six-year term, and a third of the membership is elected every two years; the Canadian Senate has 105 members and a mandatory retirement age of 75; and the French Senate has 348 elected members, who serve six-year terms, half of whom are up for election every three years.

The fact that our second Chamber has been allowed to balloon out of all proportion looks more sinister when we consider that last year Lords appointees donated over £50 million to political parties. When it looks like our political institutions are up for grabs to the highest bidder, with jobs for life, is it any wonder that people see it as another private members’ club?