House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Simon Hoare and Gareth Snell

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hoare]

I am going to stay mute on the “all” point, but my right hon. Friend echoes the point I was endeavouring to make, which is that a list of conversion, as it were, from hereditary to life should be considered by His Majesty’s Government, outwith leaving it to leaders of any party to nominate for a new year’s honour or a birthday honour, because that would clog up the system for those who are new to public life—echoing the point the Minister raised—where people want to make a contribution and may have caught the eye of the powers that be in order to secure a nomination.

I think there is a job of work that needs to be done. There are a number of ways in which one can land on the right solution, but it should not just be a case of, “Thank you so very much indeed for your service. Please return the ermine to the Lord Great Chamberlain. Your retirement party has been postponed because we could not find a room to have it in”, or whatever it may happen to be. I think there is a way which is elegant, which is kind, which is graceful and which has some democratic underpinning, because at least it will have gone through the appointments.

I close by saying that this is a missed opportunity, and the Labour Front Bench needs to consider that. I appreciate that they have the distorting effect of the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), who did take up a little Labour bandwidth. We all got constrained by delivering Brexit, or trying not to deliver Brexit. And then we all had the big national distortion of the pandemic. But to offer this dance of the seven veils, after 14 years of opposition, and on an issue that people in this place and outside have been talking about for over a century, suggests to me a lack of detailed preparedness by the Government in some policy areas. It cannot have been a shock to Labour that they won the election; it may have come as a pleasant surprise that they won so comprehensively, but it really cannot have come as a shock that they were likely to win the general election whenever it came, irrespective of how hard my colleagues and I were working to ensure that did not happen:

“There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune”,

or misfortune in my party’s case, but we are where we are.

I hope that amendments are forthcoming—I do not think it is too late to work cross-party on this—to buttress this proposal and deliver some of that democratisation of the House of Lords, and to make sure it is more regionally reflective. I listened to the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) talking about the number of white men. I will be careful as he is helping me on a constituency issue, for which I am grateful and I want to put my thanks on the record, but my party has given the country three female Prime Ministers, the first Prime Minister of Jewish heritage and the first Prime Minister of the Hindu faith, so I am not entirely certain that we need to take lessons from the Labour party on how to bring people who are not necessarily used to public life into public life.

[Gareth Snell]

The hon. Gentleman makes my point quite succinctly for me. Yes, there were three female leaders of his party, but they were elected; none of them had the opportunity to take up one of the 92 seats in the House of Lords. That is the anomaly that needs to be resolved.

[Simon Hoare]

Labour were very keen to stop the Member for Stoke Newington being elected, and doubtless she would have been donning ermine at some point, so again I think the hon. Gentleman is on slightly thin ice. I say to the hon. Member for Calder Valley (Josh Fenton-Glynn), who is looking confused, that I am talking about the Mother of the House, the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott). I say to him, “Keep up, 007!” I do not know whether he noticed it during the election campaign, but there was quite a lot in the media about it. He should look it up—the House of Commons Library is frightfully helpful on these sorts of things.

So I say to my right hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere, with huge reluctance and sadness, that I am more than likely to sit this one out, as the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee—and I am sure that the Committee will want to look at this in more detail when we are up and running. But the underlying principle that the Minister has set forward is a compelling one. It is a sadness, a disappointment and a surprise that he is not taking this opportunity, after 14 years preparing in opposition, and after a century of making the case from the centre-left of British politics, and with a massive Commons majority, and that this timid little church mouse of a Bill is the best that he can offer us this afternoon.