House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Viscount Goschen Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

My Lords, like many who have spoken in the debate this afternoon, I was delighted to hear the excellent maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Brady and saddened to hear the valedictory speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Quin.

We are Peers; we are all Peers. The word means equal and that is how we speak, behave and vote, and that is how we are treated in this House. There is no rank; we are equals as Peers. That should be held at the front of our minds throughout this debate. I certainly do not intend to follow the noble Lord, Lord Newby, down the line which he advanced in his speech, which I felt was uncharacteristically trying to be a little divisive between hereditary Peers and appointed life Peers. In fact, I think the reverse is true: in my third of a century or so in this House, I cannot think of a single instance where a Member’s rationale and motivation for the way that they speak or intervene has been questioned on the grounds of what type of Peer they are. They are a Peer; that is how they speak and that is how they behave, and I think that is how it should continue.

My second point is that our routes into this House—unless we seriously consider elections, and I think we should—are really, for the purposes of this debate, a giant red herring. The reality is that all Peers in this House are now de facto life Peers. The hereditary element has now gone. The hereditary principle, with the abolition of the by-elections, really is a non-issue. We have to look at numbers, composition and performance of the House, but I think to produce the hereditary issue as a great dragon that needs to be slain now is a very strange concept indeed and one that I do not think people outside Westminster would recognise as any sort of a priority.

Just take my noble friend Lord Strathclyde, for example, with his service as a Whip, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Minister of State, Opposition Chief Whip, Opposition Leader, Leader of the House, and no doubt a whole lot of roles that I have forgotten about over that time of nearly 40 years or so. Would anyone in the Chamber this afternoon seriously say that their own experience was superior to his on the grounds that he came to this House through a hereditary peerage some 38 years ago and they came as a prime ministerial appointment? I am prepared to take an intervention if anyone feels that they should.

Why have we got this Bill? I am very tempted to say that we should join together the three measures that have taken up so much time in this House recently: the debate on farming—the attacks on farmers and the settlement there that we have heard so much about, and will do again tomorrow—VAT on private schools, and the attacks on hereditary peerages. They could all be bundled together as a unified blood-letting Bill. Let us be honest and transparent about why this is being done.

I was most taken by the powerful speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, who is not in his place at the moment. He has done so much in the field of constitutional reform and was ready to mount his charger and draw his trusty sword of truth to fight the non-existent battle with the forces of heredity. He concluded by saying that he preferred the patronage of the Prime Minister. I am not sure that that conclusion was more than a modest bombshell. Unless and until we tackle the frankly preposterous system whereby the Prime Minister appoints his own jurors with no binding numbers, we are just tinkering at the edges of this issue. In my view, we ought to have a serious debate and move ahead with full constitutional reform, and leave this Bill to one side.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Viscount Goschen Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 10th March 2025 Lords Chamber

I am pretty sure that the greatest of all Whigs would have been against an age limit, but I am absolutely certain that he would have been against the unsupported removal of our hereditary colleagues.

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lords who tabled the amendments in this group have done the House a service in a number of different ways. Given that the 80 year-old retirement age was an important part of the Government’s manifesto, this debate gives us the opportunity to test their motivation for both bringing forward these measures and for not including them in the Bill.

The engagement we have had over the two days so far in Committee have been remarkably good-natured and constructive. They have been conducted in the right House of Lords spirit. An awful lot of what the Committee has been trying to get to the bottom of is around motivation: why measures have been brought forward and what their desired outcome is. You cannot test the efficacy of an outcome without understanding what the question is in the first place. I contend that the first day in Committee was really about whether the hereditary Peers performed better or worse than life Peers. There seemed to be a very broad consensus that there was a neutrality between the two groups.

We then, therefore, had to get to the bottom of why the Government are bringing forward that set of measures. We got on to a deep discussion of the Grocott proposals and why they were right then and wrong now, and how the only person who does not believe in the Grocott proposals is the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, and so I look forward to his intervention on this group. We were talking of dogs in fights, and I think he has got one in this group as well in terms of his distinguished vintage.

We are all very clear that age has got very little to do with how well Peers perform in the House. We are Peers: we are equals, and that is how we are treated. We do not look at someone in their late 80s as any different to a Peer who might be in their 40s. I had the good fortune to come here a very long time ago; I have been here for 37 years, and I am still 12 years under the average I believe. I have seen it over a considerable period of time.

However, the Minister needs to tell us in her response to this group why the Government originally brought forward the age limit. Was it to reduce the numbers of the House? I think we all agree that is a valid direction of travel. Or is it because the Government felt that those over 80 gave a contribution of less quality than others?

I think we need to know why the Government brought it forward and what their current view is. Of all the speeches I have heard over the last two days in Committee, the most powerful and moving was that given by the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, who cautioned the Committee that if we are to amend the constitution to change the make-up of this House, we need to do so for the right reasons, for logical reasons, with the right motivation and with a desire to improve this House, and not for any other reason. I look forward to the Government’s response.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Viscount Goschen Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 12th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, it seems to me—and this is certainly something that I would want to take through to Report—that, if we are to have a House that is totally appointed by the Prime Minister, one of the really important things is to have some control of the consequences of that for the House of Lords. It is in our memories the threat that was made in 1911 to flood the House with Peers to support the Government. I think that would be a disaster. I am glad we avoided it at the time. The Lord Lucas at the time was a Liberal, and therefore sensible.

I do not think it is the right basis for a second Chamber in a democratic country that the Prime Minister can, if they are sufficiently upset with the second House, effectively flood it with their own supporters and have done with it. Moving, as we are, to a House where the Prime Minister has total control over who comes in, we ought to have some recognition of the current settlement, which is that the Government do not have a majority in this House. I beg to move.

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend does the Committee a significant service by putting forward this amendment. It encapsulates the arguments around a fully appointed House and this extraordinary situation that we find ourselves heading towards—a fully appointed House, with all appointments made by the Prime Minister, and a ratchet, in effect, in numbers, going upwards and upwards, when there is a change of Government. I think my noble friend’s amendment, which sounds so simple and straightforward, throws up any number of difficulties, and we could spend the next two or three days of Committee, if such things existed, talking about how this mechanism might work.

My noble friend Lord Lucas is absolutely right to raise the question of the balance between the parties and the Prime Minister’s ability to introduce, unchecked, large numbers of Peers into the House. I was very taken —on Monday, I think it was—when we were talking about the question of elections, when a hushed silence went through the Committee and there were some shocked faces. I felt like I was in a Bateman cartoon: the man who dared to mention elections in the House of Lords—shock, horror. But here we are, discussing one version of an archaic situation versus another.

It is quite clear that there is no rational defence of the Prime Minister being able to appoint, without any check on numbers, to this House. The question of coalitions—parties that might come together and then split apart, parties that might themselves divide—would cause all sorts of difficulties. I suspect that this amendment that my noble friend has put forward is a legislative hand grenade, designed to illustrate the difficulties rather than necessarily put forward a carefully worked through solution.

[Lord Newby (LD)]

The noble Viscount will not be surprised at me saying again that the only way to deal with the problem that this amendment seeks to address is to have an election.

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

I quite agree with the noble Lord.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My noble friend’s amendment to ensure that no one party has a majority in the House of Lords is a relatively new idea. In the pre-1999 House of more than 1,000 noble Lords, there was often a majority well-disposed to the Government of the day. I remember observing, as an adviser in the Conservative Government after 2015, that this was perhaps the first Conservative Government in history who did not enjoy a majority in the House of Lords. What we are confronting here is a relatively new phenomenon.

Of course, it was a problem that the Labour Party faced much earlier, and had to contend with under the leadership of my noble friend Lord Attlee’s grandfather, after 1945. Out of that arose what we know as the Salisbury convention, though really it should not be called that. Viscount Cranborne had not acceded to the marquisate at that time, and poor old Viscount Addison never gets remembered.

Under that convention, your Lordships’ House agreed that it would not seek to thwart the main lines of Labour’s legislation provided it derived from the party’s manifesto for the previous election. Sadly, the then-future fifth Marquess did not tell us what to do about full stops or other punctuation in Labour manifestos, but it was a convention that certainly helped the Attlee Government get its business through and make all the changes that it did to this country. It echoed the referendal theory, which was developed under the third Marquess, in relation to legislation that was brought forward by Liberal Governments, but it is clear there was a lack of clarity on this convention.

I remember the noble Baroness the Lord Privy Seal arguing to your Lordships’ Committee on the Constitution, when I was in Downing Street advising my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead, that it was far from clear that the Salisbury-Addison convention was ever intended to apply to minority Governments and that was not an eventuality that was foreseen by the Marquess of Salisbury in the 1940s.

There are clearly a lot of gaps to fill. There was an attempt by your Lordships’ House—indeed, there was a Joint Committee—to look at the conventions and the two Houses’ understanding of how they operated, back in 2006. I wonder whether the noble Baroness or the present Government have any intention of repeating that exercise, in looking to codify or clarify the convention or to point out other unforeseen circumstances, such as minority Governments in another place.

In the 1997 Labour manifesto, there was a sentence that said:

“No one political party should seek a majority in the House of Lords”.


There was no such statement or commitment in the 2024 manifesto. I think the noble Baroness the Lord Privy Seal has been clear from the Dispatch Box before that it is her view that no party should seek a majority in your Lordships’ House, and I would be grateful if she would expand on that in a moment.

But I think my noble friend Lord Hailsham, who has spoken a few times—