House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Viscount Thurso Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 2nd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I shall say just a few words about Amendment 4, which I support wholeheartedly. It is a move in the right direction. The problem is that if this House does not have some democratic authority, it will lose the powers that it has left. In this modern day and age, we must have some democratic legitimacy, as has often been referred to, in particular on the previous amendments. To survive, we must have a democratic element. I am not here to talk about exactly what that should be. The whole point about this amendment is that it does not specify what it should look like, despite some comments from across the House that seem to presuppose what the outcome of this consultation would be. If moving in the right direction is starting to implement the promise given by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, all those years ago then we might be moving in the right direction, but we have to get some democracy into this Chamber or it will not survive into the future.

[Viscount Thurso (LD)]

My Lords, I support the amendment from my noble friend on the Front Bench and I very much echo the noble Earl’s thoughts. I have spent 30-something years, between this House’s first incarnation, the other place and this House’s second incarnation, arguing for a democratically elected upper Chamber. I do so because I believe wholeheartedly that we need and deserve a strong Parliament, which requires two Houses, both of which can exercise complementary authority to give parliamentary activities what the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, described as legitimacy. This House as it is currently composed, even after we hereditaries have all gone, still lacks the legitimacy necessary for a strong Parliament.

My support for my noble friend is because this amendment offers a route map to getting consultation without prescribing the exact manner of how that democratic legitimacy can be achieved. I am not going to be tempted into a long speech on what I think: if anybody is remotely interested, they can find it in Hansard. What I will say is that the principle of a democratically elected second Chamber is essential for a legitimate Parliament. As I think I said at Second Reading, I am a parliamentarian first and foremost. Therefore, I hope that my noble friend will seek the opinion of the House, and I will certainly support him.

[Lord Strathclyde (Con)]

My Lords, my support for this amendment is largely symbolic, but at least it is consistent with things that I have said and stood for in the past. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, talked about my Amendment 32, which we will come to late next week. Its purpose is to provide an echo of the Parliament Act 1911, that there is still a requirement for a democratic element to House of Lords reform, and to remind not just the House but the people of this country that democratic reform was a worthwhile stage 2 objective, which has been sadly missed by this Government in this Parliament, and that is the greatest missed opportunity of this entire Bill.

Of course, a wholly appointed House in itself has no democratic legitimacy, or very little. The argument I favoured and supported in 2012 under the Cameron-Clegg Bill of that year was precisely to provide the case for an elected House which included an unelected element—the great Cross Benches—which provided a good, tempering role on the whole of the House of Lords. At present, the House of Lords does an excellent job. It revises and scrutinises legislation, and it debates the great issues of the day. It does not overdo the power that it has. The noble Lords, Lord Rooker and Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, are entirely correct in saying that we are governed by conventions. The fear some of us have had, if we change the composition of the House of Lords, is: would those conventions exist and continue to provide that slight softening of the attitude of your Lordships’ House?

Of course constituencies are important, and I join my noble friend Lord Hailsham in saying that the only way of doing it—here I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Newby—is to have constituencies, perhaps based loosely on the old 80 or so European constituencies in the country, with voting in perhaps a third of them every five years to get the kind of difference that this House needs.