House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill [HL]

Second Reading

That the Bill be now read a second time.

My Lords, this is the third time in four years that I have introduced a Bill to end the hereditary Peers by-elections. From my point of view, of course, there are certain advantages in reintroducing the same Bill: it saves all the bother of having to write a brand-new speech, although there will be some variance. I must say how nice it is to see so many hereditary Peers here to speak in the debate—I think it is 10 out of the total of 30 or so who are speaking. I gently remind them—the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, is speaking first, so he can set the example—that it is quite clear from item 11(b) in the rules of conduct of this House that when Members have an interest, they should declare it before they speak. They quite clearly have an interest, so perhaps they can remember that.

On all the previous occasions, I have seen this Bill filibustered by a tiny number of Members of this House. I persist in trying to get it passed, knowing that there is overwhelming support in all parts of the Chamber—Labour, Liberal Democrat, Conservative and Cross Bench—for getting it on to the statute book. I include many hereditaries who have wished me luck this week in getting the Bill through, because—unlike a minority of their friends—they can see the sense in doing that.

Given that this process has been going on for so long, and that new Members have arrived and long-standing Members may not have caught up with recent developments, it may be helpful for me to take stock of this whole by-election saga: what has happened so far and what needs to be done. For our new listeners, here goes.

There are 92 hereditary Peers in this House, 90 of whom—when they die, retire or are expelled, though none have been—are replaced by a system of by-elections. The number 90 is constant, fixed in law by the 1999 House of Lords Act. Of the 90, 75 are elected on a party basis from the four groupings in this House. For a Conservative vacancy, the electorate consists of the Conservative hereditary Peers in the House; there are 46 at the moment. For a Cross-Bench vacancy, the electorate is 29; for Labour it is four and for the Liberal Democrats three. With such small numbers, the by-elections for these two parties are particularly absurd. There was a quite farcical by-election for a Liberal Democrat vacancy in April 2016, which many Members of the House will be familiar with, when there were more than twice as many candidates as voters—seven candidates and three voters. Six of the candidates received no votes at all and, with a 100% turnout, the winner got all three. The cost of the by-election was £100 for each vote counted, a total of £300. I would be quite happy to have done it for a mere £150. I can update the House on costs, which have escalated following a recent tendering process. The new prices for the by-elections are as follows: for a Conservative or Cross-Bench election, the cost to the House is £600; for a Labour or Liberal Democrat one, it is £570. So the Labour and Liberal Democrat hereditaries provide better value for money.

My Lords, I return the compliments of the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, and welcome so many life Peers to this debate. Many of them were not here in 1998 when we discussed the amendments which introduced the by-elections at that time, which have lasted for so long. The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, suggested that I might have an interest. I assure him that if there is a by-election upon my death, I will have no interest in it whatever.

I oppose the Bill for three main reasons. The first is the implication of the Bill that the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, did not mention. If this Bill is passed, it creates a wholly appointed House, with no checks or balances on who comes here. It is against the policy of all the main parties, and has been over the course of the past 20 years, to have a wholly appointed House. As a result of that, the second reason that I oppose the Bill is that the House of Lords Appointment Commission, excellent and extremely well run though it might be, is not a creature of statute—quite the opposite. It was created on the whim of a past Prime Minister. It can be removed tomorrow or next week. It has very few powers—in fact I think that it has no powers at all—and can judge applications to the House of Lords only on the basis of propriety.

The noble Lord simply did not mention what would happen and the way that new people would become Members of the House. I very much hope that he will accept an amendment to create an independent and statutory House of Lords appointments commission that can vet Members of this House properly, if, as he and many of his colleagues would like to see, we are to have a wholly appointed House. Having spent a lifetime on elections, I would have thought that they had had enough of them. Those of us who have been elected here rather like them.

The third reason is that it does not tackle some of the issues that the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, mentioned. There is nothing on the size of the House and there is nothing on age; there is nothing on so many of the real issues that are alive in the public mind. Just over 20 years ago, we reduced the size of this House by nearly 50%. There is no reason why, by the end of this year, we could not reduce this House down to 600 Members, as at the beginning of this century. It could be done relatively quickly using exactly the same method. This Bill could be a very effective vehicle for providing that.

My Lords, we Liberal Democrats have consistently supported this reform, and I endorse every word of the noble Lord, Lord Grocott. I will come back to the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, in a minute.

I want to spend a moment or two thinking about why we are still here, after 21 years, and remind the House of the origin of this problem. Liberal Democrats were not involved in the Labour-Conservative Front Bench stitch-up in 1999. The so-called Weatherill amendment which created these by-elections was a purely temporary measure to make some progress with the then Government’s plans to reduce the size of the Lords by taking out the majority of hereditary Peers.

At that time, my noble friend Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank, on our behalf, made absolutely clear that we could go along with the proposal only along the lines of the 1911 declaration that there would be, in due course, further and substantial reform. Since then, I have been involved in all the efforts to secure reform on that basis, first with the Joint Committee which failed to secure agreement between the two Houses, then I convened a cross-party group of MPs with Messrs Clarke, Cook, Wright and Young to publish proposals in 2003, and then, with many others, I fed into the cross-party process led by Jack Straw which published the compromise proposals in the Labour Government’s 2008 White Paper. In turn, that package was largely adopted by the coalition Government for their reform Bill in 2011, which was exhaustively scrutinised by a Joint Committee and emerged improved but not undermined, despite the best efforts of a minority of Peers on both sides of this House.

The coalition Cabinet, of which the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, was a very distinguished and active member on this issue, gave the revised Bill its full support. That Bill received a huge majority for its Second Reading in the Commons in July 2012: 338, made up of a clear majority of Conservative MPs, an overwhelming majority of Labour MPs and unanimous support from the Liberal Democrats.

My Lords, I am speaking in this debate because I am asked from time to time whether the reform in this Bill would help to meet the proposals made by the Lord Speaker’s Committee on the Size of the House. I chair that committee, which continues to meet. We met again this week to review our position on this Bill. As a committee, we agreed that, since the Lord Speaker asked us to come up with non-legislative solutions, it is not within our remit to take an official position on the Bill. However, I can say that we as individuals do not oppose the Bill and some of us, including myself, are in favour of it.

For me, the decisive issue is that it is unreasonable that some positions in this House should be filled by candidates from such a narrow hereditary group. We accept that some talented people have joined the House through this route, but they could have come through the normal processes of party recommendations and HOLAC appointments. We acknowledge that the effect of the Bill is small and does not address wider questions about the future of this House, but it follows in the footsteps of the 2014 and 2015 Private Members’ Bills that made small but crucial improvements to the House. In my view, this Bill falls into that category.

Last autumn, the figures for appointments and leavers were not too far away from the committee’s targets in aggregate, even though the balance between the parties strayed somewhat from our suggestion. But now, it appears that any restraint seems to be at risk. The change in Prime Minister produced a resignation list and we understand that, following the early general election, a dissolution list is forthcoming. Taken together, they are in danger of undoing all the progress that was being made on reducing the size of the House.

Relevant to this Bill, the long-term solution to our problem of size is hindered, as was said, by the continued existence of hereditary by-elections. First, as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, pointed out, hereditary Peers are not subject to the two-out, one-in formula, which the committee argued should guide the reduction in the size of the House. They are replaced one-for-one. Secondly, over the longer term, by-elections inhibit the rebalancing of the House; as political trends change, the allocation of the hereditary spaces in the House between the parties is set in stone. As we warned in our first report, by-elections use up some of the Conservative and Cross-Bench notional allocation of appointments, which could otherwise go to life Peers. I note that, during the last short Parliament, between 2017 and 2019, there were only three HOLAC appointments to the Cross Benches, yet there were three by-election appointments to the Cross Benches during the same period.

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Grocott on his tenacity and humour. I shall try to be brief because this is, in the old joke, déjà vu all over again. I have spoken on the previous attempts to bring about this change and heard the same arguments; they stand up just as they did on previous occasions. On the endearing desire of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, to extend the Bill so that it brings about greater changes, my noble friend has brought a very simple Bill precisely because the more complex this gets, the less likely it is to pass and the more controversy it would create. We understand why the noble Lord and those supporting him would wish to complicate the matter rather than keeping it as simple as possible. The question is very simple: is the present system acceptable or defendable? Clearly, as my noble friend spelled out, it is not.

I accept entirely that, unlike most of the Conservative Benches, the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, belongs to a party that has always wanted to abolish the House of Lords as it is at the moment and replace it with a senate. We have to accept that he is right that they were not involved in the “stitch-up”—to use his words—in 1999. Instead, they waited until they were truly stitched up in 2010 by joining the coalition. I was proud to vote against the Second Reading of the Clegg Bill in the other place and see the timetable Motion defeated, because that Bill was a nonsense. It was a constitutional outrage and did not stand up to either intellectual or practical scrutiny.

Today, I support the noble Lord, Lord Burns, on the points he made and reinforce what my noble friend Lord Grocott said about the one-out, one-in policy and the absurdity of the situation. I also want to reinforce one other point. I thank the Lord Speaker for his letter in the Times on Wednesday in relation to the restoration and renewal programme and decant. With both the Burns proposals and the decant, a large number of people would take the opportunity to retire because of the disruption, and it would be the Conservative Benches which would face the greatest problem in retaining the 90 hereditary Peers and the present system of by-elections, because people would leave indiscriminately—it would fall where it fell. Because of the large and disproportionate number of hereditary Peers compared with life Peers on the Conservative Benches, those Benches would be disproportionately inconvenienced at the very least.

My Lords, I start by recognising that there is of course room for more than one perspective and view on this matter, particularly against the background of the work done by the noble Lord, Lord Burns, about which we have just heard.

As a great friend of the Companion, would the noble Lord like to declare his interest under section 11(b) of the Members’ Code of Conduct? Irrespective of what the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, said about his possible demise, there is a much wider interest.

I am not aware of the interest that the noble Lord wishes me to declare, but I have been here a long time. That said, the problem which the Bill addresses relates to the number of Members in the House, which the noble Lord, Lord Burns, has been working on. On a single day back in 1999, 700 hereditary Peers had to leave the House. Since then, their numbers have remained firmly fixed. Meanwhile, the number of life Peers has significantly increased.

Be that as it may, the essence of the case against this Bill relates to the undertaking given by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, then the Lord Chancellor, who gave a clear undertaking that the position of the 92 hereditary Peers provided for in the 1999 Act would remain untouched until, in his words, House of Lords reform was complete. No time limit was given to that undertaking. In 2012, as we have already heard, the coalition Government introduced in the other place a comprehensive House of Lords reform Bill creating a mostly elected House of Lords, which sadly never emerged. I would not have opposed that Bill in principle, although there were a few questions relating, for example, to the number of Bishops who ought to remain.

I have referred to the present number of life Peers. I would not in principle oppose legislation as described by my noble friend Lord Strathclyde, to provide for a statutory independent committee to select new life Peers rather than leaving it in the hands of the Prime Minister as at present. I could of course be persuaded that the hereditary Peers should then leave. In the meantime, I believe that the present arrangement should remain in place and I therefore hope that this Bill will not reach the statute book.

On one detailed point, the Bill as now proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, does not include provision for the two statutory hereditary Peers, namely the Lord Great Chamberlain and the Earl Marshal, to which he has previously agreed, as I recall. I hope that that can be corrected if the Bill is to proceed.

Before the timer starts on the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, could we clarify what the Companion says about an interest? My understanding is that, if a child, cousin, niece or nephew of mine were to benefit from a Bill, I would be obliged to declare an interest. I assume, therefore, that anyone whose relative—whether second cousin or third nephew—would benefit from this Bill should declare that as an interest.

My Lords, that would depend on whether they were going to put their names forward to stand. I do not have a clue what my successor will do, so I do not declare an interest. I would be dead and well out of it, thank goodness.

My first happy duty is to wish a happy birthday to the noble Lord, Lord Burns; I regret that he has to spend his birthday debating this Bill yet again. This is not the same Bill that we discussed on Report the last time it was before us. The noble Lord, Lord Grocott—inadvertently, I am sure—has not included the amendment of mine that he accepted. I am sure he will wish to do that at a later stage and we will get back to the Bill that we were properly discussing.

This is a constitutionally important Bill because it fundamentally changes the nature of our constitution. It makes this House a totally appointed Chamber—appointed at the whim of the Prime Minister. The House of Commons has never voted for that—quite the reverse. It has voted for an elected Chamber. It is only this House that has voted to remain a totally appointed Chamber.

The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, in his typically funny, witty and amusing speech, was of course his usual inaccurate and incomplete self.

Oh!