House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Committee (1st Day) (Continued)

Amendment 6

6: Leave out Clause 1 and insert the following new Clause— “By-elections and life peerages for hereditary peer vacancies(1) Section 2 of the House of Lords Act 1999 (exception to exclusion of hereditary peers from membership of House of Lords) is amended as follows.(2) In subsection (2), after “time” insert “no more than”.(3) For subsection (4), substitute—“(4) In any case where a person excepted from section 1 dies or ceases to be a member of the House of Lords, an election must be held in which anyone on the register of electors anywhere in the United Kingdom may stand, and in which all members of the House of Lords may vote. (4A) Any person selected as a result of an election held under subsection (4) must be recommended by the Prime Minister for a life peerage.””Member's explanatory statement This amendment seeks to probe whether hereditary peer vacancies could be filled by members of the public who would be elected by members of the House and recommended to the Prime Minister for a life peerage.

My Lords, I shall also speak to my Amendment 7. My objective in this amendment, and indeed in all my others, is to improve the Bill, not upset it. I am not intending to immerse myself in the argument as to whether we should be Grocotted or garrotted. This amendment is written as if we were being Grocotted, but it works just as well if we follow the Government’s intentions and we all leave at once.

In this amendment, I am interested in the opportunity that the Bill presents to improve the House going forward without hereditary Peers. The history of Lords reform shows that this opportunity will not be back in any short order. In the time that I have been in this House, there were opportunities for reform in 1992, which did not come about because of the election; in 1999, when we were promised stage 2 but it did not happen; and in 2012, when the coalition’s Bill did not go through.

Opportunities to reform come along once a decade, and there never is a stage 2 because this is a really hard reform to do. There is no big constituency for it—not for getting rid of the hereditary Peers but for reforming the Lords generally—and those in charge of parliamentary time never find time for it. Why do your Lordships think we as a Government never reformed the Lords? Because there were always better things to do. The same is going to be true of this Government, and the silence of the noble Baroness the Lord Privy Seal is testament to that. There is no worked-out proposal for how the Lords should be reformed, only a thought that there may be discussions in the future.

Everything we know about Lords reform says that this will come to nothing, so we really need to use this Bill to see how we can improve the House. Amendment 6 says, “Don’t throw away by-elections. We can use them to improve the House”. They are a system that works. Look at the flow of talented, hard-working Peers who have come in over the last 25 years through by-elections. None of us expected things to go on anything like this long, and the noble Baroness and her colleagues are quite right that it is ridiculous how long they have gone on; none the less, they have resulted in the acquisition in this House of some very excellent Peers. That was no mean feat, given the smallness of the pool in which we had to fish.

7: In subsection (3), inserted subsection (4), after “stand” insert “if they have been recommended in accordance with procedures to be determined by the House of Lords by a member of the Council of the Nations and the Regions”

I beg to move.

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Lucas on introducing his Amendment 6. Today of all days it is an immense privilege to be able to speak in your Lordships’ Committee. Like other noble Lords have said, I feel a little bit diffident about talking about ourselves when so many more important international affairs demand our attention. But this is the way the business has been tabled and so I am following that.

I remind noble Lords that the acceptance of the Weatherill amendment to allow 92 hereditary Peers to remain was described by Viscount Cranborne, as he was at the time, as the “sand in the shoe” to ensure that the Government really would move to stage 2, which would involve a move to a wholly or partially elected House. Indeed, the Parliament Act 1911 envisaged the eventual replacement of the House of Lords, as then constituted, with a House elected on a popular instead of a hereditary basis. I stress that, although I fully accept that many life Peers are extremely popular, the Act clearly meant the introduction of at least a significant elected element.

I would remind the Lord Privy Seal that not only the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irving of Lairg, but many other Ministers at the time made clear their commitment that stage 2 really would happen. I understand that the by-elections which have been held for 26 years cannot in any sense be regarded as democratic, but they have certainly been competitive. I was evicted from this place in 1999 and had to contest a by-election against 36 candidates in 2004, which was certainly competitive.

The Weatherill amendment was successful in avoiding what many noble Lords on all sides of the House thought at the time would be a most undesirable outcome—the establishment of a wholly appointed House. However much noble Lords on other Benches have ridiculed the system for replacing hereditary Peers through by-elections, the existence of any kind of elected part of your Lordships’ House has been valuable because it has maintained 92 independent Peers who do not owe their membership to appointment almost entirely by a Prime Minister.

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Lucas’s Amendment 6, which seeks to open up the by-elections to registered voters—and, in fact, take it even further than that—to correct the wrong impression of by-elections held by many noble Lords who have never had first-hand experience of them.

The concept of by-elections to your Lordships’ House has been dismissed because of the singular nature of the candidates, but if the candidature is broadened, as envisaged by this amendment, the idea suddenly becomes much more attractive. To succeed in a by-election is no easy task; to have succeeded proves the candidate worthy to the selectorate involved in choosing him or, in the future, her.

The candidates must first a show real determination to sit in your Lordships’ House. Library research shows that, on average, an hereditary stands for election four times before being successful. As elections are held on average once a year, on the death or retirement of an existing Member, this typically means committing to a four-year election campaign to succeed. On average, there are 14 candidates for each vacancy and only one successful candidate each time—so one a year. There is no reason to suggest that the by-election process for registered voters, as imagined in my noble friend Lord Lucas’s Amendment 6, would be any less rigorous than the hereditary by-election process that has existed until very recently. First, there are hustings, where candidates hone their skills in political public speaking, followed by some very pointed and topical questions by members of the selectorate, who want only the brightest and the best to join them. Then, the voting process itself could hardly be more democratic, being a secret ballot conducted under proportional representation.

There is a lot to be said for scaling this up, not just for vacancies filled by registered voters, as in this amendment, but as a form of appointment to the whole House. Many amendments have called for a democratically elected House, but the reality is that this would mean the House of Commons agreeing to lose primacy, something to which it will never agree. I contend that that is simply never going to happen. On the other hand, we could have a democratically elected House if new Peers were elected by Members of this House. This is, after all, how political parties elect their leaders in the other place—at least partially. As ever, there is some devil in the detail, but it cannot be beyond the wit of sitting Peers to devise an election process based on the one that has worked so well, selecting only the very best hereditaries standing for election.

My Lords, I speak in support my noble friend Lord Lucas’s amendment. I say as a preliminary that I was somewhat horrified to hear, from his remarks, that there is an aversion, on the Cross Benches, to hairdressers. I have not heard that before. I cannot imagine why there would be an aversion to hairdressers among Members of your Lordships’ House, on the Cross Benches or elsewhere, and I hope that there will be opportunity before this short debate concludes for at least one Member of the Cross Benches to put my noble friend right about that and give us all a proper, egalitarian assurance.

Turning to the amendment, I remind noble Lords of my general position. I said at Second Reading that in any 21st-century democracy, there will always be a case that the legislature should be elected. That must surely be the default position, and it must apply to both Houses. All those who say that you cannot have two elected Houses are ignorant of the vast majority of functioning democracies which do have two elected Houses, although they are often different in their composition and method of election. Of course, it is perfectly possible to have two elected Houses that work together to generate effective legislation. That is what I find so frustrating about a large part of the debate, and I have sat in for much of the debate today.

My noble friend makes a sally. I do not intend to go into the details of whether it should be an open candidates list, a closed candidates list, a vetted candidates list or any of the other tunes that could be played on this theme; I simply say that he put his finger on something in saying that a House that is entirely appointed in a 21st-century democracy—with the exception of the Bishops—is mildly ludicrous and is indefensible as a long-term proposition. That is presumably why the Labour Party put forward in its manifesto a package of reforms to be delivered at different times; some immediately and some for consultation or enactment later—that is a clear distinction in the manifesto—and why it is such a frustration. The noble Baroness the Lord Privy Seal seems to be frustrated that there is some sort of filibustering going on. If there were a filibuster, I wish somebody had told me about it: I would like to have taken part.

You are.

This is the first time that I have spoken in this debate. The two Bills that I have been involved in, sitting on the Front Bench, speaking for transport, have gone through your Lordships’ House in record time. The buses Bill ended on its third day of Committee when it had had four days allocated to it. I find it mildly offensive to be told that there is a filibuster going on when many of us are in fact working to see the House’s business dispatched with reasonable efficiency.

If the Minister is frustrated by what she sees—I think wrongly—as a filibuster on this or other Bills, I think she has to understand in all candour how frustrated many of us are on our side of the House that she is utterly silent about the bringing forward of the further measures which the Labour Party had in its manifesto, why no timetable is given and why no undertaking even to issue a White Paper or a consultation document has come forward. I do not wish to sound in any sense offensive, and I do not wish to impugn in any way the honour of the Minister or her colleagues on the Front Bench, but she will understand, in the light of history, why many of us find it difficult to believe that the Government will find time in the current Parliament to bring forward the legislation implied by their manifesto beyond this Bill. The sorts of assurances that we are looking for, in terms of timetabling, likely content, consultation methods and all of that, would take a lot of the sting out of this, but we hear nothing at all of it.

That is why I support my noble friend’s amendment, because it brings just a little glimmer of democracy—as he says, a controllable element of democracy—into your Lordships’ House on a limited basis. I would like to go further and to see a larger element of democracy in your Lordships’ House if we are going to make change at all, but I will go with what my noble friend Lord Lucas is proposing, precisely because it opens that door. I really wish to hear from the Minister on the Front Bench why that is such a bad idea and why a glimmer of democracy is not possible, and a little bit more than we have had so far in terms of that programme, on which, in every attempt to raise it, she has just brought down the shutters.

My Lords, I remind the Conservative Benches that if we are talking about what has been in manifestos, there was a very clear pledge in the 2019 Conservative manifesto to set up a commission on the constitution to examine some of the underlying difficulties of the British structure of government. I recall the noble Lord, Lord True, on a number of occasions, defending from the Government Front Bench the reason why nothing had happened on that. Constitutional matters get easily put off and, once put off, we tend not to get back to them.

With these amendments, we are now beginning to talk about where we go from here, which I am sure the Leader of the House will recognise we all want to hear more about. Where do we go next, after this? This is a rather ingenious proposal from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. I am not entirely sure that ,as an electorate, this House is the best place. There might be a certain tendency in our current composition to overselect people who have been to the same school as we had, or people who are very like us, when actually, some of the people who are not like us are particularly good.

For example, if you had asked me to vote for a ballerina, on first impression I would have thought that was totally the wrong person for the Lords. I regard the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, as one of the most valued Members of the House, which was a great and wonderful surprise. If you had asked me to vote for the noble Lord, Lord Bird, as the candidate, again I might not have thought at first impression that he was a good person for the Lords. That is the hesitation I raise: elites selecting new members of the elite tend to go for the safe people like them, which is not necessarily ideal.

I will make a few wider remarks about where we go from here. I have on my shelves a full shelf of reports on House of Lords reform and previous Bills. The 2012 scheme, which I had the duty of trying to move in this House, was relatively clear. It was agreed by the coalition partners, although it was Conservative Back-Benchers, as much as the Labour Party, who let down that scheme.