House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Second Reading (continued)

My Lords, before the House adjourned this debate at 1 o’clock, we had heard the excellent and interesting maiden speech from the noble Lord, Lord Brady of Altrincham, whom I warmly congratulate on his appointment to the House. He began his speech, as many maiden speakers rightly do, by thanking the staff off the House for their helpfulness in welcoming new arrivals. That helpfulness, friendliness and efficiency of our staff has, in my experience, lasted the full 18 years I have been here, and I would like to begin my valedictory by paying a warm tribute to all of them.

It seemed like a good idea for my last speech in this House to be in a debate relating to the House, and on a Bill which I strongly support. However, when I saw the number of speakers signed up for the debate, I thought, “Will I get only two minutes to reflect on 18 years?” So the extension of the debate agreed by the business managers and the advisory time of five minutes came as something of a relief, for which I thank them. In such a well-attended debate, I also have the unexpected privilege of speaking before a large number of colleagues, including many friends from all sides of the House with whom it has been a pleasure to work during my 18 years here. I was very touched earlier by all the kind comments directed towards me.

I support this Bill and very much accept the argument that it is better to deal with this measure separately, rather than in a wider package of reforms on which it would be much more difficult to get a consensus. As my noble friend Lady Smith said in Question Time on Monday, the big-bang approach of trying to deal with all aspects has led to inertia and the absence of reform. As has been widely pointed out, this measure was in the Government’s manifesto and is unfinished business from 25 years ago, when it was only ever intended as an interim agreement in the compromise reached then.

Having listened to many speakers earlier on today, I have to say that it is not true that after 1999, the Labour Government forgot about reform. I worked with the late and very much lamented Robin Cook, who came up with a number of options, but on which the House of Commons as a whole failed to agree.

While the Bill is about the composition of the House, I hope that a changing composition will not in any way detract from its essential role as a revising Chamber. This role is badly needed in our democratic system, particularly given the complex nature of much modern legislation. This House has traditional strengths which are still relevant today. Walter Bagehot, writing way back in 1877, said:

“The House of Lords, as is well known, does a great job in committee work”.

Nearly 150 years later, this statement still rings true.

What I wish, however—I direct this comment to our new Government as they move forward—is that government will take our committee work more seriously in future, respond much more quickly to the recommendations of our reports and timetable early debates on them, rather than our waiting many months to discuss them. I also appeal, without much hope, sadly, to our press and media generally to pay more attention to our reports. By ignoring them, they do democracy a disservice, and they fail to highlight the important evidence given to us by witnesses with expertise in and significant experience of the subjects of our inquiries.

Going forward, I make a plea to improve the regional balance here, whether as a nominated House or a directly or indirectly elected House. We need to be a Chamber of the nations and regions, and I believe that this regional imbalance is our main weakness. It has been said that the old hereditary system created a kind of regional balance, because of the pattern of landed gentry estates across the UK. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, referred to this in his speech, but he was also right to say that it did nothing to create a real cross-section of our society, or to reflect our increasing diversity. But going forward, regional balance must be a guiding principle that the Government, the Official Opposition and the appointments commission all take very much to heart.

I recently had my 80th birthday, and one reason behind my decision to retire was reaching that landmark. However, on reflection, I am also sympathetic to the idea that, rather than having an age cut-off, the proposal to limit terms of office to 10 or 15 years has some merit. I hope there will be discussions on these issues and that progress on them will be made in future legislation that comes before this House.

Regarding my retirement, that frequently heard phrase of politicians—resigning because of wanting to spend more time with the family—is entirely true in my case. I also look forward to spending much more time in that wonderful part of the country that is my home area, the north-east of England. My last words in this House are an invitation to you all. Some of you perhaps know that I am a long-standing volunteer tourist guide to the City of Newcastle. As a guide, I delight in showing visitors around our wonderful city, which, like London, has a history of continued importance since Roman times and many fine Norman, medieval and Georgian buildings to show for it. Particularly to those of you who have not visited Newcastle before, I invite you please to come and sample one of the many different guided tours and discover it all for yourselves.

My Lords, it is a real privilege to follow my noble friend Lady Quin, although it is tinged with sadness that this is the last time we will share her wisdom in this Chamber. We are really grateful for what she has said today, but also for what she has done over the years.

I have known my friend, Joyce—if I can use her name for once in this Chamber—for many years. I have followed her stellar career with awe and great admiration. She spent 10 years in the European Parliament, which is a life sentence for some people. She did a wonderful job there. Then, as she said, she had 18 years in the other place and was a Minister of State in three separate departments: the Home Office, which sounded an interesting job; Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, which was even more interesting; and, above all, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, where she was Minister for Europe—and a really great one. She has also had 18 years in this place, and we have all benefited from her wisdom and enjoyed her company. We are really sorry that she is leaving us. We look forward to taking up her invitation to be shown around the north-east. If we had had a north-east assembly, as we should have, my noble friend would have stood for that and would have done a really great job as a member of such an assembly. Sadly, we did not have it. We wish her well, we thank her greatly for her service and wish her a very long and happy retirement.

I turn now to the Bill, in fact to Lords’ reform more generally, on which my noble friend Baroness Quin and I agree. With no disrespect to the great work that this House has done, which I acknowledge, it is unacceptable that the second Chamber in a 21st-century legislature is not in some way accountable to the people. My long-term preference, and that of my noble friend Baroness Quin, is for a senate of the nations and region, indirectly elected and so accountable, but not a challenge to the primacy of the House of Commons. Meanwhile, we need to sort out, as others have said earlier, some of the worst aspects of our current system.

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, and I served together on the Council of Europe. Chief Whips of both parties may be appalled to know that we often agreed on many issues in Europe. Again, I agree with the noble Lord today in his glorious tribute to his noble friend Lady Quin. I also find that I am in agreement with almost half of what the noble Lord said on the Bill today.

The Bill reminds me of the stalwart efforts of the late Tony Banks MP, later Lord Stratford, to ban hunting. I opposed his policy, but I pay tribute to his efforts to deliver it. I am reminded of this because I recall a few occasions during his passionate speeches when it seemed that what was driving him was not the love of foxes but his dislike of the people whom he thought did it: Tory toffs in red coats on horseback. Indeed, the Guardian, in an article in 2010, said,

“It wasn’t the sport Labour MPs hated, so much as the ‘tweedy toffs’ who enjoyed it. That’s why they never went for anglers. The hunting ban was always an unsubtle excuse for class war”.

And so, we have this Bill, and the class war is restarted again.

The Labour manifesto promised full-scale reform, but instead we get a narrow, highly partisan measure just to remove hereditary Peers. In one sentence of the manifesto, they say that the House “has become too big”, but in the same paragraph they say,

“too many Peers do not play a proper role in our democracy”.

So, what is the problem to be fixed then? Since the average daily attendance last year was only 397, what does it matter that there is a list of 805 Peers but that 400 do not turn up regularly? There is no cost to the taxpayer for Peers who do not come here.

However, I plan to lay amendments to implement the Labour manifesto—someone has to do it. Back in 2015, I commissioned the Lords Library to provide me with Excel spreadsheets listing all Peers, their ages and attendance records. I used that information for the inquiry of the noble Lord, Lord Burns. Then, in July this year, I asked Mr Tobin in our Library for a whole new set based on the last Parliament from 2019 to 2024. He and Mr Bolshaw did a brilliant job and gave me three superb Excel spreadsheets. I believe that the Library has now published them for us all to use. These spreadsheets list every Peer during the last Parliament who is alive today, their age at appointment and their age in 2029. They list their attendance record for those five years. I also asked the Library to produce a special one for hereditaries, and it shows what excellent work the majority of them do here and which committees they serve on. As they are Excel spreadsheets, you can select any criteria you like and get accurate figures and names. Thus, if you want to find out how many Peers would have to retire at a retirement age of 95, it is 26, including 11 who attend more than 50% of the time. A retirement age of 90 gives us 78 retirees, and a retirement age of 85 in 2029 gives us 185 retirees, including some of the most active Members of this House, and 50 of them have attended for 70% and more of our sittings during those last five years.

My Lords, I echo the praise that has been directed to my noble friend Lord Brady of Altrincham for his fine maiden, and to the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, who grew up in Whitley Bay. I am very grateful to have had the opportunity during our overlapping time in this House for the sort of cross-party friendship that so many people have spoken about in today’s debate, and I will always fondly remember being serenaded by the noble Baroness on the Northumbrian smallpipes in the River Room during the last Parliament.

I have seen the future, and it is the Football Governance Bill. We are presently debating that Bill in Committee. Now is not the time or place to talk about its merits, although I note that we were supposed to be in Committee on it again today until the Government asked us to make way for this debate. What is pertinent today is the way that our work and scrutiny have been characterised. We have had only four days of Committee: nowhere close to the 10 days we spent on what became the Online Safety Act or the 15 on what became the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act.

However, the Government have already been crying foul, rather in the manner of a footballer clutching his leg and writhing around in agony on the pitch. We have been told off for tabling too many amendments, even though 46% of them—more than 150—have come from the Government’s own Back Benches. The Secretary of State has told us to get a move on and last week at Business Questions, the Leader of the House of Commons said that Members of your Lordships’ House needed to “pipe down”. I know that the Lord Privy Seal takes her responsibilities and duties to this House very seriously and I hope she will ask her right honourable friends in another place to correct the record on that matter. I say that not to get it off my chest but because I fear it reveals rather more about the present Government’s attitude to your Lordships’ House than they realise.

My Lords, I gladly if slightly sadly extend my good wishes to the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, as she looks forward to a Northumbrian retirement. I hope I shall see quite a bit of her. She has done excellent public work in so many capacities. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Brady of Altrincham, on an excellent and very interesting maiden speech—interesting not least in his support for an elected second Chamber. That is the position of my party and has been since we put it in the 1911 Act, as well as pursuing it during the coalition Government.

I support this Bill. It will lead to our losing some much-valued and able colleagues, but we will have won the principle that ancestry confers no place in the legislature. Of course, the Bill takes no steps towards wider and more fundamental reforms, such as the creation of an elected House, which my party and I want, but blocking the Bill would not do so, either, and the notion that keeping the 92 Peers would somehow make it more likely for wider reform to take place has been shown to be quite false. The Government are talking a bit about consultation on time limits, participation and age limits, but no fundamental change will come before this Parliament under the present Government. They would have to be a very different Government for that to be the case.

There are two particular reasons for this. One is that it is difficult to the point of impossibility to get legislation through the House to make fundamental changes to the composition of this Chamber. Even this Bill might have a few difficulties, but a fundamental Bill would have considerable ones. Secondly, and more importantly, the Government—any Government—like the situation we have now. What is not to like if you are the Executive in having a second Chamber that does all the spade work on legislation but, if it says, “This is going too far and needs to be reconsidered”, can be denounced and dismissed as having no mandate as an unelected House? It puts the second Chamber in a weak position that we have to address, and having an elected House would be one way of addressing it—elected not in an identical way to the House of Commons or on the same timescale, but under a different procedure.

My Lords, getting rid of our esteemed colleagues, the hereditary Peers, is unnecessary and it is cheap. It creates a precedent for gerrymandering for which there is no need. In the five years between 2005 and 2010, the Labour Government suffered 175 defeats in the House of Lords. In the five years between 2019 and 2024, the Conservative Government suffered 410 defeats—more than twice as many as Labour. Why is there such a fuss about trying to get rid of a few hereditary Peers, just in case? It is despicable.

Get rid of the hereditary Peers and what will come next? Will be it an intensification of the silly attack on the number of Peers in this House? The average daily attendance last year was 397. If you shrink the House, where would you get the Peers with the relevant knowledge to go through Bills in detail? Since the other place took to timetabling everything, our House acting as a revising Chamber has become ever more essential. You have only to look at the number of government amendments in Committee to realise this. To have a sufficient number of Peers to properly examine the wide range of Bills, a sizeable pool is needed.

Let us reflect for a moment on how well this House works at present. Getting rid of that part of the House not appointed by today’s politicians will change the dynamic of the House for the worse. If His Majesty’s Government feel oppressed by too many Conservative hereditary Peers, they should brave the wrath of the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, and create more hereditary Labour Peers. We should not risk losing this important element of our House. Hereditary Peers may be a random and illogical element of the House of Lords, but they are nevertheless an essential part. I will not waste your Lordships’ time by repeating the statistics which prove the contribution that hereditary Peers make, as my noble friend Lord Blencathra has already talked about it.

Constitutional reform should be carefully considered, which is not the case with this Bill. There is talk of different reforms for our House. Beware of what you wish for; you do not know what might come next.

My Lords, this is a sad day for me as we face the prospect of breaking with over 800 years of history and tradition, and development of our democracy. Since our recent debate on the future of your Lordships’ House, and prompted by numerous rumours, I attempted to table a Question for urgent and topical debate, to ask the Government to announce their plans to give life peerages to the excepted hereditary Peers. My Question was not accepted, even for the ballot, on the grounds that there was no general public or media interest in the subject. That rather proved a point that I had made—that reform of the House of Lords is not a priority for most people in this country, whether a manifesto commitment or not.

In spite of being one of the few remaining Peers to have voted against the 1999 Act, I do not intend to repeat all the comments from the previous debate except perhaps, once again, to ask the Leader how, when the Labour Party’s manifesto referred to over-80s being doomed as well as the hereditaries, it became possible to drop the one pledge but not the other? In the interest of reducing the size of the House, can the noble Baroness supply us with the number of Peers who have taken advantage of one of the incremental changes that have taken place in recent years; namely, the system of voluntary retirement? The noble Baroness, Lady Quin, is an excellent example. This allows Members to make a valedictory speech and to retire amidst tributes to their contribution to your Lordships’ House and it reduces the numbers. Is there no way in which we can do more to encourage those who clearly do not wish to be active Members of your Lordships’ House to take advantage of this process on a voluntary basis?

This debate has ranged rather more widely than I had anticipated, and away from the specific provisions of the Bill. I would like to see it disappear completely, but at the very least it ought to be amended to make it less abrupt and painful to those whose ancestors made this place what it is and who themselves have served diligently and conscientiously. For example, I would support any amendment that altered Clause 4(3) and changed the enforcement of the Bill to the end of the Parliament instead of the end of the Session. I believe that that would, in some way, alleviate the pain and abruptness of it all.

My Lords, I shall speak briefly because I do not dispute the fact that the removal of hereditary Peers was in the Labour manifesto and that the Government therefore have a right to remove them and a big enough majority to do so in whatever summary fashion they care to. My concern is that we see the Government’s purpose carried through without inflicting unnecessary self-harm in the meantime.

The inconvenient truth—or perhaps it is a convenient truth—is that the current arrangements work rather well and deliver the cream of the hereditary crop to the service of the House of Lords and of Parliament more widely. Many hereditary Peers have had substantial career responsibilities in the business world, in politics or government and elsewhere, and they bring heavyweight expertise, practical experience and good judgment with them to the service of both Houses. I have observed that from my position on the Restoration and Renewal Programme Board for the Palace of Westminster, the Finance Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Lords Commission. These Peers bring expertise that helps defend the reputation of both Houses for their management of public resources—and, believe me, the public are always willing and ready to believe the worst on that score. If we deprive Parliament of these services, we are at risk of cutting off our nose to spite our face, or, to quote the Prime Minister, of “putting party before country”.

It is also fair to point out that the loss of the hereditary Peers would be particularly damaging to the Cross Benches, threatening to reduce our numbers significantly and carry away our excellent convenor, my noble friend Lord Kinnoull. As I understand the current position, based on a very helpful briefing from the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, to the Cross-Bench Peers a few weeks ago, there is a suggestion that the Government may consider admitting some of the sitting hereditary Peers as life Peers at some point after the passing of the Bill into law. Assuming that the removal of hereditary Peers is to go ahead, I strongly recommend that the Government move quickly to get the life peerage arrangements in place by the time the Bill comes into effect, so that the hereditaries who will remain as life Peers can continue to contribute without an unnecessary hiatus. This would show leadership on the part of the Government, help build trust and keep damage to the public interest as low as possible.

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Brady of Altrincham on his maiden speech and wish the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, every happiness in what I am sure and hope will be a long retirement with her family.

There have been only two successful attempts forcibly to remove a body of Members of Parliament, consisting mostly of one’s opponents, from Parliament. One was carried out by the New Model Army in the 17th century, and the other by the Labour Party in 1998. It is not a very flattering comparison, but it illustrates—or, at least, the former case illustrates—that violent action taken against this Parliament results only in constitutional complications that can take several years to extract oneself from.

One has to ask oneself: what is the practical political benefit to the nation of carrying out this measure? There could be several. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, could have said that her purpose is to achieve a permanent reduction in the size of your Lordships’ House. She could have said that her purpose is to create capacity for the appointment of Labour Peers to fill up those places. A perfectly respectable case could be made for doing either, but in fact she has given no practical benefit or purpose for carrying through this measure. The Government are doing this entirely because they can, which is exactly the same rationale that Colonel Pride used.

I take this opportunity to say that the attempt by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, somehow to blame the Conservatives, and particularly my noble friend Lord True, for this measure, on the grounds that he should have embraced the Grocott Bill in the past, does not succeed in putting me or many of my colleagues on the moral back foot. Many of us were not here for the Grocott Bill; we know almost nothing about it. I did not reject the Grocott Bill, because nobody ever asked me to give an opinion on it. The one thing I would say about the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, for whom I have a great deal of respect, is that the abolition of the by-elections for hereditary Peers—by what undoubtedly remain legally dubious means—has the very sad result that we will be deprived of his commentary on the results of the by-elections on each occasion that they are announced. That has always been a highlight for me and, I think, for many other noble Lords.