House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 9th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

My Lords, I apologise for intervening, but I have to do so because this is a concept that, like the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, I have proposed in your Lordships’ House on many occasions. I have not heard that support for it from the Conservative Benches in the past, but I have put it forward because I believe it would be a useful component of a wholesale reform programme of your Lordships’ House.

However much I agree that it is useful, I cannot agree that we should vote for it tonight. If I had written the Labour Party manifesto, I might have included it, with many other things, and if I had been the parliamentary draftsman for this Bill, I might have looked much more widely and had a much wider Bill —but I am neither of those things.

We have before us a very specific, narrow Bill. I do not believe that I shall argue later in today’s proceedings even about the content of the agenda for the Select Committee—but this should not be included in it, because it is not based on a manifesto commitment in any way. It is completely piecemeal, and I have not heard support for it in the past as part of a wholesale package of reform. Therefore, however much I might be tempted by the idea, I shall be happy to vote against it if the noble Lord, Lord True, puts the question to the House.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

Thinking of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, I trust that no wives of these new Lords will take the title “Lady”. That just creates a whole lot—we have wives of Knights who call themselves Ladies, we have wives of noble Lords who call themselves Ladies, and now we have some of us who call ourselves Ladies. If this was to go through, I trust that the new Lords—who I am against, by the way—should not be able to give that honorary title, unless my husband could become Lord Hayter.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the combination of titles with membership of the second Chamber is one of the many things that we have inherited from the medieval period and the 16th and 17th centuries. It is very pleasant, most of us enjoy it and I particularly enjoy the title that I have, because the village in which I live is a special one, a world heritage site, and people love to come and visit us. But I am occasionally confused—some years ago I was at a conference in Japan from which I had to return early. As I shared a taxi to the airport with a senior Japanese diplomat, he asked me in a most polite way, “Are you returning to your estate”? I wanted to say, “No, to my allotment”, but did not feel that he would entirely understand the subtlety of that reply.

We in the Liberal Democrats are in favour of a working and modern second Chamber. It is interesting that the noble Lord, Lord True, in his quirky way, described this as a modernising move. It seems to us to be adding another area of complexity, as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, said, to our already highly complex honours system. There are plenty of honours around: there are knighthoods, damehoods, and members of the Order of the Companions of Honour and the Order of Merit. We are not quite sure why—perhaps for the Conservative Party in particular—if one wants to award one’s more generous donors with something, the title of a peerage is particularly important.

The noble Lord, Lord True, did the honour of quoting what I said at Committee. I emphasise that, in terms of modernising the role of the second Chamber, we are in favour of thoroughgoing reform in which the title would be separated from membership of this House. What would then happen to the title is, to us, a matter of secondary importance. I know that the noble Lord, Lord True, has a particular problem with the existence of Liberal Democrats, which relates to events in Richmond in the past. It is even more difficult now that the Liberal Democrats are at roughly the same level as the Conservative Party in the polls.

I note that the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, used to object to the appallingly high number of Liberal Democrats here at a point when we had, as he would point out, fewer than 10% of the number of Conservative MPs in the Commons. Now that we are at two-thirds of the number of Conservative MPs in the Commons, I look at those very full Conservative Benches and wonder whether the noble Lords, Lord Forsyth and Lord True, really wish to defend the gross imbalance between Conservatives in this House and the other forms of representation. I remind the noble Lord, Lord True, that not only in Richmond, but throughout England, the number of Liberal Democrat councillors is about to overtake the number of Conservative councillors, so there are a range of areas that are a source of underlying problems for the noble Lord, Lord True. No doubt he wakes at 2.30am and thinks about the Liberal Democrats in a devilish fashion.

What my party wishes is to separate the honours system from membership of this House. We value the work of the House as a second Chamber, we see it as a working second Chamber and we do not think it should be muddled with the honours system in the future.