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

Lord Redesdale Excerpts

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 15th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Redesdale (LD)]

My Lords, I do not want to intervene for long, but I am in rather a strange position. As a life Peer, having stood down as a hereditary Peer and been elected to this House, I have the issue that my son could stand on the hereditary Peer list. Obviously I have had to explain to him that I will have to be dead first—that is the way of it. But I question the noble Lord’s premise. In 1999, the number of Conservative Peers was set just because that happened to be the percentage of the number of Peers there were at the time. That of course led to the Liberal Democrats having only three. If the same situation arose today and was based on the number of Peers, we would have a larger proportion. Is he saying that, as a matter of luck, the Tory party ended up with a large number of hereditary Peers who will carry on for ever and that should be the basis going forward, or is he suggesting that perhaps we should rejig the number of hereditary Peers available to other parties?

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, I wholly accept that everyone thought that the hereditary Peer by-elections would never actually occur because they would kick in, if I may use that term, during only one Session after the subsequent general election that took place in 2001. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, looked me in the eye when he made this agreement and said, “These things will never happen because we intend to come forward with proper reform early in the next Parliament”. I accepted that.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, that it is always entertaining to hear a Liberal Democrat talking about the disparity of numbers in this House: need I say more? Whether it was luck or a matter of fact, those figures for the hereditary Peers were set at the time and no one thought that they would continue. But they are set now and my point to the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, is that if you take away the hereditaries’ ability to remove themselves and put nothing else in place, that could create a long-term unfairness, which I will deal with in a moment.

Post 1999 we were promised a second-stage reform, but we are not there yet. The by-elections are a central reminder of that failure. As well as being a nod to the past, I think the new hereditary Peers are perfectly capable people and I know that the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has been at pains to say that there is no personal attack on hereditary Peers or their heirs; these are much more principled objections. But if we are stuck with this halfway house, we must deal with some of these issues. For the noble Lord that means the by-elections, while for me it means an appointments commission set up on a statutory basis.

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

Lord Redesdale Excerpts

Friday 23rd March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Redesdale (LD)]

My Lords, I interrupt because I am in an interesting position which many noble Lords are not in. I voted for the abolition of hereditary Peers. I even left the House because my peerage was abolished in 1999, and I was returned by the Liberal Democrats six months later as an appointed Peer, although many in the House believe I am a hereditary Peer, which I obviously do not take as a slight at all.

There would be no real difference if hereditary Peers were made appointed Peers to recognise their position. It does not give legitimacy. The noble Lord said that prime ministerial patronage is being shown. Many hereditary Peers’ ancestors were made up to this place precisely because of prime ministerial patronage at the time, so are we not embedding that patronage through the generations?

[Viscount Trenchard]

The noble Lord is quite correct that the original creations were due to prime ministerial patronage, but successive holders of the title who have sat in your Lordships’ House were not so obliged and did not owe their presence to the Prime Minister. In that sense, they were independent because they owed it to the random accident of birth. The by-election system is very competitive. It is a combination of random accident of birth, a bit of geographical coverage and competition.

The charge that the House as presently constituted gives these Benches an unfair political advantage—