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

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 8th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I am in favour of reform of the methods of getting into the House of Lords, but this Bill will ensure that we have an appointed House of Lords within a generation or shortly after. This has not been the clearly expressed intention of the House of Commons whenever it has voted on this issue. That is my major stumbling block because I, like many others, think that lawmakers must have democratic legitimacy and therefore be elected. This is not satisfied by an appointed House.

The trouble is that there are Members of both Houses who think that the other place might lose its primacy if we end up having an elected, or majority- elected, House over here. That is why they want to see an appointed House, even if it is via the back door as is happening here. The composition of an appointed Chamber will inevitably be heavily influenced by the Civil Service, which will end up drawing up the guidance for the appointments body and, probably, determining the membership of it.

The next challenge is that the Prime Minister is actually the head of the executive branch—the Civil Service. He or she may also sit in the House of Commons as the leader of the majority party, but these two roles should not be confused. It is democratically indefensible that this person should be able to exert immense influence on the membership of one of the Chambers of the legislature, whose purpose is to pass laws which are there to control their own Executive. That is not a good idea in any way at all. If we want greater democratic authority, and we should, we should first remove the Prime Minister’s powers of appointment via the honours system and then we can see how a replacement appointments system works in real life. If we like it, then the hereditary Peers could retire.

I had thought that most Members of both Houses of Parliament would be believers in a two-chamber democracy with checks and balances, but I now realise that a lot of people are either Commons supremacists or they think that central state control is not a problem. However, that is not why we are in Parliament.

I agree that the by-elections process is flawed, and we should consider the thoughtful ideas put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Cope, for reform of the Standing Orders. We could also alter the balance of places between the parties based, say, on the total number of votes cast for each party at the last election, while preserving the 20% of independents through the Appointments Commission. All of this would be possible without primary legislation.

By the way, the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, might be amused that I am sitting here because of my mother who sat before me: I am a Scottish Peer. The Queen sits on that Throne as Queen: the royals can also do this because of James VI—I think you call him James I.

Our small proportion of hereditary Peers was put here with a purpose: to ensure further democratic—I remember those words being used—reform of the House of Lords. It is my duty to try and see that. The fact that it is taking a long time for the other place to come up with an acceptable reform is not our fault, but until they do we hereditary Peers must stay or it will not happen. I will vote for a satisfactory, sensible, sane solution which encapsulates democracy at its core. This Bill is not that and is a dangerous step in the wrong direction.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Earl of Erroll]

It is Questions that should not be read, not speeches.

[Lord Mancroft]

My Lords, I do not wish to get involved in that debate. The one initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, is much more interesting.

Nowadays we also have unedifying and tetchy Questions—the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, may know a little bit about that—which seek and elicit little information of any use to anybody, but serve only to allow the usual suspects to grandstand, and junior Ministers to practise repeating the same bland, Civil Service jargon.

More importantly, it is difficult to conclude that we revise legislation as well as we used to, with a never-ending stream of Second Reading speeches in Committee, and too many important matters decided on Report on the Whip, without any reference to constructive input from the Back Benches. This is not, as some suggest and have suggested again today, because the House is too big. As we all know, it is actually rather smaller than it was 50 years ago. It is not a problem of quantity, but rather of quality. That is not directly because the number of hereditary Peers was reduced—by 90% on paper, or 45% in practice—but is a consequence of their departure en bloc. If the existence in the House of 92 Peers who owe their seats to their birth is an anomaly, it is not actually an outrage. I do not find that most people around the country are particularly horrified or embarrassed by it; they do not really think about it very much. What is an outrage—a genuine constitutional outrage—however, is that the Prime Minister who has the majority, or at least the control, of the other House, retains virtually sole power of appointment to it. That is a matter worth shouting about.

The red-top newspapers complain that this House is an old people’s home. They are not far wrong although they do not seem to have worked out that that is because your Lordships’ House has increasingly become a retirement home for Members of another place since the Life Peerages Act was introduced in 1958. In the old days when this House had 1,200 Members, 10% were retired Members of Parliament. Now we have 800 Members, of whom 25% are former Members of Parliament. There is nothing wrong with Members of Parliament individually—I even have a few friends who were MPs—and they are perfectly suited to the House of Commons. However, in your Lordships’ House, and in too great a number, they are an absolute menace: first, because, by their very nature, they want to do things and change things when they would be far better employed just paying attention, and, secondly because they think that being a Member of this House is a full-time job, so they turn up all day, every day and think that they ought to speak in every debate even when they have nothing original to say. That is why this House appears to the uneducated outside observer to be full to overflowing.

This House is often—erroneously in my view—referred to as a House of expertise. Of course, it is not. What it was when I first came here was a House of Members with a wide range of experience and independence of mind and attitude. That is why the Whips could not dominate it as they do the House of Commons. Where you have a group of experienced and independent-minded people, you will inevitably find that they have one or two areas of expertise, and that is what the casual observer saw and often remarked upon.

Members of Parliament by their very nature, after years of subservience to the Whip, are less comfortable with exercising their free will, which is so frowned upon at the other end of the Corridor. Their skill is not in revising legislation because, unfortunately, the House of Commons no longer deals with legislation, but rather in adversarial party politics, which is what we do not do here, or at least used not to. That is why the conduct of business has become so unruly and discourteous, aping the manners of another House.

I accept that MPs find this House more comfortable but it is not about their comfort or indeed my pleasure. It is therefore essential for the health of our system of parliamentary democracy that this House corrects and completes the reform that has led to this disastrous state of affairs. Some argue that incremental reform is better than none at all but it is clear to me that, whether deliberate or accidental, incremental reform of the type that this Bill seeks to achieve would make proper wholesale reform much less likely. That is not in the interests of this House, of Parliament or of the British people. I will therefore oppose this Bill.