House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 2nd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I will not delay the House long. Many years ago, under a Conservative Government, I advocated that Nigel Farage should become a Member of your Lordships’ House. If we had recognised the role that he played in taking Britain out of the EU, people would have said that he does represent the majority in this country.

At the time, he was polling quite significantly—which is more than one could say for most Cross-Benchers in this House—and he was a very significant political player, whether you agreed with him or not. Neither of the political parties was going to nominate him, so it would have taken the Cross-Benchers to make him an offer to join them. At that time he might well have done so, because he thought he had finished his political career by taking us out of the EU, and he would have had a very valuable role to play in your Lordships’ House.

Think how different things would be today. It does not follow that he could not have led Reform from your Lordships’ House, but I suspect that it would have been rather more difficult. We would have been in a very different position today if he were a Member of your Lordships’ House. When we think about how representative our House is of British public opinion, we have to bear in mind that there are serious players out there who are not represented here, and I believe that they should be.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, while we are all pondering what might have been, I will just say that I agree, to an extent, with the noble Lords, Lord Jackson and Lord Hannan. Something that worries me about HOLAC, or any kind of body like it, is that the establishment appoints itself, which risks losing diversity.

On the other hand, I think we are trying to let perfect be the enemy of good. Surely we need a body to look at the propriety of the people proposed to this Chamber. The one point that I think is essential—and on which I completely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Butler—is that HOLAC should not have a veto on what the Prime Minister can do. We have to accept that we are dealing with human beings, and sometimes we may have a Prime Minister who makes erratic choices. The key thing is that they have to justify those choices, not that they are prevented from making them.

The noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, described pretty much what is like to be a Cross-Bencher: without having to take an additional oath, you just speak your mind and vote with your conscience. I will let him ponder that one.

Finally, I am not quite sure how any of this relates to the Bill, but perhaps I am being too narrow in my thinking.

[Baroness Bull (CB)]

My Lords, I rise briefly and with some trepidation as somebody who came through the HOLAC process. Although I might have become part of the establishment, I did not start as that. I definitely came from a working-class family and I definitely came from the Midlands.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, and others about the importance of increasing the diversity of the House because of the importance of having diverse views within the House. I worry that the combined effect of our procedures and allowances system will always mean that it is very difficult to have people who have not become a little bit like us.

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[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, had summed up the situation at the end of Committee very well when he said that there was a broad agreement across the House that we needed to act on attendance, participation and retirement. I reckoned without the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, but, having sat through those earlier debates, I suspect that he is in a relatively small minority in your Lordships’ House. If we think that we need to move on those issues, the key question is how we can do it expeditiously and with the best likelihood of getting an outcome that your Lordships’ House wishes to see. In my view, one way that will not achieve that is to expect to do it all via primary legislation, for two reasons.

First, no Government will want to put before your Lordships’ House a Bill with a raft of provisions for further relatively minor changes, because they have seen what has happened this time. I would not fancy being the Leader of the House who went to the Cabinet committee to explain why another Bill dealing with all these things was a priority for the Government. The other argument, which I have made on a number of occasions, and for which I apologise to noble Lords, is that I do not want the House of Commons deciding what constitutes proper attendance and participation by Members of your Lordships’ House.

To take up some of the proposals that we have just heard, if you were to say to MPs that 85 was to be the par for retirement, you would be more likely to get them to pass something saying that it should be 70, because 85 is so far beyond any retirement age for anything of which I am aware that it appears almost ridiculous to people outside your Lordships’ House. This is not to say that we do not have, and have not had, many Members over the age of 85 who have been extremely impressive well beyond that age, but there are reasons for a retirement age that go way beyond competence. Retirement ages are very often introduced in order to see a throughput of people, get new experience in and prevent an organisation living off its past. That is why retirement ages are very often introduced, and is one reason why we need a retirement age here.

If I am right in thinking that we should not be looking to the Government to produce a Bill covering all these things, how else do we do it? My view is that we can do quite a lot of it via our own Standing Orders. The way to get to the point where we can change the Standing Orders is, in my view, the one that the Leader of the House has proposed.

If we have a Select Committee of your Lordships’ House with strict terms of reference and strict timetables, and which produces proposals, we can implement them very quickly on our own. We should decide what we consider a proper level of participation and what, in our view, constitutes an adequate level of attendance, and we should decide and recommend what we think is a sensible retirement age.

I understand why noble Lords are rather cynical about any proposal by any Government to set up a committee to do something that has no statutory powers to implement its recommendations, but there is such a swell of opinion on this issue about the need for change and a willingness on the part of the Government to accommodate it that I believe we should grasp that proposal. We should put forward good people from our groups to serve on it and task them with coming forward with agreed proposals in the quickest possible time. That is the way we should deal with all these issues. Therefore, I believe that we should not be looking to put amendments in this Bill that deal with one or all of them.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

I agree very much with the noble Lord, Lord Newby, who said almost everything I was about to say in the next group, but it is no less welcome for that. I just want to pick up the point about us all voting for each other. I was here in 1999, and it was a very unpleasant experience to have people constantly sidling up to you, who had never spoken to you before, and urging you to vote for them because they were such a good chap, to use a phrase. I really hope that we do not go back to that, but let us get on to the next group and we will talk more.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I must declare a conflict of interest in this respect, because I am not quite certain—I have rather forgotten—but I think my 85th birthday is next weekend. I have to say that I am still employed; I am still producing experimental work, which is being published; I am still teaching; I am still training post-doctoral students and younger students; and I am still talking to children’s schools. The fact is that we are discussing a biological problem, which your Lordships seem to have neglected. If we had a rule that we only had people of a certain height in this Chamber and that, let us say, less than 5 foot 10 would not be acceptable, we would actually forget the Gaussian curve of normality and the statistics.

The fact of the matter is that, if we look historically, in the last 20 or 30 years of this House of Lords there were many people in this Chamber who were actually demented in their 60s, and far more in their 70s and 80s who were actually clearly not suitable mentally to be taking judgment on legal issues and issues of social care. The fact of the matter remains that medicine is changing, and there is no doubt, if we actually get successful medicines in future, as we in the Labour Party hope—we will have to see about that, of course—that we will see ages increase and people being mentally competent for longer. I suggest that an arbitrary rule at any age is probably inappropriate biologically, and we should find a more sensible way of considering how we might encourage people to retire when they are no longer competent to be Members of this House.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

I cannot resist responding to that, because I agree with it. One of the problems we have is that the Whips do not have sufficient power to tap people on the shoulder and tell them it is really time, whatever age they are, if they are infirm. From that point of view, I agree: it is a matter not of age but of capability, and I think participation is the way to go to address that.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, those final comments compel me to draw your Lordships’ attention to the amendment coming up later on power of attorney, which tries to look at the problem that we have all seen of some colleagues whose mental faculties, sadly, decline at earlier ages and who need to be encouraged to retire from your Lordships’ House.

I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Hailsham and the noble Earl, Lord Devon, for their Amendments 7 and 20, which refer to other commitments in the Labour manifesto that are not in this Bill. We were told that they are not in this Bill because of a piece of punctuation in the manifesto—a full stop, which got a lot of attention in Committee and on which I shall not dwell tonight. This touches on the anxiety of many noble Lords to understand what stage 2 might look like and when it might come, and to ensure that, if we are to remove some of our colleagues from your Lordships’ House, the House they leave behind will be improved in lots of other ways, as we have discussed repeatedly.

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I hope that the noble Baroness will forgive me for what I am about to say. When I made these points in Committee, she ignored them when she came to reply to the debate. She did not deal with them at all. I hope that she will do me the courtesy of replying to them when she winds up this debate, and I look forward to hearing what she has to say.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, much of the debate on the Bill has focused on what should be in it, rather than what is in it. Amendments 8, 14 and 29 seek to bind the Government into a timed programme of further reform after this Bill has passed.

In Committee I tabled an amendment to the effect that shortly after the Bill is passed, a time-limited group within the House be formed to hammer out not just the definition but the real application in practice of a participation requirement, and my amendment received wide support across the House. I have not brought it back today because, on reflection, it is a matter that might be best addressed internally in this self-regulating House, rather than included in this Bill and sent to the Commons to alter, block or tamper with it—much as the noble Lord, Lord Newby, was saying during debate on the last group, as indeed echoed by the Minister. That is why I no longer support amendments that seek to bind the Government to producing legislation about further reform, and I am encouraged by the idea of a Select Committee, which has become such a wide topic of discussion today.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I too support the idea of a Select Committee that has been proposed by the Leader of the House: I think this is a very good way forward. I therefore very much support my noble friend Lord Blencathra because, as he says, we need a way to implement the recommendations of that committee. All my experience in this House, and doubtless that of many other people too, is that the other place is extremely reluctant to embark on legislation regarding this House. I would not expect us to get the offer of another Bill for a decade or two. To give ourselves in this Bill the power to move forward seems basically sensible. If we are to have a committee, let us make it a potent committee, not an impotent one.

The noble Lord, Lord Newby, says that we can do that of our own volition. Given the difficulties that we had in having to go to primary legislation to give ourselves the right to have basic disciplinary procedures in this House, I am not aware of any evidence that we actually have the power of our own volition to change the sort of things being considered for the Select Committee. I would be very grateful if the noble Lord, Lord Newby, could outline what he thinks our powers are and on what he bases that understanding, because if indeed we have them, that would be an encouraging and simplifying approach. Depending on what the Minister says, I very much hope that my noble friend, when we come to it next week, will press his amendment to a vote.