House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 9th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

It would. If such a rare case applied, a second, life peerage under the 1958 Act could be conferred—it would be very simple.

Like much constructive reform, this may not be a great innovation. It is an extension of a principle that exists under the royal prerogative, an extension to the 1958 Act so that non-sitting life Peers may be created through a statutory process as well. This would be helpful to Prime Ministers who wish to honour distinguished men and women but not necessarily to swell the ranks of this House.

There are many Peers who currently do not have the right to sit in your Lordships’ House, and I found the arguments put against this proposition in Committee faintly risible. A clear and unequivocal reform, enabling the creation of non-sitting life Peers under the 1958 Act, would be no more or less confusing than the current position, but it would relieve us of the potential difficulties both for individual Peers and for the House, to which I have referred. It might save some future Peers, and indeed your Lordships’ House, from the unnecessary embarrassment of including people who do not want to be here or to stay here for very long. I cannot think for the life of me why any Government would wish to resist it.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I will risk the possibility of being called risible by the noble Lord, Lord True, for disagreeing with him, but I think he has failed to spell out precisely one point that he should have done. He prayed in aid various people, including my noble friend Lord Foulkes as someone who thought we should separate membership of this House from the peerage. I agree with that—it is a very good idea—but there are of course two ways of doing it.

One way is to say that you do not require a peerage to be in this House, nor do you need a title—we could be called Members of the upper House. That deals with the problem just as effectively as the problem he has constructed, which I do not think is a serious one, to create a new category of Peer. This is the last thing we want to be doing in a Bill of this sort, which tries to simplify and clarify membership of this House, however far from that we have strayed.

According to my reckoning, if we were to make the mistake of following the advice of the noble Lord, Lord True, we would then have six categories of membership of this House. We would have hereditary Peers here for at least another 40 years, maybe longer, due to the amendment we have carried; some Law Lords remaining from the previous legislation; Bishops; life Peers; and we would still have—though not as Members of the Lords—hereditary Peers, who are not able to sit in the Lords. He is adding a further category of life Peers who are not able to sit in the Lords.

If he tried to explain that in “Understanding the House of Lords” to the average 18 year-old studying the British constitution at the moment—or the average anybody—it would sound like the ultimate in making a mountain out of a molehill. We do not need additional categories of membership of this House; we need fewer.

[Lord True (Con)]

I am not proposing an additional category of Members of this House; the whole point of this amendment is that those people should not be Members of this House. By the way, any life Peer who retires from this House is still a life Peer and a Lord, so is the noble Lord confused by that?

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

If the noble Lord, Lord True, cannot see the difference in category between a life Peer who can sit in here and legislate and a life Peer who cannot, then we are going to have considerable difficulty in having a sensible discussion. They are obviously fundamentally different, just as there is a fundamental difference between a hereditary Peer who cannot sit in this House because he is not one of the favoured 92, and a hereditary Peer who can. Believe me, they know the difference—and I am sure the life Peers would, as well.

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

Just to help the noble Lord’s confusion, there are the courtesy titles of the younger sons of certain levels of the peerage.