House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 2nd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Stowell of Beeston, who has asked some pertinent questions about a topic that also caught my eye. Since this Bill was in Committee, there have been two significant developments in terms of the Cross Benches. As my noble friend has just alluded to, there was, on 17 June, a list of four nominations to the Cross Benches. They are four very eminent people: Sir Tim Barrow, Dr Simon Case, Dame Katherine Grainger and Dame Sharon White; we look forward to welcoming them all to the House and the work that they will do. The announcement of their peerages was accompanied by short citations; I have previously paid tribute to the Government for introducing those citations, as they are very helpful. They set out the great distinctions that people have had in their careers and the expertise they will bring to your Lordships’ House. It was not made clear, however, whether these four worthy people were nominated by the House of Lords Appointments Commission or directly by the Prime Minister.

There was a doctrine in the 1990s, under Sir Tony Blair—he wrote a Written Ministerial Statement to Parliament outlining it—that he would nominate a small number of distinguished people who, for reasons of their former career, were understandably not suitable to be partisan Peers, directly to the Cross Benches. At the time he set that out, he said it would be around 10 people per Parliament: they were known in Whitehall as the “Cross-Bench exemptions”. Are the four people nominated on 17 June Cross-Bench exemptions nominated by the Prime Minister, or were some of them nominated by the House of Lords Appointments Commission? Was my noble friend Lady Stowell correct just now that the House of Lords Appointments Commission has yet to make recommendations for the Cross-Bench Peers that it suggests, quite separately from the Prime Minister of the day?

Like my noble friend Lady Stowell, I was interested in the Written Ministerial Statement that the Prime Minister made to Parliament on 19 June, as well as in the questions that she asked about HOLAC’s role in assessing suitability. The Prime Minister said in that Statement of 19 June:

“The Commission can decline to support a nomination on propriety grounds and will inform the relevant political party if this is the case. It is a matter for the Prime Minister to decide whether to recommend an individual to the Sovereign”—


echoing the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell. He went on:

“In the unlikely event I, as Prime Minister, were to proceed with a nomination against HOLAC’s advice on propriety I would write to the Commission and this letter would be published on gov.uk”.


That happened under previous Prime Ministers. The current Prime Minister, the noble Baroness and others were extremely critical of that. Is it the case, as the Prime Minister has said to Parliament, unlikely though he says it will be, that he now agrees he may need to exercise that judgment, to disagree with HOLAC and to appoint people to your Lordships’ House against its recommendations on propriety? I would be grateful if the noble Baroness could clarify that.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, again I feel that I am slightly swimming against the tide in opposing this amendment, which seems to me rooted in the outlook that I think of as “good chappery”— I am borrowing the nomenclature of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, in introducing it. It is the idea that when you are appointed to a public body, in some presumably painful operation, your opinion glands are cauterised and you suddenly become a wise, disinterested, neutral person who is uniquely capable of raising your eyes above the partisan scrum and descrying the true national interest.

The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, asked, “What if the Prime Minister isn’t a good chap or a good chapess?”, the implication being that, if you are appointed to HOLAC, you must by definition have these virtues. But who appoints you to HOLAC? How is it that you suddenly, by virtue of getting there, drop all your assumptions and prejudices and become this kind of idealised platonic guardian? I have to say that it is a doctrine that has debilitated and delegitimised successive Governments, because it has widened the gap between government and governed.

I called it “good chappery”, but actually a more accurate word would be oligarchy: it is a way of taking a group of people and putting them in a privileged position. It is an oligarchy based now not on birth so much as on outlook. How many HOLAC nominees, for example, would have voted with the majority in the 2016 referendum, just to take the one thing where we actually have an exact measure of how the country at large felt about one specific issue?

The idea that we can, in making these changes to the composition of this House, in effect narrow the way of coming here, put in another filter, strain the nomination through some sort of handkerchief of good chappery, strikes me as utterly inconsistent with the times and almost certainly unacceptable to public opinion. It is also, by the way, very much at odds with the previous amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Newby. I was one of the small number who supported it. It is one of those funny things where everyone spoke in favour of it and then everyone voted against it. It was rather like the Holocaust education centre thing: all the speeches were one way; all the votes were the other way.

[Lord Howard of Lympne (Con)]

Not all the speeches.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

Not all the speeches, no: my noble friend Lord Howard was indeed one who spoke in favour of the education centre.

It seems to me that, once we start making these changes, the pressure is going to be for widening rather than narrowing the route by which people come here. In other words, there will be more pressure for some kind of direct representation, some democratic element.

I put it to those noble Lords—I suspect the majority on both Benches—who do not want a democratic Chamber that their best tactic was just to lie low and do absolutely nothing and allow this House, in the words of the Gilbert and Sullivan song, to do nothing in particular and do it very well. Once you open the issue of the composition and function of this Chamber, you invite the public into a conversation which I can guarantee will not end with a consensus around putting more power in the hands of some appointed committee rather than an elected Government.

To go back to something that my noble friend Lord Strathclyde said in a previous group, there is a very strong case—now that we have decided to open the issue and change our composition by removing our remaining hereditary colleagues, in my view mistakenly—for having a royal commission and looking in a measured and judicious way at how this Chamber can be made more democratically accountable. If we do not do so in a timely and temperate spirit, it is very likely that a future Government will make changes that the majority of noble Lords gathered here would not like and they would do so in a spirit of frustration, having been defeated on some measure. They would lash out in anger and legislate in haste.