Ministerial Salaries (Amendment) Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & Report stage & 3rd reading
Tuesday 14th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, we on these Benches support this modest improvement. In the late 19th century, the Liberal Party spent a great deal of time campaigning for MPs to be paid, against strong Conservative opposition, on the grounds that we wanted anyone to be able to take part in public life and not limit it to those who could afford it.

I declare a strong personal interest. I was appointed to this House when the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, then Lord Bonham-Carter, died suddenly, so I was appointed straight on to my group’s Front Bench. I have spent 29 years as an unpaid Front-Bench spokesman, including five years as a Lords Whip and Minister, mainly in the Foreign Office. I am very conscious of the difficulties that causes, although, as it happens, my wife and I both had professorial pensions—you can live pretty well on that and do not need too much else.

I mildly minded it when I was sent abroad and thus could not claim my Lords allowance. To add to the anecdote from the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, I remember that in the first two years of the coalition the Foreign Office was trying to demonstrate how economical we were being. Having represented Her Majesty’s Government at a conference on the Balkans in Dubrovnik, I was collected by a Croatian Government official car, delivered to the airport and deposited at the front of the easyJet queue to come home. When I was swapping stories with other Ministers about which airlines we had been booked on to, David Lidington won because he had been on Wizz Air.

We all have attempts to save money. I strongly agree with those who have said that we need to pay our Ministers here and in the Commons well, because we have a problem with political recruitment and we want to have good Ministers and good opposition politicians to improve the quality of our Government.

This Bill is a small step forward in the very slow process of reforming our second Chamber. There is a very long way to go. The hereditary Peers Act, which is just about to come into effect, has taken us a bit further, but there is a lot further to go. After the election, the Conservative group was by far the largest in the House, but it has been given several dozen additional appointments since then, which has meant that the Government have also wished to add to their Benches. We are expanding towards 900. Thinking about the future, it is highly likely that in three years’ time we may find ourselves without a single-party majority and with some sort of coalition Government, quite possibly with one coalition partner that has few or no Members in the House of Lords. The question of how we adjust our numbers when Governments change is one that we cannot duck for much longer.

I support a time limit for appointments and a different system for them. I certainly support an age limit. I should explain to the Lord Privy Seal that, for that reason, I am at last stepping down from being on the Front Bench now that we have a younger colleague on our Benches at least as expert in the portfolio for which I stand as I am. I shall be a Back-Bencher from now on, but will occasionally be awkward and interfering as ever.

The Lords has changed enormously since I joined. The Lord Privy Seal rightly reprimanded me some weeks ago for suggesting that we are still a part-time House. I have been thinking about that correct reprimand. The 200 to 300 of us who do most of the work are now full-time. We work far harder than we used to and that is partly because the Commons does much less of the detailed legislative scrutiny it used to do some 15 or 20 years ago. This House is now the place where amendments are made to government Bills. But that leaves us with a great deal further to go in defining what it means to be a full-time House, because half of our Members are still part-time with outside interests. If we are to be a full-time second Chamber, it requires quite a lot more thinking through.

Others mentioned the quality of Ministers in the Lords. We are extremely lucky to have this quality of Ministers, many of them unpaid. I asked one of our Ministers last night whether she was paid or not and was surprised to learn that, compared to what she must have been earning before she took office, she is doing astonishingly well.

We have expert Ministers here. We also want expert Ministers in the Commons. We know, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton, said, that the quality of Ministers in the Commons and the length of time they spend in each office is a matter of some contention. I agree strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, that Ministers should stay longer in post. I say in passing that the last coalition Government had Ministers staying in post for a great deal longer than any single-party Government have had since 2015. There are advantages in coalition government, as well as some disadvantages.

Ministerial patronage and using reshuffles as party management are part of the way in which the Commons is managed, and that is unfortunate. We would do better if government patronage were reduced and the tail of Ministers, PPSs and trade envoys was shrunk. The Commons would then rightly criticise the Government more, be more independent and do more of the work that this House has now begun to take on.

Lastly, if we want to have good governance in this country, we have to pay Ministers well. I regret, and we on these Benches do not accept, the long-term freeze in ministerial salaries. I saw the report from the Taxpayers’ Alliance that remarked that there are now a large number of local council executives who are paid more than the Prime Minister. That is partly because the Prime Minister is paid so remarkably little. If we want to hold on to good people and attract good people into politics, we have to accept that we must pay them well. We have been lucky that we have had enough people here who have already made a lot of money and were therefore able to come and work for nothing in the Lords, but that was not a proper thing to do. I therefore repeat that we on these Benches support the Bill while saying that we have a lot more work to do to reform this House.