House of Lords (Alternative Second Chamber) Bill [HL]

Lord Wigley Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 23rd October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, and I agree very much with most of her points. I am grateful to her for her forthright views. I am also grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett, Lord Bourne, Lord Scriven and Lord Burns, for their constructive contributions and look forward to other colleagues addressing this House.

I am glad to speak in support of this Bill and congratulate my colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Llanfaes, on her good fortune in coming out of the ballot, on her choice of topic on which to introduce a Bill, and on her truly excellent Second Reading speech this morning. In proposing what some noble Lords may regard as a radical step, the noble Baroness has presented an opportunity for the Chamber to consider a matter that should be of concern to all of us as democrats. She has done so in a modest and reasonable manner, to which no one might take offence, and she has avoided being overtly party political, so it probably remains for me to clarify some of Plaid Cymru’s views on these matters.

Clearly, this Bill may not appeal very much those who believe that our second Chamber is perfect beyond question. But I suspect that, in their hearts, an overwhelming majority of Peers and the general public accept that, in a modern democracy, it is impossible to justify a Chamber composed of Members who have been chosen by the Prime Minister of the day when they took their seats, with a complete absence of geographic balance. The fact that we have finally done away with the hereditary principle in no way validates the composition of this Chamber.

The usual justification of the present system is that it brings to the legislative process individuals of great and wide-ranging experience who would not put themselves forward for election. I wholly accept that there are Members here with immense experience in the world of academia, the law, science, industry, agriculture, the arts, the Armed Forces, diplomacy, government and much more. But many of these highly respected cohorts of experts will admit, if pressed, that their expertise may indeed have been substantial at the height of their careers, but that may have been a decade, or two or three, ago. It will not have passed unnoticed that it is the youngest Member of this House who has brought forward this Bill today.

There is also a geographic imbalance that must cause concern to those who believe that Westminster’s system of government should be acceptable to all parts of the United Kingdom. No comprehensive figures are available for the geographic parts of the UK that Members of this Chamber regard as home, but based on limited data the Library’s brief suggests that about half of all Peers live in London and south-east England, making it grossly geographically distorted.

This brings me to the party-political dimension. My party, Plaid Cymru, is the governing party in Wales’s Senedd. Up until 2006, Plaid refused to nominate representatives for consideration to this Chamber because of the non-democratic nature of the House of Lords. The party changed its mind when the Government of Wales Act 2006, in granting primary lawmaking powers to the then National Assembly, wrote in a proviso that every single application for the use of those powers on devolved subjects such as education or housing would have to be approved by order by both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. In other words, the undemocratic second Chamber at Westminster could veto the wishes of our democratically elected National Assembly on devolved matters that solely and exclusively related to Wales.

We were told by the then Labour Chief Whip that, if we agreed to nominate suitable people for the second Chamber, we could expect to be allocated three Members. On that basis of assurance, the party, after a lot of heart-searching, agreed to make nominations and held an internal party election in which three Members—former council leader Janet Davies, industrialist Dr Eurfyl ap Gwilym, and me—were duly nominated. We were led to believe that we would be ratified quickly and that the three of us would take our seats here. But, lo and behold, by then there had been a change in Labour’s leadership: Tony Blair had stepped down and Gordon Brown had replaced him, and no way was he going to appoint any nationalist to this Chamber. He was as good as his word, and none of us were appointed.

It was only after David Cameron became Prime Minister that I was offered a place here. My two colleagues were left in suspended animation. It was March 2024 before we were allowed a second Member, and my noble friend Lady Smith of Llanfaes was elected by Plaid Cymru’s National Council to join me here. We now have a Plaid Cymru Government in Wales, with 44 Members of our Senedd elected last May, but are still denied reasonable representation in this Chamber.

Let me make it clear: while the ultimate objective of Plaid Cymru as a party is an independent Wales, which at that point would cease sending Members to either the House of Commons or the House of Lords, Plaid accepts that in the interim, Wales should have the strongest possible voice in any Chamber whose decisions affect the well-being of the people of Wales. We believe that this Chamber, while it has a legislative function over government portfolios relevant to Wales, should have a statutory number of seats from Wales, with Members democratically elected from within Wales to occupy those seats.

While we believe that Wales itself does not need a second Chamber—small countries such as New Zealand or Denmark do perfectly well with a unicameral system, as do almost half the countries in the world—we accept that the workload at Westminster indeed requires two Chambers of Parliament. However, we believe that they should both have democratic answerability. This Chamber should be directly elected on a regional system of proportional representation, and while any part of the governance of Wales is undertaken at Westminster, Wales should have a full voice in both Chambers. A reconstructed second Chamber could still be seen as a revising Chamber, albeit one with greater legitimacy, and the other place could still have primacy, or an appropriate system of resolving conflict between the two Chambers could be established, as happens in other bicameral Parliaments. That is where we stand, but we are totally prepared to participate here for as long as any public policy or legislation affecting Wales is decided here, and we would take a positive stance towards the reconstruction of the House of Lords into a democratic second Chamber and play a constructive role ourselves in that legislative process.

My noble friend Lady Smith of Llanfaes has emphasised, in moving the Second Reading of this Bill, that all she is doing is facilitating the Labour Government to fulfil their election commitment to replace the present Chamber with

“an alternative second chamber that is more representative of the regions and nations”.

If Prime Minister Burnham takes steps to fulfil that election pledge, we will engage positively with him and his Government in that process.

Today’s Bill tries to secure a more democratic system of government at Westminster. The Bill is modest, but potentially far-reaching in its consequences. As such, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Smith of Llanfaes on presenting it, I commend it to the House and I urge noble Lords to give it a Second Reading today.