Labour’s House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill to the Commons – which was presented today and will have its first substantive debate at second reading later in the autumn – is simple: it essentially ends the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the Lords, tying off what some will see as a loose end of Sir Tony Blair’s ‘stage one’ reform of the upper chamber in the House of Lords Act 1999.
That legislation offered a compromise to opponents. At the end of 1998, Blair had concluded a secret deal with the leader of the Conservative peers, Viscount Cranborne, for 92 hereditary peers to remain in the Lords as an interim measure. These were the Earl Marshal (the Duke of Norfolk, by heredity) and the Lord Great Chamberlain (currently Lord Carrington, but shared between three families by rotation), and 90 others elected for the first time in October and November 1999.
This does nothing to improve the functioning of parliament
The continued – if much diminished – presence of hereditary peers was never intended to be a permanent feature of the House of Lords. It was a gesture which meant that the House would not be entirely appointed: in effect, a promissory note of further reform. It was prima facie such an odd and anomalous composition that it would be a spur to completing ‘stage two’ once agreement could be reached on how a future house should be composed.
That agreement never came. In 2011, the coalition government published a draft House of Lords Reform Bill and handed it to a joint committee for detailed scrutiny. The proposals made a bugger’s muddle look orderly and efficient, and the committee (I was one of the clerks) hacked its way to a report published in March 2012, though 12 members of the committee from all parties produced a minority report. The report rehearsed the draft bill’s many faults, but Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, then gamely brought forward a House of Lords Reform Bill in June. His Conservative coalition partners had lost whatever enthusiasm they had ever had for the issue and the bill was dropped a few months later.
So the hereditary lords remained in place. Sir Keir Starmer has decided to grasp this 25-year-old nettle and clear them out. Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Cabinet Office minister responsible for the constitution, may have been carried away though when he lauded the bill as a ‘landmark reform’, declaring that ‘people should not be voting on our laws in parliament by an accident of birth’.
Thomas-Symonds is a pleasant and scholarly man, but one is entitled to wonder how he reconciles this attitude to heredity with his statement that the late Queen Elizabeth II was ‘a shining beacon of stability, a reassuring presence in all our lives’. We will also be charitable and gloss over the fact that the government has six ministers who are the children of peers and two who are the grandchildren of peers.
Labour has brutally scaled back its ambitions for constitutional reform. In 2020, Starmer asked former prime minister Gordon Brown to chair a 16-strong commission on the UK’s future, resulting in a characteristically dense and thorough report published in December 2022. Among its 40 recommendations was the wholesale abolition of the House of Lords and its replacement with an ‘Assembly of the Nations and Regions’, directly elected and composed of around 200 members. This was as radical as anything since Cromwell’s Other House of 1658-59, and Starmer embraced it as a priority for a first term in government.
Then his feet began to cool. As I wrote here in May, Labour started briefing that reform might initially be more limited, addressing the size and strengthening the appointments commission. By the time its manifesto was published, proposals had been reduced to removing the hereditary peers, introducing a retirement age of 80 and holding a consultation on the future of the House. The bill just introduced is all that made it to the King’s Speech.
Reforming the House of Lords is hard. But it is sheer idiocy to begin the journey without the faintest idea of the destination. The removal of the hereditary peers will leave a chamber of parliament that is wholly appointed – perhaps the Prime Minister regards the 26 Lords Spiritual as an element of independence? – and there is absolutely no consensus on what form a new house should take.
The leader of the House of Lords, Baroness Smith of Basildon, has tried to accentuate the positive. The new bill ‘will deliver on a specific manifesto commitment’, and will ‘help deliver on our commitment to reduce the size of the second chamber’.
What it does not do is address what the House of Lords should do, how it should be constituted or what its relationship with the Commons should be. Instead this miserable little measure is a fistful of P45s for the only peers who have been voted into their positions (albeit by other hereditary peers). It does nothing to improve the functioning of parliament – but why would the government want that?
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