House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill: here we go...

The government's first measure of Lords reform has begun its legislative progress, but it is a bad and inadequate measure with poor justification

Preamble

Tuesday saw the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill given a second reading in the House of Commons. This was the first opportunity for substantive debate on the proposal, and, just as a reminder for non-obsessives, the purpose of a Second Reading debate is for MPs to address and scrutinise the main principles of a bill, with closer, line-by-line examination conducted at committee stage.

The only significant element of the bill is that the 92 hereditary peers who still have the right to sit and vote in the House of Lords will be removed. There are minor provisions about adjudication of peerage claims but those are of interest only to genuine connoisseurs and will not make an iota of difference to most people. Assuming the bill passes, the membership of the House of Lords will be reduced to just over 700 life peers and up to 26 bishops of the Church of England (I say “up to” because at time of writing there are two vacancies, in the diocese of Durham, where the bishop sits ex officio, and for the next most senior diocesan bishop when he or she is introduced).

I refer the honourable gentleman to the answer I gave earlier…

Readers will know that I take a great deal of interest in reform of the House of Lords, not least because I briefly worked for it and for a much longer period shared a building (or at least the Parliamentary Estate) with it and worked hand-in-hand with its members and staff. I have, I think it is fair to say, strong views on the subject and I accept that they do not conform to the broad consensus; that said, I think that broad consensus is often very poorly thought out and often based on misunderstanding or outright misapprehension. I would at least say that my views, whether you agree or not, have gone through the process of thought and testing against evidence.

I’ve written about Lords reform frequently, so perhaps a quick bibliography would be helpful for anyone who wants to pursue these things further.

Lords reformers should be careful what they wish for (The Telegraph, 23 March 2021)
The Tories have a House of Lords problem on their hands (The Telegraph, 17 June 2022)
Reforming the House of Lords in five minutes (The Ideas Lab, 12 November 2022)
Attend His Majesty in the house of peers! (The Ideas Lab, 8 December 2022)
You’ve been elected, my lord: selection in the House of Lords (The Ideas Lab, 8 December 2022)
Braverman’s fight with the Lords over migration laws is unconstitutional (City AM, 15 May 2023)
Who should get peerages? (The Ideas Lab, 29 June 2023)
Is Rwanda decision time for the House of Lords? (The Ideas Lab, 6 December 2023)
Why can’t Starmer be honest about reforming the Lords? (The Spectator, 15 May 2024)
Labour’s constitutional reforms are misconceived and pointless (CapX, 14 June 2024)
Labour’s plan to abolish hereditary peers is pointless (The Spectator, 5 September 2024)
House of Lords reform: battle is joined again (The Ideas Lab, 25 September 2024)
Labour’s House of Lords peerage reform is just hot air (The Spectator, 10 October 2024)

In addition, I submitted written evidence to the House of Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee’s inquiry into membership of the House of Lords last year. Unfortunately the committee did not reach the stage of publishing a report before Parliament was dissolved in May 2024.

This is a bad bill

My position on this bill is straightforward: I think it is limited, lazy, unhelpful and performative, a rather miserable little measure. Let me be clear on two points, however, two concessions to those who take different views. Firstly, unlike some who have spoken against the bill, I am prepared to accept, even if I do not wholly believe, that it is in no way motivated by partisan advantage. It is true that the hereditary peers work against the Labour Party: when the concession was made in 1998 that 92 of their number would temporarily remain, the formula which was eventually set out in the Standing Orders was for 42 Conservative hereditary peers, 28 crossbenchers, three Liberal Democrats and only two Labour hereditaries (in addition to 15 elected by the whole House “to serve as Deputy Speakers or in any other office as the House may require”). This reflected the party strengths of the hereditary peers at the time. The bill under consideration will therefore remove 50-odd opposition members of the House at virtually no deficit to the government. Nonetheless, I am prepared to take on trust that this is not a motivating factor.

The second fact I wholeheartedly accept is that there are some people—manifestly I am not among them—for whom the presence of legislators by virtue of heredity is not just undesirable or even wrong, but so noxious as to require remedy at the soonest possible occasion, which this bill more or less provides. That is intellectually coherent, though I think, like any fixation on one point of principle, it can lead to a monomania which distorts someone’s view of the world. But it is neither incoherent nor (if you will forgive the pun) ignoble. What I will not accept, however, is that this principle is an adequate motivation for government legislation. Ministers have a responsibility to look at public affairs in the round and may not prey in aid an intellectual fixation to wave away opposition.

The government has accused some of those who oppose the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill as inimical to any reform whatsoever. Up to a point, I take that accusation on the chin. I think the House of Lords does what we expect of it—which is to act as a temporary brake on the executive, to conduct detailed scrutiny of legislation drawing on a diverse reservoir of expertise, and to be a body which can ask the House of Commons at least to think again—relatively well. Certainly I do not see any second chambers of comparable function which are dramatically more effective than the Lords. Its status as a “house of experts” can be overplayed and many peers are blameless but standard-issue party hacks, officials and donors. Nevertheless, it includes in its membership (to take a few examples):

5 Olympians and Paralympians
5 former chiefs of the Defence Staff
5 former secretaries to the Cabinet (of whom 4 were heads of the Civil Service)
4 former Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police
4 former permanent secretaries of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office
3 former presidents of the Supreme Court
2 former prime ministers
2 former chief executives of the NHS
2 former directors general of the BBC
2 former general secretaries of the Trade Union Congress
1 former ambassador to the United States
1 former permanent representative to the United Nations
1 former director of Liberty
1 former governor of the Bank of England

The astronomer royal
The secretary general of the Commonwealth
The mayor of Tees Valley

46 current or former professors, including in surgery, law, economics, palliative medicine, geotechnical engineering, healthcare management, government, accounting and biodiversity.

To be blunt, you will not find that in many legislative bodies.

The Labour Party’s plans for House of Lords reform

It is often observed, including by me, that if you set out to design a revising chamber of parliament, you would not start with the House of Lords in its current form. But that is not reform, it is abolition and replacement, which is a reasonable view to take but a relatively niche one in the current political discourse. Formally, according to its manifesto, the Labour Party is “committed to replacing the House of Lords with an alternative second chamber that is more representative of the regions and nations”, on the form of which it will seek “the input of the British public on how politics can best serve them”. This stems from the Commission on the UK’s Future which Sir Keir Starmer set up under the chairmanship of Gordon Brown; it produced a weighty and wide-ranging report, A New Britain: Renewing Our Democracy and Rebuilding Our Economy, which recommended the replacement of the House of Lords with an Assembly of the Nations and Regions. This new body, as well as carrying out the current functions of the upper house, would represent the nations and regions, police standards in public life and act as a constitutional watchdog.

Lords reform in practice and the removal of the hereditary peers

Starmer initially committed to creating an Assembly of the Nations and Regions within a first term of a Labour government, but it has now been pushed back beyond the next election (should Labour win that contest). In the meantime, the government pledged in its manifesto to reform the upper house, and promised that its “action to modernise the House of Lords will be an improvement”. The House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill is the first step in that process.

This is my first detailed objection to the bill, its limited scope. If you intend to reform the House, presumably with the aim of making it more representative, more effective and more legitimate, the proposed legislation does very little towards that. It can be argued that removing the hereditary peers takes away some sense of illegitimacy, though I would be wary of arguing that it positively makes the House of Lords more legitimate, but it achieves nothing else. Let us be clear about this: the measures in the bill will make the Lords, for the first time in its history, wholly an appointed chamber.

As I said above, it will consist of just over 700 life peers, all nominated by party leaders or the House of Lords Appointments Commission and ennobled by the sovereign, and the bishops of the Church of England. There will be no peers who are there by election: even if the hereditary peers are elected by a tiny electorate with a very restricted franchise, it remains the fact that they are elected, rather than chosen by any party leaders. That fragment of choice and independence will disappear. As Viscount Cranborne (now the Marquess of Salisbury), then Conservative leader in the Lords, said in 1998:

An entirely nominated Chamber is no more legitimate than a hereditary one, perhaps less so as its members owe their presence to the living rather than the safely dead.

The following year, during scrutiny of the House of Lords Act 1999, which created the House in its current composition, the leader of the Lords, Baroness Jay of Paddington, welcomed the compromise which saw 92 hereditary peers remain on a temporary basis.

The transitional House will be better. I believe it will… be better because it will be smaller, more representative and will better reflect the society of which it is part. It will also be better, stronger and more legitimate because its Members will have earned their place to participate in this country’s legislative process.

That is now being partially undone, and the government is doing without understanding, intentionally or unintentionally, the circumstances under which the compromise was agreed.

The retention of 92 hereditary peers was agreed in late 1998 between Sir Tony Blair’s government and Lord Cranborne. The latter negotiated the agreement without the knowledge of the leader of the opposition, William Hague, or the shadow cabinet, and was sacked as a result. Cranborne took his dismissal cheerfully, admitting he had “rushed in, like an ill-trained spaniel”, but what mattered to him was the result. It is certainly true that the ongoing presence of hereditary peers, even if in greatly diminished numbers, was not intended to be a permanent feature of the constitution. Therein, however, lies then whole point: none of the reforms enshrined in the 1999 act was intended as anything other than temporary, and it was widely acknowledged that the legislation was “stage one” of reform, a first step.

Importantly, the reprieve of some hereditaries was not a random concession to buy political support. It was explicitly couched as a kind of guarantee: the deal was that the 92 hereditaries should remain, their numbers maintained through by-elections as necessary, until greater reform of the House was undertaken, so-called “stage two”. They were a kind of guarantee, a token of good faith and reassurance, because what the opposition had feared and accused the government of secretly desiring was a fully appointed House of Lords. When that accusation was again made in 1999, the lord chancellor, Lord Irvine of Lairg, dismissed it as “fanciful and without any foundation at all”. He emphasised the contingent nature of the arrangement:

I make it absolutely plain that stage two reform will take place and when it does the hereditary Peers who remain, if the Weatherill amendment passes, will cease to be Members of this House.

So the two concepts, the retention of the 92 hereditary peers and further reform of the House, were directly linked. The current government is breaking that link. Introducing the bill, the Cabinet Office minister Nick Thomas-Symonds argued “it is not right that what was seen, even in 1999, as a temporary arrangement should persist any longer”. But he is missing the point: the “temporary arrangement” has persisted because neither Blair nor any subsequent prime minister brought further reform of the Lords to the statute book.

This criticism was articulated several times during yesterday’s debate. Richard Holden (Con, Billericay) made a reasonable point.

The Labour party came into government with an enormous majority and wants to reform the House of Lords, so why does it not get on and do it? Why do the Labour Government not set out some cross-party work that we can all get involved with, and introduce proper reform measures, rather than just tinkering at the edges, as the Bill does, for pure political advantage?

The government’s argument, though it is not articulated with much precision, seems to be that the delay has been too long and now the priority is simply to get rid of the hereditary peers, without any concrete proposals for further reform. Thomas-Symonds asserted rather than explained:

This Government were elected on a manifesto that was explicit in its promises that we would bring about immediate reform by removing the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. The Bill has a tightly defined objective, and a clear focus and aim that delivers on that mandate.

Now, he is correct that removing the hereditary peers was a commitment made in the Labour Party manifesto. The document said:

The next Labour government will therefore bring about an immediate modernisation, by introducing legislation to remove the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords.

But it is not good enough to answer criticism by pretending that your party’s manifesto is some kind of straitjacket or political gun to the head. Why did the leadership choose to make that commitment, with its emphasis on “immediate”? Presumably to seem dynamic, and for party political advantage, which is understandable but inadequate. The real question, which Holden posed, is why the government feels on the one hand it is urgent that the hereditary peers be removed, and on the other hand it does not yet have any firm, coherent, properly drafted plans for more comprehensive reform.

There are three possible reasons for this state of affairs, none of which I would regard as reasonable. The first is that, as I suggested above, the government finds the presence of hereditary peers so noxious, so offensive in principle, that their right to sit and vote in the House of Lords must be removed as a matter of the greatest urgency, within the first year of the administration. That will not do. The minister himself would not say that the work done by hereditary peers had been in any way inadequate:

I have not denigrated the contributions of hereditary peers—far from it. I have thanked people for their public service in the upper House.

It is, therefore, the fact of their presence he can no longer bear. The idea that this is so towering an issue, so disfiguring of our constitution that it must be done now rather than later in the parliament, as part of a larger set of proposals for reform, is simply not credible.

The second possible reason for bringing this bill forward now as a stand-alone measure is that the government fears it will not be able to achieve further reform. This would be understandable: after all, the coalition government’s House of Lords Reform Bill, introduced in April 2012 after a draft version had been scrutinised by a joint committee of both Houses, was withdrawn that September when it became clear that there was no longer agreement between the coalition partners on its contents. But the current government has a majority in the House of Commons of nearly 180, and an official opposition which is reeling from the worst electoral defeat in its 190-year history (as well as currently conducting a leadership election). We were told endlessly over the last few years how serious-minded Sir Keir Starmer’s approach to leadership was and how meticulously he was his advisers were preparing for government. It would have been perfectly possible to have prepared a bill which did not go as far as Gordon Brown’s proposals for wholesale replacement of the Lords but which did rather more than simply undo part of the 1999 settlement. Does the government think it would fail to secure the passage of such a bill? That would be an extraordinary admission of weakness and faint-heartedness.

The third possibility, which is cynical but by no means impossible, is that the government has no real interest in sweeping changes to the upper house nor any real urgent intention of undertaking reforms. This is the accusation which was levelled at the Blair government in 1998/99. Instead, one could imagine, ministers will be happy to see off the hereditary peers, of whom only two are Labour, and perhaps make one or two other small changes like introducing an age limit for peers, and will leave it at that. If that is the reason, then of course it would be utterly indefensible.

In short, this is a bad bill because it undertakes one reform without any commitment to others contingent on it; there is no overwhelming imperative for it; if anything, it increases the control of the executive over the House of Lords; and it turns its back on an important compromise made by the Blair government in 1998/99. Even those who support the principle should be able to agree that the removal of the hereditary peers ought to be accompanied by other changes. Those of us who are quite happy to live with the presence of the hereditaries have even less reason to support it.

Line-by-line scrutiny: not just for committees!

There are some smaller points I want to address, so I intend to go through Tuesday’s debate and highlight some of these arguments (here we are again, bringing “fisking” back). It is worth doing, I think, because in the high moral (and slightly argumentative) tone of the Second Reading debate, there were some dubious arguments and outright preposterous assertions which should not go unchallenged. The full record of the debate in the Official Report (Hansard’s real name, for students of the curious) can be found here, from which I will draw.

Nick Thomas-Symonds: Our manifesto sets out that there should be an alternative second Chamber that is more representative of the nations and regions of the United Kingdom.

Obviously this bill does nothing—literally nothing—to achieve that. It is an irrelevance. If anything, though I would never rely on the argument, hereditary peers might be more likely to come from parts of the United Kingdom beyond London. They could also advertise their connections with the nations and regions in their manifestos for by-elections. But this legislation does not improve representation a single jot.

Nick Thomas-Symonds: If the right hon. Gentleman reads our manifesto with his usual diligence, he will see that it states that this Bill is the immediate first step. That is the mandate we bring before the House today.

The Labour Party manifesto is not some mysterious objet trouvé or gift from God. It was written by the Labour Party. This is an order of priorities it has chosen. To say that it is going about it this way because this is the way it said it would go about it is, charitably, meaningless.

Shaun Davies: There has not been a single reform of the House of Lords over the last 14 years.

Demonstrably untrue. While the House of Lords Reform Bill was withdrawn in 2012 (see above), the House of Lords Reform Act 2014 made provision for peers to retire or resign, introduced penalties for sustained non-attendance and allowed peers sentenced to more than a year in prison to be removed. The House of Lords (Expulsion and Suspension) Act 2015 enabled the House to expel or suspend members. The Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015 gives preference to female bishops as members of the House of Lords for a period of 10 years and the current government has introduced the Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015 (Extension) Bill to prolong its provisions until 2030. (This might indicate that removing the lords spiritual from the House is not imminent.) One could also count the Lords Office-holders Allowance Order 2010, though it was a very minor measure.

Nick Thomas-Symonds: A Labour Government introduced a Bill to end the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. The events that smoothed the Bill’s passage led that Government to accept an amendment on the principle of the removal of hereditary peers. The amendment retained 92 hereditary peers on a temporary basis, until further reforms to the other place were brought forward. Despite attempts at further reform, that temporary measure is still in place.

Indeed so. This government has chosen not to fulfil the “further reform” part of the equation but to disregard the whole basis of the amendment and exclude the hereditary peers.

Olivia Bailey: Does my right hon. Friend agree that the legislation gives young people, such as the impressive A-level students I met at Little Heath School in my constituency, an equal chance to make the laws of this country from either House?

This is a strong contender for the most preposterous argument I have read in a long time. Absolutely no aspect of the presence of 92 hereditary peers prevents in any way students from Little Heath School (or anywhere else) becoming peers, nor does their removal in any way make those students more likely to become peers. It is a nonsense. If the House of Lords had a finite size, there might be the faintest glimmer of an argument in this direction (albeit a staggeringly weak one), but it does not, so there is not.

Nick Thomas-Symonds: We recognise individual contributions. We are saying that we should reflect on the millions of people who were unable to make the same contribution as a result of the family they were born into.

It is hard to see how a House of Lords composed solely of 700+ appointed life peers (and 26 bishops) reflects in any way on millions of people. The present bill makes no provision to widen or democratise the membership of the upper house. The only thing it does is remove the hereditary peers.

Nick Thomas-Symonds: [The monarchy] is a completely different part of our constitution, and no monarch has withheld Royal Assent from a Bill since the reign of Queen Anne. Secondly, we have a constitutional monarchy that enjoys popular support.

Firstly, the monarchy is not a “completely different part of our constitution”. Legislation is enacted by the King-in-Parliament, that is, the sovereign and the two houses. No bill becomes law until it has been granted Royal Assent. The fact that, in practice, this has not been withheld since Queen Anne declined to approve the Scottish Militia Bill in 1708 does not make the crown a separate part of the constitution. Secondly, are the hereditary peers being removed as a matter of principle, as the minister began by saying, or because they lack “popular support”? If, like the monarchy, they had that support from the public, would it be right to retain them, as it is apparently right to maintain the monarchy?

Graham Stringer: The compromise reached between the Labour party and the Conservative party in 1999 was nothing to do with the good work done by many hereditaries; it was to stop logjam, because the House of Lords was threatening to hold up Labour’s programme and throw the Salisbury convention aside.

Sadly this is simply not true. There were indeed fears that the House of Lords could adopt a die-in-the-ditch approach to the 1999 act, but the government of the day was explicit that the excepted hereditary peers were retained as a deposit on further reform. As Lord Irvine of Lairg told the House then:

The Weatherill amendment is a purely transitional measure… against the possibility, which we do not accept will become reality, that the transitional House will last for longer than on many occasions I have indicated that it will last.

It did last longer.

Shaun Davies: Lord Grocott epitomises what is great about the House of Lords—somebody with experience, a contribution to make to our national life, and who was appointed by the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to the other place.

Lord Grocott may be Davies’s predecessor-but-two but this is an extremely bold assertion.

Sarah Olney: I find it so extraordinary that Conservative Members are suddenly all converts to the cause of Lords reform when they have done nothing about it for a decade and a half—it is insane.

There is no contradiction here at all. In fact many Conservatives had committed to the principle of reforming the Lords, which led to the coalition government’s draft bill and the House of Lords Reform Bill as introduced in 2012. There was dissent from a number of backbenchers, and it was because of that opposition that David Cameron decided not to proceed with the bill. Some Liberal Democrats also blamed the Labour leader Ed Miliband for the bill’s demise, on the grounds that he was unwilling to support the government’s programme motion which set out the timetable for its consideration, though he had backed the bill at Second Reading. In any event, it is a perfectly logical position to say that you would prefer no change to the House of Lords, but that, if the government is determined to embark on a process of reform, to say that it should be thorough rather than piecemeal. There is nothing “insane” about that stance at all.

Sarah Olney: If successful, the Bill would have a significant impact on the size of the House. In 2017, we supported the findings of the Burns report, which recommended measures to manage the exponentially increasing membership of our second Chamber. By removing the right of hereditary peers to sit in the other place, we would see a significant reduction in the size of the House, moving it back towards a more sensible size. Liberal Democrats are supporters of that change and the move towards a smaller upper Chamber.

I will not dwell on this at length but will simply repeat what I have said over and over again. The size of the House of Lords is not an issue. Its notional total membership, at around 800, may be very large, but average attendance by session has never exceeded 500, so, in everyday terms, it is smaller than the House of Commons. The only problem the notional size presents—as I finally persuaded the lord speaker, Lord McFall of Alcluith, to admit—is a reputational one, and that is not helped by a succession of peers peddling a false narrative that it is too large.

Gareth Snell: Those 92 peers have been almost exclusively white men. When the House of Lords Act 1999 was passed, five women were allowed to continue as hereditary peers in the House of Lords… Fewer than one per cent of those eligible to fill those hereditary seats are women… It is not necessarily about who those people are.

This kind of scattergun argumentation is hopelessly lazy. What is the objection to hereditary peers? If it is their presence in the House of Lords by virtue of heredity, then it cannot matter what sex or race they are; if that was an important factor, the logical extension of Snell’s argument would be that the hereditary peers would be more acceptable if they were more evenly divided between the sexes and more ethnically heterogeneous. If you object to the hereditary principle, as some do, then nothing else matters. It is not good enough to reach for every possible argument and hurl them all, waiting to see how many are effective.

Gareth Snell: The Paymaster General [Nick Thomas-Symonds] has made it clear that, after we have completed the process of removing the excepted hereditary peers, the Government will move on to other parts of House of Lords reform, which will make the appointments process more transparent. That will allow us to have a considered debate about the way in which that process can happen.

Then why separate the measures? The government has an enormous, historic majority, the opposition is in disarray and Sir Keir Starmer has supposedly spent four years diligently and painstakingly preparing for government. Why is there no comprehensive reform programme, which would answer most of the objections raised on the Conservative benches?

Simon Hoare: We have an established church, and I do not think anybody would advocate for its disestablishment at this stage. However, it is surely an anachronism, just because of the sees to which they have been appointed, for the Archbishop of Canterbury and others to sit as part of the legislature.

I have no great dissatisfaction with the status of the Church of England, though I am an atheist. But it is not clear what Hoare understands by “established church” if he regards it as anachronistic for that church to be formally represented in the legislature. He also surely errs in thinking nobody “would advocate for… disestablishment”; there are many groups in current society who would support the disestablishment of the Church of England, just as the Church in Wales was disestablished under the Welsh Church Act 1914 and the Church of Ireland by the Irish Church Act 1869. You can support or oppose the existence of a state-sponsored church, but trying to plot some nebulous via media displays a lack of rigorous thought.

Richard Holden: It was in the Tudor era that reform of the House of Lords started, when the majority of bishops were removed, leaving these 26. The Paymaster General made a point about reforms not having been properly continued since 1999, but actually, when we are looking back to the 16th century, we can see that some of these reforms really need to catch up with modern times.

Holden seems to be confused. The biggest change to the House of Lords in the 16th century was the removal of the mitred abbots when the monasteries were dissolved in the 1530s, which had two effects: it made bishops the only lords spiritual, and it reduced their number to below that of the lords temporal, whom the bishops and abbots together had previously outnumbered. In fact, the Tudor period saw the number of bishops increase rather than decrease: to the existing 21 sees, of which four were in Wales, Henry VIII added six new dioceses (one, the diocese of Westminster, was shortlived from 1540 to 1550), bringing the total number of bishops to 26 by 1559. This number remained static until the mid-19th century, when population growth, especially in the North of England, demanded new foundations.

Phil Brickell: We must remember that we are talking about 92 Members in the other place who, for life, are able to legislate, merely by accident of birth. They do not owe their role to their abilities, and they are unaccountable.

Well, almost. The hereditary peers are not able to legislate merely by “accident of birth” but must also be elected to the House of Lords by the admittedly small electorate of their fellow hereditaries. As for their being “unaccountable”, Brickell must accept that they are no more unaccountable than the 700 life peers.

Tim Roca: Nearly 30 years on from the changes enacted under the previous Labour Government, I am pleased to see this one finish the job when it comes to hereditary peers.

On the other hand, the point made to the government again and again was that it is not “finishing the job” in terms of reforming the Lords, simply in removing the remaining hereditary peers. In the terminology of the 1990s, there are still no concrete plans for stage two reform.

Tim Roca: I am proud to have stood, as are many colleagues, on a manifesto that called for a complete overhaul of the other place, including making it more representative of the nations and regions that make up our great country.

The House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill makes not the slightest contribution to that ambition. The upper house after the passage of this bill will be not one iota more representative of the nations and regions.

Chris Curtis: Let me turn to the importance of trust in politics. I worked in polling before I became an MP; I spoke to many people across the country, and unfortunately it was always amazing just how low trust in politics is. There are many reasons for that, which I hope we will continue to work on throughout this Parliament—we are doing some important work to address that lack of trust—but one of those reasons has to be the knowledge that people can make it to Parliament not because of what they have done in life, because they represent their communities and their country, or because they have a fantastic vision for what they want to do, but because of what womb they happen to be born from. I do not think that is right, and it is one of the reasons why we have seen that lack of trust.

I agree wholeheartedly that trust in politics and politicians is at an historic low and that it represents an enormous danger to our democratic system. There are many issues which need to be addressed to begin what will be, even on the most optimistic expectation, a slow and tortuous process of rebuilding that trust. But I simply do not believe that the presence of 92 hereditary peers in the House of Lords is in the top five or even top 10 issues which would make a significant difference in this regard.

Chris Curtis: We should… make this important change today and get rid of the hereditary peers, creating a more democratic, more representative place that can carry on making the important laws that the country needs us to make.

That is simply a non-sequitur. Removing the hereditary peers, whether a good or bad idea, does nothing to make the House of Lords “more democratic” or “more accountable”. At best, there is a flimsy argument that it makes it less undemocratic, but even that is thin gruel.

Ellie Reeves: The contribution of the King and the working members of the royal family to public life in the UK is incredibly significant. The Government have enormous respect for the unique role that the royal family play in our nation. This reform does not affect the role of the sovereign. Ours is a model of constitutional monarchy that continues to be practised worldwide. By contrast, the UK is only one of two Parliaments in the world that retains a hereditary element. To seek to make any comparison between the two is not credible.

This is freewheeling nonsense. Having described the removal of the hereditary peers as “a matter of principle”, Reeves then changes tack, effectively, to say that a (constitutional) hereditary monarchy is justified because there are several others around the world and ours has public support, whereas hereditary legislators are unpopular and found only in Lesotho. Both of these arguments cannot be true. If it is a point of principle, it does not matter how popular or widespread it is. If hereditary peers should go because they are unpopular or rare, then that is not a point of principle but expediency.

Ellie Reeves: Our manifesto was scrutinised by the public and then overwhelmingly voted for.

I would be fascinated to know how the minister without portfolio has satisfied herself that the Labour Party’s manifesto was “scrutinised by the public”. In any event, it was certainly not “overwhelmingly voted for”: Labour won 33.7 per cent of the vote at the general election, on a turnout of 59.8 per cent, totalling 9,708,716 votes. At the previous election, when defeated heavily, the party received 10,269,051 votes, while the Conservatives won 13,966,454. What possible sense of “overwhelming” can that represent?

Ellie Reeves: The Salisbury convention means that measures that were proposed in manifestos cannot be blocked, but an agreement made a quarter of a century ago cannot now bind this Government and this House.

Why?

Ellie Reeves: We firmly believe in taking this first step as a matter of priority, and it is right that we take time to consider how best to implement other manifesto commitments that the Government have previously set out.

Why is there a distinction? How can it be right that this manifesto commitment, to remove the hereditary peers, must be carried out immediately, but also right that other manifesto commitments should be considered over a period of time?

Conclusion

In the end, inevitably, the bill was given a second reading without division. I remain of the opinion that it is a bad, mean, miserable little bill, but whatever opinion you hold of it, the debate was shockingly poor and shallow. Neither ministers nor government backbenchers made any considered response to criticisms, relying heavily on the fact that this measure was contained in the Labour Party’s manifesto, as if that were a grave commitment and duty imposed from outside upon it. There was wild inconsistency between arguing that the hereditary peers should be removed as a point of principle and that they should go because of practical political and presentational reasons.

Most of all, there was no acceptance of the argument that this bill destroys the understanding on which the Weatherill amendment was agreed in 1999 and the 92 hereditaries retained until further reform was effected. There are bland assurances of more proposals for change to come, but at the moment we are required to take the goverment’s word that they will not stop simply at the removal of the hereditary peers. The Blair government consented to the Weatherill amendment as a token of goodwill, and that is now being taken away with nothing to replace it.

I have little faith that the current government will proceed with genuine, effective and beneficial reform. I would rather they had not embarked on this process at all, but, now that they have, I fear that they will make a very bad job of it and leave the House of Lords weaker, less effective and perhaps less credible than it is now. I stand by what I wrote in The Daily Telegraph more than three years ago on reforming the House of Lords.

More importantly, it is all interwoven. If you pick away at a single thread—say, the remaining 92 places for hereditary peers—you may find that the whole thing unravels at a speed beyond your control. When reforming parliament, always beware the alternative.

The alternative is sadly clear. And I am not sure the government would not be happy with another 25-year stasis. We must at least hope that, if more proposals for reform are placed before Parliament, the debate on them is better than this week’s dismal showing.