The Viscount Trenchard is a hereditary peer and current member of the House of Lords.

The Government’s plans to remove the 88 hereditary peers who sit in the House of Lords today surely deserves more attention than it has received in recent months.

Those of us who were around in 1999 remember there was a high degree of continued media interest. I believe that the House of Lords performs its role as a revising chamber at least as well as it did in 1999, and that the interim House following Stage 1 of the 1999 reforms has worked very well both in terms of both its ability to scrutinise and improve legislation and its exercise from time to time of its right to ask the elected chamber to think again. The House of Lords collaborates better with the House of Commons today than it did in 1999.

The Government has forgotten that its predecessor promised in 1999 that 92 hereditary peers would remain until there is agreement on moving to an elected or partly-elected House, as had been envisaged 114 years ago in the Parliament Act 1911. It may be that a majority of the public still believe that would be a good thing, but support for an elected House of Lords among parliamentarians is much lower now than it was in 1999.

Objections chiefly focus on the gridlock which supposedly would occur in the event of a clash between the two Houses, but the Japanese example, where the elected House of Councillors replaced the hereditary and appointed House of Peers in 1947, but with restricted powers similar to its predecessor House.

The powers of the House of Commons ultimately to have its way could be protected in a new settlement following a reform of the House of Lords into a more ‘democratic’ House, whose elected element would perhaps be indirectly elected by the new ‘estates of the realm’. Even if it were to become a directly elected House, as is the Japanese House of Councillors, its role as a revising chamber should dictate that its powers, significant though they would be, could be ultimately overridden by the House of Commons.

In any case, the Government is not really contemplating introducing an elected element to the House of Lords.

The Labour Party’s manifesto said it would introduce six measures now and would later consult on proposals to replace the House of Lords with an alternative second chamber that is more representative of the regions and nations. But of those six measures that they said they would introduce now; they have introduced only one.

Indeed, they are only interested in one, the removal of the hereditary peers.

One of the other measures they committed to was to require peers to retire at the end of the Parliament in which they turned 80. They have shown just how fickle is their commitment to that by appointing two new peers who are already over 80! It is a bit of a stretch for the Government to argue that they have to remove the remaining hereditaries now because it was a manifesto commitment, but so was it to require 80-year olds to retire!

Furthermore, Labour committed to improve the national and regional balance of the House, but their action in seeking to exclude the hereditary peers will have precisely the opposite effect and will make the House significantly more London-centric. Many sitting hereditaries are involved with their local communities, serving as Deputy Lieutenants of Counties and officers of local charities. The links that they provide between rural communities and the House of Lords will be lost.

The two Houses of Parliament are working well together today, but the cultures of the two Houses remain distinct, and that is a good thing. In recent years a high proportion of new Life Peers have been former MPs. The removal of the hereditary peers will at a stroke significantly increase that proportion, which I suspect is probably not a good thing. Indeed, it would  mean that one person has sole right of appointment of all the members of the House of Lords.

The effect on the culture of the House deriving from the involvement of the hereditary peers should not be underestimated.

Earlier this month, during the Report Stage of the Great British Energy Bill, I found that a long-standing commitment prevented me from moving  or speaking to my three amendments, to ensure that the Government would start to put nuclear on an equal footing to renewable energy. Lord Hanworth, a Labour hereditary peer and much more qualified as a scientist to speak about nuclear power than I am, agreed to speak to my amendments.

This is a very good example of hereditary peers working together across party lines to improve the Government’s legislation. It is notable in the nuclear field that Lord Ravensdale, a crossbench hereditary peer, who works as a nuclear engineer in his ‘day job’ is Vice-Chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Nuclear. The removal of the hereditary peers will decimate interest and experience in nuclear power in the House of Lords.

Many observers have suggested that the real reason that the Government seems determined to go ahead with this piece of constitutional tinkering is because it is a quick way of redressing the imbalance of representation between the Labour and Conservative parties in the House of Lords.

The number of Peers taking the Conservative Party whip is now 279 compared with 214 Labour Peers, although the imbalance has already shrunk considerably since the General Election. However, it is interesting that the House of Lords since 1997 has voted against a Labour Government 40 times in each session of Parliament, but against a Conservative or Conservative-led Government 56 times in each session.

There is no evidence that the current imbalance of voting strength in the House of Lords presents a serious impediment to the Government’s ‘getting its business’ but there is a wealth of evidence that the detailed scrutiny of proposed legislation in the House of Lords improves the quality of legislation reaching the statute book. Large tracts of Bills are hardly or not at all scrutinised in the House of Commons due to the prevalent use of the guillotine in debates.

There is no strong argument that the voting strengths of the two main parties in the House of Lords needs a further substantial change in favour of Labour, especially given the nature of the huge majority in the House of Commons delivered by the First Past the Post system. The Lords Temporal who sit today, Life Peers and hereditaries, have almost identical rights and work as one body. They are allocated to front bench positions or to serve on Select Committees irrespective of the route by which they entered the House.

The House has no democratic legitimacy, but what legitimacy it does possess derives from history and from the experience and work of those who are active within the House.

The discriminatory measure now proposed by the Government will harm the House and leave it weaker and less able to perform its role as the public would wish.

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This article (Hugh Trenchard: Labour’s House of Lords reform is the wrong move for the wrong reasons) was created and published by Conservative Home and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Hugh Trenchard

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