House of Lords Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2016-10-21
Topic: Government Operations
Malcolm Sinclair (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, my noble friend Lord Elton is absolutely right to say that there is concern about the size of the House. But my noble friend Lord Strathclyde is equally right to say that this is more a perception than reality. Of course, there was a perception pre-1999 that the House was too big, but the vast number of the hereditary Peers did not attend. The net result of the 1999 Act was that about 90 working hereditaries were removed from the House, as well as a lot of non-working hereditaries. If we are concerned about the size of the House, the Bill before us does nothing to reassure me. To limit this House to the size of the House of Commons would positively encourage Prime Ministers to keep on appointing working Peers in order to build up their number to 600. I think that that would be to the great detriment of the House My noble friend Lord Strathclyde was absolutely right to say that when we move out of here in a few years’ time, that will be the ideal point at which to start reducing numbers. Rather than follow the suggestion of my noble friend Lord Elton, I would rather go for a fixed number of Peers. I would go for 350, which is not that different from the current working House. To have a figure of 600 that would be variable over the course of a five-year Parliament would be a nonsense that would not help the situation If it comes to an election in order to achieve that, it will be nothing new in your Lordships’ House. For 273 out of the last 309 years, part of this House has been elected. I refer in particular to the Scottish representative Peers. Since 1707 until the Peerage Act 1963, there were 16 elected Scottish Peers—Peers of Scotland. After every general election they held an open election in Holyrood Palace, to which they were summoned, and they decided who the 16 would be. When that happened in 1707, it represented a reduction of 90% of Peers sitting in Parliament, because there had been 143 Scottish hereditary Peers sitting in the Scottish Parliament. So what my noble friend Lord Elton suggested, and indeed what the Lord Chancellor at the time, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, who I am pleased to see in his place, did in 1999 is minor in comparison with what the Scots suffered in 1707 One of the problems that resulted from the reduction in 1707 applies to what my noble friend suggested. There was resentment in Scotland that they were not properly represented. As we move increasingly towards becoming a full-time working House, the remoter parts of the country are going to get cut off. I found this particularly when I was living in Caithness; it was one of my reasons for moving back to London. If one wanted to take part in business here on a Monday, the only way to guarantee that was to leave home on Sunday night. On a good day it was possible to make the journey in around five hours, but on a bad day it could take well over 16 hours. If the House of Lords is to become more political and professional, inevitably Peers in the outer reaches are going to be squeezed because they will not be able to participate.