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The end of hereditary peers in the House of Lords? - Parliament Matters podcast, Episode 49

18 Oct 2024
©House of Lords/Roger Harris
©House of Lords/Roger Harris

MPs debated the bill to abolish hereditary peers’ right to sit and vote in the House of Lords. But what were the opposition’s arguments? We reflect on the Government's first 100 days: is it improving legislative standards? Twenty Private Members’ Bills were announced this week: which ones may get traction? And a new Speaker’s Conference on the safety of MPs and candidates has been established. So, what is it, and what might it do?

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The Government’s bill to exclude the last vestiges of the hereditary peerage from the House of Lords has cleared its Second Reading debate in the House of Commons – but should it have proposed a more ambitious reform of the Upper House?

With some MPs calling for wider changes, including several Conservatives who think the Church of England bishops should be removed alongside the hereditaries, Ruth and Mark look at the prospects for the Bill and the chances of it being amended to include other reforms. Could peers attempt to block it when it comes before them? And what does Monty Python have to do with all this?

As Labour celebrate a hundred days in office Mark fails to detect a Kennedy/Camelot vibe and Ruth warns that having squandered political capital on avoidable scandals they are also failing to keep their promise of better law-making, by pushing through 'skeleton bills' which give sweeping powers for ministers to make the law at a later date with minimal scrutiny from Parliament.

Plus, ‘assisted dying’ will be the top issue among this year’s Private Members Bills; but there are other meaty issues to chew on, like tackling climate change, requiring solar panels on new homes, regulating Airbnb-style short accommodation lets and banning mobile phones in schools.

And with MPs and election candidates menaced by violence and intimidation, what solutions might emerge from a proposed Speaker’s Conference?

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What we talked about on this episode

  • Hereditary Peers Bill: what happened at Second Reading?

  • House of Lords reform: why are some MPs pushing for bigger changes?

  • The future of the Hereditary Peers Bill: will it face amendments or a block in the House of Lords?

  • Labour’s first 100 days: what have we learnt so far?

  • Labour’s legislative programme: are they delivering on promises for better law-making?

  • Twenty Private Members’ Bills have been introduced: what are they and how many are likely to be government-supported?

  • Speaker’s Conference on MP safety: what is it and why does it matter?

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Transcript

Please note, this transcript is automatically generated. There are consequently minor errors and the text is not formatted according to our style guide. If you wish to reference or cite the transcript copy below, please first check against the audio version above.

[00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. Coming up

Ruth Fox: The Tumbrils roll, as the House of Commons prepares to remove the remaining hereditary peers from the House of Lords.

Mark D'Arcy: It's not exactly been JFK, has it?

So what have we learned about this government in its first hundred days?

Ruth Fox: And MPs are under growing threat of physical violence from the public. A new Speaker's Conference is going to look at how to protect them. So what is it, and what might it do?

Mark D'Arcy: But first, Ruth, we're rather in the calm before the budget storm at the moment, waiting for Rachel. It's an [00:01:00] existential drama in which the main tax increases never appear, but the big parliamentary event that's going on even while the budget is in gestation is the bid to remove the hereditary peers, the remaining 92 of them who sit in the House of Lords, from the upper house so that they will no longer be entitled to seats in the legislature at all.

And that is a very big deal. We're talking about removing an element of Parliament that's been there since, what, the 1400s?

Both: Mm hmm.

Mark D'Arcy: And it's a major constitutional change being done in actually quite a mini piece of legislation. This is a five clause bill that quite simply removes the right of hereditary peers to sit in the Lords and doesn't attempt any wider constitutional change beyond that.

So it's both very big in one sense and quite minimalist in another...

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