Phil Brickell

The right hon. Member will have heard me mention previously that previous Governments do not bind the hands of future Governments, and that this Bill was a manifesto commitment last year. That leads me on to the amendments that have come back from the other place. Lords amendments 1 and 8, tabled by the noble Lord Parkinson, propose ending the by-elections for hereditaries but retaining the current cohort. The amendments would hollow out the Bill and perpetuate the very problem that we are trying to fix. I urge colleagues in the other House to respect the Salisbury convention, which has already been mentioned today: this House has primacy on election-winning manifesto pledges. Conservative colleagues have ample opportunity this afternoon to confirm that they respect that constitutional convention, and I wait with bated breath to hear them speak to that, but we cannot scrap only the by-election process. As I say, it is the principle of hereditary peers that is so objectionable, which is why I will be voting to make sure that this Bill gets on to the statute book. Many hereditary peers have made valuable contributions —I have worked alongside some already in the short amount of time I have spent in this place—but those who want to continue serving can and should do so on merit. They can stand for elected office, they can be nominated for life peerages, and HOLAC can continue to recommend strong Cross-Bench candidates. This Bill is not an attack on individuals; it is an attack on the medieval principle of privilege by birth. No one should sit in our Parliament because of the deeds of their ancestors centuries ago. Lords amendments 1 and 8 are not about accountability and they are not about democracy. They are patronage dressed up as Parliament, and the Conservatives, in 14 years in office, did absolutely nothing to change the hereditary principle. Lords amendment 3, from the noble Lord True, is about so-called non-sitting peerages. Let us be clear: peerages should not be sinecures. If the idea is simply to allow hereditary peers to retain their titles without sitting, what social value does this amendment provide? If we want to honour people’s contributions, we already have a system for that—the honours process, with knighthoods, CBEs and MBEs—as the Paymaster General stressed. This amendment looks less like reform, and more like a way of preserving influence. We have already seen the pattern with titles handed out as bargaining chips or rewards for party donations. This debate has been quite good-humoured, but I do have to flag the Conservative party’s tradition of ennobling its treasurers. I take no pleasure in quoting this, but as one former Conservative party chairman admitted in 2021: “Once you pay your £3 million, you get your peerage.” That is not public service; it is politics for sale, and it is exactly what the public are fed up with. In summary—