Baroness Finn (Con)

My Lords, I spoke extensively about HOLAC in Committee, and noble Lords will probably all be grateful that I do not intend to repeat all I said. I know that there are many different views across this House on HOLAC, but I think we can all agree that we want a House that serves with integrity and commands public trust. HOLAC provides a non-statutory safeguard within the process for appointments to your Lordships’ House, and its recommendations are currently advisory and do not bind a Prime Minister. Amendments 5 and 31 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Newby, seek to prevent life peerages being conferred when HOLAC recommends against their appointment. Amendment 6 in the name of my noble friend Lord Hailsham proposes that HOLAC, in place of the Prime Minister, should propose peerages and any recipient should be fit and proper as well as committed to participating in your Lordships’ House. The effect of these amendments would place the power of nomination to this unelected Chamber in the hands of HOLAC—an unelected quango. As the noble Lord, Lord Butler, reminded the House, and this was reinforced by many of my noble friends this evening, HOLAC was created as an advisory committee; it was created to advise, not to dictate. To make its recommendations binding would fundamentally change its remit and transform it from being a source of counsel to being a gatekeeper for your Lordships’ House. That would be a profound constitutional shift. The power to recommend appointments to His Majesty should rest where it does now: with the democratically elected Prime Minister, who is accountable to the people. I am glad that the present Prime Minister, who was very critical of former Prime Ministers who ignored the views of HOLAC, has now said that he might, now that he is in power, do the same. My noble friend Lord Parkinson has already quoted from the Written Ministerial Statement, but it is worth saying again: “In the unlikely event I, as Prime Minister, were to proceed with a nomination against HOLAC’s advice on propriety I would write to the Commission and this letter would be published on gov.uk”. As a slight digression, I am grateful to my noble friends Lady Stowell and Lord Parkinson for bringing the attention of the House to the Prime Minister’s words on the directly appointed Cross-Bench peerages that were referred to in the same Written Ministerial Statement. My noble friend Lord Parkinson reinforced the concerns and referred to the Statement from the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair. I remember this Statement because I had to dig it up when we were trying to work out how the Prime Minister made Cross-Bench peerages. At the time, these Cross-Bench peerages were limited to 10 per parliamentary Session or per parliamentary term.