Contribution
My Lords, I am sure noble Lords will be relieved to hear that my speech will be much shorter on this occasion. I leave it to my noble and learned friends and other noble Lords to suggest improvements to my amendment.
Again, my starting point is the Labour Party manifesto. It said:
“Labour will ensure all Peers meet the high standards that the public expect of them, and we will introduce a new participation requirement as well as strengthening the circumstances in which disgraced members can be removed”.
The term “disgraced” is a bit vague. If we get into the business of removing Peers who have disgraced themselves, there will be quite a few, depending on how we judge the subjective word “disgraced”. It is safer to stick with those who have brought the House into disrepute and have committed a crime which has resulted in a prison sentence. My suggestion is that the prison sentence which triggers expulsion should be reduced from 12 months to six. My noble friend Lord Hailsham is right that his amendment would rectify my sloppy and imprecise legal wording. I hope noble Lords will agree that, however it is properly and legally phrased, the term should be reduced to six months from 12.
There are a number of related issues that the Committee needs to tackle. Suppose a Peer is convicted of drunk-driving and gets a three-month prison sentence and a 12-month driving ban—any drunk driver is a potential killer—should we not suspend him or her from the House for the same period as the driving ban, for example? We have a problem—some Peers, two I believe, who have served time in prison are still here because we did not have the expulsion power when they were convicted. Another defrauded the House of over £120,000 —the largest ever expenses scandal—but was never charged with a crime. We need to use the legislative power to retrospectively deal with those disgraced Peers.
No matter how heinous the crime might be, right up to the level you get when applying for a visa for the United States—“Have you ever waged thermonuclear war against the United States?”—if a Peer was instantly expelled and could never enter the House again, their title, Lord, still remains. In those rare cases, I suggest the title must be removed.
A peerage can be removed only by an Act of Parliament. The most recent Act that did that was the Titles Deprivation Act 1917, which I am sure is on the tip of your Lordships’ tongues. It was used to remove peerages from enemies of the UK during the First World War. Specifically, Section 1 introduced powers to remove a peerage from anyone who had
“during the present war, borne arms against His Majesty or His Allies, or who have adhered to His Majesty’s enemies”.
The Act meant that any Peers suspected of assisting the enemy could be investigated by a committee of the Privy Council, which would then lay a report to both Houses of Parliament for 40 days. If this period elapsed without either House tabling a Motion disapproving the report, the report would be taken as final and presented to the monarch. The Peer would then be struck off the peerage roll and would have all rights to receive a Writ of Summons and sit in the House of Lords removed. The Act took away four titles. Three of them—the Dukes of Cumberland, Albany and Brunswick —were high-ranking German noblemen and their peerages came from Victoria. The fourth, Viscount Taaffe, an Irish title, was serving in the Austrian army.
It would be a simple matter to have a new Act of Parliament replicating that, called the “Titles Deprivation Act”, for serious criminal offences, implementing exactly the same procedure of a committee of Privy Counsellors of both Houses deciding whether or not a title should be removed because of the severity of the crime committed by the Peer. Of course these issues are not in the Bill, and I am not asking that they should be, but I cannot think of any other opportunity I would have, this year or in the next few years, to raise that little issue, which I believe should be addressed by Parliament in the future to remove disgraced Peers. I beg to move.
Amendment 30 (to Amendment 29)