My Lords, I shall speak also to a number of other amendments as shown on Marshalled List.
There are three or four quite important amendments that we need to discuss on this clause. The first amendment I draw to your Lordships’ attention is Amendment 39. It would affect the Short Title of the Bill. I propose that the words “Abolition of By-Elections” are left out. The reason for that is that the Bill gets rid of hereditary Peers. It starts by getting rid of the by-elections and, in due course, as hereditary Peers die off, there will soon be no hereditary Peers left in the House of Lords. The Bill should have the title “House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill” because there will not be another Bill to get rid of the hereditary Peers if this Bill proceeds and we wither on the vine.
The second amendment to which I draw your Lordships’ attention is Amendment 42, which states that Section 1 should not come into force until,
“the Secretary of State has commissioned an independent review of the benefits that hereditary Peers bring to Parliament”.
One of those important benefits is that we are not appointed by the Prime Minister. The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, accepted my amendment that acknowledges that the Bill is designed to produce a purely appointed Chamber, on the whim of the Prime Minister’s patronage. We will come on to patronage a bit more in due course, because it is a matter that my noble friend Lord Young—then Sir George Young—did not like when the other Bill went through the Commons in 1999.
Amendment 43 makes another condition—that there ought to be a vote of excepted hereditary Peers before the Bill becomes an Act. I tabled that amendment because the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, is arbitrarily unpicking an agreement we had signed up to that was binding in honour until stage 2 came along; I wish that stage 2 had already happened. The people who will suffer from this are the hereditary Peers, so it seemed only sensible that a vote should be taken among them on whether they were happy that the agreement should be broken.
Another amendment that I wish to talk to briefly is Amendment 58B, which concerns the size of the House. We will talk about that a bit more when we come to the amendments on the Burns report, but this amendment states that the Bill should not become an Act until,
“steps have been taken to ensure that the membership of the House … does not exceed 600 in, or after, the year 2030”.
That is about the same time as the Burns report proposed that that figure should come about, but it would be a big step towards stage 2. When the House is limited at 600, that should be the time when the hereditary Peers’ by-elections should cease. I beg to move.