MEMBERS of Parliament have voted to remove hereditary peers from the House of Lords, but rejected an amendment from the Conservative MP Gavin Williamson to abolish the parliamentary seats for the Lords Spiritual (News, 1 November).
The House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill was passed by 435 votes to 35 within the House of Commons on Tuesday evening. The Bill will now proceed to the Lords, where it is predicted to face fierce opposition.
During the five-hour debate, Mr Williamson said that the 26 bishops didn’t fairly represent the UK today, coming from England only, not Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. He argued that it was “fundamentally unsuitable that, due to the statute of 1847, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of York, the Bishop of London, the Bishop of Durham, and the Bishop of Winchester have a right to legislate on my constituents. I think that they’ve an absolute right to influence the course of public debate, but from the pulpit, not in Parliament.”
His amendment was lost by 378 votes to 41.
He had also proposed an amendment to introduce a compulsory retirement age for members of the House of Lords, which was also lost, by 376 votes to 96.
In a parallel take-note debate within the Lords on Tuesday afternoon, the Bishop of Sheffield, Dr Pete Wilcox, defended the place of the Lords Spiritual. The serving bishops, he said, brought “an independent and non-partisan presence, and a voice for faith and for our local communities. It is an expression of our vocation to service in all communities that’s core to our constitutional status as an Established Church.
“Our presence on this House is barely one component of the broader church-state relationship. Service in Parliament on the one side is matched by our accountability to Parliament on the opposite, epitomised by the weekly opportunity for Questions specifically in regards to the Church of England to the Second Church Estates Commissioner in the opposite place.”
He suggested that the Lords made three contributions to parliamentary democracy: “independence, expertise, and a voice from civil society”.
The Labour Party had made a commitment in its election manifesto to reforming the Lords, including abolishing hereditary peers, introducing a compulsory age limit of 80 for Lords, and ultimately replacing them with “another second chamber that’s more representative of the regions and nations”.
The Cabinet Office Minister Ellie Reeves told the Commons on Tuesday that previous attempts to reform the Lords “multi function go” had failed. The Government, she said, had desired to deliver “immediate reform in a timely fashion, while not undermining the business of the House with the sudden departure of a variety of hereditary peers in the midst of a parliamentary session”.
