A peerage shouldn’t be for life
If you want to join the House of Lords, there’s never been a better time. The Con-Lib coalition needs to appoint more than 100 lords to ensure it has a voting majority there. Once would-be peers made generous donations to parties to obtain titles; now Westminster may have to bribe us to join.
Padding out the Lords with government members to outnumber the opposition peers is reminiscent of companies’ mass recruitment of non-executives after the Higgs report concluded that part-timers should be in the majority. Rather than sack the executive directors, boards were expanded by appointing non-execs en masse. Because parliament cannot sack peers, it is having to create scores more to rebalance the house.
Yet when the electorate next votes in a different government, a new army of peers will have to be drafted in to rebalance the upper house the again. And the following change of government after could mean a new swathe of new lords. There are already more peers than elected MPs in the Commons, but this constant creation of new lords mean we could all end up wearing ermine.
Evicting the hereditary peers was not the solution: the real reform of the second chamber should be to end life peerages. Those thought worthy of representing us in the Lords should be made temporary peers. A term of office of, say, five or seven years seems reasonable: those lords and ladies still thought to be doing a good job could be given a further term. The best might still remain lords for life.
Company boardrooms appoint their non-execs on a similar basis. Directors must be regularly re-elected but the governance code sets a nine-year maximum before they are no longer regarded as independent.
It is madness that someone ennobled to enable them to join a government for a few weeks retains their peerage long after that government has fallen and their work is finished. So while – just in the business field – Peter Mandelson, Shriti Vadera, Paul Myners, Digby Jones, Mervyn Davies, Alan Sugar and Andrew Adonis – were elevated to the Lords to do a job, they keep their titles even though they are no longer ministers.
To recruit more than 100 peers the Tories and Liberals will have to look beyond talented people capable of doing a job in government: they just want numbers to vote, not to debate and decide. This is cannon fodder, political style: quantity not quality.
The subject of Lords reform is back on the agenda yet again – so soon after the last reform - but this time the change should be to replace life peers with temporary peers.
