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Mr. Gale: Earlier, the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mr. McWalter) said--I paraphrase only slightly--that the debate was about getting rid of600 deadbeats from the other House. The implication was clearly that the deadbeats are the hereditary peers. A significant number of Members of the other House are relatively inactive for many reasons: some do not live in this country and some are suffering from extreme old age. Some of the elderly Members of the other House are very active, but some are not and most of those are not hereditary peers but life peers. A significant number of hereditary peers play an extremely active role in the life and work of the House of the Lords.

When those men and women are removed from their tasks--and it will be a matter of when, as this measure will be steamrollered through--there will not be enough peers left to do the job and scrutinise the legislation.

Mr. Gordon Prentice (Pendle): Tell them to turn up then.

Mr. Gale: The hon. Gentleman makes a comment from a sedentary position, but his party has complained bitterly that the Government have been defeated on a number of occasions by the upper House. If he looks at the voting record in the upper House, he will find that it is the Labour life peers who have not turned up to vote and who have let his party down. I do not think that he is on very strong ground.

9.45 pm

Mr. Prentice: The Sunday newspapers tell us that the hon. Gentleman's former colleague John Moore, who at one time was a Conservative Secretary of State for Transport, was ennobled in 1992 and has yet to make his maiden speech. How does the hon. Gentleman justify that?

Mr. Gale: The point that the hon. Gentleman has missed is that it is Labour Back Benchers in the other place who have failed to turn up. That is why the Government have been defeated so often in the House of Lords.

Mrs. Beckett: I think that the hon. Gentleman must know--or should know--that he is being extremely unfair, and I shall tell him why. First, even if 100 per cent. of our Members in the House of Lords arrive, the Conservative party need only get out a much smaller percentage of its Members there to defeat us.

Secondly, and most significantly, it is a sad fact that quite a high percentage of our life peers in the House of Lords are in the later stages of their lives, and many are quite frail. We continue to have to try to bring them in, although they are not able to attend as often as they would wish. The reason for that situation is that a succession of Conservative Prime Ministers--especially Lady Thatcher and the right hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major)--absolutely refused to allow the creation of younger Labour life peers to replace those who died. So the hon. Gentleman is making a very unfair point at the expense of people who show great devotion to the House of Lords.

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Mr. Gale: The right hon. Lady knows perfectly well that, according to the simple mathematics of the House of Lords, there are enough able Labour life peers to have carried the Government's business on every occasion. However, she has helped me to make my point, which is that it is not the hereditary peers who do not attend the upper House, but the elderly life peers.

I yield to no one in my respect for some of those elderly people. I worked long and hard over a number of years with one gentleman, the late Lord Houghton of Sowerby, a member of the right hon. Lady's party. He made a major contribution to the upper House until late into his 90s, when he was still introducing legislation, so I will take no lessons from the right hon. Lady on that matter. However, the sums make it clear that, had Labour life peers turned up to vote, they could have carried the Government's business--yet they failed to do so.

Once the hereditary peers are abolished, the work of the upper House during the interim period--that is, for the five, 10, 15, 20 or 50 years that it is in place--will have to be done by people appointed. They will either be Tony's cronies, or they will be created along the lines suggested by Lord Weatherill and set out in the amendment.

What we are discussing tonight is how we are to get from where we are now--which works--to an interim arrangement, which must also work. We are also discussing who will do the job in the interim period. When the time comes to vote on the amendment--later tonight, or tomorrow--I shall support it, not because it is particularly good, but because, in the words that myhon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir P. Cormack) used earlier, it makes a bad Bill just a little less bad. On Third Reading, I shall oppose the whole sorry charade.

I asked the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) how he was going to vote. Like every other honourable Labour Member, he equivocated, because he knows that the right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn) is right. The Bill is a charade and a farce, but the Government Whips will cow their sheep into the No Lobby to vote against this amendment. The Bill will then go to, and be passed by, the other place; when it comes back here, Labour Members will bleat their way through the Aye Lobby. That is what will happen. It is two-faced, and it is dishonourable. The tactic is fundamentally dishonest.

On amendment No. 18, I want to know who will be put in to fill the gaps that we all agree will have to be filled in the interim upper House. Who will be allowed to speak? Labour Members have voted that working hereditary peers may not even speak, never mind vote.

I intervened earlier on an excellent speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Mr. Howarth), and I referred to Baroness Wharton, the deputy chairman of the all-party animal welfare group and an extremely hard-working Cross-Bench peer. Some Labour Members are members of that all-party group, and they know as well as I do of the work that Baroness Wharton has done in recent years. She worked throughout the summer recess, when others were away, to design a puppy farming Bill that many Labour Members would wish to see pass through the House and through the other place. She worked long and hard, too, to take Lord Houghton's Dangerous Dogs (Amendment) Act 1997 through the House of Lords before it came to the House of Commons.

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Baroness Wharton has to earn a living, yet she finds the time to work on legislation in Parliament as a Cross-Bench peer. She will no longer be allowed to speak because Labour Members voted, about two hours ago, to say that she cannot.

Angela Smith: The hon. Gentleman challenged me on this point earlier, and it is a shame that he was not here for the beginning of the debate when he would have heard points made by some of my hon. Friends. He has spoken of the work that Baroness Wharton has done, and my hon. Friends and I--I am vice-chair of the animal welfare group--have made it clear that the Bill to remove the voting rights of hereditary peers is no slur on the character of any work undertaken by hereditary peers. Rather, it is about the legitimacy of those peers to undertake work at all.

Mr. Gale: It is true that I was not here for the early part of the debate because I was engaged in other parliamentary business. However, one of the advantages of televising the Chamber is that we are able to hear speeches in our rooms. I therefore heard much of what was said earlier, and I waited to see how the hon. Member for Basildon (Angela Smith) would vote. Would she allow Baroness Wharton to carry on speaking? She voted no. [Interruption.]

I know that it is uncomfortable to hear about real people and the real work that they do in the real House of Lords. However, let me name a couple more real people. The third Viscount Chelmsford, for example, is a hereditary peer, and the director of the European Informatics Market. He plays an important role in the upper House in pressing the cause for the development of information technology, both in and out of Parliament.

The second Baron Renwick is a member of the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology. He is also secretary of the Parliamentary Information Technology committee, and he speaks for the British Dyslexia Association. He, too, is a hereditary peer.

I am glad to see that the Minister of State, Lord Chancellor's Department--the Lord Chancellor's spokesman on earth--has come to the Committee. I wanted to say something to him earlier, and now I have the chance. The Minister knows those two hereditary peers very well. In a former incarnation, he took a particular interest in information technology, and he knows--if no one else on the Labour Benches does--just how great was the role played by those two working hereditary peers in the parliamentary development of information technology. Yet the Minister has voted, and has recommended to his hon. Friends to vote, to ensure that those peers should not be allowed to speak in the other place. If those people, who work for little or no money, other than an attendance allowance, are not going to be allowed to speak, who is?

Is the Labour party going to do the job properly? Is it going to have the guts to do what the right hon. Member for Chesterfield, with whom I agree, would have it do? Is it going to persuade its turkeys in another place to vote for Christmas, to abolish the House of Lords and vote for a wholly elected upper Chamber, or is it going to continue with this charade, which is nothing short of vandalism of our constitution?

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