Former Lord Speaker claims many peers contribute ‘nothing’
MANY peers contribute “absolutely nothing” to Parliament, a former lord speaker claimed, as she alleged one member kept a taxi running outside while signing in to collect the £300 daily allowance.
Baroness D’Souza suggested the “sense of honour” that used to come with being a member of the House of Lords had been lost.
The comments came in an interview for a documentary about the House of Lords that saw former Cabinet minister Lord Blunkett and Lord Tebbit criticise the process for appointments to the upper house.
On the BBC show Meet The Lords, which combines interviews and fly-on-the-wall footage, Lady D’Souza said: “There is a core of peers who work incredibly hard, who do that work, and there are, sad to say, many, many, many peers who contribute absolutely nothing but who claim the full allowance.
“I can remember one occasion when I was leaving the House quite late and there was a peer – who shall be utterly nameless – who jumped out of a taxi just outside the peers’ entrance, left the engine running.
“He ran in, presumably to show that he’d attended, and then ran out again while the taxi was still running. So I mean that’s not normal, but it is something that does happen and I think we have lost the sense of honour that used to pertain, and that is a great, great shame.”
Lord Blunkett and Lord Tebbit questioned some of the appointments prime ministers had made to the upper house. Labour former home secretary Lord Blunkett said: “You have got people who may well be, out of the patronage of the government of the day, rewarded for either keeping their mouth shut or opening their mouth or their purse at a particular moment in time.”
Tory peer Lord Tebbit said: “Far too many people have been put in here as a sort of personal reward.
“You wouldn’t have imagined Mrs Thatcher wanting to give a peerage to Denis Thatcher’s tailor or something like that.
“But we have come pretty close to that in recent years.”
At a preview screening of the show, Lord Speaker Lord Fowler acknowledged there were concerns about the size of the upper house, which has more than 800 members.
He said:“And they are right, we need to be smaller and I set up a committee under (Lord) Terry Burns to work on achieving just that.” Meet The Lords will be broadcast on Monday, BBC2, 9pm.