Contribution
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Burns, for his amendment and the way he introduced it. He raised four very substantial issues—much more substantial than most of the issues we have spent most of the day debating. Should there be a maximum size of the House? How do we get there? How do we then stop recidivist Governments breaching it? Once we have got there, how do we balance the new appointments between the various parties?
The first and third questions are very straightforward. Yes, there should be a limit. Yes, it will mean that no Prime Minister can then threaten to flood the House with 100 new Peers, but the last time that was tried was over 110 years ago, and it has not proved to be a necessary part of public policy-making in the interim. Is the noble Lord, Lord Gove, right when he says the more voices, the better? Clearly, there is a point at which that ceases to be the case, and what we are arguing about is where that should be. If there were 5,000 people here, there would clearly be too many voices, and we would not be able to do anything. Those of us who have spent many hours debating here, including everybody who has been involved with the Burns amendment, have formed the view that the place would be better if it had a cap on its numbers. So, yes, there should be a cap on the numbers. It should be a legislative cap. If we have that, it solves the problem of how we stop future Prime Ministers ratcheting up the numbers again—they will not be allowed to do it by law.
How do we get to that number, 650 or whatever it is? Actually, if we do what we say we are going to do in terms of retirement and participation, we get beyond that number; we get below it. In fact, one of the arguments about having a straightforward retirement age is that we are taking out too many people, so I do not think that the bit of the noble Lord’s amendment that deals with how we get to the number would be needed in practice.
If we agree that there should be a limit and that it means you cannot ratchet up again, and if we say that we get to the limit by the combination of retirement and participation limits, the difficult question that remains is: once you have got below the limit, how do you decide on the balance of appointments? The noble Lord says there is a convention that the Labour Party and the Conservative Party should have broad parity of numbers. That may be fine, but there are some others of us here, both on these Benches and the noble Lord’s. What are we going to do about all that?
In his original report, the noble Lord came up with an elegant proposal to deal with the balance that related to votes and seats over a period of three general elections. It would have had the advantage of being a stabilising force while still reflecting the fact that the House has to move with the country. I supported that at the time, as I think the Government did, and would support it again.
On how we implement all this, if we could agree on it all, given that the debate about retirement is in part a debate about numbers, one of the issues will be how quickly we do it. If we require primary legislation to deal with retirement, I do not see why it would be illogical to include something about numbers in that.
How you deal with my point about how you rebalance over time once you have got below the cap, whether you do that by convention or statute, is a matter for another day. The only thing that worries me slightly is that framing a statute that could not be amended in the light of changing political circumstances might be quite difficult.
These are hugely important issues. There is quite a lot of consensus on some of them, but I hope we are able to debate them sensibly and make progress on them during the course of the Parliament and in the context of the other debates we are having, not least on retirement.