Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)

My Lords, I find myself questioning the premise on which this amendment rests, and indeed on which the Bill it is amending rests—namely, that there are too many of us here. It is repeated very often, but it is rarely interrogated or properly analysed. The case against the amendment from my noble friend Lord Blencathra has been eloquently made by others, and I am not going to repeat the points that they have made. My noble friend Lord Astor made an extremely good point about the perverse incentives that it would bring in, my noble friend Lord Hailsham made a very good point about its retrospective nature, and who can disagree with the compelling case made by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, about the low-frequency but high-impact Members? But we would not be having this debate at all if it were not for this general assumption that we need to free up space. Before I came here, I took that as axiomatic. We are always told that this is the second-biggest legislative chamber after the National People’s Congress in Peking. But too many Peers for what? Do we have difficulty finding a seat in the Chamber? I do not think so; if we look around, we see that there is plenty of space. Do we have difficulty booking a table in the Peers’ Dining Room? Do we not have our Written Questions accepted? Are we pullulating in such numbers that the ushers are unable to cope with us? I do not think so. If we are, the one lot of people we do not have a problem with are those who do not turn up very often. They, by definition, are the ones who are contributing least to the problem and, indeed, claiming least from it. This Chamber has existed in one form or another since Magna Carta—at least if we count the conciliar form of government that took shape under King John and Henry III as the progenitor and ancestor of this Chamber—and at no stage has anyone felt the need to insert a minimum attendance requirement. It was assumed that it could be left to the patriotism and judgment of the bishops and barons to decide when something was sufficiently important to merit turning up. Have we completely junked that idea of trusting people’s own discretion and judgment? If it really were a question of numbers and we really did feel that we were massively overloaded, why is it that almost every day we keep on admitting more Members here? If Ministers think that the problem is that this is too large a legislature, why do we seem to be gaining half a dozen people a week? I sometimes feel we are in one of those Gilbert and Sullivan operettas where everyone gets a peerage. I sometimes wonder whether that is the end game—that this country will end up becoming an oligarchy, where the real power is vested in the hands of the last remaining 500 people who still have the right to vote for the other place, and everyone else will have the right to sit here. But, you know, as long as they do not turn up, it is still not a problem—so I come back to saying that I dispute the premise. I know that Ministers share my view, because they are not proposing a cut-off based on attendance, or indeed a cut-off based on age. They have looked beyond their manifesto and have decided to do the right thing, rather than be bound by the dots and commas of what their manifesto says. I hope they will extend that logic to the only democratically elected element of your Lordships’ Chamber, namely our hereditary colleagues.