Viscount Hailsham (Con)

My Lords, in speaking to my amendment I will be very brief. My noble friend Lord Blencathra articulated a very powerful argument in favour of retirement with which I agree; I have suggested the age of 85 in my amendment. I wish to make three general points and two specific ones. The general points are these. First, we do need to get the numbers in this House down, and retirement age is one way of doing it. Secondly, and coupled with that, is the need to refresh the membership; that too is important and points to a retirement age. The third point is a difficult one to dwell on too long. In a long political career, both at the Bar and in politics, I have seen an awful lot of people who reached the age of 85 who should have retired—both judges and Members of Parliament, and indeed Members of this House. We need to focus on that. Turning to my two specific points, the first was touched on earlier in the debate: the fact that our expertise does decay. There was a time when I knew an awful lot about criminal law and practice. I have not practised as a criminal barrister since 2010, and I would hesitate to express any really informed view as to the practice and procedures in the criminal courts today. That is an example of one’s expertise decaying. Similarly—although not quite the same—as one gets older, one has to recognise that one’s expertise on many current subjects is not what the House would wish to have. For example, we are going to be regulating on artificial intelligence. If you ask me what I know about artificial intelligence, the answer is nothing. The same is true of social media too. I do not do social media at all, but we are asked to regulate it. The truth is, there does come a point in one’s life when one’s expertise is not such that the electorate would want us to regulate in any kind of detail. Therefore, to be brief, I am in favour of a retirement age. We could argue sensibly whether it should be 75, 80, 85 or 90. I plonk at 85, but the truth is that we could properly go for any of those figures.