The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)

My Lords, almost everything in life has a retirement age. I put it to the Committee that having the age of 80 as an upper limit is what most people would expect as being a normal upper limit of something that was still credible. The second issue is something that I raised both in my speech in November, in our House of Lords reform debate, and at Second Reading in December: the wisdom of imposing a retirement age on the current membership of the House retrospectively, as it were. That would probably produce a cliff edge, which would lead to what I termed an “organisational shock”. The loss of organisational power or human capital, in something which I think is adjudged by many to be performing well, would be a great shame and an unnecessary piece of self-harm. It takes some time to train up new Members. Indeed, it takes some time to find new Members, as HOLAC would be able to tell your Lordships. Accordingly, in the commercial environment, one would look for transitional arrangements and try to find some way of doing that. The very pleasing Amendment 65, which was so well introduced by the noble Earl, Lord Devon, proposes a simple set of transitional arrangements with two legs that would reduce that organisational shock enormously and allow the House to transition to an age limit of 80 without pain or any loss of our capability and effectiveness. The first leg would impose the age limit only on new Members. This was how, as I remarked in November and December, the judges of the higher courts in England and Wales did it about 35 years ago, as they were worried about the loss of institutional power at that time. They found that a number of judges in fact imposed a retirement age on themselves retrospectively, as it were. They could have gone on forever but chose to retire at the new retirement age. I would expect that to apply, as I said then, and still expect it today. The Cross Bench has a slightly higher average age at 73, so we have a number of people who are in this zone. I expect that would apply with us as well, so imposing it on the new is the first leg of this very clever amendment. The second leg would give everyone who comes in a minimum of 10 years. Selfishly, from the Cross-Bench point of view, one of the things that we need is judges. We need to supply judges in various circumstances. We needed to supply two for the Holocaust Memorial Bill Committee recently and I have to supply others for other private Bills that are coming through. These are just some examples. Some of the judges we need come from the Supreme Court and they do not retire until they are 75. Only having five years of them, with it taking a couple of years to train them up because they are no longer Members of our House beforehand, would mean that it is better for everyone to have a minimum period. That feature of the amendment from the noble Earl, Lord Devon, is also to be commended to the Committee.