Earl Attlee (Con)

My Lords, as I intimated in the previous group, noble Lords who remain after the hereditaries have gone will come under increasing media pressure on the grounds that many are far too old and unelected. Even now, we often see colourful descriptions of noble Lord’s bios, especially when how they speak and vote is not to the particular medium’s liking. In 2010, on my own initiative, I looked at a list of Peers in age order, expecting to find some age at which noble Lords became ineffective. I can assure the Committee that there is no such point, but over 33 years, what I have sadly seen time and again is Peers losing their mental faculties, alongside a relatively quick physical decline. Now that we have a system of retirement, there is not the moral drive to keep attending past the point of effectiveness, although a few do. I think we can all agree that octogenarian Peers can be effective and add value. However, at 68, I am beginning to worry that I am out of touch and out of date with the things that I think, and I am experienced in, and that I am out of date with modern society. That is partially why I want to retire in the spring. The noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, made the point about social media. I do not use social media; I have not got the foggiest clue how to use it. Wisdom and experience are valuable to the House, and I frequently seek the counsel of very old Peers. The problem is this: the maximum practical limit of the size of the House is about 800. I suspect that is part of the reason why the Government want to get rid of hereditary Peers, despite our experience. What matters is the number of active Peers, not the size of the House, but we also have too many active Peers. My theory is that, after a certain size, the effectiveness of each individual Peer is inversely proportional to the number of active Peers—so each Peer has fewer opportunities. For instance, in Parliaments before 2010, if I got fed up with what the Government were doing, I could roll into the Minute Room and say “Right, Oral Question; I want the next available slot”. They would laugh at me if I did that now; you have to go into a ballot. We never used to have to do that. The problem is not the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of older Peers; the problem is bed-blocking. We should have Peers on both the political Benches and the Cross Benches who have succeeded in their chosen careers, bought and paid for their house, and secured a decent occupational pension—that is to say, appointment at about the age of 55 to 63. There is no shortage of really good-quality people in this situation. The noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, talked about precisely that. We cannot have them because we have around 200 octogenarian Peers. I am not saying that we should not have much younger Peers. I am saying that the older Peers are bed-blocking younger potential Peers. I think the solution is to make it clear to new appointments how long their term will be. How long that should be is another matter, but I think we should make it absolutely clear how long new Peers are expected to be here. I do not think it would be fair to retire older life Peers, as they would have believed that they would be here for life. We hereditary Peers have known that we were on borrowed time since 1911.