Baroness Hayman (CB)

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter. I will not repeat what she said, except to say how well chaired we were as a committee and to give my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton. I thank Judith Brooke and her team, who supported us extremely well. I also thank my fellow committee members. We had four members from the Official Opposition, but they did not all think the same way. We all came with different starting points and foci as to how to deal with this issue. Myself and many others would have liked broader terms of reference. We would have been interested in looking at—I will come to this later—how people get into this House as well as how people leave it, but we did our best. We have provided a nuance to the proposals in the manifesto that is respectful of Members of this House and that gives people the opportunity, as the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, said, from whenever we decide this issue until July 2029 to make their own plans for the future. The noble Lord, Lord True, talked in dramatic language of expulsion. Most of us have worked in organisations at some point in our life where our contract came to an end and there was provision for retirement. It did not strike us that there was some terrible sword of Damocles over our ability to go on ad infinitum, give our wisdom and take up precious space on the Benches in this House. The language is slightly hysterical, because the concept of retirement, though it should be later in this House for good reason and should not be destructive of the knowledge base and corporate memory that we have, is really not quite as revolutionary as to say that we have been bushwhacked by the Labour manifesto. I very much support the report that we brought together. I also support the approach of trying to do this ourselves, with the nuances and transition period that we have put in. The noble Lord, Lord True, is very optimistic about a one-clause Bill on this going through this House and the House of Commons like a dose of salts and making everything perfect. From my long 30-year experience in this House, and my short five years’ experience in the House of Commons, I very much doubt that it would be as simple as that. There are two things on which I agree with the noble Lord, Lord True. One is that we have to be careful about the numbers of the Cross-Benchers. We have to preserve the view that 20% of the House should be Cross-Benchers and look at how that interacts with the age limit. The other thing that we have to look at, and on which I agree with him, is that the unconstrained prerogative of the Prime Minister to make as many appointments to this House as he wants is a dangerous weapon and the wrong place for us to be. It leads to the ratcheting up of numbers after every election. We could do that better and we should try to find a way to do that better.