Lord Grocott (Lab)

My Lords, I very much associate myself with those who have congratulated my noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton, who has performed the trick of delivering unanimous support from people who did not agree with one another on more than one occasion over the 40-odd years that she and I have been around in this House. I should declare an interest—I do not know whether to declare an interest or whether I am a beneficiary or a victim of this Bill, because I too am affected by it: from 8 July 2029, the House will have to learn how to cope without me; I expect that the nation will remain calm. I mention this because much of my view of it is affected by the time I spent as Chief Whip. I am certainly not going to name any names, but there were people coming in at very advanced ages who were not fit to come in and whose spouses desperately did not want them to come in. The House did not want them to be here, but they clung to the explanation that they had been appointed here for life to support the Government—the Labour Government at the time—and that it was their duty to do so. I welcome a retirement age; it gives you a date to work towards, and I do not regard it as expulsion—I have had more than a good innings. It is also desirable. What does it tell us about the composition of this House when I say that, if everyone now over the age of 75 were to depart by 2034, we would lose 367 people? Put another way, that is 367 of the 776 current Members of the House. Virtually half the House is over the age of 75 and lingering around the age of 80. That is not a good population balance, and we need to recognise that. Not least, I find pretty weak the argument that, somehow, losing these people will be one step short of a disaster. We have precedent. In 1999, 667 Peers left this House—or were expelled, as the noble Lord, Lord True, said. I hate to say this because it may upset people, but, when 88 went in 2026, the House carried on. As my noble friend Lord Chandos said, in many ways it improved. The institution is bigger than the individual. If we look down the Corridor to the Commons, we see that as a result of the last general election 335 new MPs arrived. In other words, since 2024, over half of that House is brand new, and it is doing well—I happen to think it is a lot better than when I was there—and functioning properly. I therefore support a retirement age. I also support the participation requirement—I will make only a brief point about this. I think 20% is quite low and should be higher. I will make another uncomfortable observation: there are broadly two groups of people in the House—those who see it as a full-time job and those who do not. If all those who see it as a full-time job reverted to working for just 20% of the time, it would not be good for the House. The real problem—I must make this point briefly—is that there is a group of people in this House who will block every attempt at reform of any sort. They opposed the 1999 Act, and they opposed the appointment and powers of the Lord Speaker. They have opposed any change to sitting times, and they also opposed my simple little Bill to end by-elections for hereditary Peers. Whatever we come up with, there is a block of people in this House who will say, “No, we’re not going to do it”. That makes consensus very difficult. Surely they have learned the lesson from the experience with hereditary Peers: if you do not deal with obvious absurdities in the operation of the House—for example, the hereditary Peers’ by-elections—sooner or later someone else will come up with something to do it for you. There are people sitting in this House—I will not name and embarrass them—who ferociously opposed every small step and ended up with the big step of all the hereditaries being expelled on the same day. There is a lesson there: we do it ourselves, or someone else will do it for us.