Contribution
My Lords, I have always believed in the supremacy of the House of Commons, and I have therefore always favoured an unelected upper House. I have always thought it right that this House should concentrate on two things: amending and improving legislation which has been initiated by the Government and, in cases where many Peers feel that the Government are going in the wrong direction, it can ask the Government to think again, but it is not here to prevent the Government from governing. It is that context we look at the membership of the upper House because, as I understand it, that is still the view of His Majesty’s Government.
I see nothing magic in the year of your 80th birthday. We know in this House that a number of people well over the age of 80 are very acute, are extremely well informed and they help our debates. We know, all too often, in our local communities that there are all too many people under the age of 80 who become enfeebled or disabled and would not be able to carry out their normal duties. That will still be the case for a very small—I hope—minority in this House, and that will still need to be handled in a sensitive way by friends, family and colleagues advising the person to take advantage of the retirement provisions or, if necessary, with the Whips being involved.
We should also remember that the grant of a peerage comes from His Majesty the King, and all of us who have been through the ceremony will remember that it is the words of the Crown investing the peerage in the individual. The words are particularly significant, because they do not just invest a title, a bauble; they invest the right to have a vote and voice in the Parliament of the United Kingdom, in the democratic context that I have just described. This report says that by a simple resolution of this House, we can undermine the will of the sovereign, quite often on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, that the people so appointed have the right to come to this Chamber all the time they wish to do so.
There are also big handling problems, some well brought out in the debate so far. Let me give another case where there can be issues for the parties: a party may have appointed someone who is doing a good job as a Minister, shadow Minister or spokesman, or the House may have appointed them as chairman of a committee. If there has to be an imposed retirement age, it would be much better to say that they would not have to retire until the end of the Parliament in which they become 80, so that there was no unnecessary interruption in their work and abilities. One way of implementing part of the Labour manifesto would be to say that, as from tomorrow, no new Peer will be appointed without expressly saying that the right to a place in Parliament is limited to age 80 and that they would have to retire at that date. That would meet the requirement of the manifesto without having the disruptive impact that we are seeing through these proposals.
I hope the Government think again, because this will not have a happy outcome and will disrupt the talent and expertise in the House. One of the things that has impressed me since I came here from another place, slightly sceptical about a self-regulating House, is seeing that on the big issue of how many people participate, we nearly always get about the right number for a big debate—the right number to cross-examine Ministers without a whole queue of others outside who cannot even get a seat in this place. Self-regulation of numbers seems to work. Indeed, there are occasions when we are considering the detail of legislation in debates in this very Chamber when, despite the large numbers, we are still a bit short of Back-Bench participation, so I do not really see the desperate need to reduce the numbers.
My final, simple thought is that if the Government still think there are too many, and would like even fewer participating, the obvious thing to do is to stop choosing Peers for a little while. Given natural wastage from tragic death and voluntary retirement, you can slim it quite quickly.