Viscount Goschen (Con)

My Lords, it feels strange to be addressing your Lordships’ House on the question of reform of the membership of the House of Lords while not being directly in the crosshairs of the process, as has occurred on every previous occasion. When I re-entered this House as Lord Hawkhurst after a few weeks in exile, I expected to be overwhelmed by a feeling of legitimacy, by virtue of my shiny new life peerage, in comparison with the rather aged and tattered viscountcy that had served me so well for 38 years or so. But I was disappointed. I very much enjoyed the remarks and wisdom of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who referred to PG Wodehouse. I had hoped to take the title of Lord Emsworth but, as we all know, that really should be reserved for an Earl, so I was disappointed again on that front. I turn to the business of the day. The committee has done a thorough job in considering these intractable issues. It is no surprise that there is a considerable diversity of opinion around the House, but no one could argue that the committee has not discharged its function, approached this issue in an extraordinarily thorough way and come up with a solution that, in its mind, was designed to avoid the cliff edge that the noble Baroness referred to. I was also very amused to hear the different views about election manifesto pledges that have come through. I find myself, as ever, in the same field as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, in treating them merely as guidance, because there were other commitments in the manifesto around a more substantially reformed House about which we are not hearing too much. All election manifesto commitments are equal, but I suspect that some are more equal than others. It is strange to debate retirement when we know that there are Peers over the age of 80 who make such fantastic contributions to your Lordships’ House. We have heard from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, and the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, has been referred to. I can tell your Lordships’ House that my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham is utterly unchanged, in every way and in capacity, since he had the misfortune of becoming my boss as Secretary of State for Transport nearly one-third of a century ago. We are talking in code, and what we are really talking about is capacity. We have made progress on that issue, and I feel that more can—and, I hope, will—be done by party managers and the convenor. Of the changes that have been made, the allowance of voluntary retirement has been a positive development. Perhaps an expectation that we should self-regulate—in the great House of Lords tradition—our own retirement is a solution. Whatever the House decides, I feel that we are tilting at the wrong windmill with this report. The primary challenge to the credibility, reputation and, therefore, authority of this House is not around age and retirement; it is to do with the Executive’s ability to control the House’s numbers and make-up. We now have a situation where entry to this House is entirely at the disposal of the Prime Minister’s patronage, with no limits on numbers. The Executive of the day can, to a large extent, choose the new Members of one of the juries they face, and if they find themselves losing the argument they can just add some more. That method of controlling the composition of your Lordships’ House is ridiculous and is no more defensible than the situation we had in the pre-1999 House. That should be the focus, and there should be much less on retirement. We need to control the numbers of people coming into this House. I suggest that whatever the merits—they are very considerable—of people arriving in the House, we go through a period of indigestion, and that does not help us do our job.