Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)

My Lords, it is customary to congratulate the chair of the committee—in this case, the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor—on the report being debated, but I am afraid I cannot do that because it is completely incoherent. Let me explain why. I am going to be 85 at the end of this year, and I will be asked, under the terms of this report, to retire from the House in 2029. That is the date of the next election. Are we really saying that the priority of the next Government, of whatever colour, will be to produce statutory legislation to enforce these recommendations? I probably will have gone by 2029, but supposing I lose my marbles and become completely unhinged, I might decide to stay on—and who can stop me? Without primary legislation, there is no way that I can be prevented from serving out my time until I die. This proposal does not make any sense whatever. My noble friend Lord True asked: what is the question that we are trying to answer? I believe that it is about whether your Lordships’ House is too big. There are too many of us and it does not look good. We know that the people who do the work very rarely exceed 500, but it looks as if there are nearly 800 Members of this House, and that is too many. I wrote a recommendation to the committee—which was never addressed at all, as far as I can make out —that suggested that we should have internal elections. As such, each party group in your Lordships’ House would be told to decide on how many should stay in the House. They could hold more than one of these elections. The first slice might be 10%, and they elect out of the House the 10% of people who they do not want. Who would they be? They would be the people who had lost their marbles—they might be of any age, as age is not a determinant of whether you have lost your marbles; a lot of younger people are completely incoherent and should be got rid of—and people who do not come to the House. Therefore, we could get rid of all the people who are not contributing and keep the people who are contributing by holding the Government to account and revising legislation, which is the purpose of this House. When I raised the question of internal elections in a previous debate, the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, got up and said he thought that elections were a terrible idea, as people briefed against each other. I spoke to him afterwards and asked how many elections he had participated in; he said, “One”. I have contributed as a candidate in six parliamentary elections and one parliamentary by-election. A number of those elections were against Liberal Democrat opponents, and they really have a lot to teach all of us about briefing against people in elections. Although democracy is imperfect, it is not a reason for us to reject it. We should elect the people out of this House whom we do not want; that is a much better way forward and will reduce the numbers. That leaves us with the problem of those who are independents and so forth. I think that they should group together and take the percentage of cut that they need as well. That is something the committee could decide on—there is a slight problem there—but otherwise we would see the same reductions across all party groupings in the House, and we would get rid of the people we really do not want who do not contribute to the workings of this House.