Baroness Hollins (CB)

My Lords, this is a thoughtful and well-argued report; I just do not agree with all its conclusions. I suggest that in some ways it could have been braver. In paragraph 26, for example, the report says that its remit included considering the impact of its recommendations on the size, functioning and membership of the House. To me, this includes what happens after an age limit has been implemented. The public discourse focuses in part on size and participation, and a fixed age will have no impact on either of those unless we also look at how people come in. There has also been a lot of talk about the lack of any limit on the number of life peerages which a Prime Minister can recommend. We could require experienced and active Members of the House to leave at 80, only for their places to be filled or more through prime ministerial patronage. The Lord Speaker’s committee proposed an overall limit on the size of the House, with appointments linked to departures and allocated according to an agreed formula. I would go further than that committee and propose an annual limit on prime ministerial appointments. So, if 46 leave each year, as current projections suggest if the age limit of 80 is introduced, a cap of 46 new appointments could be applied. Further to my noble friend Lord Patel’s number crunching, I estimate that the percentage of Cross-Benchers will have dropped from 20% to less than 8% by 2034. Therefore, at least 20% of all new appointments would need to be Cross-Benchers. Maybe that is worth thinking about, because Cross-Benchers bring a very particular expertise and tend to be appointed at an older age. We are a revising Chamber and much of what we bring here is accumulated knowledge, judgment and experience, and those attributes do not necessarily disappear on our 80th birthday. I find myself troubled by one aspect of the proposed solution: the assumption that a particular birthday is the best way of deciding when somebody should stop contributing. I have spent much of my professional career thinking about disability, mental capacity and the assumptions we make about people’s abilities. I have learned that we have to be really careful about using a characteristic such as age or disability as a proxy for capacity. People age very differently. Some people at 80 have lost abilities they once had; others remain intellectually vigorous, extraordinarily knowledgeable and capable of making a contribution which would be very difficult to replace; and, of course, incapacity can occur at any age. Are we asking the right question? Rather than simply asking how old a Member is, should we not simply ask whether they are still making a valuable contribution and are able and willing to continue doing so? I would suggest a slight modification: let it be the expectation that retirement at 80 is the norm but not necessarily an absolute rule. There is a separate, and sensitive, question of health and capacity. I am not suggesting routine medical examinations or cognitive tests at 80—like those you have to have for driving, for example, not that they are very effective—as that would risk confusing age with incapacity and disability with incapacity, which are two mistakes we have tried to eliminate elsewhere in society. But we should not avoid the issue altogether. This is the key point: if there is substantial reason to believe that a Member, at any age, no longer has the capacity to discharge the responsibilities of membership, we must have a fair, dignified and confidential way of addressing it, based, where necessary, on independent professional evidence and with proper safeguards. Finally, I agree with an earlier speaker that age does not confer superiority, but Members over the age of 80 have experience of the needs and life experience of the fastest-growing generations in our population. The House would be poorer if we entirely lost their experience.