Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)

It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Blackwell, my old foe, and a pleasure to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, on her excellent report and her feat in securing unanimous agreement on it. Some of the speeches today have shown us what a feat that was. I thought I detected what Private Eye calls “a reverse ferret”, though I may be wrong about that. I am certainly a bit baffled by the disingenuous claims that it is not clear what problem the Government and the committee are trying to solve. We know it is to how to bring in new blood without having the place get absurdly large. Clearly, given the manifesto commitment, it is going to be a retirement age. I think the talk of expulsion is, with all due respect to the noble Lord, Lord True, a little overblown. I, myself, would have preferred a fixed term or a combination of the two—not for any personal reasons as I would be caught either way. I came here in 2004, shortly after my expulsion from the Foreign Office. As for age, I prefer just to say that I was expelled from my pram well before D-Day. Pace the noble Lord, Lord True, it happens. It is called ageing. I hope the report’s case for gradualism is bought by the Government and the other place, because the cliff-edge point seems to me a very real one, particularly for us Cross-Benchers. We are the oldest group here and 60% of us would be over a 2029 edge, lemming-like, all in one go. On participation, I go for a criterion of attendance rather than verbosity; they also serve who only think and vote. But the minimum requirement should not be set too low. We are sent here primarily to legislate, and we should be ready to commit the necessary time—as many, alas, now do not. HOLAC needs to be able to check that in advance, as well as propriety, and for all people coming here. Our active membership is only about half our nominal membership, as some have pointed out, but that seems to me to be bad news rather than good. It certainly is not very good for our image. And we are doing nothing to bring down overall numbers. I naively thought the departure of our hereditary friends would produce a big fall, but it has not. Leaving aside those on leave of absence, there were 827 of us this day last year; today, there are 797—a fall of 30, but it is rapidly being reduced as new Peers flock in. A fall of only 30. Yes, there are fewer Conservatives, but only 38 fewer—still the largest group. And there are many fewer Cross-Benchers, that endangered species; we are down by much more proportionately than are the Conservatives. But there are more Labour Peers, more Lib Dem Peers, more non-aligned Peers, and even more Bishops than there were a year ago. We all know about the post-election ratchet effect. I think that is “ratchet”, not “racket”, although I am not entirely sure. But it would be good to remind the three great parties, so busy rewarding their friends, that the report of the noble Lord, Lord Burns, in 2017 convinced us all that 600, not 800, would be about the right size and that until we got there, a “two out for one in” rule would be right. We voted for that. To her credit, the noble Baroness, Lady May, respected it as Prime Minister, but no other subsequent Prime Minister has done so and it is high time they did.