Contribution
My Lords, I am down as the 50th of 65 speakers. The level of participation your Lordships manage to achieve when we are discussing our own future is amazing. I had better declare an interest: I have been here for nearly 30 years and I am over 80.
At one time, prior to coming to this House, I had some influence over Labour Party manifestos; regrettably, that is no longer the case. I was slightly bemused that the Labour Party, in writing its manifesto, seemed to consider that the most important thing wrong with the House of Lords was that there were far too many old codgers like me left in it. While that may be a criticism and a public impression that is not entirely erroneous, there are nevertheless much more fundamental things that the Government could have addressed but did not. Labour put this in its manifesto, and the responsibility of the House of Lords is to carry out that manifesto commitment according to the Salisbury convention, just as it would any other potential change that was clearly endorsed by the election of a Government who promised it in their manifesto.
My noble friend Lady Taylor has written a very useful report that spells out the problems and how we should go about fixing them. We should do so now through a House of Lords resolution that would fulfil that requirement on the House of Lords, and we can have the subsequent arguments later. There are a lot of things wrong with the House of Lords—how appointments are made by successive Governments, the number of Members, and the different groups in the House—that will be not resolved by retirement at 80 or shortly thereafter.
I had intended to retire some time in the next year—shortly after my 30 years are up. These propositions would give me a little bit more time, and I will consider the noble Baroness’s recommendations and the Government’s position. The argument on the membership of the House of Lords will go on, for two very good reasons. First, as my noble friend Lord Rooker has been very effectively underlying in recent weeks, the main role of this House is to revise and scrutinise. The elected House has failed to carry out its scrutiny functions effectively, and we need to remedy that. However, to do so, we need to have some authority and some recognition of that authority. That requires us to be a little more representative of the general population than we are now.
The other big political development over the years I have been here is that we have become a quasi-federal state—and, in view of the present Prime Minister’s dedication to greater devolution within England, we are going to become more so. In most jurisdictions that have an upper chamber, the second chamber is based directly or indirectly on the lower and regional—or in our case, national and regional—parts of the country. We must move, whether by election or some other process, to a more geographically—as well as age, gender and everything else—representative membership of this House of Lords. We need to postpone that argument tonight, but we will need to get into it fairly rapidly.
The Government will have to face up to the fact that this proposition, which will remove a coterie of old codgers like me from the House of Lords over the next few years, needs to be replaced by a much more coherent approach to both the appointment system to and the retirement system from this House. The retirement of people over 80 will not do anything about the numbers in or balance of the House of Lords; we will need another stage to do that. I hope this is the beginning of that debate.
When we come to make our decision tonight, let us focus on what we are required to do under the Salisbury convention regarding the proposition from the Government, and adopt this proposition from my noble friend that makes it real. Let us move to the situation that the Government have put to us. I hope we can do that without wider legislation—and therefore the involvement of the House of Commons or anybody else.