Contribution
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, and her committee for this report, and I declare my calendrical interest as set out in the register. Some of this report is welcome, though I regret that the committee was unable to also examine the admissions system, which is clearly integral to any changes reducing the size of the House that might follow.
At paragraph 115, the committee says:
“Some members do not contribute … and this damages the reputation of the House”.
That is perfectly true and has been for years. The committee proposes a requirement of 20% of sitting days, averaged over two Sessions, with expulsion for those who fall short. I welcome a requirement in principle, but further scrutiny is required as to whether the figure the committee has arrived at strikes the right balance. It should remove those who have in practice stopped coming without removing Members who may be here a dozen or so times a Session but who do good work when they are here, contributing their particular expertise.
On age, I am afraid I disagree. The main work of this House is going through Bills line by line, and we do it well because so many Members here have run departments or businesses, sat as judges or served in the forces, so they know where a Bill might be deficient and need improvement. Right now, the other place is younger and less experienced than at any time I can remember, and a great many of its Members started only in 2024. A consequence of this is that more work has come our way in the past two years. It is a strange moment to part with 367 of our most experienced colleagues, which is what the committee says it expects between 2029 and 2034.
Our current oath on assuming service, as far as I am concerned, commits us to that service for our lives, and I take that personally, as a primary obligation. We are not salaried in this House and we receive no pension. Paragraph 19 acknowledges this, and that
“younger members who are mid-career, may have a family to support”.
Paragraph 102 notes that they naturally come to have real time for this House only once those pressures ease. The Members this report would send away on our expiry date are often the very ones who are here every day and would go on doing their duty to this House and to the country for years to come. The workload they bear will not disappear but will ultimately pass to colleagues who, as the committee has just explained, have the least time for it, and the House must be the poorer for that.
Anyway, the premise of a retirement age is that our capacity falls away at a certain age, when it clearly does not. Just over a week ago, at the Royal Albert Hall, Martha Argerich played Beethoven’s second piano concerto, 60 years almost to the day after her Proms debut in 1966. She played it perfectly, almost as well as Alfred Brendel. She fully expects to return next year to perform again. Her rendition received a 12-minute standing ovation. She is 85 years old. Sir Roger Penrose was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics at 89. He turned 95 last month and was further honoured and entertained at Oxford a couple of weeks ago. Margaret Atwood published 600 pages of memoirs at the age of 86, to the best reviews of her career. Johanna Quaas competed as a gymnast until she was 92 and was still giving demonstrations to younger people at the age of 100. Nobody told any of them that their age has settled the question of their usefulness. I was going to mention Sir Tom Jones, but sadly, like the Labour Party, the BBC appears to be somewhat ageist in its approach. Age is a crude measure of capacity for the job, and I believe the committee knew it. Ageism has no place in this 21st-century Britain, and especially in this House, so I ask finally that a well thought-through participation requirement might indeed achieve everything necessary, and meet the ambitions of the Labour Party, without this unacceptable and totally prejudiced provision.