Contribution
My Lords, I was new then, but I am reminded of the March 2024 debate in the Moses Room on veterinary medicine regulations, which was going nowhere until a Cross-Bench Baroness told us that she was a retired president of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons: she proposed a course of action, and of course we did that. The noble Baroness needed to come only once in that Session and she would have earned her corn, because participation in and of itself is not the point of this House, nor, as the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, said, is attendance. We must also recognise that not all participation is equal.
I do not come from that far away—I come from Norfolk—but it is just impractical to commute daily. A debate can keep you late, and then you have to get to Liverpool Street on the Circle Line—it is crazy. So my wife and I bought somewhere near and handy to help me attend regularly. But for plenty of others, this proposal is at risk of reinforcing the already overweight proportion of Peers from London and the south-east over those who live in the sticks and other far-flung places. There is a world of difference between nipping in on the District Line from Fulham and making the slog from York, Norfolk, Penzance, Edinburgh or, in particular, Northern Ireland. Minimum attendance quotas work against the richness that this House gains from the devolved nations within our United Kingdom. I thought we had a Prime Minister who wanted to have all the nations and regions represented; the committee’s proposals would deliver something worse and make it harder—as the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, said—for those who currently work to bring their experience to the legislature.
As I approached the consultations in the report, I started with the data. The die had already been cast for the hereditaries, so I excluded them from a spreadsheet that I cobbled together myself from different sources, including the Library. It is a source of deep regret that the committee did not make a full dataset available to all noble Lords, so that we could do our own analysis, as it seems the Cross-Benchers did for themselves. This data should have been provided but was not.
What did I find when attempting to analyse that data? Take the arbitrary cut-off of 80 years. I will not repeat the data, but one-third of noble Lords would go—those aged 77 or over today would make the cut. But the decimation of life Peers is not uniform by party. My analysis shows that 27% of Conservative Members would suffer enforced retirement, but the figures are 37% for Labour, 42% for the Liberal Democrats and 45%—nearly half—for the Cross Benches. We have heard about the need for special treatment for the Cross Benches, but I have heard no one mention the Northern Irish, who would be absolutely, completely and totally decimated by this proposal. This would be a material change in composition, tone and expertise. It is a blunt instrument that would affect not just the individuals but the balance of the House, and the committee should have spelled that out more clearly.
Let us look at gender. Of the 773 Members in place when the committee sat, excluding the hereditaries, one-third were women. When we look at the party breakdowns, one-third of Conservative Baronesses would be expelled, but 43% of Liberal Democrat Baronesses and 45% of Labour Baronesses would be forcibly evicted. This would further aggravate the existing gender imbalance. Uncharacteristically, I find myself agreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, on this point.
Let us move on to experience. Unsurprisingly, those with the longest service tend to be the oldest, and for those who have served more than 15 years, the average age is 77, the average age of the House. This indicates to me that, if past experience is taken as a guide, on average, by arithmetic, nearly everyone who has completed 15 years will be out. Fifteen-year term limits have been discounted, but the arithmetic shows that retirement at 80 produces 15-year term limits by other means.
Let us look at the second-order consequences. With the shortest proposals for the R&R on a full decant being much more than 15 years, we risk losing our entire oral history if mandatory retirement is forced at 80. Force retirement at 80 and the arithmetic tells us there would be nobody to come back who could remember the old days. Let that sink in.
We are volunteers who bring our outside experience on the days we contribute. When we do not attend, we do not get paid. There is no prejudice there. But if we have onerous minimum attendance requirements or other participation needs, we start to become employees, subject to HR and all the stuff that comes with it, including a ban on zero hours. We are, of course, the original zero hours people. Would Fridays be included? The average age of noble Baronesses is 68, but we still have some of child-bearing age. Where is the thought given to maternity rights and the need to look after a very young family, another point on which I am in total accord with the noble Baroness, Lady Bull?
These are big changes with unknown consequences. We are shooting in the dark without the data. There is a lot of opinion but precious little analysis of the second-order consequences, and we should have expected that in this report.