Contribution
My Lords, rather like the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, when I came to your Lordships’ House, I was well under the average age—in fact, 30 years under. Sadly, I am now over the average age, and under these proposals I will retire from your Lordships’ House in 2033. But I welcome it. Retirement is a fact of life for most jobs and professions, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said. I work on the certainty it gives me in planning my future life—there is life after the House of Lords, and I am rather looking forward to it.
For me, the proposals in the report are well judged and allow for a transition that is not overly generous. They reduce our size to a more manageable level; they allow an opportunity to refresh our membership, and they deal sensitively, in a way, with the capacity issue.
The noble Lord, Lord True, set the challenge very early on. I think the proposals do enhance the House’s ability to scrutinise legislation which—and here I very much agree with my noble friend Lord Rooker—becomes ever more important the more we can see the failure of the House of Commons to scrutinise legislation. I always welcome the contributions of the noble Lord, Lord True. His affection for this House is always readily evident, but I thought his language was unfortunate. He talked about expulsion, a monster cull, a purge of a major cohort—phrases that were rather overblown.
The noble Lord, Lord True, then referred to hereditary Peers. This is a point made by my noble friend Lord Grocott. If only the noble Lord, Lord True, had supported my noble friend in his efforts to remove the elections for future hereditary Peers when some died, we would not have had the cliff edge that we had with the loss of so many hereditary Peers at one time. The lesson for me is that incremental reform is the way forward in the absence of substantive proposals, I see this as a sensible incremental reform. I thought that the response of the noble Lord, Lord True, was as dispiriting as it was predictable.
Would legislation be desirable? We must be careful what we wish for. I think this is a matter we should handle ourselves; it is an example of the House taking the initiative. Will paragraph 85 hold? This House is well used to operating on conventions and understandings; I think it would hold and that Members would accept the principle of retirement.
When it comes to future membership and size, Conservative Members fear that the Prime Minister will flood the House with Labour Peers. Their argument would be rather more convincing if Mr Johnson, Liz Truss and Mr Sunak had followed Mrs May—now the noble Baroness, Lady May—in showing constraints in appointments.
On the plea from the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, that reductions in size should occur through elections, I would just say to him—if I could see him—that I was here in 1999 when the hereditary elections took place. It was not a pleasant sight. If we think about how these elections would operate among parties, the fact is that there would be grandstanding in the Chamber all through the period of elections, there would be slates and rival slates and the Whips would have an undue influence. That is inevitably how it would be conducted, so it would not be a wise thing to do at all.
I acknowledge that this is not substantive reform. I might anticipate what the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, will say in his wind-up. I say to him that the reason the Clegg Bill failed was largely because he never worked out what the respective powers of two elected Chambers should be, what their relationship should be, what that would mean in terms of disputes and whether we needed a written constitution or not. We will never deal with this and bring substantive reform forward unless we tackle those hard issues.
Finally, I hope my noble friend will listen to the Cross-Benchers on future balance of size. Overall, this is such a sensible report. I hope my noble friend will agree to speed on with these proposals, and I hope your Lordships as a whole will support them.