Retirement and Participation Committee Report
Wednesday, 16 September 2026
Contributions
Motion to Take Note
Moved by
Baroness Taylor of Bolton
That this House takes note of the Report from the Retirement and Participation Committee (HL Paper 32).
Baroness Taylor of Bolton (Lab)
My Lords, it is probably quite appropriate that we are going to discuss this immediately after we have heard several comments about us being a self-governing House, because it enters into this as well. I start by thanking those members of the committee who gave up so much time to put in a great deal of effort to try to get a consensus on this matter. I also thank the staff we had, who worked very diligently—Judith Brooke, Rachel Borrell and Ellie Hassan—because there was an awful lot of work involved in the production of the report. I must also thank the noble Baroness the Leader of the House for organising an early debate, because it is important that we get the feeling of the House as a whole. I remind the House of the starting point for the discussion that we are about to have. In the last Labour Party manifesto, the government manifesto, there was a commitment to introduce retirement and participation requirements for the House of Lords, and for all Peers to retire at the age of 80 at the time of the next election, whenever that election came along. That was a significant commitment that was paired with other aspects of reform to this House, some of which have taken place. When we were established, many people immediately got in touch with the committee about some of the wider issues of House of Lords reform, but I emphasise that the committee’s remit was tight and specific, and rightly so. We were charged with considering and making recommendations on a retirement age and a participation requirement, and the impact that any such requirements might have on the size, membership and functioning of the House. We were also given the opportunity to consider transition arrangements and what arrangements might be made for implementation. Once established, we decided very early on that we wanted to involve as many people as possible in the decision-making process, so we embarked on a very important consultation exercise. We issued an invitation for written evidence to be submitted, we held drop-in sessions and many individual Members collared others of us at different times in different corridors. We welcomed all that and I reckon that probably 25% to 30% of active Members took part in that consultation process. Of course, we had a significant range of views and I shall come on to some of those later. All the submissions were carefully considered by every single member of that committee. It was quite a heavy workload for everyone. In the end, we managed to produce a unanimous report. I emphasise that to the House, because it is important to realise that people with very different starting points came to a consensus in the end. What do our recommendations involve? First, I will talk about retirement, because that was the one issue that concerned many Members when they were thinking about our committee. I will say a few words by way of context. The average age of Members of this House is 71. The average age on appointment is 59. The average age of retirement in the last few years has been 82. It is worth keeping that is mind when we think about the conclusions we came to. We modelled many options, with the help of our assistants. We looked at a whole range of options that had been presented to us by many colleagues in their submissions. The first question we had to ask was: what should we look at as an end date? It was very difficult, because we did not know when the next election would be, so we took the last possible sitting date of this House in this Parliament. This is why our modelling was based on July 2029. Some noble Lords may be surprised at that, but there is a logic there. There was no logic in taking any other date. We must also remember that the figure we produced was for the maximum number of Peers affected at any one time. We are not saying that everybody has to stay until a certain time; we are saying that a Member can retire at whatever point they feel is appropriate, but there is a maximum cut-off. If the Government’s proposal that all Peers older than 80 were to retire at the next election came into effect, and if that election were on the last possible date of July 2029, a maximum of 257 Peers would be required to leave by that date or at that time. As a committee, we agreed that such a number and such a cut-off point would be too severe and would have implications for the working of the House. Unintended consequences must always be considered. We took the age of 80, which is what the Government have been proposing. We had suggestions from other Members. Some were against a retirement age altogether. Some suggested 75; others suggested 85. We looked at all the evidence and decided that it was probably appropriate to look at the age the Government were proposing, which is why our modelling was based on the age of 80. We considered all those options, and we recommended that, by July 2029, all Peers over the age of 85 who had not already retired should do so, and that subsequently the maximum retirement age should reduce annually by one year. As I say, that is the maximum age of retirement. In Appendix 4 of this report, we set out exactly how the transition would work in detail, and there is an app available so that anybody who wants to know how they themselves are affected can be told. For the sake of transparency, in our report we included how this would affect each of the members of the committee, just to prove that there was no bias and that we were not looking after ourselves. For anybody who is interested, my date will be 2 July 2031. We thought this was fair and workable, and that it gave individuals a proper timescale for thinking about their futures. That is where we have landed so far as retirement is concerned. We did consider the alternative of term limits. We received submissions that were in favour of fixed terms, and I have a degree of sympathy with that. People talked about terms ranging from 15 to 20 years; I think we probably all accepted positions on 10-year terms, but there was a range of opinion. Fixed terms would provide for the refreshment of the House; people would know where they were and there would be predictability. In the end, after discussing this in some detail, we decided that the disadvantages and the problems would be too much. There would be a difficulty in transition and significant cliff edges. There was the question of reappointment and the fact that, if people had that possibility, it might alter how they behaved in the House, depending on who was making the reappointment. We also looked at the question of younger Members, who might find it difficult to re-enter their profession after 10 or 15 years here. We thought there were too many disadvantages, so we rejected that idea. I want to be clear that we do not equate participation with attendance; they are often different things for different people. We had various suggestions as to how we might measure participation. Some of these were very complex and complicated. Many mentioned the problem that it could lead to performative activity: that is, people speaking just for the sake of getting a tick in the box. In no way would that enhance the quality of our debates, so we are not suggesting a participation threshold. However, the committee believe that there is a problem with the attendance provision. The 2014 Act states that if you attend once during the Session then you continue to be a Member of this House. That is not good for the reputation of the House and people who are Members should take this House seriously. Although we acknowledge and appreciated the expertise from appropriate outside interests, we thought that membership of this House should be taken seriously. The committee therefore recommended an attendance threshold of 20%, but over two Sessions, to allow people to adjust according to their own circumstances and with the provision of the kind of short-term leave of absence that my noble friend talked about earlier. I think that would be helpful for everyone. I will mention a couple of other things that we touched on, although we did not go into great detail. We made a recommendation on leave of absence, because such Members are not bound by the provision relating to the register of interests in the Code of Conduct, despite the fact that they have clear access to Members of the House and to Ministers. It was not directly for us to deal with, but we wanted to highlight it because a very impressive case had been made to us that there was a problem here. We therefore wanted to highlight it so that the appropriate committee can look at this again. I turn briefly to another point in our report. We suggested that Peers who retire and leave the House should become “Peers emeritus”, and that there should be an association for former Peers to keep in touch, be aware of what is going on, and have access to the Libraries under the new arrangements. I am struck that several people have already come to me, asked how we can arrange this and said that they are willing to take it on. I am very happy for them to take it on, but there is merit in following that through. I am heartened by the response that I have had when talking to people—both groups and individuals. Some people have said that they now at least know how this will affect them; others have said this has made them think about what they should be doing, and how they should listen to their families and talk about their future. That has been very useful. We mention implementation in our report. We were told that a retirement age could be implemented by legislation very easily and quickly through a one-line amendment to the 2014 Act. As a committee, we decided that it would be preferable for the House to take control of this and introduce such a provision through a resolution of the House. That is an appropriate recommendation. I believe that change is coming and that it is better done by us than to us. I recommend the report.
Lord True (Con)
My Lords, it might be helpful for me to intervene at this point and set out the position of the Official Opposition, although I assure the House that I will listen carefully and weigh every contribution, including those from the many who may disagree with me. First and foremost, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, for introducing this important debate in such a typically thoughtful fashion. Even if I do not agree, I thank her and all the members of her committee for their careful work and balanced report. Incidentally, I agree with the recommendation on leave of absence and declaration of interests; I hope that will be taken forward. I declare an interest: like the noble Baroness, I will be expelled under these proposals—in my case, on 8 July 2033. Let us get the language right: “mandatory retirement” for sitting Members means expulsion. I confess that I find that prospect painful. No doubt like others here, I ask: what have I done wrong? Appendix 5 of the report tells me that up to 367 Peers could be expelled from the House over the next seven and three quarter years. In addition to expulsion on grounds of age, 94 Peers currently sitting would have failed the proposed 20% threshold. Taken together, that is a monster cull, on top of dozens of Peers recently expelled by this Government. Of course, I concede that, as the report says, the figures may well be significantly lower. Some of us lined up for the sack may die and some may retire voluntarily. After all, as the noble Baroness said, the average retirement age is 82. Eighty-two? Eighty? What problem are we trying to solve in inflicting such a purge on the House? Unlike the Select Committee, I am not constrained by terms of reference, so I will address some wider questions and ask: why are we here? Some have said it is to reduce our numbers. I have never really bought that argument, as noble Lords know. The largest Division this year had 475 votes. Such numbers are not an adequate reason for a mass cull of nearly half the House, potentially. What guarantee is there that prime ministerial patronage would not be used to fill the empty spaces with more compliant Members than those forced out? If not numbers, is the reason party balance? There was an unacceptable and unequal balance between the two main parties in 2024, but that balance is now nearing equality. A difference of 14, and narrowing, between Labour and Conservatives does not justify a mass cull, and actually the group that would suffer most from the report’s proposals are the Cross-Benchers, who could lose half their number. We should be careful what we wish for. No, as the noble Baroness said, the reason we are here is because the Labour manifesto bushwhacked the House with a draconian and, frankly, discriminatory and ageist proposal, and now we are threatened that, if hundreds of us do not go gently into that dark night, the Government will slam down a legislative guillotine. Really? Wherefore this mania to expel people from our House? Who is driving this? Sir Keir Starmer, who wrote the manifesto, is gone. Mr Burnham has said that his inspirations were the noble Lords, Lord Kinnock and Lord Blunkett, and the noble Baroness, Lady Beckett, all remarkable figures, much valued here. But, under these plans, the noble Baroness, Lady Beckett, and the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, are booted out on 8 July 2029, and the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, on 6 June 2031. The sixth of June: it would be nice if that day could be remembered for another D than the departure of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. Is this really the new Prime Minister’s wish, or is someone else driving all this? Can our Leader explain? Two criteria are proposed for the cull: age and participation. First, Labour wants to expel hundreds of Peers simply because they are older. There are many over 80 who make extraordinary contributions to public life, here in this House and elsewhere. Can we imagine, on 21 April 2006, someone rapping on the late Queen’s door saying, “Happy birthday, Ma’am. You’ve had a good run, but today you’ve got to clear your desk—but you can come back for a cup of tea”? How much wisdom and leadership would this nation have lost? Is not the same true among us here? Is it wise to attack all those who can and do perform their duty here and not address the issue of capacity, of those perhaps no longer so able to act? Age or incapacity: which more risks our disrepute? Might cognitive tests be a better focus than the blunderbuss of an age bar? Can the Lord Privy Seal say whether this alternative is being considered? This age bar will purge from our Parliament the voice and outlook of a major cohort of the British people: 7% of our adult population are over 80. After these measures, the numbers from that cohort in our Parliament will be barely 0.1%. Who then from the ranks of the elderly will speak in our Parliament for them? We should be cautious about silencing the leavening voice of experience. Every noble Lord will judge this matter freely, but let me say a word as Leader of the Opposition. My party will not support the mass expulsion of sitting Members who are well capable of doing their job and are doing it well. We can discuss rules that may apply to new Members, but we think it wrong to quash the rights of all sitting Members over 80. If the Government seek to legislate, attempts may be made to amend a Bill to ensure that any age bar should apply for the future, not expel those valued colleagues now sitting here. This House has voted before for grandfather rights: the principle that workplace rights should not be taken from those who have them. It might well vote again for that very fair principle without overturning the idea of a future age limit. My party has a constitutional problem with the central mechanism of the report and the precedent it would set. For the House of Lords to pass a resolution to tell people to go would mean that this House alone would seek to decide who its Members should be. It is not for the Government or a single House to decide who sits in Parliament; it is for Parliament. My noble friend the shadow Attorney-General will address the legal points. The report is correct at paragraph 84 that a resolution of this House cannot override the legal right under the 1958 Act to a writ. Some take comfort in paragraph 85, which concedes that Peers may simply say, “No”—I have heard much fruitier language—when their birthday comes, and will go on attending by virtue of the writ. This is hardly satisfactory. Most would no doubt comply, but some would not. Invidious divisions would arise. There are reasons—perhaps 72 million reasons—why this is also a bad political precedent. Let us suppose Reform forms a Government. Prime ministerial patronage would allow a Reform leader, even in a minority Government, to do what he says he would: pack this House. His new Peers might also pass a resolution. They might say their party was elected to sweep away the establishment, so any Peer who had been in the House for more than five years should leave forthwith. No doubt many of us might refuse, as paragraph 85 says we could. The mother and father of constitutional crises would erupt between the two Houses. I submit that this House should be cautious about laying that precedent on the table. Away from such a looming example, what is to stop a future House passing a similar resolution excluding this or that category of Peer? These are murky waters, but to us the constitutional principle is clear. This House alone should not assert the right to choose who here should stay and who should go without the assent of Parliament as a whole. On participation, I recognise that many wish to see action. The Select Committee rightly rejected the measure of performative speaking. It was sensitive to the truth inherent to a House of experts: some will come only when they have something worthwhile to say, and we will be glad to hear them when we do. As the report points out, there will be cases in which unforeseen illness or other commitments may make it hard for Peers to attend. We should not build intrusive mechanisms that probe sensitive personal circumstances. There are other questions. On attendance, in a typical 150-day session it would cost £11,130 per Peer just for the daily allowance, simply to establish the threshold right to remain. Is the 20% threshold too high? Does the exclusion criterion favour those who live near London? Who precisely are the Peers who will be affected, and how many? The principle is wearable and, unlike retirement, legally enforceable, but it bears further reflection on the details, building on the committee’s excellent report. To conclude, if we are to go forward, I submit that the outcome must meet four clear tests. Will it improve the ability of this House to hold Governments to account? Will it enrich the experience in this House? Will it enhance the independence of the House from recent or present Governments? Will it enable the House and its committees to do their revising work better? In my judgment, these proposals, however ingenious and constructive, would fail those tests. They gild the manifesto thorn bush but do not remove the thorns. Instead of plunging forward with haste, we should take time to think with honesty and humility across party lines about the far-reaching implications of an age bar for this House, its Members and the voice of the elderly in the councils of our nation.
Baroness Parminter (LD)
My Lords, I strongly support the report, and I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, not only on her introduction to it but on her excellent chairing of our Select Committee, which it was a great privilege to sit on. Like her, I thank the committee staff, whose professionalism and good humour aided us on that path. As the noble Lord, Lord True, said, the backdrop to this report and the debate today is the Government’s manifesto commitment to introduce a requirement for participation and a retirement age. We are a self-governing House, and the report is a workable and fair way for us to take charge of our own future. On proposing a retirement age of 80, we would allow Members to make a significant and meaningful contribution to the work of this House over a good number of years, but the report recognises that all organisations benefit from the refreshment and new perspectives of new members. That is important. Equally, the report sets out a tapered exit for a significant number of existing Members, which will avoid a cliff edge and the problems that would cause for the workings of the House and the good work that we know we do. On participation, I do not think that there is anyone in this House this afternoon who thinks that the conferral of a peerage is merely a gilded bauble; it is a commitment to contribute. That is what our requirements in this report on participation seek. However, that is balanced against the very real fact that the reason why we want to listen to many noble Lords’ contributions is the expertise that they bring from their outside professions. The fact that they have those outside professions, perspectives and experiences means they cannot always be with us. Therefore, we have to be very careful, particularly with the Cross Benches, to set a participation requirement that would not exclude the people whom we most want to hear from on particular debates and issues where they have expertise that the House needs to hear. To my mind, that is extremely important and valuable. We want people who can participate, but we also want people who recognise that there is a time when their voices are the most important ones that we need to be hearing. This is an important report from the House. It was drawn up with cross-party membership and we came, as the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, said, to a unanimous position of agreement. That is important. It is workable and fair, and I support it. My fear is that if this House is not seen to support these proposals, for whatever reason, that will be seen by those outside this House as self-interest. That will do nothing for the reputation of this House, which I know we all think of and worry about very deeply. If we do not accept these proposals, those who know less and care less about this House will shape our future.
Baroness Hayman (CB)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter. I will not repeat what she said, except to say how well chaired we were as a committee and to give my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton. I thank Judith Brooke and her team, who supported us extremely well. I also thank my fellow committee members. We had four members from the Official Opposition, but they did not all think the same way. We all came with different starting points and foci as to how to deal with this issue. Myself and many others would have liked broader terms of reference. We would have been interested in looking at—I will come to this later—how people get into this House as well as how people leave it, but we did our best. We have provided a nuance to the proposals in the manifesto that is respectful of Members of this House and that gives people the opportunity, as the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, said, from whenever we decide this issue until July 2029 to make their own plans for the future. The noble Lord, Lord True, talked in dramatic language of expulsion. Most of us have worked in organisations at some point in our life where our contract came to an end and there was provision for retirement. It did not strike us that there was some terrible sword of Damocles over our ability to go on ad infinitum, give our wisdom and take up precious space on the Benches in this House. The language is slightly hysterical, because the concept of retirement, though it should be later in this House for good reason and should not be destructive of the knowledge base and corporate memory that we have, is really not quite as revolutionary as to say that we have been bushwhacked by the Labour manifesto. I very much support the report that we brought together. I also support the approach of trying to do this ourselves, with the nuances and transition period that we have put in. The noble Lord, Lord True, is very optimistic about a one-clause Bill on this going through this House and the House of Commons like a dose of salts and making everything perfect. From my long 30-year experience in this House, and my short five years’ experience in the House of Commons, I very much doubt that it would be as simple as that. There are two things on which I agree with the noble Lord, Lord True. One is that we have to be careful about the numbers of the Cross-Benchers. We have to preserve the view that 20% of the House should be Cross-Benchers and look at how that interacts with the age limit. The other thing that we have to look at, and on which I agree with him, is that the unconstrained prerogative of the Prime Minister to make as many appointments to this House as he wants is a dangerous weapon and the wrong place for us to be. It leads to the ratcheting up of numbers after every election. We could do that better and we should try to find a way to do that better.
The Lord Bishop of Hereford
My Lords, I am grateful to the committee for its report and for the serious and thoughtful way in which it has approached the difficult question of the future size and composition of this House. My right reverend friend the Bishop of Manchester, the Convenor of the Lords Spiritual, made a written submission to the committee on behalf of these Benches, but is unfortunately unable to be in his place today. The Lords spiritual have long supported reforms that strengthen the effectiveness and credibility of this House while safeguarding its distinctiveness from the other place in its expertise and culture. We therefore welcome the opportunity to consider proposals that seek to create a smaller and more sustainable House. However, I know that he would wish me to highlight several concerns, particularly in relation to the recommendation of a mandatory retirement age. The report itself acknowledges one of the principal concerns raised in evidence: the potential loss of the experience, expertise and institutional memory of Members who continue to make valuable contributions well beyond the age of 80. One notable example of the expertise on which the House relies is that of senior judges. I am not persuaded by the committee’s conclusion that, because committees in the other place function without senior judges, committees in this House can and therefore should do likewise. We should be cautious about assuming that arrangements appropriate to one House must automatically apply to the other. One of the principal strengths of the House of Lords is that it complements rather than mirrors the House of Commons, drawing on forms of experience and expertise that enrich parliamentary scrutiny, such as independent chairmanship and experience in interpreting the law. The contribution of senior judges to committee work exemplifies that distinction. Their role is not simply a matter of who occupies the chair; it reflects the independence, judgment and habits of scrutiny acquired through judicial office. The Ecclesiastical Committee, for example, benefits from the specialist expertise of judicial leadership, and that contribution helps to shape both the character and the quality of the committee’s deliberations. Indeed, the Ecclesiastical Committee has benefited from senior judicial chairs since its formation in 1919. Our current chair, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, offers invaluable expertise on the interpretation of Church law and the measures passed by General Synod, along with her understanding of Church processes and structures. I know that these Benches and the committee are most grateful for her diligent contributions. Introducing a mandatory retirement age within the House may significantly reduce the number of Members able to undertake such responsibilities. Their loss would therefore represent more than a procedural change; it would alter the nature of the scrutiny that such committees can provide. More broadly, if a significant cohort of Members were required to retire within a relatively short period, we would risk creating clusters of departures and arrivals that could alter the balance of expertise. Institutional memory could be lost more rapidly than it could be replenished. It is worth acknowledging that Bishops retire earlier than any other Members of the House, perhaps explaining something of our youthful vigour. Members may have noticed that we have not benefited from a steady turnover of Bishops in recent months; rather, my right reverend friends have retired in batches. The loss of their experience and wisdom is acutely felt on these Benches and, I know, across the House. For these reasons, any reform must be introduced gradually and with great care. A phased approach is essential if continuity is to be maintained and the House’s scrutiny functions safeguarded. Equally, I wonder whether greater attention might first be given to encouraging the retirement of Members who rarely participate or attend, before measures are introduced that remove highly active and valuable contributors solely on the grounds of age. This report also welcomes the consideration of how new Members of this House are appointed. Do they directly replace the expertise of their retired counterparts? We must be careful, in the interpretation of this report, not to ring-fence seats on this basis; the House must remain agile to respond to developing policy areas. While I welcome the support and the debate that the report has initiated, I am not yet convinced that we have fully considered the implications for the functioning of the House, the operation of its committees or the preservation of the expertise on which Parliament depends.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend Lady Taylor on her skill, good humour and patience, not least with me, and I thank our fellow committee members. I actually found myself agreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, who will speak after me today; I was quite astonished on those occasions and have reflected on them since. Either he was wrong or I was right—one of the two. When I joined the committee, I accepted the terms of reference and therefore the remit, and I will speak in support of that today. The manifesto had two commitments in relation to the House of Lords. One was that there would be a rebalancing regionally of Members of the Lords across the regions and nations. Well, that went for a burton very quickly. The second was this ridiculous sentence, which was clearly discriminatory; I will come to that in a minute. As my noble friend said in opening the debate, the impact was to create a cliff edge of 257 Members going all at once. It was actually a greater number when we started our deliberations. The person who wrote the manifesto pledge clearly did not understand that we do not have fixed-term Parliaments —briefly we did, but no longer. Perhaps the person, reflecting on their social democratic commitments, might have understood that discrimination applies not just to gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity or disability but also to age. I believe that the manifesto commitment was a proxy for incapacity. I say to the noble Lord, Lord True: if we do not wish to adopt the proposals in this report, we need to take that issue very seriously and find ways of dealing with it. Things have changed over the years. Aficionados of PG Wodehouse will remember Lord Emsworth, the owner and overseer of Blandings Castle. This benign, endearing, dithering old fool was only 60. Now, as some of us come towards the age of 80, as the noble Lord, Lord True, has described, we like to think that we have our marbles. To paraphrase St Augustine, “I will retire, Lord, but not just yet”. The advantage of this report is that it provides some certainty. It provides a respect for those who have given their lives and commitment to the House. It allows the House to function appropriately and properly. It also avoids us clashing with the House of Commons. Those who remember Michael Foot and Enoch Powell scuppering previous massive proposals in relation to this House, or even the demise of the Clegg Bill just 15 years ago, will understand why we should try to avoid that like the plague. I do not pretend that I am happy with where we are or that we have had to make these proposals. We should, however, retain some influence over our own future and our reputation, a bulwark against ill thought-through constitutional changes and against those who have no clue what we do or the implications for our constitution—or, by the way, for the operation of the House of Commons. Massive reform of this place requires a complete change in the way in which the House of Commons operates. Reform and modernisation —yes; dislocating our constitution—no. This afternoon we should send a message to ourselves. Let us get our own act together. Let us make this House work better. Let us put aside the nonsense of discrimination, but let us understand that the House of Commons can deal a blow against us in time to come. It would inevitably mean the complete disruption of its own timetable and other priorities, but we have seen over recent years how even the stupidest suggestion can be adopted and pushed through by people who do not know better.
Lord Strathclyde (Con)
My Lords, I hugely enjoyed sitting on the committee with the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. In fact, as he pointed out, many of his views were a revelation to me; they are ones with which I wholeheartedly agree. I am going to speak up in favour of older Members of this House remaining here. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, and congratulate her on chairing the committee in the way she did, and I thank our excellent clerks. Some of your Lordships may be wondering how I can square what I have just said about older Members of the House with support for this committee report. We had many discussions and we consulted widely in the House. We came up with the scheme outlined in the report. It has its flaws but it fulfils what was set out in our terms of reference. However—this is the point—at its heart lies a lacuna that we were unable to bridge; namely, what is the justification for this desire to expel so many Members of the House? You can look at the Labour Party’s manifesto—much has been made of that—but it provides no explanation either. I therefore hope that when the Leader of the House winds up, she might spend just a couple of sentences answering the question: what problem was the Labour Party trying to solve in its manifesto? Was it the overall size of the House, perhaps? There are many different ways of dealing with the problem of the size of the House. Is it that older Members have lost cognitive ability to be able to continue in the House? There must be other ways of dealing with that. I therefore ask again: what is the Government’s motivation and objective? It would be very helpful to allow us to know; otherwise, there is this suspicion, which some people have mentioned, that the Government want to remove older Members of the House and replace them with new, younger supporters. That does not help us at all on numbers. As the noble Baroness reminded us, paragraph 51 tells us that the average age of joining the House is 59, and the average age of retiring from the House is 82. I wonder to what extent there is a real problem if those who wish to leave already do so at the age of roughly 82. Ever since I have been here I have always been below the average age, and it may surprise some noble Lords to know that I still am. But I have always held the elder Members of the House in great admiration. I think of Lord Callaghan, the former Prime Minister, who died in his 90s. In the 1980s, he moved an amendment to a Conservative Bill, which preserved the right of Great Ormond Street Hospital to claim its royalties from JM Barrie’s “Peter Pan”. He had the authority, the political clout and the will to get it done. Under these proposals he would be turfed out, and we would miss him. I look over at the other side and I see the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, and the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, who are so important. Sadly, I do not see the noble Lord, Lord Reid, but he is an old friend of mine and I am a great admirer of his. All of them would be turfed out. Of course, none of them needs to stay; they can retire voluntarily, which I think is very much the way forward. We lose so much knowledge, experience and wisdom by expelling these Peers. In addition, constitutionally, I am not sure it really stacks up. If we have to remove Peers from this House, surely we must reform the way for new entrants to come into this House; otherwise, it is just a free-for-all for the Government, whoever that Government are. The committee’s report has produced some very useful statistics and commentary on the work of the House. This is extremely useful and revealing, and some good suggestions lie within it. However, having done the work, I suggest respectfully to the noble Baroness and to the Government that they should perhaps think again about what is proposed. We have a new Prime Minister with his own agenda, and we have plenty of work to be getting on with over the next few years. My advice to the Government is to park this in the slow lane. There is nothing to be gained from pressing on with it.
Lord Patel (CB)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, for introducing her sensible report that introduces retiral. Speaking personally, I will do what is recommended in the report when my time comes to fulfil the retirement proposals. However, today I do not want to speak about the report itself but about the consequences that it will have, particularly on the Cross Benches. As Professor Meg Russell said in the brief that she sent to us all, it will have uneven effects on different groups, and particularly on the Cross Benches. With the help of Sam Anderson in the Convenor’s office, I have managed to get some figures to illustrate this. I am afraid that after the erudite speeches that your Lordships have just heard, mine will be a boring lot of figures—but, I hope, making an important point. I have used the figures in the report but I realise that they change all the time with new appointments, retirals and, occasionally, deaths. HOLAC appointments have been declining. Currently, among the Cross-Benchers, there are 53 HOLAC appointments, compared with 101 that are mainly prime ministerial appointments. I will come back to that later. Paragraph 33 of the report states that at the end of the 2024-26 Session, there were 776 Members of the House in total, of whom 154 were Cross-Benchers—close to 20%, which the House has agreed ought to be the proportion of representation of the Cross-Benchers. If you look at the retirals as planned, in July 2029, of those over 85 and those who will become 85 that year, there will be 38 Cross-Benchers leaving the House out of a total of 135. That means that 30% of those who leave will be Cross-Benchers. That will reduce the number of Cross-Benchers to 116. In 2030, when the 84 year-olds should leave, there will be 43 in total leaving, of whom 13 will be Cross-Benchers. Again, that is 30% of the total who will be leaving and will reduce the number of Cross-Benchers to 103. In 2031, when those aged 83 will be leaving, the total leaving will be 56. Of those 56, 17 will be Cross-Benchers. Again, that will be 30% of those leaving. That will, after three years, reduce the number of Cross-Benchers remaining to 86—down from 154. The total number in the House will then be 542. So the Cross-Benchers will be reduced to 16% of the total House. That is already a 4% reduction in Cross-Benchers. To look briefly at participation, 42 current Cross-Benchers will come into the category of attendance of less than 20%, of whom 21 will already have satisfied the retiral age, but that still leaves 21 who will not fulfil the requirements of participation. Therefore, the total number of Cross-Benchers leaving in three years—and I have not looked beyond that—is 89 of 154. After three years, if no more appointments are made, the Cross-Benchers will therefore be 65 in number, which would be 12% of the total of 542 in the House. If you look at the appointments, 53 current Cross-Benchers were appointed by HOLAC. As I mentioned, prime ministerial appointments and some others, who are hereditaries, total 101. Since 2014, the prime ministerial appointments have been twice the number of HOLAC appointments. The message, therefore, is clear. Unless this is taken into account, within three years, not six or seven years, the cohort of Cross-Benchers will be reduced to less than half the number that we have now, considerably less, and they will not be HOLAC appointments. Two things need to be addressed: numbers of Cross-Benchers need to be appointed, starting now, if people are going to start leaving in 2029, which will be significant numbers; and the number appointed by HOLAC needs to change compared with the prime ministerial appointments. That is my point: the message is about the figures that need to be addressed.
Viscount Chandos (Lab)
It is a privilege to have served on the committee that produced the report that we are debating today. I thank my noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton for her exemplary introduction and even more for her remarkable skill in drawing out a unanimous conclusion from the committee and the evidence that we heard, which was mainly from Members of this House. I am sure that this skill is innate, but I was regularly reminded of how this may have been honed by her training in the House of Commons Whips’ Office, as was so brilliantly portrayed in James Graham’s great play “This House”. Of those noble Lords who are speaking today, I have been a Member of your Lordships’ House for the longest —longer even than the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde—having served nearly 45 years with a six-month sabbatical between the 1999 Act and my appointment as a life Peer. I say this not to claim great wisdom or expertise, more the opposite, but to make two points. First, I have witnessed the evolution of the House during that time. Irregular participation, bringing in some cases exceptional expertise, was once seen as the norm. Recently, there has been a more professional, political, fuller-time culture. On balance, that has been a positive development. I have also during my time had periods of relative inactivity myself, whether because of intense outside commitments or because of, for instance, my slow transition from the Social Democratic Party to the Labour Benches. I understand the concerns that minimum participation should not be set too high. I believe that the committee’s recommendation of 20% of sitting days averaged over two Sessions strikes a well-judged balance. My noble friend the Leader of the House gave a very clear remit to the committee to identify, if possible, ways whereby its recommendations could be implemented without new primary legislation. The committee had particular regard for this, particularly in proposing sensitive and generous transitional arrangements for the retirement age proposed in the manifesto, which I very much hope will be seen by all Members of the House as fair and supportable. I deeply regret that the noble Lord, Lord True, in his opening remarks seemed to discourage that, even while describing the report as excellent. The committee’s remit did not explicitly refer to the objective of reducing the size of the House—or, to be pedantic, the number of its Members—but the Government’s manifesto commitment to a retirement age of 80 was clearly in the context of reducing numbers following the undermining of the excellent recommendations of the Burns committee by, first, the Johnson Government, of which the noble Lord, Lord True, was a member. That context is important, as it is central to the point that the proposal makes no judgment about the capacity of people over the age of 80 generally—or specifically Members of this House of that age. I am afraid that on this I disagree with my noble friend Lord Blunkett, whom I otherwise revere. My noble friend Lady Taylor described the debate in the committee about fixed terms as an alternative or complement to a retirement age. I would have been delighted if we could have achieved the necessary consensus to make terms the sole or significant test of continuing membership. I very much hope that today’s debate, despite the malign tone-setting of the noble Lord, Lord True, gives my noble friend the Leader of the House the confidence to follow the self-regulatory path that she asked the committee to consider. If, however, the support is not there for this, I would fully support primary legislation to implement a retirement age or perhaps term limits, to achieve the regular, consistent rotation and refreshing of the House’s composition.
Lord Wolfson of Tredegar (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Viscount, and it gives me an opportunity to thank him and the other members of the committee for the work which they put in under the obviously skilful chairmanship—if I can use that word—of the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton. I hope it was not particularly malign—if I can pick up that word—of the shadow Leader of the House to refer to me, because I was going to follow with a couple of legal points, and one legal point in particular, which is important for the House and perhaps those outside it to bear in mind, as to what these proposals will do and, importantly, what they will not do. I suggest that paragraphs 83 to 85 of the report repay careful reading. This House is self-regulating and therefore enjoys exclusive cognisance over its own proceedings. But, as the committee correctly recognises, that principle operates within the wider law of the land. Parliamentary privilege does not enable the House, whether by Standing Order or resolution, to alter, let alone abrogate, statutory rights. I suggest that that matters here. Existing life Peers have, under the Life Peerages Act 1958, a statutory entitlement for life to receive a Writ of Summons and to attend, sit and vote in this House. As paragraph 84 of the report records, the advice received by the committee from senior officials of the House was clear: neither a Standing Order nor a resolution can override that statutory entitlement. Indeed, the report says that an attempt to do so “would arguably constitute a challenge to the rule of law”, because the law is the law, and a Standing Order is, with respect, just a Standing Order. We should therefore be clear about the legal effect of what is proposed. For existing Members, the proposal is that they should retire at the specified age. That is an expression of opinion of the House. It carries an expectation. It may carry some moral or indeed some political force. Political groups may support it; they may somehow seek to give effect to it. But it does not—it cannot—change the law. It does not extinguish the statutory right of an existing Member who might choose, for whatever reason, not to comply. Indeed, the committee itself is candid about that. Paragraph 85 says that the resolution “would not purport to be binding”, and the implementation would therefore “depend on the cooperation of individual members as well as party groups”. By contrast, the position will be very different for new Members. The committee recommends that anyone nominated for a peerage should, before the peerage is conferred, give a “written undertaking” to retire by the 80th birthday. Of course, that then can be enforced under the House’s power of sanction under the House of Lords (Expulsion and Suspension) Act 2015. That distinction seems to be constitutionally important for future Members. The obligation is one which they accept when they enter the House; the consequences of breach are made clear to them in advance. But for existing Members, for everyone sitting here today, Parliament has already conferred the relevant statutory rights for life, and those rights—and they are legal rights—cannot be rewritten or abrogated retrospectively by resolution. Let me be clear: none of that is an argument for or against retirement at 80. My remarks are not addressed to that issue at all. They are addressed to an argument for constitutional clarity, because if the Government want to impose a legally binding requirement for a retirement age on Members, the report identifies the route, and that is legislation. That legislation would permit Parliament to identify and to decide the issue expressly. But if we decide to proceed by resolution instead of legislation, we ought to be clear about what we are actually doing. We are expressing the view of the House, and we expect existing Members to comply with it, but we are not changing, because we cannot change by way of resolution, those Members’ current existing legal entitlement to remain Members of the House. That distinction, I suggest, is not a legal technicality. It is, as the committee itself recognises, a matter of the rule of law. Whatever view we take of the merits of these paragraphs of the report, the rule of law is not an inconvenience to be worked around. It is the framework within which all of us must operate.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, I strongly welcome the report. I congratulate my noble friend and her colleagues on producing a unanimous, thoughtful and forward-looking report, which I hope we can, in effect, endorse today and, in due course, adopt its recommendations. Taking on the implementation of a manifesto commitment ourselves is surely the best way to bring about change—not being dragged screaming and shouting to the inevitable outcome, but through debate and consensus. I therefore very much regretted the tone and content of the speech by the Leader of the Official Opposition. I would have thought that the noble Lord, Lord True, would have learned from his experience of resisting and resisting the Grocott Bill, which would have very gradually ended the hereditary principle. We probably would never have had to “expel”, in his words —or, in ours, let go of—the hereditaries. He resisted that in government and then in opposition, and that is a shame. I hope we can do this differently. This is a working, legislative House, and whatever decisions we make today must be centred on what enables our—Peers’—time, expertise and collective wisdom to be best used. This is not a retirement House, and appointment to it should be not as a thanks for services rendered but, as the heading on my list when I came here said, as a “working Peer”. Our central role is to share responsibility with the Commons to make laws. I have always worried about being appointed for life rather than for as long as one can contribute, which is why I welcome the introduction of a participation requirement—although, like my noble friend, I would have quite liked appointment terms. I strongly welcome the introduction of a retirement age, partly because we all fade with age but, more importantly, because if we are to do good work here we need to be continuously refreshed by those who have more recently been in their particular area of work or expertise. When I arrived 16 years ago, I was very fresh from the consumer and charity world, but that experience is now 16 years old. Surely it is right that we move over and let those with more up-to-date experience, contacts and knowledge make their contribution to emerging legislation in their areas of expertise. We do not hold in our heads all the experience of the world. We could do this through maximum terms of appointment, as I have said, but the Labour Party manifesto took the other view: that age was the correct criterion. Of course we will lose some Members who we will miss a lot—although I still think we will be friends with them—but we would be able to welcome a new generation with much to offer. These proposals will not solve the issue of the size of the House, but they do two things. First, they signal that we recognise the need for a reduction in size and have designed a tool to start that process, rather than leaving it to the Commons and the Government, who could be rather more draconian. Secondly, it begins our side of that bargain: we are choosing to slim down, and our example should, I hope, help stay the hand of future Prime Ministers—whether under this or any other Government—about how many people they appoint here. The Government were elected on a manifesto with a retirement age of 80. We should help that happen. The process is ingenious: it is staged, but clear and predictable. We have all looked to see our date of retirement, and I will tell noble Lords a secret: I will be leaving on my birthday—I am one of those. There will be a time, therefore, when I will be the oldest person in the House. I never thought that would be my aspiration, but it is now. I support the report. Let us do this ourselves—willingly, not with it enforced on us, and with a bit of humility.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
My Lords, I thank the committee for its work and its report, and I note the limits of its remit. I support the principle of a retirement age. As an unelected House, there is good reason for us to put in place boundaries where the electorate may decide our fate differently if given a choice. But logical thinking forces me to confront reality. I also know that the electorate may well not choose any of us to serve, given half the chance. So, before we make structural changes that do not result in us becoming an elected Chamber, it is important that we are clear what problem needs fixing for us to best serve the public in our appointed state. I very much echo what my noble friend Lord Strathclyde asked of the noble Baroness the Leader, which is that she is clear, when she comes to wind up, what problem she thinks her proposal is there to address. If it is the size of the House, as suggested by the Labour Party manifesto, then a retirement age would be a quick answer. But I think size is a symptom, not the cause, of the real problem we must address, which is that this House has become less about service and expertise and is becoming far more politically motivated in its work. If we are to change that, we must understand and address the part we have all played in causing that to happen. Members of this House often criticise successive Prime Ministers for appointing increasing numbers of politically aligned Peers but rarely, if ever, acknowledge our own contribution to this ratchet effect. Just because noble Lords are not partisan, that does not make them non-political, and what constitutes “political” in the eyes of the public often crosses party lines. This problem reached its nadir after 2016 when this House enthusiastically defied the majority of leave voters in its efforts to prevent Brexit being implemented and did all it could to dilute legislation to tackle illegal immigration. All that said, that does not mean that this House does not still do good and important work, and it is not the role of the House of Lords to make life easier for the Government of the day, whichever party is in power. But as we have become individually more political in our intent and style, showing the same vices as the Commons without the virtue of being democratically elected, we cannot ignore that the case for us continuing in this unelected, appointed state is harder to make. As to what is in front of us and how the recommendations stack up, as much as I support the principle of a retirement age, I believe that, more importantly, we all have an ongoing duty to question whether we are still doing our best and are still best equipped to remain. Although I can see why some support a minimum participation level for all Peers, if we want a more expert and less political appointed House then we will need more, not fewer, Peers, since any credible measure of effectiveness would require them to attend less. The Labour Party manifesto restated its commitment to, “replacing the House of Lords with an alternative second chamber”. Not only do we not know what that might involve but it is a promise that we have heard before. Perhaps the Leader could give us an update on that when she comes to wind up. What we do know is that Labour, when in government, has form in attacking the structure of the second Chamber without addressing the real problem that it has helped to create. In doing so, it has exacerbated this House’s greatest weakness of being a political Chamber without a democratic mandate. Expelling the over-80s alongside the hereditary Peers will not fix that problem even with a staggered exit, as the committee proposed. My fear is not just that these changes on their own will have little or even no impact on declining public trust. More importantly, recent history tells us that the consequence of these changes risks making matters much worse.
Lord Burns (CB)
My Lords, I agree that the committee has done a very good job in answering the questions that it was given. The report is thorough and persuasive, and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, and her committee for their work. She and I worked together on the Lord Speaker’s committee and I know how hard she has worked on this whole subject for many years. I shall take the retirement age first. If a retirement age is to be introduced, I agree that 80 is a sensible retirement age for new Members. I think any older retirement age would be extremely difficult to sell to the public. I also support the proposed transitional arrangements for existing Members and the suggestion to begin with a fixed date. Together, these eliminate the uncertainty of any proposal tied to election dates and avoid too many existing Members leaving at the same time. The committee has also reached a sensible conclusion on the issue of participation. It is a blunt mechanism, but the reality is that there is no other solution that is not excessively complex and probably unworkable. I looked at many of them during my time working with the Lord Speaker’s committee. However, while the report provides good answers to the exam questions in isolation, my view is that the proposals do not solve the underlying problem. The Prime Minister has said that he is in favour of problem solving rather than point scoring. I was taught that before making changes you should ask two questions: what is the problem you are trying to fix, and what are the causes of the problem? The Labour Party manifesto in 2024 said that the problem was that the House of Lords was too big. Of course, there are two important reasons for the present size. The first, and the one that we are discussing today, is that Members are appointed for life unless they choose to retire. The proposals in the report would help with that. If they were implemented, there would be a one-off reduction in the size of the House, and subsequently the numbers leaving would be slightly higher than they otherwise would be. The second and more important reason for the size of the House is that Prime Ministers are under no constraint about the number of Peers they appoint or the party balance of the appointments they make. Whenever there is a change of Government, we see a pattern of leapfrogging as Prime Ministers appoint disproportionately to their own party. The manifesto also said: “We will reform the appointments process”. Yet the Government have not gone anywhere near this, as far as I am aware. Consequently, there will be no obstacles to Prime Ministers appointing any number of new Peers to fill the space that will be created by the retirement proposals. We need a package of measures that will reduce and contain the size of the House not just for a year or two but for the longer term. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, pointed out, and I think the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, agreed, such a package should include a commitment by the leaders of the main parties to exercise restraint in making new appointments and to maintain a fair balance of appointments between parties. The Leader of the House has often said that the House works best when the two parties are of a similar size. As the noble Lord, Lord True, pointed out, we are now approaching that position, with the gap between the two main parties closing. This is the ideal time for some kind of movement on the question of appointments and a fair balance of appointments between parties. In my view, the package should also include a generous term limit for new appointments. I do not want to rerun the argument of age limits versus term limits, but I think we could have both. A retirement age on its own would encourage younger appointments. Surely it can be no part of a reform process if it means we could have Members here for 40 years or maybe more; I find that quite astonishing. To summarise, I am content with the participation proposal. I am not in favour of a retirement age on its own or for its own sake, but I can envisage that it could play a valuable part in a more comprehensive and wider package to reduce and control the size of the House.
Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)
My Lords, I have come to listen as much as to contribute. I particularly look forward to the contributions from the next three speakers on my side of the House who, like me, will all be leaving on 8 July 2029, in my case after nine years of service in the House. Given that, in broad terms, I am in favour of having a retirement age with a term—if that would be longer—so that we can appoint older people to the House, I have no grounds for complaint. I congratulate the committee on its work. It fulfilled the terms of reference. I am also mindful of my party’s manifesto promise that there should be a retirement age. However, there is no doubt that what was proposed by my party and which the committee has put into form is age discrimination. We are not employees, so employment law clearly does not apply, but, using that as a parallel example, a retirement age now has to have a cause. It is quite reasonable for this debate to touch on this issue. What is the cause for having a retirement age? I know it was in the manifesto, but my experience of the House tells me that the size of the House is not a problem. On this, if nothing else, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord True. I believe that the size of the House is a resource that can be used productively. As the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said, the real cause is that it is a proxy for incapacity. Incapacity does not work just with age, as many noble Lords in this House demonstrate. I think there is a real problem. It was in the manifesto but, in pushing this policy through, there is also a need to seize the public mood. Having to explain that we are doing this because it was in the manifesto is insufficient. I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, not so much on his views on ties but on the self-regulatory nature of this proposal. It is a real problem which is downplayed in the report and will be downplayed in practice. Of course, if the party wants me to resign in accordance with these rules, I almost certainly will, but I would suffer an almost irresistible urge if I knew, when it got to 8 July 2029, that there was going to be an important pensions Bill in the following Session. I would find it very difficult not to push the limits in my case. More thought needs to be given to how this part of these proposals will be put into practice.
Lord Howard of Lympne (Con)
My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Davies, if I am still around, I will leave your Lordships’ House in July 2029. I shall do so with regret and equanimity. I assure your Lordships that the few observations that I am about to make do not spring from self-interest. I pay tribute to the work of the committee. It has faithfully fulfilled its remit. But, as others have suggested, was it the right remit? Your Lordships have an obligation not to obstruct government legislation which gives effect to a manifesto commitment, but I know of no convention which requires your Lordships’ House to take the initiative in implementing the Government’s manifesto when the Government have not seen fit to bring forward legislation. I endorse the question put by my noble friend Lord Strathclyde. What is the mischief which these proposals are designed to remedy? It is said that your Lordships’ House is too big. By what yardstick? What harm does the size of the House inflict, and what are the practical consequences of its size? The largest number who voted in the three highest attended Divisions of the 2024-26 Session was 523, on two occasions, and 512, a number close to but smaller than the number who will remain after the first tranche of these proposals is implemented in July 2029. It is reasonable to assume from those numbers that there are some 200 Members of your Lordships’ House who rarely attend, except perhaps to fulfil the requirements necessary to maintain their membership. What harm do they do? I have always believed that if something isn’t broke, you shouldn’t fix it. I do not believe your Lordships’ House is broke, regardless of the number of Peers who are eligible to attend its proceedings. Not only do I believe that these proposals are unnecessary but I believe that they would have unfortunate consequences. There are many Members of your Lordships’ House who make valuable contributions to our proceedings long after they have reached the age of 80. Who can doubt that our proceedings would have been the poorer if we had been deprived of the wisdom of the late and very much lamented Lord Mackay of Clashfern after he reached the age of 80?
Noble Lords
Hear, hear!
Lord Howard of Lympne (Con)
I had the privilege of sitting in Cabinet with James, where he was listened to with the same respect and attention as he was later as a Back-Bench Member of your Lordships’ House. Why should we impair the quality of our proceedings by this act of self-harm? The committee’s report contains no reference to cost, so I asked the Library to do a few calculations. First, we must make a few assumptions—I hope that those I have made are reasonable, though one cannot be certain. Just suppose that the 200 or so Members of your Lordships’ House who rarely attend now decide that, in order to maintain their membership between now and 2029, they ought to fulfil the participation requirement and attend 20% of the sittings of the House. That might impose some strains on the facilities of the House. And they may decide to speak. We have a generous time limit of five minutes in this debate. Could we in future be allowed to intervene in debates only for a matter of seconds, and not just at Question Time as we were told earlier today? There is also the matter of the cost: those Members would no doubt claim the allowances to which they were entitled. I asked the Library to estimate the cost that might involve. It provided various estimates, the highest of which was £9.8 million—nearly £10 million. Is that the best use of taxpayers’ money? Has the Chancellor been told? Could this be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for the bond market? We are all familiar with the law of unintended consequences. Do we want to provide an example which may be cited with relish for many years to come? These proposals are unnecessary and could lead to consequences which I suggest many of your Lordships would find undesirable. They should be rejected.
Lord Grocott (Lab)
My Lords, I very much associate myself with those who have congratulated my noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton, who has performed the trick of delivering unanimous support from people who did not agree with one another on more than one occasion over the 40-odd years that she and I have been around in this House. I should declare an interest—I do not know whether to declare an interest or whether I am a beneficiary or a victim of this Bill, because I too am affected by it: from 8 July 2029, the House will have to learn how to cope without me; I expect that the nation will remain calm. I mention this because much of my view of it is affected by the time I spent as Chief Whip. I am certainly not going to name any names, but there were people coming in at very advanced ages who were not fit to come in and whose spouses desperately did not want them to come in. The House did not want them to be here, but they clung to the explanation that they had been appointed here for life to support the Government—the Labour Government at the time—and that it was their duty to do so. I welcome a retirement age; it gives you a date to work towards, and I do not regard it as expulsion—I have had more than a good innings. It is also desirable. What does it tell us about the composition of this House when I say that, if everyone now over the age of 75 were to depart by 2034, we would lose 367 people? Put another way, that is 367 of the 776 current Members of the House. Virtually half the House is over the age of 75 and lingering around the age of 80. That is not a good population balance, and we need to recognise that. Not least, I find pretty weak the argument that, somehow, losing these people will be one step short of a disaster. We have precedent. In 1999, 667 Peers left this House—or were expelled, as the noble Lord, Lord True, said. I hate to say this because it may upset people, but, when 88 went in 2026, the House carried on. As my noble friend Lord Chandos said, in many ways it improved. The institution is bigger than the individual. If we look down the Corridor to the Commons, we see that as a result of the last general election 335 new MPs arrived. In other words, since 2024, over half of that House is brand new, and it is doing well—I happen to think it is a lot better than when I was there—and functioning properly. I therefore support a retirement age. I also support the participation requirement—I will make only a brief point about this. I think 20% is quite low and should be higher. I will make another uncomfortable observation: there are broadly two groups of people in the House—those who see it as a full-time job and those who do not. If all those who see it as a full-time job reverted to working for just 20% of the time, it would not be good for the House. The real problem—I must make this point briefly—is that there is a group of people in this House who will block every attempt at reform of any sort. They opposed the 1999 Act, and they opposed the appointment and powers of the Lord Speaker. They have opposed any change to sitting times, and they also opposed my simple little Bill to end by-elections for hereditary Peers. Whatever we come up with, there is a block of people in this House who will say, “No, we’re not going to do it”. That makes consensus very difficult. Surely they have learned the lesson from the experience with hereditary Peers: if you do not deal with obvious absurdities in the operation of the House—for example, the hereditary Peers’ by-elections—sooner or later someone else will come up with something to do it for you. There are people sitting in this House—I will not name and embarrass them—who ferociously opposed every small step and ended up with the big step of all the hereditaries being expelled on the same day. There is a lesson there: we do it ourselves, or someone else will do it for us.
Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)
My Lords, at first sight, the “Retirement” section of this report has much to commend it. I welcome the fact that the committee was looking for a solution that would avoid the need for legislation on this issue, very much for the reason that the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has just been mentioning. It must surely be right for the House itself to decide what to do and how to control this process. I also welcome the decision to identify a notional date “for the end of this Parliament” in place of the words used in the manifesto commitment. They left the date open to whatever date is chosen for the next election. For my part, the element of certainty that it introduces—I am in the same position as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, on this point too—would mean that I could plan ahead as to the date of my retirement without running the risk that an early election would upset these plans. That said, I wonder whether it was right for the committee to accept that the retirement age has to be set at 80, given the situation we are in just now, without giving greater weight to the effect that this would have on the various party groupings. Many of us on the Cross Benches have already reached the age of 80. Of course, the effects of advancing age vary from person to person, and views about what people over 80 can do tend to change the closer one gets to that age. Many of us are still very active in the service of this House. I was already over 80 when I was elected for the second term to serve as Convenor of the Cross Benches. If we have to set a retirement age—and I emphasise the word if—it would surely be better to aim higher and set it at 85. I have no self-interest in making that point as I am now over that age, but it would give more time for those such as former judges, who cannot come here until they have retired, to make a meaningful contribution to the work of the House before they must leave. Further, setting the age of 85 instead of 80 would mitigate a very real problem for the Cross Benches, to which my noble friend Lord Patel has referred. The number of those on our Benches who would be facing compulsory retirement by July 2029 under the proposed scheme is 69. That is getting close to half of those sitting on the Cross Benches referred to in paragraph 33 of the report, which is 154. Setting the age at 85 would reduce that number from 69 to 31, which is more in keeping with what we could cope with, given how slow recruitment to these Benches is. As for the “Participation” section, I accept that the most practical solution is to concentrate on attendance. My practice as convenor was to write to those who fell below 10%, suggesting that it was time for them to retire. Given that we would be setting a threshold and not making a suggestion, 20% would seem more reasonable. But there is a practical problem that the report does not address. How are less frequent attenders to keep track of their performance? It would be most unfortunate if a Member who had very good reasons for not being able to attend regularly was to fall short by a tiny margin that could easily have been made up if he or she had been given notice that there was a risk of falling short. Something needs to be done to address this problem if we are to proceed with this proposal. I make one further point. Mention is made in paragraph 97 of setting up an emeritus association for retired Members. This idea is all very well for those who live in London and the south-east, for whom keeping in touch will be relatively easy, but further thought needs to be given to what this would have to offer for people like me who live further afield, given that reimbursement of the cost of travelling from the places where they live will no longer be available when they retire. An emeritus association is a very good idea, but it must be suitable for everyone.
Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con)
My Lords, I was privileged to be a member of the committee, but before I come to the report itself I want to focus on a curiosity: why was the Select Committee set up in the first place? The commitment in the Labour manifesto was very clear: to have a retirement age of 80 and for Peers to leave at that age. The Government did not hesitate to bring in a Bill to remove the hereditary Peers, so why are they hesitating about this? I think there are two reasons. First, I do not think those who wrote on this subject in the manifesto thought through the implications at all—they just scribbled a few words that sounded good. Secondly, I do not think the Government really want to have going through Parliament a Bill that could open a Pandora’s box on House of Lords reform. That is why I believe the Leader of the House instead wanted to find a way to bring in a retirement age without legislation; hence the device of a Select Committee to let the Government off the hook. This is why the terms of reference specifically asked us to look at options which would not require primary legislation. The committee’s terms of reference were also curious in some other ways. We were not asked to consider whether there should be a retirement age; that there would be one was a given. The terms of reference did not specify the objective we were being asked to achieve. There was no mention of reducing the number of Peers in the House. Yes, we were asked to say what impact our proposals might have on the size and working of the House, but not on whether the impact would be positive or adverse. In other words, the terms of reference meant that we had to skirt round many of the hard issues which would be debated more thoroughly if there were legislation. Nevertheless, within these constraints, I believe the committee did produce a thoughtful and comprehensive report. I thank, in particular, the chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, who steered us skilfully to our conclusions, and the clerk Judith Brooke and her team who were very patient as we made more demands upon them. Finally, I turn to what I regard as a core issue, which is if there is to be a retirement age, how to implement it for existing Members. The terms of reference asked us to report on options, and we did. We set out two options: either legislation or a resolution by the House. The legal advice was clear: option one, legislation, would make retirement mandatory; without legislation, retirement would not be mandatory. However, a resolution could be passed by the House expressing the view that Members should retire no later than the age of 80, but it would not be binding on Members and would instead depend on the co-operation of individual Members and on peer pressure. There was another factor which preyed on my mind. Would it be right for the House of Lords alone to decide for itself at what age Members should be compelled to retire? Should an unelected House, as we are, decide who could and could not sit in the Lords? Yes, when it comes to transgressions of personal behaviour, but should we do so otherwise? Nevertheless, after much discussion, the committee came to the view that, if the primary objective was simply to implement a retirement age, a resolution of the House was the simplest way. However, the two options are very clearly set out in the report, and I believe it is now for both the House and the elected Government to consider and evaluate each of them.
Baroness Hunter of Auchenreoch (Lab)
My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton for introducing this debate, and her and her committee for this impressive report, a model of clarity and brevity. As I have often said, it is an honour and privilege to listen to the depth of expertise in your Lordships’ House, sometimes from some of the most venerable Peers, as we are witnessing today. None the less, I support the committee’s proposals: a retirement age at 80, all Members being treated equally irrespective of expertise or position, and with generous transitional arrangements. This is a genuinely modest proposal which will bring the profile of this Chamber more in line with legislatures worldwide and the adult population generally. Quite simply, at an appropriate moment, at a time which is well into retirement in most walks of life, we should make way for the rising generations. They are entitled to bring their valuable expertise and current experience to the challenges of the time in which we live. Our younger noble Lords, on all sides of the House, have demonstrated many times that age does not confer superiority. I am inspired in moderation by my noble friend Lord Kinnock, the first Labour leader whom I had the honour of working for, and who was an inspiration for me as a moderniser. He was once an advocate of total abolition of your Lordships’ House. Indeed, he once called noble Lords “unelected busybodies” and “descendants of brigands, muggers, bribers and gangsters”. Now in his maturer years, my noble friend, while still advocating for wider constitutional reform, proposes nothing more radical than retirement at 80 for today’s noble brigands. I know that there are many exceptionally active octogenarians and nonagenarians in your Lordships’ House, many of whom I have long admired and are speaking in this debate, and whom I hope will not consider me presumptuous, being relatively new. However, we should be honest. Our faculties fade; first the body, and then mental capacity. I know that only too well. At the age of 71—the average age, I think I heard earlier—this will be my last contribution to debate here for a couple of months, because I am shortly to have a knee replacement operation. I will miss all noble Lords, but I hasten to add that I look forward to resuming fully, and I am still all there up top. Regarding the other matter to note, that of participation, measurement is a difficult task: valuable unseen work versus seen work; quality versus quantity; popping in or popping up. I bow to the committee’s considered judgment of attendance of 20% of sitting days. I agree more emphasis needs to be made prior to appointment on the nature of our work, with a higher contribution bar made clear from the outset. I wholeheartedly support these proposals and look forward to the response from my noble friend the Leader, in the hope that your Lordships can reach consensus in a resolution of the House on this matter.
The Duke of Wellington (CB)
My Lords, I am very grateful to even be allowed to speak in this debate. I am one of the recent life peerages, but mine was granted when I was already 80, and I thought it surprising that the current Government would agree to my nomination. I am very pleased to follow my old friend the noble Baroness, Lady Hunter. In the debate on the hereditary Peers Act, I asked the Government not just to remove the hereditary Peers but also to carry out some other manifesto commitments, such as those on retirement and participation. I was therefore very pleased to hear in that debate the Leader of the House propose a committee to consider these matters, thus allowing me not to press my amendment on that point. As others have done, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, and the committee on writing this report, which I totally support. The phased retirement, starting in 2029, and the 20% participation requirement seem to me eminently sensible. When this matter is put to a vote, I will certainly vote in favour. However, I want to refer to two other matters to which I alluded in the earlier debate: namely, the removal of Peers for misconduct and the disturbing idea that peerages are apparently sometimes given to large donors to political parties. In the House of Commons, there is a mechanism for removing Members for misconduct. In the House of Lords, it is more complicated. Conviction of a crime and receiving a jail sentence of more than 12 months leads to expulsion, but breaking the Code of Conduct normally leads only to suspension for a number of months. In my opinion, this is not sufficient and therefore brings this House into disrepute. In the King’s Speech, the Government announced that they would introduce a Bill to remove peerages from disgraced Peers. I suggest to the Leader of the House that that she and the Prime Minister should instead consider a Bill to remove membership of this House from any Member who has misbehaved. The title in itself no longer carries an entitlement to sit in this House—look at all the hereditary Peers and life Peers who have retired. So, for the integrity of this House, there should be, if necessary, legislation to remove the right to sit in this House. The removal of titles could lead to unnecessary discussion of holders of peerages who are no longer Members of this House. It could be only a gesture. The Labour Party manifesto said: “Labour will ensure all peers meet the high standards the public expect of them” and strengthen “the circumstances in which disgraced members can be removed”. It seems to me that this manifesto commitment could be fulfilled by the removal of the right to sit in this House, rather than the removal of the title. The other matter which has always concerned me is the apparent granting of a peerage to a donor of a large sum of money to a political party. We will all have noticed that Reform has specifically said that the two recent large donors would not be given peerages if Reform was ever in Government. It is regrettable that Reform felt it necessary to state that, and it shows, sadly, that the giving of peerages to party-political donors has, in some sense, become normalised. I hope all political parties could somehow agree to make it impossible for the impression ever to be created that membership of this House can be given in return for large donations. The report deals only with retirement and participation but should certainly be agreed. It is another step in the continuing reform of this House, of which I am so grateful and honoured still to be a Member.
Lord Mann (Lab)
My Lords, my only caveat on what is an excellently written and structured report is that perhaps it would have benefited from asking the people for their view. I have done. Over many years, when I was an elected representative, I asked people for their views on many issues. There was a rather strong view in relation to the House of Lords. The overwhelming majority repeatedly said that it should be elected. There was a bigger view on that than any other single issue I ever polled on. There were people who had a different view. There was a group who felt that that would be outrageous and thought that we should simply be abolished. That view was held by a consistent but small minority. There was a small subsection that was very graphically much more in favour of reverting to the systems used when Henry VIII lived here, in terms of his methodology, for reducing the numbers of the House. The people’s view on this is rather clear and clearly rather different from the views of this House. The views of this House have been consistent, not just over the years but over the centuries. When the Great Reform Act was being debated here, the arguments that were put most frequently against it were about the unintended consequences and the effect on the markets. The then Duke of Wellington had a strong opinion. He argued against it, because it would lead to the slippery slope towards total democracy—something which has not quite happened in relation to the House of Lords, but has elsewhere. When universal suffrage was brought in, it was debated here. Instability, confusion, unintended consequences and problems in the markets were repeatedly cited. One politician, Asquith, went a little further: he suggested that the real reason for opposing it was because women did not really want the vote. When the voting age was reduced from 21 to 18, the House of Lords had a lot to say about it. It said it would be legally messy and confusing—this was one of the arguments that was put strongly—and that there would be unintended consequences, an impact on the markets and confusion would then prevail. There has been consistency: every time there has been any move towards a change in the system, the House of Lords has come up with the same set of arguments, and in a way, is doing so again. I have one slight caveat to that, though, because I have spent nearly seven years here now, so I can perhaps take a long-term view on this place: it would be better if it was elected. I proposed to Sir Keir Starmer and put the same proposal to the new Prime Minister that we should move immediately to elections: we should elect 40% at the next general election and 40% at the election after that, and there should be a commission to determine the separation of powers and the other 20% in the interim, with a much reduced figure of 300 Peers. Should the noble Lord, Lord True, get anywhere with his proposals, that would be a huge boost to my proposal. The Commons would, I am sure, rally behind it, and I would have the opportunity to put it to a vote. If we compromise with the more traditional approach that is put forward in the report, then it will be incremental change. But the people out there, I put it to the House, wish to see significant change. If we lag too far behind them, we will wake up one day and someone will have got rid of us.
Lord Redwood (Con)
My Lords, I have always believed in the supremacy of the House of Commons, and I have therefore always favoured an unelected upper House. I have always thought it right that this House should concentrate on two things: amending and improving legislation which has been initiated by the Government and, in cases where many Peers feel that the Government are going in the wrong direction, it can ask the Government to think again, but it is not here to prevent the Government from governing. It is that context we look at the membership of the upper House because, as I understand it, that is still the view of His Majesty’s Government. I see nothing magic in the year of your 80th birthday. We know in this House that a number of people well over the age of 80 are very acute, are extremely well informed and they help our debates. We know, all too often, in our local communities that there are all too many people under the age of 80 who become enfeebled or disabled and would not be able to carry out their normal duties. That will still be the case for a very small—I hope—minority in this House, and that will still need to be handled in a sensitive way by friends, family and colleagues advising the person to take advantage of the retirement provisions or, if necessary, with the Whips being involved. We should also remember that the grant of a peerage comes from His Majesty the King, and all of us who have been through the ceremony will remember that it is the words of the Crown investing the peerage in the individual. The words are particularly significant, because they do not just invest a title, a bauble; they invest the right to have a vote and voice in the Parliament of the United Kingdom, in the democratic context that I have just described. This report says that by a simple resolution of this House, we can undermine the will of the sovereign, quite often on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, that the people so appointed have the right to come to this Chamber all the time they wish to do so. There are also big handling problems, some well brought out in the debate so far. Let me give another case where there can be issues for the parties: a party may have appointed someone who is doing a good job as a Minister, shadow Minister or spokesman, or the House may have appointed them as chairman of a committee. If there has to be an imposed retirement age, it would be much better to say that they would not have to retire until the end of the Parliament in which they become 80, so that there was no unnecessary interruption in their work and abilities. One way of implementing part of the Labour manifesto would be to say that, as from tomorrow, no new Peer will be appointed without expressly saying that the right to a place in Parliament is limited to age 80 and that they would have to retire at that date. That would meet the requirement of the manifesto without having the disruptive impact that we are seeing through these proposals. I hope the Government think again, because this will not have a happy outcome and will disrupt the talent and expertise in the House. One of the things that has impressed me since I came here from another place, slightly sceptical about a self-regulating House, is seeing that on the big issue of how many people participate, we nearly always get about the right number for a big debate—the right number to cross-examine Ministers without a whole queue of others outside who cannot even get a seat in this place. Self-regulation of numbers seems to work. Indeed, there are occasions when we are considering the detail of legislation in debates in this very Chamber when, despite the large numbers, we are still a bit short of Back-Bench participation, so I do not really see the desperate need to reduce the numbers. My final, simple thought is that if the Government still think there are too many, and would like even fewer participating, the obvious thing to do is to stop choosing Peers for a little while. Given natural wastage from tragic death and voluntary retirement, you can slim it quite quickly.
Lord Rooker (Lab)
My Lords, the precision, clarity and delivery of this report show what a class act my noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton is. When I do Learn with the Lords programmes, I explain to students that for every decision in Parliament, the elected House has the last word. There might be a delay, but it has the last word. We are nothing more than a large sub-committee of the House of Commons, with the authority and power to ask it to think again, and again, and maybe again, but not after that. That is the reality of our status, which is why I do not support election for this place. I want the power and the last word to remain, as they are today, with the elected House. I am covered by this, like my noble friend Lord Grocott. I will be off in July 2029; I will be 88. What grounds do I have to complain? Just think about it. I do not complain; there is a precision to that, and it is a benefit to the whole House. I would like my vote back when I go, though; there is no reason why Peers who retire should not have their vote returned. It has always been a disgrace, and that is the one thing that I might want to push for when duty arrives. On the manifesto, manifestos are important but the public never read them. This one was a fraud on tax. Freezing tax allowances is a tax increase. That is the reality; the manifesto was broken the day the Chancellor moved to freeze the tax allowances. It is important to take it as a guide for what we want to be able to do. I supported the process of 80; the solution and the transition that have come up through the committee are to be commended. What we must not do is add any bells and whistles. Under no circumstances should we attempt to legislate, because that would involve the House of Commons and it will have a different view about our structures. That would be wrong, because it would be based on ignorance. My ignorance in the other place was massive before I came here. It was only when I became a Minister that I discovered how flexible this place was; I wish I had known when we were in opposition. I would have had a lot of questions that we could not get dealt with in the Commons pushed down to my noble colleagues. That is the reality. It is important that we deal with this and own the change. I freely admit that the transition is a couple of changes: retirement and attendance, or performance if you like. I realise that over the years to come, other changes will flow from that. There will be a constant drip of change. We all want to do more, but in this case we should stick to exactly what the report covers and not try to add to it and give others the chance to write our rules for us. I have no problem with this at all. I look forward to my noble friend’s response to the debate, and to a timetable for when we might get some resolutions. I have a mental note that maybe early next year we will have some resolutions to put into practice. Quite clearly, there is a division between us; I freely admit that. I just hope that there is a majority consensus to protect the well-being of the House from legislation and to support this unanimous report, put together by a cross-party group of people who all disagreed to start with.
Viscount Goschen (Con)
My Lords, it feels strange to be addressing your Lordships’ House on the question of reform of the membership of the House of Lords while not being directly in the crosshairs of the process, as has occurred on every previous occasion. When I re-entered this House as Lord Hawkhurst after a few weeks in exile, I expected to be overwhelmed by a feeling of legitimacy, by virtue of my shiny new life peerage, in comparison with the rather aged and tattered viscountcy that had served me so well for 38 years or so. But I was disappointed. I very much enjoyed the remarks and wisdom of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who referred to PG Wodehouse. I had hoped to take the title of Lord Emsworth but, as we all know, that really should be reserved for an Earl, so I was disappointed again on that front. I turn to the business of the day. The committee has done a thorough job in considering these intractable issues. It is no surprise that there is a considerable diversity of opinion around the House, but no one could argue that the committee has not discharged its function, approached this issue in an extraordinarily thorough way and come up with a solution that, in its mind, was designed to avoid the cliff edge that the noble Baroness referred to. I was also very amused to hear the different views about election manifesto pledges that have come through. I find myself, as ever, in the same field as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, in treating them merely as guidance, because there were other commitments in the manifesto around a more substantially reformed House about which we are not hearing too much. All election manifesto commitments are equal, but I suspect that some are more equal than others. It is strange to debate retirement when we know that there are Peers over the age of 80 who make such fantastic contributions to your Lordships’ House. We have heard from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, and the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, has been referred to. I can tell your Lordships’ House that my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham is utterly unchanged, in every way and in capacity, since he had the misfortune of becoming my boss as Secretary of State for Transport nearly one-third of a century ago. We are talking in code, and what we are really talking about is capacity. We have made progress on that issue, and I feel that more can—and, I hope, will—be done by party managers and the convenor. Of the changes that have been made, the allowance of voluntary retirement has been a positive development. Perhaps an expectation that we should self-regulate—in the great House of Lords tradition—our own retirement is a solution. Whatever the House decides, I feel that we are tilting at the wrong windmill with this report. The primary challenge to the credibility, reputation and, therefore, authority of this House is not around age and retirement; it is to do with the Executive’s ability to control the House’s numbers and make-up. We now have a situation where entry to this House is entirely at the disposal of the Prime Minister’s patronage, with no limits on numbers. The Executive of the day can, to a large extent, choose the new Members of one of the juries they face, and if they find themselves losing the argument they can just add some more. That method of controlling the composition of your Lordships’ House is ridiculous and is no more defensible than the situation we had in the pre-1999 House. That should be the focus, and there should be much less on retirement. We need to control the numbers of people coming into this House. I suggest that whatever the merits—they are very considerable—of people arriving in the House, we go through a period of indigestion, and that does not help us do our job.
Baroness D’Souza (CB)
My Lords, of those who have already spoken, more than half welcome this report, as do I. I had hoped that all that would remain would be to vote on whether we are in favour of it. I had hoped that the report would have been fully accepted by the House and then implemented as soon as possible. That said, it is unlikely that any process would be entirely simple. As we have heard, some will continue to object to the idea of a retirement age and argue for life membership, while others will query the suggested retirement age, perhaps alongside additional creative ideas on how best to measure participation. But what we have here is a workable, sensible, well thought-through plan that will contribute to the reform of the House. We should seize it with both hands as a step towards much-needed further regulation of appointments to the House of Lords. In so doing, we would begin—I hope—to establish a leaner culture which would become an established convention which all involved in the recruitment process and the working of the House would respect: a House that is certainly smaller and in which all Members are committed to contributing to the work of the Lords. The non-legislative incremental changes put forward in this report would allow the House to exercise its much-valued self-regulation. However, as most speakers have touched on, the fundamental issue is that the recommendations are based on the assumption that the Prime Minister of the day would exercise restraint in the appointment of new Peers and co-operate in maintaining numbers below, say, 650. Should this not happen in the coming years, it is likely that the Government will enforce stringent legislative changes. These changes would not necessarily take into account party balance or dangers such as creating a cliff edge. In seeking a balance of numbers between the two major parties, there may need to be some constructive co-operation—not to say courage, at least on the part of the Whips, who will have to persuade some minimally contributing Peers to retire earlier than the rules require. As we have heard, the Cross Benches will be disproportionately affected by retirement rules, having an older age profile than other groups and due to the heavy losses of hereditary Peers. This diminution of what most consider and agree to be a valuable voice in the Lords may be further exacerbated by the extremely spare recruitment rate of independent Peers—approximately two per annum in recent years. Given that the HOLAC appointments system ensures an inflow of experts in fields often far from politics, as well as the growing need for expertise in technology areas that have not yet been established, there is a case for an increase in nominations to the Cross Benches. This report represents a genuine step forward and it should be embraced, so that arrangements for leaving can be matched by those addressing recruitment to the House of Lords.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)
My Lords, it is customary to congratulate the chair of the committee—in this case, the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor—on the report being debated, but I am afraid I cannot do that because it is completely incoherent. Let me explain why. I am going to be 85 at the end of this year, and I will be asked, under the terms of this report, to retire from the House in 2029. That is the date of the next election. Are we really saying that the priority of the next Government, of whatever colour, will be to produce statutory legislation to enforce these recommendations? I probably will have gone by 2029, but supposing I lose my marbles and become completely unhinged, I might decide to stay on—and who can stop me? Without primary legislation, there is no way that I can be prevented from serving out my time until I die. This proposal does not make any sense whatever. My noble friend Lord True asked: what is the question that we are trying to answer? I believe that it is about whether your Lordships’ House is too big. There are too many of us and it does not look good. We know that the people who do the work very rarely exceed 500, but it looks as if there are nearly 800 Members of this House, and that is too many. I wrote a recommendation to the committee—which was never addressed at all, as far as I can make out —that suggested that we should have internal elections. As such, each party group in your Lordships’ House would be told to decide on how many should stay in the House. They could hold more than one of these elections. The first slice might be 10%, and they elect out of the House the 10% of people who they do not want. Who would they be? They would be the people who had lost their marbles—they might be of any age, as age is not a determinant of whether you have lost your marbles; a lot of younger people are completely incoherent and should be got rid of—and people who do not come to the House. Therefore, we could get rid of all the people who are not contributing and keep the people who are contributing by holding the Government to account and revising legislation, which is the purpose of this House. When I raised the question of internal elections in a previous debate, the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, got up and said he thought that elections were a terrible idea, as people briefed against each other. I spoke to him afterwards and asked how many elections he had participated in; he said, “One”. I have contributed as a candidate in six parliamentary elections and one parliamentary by-election. A number of those elections were against Liberal Democrat opponents, and they really have a lot to teach all of us about briefing against people in elections. Although democracy is imperfect, it is not a reason for us to reject it. We should elect the people out of this House whom we do not want; that is a much better way forward and will reduce the numbers. That leaves us with the problem of those who are independents and so forth. I think that they should group together and take the percentage of cut that they need as well. That is something the committee could decide on—there is a slight problem there—but otherwise we would see the same reductions across all party groupings in the House, and we would get rid of the people we really do not want who do not contribute to the workings of this House.
Lord Dubs (Lab)
My Lords, I fully support this report and congratulate my noble friend Lady Taylor on having produced it and on having got unanimous support, even though some voices are now dissenting from it. I am also relieved that I will no longer have to go on the media and always face the question of why I am the token oldie. I can now say that I will not be for much longer and the House will have decided. It makes sense to have a retirement age. I suppose that I am the oldest person who has spoken so far—I may in fact be the oldest person who is going to speak altogether, so I take that as a claim on why I should no longer want to be the token oldie in the future. I am glad to have a fixed date of 8 July 2029. Those of us who were in the Commons and lost our seats will say that that date will come very suddenly. We do not know what will happen until the early hours of polling day, and then out we are. It is good to have certainty and it means we can prepare ourselves mentally for not being here. One benefit, which has been referred to, is that we shall be allowed to vote in general elections. Perhaps my noble friend will confirm that. I once got a Private Member’s Bill through this House to give effect to our being able to vote in general elections. When it got to the Commons, it was objected to by an anonymous voice —I think it was a Lib Dem—which I thought was pretty outrageous. I hope that the timing of my leaving here will be such that I can vote in the next election. I was looking at the leaflet about the arrangements for retired Members, which are very generous. They will be able to sit below the Throne, use the dining rooms, and so on. In fact, the arrangements are so generous that I wonder whether there will be too many people swamping them. I have always felt it an honour and a privilege to be in this House, something which we should acknowledge. I am not happy that there are several hundred people here—the ones who are not active—who use the title and the perks of being in this House without making any contribution. That is wrong in principle, which is why I do not like the idea that, because there are 550 active Members, the others do not cause any problem. I think they do cause problems: they abuse the privilege of being here, and I do not think they should be here. The committee was not asked—and I understand why —to consider issues stemming from the recommendations. I am grateful to Professor Meg Russell of University College London for her very helpful briefing. There is a widespread belief that the House is too large, but there seems to be not a sufficiently great advantage in getting rid of those who are 80-plus if they are quickly replaced by a stream of people keeping the numbers high. There has to be some more radical approach to this in the way in which Prime Ministers make their appointments. We need to look again at the basis of appointments to the House, which should be considered in parallel with the arrangements for those who are 80-plus. The noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, talked about individual party groups making their own decision and voting. I once also floated that idea and was told it was not a good idea as it resembled a circular firing squad and would cause too much dissent in each group. I do not know about that, but it was an interesting idea. I still look at the way in which people are appointed and am afraid that any system of appointment will be seen by outsiders to be flawed, even if it is totally above board. I share the view of the noble Lord, Lord Mann, and others that an elected second Chamber must be an option, provided we retain the primacy of the Commons. Then we can do our job of scrutinising the work of the Commons, and possibly even make some interesting suggestions. I think an elected second Chamber is inevitable, sooner or later. I do not believe in a unicameral system, but we could provide better and more soundly based scrutiny and better safeguards for individual citizens. Therefore, I would like us to move towards that democratic election, but in the meantime we should adopt these proposals.
Lord Johnson of Lainston (Con)
My Lords, I have two interests to declare. First, I am remarkably young. I am following the oldest Member of the House in this debate and I am probably one of the youngest. I like that. Here, I feel so youthful; it is even more effective than some kind of anti-ageing moisturiser. When I leave this Chamber, I immediately feel very old—my children think I am 100; the techies I work with think I am a dinosaur. I would hate to think there will be a cut-off point at the top, a glass ceiling to my age, because I like the youthfulness I can exhibit when I am in this wonderful Chamber. Secondly, this place makes me feel foolish. When I look around the Chamber and hear the extraordinary wisdom of my colleagues—my noble friends and noble Lords—I realise that I am in the presence of greatness. So I feel both young and foolish, and those are emotions I want to maintain. These measures will, sadly, change that for the worse. This is a witan, a council of elders. The whole point is to have wisdom, which is a combination of knowledge and experience. If we set a time limit on that, we immediately derogate the principle. When I look around the Chamber and think of the individuals here, the idea that they should retire at 80 is bizarre, if not absurd, if not slightly offensive. I have just followed one of the most brilliant speakers, one of the most inspiring individuals in our country, who is 93 years old. I will have the good fortune to speak at the memorial service of Viscount Bridgeman, who died recently at 95. Until this year, he bicycled to the House of Lords every day and could not attend only for a short period because he had suffered an accident on his trampoline. The idea that there is an arbitrary age for retirement is also bizarre when by the time this legislation is in force, 7.5% of the population of this country will be over the age of 80. While I do not believe in DEI, I know that the Government Benches do—in fact, it is one of the core tenets of their existence. How can they bring into force legislation that would deliberately discriminate against people over the age of 80 when they will represent one in 15 people? As the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said, in most jobs people have a contract. Our contract is for life, and it is important that we remember that duty. It is also important to point out that, in most businesses, we have recently changed the law to reduce the enforcement of retirement ages in most businesses. These policies go against all the policies that the Government think are right. If we think of the future—and it is important to think of the future—anyone born after 2005, I am told by my scientific friends, may not die. The country is ageing, and we will find ourselves in the bizarre situation of setting an arbitrary limit of the age of 80 when the average age of the whole population could be over that in the next 100 years. I have the greatest respect for the noble Baronesses, Lady Taylor and Lady Parminter, and so on, who contributed to the report, but it seems to be trying to find a map to a location that has been pre-set rather than analysing whether these proposals—called reforms—benefit this House. The word “reform” has been used many times by my colleagues, and not in the sense of congratulating significant donors, but in the sense of making something better. However, no one has yet been able to point out to me how these reforms would make this House better. An arbitrary retirement age of 80 would immediately preclude a large number of people who participated in this debate. Why should we want to remove those people, and how would their removal improve the work of our scrutiny and oversight of legislative and government action? No one has told me that yet. We have to be very careful when we suggest that we somehow have to react to this move because it is popular. This is not my policy; it is a Labour government policy. It is entirely performative, so that they can say that they have reformed the House of Lords when they have done exactly the opposite. If I may follow in the footsteps of my noble leader, the noble Lord, Lord True, for us not to take this through legislation would be a gross dereliction of our duties. It should not be for this House to decide who sits in it; it should be for Parliament. We should have a fight about it, if for nothing else then to embarrass the Government about their performative politics in the first place. My second declared interest is my noble kinsman, my father-in-law, the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton of Epsom, who this measure will expel from the House, which means that he will be at home full-time. I think it behoves me to make a plea for my family to keep him here safe and sound, where, as we have just heard—although I am not entirely sure whether it was the electrifying speech I was hoping for—he continues to make a significant contribution even though he has passed the age of 85, or soon will. That, I am afraid, is why I object to this committee report.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, in previous debates on the future of this House, the phrase “form should follow function” has been used on many an occasion. In the clear introduction from the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, she stressed the committee’s remit, in that it was allowed to deal with only a small segment of the role and make-up of the Lords. However, in ignoring input, the proposals cannot ensure long-term expertise to undertake our fundamental functions of scrutiny and holding the Government of the day to account. I was in the first cohort of the 15 so-called people’s Peers selected by the Appointments Commission. There are only six of us left now; eight died and one retired. The indomitable Countess of Mar was the one female hereditary Peer selected to remain in her time and was an exemplar in how to conduct effective scrutiny, as well as a mentor to several of us and a guardian extraordinaire of the rules and conventions of the House. She retired at 80 and is still missed. Now, with the hereditary principle gone, prime ministerial patronage is supreme, able to drive the input of Peers with few brakes on the process. Surely entry and exit must be considered and balanced. Our function requires expertise in the widest range of topics—a breadth that requires carefully vetted appointments to the Cross Benches—yet, as we have heard, the Cross Benches will lose the greatest number of Peers in the plan laid out in the report. Professor Meg Russell’s briefing has already been referred to, and my noble friend Lord Patel explained superbly the mathematics involved. The independent House of Lords Appointments Commission must be put on a statutory footing and urgently allowed to appoint if any of this goes forward. To borrow a phrase from my noble friend Lord Sedwill used on the “Today” programme today, the question for each of us is: what can I do for my country? The report recognises the need for leave of absence for those in major roles at home and abroad, but they have a duty to come back to share their in-depth knowledge or to leave. As the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, asked, will the emeritus Peers regain the vote? As the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, pointed out so clearly, one aspect glossed over in the report—
The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Smith of Basildon) (Lab)
I am sorry to interrupt, but it might be helpful to the House to say that there is a retirement booklet that I arranged to be published which clearly states that, when Members leave this House, they will regain their vote.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
That is most helpful and I apologise for not having read that properly. It was raised earlier in the week as well. I thank the noble Baroness for the clarification. One aspect glossed over in the report is that some become less able to contribute well before the age of 80; infirmity is not the preserve of older people. There was no reference to an occupational health service, to which those who appear to have dwindling faculties, no insight or other problems could be referred for in-depth assessment. Some of us have been seeking that for some time. Standard appraisal processes would not work effectively, because those who attend rarely would not be adequately known to colleagues and staff. However, the staff here know only too well who should be seen by an occupational health service. As for wider reform, no one should think that the widely varied and independent Cross-Bench Peers could be elected. They could not be elected if they do not have the funding, know-how or support to run an electoral campaign, and that lack will exclude many. The report is sensible as far as it goes, but it will not solve all the difficulties of infirmity or simply being “out of touch”. Unless prime ministerial patronage is curbed or ceases, until HOLAC is the route through which all potential Peers are assessed, and until we recognise that younger appointees will be in the House of Lords for decades and they may also fail, our functions may not be enhanced. However, we should heed this thoughtful report, which the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, presented very well. The danger is that it could be consigned to the shelves unless we are brave enough to embrace it and end prime ministerial patronage as it stands today.
Baroness Fookes (Con)
My Lords, I have been increasingly concerned over the years about the preoccupation with numbers. It seems to me that this is putting the cart before the horse. We should be looking at whether the House of Lords functions, what its function is and whether it functions as well as it should, and then base the numbers on our assessment of that position. I believe that getting rid of so many Peers, particularly the Cross-Benchers, would be a mistake, because it would reduce the ability of the House of Lords to function as well as it does, particularly with its forensic examination in Committee and subsequent stages of Bills, and in the work of the Select Committees. Those Select Committees produce reports which are revered way beyond this House and they have an important role in helping guide government policy or in throwing a spotlight on issues which have been neglected by Governments. I believe that the way we are now going forward to reduce the numbers will affect the effectiveness with which this House performs. Let us remember also that, when it comes to considering Bills in detail, the House of Commons has long since given up any pretension of looking at Bills in any detail. When I was a young MP—God knows how many years ago now—it was an important part, but over the years that has diminished and diminished, and I suspect that the newer intake of MPs do not even realise that that was an important function. In my view, it should still be. I am concerned particularly about the impact on the Cross-Benchers, which has already been alluded to. I am very unhappy about it. The noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, pointed out that a measly two Peers are appointed each year. I would like to hear from the Leader whether this will change, because to me it is extremely important that this is revised. Indeed, I would go further: I would like the commission to be made statutory and given proper powers, but that is perhaps going wider than we should at this point. On having an age limit, I remember how as a young woman I was told, “Oh, you’re much too young to do that—you haven’t got the experience. No, no, no”. But before you can say knife, you are too old. So, I am not happy with any kind of limit. I fully agree that we need to deal with the relatively small number of Peers who are incapable. However, it certainly does not deal with the pre-80s who may be functioning and may attend the relatively easy amount of 20% but still contribute pretty little. They will have a free rein, whereas there are so many—I confess that I am well over 80, so I am pretty soon for the chop if it goes ahead—who give of their wisdom, experience and knowledge, and I would be very loath to see that go. Your Lordships will therefore not be surprised to learn that I am opposed to the suggestion that we should help ourselves by a resolution. I also take the point that we are on very difficult legal ground. I think it was the noble Lords, Lord Wolfson and Lord Redwood, who gave cogent arguments against relying on doing it ourselves, saying that it should be done by legislation. I agree with that. It is right and proper that that should be the case. It was the Government’s decision to put it in their party manifesto at the election, so they should take it forward in what I regard as the proper constitutional position. Your Lordships will not be surprised to hear that I am not prepared to help the Government in any way to build the guillotine by which I and so many others will be decapitated.
Baroness Goudie (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the committee for this report on retirement and participation, for their thorough work on this report, and for giving the House its clear direction as a result of a thorough consultation process. I also thank my good friend, my noble friend Lady Taylor, for chairing the committee and for being available to every Member of this House and to other organisations to talk about the report so that everyone knew where we were coming from. I welcome the Government’s manifesto commitment to introduce a retirement age in the House and the steps taken to advance the pledge that we have here today. By allowing the House to lead this issue, rather than proceeding immediately to legislation, we have created the space for a sensible and considered conversation and approach, allowing for the best outcome. As the committee itself recognised, the House is better placed to control the transition, and of the practical detail, if it takes the lead through a resolution of the whole House rather than waiting for a legislative process. The committee has proposed a retirement age of 80 and a minimum participation threshold of 20% of sitting days. I worry about participation. We need to have very clear rules, on induction of new Peers, about participation in the House and the work of the House—not only here but its work outside, such as working with universities, with the UN and with the Council of Europe, as many of our Members do. It is all those global things they do as well as being part of this House, representing us where they can. That is additional to other things, but just turning up 20% of the time is not enough; I think people have to be active within the House. I know some people will disagree with me on these things, but I think it is very important. Both suggestions will avoid a problematically high number of departures and will ensure that the House continues to benefit from the full experience of active Members as long as they are able to contribute. I look forward to the Government’s response, which I understand will be given later this year, and I support them in taking their time to consider these proposals carefully, given their particular significance for the future shape and functioning of this House and our democracy by relation.
Lord Howard of Rising (Con)
My Lords, I am not sure if one has to declare an interest now, if you are an old man, but anyway. I am told that the reason for wishing to get rid of Members of this House who are over 80 is that there are too many Peers. I cannot think why this opinion is held, when there is absolutely no evidence to support it. We are trying to solve a problem that does not exist. Except for the rarest occasions, there is always a seat in this Chamber. When not in the Chamber, there is always space in the Library, the Salisbury Room or the Peers’ Writing Room. The maximum number of Peers going through the voting Lobby on any one occasion in the last year was, as my noble friend Lord True pointed out, 475. If we want to spread our net a bit wider, we see that the average number voting in Divisions in the last two years was 319, and these numbers of course include hereditary Peers, who have been got rid of, so the numbers in practice would be smaller. At the last State Opening of Parliament, Peers had to be moved around by the doorkeepers to stop the place looking empty. They were all too embarrassed at what it might look like in front of the TV cameras. When the Labour Government under Tony Blair made the timetabling of Bills normal practice, it prevented the other place having sufficient time to properly examine new legislation. This resulted in an even greater revising duty being placed on this House. For this House to do its job properly in Committee on a Bill, a sufficient number of Peers is required who know the subject well enough to make sensible, constructive comments—Peers who are prepared to sit from after Questions until 10 pm with just a short dinner break; I will not upset you all by commenting on the food. We need a large pool to find enough Peers meeting these criteria for the many and diverse subjects which go through this House. How do we find them without a large number of Peers to call on? In my view, there is something even more important than the practical difficulty I have just outlined. I am shocked by this discrimination against a group of Peers—of which I am one, by the way. First, it was hereditary Peers; now it is the over-80s. What will be next? What would this Government next like to get rid of? Is it the Liberal Democrats?
A noble Lord
Hear, hear!
Lord Howard of Rising (Con)
Or would they like to limit the number of Cross-Benchers, or former trade union officials? The idea that, under the cloak of claiming that the House is too large, a Government, of whatever political persuasion, can play fast and loose with Members of the second Chamber is truly shocking. I leave your Lordships with one thought. On 5 January 2026, an amendment on the Chagos Islands was tabled and moved successfully by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig of Radley. He was 96.
Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, and her committee for their report and the thoughtful way in which they have approached the subject, on which there are, unsurprisingly, strongly held views. There is much in the report that I agree with: membership of this House should carry responsibilities, and the public are entitled to expect active participation from those entrusted with the role. However, I am less convinced that the proposals before us address the wider questions facing this House. My assumption is that the purpose of introducing a retirement age is at least in part to address concerns about the size and composition of your Lordships’ House. Indeed, the Labour Party’s manifesto argued that because appointments are for life, the second Chamber has become too large and it committed to introducing a mandatory retirement age. If that remains the Government’s objective, I would welcome some clarity from the Leader of the House in response to this debate. Is the primary purpose of a retirement age to reduce the size of the House? If that is the objective, I struggle to see how retirement alone will achieve it. The committee makes that point. It notes that increasing departures from a retirement age will not reduce the size of the House if those departures are used simply as opportunities to make additional appointments. It also observes that focusing only on departures and not arrivals will have limited effects. I think the committee is right. The unlimited power of the Prime Minister to appoint whomever they wish to a job for life cannot be ignored. For many years, proposals such as those contained in the Burns report have recognised that reducing the size of the House requires restraint in appointments. Without some mechanism to manage inflow, we risk treating the symptoms while leaving the underlying problem unresolved. I confess to some disappointment that the committee did not look more favourably on the idea of term limits, although I was pleased to hear the support for them from a committee member, the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos. We should think seriously about the principle that no parliamentary position should be held indefinitely. Being a Member of this House should not be something that we cling to for life. We have failed in our duty if we have not encouraged, mentored and prepared the next generation or the next expert to contribute more effectively than we ever could. I say this as someone who, under the committee’s recommendations, would be retiring in 2076. Regular renewal is healthy. Fresh perspectives are healthy. Term limits would also create a culture in which Members know that their time is finite. That encourages people to participate, contribute and make a positive impact. Quite frankly, I do not think that positions for life are a particularly healthy principle in a modern democracy. On participation, I welcome the committee’s recognition that the current threshold is too low and that reform is needed. The proposed requirement is a step forward, but I emphasise that this is a small improvement rather than a transformational one. Participation matters, but participation requirements alone will not address the deeper questions that continue to surround this House. The new Prime Minister described this House as “scandalous” during his recent by-election. I therefore look forward to seeing what is presented by the Prime Minister. As noble Lords know, I have a strong interest in wider reforms of your Lordships’ House. I have a Private Member’s Bill due for Second Reading later this year to explore the next stage of the Government’s manifesto commitment to replace the House of Lords with an alternative second Chamber. While I welcome this report and the practical transitional recommendations it contains, I hope that the Leader of the House can clarify how the Government believe that these proposals will achieve the objectives set out in Labour’s manifesto. If the intention is to reduce the size of the House and strengthen public confidence, what measures will accompany retirement and participation requirements to address appointments and membership as a whole? I look forward to hearing the rest of this very interesting debate and to my retirement in 2076.
Baroness Eaton (Con)
My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, and her committee, for their work. As one of the House’s endangered species, being in the over-80 bracket, I was reluctant to put my name on the speakers’ list. Clearly, I have an interest in the outcome of the process. As the speakers’ list is sizeable, it is very unlikely that I will add anything new or exceptional to the debate. However, the more I pondered the issue for debate, the more I became unclear about the assumed problem that the supporters of the proposals are claiming and aiming to resolve. So I look forward very much to the Leader of the House responding to the question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. Why are Peers aged over 80 perceived as such a problem? Institutional memory is vital. Those of us who have been involved in large institutions and organisations where we have seen a raft of senior figures leave or be removed know of the dangers that follow—the dangers of the constant reinventing of the wheel, as so often happens. I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, raised the issue of discrimination. Age discrimination does not relate to mental capacity, health or ability to contribute. If any Members of your Lordships’ House develop issues of limited capacity, I understand that we have powers and caring ways of helping to resolve the issue, both for them and for the House. These mechanisms are already in existence. Members under 80 may also lose capacity. The scrutiny work of this House is vital. As we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, at Monday’s Second Reading, the other place is failing to thoroughly scrutinise much of the legislation it sends to us. Thorough scrutiny by this House is essential. I understand that 301 Peers will be reaching the age of 80 by 2029. This loss will have a serious destabilising effect on the Chamber. Committees will be underpopulated and the daily functioning of the House could be seriously disrupted. We are regularly told that as a nation we have an increasing elderly population. Surely the elderly need representation in this House. We, the elderly, have experience and understanding of the problems of being old. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, for his comments on diversity and inclusion, which were very appropriate in this context. I have heard many speakers who disagree, but it is still not certain why these proposals are perceived as necessary. If the aim is to have a smaller House, why not use participation in the Chamber and the contribution made to the working of the House to guide such decisions? I look forward to hearing the Leader of the House’s responses.
Lord Sikka (Lab)
My Lords, I support some of the committee’s suggestions but not others. I have never knowingly supported discrimination based on gender, race, religion, disability or age and will not support a mandatory retirement age of 80 for Members of this House. There are excellent Members of that age and above who have brought unparalleled wisdom and experience to this House. It is worth noting that the UK does not have a general retirement age. Though we have a state pension age, the two are not the same. There is no mandatory retirement age for an MP, Prime Minister, Head of State, councillor, company director or mayor. People can continue in office for as long as they can discharge their duties. Therefore, the introduction of one retirement age for Members of this House is inappropriate. Yes, there is a maximum retirement age for judges and magistrates, but the crucial difference is that in most cases they make decisions as individuals, whereas Members in this House make decisions collectively. Some have argued that forced retirement at 80 will help to renew this House while bringing in younger Peers. There is no barrier to that and it is good to see younger Peers in this House. Some complain that we have too many Peers, but that has not prevented parties appointing new ones. I have no problem with a 20% attendance requirement as a condition for continued membership of this House. However, I wonder who will be sending reminders to Members of how close they are to the 20% threshold and what the scenes will be in the last chance saloon. I can understand the committee’s difficulties in grappling with a possible requirement to ask for participation instead of attendance. Participation depends on potluck in the ballots and whether the Bills fall within noble Lords’ area of expertise. During Oral Questions, Members can bob up and down but may not catch the Government Whip’s eye. Some may wish to be a member of a committee but may not be favoured by the party Whip and be silenced. Ultimately, we need to distinguish working Peers from the rest, and as an emeritus professor, I like the concept of an emeritus Peer—there is a kind of symmetry to it. The reform that I really wish to see is unfortunately beyond the remit of the committee—the replacement of this House by an elected Chamber. In the 21st century, we should not have an unelected Chamber of political appointees, with reserved seats for clergy from just one religious denomination. Other countries have two elected chambers of Parliament, and we should learn from their experiences. This possible reform raises complex constitutional issues and needs broad and prolonged public conversations. The last thing we need is a clone of the House of Commons, where ruling parties over the years have curtailed debates and leaders have silenced critical voices by banishing dissenters altogether. It is also unacceptable to have both Houses under the control of one party, and its Members must not be on the payroll of private interests either. Therefore, I urge the Government to begin the process of a meaningful reform of the House of Lords and bring proposals forward so that we can make the desired constitutional change as soon as possible.
Lord Balfe (Con)
My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, has gone somewhere, but I congratulate her on presiding over this report. I would have thought it was almost impossible to get an agreement. From time to time, people ask me what is unique about the House of Lords, and my answer is quite simple: it is the only pensioners’ Parliament in the world. We have in this House a lot of experience, a lot of age and most of us have been in some area of the public realm. That is why it works: because there are a lot of former MPs, MEPs and trade union officials here, but, basically, people have worked within the system of the rule of law, and that is part of our success. Briefly, I would like to remind people that this week we welcomed the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson, to the House—he is 77 years old. I am sure he will make a distinguished commitment, as he has during his working life, but to bring him in at 77 and throw him out at 80 does not seem to be sensible, friendly or well thought out. My next point is for the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, who is also not here. He mentioned the difficulty of having an emeritus association and the difficulty of it representing Scotland, where a lot of people live a long way from London. I was the person who established the European Parliament Former Members Association. It now has members stretching from the north of Norway right through the continent to Cyprus. It can be done, but it is not cheap. One of the problems our former members always had with the Brits was that they were always trying to do things on the cheap, not pay their subs and get away with things. If we want a proper former Members of the House of Lords association, we are looking at £300,000 to £400,000 a year to build a structure that would actually work and keep people in touch. Next, I will touch briefly on compulsory retirement. I just do not agree. We have had many speeches, and I agree with them all. It is the wrong way forward, and I certainly will not be voting for it. One problem with a compulsory age of retirement, quite simply, is that it does not distinguish between people. I have been a member of the group run by the noble Lord, Lord Norton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, for many years, and I have consistently said there, “If you want to get retirements, you’ve got to give people some form of financial recompense”. We pretend that everyone in here is a millionaire. There are many Members of this Chamber who rely on their daily allowance to keep their standard of living up. I think that after a period of years here, we should be able to rely on some sort of termination payment. If we wanted to retire people at 80, we could make 80 the peak year and let it then fall back, but we cannot just throw people out. I began life as a trade union officer, long before I was in politics, and we never expected people to work for nothing. We always regarded that people should be paid and should be paid fairly. If people come into this House and they get an income, frankly it should not just be taken away from them, leaving them deprived of any financial recompense. If you want retirements, get yourself a financial proposal which enables people to retire with some sort of pension, and, if you like, base it around 80 and then bring it down, but do not just throw people out. I do not believe that that is fair or acceptable. I hope these thoughts have been of some value. If we move to the next stage, I may well table an amendment about a pension or financial recompense for people who are thrown out.
Baroness Hollins (CB)
My Lords, this is a thoughtful and well-argued report; I just do not agree with all its conclusions. I suggest that in some ways it could have been braver. In paragraph 26, for example, the report says that its remit included considering the impact of its recommendations on the size, functioning and membership of the House. To me, this includes what happens after an age limit has been implemented. The public discourse focuses in part on size and participation, and a fixed age will have no impact on either of those unless we also look at how people come in. There has also been a lot of talk about the lack of any limit on the number of life peerages which a Prime Minister can recommend. We could require experienced and active Members of the House to leave at 80, only for their places to be filled or more through prime ministerial patronage. The Lord Speaker’s committee proposed an overall limit on the size of the House, with appointments linked to departures and allocated according to an agreed formula. I would go further than that committee and propose an annual limit on prime ministerial appointments. So, if 46 leave each year, as current projections suggest if the age limit of 80 is introduced, a cap of 46 new appointments could be applied. Further to my noble friend Lord Patel’s number crunching, I estimate that the percentage of Cross-Benchers will have dropped from 20% to less than 8% by 2034. Therefore, at least 20% of all new appointments would need to be Cross-Benchers. Maybe that is worth thinking about, because Cross-Benchers bring a very particular expertise and tend to be appointed at an older age. We are a revising Chamber and much of what we bring here is accumulated knowledge, judgment and experience, and those attributes do not necessarily disappear on our 80th birthday. I find myself troubled by one aspect of the proposed solution: the assumption that a particular birthday is the best way of deciding when somebody should stop contributing. I have spent much of my professional career thinking about disability, mental capacity and the assumptions we make about people’s abilities. I have learned that we have to be really careful about using a characteristic such as age or disability as a proxy for capacity. People age very differently. Some people at 80 have lost abilities they once had; others remain intellectually vigorous, extraordinarily knowledgeable and capable of making a contribution which would be very difficult to replace; and, of course, incapacity can occur at any age. Are we asking the right question? Rather than simply asking how old a Member is, should we not simply ask whether they are still making a valuable contribution and are able and willing to continue doing so? I would suggest a slight modification: let it be the expectation that retirement at 80 is the norm but not necessarily an absolute rule. There is a separate, and sensitive, question of health and capacity. I am not suggesting routine medical examinations or cognitive tests at 80—like those you have to have for driving, for example, not that they are very effective—as that would risk confusing age with incapacity and disability with incapacity, which are two mistakes we have tried to eliminate elsewhere in society. But we should not avoid the issue altogether. This is the key point: if there is substantial reason to believe that a Member, at any age, no longer has the capacity to discharge the responsibilities of membership, we must have a fair, dignified and confidential way of addressing it, based, where necessary, on independent professional evidence and with proper safeguards. Finally, I agree with an earlier speaker that age does not confer superiority, but Members over the age of 80 have experience of the needs and life experience of the fastest-growing generations in our population. The House would be poorer if we entirely lost their experience.
Viscount Stansgate (Lab)
My Lords, I begin by joining the queue of noble Lords who have paid tribute to my noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton and the committee for the work that they did—they produced a good report. I know they did not publish any of the evidence, but I hope that historians of the future will have access to that evidence as part of the business of explaining how the House has evolved over the years. I do not, in fact, envy my noble friend the Leader of the House for the job of trying to sum up today’s debate, given the range of speakers we have had so far and what is still to come. Is there any Member here who does not have an interest in the outcome of this debate? The answer is: I doubt it. I am sure many Members looked at the report and, the moment they saw it, turned to the point at which they would know their own end date. I am no exception, but I hope the House will understand if I say that I have been here before and, for the most of the last two and a half years, I was only too conscious of the fact of the effects of the final day of the previous Session. The whole House knows the significance of the issues identified in the report, and they arise as a result of a manifesto commitment by my party at the last election, but I admit to being slightly conflicted by two arguments. One is that it should be for the Government themselves to bring forward proposals on a mandatory retirement age, if that is what is planned; the other is that it is perhaps better for this House to take what action it can, because the government Bill considered by the Commons might well find itself broadened well beyond the subject matter of this report. On balance, I can see the case for us to take action ourselves where our objectives can be achieved by non-legislative means. There is a broader context to this debate. It is both about the case for reducing the size of the House and about our relationship with the House of Commons. The other night, we listened to my noble friend Lord Rooker make some very persuasive points about the extent to which it increasingly falls to us to scrutinise government legislation that the same Government themselves effectively prevent the House of Commons considering properly by the use of the timetable Motion and the guillotine. Meanwhile, efforts in this House to reduce our size—I pay tribute to the work of the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and others—have not yet succeeded and cannot, partly because we have no ability effectively to reduce the power of prime ministerial patronage, hence the proposals before us today. I admit to being ambivalent about the retirement age, though I appreciate the committee’s suggested phasing in of it over a number of years. Why? It is not just because it jars with the principles of discrimination against people who are older, and we live in a country where the population itself is getting older. Funnily enough, I bumped into a group of schoolchildren today when I was in the House early this morning and I asked them, “Do you think it is unfair that you should throw people out of Parliament at the age of 80?” Amazingly, the vast majority of that school group put up their hands and said that, yes, they thought it was unfair. It was quite interesting. I am slightly nervous about a fixed retirement age. It would never be applied to the House of Commons for this reason: you could never restrict the rights of the electorate to elect whomever they wish to serve in that place. I know that there are many Members of this House who are over 80 and who make an extraordinary contribution, and continue to do so, to the work of the House. A mention was made of Lord Mackay of Clashfern. I was sitting on the Benches opposite when he made his final remarks on leaving the House. He was cogent. He made some very good points. He said he had reached the view that he had reassessed certain legislation, even though he had introduced that legislation decades earlier. He was 95. My point really is that capacity is perhaps a better guide than mere age to what matters. By contrast, there are Members decades younger than that noble Lord who do not often come, speak or vote—in short, they do not often participate. In my opinion, this can bring the House into disrepute. That is why I find myself in much greater sympathy with the report’s recommendations on participation. I entirely understand the reference to the risks of performative activity, but the right balance has to be found to enable the House to fulfil its core functions: scrutinising legislation, holding the Government of the day to account, engaging in committee work and raising issues for debate. I think the report’s recommendations are a stage further forward. I end by saying this: I am one of those Members who regards this place as a workshop and not a museum. I consider myself a working Peer, and it was on that basis that I stood for election to this House. I will listen to the rest of the debate with great interest. In my experience of this place, which goes well beyond my time here—it will be five years this month since I first arrived—incremental change is usually what works best.
Lord Blackwell (Con)
My Lords, many speakers in this debate, including the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, made the arguments against an arbitrary age limit, so I will not repeat them other than to say that I agree with them. As I look, in particular, at some of the long-serving Peers who sit on the Privy Council Benches, it seems to me that Parliament will be weaker and much less effective if we lose their experience and institutional memory. I will spend some time talking about the attendance requirement. Your view on that depends on what kind of House you believe we should be and what kind of membership we should have. I pay tribute to those Peers who are regular attenders here—almost every day—whose main activity is the legislation passing through this House. The House needs those Members, we depend on them to get the business done, and they are true public servants. But I also believe that the House benefits tremendously from those more part-time Peers, whose main career is outside politics and who bring the expertise and that wider, parallel experience into Parliament. The value of contribution to this House is measured not just by the frequency of attendance and speaking but by the quality of the contributions. Although the primary function of the House is detailed scrutiny of legislation, I think the House also has an important constitutional role as an ultimate backstop against the Government on major issues. Having a wider group of Peers who are not necessarily here every day but will come in, vote, listen and attend on those major issues is another strength of the House. On that basis, although the threshold of 20% that has been suggested might seem reasonable, when you think about it, meaningful attendance of a day a week will be too limiting for those who maintain an active career outside Parliament. I would not want to hold myself up as any kind of role model, and I have now retired from active commercial activity, but I suspect that my experience of the changing scope for participation through my career is representative of many others’. I joined this House almost 30 years ago and, like many others, had a background of a mixed career in business and in policy development across Whitehall. When I arrived, I was in full-time employment in a corporate role. I made arrangements to attend when I felt I could contribute, but I had the advantage of working and living in London. Had I worked and lived elsewhere in the United Kingdom, I would have found it very difficult, even on a passing 15-minute tick-the-box exercise, to be in the House one day in five every week. I then moved on and I had a period as a non-executive director with a portfolio career. That gave me much more capacity to be involved over a period of years. But then I moved on to another role where I was chairman of a major UK bank for over seven years, and during that period that activity naturally took primacy. That kind of experience over a period of years is typical of many Members of this House who have maintained an active role in a profession or career outside, whether in law, medicine, teaching or any other activity, which does not necessarily enable them to spend one day every week on average participating in the House, but nevertheless, when they do come, they have experience and expertise to bring. The House benefits from that experience and wider engagement. I understand that there is a demand for some kind of participation requirement, but I urge the House and the Minister to consider whether a lower threshold would be more acceptable in terms of keeping those Members of the House who can contribute in that way—for example, 10%, or once a fortnight, would be much more reasonable but still imply people were actively involved. I urge the House and the Minister to think again about that threshold required to ensure that we do not exclude people who can make a major contribution.
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.
Baroness Seccombe (Con)
My Lords, I want to add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, for the many months that she and her committee wrestled with this matter, but I cannot accept the report. I feel strongly that some Peers do not consider all the relevant issues before accepting a peerage. The first thing I did was to find out my husband’s views. He had had a stroke, and I knew his life would change if I was away most of the week. He was, of course, delighted for me and we worked together on how we would make it work. I know others who reorganise their arrangements before entering the House, planning their future, knowing that they would be here for life or when they wished to retire. Now they face an about-turn which could have many ramifications, while those who enter early in their 30s and 40s will have the privilege of spending tens of years of service in the House. I hate retrospective legislation, and I think this proposal would be a mistake. With the world in such a topsy-turvy state, it would be wise to go into the next election with all the stability we could muster.
Baroness Andrews (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness. I am very much in support of this report, and I congratulate my noble friend, as so many other people have already. I do so with the privilege of having been in this House for 27 years. I appreciate enormously the vast range of expertise and experience in this House, but I have always thought that there should be a retirement age, not as an expulsion but as a matter of course. I am grateful now that we have the responsibility ourselves as a self-regulating House to decide, if we take the opportunity, what is best for the House as a whole in the future. I am very impressed by the work of the committee and for the careful and very inclusive way that it listened to so many opposing, passionate views, many of which we have heard around the House tonight, but it still agreed on what I think was a fair and practical solution. We have to consider the context. The committee has done its work in very heavy weather. Democratic politics can no longer be taken for granted. Much as we cannot expect this House to survive without radical intervention, the rule of law, as we have debated in this House recently, is under siege. The guardianship of the constitution is at issue. It is all the more important that Parliament retains respect and is truly effective and fit for purpose. The House cannot be defended against change, but a retirement age creates the opportunity to think not just about the size and composition of the House but about what it needs to match the huge demands on it in the future, not least the changing nature of expertise, as well as perpetual questions about credibility and dignity as Members of the House grow older and more frail. Capacity varies enormously; we know that. I accept and am grateful for the phasing of retirement between 80 and 85, just as I am grateful that the ludicrous notion of a mass exit at any point, with all its perverse and undignified consequences, was put down. I am also relieved that the idea of a participation bar was rejected. There is no fair way of doing that. Given the present size of the House and the way that, frankly, we do not make full use of our current expertise, a participation measure would have been bizarre as well as impossible to enforce. Much better to have attendance as a standard. Therefore, the committee avoided the two huge bear traps, but it has come to the difficult but rational conclusion that age has to be a factor in future. I agree with that, just as I agree that our older Members have a unique and impartial wisdom and an invaluable institutional memory. Even if that institutional memory is rarely called upon, it is an aide-memoire for what can go wrong, alongside all the missed opportunities that might still be there. It covers not just the revision of legislation and scrutiny but how we manage the House and our relationships within it. But there is no doubt that institutional memory can also have a chilling effect on change. We in this House are past masters at arguing the case for unripe time. We must be brave in recognising that the time is ripe. Judgment may improve in ways with age, but I do not think that the other value we hold close—our expertise—is of equal measure, and I speak from experience. Knowledge has never moved more quickly; nor has it raised such hard, ethical or existential questions. We must look at the scope for a continual renewal of knowledge in this House, whether it is the regulation of AI, hard choices over scarce resources or providing what young people need for a very different future. I agree that we must look at the way in which noble Lords come into this house. That brings me to the size of the House. I do not think that there is any one right size; nor can we predict the future size of this House, but it should be smaller and nimbler, and we achieve that only if we have the courage to radically think hard about how we do legislation and scrutiny. Indeed, we do not have to wait to do that; I think the House is already too large to be effective in many respects. I profoundly believe that the House has a duty of care to older Members but at the moment it is difficult to exercise that. Phasing in retirement gives us predictability and safety for the future. As so often, I have turned to Trollope for a perspective. In his final book, The Fixed Period , he foresees a future British colony. A young unicameral parliament decides that the national lifespan should be 67 to improve productivity. The only recompense is that at age 66, in the final year, citizens will be provided with all their hearts’ desires. His prescription goes even further than the Labour Party manifesto, and I am not recommending it, but I shall certainly be taking advantage of what that last year holds. Most importantly, let us, for goodness’ sake, decide for ourselves what is best and embed that decision within the practices and principles of this House. We do not need legislation to bring change.
Lord Farmer (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews. It is worth reflecting on Ian Dunt’s comments on How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn’t : “There is a place with a proud record of standing up to government. It works diligently and thanklessly to improve legislation. It applies expertise to policy. It seeks consensus. It is independent minded and rejects partisan point-scoring. It acts with a seriousness that is absent almost anywhere else in the political system. It is the House of Lords”. Participation requirements would enhance that contribution. This is a job, not a status. We are legislators, so voting should count. However, as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Ideas become refined by us being together, listening to and disagreeing courteously with each other. Prospective Members should be informed before their appointment is finalised what sustained contribution to this House entails, and that it is expected from day one. Requiring retirement would, however, threaten what Dunt admires. The 2024 Labour manifesto said: “Although Labour recognises the good work of many peers who scrutinise the government and improve the quality of legislation passed in Parliament … Too many peers do not play a proper role in our democracy”. It is peculiarly ageist to have a cut-off point at 80 when many octogenarians are contributing very substantially while some younger Peers, often by virtue of other significant responsibilities, are not. Declaring an interest, I, like many others, if this report were implemented, would be retiring in 2029. For me, declining cognitive and possibly physical ability might require retirement at some point, but not age. As long as I can contribute to society through my work here, I think I should. To him who has been given much, much will be expected. As an aside, it is assumed that noble Lords leaning on the red Benches with their eyes closed are asleep when actually we have our ears to the speakers in the rosettes and are concentrating hard. Perhaps it is the sound system that is archaic and needs retiring, not those using it. We are a self-regulating house. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, I have concerns about declining cognitive abilities that should be dealt with sensitively by party Whips or others with seniority who might ask trusted colleagues to initiate difficult conversations. They could encourage reduced participation, suggest retirement or even agree that a Peer will not speak. There is already subtle pressure in this House not to outstay one’s welcome. I hope someone would take me to one side if needed. I have seen this work: someone with a remarkable work history and a strong track record of contribution here began to show effects of dementia. A Peer they trusted gently suggested that they lay down their responsibilities, and they did. Any Peer might need this. Some 5% to 7% of dementia sufferers in the UK are aged below 65. To reiterate, it is simply ageist to tie ability to age, but, more importantly, we are here to serve the country, not ourselves. Firing the over-80s disenfranchises the many octogenarians, nonagenarians and centenarians still contributing enormously to our society. The rigours of the Second World War are still in their hearts and bones. Their perspective is invaluable, and a nation that forgets its past is in danger of repeating its mistakes. David Attenborough is 100 and the late Queen died at 96, but there are many older men and women in more ordinary walks of life who still contribute enormously. One of the four centenarians in this year’s honours list received the BEM, indicating remarkable community service. I appreciate the committee’s efforts to smooth the transition for existing Peers so that retirement is not suddenly forced upon them and the House is not suddenly bereft of subject expertise and experience. But even with the committee’s more gradualist plans, we have heard that almost 60% of Cross-Benchers would be gone by 2034. I will end with Dylan Thomas, and I think my noble friend Lord True started with Dylan Thomas. We should not “go gentle into that good night” of auto-retirement. For those of us still in command of our faculties, still up for the job, “Old age should burn”, although maybe not rave, until “close of day”.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in this debate. I thank the Retirement and Participation Committee, and in particular the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, as chair, for such a well-constructed report, which I believe makes sound suggestions for the continued reform of the House following the legislation associated with hereditary Members. I spoke in support of the Burns report, which recommended fixed terms of 15 years, but acknowledge that this issue was not widely accepted at the time. The report before us today acknowledges that some Members find fixed terms an attractive proposition; however, the committee concluded that the potential benefits of fixed-term appointments were outweighed by the potential disadvantages and that this might deter potential younger Members from joining the House. The House is not reflective of our population in generational representation, or rural and ethnic diversity. In the longer term, I suggest it will be necessary to return to that issue of whether fixed-term appointments, say of 20 or 25 years, particularly for new appointees, would not only be effective in containing the size of the House but result in more multigenerational representation within our body. I am particularly impressed by the ingenuity of Appendix 4, which explains in plain English how transitional arrangements would work in practice regarding a retirement age of 80. If accepted, the recommendations would provide certainty to all our Members about their own anticipated retirement date—I would be one of the first to go on the dot of 80. In Table 1, the committee members demonstrate how they will be affected, illustrating their personal commitments to the Nolan principles of public life. It is an honour and a privilege to attend this House. Committee members presenting this report acknowledge this while recommending a solution that will affect us all, including themselves, that is consistent with upholding integrity, selflessness and leadership as they apply to appointed public officeholders. I came here through the Appointments Commission, when the chair was the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, as a people’s Peer, based largely on my expertise in nursing. In the four countries of the UK, there are currently 500,000 nurses on the professional register—probably a little more. Would it not be arrogant of me to say that we could not at least find suitable replacements for my expertise as I approach the age of 80? With certainty on my retirement date, subject to my not succumbing to illness and earlier retirement, the nursing profession would undoubtedly plan to work with me to identify a range of excellent potential replacements to apply to the Appointments Commission. I am certain that similar potential succession plans could occur across the House resulting in excellent new appointments, bringing contemporary knowledge and experience to inform the work of the House. Like others, I am concerned about the size of the Cross Benches. With the recent deaths of Lord Laming and, a little while ago, Baroness Howarth, we are very short of social work practice and knowledge, particularly in child protection. We should be looking at these issues. I fully support the recommendations and want to thank the committee members again for a carefully considered review of evidence and the manifesto commitment to introduce a retirement age. The recommendations will protect some of our youngest Members who have given up other career opportunities understanding that their appointments would be for life. Reducing this to 80 seems a fair approach for younger Members too, as the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, said earlier. It also avoids the necessity of considering the introduction of an occupational health assessment at a predetermined age to ensure competency and safety in the workplace, in line with other professions. I also express my support for the idea of an emeritus association. I live five hours away, but I would be happy to pay my fare if I wanted to come up and meet a group of friends, as I do on other occasions with other Members. Watching Last Night of the Proms, I saw a new definition of AI –that Dolly Parton had always had authentic integrity. I challenge us as a body to display a similar approach to this particularly important report.
Lord Norton of Louth (Con)
My Lords, the most important words in the report of the Select Committee are not in the conclusions but in the opening summary: “We are bound by our remit.” As the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said earlier, form should follow function. The Government have focused on form. That has tied the hands of the committee. Good law is a public good. That must be front and centre in addressing what this place is for. This House is core to ensuring that Bills brought forward by government are as good as they can be to deliver what the measure seeks to achieve. This is a task that, if not fulfilled by this House, is not going to be carried out at all. An arbitrary age limit will remove some Members who contribute significantly to legislative scrutiny, bringing to bear experience that is exclusive to them, while retaining Members who make no significant contribution. Expecting Members to attend for a certain percentage of sittings may remove some who are not making much of a contribution but, again, it is a blunt weapon. It is not sufficiently calibrated to deliver the core task of the House. It would make more sense to have more sophisticated participation criteria, focusing on quality rather than quantity. If we go for targeted, qualitative participation, as recommended by the Campaign for an Effective Second Chamber, we both achieve a reduction in numbers and enhance the meaningful participation of Members. The Select Committee has come up with formulas for retirement and participation that could be delivered by the House. There is an obvious principled objection to that; namely, that it should not be for the House to use its procedures to deliver government policy. We have heard the argument that implementing the committee’s recommendations means that we are in control of what happens, but that is akin to a kidnapper letting the victim tie their own hands. If the Government introduce legislation, that will provide us with the opportunity to use the Bill to deal with a problem that is not within the Select Committee’s remit but is addressed by the Labour Party’s manifesto. Any reform focused on composition must address how Members come here and not, in isolation, how they leave. Simply removing Members at a certain age creates the opportunity, as we have heard, for the Prime Minister to fill the House with new nominees. That is open to criticism from the perspective of sheer size. Much more importantly, it is objectionable if those nominated do not have the skills and commitment necessary to contribute to the work of this House, especially in the core task of legislative scrutiny. We need workhorses, not grandstanders or theatregoers. A Constitution Unit survey some years ago found that the public rank trust in the appointments process as the most important factor in determining the legitimacy of this House. We should be driven by what is in the best interests not of this House but of the nation in delivering good law. I have three questions for the Lord Privy Seal. First, does she agree that form should follow function? Secondly, does she recognise that the public attach more importance to the process by which Peers are appointed than to how they leave? Thirdly, given that, can she tell us what the Government will do to implement their manifesto commitment to reform the process by which people are nominated for peerages? That is the most pressing issue.
Lord Kakkar (CB)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, and, in so doing, join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, for the very thoughtful way in which she introduced this important report and the work of her committee. I want to follow the noble Lord, Lord Norton, by building on the question of appointments—I declare a former interest as chair of the House of Lords Appointments Commission. In the proposals that your Lordships are considering today, it is clear that on 8 July 2029 as many as 135 vacancies could be created. From recent experience, we have seen that some 50% of all Peers appointed by a Prime Minister are appointed in the first two years of an Administration. There might well be a temptation and a perceived opportunity for a new Prime Minister to make a substantial number of appointments to your Lordships’ House. The point has been well made that this will have an impact on achieving the objective of reducing the size of your Lordships’ House and may have important implications for the effectiveness of the scrutiny that your Lordships’ House can deliver. There is another, more important, fundamental constitutional risk: a jeopardy associated with continuing to provide the unfettered opportunity for more appointments to your Lordships’ House. This rests on Clause 2(1) of the Parliament Act 1911, which reserves for your Lordships’ House a unique, retained veto over measures passed by the other place to prevent the other place passing a measure that would extend the life of a Parliament beyond five years. It is the only veto that your Lordships’ House retains. The importance of this matter was considered in a case by your Lordships’ Appellate Committee at the time—the case of Jackson v Attorney-General—which examined whether the Parliament Act procedure could be used to force the House of Lords, despite that restriction in the 1911 Act, to ensure that a measure could be passed to extend the life of a Parliament beyond five years without the consent of your Lordships’ House. At that time, your Lordships’ Appellate Committee decided by a majority that this measure could not be applied to overcome the restriction in the 1911 Act. The only way that a Prime Minister, having a majority in the other place, could proceed with extending the life of a Parliament beyond five years would be to ensure an effective majority in your Lordships’ House. Therefore, the independence of your Lordships’ House is absolutely critical. It could be argued that that could have happened at any time since the passage of the Life Peerages Act 1958, but we are now in a process of continuously changing the composition of this House, in particular the way and the number of Peers who might leave it at any given time. It must therefore be a real concern that we take ourselves to a position where there could be an effective majority in your Lordships’ House matching the majority in the other place, and a Government who decided to do so could pass a measure extending the life of a Parliament beyond five years. In so doing, they would deny the electorate the opportunity to give their view on the performance and behaviour of that Government, potentially for an indefinite period. It might be argued that the courts could intervene at that stage and protect democracy. The problem is that Article 9 of the Bill of Rights 1689 would potentially prevent that happening because the measure had been passed on the proper bicameral procedure. I ask the Leader—in considering all the measures carefully laid out in the report led by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton—how constitutional safeguards will be maintained so that we do not find ourselves in a position where an effective majority might be secured in your Lordships’ House in such a way that a Government might proceed as I have described.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Howard of Lympne got to the nub of the question when he asked what all this is for. The answer, at least in part, is as a result of a certain squeamishness. Cognitive decay is cruel and age, as we all know, affects all of us unequally. This retirement proposal is not just about reducing the numbers in this House. At its heart, it seeks to remove those who might, in the colourful words of my noble friend Lord Hamilton, have “lost their marbles”. A retirement age of 80 is really a measure to avoid a hard conversation. While I approve of avoiding awkward conversations, the cost is too high. The loss of expertise and experience would gravely damage the work of this House. Therefore, would a capacity test not be a better measure and allow us to avoid an arbitrary deadline at the age of 80? Consideration of that has been hinted at in other speeches from noble Lords this evening. No doubt such a test of capacity—following the measures that were permitted by this House to be added to the hereditary peers Act—could be conducted with humanity and kindness by the House authorities and, dare I say it, by the Whips. This is an answer that warrants careful consideration. One last point relates to a bugbear of mine. There can be no such thing as a “Peer emeritus”. We have no monopoly on the title “Lord”. Since at least the Acts of Union of 1707 there have been two categories of Peers: parliamentary and non-parliamentary. From 1707 to 1963, the Scottish Peerage elected 16 from among themselves to attend this House. The rest of those Scottish Peers were non-parliamentary. Similarly, from 1801, only 28 of the Irish peerage were sent here to serve in this House. The rest were non-parliamentary Peers. As a result of the iniquitous legislation passed by the Government, all hereditary Peers are now non-parliamentary Peers, unless they have the good fortune also to hold a life peerage. That category of non-parliamentary Peers now includes all life Peers who have retired from this House under the provisions of the 2014 Act. I can therefore reassure the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, that the Lord Privy Seal is entirely right—as is often the case—when she says that those who are not Members of this House are entitled to vote and they are still entitled to use the title that they have been given by the Crown in accordance with their Letters Patent, as is right and proper. This has been the case for many centuries, especially if they are still on the Roll of the Peerage.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
I think I might be correct, but I am sure the noble Lord will correct me if not. The Scottish Lords of Parliament, who were part of those elected to serve after the Acts of Union, had themselves to be re-elected at the start of each new Parliament. They did not have a lifetime right to serve in Parliament, as the noble Lord suggested.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, and thank him. There is a curious quirk that the Irish elected Peers were elected for life, not just for the Parliament. That is the joy of our glorious constitution. It is right that this House is considering the issue of whether a Member should be compelled to carry on serving once they are past their prime, if I might put it like that. The answer is not a hard age bar; the answer is more humane.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
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.
Baroness Foster of Oxton (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord True for his comments. I wish to take noble Lords back to 1969 or 1970. I think most of us in this House—although not all—can probably remember those times fairly clearly. We had two state-owned airlines: BEA and BOAC. They were state-owned airlines, so it was a closed shop if you wanted to join. The trade union representatives were all male. The cabin crew were a mixture, but only the male cabin crew had full-time contracts, in the sense of a career-type contract. I joined BEA, and I have my contract with me today; it is memorabilia. We had no seniority or prospect of promotion to be pursers. One of the key aspects of my employment contract was that there was an age limit. You had to leave either by the time you were 36 or after 10 years. If you left after serving five or 10 years, you would get £300 after five years and £600 after 10 years. If you served the full 10 years, you got an extra £150. The reality was that it was age discrimination. The employer I joined—I was very excited—was open to changing the contract, but my colleagues, the Transport and General Workers’ Union shop stewards, were wholly opposed to the stewardesses receiving an equalising contract. This resulted in my being elected as one of the first female shop stewards in BEA. It was not something I planned, but it happened. I rather enjoyed industrial relations, and I spent quite a few years afterwards being involved in industrial relations. By today’s standards, this was not only sexist but ageist, so we changed the rules and equalised our terms and conditions, and the rest is history. Let us fast forward to today. Five years ago, I was appointed to this House. I did not have a contract, but I had my Letters Patent from Her Majesty the Queen, which meant that I would be here until I died or decided to retire. However, within two years of the Labour Government being elected in 2024, they dispatched our hereditary Peers because of who their fathers were, despite the fact they were a diminishing number of colleagues in this House. I did not agree with that. Now we wish to impose an age limit on Members, including possibly looking at taking retrospective action on those who are already sitting in this House. Notwithstanding that, the Prime Minister recently appointed two Labour Peers aged 81 to this House. I find that quite interesting. That brings me to my conclusion. As has been clearly pointed out by my noble friend Lord Wolfson, we were appointed, and we should be able to remain in this House as long as we choose to, and as long as we contribute to this House. To do otherwise, based on age, is simply age discrimination. Here I am, at the end of my career, yet again in the hands, it appears, of the left, or a Labour Government who purport to stand against discrimination but have no compunction discriminating against Members of this House because of their age.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
My Lords, I thank the right reverend Prelate for his very kind words—totally undeserved but very kind. I very much support this report and its recommendations. As we have a manifesto commitment, it seems to me extremely difficult to go behind it. I am well over the age of 80, so the proposed staggering of the exits of over-80s seems to me entirely sensible; others will have to work out what happens with the loss of Cross-Benchers. I hope the Leader of the House will bear in mind how diminished we are going to be. This will of course affect a number of people coming in late. As the last speaker pointed out, we had two Labour Peers coming in over the age of 80 very recently. It will particularly affect the judiciary, who come in any time over 70, and many at 75, which is the retirement age. As has already been said, many of the judiciary chair committees and have a useful function in this House, and we are very short of judicial Peers at this moment. There is an idea that we do not have to leave, which is perfectly true—quite clearly, the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, is right—but I feel that if we are not wanted, we ought to go. I am much more concerned about participation. The peerage, it seems to me, is the gateway for working in this House, and I think that we really ought to consider whether there should be two sorts of Peers, quite apart from the Peers who do not sit here anyway. I can talk about the first sort, because it happened to me. I happen to have come through HOLAC, and the only question I was asked was, “If you get it, will you turn up?”, to which I said yes—and so I do today. But I believe, and I spoke to the Leader of the House about this some years ago, that there should be another sort of Peer appointed, at the head of the honours system. That Peer would not sit in this House: it would be an honour. But any Peer who is asked to sit in this House really ought to be required to say, “I will not come in unless I am actually going to work”. I do not know whether that happens today. It certainly happens through HOLAC, but I suspect it does not happen through the patronage at No. 10. I would like to see these two sorts of Peers, and I just wonder whether there is any chance that might come about. I believe that a degree of self-denial by Prime Ministers would help enormously to reduce the House and would be much preferable to the present system, and I have to say that I was very disturbed, and remain so, by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar. I think it should be reflected on by this House and possibly discussed again at No. 10. The final thing I want to say is that I oppose legislation. I think this House has to work it out. If we have legislation, it will open the gates in the House of Commons and we do not know what might happen—it could be extremely dangerous for this House.
Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate (Con)
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.
Lord Cromwell (CB)
My Lords, my goodness, what an education we have had tonight, across such a broad range of topics and ages. My remarks may fall short in that regard, but during the thankfully now concluded debates on the hereditary presence in this House, I tabled an amendment that, in line with the Government’s wider manifesto commitments, proposed that a group be established shortly after the passing of the Bill to address ongoing membership criteria, in particular the issue of participation, and this was widely supported. I was therefore very grateful when the committee that produced this excellent report was promptly brought into being. I congratulate, in particular, the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, who, like a modern Odysseus, has had to navigate a very difficult course between the whirlpools of controversy, the sirens of special pleading and the ever-present danger of mutiny, as whatever course they took would impact friends and colleagues in this House. As the committee highlighted, if these issues are not addressed by this House, something less understanding of the role and workings of this place might be imposed on it by the House of Commons. That remains a real risk if the report’s proposals are not now acted on. On the age cap, if I may comment as a mere stripling, while perhaps most of us surely accept, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins, in her speech, that we are not completely irreplaceable, we all know Members who are valuable contributors with a depth of long-term experience and wisdom that the House would be sad to lose on the basis of age alone. I suggested in my evidence to the committee that age should not be the issue but rather capacity—perhaps on a medically tested basis. But I have subsequently come to accept that the graduated progress towards an age cap recommended by the report would be less personally intrusive, give Members more clarity and thereby manage expectations. I also suggest that it is a privilege not just to come into this House but, at the age of 80, to have served well beyond the retirement age for almost any other role. On the negative side, which has been touched on widely, this will have an unbalancing numerical impact on party groups, in particular the Cross Benches. Perhaps the Leader of the House will comment further when winding up on what proposals the Government have in mind to bring forward on this. One suggestion might be that everybody on the Cross Benches gets three votes—just an idea.
Noble Lords
Oh!
Lord Cromwell (CB)
Settle down, please. On participation, I initially felt that a more detailed approach could be taken, with a weighted metric across all the diverse forms of participation. We might come back to that in the future, because the participation request is, I am afraid, in practice an attendance amount. I now accept the committee’s view that this would make things overcomplex at this stage. I cannot resist, however, being intrigued by the earlier reference to me by the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, and his suggestion for a solution. I thank him for the prior notice he very courteously gave that he was going to be rude about me, but I will correct his understanding: I was defeated a number of times in by-elections before the one in which I was successful. Perhaps I was too shy to tell him about that. These changes are, as the report points out, just two elements of possible reform. Prominent among the rest, as many have mentioned, is the ability of Prime Ministers and party leaders to treat peerages as a tool of patronage, something that has been exacerbated recently by a rapid turnover in Prime Ministers. Rather as in The Lord of the Rings , the ring of power, once obtained and wielded, becomes very precious and very hard to give up. I believe that, at least for those who accept the existence of an appointed rather than elected House, this wielding of patronage is the greatest single issue for reform, and that is reflected in many comments we have heard tonight. Its continuance is in part due to the difficulty in creating an alternative that addresses the “who appoints the appointers” test. While I still hope that the House will grip this, I am straying from the subject of the debate. As regards next steps, we have a track record in commissioning reviews, notably the Burns report, and then simply shelving them. I really hope that we can do better this time. We should not let perfect be the enemy of good. Implementing this report’s findings will represent definite progress in line with manifesto commitments. In short, I congratulate the committee on the report, I repeat my hope that we can get it implemented and I look forward to hearing the winding-up comments from the Leader of the House.
Baroness Lawlor (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord. I thank the committee for its thoughtful work and report on the manifesto commitment that Peers retire at 80, the implications of such a retirement age and their participation in the functioning of this House. I echo some of the concerns that have been expressed about the remit to which the committee was made to work and the appearance of seeming to do a deal to manage the Government’s manifesto commitment, thus sidestepping the law. I am glad my noble friend Lord Wolfson reminded us that we must obey the law. If changes are to be made, I would prefer to have a full piece of legislation that can have an Explanatory Memorandum, consultation, scrutiny and debate. There are reasons of principle to be against the proposed changes. We no longer nationally have a retirement age at which people can be forced to give up a job, except in a few professions, as we have heard today. A formal retirement age constitutes discrimination on account of age, which we should reject as firmly as we reject discrimination on grounds of race or sex. If someone does not do a job well, that is a good reason for removing them. Their reaching a certain age is not. As we have heard today, age does not stop people doing a job well. Often older people do a job best. I think this is the case in the complex job we do in the House of Lords, where experience and sagacity are needed. Even if a retirement age for Peers is introduced by law, I would suggest combining it with a fixed-term minimum membership of 15 or 20 years. These were mentioned in the report as suggestions when it considered fixed-term membership in general. This would mean that those who come to the Lords later in life can play their proper role and allow the nation to benefit from their expertise. Like all jobs, membership of this House is a constant learning curve. It takes time for Peers to learn about each Bill, each Government, each Parliament and the workings of the House, and to perform effectively. Finally, as part of the UK Parliament, itself one of the three constitutional powers, our role is that of a complementary legislative power, in scrutinising legislation, revising it to make the laws better and holding government to account or asking the other House to think again. We should be wary of changes that undermine the ability of Peers to do their work, and our main question in thinking about retirement and participation should be: what arrangements best facilitate the work done by the House? For these reasons, I fear that the recommendations in the report raise too many concerns for us to support it.
Baroness Bull (CB)
My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the committee and its chair for taking on the task and for its report, which I generally welcome. The size of the House was one of three rationales for reform in the 2024 manifesto, and I share the regret that the committee had no mandate to tackle what is surely the fundamental problem: any retirement measures we put in place will have limited effect on size without corresponding measures on the numbers that come in. The data since 2024 demonstrates this problem. When the manifesto described the Lords as too big, there were 785 eligible Members. Even with the removal of hereditary Peers, the Chamber today is bigger than it was then, and all but two of the new appointments arrived through prime ministerial patronage. I share concerns about the impact of age-based retirement on the balance of the House. The analysis already mentioned from Professor Meg Russell suggests that the Cross Benches will indeed be hit hardest, reduced by 61% by 2034. With no agreed formula for HOLAC appointments, the refreshing of these Benches will be dependent on the will of the party in power. Here, history gives little cause for optimism. The last five years have seen just eight HOLAC appointees. Does the Leader of the House agree that without a step change over the five years ahead, the valuable contribution of these Benches will be seriously diminished? We also need to be mindful of how age-based retirement impacts on the skills and the diversity of our membership. I firmly believe that this House will be fully effective only if it is fully diverse, and it is, without doubt, more diverse now than it has ever been. Yet, even with these advances, the combined effect of our procedures, our timetable and the allowance system still force an unhappy trade-off between socioeconomic diversity, age, regional background and attendance. Put simply, anyone who is in early to mid-career, needing to juggle income generation with family or caring responsibilities, had better live within the M25 if they are going to meet participation requirements, while simultaneously working enough hours to pay a mortgage, accrue a pension and be home in time to look after their dependants. That is before we even consider maternity leave, sick pay or paid parental leave—all statutory rights for most people of working age. The report acknowledges the impact of a participation requirement on Peers in early-stage careers or those who come from outside the south-east, but it is silent on the more complex issue of intersectionality. Yet this House needs Members who bring a range of overlapping backgrounds, identities and experiences. Intersectional representation broadens the range of perspectives that we bring to legislation and to policy. It enhances the effectiveness of our scrutiny and oversight. I fully support a requirement on participation, partly because, as a HOLAC appointee, like the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, I always understood that fulfilling this role meant turning up and contributing, and partly because non-participation so seriously damages public perception of this House. We need to face up to the ways in which our processes and practices already create barriers to participation and then consider the impact of any changes, not just on diversity but on intersectionality. I welcome the report in as far as its remit allows it to go, but I end by circling back to the point on which I began. If this House is to play its part in fixing the mechanisms out, we should insist that the Government play their part and fix the mechanisms in.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lords who served on the committee, ably chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady—sorry, it has gone completely out of my head.
Noble Lords
Taylor!
Baroness Coffey (Con)
The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, apologies. Participation is more important than age. There is certainly no age limit on becoming a Member of Parliament, and there are plenty who intend to continue to be an MP after the age of 80, but of course, that is the decision of their electorate. On the leave of absence, I suggest to the House that it should be available only for people who are ill, who are still working in the Diplomatic Service or who are working in the Royal Household. I do not see why anybody else should have a leave of absence at all. If they want to be part of this House—it is the second House and has a legislative purpose—they should be here or at least turn up. If we are not intending to remove the leave of absence from those people who choose to not spend their time here at all, we should apply the full declaration and registration of interests, just the same as anybody else. There is no reason why they should be any different. I am a great believer in voting—of course, I would be, when I consider how many times we voted in this House in the previous Session. There are 16 people who never voted and never spoke in the previous Session, and half had joined the House since 2019. Some 25 Peers did not vote at all, 89 Peers voted fewer than 10 times, and so it goes on. I appreciate that there are several people, particularly Cross-Benchers—and this is recognised in paragraph 108—who do not necessarily feel comfortable voting, but that is why we are here. We are legislators. So I would like to see a little more about participation—perhaps there could be a requirement to participate in at least 10 votes in a Session, which is a modest number. I was disappointed earlier this year when, in March and April, two Peers turned up just a few weeks before Prorogation. One Peer had served in this House for 20 years, the other for 30 years. They turned up on that day—I am not sure that I have seen them since—just so that they could meet that one element. I turn to the fewer than 20% of sitting days. Again, on the figures I was given by the Library for the 2024-26 Session, 116 Peers were here for fewer than 20% of the sitting days for which they were eligible. I am not talking about Peers who arrived in March this year, or whenever it was; it is about what they were eligible to do. There were 48 Cross-Benchers, 28 Conservatives, 10 non-affiliated, 10 Labour, including a Minister, three Liberal Democrats and 17 Bishops. Of those, 28 were over 88 years old, 15 were less than 55 years old, and so on. Why are we here? I believe it is for more than just to give an opinion. We could ask people to give that to a Select Committee and invite them to be a witness. It is really about the scrutiny of what the Government are doing, their legislation and the manifesto that they are trying to deliver. I respect, as has been said, that the age of 80 is in the manifesto. I remind noble Lords that one Parliament cannot bind its successor, but that is a matter for us to consider carefully, because I am conscious that in future we do not just want manifestos the length of W ar and P eace on exactly what a Government want to do or not. I was struck by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, yesterday, though I appreciate that it was a repeat of one he had given earlier. There is an issue about how much legislation is suddenly going through on Report. It is not new, but I genuinely believe it has got worse. I used to be a Whip in the Commons, and I did some comparisons. The Commons were taking twice as long to do Bills of a similar size, and the impact was that this House was doing far fewer days than it is at the moment. We have the Lord Privy Seal and the Government Chief Whip sitting on the Cabinet committee; I encourage them to think carefully about how we can get that balance right for the future. I appreciate that, in the first two years, Governments want to get their legislation through quickly, but they will continue to appoint people here if they keep losing votes. There is no doubt about that. We need to be mindful as we move forward on these big changes. Again, I come back to the point that participation is more important than age.
Baroness Manningham-Buller (CB)
My Lords, it is getting late, so the House will be pleased to hear that I have cut what I was going to say. I start with the report itself. I was a member of the committee and I have been quite surprised by some of the comments. On the committee, there were four members of the Government, four members of the Opposition, two members of the Liberal Democrats and two members of the Cross Benches, of whom I was one. The report was agreed, and not only because of the skilful chairmanship of the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor. It has been said many times this evening that we are a self-governing House. We all subscribe to that, which is why this report is pragmatic, practical, modest and reflective of a manifesto commitment. While I accept it is not the business of a Select Committee to implement a manifesto commitment, this softens its edges in such a way that we would hope—referring to what the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, said—avoids a simplistic law coming from the other place, which we would not welcome. We also need to listen to ourselves. I find it arrogant to assume that major damage will be caused by the gradual—I use that word deliberately—retirement of current Members. What price recent experience, fresh generational perspectives, recent employment, experience in cyber and AI and younger perspectives? Of course it will be a sad loss to say goodbye to some of our Members, as it was to say goodbye to many of our hereditary friends. We liked them, they contributed in most cases, and we miss them. Here I quote Dylan Thomas, like the noble Lord, Lord True, who equated death with leaving the House. There is a further quotation from that poem, that “wise men at their end know dark is right”. There are three things I would like to mention which were not in the remit of the committee. Inevitably, the House would have liked us in different ways to do things that we were not asked to do. The first, which many noble Lords have mentioned, is about how people arrive here. What my noble friend Lord Burns recommended—one in for two out, and about 600—still looks appealing. Secondly, please can the shackles on HOLAC be removed, so that it can go back to putting forward a few more people than two? Thirdly, from my recollection, the committee was not about capacity; it was about retirement age. We talked about capacity, and at one stage we had a draft paragraph, but given that the House authorities themselves are addressing the issue, we did not pursue it. I hope that the House will approve the principle of this report, and I recommend it.
Lord Fuller (Con)
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.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
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.
The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the typically energetic noble Lord, Lord Hunt. I enjoyed his contribution as ever. I am yet another to add my congratulations to the committee and particularly to its redoubtable chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, who must have been in a great sea of ideas, proposals and statistics but somehow managed to find the island of consensus in that. It was quite an achievement. We had a major debate on House of Lords reform in November 2024. I advocated a transitional arrangement for the retirement age whereby only new Members were subject to it. I also advocated a participation rate of 10%, this number being set to take account of low-frequency, high-impact Members who, because of their professional careers, find it harder to attend. The report has come down in a slightly different place on both these issues. With a 20% participation rate, the Cross Benches and our larger number of low-frequency, high-impact Members would need to manage their attendances most carefully. I have looked at this a lot, and I assess it as being difficult but possible. The first proposed mini-cliff edge on age of July 2029 is, in terms of managing the Bench strength of the House, frighteningly near. Appendix 5 makes it clear there could be 135 gaps. When one looks at the actual names, some of them bring great expertise and experience here, and we would need to replace that. Thinking on how to ensure that the House retains its necessary skill and experience base would need to start very soon. I and others therefore believe that the date of July 2029 could not wisely be brought closer. I come to an issue peculiar to the Cross Benches—the supply of replacement Members for us. We receive today about two-thirds of our Members directly from the Prime Minister’s office and his list, as it were, and about one-third who begin in HOLAC. We today represent 19.4% of the House, so we are below the 20% which was the number suggested and accepted in the Burns process, which I think there is a logic behind. However, in the first tranche we will lose up to 37 Members in July 2029. Right at the start of this debate, we heard all the data and how significantly horrible it is for us in the excellent speech by the noble Lord, Lord Patel, for which I am very grateful. We therefore need a supply of replacements, and ensuring that we have appropriate new Members with appropriate skills and expertise will greatly benefit our House. HOLAC in particular has been very successful at finding good colleagues. I know it has many suitable applicants for whom there is no place. I look forward very much to the noble Baroness the Leader’s comments on this most important area for us and, I think, the House. In that constitutional debate of November 2024, I described the Prime Minister’s prerogative as the biggest unfairness in all the various arrangements that we have in our House. The power of one person, the Prime Minister, irrespective of the size or state of their majority, to appoint as many Members as they like to this legislature, is outsized and without precedent in any other liberal democracy. At this time of challenged political stability, there is a very strong case for the revision of this prerogative so that it cannot be misused following a future general election. It is something of great importance to this House, to Parliament and to the country in general. I hope that we will hear some comments from the Leader. It is time to have a cross-party discussion about this without any preconditions. I would be in favour of treading the path that the committee has outlined, acknowledging the legal risk that the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, and other noble Lords have pointed out. However, there must be associated clarity on the Cross-Bench replacements and, most importantly, there must be action and discussion on the Prime Minister’s prerogative.
Lord Smith of Hindhead (Con)
My Lords, I am sure that all noble Lords will recognise how delighted I was to see that I was to be the final Back-Bench contributor to this long debate. However, my claim to fame may have been pinched by my noble friend Lady Hooper, who will be speaking in the gap. I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak in this debate following my service on the committee. I thank my fellow committee members, our chair—the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton—and the excellent House of Lords team who supported the committee during its deliberations. I approached my contribution to the committee’s task wearing a collaborative hat. Nevertheless, it is important to establish that this collaborative view was taken on the basis of the task that had been set out by the noble Baroness the Leader of the House. The committee was created to come up with a feasible alternative to the Government’s manifesto commitment to introduce a retirement age of 80 and to create a new level of participation, and we have done exactly that. To make my own position clear, I would not wish to see the introduction of any retirement age. Many Peers over 80 years of age make a valuable contribution to the work of the House, as has been demonstrated in this debate. Equally, I did not support the changes to the hereditary Peers serving in your Lordships’ House, another manifesto commitment, but that argument was lost. Reforming this House requires care. However, care, as I have had to remind myself, should not become an excuse for inaction. The public are entitled to expect us to examine our own arrangements with the seriousness that we bring to legislation affecting everyone else. For me, the test was straightforward: would these changes impact the ability of the House to carry out its work effectively while strengthening confidence in the institution? The committee’s principal retirement proposal is an age limit of 80, phased in for existing Members from 8 July 2029. The initial threshold would be 85, falling annually until it reaches 80 in July 2034. That timetable would apply irrespective of when the next general election is held. As my noble friend Lord Wolfson said, there is an important distinction in implementation. For existing Members, the committee proposes a resolution expressing the House’s expectation that they should retire. This would depend on co-operation from Members and party groups, but it would not override the statutory rights of noble Lords. New Members would be given a written undertaking before receiving their peerage to retire by their 80th birthday. Breaching that undertaking could then attract sanctions, including expulsion. We should be candid about what this means. If the House chooses a system founded on co-operation, each of us must take responsibility for making it work. Agreeing a resolution would be the beginning of that responsibility. I also recognise that retirement is a deeply personal matter. A Member may have devoted decades to public service and still feel capable of contributing. Any change should therefore be implemented with dignity. We can uphold a common rule while still expressing gratitude to those affected by it. The second main proposal concerns participation: attendance on at least 20% of sitting days averaged over two Sessions. This requirement would be implemented through Standing Orders, using existing statutory sanctioning powers, with expulsion for failure to comply. Members on leave of absence would be exempt, and exceptional circumstances would be considered through a separate process. I would hope that anyone accepting a place in your Lordships’ House does so with an ambition to contribute substantially. Equally, we should ask whether our rules allow someone with valuable experience to combine parliamentary service with continuing responsibilities elsewhere. A doctor, an employer or a charity leader may bring particular insight, precisely because they remain engaged in that work. The challenge is to secure a dependable commitment while preserving that connection. Alongside these changes, the committee’s report deals with capacity issues and raises concerns about Members on leave of absence retaining access without registering financial interests. Finally, the report cautions that departures will not reduce the size of the House if they simply enable additional appointments. That point deserves a clear response from His Majesty’s Government. Members who are being asked to accept changes to their own service should be able to see how those changes contribute to a coherent approach to the future of your Lordships’ House. I support taking these proposals forward. They are perhaps the start of a process. Their success, however, will depend on clear rules, fair administration and a willingness to honour the commitments we make. We have an opportunity to demonstrate that this House can address difficult questions about its own future responsibility, and, in my view, we should take this opportunity. If we decide not to take it, it will leave the Government entirely free to implement their manifesto pledge to introduce a retirement age of 80 by primary legislation. They would have every right to do so, and could do so under the Salisbury convention.
Baroness Hooper (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak briefly in the gap and apologise to my noble friend for pinching his slot. It has been a good and necessary debate, with contributions from the youngest Member, the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, as well as a number of fully competent and coherent older Members. I, of course, must declare a personal interest in this respect. I am told that I am now the longest-serving woman Peer—not the oldest but the longest-serving. I was introduced in June 1985, and like the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, I still consider it to be a great privilege to serve in your Lordships’ House. During my 41 years here, I have spent seven years on the Government Front Bench as a Minister in three departments. I subsequently served as a Deputy Speaker for 25 years, and I am now much involved in a lot of behind-the-scenes activities in the field of international relations as an active member of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, as well as various APPGs. I also have two Motions for balloted debate on the Order Paper. There are many ways to participate in the work of Parliament. I end by reminiscing, if I may. When I first nervously answered questions as a Minister, way back in 1985, I was asked a supplementary by Lord Shinwell, better known as Manny Shinwell. He was then 101. So, while I may support some of the measures in this report, I have no intention of retiring before I am at least 101, to preserve party balance of course.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness who spoke in the gap. She knows that I have the highest admiration for the work she does, and the utmost affection for her. She has been and continues to be an outstanding ambassador for Parliament as a whole, not just for this House, especially in the work she does in Latin America. I am in awe of the service that she has given. Notwithstanding that this is a government manifesto commitment, these Benches have decided that this is now a House issue. Thus, if it comes to a point where we will be making decisions on a way forward, each of my colleagues will vote on their own judgment rather than there being a whipped line. There is, however, widespread support among my colleagues for the work that my noble friends Lady Parminter and Lady Suttie have done on the committee so ably chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor—not only for the conclusions that the committee has reached but the means by which it has done so and the consensus it has sought. My noble friend Lady Parminter spoke succinctly and clearly right the beginning of this debate, a number of hours ago, and I agree with every word she said. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, very politely pre-butted a speech I was not intending to make. Our country’s legislatures should be democratically chosen, and we on these Benches believe, as others have mentioned in the debate, that there should be an opportunity for this House to be fundamentally reformed. In this debate about these proposals, some—the noble Lord, Lord Howard, and others—have asked what the problem is that we are seeking to solve. Indeed, they were asking what the problem is of this House. A number of years ago, the Conservative manifesto for the 2010 election had come to that conclusion and answered the noble Lord’s question: “We will work to build a consensus for a mainly-elected second chamber to replace the current House of Lords, recognising that an efficient and effective second chamber should play an important role in our democracy and requires both legitimacy and public confidence”. Perhaps the problem that continues to burden us is that of legitimacy and public confidence. We have heard of the need—and I agree with it—for a second Chamber to be efficient. Many made the case for reform; others, however, said it would be wholly wrong to break the link between a life peerage and a lifetime right to sit in this House. As with most debates about our House, as we have had today, there is rarely much that is new. The House previously passed, after seven days of debate, a resolution which stated the following: “That a strong and efficient Second Chamber is not merely an integral part of the British Constitution, but is necessary to the well-being of the State and to the balance of Parliament … That such a Chamber can best be obtained by the reform and reconstitution of the House of Lords … That a necessary preliminary of such reform and reconstitution is the acceptance of the principle that the possession of a Peerage should no longer of itself give the right to sit and vote in the House of Lords”.—[ Official Report , 21/3/1910; cols. 413-23.] That was in 1910; the last part was almost identical to what the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, was calling for in this debate today, and I agree with him. Moving the debate on that resolution was the Earl of Rosebery from the Cross-Benches at that point in 1910. I want to quote more of what he said in introducing it, because we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord True, and others that to change the link between the peerage and the ability to sit in this House by right and not alter that, either by retirement or by participation, would be constitutionally improper and anomalous. Lord Rosebery said: “After all, nothing can be so anomalous as the British Constitution itself. We are afraid to introduce new principles into it. But, really, when you come to analyse the Constitution itself one might be inclined to think that a little novelty might to some extent improve it”.—[ Official Report , 14/3/1910; col. 165.] It indeed is a novelty that we are seeking to improve it; 116 years later, this novelty is perhaps a little overdue. More recently, for 50 years, some who sit in this House have served under age limits as a result of an innovation. I personally do not believe there should be reserved seats for the established Church of a nation south of the border where I live, but, as with judges, for Bishops there seems to have been a settled view that age limits are appropriate and connected to efficiency and effectiveness. Indeed, the debates in the synod in 1975, which I read, were sensitive and pragmatic and came to a conclusion that retirement linked with sitting in this House was appropriate. That was 51 years ago. Similarly, the reforms introduced by a Conservative Government in 1959 to impose age limits for senior judges were debated sensitively but pragmatically and with a degree of self-awareness. In the kindest possible way, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, who indicated that we sometimes should see for ourselves the reality of how representative we are in society. In 1959, the then Conservative Government decided that for senior judges the retirement age of 75 should be put in place. Of interest in that debate, as we have heard today, it was the settled will that this was the appropriate age in that profession for those who apply the law. We are simply suggesting that we should consider it for those who make the law also. The Lord Chancellor Viscount Kilmuir in introducing the measure said: “I would also put this point … that there is no more difficult problem in life than to judge one's own dispensability and expendability. We all find it, and some of us find that the problem gets more difficult as the years advance. But I ask your Lordships to face up to the existence of that psychological problem”.—[ Official Report , 8/12/1959; cols. 125-26.] We need to do that in this House today also. We have done it for those who apply the law and we should also do it for those who make the law. This inevitably will mean that some valued colleagues will be retiring, and the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, in his shrewd contribution, as all of his are, asked us to consider the time when we might have to cope with life without him in this House. I personally will grieve when he leaves this House, because I am a great admirer of his. The noble Lord, Lord Johnson, indicated that the family of the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, might have to cope with him being with his family on retirement. We have had both sides of the argument, but I am certain that both this House and the family of the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, will manage to cope in both of those circumstances. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, made the point that this reform should not be simply about making space, but it should fundamentally be about effectiveness and efficiency, and I agree with that. We heard from the noble Lords, Lord Kerr and Lord Burns, about previous attempts for reforms about the size of this House. We have always shared that view. I should point out to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, that the size of the Liberal Democrat Benches is now exactly what it would have been if the Burns review had been implemented in full. I am certain both noble Lords would not wish the size of our Benches in particular to be diminished for any reforms going forward. I am sure that they will agree with me with on that one. On the issue of age, I have to confess, I was not expecting Dolly Parton to be mentioned in the debate today, but the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins, did so. I was trying to think of something witty to say, but I am thinking that us working nine to five might be a bit of a stretch. Yes, okay, I will move on. We heard about the difficult issue of how representative we are as a non-elected Chamber. The noble Lord, Lord True, made the point, and I share it, that the elderly are a key part of our society and need to be represented. However, I think we should be a touch cautious about saying that the elderly in society can only be represented by the elderly in this House. We cannot persuasively make that argument unless we also argue that young people can only be represented by young people in this House. If you hold that argument, when I entered this House, I was only one of two Members of the entire House under 40, so both of us would have had to share the burden of representing 49% of the country’s population. We cannot automatically make a direct link between our age profile here and those whom we represent in society. We must also be cautious of the argument that, if the committee’s proposals are taken forward then we will enter a constitutionally wrong type of expulsion—culls, sackings and purges have been referred to. Obviously there will be a collective view about what an appropriate level of participation would be, as well as those who would be participating in it. The committee should be commended for doing a difficult task that has beset us for many years, as the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, indicated: what is the appropriate means by which we recognise ourselves as legislators, not a voluntary think tank? The setting of a 20% participation rate over two Sessions is reasonable. I personally believe that in future that should be the floor, not the ceiling, of what we should expect participation to be in a Parliament, because we have a great responsibility to be legislators and active participation is required. We on these Benches will work constructively going forward. We wish to see reform and we will try to reflect the way that the committee worked constructively to try to find a way forward with the correct tone, sensitivity and a degree of pragmatism, but we will approach it as much as possible in the consensual way that the committee established. I commend it for its work and I hope to see progress.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My Lords, this has been a considered debate, and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, for the careful way in which she opened it. However, the fact that we have once again spent an entire day of precious parliamentary time debating our future as a House will be surprising for those outside this Chamber. Businesses and employers might have expected us to be debating national insurance, the job-killing Employment Rights Act and some of the highest energy costs in Europe. Farmers may have expected us to be focusing on food security and the family farm tax, and, most importantly, hard-working families might have expected us to debate energy bills, personal taxation, housing delivery and rising unemployment. But the future of this House is important. Any change to the rules by which we govern ourselves, no matter how important the issue it seeks to resolve, must be weighed against the imperative that we must preserve our ability to do our duty as a House and hold any Government to account. We have heard from across the House a number of themes begin to emerge in our debate today. We have heard how these proposals will have a disproportionate impact on the Cross Benches. If both rules were applied as of today then 30.5% of the House would be affected, but that rises to 46.6% of Cross-Benchers. My noble friend Lady Eaton raised the important issue of the effective running of this House and particularly about effective committees in the House, should many of our experienced Peers be expelled. A number of Peers raised the lack of clarity about the problem that we are trying to solve with these proposals. My noble friend Lord Howard of Rising reminded us just how many Peers are actually present in the average Division. By that measure, the House is clearly not too large. Sadly, the Labour Party manifesto gave no evidence for its claim that the second Chamber of Parliament has become “too big”. It merely gave its unevidenced diagnosis and prescribed a mandatory retirement age. My noble friend Lord Howard of Lympne told the House that it is not for this House to obstruct the Government’s manifesto commitments but it is not incumbent on us to expediate the Government’s measures by amending our own rules in this House. The bitter taste of discrimination has been remarked on by many noble Lords. In the last Session, Members of your Lordships’ House were expelled simply because they were the wrong sort of Peer. In this Session, we are being asked to expel noble Lords because they are the wrong age—not because they have a lack of capacity to do the job, as we have heard from so many noble Lords today. The noble Lord, Lord Sikka, spoke eloquently on this point. I hope his noble friends will listen to him. Why can we not find a way to deal with capability? Why do we have to use age? Two tests are proposed in this report—age and participation. The participation proposal is born of understandable concerns. The committee was right to reject a speaking requirement, which would serve only to encourage performative contributions. Mandatory attendance is not without its negative consequences either. Fundamentally, it is a good thing that noble Lords who are experts and still working at the top of their respective professions may come to the House when they have something to say without having to clock in to retain the right to do so in future. Equally, some Peers come to the House so infrequently that they make no real contribution to our public life. The principle of participation is not unsupportable, but its implementation must not weaken the House. I turn to age. A mandatory age limit for sitting Members of your Lordships’ House was a commitment made in a discredited manifesto of a discredited Prime Minister who no longer holds high office. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, reminded us of how the manifesto was broken on the day the Chancellor moved to freeze the tax allowance. I wish Sir Keir Starmer well, of course, but his departure should give us pause for thought about how we go forward now.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
I am slightly surprised to hear this from the party opposite, which went through rather a lot of Prime Ministers. Somehow I do not remember that party calling the manifesto discredited at that stage.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
I will ignore that comment. We have not sought to agree a collective position across our Benches. It is for noble Lords to come to their own view. Of course the Front Bench has a view, but we must always respect the views of our Back-Benchers. It is not for a single House of Parliament to expel parliamentarians. This is a proposal that has been brought forward by the Government. Let them bring forward a Bill. It is for Parliament to decide. As my noble friend the Leader of the Opposition said earlier in our debate, Parliament may wish to implement grandfather rights without opposing the Government’s plans for a mandatory retirement age. That was the solution when the Irish representative Peers were expelled. It is what the House voted for during the progress of what is now the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2026. We also know that a resolution of the House would not prevent Peers refusing to leave in line with the committee’s proposals. Peers may fairly argue that the test should be the competence, not the age, of the Peer. As the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, referred to earlier, age is being mistaken for capacity. Peers may also argue that the other place has no mandatory age limit, so why should their departure not be voluntary? All this is a recipe for a continuing, rumbling discord in this House. If we are to have a mandatory age, let the Government bring it forward and allow both Houses to scrutinise it thoroughly. Perhaps the most painful part of the committee’s report is the proposal that Peers be expelled from the House mid-Session, once they reach the age of 80. Grandfather rights would avoid that. Transitional arrangements are proposed in this report, but these do not mitigate the real impact that mid-Session expulsion would have on the work of Peers. If a Peer knows that they are expected to leave the House in the middle of a Session, that will disincentivise them from being involved: from speaking at Second Reading and tabling amendments in Committee in those final months of their public service. Our most experienced Peers might step back sooner than they should, depriving the House of their wisdom and good judgment. We must carefully consider all these issues. In the case of previous expulsions, which themselves caused real acrimony and unpleasantness, Peers saw out the Session. We opposed those expulsions, but the House at least accepted that Peers must be given the opportunity to complete their current work before being forced to leave the House. Surely that is the least we can do. We know that the average retirement age is not much over 80 at present, so why are we doing this? We must balance the negative effect that mid-Session expulsion will have on the scrutinising work of Peers against the reality that these measures are solving a problem that exists in theory but will have very little impact on average. The impact of this change will not merely affect an average; it is not just a question of numbers. Behind the statistics that we have heard today are noble Lords who have dedicated their lives to public service—noble Lords we have known, worked with, agreed and disagreed with—and they are the people alongside whom we have voted for many years. The moment of their expulsion marks the endpoint of a long and distinguished career in public service, and we must consider the individual impact of these proposals and how that affects our work as a House. They should be given the opportunity to complete their work as parliamentarians rather than being expelled suddenly as the guillotine falls. That would allow noble Lords to bring their contribution to public life to an end in the way that they wish, as they deserve, rather than being bound by an arbitrary date. As we have heard, the Government’s plans mean the departure of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig of Radley. We have heard how he won the House’s support for his amendment to the Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill earlier this year. As my noble friend Lord Howard of Rising reminded us, the noble and gallant Lord was 96 when he won that Division. These plans will mean losing the expertise of my noble friend Lord Hunt of Wirral from the Opposition Front Bench. We have benefited from his extensive ministerial experience, and he helped lead the House in challenging the most damaging elements of the Government’s Employment Rights Bill. Under this proposal we will also lose distinguished noble Lords from the Government Benches, such as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and the noble Baroness, Lady Beckett, who were both singled out for special praise by the Prime Minister in his first speech as leader of the Labour Party in July. We will lose the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who has so ably demonstrated his reputation as a defender of parliamentary scrutiny in recent weeks. The loss of noble Lords across the House is not just a point of personal pain, although we on these Benches ask the Government what these friends of ours have done wrong. Their loss also has an impact on our work. Losing the expertise of long-serving noble Lords risks the quality of our scrutiny. It is this effect that we should put at the forefront of our minds. My noble friend the Leader of the Opposition has set down four tests that we should consider in our deliberations. Will what we do improve the ability of the House to hold the Government to account? Will it enrich the experience of the House? Will it enhance the independence of the House from recent or present Governments? Lastly, will it enable the House and its committees to do their revising work better? Those are the tests we must apply before taking any decision on the future of our House, and we believe the proposals before us fail those tests.
The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Smith of Basildon) (Lab)
My Lords, I start by thanking my noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton and all members of the committee who took part in the deliberations and carefully considered the issues. Many doubted that, in the time that was allocated, they could come back to this House with a proposal and some consensus on a workable way forward. It is only through the diligent work they have undertaken that this report is before us today, and we should be grateful to them—I think all noble Lords, bar one, did thank them for their work. They listened to a broad range of views, as I have done tonight. The Government welcome the approach they have taken and the spirit in which their report was produced. We have seen past attempts at reform of this place, and consensus often feels quite elusive. We should recognise that this report has found a way through that, and that all members of the committee agreed with it. I have been very interested to listen to all the contributions that have been made. This is, of course, a valuable revising and scrutinising Chamber filled with expertise and dedication to public service. However, the expectations of our Members are not just about their experience and expertise but about their judgment borne from their life experience—we do not ask Members with experience to take part only in debates on the area they know the most about; we have them here for their judgment. I referenced our manifesto. I think the Labour manifesto at the last election was the first manifesto of which I am aware that explicitly recognised the good work of many Peers who improve the quality of legislation passed in Parliament. The noble Lord, Lord Norton, asked me about form following function. We are not dealing with the function of the House of Lords; we are happy with it. The criticism comes from how we are perceived and the way we are constituted. Looking at these issues over the years, we have produced and debated numerous reports—the Wakeham report, the Cunningham report, the Burns report, and now the Taylor report—and each has brought a different perspective to these issues. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Burns, alluded to eloquently, then the frustration starts about how so little progress has been made. I have spoken before about the track record of stagnation and stalled attempts at reform. I have been clear that we want to work with the House to get a better outcome, and on how incremental change can make a difference. The committee, and many Members who have spoken, often acknowledged that change is needed. There is general, but not universal, agreement that the House is too big and that we need certainty on how we can replace departing Members and bring in new expertise and experience—a point made by many of the Cross-Benchers. We are also clear that we want an active contribution from all Members of this House. That is not to say that all Members have to be full-time—that would not serve the purposes of what we seek to achieve—but we want them to value their membership and contribute during their membership. That is why we committed to a mandatory retirement age and a participation requirement. Some of the arguments against taking any action on this report sounded very similar to those we have heard before when debating other changes. I think the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, said that these proposals would affect 46% of the House.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
I did not say that.
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
I cannot remember the exact percentage. These proposals would affect 100% of this House, because every current and future Member would be affected by them; they are completely non-discriminatory in that way. The other argument often used is that we should not make this reform until we have made lots of other reforms—
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
They are discriminatory because the people here now came in thinking they were staying for life, and those who come in from now on will know that they finish at 80. That is the difference.
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
The noble Baroness is implying that there is no notice. To give notice is the very reason for these proposals. It sounds like they are going to happen tomorrow, but these proposals do not come into force, or start to come into force, until 2029, when there will be a retirement age of 85 which will go down each year to 80 by 2033 or 2034. I just make the point that every time a change is suggested, there are those who say, “We want change, but not this change, in this way, and not now”. I think that to survive and do our best work, we often have to embrace some kind of change. The noble Lord, Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury, and others asked why I set up this committee. I think he attributed motives which I would dispute. On Lords reform issues, our manifesto looked at certain stages, and there are number of issues there. When we were debating at one of its early stages the Bill on hereditary Peers, there were more amendments, more pages of amendments and more pages of Hansard about retirement age and participation—and a number of noble Lords on the other side spoke far more about it—than about hereditary Peers: “Why aren’t we doing anything about this?” So, that is why I set up the committee. I promised this House that rather than just bringing forward legislation, we would give this House the opportunity to examine and look at the issues, to give it the opportunity, as noble Lords asked for, to take some responsibility. No good deed goes unpunished, does it? But there is an opportunity for us to look at this. That is the first point. Also, I thought we would have learned a lesson from the hereditary Peers legislation. Time and again, my noble friend Lord Grocott brought to this House proposed legislation to say, “We’ll end the by-elections, which means no new hereditary Peers come in and those who are here remain”. That was rejected time and again by the party opposite when it was in government. That would have been a much smoother transition. If the noble Lord wants to intervene on me, please do.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)
I will just say that it was not whipped by then Government; it was not the party opposite, it was individual Peers. It was a Private Member’s Bill, and Members had authority to challenge the proposal of the legislation. I disagreed with them; I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, who is a friend of mine and sitting opposite, was right on this issue. I felt he was right, but it was not a party thing. We are not dealing with this as a party; we are dealing—
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
I have heard the point the noble Lord has made.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)
I hope the noble Baroness will respond to it.
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
I will do, given a chance. The noble Lord, Lord True, when he was Leader of the Opposition, told me that his party opposed it, that it was not his party’s policy. I even offered and got support from the shadow Cabinet for the legislation and the noble Lord will confirm that it was rejected by the party opposite when it was in government. I was told that then Government did not want that policy. I did try. It would have been a better way forward, and I think this is a better way forward as well. Let the House make decisions. On the need for legislation, I think the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, paraphrased the report very well when he addressed its comments. Does this House really believe that if there is a one-clause Bill to introduce a retirement age, they are not going to change that number when it goes to the other end, to the House of Commons? I think this House could take responsibility and show that we are able to do so. That was the reason I set up this committee. The size of the House is an issue, but the way to address it, as other noble Lords have said, is not just through a retirement age—I do not think that anybody thinks that will be the entirety of the way to address that. I made the point a moment ago, and I have said it when we have looked at these issues before, including during the passage of the hereditary Peers Bill: this will be an opportunity for the House itself to bring forward proposals, to take action and to show that it can lead reforms rather than resist them. If this House wants to have influence on policy that affects it, the way to do so is to take action ourselves. I hope we will consider that. We have an opportunity here to do so. The report before us has been genuinely led by the House. Over 100 Members submitted evidence to the committee and it has been interesting to listen to the views of the House today. I have been clear that I am listening to the debate. I have not yet responded to the report formally through the Government but will do so and take note of this debate as well. I turn to the specifics of the report. The committee makes the point that, because Members of this House tend to be appointed later in their careers, with an average age at introduction of 59, it is entirely logical for our retirement age to be higher than in other professions. By striking the balance at the age of 80 by 2034, which is later than for judges, magistrates and our Bishops, we do not lose the benefit of a Peer’s experience prematurely, but we do address some of the concerns that have been raised and it allows us to bring in the new expertise and talent we need. I was particularly grateful to the committee for looking at transitional arrangements. The point that the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, did not seem to take to was that this gives colleagues time to prepare. It will help Members know when they are likely to retire and address how we can bring in new Members. On the comments from the Cross-Benchers, the 20% has never been formally recognised but I think it is a fair size for the Cross Benches. I would certainly support it, and I will talk to the convenor and others about it. I think nobody in this House would want to see the Cross-Benchers fall behind that kind of level, but certainty would help in trying to address the kind of skill set needed. On the numbers of HOLAC Peers, I checked this earlier today and I was quite shocked. Two HOLAC Peers came in last year. The party opposite suggested that there must be more HOLAC-appointed Peers, so it is rather a surprise to find that in 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020 and 2023 there were no HOLAC-appointed Peers. It is a matter for the Prime Minister, but clearly there has to be a much better allocation. The only reason I hesitate over 20% is, as I said before, the imbalance around the House. The House works better, as noted, if the party of government and the Opposition are roughly the same size. That is perfectly doable with a Cross Bench of around 20%, but it needs to be worked out with the Cross-Benchers and looking at the skills needed.
Lord Fuller (Con)
My Lords, if the Minister will allow me, she seems to be referring to the special pleading made by the Cross-Benchers, to which I am sympathetic. However, I raised the point about the almost complete eradication of our colleagues from Northern Ireland. Will she address that point too?
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
I think the noble Lord was only talking about the DUP, because we have Members on our Benches from Northern Ireland as well. One of the things we need to look at, and we are bringing forward further proposals on this, is that the House as a whole has to better represent the whole of the UK. That has been recognised. Part of the issue is possibly allowances; people talked about the financial cost of travelling further distances and having to stay overnight. We are bringing further proposals; I totally agree that we have to have a House that is more representative on all kinds of levels, but certainly geographically, which is very important. I turn to some of the other issues that were in the report. The comments about leave of absence from the noble Lord, Lord True, and the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, were interesting, in that they think the point on conduct should apply to all, whether they are on leave of absence or Members of this House. I cannot remember which noble Lord referred to this, but the comments about a retirement association—whether it is called emeritus or not is irrelevant; I do not mind what it is called—were really important. It is one of the things that I suggested some time ago, when we were debating the hereditary Peers Bill. Noble Lords may not be aware of the booklet, but one thing that has always concerned me about this House is that often, as Members age, they come in a bit less and we see a bit less of them. Then they get ill and we do not see them for a long time. They may come in occasionally, and they just disappear and fade away. We do not show them the respect and the value that we put on them by ever saying “Thank you” or recognising their work. They just fade away and we do not see them again. I want Members to know what is available to them when they retire from the House. They can vote in a general election, as the noble Lords, Lord Rooker and Lord Dubs, asked me. That is in the booklet, and I recommend it. It is a way of saying to Members who retire from this House: “We value your service. These are the kinds of facilities that are still available to you, and you remain our friends and colleagues and can come to the House”. It is important that we do that. I was rather taken aback by the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord True, at the beginning—I know he is generally a bit snippy and he is cross about this anyway—when he talked about the issue of capacity, because he knows that one of the first things I did when I became Leader of the House was talk to the Administration about this. We also had a meeting through the usual channels to talk about this issue. I see a number of noble Lords who have been at these meetings acknowledging that. We have progressed that work, as he well knows; the work is under way. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, has said this. My noble friend the Chief Whip has held a series of meetings, following on from the initial meetings we had, with the usual channels, the Clerk of the Parliaments and other House officials, which have been productive. They form the basis of an agreement on a way forward to deal with the issue of capacity. This is a sensitive issue, and I think we all want to treat our friends, colleagues and other noble Lords with respect and kindness. That has been uppermost in the Chief Whip’s mind as he has been dealing with it. For the next steps, the respective Chief Whips and the Convenor will lead this work to take it forward and will bring a report forward to be agreed in the usual channels and presented to the Procedure Committee. That work is very important and is ongoing.
Lord True (Con)
My Lords, I am sorry if I appear snippy. Sometimes, the Opposition are permitted to criticise proposals or to probe them. On the point I am making about capacity, I am aware of the welcome action we agreed on power of attorney, and we have had these discussions. My point is one that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and many others made: this is an ageist and discriminatory measure, in using age as a blunderbuss to take a lot of people out of the House, as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said, as a proxy for capacity. Why do we not focus on capacity and let the capable aged stay?
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
My Lords, if this was a proxy for capacity, we would not be bringing it forward, and we would not do both at the same time. I think the noble Lord misunderstands the reasons why the retirement age has been proposed. I was perfectly willing to accept that our manifesto was rather crude in its approach: it said Members would retire at the end of the Parliament in which they were 80. The proposal brought forward by the committee is much more sophisticated and thoughtful for Members of the House. But the noble Lord seems to think that no Member of the House should ever retire unless they want to. If we constantly do that, the House will continue to grow in size and we will not bring in Members with new experience and expertise to understand what is happening. This is not in any way to disrespect Members who have given many years’ service—a lifetime of service in some cases—to the House or those who thought they would be here until they chose not to be. It is about how we can have an effective House, do our best work as the House of Lords and best contribute to the role we have. The noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, who probably now has a different title that I cannot remember, made a comment about donors, and I entirely agree with him. If the only reason somebody is being made a Member of this House is because they have made large donations to a political party, that is entirely inappropriate and wrong. He also talked about the size of the House and ensuring that, as people left, it was not a case of just creating a vacancy. He is absolutely right, and I agree with him on that. The noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, was particularly concerned that the House could be packed and flooded with Members to keep a Government in power for a long time. In a sense, that could have happened at any time in our history; we had an unlawful Prorogation under a previous Prime Minister, which the courts were able to deal with. This House has the right to say how Members are introduced. It is not sharing a secret, because I spoke to a number of noble Lords opposite about this at the time, but shortly after I became shadow Leader, Jacob Rees-Mogg said that he would introduce a thousand new Peers to force Brexit through in exactly the way that the Government wanted. A number of us felt that, if he tried that one on, we would introduce one Peer a week, and it might have taken him some time. There are ways of addressing that through our constitutional arrangements at the moment as well. We have already taken some action on the Appointments Commission. We have strengthened the transparency in appointments and worked with the House of Lords Appointments Commission to update its vetting forms. The vetting has to be stronger, and we are looking at that. We have looked at my own party’s vetting processes as well. I reiterate my thanks to the committee. It was given an almost impossible task, and it did it with great aplomb and sensitivity. I value the work of this House, but if we say that we will never change, always do things in exactly the same way and leave others to make the change and take no responsibility ourselves, we do not get the change that we want. This is an opportunity for the House to show that we can manage our own affairs. We do not need things to be done to us, and we can show that we have a responsibility for the work that we do. I was struck by the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, and I think that is the point to end on: if it is not led by us, it will be led by those who know less and care less. We have a responsibility.
Baroness Taylor of Bolton (Lab)
My Lords, it has been a very interesting day. I think all Members have learned something from somebody else. I am not sure whether there are any two Members in the House who actually agree perfectly on every aspect of what we are talking about, but I thank everyone who has participated. I will not even try to go through every contribution—my noble friend the Leader has done a great deal of that—but I want to mention a few of the themes that have come up. Several people have criticised the remit. It is the remit that we were given, but, on the basis of the discussion we have had today, if we had been given a wider remit, we would still be here well into the next Parliament, because these issues run very deep and there is a great deal of feeling on everything. The size of the House was not in our remit, though we had to look at the implications of it. If the Burns report, which the House agreed all those years ago, had been implemented, then perhaps we would not be talking about these issues quite as much at the moment. The lessons of the Grocott Bill should be remembered in all of this. In terms of us saying little on appointments, we said clearly that, if numbers are going to be reduced, there would be implications if there is not better consideration of the open door and the flow in as well as the flow out. I will be very careful about what I say on HOLAC because I am a member of it, but we do talk clearly to prospective Members about the commitment. That is appropriate and has probably happened more in recent years than perhaps was the case previously. Questions have also been raised about the impact on the Cross Benches. My noble friend’s comments about the years in which there were no appointments from HOLAC are a salutary reminder that we need to keep that drumbeat going. It is important that we do not do anything in a way which causes unbelievably difficult problems for any element in the House, in particular the Cross Benches. However, I was very reassured by what the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, said about this being difficult but manageable for the Cross-Benchers. It is a fact that a larger number of Cross-Benchers would be affected by the participation requirement, but when we looked at the numbers, we saw that quite a lot of those who were in the “under 20%” were not that far off it. If it were to apply over two Sessions, there would be far more opportunity to be aware of where you are and to get that kind of information. Incidentally, one of the things that we suggested, to make it easier to be precise about attendance, was an ability for noble Lords to clock in in the Chamber with their passes, so that everybody knows that they have actually been in the House. That would make sure that there was a proper record. The noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, quoted what we said in the report on implementation. It is true that, if we do this by resolution, we would be talking about a self-governing House, with Peers respecting that. The noble Lord, Lord Smith, made the point that it is incumbent on each of us to take responsibility for respecting exactly what the House wants to happen. That was an important consideration. One of the things that was most interesting about the discussion today was the question of refreshment, which quite a few Members mentioned, including the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller. My noble friend Lady Hayter talked about having experience in consumer affairs and charities but noted that somebody else now might have more recent experience. The noble Baroness, Lady Watkins, said the same about nursing. It is interesting that it was the women who mentioned those aspects. It really matters that we have up-to-date experience. The pace of change in every field is accelerating, so we need to make sure that we have relevant and up-to-date experience. There is a concern about the reputation of the House. We are not elected and we are vulnerable, and therefore we have to do things that matter. That was the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, made. The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, said that we are being discriminatory when we talk about people who have been put here for life having to leave. However, it was a Conservative Government, with the Liberal Democrats, who produced the Clegg Bill, which would have got rid of so many noble Lords—and we could be abolished at any time. Yes, we have a right, but it is not something that can never be changed. I share my noble friend Lord Grocott’s concern that there will always be those who oppose any change, but I think that those who oppose any change should be aware of the consequence that a bigger change very often catches up with them. It has been a very useful debate. I agree with what my noble friends have said: it is better that we take this on board ourselves and that we do not have change imposed on us. I hope that the Leader of the House will be able to find time, in the not-too-distant future, for the House to come to some decisions on these matters. I beg to move.
Motion agreed.
House adjourned at 10.08 pm.
Source: UK Parliament Hansard API. Debate ID: 5408637.