House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Lord Newby and Lord Cromwell

Report stage
Wednesday 2nd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, had summed up the situation at the end of Committee very well when he said that there was a broad agreement across the House that we needed to act on attendance, participation and retirement. I reckoned without the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, but, having sat through those earlier debates, I suspect that he is in a relatively small minority in your Lordships’ House. If we think that we need to move on those issues, the key question is how we can do it expeditiously and with the best likelihood of getting an outcome that your Lordships’ House wishes to see. In my view, one way that will not achieve that is to expect to do it all via primary legislation, for two reasons.

First, no Government will want to put before your Lordships’ House a Bill with a raft of provisions for further relatively minor changes, because they have seen what has happened this time. I would not fancy being the Leader of the House who went to the Cabinet committee to explain why another Bill dealing with all these things was a priority for the Government. The other argument, which I have made on a number of occasions, and for which I apologise to noble Lords, is that I do not want the House of Commons deciding what constitutes proper attendance and participation by Members of your Lordships’ House.

To take up some of the proposals that we have just heard, if you were to say to MPs that 85 was to be the par for retirement, you would be more likely to get them to pass something saying that it should be 70, because 85 is so far beyond any retirement age for anything of which I am aware that it appears almost ridiculous to people outside your Lordships’ House. This is not to say that we do not have, and have not had, many Members over the age of 85 who have been extremely impressive well beyond that age, but there are reasons for a retirement age that go way beyond competence. Retirement ages are very often introduced in order to see a throughput of people, get new experience in and prevent an organisation living off its past. That is why retirement ages are very often introduced, and is one reason why we need a retirement age here.

If I am right in thinking that we should not be looking to the Government to produce a Bill covering all these things, how else do we do it? My view is that we can do quite a lot of it via our own Standing Orders. The way to get to the point where we can change the Standing Orders is, in my view, the one that the Leader of the House has proposed.

If we have a Select Committee of your Lordships’ House with strict terms of reference and strict timetables, and which produces proposals, we can implement them very quickly on our own. We should decide what we consider a proper level of participation and what, in our view, constitutes an adequate level of attendance, and we should decide and recommend what we think is a sensible retirement age.

I understand why noble Lords are rather cynical about any proposal by any Government to set up a committee to do something that has no statutory powers to implement its recommendations, but there is such a swell of opinion on this issue about the need for change and a willingness on the part of the Government to accommodate it that I believe we should grasp that proposal. We should put forward good people from our groups to serve on it and task them with coming forward with agreed proposals in the quickest possible time. That is the way we should deal with all these issues. Therefore, I believe that we should not be looking to put amendments in this Bill that deal with one or all of them.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

I agree very much with the noble Lord, Lord Newby, who said almost everything I was about to say in the next group, but it is no less welcome for that. I just want to pick up the point about us all voting for each other. I was here in 1999, and it was a very unpleasant experience to have people constantly sidling up to you, who had never spoken to you before, and urging you to vote for them because they were such a good chap, to use a phrase. I really hope that we do not go back to that, but let us get on to the next group and we will talk more.