Retirement and Participation Committee Report

Baroness Hollins Excerpts

Wednesday 16th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[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.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Baroness Hollins Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. I agree that we could complete the Bill in the time allocated if we got a firm steer from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, about what he intends to do with the amendments we have already discussed. The closest we came to a steer from him was in our last session, discussing 18, 21 and 25 year-olds, when he said he would go away and think about possibly adding new tests to make it more certain that 18 year-olds had made the right decision on whether they should opt to die or not.

I have sat through all the debates here and I stand to be corrected, but I do not think the noble and learned Lord has agreed to accept in principle any of the other amendments that have been tabled. He gives the impression, rightly or wrongly, that he intends to defend every word in the Bill, line by line, and not produce reasoned amendments for Report. If he were to do that, I suspect we could make a great deal more progress.

I conclude by saying that, tomorrow, we will be discussing major amendments on palliative care, and many of them are quite different. If the noble and learned Lord were to stand up early on and say, “I like the principles of Amendments X, Y and Z, and I promise to go away and come back on Report with a better version of them”, I suspect we would make rapid progress. So it is in the noble and learned Lord’s hands to get this done in the next 10 days, and he should not blame those who are willing to talk about amendments which he gives the impression he would never accept in a month of Sundays.

[Baroness Hollins (CB)]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord who has just spoken. I also support the idea of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, that the Bill needs more time for scrutiny than is available through the usual tried and tested Private Member’s Bill process. We have to manage expectations, though, and I have been thinking about precedents for a Bill of this complexity. With the help of the House of Lords Library, I have been looking at balloted Private Members’ Bills from the House of Commons ballot that reached First Reading in this House in the 10 years from the start of the 2015 Session. It is very interesting.

In the other place, of course, ballot Bills are introduced by title only, with the full text appearing or changing at later stages. But the full text version as brought from the Commons provides a consistent and analytically robust basis for comparison. The average length of the Bills in that 10-year period was 8.8 pages, with a mean of five clauses. In contrast, this complex Bill, heralding major social and societal changes, has 51 pages, with 59 clauses. So it is hardly surprising that it needs lengthy scrutiny.

Eight of these pages were actually added by the sponsor on Report, with little or no discussion. In the other place, 92% of the amendments tabled by Members other than the sponsor were not even debated, and just seven were put to MPs for decision. This data refutes the misleading impression being given in the national media, which suggests that your Lordships’ House is delaying progress by tabling and debating amendments, as in reality they are needed to improve the safety and care of patients.

I suggest that counting the number of amendments is misleading, because many are consequential on the change proposed. As my noble friend Lord Carlile suggested, there are about 10 major issues. The noble and learned Lord has not said which amendments, if any, even those recommended by the royal colleges and patient advocacy groups, he is willing to accept. Members are waiting for his active engagement and for a bit of give and take.

In the past 10 years, only 66—about a third—of all balloted Private Members’ Bills have become law. Of these successful Bills, the vast majority were government handouts or had explicit government support. Nobody can argue against scrutiny, and I am glad that the noble and learned Lord has recognised that a Bill of this length and complexity does not fit the usual model of a Private Member’s Bill. I have concluded that the kindest thing for the Government to do would be to seek to establish a royal commission to give this weighty issue the attention that it deserves. We cannot do it justice through the Private Members’ Bill process, but I agree that it needs time.

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

I hope that the noble and learned Lord gets an opportunity to reply to this debate, but I wondered whether I could ask what is perhaps the daft laddie question. Is he, or are the Government Front Bench, able to tell us how many days and what dates they think will be required for the Bill to get through its passage in Committee, on Report—bearing in mind that there may well be Divisions on Report—and then at Third Reading, so that proceedings here will be completed in adequate time before the end of the parliamentary Session, before it goes back to the other place? Of course, the other place will presumably need time on Fridays or Wednesdays, as I think they sometimes sit on Wednesdays to deal with Private Members’ Bills.

Irrespective of one’s views of the merits of the Bill or of the noble and learned Lord’s Motion, it would be enormously helpful if he could put some meat on the bones of “reasonable time”—the phrase he uses in his Motion. That would inform us in a very helpful way. If he cannot do it, perhaps the Government Front Bench could do so instead.