House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Earl Attlee Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 12th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I want to quickly say something about participation—I think back to a long time ago when I was involved in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill. What goes into the law does not happen in here; by the time a Bill gets into Parliament, it is already set in concrete—the anchor is in the ground. If you want to see what goes into legislation, you have got to influence the thinking behind it with the Civil Service. I, and many others, certainly spent some time on that.

The statutory instruments and regulations that come out of it are the real things that affect how it works and operates. You need to talk to the civil servants behind it, before those regulations appear, because we cannot amend them or do anything about them. It was on that Bill, or perhaps another one, where we said that they had to come back with regulations within a year and that was seen as revolutionary because it almost seems beyond our powers. We did not actually turn them down and it has always been a big problem here.

How do you measure participation in the all-party groups, the discussions behind it, the influencing you have done and what comes out? It happened with that Bill, and it happened again with identity cards—there was a huge amount of work behind the scenes on that, and on the Digital Economy Act, Part 3, and all the age verification stuff—I chaired the British standard on that. The Government had something which they totally ignored, but it has become an international standard. There is all the stuff we do which may not be on the Floor of the House, because, in general, it is too late by the time it gets to the Floor. You have to get to the people who are writing the stuff before it gets here, and that means participation in other groups, such as the all-party groups and other influential ones, which you do not have recorded.

I do a lot with entrepreneurship—in fact, I am on X today, encouraging MPs to support entrepreneurship in their local areas. There is a huge amount of other parliamentary stuff and influence you can do. How on earth do you measure that? Maybe you say that the only thing that counts is talking on this Floor. For many, it is the last thing that counts.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, I remind the Committee that I intend to retire in the spring and would need a great deal of persuading not to do so.

I did not speak to the previous amendment. I had speaking notes, but I chose not to make a speech because I did not need to. I do use notes; I use them to regulate how long I speak and, actually, in my notes I have cut out several paragraphs because it was not necessary to use them. This is largely a presentation issue, and I agree with what my noble friend Lord Hannan said, but I would very strongly counsel against making any changes, especially strategy ones, because to do so could have perverse effects.

However, we are all grateful to the Guardian for its research, for pointing out that some Peers have been claiming large amounts of allowances while making little or no contribution to the work of your Lordships’ House. It will be obvious to the Committee that it is not just activity in the Chamber that should count as participation. The noble Earl, Lord Erroll, made that point. However, it is what the public are encouraged to think. Some Peers are not so good in the Chamber but are invaluable in Select Committees.

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[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

I was delighted to plan to stay overnight in Ipswich; what happened was that the abnormal load movement got cancelled, but I was still faced with the cost of the hotel, and I could not get the cost of the hotel from the heavy haulage company because of the risk of falling foul of the paid advocacy rules.

I did all this activity at my own expense and, save for one day, was not able to claim allowances. This is not unusual. Other noble Lords will be engaged in similar activity which would not be detectable as participation. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, that there could be some mechanism for measuring such activity; possibly at the end of the Session we might be required to say how much money we have claimed in allowances and what we have actually done.

We have already experimented with a participation test during Covid. Noble Lords will recall that we paid ourselves allowances only when we made a contribution. On one occasion we were debating an order that concerned vehicle testing and inspection. I thought that I was the House’s only subject matter expert. Imagine my surprise when I found that not only was the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, the country’s top psephologist but he had expertise on vehicle maintenance and inspection. Leg-pulling apart, we need to be careful to avoid creating perverse incentives to participate when it is unnecessary.

Finally, some Peers have quite low contribution rates but, nevertheless, I have found their private counsel to be invaluable. The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, talked about low-frequency, high-impact contributions. One has only to think of the contributions of the noble Lord, Lord Owen.

[Lord Desai (CB)]

My Lords, there are many dimensions in which participation can be measured. We have two problems. As the noble Lord, Lord Swire, said, we do not know the quality of the participation but we know the quantity. These different dimensions are sort of related.

I was a statistician all my life—not a good one, but I was one. There are techniques to combine those dimensions in one single measure, and I urge the Government and the people in charge to use them. It is called principal component analysis—noble Lords can ask me, and I can find out more about it for them. That will give you a more or less objective way of measuring different people’s performance across a number of dimensions. This has been done many times; it is reliable. There is no doubt that quality is difficult to measure, but quantity can be measured, and I urge the decision-makers to use this to be able to sort out who is in and who is out. That would be helpful.

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[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I consider this amendment quite important and a solution to many of the problems that have been posed by noble Lords on Monday and today; that is, that we may want to change things in the future, but we need to wait for an Act of Parliament to do it—an Act which may never materialise.

Let us suppose for a moment—and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility—that we make an amendment to this Bill which succeeds, so that the Act of Parliament may contain provisions that set out a retirement age, a minimum participation requirement or an attendance requirement, or sets up the committee that the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, described in his amendment. After 12 months or two years or longer, when that committee reports, if this House decided that we needed to tweak it and that the retirement age or attendance criteria were not right, we would need primary legislation to change it.

The justification for my Amendment 32 was in fact made, I believe, by noble Lords on Monday night. Noble Lords may recall the debate we had on retirement ages and the amendment on transitional arrangements proposed by the noble Earl, Lord Devon. It was supported by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, who said that it

“proposes a simple set of transitional arrangements with two legs that would reduce that organisational shock enormously and allow the House to transition to an age limit of 80 without pain or any loss of our capability and effectiveness … The second leg would give everyone who comes in a minimum of 10 years”.—[Official Report, 10/3/25; cols. 560-61.]

The noble Lord, Lord Burns, said

“if we are going to have an age limit, we do not have to choose between 80, 85 or 90 for ever. We could begin with an age limit of 85 and then, for the following Parliament, have an age limit of 80: we would get two bites at the process of bringing down the numbers. I support what my noble friend Lord Kinnoull says. I think the transition arrangements for this are just as important as they have been in the whole debate about hereditary Peers”.—[Official Report, 10/3/25; col. 563.]

Winding up that debate, my noble and learned friend Lord Keen of Elie had a similar argument—to bring the age down to 85 by the end of this Parliament and to 80 by the end of the next Parliament.

What those four speeches have in common is that, at some future point, a further Act of Parliament would be required on House of Lords reform. It is highly unlikely that we will get any new legislation on changes to the House of Lords, even little ones, and it would probably be outside the scope of even the usual Home Office “Christmas tree” Bill—a criminal justice Bill. The Government have had their fingers burnt with this Bill and will not want a rerun of it, even if they worked out ideas on improving

“national and regional balance of the second chamber”,

as they said in their manifesto. Thus, my solution is to have a special regulation-making power in the Act to enable any of the suggestions on retirement ages, term limits or anything else.

As your Lordships will know, all Governments over the last 40 years have ruthlessly extended the delegated powers in Bills to include more inappropriate delegations. I submit that no Government can be trusted with an open-ended regulatory power to change the four Lords rules that I have suggested in my amendment. I was interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, said about delegated powers: that, in the past few years, they have expanded dramatically, which is not acceptable. The report from our Delegated Powers Committee, when I chaired it, suggested that every Government over the last 40 years had increased their delegated powers.

Therefore, we need a tightly constrained delegated power that the Government could not change or delay. That is why I state in my amendment that the regulation must copy verbatim the wording of the resolution of the House of Lords, and it must be made within 12 months of our House passing such a Motion. We would need to look at it first, just to ensure that there was no accidental wrong wording in the government regulations.

The Committee may think that I am being a bit cynical, but after four years as chairman of the Delegated Powers Committee, I can show noble Lords real cynicism in some of the appalling delegated powers that government departments have inserted into Bills. We revealed that in our report, Democracy Denied? The Urgent Need to Rebalance Power between Parliament and the Executive, and I can slip noble Lords a few copies at very little cost.

Let us build in now the power to make changes in the future. It would not commit us to making any of those changes, but it would ensure that, if this House of Lords decided on a retirement age or term limits or participation—or to implement anything that the committee described by the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, agreed on—we would not have to wait many years for a new Act of Parliament and for the Government to find time in their legislative programme. Looking at the myriad problems that always affect the country every month and year, I cannot see any Government in the next two or three years finding time for another Bill on House of Lords changes. The regulation-making power that I suggest should be tightly drawn, unlike a Bill, which would be fair game for another 116 amendments as per this Bill.

Before concluding, I must say that I was impressed by the transitional arrangements propositions. If those four noble Lords—the noble Earls, Lord Devon and Lord Kinnoull, the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and my noble and learned friend Lord Keen of Elie—can agree some consensus amendment for Report, I will happily not push ahead with the more blunt instrument of retirement at the ages of 80, 85 or 90. In the meantime, I commend my Amendment 32 to the Committee and beg to move.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for moving his amendment. However, I am not convinced that it is a very good idea, not least because it would alter the constitution and enable this House to exclude Members of another place from coming here at some point, without affording them the opportunity to say no or to express their concerns.

[Lord Northbrook (Con)]

My Lords, I am not quite sure what

“resolution of the House of Lords”

means: whether it is by amendment and, considering the mechanics of the whole thing, whether it would also have to go through the House of Commons. I am slightly perplexed at how this amendment would work in practice.