House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Earl Attlee and Lord Blencathra

Committee stage
Wednesday 12th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[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.