House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Earl Attlee and Lord Hope of Craighead

Report stage
Wednesday 9th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I tried to deal with this problem when I was convenor in 2018. In that year my noble friend Lord Burns produced his report, which received quite a lot of support across the House, and I was persuaded that it was one of my duties as convenor to see whether I could persuade some Members on the Cross Benches to retire so that we would achieve the balance that my noble friend was seeking. What I did—it was my own choice—was to choose a 10% level, which the noble Earl has chosen in his amendment. I was conscious that the only way I could deal with this was by writing letters to people who were below the 10% bar, suggesting to them that it might be better for them to retire if they were not really able to make use of their privilege of membership of the House.

I received a mixed response—I do not think I was particularly popular in making that suggestion. But some of them responded, and a number decided to retire. The result was that I was able to achieve the balance that my noble friend Lord Burns was proposing, and I was able to maintain it during the rest of my tenure as convenor into 2019. I was greatly helped by the fact that the Prime Minister at the time was the noble Baroness, Lady May, who had very little interest in proposing new Members of the House, certainly as far as the Cross Benches were concerned, so the balance was quite easy for me to achieve.

Looking back, I am conscious of two problems. The first was the lack of authority. I really had no authority whatever, particularly as convenor; the convenor is much respected, but he does not have any authority among the Cross-Benchers. Just because I said it was time to retire, that was not necessarily something that they should follow—it was merely advice. Therefore, if we are to follow this suggestion that attendance is to be a qualification, we need the backing of something to enable the proposal to be enforced. Whether that is by legislation or by standing order is a different matter, but some kind of backing is necessary if the noble Lord and his successors are to be able to maintain the idea that attendance below 10% is not acceptable any more, and therefore people should retire.

The other problem—I am anticipating what my noble friend Lord Burns will tell us in the debate on Amendment 23—is the balance being upset by new Peers coming in whose number exceeds that of those who are retiring. That is a different issue, which we will come back to on Amendment 23.

My main point in support of the noble Earl is, first, that the 10% figure was one that I had decided was the right one in my time—we may want to debate it, but it seemed a sensible one—and, secondly, that we need some kind of authority across all the Benches seeking to enforce the idea. I offer my support for that.

I have just one footnote. One of the people to whom I wrote and who decided to retire was an academic who did not live in London and had very good reasons for finding it very difficult to get here to attend. Looking back, I thought it was a shame that he retired because if he had been a little more active, he would have made a major contribution. His attendance was at only 1%, and I thought, “Well, okay, it’s not really a margin”. If he had been at 9%, I might have said, “Look, let’s just drop it and try a little harder”, but his attendance was so far below that I felt there was no chance. If we have a cliff edge at 10%, there is the question of some people dropping over the edge of the cliff who really should not do so, and the committee should probably discuss that quite carefully.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, I have sympathy for the amendment and I am happy with the percentage suggested, but there is a difficulty. I spent most of 1995 running an NGO in Rwanda. In the winter of 1997-98, I was engaged in military operations in Bosnia; fortunately, it was a peacekeeping operation and it was for only six months. In 2003, I was engaged in a war-fighting operation. Fortunately, because of our military success—initially, anyway—I did not need to spend very long there. There could be very good reasons why a noble Lord is unable to attend, and we will have to find some way of dealing with that, but I support the general principle of the amendment.