House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Lord Burns and Earl Attlee

Committee stage
Monday 10th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness is of course absolutely correct on her point and I strongly support her.

The issue of fixed-term peerages or membership of the House is indeed closely related to the issue of age limits, so I have some sympathy with what the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, said. I think that the overall answer to both issues is a retirement age that is agreed or understood at the time of appointment for new Peers. I hope that gives some comfort to the noble Lord, Lord Desai.

Once the hereditary Peers have gone, the remaining Peers who are over 70 now will come under considerable media pressure. It is no use avoiding this point. To an even greater extent than younger Peers, such older Peers are, rightly, not very responsive to what the media think or what the media want them to do. Rather, they do what they believe is in the public interest and in accordance with the Nolan principles. I am not sure that that is what the media want. I think that having 80 year-old Peers will be made to seem just as indefensible as hereditaries are incorrectly claimed to be today.

I would not underestimate the value to the House of Lords of having some Peers whose experience goes back a very long way. For instance, I advised a noble Baroness on the Cross Benches who was faced with an assisted dying Bill. She erroneously believed that she could not try to kill the Bill at Second Reading; I advised her that she could and that I had seen it done some time before. Sure enough, she succeeded in her endeavours. Unfortunately, when drafting this speech, I could not avoid the words “kill”, “fatal” or “euthanise” or the phrase “put out of its misery” when talking about the procedure related to an assisted dying Bill.

I am not opposed to term limits, provided that those who propose them are clear about what they want the House to do. However, the Wakeham report identified a danger, in that term limits could deter potential new Members—a point well made by the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell.

[Lord Burns (CB)]

My Lords, perhaps I could comment on one or two of the points being made. The Lord Speaker’s Committee, which I chaired, did indeed make the proposal that there should be either 15-year or 20-year term limits. We looked at both of them and came down in the end marginally in favour of 15-year term limits.

That was against the background not of this Bill, of course, but of also promoting the idea of a ceiling on the size of the House of Lords. The great argument in favour of term limits is that it generates a predictable number and a predictable flow of levers, which can then work alongside a limit on the size of the House. It then provides the scope for both refreshment of the House and a change in the political balance over a period of time, which is also very important, and it all can be done in an orderly way. The proposal that we made was in this context of several other changes that were suggested, rather than something which was standing on its own.

The proposal we made was also to be applied only to new Peers. We said that it should begin then and was a long-term proposal. It was the only real mechanism we could find whereby you could stabilise the numbers over time and have the capacity to make changes. After all, there are term limits for most people in most legislatures. Most of them are determined by the electorate and by what happens to people when they meet the voter. There is nothing new about this: it is a very useful mechanism, but not really a mechanism for this Bill. I accept that it is for another day, but in the argument about a more balanced and wider group of changes being made, I would be very supportive of this important mechanism at that time.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Lord Burns and Earl Attlee

Committee stage
Monday 10th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, as I intimated in the previous group, noble Lords who remain after the hereditaries have gone will come under increasing media pressure on the grounds that many are far too old and unelected. Even now, we often see colourful descriptions of noble Lord’s bios, especially when how they speak and vote is not to the particular medium’s liking.

In 2010, on my own initiative, I looked at a list of Peers in age order, expecting to find some age at which noble Lords became ineffective. I can assure the Committee that there is no such point, but over 33 years, what I have sadly seen time and again is Peers losing their mental faculties, alongside a relatively quick physical decline. Now that we have a system of retirement, there is not the moral drive to keep attending past the point of effectiveness, although a few do.

I think we can all agree that octogenarian Peers can be effective and add value. However, at 68, I am beginning to worry that I am out of touch and out of date with the things that I think, and I am experienced in, and that I am out of date with modern society. That is partially why I want to retire in the spring. The noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, made the point about social media. I do not use social media; I have not got the foggiest clue how to use it. Wisdom and experience are valuable to the House, and I frequently seek the counsel of very old Peers.

The problem is this: the maximum practical limit of the size of the House is about 800. I suspect that is part of the reason why the Government want to get rid of hereditary Peers, despite our experience. What matters is the number of active Peers, not the size of the House, but we also have too many active Peers. My theory is that, after a certain size, the effectiveness of each individual Peer is inversely proportional to the number of active Peers—so each Peer has fewer opportunities. For instance, in Parliaments before 2010, if I got fed up with what the Government were doing, I could roll into the Minute Room and say “Right, Oral Question; I want the next available slot”. They would laugh at me if I did that now; you have to go into a ballot. We never used to have to do that.

The problem is not the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of older Peers; the problem is bed-blocking. We should have Peers on both the political Benches and the Cross Benches who have succeeded in their chosen careers, bought and paid for their house, and secured a decent occupational pension—that is to say, appointment at about the age of 55 to 63. There is no shortage of really good-quality people in this situation. The noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, talked about precisely that. We cannot have them because we have around 200 octogenarian Peers.

I am not saying that we should not have much younger Peers. I am saying that the older Peers are bed-blocking younger potential Peers. I think the solution is to make it clear to new appointments how long their term will be. How long that should be is another matter, but I think we should make it absolutely clear how long new Peers are expected to be here. I do not think it would be fair to retire older life Peers, as they would have believed that they would be here for life. We hereditary Peers have known that we were on borrowed time since 1911.

[Lord Burns (CB)]

My Lords, I want to make two comments on the figures of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra. He has given us the figures on what the impact of various age limits would be; what he has not described, of course, is what the consequential effect in future years would be. My examination of these numbers suggests that the impact of an age limit is quite large to begin with, but after that the impact is really very small. I did an exercise of trying to look at the past and to judge, using one of these spreadsheets, what would have happened if we had had an age limit of 80 in the past. What would have been the effect on the size of the House and on what has happened through time?

The result is that the House would have been smaller, but if the same number of appointments had taken place, it would have still shown exactly the same upward trajectory over time. If we put in place an age limit of 80 that comes into effect in 2029, for the following few years only 20 or 30 people would fall into the bracket of hitting the age limit, which is not such a different figure from the number of retirees that we have in any case. So, I caution against thinking that this would solve the problems, in a sense, going forward over a longish period. There is no doubt that if one wants to bring down the size of the House quickly, an age limit is a very effective way of doing that. If one wants to make sure that one has a balanced profile going forward, so that leavers match new appointments, it will not help that much with regard to that.

That is why I also slightly take issue with the noble Baroness speaking for the Government when she said, just before dinner, that there is somehow a choice between term limits and age limits. To me, they have a very different purpose. An age limit is very effective in bringing down the size of the House, but it does not do very much to ease the challenge of keeping it down at that level. What term limits will do is create an onward larger flow of leavers at a time that we can predict in advance, which leaves scope for appointments and changes in the political balance in the House.

My other point is that, of course, 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.