Procedure of the House: Select Committee Report

Debate between Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Lord Parekh

Monday 27th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I welcome the report. It is absolutely right to say that there is an anomaly in our membership of your Lordships' House. I cannot think of any institution to which one can belong without having the right to resign. Therefore, it is absolutely proper that the anomaly should be set right and that one should be allowed to resign after a certain period.

My worry is about the way in which people can be persuaded to take voluntary retirement. I may be being puritanical here, but to talk of payment does not accord with the public mood or with the spirit in which your Lordships' House is run. It has been a privilege for many of us to belong to this place. It has been a privilege over the years to propose amendments, to participate in debates and, we hope, to contribute something to the well-being of this great country. Then to be told that in order to leave you must be paid a certain amount of money is like asking: “What is your price to get out of this place?” I, for one, have no price, because I am not for sale.

I should have thought that if, on leaving, Members of your Lordships’ House were to be given access to dining facilities, the Library and research—a great privilege for which people would pay hundreds of thousands of pounds—that privilege would be enough to persuade a person to say, “I am happy to take voluntary retirement”. One can also put it in a more public spirited manner. We are 700 plus. It is necessary to reduce the number. There is no other way of reducing the number than either persuading people to take voluntary retirement or bringing in retrospective primary legislation which says that anyone over 75 or anyone who had been here for 10 years should go.

If people were told it is a matter of public service—the same spirit of public service which brought us here and kept us going—that one should take voluntary retirement after having served in your Lordships’ House for 10 or 15 years, that should be enough to persuade people. I would rather appeal to moral and public spirit than financial incentives. However, if we decide at some point to bring in financial incentives, I very much hope that we will not call it either a pension or a resettlement payment. Neither of these terms applies to the role that we have played. We have not been paid. We have only been given allowances—and only those who wanted to take allowances did so. To be told that when we leave we will get a pension is not only incoherent with the spirit in which we have been here but would also look very bad indeed outside this great House.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My Lords, I briefly point out to the Chairman of Committees and the Leader of the House that the root of this problem lies in the coalition agreement, which says that members will be appointed to this place in order to reflect the balance of votes obtained at the general election. If that policy is continued the membership of this House will increase to well over 1,000 and if, at a subsequent election, there is another change of government and they apply the same policy, it would grow exponentially.

I make this point because of something I read in the Times today. My noble friend Lord Ashdown, writing about reform of this place repeated something which he has said in our debates—that the political parties have appointed Members to the House in order to obtain a majority to get their legislation through. That is simply not true. This House has always operated on the basis that there should be no party with an overall majority. For that reason, it operates in the distinctive way in which it does.

To those who argue for some kind of financial incentive to leave this House, I respectfully point out that it is a funny way of trying to get and restore trust in Parliament: to inflate the size of Parliament and then ask the taxpayers to find the money to deal with the consequences.