Retirement and Participation Committee Report

Lord Johnson of Lainston Excerpts

Wednesday 16th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Johnson of Lainston (Con)]

My Lords, I have two interests to declare. First, I am remarkably young. I am following the oldest Member of the House in this debate and I am probably one of the youngest. I like that. Here, I feel so youthful; it is even more effective than some kind of anti-ageing moisturiser. When I leave this Chamber, I immediately feel very old—my children think I am 100; the techies I work with think I am a dinosaur. I would hate to think there will be a cut-off point at the top, a glass ceiling to my age, because I like the youthfulness I can exhibit when I am in this wonderful Chamber.

Secondly, this place makes me feel foolish. When I look around the Chamber and hear the extraordinary wisdom of my colleagues—my noble friends and noble Lords—I realise that I am in the presence of greatness. So I feel both young and foolish, and those are emotions I want to maintain. These measures will, sadly, change that for the worse. This is a witan, a council of elders. The whole point is to have wisdom, which is a combination of knowledge and experience. If we set a time limit on that, we immediately derogate the principle.

When I look around the Chamber and think of the individuals here, the idea that they should retire at 80 is bizarre, if not absurd, if not slightly offensive. I have just followed one of the most brilliant speakers, one of the most inspiring individuals in our country, who is 93 years old. I will have the good fortune to speak at the memorial service of Viscount Bridgeman, who died recently at 95. Until this year, he bicycled to the House of Lords every day and could not attend only for a short period because he had suffered an accident on his trampoline.

The idea that there is an arbitrary age for retirement is also bizarre when by the time this legislation is in force, 7.5% of the population of this country will be over the age of 80. While I do not believe in DEI, I know that the Government Benches do—in fact, it is one of the core tenets of their existence. How can they bring into force legislation that would deliberately discriminate against people over the age of 80 when they will represent one in 15 people?

As the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said, in most jobs people have a contract. Our contract is for life, and it is important that we remember that duty. It is also important to point out that, in most businesses, we have recently changed the law to reduce the enforcement of retirement ages in most businesses. These policies go against all the policies that the Government think are right.

If we think of the future—and it is important to think of the future—anyone born after 2005, I am told by my scientific friends, may not die. The country is ageing, and we will find ourselves in the bizarre situation of setting an arbitrary limit of the age of 80 when the average age of the whole population could be over that in the next 100 years.

I have the greatest respect for the noble Baronesses, Lady Taylor and Lady Parminter, and so on, who contributed to the report, but it seems to be trying to find a map to a location that has been pre-set rather than analysing whether these proposals—called reforms—benefit this House. The word “reform” has been used many times by my colleagues, and not in the sense of congratulating significant donors, but in the sense of making something better. However, no one has yet been able to point out to me how these reforms would make this House better.

An arbitrary retirement age of 80 would immediately preclude a large number of people who participated in this debate. Why should we want to remove those people, and how would their removal improve the work of our scrutiny and oversight of legislative and government action? No one has told me that yet.

We have to be very careful when we suggest that we somehow have to react to this move because it is popular. This is not my policy; it is a Labour government policy. It is entirely performative, so that they can say that they have reformed the House of Lords when they have done exactly the opposite. If I may follow in the footsteps of my noble leader, the noble Lord, Lord True, for us not to take this through legislation would be a gross dereliction of our duties. It should not be for this House to decide who sits in it; it should be for Parliament. We should have a fight about it, if for nothing else then to embarrass the Government about their performative politics in the first place.

My second declared interest is my noble kinsman, my father-in-law, the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton of Epsom, who this measure will expel from the House, which means that he will be at home full-time. I think it behoves me to make a plea for my family to keep him here safe and sound, where, as we have just heard—although I am not entirely sure whether it was the electrifying speech I was hoping for—he continues to make a significant contribution even though he has passed the age of 85, or soon will.

That, I am afraid, is why I object to this committee report.

Ministerial Salaries (Amendment) Bill

Lord Johnson of Lainston Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & Report stage & 3rd reading
Tuesday 14th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Johnson of Lainston (Con)]

My Lords, first, I express my gratitude to the Whips for allowing me to speak in the gap and apologise for not registering in time.

I have a few quick points to make after hearing what I already know, which is how hard-working and truly valuable Lords Ministers are. By the way, I exclude myself from that group. The idea that we should not pay Government Ministers anything is frankly absurd. In fact, this is an anomaly in our history, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Barber. I add that if you go back to the 1790s, William Pitt was paid £5,000 a year to be Prime Minister and another £5,000 to be Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, which equates to nearly £2 million a year in today’s money. Unfortunately, he then had to borrow a further £2 million from George III to cover his debts, putting some of our more recent profligate Prime Ministers into perspective.

The point is that if we want great statesmen running our country, we need to pay them properly. We can almost draw a geometric line from the salaries of our Ministers from the late 18th century to the zero rate today, and plot our general economic and national decline along it. In no other area of the world would we not pay for expert leadership. If I need to see a medical expert—I am going through my usual middle-aged checks at the moment—my GP does not say, “I’m so pleased. We’ve managed to track down a brain specialist who is the cheapest in the country. In fact, he’s completely free”. No, we would want the best, and actually we would want the most expensive.

I was appointed a Government Minister without any experience of the job or any formal training—and no salary. Indeed, often when asked, normally incredulously, how I got appointed a Lords Minister, I used to reply that I competed on price. Indeed, on the departmental website it said in bold letters after my name “unpaid”, and one visiting dignitary asked me about this with a clear tone that he would rather speak to someone who was paid rather than to a volunteer. I was then fired after two weeks and reinstated two weeks after that, with great dignity, by our leader—a victim, I may say, of fire and rehire. I was asked whether I got my redundancy bonus, and I said that I took 100% of it, which for those of your Lordships who were not listening carefully, was £0. My children kept telling me to resign and go and make some money.

The fact is that we are being dishonest with ourselves and our citizens, with this pretence that we are somehow careful with public money. This really is nonsense. We should pay Ministers far more than we already do. By the way, as we have heard from some noble Lords, we should expect far more from them in terms of outcomes. To say otherwise—and I am afraid my own party was guilty of this—is derogating our nation and is against all the laws of society and economics.

I end, if I may, with an additional plea. Again, under the pretence of good management, Ministers have precious few direct expenses, particularly for those who are unpaid. It is actually quite a costly business being a Minister. On my first day as a Minister, I asked whether there was a car to take me to see an ambassador. “No, Minister”, came the reply, “but we do have the number of a local taxi firm”. One high-level investment summit I had to leave by bus, with all the Saudi delegation looking rather surprised as I waved embarrassedly out of the window of the number 14. Global superpower Britain we were not.

In my last few days in office, we knew what the outcome would be so I was preparing for the worst. A slightly meek official came into my office and said, “Minister, I am afraid you owe us £39.50”. “What for?”, I asked. “For the hotel you stayed at when you visited our ambassador in Germany. It was over the threshold for Ministers’ expenses, so you need to pay the difference”. My last act as a Minister was literally to write out a cheque to His Majesty’s Government, effectively for doing my job. At least Ministers will now have a salary to meet their expenses when they represent their country abroad.

I support this Bill, but in my view it does not go far enough. The issue needs to be debated further. Please can we start by being honest with the people of this country that good politics is not free? We want the best leaders in the world, and we should be prepared to pay reasonably for them. To pretend otherwise is dishonest. This Bill is welcome, but it is only one step in the right direction.