Retirement and Participation Committee Report

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Wednesday 16th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I am down as the 50th of 65 speakers. The level of participation your Lordships manage to achieve when we are discussing our own future is amazing. I had better declare an interest: I have been here for nearly 30 years and I am over 80.

At one time, prior to coming to this House, I had some influence over Labour Party manifestos; regrettably, that is no longer the case. I was slightly bemused that the Labour Party, in writing its manifesto, seemed to consider that the most important thing wrong with the House of Lords was that there were far too many old codgers like me left in it. While that may be a criticism and a public impression that is not entirely erroneous, there are nevertheless much more fundamental things that the Government could have addressed but did not. Labour put this in its manifesto, and the responsibility of the House of Lords is to carry out that manifesto commitment according to the Salisbury convention, just as it would any other potential change that was clearly endorsed by the election of a Government who promised it in their manifesto.

My noble friend Lady Taylor has written a very useful report that spells out the problems and how we should go about fixing them. We should do so now through a House of Lords resolution that would fulfil that requirement on the House of Lords, and we can have the subsequent arguments later. There are a lot of things wrong with the House of Lords—how appointments are made by successive Governments, the number of Members, and the different groups in the House—that will be not resolved by retirement at 80 or shortly thereafter.

I had intended to retire some time in the next year—shortly after my 30 years are up. These propositions would give me a little bit more time, and I will consider the noble Baroness’s recommendations and the Government’s position. The argument on the membership of the House of Lords will go on, for two very good reasons. First, as my noble friend Lord Rooker has been very effectively underlying in recent weeks, the main role of this House is to revise and scrutinise. The elected House has failed to carry out its scrutiny functions effectively, and we need to remedy that. However, to do so, we need to have some authority and some recognition of that authority. That requires us to be a little more representative of the general population than we are now.

The other big political development over the years I have been here is that we have become a quasi-federal state—and, in view of the present Prime Minister’s dedication to greater devolution within England, we are going to become more so. In most jurisdictions that have an upper chamber, the second chamber is based directly or indirectly on the lower and regional—or in our case, national and regional—parts of the country. We must move, whether by election or some other process, to a more geographically—as well as age, gender and everything else—representative membership of this House of Lords. We need to postpone that argument tonight, but we will need to get into it fairly rapidly.

The Government will have to face up to the fact that this proposition, which will remove a coterie of old codgers like me from the House of Lords over the next few years, needs to be replaced by a much more coherent approach to both the appointment system to and the retirement system from this House. The retirement of people over 80 will not do anything about the numbers in or balance of the House of Lords; we will need another stage to do that. I hope this is the beginning of that debate.

When we come to make our decision tonight, let us focus on what we are required to do under the Salisbury convention regarding the proposition from the Government, and adopt this proposition from my noble friend that makes it real. Let us move to the situation that the Government have put to us. I hope we can do that without wider legislation—and therefore the involvement of the House of Commons or anybody else.

G20 and COP 29 Summits

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Monday 25th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

I always love my noble friend’s mixed metaphors, but I am not sure that a kettle has a brass neck. If it does, he has found it. One of the things that I find most useful, and I am sure everyone in the House agrees, is that whenever you attend a conference or meeting you make contacts and get to know people. In the few months that he has been Prime Minister, my right honourable friend has had to attend various conferences and summits. When you make good relations with people in the good times and have easy discussions, it makes those difficult discussions and harder negotiations easier in the longer term. There is no way that a bad or absent relationship helps this country. I hear the noise around the House, but I am grateful that we have a Prime Minister who recognises that good relationships with leaders of other countries are useful to this country, in good times and in bad. They promote the national interest, which is extraordinarily important.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very grateful for all the appreciation of the life of John Prescott, whom I knew and worked with for 40 years—indeed, I was his Minister in this House for four years. He was always prepared to negotiate, and that is what our current Prime Minister is doing in all these contexts. Negotiation is a multi-faceted thing, and you have to talk to people other than the person in apparent charge. The absence of America from the climate change talks, and its probable withdrawal under President Trump, is a real problem. But President Trump is not all of America. There is importance in keeping our lines open to American states, corporations, individuals and institutions so that pressure can be brought to bring America back into that process, because there are as many in America who support the reduction of fossil fuels as there are in the many countries that were present in Baku.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend’s experience, and his work with John Prescott, really shone through in that question. There are some exciting developments in the US on clean energy and clean power. Our relationship is with the Government—whichever Government are in power, we maintain that relationship—but also with, as he says, companies, civic society and the people of the US. We have a lot we can learn from them and share with them. I can give him an assurance that that will continue. It is a very important relationship for this country.

House of Lords Reform

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I have heard most of the speeches either in the Chamber or on the monitor and I am very pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst. The title of this debate is about reform of the House of Lords yet 90% of the contributions have been about the composition. We ought to be talking about what the House of Lords is for and how we best deliver it. A few noble Lords such as the noble Lords, Lord Sandhurst and Lord Norton, and my noble friend Lord Rooker made these wider constitutional points but most have ignored them. Frankly, we need a separate debate about the future of the House of Lords, maybe on the basis of a White Paper. Meanwhile, I am going to revert to the norm and follow everybody else and talk about composition.

This is a long-running story. Just before the last general election I was asked by somebody if it was really true that a Labour Government were going to democratise the House of Lords, and I assured them that it was absolutely clear and that Keir had committed us to it. I meant Keir Hardie, of course, because in those days we were supporting the Liberal Government in 1911 and, as the noble Lord, Lord Newby, reminded us we are now 113 years on.

We need now to recognise the part of the Labour Party manifesto not in the Bill now in the Commons. We are not only abolishing hereditary Peers but abolishing life Peers, as we all have to retire at 80. I do not object to that. I would have preferred a fixed-term cut-off point but we ought to enact that proposition at the same time as we are getting rid of the hereditaries or shortly thereafter. I do not object to it although it will get rid of me and a lot of my colleagues here and across the House.

It is actually 31 years since I joined the House— John Major was the Prime Minister—and the reason I am here is that Tony Blair wanted me moved from a previous position. He then gave me a number of very decent jobs in this House and I have very much enjoyed it. But that indicates that not only the hereditaries but every single one of us has no legitimacy in a way that would be understood in any other democratic country in the world. We are all here on historic anomalies, and if we are going to change this we need to change the lot of it and do that fairly rapidly.

I remember when I first came into the House, I thought it was going to be done fairly quickly. I saw that my first pass went into the 21st century and thought I would not need it that long because the Labour Government would clearly enact a new form of the House of Lords within their first or second term. But when it came to 1999 I was very disappointed—my noble friend Lord Liddle referred to this—when the deal was done to retain a proportion of the hereditaries and follow that up with by-elections. I remember the phone call from my noble friend Lady Jay, who was then Leader, and being astounded that we had made such a deal; we are still living with the consequences of it.

There have been various possibilities for change. I supported Jack Straw and the Labour Government’s proposition that it be a partly elected House. I supported the coalition’s proposals for a partly elected House and Nick Clegg’s proposals then, but nothing has happened. I have been deeply impressed by the contributions from a lot of hereditary Lords and from a lot of other noble Lords who came into the House of Lords through various nefarious ways; I have been friends and admirers of many of them. But we do not have the basic legitimacy of a Chamber in a modern democracy, and we need to work out what the second Chamber does.

In that time, we have also moved to being a quasi-federal state, plus having a degree of devolution within England as well. Most second Chambers in most democracies reflect the lower tiers of government within those democracies. The bulk of the membership of this House needs to be elected, directly or indirectly, by the chambers and regions of Britain. The time for that debate is not just to talk about hereditaries; it is to see what the role of this Chamber is in the long term, how our democracy is going to develop and where we are going. That will take a longer period. I will vote for the Bill when it comes through but it is only a partial solution, and we need a bigger-picture solution.