Interim Report: Leader's Group on Members Leaving the House

Viscount Astor Excerpts

Tuesday 16th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Astor]

My Lords, there is no greater admirer of your Lordships' House than myself, but I think that it is agreed that the House has become too large. Perhaps I can remind your Lordships that this House is second only in size to the National People’s Congress of China, which has rather a greater number of citizens than the United Kingdom. According to my research, this House is the only second Chamber in any Commonwealth country that is nearly double the size of the first, so there clearly have to be some changes to our size.

The interim report of the group led by my noble friend Lord Hunt offers three main options. The first is an age limit, for which it is suggested that 75 might be the right age. That would get rid of about a third of your Lordships—some 250—and the size of the House would be about 500. On the face of it, that may be a sensible suggestion, but as we have heard from many of your Lordships—and as has been demonstrated by my noble friend Lord Ferrers—there are many in this House who are capable of giving virtuoso performances well beyond that age. However, a limit is certainly something that your Lordships must consider. On the second option, there is general agreement that a Peer who does not attend the House should not be allowed to remain. That must make sense. The third option is to consider length of service. To achieve a cut of about a third, the length of service would have to be 15 years. In my case, I would have overstayed my welcome by at least twice that amount—although some of your Lordships might therefore think that option to be a good idea.

However, whatever option is chosen—I perhaps prefer one defined by age—there should be transitional arrangements. We have heard from my noble friends on the Front Bench that there could be a form of grandfathering—so grandfathers, and even those who are not grandfathers, would be allowed to stay—which must make sense. However, we need to consider that, if High Court judges and right reverend Prelates have some age limit, such a limit must be sensible at least for any new Peers coming into this House.

My main point is that, if we do not come up with a sensible way forward, it will be imposed by another place. We cannot debate out or ignore reform. We know that something is coming. Unless we engage with the proposals, another place will insist on reform of this House that some of us will not want. As we know, the main political parties in their manifestos at the most recent election proposed a mainly elected second Chamber. That needs more debate. I am in favour of cutting down the number of your Lordships and having a proportion elected—perhaps based on Euro-constituencies, which I think would produce 76 elected Members—so as to allow us to move slowly in changing our constitution and to see whether the arrangements work.

While I do not think that there should be a moratorium on new Peers, I plead for some restraint on the numbers who are appointed to this House. If we have too many Peers, that will complicate how we take reform forward.

Finally, I thank my noble friend the Leader of the House for providing an opportunity for this debate and, in particular, for the fact that the debate is untimed. If there is one example of why debates in your Lordships' House need reform, it is the debate on reform of your Lordships’ House that took place on 11 October—for which I was unable to be here—when each speaker was allowed two minutes. The business managers for both the Government and the Opposition should be ashamed of that. I thank my noble friend for producing the report, which is welcome and should be taken seriously. I enter a plea that, if we do not work with another place to come up with sensible ideas for reform, those will be imposed on us without our having any input into what happens in the future.