House of Lords: Labour Peers’ Working Group Report

Baroness Bakewell Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bakewell (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, will, I hope, be pleased to know that I have not arrived with a written speech. I am making some footnotes on what I have already heard. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton on introducing the debate. The issue goes forward; it goes on and on. My comments derive from being part of the outreach department of the House of Lords, which goes into schools and talks to intelligent, and sometimes not very intelligent, sixth formers about this House. There is mass ignorance about what we do.

When I arrive, with natural campaigning spirit they say to me right away, “Why aren’t you elected? What are you doing here? You have no right. How does it happen?”. When I explain that we do have democracy, that it is called the House of Commons, and that we are a revising Chamber, they settle their first eagerness for change—change almost for its own sake—and listen as I set out the purposes that we fulfil. The most surprising aspect to them is the nature of the Cross-Benchers. They do not realise that we are not all politicised and loyal to our particular Benches. They are very impressed by that.

However, they want to know who the Peers are, which brings me to other issues, some of which have been overlooked in this report. In doing my homework before meeting these young people, I have understood how change has come incrementally, little by little. Some change has been reluctant, some consensual and some argumentative. That is how it works in this country, which is why we have life Peers and women Peers. Change goes on. Here we are in the middle of change and there will be more. Many of the things recommended in this report could be brought about, and should be brought about, quite soon without legislation. Then we will discuss further legislation.

Who should be in the House of Lords? I am a working Peer. I believe that it is a great honour to serve here and that it is very important that Peers should be working Peers. A footnote to that is that working Peers have to give of their time. People who have some expertise and would be willing will have been at the peak of their career and moving towards the end of it. Young doctors or lawyers will not find the time to serve as working Peers. When we ask people to be working Peers, we are asking them to sacrifice or to phase down their professional working lives. That will present some problems of how we recruit.

I shall say a few words about retirement. I am a working Peer who is over 80. I say that as a preliminary to discussing the whole nature of retirement. Retirement in our country is fundamentally changing. We have an ageing population. The whole change of legislation is indicating that people will not get their pensions until they are in their late 60s but, believe you me, that will extend. People will work into their 70s. That raises the whole problem of the life trajectory which people can expect to live. People will age at different rates. They will have different degrees of expertise at different times in their lives. Again, that is a footnote. I want to register that an age number is not the sole criterion in deciding whether someone is useful to a Chamber. Indeed, the practice in many businesses now, as people approach their retirement age, is to begin to adjust their role to offer them opportunities to do less, give them specific tasks and generally ease that phase in which they begin to leave their work so that the institution does not lose their expertise and they themselves are not overtaxed. I know of noble Lords in this House who are over 80—indeed one is over 90—who give extremely good, expert advice. I turn up in the Chamber to hear them speak because I know that they are experts. Medical people and lawyers, too, have reached the peak of their professions and retain that knowledge. The whole retirement issue will again prompt discussion among us.

This is a tremendously interesting report. It is an interim report. But it lost its nerve by not mentioning the Bishops. I am one of a group of people who are not eligible to sit on the Bishops Benches at all—I refer to women. There are no women and they are not going to be elected. Will Bishops be elected? How do the Bishops get their role? The whole issue of the presence of the Bishops is extremely interesting and is bound to change. In the course of its changing, we may well hear arguments for representatives of other religions in our society also to have a place in this Chamber. We are very conscious these days—are we not?—of the mix of religion and politics. The idea that you could have token members of different religions, primarily there by virtue of their religion, is a dangerous path. Again, it is a footnote, but this is an issue that will come up and be pressed by the many religious communities. But where do you stop? There are a large number of them.

These are the footnotes that I offer to this impressive report. We will go on talking. We will probably talk by way of a commission. There is nothing wrong with talk. Plenty of us can do plenty of it, as we know.