House of Lords: Lord Speaker’s Committee Report

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Foulkes, who is not in his place, for standing in for me this morning as I had another appointment. Like the rest of the House, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and his committee for the work they have done—although, rather like the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market, I believe that the pace set out is quite inadequate for the problem that we face. I will come back to that in a moment.

Before the committee was appointed, I wrote to the Lord Speaker saying that I believed we had a real problem over the size of the House. This was two years ago. I suggested to him that we needed early action and that he should open a public book in which Peers who were prepared to go early, preferably around the age of 80, would put their names and make a public declaration of their intention, in order to get the size of the House down. He wrote back to me and said that it was an interesting idea but we would wait to see what the noble Lord, Lord Burns, came up with.

I put the view to the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and his committee that we need a retirement age. I still believe that we need a retirement age. Without any doubt we have some quite extraordinary people here over the age of 80, but there are quite extraordinary judges, surgeons, teachers, civil servants and heads of the Armed Forces who are all in the public service, as we are in the public service. We set out their terms and conditions, and all of them have retirement policies of one type or another, and we are able change them if we so choose.

Yet we are different from the rest. The debate today should focus to a degree on this: whether we should continue to be different. Okay, the noble Lord, Lord Burns, would change that in due course—in 11 years’ time, when this is finally enacted. It would be virtually 11 years before it finally worked its way through. We could do it overnight in the way that we reformed the Lords in 1999 when the hereditaries went in one fell swoop, with literally hundreds of them going. If we opted for a retirement age of 80, we would have close on 250 people going fairly quickly, and the House would survive.

In turn, we would be in a better negotiating position with the Prime Minister if we had made such a move ourselves on a voluntary and moral basis to influence the course of events and to try to persuade the Prime Minister of the day to draw up a code of practice on how appointments would be made in future to ensure that the House was kept within reasonable limits. I share the committee’s view that it should be 600 and all the other recommendations that it made.

I have one question for the noble Lord. When the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, was speaking, he said that we would require legislation to introduce a retirement policy in the Lords. I believe that he is wrong, but I would be grateful for clarification on that. I believe that we could decide that we wanted to go for a retirement age—whether 75, 80 or even 85. We could take that decision, and if we did that we would not only be doing the right thing but we would be sending the right message about the kind of politics we believe there should be in this country and that where change is needed we will do it ourselves.