House of Lords Reform Bill [HL]

Lord Cobbold Excerpts

Friday 3rd December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cobbold]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in welcoming this Bill which proposes a series of reform measures for this House that are positive, not destructive, and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Steel, on bringing the Bill back to this House for the umpteenth time.

There are four elements to the Bill. I will focus on the first which is that there should be a statutory Appointments Commission responsible for all appointments to a life peerage and consequential membership of this House. Under the present arrangements, there is no control on numbers of new appointments and, consequentially, no limit on total numbers in the Chamber. Following the large numbers of recent new appointments, the size of the House is definitely too large. The Bill defines the required distribution of membership among the various political parties and, happily, calls for at least 20 per cent of the membership to consist of Members who are independent of any registered political party.

The Bill says nothing about total numbers, except that the total membership should not exceed that of the House of Commons. I do not see any special reason why membership should be restricted to being less than that of the Commons, but I think that the Appointments Commission should be given an optimal total target membership. The optimal number is, I think most people would agree, considerably smaller than current total membership. I believe it should be somewhere in range of 300 to 500.

Obviously, if an optimal number is to be agreed that is much smaller than the present membership totals, a substantial transition plan would be required to spread the number of required reductions over, say, a five-year period. The Bill proposes that provision could be made for Members to be granted permanent leave of absence. My own view is that while welcoming this, it would not be used sufficiently to achieve a significant reduction in total membership. In a sense, there is already a system of voluntary retirement in that a Member may simply stop attending. I believe that a long-term reduction in the number of existing Members can be achieved only by a system of compulsory retirement, and that can be based only on the age of the Member or period of service. I do not think that age is the right choice. People age at different rates, so the only fair and workable system would be a compulsory period of service for all Members which, in my view, should be 20 years. Given a fixed period of 20 years, it should be possible for a Member reaching the limit and still performing a valuable role in the House to be given an extension of service of one to five years on application, I suggest, to the Lord Speaker. Given that 161 Members of the present House have periods of service in excess of 20 years, the introduction of such a system would require a transition period of at least five years. I would hope to put forward a detailed scheme at the hoped-for Committee stage.

The Bill contains provisions for dismissal on conviction of a serious criminal offence, which are acceptable. Lastly, it calls for the abolition of the process of electing replacements for the 92 hereditary Peers when they die. While I am lucky to be one of those 92 Peers, I do not think that heredity can, on its own, justifiably be a qualification for membership of this House any longer.

This is a constructive Bill which I believe meets the current needs of House of Lords reform, and I wish it well.