House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Desai Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 12th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

I was delighted to plan to stay overnight in Ipswich; what happened was that the abnormal load movement got cancelled, but I was still faced with the cost of the hotel, and I could not get the cost of the hotel from the heavy haulage company because of the risk of falling foul of the paid advocacy rules.

I did all this activity at my own expense and, save for one day, was not able to claim allowances. This is not unusual. Other noble Lords will be engaged in similar activity which would not be detectable as participation. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, that there could be some mechanism for measuring such activity; possibly at the end of the Session we might be required to say how much money we have claimed in allowances and what we have actually done.

We have already experimented with a participation test during Covid. Noble Lords will recall that we paid ourselves allowances only when we made a contribution. On one occasion we were debating an order that concerned vehicle testing and inspection. I thought that I was the House’s only subject matter expert. Imagine my surprise when I found that not only was the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, the country’s top psephologist but he had expertise on vehicle maintenance and inspection. Leg-pulling apart, we need to be careful to avoid creating perverse incentives to participate when it is unnecessary.

Finally, some Peers have quite low contribution rates but, nevertheless, I have found their private counsel to be invaluable. The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, talked about low-frequency, high-impact contributions. One has only to think of the contributions of the noble Lord, Lord Owen.

[Lord Desai (CB)]

My Lords, there are many dimensions in which participation can be measured. We have two problems. As the noble Lord, Lord Swire, said, we do not know the quality of the participation but we know the quantity. These different dimensions are sort of related.

I was a statistician all my life—not a good one, but I was one. There are techniques to combine those dimensions in one single measure, and I urge the Government and the people in charge to use them. It is called principal component analysis—noble Lords can ask me, and I can find out more about it for them. That will give you a more or less objective way of measuring different people’s performance across a number of dimensions. This has been done many times; it is reliable. There is no doubt that quality is difficult to measure, but quantity can be measured, and I urge the decision-makers to use this to be able to sort out who is in and who is out. That would be helpful.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, given the comments of the noble Lords, Lord Grocott and Lord Swire, I will keep my comments short. Although I am reading from a piece of paper, I am reading from my scribbles, not a full text. I hope that is all right. I co-signed Amendment 26 from the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra. I do not think he needed any real encouragement, but I think it is very sensible. In fact, Amendment 63 from the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, has real value. If he took that to a vote, I would probably support it. I absolutely hate Amendment 28 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay. It might as well say, in brackets afterwards, “Kick the Greens out”.

I suggest that we could have got around this debate—all these days, hours and repetitions. We could have just made all the hereditaries life Peers, which would have removed all this. I understand that there is an issue about kicking them out but, personally, I think we will miss them. Making them all life Peers would have just shut them up, and we would be free to go and have an early supper.