House of Lords

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Tuesday 6th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very happy to follow the noble Lord, Lord Naseby. A little unusually, I can happily say that there was nothing in his speech with which I disagreed. Every point he made was absolutely fair. I echo the views of every other noble Lord who has spoken in this debate and express my appreciation to my noble friend Lord Williams of Elvel for initiating it. It might have seemed a bit self-indulgent for a debate like this to happen on our first day back, but it has been such an excellent debate, with so many very interesting and positive points made in it, that it was well worth while. I simply say thank you very much to my noble friend.

I will try to avoid going over the ground that other noble Lords have covered in this debate—which is either one of the advantages or one of the disadvantages of speaking very late. There is no need to go into the basic statistics about the total number of Members of this House, the proportion who attend regularly and the consequences, both practical and reputational, of continuing to add to our membership. On that last point, we should perhaps be a little grateful to the Prime Minister for not following the line laid down in the 2010 coalition agreement which stated that:

“Lords appointments will be made with the objective of creating a second chamber that is reflective of the share of the vote secured by the political parties in the last general election”.

As Professor Meg Russell pointed out in the House Full report, published by the Constitution Unit in April 2011,

“putting this promise into effect would require a minimum of 269 additional peers to be appointed, taking the size of the chamber to 1062”.

As we have heard, the actual number of new Peers has been 160, which exceeds by a substantial amount the total who have left, whether by death, retirement or resignation. This is the reason why the membership of the House now stands at nearly 800.

However, the really important statistic is the number who are attending regularly, which has crept up to around 500. That compares with, for example, 350 to 450 before the passage of the House of Lords Act in 1999, when the membership of the House was well in excess of 1,000. One reason why more Peers are attending is because the average age of new Members is a lot lower than that of those who have left us. Your Lordships tend to live longer than most members of the population, and the average age of departure—until recently, that has been a euphemism for death—has been 85, whereas the average age for new Members has been 59 in the current Session. Intriguingly, the overall average age of Members, at 70, is almost exactly the same today as it was when I joined the House in 1999. The one difference, I am afraid, is that I am now much closer to the average than I was 15 years ago.

Many Members referred to the innovation of the system of retirement, which I think has been welcomed by all noble Lords. This is, or will be, a means of achieving a reduction in the membership of the House. However, I was a little surprised to discover that it does not apply when one of our 92 hereditary Members retires, because that retirement is then followed by a by-election, something which the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, spoke against earlier on. It seems rather strange that we have a by-election for somebody who has taken voluntary retirement under these arrangements.

I am afraid that the issue of the size of the House is bound to grow in significance as the general election approaches, and we must be robust in defending ourselves. It would clearly be absurd if anything approaching the old coalition policy of matching the number of new Members to the share of the vote received at the election were to be put into effect, given the fact that the election may well produce a rather strange set of results, not just in seats but in terms of the percentage share of the vote won by political parties. Are we really saying that if an extremist party were to attract 15% of the vote, that would justify it getting 100 or so Members in your Lordships’ House? Of course, if one follows that line, what would we do about a party that did well in 2010 and was rewarded with 34 new Peers during the life of this Parliament but then found that its vote had fallen to less than 10%? Will its Peers automatically volunteer to leave the House in order to bring that proportion down? I rather suspect not.

One sensible answer is to agree on a moratorium on new creations or at least agree on a one-in, one-out policy so that the total membership gets no larger, the party balances are maintained and the Government continue not to have a majority. But first, of course, there has to be agreement on what the total membership should be. I have not heard any consensual view on that, other than the fact that 400 is thought to be too few and 800 is thought to be too many.

We could adopt a rule that is followed in local government; that is, members who fail to attend a meeting in a six-month period without a good reason are deemed to have resigned their membership. We could look at more draconian measures, such as limiting membership to those who attend more than a minimum number of sittings. Your Lordships may be interested to know that if we set the figure at 25% of our sittings in the current Session, we would be saying goodbye to around 137 Members who have not attended at least 19 of the 78 sittings that have taken place.

A further change that I do not think anybody else has suggested but I would be interested to have my noble friend’s view on is that we could in future consider what we might call “ministerial peerages” which come to an end when the individual concerned ceases to be a Minister. There is nothing wrong with Prime Ministers choosing individuals as Ministers and putting them in the House of Lords. Indeed, that can enhance our effectiveness and enable us to hold the Government better to account if we can question them here. But if some of those Ministers decide that they want little to do with this place after they leave office, as was the case with a number of Ministers in the previous Government, they should be encouraged to resign from the House at the same time as they step down as Ministers.

I am not going to follow my noble friend Lord Maxton in having a go at the Bishops’ Bench, particularly as it is currently empty. But I cannot resist the temptation to ask the Leader of the House, whose speech I am looking forward to in a moment, whether the Government have plans to introduce legislation imminently to ensure that the first woman Bishop is appointed here before the end of this Parliament. I do not think anybody has mentioned that.

Your Lordships all understand that getting the number of Members of the House down without reducing the number of active Members will not do anything about reducing the cost of this House. Undoubtedly, we have to explain this better to the public and the media, who assume that just by getting rid of the old Members somehow the cost of the House of Lords will come down—it will not. What is important is that we do not compromise the quality of our debates or compromise on what we are able to do in scrutinising legislation and holding the Government to account. That has been the theme of many speeches in this debate. The fact that that message is coming through so clearly is a very good reason for having this debate.

My noble friend Lord Williams has set the ball rolling. I hope now that the Procedure Committee will take it up and run with it and look at these issues properly in the weeks ahead.