Interim Report: Leader's Group on Members Leaving the House

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Tuesday 16th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, perhaps I may add my congratulations to my noble friend Lord Hunt and the members of his committee on their very clear report which, as other noble Lords have said, is commendably brief and to the point. It contains a great deal of factual material from which no doubt each of us can find evidence to support our particular views or prejudices as the case may be. My particular view or prejudice concerns, first, the reputation of the House; secondly, the effectiveness of the House; and, to a much lesser extent, the number of Members of the House. I say that because, as many noble Lords have pointed out, the answer to that lies not here but with the activities of the party leadership.

I know that the House has important Second Reading business to conclude after this debate, so I will cut straight to the chase, and if the need for brevity makes me sound unusually brutal, I hope that noble Lords will forgive me. First, I entirely support the point made by my noble friend Lord Astor about the need for the self-regulatory framework to be followed. It is consonant with the way in which we have operated ourselves in the past and it enables us to keep control of our destiny. I strongly support that point of view.

That having been said, put simply, I am firmly of the view that there should be a compulsory retirement age for membership of your Lordships’ House. In my commercial experience, it is a hard and unpleasant but inevitable fact that mental agility and performance decline with age. The point and the rate of decline may vary, but decline there is, and it is difficult to argue that the list of compulsory retirement ages set out in paragraph 19 of the report is based entirely on prejudice against age. It is not, it is based on experience. There are additional examples not given by my noble friend. When the directors of public companies reach the age of 70, they are subject to compulsory annual re-election. Of course I accept that there will be hard cases and exceptions to the rule, but the outside world has found a compulsory retirement age to be of value, and I argue that your Lordships’ House cannot be an exception. For we are not just responsible for helping to run a company, a court or an ecclesiastical see, we are participating in the governance of our country, for which there can be no higher responsibility. Therefore the dignity of the House demands that each of us shuffles off the stage before we start dribbling into our All-Bran.

As to age, it seems to me that the age of 80 is pretty satisfactory, but if it is not to be 80, I would say 75 rather than 85. But I am afraid that I would go further because, like the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, I find it astonishing that, according to table 3 in the report, each year between 40 and 80 of our colleagues find it impossible to attend the House at all and take no part in our proceedings. I argued in my letter to my noble friend’s committee that there is a need for a cross-party committee to address what I call lack of interest. If noble Lords are inclined to ask me how I would define that, I have no precise answer, but I would reply that you will know it when you see it. Flexibility will be needed, of course. A hard definition would not address cases of, say, a noble Lord or noble Baroness who has been ill and perforce has been away for some time. But at root there needs to be an element of the famous phrase, “Use it or lose it”. If I were a director of a company and for 12 months one of my fellow directors did not turn up to any board meetings, I would ask the chairman exactly what role my fellow director was playing in the governance of the company. Again I would argue, particularly at the present time and given the cynicism among the public about Parliament and what goes on here, that the dignity and the reputation of the House demand it.

The process must be conducted with absolute dignity. The noble Lord, Lord Walton of Detchant, said much of what I want to say. It is not in our power to refuse club rights or the right to sit on the steps of the Throne: in effect, to refuse anything except the right to speak and vote in the House and its committees.

My noble friend Lord Hamilton put his finger on the issue of a financial settlement when he said that that would not be possible in the present circumstances. However, if in future years the financial sun rises a little, the proposals made by my noble friend Lord Alderdice may be worth revisiting. I accept the danger of this leading to nominal attendance and box ticking, but I argue that that risk is far less than the risk of doing nothing.

I take part in the Lord Speaker’s outreach programme, an excellent innovation, and I never fail to learn from my visits to schools. In one sense, the classes are like a mirror in which one can see a reflection of oneself and this great institution, often with slightly uncomfortable results. For the information of noble Lords who wish to see how we are seen, the most frequently remarked upon website is TheyWorkForYou.com. Many A-level students go there to see how we, in our individual ways, are performing our roles as members of the legislature of the United Kingdom. While one should not be guided only by the views of 18 year-olds, it is not easy to argue the case that the laws of our land can be made, in part, by men and women of very great age whose attendance at Parliament can be spasmodic to say the least. My private view is that unless the House grasps this issue, there is a danger of a press campaign, which could rapidly run out of control, to the detriment of all this House stands for and the reputation of the many Members who give so freely of their time.