House of Lords: Size

Lord Steel of Aikwood Excerpts

Monday 5th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Steel of Aikwood (LD)]

My Lords, this country is year by year becoming more federal in character, if not in practice. It is right that the committee in the other place that is going to look at more fundamental reform of the House of Lords should dust down the report of the commission that Prime Minister Asquith appointed after the passage of the Parliament Act, which recommended that a new senate could be elected by the House of Commons. Now that we have all those other legislative bodies in the UK, the opportunity for having a new upper Chamber here on the basis of a democratic election but not threatening the House of Commons is one that I would hope the committee would consider. It could include also the right to elect Members who are not involved in political parties, thus retaining in a new Chamber the Cross Benches, which are so valuable, and severely limiting the number of prime ministerial appointments. But that is for the long term and not for the debate today.

The point that I want the Leader of the House to consider is that the appointment of a Select Committee should lead to quick action because we do not actually need more legislation. Now that we have retirement on the statute book, anything more can be done by a resolution of the House. We are a self-governing House, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, and the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, have already mentioned. We can do it ourselves; it does not need more legislation and does not need to take up parliamentary time. I hope that the Select Committee will consider that carefully.

I hesitate to disagree with my dear friends and colleagues my noble friends Lord Tyler and Lord Rennard, but I do not regard an age cut-off as ageist. When you look at life outside, judges after all have to retire at 70, while the police retire, depending on their rank, at 60 or 65. The oldest age group that I know of for retirement are Lord Lieutenants, who have to retire at 75. Let us say that at the end of every Parliament those Peers who have reached the age of 80 or above, as the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, said earlier, should leave—80 and above is a very generous cut-off point. It is not ageist at all, in my view.

If that were to happen at the next election, 221 Members of this House would disappear, including me. I am therefore able to say, with some conviction, that this is a good idea. Also, since there is a clear-out at the other end of this building at every election, the end of every Parliament could also be the right time for a clear-out here. If you wanted to add to the 221, you could take into account those who appear very rarely. I am told by the Library that, in the previous Session of Parliament last year, 85 Members attended for less than 10% and 51 for less than 5% of the sittings of the House. There is scope for reducing the numbers by resolution of the House and I hope the Select Committee will take that into account. If there is a Select Committee, I would put forward these ideas in greater detail.

It is very rare in this place to be asked to repeat something one has said before, but various Members asked me to retell the story about the difficulty older people have with new technology. I did not make it up, it was actually a letter in the Oldie magazine, and this is what it said:

“I haven’t got a computer, but I was told about Facebook and Twitter and I am trying to make friends outside Facebook and Twitter while applying the same principles. Every day I walk down the street and tell passers-by what I have eaten, how I feel, what I have done the night before and what I will do for the rest of the day. I give them pictures of my wife, my daughter, my dog and me gardening and on holiday. I also listen to their conversations, tell them I ‘like’ them and give them my opinion on every subject that interests me … whether it interests them or not. And it works. I already have four people following me: two police officers, a social worker and a psychiatrist”.

I repeat that only because I believe the time is long overdue when we collectively insert a use-by date on ourselves.

European Union: United Kingdom Renegotiation

Lord Steel of Aikwood Excerpts

Thursday 4th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

As always, my noble friend has spoken wise words, in that this is not just about trying to get concessions. It is about starting a reform process in Europe. I disagreed with what the noble Baroness said about the way the Prime Minister had approached this because, by starting this, he has kick-started within Europe a recognition that that institution has to change for all its members to prosper. More can be done. He hopes that he can achieve an agreement that will lead to us staying in a reformed Europe and for that to be the beginning of the process, not the end.

[Lord Steel of Aikwood (LD)]

I wonder if the noble Baroness is aware that, for those of us listening to the Statement today who were involved in the 1975 referendum, there was a strong sense of déjà vu as the same arguments went on after Prime Minister Wilson’s renegotiations? I am reminded of my great predecessor Jo Grimond saying, when we were haggling over the terms of entry into the European Community, that it was as though at the time of the Reformation people were not able to make up their minds until they knew what price the monasteries were likely to fetch. When we get to the referendum, can we operate at a slightly higher level?

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

I always try to operate at a higher level.

House of Lords Reform

Lord Steel of Aikwood Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Steel of Aikwood (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Government for their courtesy in including my Motion along with this take note debate. I am not going to get involved in an argument with the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, except to point out to him that the Prime Minister said in a speech in Singapore in the course of his five-day tour:

“It is important the House of Lords in some way reflects the situation in the House of Commons. At the moment it is well away from that”.

So the noble Lord should be careful what he wishes for, because UKIP on that basis is overrepresented in this House as it stands.

However, I want to stick to the Motion before us. I thank the Leader of the House for the way in which she introduced the take note debate, which was extremely helpful. Before I come to the terms of my Motion, I hope that we do not lose sight, while we talk about incremental change to this House, of the longer-term objective of looking at the role that this House should play in the constitution of our country. Things are changing in Northern Ireland, in Scotland and in Wales, and even in England, with the Prime Minister talking about English votes for English laws. So we are missing a chance by not having the constitutional convention for which many people have argued. Indeed, the noble Baroness herself said last week in replying to another Member:

“The noble Baroness knows my party’s position on a constitutional convention. We do not feel that that is a priority at this time”.—[Official Report, 7/9/15; col. 1213.]

But when will it be a priority? A constitutional commission or a convention is bound to take some time, and it is important that we do not lose sight of the vow made by the three party leaders to the people of Scotland during the referendum and that we look to a reformed House of Lords as being a pivotal part in a quasi-federal constitution in the future. That at least is a long-term discussion which we should have.

Let me return to this immediate debate, which is about the House as we know it today. I am grateful also to the Prime Minister for what he said in that same speech in Singapore, and I quote him:

“It is now possible for people to retire from the House of Lords, and a number of people have taken up that option under the Steel Bill, and I think we should encourage that”.

Well, I thought that was a bit rich. I see the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, smiling, because he will recall as I do the struggle that we had to get the Government to accept even a tiny part of that Bill. It would never have happened but for Dan Byles, the MP in the Commons, winning a place in the ballot and getting it on to the statute book in its limited edition. It was a struggle, and I was grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde—I pay tribute to him and his successor, the noble Lord, Lord Hill, both of whom were extremely helpful. But, of course, one of the big stumbling blocks was the Deputy Prime Minister, as he well knows. I still remember the press conference when he announced that they were withdrawing after the failure to get the Bill through the House of Commons. At the press conference, he was asked about the Steel Bill and he said, “I do not propose to legitimise the illegitimate”. I took personal offence at that, and I thought it was offensive to the House as a whole. What I find illegitimate is the practice of the three party leaders, copying from Lloyd George, of continuing to give peerages to people who have done nothing for the parties except sign large cheques for the party coffers. That is the most disgraceful thing about the current practice.

I propose in this Motion that there should be a cut-off, and I admit right away that this is an age cut-off under the Act which we passed. Members may now retire, and as the Leader said, 35 will have done so. But if we had an automatic cut-off with anybody over the age of 80 at the end of each Parliament departing, it would enable the House to be refreshed after each election without the numbers becoming excessive. In fact, if this had happened at the last election, 158 Members would have left. If it happens at the end of this Parliament, 260—including myself—would have to go. I think that that is probably a very good thing—I am not referring to myself, but to the generality. It would enable an incoming Government to make new creations without the numbers becoming excessive.

That was my view, and then over the Summer Recess I happened to meet up with my noble friend Lord Lee of Trafford. He said, “You might have more chance of getting this through if you allowed an exception for those people whom we would be very sad to miss”. That is why I included in my Motion the proposal that those who are retiring,

“should elect 12 of their number”,

to stay on—rather on the same analogy as the hereditary Peers. In fact, I got it quite wrong because the noble Lord, Lord Lee, was proposing that the House as a whole should choose, not just those who are retiring. My mind was on how many fish we would catch on the Tweed that day, so I did not get this quite right.

However, I think that the age limit is not an unreasonable instrument, if rather crude, given that judges have to retire at 75 and Lord Lieutenants retire at 75. When I was a young MP a lot of Members of the House of Commons were over the age of 80, but that is no longer the case. Because of the process of parliamentary pensions, coupled with selection processes, very few Members are above that age in the Commons. It is not unreasonable to say that at a certain age people should abandon their public life.

I end with an example. I suspect that most of those over 80 are not familiar with the social media. I enjoyed the letter I read in a publication recently from one such person who said:

“I haven’t got a computer, but I was told about Facebook and Twitter and I am trying to make friends outside Facebook and Twitter while applying the same principles.

Every day, I walk down the street and tell passers-by what I have eaten, how I feel, what I have done the night before and what I will do for the rest of the day. I give them pictures of my wife, my daughter, my dog and me gardening and on holiday. I also listen to their conversations, tell them I ‘like’ them and give them my opinion on every subject that interests me … whether it interests them or not.

And it works. I already have four people following me; two police officers, a social worker and a psychiatrist”.

That letter typifies the problem for those of us who reach the age of 80, and it is not unreasonable—a crude instrument it may be, but it could be effective. I have included the Motion as a contribution to this general debate.