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

Lord Walton of Detchant Excerpts

Tuesday 16th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Walton of Detchant]

My Lords, my contribution will be comparatively brief because I am just recovering from a severe cold and I have a slightly troublesome cough that may well interrupt what I am saying.

More than 21 years ago, in 1989, I received a life peerage in the Birthday Honours List. I accepted it with great pleasure and pride. I regarded it as an outstanding honour. For someone whose father had been a primary school head teacher in a mining village in Durham county and whose grandfather was a miner, in my youth I could never have contemplated such a possibility. That honour and sense of pride has stayed with me through all the 21 years and more in which I have served in your Lordships’ House.

I was grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, for commenting on my contributions to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. I have had many wonderful experiences in this House. On behalf of your Lordships’ Select Committee on Science and Technology, I chaired inquiries into international investment in UK science, into research in the National Health Service and on complementary and alternative medicine. I take pride in the fact that the reports of those inquiries in every respect had a significant influence on government policy, as did the ad hoc Select Committee on Medical Ethics, which I chaired from 1990. It has been an immense challenge and a wonderful experience to be a Member of your Lordships’ House over the past 21 years.

However, when I read this splendid report, on whose production I must congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and his colleagues, the possibility—I say no more than the possibility—of an honourable retirement began to have its attractions. I know that with passing years it is possible for one to take leave of absence, but one can still withdraw that leave of absence. On leave of absence, you are still, nevertheless, a Member of the House. I regard my Writ of Summons by which I have a peerage for life as something that I treasure and greatly enjoy.

The noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, made a most wonderful and entertaining, if slightly iconoclastic, speech—he always entertains and adorns the House and is well worth listening to—but the point that I want to make relates to what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, whom I often see travelling down on the train from the Scottish Borders. Now that I am in my 89th year, the prospect of getting up at 5.45 am, driving 15 miles in the dark and in winter weather to the station at Berwick-upon-Tweed, travelling on a four-hour train journey to London to come to your Lordships’ House and then having a return journey with another 15 miles drive at the other end begins to be—how shall I put it?—just a little irksome at times. For that reason, the idea of a possible honourable retirement—I stress, an honourable retirement—from your Lordships’ House carries certain attractions.

If the committee or working party or Leader’s Group comes out with a final report that makes such a retirement a possible option for Peers, in the fullness of time—I am not prepared to say how long—I would be prepared seriously to consider it. However, that would be on three conditions. First, I trust that, if an honourable retirement were possible, there would be no question of my relinquishing my title. If I relinquished my title, I can imagine the views of my friends and colleagues in the community in which I live. They would assume that in losing the title I had committed some serious misdemeanour, which is a matter that I would not be prepared to consider.

Secondly, I hope that we would have the opportunity of what are often referred to as club rights; that is, the right to a limited return to the House, as with the hereditary Peers, to entertain friends and family from time to time to lunch and to show them around the Chamber and the House of Commons. Today, I showed around one daughter, two granddaughters with their husbands and five of my seven great-grandchildren. I gave them lunch. It would be a pleasure to bring them back in a few years’ time to see them as they grow up and to see how much they remember of the visit today. Club rights are important.

I know that several Members have spoken about financial questions, which are very tricky. They are sensitive and extremely difficult. As the Leader said, the public at large would not be at all enamoured of an idea whereby substantial payments on retirement were introduced. However, paragraph 39 of the report suggests:

“Most respondents suggested that any financial provision should be cost-neutral (that is, that it should pay out no more than a member might otherwise have expected to claim in expenses, on the basis of past patterns of attendance) and that it should be available only to those who had been regular contributors to the work of the House”.

There is a case for considering a modest retirement gratuity based upon years of service, and I hope very much that the group will consider this matter when it comes to produce its final report.

The other point that I would like to make is that I trust there will be no suggestion—not even a hint—of compulsion. When I chaired the House of Lords Select Committee on Medical Ethics, I recall that one of the reasons that we decided not to recommend the legislation of euthanasia was because elderly and vulnerable people might feel under unremitting pressure through feeling that they were a burden on their families or that others regarded them as ancient and no longer worthy of staying alive. They might then be pushed into accepting euthanasia. All I wish to say in ending my contribution is that, if honourable retirement comes about as a possibility, I trust that none of us elderly Peers who are regular attenders here would be likely to meet colleagues who say, “What, are you still here?”.