My Lords, I will make a couple of points right at the beginning. I have had an email from my noble friend Lord Hayward, who was going to speak, but has decided not to because there is not much time. He asks for his support to be recorded. I have also heard from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, who came up with an ingenious way of dealing with peerages, which we will come to.
To put this debate into context, I should say that this is not about attacking anyone. It is about us hopefully getting a better House of Lords. The main reason I am here moving it is that I was lucky in the raffle; we essentially have a raffle for this kind of debate.
It might help the House if I begin by reading out the question I tried to get debated, which read: “Noting the extent to which all major parties represented in the House have, on occasion, nominated persons for Membership whose virtues are not immediately evident to the general public, the House resolves to establish a committee to look into how the system could be improved and to pass its findings to all political parties to consider when making future recommendations for Membership of the House.” I thought that was a fairly straightforward and easy resolution to put forward, but I was told by the Table Office that a topical QSD needs to be in the form of a question and cannot ask the House to make a decision. That is how we got to today’s wording. That underlines the question of being a self-governing House, when we cannot even set up a committee to look at something. That in itself is a very good starting point for this debate.
To me, the debate is born out of frustration with, in particular, the present Prime Minister. Whether through contempt or disdain, he does not appear to take any notice of this House whatever. He has not taken any notice of the Burns committee or the need for us to engage in some form of reform. I see no sign of him understanding or wanting to understand. To even up the score, I was also disappointed that the Leader of the Opposition, who put her name down to speak in this debate, subsequently removed it.
We should look at the facts. We always talk about the number of people in the Lords. That is indeed a problem. But there is another problem—the number of Members of this Chamber of whom we see very little. There are 39 people on leave of absence; one whom I shall not name has been resident in California for at least the last four years. Apparently, there is nothing to stop people being on perpetual leave of absence. All they have to do is to write an annual letter to the clerk saying that, at some point, they will take up their seat again. They do not even have to give any indication as to when. With 39 Peers on leave of absence, that gives us 783. Of those 783, there are roughly 200 whom we hardly ever see.
This is as much part of the problem as the number that we do see. The number of people taking part in the work of the House is not terribly large. On Wednesday this week, we had 411 voting, and that went down to 356 for the second vote. My good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, got some figures for attendance in September and October. The average attendance at the September Sittings was 376. In October, it was 402. So we do have a problem with numbers, but part of it is that some Members are seldom seen and do not contribute to the work of this House. This is why we need some sort of thorough look at how the House works and what can be done.