House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Committee (3rd Day)

Amendment 19

19: After Clause 1, insert the following new Clause— “Attendance requirement of 20%A member of the House of Lords who attended fewer than 20% of possible sittings in the 2019–2024 Parliament must retire from the House of Lords within two months of the day on which this Act is passed.”Member's explanatory statement Alongside other amendments in the name of Lord Blencathra, this amendment has been tabled to permit the House to vote on three options for requiring peers who have made little recent contribution to the work of the House to retire. According to analysis of Library figures, requiring a minimum attendance of 20% of sittings between 2019 and 2024 could remove 154 peers.

My Lords, the Labour manifesto said that

“we will introduce a new participation requirement”.

My Amendment 26, in the next group, deals specifically with the very small number of Peers who turn up and then do nothing.

The Government keep complaining that many amendments to this Bill have nothing to do with the removal of hereditary Peers, saying that the Bill is narrowly focused. That is true, but it was a political decision by the Government to make it so narrow and not include the other priority issues from their manifesto. The Government are seeking to give the impression that dealing only with hereditary Peers is somehow sacrosanct or ordained from on high. If we were in the Moses Room right now, I would be looking at the tablets that he brought down from Sinai to see if there was an 11th commandment saying, “Thou shalt have no other provisions in thy Bill except the removal of hereditary Peers”. Governments often widen the scope of Bills and adjust the Long Title. Indeed, today in the other place the Government have tabled Amendments 262 and 263, which will amend the Long Title to the Employment Rights Bill. They could do so for this one also if they were so minded.

With these amendments, I am seeking to explore the possibility of retiring Peers who have attended few of our sittings. Let me make it crystal clear that I reject the idea of a full-time House of political professionals. The great strength of this revising Chamber is that, with a very wide range of expertise to call on, most noble Lords do not sit here all the time intervening on issues that are not their speciality, but participate in our debates and Select Committees on issues on which they are expert.

I recall a debate on an amendment to the precision breeding Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, was debating a point with the noble Lord, Lord Winston, concerning recombinant DNA—whatever that is. The rest of us sat there watching a very civilised ping-pong match, and they were the only two in the whole Chamber who knew what they were talking about. Indeed, when my noble friend the Minister wound up, he said that neither he nor his officials in the Box knew anything about the subject, either, and would both noble Lords come to the department and explain it to them? That is one tiny example of the superb strengths of this House—that is the House of Lords in action. For the record, both noble Lords had attendances in the last Parliament well above 30% and 40%.

I rise very briefly to speak to the four amendments in my name, Amendments 22 to 25. The first three would amend the lead amendment, Amendment 19, moved by my noble friend. For reasons that I shall come to shortly, I very strongly disagree with it.

First, I express some cautious agreement with my noble friend as regards future participation. My noble friend Lord Blencathra has urged the case for requiring a future minimum degree of engagement as a condition of membership of this House, and there is clearly a case for that. My own Amendment 25 suggests a participation record of 10%. However, I would be a bit cautious about setting too high a requirement; first, because occasional interventions from those who are not regular attenders can be very valuable, sometimes on esoteric subjects, although not exclusively so.

Moreover, and more generally, there is a danger that too demanding a requirement could encourage interventions for the purpose of meeting the criteria from those who are not currently great participators. We all know that speeches in major debates are time-limited, and very often the time available is very short. The question that arises is: do we want to make a more restrictive timetable? I think not, but that could well be a consequence of an increased participation requirement. As my noble friend touched on, there needs to be a degree of flexibility with regard to minimum requirements. Members may very well have good reasons for not participating: illness, leave of absence, overseas commitments, family problems and so forth. My suggestions in Amendments 22, 24 and 25 are designed to address these problems.

Where I actively and positively disagree with my noble friend is in his Amendment 19 and his related Amendments 20 and 21. Your Lordships will have noticed that those amendments relate to the 2019-24 Session. That is retrospective in character, and my noble friend is suggesting that if a Member fails to satisfy the stated participation level in the past Parliament, he must retire.

My Lords, I rise briefly to speak to Amendment 64 in my name, to which the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, has added his name. Like the other amendments in this group, it addresses the question of attendance.

By amending the House of Lords Reform Act 2014, which sets a minimum attendance of one sitting day every Session of Parliament, my amendment aims to ensure that Members attend a minimum of 10% of sitting days in each Session, which is similar to some of the amendments already mentioned. As I have said previously, I am of the view that the broad and largely amateur membership of your Lordships’ House is one of its enduring strengths. The fact that those who sit are, for the most part, not professional legislators is important to ensure that a diversity of experience and views are heard from a wide range of backgrounds. I believe that that was the consensus view of the House when we debated an elected House on Monday.

That said, a minimum attendance is entirely reasonable and this amendment puts that at 10% of the sitting days in any one Session. Such a modest attendance will ensure that Members are committed to service in the House and are able to keep suitably abreast of developments in Westminster. It will not, however, require Members to attend so often as to preclude them from continuing to maintain their outside interests, and will equally not require them to make unnecessary and numerous interventions, slowing down the business of the House as Members seek to pad their records of contribution. This is in nobody’s interests.

I note that the amendment is similar to Amendment 21, proposed so excellently and with so much Excel detail by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, but his amendment would require 10% of sitting days within any one Parliament, whereas Amendment 64 requires it in any one Session, which will ensure a greater regularity and spread of attendance. On that basis, I recommend it to the Committee.

My Lords, I have Amendment 37 in this group. I think we have Members of extreme expertise in here but, unlike my noble friend Lord Hailsham, that we do not want to hear from them only when that particular expertise is engaged. We want their broader contribution and wider understanding of life; we want them to bring that expertise into our wider debates. We should expect people who are part of this House to turn up for a reasonable percentage of time—certainly 10%. As I learned from my noble friend Lord Strathclyde, Peers whose habit is to blow in, blow off and blow out are really no use to this House whatever.

The other characteristics of my amendment, compared with others, are to leave a lot of flexibility to the House of Lords in saying what the level should be and how it should be determined. That is rather better expressed in Amendment 32, which we will come to in a while and which I thoroughly support.

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 64, which is the one I am most attracted by in this group. I have in my right hand a copy of the Writ of Summons that we each receive when we come here. I am going to read an extract:

“We, strictly enjoining, command you upon the faith and allegiance by which you are bound to Us that considering the difficulty of the said affairs and dangers impending (waiving all excuses) you be personally present at Our aforesaid Parliament with Us and with the Prelates, Nobles and Peers of Our said Kingdom to treat and give your counsel”.

I believe that the Writ of Summons is a very serious document and this is why I think that Section 2 of the House of Lords Reform Act 2014, which allows for only one day of participation, is not consistent with the Writ of Summons, frankly.

I have been looking at my own spreadsheet; my numbers came from the Journal Office, so they are no doubt slightly different. In looking at those numbers, I felt that, as I said in November and in December, by raising that one day to 10% of the days sat in a Session, we would lose between 50 and 100 of our number who did not live up to what is in our Writ of Summons. I felt that that was proportionate. However, although I clearly looked at other percentages as well, 10% is a figure that, selfishly, suits the Cross Benches, because we have a large number of people on our Benches who are low-frequency, high-impact Members. I need not name them, because all noble Lords will be able to think of several, but they are people at the very top of their professions. They are able to come here to give devastatingly good speeches, but they are not able to make more than 10% of the time here. They go on to our committees and do a lot of valuable work for our House. That is why I feel that 10% is the right number.

The pleasing thing about the amendment in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Devon, is that, in it, attendance is measured as it is today, so the very methods that we use to measure attendance are there. The methods that we use if a Member wants to appeal a wrong marking out, as it were, are there and work well. I have confirmed with the Clerk of the Parliaments that these methods could be applied to this type of amendment. Therefore, in my eyes, the noble Earl has scored a hit.

My Lords, as is proposed in Amendment 37 by my noble friend Lord Lucas, this matter ought to be dealt with proactively; for, as may be inferred from that amendment, individual Peers should make their own commitments in the first place. Therefore, at the beginning of every Session of Parliament, each House of Lords Member would sign a declaration of intent to attend more than a certain proportion of sitting days during that Session. Nevertheless, a key question obviously remains: what should this minimum number of days be?

Here, once more, my noble friend Lord Blencathra assists our thinking and comes to the rescue. He has just done so by gently nudging imprecision and indecisive conjecture towards mathematical certainty. For, as he points out, if there had been a 20% attendance stipulation between 2019 and 2024, we would have lost 154 Peers; if there had there been a 15% attendance stipulation, we would have lost 118 Peers; and, through a 10% attendance stipulation, 70 Peers would have been asked to leave.

Yet, having got thus far, mathematics then slightly escapes and retreats back towards conjecture; for, given that there was no minimum percentage attendance requirement between 2019 and 2024—and given that these years would not suddenly come to penalise Peers retrospectively—that leaves us guessing, of course, as to the number of Peers who, in the knowledge that they would be expelled if they did not meet that requirement, would have in fact failed the attendance test. Obviously, these numbers of failures would not be the same as —instead, almost certainly be much less than—those figures between 2019 and 2024, as has already been quoted, when Peers knew that there was no minimum attendance requirement as high as 10% that they had to consider at all.

Included in this grouping is Amendment 64 in the names of the noble Earl, Lord Devon, and my noble friend Lord Dobbs, to which the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, has referred. A minimum attendance requirement of 10% of House of Lords sittings is stipulated. Your Lordships may agree with that for two reasons, the amendment works efficiently and strikes a good balance when taken in conjunction with my noble friend Lord Lucas’s Amendment 37, as other speakers have said. First, following Amendment 64, Members would then know that if they do not adjust their diaries to a known quantity of 10% attendance, they will be asked to leave. Secondly, following Amendment 37, their necessary advance commitments to dates at the beginning of parliamentary Sessions would more than likely be made responsibly and, therefore, to well exceed a statutory minimum of 10% in any case.

My Lords, I offer a different opinion—perhaps a dissenting voice. My noble friend Lord Blencathra’s amendment is terrible. It is a bad amendment to a bad Bill. What he has not said is why, when he tabled it, he chose, for example, five years. What was the purpose of that? Was it one Parliament? Why not 10 years? Why not 15 years, as some noble Lords would like the Session to be? Why not go back further? In my case, the noble Lord could have gone back 50 years. I do not know what my attendance record would look like over that period—pretty shoddy, I suspect, but never mind.

It is a mistake to have this principle, because if it is carried forward we will find ourselves encouraging Lobby fodder—my noble friend is a former Chief Whip. Everybody would be here all the time to vote and get their name down but they would not participate in your Lordships’ House; they would just be here for the benefit of the Chief Whip. That is a bad thing. Also, if we are going to attract some younger Members to your Lordships’ House, they will have careers and other jobs, and maybe would not be able to attend all the time. Some noble Lords are retired and do not have other jobs to do.

This is a dangerous and bad precedent. It should be discarded and it should not be in this Bill. I welcome and look forward to hearing my noble friend’s response.

My Lords, this group and the next deal with the vexed question of how we ensure that Peers do the job for which they have been summoned by the monarch, when we know—the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, has given us the statistics—that not everybody does. Equally, we are all of the view that everybody should.

This is an area where there is a dissonance, just as there is on retirement age, between what people outside think and what people inside think. All the discussion so far has been on how it affects us rather than how we are seen. If you say to most people, “I am an active Member of the House of Lords”, they might ask, “How often do you go?” If you reply, “Well, it’s very onerous you know; I’ve got to go 10% of the time”, then they would ask, “Well, what does that mean?” You would say, “It means that when the House is sitting I have to go—well, not once a fortnight, but roughly that”. They would then ask, “What time do you start?” “I probably go in at about 3.30 pm, 4 pm”, you would say. They would ask, “What time would you finish?” You would reply, “If it was a busy day, I might stay until the dinner hour”. This is not an onerous requirement. Suppose that it is 20%. That is once a fortnight, roughly speaking, possibly for a couple of hours. That, to most people outside, would not be seen as a hugely onerous requirement.

I also think that, following our Writ of Summons and as Members of a deliberative assembly, it is frankly not good enough to turn up just once or twice a year to discuss an issue on which you are an expert. In politics, many of the issues that we have to debate are ones that we would rather not debate, because we are not experts, but they are the most important. Some of them we would rather not debate because they are really difficult, and we are not experts. Take assisted dying: I am sure that many of us, in an ideal world, would at one level rather that other people took a decision on it, because it is so difficult. However, we are summoned by the monarch to give counsel on a range of things. If there is any suggestion, particularly in legislation, that a minimum level is acceptable, then that really would not be acceptable, even though that has been the pattern in the past.

We need to give further thought to this issue—I am not being flippant about it—but I do not think that a legislative vehicle is the way to do it. The amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, which we are debating in the next group, should be expanded in scope so that we set in train a formal process under which we come back with a raft of measures that encourage people to play a bigger part in the work of your Lordships’ House. A narrow amendment, such as most of the amendments that we have before us today, is not the way to do it.

We should thank my noble friend Lord Blencathra for introducing this amendment. It is a subject worth discussing. Since this Bill is designed to fling out a cohort of your Lordships’ House who on the whole do turn up and play a part and some of whom hold very senior and important roles in the House, it is worth discussing for a few minutes those who hardly come at all and finding out whether there should be some kind of attendance threshold.

The amendment that we are discussing deals with attendance. My noble friend Lord Hailsham mentioned participation—but I think that participation, which is very important, is a very different issue from attendance, and we will come to it in the course of today’s deliberations. What the noble Earls, Lord Kinnoull and Lord Devon, said about the Cross Benches is very important. We do not want to discourage or reduce the ability of those Peers who have something to say but for a whole variety of reasons come less often than most of us; that is why the threshold should be realistic but relatively low.

I think that what my noble friend Lord Blencathra was saying was that, if it had been set at 10%, we would lose about 100 Peers, from past records. I entirely agree with my noble friend Lord Hailsham that we should not do anything that is retrospective. I do not think there is a problem and that suddenly a whole bunch of Peers would turn up because they wanted to be above the threshold—because the Peers who come hardly at all have already decided that they do not want to play a part in your Lordships’ House, but do not want to retire or take leave of absence. So this is a useful amendment and a useful debate and discussion—and setting the threshold at 10% I do not think will put anybody off.

My Lords, I, too, support my noble friend Lord Blencathra in bringing forward this topic, and I very much agree with what my noble friend Lord Strathclyde has just said.

When I looked at my noble friend’s three amendments, I was inclined to think that Amendment 20 struck the right balance. It is important to retain the concept of the House of Lords as a part-time House, but I also believe that, to remain sufficiently involved in what is going on so as to be able to make a contribution to debates on matters in which noble Lords possess expertise and knowledge, a participation level of 10% may be on the low side. But, as long as your Lordships’ House retains its present sitting hours, 15% is a reasonable minimum participation level—although it would be difficult to maintain a full-time job outside the House and a 15% participation level if the House were to adopt similar sitting hours to the House of Commons.

However, my noble friend Lord Hailsham is right to provide in his Amendment 25 for the possibility that the House may resolve to exempt a noble Lord from compulsory retirement if it concludes that there was a good cause for that noble Lord’s non-attendance. I entirely agree with the point raised by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, about low-attendance, high-impact Members.

I also support Amendment 37, in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas. This amendment would allow the House to provide exceptions to compulsory retirement, but, interestingly, allows the possibility of first fixing and later changing the minimum participation rate through Standing Orders, which would provide for more flexibility. My noble friend Lord Blencathra is absolutely right to ask your Lordships to consider this matter, because the Labour Party manifesto also committed to introduce a new participation requirement, at the same time as excluding the excepted hereditary Peers. Those who believe that the House is too large may also support the introduction of a minimum participation level. I would expect that the retirement of a number of inactive Peers would make it easier for the Government to find a better way forward that would cause less disruption to the ability of the House to discharge its functions in a way that serves the country well.