16: After Clause 1, insert the following new Clause—
“Retirement from the House of Lords at 80A member of the House of Lords who reaches the age of 80 during a Session of Parliament ceases to be a member of the House of Lords at the end of that Session.”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 a retirement age in ascending order. According to analysis of Library figures, this could remove 327 peers by 2029.
My Lords, this is one of those rare occasions when I can honestly look the Leader of the Lords in the eye and say, “I am not from the Government, but I am here to help you”. I can help the noble Baroness deliver on a manifesto promise.
The Labour Party manifesto said:
“Too many peers do not play a proper role in our democracy. Hereditary peers remain indefensible. And because appointments are for life, the second chamber of Parliament has become too big. The next Labour government will … remove the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. Labour will also introduce a mandatory retirement age. At the end of the Parliament in which a member reaches 80 years of age, they will be required to retire from the House of Lords … and we will introduce a new participation requirement as well as strengthening the circumstances in which disgraced members can be removed”.
Noble Lords will note that I have also tabled amendments in the next groups that tackle those last two issues as well.
I regret that the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, is not in his place at the moment, because I was going to say how much I enjoy the wonderful speeches he makes after hereditary elections when only two or three people have voted. He complained today that there were too many amendments—a wide range of amendments—that were not specifically related to hereditary Peers. The point is that the government manifesto promised six things in constitutional reform: the Lords is too big; hereditary Peers are indefensible; a mandatory retirement age of 80; a new participation requirement; and the removal of disgraced Peers. The one thing to be kicked further into the long grass was consultation on having national and regional balance.
On retirement ages, I have tabled three options for discussion: a retirement age of 80, 85 or 90. I shall speak to Amendments 16 and 18, and my noble friend Lord Hailsham will speak to Amendment 17. I do not necessarily believe that a retirement age is necessary, but if the Government believe what they said in their own manifesto—that the Lords is too large, even though only about 450 Peers regularly attend—then a retirement age at some appropriate age and the removal of inactive Peers is a far better way to reduce numbers than kicking out the hereditaries, who actually do attend and do work hard.
My Lords, in speaking to my amendment I will be very brief. My noble friend Lord Blencathra articulated a very powerful argument in favour of retirement with which I agree; I have suggested the age of 85 in my amendment. I wish to make three general points and two specific ones.
The general points are these. First, we do need to get the numbers in this House down, and retirement age is one way of doing it. Secondly, and coupled with that, is the need to refresh the membership; that too is important and points to a retirement age. The third point is a difficult one to dwell on too long. In a long political career, both at the Bar and in politics, I have seen an awful lot of people who reached the age of 85 who should have retired—both judges and Members of Parliament, and indeed Members of this House. We need to focus on that.
Turning to my two specific points, the first was touched on earlier in the debate: the fact that our expertise does decay. There was a time when I knew an awful lot about criminal law and practice. I have not practised as a criminal barrister since 2010, and I would hesitate to express any really informed view as to the practice and procedures in the criminal courts today. That is an example of one’s expertise decaying. Similarly—although not quite the same—as one gets older, one has to recognise that one’s expertise on many current subjects is not what the House would wish to have. For example, we are going to be regulating on artificial intelligence. If you ask me what I know about artificial intelligence, the answer is nothing. The same is true of social media too. I do not do social media at all, but we are asked to regulate it. The truth is, there does come a point in one’s life when one’s expertise is not such that the electorate would want us to regulate in any kind of detail.
Therefore, to be brief, I am in favour of a retirement age. We could argue sensibly whether it should be 75, 80, 85 or 90. I plonk at 85, but the truth is that we could properly go for any of those figures.
My Lords, I rise briefly to speak to Amendment 65 in my name, which is a further variation on the introduction of a retirement age. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, for adding his name. I would also like to thank the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, who discussed this amendment with me, and who addressed the topic so wisely in his speech at Second Reading.
As with the other amendments in this group, Amendment 65 gives effect to the Labour Party manifesto commitment. However, contrary to the other retirement-age amendments, this one introduces important leeway for those who join your Lordships after the age of 70, as it provides that retirement is at 80 or the 10th anniversary of the Member’s introduction to the House, whichever is the later. This is an important distinction, as it does away with the arbitrary 80 year-old age limit. Having noted the number of recent appointments of Members over the age of 70, my amendment would permit such Members to enjoy at least a full decade of activity in your Lordships’ House, irrespective of the age at which they are appointed.
I should perhaps note in the spirit of full disclosure that I am not an octogenarian. Indeed, as a hereditary Peer in his late 40s, I will likely be removed from this House before I turn 50, let alone 80, so I have no dog in the fight. However, I have hugely appreciated the wise contributions of elder Peers and consider the sagacity of our membership to be one of the House’s most valuable features. I remember vividly a Cross-Bench discussion on the constitutional crisis arising from Boris Johnson’s ill-advised efforts to prorogue Parliament, during which a wise voice piped up, saying, “It wasn’t as bad as this during the Suez crisis”.
Just as hereditary Peers provide a length of institutional memory that spans centuries, so individual Members over the age of 80 provide an invaluable personal memory that spans decades. We abandon that at our peril in our rush for youth and the appearance of vigour. Amendment 65 permits us to temper the age-based guillotine, at least a little. On that basis, I recommend it to your Lordships.
My Lords, my noble friends Lord Blencathra and Lord Hailsham eloquently compare 80, 85 and 90 as different options for a retirement age from this House. Within this grouping, and following my own amendment in favour of 90 as a retirement age, I would therefore also support Amendment 101D in the name of my noble friend Lord Blencathra, which calls for a resolution to enact this.
The argument is that, compared with the other options, a retirement age of 90 far better assists a transitional House, a reformed House and, not least, the present House itself.
Regarding the necessary transitional period between the present House and a reformed one, as your Lordships are aware, a short while ago the noble Lord, Lord Burns, produced a very useful report. One of its recommendations was that, in a given year, the collective total of life Peers who retire or die are replaced at 50%. This means that, in a natural way and over not too many years, current numbers of temporal Peers, at just under 800, will come down to 600.
Obviously, numbers would come down more quickly if life Peers were coerced to retire at either 80 or 85. Yet surely it would be much wiser not to enforce that. Instead, with a retirement age of 90, the transitional period can be expected to be over five years, with the advantage that some new Peers, when they first begin to serve for a fixed period of time, will do so alongside some existing life Peers, thereby becoming all the more able to develop and uphold the skills and democratic efficacy of this House as a revising Chamber.
Then, for a reformed House, there will be many excellent candidates who have just retired from their professional careers, yet who are still prepared to dedicate their time and considerable abilities here. If new Peers serve for 15 years—and I agree with my noble friend Lord Hailsham that they should—a retirement age of 90 thus enables a commencement age of up to 75.
My Lords, I rise to speak to my Amendment 86, which forms part of this group. The noble Baroness the Lord Privy Seal was not in her place in the last debate when I pointed out that I had asked for this amendment—which was initially down to be debated on its own—to be grouped with these amendments so that we can deal with expeditiously in recognition of the points that she and other noble Lords have made.
I raised my concerns with an arbitrary age or time limit in our debate on the last group, so I will not address the merits of the other amendments that noble Lords have moved so far in this group, other than to ask one question. When I was reading my copy of the Daily Mirror this weekend, I saw that the Leader of the House had given an interview saying that she would like to move quite quickly on the matter of a retirement age, which was in the Labour manifesto. She said it might not even require legislation for that to be done. So, to echo the point raised by my noble friend Lord Blencathra a moment ago, if your Lordships’ House votes during the passage of the Bill for a retirement age that enjoys the support of most noble Lords in this House, will the Government keep it in the Bill and implement it so that they can act with the speed the noble Baroness says she would like to move on this?
My Amendment 86 would make it clear that a peerage can be conferred on anybody over the age of 16. I am sure that, when some noble Lords saw this on the Marshalled List, it caused a few raised eyebrows and they may have wondered whether the point was entirely serious. It is—I have tabled this amendment in order to probe the Government’s thinking in relation to their other manifesto commitment to lower to 16 the age of voting for elections to another place. Is it the Government’s intention also to lower to 16 the age at which somebody can stand for election to the House of Commons, or do they plan to give 16 and 17 year-olds the vote but not yet give them the opportunity to put themselves forward for election if they find that there is nobody on the ballot paper who meets their approval?
My Lords, I shall say a few words in support of the amendment in my name and that of the noble Earl, Lord Devon. I hope I shall be forgiven, and not accused of parliamentary shenanigans, if, like my noble friend Lord Blencathra, I quote from the Labour party manifesto—although not at the length he did. The words are quite important to our understanding of what is going on. The manifesto says that
“reform is long over-due and essential … The next Labour Government will therefore bring about an immediate modernisation by introducing legislation to remove the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. Labour will also introduce a mandatory retirement age”.
Same paragraph, same breath, same thought. There is a full stop between those two very important aspects of parliamentary reform, but that full stop seems to have been decisive in the Government’s approach to this matter. It appears that the Government have indeed come to a full stop on these issues. As much as I like the sound of that, it is not quite the point. How can a full stop be a justification for abandoning the ambitions for a comprehensive and properly considered set of reforms?
Why, if it was promised in the manifesto, have the Government suddenly had a change of heart? After all, a retirement Bill—or a retirement amendment, as we are discussing here—would in many ways be much simpler than the Bill that is in front of the Committee. But this Bill is, of course, not so much a breath of fresh air as a sigh of relief on the part of so many Members on the Opposition Benches.
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I quote from the Guardian of 3 March this year:
“Another consideration has been the practicality of an age limit of 80. Guardian calculations show 292 out of 714 life peers will be 80 by the end of the current parliament. The change would affect Labour peers vastly more than Conservatives … ‘There was some special pleading by individual lords,’ one Labour backbencher said. ‘But overall, people just looked at the peers we would lose and started to wonder if this was a good idea’”.
The Government say they must see through their manifesto but they have no need to worry; I think we have already seen through it.
If this amendment, or any of the amendments about retirement age, were to be accepted it would very soon affect me. I would be forced to retire from this place that I love—although I look forward to the second half of my professional career. But I have always held that we are here to serve this House, rather than the House being here to serve us. Least of all is this House here to serve the constitutional meanderings of a Government who have come to a full stop.
My Lords, almost everything in life has a retirement age. I put it to the Committee that having the age of 80 as an upper limit is what most people would expect as being a normal upper limit of something that was still credible.
The second issue is something that I raised both in my speech in November, in our House of Lords reform debate, and at Second Reading in December: the wisdom of imposing a retirement age on the current membership of the House retrospectively, as it were. That would probably produce a cliff edge, which would lead to what I termed an “organisational shock”. The loss of organisational power or human capital, in something which I think is adjudged by many to be performing well, would be a great shame and an unnecessary piece of self-harm. It takes some time to train up new Members. Indeed, it takes some time to find new Members, as HOLAC would be able to tell your Lordships. Accordingly, in the commercial environment, one would look for transitional arrangements and try to find some way of doing that.
The very pleasing Amendment 65, which was so well introduced by the noble Earl, Lord Devon, proposes a simple set of transitional arrangements with two legs that would reduce that organisational shock enormously and allow the House to transition to an age limit of 80 without pain or any loss of our capability and effectiveness. The first leg would impose the age limit only on new Members. This was how, as I remarked in November and December, the judges of the higher courts in England and Wales did it about 35 years ago, as they were worried about the loss of institutional power at that time. They found that a number of judges in fact imposed a retirement age on themselves retrospectively, as it were. They could have gone on forever but chose to retire at the new retirement age. I would expect that to apply, as I said then, and still expect it today. The Cross Bench has a slightly higher average age at 73, so we have a number of people who are in this zone. I expect that would apply with us as well, so imposing it on the new is the first leg of this very clever amendment.
My Lords, as I intimated in the previous group, noble Lords who remain after the hereditaries have gone will come under increasing media pressure on the grounds that many are far too old and unelected. Even now, we often see colourful descriptions of noble Lord’s bios, especially when how they speak and vote is not to the particular medium’s liking.
In 2010, on my own initiative, I looked at a list of Peers in age order, expecting to find some age at which noble Lords became ineffective. I can assure the Committee that there is no such point, but over 33 years, what I have sadly seen time and again is Peers losing their mental faculties, alongside a relatively quick physical decline. Now that we have a system of retirement, there is not the moral drive to keep attending past the point of effectiveness, although a few do.
I think we can all agree that octogenarian Peers can be effective and add value. However, at 68, I am beginning to worry that I am out of touch and out of date with the things that I think, and I am experienced in, and that I am out of date with modern society. That is partially why I want to retire in the spring. The noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, made the point about social media. I do not use social media; I have not got the foggiest clue how to use it. Wisdom and experience are valuable to the House, and I frequently seek the counsel of very old Peers.
The problem is this: the maximum practical limit of the size of the House is about 800. I suspect that is part of the reason why the Government want to get rid of hereditary Peers, despite our experience. What matters is the number of active Peers, not the size of the House, but we also have too many active Peers. My theory is that, after a certain size, the effectiveness of each individual Peer is inversely proportional to the number of active Peers—so each Peer has fewer opportunities. For instance, in Parliaments before 2010, if I got fed up with what the Government were doing, I could roll into the Minute Room and say “Right, Oral Question; I want the next available slot”. They would laugh at me if I did that now; you have to go into a ballot. We never used to have to do that.
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We can all guess why the Government are not taking forward the retirement age of 80, as in their manifesto. We all know that manifestos are written by 20-something whizz-kid spads, who bunged in getting rid of hereditaries as a Labour Party no-brainer and then, without any research, thought, “Let’s also get rid of the old fogeys over 80 and those who do little”. That was signed off, no doubt by the national executive, and it appeared in the manifesto. Then, after the election, I suspect that the Leader and her team looked at the numbers and said, “Oh my God, a retirement age of 80 means getting rid of about 327 Peers by 2029”. Further number crunching showed that it would include 94 Labour Peers but only 90 Conservative Peers. That was not what was intended, so the retirement at age 80 had to be dropped—and rightly so, since removing 327 Peers during one Parliament would be excessive, and among that number are many of our most able and active Peers.
Of course, the Government will not admit that they made a tactical blunder here, so they came up with the excuse that they will consult. Exactly whom will they consult on a retirement age for Peers? The Pensions Regulator? The Department for Work and Pensions? Age Concern? Martin Lewis? Saga Holidays? There is only one organisation with a legitimate opinion on this, and that is the Government. There is only one body of experts who know all about the potential retirement ages for Peers, and they are in this House, and some of them are sitting here tonight. Over the next hour, let us do the consultation for the Government, and we might just get a consensus on the way forward for Report.
Before Report, I suggest that noble Lords who have not yet seen it ask the Library for the Blencathra Excel spreadsheets, particularly the one entitled “Filter of House of Lords Members by Age and Attendance”. The brilliant Mr Tobin has, at my request, entered into it the names of every Peer from 2019 to December 2024, our party or Cross-Bench affiliations, our ages, our ages in 2029, and our attendance record in the last Parliament, which will be relevant for the next debate. I am aware that there are a few little errors in there: one of my noble friends says that she is not included, and another noble friend says that his age is wrong, but generally speaking the spreadsheet gives an indication of what the effect would be of removing Peers at the age of 80, 85 and 90. Given that it is an Excel spreadsheet, you can select any criterion. Just enter a possible retirement age from 50 to 100, and you get a list of names and numbers. The Library has circulated that Excel spreadsheet to Peers who have tabled amendments, but it will not do a mass mailshot to everyone, and I do not have the capacity or skill to do it for every Member of the Lords.
The spreadsheet is highly instructive, as well as giving endless hours of fun picking random retirement ages just to see who would then be retired. Naturally, I would deplore such behaviour. I think we would all agree that a retirement age of 80 is just not on, so what about 90? First, the figures I have put in the explanatory statements for the ages of 85 and 90 are quite wrong, and I apologise for misreading my Excel spreadsheets. The correct figure is that a retirement age of 90 by 2029 would remove or retire only 16 Peers, including nine who attend more than 50% of the time, and some of them are still active. I leave it to noble Lords to draw a conclusion, but I think we would be open to ridicule if we set a retirement age of 90, and it does not do much to reduce our numbers.
That leaves another of my suggested options, namely, retirement at 85. A retirement age of 85 would mean the retirement of 185 Peers, including some highly active Members, including 14 who attended more than 70% of our sittings in the last Parliament, and some who are Deputy Speakers. However, we have 25 who attended fewer than 50% of our sittings in the last Parliament, and 12 who attended fewer than 30% of the sittings. It is my opinion that a retirement age of 85 would be equitable and justifiable. It would still be the highest retirement age of any organisation in this country, except farmers and the self-employed. It would reduce our numbers somewhat, and if we coupled that with the removal of Peers who fail to attend at all or beneath a minimum number of attendances, we could make an even more substantial reduction. At least this retirement age of 85 would remove the jibe that we just carry on being Members for potentially 30 years longer than the state pension age or 20 years longer than judges. I believe that we can justify a retirement age 10 years later than that of a judge.
I do not intend to offer any firm solution here but to provoke debate with these probing amendments; however, I think we might just get a hint of consensus for Report. I see that other noble Lords have tabled similar amendments, some with different ages. My amendment suggests retirement at the end of the Session when a Peer hits the selected retirement age, but perhaps that is wrong and the end of the Parliament might be a better time, and certainly less harsh.
I have also tabled three other amendments which tweak my three options, in order to give more control and flexibility to the House. If any of the options were agreed to—retirement at 80, 85 or 90—our hands would be tied on the timing. We might want some more time to organise ourselves, and then to produce the retirement requirement when the House concluded that we were ready for it. These amendments are not essential, and noble Lords might think that that would give us an excuse not to do it. Well, that could happen, but I do not think the House would tolerate it.
Thus, I say to the Leader of the House: do not be afraid to support a retirement age that the House wants and votes for. Politically, the Government will get more opprobrium for kicking this into the long grass of meaningless consultation than for opting for a retirement age of, say, 85, instead of the manifesto promise of 80. By the time of the next election, the electorate will be making judgments on far more broken Labour promises than the promise of a retirement age of 80. I beg to move.
Regarding the present House, research figures already on the face of this Bill give us the mathematics, as my noble friend Lord Blencathra has just reminded us. By 2029, while a retirement age of 80 would cull 327 life Peers, and that of 85 would cull 187 life Peers, a retirement age of 90 would remove 78 instead. Clearly, that is a much more balanced and acceptable figure. In any case, before reaching the age of 90, life Peers playing an active part here after the age of 80 should surely be left to decide for themselves when they will retire.
As noble Lords will know, for many years after the Representation of the People Act 1969, there was such a discrepancy. People could vote from the age of 18 but had to wait until 21 to stand for election. That was changed in time for the 2010 general election—I think the noble Baroness the Leader of the House was a Minister in the Cabinet Office—and the two ages were finally brought into line. I would be grateful if the Minister who is responding could say a bit more about the Government’s intention on the age for candidacy as well as for election.
Whatever the answer to that question, I have tabled this amendment to see the view of His Majesty’s Government on allowing 16 and 17 year-olds into your Lordships’ House to scrutinise the decisions that are made by a lower House which is to be elected and perhaps also partly filled by 16 and 17 year-olds. A bit of scepticism sometimes accompanies the arrival of a relatively younger Member of your Lordships’ House to these Benches, but we have seen in recent weeks and through the valiant work of my noble friend Lady Owen of Alderley Edge, supported by Peers of all ages from across your Lordships’ House to tackle the scourge of deepfake pornography, the benefits of having a multigenerational House, looking at issues that affect our fellow citizens of varying ages.
There is a barrier to having such a multigenerational House in our Standing Orders. Standing Order No. 2 says:
“No Lord under the age of one and twenty … shall be permitted to sit in the House”.
I see that that Standing Order was adopted on 22 May 1685, so, while it is relatively recent in the history of your Lordships’ House, it is a Standing Order of fairly long standing. Does the Minister think that this 17thcentury barrier should still be in place, given the Government’s wider commitment to give 16 and 17 year-olds the right to vote for and perhaps stand for election to the other House of Parliament?
The second leg would give everyone who comes in a minimum of 10 years. Selfishly, from the Cross-Bench point of view, one of the things that we need is judges. We need to supply judges in various circumstances. We needed to supply two for the Holocaust Memorial Bill Committee recently and I have to supply others for other private Bills that are coming through. These are just some examples. Some of the judges we need come from the Supreme Court and they do not retire until they are 75. Only having five years of them, with it taking a couple of years to train them up because they are no longer Members of our House beforehand, would mean that it is better for everyone to have a minimum period. That feature of the amendment from the noble Earl, Lord Devon, is also to be commended to the Committee.
The problem is not the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of older Peers; the problem is bed-blocking. We should have Peers on both the political Benches and the Cross Benches who have succeeded in their chosen careers, bought and paid for their house, and secured a decent occupational pension—that is to say, appointment at about the age of 55 to 63. There is no shortage of really good-quality people in this situation. The noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, talked about precisely that. We cannot have them because we have around 200 octogenarian Peers.
I am not saying that we should not have much younger Peers. I am saying that the older Peers are bed-blocking younger potential Peers. I think the solution is to make it clear to new appointments how long their term will be. How long that should be is another matter, but I think we should make it absolutely clear how long new Peers are expected to be here. I do not think it would be fair to retire older life Peers, as they would have believed that they would be here for life. We hereditary Peers have known that we were on borrowed time since 1911.