During an opposition day last week David Morris MP laid out his ideas for how the House of Lords can be reformed.
In the debate he said:
I am going to do something very brave and propose a solution to the problem down the corridor. I do not want to get rid of any of the lords, so I will not vote for this motion. Without wanting to be controversial, I have a bloodless solution. If we retired lords at 75 years of age, we would remove approximately 250 of them straight away. Let us not forget that the lords are there not to represent but to scrutinise. We do not want to get rid of every one of them, because there is expertise down there that can outweigh expertise in this Chamber—especially on the SNP Benches.
The average age in the Lords is 70, believe it or not, while the average age of those who actually contribute in the other place is 65. After that age, attendance drops off dramatically. We have to look at this in the round. If we reduced the Lords by 250 Members—those aged over 75—we would bring it down to approximately the size of the Commons. Those lords would then stay on to advise. They would not get paid or claim expenses, but go on to a higher Chamber called the Lords council, and advise their own Committees. They could then feed into the legislative process without any cost to the taxpayer.
Outside this Chamber, nobody is talking about the Lords—it is only us in here. We should not throw the baby out with the bathwater; we should look at a grown-up way of getting the numbers down. Once we have done that, over a period of 15 years, natural attrition will take its toll. The 250 who have been put into the higher status could still call themselves lords, still have the gravitas and the gratification they want, and still contribute. They will go, and we can have an apportioned system, with so many Conservatives, so many from Labour and—dare I say it?—so many from the SNP. We can break it into segments. They will be able to scrutinise sensibly in a cross-party manner. I hope to have brought some kind of sense to this subject.