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House of Lords: Financial Support for Members

My Lords, I had intended to give a speech today that started at the level of principle and worked its way down to detail, covering all the various recommendations. I do not think your Lordships would appreciate that type of speech at this stage, so instead I am going to make a number of basically incoherent and unlinked observations. Throughout the debate, emphasis has been put on the distinctive nature of your Lordships’ House. That is right, but its key distinctive characteristic is that it must be the only legislative assembly where a requirement for participation is that you have a non-parliamentary income. That is at the heart of the problem, and the Senior Salaries Review Body and other, earlier schemes have tried to get around that difficulty without being explicit that it is the nub of the problem. While I have been sitting here, it has struck me that although we are going to be paid the fee for attendance here in the Chamber, it is likely that for most people the bulk of the work on today’s debate has taken place over the weekend. That difficulty has not been recognised. The issue of principle that I want to stress is my commitment to your Lordships’ House being representative. That will eventually determine which way I vote at a later stage in the proceedings when we get the implementation resolutions. The whole argument for reform of your Lordships’ House that we had when the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, was Leader of the House was to create a more representative House. It would be a tragedy if we now introduced measures that moved us backwards and away from that. The representative test can be summed up in two ways: one, that the House’s composition should not be dependent on what I call the "three Rs"—the rich, the retired on good pensions and those resident in London who can continue with an additional job—and, two, to recognise that the House pretty effectively represents the peoples, the regions and the nations of the United Kingdom, and that nothing at all should dilute that. One of the tragedies of the review is that it is a missed opportunity. The real challenge of a review like this would have been to create a scheme that enabled, say, a relatively successful person in their mid-50s living some distance from London to be a participant in your Lordships’ House. I do not think that this scheme will deliver that. I agree with those who have focused on accommodation and the overnight issue as needing the greatest attention. More work needs to be done on people who are owners, with or without mortgages. When it comes to renters, of which I am one, I agree entirely with what the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, had to say—I think it is the first time I have agreed with anything he has said—because, as he pointed out, the model that has been produced makes it inevitable that the Peer subsidises Parliament. Very few people get 100 per cent attendance, and once you move away from that you get this perverse subsidisation. That must surely be wrong. I suggest that the ad hoc committee looks at the idea of thresholds. For example, if a Peer had a 60 per cent attendance rate, it would be clear that their rented property was being rented for the obvious purpose of sustaining the Peer’s attendance in your Lordships’ House and, therefore, 60 per cent ought to translate into 100 per cent support for the costs of the accommodation. The non-sitting day allowance has been withdrawn. There is no evidence or argument to support that decision; I do not understand it. There is a strong case to have some form of limited, continuing support for the Peer’s activity during the period of recess. That should be looked at. On travel, it has virtually all been said. I shall not bore your Lordships with my prospective story about what would happen on Aberdeen railway station as my wife went into standard class and I went into first class, mainly because delicacy prevents me from going into what I know would be her response. When it comes to air travel, though, the reason why we do not use economy tickets is not some great love for luxury—to tell you the truth, there is no difference between economy and non-economy on BA flights in the United Kingdom—but flexibility. If you change the flexible ticket, you incur additional costs; is the House up to recognising that? We cannot predict with total accuracy when we are going to require to go home. It is also about ensuring that we get a degree of priority when things go wrong. Things went wrong on Friday, for example: there were a lot of cancellations from Heathrow and the only way I managed to get home on the day and not on Saturday afternoon was that I had a full-fare ticket and got priority on one of the two other flights. That is a reasonable safeguard that Peers should have. To go back to my original speech, my real concern is that if the report is implemented in a way that some of the detail can be read as it currently stands in the report, there will be those in your Lordships’ House who will quite rightly feel that not only have they been treated unfairly but they have also been demeaned, to the extent that they will redefine their relationship with the House. That would change the nature of the House itself. Frequent attenders might become infrequent attenders. At the limit, attendance would become more a matter of personal interest and convenience than a duty. That would be bad in itself, but it would be worse if the House became less representative of the peoples, the regions and the nations of the United Kingdom. From where I stand, that is particularly worrying at a time when the bonds that keep us together are being challenged.