In 2025 the last hereditary peers will leave the House of Lords. That will not be enough to satisfy its critics, writes Ros Taylor, who believe Britain’s second chamber is overstuffed with idle peers and too many cronies who were not appointed on merit.
Lord True is not descended from a line of barons and dukes. He was made a life peer in 2010 for various services to the Conservative party. But when he rose to speak in the House of Lords on 11 December to oppose the bill that will remove hereditary peers, it was still a lament.
“This House has stood for centuries. We meet below the statues of those barons who, long ago on the meadow at Runnymede, constrained the power of the executive and gave the British people Magna Carta rights. They did not do such a bad job, did they? The Bill snaps that historic thread.”
It was a touching defence of the indefensible. In 1999 the vast majority of hereditary peers were removed from Britain’s second chamber. But it proved difficult to get the legislation through intact and the government compromised, allowing 88 to remain. When one of them dies, the rest elect someone to replace him (for ancient reasons, it is almost always ‘him’) from a pool of over 700 hereditaries who would like to regain their birthright. To give the most ancient example, Lord de Clifford’s claim to sit in the Lords dates back to 1299, when Robert de Clifford was ennobled for his service to King Edward I. A French poem written about Robert asserts that he was descended from an earl who fought at Constantinople and killed a unicorn.
English nostalgia for the aristocracy is a powerful force — Downton Abbey ran for five seasons — which is why it has taken so long to ensure that from 2025 onwards no-one will be entitled to sit in the second chamber because of their noble ancestry. But few people think this overdue reform will be enough to fix the problems with the Lords.
Appointed peers are a bigger problem
“The Lords will become somewhat less male, marginally older, and slightly less experienced,” says Lisa James, a senior research fellow at the Constitution Unit. It will also shrink to just over 700 members, still an exceptionally large number for a second chamber and bigger than the elected Commons. That is because prime ministers use peerages to reward service and loyalty at the end of their terms, and the UK has had six PMs in the past decade, multiplying the chances to appoint donors and acolytes.
Consequently, the House of Lords Appointments Commission (HOLAC), which is supposed to be able to nominate new peers based on how valuable their expertise would be, no longer has much opportunity to put them forward. Since 2018, HOLAC has managed to appoint just six people based on their objective merits as lawmakers.
Instead, the most recent set of new Lords has included a 30-year-old former aide to Boris Johnson and vice-president of his environmental consultancy firm, who become Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge. Johnson also ennobled his brother and tried to make his father a peer.
Prime ministers have always tried to pack the Lords with their supporters, both as a reward for donations and loyalty and to ensure that their party’s legislation passes smoothly through the second chamber. David Lloyd George was explicit about it, selling peerages for the then enormous sum of £50,000 a century ago. In 2006 Tony Blair nominated four businessmen who had loaned millions to the Labour party, although HOLAC blocked their appointments. A criminal investigation was dropped for lack of evidence. But while some prime ministers may be more scrupulous about whom they nominate than others, kicking out hereditary peers will increase their ability to pack the Lords with cronies — unless HOLAC stops them. In December the government announced it would force PMs to provide a statement justifying their nominations which, remarkably, they have never previously had to do. Critics say it is weak stuff.
The new Peer Review initiative by Tortoise Media revealed just how little most peers contribute. It found the ‘vast majority’ of the chamber’s work is done by just 210 members. Some do virtually no legislative work at all and effectively use the facilities as a private club.
The strengths of the second chamber
How much, then, can the Lords do? Bills pass through roughly the same process of scrutiny as they do in the Commons, with first, second and third readings, committee and report stages and consideration of amendments. This gives peers plenty of opportunity to scrutinise and improve laws.
Indeed, the Lords have often drawn attention to poor and hasty legislation and done their best to improve it. Baroness Kennedy’s contributions to the debates on the Rwanda bill — since abandoned — were a powerful example. It has ensured a continued right to trial by jury and reduced the time the government wanted to hold terrorist suspects without charge. Like the Commons, the chamber produces timely and well-informed reports based on its committee work: in December its outputs included work on methane and climate change, Britain’s inability to treat gynaecological conditions properly, and the challenges facing small businesses.
There are limits to its powers. The Lords does not vote down a bill at the second or third reading if it was in the governing party’s election manifesto. It does not scrutinise the sums in Budgets. It can delay but not stop bills. But it undoubtedly applies a level of scrutiny to bills that MPs do not have enough time for. The Lords therefore has fervent defenders, including Ian Dunt, the author of How Westminster Works (And Why It Doesn’t), who thinks it is more serious-minded than the Commons and less inclined to be partisan — about a quarter of peers are crossbenchers, who do not vote with one party.
How else should the Lords be reformed?
The most ambitious recent proposals for reforming the chamber have come from the former PM Gordon Brown, who could have joined the Lords — traditionally, former PMs do — but chose not to. As well as ‘cash for peerages’, Brown criticises the fact that most members live in London and the south-east, as well as the disproportionate number of Conservatives. He wanted to replace it with an elected chamber of 200 members called the Assembly of the Nations and Regions, which would safeguard the constitution, examine inequalities across the UK and monitor whether the ‘social rights’ Brown proposes are delivered. But with so many priorities for the new government and little appetite for radical constitutional reform, Brown’s plan has no chance of being implemented.
The other proposal, written by the constitutional expert Meg Russell in 2023, was much more measured and acknowledges the difficulty of reforming the Lords. One of its recommendations — to remove the hereditaries — is already underway. The rest are sensible and eminently achievable. They include giving HOLAC stronger powers to vet peers, a fifth of seats reserved for new crossbenchers, and equalising the size of the Commons and Lords at 650.
Labour’s own manifesto plans were to introduce a retirement age of 80 (with older peers still allowed to visit the Lords) and a minimum participation requirement. This will be difficult, as a quarter of life peers are over 80 and some, such as Lord Dubs, are held in affectionate regard. Some Labour MPs also want to remove the Lords Spiritual, who are Church of England bishops, either on the grounds that the number of Anglicans in the UK is declining or that there ought to be a firmer separation between church and state in Britain’s constitution. But any reform of the Lords will be incremental, not least because the government has a great deal of other and more urgent problems to fix.
