This blog post has been contributed by Professor Eloise Ellis, Senior Lecturer in Law.
Following several decades of discussion about further reform of the Upper Chamber of the Westminster Parliament including developments such as the high profile and controversial House of Lords Reform Bill 2012-13 introduced under the 2010-2015 Coalition Government and subsequently withdrawn, and successful legislation (albeit of limited impact) introduced as a Private Member’s Bill in the form of the House of Lords Reform Act 2014, Lords reform is firmly back on the agenda.
Arguably under Keir Starmer as Prime Minister the Labour Party is continuing the phase of reform which began in Tony Blair’s House of Lords Act 1999, which removed all bar 92 of the hereditary peers (agreed as a compromise known as the ‘Weatherill amendment’), with the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill 2024-26 currently in the final stages of the legislative process with consideration of amendments. As legislation of constitutional significance, the Committee stage in the House of Commons was as a Committee of the Whole House (on 12th November 2024). The Bill, which had been included in both the Labour Party’s 2024 General Election Manifesto and in the subsequent King’s Speech, will ‘remove the remaining connection between hereditary peerage and membership of the House of Lords’. It will repeal section 2 of the 1999 Act removing the exception for any hereditary peers to sit in the House of Lords and abolish the jurisdiction of the House of Lords in relation to claims to hereditary peerages.
A more significant concern, widely shared and explored in some depth in the multiple reports of the Lord Speaker’s Committee on the Size of the House is the untenable and unjustifiable size of House of Lords. Disappointingly this issue has not been addressed in the current Bill despite calls to introduce number controls as amendments during the Bill’s passage and Lord Strathclyde’s amendment (not moved) which sought to ‘to reduce the size of the House of Lords to 600 peers. Instead this month alone the Prime Minister has added 34 new Peers (the vast majority of whom are Labour Party political appointments) in addition to the previous 62 created in the relatively short time his Government has been in office.
Amendments were proposed to remove the Lords Spiritual (the 26 senior Bishops who sit in the Chamber as representatives of the Church of England) by Baroness Harman, Lord Birt and Viscount Hailsham (these were all withdrawn or not moved). The Lords also proposed an amendment to permit the hereditary peers currently sitting in the House to remain until they leave at which point they would not be replaced (permanently ending the system of by-elections amongst the excepted peers to fill vacancies) which was rejected by the Commons. This means that, assuming the Bill becomes an Act, the 88 current hereditary peers would be removed when the Act came into force ‘at the end of the Session of Parliament in which this Act is passed’ (clause 4(3)).
For further detail on the creation of Peerages since Life Peers were introduced in 1958 you might like to look at this House of Lords data dashboard: Peerage creations.
You might also like to read House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill 2024-25: Progress of the bill and also follow the remaining stages of this legislation.