How is the House of Lords set to change?

Illustration of the Houses of Parliament and appointed Lords cut into sections

Labour has introduced a bill to abolish hereditary peerages and wants to end 'cronyism' appointments to the Lords

(Image credit: Illustration by Stephen Kelly / Getty Images)

UK political parties will have to "publicly justify" why they are appointing peers to the House of Lords in a bid to tackle "cronyism" at Westminster.

Ministers are drawing up plans to require all future peerage nominations to be "accompanied by a citation setting out the experience the candidate would bring to the role", said The Times. The proposal aims to curb the practice of rewarding party donors and "favoured apparatchiks" with seats in the upper chamber.

Recent controversial examples of this include Boris Johnson elevating his aide Charlotte Owen, who aged 30 became the youngest peer in history, and Russian-born Evgeny Lebedev, owner of London's The Standard newspaper. Johnson "overrode security concerns" to appoint Lebedev, who was considered a potential risk due to his father's ties to the Kremlin. Since becoming a peer, Lebedev has spoken just three times in the upper house and has never voted.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

What did the commentators say?

This move is part of broader reforms intended to reduce the size of the House of Lords and ensure no party holds "an inbuilt majority", said The Times.

Labour plans to abolish 92 hereditary peerages, a key manifesto promise. The majority of these honours, inherited through family lines, were removed by Labour in 1999, but 92 were retained as a compromise with the Conservatives.

"The last meaningful reform of the House of Lords happened over 20 years ago," a government source told The Times. "While ultimately we want to move to an elected second chamber, there are certainly things we can do in the interim to improve how it functions and improve public confidence."

Further reforms being considered include introducing a mandatory retirement age of 80 and replacing the Lords with a more representative chamber for the UK's regions and nations. Labour's constitution minister, Nick Thomas-Symonds, has called proposals to remove the remainder of the hereditary peers a "landmark reform to our constitution", arguing that "people should not be voting on our laws in Parliament by an accident of birth".

Some remaining hereditary peers have voiced their concerns with the plans. The Conservatives' Lord Forsyth called it a "naked attempt to disable opposition in this House". He argued that given the size of Labour's majority in the Commons, it was the only part of Parliament that would properly scrutinise legislation.

Crossbench peer Lord Inglewood said the plans were "crude", but acknowledged that hereditary peers were an "anomaly in the modern world". He told the BBC: "I think it is important that we find a way that evolution takes place and, at the same time, it works in a seamless way."

Labour's plans are "just a tweak", said Green peer Jenny Jones in The Guardian, and are unlikely to solve "the many problems with our current unelected chamber". It is "typical gesture politics, which will briefly look good, cause plenty of hassle with painful debates to get the legislation through, but not actually achieve very much".

What is needed is a second chamber "that is representative of the regions, elected by a form of proportional representation and operating in a modern parliamentary building".

What next?

Labour ministers introduced a bill to remove hereditary peers from the upper chamber in September, with a second reading scheduled for 15 October.

Government figures "expect the bill to be debated for a long time once it has made its way to the Lords", said The Guardian. Out of those hereditary peers who retain seats in the Lords, 42 are Conservatives and 28 are crossbenchers. Two are Labour peers and three are Liberal Democrats.

Explore More

Sorcha Bradley is a writer at The Week and a regular on “The Week Unwrapped” podcast. She worked at The Week magazine for a year and a half before taking up her current role with the digital team, where she mostly covers UK current affairs and politics. Before joining The Week, Sorcha worked at slow-news start-up Tortoise Media. She has also written for Sky News, The Sunday Times, the London Evening Standard and Grazia magazine, among other publications. She has a master’s in newspaper journalism from City, University of London, where she specialised in political journalism.