Why we need to urgently reform the House of Lords

The UK and Lesotho are the only two countries to have an entirely unelected parliamentary chamber.

The House of Lords, the UK’s second parliamentary chamber, is primarily a revising chamber and urges the government of the day to rethink some aspects of its proposed legislation. However, it is unelected and unrepresentative of the population and needs to be reformed.

There are two issues facing the UK’s Labour government. Firstly, how to get its legislation through the House of Lords where Labour is heavily outnumbered by the opposition parties? Secondly, how to reform the unelected and unrepresentative House of Lords? At the outset let me state that I favour replacing the Lords with an elected and representative chamber.

Immediate Problem

The UK and Lesotho are the only two countries to have an entirely unelected parliamentary chamber. The House of Lords has a long history, dating back to the Eleventh century. For a long time, individuals (men) were appointed to the Lords because they were favoured by the monarch. Their descendants inherited the titles and law making powers. The Life Peerages Act 1958 enabled the Prime Minister to nominate and the monarch to appoint people to the Lords for the remainder of their lives. As the Monarch is also head of the Church of England, the House of Lords has 26 reserved seats for archbishops and bishops from England. There are no reserved seats for representatives of any other religious affiliation.

Becoming a lifelong legislator on the basis that that someone’s ancestor was once favoured by a medieval monarch has no place in the modern world. That came to head in 1999 and the Labour government with a large majority in the House of Commons sought to end the hereditary principle. The House of Lords Act 1999 stated that “No-one shall be a member of the House of Lords by virtue of a hereditary peerage”. The government encountered resistance and eventually permitted 92 hereditary peers, mostly Conservatives, to remain in the Lords until a comprehensive reform of the House of Lords could take place. The size of the House of Lords was reduced from 1,330 members to 669, and most of the peers in the current House are appointed by Prime Ministers.

Since then the size of the House of Lords has grown as successive Prime Ministers have handed out peerages to donors, advisers, former members of parliament and others, with plenty of accusations of nepotism and corruption. After 14 years of Conservative rule, the composition of the House of Lords is highly skewed.

After the July 2024 general election, the House of Commons has 650 members, of which 412 are Labour members. In contrast the unelected House of Lords has 827 members, of which around 500 are active in the chamber. Out of 827, only 186 are Labour Members. The Conservatives with 121 seats in the House of Commons have 272 seats in the Lords. Liberal Democrats with 72 seats in the Commons have 79 seats in the Lords. Crossbenchers, independents and non-affiliated peers hold 230 seats. The convention is that no political party should be able to control the upper chamber though some have bigger representation. The problem is that Labour is by far the biggest party in the Commons but that is not matched in the Lords. The opposition parties can unite to prevent the government from pushing its legislation through the Lords.

The government has chosen to eliminate all 92 hereditary peers, which includes 4 Labour Members, through the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill. It has been passed by the House of Commons and will soon be debated in the Lords. However, Labour has chosen to retain 26 archbishops and bishops even though the country is secular.

The expulsion of hereditary peers will change the numbers in the upper chamber but the opposition parties will still have disproportionately large presence. To seek some kind of parity, the Prime Minister can create new Labour life peers and navigate the government’s legislative programme through the Lords. However, that too is problematical. Why should Prime Minister of the day have power to appoint membership of the second/upper chamber? Such an arrangement is always open to charges of bribery, corruption and nepotism, and is highly undemocratic. The only effective option is to replace the House of Lords with an elected chamber.

Deeper Reforms

Popular opinion favours replacement of the House of Lords by an elected chamber, but how will it be elected and will it be representative of the population as a whole? What should be the size of the elected chamber? There is a class and geographical imbalance in the House of Lords as the rich, corporate elites and individuals from London and South East are over represented at the expense of regions and working class.

The House of Commons does not provide a suitable model. Currently, its 650 members are elected by the First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) system. The outcome does not reflect the citizen’s preferences. For example, in the 2024 general election, Labour Party received 33.7% of the popular vote but ended-up with 64% of the seats in the House of Commons. The FPTP system does not represent the popular vote and needs to be replaced by an alternative. Proportional representation, which has many variations, is one such system. In a 2011 referendum, 67.9% of voters opposed changing the electoral system to the Alternative Vote. The voting system is unlikely to be changed without a referendum. After the 2016 Brexit referendum, governments seem to have little enthusiasm for referendums.

Direct election of both Houses can produce tensions. Currently, as a result of past political settlements the House of Lords can delay legislation passed by the House of Commons for up to one year but cannot block a bill altogether. It is also unable to amend or initiate any ‘money bills’, which are bills that the Speaker of the Commons considers related to national taxation, public money or loans. Ultimately, the Lords must yield to the elected Commons. But if both Houses are elected by the people, they can both claim equal legitimacy and a legislative deadlock can result. One possibility is that members of the Lords could be elected by members of local councils and county councillors instead of the population at large. This means that in a conflict, Commons can claim seniority and that would help to prevent deadlocks.

However, the difficulty is that the intrusion of party machinery into elections for the upper chamber would annihilate the presence of independent voices in the Lords. Currently there are 230 crossbench, independent and non-affiliated members of the Lords. They would not have the resources to match the might of political parties and would be ousted. The loss of independent voices weakens democracy.

With direct elections, both chambers could come under the control of the same party. This would result in rudimentary scrutiny of government and legislation and result in poor laws and public accountability. That issue needs to be addressed.

One possibility is that all candidates for the upper chambers should stand as independents, and not as members of any political party. They can speak freely, not be silenced by the whipping system and vote according to their conscience. This would strengthen democracy but would make it difficult for the government to steer its legislative programme through parliament.

All of the above difficulties can and must be surmounted in the quest for democracy. The feudal system of appointing legislators by the monarch or the Prime Minister must end. However, the popular election for both chambers creates illusions of democracy because it does not address one major problem. That is the power of big corporations and the rich. They finance political parties and hand lucrative consultancy contracts to legislators. The wealthy elites control think-tanks, media and most of the means of production. They use their power and resources to colonise policymaking spaces, subvert emancipatory change and effective regulation, and shape public policies. There is an urgent need to end corporate funding of political parties and legislators, and corporate control of everyday life. Yet no major political party is willing to tame or democratise corporations. If anything, governments are rowing back regulation, removing hard-won social rights, and are handing swathes of public services to corporations. In such an environment, the probability of creating democratic and accountable institutions is low though the recurring crisis of capitalism continues to provide opportunities to advance competing discourses and possibilities of emancipatory change.