In opposition, Sir Keir Starmer called the unelected House of Lords “indefensible”. This week, barely 18 months into his prime ministership, Sir Keir took the total of unelected peers he has appointed since July 2024 to 96. Remarkably, Wednesday’s 34 new life peerages, mainly Labour supporters, take his appointment total above those of each of his four most recent Conservative predecessors. You must go back to David Cameron to find a prime minister who did more to stuff the Lords than Sir Keir.
At the last election, Labour presented itself to the voters as a party of Lords reform. The party manifesto promised to remove the remaining hereditary peers, to reform the appointments process, to impose a peers’ retirement age, and to consult on proposals for replacing the Lords with an alternative second chamber. The House of Lords, the manifesto flatly declared, was “too big”.
In office, Labour’s record on Lords reform has been dismal. True, the bill removing the hereditaries is finally close to completing its parliamentary passage (it has taken nearly 16 months already, and it is not yet over the finishing line). But there is nothing to show for the other manifesto pledges, which were not included in the current bill. Nor are we likely to see them any time soon. The Starmer government missed its best Lords reform moment last year. Today, authority diminished, there seems little appetite for more.
Instead, Labour’s main preoccupation in the Lords is not reform but party advantage. Though Labour has its large Commons majority, there are currently 282 Conservatives in the Lords, compared with 209 Labour peers. The government has lost over 100 divisions in the Lords since 2024, most recently on the employment rights bill on Wednesday. Peers have also dug in against the private member’s bill on assisted dying. Labour leaders in the Lords want more Labour appointments, so they can push such opposition back. That may sound reasonable, but it merely feeds an ermine arms race which has made both main parties enemies of reform for years.
The result is that the upper house, which Labour once deemed too big, is getting even bigger. Sir Keir has already appointed more new life peers than the 85 remaining hereditaries who will lose their places when the reform bill finally becomes law. The wish for a more even balance with the Tories means there will be more to come. After the Blair-era reforms, Lords membership stood at 666. Today, the figure is 850, with this week’s new appointees waiting in the wings. With 650 MPs in the Commons, the UK parliament may soon have more than 1,500 members. This is a ludicrous, unnecessary and, to many, corrupt total. There is nothing like it in any other parliament.
Yet unless and until Sir Keir gets a grip on the appointments system, these figures will only mount, feeding even greater public anger. In the absence of the root-and-branch reform that Labour once supported, the best way to reduce numbers in the Lords is the one proposed by Meg Russell of the UCL Constitution Unit and others: to cap membership at no higher than that of the Commons (and ideally lower). Labour could achieve this by adopting new rules and formulas that limit a prime minister’s scope to appoint. Such changes would be popular and rational. They also need making now, if only to prevent Nigel Farage from flooding the Lords with even larger numbers of new peers in a few years’ time.
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