The Labour government has pledged to remove the remaining hereditary peers from the House of Lords. With a bill to do so now in the Commons, Lisa James looks at the profiles of the sitting hereditary peers and asks how their removal might impact the second chamber.
The remaining hereditary peers will soon be removed from the House of Lords. The reform featured in the Labour manifesto and the new government’s first King’s speech; a short bill has recently been introduced into the House of Commons and will be debated later in the autumn. It will see the remaining hereditary peers removed at the end of the current session of parliament.
The reasons to remove the remaining hereditary peers include important normative ones, resting on the inappropriateness of hereditary status as a qualification to sit in parliament in a modern democracy. This normative argument is widely (if not universally) considered settled. Alongside principle sit political motives; the majority of hereditaries are Conservative (and only four are Labour). And in practical terms, their removal will reduce the size of the House, which is widely considered too large. This post focuses on the effects of the proposed change, asking how the removal of the hereditaries will affect the composition of the second chamber.
Background
The removal of the remaining hereditaries constitutes unfinished business from 25 years ago. For centuries the House of Lords was – excepting the bishops, and latterly the Law Lords – a hereditary body, with new peerages as a matter of course being created as hereditary titles. This changed in 1958, with the passage of the Life Peerages Act. Further fundamental reform followed in 1999, when Tony Blair’s Labour government removed the majority of hereditary peers from the chamber. The bill originally sought to remove all the hereditary peers, but this proved contentious in the Lords itself, and a compromise was brokered to allow it to pass. Thus 92 hereditary seats were retained (and a small number of other hereditary members were given life peerages). It is these final 92 seats which are now set to be abolished.
The remaining hereditaries are, counterintuitively, the only elected members of the House of Lords. Three different systems operate, according to the compromise reached in 1999. Two seats are reserved for the holders of roles linked to the royal family; 15 are chosen in elections by the whole of the House of Lords; and the remaining 75 are elected by the sitting hereditaries within the relevant party group. Among the latter by-elections, there have famously sometimes been more candidates than voters.
By-elections were paused via an amendment to the Standing Orders soon after this year’s King’s speech, in anticipation of the bill to remove the hereditaries, which was introduced to the Commons on 5 September. With a handful of seats currently vacant, there are now 88 hereditary peers sitting in the House of Lords.
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The House of Lords is not entirely unelected; July saw two new peers appointed following elections involving a very small, select group of electors. In this post, former Clerk of the Parliaments David Beamish discusses the process by which hereditary peers can be elected to the Lords, how the system came to exist, and the continuing efforts to remove the remaining hereditaries altogether.