The UK government revealed plans on Wednesday to abolish 92 House of Lords seats reserved for hereditary legislators, resuming reform of the unelected chamber begun by Tony Blair’s Labour party in the 1990s.
Opening the first parliamentary session following Keir Starmer’s Labour victory in the general election, King Charles III stated that removing peers’ rights to sit and vote in the Lords was part of “measures to modernise” Britain’s unwritten constitution.
Labour won the July 4 election by a landslide, returning to power for the first time since 2010, allowing it to enact its platform objectives, including the much-touted Lords reforms.
One newspaper columnist notoriously branded Parliament’s unelected upper chamber as “a chamber festering with grotesques and has-beens” in 2022.
However, the scope of Labour’s proposals remains unclear.
The abolition of hereditary peers — the hundreds of aristocrats whose titles are inherited — has been termed as a “first step in broader reform.”
“The continued presence of hereditary peers in the House of Lords is outdated and indefensible,” the government said in briefing notes accompanying the King’s Speech.
Removing hereditary seats
The House of Lords, with over 800 members, is comfortably larger than any other counterpart in a democracy.
Its members, with an average age of 71, are mainly appointed for life.
They include former MPs, who are often chosen by retiring prime ministers, as well as persons nominated after serving in significant public or private sector jobs, and Church of England clerics.
The fundamental function of the centuries-old parliament is to scrutinize the government.
It cannot overturn legislation delivered by the popularly elected House of Commons, but it can revise, delay, and originate new draft laws.
That task occasionally thrusts the Lords into the political spotlight, such as during the recent delays to the former Conservative government’s disputed Rwanda deportation plan, which was quickly canceled by the new administration.
The Lords, like the Commons, have specialty examination committees.
The new government’s proposed legislation revisits the House of Lords reform program that Blair’s Labour government launched in the late 1990s.
His government wanted to eliminate all of the seats held by hundreds of hereditary members who were present in the house at the time.
However, it ended up maintaining 92 in what was supposed to be a temporary compromise.
“25 years later, they form part of the status quo more by accident than by design,” said the briefing from Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government.
“No other modern comparable democracies allow individuals to sit and vote in their legislature by right of birth,” it added.
“Holding membership of a seat within a Parliament on a hereditary basis is incredibly rare.”
‘Overdue and essential’
The administration stated that the revisions were driven in part by the gender imbalance of hereditary peers, which are now all male because most peerages may only be passed down through male lines.
The rest of the House of Lords fair better, with 242 members—36 percent—being female.
Starmer’s new administration also claims that hereditary peers are too politically “static” to function in a democracy.
Of the 92 seats assigned to them under the 1999 reforms, 42 are for Conservatives, 28 for “crossbenchers,” three for the Liberal Democrats, and only two for Labour.
Meanwhile, 15 are chosen by the entire chamber from among the hundreds of hereditary peers in the UK.
Reformers further contend that hereditary peers are not subject to propriety checks, as opposed to life peers, who are vetted by the House of Lords Appointment Committee.
“In the 21st century, there should not be almost 100 places reserved for individuals who were born into certain families, nor should there be seats effectively reserved only for men,” the government argued.
“Reform is now long overdue and essential.”