Starmer's House of Lords reform is just a power grab
The House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill begins its committee stage in the upper chamber today. It is a miserable contribution to the saga of reforming the House of Lords.
Its only major provision is to undo the compromise agreed to ensure the passage of the House of Lords Act 1999, by which hereditary peers lost their right to sit and vote but an 'excepted' group of 90 of them, elected by their own ranks, would remain. The Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain also remained ex officio.
This change was promised as an immediate measure in Labour's election manifesto, which described hereditary peers as 'indefensible'. By isolating it from any other significant change, however, Sir Keir Starmer is proposing a mean-minded measure which will do nothing to make the House of Lords more effective, representative or accountable, but instead represents a thinly veiled power grab by the executive.
There is a democratic argument against the hereditary peerage. For reasons the minister in charge of the Bill, Nick Thomas-Symonds, was unable to articulate, however, the government sees an hereditary peerage as wholly separate from the hereditary monarchy, which it supports. But the argument is not necessarily decisive.
Labour has also maintained that the House of Lords is too big. This is a frequent but flimsy argument: there are 835 peers entitled to attend but they do not all do so at the same time, and average attendance is lower than in the House of Commons. The removal of 92 hereditary peers is modest, given the 64 life peers that the prime minister has sent to the Lords in less than eight months. Nor are the hereditaries a Tory closed shop: 45 are Conservatives and only four Labour, but there are 33 crossbenchers and four Liberal Democrats.
The real mischief of the current Bill is its betrayal of the deal to keep 92 hereditary peers which Blair agreed with the Conservative leader in the Lords, Viscount Cranborne, in 1998. This was a kind of deposit: the opposition had objected to the Lords becoming a 'House of Cronies' if wholesale reform was not implemented.
The interim retention of the hereditaries was a concession to reassure opponents that the government would not stop at 'stage one' reform. They would be a stone in the shoe to make sure there was a 'stage two'.
There has been no stage two reform of the House of Lords. Labour raised various proposals in 2003, 2007 and 2008, and the coalition government produced a draft House of Lords Reform Bill in 2012 but could not reach agreement on its final terms. Lords reform is hard: identifying unsatisfactory elements of the upper house is much easier than finding a consensus on what should take its place.
In opposition, Sir Keir Starmer pledged support for a plan devised by Gordon Brown to replace the Lords with an 'Assembly of the Nations and Regions'. By autumn 2023, that commitment was walked back, and the following May Labour's Baroness Smith of Basildon professed an 'open mind' on hereditary peers. Now the government's only commitment is to reform of some kind, at some point, after a consultation.
In the meantime, the current Bill will have one striking effect. If the remaining hereditary peers are removed, the House of Lords will, for the first time in its 750-year history, consist solely of legislators appointed by the government. This was the outcome feared in 1998, in democratic terms no better than the existing composition. The hereditary peers are, after all, the only elected members of the House, albeit by a tiny electorate.
Patronage is addictive. I suspect that the government, looking at a revising chamber almost wholly chosen by party leaders, will come to find that further reform is not so pressing after all and that the 'temporary' arrangement is very satisfactory. Making the House more independent or assertive will never be a priority.
Parliamentary sovereignty is paramount. But the government is undermining that sovereignty by bringing the composition of the House of Lords further under its own control. Status quo, or comprehensive reform: but not this shoddy power grab.
Eliot Wilson is a former House of Commons clerk
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