Could the disgraceful honours list of the disgraced Boris Johnson be the straw that breaks the camel’s back on House of Lords reform? Possibly, but it may take similar Truss and Sunak resignation honours, in size if not notoriety, before Labour truly prioritises the cause of radical reform. Even then, I wouldn’t bet on it.
For the real driver of Lords reform isn’t the individuals nominated—who, however notorious, mostly recede into obscurity on the red benches—but rather the ever-greater upsetting of the party balance in the upper house by successive Tory peerage creations since 2010. The greater the Tory preponderance by the next election, the greater the reform imperative for Labour.
After the latest Johnson peers list, there will be nearly 100 more Tory than Labour peers. Back in 2010, when Labour was last in office, the governing party had a far more modest advantage of 43 over the then Tory opposition in the upper house. Even that only happened after the removal of most of the hereditary peers in a bitterly contested reform at the beginning of the Blair government in 1999, and from the cumulative effect of Labour creations of life peers over 13 years in government. The Tories have since flooded the Lords, and if the Johnson list is followed by similar lists by Truss and Sunak, there could be 110 or 120 more Tory than Labour members by the time Labour takes office if it wins next year.
There is also a large number of Liberal Democrat (currently 83) and independent (234) peers in the Lords, so the Tories don’t have an overall majority. In the present House, the government often loses votes through coalitions of Labour, Lib Dem and independents voting together. But the key point is that the official opposition can’t get even remotely close to outvoting the government without substantial support from elsewhere in the House.
Being so outnumbered, an incoming Labour government will be vulnerable to guerrilla tactics in the upper house.
If the Tory lead over Labour is more than 100, then even the modest step of removing the remaining 92 hereditary peers in the House will still leave Labour short of the Tories, with a gap too large to be filled until a second Labour term at the earliest. With the House already set to be larger than 800 members by the next election, the scope for a major infusion of Labour peers is limited unless the ridiculous size of the present chamber is not to become farcical. There were just 690 members after the Lords was last reformed in 1999, and even this was generally thought to be far too large.
What form might a radical restructure of the Lords take? This is where, despite Keir Starmer’s nod towards radical reform, agreement breaks down within Labour ranks. For beyond removing the remaining hereditary peers, which is constitutionally inconsequential, there is no consensus on reform. Some want to continue with a fairly weak second chamber which is nominated, just on a different basis to today with fewer and hopefully “better” members, whereas others favour an elected second chamber, which even with the modest amending and delaying powers of the existing revising House would be far more assertive because of its democratic credentials.
I am in the elected camp. Unless the Lords is elected, its legitimacy and efficacy will always be severely impaired, however good the system of nomination. The reality is that whatever the balance between Tory and Labour, a nominated House will probably always suffer the double handicap of being both democratically illegitimate in principle and heavily dominated by London and the southeast in practice, where about half its current members reside (myself included).
What of Gordon Brown’s idea of “a senate of the nations and regions”? I like this idea, partly to strengthen devolution across the UK. Such a chamber could in theory be indirectly elected. But the big practical problem is that England‚ which accounts for more than 80 per cent of the UK population, has no systematised form of devolution, and in particular no regional assemblies except for Greater London. So a second chamber on the German model of the Bundesrat, representing Germany’s 16 federal state governments, is impossible. The only way of composing a UK senate of the nations and regions is therefore either to have it directly elected—by some form of proportional representation so it isn’t a replica of the Commons—or to attempt some form of regional nomination, the complexity of which I cannot even begin to conceive.
The reality is that any radical reform of the Lords will be difficult and controversial, with strongly conflicting views about different options. Every aspect of a new second chamber—its size, its composition, its powers, even its geographical location—will be contested item by item, consuming huge amounts of legislative time even if successful. And it could probably only be successful if attempted at the beginning of a Labour government, like the removal of the hereditary peers by Tony Blair after 1997, when there is the political will to override intense opposition from existing Lords.
In my view, if major reform is worth attempting at all, it should be for a reform which has the potential to make a real difference—ie an elected second chamber which is both far more representative than the existing life peerages and far better able to stand up to Britain’s “elective dictatorship” than the existing weak House of Lords. But even after Johnson, that is a minority view among my Labour parliamentary colleagues, and a tiny minority view in the Lords. So unless Truss and Sunak are as bad as Boris over peerages, I wouldn’t bet on radical reform.
