If the UK Government is serious about devolution, it must continue reforming the House of Lords
The Starmer Ministry's devolutionary agenda will come under threat if it keeps kicking the can on upper chamber reform
House of Lords Chamber (Copyright House of Lords 2016 / Photography by Roger Harris)
Like many of his predecessors, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is in danger of falling into the “Bermuda Triangle of House of Lords reform.” Despite initially promising in 2022 to replace the “indefensible” House of Lords with an elected upper house, the current Starmer ministry has since downgraded its priorities to merely abolishing the remaining hereditary peerages in the current parliamentary term. That, however, has proven surprisingly difficult, with a largely Tory group of peers hindering reform by forcing debates on up to 133 proposed amendments to the bill. Worse, Lord Nicholas True, leader of the Conservatives in the Lords, openly threatened “very aggressive procedural action” against the rest of the government’s legislative agenda should the abolition of hereditary peerages go forward.
However, as difficult as these reforms have so far proven, the Starmer ministry must maintain its course, as government bills to reform the upper chamber succeed once only every 30 years and the Labour Party has already pledged to replace the Lords with an elected “Assembly of Nations and Regions” to represent devolved polities in parliament. Accordingly, to fully deliver upon its existing pledges – especially those on devolution – the government must continue pursuing upper chamber reform.
The critical need to reform the House of Lords comes from its status as a remarkably peculiar anachronism in modern British politics. Descended from the “Witan” councils of nobles and clergy that advised Anglo-Saxon kings, today’s House of Lords is composed of appointed life peers, hereditary peers, and bishops. These peers have a mandate to revise and carefully consider legislation from the House of Commons, thereby providing a partial check on government power. In the past, the Lords once held far more power than its lower-chamber Commons counterpart, but that role was dramatically scaled back with the passage of the Parliament Act 1911. Since then, the House of Lords’ powers are restricted to merely delaying, but not fully stopping, the passage of legislation.
Even with that key reform over a century ago, the unelected nature of the Lords remains mostly unaddressed. The only improvement in the Lords’ representativeness came from the official sanctioning of life peerage appointments in the Life Peerages Act 1958. At the time, supporters of the law argued that it would provide greater legitimacy to the House of Lords by enabling peerage appointments based on merit, which would increase the representativeness of the chamber in turn.
Nevertheless, life peerage appointments were effectively made at the discretion of the sitting Prime Minister, not by the people. Additionally, the law intentionally retained the undemocratic nature of the chamber, with its supporters maintaining that a convention of cross-party appointments would keep peers immune to any political pressures.
Theoretically, this political independence would ensure the impartiality of the House of Lords when it proposed amendments to legislation. In practice though, the Prime Minister can easily make peerage appointments for cronies and other figures of similarly dubious character, and this is partly why the House of Lords now has a whopping 833 members.
Unsurprisingly, these factors have alienated the upper chamber from the UK public, with only one in seven Britons having a positive view of the Lords. Hence, even when accounting for the numerous and significant reforms it has adopted over the past century, the unfortunate reality facing the Lords is that the chamber is too outdated and rigid in structure to become more representative.
Compounding matters is how any further delays on replacing the House of Lords with the Assembly could derail some of the vital progress that the current Labour government has already made in devolution, predominantly in tackling the English devolution policy issue. In fact, under the Devolution Priority Programme (DPP), the government has already announced new plans to establish four new devolved institutions across England. Although any stoppages in upper chamber reform will not prevent the foundation of these governing bodies, it does mean that these authorities will not participate in parliament, which greatly undermines the Labour Party’s existing plans for devolutionary reforms.
The Starmer ministry would do well to learn from previous failed attempts to reform the House of Lords too. One case worth close examination is that of the first ministry of Tony Blair, which was forced to back off its original constitutional reform agenda a mere two years after winning a historic majority in the 1997 general election. Whereas its subsequent strategy of incremental change was originally seen as a pragmatic move to regroup Labour’s political strength for future reform efforts, in practice, the government drastically downscaled its reform programme after privately concluding that it was too time-consuming to be practical. Ironically, this concession is why hereditary peerages have survived to the present, as the first Blair ministry backed off from its agenda after failing to remove the very same peerages that the Starmer ministry is now trying to abolish.
Yet, history does not have to repeat itself. As hamstrung as the Starmer ministry has been with House of Lords reform, it has one significant advantage compared to previous governments’ attempts: its decisive commitment to eventually replacing the chamber with the Assembly. Moreover, because the Assembly is meant to be a platform for devolved authorities to have representation in parliament, the government could build support for upper chamber reform in regional and local polities. This would ensure the devolution remains a bottom-up effort, as per the party’s current platform. Still, even in this scenario, such a campaign can only get off the ground if the government outlines a specific timetable for constitutional reform in this parliamentary term.
Therefore, even as the Starmer ministry struggles with reforming the House of Lords, it will only succeed in improving devolution across Britain by keeping to its previous commitments to eventually replace the House of Lords with an Assembly of Nations and Regions. The government must not lose sight of this if it is to avoid the same fate of failure that befell so many of its predecessors in tackling constitutional reform. Should it succeed then, the Starmer ministry will go down in British history as the government that not only finally did away with the unelected Lords, but also achieved more devolution across the UK.