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A new bill has been passed by UK MPs to remove all hereditary peers from the House of Lords. This would abolish the 92 seats that are currently reserved for those who inherit their peerage. The bill, which has garnered 435 votes to 73, will now be taken to the Lords, where it is anticipated that it will face considerable resistance.
Ironically, although the Conservative party had battled against the legislation, Alex Burghart, shadow Cabinet Office minister, argued that the government was seeking to remove established scrutineers so as to replace them with Labour appointees. During the debate in the Commons, however, some MPs argued that the government should go further.
Sir Gavin Williamson, who is a Conservative, suggested to the Commons that Church of England bishops should also be removed from the Lords, asserting that the presence of a block of clerics was “fundamentally unfair”. However, MPs did not agree. Williamson claimed that the 26 bishops in the House of Lords only come from England and “are probably not reflective of today’s world”. SNP MP Pete Wishart went even further, stating that the unelected chamber should be scrapped altogether.
In the 2019 Labour general election manifesto, the party pledged to introduce “immediate modernisation” to the Lords and to retire members reaching the mandatory age of 80. It also said the party would replace the Lords with an alternative chamber that is more representative of the regions and nations. But the government did not include any of these changes in the bill, nor did it define a timeline for their deliverance.
Cabinet Office minister Ellie Reeves defended the government’s approach, saying that earlier reform attempts of the Lords “all in one go” had not succeeded, and the government wanted to ensure an “immediate reform”. She added that the government would then establish a consultation process on how to deliver on its other manifesto commitments on the House of Lords. Reeves also explained that the bill was “a matter of principle” and that the government valued the “good work done by hereditary peers”
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