Tory Lords Push To Stop Hereditary Peers Being Removed By Labour Reforms
3 min read
Senior Tories in the House of Lords are pushing for hereditary peers to avoid removal from the unelected chamber by being made life peers instead.
The House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill entered its report stage in the House of Lords on Wednesday, with more than 100 amendments put forward by peers.
The legislation seeks to implement Labour's general election promise to reform the Lords by removing all remaining hereditary peers and introducing a mandatory retirement age of 80.
At the vote, peers backed an amendment by Tory Lord Parkinson, which seeks to gradually reduce the number of hereditary peers, rather than abolish them all at once. The Lords backed the move by 280 votes to 243.
Conservative peer Baroness Goldie has put forward a similar amendment, co-sponsored by Tory leader in the unelected chamber, Lord True, urging Prime Minister Keir Starmer to ensure hereditary peers will be granted the status of life peerage, preventing them from being expelled.
Speaking to PoliticsHome before the votes, Lord True said the government had offered no concessions to date, and warned that the legislation would cause what he described as a constitutional crisis.
“The Tory party is not contesting the government mandate to end hereditary peers coming into the House. We've accepted that,” he told PoliticsHome.
“The real issue is a separate one. It’s not whether people come in anymore, it’s whether they go.
“The Tory party never sought to expel any MP. It is a real constitutional issue which has not attracted attention."
True said he was appealing to “common sense” and urged Labour ministers to “dial down the ideology”.
The Hereditary Peers Bill has faced stiff opposition within the Lords, with members keen to defend the role hereditary peers play. Almost 100 peers signed up to speak in the debate in December.
As things stand, 44 of the hereditary peers are Conservative, while four are Labour, meaning the Tories stand to be significantly more impacted by the reforms.
A Whitehall source told PoliticsHome: “In 2025, seats in our Parliament should not be allocated by an accident of birth.
"It’s absolutely essential that everyone feels they have a stake in our parliamentary democracy. That’s why we’re making these changes on hereditary peers.”
The House of Lords Act 1999 ended the automatic right of hereditary peers to sit in the Lords. It removed the majority of them and, as a compromise under the Tony Blair Labour government, left 92 known as ‘excepted’ hereditary peers.
The Blair government said the remaining hereditary peers would only be scrapped once Labour had produced an effective alternative.
Lord Strathclyde, a Conservative hereditary peer, told PoliticsHome that the government plan would “incentivise any future government to kick out parliamentarians they do not like.”
"The government is not interested in improving anything or accepting any valid amendments.
"We have made plenty of compromises. We have told them there is an easier way of getting their legislation through that is less brutal, ruthless and unnecessary."
He added: "It is a missed opportunity to reform a great house, rather than the bull-headed way they are going about it."
