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“Labour will rebuild trust by… replacing the unelected House of Lords with a new, smaller, democratically elected second chamber… representing the regions and nations of the United Kingdom.”
That was the Leader of the Opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, in December 2022, not quite four years ago. On Monday, as he headed for his exit interview with the King and Andy Burnham prepared to become the 59th British prime minister, there was a parting shot. Starmer released a list of 26 new nominations to the House of Lords, 16 Labour names, five Liberal Democrats, three Conservatives and two crossbenchers.
Over the course of his premiership beginning in July 2024, Starmer nominated 167 new peers, of whom 90 have been Labour supporters. Rishi Sunak managed less than half that number, putting forward 58 nominees, Boris Johnson proposed 88 peers and Theresa May only 42. Starmer approved by far the highest rate of introductions to the House of Lords since the passage of the Life Peerages Act 1958.
He did, however, oversee one measure of reform. The House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2026 tore up the delicate and pragmatic deal agreed in 1998 between Tony Blair and the then-leader of the Conservatives in the House of Lords, the Marquess of Salisbury; this allowed 92 hereditary peers to remain in the House until further and more thorough reform was undertaken. They acted as a guarantee of goodwill on the government’s part, their membership philosophically indefensible to the Labour Party accepted as a price for not at that point having reformed other aspects of the House.
Starmer and the minister in charge of the 2026 act, paymaster general Nick Thomas-Symonds, had no interest in what had gone before. Instead they simply legislated to remove the remaining hereditary peers and passed the more thoughtful (if generally mistaken) proposals from Labour’s election manifesto – a mandatory retirement age, minimum participation requirement, stronger powers of expulsion, a reformed appointments process – to a select committee. The committee was chaired by Baroness Taylor of Bolton, formerly Labour chief whip in the House of Commons and Leader of the House, guaranteed barely to touch the oars at all, let alone rock the boat.
I predicted a year ago that the bill to remove the hereditary peers without any other major measures of reform was simply an attempt to dilute the authority of the House of Lords, that once it was done ministers would rapidly lose interest in making the upper chamber strange or more transparent.
The result has been a House of Lords which is for the first time in nearly seven centuries comprised solely of individuals appointed to their places, in theory by the King but in practice the majority by the prime minister. It is, I suggested recently, less independent and less free from influence than the House of Lords under Henry VIII in the 1520s.
Sir Keir Starmer could scarcely have done more to create the opposite of what he suggested he wanted. He did not replace the unelected chamber, but stripped out the tiny electoral variable of hereditary peer by-elections to make its membership entirely dependent on patronage. He did not make it smaller, but created twice as many new peers as there were hereditaries excluded at the end of the last session of Parliament. And if it now represents “the regions and nations of the United Kingdom”, it is not easily discernible. For a prime minister regularly accused of U-turns, his policy towards the House of Lords was an astonishingly complete and comprehensive example.
Starmer also failed to reflect in any meaningful way the changing undercurrents in British politics, and especially the weakening – perhaps temporary, maybe permanent – of the long-standing two-party system (or perhaps more accurately two-and-a-half-party system).
He frequently favoured the Liberal Democrats, the third party in the House of Commons, over the Conservatives who are the official Opposition. And he refused to contemplate inviting any nominations from Reform UK, which has topped the opinion polls consistently for more than a year, but has not a single peer since Lord Offord of Garvel resigned in January to contest the Scottish Parliament elections. Labour ministers engaged in an unseemly slanging match with Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, in which both sides had a small degree of justification for their positions but distorted and misstated them grotesquely.
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After two years in Downing Street, Starmer has left the House of Lords diminished and beleaguered. For a man who promised on his first day in office to lead “a government unburdened by doctrine”, the one significant measure of reform of the House of Lords he implemented was one purely of doctrine, of dogma, of political ideology rather than some practical or cross-party challenge. He had that freedom, despite manifesto commitments, but the high-minded principle in which the government’s approach was enrobed carried the stench of sanctimony and the gutter-stink of duplicity.
“Labour will rebuild trust,” Sir Keir Starmer said in 2022. To think that his critics accuse him of lacking a sense of humour.
