The House of Lords is a bloated relic. Boris Johnson could make it bigger.
LONDON — Britain’s House of Lords is bloated, lazy and unpopular. It’s certainly undemocratic, and by design. It’s a chamber of cronies; a palace of patronage, where some members barely care enough to show up. It’s a body in desperate need of modernization.
And those are the opinions of the lords themselves — some of them, anyway. The Lord Speaker, John McFall, warned last month that the house had become “too big,” that the recent political appointees “have not been especially active,” and their selection risks undermining “the public confidence in our parliamentary system.”
But if Boris Johnson gets his way, another 50 life peers could soon be bending elbows in the chamber’s rarefied dining rooms. That’s because a farewell perk allows the outgoing prime minister to ask the queen to bestow peerages to any number of people of his choosing — including top-money donors to the Conservative Party and all manner of political allies, including family and friends.
The Sunday Times of London and Open Democracy group last year estimated the going rate at?3 million pounds?for a seat in the Lords.
This appears to be both scandal, and tradition.
But it comes at a moment when many — including a number of highly competent peers — fear that without serious reform, mostly stymied over the past century, the House of Lords might not survive far into the 21st century, because the people just won’t have it.
Arising in the 14th century, begun in its present form in 1801, the House of Lords evolved to become the second chamber of Britain’s bicameral parliament, where unelected peers scrutinize government policy and bills drafted in the elected, more boisterous House of Commons, seen by a global television audience in recent years banging on about Brexit, as the bellicose speaker?bellowed?out “orrrder!”
The Commons is where real power lies, but the Lords provides, as one member put it, “real value.”
“You will find the people who are most keen for reform of the House of Lords are the Lords themselves,” said?David Anderson?— since 2018, Lord Anderson, Baron of Ipswich — a prominent barrister with expertise in human rights and constitutional law.
He worries that the chamber has become a target of derision. “The perception of corruption is extraordinarily corrosive,” Anderson told The Washington Post. He said the way appointments are doled out by prime ministers is “the biggest abuse, more than the actual numbers,” which is also a problem.
Much of the negative focus is not really about the money spent on the Lords, but the money Lords might pay to get into the house. The life peers — many of them already well-to-do — earn only a gig rate. For each day they show up to work at Westminster, they receive $379, tax-free, plus modest travel expenses.
How big is the House of Lords? Huge.
And on his way out the door, Johnson may make it more huge. There is no upper limit.
It’s gotten so big, there aren’t enough seats on the red-upholstered benches in the Victorian-era Palace of Westminster for the all the members’ bottoms.
The official count is “around 800” members — and the lack of precision underscores the fact that the deliberative body is replete with inactive or aged members, who because of sickness or infirmity or more pressing matters elsewhere, might be in the act of quiet quitting or subtle retirement.
A lot of them simply don’t show up.
Regardless, the number 800 makes the Lords the second-largest parliamentary chamber in the world, after China’s National People’s Congress, with 2,980 members.
Population of Britain: 67 million.
Population of China: 1.4 billion.
Members of China’s assembly serve five-year terms. The Lords serve for life. (Their 650 counterparts in the House of Commons rise and fall by each general election.)
Who are these 800-plus Lords?
There are 26 “spiritual peers,” bishops of the Church of England — despite the fact that Britain is a nation of multiple faiths, where half the people say they?don’t belong to any religion.
Another 92 are “heredity peers.” These are the Downton Abbey-type aristocrats whom many reformers would like to see tossed: The marquesses, viscounts, barons et cetera, whose titles are passed down for generations.
One earl dies, another takes his place, elected by his fellow noblemen, to the house.
By the way, the hereditary peers are all men. A lone hereditary baroness died a few years ago.
The vast majority of the Lords — 700 or so — are nominated by a prime minister, in consultation with other political leaders, and appointed by the monarch. Many are aligned with the political parties, but a few hundred are “cross-benchers,” who are mostly independent (though not without their own political loyalties).
Johnson, after three years in office, has already sent 86 new members to the Lords — more than 10 percent of the current house. They include his former boss at the Daily Telegraph newspaper, the columnist and Thatcher biographer Charles Moore; the Russian-born businessman and tabloid newspaper owner Evgeny Lebedev, son of a former KGB officer; and Jo Johnson, his younger brother.
Once in, hard to kick out. Some reformers have pressed prime ministers to adopt a “two out, one in” rule to slim down the Lords. The diet plan hasn’t worked.
Life peer means what it says, for life — and these aren’t spring chickens.
The heredity peer?Lord Trefgarne?took his seat on his 21st birthday in 1962 and has been in service for six decades. He’s now 81. Which isn’t really that old, considering. The?average age?is 71. The?oldest member?is Lord Christopher. He’s 97. Baroness Gardner of Parkes at 95 is the oldest woman.
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Some members do eventually die. Some retire. A few are pushed, including Lords who, it turned out, weren’t British taxpayers, but domiciled in Monaco, Hong Kong and Switzerland.
So far, the list of names on Johnson’s resignation honor roll remains semi-secret. But the former Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, revealed last month that he had seen a draft drawn up by a political lobby group that advises Johnson, with a plan “to appoint up to 50 new Conservative peers to force contentious new laws through parliament.”
Brown charged that it was Johnson’s plan to pack “the Lords with his cronies and legitimize bribery.”
“Money talks, and nowhere more so than in the Lords,” Gordon?wrote in the Guardian. He said 22 of the most generous Tory donors — who together have donated $64 million to the Conservatives — have been made Lords since 2010, when the party began its 12-year hold on 10 Downing Street.
Brown pointed out that the abolition of the current House of Lords was one of the ten commitments Keir Starmer made when he took over leadership of the Labour Party in 2020.
Johnson has not confirmed plans to appoint so many new peers, of which a majority would certainly be Conservative Party members. But a spokesman defended the prime minister. “Given retirements and departures, new members of the Lords continue to be needed,” he said. “It is entirely proper for a prime minister and opposition parties to put forward names for a political peerage list.”
The British parliament is sometimes compared to the U.S. Congress, with its House of Representatives and Senate, but in fact is very different.
In the British system, the House of Commons is where really all the action is. It’s where the government introduces legislation, and where it’s debated and voted upon.
The House of Lords serves more as an advisory, overseeing body — but?provides important services. The chamber closely, methodically, line-by-line, scrutinizes the bills approved by the House of Commons. It regularly amends the drafts. Its committee report are the best of class, but rarely read widely outside the Westminster bubble.
The Lords is the more deliberative, less partisan body, deploying considerable expertise that can shape and sharpen public policy and hold the government to account.
“There are a substantial number of peers who really work quite hard,” said Robert James Roberts, a.k.a. Lord Lisvane, a former lawmaker from Wales, who previously served as the clerk or chief executive, in the House of Commons. Roberts told The Post there were also many members he might not even recognize in the chamber, as they attend so infrequently
“We are seen as a bloated chamber,” said?Peter Norton, professor of government at the University of Hull, described in the press as Britain’s “greatest living expert on parliament” and since 1998 a member of the Lords. But he told The Post that the chamber does provide “excellent value” in its improvement of legislation.
He said the reputation and mission of the House of Lords has been undercut by rule-breaking Johnson, “a prime minister putting cronies in, or people who will just support the party line.”
“This doesn’t help” anyone, he said, except maybe Johnson.
Norton has introduced a private member’s bill that would give the House of Lords statutory authority to vet — even veto — a prime minister’s nominees.
He envisions a high bar: Appointees must demonstrate “conspicuous merit” and “a willingness to serve,” and not just a desire to exploit their new title.
He called the proposed vetting a necessary tool to maintain “quality control.”
Norton pointed to Tory donor, businessman and billionaire philanthropist Peter Cruddas, who was ennobled in 2020 in defiance of advice from the House of Lords Appointments Commission, which recommended unanimously that Johnson rescind the nomination. Days after becoming Baron Cruddas, The Times of London reported,?he gave half a million pounds to the Conservative Party.
“Ultimately it is for the Prime Minister to decide who he wants in the House of Lords,” Cruddas told The Post in a statement. “I was nominated because of my Brexit work.”
Johnson praised Cruddas for his philanthropy and his financial acumen.
Cruddas said the vetting commission in the Lords existed for the last 20 years and that the group “never give reasons, and they never publish their minutes of meetings, and their decisions are secretive and without explanation.”
Darren Hughes, chief executive of the?Electoral Reform Society, an advocacy group pushing for the democratization of the House of Lords, said many Britons tell pollsters they view the House of Lords “as a cozy club for the privileged few,” but might not understand that they pass legislation.
A recent survey by the YouGov group in March 2022 found that almost half those asked said they had?little or no confidence?in the House of Lords.
“The Lords has some very distinguished individual members, but they and all their hard work is degraded by this kind of grubby connection between membership and money,” Hughes said.
Reforms would require approval from the government and the House of Commons. Some prime ministers have expressed support, but actual measurers have gone nowhere.
Anderson says the chamber is stuck in part because the House of Commons is satisfied with the status quo.
“A lot of elected politicians pretend they want the House of Lords to be elected because that is more democratic. But the reality is that if the Lords were elected, the House of Lords would have a legitimacy that it currently does not,” he said. “It would become a democratic rival to the Commons, in a way you are familiar with in the United States, with the House and Senate.”
“It probably suits them,” he said, “that the Lords look a little bit ridiculous around the edges.”