Labour’s Keir Starmer pledges for House of Lords to be replaced with elected chamber


Members who are nominated by political parties are vetted by an appointment commission, which is an independent public body before they are accepted into the House of Lords. The commission also puts forward recommendations for non-political nominees.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer (left) tasked former prime minister Gordon Brown (right) with reviewing plans for constitutional change in Britain. Credit:PA

As well as life peers there are 92 hereditary peers, although their place in the Lords is no longer an automatic birthright following the House of Lords Act 1999. There are also 26 bishops and archbishops of the Church of England, who are known as the Lords Spiritual.

Brown’s proposals for an elected chamber involve setting up a “new, democratically legitimate second chamber” which would be called the “Assembly of the Nations and Regions”. Its role would be to safeguard the UK constitution, and it would have as few as 200 members — compared to four times that in the Lords.

Labour holds more than a 20-point lead over the Conservatives in opinion polls, but Starmer’s approval ratings have fallen overall since August, and several in the party are calling on him to do more to set out his plans.

The proposals are aimed at appealing to former Labour voters who switched to the Conservatives in the so-called “red wall” in England at the 2019 general election and who help blunt support for independence in Scotland and Wales.

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The House of Lords is dominated by peers from London, the south-east and east of England, leaving a perception that many areas of the UK are woefully underrepresented.

Nationalists movements in Scotland have gained momentum is recent years amid the fallout from the decision to leave the European Union. Chaos in the ruling Conservative which has churned through five prime ministers in the past six years has further bolstered Scottish nationalism.

Labour would not need a referendum to reform the Lords and would be able to make the change through legislation; however it could seek the endorsement by the electorate, to protect the change from reversal by a future government.

The report, commissioned two years ago, include proposals for cleaning up Westminster involving new powers to clamp down on outside earnings for MPs, laws to eliminate foreign money from UK politics and a new anti-corruption commissioner to “root out criminal behaviour” in British political life.

Juries of ordinary citizens would review the arrangements governing MPs’ ethics to ensure they were functioning effectively.

Attempts to reform the upper house a decade ago by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government led by Tory prime minister David Cameron were dropped after running into resistance from within his own party.

Brown, who was chancellor under Tony Blair who led Labour as prime minister until his 2010 loss, said the reforms would give Scots who wanted constitutional change an alternative to independence. Thousands of civil service jobs could be transferred from London to Scotland, with Brown saying the report would name 12 agencies that could be moved north.

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