King's Speech 2024 - House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill 

“Measures to modernise the constitution will be introduced including House of Lords reform to remove the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the Lords”

• The continued presence of hereditary peers in the House of Lords is outdated and indefensible. 

• The House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill is a short and narrowly focussed bill that delivers the Government's manifesto commitment to bring about modernisation by removing the right of the remaining hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. This will be the first step in wider reform to the second chamber.

What does the Bill do? 

• The Bill will mean that hereditary peers will no longer be able to sit and vote in the House of Lords:

• While the composition of the rest of the House can evolve as appointments are made and Members retire, the party balance of hereditary peers remains static, providing an advantage to one party regardless of the wider context.

• This Bill takes us a step closer to a House of Lords that is fit for the 21st Century.

Territorial extent and application 

• The Bill will extend and apply UK-wide.

Key facts

• The original intention of the House of Lords Act 1999 was to remove all hereditary peers from the House. The Act provides an exception so that 90 hereditary peers and the Earl Marshal and Lord Great Chamberlain could remain. This was agreed as a compromise that would only last for a short period before more substantial reforms were made to the House of Lords. Consensus could not be reached on those wider reforms and so these hereditary peers have remained in the House by accident rather than by design.

• No other modern comparable democracies allow individuals to sit and vote in their legislature by right of birth. Holding membership of a seat within a Parliament on a hereditary basis is incredibly rare. There are no equivalents in comparable Western democracies (e.g. USA, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, Ireland or New Zealand).

• The gender balance of hereditary peers is currently 100 per cent male (as most peerages can only be passed down the male line). By contrast, the gender balance of the rest of the House is 64 per cent (429) male and 36 per cent (242) female.

• The political composition of the hereditary peers is static, irrespective of wider political trends or the party of government. Of the hereditary peers, 42 seats are ring fenced for Conservative hereditary peers, 28 for Crossbenchers, three for the Liberal Democrats and two for Labour (while 15 are elected by the whole House).

• Individuals in the UK who hold hereditary peerages are over-represented in Parliament. The 805 individuals in the UK who hold hereditary peerages (and are eligible to be ‘elected' to one of the 90 hereditary seats) represent 0.001 percent of the population, yet the hereditary peers take up 11.15 per cent of the 825 seats currently in the House of Lords. In other words, hereditary peers have over 10,000 times more representation in the House of Lords than any other given person in the UK.

• Discussions as to whether hereditary peers should be included in the House of Lords have been a regular feature of the political debate for over a century. The preamble to the Parliament Act 1911 questioned whether the UK's second chamber should be composed on a hereditary basis. It was not until the Life Peerages Act 1958 that the current mechanism for appointing peers to the House for life only was established, thereby removing the need to create hereditary peerages for every new appointment to the Lords. 

• Hereditary peers are not subject to any propriety checks. By contrast, all life peers are subject to a vetting procedure from the House of Lords Appointment Committee, which the government considers before they are appointed. There is no adequate rationale for this inconsistent treatment of different Members.