Democracy: Reform of House of Lords appointments through a structured framework of nominations

Ministerial submission

To: The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice

Issue

1. Following the removal of hereditary peers under the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2026, the Lords now consists exclusively of life peers and the Lords Spiritual, its entire composition determined by the appointments mechanism. That mechanism — Prime Ministerial nomination under constitutional convention — provides no structural guarantee of the expertise, political balance, or national representation upon which the chamber’s authority as a revising chamber depends. There is already, through the Church of England’s appointments of the Lords Spiritual, a precedent of differentiated admission routes within the single chamber. This submission concerns its reform along those lines.

Background

2. Life peerages are conferred under the Life Peerages Act 1958, which grants the Sovereign the power to create peerages for life by letters patent. The Act is silent on nomination procedure; by constitutional convention, the Prime Minister nominates the substantial majority of new life peers, with smaller allocations to the leaders of other parties. The House of Lords Appointments Commission (HOLAC) serves two functions: it vets all nominations for propriety, and it directly nominates a small number of non-party-political peers of its own initiative. In both roles it exercises only advisory authority — the Prime Minister may proceed with a nomination HOLAC has found unsatisfactory, and HOLAC’s own nominations are subject to prime ministerial acceptance. The House of Lords (Peerage Nominations) Bill previously before Parliament would have introduced a two-year delay where HOLAC objects to a nomination, but fell short of a binding veto.

3. The Lords now numbers 770 members following the removal of the hereditary peers — 23 Lords Spiritual and 747 life peers — still amongst the largest legislative chambers in the democratic world, a figure reflecting decades of Prime Ministerial patronage with no effective mechanism for departure. The recent convention of peers retiring at 80 rather than waiting only for death has not made a significant dent in the membership.

4. Your manifesto committed to reform of the appointments process to ensure higher standards and improved national and regional balance, following the removal of hereditary peers as an initial step. This submission responds to that commitment by examining one discrete reform to the nomination mechanism that could proceed independently of broader structural change.

The General Case

5. The Lords in practice combines three distinct functions: the provision of professional expertise in legislative revision; the representation of organised political opinion; and territorial representation of the nations of the United Kingdom. Each is currently delivered through Prime Ministerial patronage, which provides no principled mechanism for any of them. A structured nominations framework would replace this single point of patronage with three nominating classes, each appropriate to the function it serves: recognised learnèd societies and professional bodies for the expert function; registered political parties by a defined electoral formula for the political function; and the devolved governments and an appropriate English regional body for the territorial function.

6. The case against intervention at this level rests upon three distinct grounds.

• (a) The democratic objection: no appointment reform, however meritocratic or representative, resolves the fundamental fact that the Lords is an unelected chamber; critics may regard a structured framework as an elegant solution to a problem that can only be resolved by democratic mandate, though an elected upper chamber risks acquiring a mandate capable of challenging Commons primacy — an outcome the Parliament Acts were designed to foreclose and which would require more fundamental constitutional renegotiation than the present submission contemplates.
• (b) The substitution objection: the present system, for all its deficiencies, produces many effective legislators whose expertise lies in governance and politics — a structured nominations model may not reliably generate this cohort across all three classes.
• (c) The regional legitimacy objection: though four of the twelve regions of the United Kingdom have devolved administrations (the three nations plus London), the remaining eight do not, and there are competing sources of regional and sub-regional legitimacy — such as the mayors for Tees Valley, Lincolnshire, or Greater Manchester — which do not fully map onto those regions, creating a risk of disputed legitimacy in the source of territorial nominations.

Options

Option A: Maintain the existing appointments mechanism

7. Under this option, Prime Ministerial nomination advised by HOLAC continues, with Parliament open to adopt measures like the strengthened delay mechanism from the failed Peerage Nominations Bill. No governmental primary legislation is required.

8. For:

• (a) no disruption to the Lords’s existing legislative capacity;
• (b) retains the Prime Minister’s ability to manage the chamber’s working composition;
• (c) avoids the substantial definitional and design difficulties of establishing a three-class framework;
• (d) permits Lords reform to proceed at the pace of the broader agenda.

9. Against:

• (a) does not address the patronage perception or the structural absence of any principled criterion in the nomination process;
• (b) the chamber continues to grow absent an effective departure mechanism;
• (c) the Peerage Nominations Bill’s delaying power does not resolve the underlying problem.

Option B: Prospective reform of future appointments

10. Under this option, new life peerage nominations would in future be made through the three-class framework. Two variants arise naturally. Under variant (i), a defined proportion of new appointments — for example, 25 a year until reaching half of the House’s eventual complement — would be allocated through the framework, with any remainder continuing under reformed Prime Ministerial and cross-party nomination with an enhanced HOLAC role. Under variant (ii), all new appointments would be made through the framework, eliminating Prime Ministerial discretion over individual appointments entirely. Under both variants, framework nominations would be distributed among:

• (a) recognised learnèd societies and professional bodies, allocated by field;
• (b) registered political parties, in proportions determined by a defined electoral formula;
• (c) the devolved governments of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and an appropriate body representing English regions.

A statutory framework, with detailed allocations adjustable by SI, would define the recognised bodies, the party formula, and the territorial nominees.

11. For:

• (a) formalises all three nominating functions within a principled framework;
• (b) creates identifiable cohorts of expert, political, and territorial peers who may speak with particular authority in their respective capacities;
• (c) under variant (i), preserves executive flexibility through the residual discretionary tranche and provides a workable first step from which full transfer could proceed;
• (d) under variant (ii), provides the clearest prospective break from personal patronage, with all future appointments immediately subject to the framework.

12. Against:

• (a) under both variants, the chamber’s composition would not reflect the three-class framework for decades, as the 800-plus existing patronage-appointed members would continue to sit until death or retirement;
• (b) under variant (i), residual Prime Ministerial appointments alongside formal party nominations risks incoherence about the basis of members’ authority;
• (c) under variant (i), partial reform may satisfy neither those seeking full structural change nor those opposed to constraining Prime Ministerial discretion;
• (d) the three-class allocation requires complex calibration across hundreds of potential learnèd bodies, a contested party formula, and territorial bodies of unequal constitutional standing;
• (e) former ministers, senior civil servants, and others with deep governmental experience — among the chamber’s most effective contributors — may fall outside all three nominating classes;
• (f) the party formula becomes highly contentious: proportional to Commons seats, to popular vote, or to some other basis, each producing a substantially different composition and raising questions about qualifying thresholds, recalculation timing, and the treatment of independent members.

Option C: Immediate dissolution and reconstitution

13. Under this option, the existing Lords would be wound up by Act of Parliament and a new upper chamber, possibly called a Senate for clarity of difference, reconstituted from scratch on the three-class framework, with a fixed total size determined in advance. Existing life peers would cease to sit upon commencement. A founding nominating round by all three classes would establish the initial membership before the reconstituted chamber convenes.

14. For:

• (a) immediately eliminates the legacy of accumulated patronage appointments rather than waiting decades for natural attrition;
• (b) allows the chamber to be right-sized from the outset; the current 770 members is widely regarded as unsustainably large;
• (c) it would be possible to retain the appointment of (non-parliamentary member) Lords as an honour, and current Lords who took the rôle for the honour would have a clean mechanism to bow out;
• (d) the reconstituted chamber would from its first sitting be fully constituted on the principled three-class basis, without a transitional period in which patronage appointees and framework nominees coexist.

15. Against:

• (a) existing life peerages are granted for life by letters patent; Parliament may extinguish them by statute under parliamentary sovereignty, but doing so is without modern precedent and would raise questions of vested rights likely to attract legal challenge;
• (b) eliminating all existing life peers overnight destroys accumulated legislative experience and risks significantly reducing the chamber’s effectiveness during the reconstitution period;
• (c) complex transitional arrangements would be required: the Lords cannot cease to function, requiring either a defined caretaker mechanism or a sequenced dissolution and reconstitution;
• (d) the most constitutionally disruptive of the available options; likely to face significant political resistance, including from within the existing Lords, and to require substantial Parliamentary time to legislate.

Resource and Cost Implications

16. Options B and C require primary legislation, incurring standard Parliamentary and departmental costs, much more so in the latter case. Either option would additionally require the establishment of an administrative framework to manage the three-class nominations process, allocations, and disputes. Option C would incur substantially greater transitional costs, including the operational arrangements for the caretaker period and the administrative machinery for a single founding nominating round across all three classes simultaneously. Any reduction in overall membership would reduce Lords expenses over time.

Legal and Devolution Considerations

17. The Life Peerages Act 1958 would require amendment or replacement to give statutory effect to any nomination reform; as legislation concerning the composition of the UK Parliament, this is reserved and does not require legislative consent from the devolved legislatures. The territorial tier of the proposed framework would, however, require careful engagement with the devolved governments, each of which would acquire for the first time a formal role in constituting the UK Parliament.

18. Three specific design challenges arise in the territorial tier:

• (a) England has no government or Parliament equivalent to the devolved institutions; any English or regional nominations mechanism would require the identification or creation of an appropriate body, whether a council of metro mayors and combined authority leaders, the Local Government Association, or a new statutory commission;
• (b) the Northern Ireland Executive has been repeatedly suspended; a fallback nomination mechanism would be required for periods in which the Executive is not functioning;
• (c) a Scottish Government committed to independence might decline to nominate, or use nominations strategically; the framework would require a mechanism to address this contingency that does not draw the Crown into the dispute.

19. Any reform of the nomination mechanism must be designed to ensure that the Sovereign is not drawn into political controversy. Under the present system, the Prime Minister accepts political responsibility for nominations, shielding the Crown from criticism of individual appointments. Any new framework must ensure that disputes over body recognition, seat allocation, or the eligibility of individual nominees are resolved at the level of the responsible statutory body or minister before the matter formally reaches the Crown. This risk is most acute under Option B variant (ii) and Option C, where no Prime Minister bears accountability for individual nominations.

20. Options A and B require no transitional provisions affecting existing life peers, as neither affects the tenure of current members. Option C requires primary legislation addressing the termination of existing life peerages and the bridging arrangements necessary to maintain a functioning upper chamber during the reconstitution period.

Requested direction

21. Ministers are invited to determine whether a three-class nominations framework is a priority for this Parliament; if so, to indicate whether prospective reform (Option B) or immediate dissolution and reconstitution (Option C) should be pursued; and under Option B, whether variant (i) or variant (ii) should be developed in detail for subsequent consideration by Cabinet.