Daniel Dieppe: Ignore the protesters. The House of Lords should not be replaced.

Daniel Dieppe is a researcher for Civitas think tank and a former House of Lords parliamentary researcher. 

Recently, anti-Lords campaign group Assemble disrupted the House of Lords, threw leaflets from the public viewing gallery and chanted, ‘Lords out, people in’. They demanded a ‘House of People’ to represent ‘Posties, mums, nurses and neighbours’ rather than ‘Aristocrats and oligarchs’.

Equally troubling are the progressive, reformist views of members of the House of Lords themselves. Since July last year, the archaic, 700-year-old Parliamentary upper chamber has been under the control of a modern, progressive and surprisingly spiteful Labour Party wanting to radically reform the red benches.

What could possibly go wrong?

Happily, I can inform Assemble that we already have a ‘House of the People’. Except, it is not called the ‘House of the People’, but instead the ‘House of Commons’. It has existed since 1332 and, under reforms introduced by Winston Churchill, is supreme over the House of Lords. The House of Lords instead acts as something of a scrutiny chamber, checking and double-checking what the House of Commons does.

The necessity of such scrutiny is increasingly apparent.

With the quality of MPs in constant decline, the Lords are ever more picking up the mess. Almost every party in the Commons has some sort of gender or racial diversity scheme in their candidacy policy, including the Conservatives. The current crop of MPs is the youngest, and therefore most inexperienced ever, averaging at just 46 years old. A greater number than ever are ‘careerists’ who have only ever worked in politics. According to the House of Commons library, half of the 2019 Tory MP intake and an astonishing three-quarters of the 2019 Labour intake come from political backgrounds (Councillors, Party researchers, lobbyists, trade unionists etc.).

That is hardly representative of the people.

The Commons lifestyle has become easier for MPs. The House no longer sits late into the night. In 1997, the Chamber sat until 10pm Monday-Thursday. Today, it only sits to 10pm on a Monday. In 1979, almost half of sittings lasted until after midnight. Today, only one per cent last until after midnight. The average length of Commons contributions has declined by 25% since the turn of the millennium, although MPs do speak more often. While Churchill’s maiden speech takes 18 minutes to read and was released to the national press, the average length of maiden speeches now is about 10 minutes and receives almost no press attention.

The Commons is also, of course, highly politicised. MPs can often barely be heard through the din of Prime Minister’s Questions or the roar of a fiscal announcement. In contrast, the Lords are hardly politicised at all. It is self-regulated, meaning peers decide among themselves who will ask particular questions – and generally call experts of a field to ask questions to Government Ministers. Nearly a third of peers are either crossbench, non-affiliated or Lords Spiritual, without ties to a political party.

The House of Lords is nothing but full of experts. It contains two former Prime Ministers, three former Chancellors and seven former Home Secretaries. Outside politics, the professions are wide and varied. There are three former Olympians, professional historians, five BAFTA award winners, six former newspaper editors, 19 former university chancellors and four former presidents of the Supreme Court. There are professors of Palliative Care (much needed in the assisted suicide debate), business leaders and surgeons.

Gimmicky political comments like ‘£22bn black hole’ do not go down well in the Lords because debate is meant to be above that.

Of course, the Lords are far from perfect.

Recent ennoblements of Sue Gray and failed Bristol West candidate Thangam Debbonaire deteriorate the public’s trust in appointments. Lord Alli, who so generously bought clothes for the Prime Minister, or Baroness Mone, who denied profiting from Covid PPE contracts do much to besmirch the House.

But good appointments can be made. Kemi Badenoch’s recent ennoblements of free speech campaigner Toby Young and ethicist Nigel Biggar are prime examples of this. For Labour, the ennoblement and appointment of business leader James Timpson as Prisons Minister was particularly refreshing.

The only thing a new ‘House of People’ would ensure, however, is a constitutional crisis. Ever since 1911, the Lords have only at best been able to delay Government legislation. By creating a second elected chamber, it would naturally clash with the Commons if it had a different vision or party in control. Such is the nature of politics.

Worse, an elected second chamber would do nothing to cut the so-called ‘democratic deficit’. People are already fed up with politicians enough not to want more of them competing for precious media time. Brenda from Bristol represented the nation when she infamously declared, ‘You’re joking – not another one!’ to the announcement of a 2017 snap election. At 59.7 per cent, turnout at the 2024 general election was the lowest for 20 years. It is hard to blame the Lords for the public’s disinterest in politicians.

Above all, there is no evidence an elected second chamber would improve Parliament. The last Conservative Government’s greatest difficulty was convincing the Lords of the virtues of the Rwanda plan, not the Commons. There’s a reason Lords are occasionally seen falling asleep – the details of scrutiny are often extremely boring. A ‘House of People’ would likely replace the experts and former Cabinet Ministers with a terrifying cross between the Scottish and Youth Parliaments. Wishing for the infantilisation of politics is good for no one.

Labour’s long-term ‘solution’ to the House of Lords is a Chamber of the Nation and Regions. But, for now, they aim to remove the hereditary peers. This is a meaningless, spiteful piece of legislation done at a time when Labour is looking for easy red meat for their supporters. As Andrew (Lord) Roberts argued, the removal of the hereditary peers will make the Lords more susceptible to the whims of present Prime Ministers, rather than the ‘cronies of the Stuart, Hanoverian and Saxe-Coburg monarchs too, who are not beholden to anyone living’. Hereditaries, in a sense, were appointed generations ago.

Counterintuitively, the hereditary peers are among the hardest-working peers in the Chamber.

They are the longest serving – Lord Trefgaryne for an astonishing 63 years – and quite literally live up to the Burkean principle that society is a contract between those who are living, those who are dead, and those yet to be born.’ By inheriting their position, they very much represent the dead part of the contract that is so often forgotten.

Yes, the Lords are archaic and unusual, but what’s wrong with British exceptionalism? Conservatives believe that, ‘If it ain’t broke don’t fix it’. Rather than fixing it, Labour’s reform risks dragging the House of Lords further into the dirt. We should ignore the protesters and keep the Lords as it is.