This Wednesday: The last best hope for Lords reform

No-one is paying attention. No-one gives a damn. But one man is valiantly trying to make Labour stick by its manifesto commitment.

Photo by Jure Tufekcic on Unsplash

If it happens at all, it'll happen on Wednesday. After that, the last glimmer of hope vanishes. After that, Lords reform will fade away for another generation.

No-one recognises it, of course. No-one talks about it. No-one gives a damn. People like to complain about the Lords, but when an opportunity comes to fix its more egregious failures, no-one pays the slightest attention. And yet quietly, away from the spotlight, and without anyone to comment on it, we'll lose another chance to fix parliament.

If there is any hope, it lies in a man called Terry Burns. He is the crossbench peer who is single-handedly trying to hold the Labour government's feet to the fire.

Burns is a classic example of what is worth preserving about the Lords. He has experience. He has specialist knowledge. He has independent judgement. He has, in short, all the qualities which you might want in a legislator but will rarely find in the House of Commons.

His career began in the Treasury, where he rose through the ranks and became permanent secretary - basically the CEO of the department - between 1991 to 1998. A year after he took the post, Black Wednesday took place and Britain fell out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. It was chaos. He was the man in the driver's seat, responsible for putting together an alternative monetary framework at speed. It was in place in weeks, complete with an inflation target and Bank of England reporting.

After the civil service he led countless external reviews into subjects including fox hunting, Freedom of Information. BBC regulation and football governance. He was president of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. He was chair of more organisations than I've ever even been a member of, including Channel Four, Santander UK, Marks and Spencer, the National Lottery Commission, and Ofcom.

In short, he's precisely the sort of person you want lurking around the legislative process. Someone who might, on a good day, know what they're talking about.

In the rare moments when people think about Lords reform, they usually demand that it be made democratic. There is really no good reason on earth to do that. The Lords is a revision Chamber. It does not initiate legislation and it cannot kill it. Its purpose is to improve it. To find the weaknesses, to bolster the strengths, to make additional suggestions, to propose alternatives. To refine. That is best done by people like Burns rather than copy-and-paste party people. Because he is cross-bench, he belongs to no party. He cannot be threatened with party discipline. He cannot be tempted by ministerial offers. He operates independently.

This also means that he is completely isolated when the full force of the party machinery falls down on him, as it almost certainly is right now, as I type this. He will not have institutional support. He will not have a defensive phalanx. He will be exposed.

What has Burns done that might bring this terrible machine down on him? He has committed the greatest crime of all. He has demanded that the government stand by its manifesto commitments. He has urged people to remember the things they said they would do 12 months ago.

When Labour came to power, it made a series of promises about Lords reform. First, it would get rid of the hereditary peers. Second, it would introduce a mandatory retirement age. And third, it would pursue reform more broadly. "The second chamber of parliament has become too big," the manifesto stated. "We will reform the appointments process to ensure the quality of new appointments." It did the first, it did not do the second, and it seems to have forgotten about the third.

The government introduced the House of Lords (hereditary peers) bill, which is currently going through parliament. It said it would quickly get rid of the hereditaries, then formulate plans for broader changes and introduce another bill.

This, however, was never likely to work. The pace of British constitutional change is too glacial. Each attempt gets buried in rearguard defences and open hostilities. Starmer's government is discovering, like Blair's before it, that Lords reform is exhausting, laborious and thankless. Conservative Peers have thrown countless amendments at the government and buried it in the weeds in the Lords as they attempt to fight off the hereditary ban. Once a government sees how difficult and unrewarded Lords reform is, they rarely go back for more.

But that's not all there is to it. There's also something grubbier, something more cynical. Broader reform would limit prime ministerial power. It would reduce the executive might of the government. And now that they finally have their hands on this power, they don't want to give it up.

The key problem with the House of Lords is that the prime minister has the power to make appointments. Naturally, they misuse it. They deploy it to reward loyalists, thereby placing brain-dead zombies in the Chamber. Or they use it to place security threats or party donors, which makes our country look like the tinpot shitheap it so obviously is. Or they put people in there who have so few qualities to their name that we have to turn into detectives to work out what earned them their spot.

This is the strange double-life of the Lords. On the one hand you have the outstanding appointments, like Burns - nearly always crossbenchers - who stand as some of the finest examples of British parliamentarianism. On the other you have risible exhibitions of national debasement, like Toby Young or Daniel Hannan, own-the-libs mediocrities at best, conspiracy theorist dipshits at worst. And then you have all the people in the middle - party grandees, who bring great political experience but still take the whip. People on the spectrum of these two extremes.

The outstanding appointments are responsible for nearly all the improvements to government bills we get in this country. It is unsung work and we would be in a much worse place without it. The risible exhibitions serve to discredit the Lords in the eyes of most sensible observers. Last month, for instance, the Lords repeatedly defeated the government on tech companies being able to bypass copyright laws to train AI models. Who hears about it? No-one. The only time people think about the place is when some piss-take new Tufton Street appointment is made, so they assume it is a house of cronies and halfwits.

The trouble is: this corrosive process helps the government. They can stuff the place full of their party political appointments and they can simultaneously discredit it in the process. Then, whenever the more impressive peers do defeat the government, they can tell everyone how disgraceful it is that this unelected Chamber has dared to speak its mind. The excess deployment of prime ministerial power is used as a mechanism to entrench it even further.

The government rushed the hereditary peers bill through its Commons committee and third reading stage in one afternoon. Just consider that for a moment. It gave MPs a few hours to consider it - nothing more. There was a reason for that. They did not want them thinking about it too deeply. They did not want them asking awkward questions.

In the Lords, the various amendments trying to introduce modest reforms have all been defeated. Only one is left standing and that is Burn's amendment. It will be voted on tomorrow.

The amendment is very simple. It would introduce a one-in-one-out policy for the Lords until the next general election, at which point it would become one-in-two-out until the Lords was the same size as the Commons. Afterwards, there would be a rule that the Lords must be smaller than the Commons.

The public supports this. Polling commissioned by the UCL Constitution Unit found 79% support a one-in-one-out policy for the Lords, while 71% support restricting the size of the Lords so that it's no bigger than the Commons. Most Labour MPs presumably want it. Hell, Labour literally supports it - it's what the party wrote in its fucking manifesto, which it then took to the country and secured a majority on the basis of. They have an electoral responsibility to pass it.

So why isn't the government supporting Burns? Because of power. If you limit Lords appointments, you limit the prime minister's power of patronage. They can't stuff the Chamber with their people. They can't ram through another generation of cronies and yes-men. The same old cruel irony of British constitutional reform rears its head once again: those with the power to change the system never wish to, because it was this system which gave them the power to do so.

Burns' amendment is the last best chance for reform. If it passes, it will go back to the Commons. Labour MPs will have to confront their own manifesto commitment. They will have to answer the great unanswerable question: why are you voting against the very thing you said you'd do?

Burns has fought a long and lonely fight to get this far. Now the pressure will be brought to bear on him. But who knows? If he is successful tomorrow, he could be the man who secured the next pivotal stage of British constitutional reform. It's still all to play for.

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