Labour’s plan for the Lords looks unwise

Labour’s plans for Lords reform, announced during the King’s Speech this morning, do not come as a great surprise. It promised measures to ‘modernise the constitution’ and ‘remove the right of hereditary peers’ to sit and vote in the Lords via a House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill. These plans were heralded in the Labour party manifesto, which pledged ‘immediate reform of the House of Lords’. They are, nonetheless, both unambitious and in some respects unwise.

The reforms proposed in the manifesto included the removal of the remaining 92 hereditary peers; the introduction of a compulsory retirement age; a revised participation requirement and new powers to remove ‘disgraced Members’. These all sound perfectly reasonable in isolation. It appears that the only measure which will require legislation now is the removal of the hereditaries. The precise details of the other measures were not mentioned in the King’s Speech, although ‘wider reform’ is still promised.