Starmer’s Lords legacy is his leadership in microcosm

Bold promises of radical change lacked coherence, yielding disjointed and contradictory results

Tom Brake is the Chief Executive of Unlock Democracy

Keir Starmer’s approach to House of Lords reform tells you almost everything you need to know about his premiership.

He came into office having promised to abolish the House of Lords. Peerage appointments would be taken out of the hands of politicians, he said. An elected second chamber would replace a House of Lords stuffed with “lackeys and donors.” All this was needed to “restore trust” and to “fix our politics.”

Labour’s manifesto echoed those positions, albeit in more guarded language. It pledged only vague “reform [to] the appointments’ process”, and stopped short of the overhaul Starmer had endorsed, less than two years earlier. Nevertheless, it reiterated Labour’s commitment to reconstituting the Lords into “an alternative second chamber that is more representative of the regions and nations.”

That vision has shown no sign of materialising.

All we have had is the expulsion of the remaining hereditary peers. The principle behind that reform was sound enough. Hereditary legislators are impossible to defend in a modern democracy. Their presence rested on a pre-democratic constitutional settlement that had long ceased to hold.

But removing them was supposed to be only one piece of a much larger puzzle.

Changes to the appointments’ process have been entirely cosmetic – it remains in the Prime Minister’s lap. Meanwhile ongoing efforts to reduce the size of the Lords (by introducing a retirement age and participation requirements) have been undermined by Starmer’s own actions. He has appointed peers at a faster rate than any previous Prime Minister (other, of course, than Liz Truss). Depending on your measure, Starmer has averaged between 66% and 100% more appointments per year than the next most prolific PM, David Cameron. These have also been strikingly partisan. Before buying off opposition to the Hereditary Peers Bill by bestowing 26 life peerages on predominantly Conservative former hereditaries, Starmer had appointed more peers of his own party as a share of total appointments than any previous PM.

What message does this send? Starmer’s manifesto – emblazoned with his picture on the cover – tells the country the Lords “has become too big”, then he sets about expanding it at record pace. Starmer promises to reduce prime ministerial patronage, only to make unprecedented use of it.

The net result of Starmer’s inconsistency presents Andy Burnham with an awkward inheritance.

Burnham has reiterated his support for replacing the Lords with a ‘senate of the regions and nations’, with seats reserved for elected mayors. The idea draws inspiration from Germany’s Bundesrat, and reflects Burnham’s broader desire to strengthen devolved voices in the governance of the UK.

Yet importing that model into the British constitution is not straightforward. The Bundesrat is not the principal chamber of legislative scrutiny, the role into which the House of Lords has evolved. And with the devolution settlement still decidedly uneven, how would such a chamber be populated? Neither problem is irresolvable, but the details take time.

Following the well-trodden path of previous Prime Ministers, Burnham is reported to have concluded that substantive Lords reform is therefore best left for the next term. 

Which brings us back to Starmer’s legacy.

Big announcements, but no sense of a coherent path or destination. Partial follow-through and disjointed results. There’s no doubt the hereditary peers were democratically indefensible. Nonetheless it would be difficult to construct a democratic or constitutional defence of the second chamber their expulsion leaves behind.

Come the next election, the House of Lords will be an entirely appointed chamber in which the government’s principal electoral rival has little or no representation. Should Reform UK secure the 30% vote share that could, under First Past the Post, deliver a Commons majority, Danny Kruger MP has made clear how a Reform UK government would seek to push its programme through the Lords. Peers aware of their own illegitimacy would be reluctant to resist, the shadow of two hundred new Reform UK peers looming overhead lest they overstep.

Starmer’s plan for the House of Lords was always tentative, lacking in clarity or coherence. A bit of this and a bit of that. So perhaps it’s fitting that removing the hereditary peers is just another isolated item in a patchy legacy. The Lords, meanwhile, staggers on as incoherent and bloated as ever.