Nobody Ever Decided Who Sits in the Lords
On 27 June 2012, Nick Clegg stood at the dispatch box to introduce the House of Lords Reform Bill, and for a few weeks that summer it looked as though something might actually happen. The bill was not a sketch. It proposed a 300-member chamber, 80 per cent elected by proportional representation, serving single fifteen-year terms with no possibility of renewal — a design meant to produce senators answerable to voters rather than to whoever had appointed them. Former MPs could stand. Space was reserved for a shrunken bench of bishops. It built on a draft published the previous May, itself the fruit of a promise written into the Coalition Agreement two years earlier: a committee to bring forward proposals for "a wholly or mainly elected upper chamber."
By August it was dead, abandoned on the 6th after enough of David Cameron's own backbenchers made clear they would rather sink the coalition's legislative timetable than let it pass. The Liberal Democrats, in retaliation, withdrew support for boundary changes the Conservatives wanted far more badly than they had ever wanted Clegg's senators. Two parts of the same government traded away each other's priorities, and the voter, whose accountability the whole exercise was supposedly designed to restore, had no say in either transaction.
It is worth being honest about the case for leaving well alone, because it is not a stupid one. A chamber of appointed experts, freed from the electoral cycle, can scrutinise legislation with a patience the Commons rarely affords itself; introduce election and you risk manufacturing a second set of career politicians competing for the same mandate, at which point you have built a rival Commons rather than a check on it. The system evolved the way it did for reasons, and reasons deserve at least a hearing before you demolish the building they hold up. But a case for caution is not the same as a case for a century of paralysis, and paralysis, on the record, is what caution has actually produced.
Start earlier than 2012. The Parliament Act 1911 — passed to break the Lords' veto over the Budget — announced in its preamble an intention "to substitute for the House of Lords as it at present exists a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis," and added that this substitution "cannot be immediately brought into operation." It has now been not immediately brought into operation for a hundred and fifteen years. A committee under Lord Home proposed a two-thirds elected chamber in 1978; it went nowhere. The 1999 Act removed all but 92 hereditary peers and froze that number "until further reform" — Whitehall's preferred tense, the permanent future perfect, meaning not yet and possibly never and please stop asking. In 2007 the pattern produced its purest specimen: the government published a White Paper for a chamber half elected and half appointed, the Commons voted in March for a substantially or fully elected option, and a week later the House of Lords voted for a fully appointed one. The unelected chamber, asked whether it should become elected, voted no. Nobody found this constitutionally awkward enough to overrule.
The one genuine legislative success of this whole period was the House of Lords Reform Act 2014, which let peers resign and permitted the expulsion of those jailed for a year or more. It is a housekeeping measure — useful, modest, and no more an answer to the legitimacy question than fixing the locks answers the question of who owns the house.
A size committee formed in 2017 has since published five reports, the latest in 2023, on how to shrink a chamber that has kept growing regardless. And it took until 18 March 2026 — this year — for the remaining hereditary peers to be removed altogether, under an Act that received Royal Assent a hundred and fifteen years after the 1911 promise that started the clock. The Lords is now, for the first time in its history, composed almost entirely of life peers appointed by prime ministers. Nobody voted for a single one of them. The reform that took over a century to complete addressed how you get out of the chamber. It left entirely untouched the question of how anyone gets in.
That is the shape Nigel Farage's recent threats to overhaul the Lords, and the judges alongside it, arrive into. Threats are cheap, and this column has no more faith in Farage's appetite for the unglamorous mechanics of constitutional drafting than it had in Clegg's. But the grievance he is exploiting is not manufactured. An appointed chamber that can delay legislation, that has expanded past 800 members through prime ministerial patronage, and that in living memory voted to keep itself unelected when handed the chance to do otherwise, is not a subtle target. It is one of the more literal examples of the accountability vacuum this column keeps returning to: a body that makes and unmakes law, and that no elector anywhere can reach, remove, or punish. You do not need populism to notice that. You need only read the 1911 Act's preamble and check whether the sentence after "cannot be immediately brought into operation" was ever written.
The honest answer, a hundred and fifteen years on, is that it wasn't, because nobody with the power to write it had any incentive to. Appointed peers do not vote to abolish appointment. Governments that inherit a stuffed chamber discover, in office, how convenient a stuffed chamber can be. Every party has promised reform from opposition and discovered patronage from power, which is not hypocrisy so much as an institution behaving exactly as institutions behave when nobody outside them can make them answer for it. The 2026 Act removed the hereditary peers. It did not touch the deeper habit — a century of governments agreeing, in principle, that somebody else's government should be the one to finish the job.