The Speaker of the House of Lords has urged the prime minister to cap the size of the upper house and bring an end to resignation honours.
Peers in 2017 recommended the Lords be capped at 600 to make it smaller than the Houe of Commons.
But it has continued to balloon, with the latest report suggesting there are 824 members, making it one of the largest scrutiny chambers in the world—second only to communist China’s rubberstamp National People’s Congress.
Writing in The Telegraph on Monday, Lord McFall said he would be meeting Rishi Sunak in days to urge him to accept the recommendations of a new report by a cross-party committee of senior peers.
In its latest report, also published on Monday, the Lord Speaker’s Committee on the Size of the House recommended imposing a fixed-term limit, possibly of about 15 years, for service in the Lords and called for a fairer allocation of new appointments that are based on election results.
The urgency around the reforms comes as peers consider the prospect of Labour winning the next general election, which is likely to be held next year.
Johnson’s Controversial List
The committee said Boris Johnson’s controversial resignation honours list has “brought into question” the current appointments system for creating new peers,The report said the former prime minister “showed no interest” in reducing the number of peers during his three years in office and that the number of new appointments he made “far exceeded” the target set by the upper house.
The panel also noted that peerages were “granted predominantly to members of his own party” by the former Conservative leader.
The peers said: “In recent months, there have been further developments which have brought the appointments system into question.
“Most notably, there was considerable controversy over the size and composition of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s resignation list, with over half of initial nominees not being approved by the House of Lords Appointments Commission.”
The committee said the priority is to introduce a “sustainable” appointments system, ideally via legislation or otherwise by consensus among the political parties.
Lord Burns, chairman of the Size of the House committee, said: “The political leadership should focus initially on putting in place a sustainable and fair method of allocating appointments.
‘Fair and Sustainable’ Appointments
In his newspaper article, Mr. McFall said the committee’s report “makes plain that all efforts by the House of Lords to control its size will be in vain until a ‘fair and sustainable’ appointments system is agreed.”He wrote, “I am meeting the prime minister in the coming days and I will urge him to give the most serious consideration to these reforms, as I will similarly encourage the leaders of opposition parties.”
“Reform of the Lords is not near the top of the list of voters’ priorities. But voter confidence in politics is most definitely at a low ebb following recent controversies and is further undermined by the perception of unfairness in the appointment of peers,” he added.
One of the committee’s recommendations is that each prime minister should be limited to appointing 10 crossbench peers, with more chosen by the independent House of Lords Appointments Commission.
Mr. McFall said the move would “refocus the Lords on its core functions and help restore public faith in the independence and expertise which make the upper house an integral and valued part of the Westminster parliamentary system.”
