LONDON —  Keir Starmer promised to shake up the U.K.’s unelected House of Lords. But his big pitch is getting bogged down in process.

The prime minister vowed to transform the archaic upper chamber, including slapping a retirement age of 80 on its members.

His government has also floated bringing in a new minimum participation requirement to ensure peers actually show up for work.

On one count at least, there’s been movement. Legislation removing all Britain’s hereditary peers, who sit in the Lords by birthright and who Tony Blair’s last Labour government tried and failed to fully abolish, is almost law, despite a feisty opposition campaign.

But ministers now appear to be taking a step back from further modernization and letting the Lords itself have a big say in its own fate — prompting accusations of turning “timid.”

Peer review 

The government’s Lords Leader Angela Smith announced in August that a cross-party committee will “consider and report on potential mechanisms” for cutting the size of the Lords, which has ballooned to more than 800 members.

That makes it the largest legislature in the world — other than the Chinese National People’s Congress.

Most peers, Smith insisted, “do not want these issues kicked into the long grass.”

But the committee won’t report back until the end of 2026 — and some in Labour fear leaving the whole issue in the hands of the Lords rather than pressing ahead with bold reforming legislation creates its own set of problems.

There are currently 13 government bills getting scrutinized in the Lords – and making time for reform of the chamber itself gets dicier if peers don’t play along. “Sadly, at this point the Lords are holding the government to ransom over this and we need to get other business through,” argued Labour MP Ben Goldsborough.

Some fear too that tasking the upper house with deciding its own future could result in simply sticking with the status quo. “I’m rather hesitant about institutions having committees themselves to decide their future,” Labour peer Larry Whitty, who was a minister during the removal of some hereditary peers during Blair’s stint in office, said.

“All reforms that are looking at the system … will take time, because it’s literally asking a chamber to vote for changes to itself,” said a second Labour MP, granted anonymity to speak candidly, arguing that peers have few incentives to back change. 

Battle lines

Less than eighteen months into the job, Labour ministers already have battle scars from trying to shake up the upper chamber.

Tory peers, who make up the highest number of hereditary lawmakers in the Lords, submitted a host of amendments to the bill abolishing birthright members in a bid to hold up Labour’s agenda and secure fresh compromise.

They include offering all departing hereditary peers life peerages instead, allowing them to stay in the chamber but with no guaranteed place for their ancestors — and making their departure conditional on a referendum.

Despite a bold Labour manifesto pledge to retire peers at the age of 80, there has always been skepticism about removing members of the Lords just because of their age.

Whitty, one of many peers aged over 80, prefers a 20-year term limit over a mandatory retirement age in a bid to ensure fairness: “If we’re appointing people [to the Lords] who come to the top of their industry or occupation, some of them won’t be really eligible … until they’re in their 70s.” 

Former Deputy Commons Leader Paddy Tipping argues for another compromise: letting existing peers remain in the Lords for life, while new peers must retire during the parliament in which they turn 80.

Some of Labour’s other pledges for change aren’t even getting a hearing. There are no plans for the committee to explore reforming the way peers are appointed to the upper chamber — a gift that currently sits in the hands of the PM.

Starmer has used that power liberally, nominating 47 Labour peers since taking office. “The appointment process on the whim of the prime minister of the day just isn’t acceptable,” argues Tipping. “There needs to be a much more thoughtful and transparent way of doing that.” 

Labour’s wider promise in the manifesto of an alternative chamber “that is more representative of the regions and nations” is also gathering dust.

“All this tinkering around the edge doesn’t really get the job done in the long term,” said the second Labour MP quoted above. “We shouldn’t be timid with this.” 

Niche appeal

House of Lords reform is never going to be front and center of an election campaign — especially with Labour on the back foot to Nigel Farage’s insurgent Reform UK.

“I don’t think there’s anybody sitting at home in any of the constituencies watching TV or on Netflix … going, ‘God, I hope they really be careful with the reform for the Lords,’” the second Labour MP acknowledged.

“Any more radical change would take parliamentary time, which could be used in meeting their more popular objectives,” admitted Whitty. “It’s understandable that they’ve backed off.” 

“Lords reform is always like watching a turtle do gymnastics: incredibly slow and baffling to everyone but at the same time fascinating to those who care willing it on to succeed,” Goldsborough says.  

Yet some in Westminster argue that the government could tie a more ambitious program of Lords reform into a punchy, wider narrative of taking on a broken political system.

Labour MP Simon Opher says “one of the big crises in politics” is “a loss of faith” and, to solve this, “we have to change how it works.”

Tom Lubbock, co-founder of public opinion agency. J.L. Partners, says Lords reform could be “a bullet point in a bigger argument about how the state is out of touch and isn’t delivering.” Right now, he says, “if anything exists as part of the status quo, then the public are pretty cross about it.”

“It’s a marginal improvement,” said Opher of the government’s current committee approach — although he favors abolishing the Lords altogether, as Starmer himself once argued. “It’s an absolute embarrassment, really, to our democracy.”