LEGISLATION to remove the 92 hereditary peers from the House of Lords was tabled in Parliament today.
Ministers began the process of removing the all-white and all-male peers from the upper chamber in line with a Labour manifesto pledge.
The reforms are expected to be followed by the imposition of an age limit of 80 for members of the Lords.
Labour removed most hereditary peers from the upper house in 1999, but Tony Blair’s government allowed 92 to remain, pending further legislation.
About half of those still in the chamber are Conservatives, with the rest being mainly independent crossbenchers.
Minister for the Constitution Nick Thomas-Symonds said the legislation was a “landmark reform to our constitution” and marked an end to voting on laws “by an accident of birth.”
Campaigners and the Communist Party (CPB) welcomed the move, but they said it should be just first step towards much wider and fundamental reform of the bloated Lords, which currently has around 800 members.
CPB general secretary Robert Griffiths said: “This headlong rush into the 20th century is more than 100 years late.
“The surviving 700-plus life peers, most of them appointed for political or pecuniary reasons, should be handed their P45s and a modern second chamber elected by the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and English regional assemblies in a federal Britain.”
Electoral Reform Society chief executive Darren Hughes said: “Removing the 92 all-male hereditary peers is an essential step to modernising the second chamber, as there is no place for people being able to influence our laws due to birthright in a modern democracy.
“Ultimately, we must address the unelected and unrestrained way that new members are added to the Lords, as the spectacle of current and former prime ministers stuffing yet more peers into the upper house will do nothing to improve the public’s trust in politics.
“This is why these reforms must be the start of a process that sees the Lords transformed into a smaller, elected chamber, with a set number of members where the people of this country, and not prime ministers, choose who sits in Parliament shaping the laws we all live under.”
Labour remains formally committed to abolishing the Lords and replacing it with an elected chamber, but the party’s general election manifesto promised only to “consult on proposals.”
