It is not often we get to indulge in the mystery genre here at the ERS; however, this blog will delve into the curious incident of the missing Hereditary Peers bill. The bill, a straightforward piece of legislation to remove the remaining 92 hereditary peers from the House of Lords, was last spotted in September 2025. Then it was entering the last stages of the legislative process where the Lords and Commons consider amendments. Since then, nothing. The bill has stalled and seems stuck in suspended legislative animation.
It is hard to work out exactly what could be holding up the bill… There is hardly much of a disagreement over its aim: to end the principle of people legislating by accident of birth in Parliament. As it stands, it is only the UK and the African nation of Lesotho that still have hereditary legislators in the twenty-first century. In our case it is 92 (now 85, in practice, with retirements and lords passing away) peers, all men, who each have a job for life shaping and influencing our laws in Parliament due to who their parents were. In short, their fathers were peers with a permanent seat in parliament, and so they inherited that seat.
This practice clearly has no place in a modern democracy. The famous political pamphleteer Thomas Paine pointed out the absurdity of the practice over 200 years ago, arguing that having hereditary lawmakers makes as much sense as having hereditary mathematicians. The public, coincidentally, also find the idea unacceptable, as recent polling has shown.
A manifesto commitment to remove Hereditary peers
And the government agrees. At the last election, the Labour manifesto said that “Hereditary peers remain indefensible” and promised that “the next Labour government will therefore bring about an immediate modernisation, by introducing legislation to remove the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords.” To ministers’ credit, the government announced the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill to remove the hereditaries in the first King’s Speech and then moved quickly to introduce it in Parliament.
That’s where the trouble began. Soon after the bill started its parliamentary journey, peers began aggressive delaying action. This was not a coincidence, it seems. The leader of the Conservatives in the Lords, Nicholas True, explicitly warned the government that if it went ahead with their manifesto pledge to remove the hereditary peers, it would face “very aggressive procedural action”, not just on the bill itself, but against the rest of its legislative agenda.
He seems to have been true to his word, as the bill has made achingly slow progress since. For example, there were 46 pages of amendments proposed to the bill at its report stage alone. This is for a simple bill that is two pages long, three if you count the contents page.
Unelected peers are trying to thwart a democratically-backed manifesto pledge
This whole episode is revealing about the state of our democracy and how it is working in practice. The sight of unelected peers using their constitutional position to disrupt and delay (with the explicit aim of thwarting altogether) a manifesto pledge of an elected government, exposes the backwards nature of our parliamentary system. The conduct of a section of peers over the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill only strengthens the case for structural democratic reform of the upper chamber. No part of Parliament should be an exclusive gated community for politicians who are completely unaccountable to the people of this country.
Meanwhile, the public, who are impacted by the work that happens in the Lords every day, are still waiting for the government to make good on this clear manifesto pledge. And the wait goes on…
Add your name to our call for an elected House of Lords
Join our campaign today