We must axe 200 peers, says Speaker of the Lords

THE bloated House of Lords must get rid of more than 200 peers, its most senior member has argued.

Lord Fowler, the new Speaker in the Lords, said the Upper Chamber ‘cannot justify’ having more than 800 members while the House of Commons is being cut. He warned that Parliament must stop ‘faffing around’ with Lords reform and just do it.

MPs are due to have their numbers cut by 50 before the next election in a shake-up by the Boundary Commission.

This will shrink the House of Commons to about 600 seats and will ensure every MP has a similar number of constituents.

Lord Fowler, who served in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, said the number of peers should not be higher than the number of MPs.

In an interview with Parliament’s The House Magazine, he said: ‘Frankly we’ve been faffing around on this [Lords reform] for some time now. And my fear would be that unless we take the initiative here someone else will take the initiative – like the Government – and seek to force something upon us. I don’t think we can justify a situation where you have over 800 peers at

‘We’ve been faffing around’

the same time as you’re bringing down the Commons to 600 MPs. At the moment the size of the House hangs over it like a cloud so anything you do it always comes back to, “aren’t you too big?” etc.

‘If you get rid of the “too big” argument, perhaps the public and politicians can concentrate on what we actually do, which I think is fundamentally important.’

Lord Fowler said there were ‘a few passengers’ in the Lords but most were ‘hardworking and conscientious’.

Successive governments have tried to introduce Lords reform but the last significant change – to purge most of the hereditary peers – was in 1999. Most attempts to overhaul the Upper Chamber have been stalled by rows over the numbers and whether peers should be elected.

As his parting shot before leaving Downing Street, David Cameron introduced 16 new peers in his resignation honours list.

He was accused of rewarding ‘cronies’ as 13 of these were Tories, with two crossbenchers and one Labour.

The dominance of Opposition peers in the Lords has inflicted 60 defeats on the Government since last year.

IN coming weeks the benches of the already bloated House of Lords will be swelled even further by a raft of new Cameron cronies who will take its membership to more than 800. What an undemocratic farce!

This newspaper has long called for an urgent cull of the Peers who make up the second biggest legislature in the world (behind only China’s National People’s Congress) and it is therefore extremely welcome to hear the same sentiment from a senior member of this often self-protecting elite club.

The new Lord Speaker Lord Fowler, the distinguished former Cabinet minister and Tory party chairman, has called for the number of peers to be drastically cut so that the Lords is smaller than the House of Commons ( currently 650 strong). He also admits, with some understatement, that among the ermineclad legions there are ‘a few passengers’.

The grim reality is the Lords is stuffed with cronies, donors and party placemen, and far too many peers who only turn up to collect their allowances. It sorely needs an influx of eminent people with experience across different fields of national life, selected not because of patronage but by an independent commission.

Only then will it lose its reputation as a gilded dumping ground for former politicians and their hangers- on, and regain some public trust.