Labour promised in its manifesto to downsize the House of Lords, which has ballooned over the past two decades. The government has already put forward legislation to remove hereditary peers, which is making its way through parliament. But a manifesto proposal for a mandatory retirement age of 80 now appears in doubt. Combined, these two measures would have halved the size of the upper house.
In five charts, we examine the age and gender profile, education and political affiliation of peers and set out the implications of the proposed changes.
Hereditary and life peers
Since 1999 when the last Labour government’s House of Lords Act shrank the number of hereditary peers from 758 to 92, life peers have held the majority of seats. Life peers are those appointed by political parties or the House of Lords appointments commission, and as the name suggests, they hold their seat for life.
They are joined by 26 bishops and six judges. The six judicial seats are a remnant of the chamber’s previous role as the highest court of appeal before the creation of the supreme court in 2009.
In another of the historical quirks of the British constitution, not all hereditary peers are created equally: two seats are reserved for the earl marshal and the lord great chamberlain.
The other 90 hereditary peers are chosen in byelections held on the retirement or death of any sitting hereditary peers. Candidates are drawn from the wider pool of remaining hereditary aristocrats, and only those already in the Lords can vote.
When Labour took power last year, hereditary peer byelections were suspended. A government bill introduced last September is likely to pass this year and is expected to lead to the remaining hereditary peers losing their seats at the end of the parliamentary session in July.
Tony Blair’s changes reduced the Lords from 1,210 members to 692. But numbers have surged again, to 836, thanks to enthusiastic use of the power to create new peers by subsequent prime ministers.
Retiring older peers
The median age of members of the House of Lords is 71 – five years older than the state pension age. By comparison, the median age of UK citizens is just over 40, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Labour promised in its manifesto to introduce a mandatory retirement age of 80, with the caveat that peers would be allowed to remain until the end of a parliament, which lasts from one general election to the next. The proposal would have forced almost 300 life peers to retire by the end of the parliament.
Those plans are now in doubt, with Labour scaling back its manifesto proposals in response to resistance from the Lords.
The oldest peer in the upper chamber is 99-year-old Tony Christopher, a trade unionist who served in the RAF towards the end of the second world war. Lord Christopher has been on a leave of absence since 2021.
Only a handful of peers are under 40. Carmen Smith, 28, a Plaid Cymru activist, became the youngest person ever to receive a life peerage when appointed in March 2024.
Lords Labour’s lost
Introducing a retirement age of 80 would affect Labour’s numbers in the house more than the Conservatives’. By the end of this parliament, 43% of Labour life peers will have turned 80, compared with 31% of Conservatives.
This could create a problem for a Labour government’s ability to pass its legislation through the chamber after the next election. Since the party’s manifesto said the Lords had become too big, packing it with younger peers in this parliament could appear inconsistent.
If hereditary peers were removed today, the Conservatives would lose 45 members while Labour would lose four. This would reduce the gap between the two parties in the upper house to just three percentage points.
If after that peers were made to retire at 80, the Conservatives would lose 72 members and Labour would lose 90. As a result, the makeup of peers would swing back to 35% Conservative and 26% Labour.
Those numbers may explain why age restrictions have been put on the back burner.
Ladies of the house
In October 1958, Stella Isaacs, Baroness Swanborough, became the first woman in the modern era to take a seat in the House of Lords (a handful of abbesses are said to have sat in 13th-century parliaments).
It took until the Peerage Act 1963 for women to be allowed to sit as hereditary peers, on the rare occasions that titles were not inherited by men, though all of the hereditaries today are men.
No prime minister has ever appointed more women than men over their time in office. However, of the 65 peers created so far in Keir Starmer’s tenure, 35 are women.
Women have sat on the bishops’ bench since 2015, when Rachel Treweek became the bishop of Gloucester, after a law was passed to fast-track female bishops into the chamber when vacancies arose. They now hold nearly a third of the bishops’ seats.
Overall, there are 260 female peers, with the biggest cohort, of 89, on the Labour benches.
Old boys’ club
David Cameron once described the Houses of Parliament as looking “half like a museum, half like a church, half like a school”. Not an ordinary school, though. The Lords is more Eton college than Grange Hill. Lord Cameron and more than half of the upper chamber are alumni of private secondary schools.
The Conservatives have the highest proportion of privately educated members of the House of Lords, at 56%. The president of the Independent Schools Association is a Conservative life peer.
A remarkably high number, 22 out of 24 bishops, are Oxford or Cambridge alumni, in part due to the Anglican theological training colleges based at those universities.
Additional reporting by Lily Smith, Emma Russell and Gabriel Smith.
Methodology: a data snapshot of all the eligible current members was taken in the week of 24 February 2025.
