The House of Lords needs more independent, expert peers, the lord speaker has warned, amid growing controversy over plans by Boris Johnson and Liz Truss to pack the chamber with dozens of political allies and donors.
John McFall stressed he was making no direct criticism of recent peerage choices, given his neutral role, but he told the Guardian that the upper house was in danger of becoming “out of sync” with its balance of legislators.
A Lords too full of politicians and former political aides, rather than people with outside expertise, risked jeopardising the chamber’s crucial role in taking a broader view on legislation and wider national policy, said Lord McFall.
“We’ve got to keep an eagle eye on that,” he said when asked if the number of independent peers was in danger of falling too low. “The House of Lords doesn’t challenge the House of Commons but it complements it, so the composition of the House of Lords has to be different from the House of Commons.”
McFall plans to meet Rishi Sunak to urge the prime minister to lift a cap limiting the number of new, non-party expert peers that can be created by the House of Lords Appointment Commission (Holac), currently set at a maximum of two a year.
The maximum was imposed by David Cameron in 2012, supposedly as a temporary measure, but has never been lifted. It means that from 2011 to 2022, Holac has created just 17 new peers out of nearly 400 created overall over that period.
Among those nominated recently by Holac are Kathy Willis, a professor of biodiversity; the forensic anthropologist Susan Black; David Anderson, a barrister and former reviewer of terrorism laws, and Julia King, a leading engineer.
Peers nominated by the prime minister and other party leaders are not inevitably politicians, aides and donors, and can be experts who sit as so-called crossbenchers, without a party allegiance. However, recent intakes have leaned notably towards the former.
Among 79 life peers created by Boris Johnson were his own brother and the newspaper proprietor Evgeny Lebedev, who has attended just over 1% of Lords sessions since he joined the chamber and recently went a whole year without contributing to its work.
Johnson and Truss are set to nominate yet more peers in their respective resignation honours. Johnson’s choices reportedly include Ross Kempsell and Charlotte Owen, former staffers aged 30 and 29, while Truss is understood to have picked a Tory donor and the head of her favourite thinktank.
McFall, a former teacher turned Labour MP who has been lord speaker since 2021, stressed that the Lords was “a place for politicians” as well as experts: “At the end of the day, politics is about judgment, and decision-making is really important.” But when he meets Sunak, he aims to argue the particular benefits brought by expert peers, and the impact of the cap on Holac appointments.
“I think it would be a really fruitful exercise for a prime minister to look at that again, and ensure we get that balance right. It seems to have gone out of sync, particularly since 2012,” he said.
“If the prime minister was able to say: ‘We don’t need that cap of two on, we can look at it and get more experts in’, to have experts like that in here would not just be of benefit of the House of Lords, but the benefit of society.”
While maintaining his neutrality, McFall has become an increasingly vocal advocate for what he sees as the benefits the Lords brings to British political life, and a cautionary voice against reform to the chamber which could undermine its role.
Much of the Lords’ work involved scrutinising and improving legislation, McFall argued, saying this was something that increasingly time-pressed MPs did not have the chance to do.
He cited the example of the levelling up and regeneration bill, currently in the committee stage in the Lords. “I believe we’re on day 10, and so far we’ve made negative progress – in other words, more amendments have come in than we started off with. But that’s in a sense the beauty of the House of Lords, to have that opportunity.”
Another under-appreciated role, he added, was examining longer-term issues and potential crises, often drawing on the expertise of a legislative chamber he likens to a particularly august thinktank.
“No disrespect to the House of Commons, but would they have the time to do that?” he said. “It’s also the type of people we have: former chiefs to the general staff, highly educated medics, engineers. If you were a consulting firm and you wanted to get those people together, you’d be paying thousands of pounds a day. We’ve got that ready-made here.”
McFall also has other issues to tackle, not least the continuing – and so far floundering – efforts to trim the size of an 800-strong chamber generally billed as the largest legislative assembly apart from China’s National People’s Congress.
There is also the more existential threat of reform, notably Labour’s plan to replace the Lords with an elected chamber, something McFall has warned carries risks, including a potential challenge to the supremacy of the Commons.
“It’s not for me, as lord speaker, to be involved in this, but it is for me, as the public face of the House of Lords, to present the case of what the House of Lords does at the moment for people,” he said.
Downing Street was approached for comment.
