Church of England bishops who sit in the House of Lords by right should be removed as part of the government’s changes to the second chamber, according to the veteran legislator Harriet Harman.
Harman, who was a Labour MP for more than 40 years until 2024, has put forward an amendment to the government’s hereditary peers bill, aimed at ending the automatic right of 26 bishops to sit in the Lords.
Their presence was an anachronism that “undermines the legitimacy” of the second chamber, Harman told the Guardian. “It is outdated that we have legislative scrutiny carried out by representatives of one Christian denomination. The only other legislature that has religious theocrats as members by right is Iran,” she said.
The government was seeking to increase the legitimacy of the Lords by removing the remaining hereditary peers, but that was undermined by the automatic seats for bishops, she said.
Harman’s amendment says the Lords Spiritual, as the 26 bishops are known, must be removed from membership of the Lords, but there should be no bar on individual bishops and archbishops being appointed as life peers.
“If we were starting afresh, I don’t think anyone would give bishops an automatic right to sit in parliament,” she said.
The argument that the bishops provided a moral element in the Lords was spurious, she added. “I don’t think anyone in 2025 believes that morality is the exclusive preserve of the Church of England. This is not about individual bishops or whether they make a good contribution [to the Lords], and it does not arise out of the C of E’s abuse scandals.”
She and other peers backing the amendment had “no intrinsic hostility to religion”, she said. Some would like to see other faiths and denominations represented in the Lords.
Harman said: “Aside from the bishops, I’ve not come across a single peer who thinks that the presence of bishops by right is a good thing. People speak well of individual bishops, but that’s not the point. The point is the legitimacy of the institution.”
Lord Birt, a cross-bench peer and former director general of the BBC, who intends to co-sponsor Harman’s amendment, said: “We are now an incredibly diverse society, comprised of people embracing many religions and beliefs. Embedding the C of E in our legislature is an indefensible, undemocratic anomaly.
“I have the greatest possible respect for the individual qualities and the inherent goodness of leaders I have met in my time from many faiths. I would hope and expect to see faith leaders of every kind represented in a reformed house. But they should be appointed on individual merit, not as exercising a right existing in one form or another for half a millennium.”
Lord Scriven, a Liberal Democrat peer, said the presence of bishops by right was “a medieval tradition not serving any effective purpose in the 21st century … We should stop granting special power and privilege to a church that no longer represents the vast majority of citizens that parliament serves”.
According to a recent poll carried out by YouGov for Humanists UK, which is backing Harman’s amendment, 22% of Britons want to keep bishops in the Lords and 52% want them removed.
Harman said she had tabled the amendment to “put down a strong marker” that the Lords Spiritual needed to be included in the government’s overhaul of the House of Lords.
She would also like to see the abolition of titles for life peers, such as baroness and lord. “We are not appointed to have airs and graces, but to do a job of scrutinising legislation. These outdated titles should be done away with.”
