'Unsustainable': Speaker calls for freeze on new appointments to House of Lords

A moratorium on the appointment of new peers to the House of Lords should be introduced urgently to combat its excessive size, according to the speaker of the upper chamber.

Norman Fowler’s intervention comes as both Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson prepare to nominate new peers in the Lords as part of the dissolution honours list, taking the total size of the chamber beyond 800 members.

It is already one of the largest legislative bodies in the world, surpassed only by China's National People’s Congress, and calls have already been made to remove “passengers” who fail to contribute to debates.

In an article for The House magazine, Lord Fowler, who has been speaker of the Lords since 2016, said: “It is both unsustainable and unfair for peers to retire, only to find that they are immediately replaced by a prime minister who appoints more than the number who have departed.

“The dissolution honours are now all but water under the bridge but, after that, I would advocate an effective moratorium on new appointments until the commission has completed its work.

“There can be a few exceptions, such as a frontbench appointment, but the general approach should be one of reduction, not increase.”

He said he fears that “hopes may soon be dashed” of the government acting on the recommendations put forward by the Burns committee in 2017 to maintain confidence in the upper chamber. The report suggested reducing the size of the Lords to no more than 600 peers and limiting the terms of new appointments to the chamber to 15 years.

Lord Fowler said that “in his experience” most peers take their role seriously, but added that "in the 2017-19 session, there were over 100 members who took part in fewer than 10 per cent of divisions”.

“My chief hope had been that the prime minister would follow the course of his predecessor, Mrs May, who pledged herself to ‘moderation’ in new appointments and that he would adopt the formula set out by the committee I established under the expert chairmanship of Terry Burns.

“If the leaks are to be believed, then Labour have nominated eight new peers.

“But they are just the Labour-nominated peers and the government will also have their own nominations which could well be double that of Labour. In addition, two new ministers have been introduced to the House.

“It could mean that in the few weeks since the general election there will have been around 25 new appointments and the total members in the Lords will have been pushed up past 800 once again. This will have been in spite of the efforts by made the house itself, without the benefit of government legislation, to curb this excess.”