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Labour U-turns on pledge to scrap House of Lords because ‘it’s doing a good job’

Labour is preparing to shelve its pledge to abolish the House of Lords entirely after concluding that the second chamber is operating well, i understands.

The party is committed to a thorough overhaul of the Lords but an insider suggested that it would not “get rid of it” after winning an election.

The apparent reversal in policy comes after senior peers have gone public with their concerns about the prospect of scrapping the upper house altogether.

Labour’s national policy forum last year backed the recommendation by Gordon Brown that the Lords should be abolished and replaced with “a second chamber that is smaller, offers the taxpayer better value for money, and is reflective of the regions and nations with elected representatives rather than political appointees”.

Sir Keir Starmer continues to insist that he is committed to that policy, but party insiders have said that the Lords would not be scrapped in a first term with other more limited reforms – including removing the remaining hereditary peers, and overhauling the appointments process – enacted instead.

A source said: “We’re not going to go around saying the House of Lords is crap, let’s get rid of it … We need to look at how it combines with reform more generally. We don’t want to be picking on one group of people, it’s about the overall system.”

There are still 92 hereditary peers allowed to sit in the Lords, with new members voted in by other aristocrats when an existing member dies or retires. As well as abolishing this convention, Labour is likely to toughen up the powers of the House of Lords Appointments Commission to block new peers and introduce new limits to the overall size of the chamber – which currently stands at 784 people.

John McFall, a former Labour minister who is now the non-partisan Lord Speaker presiding over the proceedings of the upper house, has publicly expressed scepticism about the unintended consequences of abolishing the chamber. He has met Starmer and written to him drawing attention to his concerns, i understands.

Angela Smith, Labour’s leader in the Lords, has said that abolishing the chamber would not be an immediate priority for a new Labour government and admitted that the party would need to appoint new peers to help its legislation pass through the upper house.

The Conservatives have an in-built advantage in the Lords because a majority of hereditary peers take the Tory whip and the party also has the largest number of life peers, although it lacks an overall majority in the chamber and has suffered 373 separate defeats since the last general election.

Sir Chris Bryant, the shadow Digital Minister, said at the weekend that Labour’s policy had not changed. He told Times Radio: “We are still committed to reform of the House of Lords. Some call it abolition because we want to make it on a democratic basis rather than an appointment process. Obviously, we would need to get such reforms through the House of Lords itself.”

Other party insiders have suggested that even if a first-term Labour government did not scrap the chamber, it could do so after winning re-election in future.

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