How many hereditary peers sit in Parliament?

Lord Norton

How many hereditary peers sit in Parliament?  If you think the answer is 92 – the number prescribed by the House of Lords Act 1999 – you would be wrong. 

There are indeed 92 hereditary peers who sit in the Lords by virtue of the 1999 Act.  However, there are other hereditary peers who also sit. 

First, there are hereditary peers who sit by virtue of having life peerages conferred on them.  At the time of the 1999 Act, life peerages were offered to those hereditaries, such as Lord Carrington, who had previously served as Leaders of the House.  Since 1999, a number of Labour and Liberal Democrat hereditary peers have been brought back by their parties as life peers.  Indeed, more Labour hereditaries sit as life peers than Labour peers who sit as hereditaries under the provisions of the 1999 Act.

Second, it is a bit of a trick question: I asked how many hereditary peers sit in Parliament, not how many sit in the House of Lords.   Since the 1999 Act, it has been possible for hereditary peers excluded under the Act to seek election to the House of Commons.  The passage of the Act has also meant that heirs to hereditary peerages who sit in the Commons no longer have to disclaim their titles in order to remain in the Commons.   There are now three hereditary peers sitting in the House of Commons, one who has previously sat in the Lords and two sitting MPs who succeeded on the death of their fathers.  Given that one is a Marquess and two are Viscounts, the body of hereditary peers sitting in the House of Commons is grander than the body of peers (mostly Barons) sitting in the Lords!

The quiz question is: can you name the three hereditary peers sitting in the House of Commons?  I should add that none of the three uses his title.

8 comments for “How many hereditary peers sit in Parliament?

  1. 14/05/2008 at 8:38 pm

    I think I know two – John Thurso and Michael Ancram? I’d be fascinated to know who the other is.

  2. lordnorton
    14/05/2008 at 9:29 pm

    That’s two out of the three. Michael Ancram is Marquess of Lothian and John Thurso is Viscount Thurso.

    Michael Ancram, incidentally, did not use his courtesy title as Lord Ancram (never mind his title now of Marquess of Lothian). He claims this was because when he was a lawyer in Scotland it was confusing when judges addressed him as ‘my lord’, so he dropped the use of the title.

  3. First Year BPLSer
    14/05/2008 at 9:55 pm

    The Rt. Hon Douglas Hogg QC MP?

  4. James Hand
    14/05/2008 at 10:50 pm

    I assume the third must be Douglas Hogg (Viscount Hailsham).

    A fascinating site.

  5. ladytizzy
    14/05/2008 at 11:20 pm

    Douglas Hogg, Viscount Hailsham.

  6. lordnorton
    15/05/2008 at 8:10 am

    Well done. I am afraid there are no prizes other than the knowledge that you are all spot on.

  7. CHRISTOPHER LUKE
    02/06/2008 at 2:04 pm

    Personally speaking I wish ALL hereditary peers – who sat in the House prior to being booted out not unlike the occupants of Channel Four’s Big Brother House – still sat in their Lordships’ House.

    It is a matter of regret to me that opposition parties (particularly the Conservative Party, the UK Independence Party and the Ulster Unionist Party) did not mount a more vigorous defence of the status-quo at the time of the first stage of Labour’s reform of the House of Lords for whilst, at first, it may appear unfair that hereditary peers should be able to sit and vote in the United Kingdom Parliament purely on the grounds of their ancestors’ deeds (moral or otherwise) and without their first having to contest and win an election on the basis of their words and deeds alone, their absence from first needing to be approved by a political party as a suitable candidate and secondly from being selected by a constituency party to contest an election (before finally winning an election) does mean that hereditary peers are more likely to bring to Parliament an independence of mind that is so sorely lacking in the House of Commons, where prospective members are largely selected on the basis of their loyalty to a political party rather than either the conscience of their constituents or their personal convictions .

    It should not be forgotten, amidst the Labour Party’s claim that the presence of hereditary peers affords the Conservative Party an in-built majority in the House of Lords, that only titles and voting rights of hereditary peers are currently hereditary, political allegiances are not! There is no guarantee that any heir to any title will share the same political convictions of the present peer, anymore than there is that a present peer will share the beliefs of his/her ancestors.

    It is also the case that the overwhelming majority of hereditary peers bring with them a breadth and depth of knowledge on a wider range of matters than directly-elected MPs in the Lower House, particularly in recent years as politics graduates have gone straight from university into being full-time research assistants to MPs, and then onto being MPs and Government Ministers themselves with little, or no, knowledge and understanding of life and work outside Parliament, in much the same way as the more politicised animals in the Young Conservatives once ascended the greasy pole of self-advancement by eventually becoming the National Chairman of the Young Conservatives’ Organisation having previously held office (in descending order) as one of four National Vice-Chairmen, an Area Chairman, a Constituency Chairman and lastly as a Branch Chairman, when the YCs were indeed the largest political youth organisation in the country. Contrary to New Labour disinformation, not all hereditary peers are Eton and Oxbridge educated landowners; the overwhelming majority were educated at other schools and/or universities and either are, or were, employed in a wide range of occupations and professions.

    It is precisely the differing educational, occupational and social backgrounds of hereditary peers which makes their contribution to debate so unique and interesting and, as the defeat of successive UK Government proposals in the House of Lords show, often more in-touch with public opinion than MPs in the directly-elected House of Commons, where loyalty to the Party Whip is the fundamental precondition for membership.

    The continuity of hereditary peerages also confers upon the holder a reverence for the past and a concern for the future which is so often lacking in elected MPs (and some Party appointees as life peers) who view their licence to legislate as being not unlike the ownership of a property, to do with what they please, rather than a trusteeship to be bequeathed to future generations. That reverence for the past and concern for the future appears to be increasingly non-existent in the hearts and minds of New Labour on a wide range of issues and not just those pertaining to constitutional affairs.

    Having resisted the temptation to annul the right of all hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords in the first stage of its reform of the House of Lords, many in the Labour Party are now clamouring for the remaining ninety-two hereditary peers (who currently sit and vote in their Lordships’ House) to be evicted, whilst many in the Conservative Party – who earlier failed miserably to defend the hereditary principle – appear equally unable or unwilling to articulate the case for retaining hereditary peers and allowing them to continue to elect some of their number to sit and vote in the Upper House (either according to their rank – i.e., Baron/Viscount/Earl/ Marquess/Duke – or their peerage, i.e., England/Scotland/Great Britain/United Kingdom), in the same way that they currently elect ninety-two of their number to sit and vote in the House of Lords and as Peers of Ireland used to elect twenty-eight of their number to enjoy voting rights in their Lordships’ House following the Act of Union 1800 and prior to the enactment of the Irish Free State Agreement Act 1922.

    At the same time, various other suggestions have been made for making the House of Lords more reflective of the proportion of votes cast at the previous General Election including allowing MPs to elect a number of life peers to form a second chamber in the same way as Northern Ireland MPs in the 1921-72 Stormont Parliament elected Members of the (now defunct) Northern Ireland Senate; creating a directly-elected second chamber of life peers elected by the electorate as a whole (possibly on a different voting system and for a different term of office from that used in elections to the House of Commons); creating a wholly-appointed second chamber of life peers appointed either by the Prime Minister of the day or a quasi-autonomous “Appointments Commission” (although just who would appoint the Members of the Appointments Commission is unclear) or creating a part-elected, part-appointed second chamber (even though when this option has been discussed in Parliament, MPs and Peers have been unable to agree among themselves as to the percentage of peers who should be elected and the percentage which should be appointed). However, all these options – in my humble opinion – compromise the independence of mind afforded to existing hereditary peers who currently sit and vote in the House of Lords as of right, and which is fundamental both to preserving the historic rights and liberties of the Queen’s Subjects, and the hereditary principle which underpins the monarchy itself. For all these reasons, I strongly oppose any proposals to end the right of the remnant of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords, yet more strongly than I did the earlier eviction of many of our nation’s finest men and women from debating and voting in Parliament’s second chamber when they lost their right to sit in their Lordships’ House.

    Hand-in-glove with the call to end the right of the remaining hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords are, of course, the calls either to end the right of the twenty-six Lords Spiritual to vote in the House of Lords and disestablish the Church of England or afford the representatives of other faiths and Christian denominations the right to sit and vote in the House of Lords as of right, to reflect the changing status of the United Kingdom from being a predominantly Christian (and, in particular, Protestant) country into either an agnostic/atheistic state or a multi-faith society. I am not a Member of the Church of England nor do I necessarily agree with many of the pontifications of its Bishops who, as many before me have said, often “preach the Gospel of Karl Marx not the Gospel according to St Mark”, but I nevertheless believe very strongly that the Established Church provides a bulwark against our national descent into syncretism and being governed by either Anti-Christian or atheistic supranational powers, and I am not therefore in favour of disestablishing the Church of England.

    Furthermore, as the twenty-six Lords Spiritual are not hereditary peers but Peers of Parliament – in the sense that they are appointed by the monarch (in his/her role as Supreme-Governor of the Church of England and Defender of The Faith) on the advice of the Prime Minister, according to their level of seniority within the Established Church itself – it does seem to me that once one starts looking at reducing the number of Bishops that can sit and vote in the House of Lords and allowing representatives of other faiths statutory representation in the Lordships’ House as of right, one is in grave danger of rewriting historical arrangements which have served the nation well for centuries and putting in place a quota system for the representatives of various faiths and factions (or denominations) of faiths which would soon ferment greater division and hatred between differing (and often conflicting) faiths than currently exists, to the detriment of the rights and liberties of us all. Like it or not, the United Kingdom is a Protestant country, our laws have traditionally been based upon the teachings of the Ten Commandments, not the Koran; we forget at our peril the great sacrifice the Reformers made to ensure the Open Bible was available to all in our own language without its teachings being withheld from us.

    The significance of the monarch’s role should not be under-estimated for at the same time as many republicans and socialists make no secret of the fact that they would like to abolish the monarchy, all the time we have a monarchy whose role is both to be Head of State and Supreme-Governor (but not, as often incorrectly stated in the press, the Head) of the Church of England – as Christ alone is the Head of His church and no mortal sinner, be it the Queen or the Pope in Rome – then the monarch must robustly defend The (Evangelical Protestant Reformed) Faith s/he swore to maintain in the coronation oath. This makes void any nonsense by HRH The Prince of Wales that, if and when he succeeds to the Throne, he wishes to be known simply as “Defender of Faith” (i.e., all faiths and none) not “Defender of The (Reformed) Faith” which distinguishes Protestantism from Roman Catholicism and all the world’s other religions.

    It has also been suggested that Members of local authorities and/or the devolved institutions (i.e., the Scottish Parliament, Northern Ireland Assembly and the National Assembly for Wales) and the unelected English Regional Assemblies could be permitted to elect X of their number to sit and vote in Parliament’s second chamber to make it “more representative” of the United Kingdom electorate as a whole: a noble suggestion one feels but for the fact that it may add to the confusion as to the role of the legislature and the purpose of local government, in particular whether the latter is primarily to give a democratic forum for executing and applying legislation (enacted in the United Kingdom Parliament) or represent local opinion. Moreover, one fears that returning nominated representatives from the devolved institutions and unelected English Regional Assemblies would only hasten the creation of a Federal Europe of the Regions as opposed to maintaining a Europe of Nation-States.

    As to the call – which seems to be growing, following the enactment of the 1998 Human Rights Act – for the House of Lords to lose its role as the highest court in the land to facilitate the eviction of the twelve Law Lords from their Lordships’ House and the creation of a separate Supreme Court, one cannot help feeling the current role of the Law Lords to be invaluable in preventing the enactment of overmuch bad legislation, without which (and particularly following the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into UK domestic law) the Crown (and, ultimately, the taxpayer) would end up footing a very expensive bill for unsuccessfully seeking to prosecute those who broke the very laws which more learned and experienced members of the legal profession no longer had any opportunity to help draft or shape when they were being debated in Parliament.

    For the record, I am firmly opposed to the proposal that, in order to secure the separation of powers between the executive, the judiciary and the legislature, the Law Lords should only be afforded an advisory role in being allowed to sit in the Lords and participate in debates on proposed legislation but not be able to initiate, propose amendments to, or vote on, draft legislation in the House, as to do so would strip the Law Lords of their legislative role, as it seems to me this would make two classes of membership in Parliament’s second chamber, rather than affording all Members of the House of Lords equality of opportunity in the legislative process.

    Comments anyone – favourbale or otherwise?!

  8. Matt
    25/06/2010 at 5:56 pm

    A HOUSE OF LORDS REFORM PROPOSAL

    The chief aim of my proposals is to make a transition to a different form of second chamber, on the threefold principle that:

    a) Such a transition needs to be a reasonably painless, evolutionary process.

    b) Such a transition needs to produce a more effective, ‘slim-line’ revising chamber.

    c) Such a transition needs to produce a chamber which contains a more interesting and varied mix of members.

    Taking these three principles together, we need to take steps which will, so to speak, throw out the bath-water, but not the baby … and, to stretch the analogy a little, create space for some fresh water, too:

    Step One:
    Retain current arrangements for Hereditaries and Bishops. Automatically grant a life-peerage to all members of the supreme court ; who become entitled to sit in the Lords (as ‘Law Lords’) upon their retirement from the court.

    Step Two:
    A Bill placing a limit on the total number of peers there can be (whether sitting in the Lords or not), at any one time. I suggest 1750 people.

    Step Three:
    The Life Peers to select 25% of their numbers to sit in the Lords (the remaining ‘pool’ of Life Peers could, like the pool of Hereditaries, be voted back into the chamber, upon the death of a sitting Life Peer).

    Step Four:
    100 New Category Peers, selected entirely at random, maybe by a form of national lottery, phased in 20 per year. Replaced one at a time, on the death of one of their number.

    Democracy is good, but so also is a link with our history as a nation (which the already much-depleted ‘Lords Spiritual’ help to provide). Our main focus should be on the house continuing to do what it does best, and strengthening and improving upon those things. There is no public clamour now for the complete removal of the Hereditaries. It is the number of Life Peers which is becoming unwieldy. Meanwhile, the introduction of Random ‘Jury’ Peers would be a simple and direct way of engaging the general public in parliamentary business.

    It would be good to get a bit more ‘randomism’ in public life. What a delightful thing it would be, and what a boost to public interest in politics, if, say, the local bin-man was suddenly ennobled, under my system. Certainly, the presence of these ‘Jury Peers’ would go a long way to making the ‘feel’ of the second chamber much less elitist.

    For clarity, a Lords ‘Lottery Winner’ would have so many days (I’m open to suggestions on how many) to accept, in writing, the offer of a seat. Obviously, those who were going to find it too disruptive to their lives would most likely not bother to respond, which would be taken as declining the offer ~ with the offer passed on to the next on the list.

    New entrants of this sort could well be over-awed to begin with, but I think they would soon get into the swing of things … and before long, they would find themselves mentoring the next batch of entrants.

    The possibility of dangerous/criminal/extreme types getting in there should be covered by clear proceedural rules in the house, and the law of the land, as and when any problems arise. I wouldn’t want there to be any pre-vetting as such, because the virtue of the random intake is it’s potential to bring forward some real free thinkers. This free thinking is enshrined by life-long occupation of the seat.

    The opt-out that I mentioned earlier assumes that those who take their seats will want to participate. However, it does not ask anyone in advance about whether they would want to get involved, due to the old adage of ‘those who seek power shouldn’t be given it’. Thus random allocation comes as more of a pleasant surprise.

    A sufficient (though not extravagant) salary would also need to be agreed upon, so that poorer people are not immediately put off … but this again is a detail to be discussed. My hope is that the ‘Jury Peers’ would come into their own, over time, as guardians of the constitution, of basic liberties, and of common standards of decency … They would begin as absolute beginners, and end their lives as national treasures.

    Some idle musings now on what the approximate ‘shape’ (using slightly out-dated wikipedia figures!) of The Lords would be, following my slimming down of the number of Life Peers ~

    Conservative: 83 (35 Life, 48 Hereditary)
    Cross: 71 (38 L, 33 H)
    Labour: 54 (52 L, 2 H)
    Lib Dems: 22 (17 L, 5 H)
    UKIP: 2 (1 L, 1 H)

    Significantly, the current (2010) Coalition Government gets a much better ‘showing’ here ~ but by a process of reduction, rather than addition.

    Total: 232 (117 for majority vote, currently Cons plus Lib Dems = 105; which means support also needed from 12 cross-benchers).

    Party Percentages:
    Conservative: 35.8%
    Cross: 30.6%
    Labour: 23.3%
    Lib Dems: 9.5%
    UKIP: 0.9%

    [Comparison To Commons:]
    [Conservative: 46.9%]
    [Labour: 39.7%]
    [Lib Dems: 8.8%]
    [Others: 4.6 %]

    First Intake Of Random (‘Jury’) Peers: 20
    Bishops: 25
    Law Lords: 22

    Total added on: 69

    Total Life Peers: 143
    Total Hereditary Peers: 91 (1 replacement pending)

    Total House: 301

    % Life Peers: 47.5 %
    % Hereditary: 30.2 %
    % First Intake Jury: 6.6 %
    % Bishops: 8.3 %
    % Law: 7.3 %

    In Sweden, a ‘Council on Legislation’ considers:

    1. the manner in which the draft law relates to the fundamental laws (i.e. Sweden’s written and entrenched Constitution) and the legal system in general;

    2. the manner in which the different provisions of the draft law relate to one another;

    3. the manner in which the draft law relates to the requirements of the rule of law;

    4. whether the draft law is so framed that the resulting act of law may be expected to satisfy the stated purposes of the proposed law;

    5. what problems are likely to arise in applying the act of law.

    I think all of those considerations could be usefully discussed by the Law Lords (and other peers with a legal background).
    I think it unlikely that the Law Lords would want to do much voting in the divisions ~ this could be something for a Lords committee to keep an eye on.
    I would also like to see a gradual movement towards one written constitution; which could incorporate those five key points.

    Upon the completion of a written constitution, I would want any future alterations to that constitution to require the consent of both houses (maybe at a higher threshold than 50% plus 1).

    On a final side point, it might be healthy to introduce a check-and-balance to the hereditary monarchy, by requiring the next in line to the throne to secure the approval of both houses, before becoming Head Of State. In the (highly unlikely) event of this approval not being granted, the next person along in line to the throne would go forward in the same way.

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