Keir Starmer ‘eyes dozens of new peers to aid Labour government’

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Labour is reportedly devising plans to appoint dozens of peers to the House of Lords to prevent a Keir Starmer government being stymied by the upper chamber.

There are 174 Labour peers, making up 22% of the Lords, compared with 263 Conservatives and 183 unaligned crossbench peers.

Labour sources told the Times the party is considering appointing more full-time peers of working age to attend the Lords most days to scrutinise and vote on legislation.

“There would be lots of opportunities for a Conservative opposition with a bigger, younger group of peers to make life difficult for us in the Lords while respecting convention,” one source said.

A shadow cabinet minister, who was not named, acknowledged: “We will need to appoint dozens of them, at least. The current cohort aren’t getting any younger, and there’s so few of them doing the actual work that they are increasingly knackered.”

Tony Blair appointed 36 Labour peers in 1997, the year he came to power, and a further 19 in 1998.

David Cameron created 47 Tory peers in 2010 after he entered Downing Street, in addition to 24 Liberal Democrats, to support the coalition government.

There are 779 members of the upper chamber, with more incoming from Boris Johnson’s recent resignation honours list which included seven peerages.

A senior Labour source told the newspaper that “you can’t just replace the need for Commons ministers with Lords ministers”. “We’re confident that if elected we would have high-quality ministers in both Houses of Parliament. We’re really excited about the new intake of Labour MPs. The whole reason for our strict candidates process is to ensure we have a high-quality parliamentary Labour party,” they said.

Last September the Guardian reported that Labour was considering abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with an upper house of nations and regions.

The constitutional review by the former prime minister Gordon Brown suggested that the House of Lords would be reformed as an assembly of regions and nations, with a remit of safeguarding the constitution and with power to refer the government to the supreme court.