Just how committed is Labour to reforming the House of Lords?

A running joke at Westminster is that it has been Labour and Lib Dem policy to abolish the Lords for more than 100 years, writes Andrew Grice

When the crunch comes, the Labour leader may discover he has more pressing priorities (PA)

Would a Labour government replace the House of Lords with an elected second chamber of the nations and regions? It certainly sounded like it when Keir Starmer endorsed Gordon Brown’s 155-page, 43-point plan this week to reform the constitution.

However, the question of what Labour would actually do if it won power is far from settled. Starmer played for time by announcing a consultation exercise on how – not whether – to implement the report. This is a holding line that masks deep Labour divisions over Brown’s blueprint.

Some party figures, including some of Starmer’s senior aides, oppose a “big bang” reform of the Lords, warning it would suck an incoming Labour government into a quagmire. True, the issue would dominate the parliamentary timetable and might look to voters worried about the economy and public services that Starmer was fiddling while Rome burned.

Previous attempts to shake up the Lords have run into the sand. MPs voted down all the options on the table under Tony Blair’s government, although it did remove most hereditary peers. A dispute between the pro-reform Liberal Democrats and the lukewarm Conservatives almost blew up their coalition; reform was abandoned.

Many MPs do not want the current revising chamber replaced by an elected rival that would inevitably flex its muscles, resulting in parliamentary gridlock. Then there are the Lords turkeys who accept the need to slim a bloated 785-seat chamber – the largest assembly in any democracy – but will not vote for Christmas (and not just at this time of year).

The Brown commission’s plan does have plus points for Starmer. It wouldn’t cost money (and a Labour government wouldn’t have much). It would help to answer the “what is Labour for?” question.

Headlines about the Lords eclipsed the many good ideas in the Brown report, as some Starmer aides warned him would happen. Labour would implement Brown’s plan to end the “Whitehall knows best” culture by devolving power in the most centralised state in Europe to local areas to boost economic growth. This provides Labour’s answer to the Tories’ undelivered “levelling up” agenda.

On some issues, Labour might go further than Brown suggests; for example, a regional immigration system could tackle local labour shortages. Such questions are in a Labour box marked “too difficult to talk about before the election” (the Tories would claim Labour planned open-ended immigration).

Brown has also given Labour an answer to the Scottish question. He hopes a second chamber with members elected by the nations and regions, plus some new powers for the Edinburgh parliament, would help lock Scotland into the UK. Labour, back in the game in Scotland under Anas Sarwar, can now offer a third way to the Tories’ status quo and the SNP’s independence.

Labour would rather talk about such matters than get drawn into the weeds of Lords reform. But the question won’t go away now Starmer has allowed Brown to raise it. Opponents of wholesale reform claim he was bounced by the former prime minister. “The Brown bulldozer is back,” one Labour MP told me. Brown allies deny this, saying Starmer never wavered, and the last-minute wobble was only among his aides.

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The doubters will try to persuade the Labour leader to opt for a gradualist approach. A sensible one was spelt out this week by William Hague, the former Tory leader, currently on leave of absence from the Lords. “I would never hesitate to abolish myself,” he told Times Radio. “I think it should be a wholly or mainly elected House.” He suggested a 450-strong chamber – 200 fewer members than the Commons – with the vast majority elected for a non-renewable 15-year term. Hague warned that Starmer would get “totally bogged down” if he tried to abolish the Lords.

There is merit in proceeding on a cross-party basis, which would prevent an opposition playing politics to trip up the government. Hague suggested an agreement to bring down the numbers when peers die or retire and a “one in, two out” rule on appointments. Then in five or six years, the parties could seek consensus on an elected chamber.

The crucial question now is the precise wording on the Lords in the Labour manifesto, over which there will be a battle between Brown and the sceptics. A firm pledge to implement Brown’s plan would make it much harder for peers to block change; by convention, the Lords does not oppose measures in a winning party’s manifesto. But a weaker aspiration would signal that Starmer would not attempt to abolish the Lords during a first five-year term.

Yet more long grass; a running joke at Westminster is that it has been Labour and Lib Dem policy to abolish the Lords for more than 100 years.

For now, Starmer is signed up to the Brown plan to do so. But when the crunch comes, the Labour leader may discover he has more pressing priorities.