So much for the sleepy second chamber. Since the 2024 election, life has been an endless Neighbourhood Watch for the lords and ladies of the Labour Party. They are now asked to sit around “guarding the business”, just in case the Conservatives launch sudden late-night attacks on government legislation. “We’re sitting longer and later,” said one senior Labour peer. “If this continues, we will be in different territory.”
Labour is frustrated that the Conservatives are thwarting major parts of the government’s agenda in the upper chamber – even things that appeared in its manifesto. The Tory lords have decided to take every opportunity to slow down this government’s business.
The House of Lords is a ridiculous place. The overbearing statues, the Wetherspoons carpet, a throne of gold. But it’s all about the numbers. There are more Conservative peers than Labour ones, and the Tories have been able to “bugle out their backwoodsmen”. At the report stage of the Hereditary Peers Bill, they turned out 249 of their 281 peers, an extraordinarily high turnout for the upper chamber.
This conflict started over private school VAT, inheritance tax changes for farmers and the employment rights bill. Labour had expected as much. The Tories had gone back to basics, defending the interests of its core vote, though one peer couldn’t help but quip, “If I was a Tory and wanted to reset the party, those aren’t the three issues I would have gone for.”
Before Christmas, the government had to choose between delivering its employment rights bill to timetable by jettisoning a large part of the package or keeping the legislation intact and triggering the Parliament Act, which would have set things back by over a year. All because of the Lords.
The frontiers of Tory opposition keep expanding. The Hereditary Peers Bill, Railway Bill, Water Act, Energy Act, Chagos Treaty and even the Football Governance Bill – on each the Tories are understood to have broken convention to inflict delays and defeats on Labour.
Their latest tactic is “degrouping” amendments at the last minute, meaning that where up to half a dozen similar amendments would be debated at once over an hour, each now has an individual slot. The Tories call this proper scrutiny. Labour calls it “playing silly buggers” and “flexing their numbers”. One Tory peer recently complained to Labour’s whips that his amendment had been degrouped before being told this had been done by his own side to slow down the day’s debate.
In the Commons, Labour MPs see a conspiracy to impede a government with a landslide majority. “We’re getting shit from everyone about not delivering, but everything’s being held up. They’re signing their own death warrant,” said one, who has watched in horror as the Lords monstered manifesto pledges. Another says, “This is a Tory strategy to just slow us down at every stage for the rest of this parliament.”
Keir Starmer is in a tricky spot. To get his business through, he must create more Labour peers. Yet every time he nominates, there come cries of hypocrisy.
Labour has been forced to play this game by David Cameron and Boris Johnson, who stuffed the upper chamber so that the Tories had a near 100-place majority over Labour after the 2024 election.
Then there is the troubled Assisted Dying Bill, which has been buried by early amendments in the Lords, and could now be destroyed. That debate doesn’t run along party lines, but there are those who question the propriety of this behaviour – specifically from peers who have spent a year saying they simply wanted to amend a “bad bill” but are now making a last-minute dash to blow it up.
When the Tories were in power, a mere peep of disapproval from the Labour Lords was enough to bring down cries of the end of democracy from the Tories and their Fleet Street supporters. “Dinosaurs In Ermine” was a particularly memorable front page from the Mail, when peers attempted to amend the EU (Withdrawal) Bill. Yet there are no screams of disapproval now. If the Lords is Jurassic Park, Kemi Badenoch has turned off the electric fences.
Labour has identified three reasons for the Tories’ behaviour. First, new recruits on the Conservative benches haven’t yet made the adjustment to the more laid back manner of the Lords. Second, there is the reluctance to accept they’re not in charge anymore – the joke about Nick True, their leader, is that he doesn’t understand why his party lost the election. Third, and most important, “their behaviour has been driven by a reaction to the expulsion of the hereditary peers”, says a Labour source.
What next? Keep an eye on the serenely named Retirement and Participation Committee, set up by the government just before Christmas and chaired by the veteran constitutional reformer Ann Taylor. It has been tasked with drawing up proposals for enforced retirement dates and minimum participation standards for peers, as promised in Labour’s manifesto, but the terms of reference are broadly agreed.
I’m told by a plugged-in Labour peer to expect the consideration of more radical proposals, specifically a “two out, one in” system to slim down the Tory ranks, as well as term limits to deal with tyro-peers appointed in their early thirties who are currently set to spend half a century or more as unelected legislators. The more peers Starmer puts in the Lords, the more chance that radical recommendations for reform will get through the necessary votes.
[Further reading: The housing market has already crashed]
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This article appears in the 14 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Battle for power
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