Life Peerages Act permits women to sit in House of Lords

On 30 April 1958, the Life Peerages Act received royal assent, a landmark piece of constitutional reform that altered the composition of the House of Lords.

Passed by Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government, the act gave prime ministers the power to appoint individuals for “life”. This broke the centuries-old hereditary principle that had previously dominated the upper house. (Life peerages are formally granted by the monarch, as the fount of honour, on the advice of the prime minister.)

The Appellate Jurisdiction Act 1876 introduced the concept of the life peer; these were the lords of appeal in ordinary (known as law lords) appointed by the sovereign. The 1958 act enabled the prime minister to make their own appointments to the Lords, including for explicitly political purposes.

Significantly, the act allowed women to sit and vote in the House of Lords for the first time. While women had been able to vote in general elections and stand as a candidate since 1918, the upper chamber had remained an exclusively male preserve.

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The law began life as a bill proposed by Lord Home, secretary of state for Commonwealth relations and leader of the House, on 21 November 1957.

The one-clause bill stated: “Her Majesty shall have power by letters patent to confer on any person a peerage for life”. Subsection 3 of the bill provided that a “life peerage may be conferred under this section on a woman”.

Introducing the bill, Home said that “in the selection and appointment of life peers the emphasis will be on the appointment of persons who can help the working of parliament.”

Home also referred to the need to “keep this House up to date”, which he described as the “most powerful argument for the introduction of women.”

He added: “There are some of your Lordships who may contend – indeed, some have – that women have not made the mark on the political life of this country that was expected of them.

“Some of our instincts against surrendering this, one of the last sanctuaries of the male, may be very strong. Some may say that women do not understand how golden is silence, particularly when seven o’clock in the evening is approaching.

“My trouble is that I cannot see any argument in logic or in reason, why, if women are in another place [the commons], they should not be here.”

Expressing his support for the principles behind the bill in October 1957, Labour peer Lord Pethick-Lawrence said it was “quite ridiculous that we should be an entirely male assembly.”

The Earl of Airlie, a cross bench peer, proposed an amendment to exclude women from the House. Airlie dismissed the suggestion that “the ladies have been a howling success in another place.” He argued that it would be “wiser, before including the female sex, to move step by step to see how the reforms work.”

Airlie’s amendment was defeated by 134 votes to 30.

Rab Butler, the home secretary and lord privy seal, later told the commons that “men and women of distinction from all the main sectors of our national life” would be appointed on both political grounds and non-political grounds under the bill.

Notably, the Labour Party opposed the bill, calling for more wide-ranging reform of the upper chamber. Hugh Gaitskell, the Labour leader of the opposition, said the bill left the House of Lords “overwhelmingly hereditary in character and with unimpaired powers to frustrate and obstruct the will of the elected representatives of the people”.

Nonetheless, the bill secured its third reading in the House of Commons on 2 April 1958 by 292 votes to 241.

It received royal assent later that month.

The first 14 life peers were announced on 24 July 1958.

In October 1958, Barbara Wootton, Stella Isaacs, Katharine Elliot and Irene Curzon – the first four women to be nominated to the upper chamber – were sworn in.

Macmillan created a total of 47 life peers from 1958 to his resignation as prime minister in 1963.

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The 1958 act was a significant step in restructuring the composition and principles that informed the work of the upper chamber.

The practice of appointing hereditary peers virtually ceased in 1964 upon the start of Harold Wilson’s government. (Macmillan, who accepted an earldom 20 years later after his resignation as prime minister, was the last non-royal recipient of a hereditary peerage.)

Alec Douglas-Home, who served as prime minister between 1963 and 1964, was the first former prime minister to receive a life peerage. (Douglas-Home had previously disclaimed a hereditary earldom to take up the post of prime minister.)

The House of Lords Act 1999, passed during Tony Blair’s tenure as prime minister, reduced the number of hereditary peers from around 750 at the time – to only 92. Speaking during a commons debate on the House of Lords Bill, the minister for constitutional affairs, Geoff Hoon, declared the Labour Party had been wrong to oppose the 1958 act.

He said: “The Labour party opposed that act, arguing that there should be more fundamental review of the House of Lords… [But] the Labour party lost the argument in 1958.

“The reform provided by the Life Peerages Act 1958 was a successful single-stage reform of the operation of the second chamber. History has proved that the Labour Party was wrong and Conservative ministers were right in 1958.”

The House of Lords Library maintains a running total of life peerages created since the passage of the Life Peerages Act 1958, with the figures broken down by the prime minister in office at the time of each appointment.