The United Kingdom’s honours system is the method by which individuals are rewarded for outstanding merit, service or bravery. Honours are bestowed by the monarch, who is the “fountain of honour”. The system encompasses a complex hierarchy of orders, decorations, and medals, many of which are centuries old.

While the system is a prominent feature of British national life and is often used to recognise the work of community volunteers and public figures, it is also subject to persistent controversy. Criticisms focus on its perceived use for political patronage, its historic links to the British Empire, and a lack of transparency in the appointments process, particularly concerning life peerages.

In response to these criticisms, the current Labour government has pledged to reform the system to prevent abuse, primarily by strengthening the independence of the bodies that scrutinise nominations.

Types of honours

Honours are organised into various orders and levels. The most well-known include the Companion of Honour (CH) for major contributions to the arts, science, medicine or government over a long period; knighthoods and damehoods (KBE/DBE), which confer the title ‘Sir’ or ‘Dame’; and appointments to the Order of the British Empire.

The Order of the British Empire is the largest order and is graded in five classes:

• Knight or Dame Grand Cross (GBE)
• Knight or Dame Commander (KBE/DBE)
• Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)
• Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE)
• Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE)

The British Empire Medal (BEM), since its revival in 2012, is awarded to recognise the contribution of very “hands-on” service to a community.

Life peerages, which grant the recipient a seat in the House of Lords, are also conferred as part of the honours system.

The nomination and vetting process

Any member of the public can nominate someone for an honour. Nominations are submitted to the Honours and Appointments Secretariat in the Cabinet Office. Nominations can be sent using an online form, as well as by email and in the post.

These are then reviewed by one of ten specialist honours committees, which are composed of independent experts and senior civil servants, covering fields such as sport, health, and the arts. The parliamentary and political service honours committee (PPS committee), for example, considers nominations for honours from across the UK parliament and devolved legislatures, including parliamentary staff, employees of bodies accountable to them, party workers, councillors, and others working in local government.

After this initial review, recommendations are passed to the main honours committee, then to the prime minister, and finally to the monarch for formal approval. In the wake of the cash-for-honours scandal in 2007, the main committee was required to ensure that nominations are not influenced by campaign or political donations.

A 2011 Cabinet Office report stated: “The main honours committee must satisfy itself that a party political donation has not influenced the decision to award an honour in any way; the committee must be confident that the candidate would have been a meritorious recipient of an honour if he or she had not made a political donation.”

Honours lists are published twice a year, at New Year and on the monarch’s official birthday.

Scrutiny and forfeiture

Nominations for life peerages are subject to additional scrutiny by the House of Lords appointments commission (Holac). Holac is an advisory, non-statutory body that vets all nominations for propriety. It can offer advice to the prime minister but does not currently have the legal power to block an appointment.

The honours forfeiture committee is a Cabinet Office body that can recommend an honour be revoked if the recipient is perceived to have “brought the honours system into disrepute”, for example, by receiving a criminal conviction. Recommendations are submitted to the monarch, who alone has the authority to revoke an honour.

In February 2024, British grime artist Wiley (whose real name is Richard Cowie) lost his MBE for “bringing the honours system into disrepute”.

Links to the British Empire

In July 2004, the House of Commons public administration committee’s report on the honours system concluded that the presence of the word ‘Empire’ in the honours system was “no longer acceptable”.

The 2004 report stated: “This is anachronistic and insensitive, an inappropriate symbol for today’s Britain.

“The United Kingdom has an increasingly diverse population, many of them with links to the countries of the former Empire, and they are often uneasy at something that reminds them of imperial domination.”

The committee argued that the Order of the British Empire should be ended and replaced by a new Order of British Excellence as part of an overhaul of the honours system.

Blair’s government did not follow these recommendations

In December 2020, the then shadow education secretary and Labour MP, Kate Green, attacked the current British honours system. Green argued that the imperial nomenclature reflected “really the wrong language – it’s divisive, it’s offensive, it’s hurtful to people.”

Keir Starmer, the Labour leader of the opposition, responded by defending the honours system. Asked on LBC Radio if he found the awards offensive, Starmer said: “No I don’t.”

He added: “Whenever I see the honours list I go through the list and look at who they are and what they’re getting it for and it’s really interesting to see the people who’ve – charitable work, public service – the things that people have put in that they get rewarded for and I think that’s a good thing.”

Green was made an OBE in recognition of her charitable work in the 2005 New Year Honours list.

Honours representation

The government publishes diversity statistics for each honours list.

In the 2025 new year honours list, 87.5% of honours recipients were White. 5.6% of honours recipients were Asian, 3.7% were Black, while 1.9% had Mixed ethnicity; 1.4% were from the “Other” ethnic group, according to government statistics.

Between June 2015 and December 2024, the total percentage of honours recipients from Asian, Black, Mixed and Other backgrounds went up from 7.0% to 12.5%.

For the 2025 new year list, BBC analysis found that only 6% of higher awards went to people in the north of England and 4% to people from working-class backgrounds. 15% of recipients were reported to have a disability.

Honours system controversies from Macmillan to Johnson

The prime minister of the day is able to use the honours system for leverage. In the early 1960s, several of the victims of Harold Macmillan’s “night of the long knives” were mollified with peerages. Macmillan offered the outgoing chancellor, Selwyn Lloyd, a peerage.

While Lloyd, the highest profile casualty of the purge, rejected the gong, he was nonetheless appointed as a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour – alongside Harold Watkinson, the outgoing defence minister.

Viscount Kilmuir, who was dismissed as lord chancellor, was elevated in the peerage to an earldom. The education minister, Sir David Eccles, was raised to the peerage as Baron Eccles. Lord Mills, who left his post as a minister without portfolio, was soon created a viscount.

Harold Wilson’s reputation was tarnished by his controversial resignation honours list, nicknamed the “Lavender list”, which rewarded a number of businessmen and associates. Lord Kagan, elevated as part of the honours list, was convicted of fraud in 1980; another, Sir Eric Miller committed suicide while under investigation for fraud in 1977.

The original list of nominees was drawn up by Wilson’s political secretary Marcia Williams on lavender notepaper – hence its nickname. Roy Jenkins, the former home secretary, later noted that Wilson’s retirement “was disfigured by his, at best, eccentric resignation honours list, which gave peerages or knighthoods to some adventurous business gentlemen, several of whom were close neither to him nor to the Labour Party.”

More recently, it was alleged that Tony Blair successfully convinced a number of ageing Labour MPs to retire in 2001 to make way for New Labour rising stars by promising them peerages. David Clark, who served as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster from 1997 to 1998, initially denied speculation that he would stand down at the 2001 election as the MP for South Shields, a safe Labour seat.

Clark, having won re-selection as the prospective Labour candidate for South Shields, then reportedly stood down once the election was called. David Miliband, the director of the No 10 policy unit, was then imposed on the South Shields by Labour’s national executive committee (NEC). Following the election, Clark was awarded a life peerage and appointed chairman of the Forestry Commission.

James Purnell, a No 10 special adviser, succeeded veteran parliamentarian Tom Pendry as the MP for Stalybridge and Hyde. Pendry was subsequently elevated to the Lords.

Blair, however, rejected allegations that retiring MPs had been offered a peerage to make way for Downing Street favourites. He told the BBC: “The question of who goes to the House of Lords as Labour nominations… those are decisions for a different time.”

Blair added: “Nobody gets offered anything.”

During his tenure as prime minister, Blair was accused of using his powers of patronage to pack the House of Lords with his supporters – sometimes referred to as “Tony’s cronies”. Blair created the most life peers of any prime minister during his time in office (374).

In early 2006, the police were called upon to investigate allegations that fundraisers for both the Labour and Conservative parties had offered supporters a life peerage in return for their financial support. Both parties denied the claims but the ensuing row led to calls for greater scrutiny of the process of appointing people to the House of Lords.

Blair and various other figures from all the main parties were interviewed by the police over the affair. Lord Levy, Labour’s fundraiser, was arrested and released on bail.

In July 2006, following Levy’s arrest, Blair pointed to the fact that there are places reserved in the Lords “for party supporters, Conservative supporters, Labour supporters, Liberal Democrat supporters.”

He added: “In my view, it is absurd to say that if someone supports a political party financially – helps it pay its bills, run its election campaign – that they should be debarred from… those places reserved specifically for party supporters.”

The story had a significant political impact and, according to some commentators, hastened Blair’s downfall as prime minister. At the time, the Labour Party returned a number of loans, leaving it with a financial headache.

The crown prosecution service (CPS) announced on 20 July 2007 it would not bring any charges against any of the individuals involved. The service said it had not rejected the idea the loans may have been made in exchange for honours, but it could not find any direct evidence sufficient for a successful prosecution. The announcement brought to an end a 16-month inquiry that cost £800,000.

The CPS stated: “For a case to proceed, the prosecution must have a realistic prospect of being able to prove that the two people agreed that the gift, etc, was in exchange for an honour.”

It concluded that there was “no direct evidence of any such agreement between any two people subject of this investigation”.

The scandal nonetheless prompted an investigation into the honours system by the House of Commons public administration select committee. The committee’s report, titled Propriety and Peerages, noted that the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925 was “severely tested” by the police investigation. However, it concluded that “its scope remains appropriate, even if the behaviour it criminalises is inherently difficult to prove to the necessary standard”.

It recommended that Holac should be put on a statutory footing – a proposal that was not taken up by the government.

In addition, it recommended greater clarity between the receipt of an honour and the ability to sit in the House of Lords as a legislator.

During her time as prime minister, Theresa May nominated several cricketers for honours. These included recent England cricket captains, Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook, and the former batsman, Geoffrey Boycott. In Boycott’s case, the honour generated controversy on account of a previous conviction in a French court for assaulting his then girlfriend. Boycott, who always denied the assault, was fined £5,000 and given a three-month suspended jail sentence.

In 2020, the Holac objected to prime minister Boris Johnson’s nomination of Peter Cruddas for a peerage. Cruddas had donated over £1,000,000 to the Conservative Party. Despite this, Johnson chose to proceed with the appointment. He became the first prime minister ever to overrule the commission’s advice.

In his letter to the chair of the Holac, Lord Bew, Johnson said Cruddas had made “outstanding contributions” to the business and charitable sectors.

In July 2020, Johnson nominated Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of the Evening Standard, to the Lords as a life peer. Lebedev, the Russian-born son of a KGB agent, was created Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation.

The appointment sparked significant controversy, leading the House of Commons to approve a motion requiring the government to release documents concerning Johnson’s role in the appointment. The controversy centred on whether Johnson pressured security services to withdraw or reconsider a previous assessment of Lebedev before his appointment.

The Cabinet Office has largely withheld detailed security advice. Ministers cited the need to “protect national security” and maintain the integrity of the honours system.

The resignation honours lists of both Liz Truss (2022) and Johnson (2023) sparked significant controversy. Johnson’s list was especially controversial as Holac advised against several of his nominations for peerages. In total, Holac advised against eight of Johnson’s nominations.

In June 2023, Holac issued a statement declaring that it “considered the nominations proposed by the Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP in line with its usual processes… Eight nominees were not supported by the commission. The commission is advisory to the prime minister and is not involved in the appointment processes after providing advice.”

In the end, the honours list, published during Rishi Sunak’s tenure as prime minister, landed without the names of some of Johnson’s leading allies, including Conservative MPs Nadine Dorries and Nigel Adams.

Charlotte Owen, a 30-year-old former adviser to Boris Johnson, was among those who received a life peerage in his resignation honours list. Critics of the selection claimed that she was too junior to take on such a role and that Johnson was handing out peerages to his “cronies”.

In November 2023, Sunak created former Conservative leader David Cameron as a life peer and appointed him as foreign secretary. Lord Cameron’s appointment caused considerable controversy at the time. MPs objected to the fact that a head of one of the so-called “great offices of state” was subject to routine scrutiny by peers, as opposed to elected MPs. Upon Cameron’s appointment, the speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, said he would work to ensure that the new foreign secretary was “accountable”.

Speaking in defence of Cameron’s appointment, the prime minister’s official spokesperson said there was a “longstanding precedent” for such elevations. “We had Nicky Morgan, who was secretary of state for culture, media and sport in the Lords in 2019”, they said. “Lord Mandelson served as business secretary under the last Labour government [and] Lord Carrington was foreign secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s government.”

Before Cameron, the most recent cabinet minister to be based in the House of Lords was Lord Frost. In his capacity as chief Brexit negotiator, however, Frost did not run a government department.

In August 2025, Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, called on the prime minister to allow him to appoint peers to the House of Lords.

He stated: “My party received over 4.1 million votes at the general election in July 2024. We have since won a large number of seats in local government, led the national opinion polls for many months and won the only by-election of this parliament… the time has come to address the democratic disparity that exists in the upper house.”

David Lloyd George honours scandal

Historically, the honours system has been abused for corrupt purposes.

David Lloyd George, who served as prime minister from 1916 to 1922, was the subject of a damaging scandal surrounding the sale of honours. It was widely believed that titles were being systematically sold through morally dubious middlemen or ‘honours touts’ like Maundy Gregory, with a view to building a party chest. Rewarding political donors was nothing new, but the sheer number of honours handed out often to individuals of questionable reputation or service, provoked outrage. Between 1916 and 1922, 120 hereditary peerages and more than 1,500 knighthoods were awarded.

The tipping point came with the June 1922 birthday honours list. It included Samuel Waring, a war profiteer who reorganised his company to avoid paying his shareholders while making a fortune during the war through government contracts; William Vestey, who moved his meatpacking business to Buenos Aires to avoid paying income tax in 1915; and Archibald Williamson, whose oil firm, Williamson, Balfour and Co, had been accused of trading with the enemy during the war.

The inclusion of Sir Joseph Robinson, a South African diamond magnate recently fined £500,000 for fraud, was seen as especially egregious. Robinson was listed for a barony “for national and imperial services”, having paid £30,000 for the privilege.

King George V is said to have been furious. In a letter to Lloyd George, he wrote: “The case of Sir Joseph Robinson … must be regarded as little less than an insult to the Crown and to the House of Lords and may, I fear, work injury to the prerogative in the public mind.”

The government was forced to announce Robinson’s decision to decline the honour.

On 17 July 1922, the Lords and commons jointly considered a motion calling for a “select committee… to consider the present methods of submitting names of persons for dignities and honours for the consideration of His Majesty.”

The most stinging attack came in the Lords from the Duke of Northumberland. He accused Lloyd George of amassing an “enormous party chest, variously estimated, at anything from £1,000,000 to £2,000,000”.

Northumberland produced the correspondence of an alleged “tout”, suggesting a knighthood could be secured for £12,000 and a baronetcy for £35,000. The middleman urged quick action as “it is not likely that the next government will give so many honours”.

He also claimed Lloyd George had used honours to buy the silence of newspaper proprietors, referring to the “method of using honours to influence the press”. The prime minister had in fact ennobled several proprietors over the recent period, including Lord Beaverbrook (Daily Express) and Lord Rothermere (Daily Mirror).

In a simultaneous debate in the commons, Lloyd George bowed to pressure and announced his support for the appointment of a royal commission to “consider and advise on the procedure to be adopted in future to assist the prime minister in making recommendations… of the names of persons deserving special honour”. He suggested an inquiry would assuage the “unrest… created in the public mind”.

But having declared his support for an inquiry, Lloyd George dedicated the largest part of his address to a robust historical and political defence of the honours system. He warned moreover that any retrospective inquiry would inevitably concentrate “on what are called bad cases” while the “999 cases which are unexceptional” would be ignored.

He declared: “It is a mistake to assume that all rich men contribute [to funds] – even strong party men… There are men who have rendered other services also.”

He added: “The point is, does parliament really wish to terminate the system by which service to party is rewarded in this country?”

Asquith dismissed his successor’s speech as an effort “in the demolition of propositions which no rational person would ever uphold.”

The royal commission published its report in December 1922. It did not pass judgement on Lloyd George – reflecting its limited remit. But the report acknowledged that “there is no doubt that there have been for some time, and recently in increasing numbers, persons who, for want of a better name, we may stigmatise as touts, who have been going about asserting that they were in a position to secure honours in return for specified payments.”

The commission recommended legislation. The Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925 subsequently made it an offence to accept a monetary award in exchange for an honour.

Only one person has ever been convicted under the 1925 act: Maundy Gregory. Gregory continued to ply his trade for some years after marauding as Lloyd George’s middleman. Having diversified into the distribution of papal gongs, he was convicted in 1933 over his attempts to broker the selling of Vatican knighthoods in the UK. He was fined £50 and jailed for two months.

Some 80 years later, the 1925 act was cited in the ‘cash for peerages’ police investigation involving Tony Blair’s government.

As for Lloyd George, his ‘cash for honours scandal’ played a not insignificant role in the Conservative Party’s decision to withdraw from the coalition at the Carlton Club meeting in October 1922, which directly precipitated his resignation as prime minister.

History of the honours system

The modern honours system has its origins in the relationship between the sovereign and the nobility. In the Middle Ages, successive monarchs shifted from rewarding aristocratic allies with land, money and weapons for their loyalty and services to bestowing personal honours, ranks and titles.

The highest English order of chivalry, the Most Noble Order of the Garter, was founded in 1348 by Edward III as a re-creation of the round table of King Arthur. Its membership is restricted to the monarch, the prince of Wales, and 24 knights-companion. It is disputed as to whether this, or its Scottish equivalent, the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle, is the oldest surviving British order of chivalry.

The role of the prime minister in the honours system emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, as the personal rule and prerogatives of the monarch gradually gave way to the supremacy of parliament. At the same time, the award of honours for service to the monarch evolved into service to the state (although the senior orders of chivalry remain the exclusive preserve of the monarch). Even today, a wide range of honours are restricted to the military or civil servants, including the Order of the Bath, the Order of St Michael and St George and the Imperial Service Medal.

However, at the start of the 19th century, the orders of chivalry were the exclusive preserve of the aristocracy and the senior military. As the “establishment” became more open to the middle classes during that century, the range of people to whom honours were awarded widened. The most recent and largest order, the Order of the British Empire (OBE), founded in 1917, was open to anyone who had given service to the UK.

Although the monarch had for centuries been empowered to create hereditary peers, with rights to sit in the House of Lords, the Life Peerages Act 1958 had a profound impact on the honours system and parliament. The Appellate Jurisdiction Act 1876 had introduced the concept of the life peer; these were the lords of appeal in ordinary (commonly 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.

A recent reform of the honours system came in 1993, when prime minister John Major introduced changes to make it easier for the public to make nominations for honours.

Major’s reforms aimed to ensure “that exceptional service or achievement will be more widely recognised; that greater importance will be given to voluntary service; that automatic honours will end; that the distinction between ranks in military operational gallantry awards will cease; that the bulk of honours in the half-yearly lists will be of a single, undifferentiated award, the MBE; that all recipients of honours will be invited to a royal investiture.”

Following a review of the honours system carried out in 2004 by Sir Hayden Phillips, a new system of eight committees (later ten) was formed in 2005 to advise the cabinet secretary on the twice-yearly lists of recommendations for honours which are put to the monarch by the prime minister. The committees comprise experts and specialists in the particular areas covered by each committee and the chair and the majority of committee members are independent of government.

Quotes

“I’m dead chuffed and I’m dead chuffed partly because it is for studying classical civilisation. It’s an honour for me but an honour for the ancient Greeks and Romans too and for all my colleagues who work on classical civilisations. What’s not to like?” – Dame Mary Beard, reacting to her knighthood, June 2018

“Raymond Williams famous wrote a piece called Who Speaks For Wales in 1971 – and I took that as my starting point for the lecture as in who speaks for Wales now? And in my research, to do that lecture, I learnt a lot about Welsh history. By the time I finished typing that lecture […] I remember sitting there and thinking ‘well I have a choice’ either don’t give this lecture and hold on to my OBE or I give this lecture and give the OBE back. I wanted to do the lecture so I gave my OBE back.” – Michael Sheen, actor, December 2020

Additional resources

• UK Government – Nominate someone for an honour or award: https://www.gov.uk/honours
• House of Lords Appointments Commission: https://lordsappointments.independent.gov.uk/
• The Guardian – ‘Michael Sheen returned OBE to air views on royal family’ https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/dec/29/michael-sheen-gave-back-obe-to-air-views-on-royal-family