Written by Katie Riley and Joe White. Photographs and videos by Oscar Ingham and Tomini Babs. Design and development by Oscar Ingham, Will Jarrett, Katie Riley and Jon Hill. Edited by Jess Winch and Catherine Neilan.

More than half of Britain is in favour of transforming the House of Lords – which traces its history to the ad-hoc royal councils of Anglo-Saxon England – into an entirely elected body.

Yet, despite the polling – and despite the Lords’ enduring role in the state – the British people are overwhelmingly indifferent to its existence and ignorant of its functions.

Some of this comes down to design. The fact that peers do not have to win their seats in an election gives them a level of insulation from the public – and its scrutiny – that does not apply to their counterparts in the House of Commons.

While the business interests and familial connections of MPs are constantly being probed by journalists, almost none of the peers currently sitting in the chamber – with very few, notable exceptions – are subject to serious media oversight.

And the problem, of course, is that when the media ignores something, the public tends to ignore it too.

It’s been 25 years since the Blair reforms of the late-1990s, and since then, the chamber has largely remained unscrutinised by the media or the public. That’s too long for a public institution that sits at the centre of one of the world’s richest, oldest and most powerful democracies.

The current Labour government has now announced its plans to reform the chamber by abolishing all hereditary lords. This process is opening up the bigger question of who should sit in Britain’s upper house, and what we want them to do.

Tortoise Media has spent months methodically collecting and analysing publicly available information about each member of the House of Lords, including:

  • From the Register of Lords’ Interests: secondary employment, directorships, shareholdings, significant control of companies, land and property ownership, overseas visits, and other gifts and benefits for all current peers since the beginning of the last parliament in December 2019.
  • From Parliament’s open data portal: voting records, written questions, spoken contributions, amendments proposed, select committee membership and prior parliamentary or government experience, as well as basic demographic information, for every current peer.
  • From the Electoral Commission: political donations for each peer going back to 2001.
  • From our own manual and programmatic research: leaves of absence, date of birth and spousal information for every possible current peer.
  • Additional sources of data which were used more sparingly: Hansard, monthly attendance records, expense records, banquetting logs, and the Register of Lords’ Staff Interests.

Using this data, we’ve created an interactive tool that lets you investigate who sits in the House of Lords, how they got there and ultimately the role they play in British democracy.

But first, back to basics…

In the United Kingdom, Parliament is made up of two separate chambers: the elected House of Commons and the unelected House of Lords.

Unlike the 650 members of parliament who win their seats in the House of Commons by popular vote, no members of the House of Lords – called “peers” – are democratically elected by the British public.

With current peers, it’s one of the largest legislative bodies in the world, second only to China’s National People’s Congress. It’s also one of the oldest, with a median age of 70.

While elected bodies tend to stay relatively stable in size and membership, the number of peers is constantly changing. Today there are peers, but the chamber has lost or added a member since January 2020.

Because of this unending evolution (as well as for practical reasons), we’re going to deal with a scaled-down version of the chamber, in which each wooden counter – at least for now – represents around 35 peers.

In the modern House of Lords, there are three different types of peers.

The 26 Church of England clergymen who sit in the chamber – known as the “Lords Spiritual” – always include the Bishops of London, Durham and Winchester and the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. Unlike the chamber’s other members, they do not hold their seats for life. When they retire, their seats pass to a new bishop.

About 10 per cent of the chamber is made up of hereditary lords, the remnants of a previously much larger group that was reduced by the Blair government from 647 to 92 in 1999.

One of the curiosities of the Lords is that new hereditary lords are chosen by a vote of either fellow hereditary peers or all peers, making them the only members of the chamber who are in any way elected.

But more than 80 per cent of members are life peers, who have been appointed to the chamber and cannot pass their titles down. Most are appointed by the prime minister or via other political party leaders, but about eight in every 100 are appointed by the independent House of Lords Appointments Commission.

Although some appointments – like Baroness Owen’s in July 2023 – garner public attention, most life peers are appointed quietly.

As in the House of Commons, peers sit in party groupings.

When a party is in government, its peers sit on the government benches in the Lords as in the Commons, even if an opposing party has more peers.

The bishops and crossbenchers are both non-partisan. The former sit beside the government, and the latter sit on benches that literally cross the chamber – directly between the opposition and government.

But the traditional ways in which we categorise peers – by party and type – aren’t the only useful ways to understand the interests and forces at play in the House of Lords.

While the public may think of the Lords as a traditional upper chamber – full of full-time public servants dutifully carrying out the business of legislating – the truth is more complicated.

For one, the chamber’s own Code of Conduct encourages its members to work in “any non-parliamentary sphere of activity”. But more importantly, a good share of the chamber engages with it very little, despite retaining the title, prestige and privileges of membership.

Using the data we collected, we were able to build a sort of taxonomy of the House of Lords.

Under our system of classification, each peer is assigned to one of 11 different categories which we call “archetypes”.

No statistical analysis is devoid of human bias, but we’ve done our best to let our observations of the chamber and its members guide our analysis and not the other way around.

At the beginning of this project, our goal was to better understand the House of Lords in its current iteration by performing a systematic review of all of its members.

In the end, we landed on this taxonomy as a way of doing that.

Some archetypes mirror existing divisions in the chamber. For example, the group we’re calling the Highborn includes all remaining hereditary peers.

While many lords – including many of the Highborn – could fall into multiple groups based on their behaviour, ultimately we chose to assign peers a single archetype based on their most distinctive characteristics and activities.

For every hereditary peer, the fact that they sit in the chamber by birthright – even just partially – profoundly affects everything they do as a member, both inside and outside of the chamber.

The same goes for the Bishops. Because of their unique position in the chamber, they have the shortest average tenure of any archetype, as well as the second lowest vote attendance at just per cent of all votes and per cent of what we’ve called “important votes” – votes in which over 500 peers take part.

Another notable shared trait is that, since December 2019, they’ve declared an average of financial interest per Bishop. In fact, Bishops have declared no interests and just have declared more than one. In comparison, the peers who have made significant party donations have declared an average of interests per person.

While most government ministers are MPs, the government can also appoint ministers from the upper chamber. All current government ministers, secretaries and under-secretaries of state and shadow ministers, as well as a small number of peers with other official positions, fall under the Minister archetype.

Ministers are among the most active and legislatively prolific peers. For instance, each makes an average of spoken contributions per year, more than twice the average of the next highest archetype.

The chamber’s most active members who are not current ministers are called Workhorses. Alongside the Ministers, they do the bulk of the work to scrutinise, amend and move along the legislation sent to the Lords from the Commons.

This group is made of almost equal numbers of Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem and Crossbench peers, because most of the chamber’s work is uncontroversial – small tweaks to draft legislation that are accepted or rejected after very little debate.

Some legislative activity is more contentious, though. Blockers are also among the most active peers. However, their activity is focused on opposing – or slowing – the government’s legislative agenda rather than advancing it.

Blockers submit the most questions and participate in the most committees of any archetype. Their amendments are most likely to “divide the house” and lead to a defeat of government legislation.

peers are Rebels – members who have broken their party whip repeatedly on key votes, often over contentious legislation like the 2024 Safety of Rwanda Bill.

Because peers sit for life and don’t have to worry about re-election, it’s harder for parties to enforce the whip. Despite this, they generally vote with their party. Rebels are by definition among the top 10 per cent of most rebellious peers, and even they vote with their party 95 per cent of the time.

Specialists are a lot less active in the chamber than Ministers, Workhorses, Blockers or Rebels but still contribute. Many are appointed to the Lords because of their experience in a particular area, and will generally attend parliament and get involved when legislation is relevant to their specific expertise.

Almost half of Specialists are Crossbenchers, and many are appointed by the House of Lords Appointments Commission rather than a political party.

Loyalists are also generally less active in the chamber. Although they speak less often, propose fewer amendments and submit fewer questions, they are a reliable block of support for their respective parties.

While the average attendance for votes among all peers is per cent, Loyalists show up for more than per cent of votes and almost always follow the whip. They also tend to be former MPs, council leaders or political advisers who have been “elevated” to the Lords after service to a political party.

Another reliable voting block for parties is their Donor peers – those who donated at least £100,000 to a political party prior to or within a year of their appointment to the chamber.

In general, the number of peers who’ve made donations to political parties is on the rise. An April 2024 report from Transparency International UK found that more than one in five political nominees to the House of Lords between 2013 and 2023 had made political donations totalling almost £60 million – 91 per cent of which went to the Conservative Party.

A little under five per cent of peers are effectively Ghosts who – as far as we can tell – are hardly ever seen in the House of Lords.

Many have not spoken, voted, submitted a written question or sat on a select committee since December 2019. Others have been on extended leave of absence for years.

Since 2014, peers who have not attended the Lords’ proceedings at least once a session are automatically expelled from the chamber. In practice, this means that there are about 20 lords who come in once or twice a year to satisfy their attendance requirement, but that’s as far as their participation goes.

Like Ghosts, Reserves are among the least active members of the chamber and sit on no select committees. Unlike Ghosts, they do very infrequently make spoken contributions in the chamber. They also vote more frequently – often when a bill is important or controversial.

The House of Lords is a place of power and strategy; of history and tradition; of checks and balances. It is also a place that too often escapes public scrutiny and understanding.

It is a chamber that exists to serve a democracy but isn’t elected; one which successive governments have repeatedly – but with limited success – tried to reform.

The Peer Review is a new way for users to make sense of this chamber.

The House of Lords is 1,000 years old. It’s about time we figured out what makes it tick.



Additional credits: Colour correction by Misha Kim. Laser cuts by Cut Laser Cut. Supported by the Open Society Foundations.