Farage demands right to nominate Reform UK peers

Leader tells Sir Keir Starmer his party should not be excluded from the process of making appointments to the House of Lords

Nigel Farage has demanded the right to appoint Reform UK peers to the House of Lords.

The Reform leader said in a letter to the Prime Minister that his party should not be shut out of the process of appointing new peers because it has four MPs and controls 10 councils.

The Prime Minister has no obligation to nominate any opposition politicians to the second chamber.

Convention dictates that No 10 asks the leaders of opposition parties to nominate their own candidates for peerages at the same time as the Prime Minister nominates theirs.

The Green Party, which has the same number of MPs as Mr Farage’s party, has two working peers.

Reform is leading in the opinion polls and Sir Keir has increasingly been treating the party as the real opposition in recent months.

The Reform leader wrote in the letter, first reported by The Times: “My party received over 4.1 million votes at the general election in July 2024 [and] have since won a large number of seats in local government, led in the national opinion polls for many months and won the only by-election of this parliament.

“The Greens, DUP, Plaid Cymru and UUP [Ulster Unionist Party] have 13 peers between them, but Reform UK has none. The time has come to address the democratic disparity that exists in the upper house.”

Potential peers are reported to include Ann Widdecome, who served as a Tory minister in the 1990s and later defected to Reform’s predecessor, the Brexit Party.

Zia Yusuf, the former Reform chairman and now head of Reform’s department of government efficiency, and Nick Candy, the billionaire party donor, are also said to be potential candidates.

Lord Norton of Louth, a constitutional expert, said there was a “case for” Reform to be represented in the upper chamber, but any decision was for the Prime Minister.

He told The Times: “Historically appointments to the House of Lords were in the gift of the Crown but that function has been passed to the Prime Minister. So any decision on whether to create Reform MPs would rest with him alone.”

Lord O’Donnell, the former cabinet secretary, told the newspaper: “It is a feature of our system that the Prime Minister can appoint whoever they like to the House of Lords. It is an area where I think we need greater checks and balances.”

Baroness Fox of Buckley, who was appointed to the upper chamber in 2020 and is a crossbench peer, said the Reform leader was making a “legitimate request”.

She added: “Labour says it wants to improve the diversity of the House of Lords and this seems like a very sensible place to start. There can be no rational reason for Starmer to turn it down.”