Peer Review: what in the Lord(s) are they doing?

By Ben Worthy, Cat Morgan and Stefani Langehennig, originally published by UK in a Changing Europe

In November 2024, Tortoise media launched a new site where the public can monitor members of the House of Lords. The wonderfully named Peer Review is a platform designed to ‘give everyone the ability to assess how – and who within – the upper chamber really works’. The site hopes to help ‘members of the public to better understand the oldest, biggest and by most yardsticks least accountable pillar of the British democratic system’. It offers data on individual Peers, their interests and voting record as well as a fun typology of Peers, allowing you to see who are the ‘Workhorses’, the ‘blockers’ and the ‘Rebels’.

So far, the platform has thrown up some illuminating insights. Tortoise have found that work is unequally done, and that the ‘vast majority of the work of the House is done by roughly 210 of its 830 members’ (though there are ‘149 specialists who generally speak only on their chosen topic, bringing expertise to debates’). There are also stories of conflicts of interest and secrecy, with some links undeclared.

As a database, Peer Review follows in the footsteps of other political monitoring platforms, such as TheyWorkForYou, which tells us about voting records and interests of MPs and Peers, and another Tortoise/Sky News site, Westminster Accounts, which details MPs’ interests and donations. Like these sites, Peer Review is a dataset of datasets, matching numerous sources to create an interactive platform. Such ‘watching’ doesn’t end there. This Twitter bot tells you every time someone with a Westminster IP address changes a Wikipedia page (of which there were 5000 edits between 2003 and 2014).

Who will watch the Lords?

Between 2019 and 2022, our Leverhulme Trust-funded study looked at the impact of monitoring sites like TheyWorkForYou on the UK Parliament.

This gave us some idea of who might use Peer Review and what impact it might have. It is likely it will be used by a relatively small group regularly, mostly journalists, campaigners, and academics, plus a smattering of the curious. This may be a small group, but they can do important and innovative things. One brilliantly named academic study of appointments and donations calculated that giving a major donation to a party and being appointed to the Lords could be a coincidence, but one roughly equal to ‘winning the lottery fives time in a row’.

It’s also probable that the Lords won’t be watched as closely as the Commons, because the Second Chamber is, in general, much less monitored. So, for example, around 80% of all FOI request go the Commons, and just 20% to the Lords.

In the House of Lords, the main focus of interest is on appointments, activity, and allowances, which are sometimes bundled and tied together in stories. In terms of what is being watched on Peer Review, they’ll be a probable focus on things like voting, interests and allowances. Certain types of Peers will be of particular interest, such as Bishops or (at least for the time being) Hereditary Peers. It’s likely there’s then bursts of wider interest on the site during controversy and tensions with the Commons, when there’s either a disagreement, a high profile government defeat or when there’s a scandal.

What Will Happen?

What is harder to predict is the impact of Peer Review over time. Will the site alter Peers’ behaviour? There was some evidence from our project that TWFY has made MPs feel more accountable. So, after votes, MPs share explanations and justifications in Hansard, on Twitter or in the local press (though this varied depending on their time as an MP, how safe their seat was and their gender). But does that effect still hold if no one votes for you? Peers can and do represent, and certainly feel a duty to act in certain ways, but how much of an incentive it is without an election and possible removal?

Another question is how much Peer Review can help the public know more about the Lords. Can it help the public ‘better understand’ the Lords? One perspective is that, in terms of knowledge, the only way is up, as good knowledge of the Lords hovers around single digits. The Lords is much less well understood and much less visible than the Commons. This YouGov Poll in 2018 found that ‘almost six in ten people say they don’t know much (44%) or anything (15%) about the second chamber’. There’s a further difficulty in that the public views tend towards the negative with ‘38% hold a negative view, just 17% are positive [and] the remaining 45% either have a neutral opinion or no view at all’.

The danger, on the flip side, is that the data and stories that emerge from it just reinforces the poor and ‘misleading’ perceptions. There are recurrent tropes of work-shy Peers as ‘couch potato’ members, or allegations of Peers clocking in to claim their allowance or not attending at all. The question of who is appointed has not been helped, to put it mildly, by Boris Johnson putting his brother, then trying to put in his Dad.

This leads to a further, final question. Will the data and stories play into further calls for reform and change? Data can drive agendas and issues. In the Commons, data and stories on MPs’ outside earnings certainly help apply pressure for change.

The House of Lords is in a continual state of possible big change since at least 1911. Peter Hennessy called Lords Reform the ‘Bermuda triangle’ of British politics, where all plans are lost, and I’ll add that it is the ‘cure for Baldness of British Politics’: everyone has a solution, but none of them work.

Nevertheless, the creators of Peer Review have argued that Labour’s removal of the Hereditary Peers ‘only scratch the surface of potential changes’ and called for debate on the place of Bishops and having a participation threshold. Can the new data help push change?

The problem, as Meg Russell argues, is that the Lords makes ‘headlines…due to controversies about its membership, or claims that it needs reform, rather than for its actual work’. Time will tell if Peer Review makes know more about our Second Chamber or think worse.

By Dr Ben Worthy, Reader in Politics and Public Policy, Birkbeck College, University of London; Dr Stefani Langehennig, Associate Professor of the Practice, University of Denver, and Dr Cat Morgan, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Heriot-Watt University.