The bill to remove all 88 hereditary peers from the House of Lords is making its way through the House of Lords itself, and their removal is now imminent. But while we are finally set to see the end of peers born into their seats through nothing more than their aristocratic birthright, there is a strong case for taking House of Lords reform much further.

Hereditary peers represent one of the most egregiously archaic aspects of our second chamber – and perhaps the most obviously undemocratic – but they’re far from the only problem. Aside from birthright, there are numerous routes into the House of Lords – from certain bishops being guaranteed seats as ‘Lords spiritual’, to direct appointment by the Prime Minister. What’s missing is any public say in who gets a seat in the chamber. As such, it’s the whole of the House of Lords that’s undemocratic, not just the hereditaries.

The logical next step is for the Government to begin the process of reforming the whole House of Lords, finally putting an end to unelected parliamentarians.

In its current form, the House of Lords is undemocratic

The UK Parliament is bicameral, which means it’s made up of two chambers: the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The House of Lords plays a role in scrutinising and amending proposed laws – known as Bills – which have been tabled in the House of Commons.

Yet despite possessing the power to propose amendments to the laws we all have to abide by, not a single member of the House of Lords is elected by the public.

We live in a democracy. And in a democracy, power should lie in the hands of the people, with the politicians who represent us voted in by us – not appointed, or born into their seat. As such, we wouldn’t accept our MPs receiving seats in Parliament without being publicly elected. Yet that’s exactly how the House of Lords functions: members are handed power without a public mandate. It’s an unjustifiable system.

To put it into perspective, our House of Lords is an anomaly globally: we’re the only democracy in all of Europe that selects members of parliament by appointment and hereditary principle. We are falling behind other contemporary democracies.

The British public want an elected second chamber

The fact that members of the House of Lords are unelected is unacceptable on principle. And beyond principles, the people of Britain have also made it clear that they don’t want unelected Lords. According to polling by YouGov, over half of us would prefer an elected House of Lords. And just one in seven of us have a positive view of the upper chamber. With so many of us in favour of an elected House of Lords, there’s an even stronger case for wholesale reform.

An opportunity to create a chamber which represents the whole of the UK

It’s clear that the House of Lords needs to be reformed – but what might that look like? Crucially, members of the second chamber should be democratically elected through a system of proportional representation; ideally, via the Single Transferable Vote. But reforming the House of Lords presents an opportunity to consider other measures that might improve the second chamber, and Parliament overall.

In particular, there is a case for building a stronger voice for the UK’s regions and nations. A House of the Nations and Regions could serve as a guaranteed voice for the UK’s constituent parts. With the composition of the House of Lords currently dominated by members residing in London and the South East, this would be a welcome improvement in representation.

We can’t wait any longer for Lords reform

Removing hereditary peers is an excellent step in the right direction – but it can’t be the end of the story. In a 21st-century democracy, power should never be handed down or given away behind closed doors. It should be earned, through the ballot box.

Reforming the House of Lords isn’t just about modernising a relic; it’s about making our democracy fit for purpose. The British people deserve a second chamber that represents them, not privilege or patronage. We need to seize this opportunity to build a fairer, more democratic future.

It’s time to finish the job on Lords reform.

Want an elected second chamber? Add your name to our call.

Political parties cost money to run. In the UK, they’re funded by a variety of sources, including membership fees, grants, and donations. Donations come from individuals, companies, and trade unions.

The Electoral Commission reported that in 2024 alone, parties accepted almost £100m in donations. That’s a vast quantity of money flowing into our politics. What’s more, these donations aren’t just the product of small donations accumulating from lots of supporters. In fact, a fifth of all major donations in the decades between 2001 and 2021 came from a mere ten ‘big donors’.

The existence of these big donors raises a worrying question: how much sway might they have over our politics? In a democracy, those with the deepest pockets shouldn’t be able to pay for influence.

With a never-ending stream of financial scandals in politics, party funding is out of control. Surely we should be able to put a limit on an individual’s power through their purse?

Do we have political donation caps in the UK?

When a small number of the wealthiest individuals and organisations can fund election campaigns and the running of political parties, we are opened up to a culture of politics for sale.

Yet at the moment, there is no limit on the amount of money any one person or organisation can donate. And this means there’s no limit on just how much influence can be bought.

By introducing a cap on donations, the Government could finally bring about an end to toxic big donor culture. Political influence would be fairly shared amongst all of us, not concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest few.

Donations are regulated – but the rules don’t go far enough

Fortunately, some rules are in place to regulate political donations. These include the requirement that donations or loans over £11,180 must be reported, and limitations on who can donate.

But these rules don’t go far enough. There are loopholes which allow individuals and organisations to avoid this reporting threshold.

Loopholes muddy the already murky waters of political donations, pointing to an especially pressing need for donation caps. With money flowing into politics from often secretive sources, it’s crucial that the spending of any one person or organisation is limited.

We need tighter limits on political donations

To stop the outsize influence of wealth on our politics, we need donation rules to be tightened. This includes the urgent need for donation caps.

If the Government wants to ensure that we, the voters, trust our democratic institutions, it needs to start with ending the reign of big donors. We need assurance that everyone’s voice carries equal weight – something difficult to believe when power is for sale to the highest bidder.

Agree that politics shouldn’t be for sale? Add your name.

First Past the Post (FPTP) is the name for the voting system used to elect Members of Parliament (MPs) to Westminster.

It’s also used in a variety of other elections across the UK, including local elections in England and Wales.

We’ve been calling for the government to scrap First Past the Post, and to introduce a voting system that uses Proportional Representation (PR) – namely, the Single Transferable Vote (STV).

But what, exactly, is the problem with FPTP?

First Past the Post results in ignored voters

We live in a representative democracy. That means that when we elect MPs, we’re electing people who’ll represent our interests in parliament. We can get on with our lives while they stand up for the national policies that matter for us, be they on education, healthcare or taxation.

The problem is, under First Past the Post, huge portions of us end up without a representative that we actually voted for. In the 2024 General Election, 73.7% of votes cast made no difference to the result – either going to losing candidates or candidates who already had enough votes to win.

The reality is that First Past the Post delivers election results that are disproportional. In other words: seats in Parliament simply not matching votes.

But how does this happen? Take the constituency of Somerset North. In the 2024 General Election, 53,766 residents cast a vote in this area. 19,138 voted for the winning Labour candidate. That’s just 35.6% of all voters. Meanwhile, 34,628 – 64% of voters – voted for somebody else. Their votes? Ignored. Even though they outnumber the people who voted for the winner.

The story is repeated again and again across the country, and across our elections. Head north to Dumfries & Galloway, and just 29.6% of voters voted for the winning Conservative candidate.

So a picture emerges of a Parliament that doesn’t actually represent voters. That’s why we have a Labour Government with 63.2% of MPs, on just 33.7% of the votes.

In a representative democracy, we ought to have a Parliament that matches the way people actually vote. Under First Past the Post, that just doesn’t happen. It needs to be scrapped – and replaced with the Single Transferable Vote, which will deliver fairer, more proportional election results.

First Past the Post creates safe seats – which create complacency

In a democracy, every person’s vote should count as much as any other, right? Not under First Past the Post. 

First Past the Post has created a network of ‘safe seats’ – where there’s such a low chance of the seat changing hands, that parties don’t bother campaigning in those constituencies.  

Swing seats, where the results are much closer, are much more likely to change hands. Because parties care about getting as many MPs as possible, they’ll invest their energy into the swing seats where they have a higher chance of convincing voters to change their minds.  

Manifestos are designed with swing seats in mind – and parties spend most of their money campaigning in them.  

That means that if you happen to live in a safe seat, your political views are, in essence, irrelevant to the political parties. And that means that many of us are ignored by the politicians who are supposed to represent us. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. We could have an electoral system where parties don’t just pander to the interests of voters in a select few seats, while ignoring the rest of us. A proportional voting system, such as the Single Transferable Vote would mean that votes would actually be reflected in who wins the election – with multiple MPs representing larger constituencies – so parties would have reason to care about every single vote. 

First Past the Post makes us vote against our true preferences

Many of us who have voted before are already familiar with the winner-takes-all workings of First Past the Post.

This means that many of us opt to vote tactically in elections: voting not for our favourite candidate, but for the candidate we think is more likely to stop another candidate from getting the most votes.

This is because we know that under First Past the Post a vote for a losing candidate will go to waste – so it can be more impactful to try to prevent our least favourite candidate from winning.

In a democracy, we should feel empowered to vote according to our beliefs and preferences, rather than having to resort to tactical calculations and holding our nose while voting. First Past the Post means many of us end up thinking strategically at the polling station instead of voting for what we really believe in. It’s a system that’s simply not fit for purpose.

By contrast, with the Single Transferable Vote, we’d be empowered to vote for the candidates we really want to see represent us, confident in the knowledge that our vote won’t just go to waste.

First Past the Post isn’t fit for multi-party politics

First Past the Post results in wasted votes and disproportional results regardless of how many parties are in the running.

But in elections with multiple contending parties, vote shares end up being spread thin across an array of parties – resulting in MPs securing seats on very low portions of the vote.

This happened in Northern Ireland in 2015, when the SDLP candidate for Belfast South won their seat with just 24.5% of the vote. Nine parties were in the running.

A system that allows a single MP to preside over a constituency with less than a quarter of all votes is clearly broken.

The fact is, First Past the Post just isn’t equipped for the reality of our ever-changing democracy, which has seen increasingly fractured vote shares in elections: in 2024, more voters than ever voted for parties other than Labour and the Conservatives.

We need a system that can cope in this kind of scenario. FPTP truly is a square peg in a round hole, with multi-party voting being clumsily crammed into a two-party voting system. STV is far better equipped to ensure that voters are represented, even in cases where votes are split across a number of parties.

And FPTP’s failure to cope with changing electoral landscapes has been showcased again in the 2025 local elections, where mayors have been elected on tiny shares of the vote, thanks largely to multi-party voting.

Here again, in the West of England combined authority, the impact of forcing multi-party voting into the two-party system of First Past the Post is clear: a mayor elected on just a quarter of the vote. That’s not good enough.

There’s no hiding from it: First Past the Post is broken

From giving us unrepresentative parliaments, to causing chaos across local and national elections, it’s undeniable: our voting system is broken. First Past the Post needs to be scrapped – and replaced with the fair, proportional system of STV.

Agree that First Past the Post needs to be replaced? Add your name.

Women’s equal representation in Parliament matters for a host of reasons. From the simple fact that 50% of us are women – to research that points to improved decision-making when women are involved in leadership, and that people like decisions made by mixed groups.  

 Our Parliament made a positive step toward equal representation at the 2024 General Election, with more women MPs elected than ever before, but there’s still room for improvement. The lack of women in Parliament is the result of many small decisions that have blocked the road to equal representation in our politics. 

Women’s Representation in the House of Commons

In the House of Commons, there are currently 263 MPs who are women, out of 650 MPs in total. That means that we now have the highest ever proportion of women MPs, at 40%.

But though 40% is a record high, it’s still a far cry from equal representation. And globally, we’re lagging behind: the UK ranks just 27th in the world ranking of women in parliament.

Meanwhile, across the different parties, there are varying levels of representation. 46% of all Labour MPs are women; in the Conservative party, 24% of MPs are women, and for the Liberal Democrats, the figure is 44%. So, there’s no parity in sight at party level, either.

Under-representation begins long before MPs take their seats 

The root of this imbalance in the House of Commons starts before we actually head to the polls and vote for MPs.

This is because candidates (excluding independents) standing in election are chosen by political parties. So the fact that we have such poor representation in Parliament, even though 50% of us are women, is largely the result of parties choosing to stand male candidates in winnable seats.

In the 2024 UK General Election, not a single party choose a gender equal slate of candidates. Overall, just 31% of candidates were women.

If there aren’t enough women for us to vote for in the first place, then we’ll never get equal representation. That needs to change: parties need to do more to build representation into the candidate selection process. Fortunately the UK Government is now taking steps to address this, now that they’ve enacted a piece of legislation that we’ve been pushing for since 2018. Political parties will now be required to release diversity data about their candidates at every stage of selection – which will make it easier to hold parties to account on representation, and to identify where the barriers to women lie.

However, beyond ensuring that enough women are actually being selected, they also need to stand in seats where they have a chance of winning. There’s no point having half of your candidates as women, if they are all challengers in seats they have no chance of winning.

Women’s Representation in the House of Lords 

In the House of Lords, women’s representation continues to be pitifully unequal.  

There are 829 Members of the House of Lords. Just 258 of them are women. That’s just 31% of all members of the House of Lords who are women. 

This is an especially troubling figure given that it’s not the result of an election, but appointment. Since the Prime Minister has the power to appoint anyone they want, we could easily have a House of Lords made up with 50% women.  

Unequal representation amongst our lawmakers is being forced on the public. 

Women’s Representation across Parliament as a whole 

Looking at our parliament as whole – both the House of Commons and the House of Lords – women’s representation is lacking.

Across both chambers of parliament, women make up only 35% of members of the Commons and the Lords

But the work toward a gender equal parliament can’t end there. There are other measures that can be used to aid women’s representation in our politics, such as gender quotas.

Think it’s time women had equal representation? Add your name.

Since 2023, we’ve had to present a valid form of photo ID to vote in UK-wide elections, and municipal elections in England.

With the introduction of the scheme, the UK has taken a wrong turn when it comes to democratic progress. Here are the key reasons why it’s a scheme that desperately needs to be scrapped – or at minimum, massively re-assessed.

There was never a justification for introducing Voter ID

There’s one thing that needs to be made clear about Voter ID: it’s always been unnecessary. 

With 16,000 voters blocked from casting their ballots in the 2024 General Election because they did not bring an acceptable form of ID to the polling station, you’d really hope that there was a strong reason for introducing these regulations to begin with.  

But that’s far from the case. There’s never been an evidence-based justification for the introduction of Voter ID in the UK. It’s always been a solution looking for a problem. 

The then-Conservative government said, in 2023, that Voter ID was needed for “stamping out the potential for voter fraud”. But thankfully, voter fraud hasn’t been an issue in UK elections.

To put it into perspective: in elections held in 2019, 58 million votes were cast. There were only 33 cases of alleged impersonation at the polling station. That’s 0.000057% of all votes. And out of this already miniscule fraction, there was only one conviction.

Yet due to Voter ID, we’ve seen 40,000 people turned away from polling stations since the scheme was first introduced. The government stopped tens of thousands of us from voting, all in the name of stopping a handful of people from losing their votes to fraud.  

And it’s not as if there was an issue with public confidence in elections, either. Before the heavy-handed Voter ID scheme was introduced, 80% of us were confident that our elections are well run, and 87% of us said voting in general is safe from fraud and abuse.

So perhaps there was another rationale? One former minister involved in bringing in the rules made it quite clear what he thought the point of the policy was. And it wasn’t fighting fraud.

Voter ID creates a barrier for some people, but doesn’t affect others 

In the UK, the more wealthy you are, the more likely you are to have ID. Voter ID rules have been found to disproportionately disadvantage those of us who might already be having a tough time.

That means that mandatory Voter ID has built barriers to voting for those of us who might not have a passport because we can’t afford a foreign holiday; or who can’t drive, so don’t have a driving license. And research commissioned by the last government also found that those with severely limiting disabilities, the unemployed, people without qualifications, and those who had never voted before were all less likely to hold any form of photo ID. In fact, research published in 2021 found that 2% of us don’t have any form of photo ID whatsoever.  

Voter ID means that for some portions of the public, there’s now a barrier blocking their route to participation. People who have the democratic right to vote are being unfairly left behind by these regulations – just because they’re less likely to have ID. 

Citizens are being turned away 

In a modern democracy, we should be taking steps to improve participation, not making it more difficult to vote, because participation is the fuel that democracies run on. In the 2024 General Election, we saw the second lowest turnout on record. This lack of participation is a real problem that the Government should be working on. 

So the fact that Voter ID rules have blocked thousands of us from participating, with 16,000 people turned away at polling stations in the 2024 General Election, shows that Voter ID has been a huge step in the wrong direction. Those thousands of citizens were willing and ready to cast their vote: their participation should have been encouraged and nurtured, not denied on a technicality.

From police officers to nurses, we’ve heard from a number of citizens who’ve contributed to our society their whole lives, only to be denied the right to have their say at the polling station because they didn’t have the right ID. 

The Government should be standing up for our right to have our voices heard instead of making it harder to take part in democracy. 

It’s time to re-assess the voter ID scheme 

In a democracy, voting is a fundamental right. And at a time when turnout is faltering, it should be encouraged, not restricted.

At minimum, the government must expand the types of ID people can use at polling stations. But in reality, as this is a scheme which has caused far more harm than good, the best course of action is for it to be scrapped completely.

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If you live in England, you might be casting a vote for a councillor in a local election this May – and with your vote, expressing your desire for how you’d like your local services to be run. With councils responsible for the management of key services, from social care to parks and schools, local government is a way for us to have a say on the decisions that impact our local area.

From withdrawing your vote from the party in charge because you don’t think they have done a good enough job, to lending it to the challengers because you like their ideas, voting is the key to influencing the priorities of your local council.

So, it’s concerning that in England and Wales, we use a voting system that means that, for many voters, it makes no difference who they vote for.

The First Past the Post system used in England and Wales results in council chambers which are scarcely recognisable when it comes to how the local population voted. It means the ideal of local elections as a way for us to make our voices heard locally breaks down.

Local councils would be better off switching to the fairer system used in Scotland for their local elections, the Single Transferable Vote (STV) – giving us a system which puts power back into local hands.

We’d have local election results that match how we voted

In 2023, local elections saw some parties winning up to 90% of the available seats on less than half of the vote share. In Tameside, for example, Labour took 90% of the council seats despite only 48% of voters backing their candidates.

Why is this? The problem with First Past the Post is that the winner only needs to win by a single vote in a crowded field. The ‘winner’ might only win a third of the vote, but as long as nobody got more, they will become the councillor. The problem comes about when the same party wins every ward on a similar level of support. Winning a third of the vote in every ward, could become winning every seat in the council chamber. Many councils aren’t that far off our hypothetical example.

That means that often, the makeup of the council simply won’t match the makeup of the votes cast – as all the votes cast for anyone other than the winner won’t contribute to the result.

Every vote is a message from a voter on how they want local services to be run.

It’s a bit of a stretch to say that we can all have a say in how our local services are run, when this system means huge swathes of these messages never translate into councillors who can put them into action.

By contrast, in Scotland council chambers are much closer to how everyone voted. And this means that we can actually hold sway over council decisions, as we’d be getting councils which actually represent us.

That’s what we should demand, and expect, in a representative democracy.

You should be able to influence how your local area is run

If you want to save your local library, get more green space, or see lower (or higher for that matter) council tax bills you need your vote to count.

Under First Past the Post, votes cast in local elections go to waste unless they’re votes for the winners. But also, the excess votes, those above the level they needed to win, make no difference.

That means that huge swathes of voters are left in a position where their vote has had no impact on the election results. Some councillors can afford to lose a lot of support in the knowledge that nothing will happen.

When a councillor can afford to lose your vote, how can you influence them?

By contrast, the Single Transferable Vote is a system which sees far fewer wasted votes, so councillors know that every vote matters, and every voter should be listened to.

STV is a tried and tested alternative

The fact is, the way we currently elect our local representatives just isn’t adequate. Huge swathes of us aren’t getting the councils we voted for, which means huge numbers of us get no say in the local decisions that really affect us.

STV is an excellent alternative to this broken system not just in theory, but in practice. In Scotland, councils have been elected via STV since 2007, and it’s put an end to councils dominated by a single party when the local area is much more mixed. As Professor Sir John Curtice illustrated in his 2022 report on the impact of STV in Scottish Local Elections, the Scottish system is a powerful example of how local democracy can put power into peoples’ hands.

Ultimately, in Scotland, voters have more say over how their local council is run than we do in England and Wales – and it’s because they scrapped the unfair system of First Past the Post, in favour of STV.

Want your vote to matter in local elections? Add your name to our call.

The Government was elected on a manifesto promise to “increase the engagement of young people in our vibrant democracy by giving 16 and 17-year-olds the right to vote in all elections.” We agree, and here’s why they should do it.

16- and 17-year-olds voting isn’t a new idea. In Scotland and Wales, 16- and 17-year-olds are already allowed to vote in devolved elections. The positive experience there, and further afield, has shown the far-reaching benefits to extending the franchise to young people across the United Kingdom.

Extending the franchise means a boost to turnout

Voter turnout is one of the vital signs of our democracy. When it’s low, it’s an indicator that our democracy isn’t as healthy as it could be. When it’s high, governments are considered to be more representative – because a higher proportion of people actually took part in electing them. The more people who vote, the more people get to shape the laws we all live under, which is an important feature of a healthy democracy.

So, if you care about living in a healthy democracy, it follows you should care about voter turnout.

But where does votes at 16 come into this? The research suggests that extending the franchise to all 16- and 17-year-olds is one way to make sure that turnout is bolstered in the long-term.

One reason for this is that when 16- and 17-year-olds have the vote, they’re more likely to vote than their counterparts who were enfranchised at 18. That’s one uptick for turnout – and one uptick for a flourishing democracy.

More participation in the long-term

Another reason why extending the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds is so vital for our democracy is that it has the potential to boost turnout long-term. This is because there’s also evidence that if a person is enfranchised at 16, they’re more likely to vote again going forward.

So it’s not just that we’ll have a new age bracket raising turnout: a key benefit of votes at 16 is that we’ll be fostering a generation of voters who will go on to become voting adults in future elections. Higher participation would be baked into our politics for good.

Given that our most recent General Election saw turnout reaching a record low, the case for votes at 16 is stronger than ever. Our democracy needs a health boost.

England and Northern Ireland are lagging behind

There’s also the simple matter of unfairness.

It’s a postcode lottery that means young people in England and Northern Ireland  don’t get to vote in local and devolved elections. In Wales and Scotland, 16- and 17-year-olds can already vote in Senedd and Scottish Parliament elections, as well as for local councillors.

To combat this inequality in voting rights, it’s now time for the barriers to participation to be lifted for young people in England and Northern Ireland, and the opportunities for participation extended to Westminster elections.

Extending the franchise is long overdue

Britain has a long, proud history of shaking up the franchise. It was in 1969 that the right to vote was last amended, with the voting age dropped from 21 to 18 – a change that few would think of undoing. When people experience voting alongside 16 and 17 year olds, they support it – 60 per cent of Scots now back the idea.

For the sake of a modern, well-functioning democracy, England, Northern Ireland and Westminster need to catch up and modernise the franchise once again.

Add your name: elections shouldn’t exclude 16- and 17-year-olds

Understanding how the different levels of government in the UK can sometimes feel like piecing together a tricky puzzle. At the centre is Westminster, with the Prime Minister leading from the House of Commons. But we also have devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – each with their own First Ministers and parliaments or assemblies.

But when it comes to local government – especially in England – the picture isn’t always straightforward.

In England, different areas have different types of councils, each responsible for delivering key services like social care, road maintenance, waste collection, schools, parks, and libraries.

In this article, we’ll take a look at local government in England, and make sense of the different council structures and how they fit together.

Click the boxes below to expand and find out more about each type of local authority.

Voting systems are the methods we use to elect representatives, like MPs or local councillors. They lay out rules about the way votes are cast and counted. 

Which system do we use in general elections in the UK?

In Britain, we use the First Past the Post voting system for general elections for Westminster. In general elections, people across the UK vote to elect a representative for their local area to the House of Commons. Winning candidates become MPs. 

How does First Past the Post work?

When voting under First Past the Post, you’ll receive one ballot paper.   

Only one MP can represent each constituency, and parties can only have one candidate for you to choose from per constituency. You get one vote, and must put an ‘X’ next to your single chosen candidate on a ballot paper.  

The winner is whichever candidate receives more votes than any other candidate. The rest of the candidates don’t get a place in Parliament –  it’s a winner-takes-all system. In fact, under First Past the Post, a candidate could win by just a single vote. 

If enough MPs from a single party secure a majority of the 650 seats across the UK, they then are able to form a government.  

Unfortunately, this system means that votes end up ‘wasted’, because votes for losing candidates in each seat don’t impact the election result. Shockingly, this can apply to millions of voters: in the 2024 General Election, 57.8% of votes were cast for candidates that weren’t elected.  

Westminster’s broken system delivers unfair results

A real problem with First Past the Post is that it delivers parliaments which are not proportional. This means we get parliaments where the seats don’t closely match votes cast. And that means that thousands of people end up without someone representing their interests in Parliament.  

To understand how this happens, it can be useful to think back to past election results. 

In the 2024 General Election, in the constituency of Godalming & Ash, 23,293 people voted for the winning Conservative candidate. As they received the single highest number of votes, they won the election because of the rules of First Past the Post. 

But 22,402 people voted for the second-place candidate. 9,001 voters combined voted for the other candidates. That’s 31,403 people who did not vote for the winning candidate – over half of all voters in the constituency – but whose votes made no difference to the results of the election. 

Those 31,403 voices are now not reflected in the make-up of Parliament. 

Under First Past the Post, seats simply don’t match votes. 

First Past the Post makes voters reluctant to vote with their hearts

Many voters who understand that First Past the Post is a winner-takes-all system will turn to ‘tactical voting’.  This is when you vote for a candidate other than your preferred candidate, to reduce the chance of your least favourite candidate from winning.
There are even websites that will tell voters whether they should vote tactically or not in order to keep out a particular party.  

This isn’t how it should be. A fair voting system should empower us to vote with our hearts for candidates that we actually want to win. Instead, we’re forced to try to make a broken system work for us by voting tactically. 

What is the alternative to First Past the Post?

Unfair results and disempowered voters are just two of several problems with Britain’s voting system. 

To address them, we need a system that delivers proportional representation: the idea that the seats in parliament should be in proportion to the votes cast.  

That’s why we’re campaigning for Westminster elections to adopt the Single Transferable Vote, a system which achieves proportional representation. We’d have a parliament that more accurately matches the make-up of votes cast, and voters wouldn’t feel forced to make tactical decisions. 

Do you think it’s time for a fair voting system? Add your name.

The House of Lords is the second chamber of our Parliament. Before bills become laws, they must pass through the House of Lords, and Lords themselves play a key role in scrutinising public policy.

That all sounds reasonable. What’s entirely unreasonable, though, is that to be a member of the House of Lords, you don’t need to be elected by the public. There are a number of routes to becoming a Lord, and none of them are democratic.

Political Lists

Leaders of the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties have the power to appoint peers through ‘political lists’.

Several political appointments were made in December 2024. Labour appointed thirty peers, the Conservative Party appointed six, and the Liberal Democrats appointed two. That’s thirty-eight new members of the house of lords who get a say in our politics for the rest of their lives, or until they resign, with no public backing.

When nominated, potential peers are vetted by the House of Lords Appointments Commission prior to being appointed. This is true of all types of appointment – but not for ‘Lords Spiritual’ or ‘Hereditary Peers’.

Resignation Honours

Resignation Honours are honours granted by outgoing Prime Ministers. They include titles such as knighthoods and damehoods, as well as peerages which see recipients appointed to the House of Lords.

In 2022, following her resignation after just 45 days in office, Liz Truss released a resignation honours list at the same time as the New Years Honours list.

Ad Hoc Announcements

Peerages can also be granted by the government on an ad hoc basis throughout the year. These need not be part of any particular honours list.

Dissolution Honours

Parliament is ‘dissolved’ ahead of a general election. It means that the current sitting parliament has ended permanently, and it happens either at the end of a parliament’s maximum term of five years, or earlier if a general election is called before the term is up.

Dissolution honours allow parties to nominate outgoing MPs and political staff for peerages. The 2024 dissolution honours list saw 19 new peers appointed to the House of Lords.

Hereditary Peerages

Some members of the House of Lords are entitled to their peerage through birthright. Holding a hereditary title doesn’t automatically grant you a seat in the Lords, but it means you’re eligible to take one of the reserved seats. When a place becomes available, holders of hereditary peerages are able to stand in by-elections, which only members of the House of Lords can vote in.

However, political power is not something that should be inherited. You wouldn’t accept a hereditary lawyer or dentist, so why a hereditary legislator?

There are currently 92 hereditary peers still in our Lords – all are male, and all are white. Due to male primogeniture, we essentially have reserved seats for men in our parliament.
Thankfully, a bill is currently passing through parliament which, if it is successful, will see the removal of the 92 seats reserved for hereditary peers.

Lords Spiritual

There are 26 seats in the House of Lords for senior bishops of the Church of England: these are the ‘lords spiritual’.

Five of the bishops are automatically granted a seat, including the archbishop of canterbury. The other 21 seats aren’t granted to any particular bishops automatically and are instead filled by various bishops from eligible dioceses.

Multiple routes into the Lords, and they’re all undemocratic

There are all manner of routes into the House of Lords, yet the only path that’s actually justifiable in a democratic society is missing: one which sees Lords elected fairly by the people.

It’s time to scrap this rotten system and replace the unelected Lords with a smaller elected chamber where the people of this country, not prime ministers, choose who shape the laws we all live under.

Add your name to our call: We don’t need any more unelected lords in Parliament

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