Peer Review: methodology

The Peer Review tool brings together numerous datasets to build up a picture of how the House of Lords works, how individual peers behave and what financial interests they hold.

We looked at all current members of the House of Lords, including peers currently on a leave of absence and those who have been suspended.

The project involved compiling and analysing datasets primarily drawn from the open data made available by UK parliament, as well as other data sources like the Electoral Commission. These datasets can be broadly grouped into two categories – what peers do inside the House of Lords, and what they do outside.

Sources

Inside the House

We took and analysed the following data to build up a profile of activity and behaviour for each peer.

Appointments: how and when peers were appointed to the House.
Party membership.
Demographics: age and gender.
Voting: how often peers attend votes and how often they vote in line with their party.
Spoken contributions: how often peers spoke in the chamber.
Written questions: how often peers contribute written questions.
Amendments proposed to legislation: how often peers propose amendments to legislation and how often they propose “divisive” amendments that divide the house and trigger a formal vote.
Select committee membership: how many select committee peers sit on, and how many they chair.

Our analysis begins with the 2019 parliament on 20 December 2019 and runs up to 18 November 2024.

Outside the House

We looked at the House of Lords Register of Financial Interests to understand what financial interests are currently held by peers, or were previously held from December 2019 onwards.

We also looked at the electoral commission to track how peers have donated to political parties over time.

Archetypes

We grouped together peers into 11 archetype groups, based on their characteristics and patterns of behaviour. We then developed a set of criteria to categorise each peer, which are listed below.

While many lords 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 example, a peer may fit the criteria to be both a Minister and a Workhorse. In this case, Minister will take precedence over Workhorse as the more defining role for their activity. Archetype precedence is determined by the order in which they are listed below.

Minister: currently serving ministers of the government, or shadow ministers of the official opposition. Includes ministers, secretaries and undersecretaries of state, as well as Lords spokespersons, leaders/deputy leaders of the house and whips.

Highborn: one of the 89 hereditary peers who sit in the House of Lords by birthright.

Bishop: one of the 26 “Lords spiritual”, who sit in the House by virtue of seats reserved for Church of England bishops.

Donor: peers who have donated significant sums of money to a political party, prior to or around the time of their appointment to the house. To be categorised as a Donor, peers must have donated:

over £100,000 in total;
to the political party or in MPs of the political party that appointed them for the house;
prior to, or one year subsequent to, their appointment.

Because Electoral Commission records only go back to 2001, we are not able to categorise peers who were appointed before 2001, or peers who donated significant sums of money before 2001, as Donors.

Rebel: peers who are among the most rebellious, having voted against their party whip on numerous occasions. To be categorised as a Rebel, peers must be:

aligned to a political party (i.e. not a crossbencher or non-affiliated);
in the top 10 per cent of the most rebellious peers across all votes they have attended, defined by the ratio of votes where they broke the whip rather than following it; or
in the top five per cent of the most rebellious peers across all “important” votes they have taken part in, where important votes is defined as votes with more than 500 voting peers.

Blockers: peers who have a record of tabling amendments to legislation that divide the House to a vote, often defeating the government and blocking its legislative agenda at least temporarily, or substantially altering legislation. To be categorised as a Blocker, peers must have:

tabled at least one amendment to proposed legislation in the chamber where
- the government opposes the proposed amendment;
- the House divides, i.e. the proposed amendment goes to a formal vote;
- the government is defeated and the amendment is included in the draft bill; and
be in the top 20 per cent of the most active peers for proposing divisive amendments in the chamber, defined by the total count of amendments proposed that go to a vote and defeat the government.

Workhorse: among the most active peers in terms of legislative work, scrutiny and contributions in the chamber. To be categorised as a Workhorse, peers must be either:

in the top 10 per cent of the most active drafters of amendments to legislation defined by average amendments proposed per year; or
in the top 10 per cent of the most active speakers in the chamber defined by average spoken contributions per year; or
in the top 10 per cent of the most active submitters of written questions to government departments defined by written questions submitted per year; or
have chaired at least one select committee.

Loyalist: takes part in the majority of votes and generally votes with the party whip. To be categorised as a Loyalist, peers must:

be aligned to a political party (i.e. not a crossbencher or non-affiliated); and
attend over 50 per cent of all votes they are eligible for; and
vote with the party whip over 99 per cent of the time for votes attended.

Specialist: these peers are less active in the chamber but occasionally contribute to debates, ask questions and table amendments. To be categorised as a Specialist, peers must:

sit on at least one select committee; or
not be in the bottom half of activity for proposing amendments; or
not be in the bottom half of activity for spoken contributions; or
not be in the bottom half of activity for written questions.

Reserve: these lords contribute less to proceedings, rarely contribute to debates and have sat on no select committees. To be categorised as a Reserve, peers must:

have made more than one spoken contribution (often their maiden speech to the House); and are
not be in the bottom five per cent of activity for proposing amendments; or
not be in the bottom five per cent of activity for spoken contributions; or
not be in the bottom five per cent of activity for written questions; or
are not in the bottom five per cent of activity for votes attended.

Ghost: ghosts are almost entirely absent and there is very little activity to measure. To be categorised as a Ghost, peers must:

not fit into any of the above criteria (i.e. in the bottom five per cent of activity across all activity metrics); or
currently be on a leave of absence that has lasted more than two years in total. This leave of absence rule supersedes earlier rules in the dataset.

Register of Interests

Lords must declare their interests in an official register on an ongoing basis, in accordance with the House of Lords Code of Conduct. We included the following categories of financial interests from the Lords Register of Financial interests.

Category 1: directorships
Category 2: remunerated employment
Category 3: people with significant control of a company
Category 4: shareholdings
Category 5: land and property
Category 7: overseas visits
Category 8: gifts, benefits and hospitality

Within the tool, we group these categories into four groups

Positions: categories 1 and 2
Holdings: categories 3 and 4
Land and Property: category 5
Other: categories 7 and 8

We excluded category 6: sponsorship and category 9: miscellaneous financial interests because the overall number of entries under these categories was small, and category 10: non-financial interests.

We included all interests that were active on a given peer’s register from 20 December 2019 onwards.

Peers are generally obliged to keep interests on their register for a year after the interest has formally ceased. They often include the date of interest ceased in the register entry, and we have included this in the tool.

To visualise financial interests in the tool, we:

extracted fields of interest from the entry text in the register. For example, from a Category 1: directorship entry such as “Chairman, Microlink PC (UK) Ltd (computing and software)”, we extracted the entity (Microlink PC) and the role “Chairman”; and
standardised entity names. For example, variants like “Shell”, “Shell Petroleum” and “Royal Dutch Shell PLC”, which were recorded by a number of different peers, were all standardised to “Royal Dutch Shell plc”.

In most cases, extracting and standardising the entities from each register entry was fairly straightforward. However for certain types of entry we made the following decisions:

For Category 4: shareholdings, we excluded national treasury bonds and gilts and currency holdings.
For shareholdings in financial products sold by financial institutions, for example ETF (exchange-traded funds) offered by an institution like iShares, we standardised these to the name of the financial institution that sells the financial product.
- In some cases where financial products are specific to an industry (e.g. “iShares Healthcare Innovation UCITS ETF”), we have chosen to include the full name of the product because it provides additional detail on the financial interest.
For Category 5: land and property, we grouped all entries into either agricultural, residential or commercial depending on the description in the entry. If the entry doesn’t specify the type of property, we classify it as “Other”.
- We determine whether a peer is a Landlord based on whether they declare they derive rental income from the property