Labour has ruled out immediately packing the House of Lords with dozens of peers if Keir Starmer wins the next general election.
The Labour leader has already scaled back on his previous pledges to abolish the Lords and replace it with a fully elected second chamber in his first term.
Angela Smith, Labour’s leader in the Lords, said on Monday the party would need to “refresh our numbers” since the Tories have more than 100 peers in the upper chamber than Labour. However, she dismissed the idea that Starmer would rush through the appointment of his own peers after an election win.
Smith told the House magazine: “The idea that Keir Starmer is on day one going to have a list of 100 people to put here is cloud cuckoo … If you look at the numbers at the moment, the Tories have over 100 more than us, and they still lose votes.
“If I’m leader of the house, I don’t want this to be a numbers game, like ‘yah boo, we’ve got more than you, we’re gonna win, we’re gonna smash this through’. That’s not what the House of Lords does.”
Asked how many peers could be appointed in the “refresh”, Smith added: “I haven’t got a number for you, but I just know that’s not where Keir is headed, quite rightly. That’s not where he’d want to be at all.”
Senior figures in the party previously told the Observer a fully elected second chamber would remain a long-term goal, while it would seek to possibly get rid of the 90 or so remaining hereditary peers in a first term. In its first few years the party also hopes to increase the powers of the body that oversees appointments to prevent inappropriate people being given peerages.
Smith has previously said the party was focused on getting legislation through parliament even if that meant increasing the size of the upper chamber.
Labour has vowed to use its first years in power to focus on a number of priorities including its “new deal” for working people that would ban zero-hours contracts and end qualifying periods for basic rights such as sick pay and parental leave.
Smith confirmed this, adding: “If I’m honest, I think the first few years of a Labour government will be dealing with economic growth and the cost of living … There’ll be something about House of Lords reform in the manifesto. It is most times. But I think we should be honest about what we can achieve and what we’re ready to do.”
The lord speaker, John McFall, a former Labour MP, has made a number of speeches urging caution on the changes, warning against moving too far too fast and instead calling for “incremental” change.
There are 174 Labour peers, 274 on the Conservative benches, 84 Lib Dems and 183 crossbenchers.
Peter Mandelson, a former business secretary and architect of Labour’s 1997 election victory, has previously warned Labour that overhauling the upper chamber could sweep Starmer’s party into a “quagmire of disagreement” without cross-party support.
He said: “You can either showboat and grandstand about abolition or you can get serious about ... reform ... don’t imagine that it’s quick or painless or simple, and don’t imagine that you’re going to be able to pull it off simply by the Labour party agreeing with itself and imposing some outcome on everyone else.”
