Labour will aim to abolish the House of Lords “as quickly as possible”, Sir Keir Starmer has said.
Sir Keir will consult on the size and nature of the chamber following a constitutional review led by Gordon Brown, the former prime minister.
He suggested the move could be delivered in Labour’s first term in government – but did not commit to a timeframe.
He told BBC Breakfast: “I think the House of Lords is indefensible. Anybody who looks at the House of Lords would struggle to say that it should be kept.
“So we want to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with an elected chamber that has a really strong mission.”
Asked how much of a priority this would be for Labour, Sir Keir replied: “I’m very keen that all of the recommendations in the report are carried out as quickly as possible. So we will now have after today a process of consultation testing the ideas... with a view to how do we implement them?”
He said all the recommendations in the report, including the proposal to abolish the House of Lords, are “deliberately written in a way that means they can be implemented within the first five years of a Labour government”.
Mr Brown has reportedly recommended a new upper house of nations and regions with appropriate weighting given to different parts of the UK.
Further details will be set out in the coming weeks and months and his commission will form the basis of a number of Labour policies at the next election.
Sir Keir is understood to strongly agree that a new chamber must be “absolutely” representative of the country as a whole in line with party policies on unionism and levelling up.
He addressed Labour peers in November to argue that House of Lords reform was a critical aspect of “promoting inclusive growth and restoring trust in politics”.
“We should be rebuilding trust in politics, but this can’t just be an article of faith,” Sir Keir said. “We need to show how we will do things differently. Reforming our second chamber has to be a part of that.”
