Parliament: Peers 'will need pay rise after reforms'

LIFE PEERS may need higher pay and expenses to compensate them for the extra workload they will face once hereditaries have been removed from the Lords, the Tories warned last night.

The party called on the Government to ensure that the issue was looked at by the Senior Salaries Review Board.

Paddy Tipping, Deputy Leader of the Commons, agreed that the Prime Minister might invite the pay body to look at the matter once the Royal Commission on Lords reform has made its recommendations on the future of the second chamber.

But Tories claimed that to duck the issue could result in major problems when the Government's plan to abolish the centuries-old right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the Lords becomes law.

Lords select committees and the role of Deputy Speaker, who sits on the woolsack in the absence of the Lord Chancellor, are currently filled in many instances by hereditary peers.

Dominic Grieve, MP for Beaconsfield, said the Government was "living in cloud cuckoo land if it thinks it can cut off the heads of the hereditaries and forget it - we can't".