Can I Buy A Peerage?

Are British peerages for sale? Can you be a Lord or Lady? If so, how?

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So you want a pension plan, and you think becoming a Lord might be a good way to go? And you love dressing up as Mumm-Ra from 'Thundercats'?

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Actually, if you can pull it off, it's probably a good wheeze. You can claim £300 a day for turning up on any day when the Lords sits; and then you can go home as soon as you've signed in. There's no obligation to do any work for your money. The Lords sit for an average of 150 days a year, so that's potentially a cool £45,000 a year, tax-free, as long as you sign in each day.

Stuart Prior

The bad news is, like most select clubs, it’s tough to get into. 69.6% of peerages go to “The Usual Suspects” from public life, and so you won’t get a look-in for most of them.

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Now it gets interesting. The remaining 30.4% go to "The Others", who are all sorts of people: millionaires, academics, millionaires, surgeons, millionaires, lawyers, millionaires, charity workers, millionaires, saints, and billionaires. It's a diverse mix.

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Just under a third of these "others" happen to give very large amounts of money to a political party. Quite possibly more money than your home is worth. And if you give this sort of money, it does seem to astronomically increase your odds of being put up for a peerage. In fact, the odds of this happening by chance to so many big donors are the same as winning the National Lottery jackpot five times in a row.

Diana Ibáñez López / Via Figures from Mell, Radford and Thévoz (2015).

So who should you try giving your money to? Well there's no guarantee they'll play ball, but why not try one of the three main parties? On average, “The Others” donated an extra £220,000 among Conservatives, £333,000 among Liberal Democrats, and £464,000 among Labour nominees, compared to the negligible amounts put up by "The Usual Suspects". If peerages are being sold, then these could be thought of as the ‘average price’ per party.

Diana Ibáñez López / Via Figures from Mell, Radford and Thévoz (2015).

If those are the 'prices', they're a bargain. In 2015 money, Lloyd George charged £1.7 million for a peerage in 1916-22, and Thatcher's 'going rate' was £500,000 for a peerage in 1979-85. So those 'prices' would be daylight robbery!

Diana Ibáñez López / Via Figures from Mell, Radford and Thévoz (2015).

But it's not just about price. Only a small minority of ‘big donors’ have actually been put forward as peers. Broken down by party, the numbers for the last ten years are:

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So in absolute numbers, the Conservatives would seem to offer the best prospect for a peerage, and the Lib Dems the worst.

Diana Ibáñez López / Via Figures from Mell, Radford and Thévoz (2015).

But the Conservatives are flush with lots of big donors. Very few of them actually make it through to the Lords. It's hard to stand out from a crowd of so many very, very, very wealthy people. So perhaps you should look at the ratio of big donors in each party who are put forward for a peerage?

Diana Ibáñez López / Via Figures from Mell, Radford and Thévoz (2015).

So over the last ten years, Lib Dems donors have had the best odds of being measured up for ermine. But before you start filling out an application form, look at how the Lib Dems have featured in peerages handed out in the last five years.

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and look at where they're currently averaging in the opinion polls:

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So in the next Parliament, they're likely to be over-represented in the Lords, which means you won't see many new Lib Dem peerages being handed out. As such, you might be better off donating to the Labour Party, and trying your luck there.

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And as former Liberal Party leader David Steel has said, signing cheques seems to be a very effective way of catching a party leader's eye. And that can't do any harm, since the leaders do the nominating, and personally give citations for each of their party's nominees.

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So to go back to the start, if you're a big donor who happens to get a peerage, you can claim £45k a year as a peer. And if you stay in good enough health to rock up under your own steam for years to come and keep signing in, then you can make your original donation back in 5-10 years (depending on which party you donated to), and then the rest is pure profit, and a decent tax-free income for the rest of your days. Lovely-jubbly.

This Buzzfeed by Stuart Prior, Diana Ibáñez López and Seth Alexander Thévoz is based on the findings of Andrew Mell, Simon Radford and Seth Alexander Thevoz, "Is There a Market in Peerages? Can Donations Buy You a British Peerage? A Study in the Link Between Party Political Funding and Peerage Nominations, 2005-14" (Oxford University Department of Economics, Oxford, 2015).