The Life Peerages Act 1958 established the modern standards for the creation of life peers by the monarch of the United Kingdom. Life peers are barons and are members of the House of Lords for life, but their titles and membership in the Lords are not inherited by their children. Judicial life peers already sat in the House under the terms of the Appellate Jurisdiction Act 1876. The Life Peerages Act vastly increased the ability of the Prime Minister to change the composition of the House of Lords and considerably lessened the dominance of hereditary peers.
The Act allowed for the creation of female peers entitled to sit in the House of Lords; the first such women peers took their seats 21 October 1958.
A life peer is created by the Queen by Letters Patent under the Great Seal on the advice of the Prime Minister.
Before the Act was passed, former Prime Ministers were usually created Viscounts or Earls (which are hereditary peerages) in gratitude for their public service in high office. The last Prime Minister and the last person to be made an Earl was Harold Macmillan under the Thatcher government in the 1980s.
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or act:
“By the time we hit fifty, we have learned our hardest lessons. We have found out that only a few things are really important. We have learned to take life seriously, but never ourselves.”
—Marie Dressler (1873–1934)
“For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)