House of Lords

====Life peers====
The largest group of Lords Temporal, and indeed of the whole House, are life peers. {{As of|2024|03|post=,}} there are 670 life peers eligible to vote in the House.<ref name="parliament.uk"/> Life peers rank only as barons or baronesses, and are created under the Life Peerages Act 1958. Like all other peers, life peers are created by the Sovereign, who acts on the advice of the Prime Minister or the [[House of Lords Appointments Commission]]. By convention, however, the Prime Minister allows leaders of other parties to nominate some life peers, so as to maintain a political balance in the House of Lords. Moreover, some non-party life peers (the number being determined by the Prime Minister) are nominated by the independent House of Lords Appointments Commission.

In 2000 the government announced that it would set up an Independent Appointments Commission, under [[Dennis Stevenson, Baron Stevenson of Coddenham|Dennis Stevenson, Lord Stevenson of Coddenham]], to select fifteen so-called "[[people's peer]]s" for life peerages. However, when the choices were announced in April 2001, from a list of 3,000 applicants, the choices were treated with criticism in the media, as all were distinguished in their field, and none were "ordinary people" as some had originally hoped.<ref>{{cite news|url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/uk_politics/2001/open_politics/lords/peoples_peers.stm |title=People's Peers: the strange case of the missing lollipop ladies |publisher=Open University |via=BBC News |year=2001<!--nothing more precise available unfortunately-->}}</ref>