The membership of the House of Lords consists of Lords Spiritual and Temporal. The Lords Spiritual are the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and 24 other senior Bishops of the Church of England. The Lords Temporal comprise life peers created under the Life Peerages Act 1958 and Lords created for life under the Appellate Jurisdiction Act 1876 to serve as Lords of Appeal in Ordinary1 and, prior to this Act, included the excepted hereditary peers referred to above.
	Section 1 of the 1999 Act provides that no-one shall be a member of the House of Lords by virtue of a hereditary peerage. Section 2 of the 1999 Act (repealed by the Act) provided that this exclusion from membership of the House of Lords did not apply to the excepted hereditary peers referred to above. Once a person was excepted by virtue of section 2 from the exclusion in section 1, they were excepted for life. Section 2 also provided that the arrangements for selecting the 90 excepted hereditary peers, and for subsequently filling any vacancies via a by-election, were to be set out in the Standing Orders of the House of Lords.
	Section 1 of the 2014 Act makes provision for a member of the House of Lords who is a peer to retire or otherwise resign by giving notice in writing to the Clerk of the Parliaments. The notice must specify a date from which the resignation is to take effect and must be signed by the peer and by a witness.
	In addition, the House of Lords had a role in considering disputed or complex peerage claims, as well as confirming the succession to peerages of Ireland. As outlined in the Royal Warrant of 2004, applications to be entered onto the Roll of the Peerage are made to the Lord Chancellor in the first instance. Disputed or complex peerage claims (which occur infrequently) could have been referred to the House of Lords following a petition to the Crown. The House of Lords Standing Orders provided for referral of claims to a committee for peerage claims, which was set up on an ad hoc basis to consider such claims and report to the House. The process for those claiming Irish peerages was similar, save that the claimants petitioned the House of Lords directly to confirm their succession, as well as applying to the Lord Chancellor to be entered onto the Roll of the Peerage.
Legal background