The term is used to differentiate these members from the Lords Spiritual, who sit in the House as a consequence of being bishops in the Church of England.
[1][2] Membership in the Lords Temporal was once an entitlement of all hereditary peers, other than those in the peerage of Ireland.
When Scotland united with England to form Great Britain in 1707, it was provided that the Scottish hereditary peers would only be able to elect 16 Scottish representative peers to sit in the House of Lords; the term of a representative was to extend until the next general election.
A similar provision was enacted when Ireland merged with Great Britain in 1801 to form the United Kingdom; the Irish peers were allowed to elect 28 representatives, who were to retain office for life.
Elections for Irish representatives ended in 1922, when most of Ireland became an independent state; elections for Scottish representatives ended with the passage of the Peerage Act 1963, under which all Scottish peers obtained seats in the Upper House.
However, by convention, the Prime Minister allows leaders of other parties to nominate some life peers, to maintain political equilibrium.
In 2000, the government announced it would set up an Independent Appointments Commission, under Lord Stevenson of Coddenham, to select fifteen so-called "people's peers" for life peerages.