 On 13 June 1957 he became chairman of a committee of Privy Counsellors holding an inquiry into the Home Secretary's use of telephone tapping. After twenty-nine meetings, Birkett drafted a report which he passed on to Parliament supporting the use of telephone taps and noting their effectiveness. On 9 December, a letter arrived from the Prime Minister offering him a peerage. He accepted, and his name appeared in the New Year Honours list, and was created Baron Birkett, of Ulverston in the County of Lancaster, and took his seat in the House of Lords on 20 February 1958. In the same year, he was awarded a LLD by the University of Cambridge, where the speaker said that Birkett was "endowed with such a voice as Cicero declared to be first requisite of an orator" and that "in our own time there had been no one more skilled in swaying the mind of a jury." In February 1959, he appeared on the first episode of the BBC television program Face to Face, where he was described as "one of the three or four greatest criminal lawyers of this century, and perhaps one of the three or four greatest criminal lawyers of all time". Outside politics and the law, he also served as Master of the Worshipful Company of Curriers four times.
