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'Positive Policy' - The Lords Question: Reforming the House of Lords
Posted by Shane McMurray (@HMSEnterprise)
Thursday, 4th March 2010
Being a fan of our ancient and, at times, curious system of government when I was asked to choose any area of policy and write about it I knew almost immediately it would be on constitutional reform, specifically everyone’s favourite upper house: the House of Lords. Or The Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament assembled to give it its full, official title.
As chance would have it I ended up on a tour of the Palace of Westminster while Parliament was in recess recently that focused almost entirely on the Lords (the House of Commons was closed for maintenance and restoration work). Standing in the chamber itself, and the rooms surrounding it, you get a real sense of how important it is – or at least was– within our unwritten constitution.
In the 163 years since construction on the chamber was completed it has undergone such a transformation as to render it almost unrecognisable to the peers who first sat on those red benches. The only constant: Pugin’s stunning interior. The most startling development is the Commons near-total supremacy thanks to the 1911 and 1949 Acts of Parliament. This has only been exacerbated with the removal of all but 92 of the hereditary peers in 1999 without the faintest idea what put in their place.
Eleven years on and there is still no agreement as to the composition of the upper house. Some want a fully appointed others a fully elected and the rest somewhere in-between. There have been several consultations, numerous debates, votes and even a Royal Commission yet we are no closer to achieving a consensus on the subject.
To be fair, most of Labour’s reforms have been pretty sensible such as the establishment of a supreme court and the restructuring of the Lord Chancellor’s office. But we now lack an essential counter-weight to balance the power of the House of Commons. The government has, on more than one occasion, ridden roughshod over the wishes of Parliament and the people solely because of its Commons majority.
At the moment the lower house is so dominant that if the Lords suddenly vanished tomorrow people would barely take any notice. The house is stuck in limbo, in-between reforms, filled by Labour with some shady characters that created the conditions for the cash for influence and cash for peerages scandals. They did the reputation of Parliament no favours and were to prove the precursors to the MPs expenses fiasco.
But that weakness – the ability to appoint individuals to the chamber– is also its underlying strength. It allows for a wise council of elders, with a huge wealth of knowledge and experience just waiting to be tapped not only for lawmaking but also for high ministerial office. To that end I hope we see a continuation and expansion of GOATs under a future Conservative government.
However, in order to return the Lords to its former glory much more must be done including reforms that lend the chamber some democratic legitimacy. Here are a few suggestions:
- Composition: Reduce the number of peers by at least a third with an equal amount of seats for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland re-enforcing the concept of a truly United Kingdom. The Lords Spiritual should be retained but restricted to one representative per religion. The hereditaries, if they survive the coming weeks, should remain too so to retain a link with history & offer a long-term perspective to proceedings
- Election: End prime ministerial patronage, replaced by an electoral college consisting of the Scottish Parliament, Welsh and NI Assemblies and English MPs (ideally an English Parliament). Leading national figures that express an interest can be sponsored by political parties, vetted by a Statutory Appointments Commission and then elected following the Holyrood, Cardiff Bay, Stormont & Westminster elections
- Powers: Lords should be conferred new powers including confirmation for any major government/prime ministerial appointments. This would help re-align the balance of power between Lords and Commons as well as enhance the effectiveness in holding the executive to account, the primary function of any legislature
David Cameron has said that Lords reform would be a “third term issue” for a Conservative government. Considering the scale of the national problems currently I don’t expect anything in the manifesto. But perhaps we’ll see something in the next one. With the urgent need restore the public’s faith in our Parliamentary institutions I am sure the Conservatives will come to recognise, as I have, the settlement of the Lords Question as an important piece in that very large jigsaw.
