Our first report was published in October and debated in the Lords that December, with 95 members taking part and the great majority of speakers supporting our proposals. This was partly because of the restraint shown by Theresa May in the number of appointments and partly because a significant number of members made use of the relatively new option to retire.
However, we have also seen some headwinds with a change in Prime Minister and two general elections. These are significant events because typically they bring forward retirement and dissolution lists of appointments.
As a committee we stand by the proposals we made four years ago. However, in our most recent report we have drawn attention to some additional issues. The experience since our initial report is that although we have succeeded in stabilising the numbers, we have not made the progress we wanted.
Our conclusion is that we now need a faster transition to a House of , because the original timescale is too vulnerable to further headwinds. The reduction could be achieved by the end of this parliament with the support of the leaders of the main parties.
We have received strong indications that there are many members who would willingly retire but are not ready to do so without a cross-party agreement about the scale and balance of new appointments. We also concluded that the time has come to end the by-elections to replace excepted hereditary peers when they leave.
Some talented people have joined the House through this route, but it is an interim solution that has endured for two decades and inhibits the rebalancing of the House as political trends change: the allocation of the hereditary spaces in the House between the parties is set in stone. Following the establishment of HOLAC there was an understanding that there would be a limit on prime ministerial appointments to the Crossbenches.
The number of appointments at any given time is in the gift of the Prime Minister: if the government is nominating a large number of peers, then it is likely — and has recently been the case — that the Prime Minister will offer HOLAC fewer places to fill.
It is not difficult to understand the reluctance of Prime Ministers to address these issues given their other priorities. We are also aware that some groups are anxious for deeper and wider reform. However, experience demonstrates that such reform is difficult to achieve. I am in no doubt that the present system is flawed and, in the absence of major legislation, we should not underestimate the potential gains from removing those flaws.
As we have set out, it is possible to have a House of Lords which is smaller than the Commons, which reflects the changing balance of political opinion in the country, and which allows for the membership and the ministerial front bench to be refreshed. Without these changes, the authority and reputation of the House will suffer.
The question is: do the party leaders and the Prime Minister have the courage to put aside their short-term interests and strike a firm agreement to make these necessary improvements?
If you enjoy the Constitution Unit blog, sign up for updates in the left sidebar, join our mailing list for news of our events and research, and support us through a one-off or regular donation. The author image is used courtesy of a Creative Commons licence. The Constitution Unit Blog. Like this: Like Loading They were elected by the other hereditary peers and when one dies the remaining peers of the same party elect a new one.
The irony is the only elected members of the House of Lords are hereditary peers. They are replaced when they retire by the new bishop. In , the Conservative Government became conscious that a house entirely of hereditary peers was becoming a problem in modern society. They made it possible for new people from different walks of life to come into the Lords by introducing peers who were in the Lords until they died but could not pass their title on to their descendants.
This was also the first time that women entered the House of Lords, as women had not been able to sit even if they inherited a title.
Some people chosen are nominated by the political parties. Since , there has been an independent House of Lords Appointments Commission. The Commission receives nominations for non-party people and vets these and the party nominees to make sure that they are suitable.
The creation of Life Peers has brought into the House of Lords people with a range of professional expertise — former MPs and council leaders, diplomats, senior civil servants, academics, doctors, leaders of religious faiths, business people and so on. Large numbers have been appointed, however, and the House of Lords now has over members. This makes it the largest parliamentary assembly apart from the Chinese Parliament. There are around Independent peers. These are called Crossbenchers in the Lords because of where they sit.
Previous Next. About Members of Parliament MPs. The workings of Parliament. About Backbench MPs. The House of Lords. Hereditary Peers Until the second half of the 20 th century the House of Lords was made up of men who had a peerage from the monarch, mostly large landowners.
By the late 19 th century they overwhelmingly supported the Conservative Party. Reasons for greater confidence. I suggest that there are four reasons why the House of Lords, for all its strangeness, may feel—and indeed may be justified to feel—more confident than previously to intervene in policy debates and to challenge the executive. The first and most obvious is that heredity is no longer the main route into the chamber. This was a clearly anachronistic practice in a modern democracy, and did little to gain the House of Lords respect.
Although a number of hereditary peers remain, they are a small fraction of the previous total, and furthermore were chosen in elections by their peers largely on their record in the House. Most are active parliamentarians and many are individually well-respected. Figure 1: Party balance in House of Lords before and after reform. Second, and at least as important, the party balance in the chamber has fundamentally changed.
While previously it was permanently dominated by the Conservatives, it is now a chamber of no overall party control. When Labour was in government, in contrast, they had to rely on the restraint of the Conservatives not to defeat their legislation. Peers therefore learned to act with great caution and not use most of the power they had. In particular conventions grew up that government manifesto measures should not be blocked. This situation broadly remains, although in the Labour Party went on to become marginally the largest party in the chamber for the first time.
The new House of Lords is clearly more representative than its predecessor. But in terms of party balance it can also be argued to be more representative than the House of Commons. Our single member constituency system for the lower house, like yours, tends to produce inflated majorities for the governing party and under-represent minor parties in particular.
In the and parliaments the situation was quite extreme. At the election Labour won 63 per cent of seats on 43 per cent of the vote. These figures are shown in Figure 2. Applying the measures political scientists use to gauge proportionality confirms that the distribution of seats in the Lords is far more proportionate than that in the Commons.
Figure 2: Party balance in House of Commons seats and votes, In part for these reasons, the Lords seems to enjoy greater public support than previously, and elite attitudes to the chamber have also changed, particularly on the Labour side.
These views were echoed in surveys we conducted of public opinion. The final reason that the Lords may feel more justified in flexing its political muscles is the lack of further reform since In the early months of the government, and even the early years, ministers could complain that an unelected chamber had no mandate to meddle in their legislation, and that the chamber instead should be reformed.
However, the longer this reform is delayed, the less such arguments sound convincing. If the government really wanted to democratise the Lords it has now had almost ten years to do so. It can be argued that ministers are the last who can complain that the chamber is unelected—if they want it to change then they should introduce a bill to reform it. If this included provision for elected members it would probably have popular support.
These are not my arguments alone. All these justifications for greater assertiveness on the part of the Lords are regularly made in the corridors at Westminster, not least by the peers themselves. The longer time goes on the more they are also entering into the discourse of journalists, other commentators and the general public. These are the things that could make the peers feel more confident—but are they? What is the evidence of this greater confidence?
Evidence of greater confidence. There is mounting evidence, I suggest, both in what the peers say and what they do. The greater assertiveness of the Lords has also been recognised by government, which has sought to act in response. The first evidence comes from the views of peers themselves. In a parallel survey to that conducted amongst MPs we asked peers whether they believed that reform had made the chamber more legitimate. In total 78 per cent of members of the House of Lords believed that it had.
This figure is somewhat suppressed by views of the Conservatives—who had originally opposed reform and are reluctant to now acknowledge that any good came of it. Amongst Labour peers, 88 per cent believed the chamber was more legitimate. Over 90 per cent of them believed the chamber was justified to vote against unpopular government measures, even if they appeared in a manifesto bill.
This included over 80 per cent of Labour peers. But their belief that legitimacy has grown shows that reform has had an important impact. This is clear from the public statements of members as well as in their privately confessed views.
There are many instances that could be cited from Lords debate. The Liberal Democrats—the third party who now effectively hold the balance of power in most votes in the chamber—have been particularly strident in their views.
They have long supported proportional representation for the House of Commons, as they are consistently under-represented there despite now holding over 60 seats. Liberal Democrat leaders questioned the validity of the general election, when Labour won a majority of seats on only 35 per cent of the vote. They have repeatedly renounced the convention whereby government manifesto bills are allowed a relatively free passage through the House of Lords, describing this as the product of the bygone age when the chamber was Conservative-dominated and largely made up of hereditary peers.
What the peers think is perhaps less important, of course, than what they actually do. Quantitative measures tell at best only half the story, and much of the influence goes on in parliamentary corridors and ministerial offices out of public view.
But there are some measures we can look at with respect to the House of Lords which are instructive. There have always been large numbers of amendments made to government bills in the chamber, which can run into thousands per year. But most of these are government amendments, which may result from poorly drafted legislation, or respond to points made when the bill was in the House of Commons, as well as to debates in the House of Lords.
Numbers of amendments alone therefore do not tell us very much. In recent years there have been large numbers of such defeats, and this figure appears to be rising. In the session that ended in early November this year, there were 62 government defeats. In the previous long post-election session in —02 there were 56, and in the —98 session there were In total there have been over government defeats in the chamber since it was reformed in Figure 3: Government defeats in the House of Lords, — Figure 3 shows the number of defeats in the chamber in each session since You can see a rise after , and particularly after However, this could be interpreted, as it is by some Labour ministers, as simply demonstrating that the House of Lords is more hostile to Labour governments.
As you can see, the level of defeats was consistently low during the Conservative years —97—averaging 13 per year—but was exceptionally high during the —79 Labour government, reaching a peak of in its second parliamentary session alone. But although the Lords undoubtedly made life more difficult for Labour governments in the past, I think that we are now seeing a different pattern. If the Conservatives were in government, Labour and the Liberal Democrats would almost certainly combine to defeat them in the Lords, so we would not see a return to the formerly quiet times.
However, this cannot be definitively shown until we have a Conservative government. The number of defeats the government suffers therefore gives some indication of greater assertiveness on the part of the Lords, but is not on its own conclusive proof that the chamber has changed. Another measure that may provide greater evidence is the extent to which the House of Lords is prepared to insist on its amendments. In this case the bill shuttles back and forth between the chambers until they either agree, or the bill is dropped, or occasionally the government uses its power to bring the bill back in the following session and pass it without the support of the House of Lords.
In two cases it insisted once, and then backed down. In one case it insisted twice, and in the last case it insisted three times—meaning that the bill shuttled back and forth three times before the matter was resolved. This was an increase on the record under the previous Labour government, when over the whole period —70, the Lords had only insisted once on an amendment. In the —05 parliament there were insistences on 17 bills.
In most cases there was just one insistence before either the Lords backed down or some kind of compromise was reached. In three cases there were two rounds of insistence. This seems a sure sign that the Lords are prepared to throw away the caution that guided them in the past, and stick to their ground when they believe that the government is wrong.
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