Video 3.2 House of Lords Reform

The House of Lords Reform Bill is currently before Parliament and a House of Lords Reform is something that's been discussed for a very long time. It's more than 100 years since the Parliament Act was passed and it changed the balance of power between The House of Commons and the House of Lords, making the Commons the more dominant chamber.

But when that reform was enacted it was explicitly said to be a stop-gap measure pending full reform of The House of Lords by means of a shift to an elected Upper Chamber. In July 2012, 80 percent of people surveyed by IPSOS MORI supported House of Lords reform although few of them thought it was an important priority.

But while there’s a broad consensus that The House of Lords needs to be reformed, there's less agreement about how it should be reformed. And so, several consultations on from the Blair government's first attempt of this, there was a sense that we're simply going around in circles.

There were two difficulties with the way with the debate is conducted about House of Lords reform. First was a great focus on questions of composition. How should people get to the House of Lords? Should they be appointed, or elected, or get there in some other way? This is obviously an important question. But it's one that can't really be addressed properly unless prior issues are considered.

What powers does the House of Lords have? What should its powers be? And what function does it serve? Why do we want to have a second chamber at all? The second area of difficulty is that the debate focuses on questions of legitimacy without very much attention to questions of efficacy, to questions about how The House of Lords ought to be composed in order to deliver the role that we want to see.

So, this dual focus on questions of composition and legitimacy, leads to the simplistic conclusion that the House of Lords must be elected. A better way of looking at this is to ask firstly, what is the House of Lords’ proper role? What do we actually want it to achieve? And then to ask, what approach to its composition will best enable it to fulfill that role? Finally, we need to consider whether that approach to its composition is one that can be reconciled with concerns about legitimacy.

Let me explain how The House of Lords works today. The House of Lords is composed of around 825 Peers. The vast majority of these are life peers. 700 life peers have been appointed by successive Prime Ministers to serve for the whole of their lives. The next group is the 92 hereditary peers. These are left over following the House of Lords Reform Act in 1999. That act removed the majority but not all of the hereditaries. And the other significant group are the 26 Church of England Bishops, who serve in The House of Lords in recognition of the established status of the Church of England. What then of the powers and role of the House of Lords today? The House of Lords plays two crucial constitutional functions; it scrutinizes the work of the government and it operates as a revising chamber, scrutinizing the legislation with the government brings to the House of Commons.

In particular, the House of Lords can and does prompt the House of Commons to think again. But importantly, the House of Lords has no power of veto. The most that it can do is delay the enactment of legislation by one year. This recognizes that the House of Lords does not have the same claim to a democratic mandate as the elected House of Commons.

Rather, the House of Lords operates as a counterweight to the executive-controlled House of Commons. And this is especially important in our constitutional system. In many countries, there is an external constraint on Parliament in the form of a written constitution which can be enforced by the courts.

Courts that can ultimately strike down a legislation if Parliament acts unconstitutionally. Because the British Parliament is sovereign, the courts do not have the ultimate power of control. And so, it's crucial that within our parliamentary system we have an internal check and balance on the powers of the government and the House of Commons. And that's the crucial function which the House of Lords today fulfills.