HOUSE OF LORDS REFORM

Many people (not just me) might think it odd that, when most European countries are experiencing the most difficult economic situation in a long long time, the U.K. coalition Government has chosen to spend time reforming the House of Lords, the upper chamber of Parliament.

Let's be honest, if the House of Lords did not exist, then you would not invent it. Its origins, as the name suggests, go back to the earliest days of Parliament in the fourteenth century, when the nobility (the Lords) met separately from the representatives of the middle classes (the Commons). Although during the Civil Wars of the 1640's between King and Parliament, the Lords were generally on the royalist side, they were not uniformly so. And when peace was restored, both houses retained their importance. Indeed, for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British Prime Minister was just as likely to be a peer as a commoner.

The crucial battles between the two chambers came in the years just before the first world war. After a series of skirmishes between the Liberal Government and the (Conservative-dominated) House of Lords, the Lords vetoed the 1909 finance bill based on the Government budget. This broke a long-standing convention that the Lords would not stand in the way of money bills, the traditional remit of the Commons, and was justified on the grounds that the budget did not reflect the will of the people. The Liberals tested that theory by holding a general election in January 1910; and although they did badly, they retained a majority thanks to the support of Irish nationalist M.P.'s. The budget was duly passed.

After that exhausting dispute, the Liberals decided to assert the supremacy of the Commons once and for all. A Parliament Act was introduced, which would do just that. Again it was rejected by the Lords, after tortuous discussions in joint committees. Again there was a general election, this time in December 2010; the outcome was pretty much unchanged. The King was then persuaded to say that if the Lords continued to defy the Commons on the Parliament Act, then he would create as many Liberal peers as necessary to get it through. The Lords backed down and the Parliament Act became law in the summer of 1911. Since then, the Lords have had no power over money bills; other public bills, generally those mentioned in the Queen's Speech setting out the Government's legislative programme, can not be vetoed indefinitely, but they can be delayed by up to two years.

The main effect of the Parliament Act was to make the Lords an advisory and amending, as opposed to a deciding, chamber. And in my view, it worked pretty well. Sure, there were a load of hereditary peers, whose only right to be there was an accident of birth. But there were also life peers, people who had been given a title. Some of those people were extremely knowledgeable on certain subjects, so it sometimes made a lot of sense to have them suggest amendments and improvements to bills put forward by hot-headed political zealots in the Commons. Bills which potentially affected everybody in the community - social care, for instance - were sometimes introduced in the Lords first, for that very reason.

So, the Lords became - in democratic terms - an anomaly. On the one hand, it was the guardian of democracy (notably under Margaret Thatcher, who was opposed more by the Lords than by the Commons); on the other, it was completely undemocratic itself. A curiously British solution.

There's a lot to be said for the saying "if it ain't broke, then don't fix it". Tony Blair, anxious to promote constitutional reform along with devolution to Scotland and Wales, decided that the Lords needed reforming. The obvious answer, if you were going to reform seriously, was to abolish the hereditary peers and have some sort of election for the whole house, making the Lords similar to other second houses in other countries. But that is not what happened. The 1999 reform got rid of most of the hereditary peers, except for 92 (I don't know where that precise number came from) as part of a reduction in the size of the house from 1,330 to 669; nothing was said about elections. Ten years later, Gordon Brown's Government put forward proposals to get rid of the remaining hereditaries, but it did not have time to implement them before it lost power.

And so here we are today, with a few hereditaries, a lot of life peers, and still no elections. Within the coalition Government, the Liberal Democrats, long-time experts on constitutional matters, are itching to put in place the comprehensive reform that (in their view) should have taken place long ago. In other words, an elected second chamber, as happens elsewhere. The Conservatives, on the other hand (and possibly the Labour opposition, though nobody is quite sure), are more sceptical. Although they accept that the current system is hard to defend, they worry that a fully elected House of Lords will become assertive, and aim for equal weight with the Commons, as (say) the Senate does with the House of Representatives in the United States. That would go against the history of Parliament, and in particular the Commons' victory by way of the Parliament Act. 

So, difficulties for the Coalition, and difficulties for the two major parties. But at the end of the day, does it really matter to the man on the Clapham omnibus? I would say, probably not, but it should. I would not have reformed the Lords in 1999 in the way it was done; and I would not do it now, because the timing is all worng. The way forward in my view would be for each party to include a proposal in their election manifestos for the next general election, and have the resulting Government implement a comprehensive reform at that time. However, I also predict that that is precisely what will not happen.

Walter Blotscher