Draft House of Lords Bill

---

Main benefits

• To create an elected second chamber to ensure those who make laws can be held to account by the people who have to live by those laws.

Main elements

To build on the government proposals set out in the White Paper published in July 2008. The main conclusions of that White Paper, which followed cross-party discussions, were that:

• The reformed second chamber should be 80 per cent or 100 per cent elected;

• The 26 Bishops should not retain reserved places in a 100 per cent elected House, but may so in a House with an appointed element;

• The link between a peerage and a place in the second chamber should be broken;

• The government should not hold a majority in the second chamber and its members should be independent;

• In an 80 per cent elected House the Appointments Commission should be placed on a statutory footing; and

• That there should be no changes to the powers of the second chamber and that the House of Commons should retain its primacy.

Dods commentary

Labour has been promising to reform the House of Lords since it came to power in 1997, but progress has been relatively slow.

While all but 92 of the hereditary peers have been removed from the upper house, the chamber remains unelected and appointments rest with party leaders.

The draft Bill stops short of proposing a completely elected chamber in favour of an 80 per cent elected House. This would see the remaining hereditary peers ejected, but the 26 Bishops would remain.

A ComRes poll taken in January 2009 showed Conservative peers (73 per cent) are overwhelmingly of the view that changes to the status quo to remove the Bishops are unnecessary.

Labour peers predominantly (49 per cent) say that there should not be any faith based representation in the Upper House.

Gordon Brown may hope that by pushing reform of the Lords he can paint David Cameron as being supportive of the hereditary principle.

Cameron has said he is notionally in favour of an elected chamber, but significant moves to democratise the chamber are unlikely to find much support amongst Conservative peers and he would be keen to avoid an unnecessary internal battle over the issue.

As such the Conservative leader is reported to see reform of the upper house as "a third-term issue", very low down the priority list.

An incoming Conservative government would also not have an inbuilt majority in the Lords, meaning Cameron is likely to want to appoint a raft of new peers in-order to adjust the balance of power in the chamber.

Nick Clegg has called for a wholly elected House of Lords to be renamed the Senate in order to detach the legislature from peerages.

And the Liberal Democrat leader wants the government to adopt the recommendations of the Power Commission, which favour the election of Senators for three parliamentary terms, with a third of the House elected at each General Election.

The parachuting of people into the Lords so that may take up cabinet positions - such as Lord Mandelson - has highlighted the accountability dilemma.

And the Electoral Reform Society believe it "not appropriate" that the second chamber of a democratic society be hand-picked by the political establishment and have called for members to be elected by the Single Transferable Vote system.

It is unlikely that the Bill will become law given the limited legislative time available, and the lack of appetite for serious reform amongst many MPs and peers.