100 years later, we will finally be able to expel a rotten Lord

Joe Wright, 2 April 2014

The daily churn of debate in Parliament can amass into a blur over time. The rise and fall of GDP, house prices, the EU, are all issues that come and go while rarely seeming to progress before some other incident diverts the House’s attention. But every now and then, something happens that can conceivably be called historic. The passage of the Same-sex Marriage Bill, for example, is one which will, whatever your opinion, be remembered and written about – possibly as the most important act of this government.

Another, on a smaller scale, is the largely unnoticed Private Members’ Bill on Lords Reform, which just passed its last major hurdle. It won’t create a dramatic shift in how Britain is run, nor a noticeable change in how the Lords functions. But this Bill is a quiet, small and very rare step toward improving a part of Parliament that has avoided democratisation (rather successfully) for centuries.

Lords reform is a slow and painful process, beginning in 1911 with Lloyd George asserting the primacy of the elected House by removing the ability of Lords (then only hereditary or appointed by the Church of England) to veto money Bills, and any other Bill for more than three parliaments, from the Commons. The second milestone, 47 years later, loosened the hereditary grip by giving the Commons the ability to appoint peers – life peers – to make the House more merit-based.

Another 41 years later and the majority of hereditary peers were removed from the House of Lords, leaving only 92 active in the House. The membership was reduced by 1,330 to 669 mainly life peers. This may seem inconsequential today, but it shows how absurdly long it took Britain to largely embrace a basic Enlightenment principle: high birth alone should not confer power.

But so awkward does our second chamber remain that we have now created a system where ‘whenever [one of the remaining hereditary peers] dies, another one has to be elected in a by-election – whose electorate consists solely of other hereditary peers from that group. This means that the only peers who are actually elected to our Upper House are those who have inherited a peerage. Yes, welcome to the topsy-turvy world of the Lords constitution.’ (Politics Home article)

So, what will this new Bill change? In the words its sponsor, Dan Byles, three elements:

• For the first time ever it brings in the right for members of the HOL to retire or resign.

• It will remove members of the HOL who don’t turn up.

• It will bring the HOL into line with the House of Commons by removing members who are convicted of a serious criminal offence and sentenced to more than twelve months in prison.

After over a century’s reform, we can finally eject those who don’t fulfil their duties or who are serious criminals. In return for wielding a vote on the law of the land, that isn’t much to ask for.

One reason Lords reform’s so difficult is that nobody can agree on an alternative (this is a particularly interesting suggestion), as the Lib Dems discovered in 2012. This small, measured change is the best that can be achieved right now. It is historic in its own under-stated way.

(It‘s quite pleasing that this is a Private Members’ Bill, a piece of legislation initiated and lobbied for by a single Commoner, which has finally brought a little more accountability to an age-old institution.)