Elected Second Chambers and Their Powers: An International Survey

In May 2011, Britain's Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government published proposals for reform of the House of Lords. In a White Paper and draft bill they set out detailed plans for a largely or wholly elected second chamber. These marked the latest stage in a long‐running debate on Lords reform. The government's proposals aim to change the composition of the second chamber, suggesting that there will be no change to its powers or the conventions governing relations with the House of Commons. But this expectation has been disputed. The House of Lords presently does not make full use of its powers, and many anticipate that it would if its members became elected. This paper reviews the composition of all second chambers internationally, showing that wholly directly elected chambers make up the minority, and that both mixed chambers and indirect election are common. It then reviews the formal powers of all largely and wholly elected chambers. This shows that amongst parliamentary systems the formal powers of the House of Lords are relatively great. But second chamber powers, as well as their composition, vary widely.     

Does It Matter If the House of Lords isn't Reformed? Perspectives from a Symposium at Trinity Hall,Cambridge

In May 2011 the Coalition government published a draft bill for reform of the House of Lords, proposing an upper chamber composed of 80% elected and 20% appointed members serving for single 15‐year terms. These plans reflect aspects of the stated positions of the main political parties, votes in the House of Commons, and broader political and scholarly debates over the past decade. Nevertheless, there is significant opposition from across the political spectrum, and there is a significant possibility that the proposed reforms will not be enacted before the next general election. This article draws on the views of participants (including three current peers) in a Symposium at Trinity Hall, Cambridge to argue that the likely failure of the reforms may be less disastrous than many suppose. Especially since the 1999 reforms, the House of Lords is in many ways a more active and legitimate chamber than is commonly realised.     

Reforming the Conventions Regarding Parliamentary Scrutiny of Ministerial Actions

Parliamentary scrutiny of government ministers is limited by the convention that one house of parliament cannot compel a member of the other house to appear before it. This convention limits the Senate's capacity to examine ministers who are members of the House of Representatives. It has its origins in UK parliamentary practice, and is given alleged legal force in Australia by virtue of section 49 of Australia's constitution. That section effectively says that Australia's current parliamentary powers, privileges and immunities are those of the UK House of Commons in 1901.
However analysis of UK practice prior to the twentieth century reveals a surprising picture. Far from protecting members of one house from the other house's inquiries, it would seem that invitations issued by one chamber to a member of the other were never refused, an element of 'custom and practice' now conveniently overlooked. Furthermore, the purpose of the powers had nothing to do with protecting ministers. On the contrary, their origins He in a desire to ensure the strength of parliamentary accountability. If modern Australian practice is to be true to historical House of Commons practice, consideration should be given to ensuring that each chamber does have guaranteed access to ministers of the other house.     

An Elected Upper House and Other Fallacies

All fashionable political talk is of an elected House of Lords. Doing this smart, new unthought‐out thing, says Edward Pearce, means dissolving the reliably rebellious upper house regularly rejecting bad bills from Tory and Labour governments, for a House as submissive as the Commons. Second‐line politicians will replace the difficult individual people, soldiers, doctors, academics, scientists, assorted and distinguished experts who, by lucky muddle, go there today. Far better, he says, to abolish actual titles which create a false idea of privilege, but continue drawing upon independent professional specialists. Also, Ministers should be barred from the pernicious Mandelson Effect, of making an instant Minister by life‐ennoblement, huge powers conferred without a voter in sight. An upper house called ‘The Upper House’, chosen as now for competence, will be a House of Commoners, of Independence, of Contradiction. Elected Party‐liners under guidance would be a House of Sheep.     

A Proposal for Simultaneous Reform of the House of Commons and House of Lords

The disproportional electoral system of the House of Commons is increasingly contested, while the undemocratic composition of the House of Lords has been criticised for a century. I first argue that simultaneous reform of both chambers creates the opportunity for far more optimal outcomes than possible under attempts to reform just one chamber. I then argue that bicameralism should continue so that the UK can be represented in two, currently convoluted, ways: as a singular polity in partisan terms and as both an aggregate of constituencies and union of nations, in geographic terms. The former would best take place in a reformed House of Commons, responsible for government formation, and composed of around 300 MPs elected by ‘pure’ proportional representation. The latter would best take place in a reformed House of Lords of around 300 peers, elected by plurality voting from single-member constituencies. Together, these reforms would improve governance, representation, legitimacy, accountability and the robustness of the union, while retaining celebrated facets of the status quo such as simplicity and the direct constituency link.     

The House of Lords: A Deliberative Democratic Defence

This article defends the idea of an appointed House of Lords using deliberative democratic theory. The analysis suggests that while one might well think that current appointment procedures leave much to be desired, a reformed but still appointed House of Lords would be better at maximising the deliberative democratic qualities of inclusiveness and the scrutiny of arguments than a fully elected one; indeed, that election might do actual damage. It suggests that the debate thus far has been focused too narrowly on an outdated account of democracy, and too narrowly on the peculiarities of the House of Lords in isolation from its institutional context.     

Can the Boundary Commissions Help the Conservative Party? Constituency Size and Electoral Bias in the United Kingdom

As part of a strategy to remove perceived biases operating against it in the system used for elections to the House of Commons, the British Conservative party is promoting a revision of the rules used by the Boundary Commissions to ensure greater equality in constituency electorates. A Bill designed to achieve this—and also to reduce the size of the House—was introduced to the House of Lords in 2007. This paper critiques that Bill and suggests an alternative formulation that would better achieve the goal, whilst identifying a number of operational difficulties that its implementation would involve.     

Elected or Selected? The Continuing Constitutional Conundrum of House of Lords Reform

The 1911 Parliament Act decreed that Lords reform was ‘an urgent question which brooks no delay’, yet the subsequent 112 years have witnessed only sporadic and inchoate reforms. The issue has invariably suffered both from interparty disagreement between the Conservatives and Labour and, more importantly, intraparty disagreements owing to the divergent views and irreconcilable disagreements among Labour MPs over ‘what is to be done?’, and recognition that any reform which enhanced the legitimacy of the second chamber would threaten the pre-eminence of the House of Commons and a Labour government therein. A similar fate is likely to befall the Labour Party's latest proposal for replacing the current House of Lords with an elected second chamber. Meanwhile, the Conservative peer, Lord Norton, is seeking to place the House of Lords Appointments Commission (HOLAC) on a statutory basis and impose stricter criteria on prime ministerial nominations for peerages. Yet, this would still leave any Prime Minister with considerable powers of patronage in appointing members of the second chamber. This article therefore suggests that a Prime Minister should only be permitted to nominate 20 per cent of the membership, with the rest appointed via HOLAC itself, thereby depoliticising the process as far as practicably possible, and imbuing it with greater public trust.     

A Long Way to Go: The Final Report of the Speaker's Conference on Parliamentary Representation

The Speaker's Conference on Parliamentary Representation reported in January 2010. The report calls for a host of measures to improve the representativeness of the House of Commons and to revitalise political parties, as well as to enhance citizenship education, develop youth and community citizenship engagement programmes, and more generally to revitalise British democracy. Early responses indicate that the government and political parties will take the report seriously. The report is thoughtful, thorough and extensive, a treasure trove for policy makers, advocates and researchers. If it has a weakness, it is that it shows a better understanding of parliamentary reform than of party reform.     

Lords Reform: Some Inconvenient Truths

The failure of the Coalition government's attempt to reform the House of Lords has by no means taken further reform off the political agenda. The commitment to installing an elected upper chamber is still widely shared across the political spectrum, on the basis of perceptions that the House of Lords lacks democratic legitimacy. Against this view, this article considers recent literature upon non‐electoral representation, deliberative democracy and bicameralism, which together highlight the possibility of an unelected second chamber playing a legitimate role within a wider (democratic) system of government. The article then considers the House of Lords from this perspective, reflecting on changes in the upper chamber since the 1999 reforms and evaluating its role within the wider political system. The paper concludes by suggesting that political debate should focus upon small‐scale reforms to ensure that the Lords becomes more effective, representative and legitimate, within the constraints of its present role.     

Safe as Houses? Conservative Social Policy,Public Opinion and Parliament

Social policy is of key importance to contemporary society, accounting for two thirds of public expenditure and, through provision such as the NHS, pensions, benefits, schools, universities and social care, touching on the lives of much of the population on a daily basis. It has also been one of the areas where the Conservative party have sought to change their image, and to some extent policies, under David Cameron. Drawing upon a range of evidence, including interviews with more than ten per cent of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, this article examines the potential challenges for a Conservative government of either stance, focusing on the extent of possible support for the Conservatives' approach to social policy amongst three key groups: the public, MPs, and members of the House of Lords.     

The House of Lords: The Working of the Electoral Process in the 1999 Act of Parliament

This article investigates the working of the 1999 Act of Parliament in relation to the electoral process. One of the more controversial measures in the 1999 Act was the preservation of the representation of the hereditary element in the House of Lords. In the 2007-2008 session of Parliament, Lord Avebury introduced the House of Lords (Amendment) Bill, to repeal this electoral process, and Lord (David) Steel of Aikwood introduced the House of Lords Bill, which had provisions to the same effect as Lord Avebury's Bill. The working of this electoral process is therefore likely to be a topic of debate in the 2008-2009 session of the House of Lords. We suggest that there are three possible options to deal with the likely future issues for this electoral process. These we present as a contribution to a wider debate on the way forward for this constitutional issue.     

Ministerial Responsiveness in Westminster Systems: Institutional Choices and House of Commons Debate, 1832–1915

In Westminster systems, governments enjoy strong agenda‐setting powers but are accountable to an inquisitorial opposition. This article provides insights into the origins of this arrangement from the British House of Commons, drawing primarily on a new data set of a half million parliamentary speeches. We show that, according to a novel measure we develop, government ministers became more responsive to opposition members of parliament in the same period that the government's agenda power was most conclusively strengthened—roughly, the two decades culminating in Balfour's “railway timetable” of 1902. We argue that this increase in responsiveness helps to explain why opposition members of parliament acceded to reductions in their procedural power. We thus highlight a link between government strength and opposition scrutiny in the historical development of the Westminster system.     

‘Somewhat more disruptive than we had in mind’1: The Boundary Commission for England's 2011 Proposed Redistribution of Parliamentary Constituencies

In February 2011 the UK Parliament passed an Act that both reduced the number of MPs to be elected to the House of Commons and significantly altered the rules for the definition of Parliamentary constituencies. After six redistributions in which organic criteria—MPs representing places with a community of interest—dominated the redrawing of constituency boundaries, the new rules gave precedence to an arithmetic criterion: all constituencies must have electorates within 5 per cent of the national quota (average). Seven months later the Boundary Commission published its initial proposals for a new set of 502 constituencies implementing these new rules. This paper evaluates the amount of change to the country's electoral map that this involves, identifies the main features of the new constituency configurations, and assesses their likely impact on UK political life.     

Feminising British Politics: Six Lessons from Devolution in Scotland and Wales

Modest levels of female representation at the House of Commons are in sharp contrast to the Nordic‐levels of representation achieved in the Scottish Parliament and the National Assembly for Wales since devolution in 1999. One apparent advantage of devolution is the opportunity that it provides for lesson‐learning across jurisdictions. This article offers six lessons on women's political representation—three positive and three negative—drawn from the experience of devolution in Scotland and Wales. We draw conclusions from these lessons, including the need to keep parties under scrutiny to ensure they deliver on their rhetorical commitments. We also postulate that gender equality might prove too important to be left to political parties and consider whether there is a need to consider stronger measures such as mandatory quotas.     

Devolution,Evolution, Revolution … Democracy? What's Really Happening to English Local Governance?

The Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill 2015–2016[HL] was introduced into the House of Lords as Bill No. 1 in the 2015–2016 parliamentary session. The Bill forms a critical element of the government's high‐profile policy of devolving powers and responsibilities to local areas within England. The transition from first‐generation ‘city deals’ to second‐generation ‘devolution deals’ within five years provides a sense of the pace and development of the reform agenda but there is also a strong sense that something is missing. ‘Missing’ in the sense of an understanding of the specific type of devolution on offer, ‘missing’ in the sense of how an explosion of bilateral new ‘deals’ will be offset against the obvious risks of fragmentation and complexity, and ‘missing’—most importantly—in relation to the democratic roots that might be put in place to counterbalance the economic thrust and make the reform agenda sustainable. It is in exactly this context that this article argues that the full potential of the current devolution agenda will only be realised when the Conservative government fulfils its September 2014 commitment to wider civic engagement about how England is governed.     

Analysing Reform: The House of Commons, 2001–5

This article examines the nature and implications of reforms to the House of Commons that were implemented during the 2001–5 Parliament under the guise of 'modernisation'. It describes the reforms that were implemented during this period in order to enhance the House of Commons' scrutiny capacity over the executive and attempts to assess the degree to which these reforms represent a shift in the balance of power. In order to ground the analysis and provide a clear conceptualisation of power the article adopts a resource-dependency framework that identifies and traces the transfer and deployment of key resources in order to prevent or facilitate change. The article concludes that the common distinction between 'modernising parliament' and 'parliamentary reform' needs refining and offers an 'incremental-bounded reform' model which provides a framework for not only gauging and understanding the process of reform but also explaining the nature of restraints. This model suggests that scrutiny reforms implemented during 2001–5 should not be dismissed, particularly in the context of the parliamentary decline thesis. A number of significant 'cracks and wedges' have been achieved and these may expand over time through a gradual process of extension, accretion and spillover.     

Estimating Ideal Points in the British House of Commons Using Early Day Motions

This article develops a new method for estimating the ideological preferences of members of the British House of Commons. Existing methods produce implausible results due to high levels of party cohesion and strategic voting on the part of opposition parties. To circumvent these problems, this article estimates MP preferences using Early Day Motions (EDMs) as an alternative to roll‐call votes. The Bayesian ideal point model for the decision to sign an EDM takes into account both policy preferences and signing costs. The estimates obtained have greater face validity than previous attempts to measure preferences in the House of Commons, recovering the expected order of parties and of members within parties. The estimates successfully predict voting behavior in the House of Commons. As with other Bayesian ideal point methods, this approach produces natural uncertainty estimates and allows for easy calculation of quantities of interest such as member ranks.     

Alastair Campbell,exit stage left: Do the ‘Phillis’ recommendations represent a new chapter in political communications or is it ‘business as usual’?

That there has been a breakdown in trust between government, the media and the people in the UK is now a commonplace axiom—indeed, it was the starting point of the Review of Government Communications undertaken by Bob Phillis in 2003 at the promptings of the House of Commons Select Committee on Public Administration. The Review reported in February 2004, and the government has indicated that it intends to accept the majority of its recommendations. The Review was supposed to usher in a new era in the relationship between government, the media and the people but this might turn out to be a false expectation. Because the Review was based on a number of false assumptions, it runs the risk of creating a system which entrenches some of the worst aspects of the old system without achieving any significant improvements. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications     

Out of the Hands of the Parties: Women's Legislative Recruitment at Westminster

At the next general election the percentage of women elected to the smaller House of Commons risks being lower than in the current parliament, where they constitute 22 percent of all MPs. The 2008–10 Speaker's Conference identified many of the barriers faced by women and other under‐represented groups and made a series of recommendations, only some of which have been introduced. The Government favours a voluntary approach to Recommendation 24, which calls for diversity data monitoring, whilst Recommendation 25 which calls for serious consideration of legislative quotas in the absence of a significant increase in the numbers of women in 2010, appears forgotten. A second Speaker's Conference should therefore be established; the issue of women's under‐representation should be taken up above the party level—with legislative quotas introduced to address the system level failure of democratic representation at Westminster.