House of Lords

This article was last updated in February 2012.

The House of Lords is the second chamber of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Its principal functions are to initiate, scrutinise and amend legislation. It has no general power of veto, but it attaches importance to its ability to return proposed legislation to the House of Commons, the lower chamber of Parliament, for further consideration.

Members and staff

The current membership of the House of Lords consists of

• about 670 "life peers", who had been appointed by current and previous administrations, including eminent professionals and members of previous governments;
• 26 "lords spiritual", who are current bishops and archbishops of the Church of England: and,
• 92 "hereditary peers", who had been elected from the membership of the previous House of Lords. (The exclusion of hereditary peers is among the legislative proposals for the reform of the House of Lords that are currently under consideration.)

The Leader of the House of Lords organises government business in the House of Lords, and the Lord Speaker is effectively its president. Besides presiding over debates, the Lord Speaker chairs the House Committee, which supervises the House of Lords administration. The Clerk of the Parliaments is the head of the House of Lords administration and is supported by an office providing corporate planning and related services. Committee Office Clerks organise inquiries, draft reports and sometimes travel with their committees.

The conduct of business

Government and opposition Peers sit on rows of benches facing each other in the magnificent House of Lords Chamber, on benches that are less closely spaced than those in the Commons chamber. Between them at one end is the Throne, and facing it at the other end are benches for the use of "cross-benchers", who are Peers with no party affiliation. Debates are chaired by the Lord Speaker, seated on the "woolsack" in front of the Throne. The procedures used in debates are similar to those governing the conduct of business in the House of Commons, but the conduct of debates in the House of Lords is noticeably different. Business is conducted on a much more consensual basis, with no formal government control over the timetable. As in the House of Commons, the time allocated to each item is agreed in advance by government and opposition whips, but in the House of Lords the agreement is interpreted flexibly and may be altered in the course of a debate. Bills are given detailed scrutiny, often by Peers who have expertise or experience in the matters that they deal with. Debates tend to involve lively exchanges, rather than the unrelated successions of prepared statements that tend to characterise Commons debates. Two select committees of the House of Lords provide Parliament with reports on the implications of domestic and European legislative proposals. The Lords Constitution Committee investigates the constitutional implications of Public Bills (as well as conducting enquiries into constitutional issues), and the European Union Committee with its seven sub-committees, reports on legislative proposals that are under consideration by the European Union.

Powers

The powers of the House of Lords are limited by a combination of law and convention. Under the Parliament Acts, money Bills become law one month after being sent to the House of Lords, and cannot be amended there, and other Commons Bills can only be held up for about a year, although the House of Commons can reintroduce them in the following session and pass them without the consent of the House of Lords. Under the Salisbury Convention, the House of Lords does not vote down a Bill that a government had mentioned in its election manifesto.

History

Strictly speaking, the House of Lords originated in the fourteenth century when the Commons took to meeting separately. For most practical purposes, however, it is identical to the Great Council, the Norman continuation of the Anglo-Saxon Witan or Witenagemot.

In the Middle Ages the Lords Spiritual were the majority. This changed in the reign of Henry VIII, when the dissolution of the monasteries removed abbots, priors and masters of orders, leaving the bishops outnumbered by the Lords Temporal. An act of 1641 removed them from the House, but it was repealed two decades later. When new bishoprics were created in the nineteenth century to cope with shifting populations, an act was passed limiting the number of Church of England bishops in the House to 26: the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Bishops of London, Durham and Winchester, and the 21 other diocesan bishops in office for longest, excluding the Bishop of Sodor and Man, whose diocese is outside the United Kingdom proper.

Chapter 14 of Magna Carta speaks of "earls and greater barons" receiving individual summons to the Council. Originally the question of who counted as a "greater" baron was political, but by the seventeenth century the House had evolved the doctrine that, if someone received a summons to Parliament and he or his heir attended, this created a "barony by writ of summons" descendible to heirs. In the Wensleydale case (1876) the House confirmed that, while the Queen, as fountain of honour, could create whatever titles she wished, with whatever rules of succession she wished, they could only confer seats in the House if they satisfied certain conditions; in particular, in that case, a life peerage could not. Parliament then passed an act authorizing a limited number of "Lords of Appeal in Ordinary", commonly known as "Law Lords", with life peerages, to carry out the House's business as a court of appeal. In 1958 another act allowed unlimited life peerages, and the first women entered the House under its provisions. Female inheritors of peerages were not allowed to sit in the House until 1963.

Under the Acts of union between England and Scotland in 1707, the Scottish peers elected for each Parliament 16 of their number. When Ireland joined the union in 1801, its peers were granted the right to elect 28 of their number, but in this case the elections were for life. After most of Ireland became independent in the 1920s, this procedure ceased to operate, and the representative peers of Ireland gradually died out, the last of them, the Earl of Kilmorey, dying in 1961. The Church of Ireland was represented by 4 bishops from 1801 to 1870, after which it was disestablished under the Gladstone government. In 1963, all Scottish peers were granted the right to sit in the House. Another reform in that act was to grant inheritors of peerages the right to disclaim them, thus allowing them to sit in the House of Commons instead (if elected).

Up to the early twentieth century, the Lords and Commons had comparable power, and Prime Ministers were about equally likely to sit in either House (Disraeli even moved to the Lords in the middle of his term of office, in 1876). Occasionally, the Sovereign might enforce the will of the Commons against the Lords by creating new peers, or threatening to do so. A convention evolved that the Lords would not interfere in financial matters. However, in 1909 the Lords violated this convention by rejecting the increase in death duties in Lloyd George's budget. Edward VII agreed to dissolve Parliament to allow the government to seek a fresh mandate. In the ensuing election in January 1910, the Liberals lost their large majority and came in neck and neck with the Unionists. However, the Irish Nationalists and Labour supported them and the Lords backed down. The new king, George V, then agreed to repeat the process, and a second election in December produced almost identical results. After the King agreed to create new peers if necessary, the Lords agreed to the Parliament Act 1911. This provided that, if the Commons passed a bill in three successive sessions over about two years, it could be sent for Royal Assent as an act if the Lords still refused to pass it. An exception was made for bills to extend the life of Parliament, which still required the Lords' agreement. Contrariwise, bills certified by the Speaker as "money bills" could be sent for Royal Assent if the Lords did not pass them within a month.

The 1911 act was only ever used three times (though the threat had its effects). In 1914 acts were passed under it to disestablish the Anglican church in Wales, and to set up what would now be called a devolved Parliament for Ireland. (The implementation of the latter was deferred on the outbreak of war, and events moved on, so that it never took effect at all.) And in 1949 it was used to pass the Parliament Act 1949, which amended it to say that a bill only had to be passed in two successive sessions over a period of about two years. This act was itself only used once before the 1997 election (for the War Crimes Act introduced by Mrs Thatcher's government). However, with the election of a government committed to reforming the House, the latter seems to have decided it had nothing to lose by exercising its powers to the full, and the act was used a number of times under the Labour government.

The main reform made by the Labour government was the removal of most hereditary peers. It si important to note here that this included peers of first creation, not just those who had inherited their titles. A compromise negotiated with the Conservative leader in the Lords (behind his leader's back, for which he was sacked) allowed 92 to remain for the time being, a tenth of the total existing at the time. Of the 92, 2 were ex officio (see above) and the remainder elected.

In addition, the Labour government removed the judicial authority of the House (apart from its own internal affairs), transferring them to a new Supreme Court, though its initial judges were simply the existing Law Lords.

Another change they made was to the chairing of the House. Originally the King presided, and in theory the Queen could do so today. In practice, the last monarch to preside over ordinary business in the House was Queen Anne, and the last time a monarch even attended to grant Royal Assent in person was in 1856. Nowadays the Queen attends only for the formal opening ceremony. In the absence of the monarch the House is chaired by its Speaker, an office until recently normally combined with that of Lord Chancellor and a Crown appointment. The Labour government separated the two posts and allowed the House to elect its own Speaker.

By the general election of 2010, all three main parties were committed in principle to a wholly or mainly elected House of Lords (or Senate). In 2011 the coalition government published a draft reform bill, subject to amendment after consultation. They plan to put the legislation through in time for the 2015 election. The proposal is to move to a house of 240 elected members, 60 appointed members and 12 bishops. These (apart from the bishops) would fill their posts for a 15-year term, without possibility of renewal. This would be introduced progressively over three Parliaments. Thus, in 2015, 80 new members would be elected and 20 appointed, while the existing House would select two-thirds of its members to continue to 2020. Similarly, in 2020, another 100 new members would be added and another third of the existing House removed, and the process would be completed in 2025. Thus the House would eventually consist mostly of elected members, but these would be elected for staggered long terms, so that the House of Commons would always have a more recent electoral mandate.