LONDON, (Reuters) – It has long been seen as the lesser chamber, an anachronism from Britain’s past, but the country’s unelected upper house of parliament briefly reclaimed its long-lost pre-eminence this week when it rejected the government’s welfare reforms.
The House of Lords, with its many elderly members and their ceremonial fur-fringed red robes, voted to delay cuts to benefits for low-earning families, with many arguing the proposals were morally indefensible and a threat to the lives of millions.
But their brief defiance of a decades-old convention not to delay passage of financial bills from the elected lower house, has caused an uproar and prompted Prime Minister David Cameron to launch an urgent review.
“If the Lords is intent on wrecking the manifesto of the elected government …. then of course we’ve got to address that,” the leader of the House of Commons Chris Grayling told the BBC yesterday. “There will have to be change.”
Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government at King’s College London, said the vote by the Lords against the government caused a constitutional difficulty because it suggested that the unelected upper house was acting as an opposition chamber.
The governing Conservative party has known that its bills could get a rough ride in the Lords, because it does not have a majority there, but the rejection of a financial matter amounted to a “constitutional issue” in the prime minister’s eyes.
“A convention exists and it has been broken. He has asked for a rapid review to see how it can be put back in place,” Cameron’s spokesman said.
Late yesterday, a spokesman said the government was setting up a review to “examine how to protect the ability of elected governments to secure their business in parliament”.
“The review will consider in particular how to secure the decisive role of the elected House of Commons in relation to its primacy on financial matters; and secondary legislation,” the spokesman said.
The last time the Lords blocked a finance bill that had been approved by the Commons was in 1909 when the defeat brought down the Liberal government of the day and prompted its successor to pass the Parliament Act of 1911 which severely limited the Lords’ powers.
Now, by convention, the upper chamber does not block financial bills or those that fulfil promises in the governing party’s election manifesto, but it can amend them, as it did on Monday, delaying the government’s flagship policy of welfare cuts just months into its five-year term.
The review was dismissed by Steven Fielding, professor of political history at Nottingham University, as an exercise in saving face.
Further reform of the upper chamber has been an objective of many British governments for more than a century, but progress has been slow, with a consensus on comprehensive change continually out of reach.
“One suspects that this is going to be back of the envelope stuff and it’ll probably go nowhere,” Fielding said.
Bogdanor suggested the situation could be clarified by putting the existing conventions that govern the Lords into law, as was done with the Parliament Act of 1911.
“I think that would be the right procedure now, to put these conventions into law, to codify them if you like so the Lords couldn’t do that again,” he told Reuters.
EXPERTISE
House of Lords members, known as peers, are appointed by the prime minister following arcane rules. Members include Seb Coe, the former Olympic gold medal-winning 1500 metre runner, Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer of the Phantom of the Opera musical, and Alan West, a former head of the Royal Navy.
One option open to the Conservative government would be to use the Prime Minister’s right to appoint members to the Lords to flood it with sympathisers. But that would likely reignite calls for an overhaul of the appointment system on which the Lords is based.
The most recent attempt at Lords reform, which would have made the majority of peers elected, was killed off in 2012.
The Lords, where the speaker sits on a wool seat to reflect the commodity’s importance in medieval England, can seem like an anachronism but its defenders point to the wide-ranging expertise of its peers, and a tradition of acting as a counter-balance to politicians.
For Fielding, the case for Lords reform is unchanged by the anti-government vote in the upper house because opinion polls showed that most of the public were on the same side as the Lords.
“If the people think the Lords are on the right side, the politics, the constitutional aspect of it, don’t really matter,” he said.
For those who have long campaigned for constitutional reform, the current confusion was evidence that now was the time to act.
“If the government is serious about dealing with the ‘constitutional crisis’ our democracy is in, they should ensure the public get a say at last in who represents us in the upper chamber,” said The Electoral Reform Society’s deputy chief executive Darren Hughes.
