Just one in 10 think Lords should remain unelected

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The government has announced it will be launching a review into the powers of the House of Lords

 

Just one in 10 think the House of Lords should remain unelected, according to a new poll by the Electoral Reform Society.

The findings come after the government announced it will be launching a review into the powers of the House of Lords, led by Conservative hereditary peer Lord Strathclyde.

The former leader of the House of Lords told the BBC that the Lords had the “power but not the authority” to challenge the Commons over the issue, adding that they had behaved “deplorably” by seeking major changes to tax credits cuts.

According to the poll, by BMG Research almost half (48 per cent) of the public think the Lords should be an elected chamber, while nearly a quarter (22 per cent) back abolition. This compares to one in ten who back the status quo.

Commenting on the poll, deputy chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society Darren Hughes said the public “want real reform of the House of Lords – not just tinkering around the edges”:

“The time for root and branch reform is now – it is simply wrong in a modern democracy for legislators to remain unelected.

“The government are tying themselves in knots over the question of Lords reform, with George Osborne saying he supports an elected upper house, while this review only looks at the issue of conventions. They shouldn’t be making changes to our constitution out of partisan interest, just because they lost a couple of votes – they have to deal with the crux of the matter: the make-up of the constitutional calamity that is the House of Lords.

“Instead of simply emasculating our revising chamber, they should ensure it has the legitimacy it needs to be a real check on executive power. That can only happen through electing it.”

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14 Responses to “Just one in 10 think Lords should remain unelected”

  1. Bob Roberts

    No, no, no. The idea of a revising chamber is to think twice about the mistakes or the flaws that democracy might induce. If it was simply a second opinion on every law, then we’d be better off doubling the size of the Commons. The whole point of separate houses is to have separate functions

    If the Lords were made elected, it would simply become a mirror of the Commons, and become far more partisan than it is at the moment. What we need is processes to ensure that genuine merit as opposed to patronage is the criteria for entering the Lords, not to double up the flaws that democracy brings. Yes, democracy is the least-bad system of government. But genuine experts, revising and deliberating (not making policy) are needed to refine its worst excesses. The fact that the Lords is currently unelected means that it hardly ever blocks the will of an elected government, merely refines some of the finer points.

  2. Bob Roberts

    Exactly. The Lords need to quietly get on with their work, tweaking and refining, and deliberating in a less partisan atmosphere.

    I think that there needs to be term limits, a cap on numbers, and it needs to be ensured that 80% of them are crossbenchers. The Bishops and hereditary peers should go too. But if we were to make it elected, it would lose all of its purpose, and become nothing more than a mirror of the Commons, or an American-style block, making the country ungovernable.

  3. blarg1987

    Maybe part of the solution can be staggered elections, so not to replace them all at once that way it mitigates sentiments at a particular time on an issue.

  4. Bob Roberts

    I’d have thought that the Lords would be more aristocratic than the Commons. The Lords has hereditary peers, whilst the Commons is mainly full of professionals, businesspeople and political bag-carriers.

    Anyway, why should any party have guaranteed representation? Why should the Lords be so blatantly political? It is supposed to be a revising chamber.

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