The Royal Commission on Reform of the House of Lords: A House for the Future?
| Date | 01 January 2001 |
| Author | Meg Russell,Richard Cornes |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.00310 |
| Published date | 01 January 2001 |
REPORTS
The Royal Commission on Reform of the House of
Lords: A House for the Future?
Meg Russell* and Richard Cornes**
The Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords, chaired by Lord
Wakeham, published its report in January 2000.1The Commission’s purpose was
to consider the long term reform of the United Kingdom (UK)’s upper house. Its
establishment was announced in December 1998, when the government published
its House of Lords Bill to remove the hereditary peers from the chamber, and a
White Paper setting out its longer term intentions. The terms of reference for the
Royal Commission, set out in the White Paper, were as follows:
Having regard to the need to maintain the position of the House of Commons as the pre-
eminent chamber of Parliament and taking particular account of the present nature of the
constitutional settlement, including the newly devolved institutions, the impact of the
Human Rights Act and developing relations with the European Union:
•to consider and make recommendations on the role and functions of a second chamber;
•to make recommendations on the method or combination of methods of composition
required to constitute a second chamber fit for that role and those functions;
•to report by 31 December 1999.2
These were ambitious targets. The Commission did not meet until March 1999
so had only nine months to report. It was required to take into account the raft of
constitutional changes put into place since 1997, but to a large extent the
outcomes of these constitutional changes were impossible to predict. The ‘newly
devolved institutions’ in Scotland and Wales were elected two months after the
Commission first met, and only assumed their powers two months after that. The
Human Rights Act came into force across the UK only in October 2000, ten
months after the Commission had reported. The timescale allowed little time for
either public consultation or background research. In particular the Commission
had little opportunity to draw on the experiences of overseas constitutions, many
of which already exhibit characteristics which the UK is likely to develop as a
result of these reforms. It seems impossible that any commission, in these
circumstances, could ‘take account of the present nature of the constitutional
settlement’, as the Royal Commission was required to do. Indeed an
investigation into the role, functions and composition of the second chamber
requires some fundamental constitutional questions to be addressed, amongst
them the relationship between parliament, the executive and the judiciary, the
relationship between the centre and the territorial administrations in a devolved
ßThe Modern Law Review Limited 2001 (MLR 64:1, January). Published by Blackwell Publishers,
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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* The Constitution Unit, School of Public Policy, University College London.
** School of Law, University of Essex.
1A House for the Future, Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords Cm 4534 (2000).
2Modernising Parliament – Reforming the House of Lords, Cm 4183 (1999).
Britain and even the relationship between church and state. The Royal
Commission had neither the resources, the time, nor the political backing to
carry out such an investigation.
This paper analyses the Royal Commission’s recommendations, with particular
reference to the new constitutional settlement. Our analysis is informed by lessons
which can be drawn from other comparable democracies. We conclude that the
Commission’s proposals were timid, and did not adequately take into account the
ways in which the UK constitution is liable to develop. This is unsurprising given
the constraints within which it operated. The Commission also failed to tackle
adequately the question of the appropriate powers for a second chamber in modern
Britain, and the way in which the composition of the chamber will govern its
ability to effectively use its powers. Given the removal of the hereditary peers from
the chamber in 1999, the context for debate about its reform has already radically
changed. The issues outlined in this paper are some of those which are likely to
come to the fore as this debate develops.3
The powers of the chamber
The Royal Commission was not explicitly required to consider the powers of the
reformed upper house, only its ‘role and functions’. However, inevitably it was
impossible to separate these issues (nor the issue of composition), and the
Commission made a number of recommendations on powers. In doing so,
however, the Commissioners clearly felt constrained by the requirement to
‘maintain the position of the House of Commons as the pre-eminent chamber’.
Here we consider the Commission’s recommendations with respect to four
different areas.
Making and breaking governments
The House of Lords currently has no direct part in the process that leads to the
formation of government following an election. There is also no concept of a
confidence vote in the upper house. The British parliamentary system gives sole
power to the House of Commons in the making and breaking of governments. This
is entirely appropriate in a system where the House of Commons is elected and the
House of Lords is not. However, the lack of power over government formation is
one of the defining features of upper chambers of parliament worldwide. Only in
Italy does government face confidence motions in both the upper and lower houses.
The notion of giving a reformed UK upper house the right to remove government
from office was not even considered in the Royal Commission’s report. It is,
however, introduced here for an illustrative purpose. For a narrow interpretation of
the ‘pre-eminence’ of the House of Commons could rest on this characteristic
alone. The Royal Commission chose to interpret the pre-eminence condition far
more broadly, with consequences for their recommendations in each of the three
areas discussed below.
3 We do not seek to provide an exhaustive critique of all the Commission’s proposals. In particular we
do not address the issues of religious representation in the chamber, links to the peerage, the name of
the new chamber, or changeover arrangements. Discussion of all of these issues may be found in the
Commission’s report.
January 2001] Royal Commission on Reform of the House of Lords
ßThe Modern Law Review Limited 2001 83
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