THE Labour Party used to believe in a strengthened House of Lords. Its 1992 reform package offers a way out of the current deadlock. At present, everyone — voters, peers, Government and Opposition — wants to have the best of both worlds.

The latest Populus poll for The Times, undertaken last weekend, highlights the public’s contradictory views.

More than three quarters of voters (78 per cent) believe that it is important to “have a strong Lords as a check on the Commons and Government”.

But more than three fifths (62 per cent) also think that it is right that “the Commons can ultimately overrule the Lords as the Commons is elected and the Lords isn’t”.

The biggest variation is among Tory voters: 91 per cent of them want a strong Lords as a check, but only 53 per cent want the Commons to have the final say.

Voters are also inconsistent on the future of the Lords. Seventy-five per cent believe that it should remain a mainly appointed House to provide “a degree of independence from electoral politics”. But 72 per cent think that at least half its members should be elected to provide “democratic legitimacy”.

These results are not as perverse as they seem. They reflect the lack of clarity in the debate. The conventions, and self-imposed constraints, that the Lords was mainly a revising chamber that only rarely challenged the Commons on big issues went in 1999 when most of the hereditaries left the Lords.

Far from becoming “Tony’s cronies”, a more self-confident Lords has become an assertive and integral part of the legislative process — with Liberal Democrat peers as often the pivotal or swing votes.

The implications were this week highlighted in a paper for the conference of the Political Studies Association by Meg Russell and Maria Sciara, of the independent Constitution Unit. Not only is the Government defeated more often than in the past (nearly 400 times since 1997) but almost four out of ten of these defeats are not overturned, resulting in lasting policy changes.

This situation is inherently unstable. A government with a clear Commons majority feels that it should be able to get its business through. The Lord Chancellor said last weekend that “you cannot have a situation where it’s the confidence of the Commons that determines (who forms) the government, yet the Lords blocks the Commons.”

Taken literally, that implies unicameralism. Yet the opposition parties also want to have it both ways, to preserve the existing powers of the Lords even in the absence of the previous voluntary restraints. An elected House would increase further the chances of deadlock, though most existing peers, whether Tory or Labour, are eager to preserve themselves as an appointed House.

Any compromise could involve codifying some of the current conventions (as proposed by a working group of Labour peers in 2004) on the handling of most legislation. This would apply to manifesto Bills, hard though it is to define them, as the row over the Identity Cards Act showed. But, as a balance, the Lords should be given “the power to delay, for the lifetime of a Parliament, changes to designated legislation reducing individual or constitutional rights”. These are the words of the 1992 Labour manifesto, before the party became cautious on the Lords. That could be the basis of a deal that would be hard for the Tories and Lib Dems to refuse.

www.populuslimited.com

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