Is the House of Lords our best constitutional check?

The government was defeated last week. A House of Lords amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill adding

UK Parliament

a ‘free speech’ clause to the legislation was held up despite the House of Commons voting against the amendment on four separate occasions.

To some the House of Lords is a constitutional anachronism, a leftover from an era of feudalism and power for the privileged that has no place in a modern democracy. Even the Conservative Party, the old opponent of constitutional reform, has now come to terms with the need for the upper chamber to be elected. Though this may have as much to do with the loss of their inbuilt, hereditary majority than any great principle or conviction.

I’m in favour of elected institutions, generally, but I fear that at the moment the only effective check on government power comes from the House of Lords. To insist on the upper chamber being elected is to tamper with the one domestic institution we’ve got that is prepared to stand up to the government of the day.

Often, when the government proposes controversial legislation it is left to the Lords to stand up to ministers. On 28 days detention, for instance, the House of Commons was won over by squalid deals whereas the Lords stood up and ultimately forced the government to back down.

The Lords is partly so effective because, frankly, it is filled with has-beens. The ‘free speech’ amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill was added by the former Conservative Home Secretary David Waddington. These are the kinds of people who cannot easily be intimidated and who often don’t have much to lose. This is strengthened by the security of tenure that prevents party leaders from removing Peers, while you can hardly coax a former Cabinet minister with the temptation of high office.

For all the attempts to reform the House of Lords over the past one hundred years, none has ever made the Lords more accountable, more democratic or more open. The upper chamber has been made less powerful; its composition has become more and more controlled by party leaders in the House of Commons and it has become a mechanism for appointing unelected ministers. For all of this, it still does a better job at holding the government to account than the Commons.

In principle, of course, I’m in favour of having more elected institutions. Without those elections we will always wonder why the House of Lords is standing up to government. In whose interest are they acting? Who benefits?

But on the other hand, we don’t really want an elected upper chamber just for the sake of it. The danger is that being ‘elected’ is a meaningless status that sounds appropriate but pushes power further into the hands of party leaders in the Commons. A House of Lords elected from party lists, arranged by internal party selection procedures, would make it particularly difficult for members of the upper chamber to challenge their dominant colleagues in the Commons.

I sometimes wonder what those unfamiliar with our system would make of the House of Lords. I expect it would look astonishingly out-dated, almost an offence to democracy and, at times, probably downright hilarious. But despite the peculiarities of our system, the Lords is a component that does the job of parliament exceptionally well. If anything, this is a plea for constitutional pragmatism. Perhaps we should leave House of Lords reform while we focus on the House of Commons.