House Of Lords reform

House of Lords reform seems to be in the news a bit in the last couple of days. I have my own idea (as always) on how it should be dealt with:

Keep the hereditary and life peers if they want to stay but don’t pay them. Most if not all are probably rich anyway and only want to be lords for the status and they can be paid to make snobby speeches at parties that they will probably get invited to because of their status, just like so many ex prime ministers and Mrs Blair who can make 60k just be making two speeches.

These unelected lords also wouldn’t have the same voting power as the elected lords.

There would be an elected element of the lords of around 10% of MPs which would be around 65. They would have their own ‘super’ constituencies (10 mp constituencies = 1 lord constituency).

The Parliament Act would be changed. At the moment they can completely bypass all the lords and don’t have to care about them. Under my proposals the Parliament Act would be modified.

It would be modified so it could bypass the unelected Lords but the elected Lords would still have a vote.

Having an elected element may create a danger of creating a House of Commons clone which is a bad thing because the job of the Lords is to hold the government to account.

I think that the elected lords should be purely independent and the elections for lords would not include political parties. They would also have to fund themselves because donations would be banned too.

This would probably create trilateral legislature rather than a bilateral legislature though but I think the government would be far more accountable than it is now because the opposition parties have failed to hold the government to account on anything.

There would be a problem in fully independent elected lords. Would the people know what those Lords stood for? If not would the people bother to turn up and vote? If they were clear about what they stood for would it matter when they can’t initiate legislation anyway?

I don’t know the answer to any of those questions but they would have to be sorted out beforehand or the role of the Lords modified in a way to give them more power. Should we make it so that the elected lords have to agree to send troops abroad before they are sent? This would certainly stop our soldiers being sent on foreign wars but is that a good thing?

How many years would lords be elected for? I say every 6 years.