Unit 2: Is the Lords currently too powerful?

There's some useful analysis on the extent to which the Lords has power in Parliament (great for the Unit 2 paper!) in this article from the BBC.

A few weeks ago, Ministers were arguing that the elected Commons was being undermined by the unelected Lords, and were planning legislation to prevent peers in the Lords from overturning government legislation - this came about following the government's defeat on cutting tax credits in the Lords in October.

However, critics of the proposed move said that this would tilt the balance of power too much in favour of the government, and reduce the ability of the Lords to act as an effective check on government power. Ultimately, the Constitution Committee recognised that a 6 week review into this highly politicised debate was not really a good enough basis for fundamentally changing the UK's constitution and balance of power.

This meant that when the Queen gave her speech to Parliament last week at the State Opening there was no mention of any legislation that might curb the powers of the Lords to veto legislation.

But is the Lords getting more militant? If we look simply at the numbers then it certainly appear to be the case. In the 2015-2016 parliamentary session there were 60 defeats inflicted by the Lords on the Commons. However, this isn't necessarily that uncommon. In Labour's 2005-2006 session, they lost on 62 occasions, and 88 occasions in 2002-2003. You can find the details of defeats here on the Parliament website.

I think we need to look beyond the numbers, though. Labour suffered so many defeats partly because at the time the Lords was still dominated by the Conservatives. Now, however, the Tories are in a minority in the Lords. There are many more Lib Dem peers in the Lords (chosen by Nick Clegg during his time as Deputy PM), and many of them are responsible for some of the defeats. There are 109 Lib Dem peers out of 807 Lords - this is around half the number of Labour peers - and it gives the Lib Dems much more power in the Lords than they have in the Commons with only 8 of the 650 MPs.

It's also worth looking more broadly at the nature of the Lords as it currently exists. It's not clear that tweaking the rules on what they can vote on is actually the answer here. Maybe something more fundamental - like an elected chamber, or at least partially-elected - would be more useful. Although based on the evidence of gridlock in the US system, maybe this would cause even less legislation to be passed.