University of Manchester parliamentary expert attacks Clegg's reform proposals for House of Lords

IMPOSSIBLE? Clegg's House of Lords reforms

By Sophia Rahman

One of Britain’s foremost authorities on parliamentary concerns has unleashed a substantial attack on the Deputy Prime Minister’s proposed reforms to the House of Lords.

Prof. Rodney Brazier of The University of Manchester, a Professor of Constitutional Law and himself an advocate of reforms to the upper house, voiced the concerns in a public lecture entitled “Asquith to Clegg: Is Lords Reform Impossible?”

He said: “If I had been commissioned to write a Lords Reform Bill designed to be as unattractive to Parliament as possible, Mr Clegg’s draft Bill is more or less the text I would have devised.”

The lecture calls for an independent appointments commission to replace the Prime Minister’s role in appointing peerages and removing members who have broken the law.

While Nick Clegg’s posit that the unelected House of Lords is a 'symbol of a closed society' is widely accepted across political parties and the public, the highly pragmatic nature of some of the key facets of the Lords Reform Bill prove too problematic for many to overlook.

The Draft Bill proposes trimming down the upper house from 789 members down to 300, 80% of whom would be elected, which would according to Prof. Brazier leave 'no room [for] the part-time experts who add so much value to the House of Lords' – a view shared by sources as disparate as The Guardian to the LSE.

Peers will also be elected for a single term of fifteen years. “This means once elected, members would care little about what their voters think, as they would never face them again,”  Brazier said. UCL’s School of Public Policy also finds that many 'think this is too long, while others believe that re-election is essential for accountability'.

Brazier went on to unpack the problems with choosing the electoral system that will award peerages if they are reformed. He said: “Choosing First Past the Post as the electoral process would produce a political duplicate of the Commons and would therefore be unacceptable to the Commons.

"But proportional representation would make the Lords more representative than the Commons, so that would be unworkable too.”

Bishops are to be reduced from 26 down to 12 in order to further separate church and state - a compromise from Clegg’s preferred removal of religious figures, on the behalf of the Prime Minister - which should be welcome news to secular Britons.

However, the National Secular Society pointed out issues with this. A spokesperson said: “As the new upper chamber would have only 300 members, this actually represents an increase in the percentage of bishops, [which is] a regression, not modernisation.”

University College London considers this might be 'a compromise that pleases no one'. An UCL spokesperson said: "Many want the bishops to go.” 

With regards to the pragmatism of the Bill, Clegg has said that 'the key thing is not to make the best the enemy of the good, [as] that approach has stymied the Lords reform for too long'.

Parliamentarians have been attempting to reform the House of Lords for over a century. Clegg’s Bill is, by his own admittance, is a ‘diluted’ version of what he would have liked to bring into action.