Today, over 100 years since the last Liberal Government started the process of reform of the House of Lords, a bill has been published to finally remove the last hereditary peers from Parliament and to make the Lords a body of mostly elected members, see House of Lords Reform Bill.  In doing this the Liberal Democrats are not only making good on our Manifesto commitment but also fulfilling our long cherished ambition to make Parliament more democratic.

No one is pretending that Lords Reform is the most pressing problem facing the nation or that the House of Lords is not performing the role it should with its present membership.  What this is about is making the Parliament more representative of the population.

Currently, there are over 370 members of the House of Lords over 70 and it has 4 times more members over 90 than under 40.  It is not only in age that the current House of Lords is unrepresentative, nearly 4/5 are male and 1/3 are from London or the South East, 25% are former MPs, 92 Hereditary peers & 26 Bishops also are members.  In 2012 only Lesotho has hereditary politicians and Iran the only country that retain clerics in its legislature.

The new system would provide for the election of 360 members of a reformed House, elected in three groups of 120, for a single 15 year term.  The elections would be on a similar system we use to elect members of the European Parliament (i.e regionally and PR based). There would also be 90 appointed members (again in 3 groups of 30) also for 15 years.  In addition the number of Bishops will be reduced to 12 and there will also be a number of “ministerial” appointments to allow the Government of the day to appoint ministers who are not currently Members of Parliament.

I cannot pretend that I agree with all these changes are what I would want (if we must have clerics in Parliament they should represent all religions in the country, not just one sect of one religion) but I do support this proposal and, as all three main parties had proposals for House of Lords reform in the manifestos in 2012, I hope that Labour & Conservative MPs & Lords realise that attempts to stop it being enacted will be seen for what they are, just cheap opportunist point scoring over other parties.

It has taken over 100 years to move this far on House of Lords Reform, don’t let it take any more.

Update 30/06/12

Earlier on the week I emailed our MP to ask if he would be supporting the proposals in the Bill and John Mann has confirmed that he will be.  I know he  hasn’t always agreed with Liberal Democrats in the past but it’s good to see him on board on this issue.