Hannah White considers the significance of defeats in the House of Lords at the start of the new parliament for how the government goes about its parliamentary business.
In the aftermath of the general election, questions were raised about how the composition of the House of Lords would affect the ability of the new Conservative Government to get its business through Parliament. Even though no contentious legislation has yet reached the final crunch point of legislative ping-pong between the two Houses, the House of Lords has already defeated the government ten times since the election. This seems to vindicate those who predicted that the make-up of the Lords would affect government business in this parliament.
The present tally of peers in the House of Lords is 228 Conservative peers, 212 Labour, 101 Liberal Democrat, 178 crossbenchers, 26 bishops and 38 from other parties or non-affiliated. The Conservative party is far from having a majority and the Liberal Democrats carry much greater weight now in the Lords than in the Commons.
Following the election, the Liberal Democrat Leader in the Lords, Lord Wallace, argued that the convention which constrains the Lords from voting down the governing party’s manifesto promises (the Salisbury convention - established following Labour’s landslide victory in 1945, when the party had just 16 peers) was out of date. He suggested that Liberal Democrat peers would not feel bound by it.
Drawing on the helpful record kept by the UCL Constitution Unit, we can see that the ten government defeats in as many sitting weeks at the start of this session represent a rise in comparison to the last parliament. The last parliament saw a total of 99 government defeats in the Lords –from 48 in the extra-long 2010-12 session to only 11 in 2014-15. If the current rate of defeats continues, then the government could expect to lose 30-40 votes in the Lords each session – that is 150-200 by the parliament’s end in 2020.
The defeats in the new parliament don’t relate simply to a single piece of contentious legislation. Although six of the ten have been on aspects of the Cities and Devolution Bill, the government has also been defeated on:
- two pieces of legislation: the Psychoactive Substances Bill and the Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill;
- a set of regulations: the Universal Credit (Waiting Days) (Amendment) Regulations 2015; and
- a motion to establish a joint committee with the House of Commons on proposed changes to Standing Orders relating to English Votes for English Laws (EVEL) - although this remains highly unlikely to happen.
- Keywords
- General election Law
- Administration
- Cameron government
- Legislature
- House of Lords
- Publisher
- Institute for Government