Following the votes, the cross-party group was reconvened, which once again culminated in the publication of White Paper in July 2008 which was part of the Governance of Britain programme: An elected Second Chamber: Further reform of the House of Lords. 

The Government is taking forward some interim reforms of the House of Lords in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill which will be before the House this session.

The purpose of the draft legislation is to:

• Set out how the Government proposes to take forward the vote of the House of Commons in March 2007 in favour of a wholly or substantially elected second chamber.

The main benefits of this draft legislation would be:

• To create an elected second chamber to ensure those who make laws can be held to account by the people who have to live by those laws.

The main elements in the draft legislation are:

To build on the Government proposals set out in the White Paper published in July 2008.  The main conclusions of that White Paper, which followed cross-party discussions, were that:

• the reformed second chamber should be 80 per cent or 100 per cent elected;
• the Bishops should not retain reserved places in a 100 per cent elected House, but may do so in a House with an appointed element;
• the link between a peerage and place in the second chamber should be broken;
• the Government should not hold a majority in the second chamber and its members should  be independent;
• in an 80 per cent elected House the Appointments Commission should be placed on a statutory footing; and
• that there should be no changes to the powers of the second chamber and that the House of Common should retain its primacy.

Related Documents:

• White Paper An Elected Second Chamber, July 2008.

• White Paper The House of Lords: Reform, February 2007.

The Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, announced the Government’s intention to bring forward draft legislation in a Written Ministerial Statement on 20 July 2009.

“The Government are fully committed to comprehensive reform of the Lords, based on four principles, all of which were endorsed by the cross-party group (see White Paper, An Elected Second Chamber, July 2008, Cm 7438:

“The primacy of the House of Commons, enshrined in the Parliament Acts, and in rules and convention.  Independence of Members, supported by their serving a single, non-renewable term of three normal-length Parliaments, and, as set out originally in the 2007 White Paper (The House of Lords: Reform, Cm 7027), by a system of election which prevents a single party gaining an overall majority; direct election, such that the second chamber has a democratic mandate underpinning its revising role, but one that is never as a whole more up to date than that of the Commons; and “sensible transitional arrangements in respect of existing peers.

“There remain outstanding questions, which the Government will seek to answer in final proposals after the summer, with draft legislation for pre-legislative scrutiny as soon as possible. The two key issues are the electoral system and the size of the elected element (80 per cent or 100 per cent). The Government are giving careful and active consideration to resolving these questions in such a way as to make best use of a transitional period.”