This week sees the start of the Lords Committee stages of two major pieces of legislation. The two bills in question are the Parliamentary Voting and Constituency Bill (the AV Bill) and the Public Bodies Bill. Both will test whether the House of Lords is able to do its job of scrutiny with any serious effectiveness. We in the Lords are supposed to have the ability to amend legislation or send it back to the House of Commons for reconsideration. The numbers are stacked against the Labour opposition and with the more recent influx of life peers the government will have a majority of over 50.

During the years 1997 – 2010 very regularly the opposition parties would bring forward amendments over which there would be a negotiation or which would be put to the vote with a reasonable chance of success if the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties united against the Labour government. This means that the legislation in question would either be amended or the bill would be sent back to the Commons for their consideration. Sometimes the Commons would agree with the amendments carried in the Lords, and sometimes they would not. Occasionally we would have what is known as ‘ping pong’ when a bill bounced back and forth from the Lords to the Commons, until an accommodation had been reached.

The AV Bill, seeks to introduce a new voting method to the electorate by way of a referendum next April, and in its second part seeks to reduce the number of parliamentary seats in the Commons by 50, equalise the number of votes in a seat and introduce fixed-term parliament of five years. It is a bill in two distinct parts: one Liberal Democrat, one Conservative. There should be two bills but they are locked together because of the coalition agreement.

These matters are of great constitutional importance, and would normally have been subject to at least year of pre-legislative scrutiny, with a draft bill or even two bills, and considerable discussion, not only in parliament but amongst interested organisations and academics. There has been such a rush to legislated that the only possibility of any in-depth scrutiny will now take place in the House of Lords in the next four or so weeks. The government is trying to insist that we get through the bill as soon as possible to meet the deadline for the referendum.

We have already lost the vote to have the bill examined for hybridity, but only by 14 votes, which shook the government parties. But to sustain that level of vote, and get enough of the cross benchers to come in and stay and do a job of real scrutiny is going to be a great challenge.

The arguments have barely begun – and very fundamental questions have to be examined. For example, the issue of boundaries of the reduced number constituencies. The bill sacrifices the concept of community and replaces it with a statistical mean. Each constituency should be roughly the same size regardless of the community to be represented. The UK is made up of communities living in towns, shires and cities, not blocks of equal numbers of voters. Key principles of democracy and localism are at stake here. And of course the bill will disproportionately affect the number of Labour MPs. Each component part of the bill presents questions of similar importance.

It is safe to predict hand-to-hand combat on this bill with Charlie Faulkner leading such stalwarts as Bruce Grocott, Larry Whitty, Joyce Gould, Tommy McAvoy and Helen Liddle

The Public Bodies Bill is a different but equally challenging bill. The government is trying to take powers (known as Henry VIIIth powers) to abolish, amend the duties of or merge hundreds of organisations – arms-length bodies – without recourse to primary legislation. This means that, for example, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority can be abolished and all its powers given to the secretary of state, on the issuing of secondary legislation which cannot be amended or changed – it can only be agreed or rejected. The HFEA took over 200 hours of parliamentary debate to create, and its independence is very important for its functions. There are dozens of bodies in this bill about whom the same things can be said. They include the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, Ofcom, many justice bodies, and Consumer Focus. If the organisation is not actually up for abolition it is included in the bill and is at the mercy of the whim of the secretary of state. So much for independence!

The same hasty, arrogance is being brought to bear on this bill too, and one of the reasons that the government feels it can behave in this way is because of the majority that they command in the Lords. If the crossbenchers do not attend in large numbers and do the job of work that they were appointed to, all the hard work and commitment of the band of Labour peers may come to naught. There is a fundamental problem at the heart of our parliamentary democracy.

Photo: UK Parliament