Have you heard the one about that MEP that barely ever turned up, never did anything for his country, got a whacking great salary and expenses, cushy pension, dossed around for years........they reelected him.
Well we could get rid of all the hereditary ones for a start, cull the elderly ones above some point and introduce limited terms for the rest along with some minimum attendance and voting requirements if they want to keep the position.
Could really do with reducing the numbers to about a third of the current size at most.
I agree with most of this, except the age restrictions (as per
@The_Abyss' post).
We definitely need a second house that can balance some of the excesses of the Commons, but any system that replaced the Lords would need careful consideration.
I would like to see Lords elected with a fixed term limit (maybe two parliamentary terms) and they can only sit once.
The criticism of elected Lords is that it will lead to the same campaign lies and hypocrisy that we see from other elected officials. It would also promote undesirable incentives in the sense that the elected Lords would feel obliged to speak and vote on behalf of those that helped them get elected.
I appreciate that this second point can happen under the current system but without the threat of losing their seat, Lords currently have more flexibility to be free agents and vote with their conscience rather than down party lines every time.
This is what I'm trying to replicate in my vision for the system — by having a fixed term that spans two parliamentary terms, you avoid the short-termism we see from MPs and by only allowing them to sit once, they don't have to worry about being re-elected so they can continue to vote with their conscience. I guess this may lead to the unintended consequence that they actually vote with their conscience
less.
Another issue with electing Lords is how and when you run the elections — say we disbanded the House tomorrow and every seat was up for election using my system — the house could easily end up being packed with hardcore Brexiteers and we'd be stuck with them for 10 years… I pick Brexiteers as an obvious example right now, but the issue is the same for any party — at the moment the house is fairly evenly distributed amongst Con/Lab/Crossbench (195/179/151 for reference). Under an electoral system, the Lords could end up heavily weighted towards a single party and stay that way for a decade… It would need to be some form of Proportional Representation but then the question is which one?
There are no easy answers, which is probably why Lords reform is such a slow-moving beast.
We need two houses in government. One a body of elected officials, the other an assembly of engineers.
The elected body proposes and creates legislation, the assembly of engineers sends back anything that is redundant, contradictory or otherwise just doesn't make sense.
I like the concept, but how would the engineers be put in-post? If they aren't elected you get the same-old issues of "unelected bureaucrats… etc." Are you assuming that because they are engineers, they will be impartial or is this not important?