The importance of the Lords

Baroness Stowell has a tough job on her hands in the next few years

One subtle, but important difference in the House of Lords is where the hundred Lib Dem peers will now sit on the Opposition side…

They've not gone back to their former seats in pre-coaltion days. Instead, they've shifted position slightly, to occupy a strategic space between the Labour peers and the crossbenchers. It's a convenient spot from which to coordinate anti-Government majorities in the Upper House, and exert what little political leverage remains for the Lib Dems in Westminster.

The arithmetic in the Lords certainly suggests that the government will face a hostile majority of peers, quite a lot of the time. But the reality is that that majority will be constrained by the ingrained conventions of the Upper House.

Chief among these is the Salisbury-Addison Convention, the deal struck in 1945, between "Bobbity" Salisbury, the leader of the Conservative peers, (and part of a political dynasty which stretches back to Elizabeth I's Privy Council), and Lord Addison, the old Asquithian minister who then led a tiny band of Labour peers.

Deal struck

At that time the Conservatives utterly dominated the Lords, but a Labour government had been elected by a landslide - so a deal was struck that the Lords would not strike down at second or third reading, any legislation which had appeared in the winning party's manifesto, and could therefore be assumed to have the approval of the electorate.

It was a development of earlier doctrines, dating back to the Duke of Wellington, and then extended during Gladstone's struggle to disestablish the Church of Ireland. The idea was to reconcile the power of the Lords with the increasing importance of the popular vote.

The 1945 deal effectively surrendered the right, regularly exercised 40 years before, against the Liberal governments of Campbell Bannerman and Asquith, to pole-axe any bill peers didn't fancy, at the first opportunity. But, crucially, it still left scope for bills to be amended, even gutted, later in the legislative process - particularly at report stage consideration.

So, even bills foreshadowed in the Conservative manifesto will not be immune from the attentions of Their Lordships, although in practice, the government will have to lose the argument on the floor of the House, and lose pretty badly, for a bill to be totally undermined. So how might this apply in the coming year?

The first point to make is that the opposition parties in the Lords won't take a swing at every government measure. All the major groups will pick their battles carefully, and they might not always pick the same ones; Labour might support some of the package of internet surveillance measures (AKA the "snoopers charter") that the home secretary is pledged to bring in.

The Lib Dems undoubtedly will oppose it - and may rather relish doing so alone.

Pinch points

The most obvious case for treatment will be the promised bill to create a British Bill of Rights and end the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights. That central aim is opposed by Labour, the Lib Dems and many of the legions of lawyers on the crossbenches - not to mention by a number of Conservative peers, and that's before they get onto the implications for the devolution settlements in Scotland and, especially, Northern Ireland, where the ECHR is embedded in the Good Friday Agreement.

What else? The list of government defeats during the last Parliament provides a handy checklist of possible action points for the new set of ministers - on judges' discretion over costs in judicial reviews (Criminal Justice and Courts Act); on legal aid for disabled people (SI under the Legal Aid etc Act); a whole raft of issues in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act on things like civil liability in health and safety cases; on quangos that were saved from abolition under the Public Bodies Act and any number of benefits changes under the Welfare Reform Act.

With the other main parties in some disarray, ministers may seek to reverse some of those defeats and unpick some of the compromises they were forced into, during the last Parliament. Sometimes this will involve new bills, sometimes it may mean votes on statutory instruments - but I'm told the opposition parties are on the alert.

In the last Parliament, Labour peers fought a bitter delaying action against the Parliamentary Voting and Constituencies Bill; the Lib Dem peers certainly plan to make life difficult for the government, but intend to do so "within the spirit and conventions of the House", according to one senior figure.

So expect late votes to be forced on random amendments, and expect the government to find itself forced to negotiate the content of its bills rather more often than it would like.