The membership of the House of Lords was extended to women in 1958. This was forty years after women were able to be elected to the House of Commons. Today, the proportion of women in the Lords is the same as that in the Commons, though women tend to be more prominent in leadership positions…
There is a statutory limit on the number of ministers who can sit in the House of Commons, whether paid or unpaid, and a statutory limit on the number of ministers who can receive a ministerial salary. As a result, this Government, like its predecessor, has appointed a number of unpaid ministers, especially in the Lords. …
Each year, I table a question asking how many items of mail were received in the Palace of Westminster in the previous year. I have previously written on how the number of letters we receive has declined in recent years. In 2006, for example, 4,789,935 items of post were received. In 2010, the figure was…
The Government has suffered two defeats this week on the Welfare Reform Bill, both attracting considerable media attention. The fact of defeat is, as I have previously noted, not particularly unusual. These two defeats, though, are noteworthy, the first for the fact that it was Liberal Democrat votes that accounted for it. The Government is…
I detect that attitudes towards drugs policy are starting to move, both at the international and the national level. The Home Affairs Committee in the House of Commons announced last year that it was undertaking an inquiry and invited submissions. It has now started taking evidence and has heard from Sir Richard Branson, who serves on…
