Tag Archive for House of Lords Constitution Committee

The Government’s latest plans to undermine democracy must be opposed

Lord Rennard

  On Thursday last week, the Government tabled a measure to bring forward changes to the electoral registers which provides the basis for conducting our elections and reviewing constituency boundaries.  It probably hoped that nobody would notice that this change could remove nearly two million people from the voting registers by the end of this…

Constitutional standards

Lord Norton

On Monday, I chaired a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Constitution.  The speakers were Professor Dawn Oliver, of University College London, and Jack Simson Caird, of Queen Mary College, addressing their report, published by the Constitution Unit, on The Constitutional Standards of the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution.  (You…

Stirring up apathy?

Lord Norton

Last week, the Joint Committee on the Draft House of Lords Reform Bill achieved some unexpected publicity.   There was a leak from the committee about what had been discussed as to the proposed size of the House.   On what one suspects was a slow news day, the BBC had a substantial item about the committtee’s deliberations.  This…

Health and Social Care Bill

Lord Norton

The Constitution Committee has published a report on the Health and Social Care Bill.  The remit of the committee is confined to the constitutional implications of the Bill and we are concerned that the Bill, in its current form, risks diluting the Government’s constitutional responsibilities with regard to the NHS.  You can read the report…

The process of constitutional change

Lord Norton

When the Constitution Committee of the House of Lords was created in 2001 – I was the first chairman – one of the the first reports we did was on the process of constitutional change. The Committee returned to the subject this year and has just published The Process of Constitutional Change, noting in effect that the situation…