Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

It's not just MPs facing a parliamentary cull. With the number of peers in the House of Lords pushing 800, especially with the wave of new post-election arrivals, all parties are worried that the Upper House has expanded to embarrassing, even absurd dimensions.

and into retirement. The report, compiled under the chairmanship of the wily Conservative ex-cabinet minister , is essentially a list of possibilities, and doesn't recommend any particular answer.

There will be a debate later in the month to "take voices" and then further work to come up with something more concrete. But the analysis has turned up some interesting factoids....for example, there are 15 Conservative peers, 14 Crossbenchers, four Liberal Democrats and three Labour peers, who have served for between 25 and 30 years. Should length of service be capped? Some of the oldest peers have some of the most interesting things to say, retort senior Lords sources.

Then there's the issue of attendance. In the 2009-10 session of Parliament, 289 peers were there three-quarters of the time, and 135 more than half the time. And 68 attended at least once, but less than 10% of the time. But there was a substantial group who didn't attend at all - 79 peers - a bit more than a tenth of the total membership. Bearing in mind the age profile of the House of Lords, and the fact that membership is for life (I have a vague notion that peers can only be expelled from the Lords in very extreme circumstances, and that the last case involved an Anglo-German aristocrat who chose to fight for the Kaiser in 1914) this shouldn't be taken to mean that all 79 are wilfully ignoring their responsibilities as legislators.

The Lords gripe about pressure on the facilities from their influx of new members - their library is too crowded, it's often hard to book a table for dinner etc - but the real issue is that the expansion of the Upper House seems to be getting a little out of hand. And as the Labour MP Chris Ruane demonstrated at that point is not being lost on the soon to be culled members of the Commons.

The coalition is planning to phase in an elected Lords (or Senate, or whatever...) and was due to announce its proposals about now. I gather that has slipped back a bit, with the all-party talks rather bogged down at the moment, and the plans may now emerge in January. But they will have to include some way of easing out some peers. There's talk of allowing ex-Lords continued access to some Lords facilities and to keep some suitable honorific, but the Treasury is said to be loath to allow anything amounting to a buy-out package...which may mean a lot of peers won't go quietly. That in turn may make life awkward for the coalition, because Lords reform has to be passed by, er, the Lords. And the prospect of getting through one of the Lib Dems' key coalition sweeteners, an elected Upper House, look less rosy if the plan has to be forced through via the Parliament Act, which will keep an apparently abstruse issue in the news for a good two years.

There may be great constitutional issues at stake, but solving the mundane ones, would make them a lot easier to deal with. (Sigh).

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