Turning the House of Lords into a properly democratic second chamber will be central to reforming the House of Commons and Parliament as a whole.

In a healthy, lively, democracy a perpetual tension exists between the executive and legislative branches of government. In Britain today that tension scarcely exists, because power lies predominantly on the executive side. It is inevitable that the party leaderships will largely control MPs, for the Commons functions as an electoral college to chose the government of the day. The realities of party discipline and the fact that voters quite rightly want a channel by which to choose who shall form the government entail that there are a great many merits in this system. There always has to be a clear-cut way to democratically remove a government and replace it with another, by means of elections for the first chamber, the House of Commons.

Democracy is seriously defective, however, if governments are able to get almost any law they wish passed by Parliament, as they can in Britain now. It is essential for a healthy democracy that it should be possible for a government to fail to have some of its measures passed by the legislature. A government’s democratic mandate ought not to give it carte blanche in law-making. Without this principle in force there is little point in having a legislature at all. Without it, the government might just as well be empowered to rule by decree.

For these reasons, a democratically elected second chamber, firmly outside the control not just of the government but also of the opposition leaderships, is critical for effective democracy.

However, a new second chamber will only be effective if its rules of operation and the method by which is it elected are devised with great care. That involves recognising that the constitutional law covering the second chamber must be built upon a consistent and coherent view of its purpose.

The second chamber must, of course, be elected directly by the voters if it is to have the democratic legitimacy not just to review but to reject, when it decides to, bills passed by the Commons.

Political parties form a key part of a modern democracy and parties must be represented by candidates that broadly share their objectives. However, a key goal in establishing a second chamber must be to ensure that the scope for independent thought and action by its members is maximised.

The flawed electoral system now in place for the Commons, whereby  the outcome does not depend upon the votes cast in many constituencies, illustrates how important it is to have a voting system for the second chamber that maps voters’ intentions as closely as possible while being consistent with effective representative democracy. A form of proportional representation (PR) is the best way to ensure this.

Some forms of PR express voters’ intentions more accurately than others. The form that does it best is the system of the single transferable vote (STV) in multi-member electoral divisions. The objective of this is to ensure that the widest spread of voter opinion is reflected in who is elected as is practically possible. Each constituency should have around 10 seats. This means that a candidate able to gain the support of about 10 per cent of the electorate has a good chance of being elected.

It is important for the purposes of the second chamber to avoid the party-list system of PR that operates for some assemblies, often for good reasons. Under a party list system voters vote for a party, not an individual, and who gets elected from that party is predetermined by the place of the candidates on a list which is in turn determined by the internal selection system of the party.

Under STV, voters cast their votes for individual candidates. This enables people to vote for the candidates who have impressed them as individuals by their policies, their personal qualities and their capacity for independent thought. Candidates would usually be members of a party but they would not necessarily be those most favoured by their own parties. Independent, non-party,  candidates would also have a good chance of election. This is just the kind and calibre of legislators that we need in the second chamber.

The STV system would also ensure that, with the present respective levels of support for the main political parties today, none of them could obtain a majority in the second chamber.

The STV system, additionally and crucially, obviates two major problems that can arise with legislative bodies elected independently of elections for the executive branch. The Congress and many state legislatures in the United States manifest these problems. One of them is gerrymandering. Collusion between parties enables the continuation of electoral divisions with boundaries calculated to make the seats of many legislators almost impregnable. Under STV, since there are no single-member constituencies, this cannot happen.

The second problem is that, to reinforce their chance of re-election, many US legislators do deals to ensure that lucrative government contracts create jobs within their electoral divisions. This sort of economic localism – so contrary as it is to strategic direction of national economic policy – would be hard to engineer  under STV and in the face of national government programmes coming from the House of Commons.

A further constitutional provision to critical to making the second chamber operate as it ought to. Members should be barred from taking any ministerial or other post within the executive branch. This would make it quite clear that they were there to act as legislators and to scrutinize government activity, and that this is an important political role and a worthy political career in itself. Parliament now signally fails to carry out this function effectively. Part of the reason for this is that many members are ambitious to take up a government job or a post on their party’s front bench.

In addition, the considerable size of this government payroll vote weakens even further than it already is the capacity of the Commons to block government measures. Such political ambition by MPs is of course a good thing. It is important to have gifted and motivated people wanting to play a in running the executive side of government. But the place for that is the House of Commons.

Achieving a balance between the legislative and executive branches of the constitution requires also that Parliament should not be able to thwart the government’s legitimate actions in running the country. This can happen, as U.S. experience illustrates, when a parliament blocks the budget.  A viable model for the second chamber would therefore include the provision, already operative for the House of Lords, that the second chamber could not stop money bills, but merely delay them, in the interests of review, for a short period, probably no longer than 30 days.

An elected second chamber should have full powers of scrutiny of government activity and should therefore be empowered to call ministers and public officials to give evidence before its committees.

This could open into a wider role, where members of the second chamber, freed of the need to observe the government’s priorities, could make useful investigations into significant public issues. This would in turn open the pathway to greater degree of initiation of legislation in the second chamber. This would be likely to lead to a wider-ranging and better considered body of legislation than is usually possible within a government legislative agenda. The desire of members to enact such laws would provide them with useful material for bargaining with Commons business managers about objections to measures coming from the Commons.

A second chamber on this model would bring major improvements to the constitution. The House of Commons also needs reforming, but a robust second chamber will be an essential component in the building of a vibrant, effective Parliament.