Analyse the relationship between the HoC and HoL in recent years
In recent years, the House of Commons and House of Lords have been closely involved which each other, and have a formal relationship.
The formal relationship between the House of Commons and the House of Lords includes the rule that for bills to become acts, they have to be approved by both the House of Lords and House of Commons. The House of Lords is subordinate to the House of Commons because of two reasons, the first is the Parliament Act 1949. This means that the House of Commons can over-rule the House of Lords rejection of bills after a delay of one year. Originally, the longest period of time that the House of Lords could delay a bill was two years; this was brought in by the Parliament Act of 1911; however the Parliament Act of 1949 reduced it to one year. The second reason is that the House of Lords are able to delay ‘money bills’ by only one month; a money bill is bill that only involves taxation or government spending. But the House of Lords still retains the power to veto and House of Common bill to postpone the general election. Generally speaking, the House of Lords has two main roles. The first role is to revise legislation; they do uncontroversial work of tidying legislation; however it is not sufficiently examined, or not at all in some cases, in the House of Commons because of the guillotines in committees. Their second role is to check on the government, the House of Lords may reject the whole of a bill; usually it’s just parts of it, which means that it has to return to the House of Commons for a further vote before being taken back to the House of Lords again. When the piece of legislation keeps going back and forth between the House of Commons and House of Lords, this is called parliamentary Ping-Pong. A further element of the relationship between the House of Lords and House of Commons is the Salisbury convention. The Salisbury convention states that the House of Lord won’t reject a bill which was included in the government’s manifesto programme, and the bill will still go through the Lords even when the Government of the day has no majority in the House of Lords.
In theory, the relationship between the House of Commons and House of Lords should be straight-forward. Because the House of Lords was the subordinate house, it recognises the authority of the ‘elected house’ and usually passes the amendments they have rejected if returned to them by