so in this video could look at how the House of Lords has been reformed over the last 100 years we'll go touch on briefly the Parliament acts which we've already mentioned in a previous video and then we're talk about the House of Lords act and then the Royal Commission so an introduction to this topic as was noted previously the preamble to the house to the Parliament act nineteen states that its drafters ultimately intended to substitute the House of Lords as it as it at present exists a second chamber constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis okay that's very fancy talk for suggesting that they wanted the House of Lords to become subordinate to the House of Commons in the years since the Parliament act a reform of the House of Lords has occupied various positions on the political agendas and of successive governments the labor governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown succeeded in carrying through many constitutional reforms of note so we have I think talked about the House of Lords act in the constitutional reform video however this is going to be a little bit more specific so the House of Lords Act of 1999 was passed by the Labour government and it reduced the number of hereditary peers in the second chamber to 92 it also established a appointments commission responsible for making recommendations to the prime minister regarding the appointments of life peers so this is really this is really the way of taking away power from the hereditary peers within the House of Lords as also it should be noted that there will always be under this piece of legislation there will always be 92 hereditary peers if one family dies out for example then there will be a appointments Commission to start to look at appointing another family for hereditary peers peerage okay so the Royal Commission is another reform that we have seen for the House of Lords and Labor Government's had also established a Royal Commission to look into the matter under the chairmanship of Lord awaken so it's reports a house for the future who's called was published in January of 2000 and it made a number of recommendations including that including that a reformed second chamber a should act as a constitutional long stop ensuring that changes are not made to the Constitution without full and open debates and an awareness of the consequences and it should also be authoritative okay but that authority should not be such that such as to challenge the ultimate democratic authority of the House of Commons so it's saying really that the House of Lords should have all authority in legislation however this shouldn't be a challenge to the authority of the House of Commons because the House of Commons is still the Democratic Authority it should also be broadly representative of British society as a whole so this is really this is a commission of how to make the house of to bring the House of Lords out of the the 18th century and bring it into the modern day era okay so they want the House of Lords to still remain as a way to ensure that there is an open debate for legislation before it is passed they said they also agree that it should be able to wield authority but not so much authority as to challenge the House of Commons of course because the House of Commons is the Democratic authority of Parliament and it should also reflect British society okay there were also parliamentary debates on matters such as a partly elected or partly appointed single chamber second chamber sorry it was noteworthy that whilst the House of Commons it voted in favor of a fully elected of a fully elected and a 80/20 split in a second chamber the only reform option to secure a majority the House of Lords was a fully appointed house of Lords so this is really interesting the House of Commons did vote in favor of either fully electing the House of Lords or having it so a certain percentage of it was elected and there was a potential that was appointed however neither of these came through the House of Lords a bill which provided for mainly elected second chamber passed its second reading by vote of 462 to 124 so you can see there is a huge a huge majority in favor of reforming the House of Lords and to make it become an elected chamber it was dropped however when they became apparent to the government that it would not be able to get companying program motion passed which would have determined the timetable for the bill's passage so there are a number of little reasons why this didn't actually pass through and it was actually dropped but with that being said if there was a motivation the motivation for reforming today or maybe even after the brexit negotiations you would probably see the House of Lords reform to a more of an elected body okay so the House of Lords has had a it's still very controversial we still see that there are some areas that need to be reformed the House of Lords act and the Royal Commission have done a lot in the recent 10 years to make these reforms but we're gonna see more reforms I'm assuming in the future