HOUSE OF LORDS

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25321, 22 October 1947, Page 7

HOUSE OF LORDS

New Limit To Powers

Proposed DECIDES ON BILL

(Rec. 7 p.m.) LONDON, October 20. The political correspondent., ef the “Daily Herald” .confirms reports that the Cabinet, in principle, has decided to introduce a bill to limit still further the power of the House of Lords to reject legislation passed by the House of Commons. He says that the new bill will eliminate the peers’ partial veto and thus prevent the sidetracking, for example, of the proposed nationalisation of the steel industry.

The bill is not being included in the new session’s programme'but the Government means to get it passed into law during the present Parliament’s lifetime. The Government is bringing forward the measure to reform the House of Lords to safeguard the pledges on which it was elected.

Under an Act of Parliament of 1911, the House of Lords is orevented from interfering with financial measures approved by the House of Commons, but other measures to which the Lords object can be held up for two years. Only then, by the repeated passing of measures in the House of Commons, do they automatically become law. The political correspondent of the “Daily Herald” says: “The decision to curb the power of the House of Lords was taken at yesterday’s Cabinet meeting, and the proposed bill will be outlined in the King’s speech at the reopening of Parliament. The Tory Opposition in the House of Commons may be expected to make the wildest allegations against the Government for its action, but the new proposals are in accordance with the Labour Party’s policy contained in ‘Let’s Face the Future,’ which gave clear notice ‘that we will not tolerate obstruction of the people’s will by the House of Lords’.”