House of Lords and Where to Take It

Following consultation in the thread and private consultations in my messages, I have identified a few issues with the House of Lords, and want to begin the process of coming up with ways on how to fix it.

Issue Number One: A Lack of Engagement Opportunities

The House of Lords has a lack of opportunities for people to uniquely engage. Part of this is a lack of incentive to debate, and a lack of things to debate on. The very basis of MHoC is to engage with user created content, and currently there’s a lack of drive to provide that for the House of Lords. There have been some suggestions as to how to address this, the main one being to stop Lords being able to comment and debate in the House of Commons - this is something I’m willing to pursue should the community believe it is the best course of action, however I am unsure if it would provide a long term boost.

Another possible solution is strengthening the Committees system and making it much clearer. Frankly in order to do this it will need to be rebuilt from the ground up to make it actually fun and rewarding. I’m open to suggestions for this, and will be seeking advice from people who have interacted with the Committees system in the past.

The final proposal I would like to bring up myself under this point is the introduction of topic debates to the House of Lords. This more open ended debate would, hopefully, promote discussion about things people are particularly interested in. The previous system used in the Commons were slightly too narrow, so I would personally prefer these to be vague such as “Debate on Space”, which can be used as a platform to discuss space exploration, colonisation, advances and discoveries in the sciences, etc,.

Issue Number Two: The Position of the Lord Speaker

The Lord Speaker has, for a long time, been seen as a deadweight amongst the Quadrumvirate. Whilst I am trying my hardest to change this, and others in the past have absolutely shown that the position can be used for something great, it still remains that the position is nebulous and doesn’t actually do much even in the House of Lords itself. Therefore I would like to begin discussion on the position of Lord Speaker itself. I have a few proposals myself:

1) Status quo - fairly standard, keep things as they are with the Lord Speaker being a member of the Quadrumvirate.

2) Demote the Lord Speaker as a member of Quad - this would involve moving the Lords Speakership team under the Commons, being ran by the Chair of Committees which would be renamed to Lord Speaker and act as an autonomous leader within the Commons Speakership responsible for hiring and managing Deputy Lord Speakers and keeping things running.

Obviously this entire concept would require far more work and consultation, my aim proposing these is to get the ball rolling.

Issue Number Three: The Existence of the House of Lords

This is not an issue, and the House of Lords will not be abolished under my watch.

Let the discussions begin!