Parliament of The United Kingdom - Composition and Powers

Composition and Powers

The legislative authority, the Crown-in-Parliament, has three separate elements: the Monarch, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons. No individual may be a member of both Houses, and members of the House of Lords are legally barred from voting in elections for members of the House of Commons.

Royal Assent of the Monarch is required for all Bills to become law, and certain Delegated Legislation must be made by the Monarch by Order in Council. The Crown also has executive powers which do not depend on Parliament, through prerogative powers, which include among others the ability to dissolve Parliament, make treaties, declare war, award honours, and appoint officers and civil servants. In practice these are always exercised by the monarch on the advice of the Prime Minister and the other ministers of HM Government. The Prime Minister and government are directly accountable to Parliament, through its control of public finances, and to the public, through election of Members of Parliament.

The Monarch also chooses the Prime Minister, who then forms a government from members of the houses of parliament. This must be someone who could command a majority in a confidence vote in the House of Commons. In the recent past the monarch has had to make a judgment, as in the appointment of Alec Douglas-Home in 1963 when it was thought that the incumbent Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, had become ill with terminal cancer. However, today the monarch is advised by the outgoing Prime Minister as to whom she should offer the position next.

The Upper House is formally styled The Right Honourable The Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament Assembled, the Lords Spiritual being bishops of the Church of England and the Lords Temporal being Peers of the Realm. The Lords Spiritual and Lords Temporal are considered separate "estates", but they sit, debate and vote together.

Since the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949, the powers of the House of Lords have been very much less than those of the House of Commons. All bills except money bills are debated and voted upon in House of Lords; however by voting against a bill, the House of Lords can only delay it for a maximum of two parliamentary sessions over a year. After this time, the House of Commons can force the Bill through without the Lords' consent under the Parliament Acts. The House of Lords can also hold the government to account through questions to government ministers and the operation of a small number of select committees. The highest court in England & Wales and Northern Ireland used to be a committee of the House of Lords, but it became an independent supreme court in 2009.

The Lords Spiritual formerly included all of the senior clergymen of the Church of England—archbishops, bishops, abbots and mitred priors. Upon the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII the abbots and mitred priors lost their positions in Parliament. All diocesan bishops continued to sit in Parliament, but the Bishopric of Manchester Act 1847, and later acts, provide that only the 26 most senior are Lords Spiritual. These always include the incumbents of the "five great sees", namely the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of York, the Bishop of London, the Bishop of Durham and the Bishop of Winchester. The remaining 21 Lords Spiritual are the most senior diocesan bishops, ranked in order of consecration.

The Lords Temporal are all members of the Peerage. Formerly, they were hereditary peers. The right of some hereditary peers to sit in Parliament was not automatic: after Scotland and England united into Great Britain in 1707, it was provided that all peers whose dignities had been created by English Kings could sit in Parliament, but those whose dignities had been created by Scottish Kings were to elect a limited number of "representative peers". A similar arrangement was made in respect of Ireland when it was united with Great Britain in 1801, but when southern Ireland left the United Kingdom in 1922 the election of Irish representative peers ceased. By the Peerage Act 1963, the election of Scottish representative peers also ended, and all Scottish peers were granted the right to sit in Parliament. Under the House of Lords Act 1999, only life peerages (that is to say, peerage dignities which cannot be inherited) automatically entitle their holders to seats in the House of Lords. Of the hereditary peers, only 92—the Earl Marshal, the Lord Great Chamberlain and the 90 elected by other peers—retain their seats in the House.

The Commons, the last of the "estates" of the Kingdom, are represented in the House of Commons, which is formally styled The Honourable The Commons in Parliament Assembled (commons coming not from the term commoner, but from commune, the old French term for a district). The House currently consists of 650 members. Each "Member of Parliament" or "MP" is chosen by a single constituency according to the First-Past-the-Post electoral system. Universal adult suffrage exists for those 18 and over; citizens of the United Kingdom, and those of the Republic of Ireland and Commonwealth nations resident in the United Kingdom are qualified to vote, unless they are in prison at the time of the elections. The term of members of the House of Commons depends on the term of Parliament, a maximum of five years; a general election, during which all the seats are contested, occurs after each dissolution (see below).

All legislation must be passed by the House of Commons to become law and it controls taxation and the supply of money to the government. Government ministers (including the Prime Minister) must regularly answer questions in the House of Commons and there are a number of select committees that scrutinise particular issues and the workings of the government. There are also mechanisms that allow members of the House of Commons to bring to the attention of the government particular issues affecting their constituents.