What power does the House of Lords have?

As I was walking to the kitchen, the TV was on CSPAN and some brit was giving a speech and mentioned the House of Lords and said something like “the house of lords is kind of the equivalent of the senate in the U.S”

Is that true? Or did this man just have a poor grasp of how the U.S government is structured? Because the senate has real power and I thought the house of lords had pretty much been reduced to an exclusive social club.

It’s complex. Members are now appointed almost entirely on merit (in the eyes of the appointers) - convention dictates that some people get Lordships because of their position (e.g. the Lords Spiritual and the Law Lords). The Lords is primarily a revising house, catching legislative blunders on one hand and fine-tuning on the other. While the House of Lords can reject legislation from the Commons, the Commons can force it through by use of the Parliament Act. But the cost is parliamentary time, which is valuable, so the Commons listens carefully to the Lords. Members of the Lords also sit and form committees and do useful legislative work there.

By custom the Lords do not interfere with Budgets - so there’s no loading of pork.

According to wiki

“The House of Lords as an upper chamber has the primary purpose of scrutinising Legislation proposed by the Lower House through the form of debate and through proposing amendments to legislation. Bills are able to be introduced into either House for debate and reading.”

Sounds a lot like the US Senate to me, except they are not elected…

“Unlike the House of Commons, members of the House of Lords are not democratically elected but attained by appointment, or by virtue of their ecclesiastical role within the established church (Lords Spiritual), or through a by-election.”

There are still 2 hereditary peers (the Duke of Norfolk and the Lord Great Chamberlain) are still allowed to sit in the Lords by virtue of their title. Another 90 peers are selected by an electorate consisting of all hereditary peers to sit in the Lords (for life).

The Duke of Norfolk does not sit as the Duke of Norfolk but because he is the hereditary Earl Marshal, and in charge of several of the ‘ceremonial’ aspects of government by virtue of that job. E.g., he is the man who has the authority (short of the monarch) to run coronation and investiture ceremonies, he heads the College of Heralds (which has ‘real’ as well as heraldry-geek functions), etc. He’s also the senior peer of England (and of the entire U.K.).

The Lords are a lot less powerful than the U.S. senate, because the Commons (who are elected) can always override the Lords decisions if they want to. However, they are by no means powerless. It is time consuming (and sometimes embarrassing) for the Commons to override them (and IIRC, the Lords get three shots at blocking what the Commons want). What this means in practice is that the Commons only rarely passes bills that they expect the Lords to really hate, and, by the same token, the Lords very rarely try to block anything that they know the Commons really wants, or introduce any bills that they know the Commons is going to hate.

Does this mean that the Church of England can essentially appoint people to the House of Lords? One specific church has an actual formal role in passing (or blocking) legislation in England? I didn’t realize this.

No, the House of Lords has much less power than the Senate. The House of Commons can override the Lords, so if the Commons is determined to pass a bill the Lords ultimately can’t stop them - the most they can do is delay passage of the bill for about a year. In 2005 Tony Blair’s government wanted to pass a controversial bill to ban fox-hunting - it had majority support in the Commons but there was outright, furious opposition to it in the Lords, who wanted to keep fox-hunting legal. The bill was delayed for a while but it passed.

Also while the Lords can introduce legislation, they can’t introduce any bills that concern taxation or government spending (known as “money bills”). Nor can they delay money bills for longer than a month, or propose amendments along those lines unless granted permission, so the Lords has hardly almost no power at all over taxes or spending.

There’s also a long-standing convention, called the Salisbury convention, that the Lords do not oppose any measures that the government proposed in their election manifesto.

Overall you’re right that the set-up of the Commons and Lords is ostensibly quite similar to the set-up of the House and Senate in the US, but in the UK the upper house just has much less power than it does in the US.

There are 26 English bishops who sit in the house of lords; Welsh and Scottish bishops are excluded because the Church of Scotland and the Church of Wales are not established chuches like the Church of England.

Bishops are appointed by a process which involves the diocese, synod and some input from the prime minister.

In 2010 the bishops were instrumental in excluding churches from aspects of the Equality Bill relating to equal employment protection for gay people, such is the amending power of the lords. They are capable of wielding power when it suits their interests.

No other church in the UK is granted this privilage, but there are probably many which supported this particular intervention.

They’re called the “Lords Spiritual”. They used to comprise the majority of the House until the 1500s - nowadays there’s only 26 of them, and as I’ve noted already the House of Lords itself is very restricted nowadays in terms of the influence it can have over public policy anyway. But not only does the Church of England appoint legislators to one of Parliament’s chambers, it actually proposes its own formal legislation as well, called Church of England Measures.

It’s hardly surprising that the C of E would have such powers, as it is the established state church and has been since Henry VIII’s time. Also, the Queen is Supreme Governor of the church.

1910 was a watershed year in the diminution of the Lords’ power. From Wiki:

King George V inherited the throne at a politically turbulent time. The Liberal Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, led a minority government dependent upon the support of Irish Nationalists. Asquith’s reforming People’s Budget had been rejected the previous year by the Conservative-dominated House of Lords. Asquith had asked the previous King to give an undertaking that he would create sufficient Liberal peers to force the budget through the House if it was rejected again. Edward VII had reluctantly agreed, with conditions, and after a general election in January 1910 and fearing the mass creation, the Conservative peers let the budget through. Asquith attempted to curtail the power of the Lords through constitutional reforms, which were again blocked by the Upper House. Like his father, George reluctantly agreed to Asquith’s request to create sufficient Liberal peers after a general election if the Lords blocked the legislation. After the December 1910 election, the Lords once again let the bill pass on hearing of the threat to swamp the house with new peers. The subsequent Parliament Act 1911 permanently removed the power of the Lords to veto money bills…

The Church of Scotland doesn’t have any bishops. It’s not organized that way.

Just a data point, but the past few Chief Rabbis have been offered a peerage in order that they can sit in the Lords (as a Lord Temporal). It’s not compulsory to accept, of course, and I wonder if a few Cardinals have been made the offer? Canon law may make it trickier for a Catholic to accept the offer though.

Just to be clear, the Church of Scotland, which is established, doesn’t have bishops, whereas the Anglican church in Scotland, the Episcopalian Church, which is not established, does have them (as its name suggests).

Catholic clergy are not supposed to sit in parliamentary assemblies, a legacy of the nineteenth-century Catholic view that such bodies were a dangerous novelty. This has usually been a issue involving Catholic priests sitting as elected representatives, but it has also prevented any of them accepting life peerages. Cardinal Hume is the obvious case where it is known that one was offered and declined.

Not in the same way that the Church of England is, though. After furious wiki-ing it seems that the relationship between Church and State was only settled in 1921!

The Lords does have one advantage. It is not beholden to the electorate, so it can take a more dispassionate view of things. And generally, the make up of the Lords (especially after the expulsion of most of the Heredity peers) means that there is a lot of expertise in there which is not the case in the Commons. It is failry standard for former Judges, retired Military and Civil Service leaders and Captains of Industry to be given peerages. It is an advantage to have them there. Furthermore in the last 10 years, the House of Lords have been more concerned about Civil liberties then the Commons was.