• Hereditary Peers Bill: what happened at Second Reading?

• House of Lords reform: why are some MPs pushing for bigger changes?

• The future of the Hereditary Peers Bill: will it face amendments or a block in the House of Lords?

• Labour’s first 100 days: what have we learnt so far?

• Labour’s legislative programme: are they delivering on promises for better law-making?

• Twenty Private Members’ Bills have been introduced: what are they and how many are likely to be government-supported?

• Speaker’s Conference on MP safety: what is it and why does it matter?

Hansard Society

• Private Members' Bills (PMBs): A procedural and constitutional guide

• Inside the Private Members' Bill Ballot: 20 MPs win the legislative lottery - Parliament Matters podcast, Episode 46

• Private Members' Bills: Reform recommendations

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[00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. Coming up

Ruth Fox: The Tumbrils roll, as the House of Commons prepares to remove the remaining hereditary peers from the House of Lords.

Mark D'Arcy: It's not exactly been JFK, has it?

So what have we learned about this government in its first hundred days?

Ruth Fox: And MPs are under growing threat of physical violence from the public. A new Speaker's Conference is going to look at how to protect them. So what is it, and what might it do?

Mark D'Arcy: But first, Ruth, we're rather in the calm before the budget storm at the moment, waiting for Rachel. It's an [00:01:00] existential drama in which the main tax increases never appear, but the big parliamentary event that's going on even while the budget is in gestation is the bid to remove the hereditary peers, the remaining 92 of them who sit in the House of Lords, from the upper house so that they will no longer be entitled to seats in the legislature at all.

And that is a very big deal. We're talking about removing an element of Parliament that's been there since, what, the 1400s?

Both: Mm hmm.

Mark D'Arcy: And it's a major constitutional change being done in actually quite a mini piece of legislation. This is a five clause bill that quite simply removes the right of hereditary peers to sit in the Lords and doesn't attempt any wider constitutional change beyond that.

So it's both very big in one sense and quite minimalist in another...