How many conservatives in house of commons

It is separated into two halves by a centre aisle. Each half has six rows of between 27 and 30 seats. Opposite to the chair at the other end is the bar, a brass rod extending across the floor of the chamber past which non-Members are not permitted. Each member of Parliament is assigned a seat in the Commons chamber. If there are more government members or opposition members than can be accommodated on one side, the larger group will have members seated on both sides of the chamber.

Members of parties not recognized in the House and independent members are assigned seats by the Speaker. The seat position of each member of Parliament, including their name, political affiliation, constituency and province are as follows.

The House. Procedural Reference Material Library of Parliament. Parliamentary Diplomacy. Members - Home. Members and Roles. Related Information. Participate - Home. About the House - Home. But there is no apparent way this could be done, since the divided Tory party as a whole is now the only large-scale nominator of peers now. The Bill would have created a smaller House of Lords in which a large majority of representatives would be elected by a system of proportional representation, but where a substantial minority of peers would be appointed more or less as they are now.

The reforms were essentially wrecked by the opposition of Conservative backbench MPs, combined with the refusal of the Parliamentary Labour Party to facilitate debate citing opposition to the proposed timetable rather than the substance of the reforms. Widespread public and media outrage over a string of misconduct incidents, and unease over the role of party political donations in securing peerages for governing party supporters especially, have been backed up by continued demands for a major reform of the House of Lords.

The Liberal Democrats are firm in wanting a democratically elected chamber but nonetheless have a full quota of members themselves. The Scottish National Party refuses point blank to make any party nominations. Their deliberate and long-term absence makes the Lords even more grossly unrepresentative and south-east England-centric than ever.

Figure 1 shows the current party make-up of the House. Source: Parliament. For Prime Ministers and opposition leaders alike, the ability to appoint peers without any limit has been politically convenient. David Cameron created new peers faster than any of his predecessors, following a policy that the membership of the House of Lords should be roughly in proportion to the party voting totals at House of Commons elections. Figure 2 shows the size of the Lords in between and ; the vertical line indicates most hereditary members were removed in Absolute members include those who have retired, or taken leave of absence — it can be seen that in recent years the orange line has again risen above the grey line of actual membership.

There is a constant tendency for potential members to decrease, as elderly peers die, offset by bouts of Prime Ministers creating new peers for their party and pro rata-ing for other parties making nominations. Public criticism of rising numbers has led to a small decline in recent years. Both faced Labour and Liberal Democrat peers in opposition nearly two-fifths of the House. Notes: The dotted line here marks the exclusion of most hereditary peers from the House.

To cope with this, Cameron appointed 40 more peers of whom 26 were Conservatives in the dissolution honours and a further 16 13 of them Conservative in his resignation honours.

The only Labour nominee, Shami Chakrabarti, had chaired an inquiry that largely cleared the party of charges of anti-semitism three months earlier. In total, Cameron appointed peers during his premiership, a faster rate than any Prime Minister before him.

May has slowed the rate, but in early appointed nine new peers, three of them former Tory ministers. These efforts to increase Tory representation did not prevent ministers being defeated 98 times in the Lords between May and June , compared to 99 times in the previous five years of coalition.

Analysis by the SNP showed that nearly three-quarters of the 62 peers appointed in the second half of were former MPs, special advisers or party aides. Only four academics and two NGO or third-sector figures entered the Lords in this time, suggesting that little diversity or expertise is being brought into play by the current House. Just over a quarter of eligible peers are women and only 6.

Territorial representation is particularly poor, with limited representation of those outside the south-east of England. After a flurry of appointments during the s, the House of Lords Appointments Commission — which has only appointed crossbenchers — has been told to recommend only two new appointments each year; in there were none.

The only other parliamentary chamber in the world to include representatives from the state religion is the Islamic Republic of Iran. By more than a quarter of peers will be over 80, and Lord Steel has suggested introducing a retirement age. However, Meg Russell has pointed out that this measure if adopted alone would lead to an uneven party balance, and would not prevent Prime Ministers from appointing large numbers of new peers to replace them.

Even simply imposing a cap on numbers would reduce the proportion of crossbenchers, since Prime Ministers tend to appoint overwhelmingly from their own party. The only other parliamentary chambers in the world to still include hereditary members of the aristocracy are in the tiny polities of Tonga and the Kingdom of Lesotho. An attempt to end the hereditary peerage by-elections, in which some or all of the House picks replacements to top up the remaining 91 hereditary peers after one dies, also failed in late after not receiving government support.

It was revived in —18 and, if successful, would mean that the number of hereditary peers would gradually dwindle as their current eligible members die off. At present, around one in five ministers, 20 in all, sit in the Lords and are accountable only to other peers, providing no direct link between them and voters to create legitimacy and accountability.

Currently no Secretaries of State sit in the House of Lords, but in the recent past important figures were there — for example, Peter Mandelson was virtually Deputy Prime Minister there in —10, and Business Secretary before that in —9. However, the only form of scrutiny of peer ministers by MPs is currently through the Commons committees, which very infrequently ask them to give evidence. In , the Lords rebelled over the right of EU citizens to stay in the UK after Brexit, which were followed by extensive Brexit legislation defeats for the government in the —18 session.

This development towards a more even-handed scrutiny has come as something of a shock the Conservatives, who always dominated the Lords under the hereditary system and so were therefore used to suffering far fewer defeats when in power than Labour governments did. Furthermore, Lords defeats since have frequently been on significant pieces of legislation including some relating to immigration, pensions, anti-lobbying, financial services, children and families, welfare reform and legal aid.

In some of these cases the amendments passed by the Lords, or the amended government proposals responding to Lords defeats, were accepted by the Commons, often bringing about better policy-making.

The pattern of defeats and amendments suggest that the Lords continues to play a significant legislative role on issues where the heavily whipped MPs in the Commons at times seem incapable or unwilling to act. Most of the time amendments moved in the Lords are reversed in the Commons under governments with a majority, of which —17 is the only recent example. However, in October peers very unusually voted to delay changes to tax credits until certain conditions were met — in the process verging into budgetary matters where normally they have no competence.

This move sparked outrage from Conservative ministers, who argued that peers were overstepping their constitutional powers by meddling with a budgetary matter albeit intended to be implemented via delegated legislation. Opposition peers countered that the legislation was not a money bill but a statutory instrument, a method seemingly chosen by the government so as to avoid debate and amendment in the Commons, while the cuts themselves were in violation of election pledges given by leading Tories that tax credits would not be changed.

Therefore, they argued, it was within their rights to ask the government to rethink. The former chancellor, George Osborne, subsequently made a virtue out of dropping the tax credit cuts in his Autumn Statement.

These contentious recommendations were received with scepticism by the opposition, and were widely criticised for threatening to undermine parliamentary scrutiny of secondary legislation. The House of Lords periodically hits the headlines due to expenses scandals which highlight the on-going openness of the Upper House to financial misuse. In Lord Hanningfield was suspended for a year after being convicted of abusing expenses for a second time he served time in prison for his first offence in