How well do the House of Lords do their jobs?

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How well do the H.O.L do their jobs?

The House of Lords (HL), sometimes known as the revising chamber or upper chamber of parliament, is the second element of parliament and as such its consent (generally) is required to make law. There are two types of peer, Lord spiritual (the 26 most senior Church of England bishop, which now has 2 women in is ranks) and the Lord Temporal (of which there are three types; hereditary peers, life peers and law Lords). Before the passing of the Parliament Act in 1911 the Hl held a veto over legislation passed in the Commons. That statue means that the Lords can only delay the passing of a bill and not defeat it totally. When New Labour came into power in 1997 one of their manifesto pledges was to reform the Upper chamber by abolition the rights of hereditary peers to come to parliament and vote on legislation. This was always going to be hard to achieve and when the House of Lords Act 1999 was granted Royal Assent, due to the Weatherall (Speaker of the HC before Bercow) Amendments, 92 hereditary remained members of the lords. Despite a couple of half-hearted attempts to further reform the Lords since the HLA this conditional anachronism remains part of the way we are governed. As the unelected body the HL is the junior House, it revises legislation and scrutinises government in a less heated and party partisan manner. However since 1911 the HL's role and more importantly its composition has undergone sporadic bouts of controversy. Since 1911 the HL has undergone reform but in a piecemeal incremental fashion, 1957 Life Peerages Act, House of Lords Act 1999 and the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 have all altered the composition of the HL. However arguments still rage in some quarters that the unelected nature of the HL is itself an affront to democracy.
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One of the most important roles of the House of Lords is to delay and amend laws, which were suggested by the House of Commons and passed to the House of Lords to get their expert knowledge analysing it. They then amend, delay or pass it through for Royal assent, which then becomes law. However, The House of Lords is limited in its ability to block legislation by statute, because they can only delay it once and if the Commons are still persistent they will send it again in the second term and it will skip the House ...

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