Debates on Further Constitutional Reform

Content area 1.4 asks three distinct questions. Treating them as one blurs the argument the question is actually asking for.

1. How far should the reforms since 1997 be taken further? The House of Lords, electoral reform, devolution and human rights were all left in an unfinished state, and the Supreme Court created in 2005 has its own critics. Each has its own debate about completion.
2. How far should devolution be extended in England? England has executive mayors but no legislature, and no settled answer to the West Lothian question.
3. Should the constitution be entrenched and codified, including a bill of rights? This is the largest question, and the one that subsumes the others: a codified constitution would have to settle the status of the Lords, the electoral system and devolution as part of its own drafting.

The recurring tension underneath all three is between flexibility and restraint. The UK constitution changes easily, which lets it adapt without crisis. The same feature means a government with a Commons majority can rewrite the rules under which it governs — what Lord Hailsham called an elective dictatorship in 1976.

Every reform proposal in this content area is a bet about which risk is greater: a constitution too rigid to adapt, or an executive too lightly constrained.

The House of Lords Act 1999 was stage one of a two-stage plan. Stage two has not happened, and the chamber's composition keeps the argument alive.

The position as of March 2026: more than 800 members, no upper limit on the chamber's size, most members appointed on the nomination of party leaders, and crossbenchers making up about 22% of the membership as the third largest group. Because of the crossbenchers, no government commands a Lords majority.

Worked example — how much power does the Lords actually have? Test the claim that an unelected chamber obstructs the elected one against four recent episodes.

1. It can delay. In December 2025 supporters of the assisted dying bill, which had passed the Commons in June 2025, complained publicly about slow progress in the Lords and warned the bill could run out of parliamentary time.
2. It can defeat the government. In January 2026 peers voted for a ban on social media use by under-16s against the government's position.
3. But the Commons can reverse it. In April 2024 the government used its Commons majority to strip out Lords amendments to the Rwanda Bill.
4. And the final weapon is rarely needed. The Parliament Acts, which let the Commons override the Lords after a year's delay, were last used to pass the Hunting Act 2004.

The judgement that follows: the Lords is influential when it works with the grain of political and public opinion, and gives way when the Commons insists. That supports the defenders' case — it revises rather than blocks — but it also weakens the reformers' urgency, which is part of why stage two has stalled.

Defenders add that the Lords compensates for weak Commons scrutiny: public bill committees do not consistently examine legislation in the detail long or badly drafted bills require, and the Lords catches what they miss.

Electoral reform for Westminster stalled after the 2011 referendum on the Alternative Vote, lost by 67.9% to 32.1% on a 42.2% turnout. The argument has revived because first past the post is producing results that are harder to defend as multi-party competition grows.

The evidence reformers use:

• In 2024 Labour won about 63% of the 650 Commons seats on 33.7% of the UK vote, a majority of 174.
• The combined Conservative and Labour vote share was just over 57%, a record low for the two main parties, and turnout was 59.7%, the lowest since 2001.
• Individual MPs can be elected on around 30% of a constituency vote when four or five parties compete.
• Polling in early September 2026 showed four- and five-party competition, with YouGov on 6–7 September putting Labour 23%, Reform UK 23%, Conservative 20%, Green 12% and the Liberal Democrats 11–12%.

The counter-argument, set out by Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times in May 2026, is that first past the post does not merely record a party system — it shapes one. The system reduces voters' effective options to two, punishes votes for smaller parties and pushes parties to build broad coalitions internally before an election rather than in negotiations afterwards. On that reading, multi-party competition is a phase rather than a settled state, and the system will squeeze it back towards two blocs.

Wales now supplies a live test. The Senedd election of 7 May 2026 used a closed proportional list system for the first time, returning 96 members from 16 six-member constituencies. Turnout rose to 51.6%, the highest at any Senedd election, and six parties won seats: Plaid Cymru 43, Reform UK 34, Labour 9, Conservative 7, Green 2, Liberal Democrat 1. No party won a majority.

That result gives both sides material. Proportional representation delivered a chamber that reflects the vote and a higher turnout; it also delivered no majority government and a system in which voters choose a party list rather than a named candidate. The obstacle to Westminster reform is structural: parties that form governments under first past the post won under it, and have limited incentive to replace it.

Devolution appears in 1.2 as one of Labour's reforms and in 1.4 as unfinished business. It was built nation by nation rather than to a single plan, so each part of it has its own argument about the next step.

Where the argument is loudest. In Scotland "further" runs into independence. The referendum of 18 September 2014 was lost 55.3% to 44.7% on an 84.6% turnout, and the Supreme Court held in November 2022 that the Scottish Parliament could not legislate for a referendum on its own, because a measure of that kind relates to the reserved matter of the Union. At the election of 7 May 2026 the SNP won 57 seats — the largest party, but short of the 65 needed for a majority. A further referendum therefore needs Westminster's agreement, and the argument is about whether a mandate for one exists.

Northern Ireland is the hardest case. Its institutions rest on the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and on cross-community consent, and they stopped functioning from early 2017 to January 2020 and again from 2022 until February 2024. Reformers argue that rules allowing either community to collapse the Executive should be loosened. The counter-argument is that those rules are why both communities accepted the settlement, so changing them without agreement would remove its foundation.

The pattern to notice. Powers move outwards and are not brought back, while the legal framework stays as it was in 1998: devolved bodies created by ordinary statute, protected by convention rather than by law. That is why "should devolution go further?" is a much easier question about individual powers than about the settlement as a whole.

England is the unfinished part of the devolution settlement. It holds about 84% of the UK population, has executive mayors but no legislature, and lacks any answer to the West Lothian question since English votes for English laws was scrapped in July 2021.

The practical direction of travel has been mayors. Their political weight is real but bounded: an English metro mayor manages transport, skills and housing budgets and cannot pass primary law. The limits were visible in June 2026, when Andy Burnham, then Mayor of Greater Manchester, won a Commons seat at the Makerfield by-election on 18 June before becoming Prime Minister on 20 July 2026 — the route to national power still runs through Westminster, not through England's devolved offices.

The Human Rights Act 1998 sits at the centre of this debate because it protects rights without entrenching them. Courts can interpret legislation compatibly with Convention rights, and issue a declaration of incompatibility where they cannot, but Parliament decides the remedy and could repeal the Act by simple majority.

Three positions:

• Keep and strengthen. Rights that depend on a government's forbearance are not securely protected. Entrenching them, with courts able to strike down incompatible legislation, would give citizens a remedy rather than a declaration.
• Replace. Proposals for a British Bill of Rights have recurred since 2010, arguing that domestic rights should be defined domestically and balanced against responsibilities. A Bill of Rights Bill introduced in 2022 was dropped in 2023, and the Human Rights Act remains in force.
• Leave it as it is. The current design lets courts identify rights problems while leaving the final word with elected politicians. Entrenchment would move contested moral questions — assisted dying, abortion, free expression — from Parliament to a court of unelected judges.

Worked example — what entrenchment would require. Trace the chain of consequences, because this is where most answers stop too early.

1. Write the rights down. A UK bill of rights would have to specify each right and its limits, which itself requires political agreement on contested questions.
2. Give courts the power to enforce it. A declaration of incompatibility would have to become a power to strike legislation down — a transfer of authority from Parliament to the Supreme Court.
3. Protect it from repeal. Entrenchment needs a special amendment procedure, such as a two-thirds Commons majority or a referendum.
4. Solve the sovereignty problem. Step 3 collides with the rule that no Parliament can bind its successors. A future Parliament could repeal the entrenching provision by simple majority unless the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty were itself abandoned.

Step 4 is the reason codification is a bigger question than it first appears. It cannot be delivered as an add-on; it requires replacing one of the twin pillars.

The Constitutional Reform Act 2005 created the UK Supreme Court, which opened in October 2009 with twelve Justices, moved the role of head of the judiciary to the Lord Chief Justice and set up the Judicial Appointments Commission. As of September 2026 Lord Reed is President, with Lord Briggs appointed to succeed him from January 2027. The reform is recent enough that critics and supporters both want it taken further — in opposite directions.

The name is the giveaway. The Court is supreme over other courts, not over Parliament. It can quash a ministerial decision, rule a devolved bill outside competence and declare a statute incompatible with Convention rights, but it cannot annul an Act.

Treating the Supreme Court as a separate topic misses the strongest connection in 1.4: entrenchment needs a court able to enforce the entrenched rules, so anyone arguing for a codified constitution is also arguing for a more powerful Supreme Court, and has to defend that consequence.

The reform case rests on four claims.

1. Clarity. Rules scattered across statutes, judgments, conventions and textbooks are hard to identify and easier to bend. Disputes over prorogation in 2019 and over the meaning of conventions in devolution arose partly because no authoritative text settled them.

2. Limits on executive power. The UK executive typically controls a Commons majority through party discipline, and the Commons dominates a legislature in which the Lords can only delay. Nothing legally prevents that majority from rewriting constitutional rules to its own advantage: the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 was introduced by one government and repealed by another eleven years later, both by ordinary Act. A codified constitution would place some rules beyond ordinary majorities.

3. Rights protection. Rights resting on an unentrenched statute depend on the political weather. An entrenched bill of rights would put them beyond ordinary repeal.

4. Accessibility and citizenship. A constitution a citizen can read is a constitution a citizen can hold government to. Codified constitutions elsewhere serve as focal points of civic education in a way an uncodified one cannot.

A change of Prime Minister illustrates the reformers' point sharply. On 20 July 2026 Andy Burnham became Prime Minister having entered the Commons at a by-election on 18 June, been elected Labour leader unopposed on 17 July, and faced no general election. Every step was lawful and conventional. A codified constitution would either authorise that sequence explicitly or forbid it — either way, the rule would be written down and known in advance rather than inferred from practice.

The four objections in detail:

• Flexibility is a genuine asset. The constitution absorbed devolution in 1998, the Supreme Court in 2005 and a change of Prime Minister in 2026 without needing an amendment process. Codified systems can be immobilised by their own amendment rules; the US Constitution has been amended only 27 times since 1787.
• It transfers power to judges. Enforcing a codified constitution means courts deciding what its clauses mean. Those decisions are political in substance, taken by appointed judges who cannot be voted out. Critics of the 2019 prorogation ruling argued this shift had already begun without codification.
• It conflicts with parliamentary sovereignty. Entrenchment requires that some law be beyond Parliament's reach, which the doctrine denies. Reform therefore means replacing a foundational principle, not adding a document.
• There is no agreement on content or process. Who drafts it — a convention, a citizens' assembly, a parliamentary committee? Is it approved by referendum? Would it fix the electoral system, the Lords and devolution as they now stand? Each answer creates its own opposition, which is why proposals rarely progress beyond the argument for having one.

Reaching a judgement. A strong 30-mark answer takes a position and holds it. Two defensible lines:

• Reform is overdue. The system depends on self-restraint by the people it constrains, and the record since 2010 — a fixed-term law imposed and repealed, English votes for English laws imposed and scrapped, an unelected chamber left uncapped — shows restraint working inconsistently.
• Reform is unnecessary and risky. The system has absorbed major change repeatedly without breakdown, the courts have proved willing to check the executive under existing law, and codification would buy certainty at the price of adaptability and of democratic control over contested moral questions.

1. Treating codified and entrenched as the same thing

Codification is about where the rules live; entrenchment is about how hard they are to change. A codified constitution Parliament could rewrite by simple majority would fix presentation without fixing protection. Answers that separate the two show the sharper understanding.

2. Ignoring the sovereignty obstacle

Entrenchment requires abandoning the rule that no Parliament can bind its successors. An answer arguing for a codified constitution without addressing that point has skipped the hardest part of its own case.

3. Arguing only about codification

Content area 1.4 also covers completing the reforms since 1997 and extending devolution in England. A question on further reform may target the Lords, electoral reform, devolution to the nations, human rights, the Supreme Court or England specifically, so revise all three strands rather than one.

4. Asserting that the Lords blocks the elected chamber

The evidence is mixed and should be presented that way: the Lords delayed the assisted dying bill in December 2025 and defeated the government on under-16 social media use in January 2026, but the Commons reversed Lords amendments to the Rwanda Bill in April 2024 and the Parliament Acts were last needed in 2004.

5. Using undated examples

Composition figures for the Lords, poll standings and devolution arrangements all change. Attach a date: "over 800 peers as of March 2026", "the Senedd's first closed-list election in May 2026". A dated claim shows currency; an undated one quietly goes out of date.

6. Listing other countries' constitutions instead of arguing

The USA and Germany are useful for one comparative point each — entrenchment through a demanding amendment procedure, and the difficulty of updating a frozen text. Use them to support a point about the UK; extended description of a foreign constitution for its own sake is off the question on a UK Government paper.

7. Balancing without concluding

The 30-mark command word is Evaluate, carrying 10 marks for AO3. Set out both sides, then state which case is stronger and why, and keep that judgement visible in each paragraph rather than saving it for a final sentence.