The government has “fashioned a pretend constitutional crisis” out of the House of Lords’ decision to delay Conservative plans to cut £4.4bn from tax credits, the shadow leader of the House of Commons, Chris Bryant, has said.

Speaking during an urgent debate in parliament on a recently announced review of the relationship between the Commons and the Lords, Bryant said: “It’s clear that the government intends to give the House of Lords a kicking, but it should remember – as it fashions this pretend constitutional crisis – that the vast majority of people in this country applauded the Lords on Monday because the [tax credits cuts were] not in the government’s manifesto.”

The government launched a “rapid review” led by Lord Strathclyde of how MPs can be given the “decisive role” over key financial decisions on Tuesday, following the government’s Lords defeat the previous day over plans to cut tax credits. Strathclyde said on Wednesday the Lords had acted “wrongly, deplorably and unnecessarily”.

Strathclyde said one of the more extreme solutions would be to amend the Parliament Act, but he ruled out flooding the Lords with Tory peers, something government sources threatened to do last week. “[Creating many more Conservative peers] is not [a solution] that I would recommend,” he said. “I think that that would be the wrong thing to do. Mr Blair created probably more peers than anybody in modern history, but it’s the wrong thing to do to deal with this particular problem.”



Convention dictates that peers do not vote against measures that were set out in a governing party’s manifesto. The government can also override primary legislation blocked by the Lords using the Parliament Act, but this does not apply to secondary legislation, the type used for the tax credit cuts, which can be killed off with a fatal motion.

The leader of the House of Commons, Chris Grayling, argued that the decision by the Lords to reject a financial measure that had been approved three times by the elected Commons raised clear “constitutional issues that need to be examined carefully”.

He said the government would publish the full details of the terms of reference of the review and the review panel in due course, adding later that the issue of House of Lords reform had returned “very much to centre stage”.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s World at One, Strathclyde said he thought the House of Lords had behaved “wrongly, deplorably and unnecessarily”, but dismissed claims that the review was a revenge act on peers. He said he hoped the review’s work would be finished by Christmas.

“My role is to try and give clarity to the conventions that have existed, to look at the choice, because there is no government I can think of since the second world war that would have put up with the House of Lords destroying or stopping in its tracks a piece of legislation, to do with financial matters, a matter of weeks before the autumn statement, and a few days after the House of Commons voted in favour of it,” said Strathclyde.

Bryant had asked Grayling in the Commons: “Does the leader see no irony at all in getting the House of Lords to review the financial privilege of the House of Commons and for that matter [a review by a] hereditary peer?”

He pointed to an instance in 1999 where a Conservative-led Lords voted down two statutory instruments proposed by the then Labour government, a move Strathclyde defended at the time, describing the convention that prevented peers from doing so as “dead”.

Former Conservative lord chancellor Kenneth Clarke asked that there be no delay in bringing forward “legislation that sets out clearly what convention has previously established”.

“If the Lords keep repeating these party political votes, it will be almost impossible to have stable government taking firm and difficult decisions for the remainder of this parliament – where presumably they will start misbehaving with ever more frequency,” he added.