This week we ask: What are the prospects for constitutional reform in the UK? What options are on the government’s agenda? What might actually happen? And will any such changes be adequate for resolving underlying problems?
Politics in the UK has been in turmoil in recent years—Brexit, Covid, movements for independence in Scotland and Northern Ireland, rule-breaking Prime Ministers, and now the shockwaves from Donald Trump’s return to the White House. These pressures have tested the UK’s political system, raising serious questions about whether constitutional reforms are needed.
In this episode, we dive into a new report from the UCL Constitution Unit, which examines possible constitutional changes, their likelihood of passing, and whether they could truly address the challenges the UK faces. Our guests are two of the report’s authors:
Our host, Alan Renwick, also a co-author of the report, leads the discussion on ossible constitutional reforms, their feasibility, and what reforms could be on the horizon.
Mentioned in this episode:
[00:00:00]Alan Renwick: Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics, and this week we ask what are the prospects for constitutional reform in the UK? What options are on the government's agenda? What might actually happen, and will any such changes be adequate for resolving underlying problems?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London. Politics in the UK has, in recent years been pretty tempestuous. Brexit, COVID, movements to break up the UK, particularly in Scotland and Northern Ireland, prime ministers who seemed to disrespect the rules. Most recently, the ructions caused by Donald Trump's return to the White House. All of these pressures and others have stretched political norms, sometimes close to breaking point. They have also raised many questions about how the core institutions of the UK's political system function and whether reforms are needed.
So constitutional change is on the table, but what options are on the agenda? How likely are they to pass and would they resolve the problems that have been exposed? Well, a new report exploring such questions has just been published by the UCL Constitution Unit, which specializes in research aimed at informing debate on constitutional change.
Two of the report’s authors join me now. They are Meg Russell, director of The Constitution Unit, and Professor of British and Comparative Politics in the UCL Department of Political Science, and Lisa James, who is Senior Research Fellow at The Constitution Unit.
Meg and Lisa, welcome back both of you to UCL Uncovering Politics. It's great to have you on again, and I should also mention before we get going that I'm in a slightly unusual position today because I'm also one of the authors of this report. So alongside us asking the questions, I'll be maybe chipping in a few thoughts as we go along as well.
But before we get into the details of the report, let's maybe set the scene a bit. And Meg, some of our listeners may be surprised by the idea that the UK has a constitution at all. It's often said by people that the UK is a country that doesn't have a constitution. When we're talking about this thing, the UK constitution, what kind of thing should listeners have in mind? How would you characterize the nature of the UK constitution?
[00:02:28]Meg Russell: Thanks Alan. And it's good to be here. I would say all democracies have a constitution, and indeed, many non democracies also have a constitution. Um, but the UK constitution is an unusual one. It's a sort of famously unusual one for being one of the few in the world that doesn't have its central rules written down in a single document. Constitutions basically describe the rules of the game, the relationships between different key institutions and how the system works. The system within which we do politics. Um, and many countries do write that down in a document so that people can go and look up their rules. And we don't do that here.
Our constitution is unusual, not only for not being written, but also a key word is codified. It's not codified. So when you have one of these documents, generally it's a document which is harder to amend than ordinary law. So you have some sort of special process for constitutional amendment, which makes it quite sort of rigid.
We have a constitution. We have a whole set of rules, but they're scattered around in different places. Some of them are in law, some of them are in guidance or documents which don't have legal status, and some of them are just in convention. Now, all countries have a degree of that. So even those that famously have written constitutions have a lot of aspects of the constitution and, and its interpretation that aren't written down.
If you look at this report, which we'll come to discuss in more detail, it covers a lot of different topics, some of which would be written down in a constitution in another country. So things like the membership of the second chamber, the relationship between the central government and the subnational governments, how those powers are distributed, the franchise, who's allowed to vote, those kinds of things you would normally find in a constitutional document.
But it also discusses a lot of other things. I mean, people might be surprised to know that the electoral system often isn't stated in a written constitution. And then there are lots of other things which are sort of lower-level things like the rules for lobbying. Or the use of deliberative democracy, or we discuss all of these things in the report.
So the fact that the UK constitution is an un codified constitution means that it is famously flexible. It's easier to change than typical written constitutions. And I think that one of the consequences of that is that we are, as a country, rather constantly engaged in a discussion about our constitution. What should change next? This report covers 31 different topics. We are always having these kinds of con- of conversations, and the question is, what's on the agenda now for this government and what might change next?
[00:05:18]Alan Renwick: That's really helpful. Thank you.
So that sets out both the scope of this document and the fact that it is very broad. It includes many aspects of the rules and the conventions, often through which the governing institutions in the UK function. But it also tells us something about the nature of debate about constitutional reform in the UK. And as you say, that's a, a very continuous process.
And also, I guess constitutional reform is itself, is just easier to happen in the UK than in many other countries. Thinking about the state of debate around the constitution in the UK; Lisa, this has been, as I hinted at in the introduction there, a fairly vexed area. Over recent years, there have been various different constitutional controversies. What would you say have been the main controversies that shape the current debates about possible constitutional reforms?
[00:06:11]Lisa James: Well, I think if we look back over the last decade, there are two really big events that really kind of brought to the fore some of the long running conversations and tensions that Meg referred to that have always existed in the constitution, but are rarely at the front of people's minds.
And those two events were, of course, first the Brexit period, and then the COVID pandemic. And both of those engaged some of the really big questions about how the core constitutional actors in the UK relate to one another.
So listeners may well remember the very vexed period of 2019 in particular, as the government and parliament fought it out to decide who was going to be responsible for creating and approving Brexit policy. Some of those questions came back in relation to pandemic regulations, when there was a lot of debate about what was the appropriate balance of government flexibility in deciding how to respond to a public health emergency and parliamentary oversight of what restrictions were being put on people's lives.
And both those periods also engage various other areas of constitutional debate. Devolution in particular, the repatriation of policy areas that had been managed at EU level, and then again, the policy response to the pandemic. Both raised really, really difficult questions about how powers and responsibilities should be balanced between UK level, um, and the devolved administrations.
And there are really competing arguments on both sides about how you both respond to the democratic aspects of devolution, and ensuring that people in devolved administrations have an appropriate voice and are allowed to make their own policy decisions. And also, how you make sure that the UK as a state responds to things in a sort of coherent and joined up way. And that's a debate that's ongoing to this day.
And then of course, in recent years, we've seen quite a lot of tension at times between the government and the courts. And that brings us into tricky areas like how judicial review should be managed, but also debates about the role of political discourse and how we make sure that we have these conversations in sort of constructive fashion.
[00:08:16]Alan Renwick: Hmm. And just picking up on that last point- Meg, something that you've written about a fair bit over these years has been around the quality of standards in public life and the concerns that, particularly during the premiership of Boris Johnson, those standards were not being adequately upheld.
[00:08:33]Meg Russell: Well, I think that's going back to what I was saying about where a constitution resides, whether it's in a codified document or in statute or in convention, there were pressures on some of the formal rules. And indeed the conservative manifesto of 2019, suggested that there needed to be a reconsideration of the relationship between Parliament, the government, and the courts.
But a lot of the concerns in that period were not about hard rules. They were about adherence to norms of good behaviour. Whether we are anymore, as Peter Hennessy famously put it, “good chaps”, whether we can expect/rely on people to behave well, or whether we need to constrain them further. And I think, obviously during the Johnson period, we also saw the parties in number 10 during lockdown, and there was a lot of concern about sort of standards of decency slipping.
[00:09:24]Meg Russell: I would also add, because I think Lisa didn't mention them, during the Johnson period there were major controversies about the when Parliament sits and when it doesn't.
[00:09:33]Meg Russell: Both in terms of his prorogation of parliament that was ruled unlawful in the Supreme Court, thereby stoking those tensions between government, parliament and the courts, but also the dissolution of parliament. These are both things that there are sections on in the report; about the circumstances in which it should be possible to dissolve Parliament and hold a general election. Because there was a big fight between Johnson and Parliament regarding whether he was allowed to call an early election in 2019 because of the fixed term parliaments act- which he subsequently got rid of. So there were an awful lot of controversies over that period.
Another thing that I've written about is standards of legislative scrutiny, which came up during that period as well, and is discussed in the report.
Alan Renwick: Yeah, and just to add further to this litany of woe, I guess I would also point out that the public have noticed these problems and the public are deeply disaffected with the state of democracy in the UK.
You know, we can see that in terms of the opinion polls, but we can also see it with very low turnout at the last election. Exceptionally, historically, low levels of support for the two main historical political parties, people really feeling alienated from the political system. And, of course, concerns around misinformation, disinformation interference from malign actors, the potential for big money to subvert, the democratic process, the looming possibilities of AI coming in, and how that might influence democracy as well.
So, lots of concerns about the kind of health of the democratic process underlying a lot of these concerns.
So, there are many, many issues that many people are concerned about that might deserve attention to be given to the institutions and possible constitutional reforms. And this Constitution Unit report seeks to offer an intervention in these debates. What's the purpose of the report. What fundamentally is it trying to do in this context? Lisa, do you want to pick that up?
[00:11:29]Lisa James: Sure. So the report is essentially seeking to provide an accessible, concise guide to the current state of affairs in various areas of the constitution, and also to point to what might be done if you wanted to strengthen in various areas.
So our starting point is that we're still relatively near the beginning of a new parliament. We are, as I mentioned here, emerging from a period in which there's been a lot of very high profile constitutional controversy, and I think that creates a good moment to stop and take stock.
We've tried to do that in a very accessible way. The constitution is a sort of sprawling and complicated thing at times. And so the report is quite simply structured into 31 standalone sections, so that people can hopefully dip in and find the things they're most interested in.
[00:12:17]Alan Renwick: So 31 different bits of the constitutional framework, if you like.
[00:12:20]Lisa James: Indeed, indeed. Yeah. Across six broad areas. And what we've tried to do-
[00:12:24]Alan Renwick: And just what, tell us what those broad areas are.
[00:12:26]Lisa James: Yeah, of course. So, parliament, of course government, the royal prerogative (which is a bit of jargon and that's powers officially held by the monarch, but really exercised by the government on its behalf), devolution and the future of the union, elections and public participation, and law, justice and the court. So it's quite a wide ranging document. And our aim for each of these things, as I mentioned, has been to lay out essentially what is the current state of affairs, and then to talk about the work that's already been done to identify potential reforms.
And in some areas there's really quite clear agreement between kind of the parliamentary committees expert bodies about what you would do in those areas if you wanted to make changes. So we may come on to talk about ministerial standards. There's a fairly clear set of potential reforms around that.
In some others we might take civil service reform as an example. It's relatively clear what the problems are, but it's much harder to come to a single set of solutions on which everyone would agree. And we've tried to be quite open about where there is consensus and where actually there are lots of different options that you would need to take into consideration.
[00:13:32]Meg Russell: And I think there are other areas beyond that where there isn't agreement on what the problem is if you take the future of the union, the SNP want to break the union up and want Scotland to be independent, and there are other people who are very firmly opposed to that. And so there's quite a lot of conflict on some of these areas as well.
I mean, I would say that the Constitution Unit always seeks to provide an impartial and objective voice, which is very evidence based on these matters. So I hope that this is a useful guide for maybe for people who are less familiar with some of these topics, or who just want to dip in and wonder what's going on, on some of these individual topics to very quickly get an idea of what the position of the government might be based on its manifesto, what some of the events of recent years have been, but also to provide the evidence. There's a lot of references in the report to much more detailed reports of other expert bodies, parliamentary committees, and so on.
So if you really want to gen up on one of these areas, it's a place to go to kind of work out what the lay of the land is and to recommend you lots of further reading. It follows up a report that we did back in 2023 where we looked across what the sort of range of topics were that a new government might look at. And this is trying to go into more detail to provide people with a bit more of that background so they can get into these things area by area.
[00:14:53]Alan Renwick: And Meg mentioned there the Labour manifesto. I guess it would be useful before we go into the detail of some of the parts of the report to just get a sense overall of how much constitutional reform actually is an important issue on the government's agenda at the moment. If we think back to the last. Labour government coming to power in 1997, it came to power with a very extensive and ambitious program of reform on the constitution. Do we see anything comparable to that in the present government? Lisa?
[00:15:26]Lisa James: So Labour did come to power last year with some stated ambitions on the constitution. Obviously the election itself was not fought on constitutional policy issues. Elections very, very rarely are. But if you look at the manifesto, there were some fairly clear ambitions for reform. And I think even looking beyond that, something that people may well recall from the campaign is a stated ambition to do politics differently and to do politics better. What Kier Starmer often talked about as a sort of politics of service, and an attempt to draw quite a clear dividing line between what they were very keen to present as a sort of a public service oriented party, compared to what they would've seen as a sort of scandal ridden Tory government. And so there was a sort of a rhetorical divide there quite clearly. But there were some concrete constitutional policies in the manifesto. Some of the most eye catching perhaps in the area of elections.
[00:16:21]Lisa James:With the pledge to introduce votes at 16. Also in devolution, there was a very clear ambition, which the government is currently acting on—and we talk about this a bit more in the report—to extend devolution settlements in England, to look at the combined authority model, but also in some other areas.
So, Lords reform was very clearly in there, and that's one of the areas where there was some detail—the removal of the remaining hereditaries, so the 92 hereditary peers who were retained when most of their fellows left under the last Labour government—the introduction of a retirement age, a participation requirement.
[00:16:54]Alan Renwick: A retirement age for the House of Lords.
[00:16:55]Lisa James: For the House of Lords, sorry. Yes. Yes.
Consultation or long-term Lords reform, which is one of those particularly thorny topics that Meg was talking about. Then, there are some broader comments indicating ambitions for change in specific areas.
A Modernisation Committee is proposed to explore potential changes in the House of Commons across a range of areas. This borrows the name of the Modernisation Committee that existed under the last Labour government. There is also mention of a new standards body.
Overall, there is a clear ambition to do things differently and introduce constitutional reform. However, what’s less clear to me is whether this is a fully joined-up program. I think it may be somewhat fragmented, and that’s something we might come on to talk about.
[00:17:37] Meg Russell: I think one of the interesting questions, which Lisa has already alluded to, is the extent to which these are sort of real principled commitments to change, and the extent to which they're handy political devices to beat your opponents with.
So in some of these areas, we heard quite a lot of complaints when Labour was in opposition and when they’d just entered power about, as Lisa says, wanting to change everything. And yet, in some of the areas where things could most easily be changed, we've seen rather little change. Some of the things that you've mentioned, we have got a bill on—there's a bill in Parliament on the House of Lords to get rid of the hereditary peers. There's been a white paper on devolution in England, for example.
But then some of the changes, which maybe you want to say more about in a moment, in terms of ministerial standards, for example, would have been very easy to change. But we've seen very little movement so far. So the report, I think, is not a menu of what the Labour government wants to do. It's a menu of all the things it might come under pressure to do, some of which it has very clear intentions to act upon and others of which people outside government would quite like it to do.
And I think in that latter category, there are those things that it might be persuaded to do, and there are those things that it's very unlikely to be persuaded to do as well. But we're trying to provide an overview of everything on, as we call it, the constitutional landscape, the constitutional agenda of people inside and outside government.
[00:18:58] Alan Renwick: Yes. Let's then go in a bit more depth into some of these areas. And Meg just mentioned standards—standards of conduct, standards of behavior from those in public life.
And Lisa, a number of parts of the report explore what might happen in the standards area. Do you want to dig into that a little bit further?
[00:19:16] Lisa James: Yes. Well, standards have obviously been one of the areas of the Constitution that quite regularly finds itself on the front pages of newspapers.
Over the last few years, some of the gaps in the existing standards system have been exposed. The system as it currently exists is fairly fragmented—it has developed piecemeal over time, resulting in a range of different bodies with varying powers and statuses. Some of these bodies are established in legislation, while others are not, meaning they could, in theory, be abolished quickly and easily if a Prime Minister chose to do so.
There has been significant work in recent years by bodies such as the Constitution Unit, the Institute for Government, the UK Government’s project, and various parliamentary committees to explore ways to harmonize and strengthen this landscape. A key question is how to ensure that the regulators overseeing ministerial standards—since ministers and MPs operate under slightly different systems—have the necessary powers to act effectively.
One of the fundamental tensions in the UK Constitution is how standards relating to elected politicians should be enforced. There is an ongoing debate about the extent to which enforcement should be handled by unelected regulators versus by politicians’ peers, who share the same democratic mandate but may also be influenced by factors such as party loyalty or opposition dynamics when making decisions in individual cases.
[00:20:55] Alan Renwick: Or, of course, by voters themselves. It’s sometimes said that the sanction comes at an election after a five-year period, and voters have the chance to—
[00:21:03] Meg Russell: Or indeed sometimes with a recall election between elections these days.
[00:21:05] All: laughing
[00:21:08] Alan Renwick: Sorry, lost my train of thought. Uh, yes. So, Lisa, you were thinking particularly about reforms that might be made to the regulators, the watchdogs, in order to potentially firm up their role.
[00:21:22] Lisa James: Yes. So, the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which looks across the entire standards landscape in the public sector to assess how high standards can be maintained and enforced, did some work on this a little while ago. They developed a set of criteria to evaluate whether a regulator has the necessary powers.
These criteria include factors such as a statutory basis, adequate resources—since effective investigations require staff and funding—and whether regulators are independently appointed. Other key considerations include whether they have the power to start their own investigations, publish findings, and recommend sanctions. This framework helps assess how regulators might need to be strengthened.
A few bodies tend to come up repeatedly in these discussions. One is the Independent Adviser on Ministerial Standards, who advises the Prime Minister when ministers are accused of breaching the ministerial code. This role involves gathering facts, establishing evidence, and advising on whether the code has been broken and what action should be taken. The final decision rests with the Prime Minister, but the adviser plays a crucial role.
This position is not established in law and has traditionally been appointed through an informal process. Previous advisers have described it as a "tap on the shoulder" appointment, with relatively limited powers. However, a recent change—introduced since the current government came to power—has granted the adviser the ability to initiate investigations without needing the Prime Minister’s permission.
[00:23:01] Alan Renwick: So that’s an innovation since the election, is that right?
[00:23:03] Lisa James: Yes.
[00:23:03] Alan Renwick: Something that the current government has done since it came to power?
[00:23:06] Lisa James: Yes, it was promised in the manifesto and has since been implemented.
[00:23:10] Lisa James: But there are still various other powers that could be given to that role. The question of statutory basis also applies to other regulators.
For example, the Commissioner for Public Appointments, which oversees the public appointments process to ensure fairness and transparency, and the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (“acoba” or “ackaba”, depending on pronunciation), which works to prevent a revolving door between government and lobbying. ACOBA enforces rules on what jobs ministers and senior civil servants can take after leaving office. However, it lacks a statutory basis, and its enforcement powers are limited to publishing critical reports on its website.
There has been considerable discussion on how to strengthen these bodies, and the Labour government pledged in its manifesto to review this area. However, no firm conclusions have been reached yet.
[00:24:16] Alan Renwick: Yeah. So, I guess I’m wondering how receptive the government is to these proposals. You've already mentioned that they have strengthened the powers of the Independent Adviser on Ministerial Standards and changed the title of that role since the election. Can we expect more activity in this area?
[00:24:35] Lisa James: I think the government certainly came to power with good intentions in this area. It has surprised some observers that they haven’t taken further action yet.
A major question about their policy is that both the manifesto and Angela Rayner, in speeches before the election, promised to establish a new independent ethics and integrity commission to oversee standards.
[00:25:00] Lisa James: There's a very obvious question about how that body should relate to the regulators that currently exist—whether it’s intended to subsume some of them, which seemed to be the initial thinking but now appears to have been reconsidered, or whether it would serve as an umbrella body or play more of a coordinating role.
[00:25:16] Alan Renwick: But we just haven't heard anything more about it since the election.
[00:25:19] Lisa James: And it seems that much of the rest of the standards agenda has been put on hold until a decision is made on that.
[00:25:26] Meg Russell: I think sometimes it’s hard to tell to what extent you’re pushing at an open door. While the government is open in many respects, it doesn’t disclose everything it’s planning. We don’t know if they’ll suddenly announce a major speech tomorrow about their determination to reform standards.
But one of the things this report aims to do is lay out the agenda so that people know what issues they might press the government on. It also reminds ministers of commitments already made—such as recommendations from the Committee on Standards in Public Life (CSPL)—so that they can be held accountable. For example, if the government pledged to implement a CSPL recommendation, the report helps keep up the pressure by asking, "When are you going to do it?" This applies across several areas.
[00:26:11] Alan Renwick: So, moving on to your area, Meg. You are the expert on Parliament. What would you—
[00:26:14] Meg Russell: There are others!
[00:26:17] Alan Renwick: I can’t imagine who! What would you want to highlight from the report’s chapter on Parliament?
[00:26:23] Meg Russell: The chapter on Parliament has, I think, six different sections. Two relate to legislation, one covers Commons procedural reform, two focus on the House of Lords, and one deals with standards, which Lisa has already discussed in the context of government.
During the turbulent Brexit, Covid, and Johnson years, there were growing concerns about a decline in legislative standards. Legislation was often rushed through without sufficient scrutiny, and key procedures—such as evidence-taking—were sidelined. Another issue was the increasing use of delegated legislation, where Parliament grants the government authority to make legal changes with only limited oversight. The concern is that this practice has expanded too far, allowing the government to implement significant policy changes with minimal parliamentary scrutiny.
The report includes a chapter on improving the delegated legislation process, reflecting recommendations from the Hansard Society and parliamentary committees. Another chapter examines primary legislation and how it can be improved, with calls for better evidence-taking and more time for scrutiny.
Beyond legislation, the report looks at broader reforms to House of Commons procedures. Lisa or Alan, you already mentioned that the Labour manifesto included a pledge to establish a Modernisation Committee, which has since been set up. However, its agenda remains unclear.
One ongoing issue is the control of time in the House of Commons—whether backbenchers have enough influence, and whether, given the unusual balance of power in this Parliament (with the Conservatives holding a very small number of seats and the Liberal Democrats having a historically large presence), the way parliamentary time is allocated between opposition parties should be reconsidered.
The chapters on Lords reform are split into two, reflecting how the Labour manifesto approached the issue. Lords reform is often discussed in two ways:
Smaller, incremental reforms that could be implemented relatively quickly. These include improving the appointments process, capping the size of the Lords, ensuring members are of sufficient quality, encouraging retirements, and removing hereditary peers. The only reform currently progressing is the removal of hereditary peers, with a bill being debated in the Lords. However, other issues—such as setting a size limit, tightening appointments criteria, and requiring minimum participation—are still being discussed.
Longer-term, large-scale reform. Some listeners may remember the Gordon Brown Commission, which reported to Keir Starmer a few years ago. Much of its focus was on devolution, but it also proposed replacing the House of Lords with a second chamber of the nations and regions, an elected body structured differently from the current Lords. The Labour manifesto references this idea but frames it as a long-term goal requiring consultation. One possibility is a citizens' assembly to gather public input on the future of the Lords.
There is clearly momentum for smaller reforms, and the government has indicated a willingness to act. However, it has been slower than expected in some areas. Perhaps this report will help maintain pressure on the government to follow through on its commitments.
[00:30:32] Alan Renwick: Yes. And for listeners interested in more detail on Lords reform, we did a podcast episode a couple of years ago, Meg, when you had a report out exploring the landscape of Lords reform.
[00:30:46] Meg Russell: House of Lords reform—it’s a job for life.
[00:30:49] Alan Renwick: Well, it has been on the agenda... You’d probably say since the 19th century? The date that always sticks in my mind is 1911, when legislation stated there would be further Lords reform, yet here we are, over a century later…
[00:31:02] Meg Russell: More than a century later! The point I always make is that the first bill attempting to limit the number of Lords appointments was in 1719—over 300 years ago. So, Lords reform isn’t just a job for life—it’s a job for many lifetimes!
[00:31:18] Alan Renwick: And you’re still pushing for it.
[00:31:20] Meg Russell: Indeed!
[00:31:21] Alan Renwick: And it still has not happened. Gosh. Well, let us see if this government manages to change that record.
I should probably say a bit about some of the reports that are in my domain, some of the bits of the report that are in my domain as well. So I focus mainly on elections in my work. And as Lisa said earlier on, there are some quite significant proposals in the government's manifesto in relation to elections.
I guess the biggest one perhaps is on votes at 16. So it's very clear that the government wants to follow what's already happened in Scotland and Wales and reduce the age of enfranchisement from 18 down to 16. And I think there's broad agreement, certainly not universal agreement among experts, but broad agreement that that is quite a sensible thing. There's certainly evidence that it would, over the long term, tend to increase turnout at elections. But only if it's done really well. And I think this is the crucial thing for us to be looking at over the next year or two. That effect on turnout works if you really put effort into education, citizenship education in schools, enabling people to understand their role in the democratic system and how they can vote effectively in order to have their voice heard.
The government at the moment is conducting a review of the curriculum in England. There have been reviews in Scotland and Wales in recent years as well, so it'd be very interesting to see if the government picks up this point that doing votes at 16 crucially has to be accompanied by curriculum reform and work around education in order to ensure that that reform works well.
Another thing that Labour has said that it will pursue is making it easier for people to register to vote, and then also actually to vote. And again, there are various experiments going on in Wales and Scotland, different parts of the country, thinking about how we can make the process of registering to vote easier and make it a bit more automatic so that if you're registering for other government services, then you can automatically, or fairly automatically, register to vote at the same time.
In terms of making it easier to vote, then I guess many people will be concerned about the voter ID requirements that were introduced by the previous government. So people voting at polling stations now have to show photographic ID, which they didn't have to do in the past. And it's clear that that has had some effect in reducing turnout in elections since that was introduced.
It's also clear that the Labour government isn't going to remove that requirement. But they do look like they want to make it a bit easier to extend the list of forms of ID that is acceptable. And it'd be very interesting to see if they move in the direction of a digital form of ID, and whether that kind of starts to morph into a sort of digital ID card for other purposes as well. And just where that takes us in the debates around these issues.
And then the third area where the government has said that it wants to act in terms of elections is in clamping down on foreign donations. So it is not allowed for people who are not on the UK electoral register to donate to political parties. But it is possible for such people to do so if they channel money through UK-based companies. And that essentially at the moment is an avenue that is ripe for exploitation, and the government is clear that it wants to clamp down on that, at least a bit. Again, quite how far it wants to go isn't terribly clear at the moment.
And I guess from my point of view, it's not obvious why anyone, wherever they're from, should be able to donate some vast sum of money to a political party, given the principle of everyone being equal in the democratic system. And it seems that the government doesn't want to move in the direction of having donation caps. So caps on how much people can donate to political parties. That was an issue that was quite live on the agenda some years ago, but has tended to move off the agenda more recently. So it'd be interesting to see just how far they're willing to go in that area.
I guess just finally, I might mention again, many people will be concerned with the core of the electoral system—the first-past-the-post electoral system. We had an exceptionally disproportional election result just a few months ago, and if the political party system is fragmenting increasingly, then the argument for first-past-the-post—that it delivers stable single-party governments—may increasingly in the future be difficult to sustain. But on the other hand, at least for now, we have a stable government, a stable single-party government that has been produced by that electoral system. And there's clearly no chance that this government is going to pursue electoral reform.
And then, yeah, I guess just finally, finally, Meg mentioned the idea of maybe there being a citizens' assembly in relation to Lords reform and the whole question of how the government can potentially open up the democratic system and enable more effective democratic participation. I think is a really live one. There was certainly some interest in senior parts of the Labour Party in using citizens' assemblies before the election. We haven't really heard terribly much on that since the election. But again, there are lots of interesting ideas out there for how they could be used and how a range of other processes could be used to try to get people involved and enable people just to feel heard, feel part of the democratic process, which at the moment very few people do. So yeah, there's a little sense of some of the bits of the reports that I have particularly focused on.
Our time is always far too short, and we're coming to the end. Let me just ask one final question to each of you. Lisa and Meg, what is your message that you would want to give to policymakers, to ministers coming out of this report? What's the main thing that you would want them to hear and go away with and think about further? Lisa?
[00:37:29] Lisa James: I think the main thing that I would want people to take away from the report is the wealth of work that already exists on constitutional reform. I think there are lots of different areas in which people may have an interest and where people may think that the problems are easily identifiable.
I think I'd say to those people, don't feel you have to start with a blank slate. There's an awful lot of work that's been done by parliamentary committees, by different specialist bodies across a huge range of areas. And one thing that I really hope the report does is to spotlight some of that work and give people a guide to where they might go looking if they want to find out more about any of these topics or if they want to think about what concrete policy solutions they might want to espouse.
[00:38:10] Alan Renwick: Meg?
[00:38:11] Meg Russell: Yeah, I think I totally agree with that. And I would say some of these changes we've already referred to could be achieved relatively easily. I mean, I think there are two dimensions to that. One is where there's a high level of agreement. You're not gonna get into sort of intractable long arguments about things, but actually some of these changes could be achieved without even legislating.
Some of them are about the Prime Minister just saying that things are gonna be different. You don't need to legislate, for example, to hold a citizen's assembly. You didn't refer to the section on political discourse, Alan, that's not necessarily about legislating for different discourse. It's about having a determination for discourse to be different. The section on devolution in the report hasn't got much attention during our discussion. You know, there are some things culturally there about just the different institutions at Westminster and in the devolved areas, dealing with it at each other differently, respecting each other more.
There are things that you can achieve quite easily if you've got a determination to do it. And then there are other things that are fairly intractable. Maybe they do need legislation. And crucially if people are loggerheads about them—independence for Scotland, changing the electoral system, maybe even long-term Lords reform—go in those categories. So, you know, be aware, we're trying to indicate in this report where there's a relatively consensual set of experts and politicians and where you might be able to make progress quite easily. And others where you may get into trouble if you rush into them too quickly.
[00:39:42] Alan Renwick: And I guess I would just add to those points that these things really matter, that the health of the democratic system is incredibly important for all of us. And maybe we're seeing in various places around the world just at the moment, the dangers that arise if you don't adequately protect and preserve and cherish your checks and balances within your system and the quality of democratic discourse as Meg has just been saying in the system.
So these are not kind of second-order issues that politicians might think are unimportant relative to the issues around kind of delivery of public services and all these matters. Actually, the health of the democratic process is central to the delivery of the outcomes from government that the public want.
And it's really essential to be thinking about these matters. So thank you so much, Meg and Lisa, for that conversation. At this point, I normally reflect on how much I've learned from the fascinating piece of research that we have been discussing. But I may be thought biased in this case, so perhaps I should refrain from commenting. But I really hope that listeners have had their appetites whetted by this conversation and that they will want to go away and dig further into all of those 31 various bits of the Constitution that we have been talking about.
We have been discussing a new report just published by the Constitution Unit called "The Constitutional Landscape: Options for Reform". It's written by Lisa James, Patrick Thomas, our excellent fourth author who couldn't join us today, by me, Alan Renwick, and by Meg Russell. It's freely available to download from the Constitution Unit's website. And as ever, we'll put full details in the show notes for this episode. Next week we have a special episode celebrating our colleague Cathy Elliot's inaugural lecture as professor here in the UCL Department of Political Science. The topic will be "Rewilding The University". So don't miss that.
And to make sure you don't miss out on that or other future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics, all you need to do is subscribe. You can do so on Apple, Google Podcasts, or whatever podcast provider you use. And while you are there, we'd love it if you could take a moment of time to rate or review us too.
I'm Alan Renwick. This episode was produced by Eleanor Kingwell-Banham and Kaiser Kang. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.