The 1911 Act removed the Lords' veto over money bills and replaced its general veto with a two-year delay; the 1949 Act cut the delay to one year. Together they fixed the legal hierarchy - the Lords revises and delays, the Commons decides.
Composition was left untouched: the Acts solved the power question and left the membership question for the rest of the century.
The 1911 Act stripped powers from the hereditary chamber without touching its membership - peers still sat by birth for another nine decades, just with less to do. The legitimacy question was deferred, not answered.
Use this to open the unfinished-reform theme: the century of patchwork starts here.
The Acts dealt entirely in powers - veto removed on money bills, delay capped - and left who sits in the chamber for later statutes. The expertise model had to wait for the Life Peerages Act 1958.
Keep this row for the powers and primacy columns, where it does the heavy lifting.
The 1911 Act removed the Lords' veto over money bills and replaced its general veto with a two-year delay; the 1949 Act cut the delay to one year. Each Act made the Lords a weaker check than before.
The modern revising chamber works within these limits - delay and amendment, never veto - so every later checks cell on this grid operates inside the 1911-49 frame.
The Salisbury Convention, financial privilege and the reasonable-time convention all assume the legal hierarchy the Parliament Acts fixed: the Lords revises and delays, the Commons decides.
The Acts are the statutory floor under the conventions - which is why the conventions survived a century of composition fights largely intact.
The Acts put Commons supremacy into statute: no veto on money bills from 1911, a one-year cap on delay from 1949. The elected chamber's last word stopped being a convention and became law.
Every Lords essay should state this settlement early - the powers question was answered in statute long before the membership question.
The 1911 Act's own preamble promised a chamber constituted on a popular basis - stage two of a reform that never came. A century later the same pattern repeated: 1999 removed most hereditaries as stage one, and its stage two never came either.
The Parliament Acts set the template for unfinished Lords reform.
By solving the power question - delay not veto, Commons supremacy in statute - the Acts removed the urgency from the composition question, and the chamber stayed unelected for the century that followed.
In essays this is the structural reason election keeps stalling: once the Lords could not block the Commons, the case for electing it lost its emergency.
Created life peers - membership for life, not inheritance - and admitted the first women to the chamber. Life peers now form the majority of around 800 members, including former judges, doctors, scientists and ministers, with around 180 crossbenchers carrying no party whip.
The Act built the expertise model that remains the strongest argument for an appointed chamber.
The Act broke heredity's monopoly: membership for life rather than by birth, and the first women admitted to the chamber. The Lords stopped being a purely aristocratic body.
Better is not legitimate, though - the chamber remained wholly unelected, which is why this plus is a relative one.
Life peerages created the route for ennobling former judges, doctors, scientists, military officers and ministers - and around 180 crossbenchers now carry no party whip at all.
This is the strongest argument for the appointed model, and the question every elected-Lords plan must answer: where does the expertise go when peers must campaign for their seats?
A chamber of working appointees rather than absentee aristocrats could do serious revising work - the committee scrutiny and detailed amendment the modern Lords is valued for grew from the 1958 membership.
The checking function the Parliament Acts capped in law, the Life Peerages Act revived in practice.
The conventions - Salisbury, financial privilege, reasonable time - assume a chamber that revises seriously but knows its place. The 1958 Act built exactly that chamber: expert enough to be useful, unelected enough to defer.
A more credible Lords made the conventions workable rather than merely theoretical.
Appointed life peers claim no rival mandate - they can advise, amend and delay, but they cannot tell an elected Commons that voters chose them too. Commons primacy was never safer than under the appointed model.
This is the primacy argument later deployed against the 2012 elected-Lords plan: election creates exactly the rival mandate appointment avoids.
The Act added a new membership route without removing the old one - hereditary peers stayed for another four decades, until 1999, and a rump survived until the 2024 Bill.
Patchwork again: each reform improved the chamber and left the underlying question of what legitimises it unanswered.
The expertise model the Act built is the standing case against election: a chamber of former judges, scientists and ministers, with around 180 unwhipped crossbenchers, doing work an elected chamber of career politicians would not.
Any elected-Lords essay must engage this row directly - it is the appointed side's best evidence, not a strawman.
New Labour's stage one: removed most hereditary peers, leaving a rump in place as part of the compromise that got the Bill through. Stage two - a decision on what the chamber should finally become - never came.
The part-reformed chamber proved more assertive than the old one: with the indefensible majority of hereditaries gone, peers felt more confident in pressing amendments.
New Labour's Act removed most hereditary peers - the chamber's least defensible feature - leaving a hereditary rump in place as the price of getting the Bill through.
The compromise rump is the cell's qualification: heredity was cut back, not ended, and 88 hereditary peers still sat when the 2024 Bill arrived a quarter-century later.
The Act changed who left, not who arrived: the appointments system and the life-peerage expertise route were untouched, so the chamber's expert character neither gained nor lost.
Keep this row for the legitimacy and completion columns - the expertise story belongs to 1958.
The part-reformed chamber became more assertive, not less: with the indefensible hereditary majority gone, peers felt their standing to press amendments had strengthened.
This is the row's most useful essay point - reform aimed at legitimacy ended up sharpening the chamber's checking behaviour, an unintended consequence worth a sentence in any effectiveness paragraph.
Salisbury, financial privilege and reasonable time all survived the 1999 change without amendment - the conventions govern how the chamber behaves, and a more legitimate membership had no reason to break them.
The next real test of the conventions came in 2015, over tax credits, not from composition reform.
Removing hereditaries gave the chamber no mandate - peers were still appointed, so the Commons' claim to be the only elected House was untouched.
Composition reform that stops short of election leaves primacy entirely safe, which is part of why this kind of reform passes and elected reform fails.
The Act was explicitly stage one of New Labour's plan; stage two - deciding what the chamber should finally become - never came, and the hereditary rump sat for another quarter-century.
With the 1911 preamble, this is the second great unfinished reform: the pattern, not the exception.
Removing heredity stripped away the chamber's old justification without supplying a new one - if not birth, then what legitimises the Lords? Appointment by prime ministers is hardly a stronger answer.
Each anomaly removed sharpens the elected case by elimination: the 1999 Act made the legitimacy question harder to avoid, not easier.
The Coalition's plan for a mainly elected chamber was abandoned after a Conservative backbench rebellion made the timetable unworkable. The strongest argument deployed against it was Commons primacy: an elected second chamber would claim a rival mandate.
The clearest modern proof that big-bang Lords reform fails even when a government formally supports it.
The Coalition's plan for a mainly elected chamber was abandoned after a Conservative backbench rebellion made the timetable unworkable - so the legitimacy deficit it targeted survived untouched.
A reform that fails leaves the problem exactly where it found it; the chamber stayed around 800 unelected members.
Whether an elected chamber would have lost the crossbench experts was never tested, because the Bill never passed. The expertise question - the appointed side's strongest card - remained hypothetical on both sides.
In essays, say so plainly: 2012 proves election is hard to legislate, not that elected chambers fail.
Nothing about the chamber's powers, conventions or behaviour changed - the Bill died before reaching any of them. The Lords carried on revising and delaying exactly as before.
The row's significance is entirely about the politics of reform, which is where its pluses and minuses live.
The Bill never passed, so no elected peers ever arrived to test whether Salisbury and the rest would survive a chamber with its own mandate. That untested question - would elected members still defer? - was itself part of what killed the plan.
The real convention test came three years later from appointed peers, in the 2015 tax credits row - worth pairing in any conventions paragraph.
The strongest argument deployed against the Bill was the rival-mandate fear: an elected second chamber would claim democratic legitimacy of its own and challenge Commons supremacy. The Bill died and primacy was preserved by default.
This is the structural dilemma of Lords reform in one episode - the change that would fix legitimacy is the change that threatens primacy.
A government formally committed to a mainly elected chamber, with the plan in the Coalition agreement, could not get it past its own backbenches - the clearest modern proof that big-bang Lords reform fails even with formal government support.
Cite 2012 whenever an essay needs to explain why reform proceeds by patchwork: the whole-job route has been tried.
The episode weakens the elected case practically rather than in principle: election commands wide rhetorical support and could not survive contact with a Commons vote, because MPs themselves fear a rival chamber.
The appointed side's argument writes itself - if even its supporters will not legislate it, election is an answer the system cannot deliver.
The Lords voted to delay the government's tax credit cuts - a statutory instrument the Commons had already approved - and forced a full retreat. The government's complaint was financial privilege; the episode triggered the Strathclyde Review, whose proposals to curb the Lords were then shelved.
Both sides of the reform essay claim this row: real scrutiny that the Commons had failed to provide, exercised by a chamber nobody elected.
Unelected peers voted to delay welfare cuts an elected government had brought forward and the Commons had approved - the legitimacy problem performed in public.
However good the scrutiny, the optics carried the constitutional argument: who elected the people who just overruled the government on tax credits?
The cuts came as a statutory instrument the Commons had waved through with minimal scrutiny - it was the Lords that examined the detail and forced the issue.
This is the revising chamber doing exactly the careful secondary-legislation work the appointed model is praised for; the row's tension is that the same act is the elected side's favourite grievance.
The Lords' vote forced a full government retreat on the tax credit cuts - not a request to think again but an actual reversal of policy.
The most concrete modern demonstration that the chamber can check a government with a Commons majority; pair it with the Strathclyde aftermath to show the check survived the government's anger.
The government's complaint was financial privilege - the Commons' supremacy on money matters - and the episode triggered the Strathclyde Review into curbing the Lords' powers over statutory instruments.
The conventions bent: the Lords argued an SI was not a money bill, the government disagreed, and the boundary turned out to be contested rather than clear.
The government's case was precisely that the elected chamber's financial supremacy had been breached - the Lords had blocked a welfare measure the Commons approved.
Whether the SI route really engaged financial privilege is arguable, but the episode shows primacy is policed politically: the government's answer was a review and a threat, not a statute.
The Strathclyde Review proposed curbing the Lords' power over statutory instruments - and the proposals were then shelved, leaving the chamber's powers exactly as before.
Even reform provoked by open confrontation went nowhere: more evidence for the pattern that Lords reform stalls whenever it gets specific.
Power without a mandate is the elected case's favourite example: peers nobody chose forced an elected government to retreat on welfare policy. If the chamber is going to exercise real power, the argument runs, it needs democratic authority behind it.
The appointed reply uses the same facts - the scrutiny was right and the Commons had failed to provide it. Both sides claim this row, so use it to stage the clash.
The Labour government's measure removing the remaining hereditary peers - ending heredity in the legislature a quarter-century after the 1999 Act removed most of it.
Still patchwork: bishops, the appointments system and the chamber's size are untouched, so the underlying question - what finally legitimises the second chamber - remains open.
The Bill removes the 88 hereditary peers who survived the 1999 compromise - ending heredity in the legislature a quarter-century after the first stage. The chamber's most obviously indefensible feature finally goes.
A real legitimacy gain, but a narrow one: around 800 members remain unelected, with 26 bishops still sitting as of right.
The Bill subtracts the hereditaries and adds nothing: appointments, the life-peerage route and the crossbench expertise model all continue unchanged.
Keep this row for the legitimacy and completion columns - the expertise argument is untouched by removing 88 members who sat by birth.
Like 1999, this is composition reform, not powers reform: the Parliament Acts framework, the conventions and the chamber's revising role all carry on as before.
If 1999 is a guide, a more defensible membership may again make the chamber more assertive - worth flagging as a possibility, not asserting as fact.
The Bill was processed through the very chamber it reforms - peers scrutinising the abolition of some of their own number, within the usual conventions, without constitutional crisis.
A reform of the Lords passing through the Lords by ordinary process is itself evidence the conventions still hold.
Removing hereditaries gives the chamber no new mandate - members are still appointed, so the Commons remains the only elected House and its supremacy is untouched.
The same logic as 1999: composition reform short of election is safe for primacy, which is exactly why this kind of reform is the kind that passes.
Bishops, the appointments system and the chamber's size of around 800 are all untouched - the Bill ends heredity and leaves every other legitimacy question open.
Patchwork for a third time: 1911 promised stage two, 1999 promised stage two, and 2024 repeats the pattern of finishing one anomaly while deferring the chamber's final form.
With heredity gone, the question of what does legitimise the chamber gets harder to dodge: appointment by prime ministers is the last justification standing, and it is not obviously stronger than the birthright just abolished.
Each anomaly removed sharpens the elected case by elimination - the 2024 Bill clears the ground for the argument the 2024 Q1(a) source question asks directly.