The structure and role of the House of Commons and House of Lords, the comparative powers of the two chambers, the legislative process, and how effectively Parliament represents, legislates and scrutinises the executive.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to describe the structure and membership of the Commons and the Lords, compare their powers, explain the legislative process, and evaluate how effectively Parliament carries out its core functions of representation, legislation and scrutiny of the executive.

The structure of Parliament

Parliament is bicameral, made up of two chambers plus the Crown.

• House of Commons: 650 MPs each elected by First Past the Post in a single-member constituency. It is the dominant chamber because it is democratically elected and the government must keep its confidence to survive. The Speaker chairs it impartially, and the governing party's frontbench (ministers) faces the opposition frontbench across the chamber.
• House of Lords: around 800 unelected members, mostly life peers (appointed under the Life Peerages Act 1958), plus 92 remaining hereditary peers (after the House of Lords Act 1999) and 26 Church of England bishops. It is a revising chamber that scrutinises, amends and delays legislation and contributes expertise, but lacks the democratic legitimacy to block the elected Commons.

Comparative powers of the two chambers

The Lords still matters. It defeats the government regularly on amendments, forcing compromise or the use of the Parliament Acts; its members include former ministers, judges, scientists and bishops, giving it expertise the Commons lacks; and it is less constrained by the whip, so its scrutiny can be more independent. But the Commons can ultimately override it.

The legislative process

A public bill passes through both Houses: first reading (formal introduction), second reading (the main debate on the principle of the bill), committee stage (line-by-line scrutiny and amendment in a public bill committee), report stage (the amended bill is reviewed by the whole House) and third reading (a final debate), then the same stages in the other House, before royal assent turns it into an Act. Most bills are government bills that pass because the government commands a Commons majority; backbench private members' bills rarely succeed without government time, though some (such as abortion and capital punishment reforms historically) have changed major social policy.

How effectively does Parliament scrutinise the executive?

Parliament's scrutiny tools include Prime Minister's Questions and ministerial question time, departmental select committees (which question ministers and officials and publish influential reports), urgent questions and debates, the work of the official opposition, and the revising expertise of the House of Lords.

However, scrutiny is weakened when the government has a large majority, by strong party discipline enforced by the whips, and by the executive's control of the parliamentary timetable, so most government legislation passes. This imbalance is the "elective dictatorship" concern raised by Lord Hailsham: a government with a secure majority can dominate the legislature that is meant to check it. The strength of scrutiny therefore varies sharply with the size of the majority, as the contrast between a large majority and the minority and hung parliaments of 2017 to 2019 shows.