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9.15am GMT
You can tell it’s a relatively quiet news day when the Today programme leads with a story about the powers of the House of Lords in relation to secondary legislation. A year ago David Cameron (remember him?) published a report from Lord Strathclyde, a former Conservative leader of the Lords, saying the Lords should lose the right to veto secondary legislation. Cameron commissioned the report after the Lords blocked a proposed £4bn tax credit cut.
For obvious reasons the Lords were not very keen on the Strathclyde proposals and, since then, we have heard almost nothing about them. Today the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg is reporting that they have been dropped. She has been told that ministers want a more constructive relationship with the Lords, which is not surprising because Theresa May is going to need every ounce of goodwill she can squeeze out of the upper house as it begins the marathon task of passing Brexit legislation.
The government would be making a big mistake to drop plans to curb the power House of Lords, one former minister has said, following reports that the prime minister is to abandon plans to ban peers from overturning legislation.
Digby Jones, the crossbench peer who was minister for trade and investment under Gordon Brown, said the government would “live to regret” backing down on reforming the Lords, which he said had overreached itself in blocking key legislation.
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Sig Nordal 