Author Archive

Tim Hicks

Tim Hicks is a Lecturer in Public Policy at UCL. He joined the Department in the summer of 2014 from Trinity College, Dublin, where he had worked as Ussher Assistant Professor of Political Economy. He has also been a visiting student at Yale (2009) and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia (2014). He received a DPhil in Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford, in 2009.

Lords reform is well and truly on the agenda. So much so that it seems plausible to say that it could split the coalition. Compromise seems desirable. But tensions between and within parties could see progress grind to a halt, a situation unwanted not least because all of the three major parties have actually expressed support for reform, at least in principle. In this context, here, I outline a proposal I developed in a recent paper that has, to my knowledge, not be aired in the Lords reform debate before. I propose a reform that would reconstitute the House of ‘Lords’ with features that are commonly deemed desirable, but sometimes thought to be in conflict. Those features are that it …