Tilgner Report

The Tilgner Report was a report published by Kerstin Tilgner, leader of the Hanoverian Union Party and the fifth Minister-President of Hanover. The report, which primarily concerns reforms surrounding the House of Lords, the United Kingdom's upper house, was published in light of calls for reform as well as for abolition of the institution which critics deem to be "outdated" and "undemocratic". Authored mostly by members of the Hanoverian Union Party, along with several additional members from both the Conservative and Labour parties, the report recommended several reforms for the House of Lords, namely:

• The imposition of a limit on membership at 600 members with twenty-five seats explicitly reserved for the Lords Spiritual, 20% for crossbenchers, and any amount of seats that are supposed to be occupied by those who otherwise abstain from the House of Commons provided to poltiical independents.

• The abolition or reduction of the composition of hereditary peers.

• A term limit for the Lords Temporal whereby those except for the Lords Spiritual are re-appointed every ten years according to the results of the latest general election.

• The alignment of the composition of members of the House of Lords based on the most recent general elections.

• The establishment of an independent Appointments and Honours Commission for the purpose of overseeing appointments to the House of Lords, replacing the Prime Minister's longstanding role in recommending appointments to the monarch. The commission would comprise ten members, five of whom are partisans and the remaining five being non-partisans, and are appointed on a non-renewable ten-year term.

Considered to be the most prominent set of reforms concerning the House of Lords, the report's recommendations were later accepted and subsequently became the main provisions for the House of Lords Reform Act 1980, marking the first major reform of the House of Lords in decades since the Parliament Act 1949.