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was published in light of calls for reform as well as for the abolition of the institution which critics deem to be "outdated" and "undemocratic".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 left that are supposed to be occupied by those who otherwise abstain from the House of Commons given to political independents. The vast remainder of seats would be filled by members of political parties based on the concept of proportionality and depending on the results of the latest general election.

• The abolition or reduction of the overall composition of hereditary peers in the House of Lords.

• The imposition of a term limit for the Lords Temporal in which those except for the Lords Spiritual are re-appointed every ten years according to the results of the latest general election. Members must be free of any criminal convictions, are financially solvent, aged no younger than forty, and must mandatorily retire at the age of eighty.

• The provision for resignation or disqualification of a peer in the House of Lords in which members may be removed either by voluntary resignation, having reached the mandatory retirement age, criminal conviction, or non-attendance for six consecutive months without proper reasoning.

• The alignment of the composition of members of the House of Lords based on the most recent general election with the seats distributed on a proportional basis.

• 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 came into force. Later, the passing of the Church of England Act 1998, which officially disestablished the Church of England as the United Kingdom's official church, saw the twenty-five seats reserved for the Lords Spiritual abolished and given to crossbenchers.