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was published in light of calls for reform as well as for the abolition of the institution which critics deem to be "outdated" and "undemocratic".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, 92 for hereditary peers, 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 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 to a fixed total of 92 members.

• The imposition of a set of rules for the Lords Temporal appointed every ten years according to the latest general election results. In this, members must be British citizens, free of any criminal convictions, aged no younger than forty, financially solvent, have a career in the public or private sector for more than ten years, and must mandatorily retire at the age of eighty. However, hereditary peers are excluded from the ten-year rule and are instead succeeded in their seats by their heirs.

• 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, bankruptcy, or non-attendance for six whole months without proper reasoning.

• The establishment of an independent Appointments and Honours Commission to oversee 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. In this, as a result of subsequent negotiations, a notable provision of the Act not previously included in the report stipulated that a majority of candidates nominated by a political party must not come from the same area, thereby ensuring that all 600 members are spread across the United Kingdom rather than being concentrated in a single area or region. Later, the passing of the Church of England Act 1998, which officially disestablished the Church of England as the United Kingdom's official church and thus ended the roles of church officials in parliament, saw the twenty-five seats reserved for the Lords Spiritual abolished and included with the non-hereditary seats.