So with the House of Lords looking like its about to block the governments tax credit plan I keep on reading that there have only ever been 21 fatal motions ever tables and only 2 have ever passed, however I can't find anything about what bills were stopped and what the aftermath was. So my questions are: •When have they been used successfully in the past? •What did the government do when they had been defeated in the Lords? Did they try again with amended legislation? •If the fatal motion was defeated, did the government concede amendments to its bill anyway?
Kindly ignore the flair for this answer!
The first thing to be aware of is that neither of the Parliament Acts - the laws that give the House of Commons the final say on legislation - apply to delegated, or secondary legislation. Delegated legislation is a kind of law made by the executive branch of the government under the authority of a different, broader law previously passed by Parliament (primary legislation). Usually, these laws take the form of statutory instruments, and Parliament is traditionally permitted only to accept or reject - not modify - a statutory instrument.
When the Government seeks to make delegated legislation, either House of Parliament may reject it by motion - the so-called 'fatal motion' being discussed now - or by defeating a motion to consent to the legislation. The authority of the House of Lords to pass such motions without needing the consent of the Commons was affirmed in 1994, when the Lords passed a motion affirming "its unfetered freedom to vote on any subordinate legislation". This is a relatively novel and rare feature of British politics; its present implementation has arguably been made possible only by the reform of the House of Lords under the last Labour government, which has been seen to empower the Lords by giving them some measure of democratic integrity (most now being appointed by elected governments rather than holding seats by virtue of inheritance).
The only successful 'fatal motion' before reform of the Lords was the defeat of the Southern Rhodesia (United Nations Sanctions) Order in 1968. At the time, Labour had a crushing majority in the House of Commons but the opposition Conservative Party had an overwhelming majority in the Lords. The Labour government favoured imposing sanctions on Southern Rhodesia, which had unilaterally seceded from the UK in 1965 as the Republic of Rhodesia with a racially stratified political and social system that has often been compared to the apartheid of South Africa. In 1968, the United Nations had passed Resolution 253 harshly condemning the Rhodesian government and calling upon the United Kingdom to take severe action to bring the nation back in line, imposing sanctions in the meantime.
The Labour government of Harold Wilson was in favour of imposing such sanctions, whilst the Conservatives stood in opposition to them. Unable to defeat them in the Commons, they turned to the Lords as a means of blocking the UK's consent. At the time, a serious debate over reform of the Lords was also raging, bringing to the fore debates over just what form that chamber should take and how powerful it should be. Conservative peer Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury (after who the Salisbury Convention - the tradition that the Lords will not obstruct the explicit manifesto pledges of a majority government - is named), argued that the Lords had to stand up for the people of Britain who he felt were opposed to sanctions. The Conservatives ultimately pledged that if the Order was defeated but the Commons approved it for a second time, they would allow the Order to pass, the hope presumably being that rejection in the Lords would give Labour pause for thought.
In the event, the first fatal motion was successful, killing the order to impose sanctions on Rhodesia. Four weeks later however an adamant Labour Party tabled an identical motion to adopt sanctions against Rhodesia; this time, the motion made it comfortably through the Lords. So prior to 1995 (and anything after 1995 would be against the sub's 20 year rule), no government had delegated legislation permanently defeated by the Lords in the post-Parliament Act period; the 1968 fatal motion only succeeded in delaying a statutory order.
[Source, from the 2006 Parliamentary Joint Committee on Conventions Report] (http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt200506/jtselect/jtconv/265/26509.htm).
I would love to hear from someone with expertise in British Parliamentary procedure, but I would question the basis of at least one of your assumptions. This FT article says that the lords passed 3 such motions in the last parliament alone (i.e. in the last 5 years) http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/294ef2e4-767b-11e5-933d-efcdc3c11c89.html#axzz3pUQ8VyHK
Im not so well versed, what is a fatal motion