Gordon Brown announced in June 2009 the creation of a new parliamentary committee - headed by the senior Labour MP Tony Wright - to look at further ways to modernise the Commons. This Select Committee on Commons Reform reported back in November 2009 with a series of proposals designed to give more power to backbench MPs.
It focused on two highly contentious issues, both of which centre on the Government's behind-the-scenes power to control how and when things happen in the Commons.
It is proposing, for example, that the decision on which MPs sit on the influential cross-party committees that scrutinise government - called select committees - should be taken out of the hands of the party business managers, the whips, and given to fellow backbench MPs.
It's recommending that who chairs these scrutiny committees should be decided by all MPs in secret ballots - and that committee members should be chosen - still in proportion to each party's strength in the Commons but - in secret ballots of MPs of their own parties.
It's also suggesting that the government should be stripped of the power to decide on and schedule all business in the Commons.
It is proposing that a Backbench Business Committee should be set up, again by secret ballot, to decide how Commons time is used, and to schedule all non-government business in the House.
And two other major proposals: the Committee wants more public involvement in Parliament - proposing an e-petition scheme enabling people to sign petitions started by Mps and which could result in some of the issues being debated in the Commons.
And then there's a suggestion that Prime Minister's Questions should be moved from Wednesday lunchtime to Thursday afternoon - an idea unlikely to find favour with at least some MPs, who by then are often on their way back to far-flung constituencies. The committee chairman, Tony Wright, said he wanted the proposals to be implemented within two months.
The Commons Leader, Harriet Harman, said that the Government would give its response and allow MPs to have their say by the end of January 2010, though some MPs are worried the committee's proposals will be stifled by the Government business managers, the whips.
As for Gordon Brown's other big ideas, he has promised to give "urgent consideration" to the idea of lowering the voting age from 18 to 16 - which would increase the number of eligible voters by nearly 1.5 million.
And, perhaps most controversially of all, he said he was consulting on possible changes to the first-past-the-post voting system for electing MPs - an idea which, by the time of his speech to the Labour Party Conference in Brighton in September 2009, had become a pledge to hold a referendum "early" in the next parliament on changing the system.
He said a referendum would be held on the Alternative Vote (AV) system, which would rank candidates in order of preference, with votes continuing to be re-allocated until one of the candidates achieved more than 50% of the vote.
The Conservatives have already ruled out changing the voting system if they win the next general election - with their leader, David Cameron, accusing Mr Brown of trying to "fix" things in Labour's favour.
The Liberal Democrats have long argued for electoral reform but they say AV isn't a form of proportional representation. All the same, they have welcomed the "deathbed conversion" of Gordon Brown, "the man who has blocked change at every opportunity for the past 12 years".
