I practiced law in the UK during the transition; fundamentally they operate very similarly and the cases they hear are essentially identical. So much so, HoL decisions have equal precedential value. The UK did not gain some new level of appellate Court as a result of this change.
The rebrand to Supreme Court and change to appointment processes do indeed remove some of the risk of perception of political interference, but if you look at the historical operations of the HoL as an appelate Court in the last 80 years, political interference was much more a hypothetical problem than a real one - the HoL routinely passed decisions that greatly upset the ruling parties of the day, and the appointments of Law Lords was greatly removed from the appointments of rank and file life peers etc.
> The system of appointment to the SC is rather different to the HoL as it draws from the judiciary and merely being a Lord isn't enough.
The law lords where almost always drawn from the Judiciary too in modern history, sitting here right now I can't think of one who didn't have a very significant judicial career prior to becoming a law lord. The government was able to simply grant them a peerage permitting them to become a law lord, which is not 1000 miles removed from the Supreme Court's life-long appointments. The HoL required retirement at 75 for a Law Lord exactly the same as is expected for a new SC justice too.
> It is worth noting that had the SC not been split from the HoL after life peerages became the majority of that house, we'd be in danger of those political appointees and the like being the basis of the court. It was therefore necessary and not a "rebrand".
This is nonsense. Only the law lords sat on the court. It was not just "any" peer who could sit on the Court, of which there were only 12 members.
"To be appointed a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary under the 1876 Act, a person was required to have been a practising barrister for a period of fifteen years or to have held a high judicial office—as Lord Chancellor (before 2005) or judge of the Court of Appeal, High Court or Court of Session—for a period of two years. Lords of Appeal in Ordinary were required to retire from judicial office at 70 or 75 years of age, though as barons they continued to serve as members of the House of Lords in its legislative capacity for life."
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_of_Appeal_in_Ordinary
There are many things that are arguably wrong/undesirable about an unelected second legislative chamber such as the HoL, but the operations of its Court were arguably one of its least egregious short-comings, and very separate from the general workings of the HoL at large.