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Speaker’s Statement
Mr Speaker
In accordance with Standing Order No. 122D I will now announce the arrangements for the election of the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee for the new Session.
Nominations should be submitted in the lower Table Office from 10 am to 5 pm on Wednesday 16 May.
Following the House’s decision of 12 March, only Members who do not belong to a party represented in Her Majesty’s Government may be candidates in this election.
If there is more than one candidate, the ballot will take place in the Division Lobbies from 11 am to 1 pm on Thursday 17 May.
A briefing note with more details about the election will be made available to Members and published on the intranet.
Business of the House
(12 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)
Following the brief—sorry. Will the Leader of the House give us the business for next week?
The Leader of the House of Commons (Sir George Young)
We got there in the end.
Mr Speaker, you informed the House on Wednesday of the subjects for debate on the Queen’s Speech. The business for next week will be:
Monday 14 May—Continuation of the debate on the Queen’s Speech. The subject will be business and the economy.
Tuesday 15 May—Continuation of the debate on the Queen’s Speech. The subject will be foreign affairs and international development.
Wednesday 16 May—Continuation of the debate on the Queen’s Speech. The subject will be the cost of living.
Thursday 17 May—Conclusion of the debate on the Queen’s Speech. The subject will be jobs and growth.
The provisional business for the week commencing 21 May will include:
Monday 21 May—Remaining stages of the Local Government Finance Bill.
Tuesday 22 May—Conclusion of remaining stages of the Financial Services Bill (Day 2), followed by Third Reading of the Civil Aviation Bill.
Wednesday 23 May—Second Reading of the Electoral Registration and Administration Bill, followed by a European document relating to the proceeds of crime.
Thursday 24 May—Business to be nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.
I should also like to inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall for 24 May will be:
Thursday 24 May—Debate on the operations of the family courts.
Ms Eagle
I thank the Leader of the House for his statement and apologise for my slightly unfocused beginning; I was lost in admiration for the work that my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel) has done as Chair of the Backbench Business Committee and rather wondering whether, and hoping that, she would consider standing again.
Following the brief announcement yesterday of the Government’s legislative programme, the Deputy Prime Minister said in a letter to his party activists that it showed that
“Liberal Democrats are punching above their weight”.
At last, we have an acknowledgement from them—that they are in the political lightweight division. After all, this is a party that was beaten at the polls last week by a man dressed as a penguin.
The Deputy Prime Minister added in desperation that the Queen’s Speech
“has a firm Liberal Democrat stamp on it”—
and he was right. It had nothing to say on the economy; nothing to say on getting people back to work; nothing to help hard-pressed families. All that Liberal Democrats want to do is sit around and debate House of Lords reform. The Leader of the House has announced six days of debate on the Government's packed legislative programme. Will he find time for a debate about how the Liberal Democrats are punching above their weight?
Will the Leader of the House find time also for the Minister of State, Cabinet Office, the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr Letwin), to participate in that debate? After all, he said of the Government last year:
“We don’t know what we’re doing”
after 2011, and
“we’ve run out of ideas”.
Will the Leader of the House coax the right hon. Gentleman out of whatever cupboard they have put him in and get him to the Chamber so that we can congratulate him on being correct?
Before the Queen’s Speech the Conservative Chair of the Public Administration Committee said that the Government lacked a compelling vision. Today it is clear: the problem is not that they lack a compelling vision, but that they lack any vision at all. The Leader of the House was unable to find time for a debate on the Committee’s report before the Queen’s Speech. Will he now finally do so?
While his economic plan is failing, the part-time Chancellor is focused on his other job of managing the Conservatives’ election strategy. As Thursday’s local elections showed, that is going very well. Will the Leader of the House join me in congratulating the new Chipping Norton set of Labour councillors elected in the Prime Minister’s constituency last Thursday? They join more than 800 other new Labour councillors elected up and down the country.
After last week’s polls, the Prime Minister said that he wanted to listen. Why does he not meet his new Labour councillors, who will be able to tell this out-of-touch Prime Minister what the electorate are really saying? He will not even have to ban photographs of that meeting. On that very point, we learned this week that the Prime Minister arranged to meet Rebekah Brooks at a point-to-point meeting so long as they were not seen together. Meanwhile, the Culture Secretary hides behind a tree so that members of the press do not spot him meeting James Murdoch. That sums up the Government—wrong choices, wrong priorities.
Can the Leader of the House confirm that prior to appearances before the Leveson inquiry, Ministers still have to account for their actions to the House and that the ministerial code still covers them? Following yesterday’s Queen’s Speech, the Institute of Directors said that the Government were beginning to lose the confidence of UK plc, the Institute of Mechanical Engineers complained that there was no industrial strategy, and the British Chambers of Commerce wanted more support for jobs and growth. Even today’s edition of The Daily Telegraph asks, “Why was there no plan for growth?”
Will the Leader of the House find time for a statement on the Government’s elusive plan for growth? Slashing employment rights is no substitute for a growth strategy. The Government’s disastrous economic policy has led to massive unemployment, growing inequality and a double-dip recession. The out-of-touch Chancellor thinks that the solution is a huge tax cut for millionaires. A Cabinet Minister says that the Government have no ideas, while a senior Back Bencher says that they have no vision. It is little wonder that, abandoning the No. 10 rose garden, the Prime Minister and his deputy went this week to a factory to relaunch the Government. It was a factory where big blue tractors pulled small yellow trailers. What an apt metaphor for this Government.
Sir George Young
Mr Speaker, before I address the issues raised by the hon. Lady, I should say that you will have seen today’s announcement of the death of Lord Glenamara, who, as Ted Short, was Leader of the House from 1974 to 1976—my first two years in the House. He has left his name as the author of Short money, an important constitutional reform that enables Opposition parties better to hold the Government to account. As Leader of the House, he gave the shortest answers at business questions; whatever was asked for, the answer was “not next week”. The answers today may still be the same, but they are at least couched in more user-friendly terms when people ask for a debate.
The local elections did not produce a famous set of results for the governing parties, but if we add together the votes for the two coalition parties, we find that we comprehensively beat the Labour party. The Labour party was, of course, beaten by a monkey in Hartlepool and it did not even put up a candidate in more than 110 wards—the penguin did not even have a chance to beat the Labour party because the Labour party did not stand.
I move on to the Queen’s Speech. The hon. Lady complains that there is not much in it; if that is right, I hope that we will have no complaints from her on a Thursday that the Government have not allowed adequate time to debate the legislative programme. If she looks at that programme, she will see that we are addressing a whole range of issues that her party simply ducked when it was in government—energy, electricity market reform, public sector pensions, House of Lords reform, adult care and executive pay. Her side ducked all those policies, but we are now dealing with them.
On high rates of tax, the fact is that for 13 years Labour’s top rate was not 50% or 45%; it was 40%. Labour left us with a legacy of a 50% tax rate that raised no money at all and a letter saying that there was no money left. As a result of the Budget, those earning above £150,000 will pay £1,300 a year more, which means that there will be less pressure on those who are not in the top tax bracket, who will obviously pay less. The question to which we have not had the answer is whether, if Labour Members know that that rate raises very little, they are pledged to reinstate it.
Turning to the question of Ministers, of course Ministers remain subject to the ministerial code, and of course they are accountable to Parliament for the actions that they take.
On growth, if the hon. Lady looks at the Queen’s Speech she will see that it contains some good Bills for businesses. There is an enterprise Bill giving employers more confidence to hire new staff and grow, there are repeals to save businesses time and money, there is a £3 billion green investment bank to stimulate the green economy, and there is an energy Bill delivering long-term, affordable electricity. Also, we have just had the Budget, and the Finance Bill is going through the House at the moment. That is the main vehicle for economic policy rather than the Queen’s Speech. The Budget included cuts to corporation tax, more funding for the Business Finance Partnership, the scrapping of health and safety legislation, investment in technology, and more investment in infrastructure—all in addition to the measures that we announced in the autumn statement last year. Of course there is more administrative action that we can take and will take. We have set our course and we must stick to it. The International Monetary Fund is forecasting higher growth in the UK this year than in Germany, France and the eurozone. I very much hope that we will have the hon. Lady’s support for the measures in the Queen’s Speech, which promote growth in this country.
Joseph Johnson (Orpington) (Con)
Southeastern has just opened a consultation on its December rail timetable, which presents the Department for Transport with an opportunity to give commuters in Orpington the fast services during peak hours for which they have been crying out for a long time. May we please have a debate on the urgency of providing Orpington with a service that is commensurate with the town’s importance and its sizeable commuter base?
Sir George Young
My hon. Friend speaks for the large number of commuters in his constituency who need a fast train service into the centre of the capital. As a former Transport Secretary, I understand the importance of what he has said. My understanding is that the Department for Transport has to sign off any revised timetable, and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will need to be satisfied that it meets the aspirations of my hon. Friend’s constituents. I will certainly pass on his concern to her so that she can be aware of it before any such validation takes place.
Mr David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)
I think we would all agree that we owe the late Ted Short a debt of gratitude as a former Leader of the House and deputy leader of the Labour party.
May I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle) for drawing my attention to the colour of the tractors and the trailers in Basildon? I now have a mental picture of the wheels coming off.
Will the Leader of the House tell us when the Government intend to make time available for a debate on the report by the Joint Committee that considered the beleaguered draft Bill on the so-called reform of the House of Lords? Given the comprehensive trashing of the draft Bill not only by those who are opposed to reform but by anyone who has any constitutional understanding whatsoever, it would be quite useful if we could have a debate to expose its weaknesses.
Sir George Young
Listening to that question, one would not have believed that the right hon. Gentleman stood for election on three manifestos committed to House of Lords reform. The Joint Committee reported a few days ago. The Government want to reflect on the recommendations in its report in order to see whether we need to amend the draft Bill that was published last year. There will then be a House of Lords reform Bill, and so there will be a debate on that. I anticipate that the Bill will be introduced before the summer recess.
Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)
Will the Leader of the House arrange for a statement on the regional growth fund? Yesterday I got a letter from the Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr Prisk), saying that the National Audit Office is going to find that the money from the regional growth fund has been very positive for jobs and growth. There is a further £1 billion available for growing businesses that is due to expire this month. A statement from the Minister would be very valuable in publicising that opportunity.
Sir George Young
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for reminding the House that £1 billion is available. We are a month away from the deadline for bidding under round 3. I am sure that all hon. Members with prospects in their constituency for the regional growth fund will encourage businesses to put bids forward. On her bid for a debate on this matter, there will be such an opportunity on Wednesday when my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills will update the House on the steps that we have taken to promote growth and employment in regions of the country that need further help.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Does the Leader of the House share my view that the recent trial and conviction of nine men for child abuse in Rochdale should lead us immediately to have a thorough debate in the House on what on earth was going on? I have a long-held interest in this matter. Indeed, I secured a Westminster Hall debate on it back in January 2009. It surprises me that the Secretary of State for Education has not indicated that he will be at the Dispatch Box to discuss this terrible case of child abuse, but has leaked his reaction to it to the press. He should be here at the Dispatch Box, leading a debate on the matter.
Sir George Young
I am sure that the whole House agrees with the hon. Gentleman about the seriousness of the offences that have been revealed and about the need to take action to ensure that vulnerable girls are not subjected to the abuse to which those ones were subjected. I hope that it will be possible in today’s debate on home affairs and justice for hon. Members to intervene on the issues that he has mentioned. He will have seen the announcement by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education on the steps that he has taken to ensure that those in care homes are not subjected to the abuse to which those girls were subjected.
Sir George Young
The hon. Gentleman says that my right hon. Friend should be here. The subjects for the Queen’s Speech debate are chosen by the Opposition, not by the Government, so I resist his accusation that we have not found time for a debate on this matter.
There is recognition from leaders of the Pakistani community that there is a cultural issue that needs to be addressed. I assure the hon. Gentleman that this is an issue that the Government take seriously, as he will have seen from the statement by my right hon. Friend. I hope that the next time my right hon. Friend appears for questions, he will have an opportunity to update the House on the steps that are being taken.
Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD)
May we have a debate at the start of this Session on the future of business statements? As is demonstrated by serious contributions such as that of the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman), Members have an appetite for something more than the tiresome trivia that have become a habit at these events. At the least, could we reform the business statement to make it an opportunity to put the deliberations of the Backbench Business Committee centrestage in the House?
Sir George Young
When, in due course, we establish a committee that deals with Government business as well as having a Backbench Business Committee, it will be a good opportunity to look at business statements, because if the regime for fixing the business of the House changes, we may need to change the way in which the business statement is made. I defend my hon. Friends from any accusation of the trivial use of business questions. I find them helpful to find out what concerns there are, certainly on the Government Benches, and on many occasions they influence the structure of debates.
Alison Seabeck (Plymouth, Moor View) (Lab)
Would it be possible, although I appreciate that it might not be next week, to have a debate about the way in which the arrangements for transferring child-related benefits from one parent to another are failing? They are failing fathers in particular. A number of constituents are coming to me to say that there are such delays with child benefit and other child-related tax benefits, and that they are finding themselves in severe financial hardship. The system is allowing bureaucracy to win over child welfare. It is time for us to have a debate on this matter, so that I do not have to go to a Minister every time it happens.
Sir George Young
The hon. Lady raises a serious issue. Where there is no agreement between the mother and father about who is the recipient of child benefit, it falls to the Department to resolve the matter. In the absence of agreement, the receipt of benefit often stays where it is. That is often not with the parent who cares for the children. I will raise the matter with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to see whether there are proposals to cut through the bureaucracy in coming to a fair decision, and to ensure that the parent who has the child gets the benefit that should go with them.
Mark Lancaster (Milton Keynes North) (Con)
May we have a debate on the economic impact of prolonged roadworks? We are approaching the fourth anniversary of the roadworks on the M1 between junctions 6 and 14, which are having a major impact on businesses in Milton Keynes. Although I appreciate that the programme has been speeded up under this Government, can we please bring it to an early conclusion?
Sir George Young
I will raise the matter with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport. Speaking from memory, these contracts are let on lane rental terms, which means if they overrun, the contractor is out of pocket because he is paying rent for the lanes that are out of use. I take seriously the issue that my hon. Friend raises and I will share it with the Secretary of State for Transport and ask her to write to him.
Mr Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)
I encourage the Leader of the House, as a former Transport Secretary, to seek the support of his successor for a debate on airport capacity in the south-east. I ask that in the context of speculation about the future of RAF Northolt, which is adjacent to my constituency and whose flight paths go across it. There has been much speculation about a substantial increase in business jet usage of RAF Northolt, about which many of my constituents are understandably concerned, so they would want to participate in the broader debate on that issue.
Sir George Young
If the hon. Gentleman is ingenious, he may be able to raise the issue when we deal with the remaining stages of the Civil Aviation Bill, when there will be a two-hour debate. Subject to what the occupant of the Chair decides, it may be possible to raise the issue of Northolt during that debate; I will certainly forewarn the Minister replying to it that she is likely to get this matter coming in to land.
Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)
Vidal Sassoon, who passed away yesterday, revolutionised hair styling. This son of immigrants rose from a humble upbringing to become one of the best-known brands in the world. Emelia at Studio 21, Zak and Gennaro at Jagged Edge and Sugar at Sugaz in my own constituency are, in their own way, emulating that ambition. May we have a debate on behalf of the National Hairdressers Federation, which is based in Bedford, and in memory of Vidal Sassoon to talk about the positive role that hairdressers and barbers play in promoting entrepreneurship, supporting apprenticeships and making all of us, even given some challenges, look and feel a little bit better?
Sir George Young
The whole House is grateful to my hon. Friend for his tribute to that noble profession of hairdressing. I am afraid I do not require very much time in the hairdresser’s chair to have my hair dealt with. There may be an opportunity in the debates on the Queen’s Speech to debate hairdressing, the role it can play in raising the nation’s morale and, of course, the contribution many hairdressers make to style—making even Members of the House look more attractive than they would otherwise.
Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)
Liver disease in young people is a rapidly growing problem. May we please have a debate on public health and the advertising and sponsorship of alcohol? We need to reduce alcohol misuse among young people.
Sir George Young
The hon. Gentleman raises a serious issue. He will know that the Government have proposals to minimise the damage done by alcohol through proposals for minimum prices and more expensive duties on the drinks that do the most damage. I cannot promise a debate in the near future, but I hope there will be an opportunity, perhaps when the Backbench Business Committee gets up and running, to have a debate on the serious issue of liver disease.
Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)
Will my right hon. Friend find time for a debate on British manufacturing? In North Staffordshire, the success or otherwise of JCB has a great impact on the economy in Staffordshire Moorlands because of the number of people employed by JCB and the number of local businesses that supply JCB. It was great news to learn of last year’s record results—the best in the business’s 66-year history.
Sir George Young
My hon. Friend raises a good issue, and I am delighted to read of JCB’s results, with turnover at a higher level and more than double the sales of 2009. That helps to provide jobs in my hon. Friend’s constituency, while many other smaller firms also benefit from what is happening. What she says shows that some of the steps we have taken to promote growth and bring down unemployment are taking root. I hope that many others will follow in the steps of JCB.
Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)
On Tuesday 29 May, people in Nottingham and beyond will use the social media site Twitter to promote our fine city by tweeting about its very many attractions and attempting to get Nottingham trending. There is a limit to what one can say in 140 characters or, indeed, at business questions, so will the Leader of the House make time for a debate about why Nottingham is such a great place in which to live, work and invest, and how the Government can support the city’s economic growth plan?
Sir George Young
The city can be proud of the hon. Lady for using prime time in the House of Commons to promote the city she represents. As I said in response to an earlier question, it may be possible during the debate on the Queen’s Speech to find time for a speech in which, in more than the 140 words that she has just used, she may be able to pay tribute to the great city she represents, to encourage investment in it, tourism to it and further promote its prosperity.
Mr Marcus Jones (Nuneaton) (Con)
Regional growth and enterprise zone policies are helping companies such as the Motor Industry Research Association and Jaguar Land Rover to create thousands of manufacturing jobs in the midlands, and, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders and the Engineering Employers Federation, extending “above the line” research and development tax credits will have a similar effect. Given that 22% of the work force in my constituency are engaged in manufacturing, that is obviously excellent news. May we have a debate on midlands manufacturing and the progress that it is making? That would help us to establish what more can be done to embed the present renaissance.
Sir George Young
My hon. Friend may be able to speak in next Thursday’s debate. However, he has reminded the House of the success of the motor manufacturing industry in this country, with Jaguar Land Rover and some of the Japanese companies investing, succeeding and exporting. That is exactly the sort of rebalancing of the economy that the Government seek to promote, and I was delighted to hear of the success in my hon. Friend’s constituency.
John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)
I recently met my constituent Stephen Fletcher, who is a victim of thalidomide. He is concerned about the Government’s intentions in respect of maintaining financial support for thalidomide victims. Could the Leader of the House make time for an urgent statement from the Secretary of State for Health to offer reassurance to Stephen, and to many others like him who are concerned about their futures?
Sir George Young
Many of our constituencies contain thalidomide survivors, and I know that they are worried about what will happen after the three-year pilot fund of some £20 million runs out in March next year. The current pilot will be evaluated, and discussions are being held with the Thalidomide Trust’s national advisory council. When the discussions have ended and we have the results of the evaluation of the pilot, it will be possible for a statement to be made about the way forward. We do take seriously the problems of thalidomide survivors, who need reassurance that help will be available when the fund runs out.
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
May we have a debate on standards in our schools? I know from my work as a local school governor that there are many extremely dedicated teachers in my constituency, but I was concerned to learn from a mother recently that the marking policy in her children’s school is for teachers not to correct more than three spelling mistakes for fear of harming the children’s self-esteem. I am sure the Leader of the House agrees that that policy puts many young people at a disadvantage when it comes to jobs that require correct spelling. I think that it may be a hangover from national guidance in the past, and that the present Government would not be keen for it to continue.
Sir George Young
That sounds to me like political correctness taken to excess. I am sure that it is in children’s interests for any spelling mistakes to be put right at an early stage, when they are at school, rather than possibly counting against them at a later stage. I hope that many of the steps that we have taken to promote the authority of head teachers to make schools more responsive to the needs of parents will encourage the adoption of the approach suggested by my hon. Friend, and that teachers will put mistakes right at an early stage rather than, out of misguided kindness, allowing them to fester and, perhaps, prove more damaging subsequently.
Glyn Davies (Montgomeryshire) (Con)
Yesterday’s Queen’s Speech included a commitment to a draft Bill on adult social care, which is a hugely complex and important subject. Does the Leader of the House agree that we should have debates on it during the new Session to ensure that the momentum of this important policy is not lost?
Sir George Young
I agree with my hon. Friend. As I said in response to the shadow Leader of the House, this was one of the issues that the last Government did not address. My hon. Friend may have heard Lord Warner, on this morning’s “Today” programme, basically saying that the Labour party had fought the last election on a false prospectus, holding out the prospect of a national social service but being totally unable to fund it.
We commissioned the Dilnot report, and a White Paper will be published this spring containing proposals on adult care. As my hon. Friend mentioned, there will then be a draft Bill to take the agenda forward. In the meantime, resources have been put into the national health service and adult services to give more support to social services departments, which I recognise are under pressure.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
This morning I spoke at the UK and European symposium on addiction disorders, an issue which I know is of great concern to Mr Speaker. May we have a statement about Government policy on addiction, and its impact on families and on wider society? I am sure that Members on both sides of the House will have dealt with casework in which addiction has been an issue, and have observed at first hand both its huge human cost and its financial cost, which is estimated to have been £110 billion in the UK last year alone.
Sir George Young
My hon. Friend raises an important issue. As he will know, we set out our drugs strategy in December 2010, and we are in the process of updating it. We will shortly publish a report on the achievements in the first year of the strategy, and it might be possible to “pin” a debate once the report becomes available. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for having spoken at the symposium this morning.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
I am sure my right hon. Friend is aware that last week voter turnout in London was 7% above the national average, and I am sure the whole House will wish to congratulate Mayor Boris Johnson on his re-election and Ken Livingstone on his retirement from front-line politics. Will my right hon. Friend find time for a debate on devolving much more power to the Mayor of London so that Londoners can fully see and feel the benefit of having Boris Johnson as our Mayor?
Sir George Young
Without wanting to put too much pressure on my coalition colleagues who sit on the Front Bench with me, I do, of course, congratulate Boris on his re-election, which was achieved with the support of my party and many of my hon. Friends on the Back Benches who worked tirelessly to get him re-elected. We have recently devolved more powers to the Mayor: powers under the Homes and Communities Agency have been transferred to the Greater London Authority; we have abolished the London Development Agency and transferred its activities to the GLA; and we have enabled the Mayor of London to establish a mayoral development corporation to oversee the long-term development of the Olympic park. I hope my hon. Friend will therefore see that we are in the process of devolving more powers to the Mayor of London.
Brandon Lewis (Great Yarmouth) (Con)
In Great Yarmouth, the energy industry and the engineering industry that support it are growing exponentially, with companies having made and received investments of hundreds of millions of pounds: Perenco, Seajacks, ODE and Gardline are just a few of the companies that are struggling to keep up with demand. This is a good problem to have, so may we have a debate in Government time to examine and highlight the growth opportunities, particularly given what this Government have done for the energy sector and business in general?
Sir George Young
My hon. Friend raises a good point. The green investment bank is coming on-stream, with billions of pounds available for investment, and the energy Bill, with its electricity market reform, will provide an opportunity for fresh investment in electricity generation. I am delighted that firms in my hon. Friend’s constituency are well placed to take advantage of the growth that has been achieved.
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
As you will be aware, Mr Speaker, 200 years ago tomorrow Spencer Perceval was assassinated in the House of Commons, yet the only thing marking where he fell are a few irregularly placed floor tiles. May we have a statement on whether we might put in place a more fitting memorial to that statesman?
Sir George Young
The question of whether to have a statue or memorial is a matter not for the Government but for you, Mr Speaker, and the Commission. Spencer Perceval’s family used to live in my old constituency in Ealing, where a church, All Saints church, has been built in his memory and a concert is held to remember him. The mayor of the constituency he represented—Northampton, I think—will lay a wreath in his memory at the weekend. I will pursue, through the Commission, my hon. Friend’s suggestion of having a more fitting memorial to Spencer Perceval.
Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)
I am sure the Leader of the House will be aware of the results of Thursday’s elections to Rugby borough council. By focusing on the efficient delivery of local services, the controlling Conservative group increased its proportion of councillors. Will my right hon. Friend consider finding time for a debate to make the point that local elections should remain exactly that: local?
Sir George Young
I am delighted to hear of the good results in my hon. Friend’s constituency. I know that much of that was due to his tireless work on the doorstep, and I am sorry that I missed those results on the night. He makes a good point: local elections should be local. There is a lot of evidence that where local councillors perform well, that gets recognised in the ballot box and they outperform their party, which may not be doing so well. I am delighted that Rugby will continue to enjoy the benefits of having a Conservative-controlled local authority.
Andrew Jones (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (Con)
Total UK automotive exports have reached just under £30 billion, which is a record, and they increased by 15% last year alone. Our car trade deficit is now at its lowest since the mid-1970s. May we have a debate on the success of the automotive industry, its role in our national economy and—running through all of that—the Government’s work in promoting exports as a whole?
Sir George Young
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that. Again, there may be opportunities in the debates on the Queen’s Speech to develop the theme, but he reminds the House that on 3 May Jaguar Land Rover announced plans to invest £200 million at its factory in Castle Bromwich. Nissan is creating more than 1,000 new jobs in Sunderland, Bentley is creating 500 jobs thanks to the regional growth fund, and Jaguar Land Rover is creating 1,000 new jobs on Merseyside. It is a good example of how we are winning export orders in a competitive world market, but also rebalancing the economy so it is less dependent on financial services.
Jason McCartney (Colne Valley) (Con)
I join the many small food and drink manufacturers in my constituency in welcoming the announcement of a groceries adjudicator in the Queen’s Speech. Bearing in mind that Longley Farm dairy, in my constituency, exports more than half the products it makes, may we have a debate on the wonderful contribution our small food and drink manufacturers are making to our economy?
Sir George Young
I am delighted to hear of the export success of my hon. Friend’s constituency firm. There will be an opportunity when we debate the Bill to which he refers to look more closely at the role of the adjudicator, and there will be opportunities during the remaining days’ consideration of the Queen’s Speech to highlight the efforts of small firms in the food manufacturing industry to help turn the country round and create sustainable jobs.
Carrier Strike Capability
(12 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Secretary of State for Defence (Mr Philip Hammond)
With permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to make a statement on the carrier strike programme. The strategic defence and security review considered the carrier strike programme, put in place by the previous Government, as part of a wide-ranging review of options for delivering effective future defence while dealing with the black hole in Labour’s defence budget and the unaffordable “fantasy” equipment plan bequeathed to us by the Labour party. While the review confirmed that carrier strike would be a key capability in delivering Future Force 2020, it also recognised the unsustainability as a whole of the defence equipment plan we inherited.
The strategic decision on carrier strike that emerged from the SDSR process was to convert one carrier with catapults and arrester gear to operate the carrier variant of the joint strike fighter, facilitating greater interoperability with allies, with a decision on the future use or disposal of the second carrier to be taken at the 2015 SDSR. The decision was also taken routinely to embark 12 fast jets while retaining the ability to surge up to the previously planned level of 36 aircraft. As the House would expect for such a complex and high-value project, the strategic decision taken at SDSR was followed by the commissioning of a detailed programme of work to look at the costs, risks and technical feasibility of all aspects of the proposed solution. That study was expected to take 18 months, completing by the end of 2012.
Since I took on the role of Defence Secretary in October last year, my overriding concern, after current operations and the welfare of our armed forces, has been to ensure the deliverability of the MOD’s equipment plan and the achievement of a balanced and sustainable budget. That will give our armed forces the assurance they need to carry out the massive transformation that will deliver Future Force 2020—the concept for our armed forces set out in the SDSR. The carrier project is a large element of the equipment programme, and I have worked closely with the new Chief of Defence Matériel, Bernard Gray, to assess the technical and financial risks involved in it.
It quickly became clear to me that a number of the underlying facts on which the SDSR decision on carriers was based were changing. First, as the programme to convert a carrier to operate with a catapult system has matured, and more detailed analysis has been carried out by suppliers, it has become clear that operational carrier strike capability, using the “cats and traps” system, could not be delivered until late 2023 at the earliest—considerably later than the date envisaged at the time of the SDSR of “around 2020”. Britain’s carriers will have all-electric propulsion, and therefore will not generate steam like nuclear-powered vessels, so the catapult system would need to be the innovative electromagnetic version, EMALS—the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System—being developed for the United States navy. Fitting that new system to a UK carrier has presented greater design challenges than were anticipated.
Secondly, and partly as a result of the delayed timetable, the estimated cost of fitting this equipment to HMS Prince of Wales has more than doubled in the past 17 months, rising from an estimated £950 million to about £2 billion, with no guarantee that it will not rise further. Given the technical complexity involved and given that the cost of retrofitting “cats and traps” to HMS Queen Elizabeth—the first carrier out of build—would be even higher, it is unlikely that she would ever, in practice, be converted in the future.
Thirdly, at the time of the SDSR there was judged to be a very significant technical risk around the STOVL—short take-off, vertical landing—version of the joint strike fighter, and some commentators were speculating that it could even be cancelled. Indeed, the STOVL programme was subsequently placed on probation by the Pentagon However, over the past year, the STOVL programme has made excellent progress and in the past few months has been removed from probation. The aircraft has now completed more than 900 hours of flying, including flights from the USS Wasp, and the US marine corps has a high degree of confidence in the in-service date for the aircraft. The balance of risk has changed, and there is now judged to be no greater risk in STOVL than in other variants of JSF.
Fourthly, further work with our allies on the best approach to collaborative operation has satisfied us that joint maritime task groups involving our carriers, with co-ordinated scheduling of maintenance and refit periods, and an emphasis on carrier availability, rather than cross-deck operations, is the more appropriate route to optimising alliance capabilities.
When the facts change, the responsible thing to do is to examine the decisions you have made and to be willing to change your mind, however inconvenient that may be. It is about doing what is right for Britain, not burying your head in the sand and ploughing on regardless, as the previous Government all too often did. A persistent failure to observe that simple principle is at the root of many of the MOD budget problems that we inherited from the Labour party, and I do not intend to repeat its mistakes.
The decision taken in the SDSR to proceed with a carrier strike capability, despite the massive challenges we faced with the MOD’s budget, was the right decision. The decision to seek to contain costs by going for “cats and traps” on a single carrier, with greater interoperability with allies, and the cheaper carrier variant version of the JSF aircraft was also the right decision, based on the information available at the time. However, the facts have changed, and I am not prepared to accept a delay in regenerating Britain’s carrier strike capability beyond the timetable set out in the SDSR. And I am not prepared to put the equipment plan, which will support Future Force 2020, at risk of a billion-pound-plus increase in the carrier programme and unquantifiable risk of further cost rises.
So, I can announce to the House today that the National Security Council has decided not to proceed with the “cats and traps” conversion, but to complete both carriers in the STOVL configuration. That will give us the ability to use both carriers to provide continuous carrier availability, at a net additional operating cost averaging about £60 million per year. As we set out in the SDSR, a final decision on the use of the second carrier will be taken as part of SDSR 2015. We will switch the order for JSF aircraft from CV to STOVL, which we can do without delaying delivery and, by making this announcement today, we can plan on the basis of the first operational aircraft being delivered with a UK-weapons-fit package.
We expect HMS Queen Elizabeth to be handed over to the Navy in early 2017 for sea trials. We expect to take delivery of our first test aircraft in July of this year, and we expect the first production aircraft to be delivered to us in 2016, with flying from the Queen Elizabeth to begin in 2018, after her sea trials are complete.
We have discussed this decision with the French Government and with the United States. The French confirm that they are satisfied with our commitment to jointly planned carrier operations to enhance European-NATO capability. The United States, on whose support we would rely in regenerating either type of carrier capability, has been highly supportive throughout the review and I would like to record my personal thanks to the Secretary of Defence, the Pentagon, the navy and the marine corps for their high level of engagement with us. I spoke to Secretary Panetta last night and he confirmed the US’s willingness to support our decision and its view that UK carrier strike availability and our commitment to the JSF programme are the key factors. The Chief of the Defence Staff and his fellow chiefs of staff—all of them—endorse this decision as the quickest and most assured way now to deliver carrier strike as part of an overall affordable equipment programme that will support Future Force 2020.
This was not an easy decision to take, but our responsibility is to make the right decision on the basis of the facts available to us. Neither I nor any of my colleagues came into government expecting decisions to be easy or pain-free. I have a responsibility to clear up the financial mess we inherited in the MOD, just as we are clearing up the mess we inherited across Government as a whole, and to set a balanced budget and an affordable, deliverable equipment programme with manageable and bounded risk. This decision addresses one of the last impediments to my announcing the achievement of those objectives to the House, and I hope to be able to do so very soon.
This is not just about balancing budgets, critical as that is. It is about the UK’s defence, secured by an appropriate and sustainable military capability. This announcement delivers an affordable solution to securing that capability and, with two useable carriers, gives us the option of continuous carrier availability. It confirms the expected delivery of the first test aircraft this summer, of the first production aircraft in 2016, of the first carrier into sea trials in 2017 and of the first flight of the JSF from the deck of the carrier in 2018, with an operational military capability in 2020. It confirms the support of our principal allies, the US and France, and that of the defence chiefs. It shows that we, at least, are not afraid to take difficult decisions when they are right for Britain and I commend the statement to the House.
Mr Jim Murphy (East Renfrewshire) (Lab)
I thank the Secretary of State for his statement. Let me start by saying again that when the Government do the right thing on defence they will have the support of Labour Members. In politics, however, one can often judge what a Government genuinely feel about their own policy not just by what they say but by when they say it. They have told the media that this is positive news and yet they announced it here in the Commons the very first day after the council election defeats. It must be the first ever example of a Government waiting until the polls close to announce good news.
It is worth reminding the Secretary of State how he got here. The Government were elected promising a bigger Army but are delivering the smallest Army since the Boer war, they have curtailed anti-piracy duties owing to Royal Navy cuts and the RAF has lost long-term surveillance capabilities. On the defence budget, decisions this Government have taken have increased costs. Changes to the Astute class submarines added a further £200 million and the carrier U-turn has cost up to £250 million. On top of that, they are failing on reform with the defence procurement plan delayed for two years. Last year, the largest defence programmes were delayed by a combined 30 months adding £500 million to their costs and while hundreds of defence workers across the country are losing their jobs the Government have no defence industrial strategy to speak of whatsoever.
The biggest blow to the Government’s defence credibility is this chaotic carrier programme. Standing at the Dispatch Box, the Prime Minister announced his plans to U-turn on Labour’s carrier strike policy, scrap the Harriers, sell Ark Royal, build two carriers but mothball one, sack trainee pilots and downgrade British sea power. But that U-turn has now come full circle. Nothing has been gained and two years have been wasted. In tough times, £250 million have been squandered while the forces are having their allowances cut. Harriers are being sold to the Americans for a fraction of their value, we are subject to international ridicule and there will be no jets on carriers for a decade. Mr Speaker, you do not have to be a military strategist to know what aircraft carriers are meant to carry—the clue is in the name.
The Government say their policy is cheaper, but it is more expensive. They said there would be interoperability with the French but their chosen jet cannot land on the French carrier. The Prime Minister personally derided a policy that he is now defending. The Government said that Britain did not need jump jets and Ministers scrapped the expertise needed to operate STOVL aircraft only now to decide to buy a new fleet of jump jets. We now need to retrain people and redevelop the skills that were so carelessly cast aside just two years ago. That is as incoherent as it is ludicrous.
The Secretary of State’s defence today is that the facts have changed, but that is not the full story. I know the advice that the Prime Minister received—that the defence review policy was high risk and high cost—but the Prime Minister overruled that. The Public Accounts Committee warned of rising costs, the National Audit Office said that the Government had an “immature understanding” of the costs, and the Select Committee on Defence warned against strategic shrinkage. The Prime Minister’s decisions have cost British time, British money, British talent and British prestige.
I know the Secretary of State always likes to blame someone else, and he has done that again today. He recently accused British families of causing the financial crash, but he cannot scapegoat the former Defence Secretary for this decision. He has to take some responsibility for the Prime Minister’s mistakes. The Secretary of State has carefully nurtured a reputation as a spreadsheet king who is most at home over his paperwork, so he needs to share some of it with us today. Will he publish a full breakdown of the costs of the plans being abandoned? Will he confirm that the cost of the U-turn is greater than the income from the sale of the Harrier jump jets? How many of the new aircraft does he plan to purchase? Will he confirm that Ministers were warned 18 months ago about the risks and costs inherent in this decision? If Britain will have two aircraft carriers, will the Royal Navy have to increase the number of its personnel? Finally, there is another question that the Secretary of State did not cover in his statement: what will now be the total cost of the carrier build programme?
In conclusion, the Secretary of State has said the Government will do the right thing when the facts have changed, but the previous Labour Government got things right whereas this Government’s policy has unravelled. In recent weeks we have seen incompetence piled upon political hubris. Only a Government who started a petrol crisis when trying to avoid one and whose idea of putting more police on the streets is having thousands demonstrating outside Parliament would have a policy of building two carriers, mothballing one immediately, selling the Harriers and having no planes to fly off aircraft carriers for a decade. Describing the Government’s defence strategy as an “omnishambles” would be a compliment. It is time the Prime Minister started to take responsibility. He should be at the Dispatch Box apologising for his and his Government’s incompetence.
Mr Hammond
Before the right hon. Gentleman climbs too far up his high horse, perhaps we should, to give a bit of context, remind ourselves of the role that his party played in the history of this project. It was Labour’s fiscal incontinence that created the black hole that we are trying to climb out of and Labour’s decisions that left us facing the challenges we faced at the time of the strategic defence and security review. It was Labour that ordered two 65,000 tonnes carriers, three times the size of a typical STOVL carrier, without cats and traps.
It was Labour who let the contracts on a sweetheart deal, which meant that cancelling the second carrier would have cost more than going ahead and building it. It was Labour who ordered the ships without having the money to pay for them, and then drove costs of £1.6 billion into the carrier programme by delaying the build to accommodate a £250 million cash-flow problem—a performance described by the Public Accounts Committee as setting
“a new benchmark in poor corporate decision making.”
Let me turn to the couple of specific questions buried at the end of the shadow Defence Secretary’s rant. He asked me about the timing of the statement. I have come to the House at the earliest possible date after the National Security Council took the decision to make the change. He said that £250 million has been squandered. I tell the House frankly that expenditure has been incurred in appraising the option of building a CV carrier and fitting it with cats and traps, but it has been nowhere near the £250 million that the right hon. Gentleman referred to. He asked me if I would publish details of the costs involved.
Mr Hammond
The right hon. Gentleman says that I do not know. If he had ever been a Defence Minister, or inside the Ministry of Defence, he would understand why I do not know. These are complex contracts. I can give him an approximate idea. We think the cost of the design work that has been carried out and the appraisal work will be between £40 million and £50 million. There may also be some exit costs payable to the US contractors responsible for the EMAL system. We will be negotiating around those issues, and I give the right hon. Gentleman this commitment: once we have a definitive figure, I will make it available to the House.
The right hon. Gentleman said that we will have no jets on our carriers for a decade. I do not think he was listening to the statement. We will take delivery of the first test aircraft this year. We will receive the first STOVL variant aircraft in 2016 for operation off land. The carrier will go into sea trials in 2017 and, as soon as she has completed them in 2018, flights will begin from the deck of HMS Queen Elizabeth. It will take us two years to work up full military operational capability, but it is important that the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), who is shaking his head, understands what that means. It is the gap between getting from the point when we fly the jets off the carrier to the point when the military are satisfied that we have full operational capability.
The right hon. Gentleman asked about the number of aircraft that we will be purchasing. The plans for deployment of aircraft have not changed as a result of this announcement. We will routinely embark 12 aircraft and we will be able to surge that number to 36. On the purchasing of aircraft in the joint strike fighter programme, I can tell him that there is no requirement for us to go firm with numbers at this early stage of the programme. Where we can retain optionality, we will do so, as part of prudent budget management.
The right hon. Gentleman asked about risks and costs in this project and in the carrier variant project. We are talking about a project with a total cost of around £10 billion. It is hugely complex, probably the second largest industrial project under way in this country today. There will always be risks, and there will always be risks of cost escalation in such a project. The challenge is not to eliminate risks, but to manage them. That is what proper management of the Ministry of Defence is all about.
The right hon. Gentleman asked about the operation of two carriers. If at the next strategic defence and security review, the Government and the National Security Council take the decision to operate two carriers in order to give us continuous carrier availability, there will be an additional cost of about £60 million a year on average for additional crewing and maintenance to keep the two carriers in high readiness.
Dr Liam Fox (North Somerset) (Con)
Will the Secretary of State accept that there were two optimal mixes for JSF and carrier? We could either have a 65,000 tonne carrier and use the carrier variant, with a longer range and bigger payload, or, as the American marine corps are doing, choose the jump jet variant and have smaller carriers. Is the position we are in today sub-optimal, and not the result of industrial policy leading military policy? Does he accept that the real difference, and the reason why he has come to this decision, is that the extra time required for the EMAL system to be put in actually breaches the risk that we were willing to take at the SDSR?
Mr Hammond
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right that at the SDSR, a view was taken about the amount of risk that was tolerable, about the horizon to which we could accept an absence of carrier capability and, as I have said, I am certainly not prepared to see us go beyond 2020 without the carrier strike capability.
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. This is the question for Opposition Members to answer: why did they order two 65,000 tonne carriers without cats and traps, which anyone involved in naval aviation operations knows is itself an absurdity? [Interruption.]
Mr Speaker
Order. I appeal to the House to calm down. The hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), assisted by his colleagues, is chuntering repetitively from a sedentary position, in breach of the conventions of the House. I ask the hon. Gentleman to exercise what modicum of self-restraint he is able, in the circumstances, to muster.
Mr Hammond
We inherited this programme, and frankly I am not interested in trading insults with the Opposition about what happened in the past. What I need to do now is take the carriers that are in build and that are being built under a contract that makes it more expensive to cancel them than to complete them, and put them to the best possible military use for the defence of this country.
Mr Bob Ainsworth (Coventry North East) (Lab)
The Secretary of State has taken, and is announcing, the right decision today, and I understand how difficult it is to perform that kind of U-turn and how uncomfortable it must be. But I cannot go along with him on the excuse—the reason—that both he and the Prime Minister decided to give for that decision. That is that the facts have changed and therefore we are changing the decision.
I reviewed this decision, taken by my predecessors. The fundamental facts were there at the time and have not changed. We have been up an extremely expensive cul-de-sac for the last 18 months as a result of a shambles of an SDSR, and I can only congratulate the Secretary of State on bringing some sanity to it; but he ought to understand the problem that he will give himself in sorting out procurement work—which, yes, is problematic and was in our time—if he cannot find a way of being straight about why the decision is being taken and the fact that the previous decision was taken in the face of clear advice to the contrary.
Mr Hammond
I refute that last comment absolutely. The right hon. Gentleman is in a better position than many in the House to understand the complexities and the challenges of defence procurement, but to say that the facts have not changed is simply wrong. The risk profile of the STOVL aircraft is dramatically different now from what it was in 2010, when there was a very real risk that the variant would be cancelled. The cost estimates for fitting the EMAL system, and the understanding of the complexity of that task, have matured through the work that we have done since the SDSR. Although I am grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s endorsement of the substantive decision, he is simply wrong when he says the facts have not changed.
Mr James Arbuthnot (North East Hampshire) (Con)
To make an announcement like this takes real courage and I commend the Secretary of State, and the Prime Minister, for making what I agree with the former Secretary of State is the right decision. Is my right hon. Friend able to say how much it would have cost to have converted the second carrier to cats and traps, because was there not a real risk that we would end up with a carrier that we could neither use nor sell?
Mr Hammond
My right hon. Friend is correct to focus on that point, and I thank him for his comments. As I think I said in my statement, fitting cats and traps retrospectively to the Queen Elizabeth, after her completion, would undoubtedly be significantly more expensive than even the current £2 billion estimate for fitting them to the Prince of Wales in build. It is therefore not unreasonable to think of a likely cost of between £2.5 billion and £3 billion for retrospective fit to the Queen Elizabeth, making that project, as I suggested in my statement, in practice unlikely ever to occur.
Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)
Can the Secretary of State confirm that the terms of business agreement signed in 2009 provide that on completion of the carrier build, the UK will be spending perhaps only £230 million a year—0.7% of the MOD budget—to maintain essential shipbuilding skills? More important, will he tell us whether, as a result of the additional costs announced in today’s statement, he envisages that very small figure being reduced further in the future?
Mr Hammond
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: the terms of business agreement with the shipbuilding consortium commits the MOD to underwriting overhead costs of about £230 million a year to maintain skills. The challenge for the MOD is so to manage the shipbuilding programme as to recover as much of that as possible. After the carrier programme is finished in the shipyards covered by the TOBA, we will move on to the Type 26 programme and recover costs in that way. As far as I am aware, there is no mechanism for reducing that £230 million—it is a contractual figure.
Sir Menzies Campbell (North East Fife) (LD)
Is it not abundantly clear that any discomfort or embarrassment the Government may feel is more than outweighed by the fact that the decision the Secretary of State has announced today is right both tactically and strategically? When the sound and fury have died down, that is what will concern those members of the Royal Navy who have the responsibility of looking after these ships and the aircraft that fly from them. Is it not important that today’s announcement will help to close earlier the yawning gap in capability left by the decommissioning of the Harrier aircraft and the carriers from which they were deployed? That shows commendable flexibility on the part of the right hon. Gentleman. I hope he will show the same flexibility in respect of other matters, not least, for example, the role of the Royal Air Force at Leuchars in my constituency.
Mr Hammond
I knew my right hon. and learned Friend would get that in somewhere, but I thank him for his question. In the interest of tri-service harmony, I should make it clear that responsibility for the aircraft will be a combined responsibility of the Royal Navy and the RAF.
My right hon. and learned Friend refers to the Harrier question. Perhaps I need to remind him that it was the previous Government who sealed the fate of the Harrier in 2006, when they scrapped the Navy’s FA2 Sea Harriers, leaving only the ground attack version; and then in 2009 cut the size of that fleet, so that by the time of the SDSR in 2010 the fleet was simply too small to sustain operations in Afghanistan, never mind in Libya as well. We therefore had to take the difficult decision to end the Harrier’s service with the Royal Navy in order to sustain the Tornado, which continues to serve in Afghanistan and which acquitted itself so well in Libya.
Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)
I agree that the Secretary of State has made the right decision, particularly given the current financial climate, but I want him to clarify a comment he made. He said that the option of cancelling the carrier programme was not open to him. If it had been open to him, would he have cancelled it?
Mr Hammond
The SDSR in 2010 considered the possibility of cancelling the second carrier, to deal with the huge budget challenges we inherited, but the terms of business agreement was such that cancelling the carrier at that point would have cost more than delivering it.
Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)
I have long argued that if we are going to spend money on carrier strike force, we need to ensure that we have that capability all year round. Can the Secretary of State confirm that, in terms of capability, one advantage of the programme he has announced today is that it puts two operational carriers back on the table?
Mr Hammond
My hon. Friend is right. I made the precise point, in response to my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot), that the cost of converting the second carrier to EMALS cats and traps was likely to be prohibitive; that has emerged from the work that has been going on. Completing the two carriers in STOVL configuration gives us optionality. It means that they can both operate the STOVL aircraft; that the 2015 SDSR can decide whether to bring the second carrier out of extended readiness and deploy it during periods of refit or extended maintenance of the first carrier; and that subsequent SDSRs can decide whether finding the extra crew and meeting the maintenance cost is an appropriate use of naval resources, depending on our assessment of the threat risk.
Ms Gisela Stuart (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab)
I am still trying to understand precisely what the new facts are that the Secretary of State so recently discovered. He mentions risk profiles and cost estimates, but surely they were known. Would it not be wise of him either to be more specific or, even better, to publish the advice that would show us what those new facts are?
Mr Hammond
The hon. Lady will remember that I spent three and a half years in a shadow Treasury brief, during which time I developed a healthily jaundiced view of the Ministry of Defence’s procurement process. Now that I am inside the Department and see the process from the other side, I understand that it is a little bit more complicated than nipping down to the local supermarket to buy a carton of eggs or a bottle of milk. These are immensely complex projects. The way they typically work is that they start with a high-level estimate, informed by the best information available. One then commits funds—this costs money—to do a more detailed appraisal that identifies the technical and financial challenges and risks around the project. That is precisely what we have done. In terms of the appropriate management of a large, complex project, the MOD has followed exactly the right process. It has delivered us the facts to which I referred, and we have drawn the appropriate conclusions from them.
Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)
The Opposition should show a little more humility and gloat less on the subject of their responsibility towards the Royal Navy. It was Labour that quibbled over the design for 10 years, and Labour that told the workers to down tools, which cost £1.6 billion. It was Labour that sacked the Sea Harrier—and indeed the Ark Royal—and Labour that cut the number of Type 45s from 12 to six. That is the maritime legacy that this Government have inherited.
Mr Speaker
We can leave it at that. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), but in future, a question mark would be appreciated.
Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)
Will the Secretary of State confirm if he has investigated whether Mr Adam Werritty met any companies or lobbyists involved in the original very bad decision?
Mr Hammond
I have answered a number of parliamentary questions on the information that the Department holds on meetings held by, and contacts made with, Mr Werritty. As far as I am aware, I have disclosed in parliamentary questions the full extent of the Department’s knowledge.
Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)
Amphibious capability is a key part of our defence strategy. I thank my right hon. Friend for making sure that we clarify the timetable, but will he explain what impact the decision will have on amphibious capability, so that we can ensure that our Royal Marines are protected when they go on to land?
Mr Hammond
The STOVL configuration of the carrier in the carrier-enabled power projection model means that the carrier will embark both fast jets and helicopters—Chinook, Lynx and Merlin. It will also be able to embark Marines. It is a very large ship, as we have mentioned this morning. It will have the capability to carry troops and embark helicopters and fast jets in a way that will facilitate amphibious warfare.
Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)
Even a first-week midshipman could tell the Prime Minister that adopting two 180° U-turns takes us back to where we started two years ago. Will the Secretary of State give a commitment that the Government will continue to stand beside the use of Rosyth dockyard for the long-term maintenance of the carriers when they enter service? Will he tell the House what we will achieve, except squandering he knows not how many millions of pounds, by flogging our Harrier fleet for spare parts for a peppercorn, scrapping a generation of fast-jet Harrier pilots, and leaving the nation with—
Mr Hammond
A first-week midshipman could probably tell the hon. Gentleman that it is not normal to order a 65,000 tonne STOVL carrier without any cats and traps. With regard to the hon. Gentleman’s question on Rosyth, no decision has been taken on where the carriers will be maintained in future.
John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)
It is widely alleged by some that the through-life costs of the F-35B could compare unfavourably with those of the F-35C. What rigorous assessment has my right hon. Friend undertaken to ensure that we achieve value for money, having made this decision, and what wider lessons on the defence budget can be drawn for similarly important and large decisions in future?
Mr Hammond
To answer the last question first, I am drawing some very interesting conclusions about how to manage the defence budget on an ongoing basis and hope to share them with the House shortly. It is precisely because the F-35C variant, on the face of it, has a lower purchase cost and a lower through-life maintenance cost that this option was pursued at the time of the SDSR 2010, but operating the carrier variant will of course require the installation upfront of the catapults and arrester gears, which we now know will cost in the order of £2 billion and rising. On the basis of a properly discounted cash-flow analysis over 30 years, I am clear that the STOVL variant, given the current estimate of the cost of cats and traps, will now be cheaper.
Jason McCartney (Colne Valley) (Con)
At the Royal Air Force officer training college at Cranwell we were taught that flexibility is the key to air power. I congratulate my right hon. Friend on showing the flexibility to make the right decision for our nation and our future military capability. Will he confirm that his decision has the support of the Chiefs, unlike the previous Government’s decision to scrap the Sea Harriers, which reportedly led to two of the Chiefs standing down?
Mr Hammond
I am very clear that my job is about supporting the military and our armed forces in defending our country. When I make decisions, I will work with the Chiefs to reach an outcome that works for the military. I can confirm that the Chief of the Defence Staff and all three single service Chiefs support the decision and have confirmed their support in writing to the Prime Minister.
Mark Lancaster (Milton Keynes North) (Con)
Those on the Labour Front Bench have short memories. The pages of Hansard will show the debate that the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) and I had in 2009 on the previous Government’s decision to withdraw the Harrier from Afghanistan prematurely so that it could be subjected to the programme review the following year and potentially cut. Of course, that is now ancient history and they seem to have forgotten it. I commend my right hon. Friend for his brave decision, which is undoubtedly the right one, to minimise the capability gap for carrier strike. Will he confirm that the STOVL version is easily a superior aircraft to the Harrier it replaces and equally comparable to anything it might meet in the air?
Mr Hammond
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising a point that perhaps I should have made before. The STOVL variant—indeed, any variant of the JSF—is a fifth-generation aircraft and represents a step change in capability. It is a stealth aircraft with an autonomous intelligence-gathering capability, and the STOVL variant has significantly greater range than the Harrier had. It is an aircraft with greater capability, greater range than the Harrier and a range of capabilities that previous generations of aircraft simply did not have.
Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)
I have received a good deal of correspondence from constituents, both those serving in and those retired from the armed forces, who for a long time have expressed huge concern about the strategy and direction of our procurement. They will be relieved and delighted to hear today that my right hon. Friend has been able to continue to assess the strategy and come up with the right decision and brave enough to announce it to the House. Will he reassure the House that he will never let the woolly thinking and loose purse strings shown by the previous Government undermine our armed forces again?
Mr Hammond
My hon. Friend makes an important point. Fiscal incontinence undermines the support that we can offer our armed forces. Doing this in a disciplined way is not, as the right hon. Member for East Renfrewshire (Mr Murphy) would try to present it in a rather sneering fashion, some sort of obsession with spreadsheets; it is about doing our job as politicians, which is to ensure that the support for our armed forces is there, is sustainable and can actually be delivered to them.
Alun Cairns (Vale of Glamorgan) (Con)
The Ministry of Defence has a long and tawdry history of overspend in procurement, timelines that are well in excess of those originally planned and of ploughing on regardless. Will the Secretary of State confirm that his decision today demonstrates a change of culture that really shows that we are getting to grips with the budget and the timelines to provide guarantees to the armed forces and our nation?
Mr Hammond
I thank my hon. Friend for his question and assure him that we will take the decisions that need to be taken in the interests of the nation’s defence, however awkward or inconvenient. I will come to the House however many times I need to and make however many announcements I need to make to get the Department back on track. I want the MOD to stand tall among the Departments of State, with a normal relationship with the Treasury and with the centre of government, and with proper contingency arrangements in its budget so that the armed forces can be confident that the promises that are made to them will be delivered, unlike those of the previous Government.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
What steps is my right hon. Friend taking on defence procurement to ensure that the Government do not risk repeating the mistakes of the previous Government, who even in their last financial year in office, 2009-10, oversaw a huge increase of £3.3 billion in the cost of the 15 largest defence projects?
Mr Hammond
I think that the announcement I have made today demonstrates for my hon. Friend and the House that we will put prudent management of defence projects ahead of playing politics. It would have been easy to avoid making this decision today, and politically much less uncomfortable, but this is about making the right decisions for the future of our armed forces and I can assure him that that is what we will continue to do.
Health Transition Risk Register
(12 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Andrew Lansley)
With permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to make a statement on the publication of the Department of Health’s strategic and transition risk registers. In November 2010 the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) submitted a freedom of information request asking for the publication of the transition risk register relating to the planned Health and Social Care Bill. A similar request by Nic Cecil, a journalist with the Evening Standard, for publication of the Department’s strategic risk register followed in February 2011. The Government refused both requests on the grounds that the risk registers related to the formulation and development of policy and, as set out in the Freedom of Information Act 2000, were not required to be published.
Appeals were then made by the applicants to the Information Commissioner. In both instances, the commissioner ruled against the Government, arguing that the balance of the public interest lay in public disclosure. The Government’s view, to the contrary, is that the public interest is best served in this instance by officials and Ministers being able privately to consider such issues, including any risks. We therefore appealed the commissioner’s decision, under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act, to the first-tier tribunal.
The tribunal was asked to consider whether the Information Commissioner was correct to find that, on balance, the public interest required disclosure of the risk registers. On 5 April this year the tribunal made public the reasons for its decision. For the Department’s strategic risk register it found in favour of the Government and so did not order its disclosure, but it came to the opposite conclusion with regard to the transition risk register.
I have carefully considered the tribunal’s decision and discussed it thoroughly with Cabinet colleagues. Following these discussions, I have decided to exercise the ministerial veto, as allowed by the Freedom of Information Act, in relation to the disclosure of the transition risk register. This decision represents the view of the Cabinet. I have decided to veto rather than appeal the decision to the upper-tier tribunal, because the disagreement is on where the balance of the public interest lies and is a matter of principle and not a matter of law, as would be the focus of any further appeal. I recognise that this is an exceptional step; it is not one that is taken lightly. There is no doubt that reform of the NHS has attracted huge public interest, but my decision to veto, while an exceptional case, is also a matter of wider principle and not just about the specific content of the transition risk register.
In all Departments, Ministers are required to balance the public interest in terms of disclosure with the need properly to consider complex areas of public policy. Good government demands that the analysis and management of risk is thorough and robust, whichever party is in power. It is an essential aspect of good government, in the formulation and development of policy, that officials have a “safe space” within which to formulate sensitive advice to Ministers, that they feel free to use direct language and to make frank assessments, and that the Government should, in exceptional circumstances, be able to reserve such privacy absolutely.
The right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) said in his evidence to the Select Committee on Justice last month:
“There has to be a space in which decision makers can think thoughts without the risk of disclosure, and not only of disclosure at the time, but of disclosure afterwards.”
He said also that there have been
“some rather extraordinary decisions by the Freedom of Information Tribunal, in which they suggested that it”—
the exemption—
“can apply only while policy was in the process of development but not at any time thereafter. That is crazy and it is not remotely what was intended.”
The Freedom of Information Act was drafted specifically to allow a safe space for the development of policy, and I have acted throughout in strict accordance with its provisions.
The risk assessment process, carried out by civil servants and detailed in those registers, is an integral part of the formulation and development of Government policy. It is strongly in the public interest that this process be as effective as possible. When the request for the transition risk register was made, many aspects of the policy were still at an early stage of their development: the Command Paper, responding to the consultation, had not been published; and the Bill had not been published. It is therefore incorrect to say that the transition risk register does not relate to the development of policy, because it fed, and continues to feed, directly into the advice given to Ministers.
The Bill may have become an Act in March, but we are still developing policy at the next level of detail. The value of risk registers is directly linked to the form and manner in which they are expressed—with the use of direct language. They do not, however, show the benefits of a policy, and they are not, as impact assessments are, intended to reflect considered calculations of both costs and benefits. They are simply about identifying possible risks in order to stimulate action to mitigate them.
If such registers were disclosed at sensitive times in relation to sensitive issues, as would have happened in the case before us, it is highly likely that they would be open to misinterpretation and misuse, with the impact that future risk registers would become anodyne documents of little use. Potential risks would be more likely to develop without adequate mitigation, and that would be detrimental to good government and very much against the public interest. Reflecting that, a detailed statement of reasons for my decision to exercise the ministerial veto in this case has been laid before Parliament.
This decision to veto the disclosure of the register is not in any way a criticism of the Freedom of Information Act. The Act always envisaged times when the Government would need to protect the process of policy development. This is one of those times. The Government’s right to make just such a veto is written into, and is a proper use of, the Act.
We have always been as open as possible about the risks and issues involved in the modernisation of the NHS. There was the full public consultation, a thorough examination by the NHS Future Forum and 50 days of detailed debate in both Houses, in addition to the detailed risks published in the impact assessment. Very few pieces of legislation have ever received that degree of public and parliamentary scrutiny.
On Tuesday I went further and published a separate document that includes the risk areas covered in the transition risk register, as previously set out not least by my noble Friend Lord Howe in another place on 28 November 2011. That document also includes the actions taken to mitigate those risk areas.
I have also published a “Scheme for Publication”, which sets out our proposals for reviewing and releasing material relating to the transition programme in future. Both documents are available in the Library and on the Department’s website. They further confirm that the purpose of the veto was not in any sense to restrict public access to relevant information, but was to establish that publication of the risk register in December 2010 would have been contrary to the public interest. This Government, more than any before us, are committed to openness and transparency. Across government we publish business plans, departmental staffing and salaries, full details of departmental contracts and summaries of departmental board meetings. In the national health service, we have published more information about services than was ever the case—not only shining a light on poor performance, but helping to root it out. We now publish the NHS atlas of variation, exposing variations in outcomes throughout the country; we have published data on mixed-sex accommodation, leading to a dramatic 95% reduction in breaches; and we have invested in new information collections on A and E performance, on ambulance performance and on clinical audits.
The decision to veto is about long-term principles and good government, not about limiting in any way the scrutiny of NHS reform. Information relating to much of the content of the risk registers is now in the public domain, but the important principle of the right not to publish has been maintained, and I commend this statement to the House.
Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)
Back in the rose garden, the talk was of the most open and transparent Government ever. Today, those words are as worthless as “no rise in tuition fees” and “no top-down re-organisation of the NHS”. We have heard self-serving rubbish today from a Secretary of State who does not want patients and the public to know the whole truth about his NHS re-organisation, but he has been brought here by the sheer tenacity of my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey).
My right hon. Friend has been completely vindicated by the Information Rights Tribunal, which was scathing about the way in which the Government have conducted their re-organisation of the NHS, their failure to give an indication of their wide-ranging plans before their hastily drawn-up White Paper, and their decision to implement them on the ground before a Bill had been presented to the House.
After last Thursday, in interviews following the local election results, Government Members all promised to listen, but what is the first thing that they do? They take this unanimous ruling from a judge-led legal tribunal and tear it in two with trademark arrogance—a Government who believe that they are born to rule and above the law. In doing so, they have made a major departure from the established policy on freedom of information, and from the precedent set by the previous Government.
Hitherto, the ministerial veto has been used on only three occasions, all related to Cabinet discussions; applying the veto to operational matters of domestic policy breaks that precedent. As such, it is a major step backwards towards secrecy and closed government. Is there not now a real risk that other Departments will cite this shoddy decision as a precedent and seek to withhold public information that, in the spirit of policy intention of the Freedom of Information Act, should be placed in the public domain?
Where does this decision leave the Information Commissioner and, indeed, the Information Tribunal? Have they not been completely undermined by the Cabinet’s decision? The truth is that there is confusion in government about the decision, and the Secretary of State has failed to clear it up today. In his statement on Tuesday he said clearly that the risk register would not be published following Cabinet agreement and that it was a “final decision” by the Secretary of State, but just hours later on the “Today” programme the Health Minister Earl Howe said:
“We have every intention of publishing the risk register in due course, when we think the time is right”.
I have a simple question: will it be published or not? Was the Secretary of State’s Minister speaking for him and his Department when he made that statement, and if so will the Secretary of State tell us what his Minister means by “when…the time is right”? Most people, including those on the tribunal, felt that the time was right when the Bill was going through the House of Commons—before the right hon. Gentleman shamelessly rammed it on to the statute book.
The shambles is not just in the Department of Health, however; it is right across government. The shadow Leader of the House has just left the Chamber, but in a blog post earlier this week he said—
The Minister of State, Department of Health (Mr Simon Burns)
The Deputy Leader of the House.
Andy Burnham
The Deputy Leader of the House said that
“it would also be right to publish as much of what is contained in the risk register as possible”.
He said that this week—that the risk register should have been published. How many more Ministers and coalition MPs do not agree with the Cabinet’s decision?
Most worrying, however, is the confusion over freedom of information policy. The Secretary of State, in his statement earlier this week, said:
“If such risk registers were regularly disclosed, it is likely that their form and content would change”.
But later in the same statement he said that this was an “exceptional case”. Which is it? Do the Government now have a blanket ban on the publication of any risk register, even if ordered to do so by a judge, or was this an exceptional case? If it was the latter, how did it meet the exceptional criteria that Government rules require? We need answers, as again this Government are breaking the precedent set by the last Government. Following a ruling from the Information Commissioner, we released the Heathrow third runway risk register. We never called for the publication of all risk registers, but said that each case should be judged on its merits. Inconveniently for the Minister and the Conservative party, that ruling makes a clear differentiation between the strategic risk register on the one hand and the transition risk register on the other, as I have argued all the way through this discussion.
The Secretary of State’s argument today hinges on the “safe space” argument—he says that if we did not have a safe space, it may change future risk registers. Is he aware that the tribunal considered that point in detail but concluded that there was no evidence presented to us that the release of the Heathrow risk register had a chilling effect on their use by Government? Was the Secretary of State’s argument not tested in court and did it not fail in court? Is he not now showing a blatant disregard for the law? He said today that it “is a matter of principle and not a matter of law”, but it is a matter of principle and of law—freedom of information is the principle and the Freedom of Information Act is the law. He should be following the law that enacts that principle, but he has taken a step away from it today.
The Treasury website still has this statement on risk policy:
“Government will make available its assessments of risks that affect the public, how it has reached its decisions, and how it will handle the risk. It will also do so where the development of new policies poses a potential risk to the public.”
I ask again: if that is no longer the Government’s policy on risk management, when will it be removed from the Treasury’s website?
In conclusion, the Government are in disarray on many fronts. The NHS belongs to the people of this country, not Ministers. If Ministers cannot be open about the risks that they are taking with the NHS, they should not be taking those risks. That is a simple principle.
The truth is that this has been a cowardly decision from a Government on the run who are now too frightened to face up to the consequences of their own incompetence. The real reason for the veto is that publication would have shown that the warnings from doctors, nurses, midwives and patients were echoed in private by civil servants but the Government just ignored them. This is a Cabinet cover-up of epic proportions—a Government closing ranks and covering each other’s backs because they know that the public would never forgive them if they could see the scale of the risks that the Government are taking with the national health service.
Mr Lansley
Most of that was synthetic indignation. I am really surprised; the right hon. Gentleman cannot have read any of the review of the risk register that I published on Tuesday. That set out, in detail, all the risk areas carried in the risk register and the mitigating actions that have been taken. There is in no sense any area of risk identified 18 months ago that has not been put into the public domain in a proper form—one that reflects not only the character of those risks, but how those risks have been subsequently addressed.
The right hon. Gentleman is completely confused about the issue. The point of the veto was to confirm that it was not in the public interest for the risk register in December 2010 to be published in relation to the November 2010 document. That point was made very clearly. Acting as we did was not in any sense above the law; it was absolutely in accordance with the law. It is in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act and with the structure of the management of risk. For the further clarification of the House, on Tuesday I published the risk management strategy associated with the transition programme, so the right hon. Gentleman can see that it is exactly in line with how the Government manage such risks.
The right hon. Gentleman asked about our intention to publish the risk register. We will publish it at a point when it would not prejudice the exemption for officials for the formulation and development of policy. There will come a time when it is appropriate to do so, when doing so will not prejudice that exemption under the Freedom of Information Act.
The right hon. Gentleman is completely wrong to suggest that no evidence was presented to the first-tier tribunal relating to the potentially damaging effect of publication under these circumstances. As the former Cabinet Secretary, Lord O’Donnell made those risks very clear to the tribunal. Who is better placed than him to say that? He must know that in another place, during debates on this precise issue of publication and relevance to the legislation, other Cabinet Secretaries and Members clearly stated their view that the publication of the transition risk register would run that risk.
The right hon. Gentleman is speaking directly contrary to his own view. When he was a Minister, he said in relation to a request for publication of a departmental risk register:
“Putting the risk register in the public domain would be likely to reduce the detail and utility of its contents.”—[Official Report, 23 March 2007; Vol. 458, c. 1192W.]
He is making an absolutely spurious distinction between the transition register and the strategic register. [Interruption.] It is no good him shouting. The overlap between the two registers and the character of the formulation and development of policy—
Mr Speaker
Order. I appeal to the House to calm down. I say to the shadow Secretary of State that he has asked a series of questions and must await the answers. I say to the hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry), a distinguished practitioner at the Bar, that if she conducted herself in the court room as she has here, the judge would not be amused—and I am sure that she would not do it.
Mr Lansley
Thank you, Mr Speaker. Let me be clear. The right hon. Gentleman, as a Minister, refused requests for the publication of risk registers. This risk register, the transition risk register, at the point when it was requested and formulated, was absolutely part of the formulation and development of policy and has continued to be used as part of the development of policy.
To make it clearer what the Labour party actually thinks about the issue, I should say that a Conservative party member recently submitted a request for a risk register to the one place where the Labour Government remain in power—in Wales. What did the Labour Government say? On 12 April 2012, less than a month ago, the Welsh Assembly Labour Government said:
“Release of the risk register would inhibit the way in which such risks are expressed, which potentially makes the management and mitigation of risk more difficult. This in turn would impair the quality of decision making when determining the most appropriate response to an identified risk. Ultimately this could impede the delivery of Ministerial priorities and inhibit the effective management of NHS performance, in both delivery and financial terms.”
That request to a Labour Government for an NHS risk register was turned down for precisely the reasons we have rejected the request for risk registers in relation to the NHS. The Labour party says one thing, but in government it did another and in government in Wales it does another.
Instead of spending his time debating an 18-month-old document—it is now out of date, frankly—the right hon. Gentleman ought to be recognising the reality of what is happening in the NHS. Instead of the risks that he keeps talking about happening, NHS performance is improving, and he should celebrate that. Waiting times are down, there are more diagnostic tests, and waiting times for diagnostic tests have been maintained. There is extra access to dentistry, cancer drugs and new cancer medicines. Health care-acquired infections in the NHS are at their lowest-ever level and the performance of the NHS is continually improving. As shadow Secretary of State, he would be better off celebrating the performance of the NHS than trying to run it down.
Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)
My right hon. Friend quoted some of the evidence that the Justice Committee is receiving, including very interesting evidence from the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw). It would help the Committee if it had an understanding of whether this instance is a special and particular case or whether it is seen by quite a lot of people in the civil service as a test case of whether there really is a safe space in which they can freely advance arguments about risk.
Mr Lansley
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. This case is seen and was judged by me and my colleagues on its particular circumstances; as I made clear, it is an exceptional case. One of the arguments that underlay our decision was necessarily the one about the principle that we were assessing. That principle is very clear: the Freedom of Information Act envisages that there should be an exemption for the formulation and development of policy, and that under those circumstances the public interest in the proper development of policy could outweigh the public interest in disclosure.
In this case, we are very clear—and my colleagues have been very clear—that the risk register, when it was produced, was at that time instrumental to the formulation and development of policy and that therefore the public interest did not require its disclosure.
John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)
On Tuesday, the Health Secretary said that the veto was justified because the NHS risk register case is exceptional. On Wednesday, Earl Howe, the Health Minister, said:
“This isn’t just about the NHS. The Cabinet collectively took a decision that this was a matter that extended across Government.”
On Tuesday, the Health Secretary said that he was blocking publication, but on Wednesday, the same Health Minister said:
“We have every intention of publishing the risk register”.
This is a conspiracy and a cock-up. Is it not typical of this Government—too incompetent even to organise a decent cover-up?
Mr Lansley
I am afraid that the right hon. Gentleman knows perfectly well that I took the decision to veto the publication of the risk register, in justification of the Government’s view that it should not be disclosed, in December 2010. I am now making it very clear that I have put all the risk areas covered in the risk register in the public domain in the document that sets them out. The issue is not about the publication of the risk register now; it is about whether it was right to refuse its publication in December 2010. He knows perfectly well that that is the question and that is the judgment we made.
Stephen Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con)
If the position of Labour Members is that the ministerial veto should apply only to Cabinet discussions, is it not odd that the legislation they passed does not contain that description? Is it not the case that the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) spoke for the reality of government rather than the opportunism of opposition?
Mr Lansley
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I am sorry that the right hon. Member for Blackburn is not here; I told him that I would quote from his evidence to the Justice Committee. I will therefore not attempt further to interpret what his view might be. I think that what he said to the Justice Committee was consistent with the view that those implementing the FOI Act should bear it in mind that there was an exemption for the formulation and development of policy, as my hon. Friend implies. There was not an exemption for Cabinet collective discussion; there was an exemption for the formulation and development of policy. In each case, we have to weigh the public interest very carefully. Clearly, there will be many circumstances in which the public interest in disclosure outweighs the necessity for there to be a safe space for private discussions about issues of risk. In this case, in December 2010 my colleagues and I were clear that it would have been wholly wrong, and disruptive and damaging, to the policy development process for the document to be published at that time.
Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)
What does the Secretary of State so fear about what is in the risk register that he refuses to show it the light of day and defies a tribunal ruling?
Mr Lansley
I know that I cannot ask the hon. Gentleman a question, but I wonder whether he has read the document I published on Tuesday about what is in the risk register. I bet he has not.
Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)
Has the Secretary of State of State seen any previous risk registers, and does he think that their early publication may have affected the policy development of the previous Government?
Mr Lansley
I have seen many risk registers. Of course, I do not have access to the documents of the previous Government, so I cannot judge what the precise circumstances were in which the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) refused to publish a risk register, his predecessor as Secretary of State for Health refused to publish a risk register, or, indeed, the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) refused to publish a risk register when he was a Treasury Minister.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
In my constituency, the future of our hospital services, especially our accident and emergency service, is deeply uncertain. GP commissioning is colliding with massive cuts to social care budgets, creating considerable uncertainty about how that will pan out. Our ambulance services are being reconfigured—we are losing an ambulance to Salford—and our community services are being broken up and contracted out in penny parcels. Given all this uncertainty as transition begins to take its course in Trafford, what guarantees can the Secretary of State give to my constituents that they will be fully informed of the risks associated with such change when he is setting such a bad example nationally?
Mr Lansley
If the hon. Lady had looked at the document I published on Tuesday, she would realise that none of the issues she is talking about—quite properly, on behalf of her constituents—was addressed in November 2010 in the risk register. In so far as there were issues concerning the transition, not only have they been addressed but we have set out how we have mitigated them, with the specific objective of ensuring that during the process of transition there is not only business as usual in the NHS but performance is improved. That is why Labour Members should take on board the point that I made at the end of my response to the right hon. Member for Leigh: the performance of the NHS is improving during this process of transition.
David Rutley (Macclesfield) (Con)
Has my right hon. Friend received any representations from Labour Front Benchers about releasing the 2009 risk register, which they refused to publish when they were in office?
Mr Lansley
My hon. Friend may be surprised to know that I have received no such representations from Labour Members.
Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) (Lab)
Is not the real reason the Secretary of State is vetoing publication of the risk register that it shows what the doctors, the nurses and the midwives warned of all along—that this reorganisation is dangerous and reckless, and actually puts patients at risk?
Mr Lansley
It does not say that. Before Labour Members get up to read out the Whips’ handouts, why do they not read the document that was published on Tuesday about what is in the risk register and how we have mitigated these risks? The hon. Lady’s point is unjustified, not least as regards nurses, because the general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, in April 2011 and again in December 2011, sat in my office and told me, “We support the Bill.”
Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)
Will my right hon. Friend detail the changes in Department of Health policy on the publication of risk registers before or since May 2010?
Mr Lansley
The Department of Health’s risk management strategy is the same now as it was in 2009 or 2010.
Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)
The risk register that the Government fear publishing apparently points to potential major failures, including financial ones, in their plan for the NHS. Within weeks of coming to power, the Government ditched Labour plans for a new hospital for my constituents as it was considered too costly or financially risky, yet several hospitals could be built with the money wasted through their reorganisation. When will they recognise that and give their backing to the new financial plan for our hospital?
Mr Lansley
The hon. Gentleman knows perfectly well that the reason we refused that support is that his local trust is a foundation trust. It was never contemplated that foundation trusts undertaking major capital projects in excess of £400 million should simply expect the Department to supply a capital grant for that purpose. Without commenting on the merits of the proposal, I think that his trust has since developed new and improved proposals. I am not sure that they have come to me in any sense at this stage, but when they do I will certainly be willing to look at them very carefully with the Minister of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Mr Burns).
Craig Whittaker (Calder Valley) (Con)
Will my right hon. Friend tell the House how many times, under the previous Government’s many reforms of the NHS, risk registers were routinely published as a matter of course?
Mr Speaker
Order. The difficulty with that question, although I am sure that it was sincerely intended, is that it relates to the policies of a previous Administration, for which of course the Secretary of State has no responsibility.
Mr Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)
Should the Information Commissioner and the tribunal decide to approve the release of other risk registers, be it those that cover other work by his Department or the work of other Departments, such as the Work programme, has the Cabinet already decided also to veto their release?
Mr Lansley
No. The hon. Gentleman should know that in accordance with the FOI Act, if a ministerial veto were to be considered, it would be considered on the merits of any individual case.
Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)
Will my right hon. Friend confirm that he has followed the policy laid down by the previous Government on the application of the Act and that nothing has changed in that respect in policy terms?
Mr Lansley
Of course, Mr Speaker, I cannot comment on the policies of the previous Labour Government. I would be happy, if the right hon. Member for Leigh agrees, to publish the risk management strategy that the Department of Health had in place in 2009, which was not placed in the public domain at that time.
Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)
It is no surprise that the Secretary of State is running scared of publishing the risk register, because, as the House should not forget, an awful lot of measures now come through secondary legislation because the Government left a lot of detail out of the Health and Social Care Bill. In his statement—this is not from a Whips’ spreadsheet, let me add—he said: “If such registers were disclosed at sensitive times in relation to sensitive issues, as would have happened in the case before us, it is highly likely that they would be open to misinterpretation and misuse”. At what point does he think that there will cease to be “sensitive times”, and will he publish before the next general election?
Mr Lansley
I will repeat what my noble Friend Earl Howe said: we have every intention of publishing the risk register, but will do so when it is no longer directly relevant to the formulation and development of policy.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
Having been involved in the production of risk registers for many years, I know that they are pertinent to the point in time at which they are produced and require free thinking by those who put them together. There must then be a mitigation strategy to prevent the risks from ever happening. The key issue is this: what does my right hon. Friend think would happen to the policy advisers who put together risk registers for Ministers if these highly sensitive documents were put in the public domain?
Mr Lansley
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. To be absolutely clear, some risk registers are designed to be published. For example, strategic health authorities publish risk registers, and have done for a period of time, because they are designed to be published. The way in which the Labour party used the risk registers published by strategic health authorities, I think at the last Health questions, amply demonstrated that not only are they open to misrepresentation and misuse, but that the Labour party is very keen to misuse and misrepresent them. Even more so would it misrepresent and abuse the information in risk registers that were designed for the frank expression of advice if they were published. I do not need to speculate further in reply to my hon. Friend, because Lord O’Donnell, the former Cabinet Secretary, made it very clear that we would end up with bland, anodyne documents that did not serve the management purpose for which they were created.
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
May I follow up the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman)? If civil servants did not trust that what they said to Ministers was said in confidence, we would get poor advice. Some things must remain confidential until the time is right for their publication. Does my right hon. Friend agree with that?
Mr Lansley
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, and I do agree with him. The Freedom of Information Act recognises explicitly that what he says is true, and that a judgment should therefore be made by Ministers about where the balance of public interest lies. That is what we have done.
Bills Presented
Electoral Registration and Administration Bill
Presentation and First Reading (Standing Order No. 57)
The Deputy Prime Minister, supported by the Prime Minister, Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Secretary Kenneth Clarke, Mr Secretary Moore, Mr Mark Harper and Mr David Heath, presented a Bill to make provision about the registration of electors and the administration and conduct of elections.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Monday 14 May, and to be printed (Bill 6) with explanatory notes (Bill 6-EN).
Civil Aviation Bill
Presentation and resumption of proceedings (Standing Order No. 80A)
Mrs Theresa Villiers, supported by the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Secretary Hague, Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mrs Secretary May, Secretary Vince Cable, Secretary Justine Greening, Mr Secretary Paterson, Secretary Michael Moore, Mrs Secretary Gillan and Mr Francis Maude, presented a Bill to make provision about the regulation of operators of dominant airports; to confer functions on the Civil Aviation Authority under competition legislation in relation to services provided at airports; to make provision about airport security; to make provision about the regulation of provision of flight accommodation; to make further provision about the Civil Aviation Authority’s membership, administration and functions in relation to enforcement, regulatory burdens and the provision of information relating to aviation; and for connected purposes.
Bill read the First and Second time without Question put (Standing Order No. 80A and Order, 30 January); to be read the Third time on Monday 14 May, and to be printed (Bill 3) with explanatory notes (Bill 3-EN).
Defamation Bill
Presentation and First Reading (Standing Order No. 57),
Mr Secretary Kenneth Clarke, the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr David Willetts, Mr Edward Vaizey and Mr Jonathan Djanogly, presented a Bill to amend the law of defamation.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Monday 14 May, and to be printed (Bill 5) with explanatory notes (Bill 5-EN).
Finance Bill
Presentation and resumption of proceedings (Standing Order No. 80B)
Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, Secretary Vince Cable, Mr Secretary Duncan Smith, Mr Secretary Davey, Danny Alexander, Mr Mark Hoban, Mr David Gauke and Miss Chloe Smith, presented a Bill to grant certain duties, and to amend the law relating to the National Debt and the Public Revenue, and to make further provision in connection with finance.
Bill read the First and Second time, clauses 1, 4, 8, 189 and 209 and schedules 1, 23 and 33 as reported from a Committee of the whole House were laid upon the Table without Question put, and the Bill stood committed to a Public Bill Committee in respect of clauses 7, 9 to 188, 190 to 208 and 210 to 227 and schedules 2 to 22, 24 to 32 and 34 to 38 (Standing Order No. 80B and Order, 16 April); and to be printed (Bill 1).
Financial Services Bill
Presentation and resumption of proceedings (Standing Order No. 80A)
Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, Secretary Vince Cable, Danny Alexander, Mr Mark Hoban, Mr David Gauke, Miss Chloe Smith and Norman Lamb, presented a Bill to amend the Bank of England Act 1998, the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 and the Banking Act 2009; to make other provision about the exercise of certain statutory functions relating to building societies, friendly societies and other mutual societies; to amend section 785 of the Companies Act 2006; to make provision enabling the Director of Savings to provide services to other public bodies; and for connected purposes.
Bill read the First and Second time without Question put (Standing Order No 80A) and Order, 6 February); to be further considered on Monday 14 May, and to be printed (Bill 2) with explanatory notes (Bill 2-EN).
Local Government Finance Bill
Presentation and resumption of proceedings (Standing Order No. 80A)
Mr Secretary Pickles, the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, Secretary Vince Cable, Danny Alexander, Mr Oliver Letwin, Andrew Stunell, Robert Neill and Mr David Jones, presented a Bill to make provision about non-domestic rating; to make provision about grants to local authorities; to make provision about council tax; and for connected purposes.
Bill read the First and Second time without Question put (Standing Order No. 80A and Order, 10 January); to be considered on Monday 14 May, and to be printed (Bill 4) with explanatory notes (Bill 4-EN).
Debate on the Address
Home Affairs and Justice
(12 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mrs Theresa May)
In justice and home affairs, the coalition Government achieved a great deal in the first parliamentary Session. We legislated to bring in elected police and crime commissioners, giving proper public accountability to policing. We brought in reforms to reduce reoffending and started paying by results. We rolled back unwarranted state intrusion into private lives through the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. We placed successful investigation and prosecution, once again, at the heart of our strategy for countering terrorism. We reduced the cost of legal aid, while protecting the vulnerable.
In the second Session, we are bringing forward further reforms to strengthen public protection; to better tackle serious crime and defend our borders; to make justice swifter, fairer and more comprehensive; to maintain and modernise our communications data capabilities; and to improve the oversight of the security intelligence agencies that keep us safe.
The Gracious Speech included the Crime and Courts Bill, which was introduced into another place earlier today. Current estimates suggest that serious, organised and complex crime costs our country between £20 billion and £40 billion a year. Law enforcement figures suggest that there are more than 7,000 organised crime groups that impact on the UK, involving about 30,000 individuals. Even those figures may underestimate the impact. Behind those statistics is the human misery that serious and organised crime inflicts on our communities. The drug dealing on street corners, the burglary and mugging by addicts, and the credit card fraud that robs so many are all fundamentally driven by serious, organised and complex crime.
As well as growing, that threat is changing. That means that our law enforcement response must also change. Visible neighbourhood policing is vital, but it will not deal with the cyber-criminal who is raiding bank accounts directly from overseas. Arresting drug dealers is important, but it will not stop the flow of drugs from abroad. Vetting and barring are important, but they cannot protect a child from the dangers that lurk online. To deal with those new threats, we need a new crime fighting force—a force that is capable of working across police boundaries and organisational divisions; a force that can defend our borders and deal with the economic consequences of complex crime; a force that protects children and vulnerable people and is active in cyberspace. That crime fighting force will be the National Crime Agency.
Alun Michael (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)
The Home Secretary has used the phrase “serious and organised crime” a number of times. Is she aware of the high reputation of the Serious Organised Crime Agency internationally in south America and many other places around the world that are involved in combating the people trafficking and drug trafficking to which she has referred? How will she ensure that, with the changes in organisation and the new name, we do not lose the brand and the reputation that have been built over many years?
Mrs May
I am well aware of the good name that SOCA has across the world. When I visit other countries, I try to speak to local SOCA liaison officers, where we have them, and I have met some of our liaison officers from south America when they have been in the UK.
I know the value that other law enforcement agencies across the world place on the work that SOCA does. That is why the National Crime Agency will build on the good work that SOCA has developed. SOCA will become the serious and organised crime command within the NCA, so we will develop the good work that has been done. I believe that being within the NCA will give SOCA a greater ability to deal with these issues. Linking SOCA with the border police command, the economic crime command and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre will give us a greater ability to act across the various types of serious and organised crime. Criminals do not compartmentalise their crime. Serious and organised crime groups are often involved in many types of crime and we need to reflect that in our law enforcement capability.
Tony Lloyd (Manchester Central) (Lab)
There are a couple of areas of anxiety concerning the NCA. The first is that it has no clear line of accountability to the general public. Perhaps the Home Secretary can give some information on the mechanisms of accountability to local communities. Secondly, as I understand it the NCA will have fewer staff than SOCA. Which of SOCA’s responsibilities will therefore disappear? If I am wrong, perhaps she can clarify how the staffing and financing of the NCA will compare to those of SOCA. The ambiguity and confusion around those issues have not been cleared up.
Mrs May
I visited SOCA some weeks ago and spoke to its staff about the situation that will pertain when it comes into the National Crime Agency. Discussions are obviously taking place with staff about the arrangements for the transition. There is a limit to what can be done until we are in a position to introduce and take forward a Bill, but those discussions will take place. I recognise that at a time of transition there is always a degree of uncertainty for individuals. That happens because of the process of transition, but we will make every effort to continue discussions with staff about what will happen when SOCA comes into the NCA.
In terms of accountability and responsibility, the NCA director general will be responsible to the Home Secretary and through the Home Secretary to Parliament. I have every confidence that the Chairman of the Select Committee on Home Affairs, who has already shown a significant interest in the matter, will make every effort to ensure that his Committee has the opportunity to look into the workings of the NCA—
Mr Sheerman
I missed the first two minutes of the Home Secretary’s speech, but I am keen to get into the debate because I have been outside talking about the dreadful case of criminals preying on children in Rochdale. My constituents do not really care what an agency is called; they want an effective mechanism. When I led a debate on child prostitution and the curse that we had across the northern region, I pointed out that one of the central problems is the not-joined-up relationship between different police forces in Lancashire, Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire.
Madam Deputy Speaker
Order. The hon. Gentleman will sit down when I say “Order”. Interventions should be brief, and it is customary to ask a Minister to give way before launching into an intervention, although the Home Secretary is perfectly capable of taking care of herself.
Mrs May
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I recognise that the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) passionately believes in, and cares greatly about, the issue he raised—and, frankly, so should we all. Sadly, child sexual exploitation takes place across communities and across the country. It is a matter of growing concern, given the number of cases identified by the police.
The hon. Gentleman raises the issue of police forces working together. One feature of the National Crime Agency will be its greater ability not only to bring the agencies within the commands of the NCA together, but to work with police forces up and down the country. One aim is to get a more joined-up approach towards crime fighting at this level. That is why I am pleased that CEOP will be within the NCA because CEOP has a hugely respected reputation for its work—but I think it can do more, and being located within the NCA will enable it to do more.
Ian Paisley
I appreciate the Secretary of State’s generosity and I welcome what she has said. On the issue of tackling these issues in a joined-up way, a Northern Ireland court recently convicted people for sex trafficking—the first case in that regard. However, the sentence was incredibly low, and I have raised the matter with the Attorney-General for Northern Ireland and with our Public Prosecution Service. Will the Secretary of State ensure that, when it comes to consistency in prosecutions, we also have consistency in outcomes, so that people convicted in Northern Ireland are put away for just as long as people here on the mainland?
Mrs May
The hon. Gentleman makes a point that is specific to Northern Ireland. The legal structures within Northern Ireland—the Attorney-General for Northern Ireland and Northern Ireland prosecutors—are the right place for the hon. Gentleman to pursue his concerns about sentencing in Northern Ireland. We have been in significant discussions with the Northern Ireland Justice Minister, with the Police Service of Northern Ireland and, indeed, with the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland about the working of the National Crime Agency and how it will interact with the devolved Administrations. We have also been having discussions on that matter with others, as appropriate.
The National Crime Agency will, first and foremost, be a crime-fighting organisation. I have appointed Keith Bristow, the former chief constable of Warwickshire police, as its first director general. He will be operationally independent, but, as I said in response to the hon. Member for Manchester Central (Tony Lloyd), accountable to the Home Secretary and through the Home Secretary to Parliament.
I see the NCA as having three important characteristics. I would like to set them out, as they reflect some of the exchanges we have just had. First, it must have a positive effect on the safety of local communities by joining up the law enforcement response from the local to the national to the international. That will enable us to do rather better than has been the case so far. Secondly, it must act as the controlling hand, owning the co-ordinated intelligence picture, but working with the police and others to decide on the highest priority criminal targets, agreeing on the action necessary to tackle them and having the power to ensure that action is taken. Thirdly, it must bring its own contribution to the fight against serious, organised and complex crime. That means having its own intelligence-gathering and investigative capability, sophisticated technical skills, and a presence internationally, at the border and in cyberspace. That is how I believe the NCA will help cut crime and lock up criminals.
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
Will the National Crime Agency have the authority and ability to go straight into a regional police force computer and, indeed, have the authority to go in and take over an investigation if the director general feels that it should do so?
Mrs May
The important point for the NCA is to be able to work with police forces at various levels to ensure that where it is necessary for it to be involved in investigations, that can be done. The Bill will provide for the NCA to have the ability to task police forces around the country. I expect it to work on the basis of co-operation and collaboration. That is the basis on which SOCA and CEOP have operated, and it has worked very well so far. I expect it to be possible to achieve what we want in respect of the effective joining up and collaboration of forces with the NCA and its commands. Any action will be based on the identification through intelligence of the greatest harms, which will allow us to identify the greatest priorities where action needs to be taken.
For justice to be effective, it must also be swift and efficient, and it must be seen to be done by a criminal justice system that properly reflects our society. The Crime and Courts Bill will further set out our reforms of the courts and tribunals system to make it faster, more transparent, more representative of the communities it serves and more efficient in its use of resources.
Michael Ellis (Northampton North) (Con)
On the subject of efficiency and speed, the Home Secretary said in this morning’s written statement on Abu Qatada that she now has two options for the deportation of this man. One is to go through the Special Immigration Appeals Commission court and the other is to certify his further appeal as clearly unfounded. Can she say anything about whether she feels that certifying any further appeal as clearly unfounded would be effective?
Mrs May
My hon. Friend raises an important point. Many would have wished to see a conclusion to the Abu Qatada case rather more swiftly than has been possible so far. I am confident, however, that we are closer to the deportation of Abu Qatada today than we were two days ago. We need to go through the proper processes in the UK courts. My hon. Friend rightly referred to the written ministerial statement and the two available processes.
Mrs May
If I can finish providing an explanation to my hon. Friend, the right hon. Lady might not need to ask a question.
Two processes are available. A very high bar is set for the Government to go down the route of adopting the certification process. Declaring a case against deportation as unfounded is effectively the same as saying that there is no legal argument against the deportation. As I said, a very high bar has been set in relation to that, but I am, of course, taking advice on both options. I shall make the Government’s position clear in due course.
Yvette Cooper
Like the Home Secretary, I strongly welcomed yesterday’s decision by the European Court to refuse Abu Qatada’s appeal. I think that we all want him to be deported to Jordan as rapidly as possible. Of course we recognise that she will have to make complex and difficult decisions in order to ensure that she gets the next steps right, but will she now accept that she got it wrong when she told the House of Commons 12 times that the date of the deadline for Abu Qatada’s appeal was the Monday rather than the Tuesday night?
Mrs May
Obviously I welcome the fact that the European Court came out and refused Abu Qatada’s application for referral yesterday. As I told the Home Affairs Committee, I had been strongly advised that that was expected to happen because of the case that we had made.
Of course I accept that the Court has made its decision on the matter of the deadline. The Government still do not agree with that decision—[Interruption.] As I have said, we accept the Court’s decision. I made clear at every stage to the House and to the Home Affairs Committee that it was only ever going to be that panel of judges that finally decided whether the referral could be accepted. However, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office wrote to the European Court today drawing attention to inconsistencies in the guidance that it had published on how to calculate the date, and asking it to clarify the position for future purposes and provide revised guidance.
I was talking about the Crime and Courts Bill, and the matters relating to the criminal justice system that it reflects. We will ensure that fines represent real justice by making defaulting offenders, not the taxpayer, pay the cost of collection. A single county court and a single family court will be established to increase the efficiency of the civil and family court systems, and the judicial appointments process will be reformed to introduce greater transparency, flexibility and diversity. Court broadcasting will be allowed, in limited circumstances, to help to demystify the justice system. We will improve the efficiency of our immigration system by removing full appeal rights for family visit visas and removing in-country appeal rights for excluded persons, and we will strengthen our borders by extending the powers of immigration officers to tackle serious and organised immigration-related crime.
Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)
I am glad that the Home Secretary acknowledges that the unequivocal advice about the deadline was wrong.
We were told yesterday that £3.5 million in bonuses had been paid to senior officials at the UK Border Agency, including a payment of £10,000 to one individual. Does the Home Secretary agree that it is wrong to give bonuses to officials of an organisation that has been so heavily criticised, not just by the Home Affairs Committee but by Members in all parts of the House and, indeed, by the Prime Minister? May we please see an end to this bonus culture unless the UKBA is fit for purpose?
Mrs May
The right hon. Gentleman has been vociferous in his reflections on the UK Border Agency and the UK Border Force for some time. The arrangements for bonus payments in the civil service are agreed collectively. For the 2010-11 performance year, 24% of Home Office senior civil servants were awarded non-consolidated performance payments. The highest bonus award paid to a permanent staff member of the senior civil service and its agencies was £10,000, and no UKBA civil servant was awarded a bonus of £10,000 for the 2011 performance year. Bonus payments are kept under constant review. They are awarded when individual staff have performed to strict criteria, and the restraint exercised by the current Government will continue to be exercised.
Another element of the Crime and Courts Bill is relevant to an issue raised yesterday by my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell) during the Prime Minister’s speech. We will introduce a new offence of driving while under the influence of drugs. Dangerous drug drivers should not be on the roads. Too many innocent people, such as 14-year-old Lillian Groves, have been killed or injured by people who have been driving under the influence of illegal drugs. We will close that loophole, and we will ensure that justice is done.
Mr Dave Watts (St Helens North) (Lab)
It is proposed that cameras should be allowed in courtrooms to give the general public a better understanding of what goes on there. Will the Home Secretary allow television companies to use snippets from those films? I think the effect of that might be the reverse of what she seeks.
Mrs May
This will be done extremely carefully. There has been discussion for some time about whether cameras should be allowed in courtrooms. The ability to film will be limited, in terms of who and what can be filmed. The details of how that is arranged with television companies and the courts will be discussed during the Bill’s passage. I think we all recognise that the filming could be of significant benefit, but it needs to be done in the right way if that benefit is to be achieved.
David Wright (Telford) (Lab)
The Home Secretary has been speaking for 20 minutes. She is rightly covering the detail of the Queen’s Speech, and we will want to examine those Bills in detail. However, I am stunned by the fact that not once in 20 minutes has she mentioned the fact that thousands of police officers are marching just a few hundred yards away, taking an unprecedented level of action. They are campaigning because they are very much against 20% cuts in police budgets. Does the Home Secretary agree that we should be given more detail, and perhaps a Bill on police numbers? For instance, 5,000 front-line officers have been removed since May 2010.
Mrs May
The hon. Gentleman knows very well why it has been necessary for the Government to cut police budgets: because of the deficit that we were left by the Labour Government. As he reflects on the decision to reduce those budgets, perhaps he will also reflect on the fact that reductions of the same order are supported by his party’s Front Benchers, as they have made clear.
Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of our justice system means reviewing and reforming aspects that are not operating as they should. All Members will be aware that our current libel laws are having a detrimental effect on freedom of expression and on academic and scientific debate, and that our courts have become a magnet for libel tourists. That is why all three parties included a commitment to reform in their manifestos. We are introducing a Defamation Bill rebalancing our libel laws to offer more effective protection for freedom of speech and reasonable debate, while at the same time protecting those who have been genuinely and unjustly defamed.
The Bill has benefited from extremely detailed and helpful scrutiny in draft by a Joint Committee of both Houses, as well as having been the subject of public consultation. That has been a great advantage, enabling a wide range of views to be expressed and carefully considered in a thorough and open way. It has helped us to draw up proposals that we believe address core issues of concern where reform is needed and where legislation can make a real difference.
The Government's second Session programme contains measures to fight serious and novel crime and to strengthen justice, but we must also ensure that we keep pace with all the threats to our country. The internet revolution has benefited us all—we now communicate and interact in ways that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago—but the communications revolution also presents an opportunity for terrorists to plot attacks, for serious criminals to arrange drug deals, and for paedophiles to share illegal and abhorrent images.
For many years our police, law enforcement and security and intelligence agencies have used communications data from landline telephones and mobiles—that is, the context but not the content of communications—to catch criminals and to protect the public. Understanding whom suspects have contacted, when they did so and where they were at the time can be central to building a case, proving associations between criminals or terrorists and showing that a suspect was at the scene of a crime. Over the past decade, communications data have been used in every major Security Service counter-terrorism investigation and in 95% of all serious crime cases.
Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)
As the Home Secretary will know, I practically cheered on the Conservative Government as they began to roll back the rotten anti-civil libertarian state that Labour had left them. Why is it now business as usual? Why does what the Home Secretary is saying suggest the worst excesses of new Labour, and why is she embarking on a snoopers’ charter?
Mrs May
Perhaps if the hon. Gentleman listens further to my explanation of the Bill, he will recognise that it is not a snoopers’ charter. Why am I standing here saying that we are introducing a communications data Bill? Because over the past decade, communications data have been used in every major Security Service counter-terrorism investigation and in 95% of all serious crime cases. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner has said,
“it is an essential and irreplaceable tool for protecting the public.”
If we allow our capabilities in this area to be degraded, criminals will go free who otherwise would not. The ability to use that tool is disappearing. As more and more criminal communication moves online, the ability of the police and agencies to access those communications is being degraded.
In the past, phone companies needed, for billing purposes, to log who a person had called, who called them, when, and for how long the conversation lasted. We can see that they keep such information just by looking at our itemised phone bills. Internet service providers have a different business model. Nobody charges per e-mail, and there are no itemised bills of Facebook posts. That means that modern communications companies do not store all of the communications data the police need. The police and agencies estimate that about 25% of requests for communications data can no longer be met because the data have not been stored, compared with just 10% six years ago.
In a recent case, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre received intelligence of unique internet addresses from the UK that had accessed child abuse material. Because some of the communications data were not available, nine out of 41 members of an international paedophile ring could not be traced. This Government are not prepared to allow more paedophiles to go free, more serious criminals to go on committing crimes, and more terrorist plots to go undetected, so we will bring forward legislation to ensure that communications data are available in the future, just as they have been in the past.
Ian Paisley
There will need to be more analysts in order to enable this additional data to which the Government and the authorities will have access to be used in real time. Are more appropriately trained analysts being put in place?
Mrs May
The hon. Gentleman misunderstands what will be done. There will not be accessing of information in real time. There are currently some limited occasions when real-time data are used, such as in kidnapping cases, where whether the individual is discovered could be a matter of life and death. These measures are not about accessing in real time, however, and I shall describe in a little more detail what our proposal is about and what it is not about, because some myths have been going around about the Government’s plans.
Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)
Does my right hon. Friend remember that one of the options that was considered when the previous Government were in power was the creation of a warehouse of information, because, as certain information was not needed by the service providers, the Government would have had to collect it? That would be a particularly undesirable and unattractive course of action, especially when compared with simply requiring providers to hold information for a little longer.
Mrs May
My right hon. Friend is right, and we opposed that proposal, as did our Liberal Democrat colleagues. We are not in the business of creating what my right hon. Friend described as a warehouse; this proposal is not about creating some giant new Government database, with every single piece of telephone information and e-mail. It is important to bust that myth.
What the legislation will do is provide an updated framework for the collection, retention and acquisition of communications data. It will place new obligations on internet and communication service providers to retain certain data securely for up to 12 months. After 12 months, the data will be destroyed. Just as now, the communications industry will be reimbursed by Government for providing this service. The costs incurred are a fraction of those we would face for any alternative method; indeed, there is no like-for-like alternative. As now, data would be available only to designated officers on a case-by-case basis, authorised under legislation approved by Parliament, and overseen by the independent Interception of Communications Commissioner, who is a former Court of Appeal judge.
There will be no extension of the number of people who can access that data. Indeed, we have already legislated, through the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012, to limit local authority access to communications data. Each acquisition of data must be authorised by a senior officer at a rank stipulated by Parliament. Access will be granted only if it is necessary and proportionate for a criminal or terrorist investigation, or to protect the public. Fishing expeditions would neither be necessary nor proportionate, and so would not be allowed.
The role of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal—a panel of senior judicial figures—will be extended to ensure that individuals have a proper avenue of complaint and independent investigation if they think the powers have been used unlawfully.
Michael Ellis
I congratulate my right hon. Friend on this measure. Does she agree that, far from being a snoopers’ charter, these provisions will modernise and bring into line procedures that are already in place in respect of more traditional forms of communication, and allow the Crown Prosecution Service to continue, and to improve, its evidence-gathering techniques in prosecuting people involved in organised crime and other serious criminality?
Alun Michael
The Home Secretary is, indeed, being very generous, but these are very important points.
I accept that the intention is as the right hon. Lady says, but there is a great danger that measures will be introduced that do not keep pace with technological change and that are not future-proofed. There is also a danger that the industry will not be engaged with properly, and that we therefore fail to address fully the ways in which modern technology functions. Will the right hon. Lady undertake to use the skills, abilities and experience of people in this House and in the industry, in order to ensure that the legislation that is designed is absolutely right?
Mrs May
The right hon. Gentleman makes the valid point—which, if I recall correctly, was similar to a point he made when I appeared before the Home Affairs Committee—that there is expertise in this House. We will look for ways to engage with those who have an interest in these matters. We do, of course, engage with industry, because, in respect of this Bill, it is important for us to be able to understand where the technology is going and the prospects for its future development.
The police and other agencies will have no new powers or capabilities to intercept and read e-mails or telephone calls. All such requests will always require a warrant signed by a Secretary of State. There will be no changes in these arrangements, and we envisage no increase in interception. Finally, to reiterate the point I made in response to the question asked by my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), let me make it clear that there will be no giant new Government database containing the data behind all e-mails and phone calls, which was what was proposed by the last Government.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
The Home Secretary rightly said that communication service providers are required to keep data for commercial purposes such as billing, and that these new proposed measures will extend that to information for criminal cases. However, many companies will retain data for commercial purposes for up to seven years, so will my right hon. Friend confirm that they will not be required to dispose of that data within 12 months?
Mrs May
It is not the Government’s intention to require any change in the commercial model currently operated by communication service providers. The data that will be covered by the legislation—data that might not otherwise have been kept—will be required to be kept for only 12 months, however, after which time those data will have to be destroyed.
Mr Sheerman
We are entering a new and highly complex technological world. In order to deal with it, we will need a highly motivated, well-paid police force. What am I going to say to the people who have been on today’s march, and who will come to see me later on, in order to assure them that the right hon. Lady believes they should be looked after?
Mrs May
The hon. Gentleman can tell the policemen he will meet later today that this Government are ensuring, through their changes, that the police will continue to be well remunerated and have access to a very good pension, and that police forces up and down this country will be able to continue to keep people safe and fight crime as they always have done. He can also assure them that, through the measures we are taking to introduce a new police professional body and to enhance the status and professionalism of policing, we are ensuring individual police officers will have access to the training and development they will need in order to acquire the skills that we want them to have. I see an exciting future for policing as a result of the reforms this Government are putting through, and that is the message I hope everybody will be taking out to police officers on the streets.
Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that leadership from the top is vital, and that the recent allegations of poor procurement practices and the payment of large consulting fees to ex-coppers at the Association of Chief Police Officers have to be investigated fully before we look at the best structure for police leadership going forward?
The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Nick Herbert)
indicated assent.
Mrs May
The coalition has done a great deal to defend civil liberties. We have abolished ID cards, cut back Government databases and limited pre-charge detention. We have shown that we are not going to throw away hard-won British freedoms, even when we have to take important decisions about national security, and our proposals on communications data are consistent with those values. However, I recognise that Members will want the chance properly to scrutinise our proposals, so the draft clauses will be put forward for careful pre-legislative scrutiny. Following that, proposals will be introduced at the earliest opportunity, and I hope I can count on the support of the Opposition when they are introduced.
The strengthened safeguards we will put in place for access to communications data show that at the same time as we protect national security, we can also defend civil liberties. There is no contradiction between those two aims, so our justice and security Bill will enhance national security and justice by ensuring that all relevant material can be considered in court cases, at the same time as modernising and enhancing parliamentary oversight of our security and intelligence agencies. The statutory framework for oversight of the agencies has not changed since before 9/11. During that time, the public profile and budgets of, and the operational demands on, the agencies have all increased significantly.
The Government believe the time is now right to modernise the oversight regime to ensure that it is both effective and credible, so we will modernise the Intelligence and Security Committee and extend its remit. For the first time, the Committee will be given responsibility for the wider intelligence community. It will also be given broader powers to access information, it will have additional resources to carry out its tasks, and its status will be changed to bring it closer to Parliament. We will also broaden the remit of the intelligence services commissioner. These proposals represent a considerable increase in the powers of the bodies responsible for overseeing the intelligence community.
The justice and security Bill will also introduce proposals to deal with the limitations of the current court rules which do not allow sensitive intelligence evidence to be heard in civil proceedings, even where it is of central relevance to the case. In future, any challenges brought against the Government will be able to be heard fully, with all relevant facts and information available to the court. No important information will have to be withheld for fear of jeopardising important intelligence-sharing relationships or endangering lives. Under these plans, closed material procedures will be available in the tiny number of civil cases where national security-sensitive material is centrally relevant, just as they currently are in some immigration, employment and family hearings. The final decision on whether a closed material procedure is needed will rest with the judge. As much of the case as possible will always be held in open court. This is a step forward for justice. It will mean that civil cases that are currently not heard will be heard, and that serious allegations made against the Government will be fully and independently investigated and scrutinised by the courts. It will also mean that cases the Government believe have no merit will no longer be settled for significant sums, but will be heard and judged by our courts.
The Bill also seeks to protect our vital intelligence-sharing relationships by reforming the Norwich Pharmacal jurisdiction, which allows someone fighting a case outside the UK to apply to a British court for access to intelligence information held by us, and in some cases supplied by our allies. The Norwich Pharmacal jurisdiction has been used no fewer than nine times in the last three years to seek the disclosure of secret intelligence that either belongs to the UK Government, or which our allies have shared with us. In such cases, the Government do not have the option of withdrawing from or settling these proceedings. Our inability to reassure our allies that we will uphold the confidential terms on which they share intelligence material with us has obvious and damaging consequences, so we will address the Norwich Pharmacal jurisdiction in the justice and security Bill.
The Government’s justice and home affairs proposals will ensure that serious, organised and complex crime is tackled; punishments are strengthened; justice is swifter and more efficient; freedom of speech is protected; national security is maintained; and the oversight of those who keep us safe is modernised. It is a comprehensive reform package that will enhance public safety, improve justice and cut crime. While today is only the start of the debate, these are aims with which I hope the whole House will agree.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
Yesterday, it was clear that this Queen’s Speech will do nothing to tackle jobs and growth, nothing to get Britain out of a double-dip recession, and nothing to help family finances. Now, sadly, it is clear that there is not much to help tackle crime or improve policing, border security and justice, either.
As we gather to debate the Queen’s Speech, 16,000 police officers from across the country—officers in black hats, and many more thousands beside them—are gathering and marching through London. Constables, sergeants, inspectors, superintendents, even chief constables, are protesting against the 20% criminal cuts the Home Secretary is making. There are many more whom they represent who could not make it today because they are at work or out on the beat. There are officers such as Tony MacDonald, whom I met last month, who used to be a beat officer in Retford. He loved his job. He has been forced to retire years early, and police support for the town has been cut back. There are the officers in the midlands who told me that their response units have been cut back, so when a 999 call came in about a hit-and-run involving a child, it took the nearest officer 45 minutes to get to the scene of the crime.
This morning, I spoke to officers from Yorkshire who told me that they are spending more time on bureaucracy, not less, because the back office has been so heavily cut—officers such as Chief Constable Tony Melville, who warned that his force was at a cliff edge because of the cuts, and who has tendered his resignation because of his opposition to Government reforms.
Yvette Cooper
The officers who risk life and limb to keep us safe are deeply angry at the cuts and the chaos they face. They are worried about whether, in the light of the Winsor review, they will be able to keep up with their mortgage payments. Morale is at rock bottom and they are overstretched, especially with the Olympics coming up. They are angry at a Home Secretary and a Prime Minister who do not recognise or sufficiently value the work they do.
Yvette Cooper
I will give way to the hon. Lady if she will say whether she supports the officers from her constituency who are marching in protest today.
Andrea Leadsom
I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way. Will she give the House an idea of what her party thinks the outcome of the police review should be?
Yvette Cooper
We have said many times that we think the police could sustain cuts to their budgets of some £1 billion over the course of a Parliament, but instead, the Government have gone for £2 billion—going far further and too fast. That is why 16,000 officers are being lost, including thousands from the hon. Lady’s region. These are deeply destructive decisions that, in the end, are putting communities at risk. Of course, 16,000 officers is the number we needed on the streets of London to take back control after rioters burned Tottenham and Croydon, and looters ransacked Clapham, Hackney and Ealing; and 16,000 is the number of police officers that this Home Secretary has decided to cut.
Mark Lancaster
I thank the right hon. Lady for giving way. So that we are clear, will she explain to the House from where she will find the £1 billion difference between this Government’s proposals and her party’s proposals?
Yvette Cooper
The hon. Gentleman will be aware that we have said many times that, overall, this Government are cutting too far and too fast. Their deficit reduction plan is going so far and so fast that it is hitting jobs and hitting growth, and it is not working. His Government and his Chancellor are borrowing over £150 billion more in order to pay for the bills of failure. The economy is not growing, jobs are being cut, businesses are not paying tax because they are not growing, and unemployment benefit has to be paid to all those people stuck on the dole.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend makes an important point: the economy was growing at the time of the general election, but we now have a double-dip recession instead. The Government have shoved the economy into reverse. As a result, businesses are not growing and paying their taxes, and more and more people are needing unemployment benefit. We are spending billions more on unemployment benefit and social security benefits. The Government are paying the bills of failure, rather than supporting growth and success.
Gavin Barwell (Croydon Central) (Con)
The right hon. Lady can certainly argue about the pace at which the cuts have to be made, but may I take her back to the question my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Mark Lancaster) asked about whether the Government were going too far? The Chancellor is seeking to remove the structural deficit and, as I understand it, the Labour party is committed to exactly the same objective, and so the argument is only about pace, rather than about the overall scale. If that is so, can she answer the question: where will she find the extra £1 billion?
Yvette Cooper
I have to say to the hon. Gentleman that this is also about the “how”, because we want the economy to grow and his party has given up on growth, as even The Daily Telegraph has admitted. The economy has gone into a double-dip recession and, as a result, businesses are not paying the taxes that we need and more people are needing unemployment benefit. The economy is therefore suffering and the Chancellor is having to borrow an extra £150 billion more. He is failing on every single count; the approach is hurting but it is not working.
Yvette Cooper
I will give the Policing Minister the opportunity to tell us what he would say to the 16,000 or more officers who are out on the streets today.
Nick Herbert
The right hon. Lady has conceded that the Labour party would be cutting £1 billion a year from the police budget—I doubt she told police officers that when she saw them earlier. Will she also concede that she has said that there should be a two-year pay freeze, which saves another half a billion, and that her right hon. Friend the shadow Policing Minister has said that there should be changes to overtime and shift patterns that would save another £600 million—those were his words—which means that they are committed to exactly the same savings as the Government? Does she therefore understand that police officers will not believe her when she makes the claims that she does?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Minister, you should know better. Interventions are to be brief; they are not an opportunity to make a speech. That applies to Ministers as well as to Back Benchers.
Yvette Cooper
The Policing Minister can try this as often as he likes; it does not matter how many times he says it, he knows that it is not true. We have made it very clear that we think that this figure of £1 billion would be sustainable and, yes, it would include pay measures, changes and other ways of making efficiency savings. His figures may not include that, but we have made it very clear that to deliver the number of police officers—[Interruption.]
Madam Deputy Speaker
Order. Minister, you should not shout across the Chamber. You made an intervention. You are not required to like the answer, but you are required to listen to it and not heckle.
Yvette Cooper
Government Members need to recognise that their decisions are cutting 16,000 police officers. Our approach is to say that we do not believe that 16,000 police officers should be cut. We believe that the police should have enough money to support those 16,000 officers. We should not have had to cut 5,000 police officers already from 999 units, from neighbourhood response units and from the urgent response units that we need to keep us safe and to arrive in an emergency.
Yvette Cooper
I will give way to the Home Secretary if she will tell us why she thinks that it is a good idea to have already taken more than 5,000 police out of 999 units, neighbourhood units and the traffic cops.
Mrs May
The right hon. Lady just said that the 12% cut in police budgets that she has told us in this Chamber the Opposition would support includes the pay freeze, but it does not. She has said that she would support the 12% efficiency savings outlined by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary, but those did not include either the pay freeze—£500 million—or the overtime cuts of a further £600 million announced by the shadow Policing Minister. What Opposition Members need to understand is that what she has said about cuts to police budgets would lead to cuts in police officer numbers and that they should not say anything other than that when they talk to the police.
Yvette Cooper
We heard nothing then to defend the 5,000 officers being cut from 999 response units, from neighbourhood policing units and from emergency response units across the country. The Home Secretary is dealing in fantasy figures. She needs to think about what she has just said. If the figures she has just used were correct, no police officers would be going—no front-line staff would be being cut—everything would be hunky-dory and she would be able to do it all through the pay freeze and through the back-office cuts that she has proposed. But that is not what is happening. Instead, 16,000 police officers are going, from every corner of the country. They are being taken from the very front-line services we need. Time and again the Government told us that the front line would be protected and would not be hit, but that is not happening. She is out of touch. The Prime Minister told us:
“We won’t do anything that will reduce the amount of visible policing on our streets.”
But 5,000 police officers have gone already, and many thousands more are to go.
Mr John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)
This is not just about the number; it is also about the considerable experience of many of those police officers. That is especially the case in respect of the grotesque picture in the west midlands, where, under rule A19, which the Home Secretary has blithely ignored and dismissed, very experienced police officers are being dismissed. They are going on to the pension scheme—this does not fall on the west midlands account, but it sure adds on to the public finances because of the pensions. When we talk about dodgy figures, that is exactly the sort of dodgy accounting we are discussing. This is a real loss to policing in the west midlands.
Yvette Cooper
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that we are losing some of our most experienced officers. I have spoken to officers from other places around the country who wanted to carry on working, and who had great skills and experience to contribute to the police force, but are being forced into early retirement. The evidence and research from the House of Commons Library shows that that will actually cost the taxpayer more. This approach is absolutely crazy. It is bad for communities and bad for the taxpayer.
We know now what the Prime Minister’s response to this situation is. He does not think it is a problem; cutting 999 response teams is not about emergencies or about visibility—it is not even austerity. He said that it is just “efficiency”. He calls it “efficiency” but communities across the country call it, “Out of touch, irresponsible and unfair”, because they know it is communities that are paying the price.
Michael Ellis
How can the right hon. Lady reconcile her current rhetoric on numbers with the fact that under the Labour Government only 11% of the police were available to the general public at any one time? Was that not because mismanagement and bureaucracy ran riot under Labour?
Yvette Cooper
The hon. Gentleman knows that that figure does not actually reflect what happens in police forces across the country. Barely an hour ago, I spoke to police officers who told me that they are now having to deal with more bureaucracy, not less. They have to do all their own recording of crime and all their own collecting of statements, which used to be done by civilian support staff. Those police officers told me categorically that they are now spending less time out on the beat and having to deal with more bureaucracy than they were before. The police are becoming less visible, not more visible, as a result of this Government’s decisions.
What then does the Queen’s Speech have to offer to cut crime or to improve public safety? The answer is: not much. The previous Queen’s Speech was bad enough: 17,000 suspected rapists were taken off the DNA database; 20% cuts were made in policing at the same time as £100 million could be found for elected police commissioners; counter-terrorism powers were watered down; and getting CCTV was made tougher. So what do the Government have to offer this time to make good the damage? The answer is: cameras in courts. I guess they had to put them somewhere, now that they are taking them away from the town centres and the housing estates.
The Home Secretary did promise stronger oversight of the intelligence and security agencies. We will support that, and I hope that she goes far enough. She also said that she wants more closed material procedures—the devil will be in the detail on that. There is a problem with foreign intelligence, and I agree with her that there is a problem with the Norwich Pharmacal jurisdiction. The proposals that she set out in the Green Paper were not justified and went too far. I recognise from her remarks today that she has made some changes to those positions, but we will need to see the detail, reflect and give the matter consideration. She also talked about extending communication surveillance. Again, we will await the detail. Everyone wants the police to be able to keep up with new technology in the fight against terrorism, but no one wants the police or security agencies browsing personal e-mails or Facebook pages at will. I hope that we can have cross-party discussions on this. The Home Secretary will know that the practice of previous Home Secretaries has been to provide extensive briefing for the Opposition and for Select Committees, so we will wait to see what detail she is able to provide.
Mrs May
I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way again. May I please press her in particular on the point about closed material proceedings? When the Green Paper proposals were announced in this House, the Opposition made it clear that they supported closed material proceedings and recognised the need to protect certain material. Is she now suggesting that the Opposition’s position has changed?
Yvette Cooper
As the Home Secretary will know, we have said that the scope of the Green Paper was too wide. We recognise that there is a problem for the security agencies with regard to how civil claims are made and how material needs to be considered. However, proper safeguards need to be in place, as we have said. She also knows, as I have said this to her, that I am very willing to have further cross-party discussions with her about the detail. We have not yet seen what amendments she may have made to the Green Paper proposals and we will wait to see them and scrutinise them in detail. It is important that she should do that. On communications surveillance—I do not know whether she heard my points earlier, as she was conferring with her Front-Bench colleagues—it has been normal practice in the past for Home Secretaries to provide extensive briefing for the Opposition and the Select Committees. We will wait for that briefing and consider and scrutinise the detail as it is proposed.
The Home Secretary has also proposed stronger community sentences. That sounds good, although we gather that the Bill will be published and debated in the House of Lords without any clauses on community sentences. We should also consider what is missing. There is nothing on equal marriage—not even a draft Bill—even though, as Minister for Women and Equalities, she made it clear that she was consulting not on whether but on how to introduce the changes. There is nothing on violence against women and nothing on antisocial behaviour, even though she promised more than two years ago that new action would be taken. There is nothing on gangs, even though after the riots the Government told us that that was their big priority and even though we know that gang injunctions need to be improved. There is nothing on problem families, even though the Government told us in the autumn that they were the priority, and there is nothing to protect core public policing or to stop neighbourhood patrols being contracted out to private companies such as G4S or KBR as the cuts bite.
Yvette Cooper
My right hon. Friend is certainly right that the newspapers have been briefed on that subject, but as it is not in the Queen’s Speech we do not know the Government’s position. It is obviously a complex issue; nevertheless it would be useful to know the Government’s view.
There is nothing on knife crime, crime prevention or counter-terrorism. This was the Queen’s Speech that the Government briefed as being tough on crime and tough on antisocial behaviour, but it is hardly the stuff to have criminals quaking in their boots.
To be fair to the Home Secretary, she did tell us about the National Crime Agency. We support it; it is sensible enough, it is right and there are serious national crime issues that need to be addressed, but let us be honest that this is not radical reform but mainly a rearrangement. It is a cross between the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, with the police national computer and a new command structure thrown in. It is sensible enough, it will be an improvement, but it will not compensate for the lack of 16,000 police.
As for Britain’s borders, the Home Secretary says the new National Crime Agency will include a border policing command. Will that deliver extra staff to deal with queues, extra technology to improve security checks, better management to sort out the chaos, and help for families queuing for hours with tired kids? No. Instead we will have a border command in a separate organisation from the border force, which is itself in a separate organisation from the border agency, and there will still be no clear direction from the Government about what any of the three of them is supposed to do. The Home Secretary is adding to the chaos, not solving it.
Keith Vaz
I am grateful to the shadow Home Secretary for giving way a second time. Has she had the opportunity to read the report by John Vine that was published this morning, in which he specifically points out his concern about constant reorganisation not helping the protection of our borders?
Yvette Cooper
My right hon. Friend, who is the Chair of the Select Committee on Home Affairs, makes an extremely important point. I wanted to come on to that report, because, overall, we can see the queues getting longer while Ministers do not seem to have a clue what is going on.
Last Monday, the Minister for Immigration claimed the maximum queues were an hour and a half and accused the media of making “wild suggestions”. By Tuesday he was admitting the wild suggestions were nearer the truth; by Wednesday we were told the Prime Minister was getting a grip; by Thursday and Friday the queues were getting worse and worse. There were two-hour waits at Stansted and three-hour waits at Heathrow, reports of trains delayed by queues at Paris, Customs checks stopped at Heathrow and reports that staff from Manchester were being put on a plane, told to work for a few hours at Heathrow and put on another plane back again.
Finally, this week, we got the truth from the borders and immigration inspectorate. Passport staff at terminal 3 have been cut by 15%, shortages mean that they cannot cope with the queues, and management changes brought in under this Government are making things much worse. The Minister for Immigration charmingly told us that the report was out of date because action had been taken since September to sort it out, but since September things have got worse, not better. The report says the staff are all on at the wrong times—more when the airport is quiet and fewer when all the planes are coming in.
It is just baffling to everyone that the UK Border Force and the Minister for Immigration do not seem to be able to work out what time of day it is, but at least they are doing better than the Home Secretary, who is still rather challenged by the day of the week. I know that the Home Secretary is not on Twitter and she might have missed the attempts to cheer her up through the difficult time that she is having. They have started to suggest songs, such as “ Sunday, Wednesday, happy days,” “I don’t know why I don’t like Tuesdays,” “Eight days a week” and—clearly—nothing by The Police. How about Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Not leaving on a jet plane and I don’t know when I’ll be back again”?
Getting the date wrong in a case such as Abu Qatada’s, however, could have been very serious. Everyone is very relieved that the European Court decided to reject Abu Qatada’s appeal not because of the date, but because of the merits of the case. We should all welcome that decision. We all want him deported as soon as possible and the case has been repeatedly and thoroughly considered at every level in the courts, but lessons also have to be learned at the Home Office too. Three weeks ago the Home Secretary came to the House and was adamant that she had got the date right. Twelve times she told the House the deadline was Monday. In scathing tones she said to me:
“We are talking about a simple mathematical question.”—[Official Report, 19 April 2012; Vol. 543, c. 509.]
Sadly, it was a mathematical question that neither the Home Secretary nor her Ministers seemed able to answer.
The Court was very clear in its judgment that the deadline was Tuesday and Court officials said so at the time. It is no good the Home Secretary’s saying that the Foreign Office is now complaining that the Court’s guidance was not clear enough. If it was not clear enough, why not ask questions at the time? Why did they not ring up the Court and ask the question? Why did they not listen to the media and to the others who were raising with her the point that the Court was saying very clearly that the date was Tuesday, instead? Why take the risk?
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Kenneth Clarke)
It is all irrelevant now.
Yvette Cooper
The Justice Secretary likes to chunter from a sedentary position that that is all irrelevant now, but the trouble is that it is not. The Home Office makes these serious decisions every day of the week. If it cannot even get what day of the week it is right, how can we have confidence in its decisions about the future? How can we have confidence when the Home Secretary next comes to the House and tells us categorically that she is right and that the Home Office advice is right when we still do not know why they got it so catastrophically wrong this time around? Surely she should now come to the House and explain why the Home Office got this so wrong, why it could not ask the right questions and why it did not take advice, listen to it and avoid taking the risk—a risk that could have added further considerable delays to this process.
Jane Ellison (Battersea) (Con)
The right hon. Lady is making good knockabout political points, but is it not the case that, given that Abu Qatada’s deportation process started in 2001, the real question she should be answering is why her party made so little progress in all that time whereas this Home Secretary has made so much progress in such a short time?
Yvette Cooper
We still have a problem in that we all want Abu Qatada deported but he has not yet been deported. I agree that the process has taken far too long in the British courts and in the European Courts. I even agree with the Justice Secretary that reforms need to be made to the European courts to try to speed things up although there are considerable questions about the progress he has been able to make. I do not think, however, that we should have self-inflicted problems with the Home Office creating additional delays by getting something so basic wrong. This is about the serious decisions the Home Office takes and if it is unable to learn the lessons of the past or to recognise the errors it has made there will be serious problems in the future.
Mr Kenneth Clarke
Do I gather that the right hon. Lady welcomes the fact that we got 47 countries to agree to get rid of these arrears so that there are not years and years of delay before things can get on? Does she welcome the fact that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has just won her appeal, which has not been delayed, and that we are now able to resume the ordinary deportation process? Why is she getting bogged down in procedural niceties that are now quite irrelevant and why did not her Government do anything about this for eight years, as my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison) has just asked?
Yvette Cooper
It is indeed gallant of the Justice Secretary to leap to the Home Secretary’s defence. They are huge friends—this is obviously a change of relationship between them. We are delighted to see their rapprochement.
I agree with the Justice Secretary that it is important to get rid of the arrears and try to deal with the backlogs at the European Court. That is a problem and I hope that some progress can be made. We are all very pleased that the Court rejected Abu Qatada’s appeal, but I must say that the Home Secretary made that more difficult, not easier. Abu Qatada should not have been able to appeal and she could have delayed her decision by a single day. The procedures matter because we do not want the Home Office to screw up important procedures. Whether it be in situations such as that when Raed Salah walked into this country because the Home Secretary did not get the procedures right to enable his being stopped at the border when she wanted him to be stopped, or whether it is about getting the date right, it does matter because this is not just any other omnishambles for this Government. It is not like a pasty tax or queues at the petrol pumps—this affects our national security. Whether about counter-terrorism or police on our streets, these decisions affect public safety. Whether on our borders or in our courts, these decisions affect our national security.
When we have 16,000 fewer police, a 10% increase in personal crime, 1,000 fewer foreign criminals being deported and this latest report showing 100 more illegal immigrants absconding according to the most recent figures, people are anxious. They are already worried about their jobs and their financial security and they do not want to have to worry about crime and public safety as well. This Queen’s Speech is failing the people of Britain just as the Home Office is failing on policing, border security and public confidence. It is a Queen’s Speech that offers no change, no hope and no direction from a Government who are not listening or learning. They should change course before it is too late.
Mr Charles Kennedy (Ross, Skye and Lochaber) (LD)
I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute briefly to this debate. Such is the nature of these debates that most of my remarks will be much more localised and parochial than those that fall within the ambit of the justice and home affairs issues being debated today.
First, let me say to the shadow Home Secretary that in the golden age of my period as a party leader I had to go, with great regularity, to meet a succession of Labour Home Secretaries. At that time, one never quite knew what was most likely to have changed since the previous meeting. On issues such as detention orders, people were scratching their heads and trying to find their way around the problems to which she referred. One week, Tony Blair would tell us that it was absolutely essential to have this number of days or it would be the end of civilisation as we knew it, and then poor Charles Clarke would have to go off and try to make sense of it. At the next meeting, when that issue had been shelved, we would be told that something else was absolutely critical and had to be dealt with or the earth would collapse around our ears. Given all the criticisms in the concluding part of the right hon. Lady’s speech, I have to say to her that any cursory examination of the way in which the Home Office and No. 10 handled these matters under Prime Minister Blair would reveal it to be rather chaotic. If I were her I would tread carefully and not be too critical about the progress that has been achieved recently under the coalition.
The second point I want to make about justice and home affairs involves casting my mind back even further to when I first became a Member in 1983. At that time, I was part of a new intake and the youngest Member of the House, and much to Mrs Thatcher’s disapproval, as Prime Minister, the House had voted by a significant majority to conduct an experiment into the televising of our proceedings. It is interesting to look back at the Hansard reports of those debates. As a party representative and the youngest Member of the House, I was appointed to the Select Committee that, under Sir Geoffrey Howe, oversaw the conduct of the experiment with cameras. At that time, people were predicting that all sorts of things would happen to the character of the Chamber if the cameras were allowed in. They said that everything would be a disaster, that nobody would understand what was going on and that the quality of our democracy would be demeaned—it went on and on. In due course, the cameras came in and, rather like what happened following the debates about votes for women, if anyone had stood up in the House of Commons a year or two later and suggested that the cameras should be taken out, they would have been laughed out of court.
“Court” is the operative word here because there has recently been an example in the Scottish courts, which has been well publicised south of the border, of the televising of a judicial sentencing. When the broadcasters came into the House of Commons, they were subject to very strict criteria, and they conducted themselves very responsibly, as they had to. I know that some people have genuine apprehensions about cameras coming into the courts in England, but I think the broadcasters will conduct themselves in exactly the same way. I do not think that televising proceedings will undermine the quality or integrity of the justice being dispensed. Instead, as with our proceedings, it will open them up to a wider audience in a way that is more illuminating, although perhaps not always more encouraging.
I want to touch on four of the measures announced in the Queen’s Speech and focus on how they will affect my part of the country—the highlands of Scotland. I will also make a further general point about House of Lords reform. First, we have already had the very welcome decision that the Green investment bank will be sited in Edinburgh. As a Scot representing a Scottish constituency, I am highly pleased by that, as one might expect. My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh West (Mike Crockart) played a very important role in that campaign. The highlands of Scotland could contribute to the Green investment bank’s potential and also benefit greatly from it. I am thinking particularly of areas such as the Kishorn site in my constituency, which is on the brink of being brought back into being and at the cutting edge of offshore technology. I am also thinking about the tidal stream campaign at Kylerhea, which has attracted a great deal of attention and has great potential.
Secondly, I welcome the measures on banking. The anger that we all know remains out there among our constituents across the country and across parties about the inability of so many small businesses to secure decent levels of funding from the banks is genuine and further reform is essential. In my area and others, we need only look at the continuing rate of shop closures on the high street. In an area such as the Scottish highlands, to which tourism is so important, there is a stranglehold on local bed-and-breakfast businesses when it comes to getting funding out of the local banks, although it is not the local banks that are preventing that from happening because they are at the bottom of the food chain. Those decisions are being taken way up the food chain. That is why the measures on banking announced in the Queen’s Speech are so welcome and necessary.
Thirdly, let me address an issue on which the Liberal Democrats, including many colleagues of mine, some of whom are still in the House, some of whom are in the European Parliament and some of whom have moved on to become Members of the other place or to elsewhere, have campaigned for the best part of 20 years—the regulation of the supermarkets in relation to local agricultural producers. For example, producers have to sell milk to supermarkets at below the cost of production. Coupled with the phasing out of milk quotas under the common agricultural policy, that has caused a huge contraction in the number of producers, which is unhealthy in a liberal economy. It has also put them at a severe commercial disadvantage in relation to the supermarkets. The proposed reforms are a welcome development, and the thumbprints of Liberal Democrats are right across them.
My fourth point is about reform of the electricity market to ensure fair prices. Our position in the highlands is thanks to the late, great Tom Johnston, a pioneering Labour Secretary of State after the second world war—“Power to the Glens” was the slogan at the time. The most marvellous and visually dramatic hydroelectric system was built, and it remains tremendously vital for power production to this day. It is safe, secure and sustainable energy. We make as much from it as we can commercially, and climatically we are now well placed—perhaps not for all the right reasons—to take advantage of wind generation, both on and offshore, but the highlands pay more per unit for electricity than any region of Scotland. The House can imagine the incomprehension, if not irritation and downright anger, locally, not least when we have no gas alternative. The past winter has not been the easiest, and my postbag is still full of letters from pensioners who are unable to heat their homes adequately. All around us is the magnificent contribution that we make to the UK national grid, yet in return we do not seem to get a reasonable and fair rate in our area. If the legislation can help with that, it will be welcome indeed.
My final point is on House of Lords reform. I mentioned votes for women and the televising of the House of Commons. Nobody in their right mind would want to reverse those decisions. When we have a properly democratically accountable and elected House of Lords, nobody in their right mind will want to reverse that either. They could not argue for such a case with any credibility.
The very fact that the debate is still going on more than a century after it was predominant in British politics is in itself unbelievable. As the legislation goes forward, I do not doubt that we shall have arguments and disagreements in both Houses and within and across parties, but surely to God, in this day and age, we must find a basis for a mature, bicameral, properly democratically elected and functioning Parliament, fit for the modern age. The House of Lords does a lot of its work very well—I do not criticise it on that—but globally it is an unjustifiable and incomprehensible anachronism in this day and age, as history will judge when it is ultimately reformed. People will look at their history books and ask why it took generations of parliamentarians more than a century to get together and do it. I hope that my Labour friends across the Floor will not succumb to playing party politics and making mischief to try to cause problems for the coalition and miss the bigger historic opportunity before us.
There is much to commend in the Queen’s Speech, and I am delighted to speak in its support.
Tony Lloyd (Manchester Central) (Lab)
It would have been possible to discuss many aspects of the failure of the Queen’s Speech to address the needs of the country. The fact that 1 million young people are out of work ought to have been one of the priorities addressed by the Prime Minister in the Gracious Speech, but it was not there. That is relevant to our debate on home affairs, because we know that as unemployment rises among young people, some are drawn into criminality and some feel abandoned by society. That affects how some young people—not all—relate to the rest of society. There is a direct impact when we fail to look at growth and creating an employment base for our young people.
We could have looked at the failure of the Queen’s Speech to address funding of the national health service. Every time there are cuts in the health service, there are cutbacks in mental health services and there is a direct impact on the criminal justice system. Crime rates go up when we do not deal properly with mental illness in our society. Discussion of both those issues would have been relevant today, but as the Home Secretary is with us, I shall devote the bulk of my remarks to her responsibilities in the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice.
First, however, I cannot resist responding to the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Mr Kennedy). He hopes that his friends on the Labour Benches, where many of us regard him highly, do not make mischief simply to cause confusion in the coalition. I have to tell him that the confusion is already embedded deep in the coalition parties; it is nothing to do with us. Of course, it is impossible to defend the House of Lords as is, but he and his colleagues must address the fact that before we get to the important question of how we move people into a second Chamber, reform must be defined by the function and nature of the relationship between the two Houses.
I believe we should have either no second Chamber or an elected one, but we should also make sure that there is a proper relationship between the two Houses. It is not a trivial question. If it is not addressed, the Bill we think is coming before us will not be adequate for the modern constitution our nation needs.
I turn to the Home Secretary’s direct responsibilities. She was asked on a number of occasions why she did not address the fact that more than 16,000 people are demonstrating outside this building. They include police officers, many from the conurbation of Greater Manchester —my area—who are very concerned about three issues that affect policing. Of course, there are some matters of self-interest. Police officers are concerned about their pensions. I talked to one officer who has served for 12 years. He signed on in the belief that he would get his pension after 30 years’ service. He was perfectly entitled to believe that his contract would be maintained, but now he fears that instead of serving 18 years, he will be asked to serve 28 years before he can take his pension. Those are the legitimate grievances of people we should respect for the work they do.
The police feel that the Winsor report was adopted mechanically with no proper consideration of what the reform agenda could and should have been. The Home Secretary had the opportunity to lead a debate about modern policing, but instead she simply delegated the responsibility to Tom Winsor. His report could have formed the basis for the debate, but it was not fit for implementation lock, stock and barrel, and the police are right to be concerned about that.
The police are also concerned about what is happening to policing in our communities, despite what the Home Secretary tells us consistently. When I have pointed out to her that even though Greater Manchester is not a low crime area, police cutbacks pro rata are greater than in any force in England and Wales, she dismisses it by saying that the chief constable does not agree with my view that the cuts will have an impact on policing. She might have heard the chief constable of Greater Manchester police on the radio this morning talking about the difficult challenges in policing. He talked about the increased demands on the police—in relation to mental health, for example, which we know is increasingly an issue in conurbations such as mine. We know that these issues are piling extra pressures on the police while these cuts are taking place—1,500 police officers and 1,500 civilian staff are to go from the Greater Manchester police force. Despite Government rhetoric, that simply cannot be done without a direct impact on front-line policing.
I could say dramatically, had these cuts already been fully functioning at the time of the riots last August, it would have been massively more difficult to assemble the concentration of police officers that we were able to in Greater Manchester—police officers who literally put their lives on the line, out of an enormous sense of duty to our society. They were not asking questions about pensions, they were not asking questions about reform, but were prepared to stand up to rioters because they knew that that was what society expected of them. If we cut those police officer numbers, we cut the capacity to deal with such emergencies.
Keith Vaz
It is those extraordinary events that take so much of the police resources. My hon. Friend and I were present at the memorial service for Anuj Bidvi, the student who was murdered on Boxing day. It took a huge amount of Greater Manchester police’s time to catch his killer, and that was not written into any budget. Those were circumstances of the sort that occur outside budgets.
Tony Lloyd
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, who has enormous experience and is enormously well respected throughout the world of criminal justice. He is absolutely right. That brings me to a point that I want to make. The Home Secretary and her colleagues have wanted to peddle the myth that it is easy to define what is front-line policing and what is not. Further to the case to which my right hon. Friend refers, of course an enormous number of back-room staff are involved in solving a murder. It is reckoned that, in Greater Manchester, a shooting costs somewhere in the order of £1 million to solve. That is not £1 million of blue-uniformed police officers plodding the streets, picking up bullets and rescuing people; it is £1 million spent on a resource base that is necessary to solve that type of most serious crime.
Fortunately, in Greater Manchester the number of shootings has gone down significantly in recent years because of the good partnership work that the police have been able to do; but that partnership work is challenged by the cuts. There is, I must say to the Home Secretary, too much denial among Government Members of the real impact of the policing cuts, too much denial of the fact that those cuts are reducing policing capacity, too much denial of the fact that there is an impact on the morale of the police officers who serve our communities, and who are now at the point where they feel they are being taken for granted and treated very badly in this process.
It is easy for any politician to stand up and defend the police, especially when we are in opposition, and I understand the dangers of that. The police do need reform. The police themselves accept that there is a great need for reform. But that reform must be consistent with the challenges they face, and with ensuring that the process of change is not so rapid that we prevent the process of embedding the necessary changes. I think there is now a need for a pause in the pace of change, although I do not expect one. I hope the Home Secretary will listen to those who are advising her away from that direction of travel, because we do need to look at what modern policing demands. We do need to look at partnership working of the type that modern policing has so successfully cultivated in recent years, which has allowed policing to operate within our neighbourhoods and to become part of the community, but which has also allowed it to operate at the most sophisticated level of modern technology, to solve the type of gun crime that I mentioned, or to be involved in the combating of terrorism and all the things that require a very different type of sophistication. But all that requires a more secure resource base.
When the Home Secretary was talking about the National Crime Agency, she did not answer my specific question about its resourcing and the number of people working there. The concern has been raised with me that there would be fewer people transferring across to the NCA than there are at present in the National Policing Improvement Agency and the Serious Organised Crime Agency combined, but with an expectation that more duties would be placed on the NCA. If that is right, we need to know how those extra efficiencies will be generated, or in any case we need some indication. I may well be wrong, and if the Home Secretary wants to tell the House now or later that I am wrong, I will hold up my hands and accept that. But it really is important that we get this right, because the NCA’s task will be of such fundamental importance that we must have the proper resource base. We must know that that resource base is sufficient to enable the continuation of the work that has in the past been done by SOCA and the NPIA, to enable the NCA to play a significant part in the future of policing.
I conclude as I began. There are many things we could have discussed in the Queen’s Speech that will impact directly on the levels of crime and security in our communities. It could have been mental health or issues around unemployment, especially among our young people. There is enough lacking in what the Home Secretary said today about the future of policing to cause concern, in communities such as mine and up and down this country of ours. I hope she will go back and fight a stronger case with the Chancellor—a stronger case that says, “Of all the things that you can cut back on, people’s security should be amongst the last.”
Mark Lancaster (Milton Keynes North) (Con)
It is a pleasure to be able to contribute to the debate, and I start by mentioning some comments that the Home Secretary made. I particularly welcome the Crime and Courts Bill, with its potential impact on border security, and especially serious organised crime. I have campaigned in the House for a couple of years to ban the drug khat and, as it now looks as if the sale and importation of khat has been linked to serious organised crime, I hope that the Bill will have a direct impact on that. Equally, I welcome the establishment of the National Crime Agency, which must be a step in the right direction. However, I am sure that the key there will be a strong working relationship between the NCA and other agencies.
It is perfectly reasonable for the shadow Home Secretary to stand and oppose many of the Government’s cuts; that is her choice. But I do worry that there now seems to be a pattern whereby the Opposition will go to each of the pressure groups opposing the proposals for cuts, without any explanation of how the funding deficit will be managed. We saw that today, when we seem to have established at least a £1 billion difference between the funding arrangements, with no proper explanation of whether that will equate to a rise in taxes, should the Labour Opposition become a Government again, or where perhaps cuts will come in other areas. Until that gap is bridged, it is very hard to take seriously what is being said. My constituents are not stupid, and I think over time they will realise that, as the Labour party seems to oppose everything and propose very little in return, there is something of a credibility gap.
I will not keep the House long. I apologise for focusing on the families and children Bill. I appreciate that with six days to debate the Queen’s Speech, it is for the Opposition to choose the subjects debated, and time will always be a constraint, but today seems the most opportune time to talk about the Bill. I want to focus my comments on an area that, I hope, is not contentious across the House—the changes to the adoption system. I am pleased that the Government have been to date very clear in their aims. They have said that they would like to reduce the number of adoptions that are delayed in order to achieve a “perfect”, or near, ethnic match between adoptive parents and the adoptive child; to see swifter use of a national adoption register in order to find the right adopters for a child wherever they might live; to encourage all local authorities to seek to place children with their potential adopters in anticipation of the court’s placement order; and radically to speed up the adopter assessment process, so that two months are spent in training and information gathering—a pre-qualification phase—followed by four months of full assessment; to introduce a fast-track process for those who have adopted before or who are foster carers wanting to adopt a child in their care; and finally, to develop the concept of a national gateway to adoption as a consistent source of advice and information for those thinking about adoption.
I, and I sense the whole House, will support all those aspirations. I am confident that the families and children Bill will give hope to the 4,000-plus children in care who are waiting to be adopted by a loving family. It proves that we are not just paying lip service, but acting with due urgency and care to overhaul what is at times a lengthy and damaging process.
Bob Stewart
It strikes me that people who are slightly older, sometimes those in their early 40s, who want to adopt a child are debarred from doing so. I want legislation to raise the age limit—perhaps even to an age as great as my own.
Mark Lancaster
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for intervening. As one who turns 42 on Tuesday, I do not consider myself especially old, but perhaps I am considered too old in the present system. I think the point of the proposals is to broaden the range of potential adopters.
In supporting the Government’s aims, I would, however, underline the need for post-adoption support and services for birth parents. It is clear why we have acted to rebuild the exhausting road to adoption. On average, two and a half years elapse between a child entering the care system and being matched for adoption—an unacceptably long period. The assessment process for potential parents can be incredibly intrusive: adopters in my constituency have conveyed to me the prejudiced attitude that they have faced for trivial matters, such as earning a good salary or even owning a dog. Some families have faced difficulties in adopting the sibling of their adopted child: that even resulted in one couple being unable to adopt the brother of one of their children, thus depriving that child of the chance to grow up with his sibling. Black children wait in care about six months longer than white children in the hope of finding the “perfect” ethnic match. All the while, those children’s chances of making secure attachments with a new, loving family are lessened.
Thankfully though, measures are finally being taken by this Government to curb the damage that can be done. The plans include an increased profile for concurrency and swifter use of the national adoption register, throwing the net wider for potential adopters. Research shows that the well-being of a child who has successfully settled in a foster placement is equal to that of a child in a good adoption placement. Concurrent planning makes it easier for potential parents to adopt the child they are fostering, which means that the initial strong bonds made in foster care need not be disrupted. Referral to the national adoption register will ensure that delayed placements motivated by financial savings will no longer be possible, which will encourage ties with independent adoption agencies.
I am encouraged by the zeal with which the Government are embracing the challenge. I recently visited an independent adoption agency in my Milton Keynes constituency. Despite the positive feedback on the proposed changes, St Francis’ Children’s Society discussed the additional challenges it faces in its work. It is clear to me that two specific areas should not be ignored during this period of change: increased support for post-adoption services and better awareness of the needs of birth parents.
The work for adopted children does not simply stop the day that the child steps into their new home. Many independent adoption agencies across the country, such as St Francis’, pledge lifetime support. The needs of adopted children are highly specific. They are very likely to have experienced some sort of abuse or neglect, the effects of which can cause problems later in the child’s life. They may have development delay, with some children unable to walk or talk at the age of three or four. A lack of understanding persists in families and classrooms about attachment disorders and how they affect a child’s ability to form relationships and express emotion. Ignoring those problems, which are faced by all adopted children, will greatly affect their chance of living a stable and prosperous life.
Despite the requirement that all adopters should receive an assessment of their child’s needs, they have no statutory entitlement to the recommended support. Often, if their child requires therapeutic intervention, adopters have to seek funds for private help or do battle with their local authority. If a child can receive such intervention while in care, why can we not extend the support to when the child is adopted? Post-adoption support is where the work really takes place in shaping that young person and their family. Making post-adoption support statutory would reassure potential adopters that they can change the life of a child, with the full backing of this Government.
Positive work with birth families is taking place in my constituency. Birth parents who have lost their children to adoption are the often ignored third element of the adoption triangle. If we want to cut the number of children entering the care system, birth parents also require proper support and intervention to turn their lives around. In a written response detailing the support available to families of at-risk children, the Children’s Minister assured me that the Government are committed to reducing the number of children entering the care system. The Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), is right to focus on early preventive measures, breaking cycles before they envelop new generations and giving hope to those who are most in need.
St Francis’ Children’s Society birth connections service empowers individuals to make better decisions for the lives of their children, as well as for their own lives. Individuals counselled through the service have gained a better understanding of why their children were taken into care; they have also made healthier choices regarding the children who remain with them, or on whether to continue to have children. Most important, however, children whose birth families are properly supported during the adoption process are shown to have a better and more positive experience of adoption. Such direct work, which focuses on breaking habits and providing understanding, is much more valuable and effective in encouraging individuals to consider positive life paths.
Adoption is no longer the taboo subject it once was, but having a child taken away remains so. Demonising such parents has proved to be ineffectual. Let us consider new ways to help birth parents to re-engage with society, and continue to work to create more preventive services for the most disadvantaged.
The Government have begun to make it easier for people to adopt. The proof that the changes are working will surely be an increase in the number of children adopted in the coming years, but how can we get the message out to individuals and couples across Britain that adopting is a wonderful way to build a family, and is not simply for those who cannot conceive? Crucially, we need to think about how to change the mentality that, “Adoption isn’t for me,” when of course the truth is that adoption can and should be for anyone. That is perhaps the greater task that lies ahead of us. This Government have taken bold steps where previous Governments have failed to do so. By improving post-adoption support and addressing the needs of birth parents, we will truly create better outcomes for children.
Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Milton Keynes North (Mark Lancaster), who in this home affairs debate has rightly raised the important subject of children, families and adoption. Before I was elected to this place, I was a child care solicitor in local government, so I recognise the importance of a number of the points he made about the bureaucracy surrounding adoption and the need to make sure that children are placed for adoption. I hope that those points will be considered during the Bill’s passage through this House, and that its journey will be a speedy one.
I welcome the proposed legislation on drug driving to put it on a par with drink driving. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell) and the Croydon Advertiser, who have led the campaign for a number of months. Having looked at the legislation and learnt about the campaign that the hon. Gentleman has prosecuted since becoming a Member of this House, I think the proposal seems so sensible that one wonders why we did not act before now. The only problem, I think, was that the equipment was not sufficient to allow the police to test drivers who may have taken drugs. I am sure that when the hon. Gentleman catches your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker, he will say more about the proposed legislation.
I also welcome the Government’s commitment to changing the landscape of policing and the creation of the National Crime Agency. As the shadow Home Secretary said, it is a good concept to put organisations together and focus their efforts. The Prime Minister went further in his speech yesterday when he spoke about creating an FBI for the United Kingdom. I am not sure whether the Home Secretary and the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice see the NCA in the same light, or whether the right hon. Gentleman will become the new J Edgar Hoover, but the fact is that we need to unclutter the landscape of policing and make sure that it does the job we want it to do.
I am not sure that, at the end of the reorganisation, we will have fewer organisations than when the process started, but it is sensible to place the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre within the National Crime Agency. I was concerned when that was suggested, and in the light of the recent controversies about the grooming of young girls, CEOP’s importance has come to the fore, but I was convinced by other members of the Home Affairs Committee and we agreed unanimously that it is sensible to put CEOP in the NCA, as long as it retains its identity and focus and is not submerged in some great bureaucracy.
The problem that I have with the National Crime Agency is that we have so few details. I remember the appearance of the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice before the Select Committee. He asked me in advance whether he could bring his director of finance to the Committee sitting, so the director of finance came along and sat with him. I asked the director of finance what the NCA’s budget was, and he could not give the Committee an answer. It was at that stage that we became very worried about how the details of the NCA would be arrived at, so every month—I do not know whether the Minister knows this—the Committee sends to the only employee, as far as I know, of the National Crime Agency, Keith Bristow. He must be a very lonely man in this huge organisation, which the Prime Minister likened to the FBI, and which is to have many organisations going into it. It has only one full-time employee, as I understand it. We sent him a questionnaire, so that he can fill in the gaps, and so that the jigsaw or new landscape can hopefully be completed by vesting day—the crucial day, of course, on which the NCA will get all its powers.
We will watch the NCA very carefully. We will watch the way in which the Serious Organised Crime Agency is merged with it, and will monitor the number of people leaving SOCA. We will follow the deliberations of the Public Accounts Committee, which had a very good sitting in which it discovered that hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money were being paid to former employees of SOCA who decided to take early retirement rather than stay in the police service. We will monitor those former employees to see whether they come back as consultants. If they decide to advise the Sultan of Brunei or the King of Bahrain, as some of our senior officers have done, that is a matter for them, but if they come back as consultants, having been paid off by the taxpayer, the Home Affairs Committee and the Public Accounts Committee will have something to say about it.
I share the Government’s ambition for a new landscape, but it is important to have people in that landscape. The crucial people to have, when dealing with policing, are police officers. Like the shadow Home Secretary, I went to talk to some police officers—mostly those who had come from Leicestershire, but also a few others including Paul McKeever, the chairman of the Police Federation—about their march in Westminster today. I am sorry that the commissioner did not allow them to march past the Palace of Westminster, and I am sorry that certain chief constables did not allow officers leave to join the march—I understand that police leave was cancelled in some, if not all, areas—because it is really important that we hear what the police have to say about the Winsor review.
If the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice and others have followed the proceedings of the Home Affairs Committee, they will know that we were not that impressed by Mr Winsor, partly because he decided to criticise the Select Committee, which obviously does not go down well with its members, and also because we felt that his data and the claims that he made were not really backed up with facts.
Alun Michael
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. Does he acknowledge that at one point Mr Winsor said he had given a definition of front-line policing in his earlier report, although there is not, in fact, anything like an adequate definition there of what he means by front-line policing, never mind a definition that could practically be used, if we are to use that term?
Keith Vaz
My right hon. Friend is right: Mr Winsor did not give a definition, and it would have been useful to receive one. I know that the Minister has written to the Committee with his definition of what front-line policing should be.
We have to carry police officers with us. I cannot really understand why a Government committed to law and order with the kind of vision and ambition that Ministers have should want to take on the very people who are to administer that vision. The last time I was on a demonstration with the police was under the previous Government, who made the terrible error of not paying police officers what the arbitration committee said they should. In the only robust conversation—I was going to say “row”—that I had with the previous Prime Minister on the subject, I pointed out that a Labour Government ought to honour an agreement that they had made, and should pay police officers what we said we would. I think 100,000 officers turned up to that demonstration. There are slightly fewer this time—28,000—but, as I have said, their leave has been cancelled.
The Government should not take on the very people who are to administer a crucial part of their agenda, because if anything goes wrong, and there is an emergency, the first people praised by the Home Secretary at the Dispatch Box are the police.
Nick Herbert
I am listening carefully to what the right hon. Gentleman is saying, as he knows. May I point out that the Government honoured the third year of that pay deal? That is one of the first things we did when we came to office. Will he reflect on the fact that the recommendations of the independent Winsor review, which was advised by a former senior chief constable, have been broadly supported by the Association of Chief Police Officers, which represents the 43 forces of England and Wales? The recommendations are now the subject of negotiation. It is not right to dismiss a considered, independent report that is broadly supported by the chief constables of this country.
Keith Vaz
It depends which chief constable we are talking about; I do not think that the chief constable of Gloucestershire, who recently announced that he is going, is the best person to call in the Minister’s defence. This is about ordinary police officers, not those who sit at the top of the tree. Very soon, ACPO will no longer be there, because the Minister is getting rid of it. He may pray it in aid, but we are talking about the effect on ordinary police officers. I do not want ordinary police officers to have to take second jobs to make ends meet. I do not want them to spend some of their time as private investigators, as some of them do. I do not want them to have to leave the police force to become private investigators; 60% of private investigators are former police officers. I want police officers to have a career, be well paid, and be compensated.
I endorse the points made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Alun Michael) about the way in which SOCA operates internationally. What it does internationally is different from what it does in this country. Ever since I have chaired the Select Committee, I have felt that if the public give an organisation £500 million, we expect it to be able to deliver as far as seizures and disrupting organised crime are concerned. I never thought SOCA quite made it, in terms of giving the public value for money. However, on our recent visit to Colombia, I was deeply impressed by what SOCA does abroad. I know that it is to go into the NCA, but given that the President of Colombia, in a meeting with the Select Committee, spent the entire time praising the work of SOCA and what it is doing to stop drugs coming out of Colombia, we should consider branding for one moment, and whether we actually want to change SOCA’s name abroad, or keep it, just for these purposes. Many countries rate what SOCA is doing, and to give it a new name and branding may be a step too far.
I will not deal with surveillance issues because I know that the Chairman of the Select Committee on Justice will speak on the subject, but I will talk about two more issues. One is immigration. The Government will deeply regret their decision to take away the right of appeal for family visits. I am looking round the Chamber. The hon. Members for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod), for Croydon Central and for Harrow East (Bob Blackman)—I am sure that there are others, but I pick those because I know a bit about their constituencies —will have huge immigration case loads in their surgeries, as many Labour Members have. The fact is that taking away the right of appeal will hugely increase Members’ case loads. We are happy to do more work, but the fact is that we will send those people back to make further applications. The Minister for Immigration is not in the Chamber at the moment and other Ministers do not deal with immigration work, but the facts are very clear: 50% of the appeals against decisions to refuse family visits are won in the immigration tribunal, which means that decision making is not as good as it should be. If we take away the right of appeal, we will take away people’s only option to have their relatives come here to attend family occasions, funerals and weddings.
That will be a big mistake by the Government. The previous Government were about to make the same mistake. I think that the proposal comes not from Ministers but from officials. I can recall talking with Charles Clarke about it—he happened to be watching a Norwich match at the time—when colleagues and I went to see him, and he took our point. I said, “Take away the right of appeal, and you will deny our citizens, people who live in this country, the chance to get their relatives here for their family occasions.”
The Government will regret what they are doing. The Prime Minister addressed 1,000 people at the launch of Conservative Friends of India 10 days ago. I am glad that he did so—he made a very good speech—but he did not tell them about this proposal. Every single person attending that event will have a relative who wishes to come here to visit them and so will be inconvenienced by and feel distressed about what is proposed. We are putting pressure on the entry clearance officers, who themselves are having their numbers cut because of Government decisions. I ask Ministers please to look at this again. It is extremely important that they do so.
The shadow Home Secretary spoke about Abu Qatada. The Home Secretary came out and said that a mistake was made—not in so many words, but she said that the date was wrong. She came to the House and was asked 12 times about it, and she came to the Home Affairs Committee and was asked by me six times about it. She said that she accepted unequivocal legal advice, so she should change her legal advisers. She has spent £1 million on external legal advisers on the Abu Qatada case. It is not as though there is an absence of Queen’s counsel; they are not all at the Leveson inquiry. My advice is to find someone else who knows about immigration law and pay them what they ask to be paid, but for goodness sake get some good legal advice. I do not blame Ministers for the mistake, and I do not expect the Home Secretary to pick up a phone and find out when a deadline is, but I do expect her to get that legal advice, and if someone says they think it is wrong, even if it happens to be a BBC journalist, she should call her officials together and ask them to look at it again.
My final point is not about home affairs but about an issue I have raised in nearly every Queen’s Speech debate in the 25 years I have been a Member of the House. It is something that happened 21 years ago—the closure of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. In every Gracious Speech debate I have talked about the need to end the liquidation of BCCI. On 5 July 1991 the sixth-biggest bank in the world was closed down. Many of my constituents lost money in that bank, and I can remember going to see the then Prime Minister, the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England with people such as the former leader of the Liberal Democrats and Mr Alex Salmond and many others to see what money there was for the people who had lost their money in BCCI. We were told that there would be no money left for them because the bank was empty and bankrupt. The Sheikh of Abu Dhabi was told, “Please don’t give us the money, because the bank is broke.”
After 21 years, those people have now received 90% of their money back, thanks to the work of the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills. He was the first and only Secretary of State in 21 years to write directly to the liquidators to ask when the liquidation would be completed. I am pleased to say that shortly afterwards the liquidators fixed the final meeting, and on 17 May, after 21 years and £1 billion of liquidators’ fees for a £6 billion bank, BCCI will finally close and the creditors will have got 90% of their money back. This is the last time I shall mention BCCI in this House, certainly in a home affairs debate. I wish all those who have been involved in the campaign well and hope that we will learn the lessons from it: when a bank is in trouble and people are prepared to support it, as we have done subsequently with a number of other banks, we should stop and pause before closing it down and causing misery for so many thousands of people.
Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)
It is a pleasure to follow my colleague, the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz). He made an interesting point about family visas, and he and I sat behind entry clearance officers in Mumbai and New Delhi, trying to work out why they generated so many appeals and discovering that, for example, people’s tendency to tell untruths that were irrelevant to their case caused some of the problems. Subsequent to that, when the Select Committee on Justice looked at appeals, we came to the view that Departments should be penalised if their decision-making processes were so bad that they generated a large number of appeals. It was not that we had in mind abolishing appeals; it was much more that Departments should have a financial incentive to get their decisions right in the first place.
I shall refer to other justice issues, of which there are quite a lot in the Gracious Speech, but first I welcome its general approach and the priority that it gives to the economy. My constituents are primarily interested not in how many Bills the House passes, but in whether we get the country out of this crisis, treat people fairly and build for the future. There are things that they would like to see, such as investment in the A1 and an announcement—long delayed—about school capital programmes so that we can have a new high school in Alnwick, but my farmer constituents will be pleased to see in the Queen’s Speech a long-standing Liberal Democrat commitment: the Bill to create an independent regulator for the supermarket supply chain, which has seen so many market distortions at the expense of small farmers.
On the issues that are of special interest to the Justice Committee, I start with the Crime and Courts Bill. It includes a lot of detail, which we still need to find out about, but we share a number of its general objectives: the reform of county courts offers opportunities for greater efficiency; the measure on driving under the influence of drugs will be welcomed throughout the House; and the facilities for broadcasting from courts, if carefully managed, provide real opportunities to achieve a better understanding of the courts.
There is tremendous scope for greater efficiency in fine enforcement, as it is a scandal that so many fines remain unpaid; there is scope within the transfer of documents, because the courts are able only gradually to secure good technology; and there are areas in which attempts to achieve greater efficiency have initially misfired, such as in the provision of interpreters in court proceedings, as the new contract, at least initially, has thrown up serious deficiencies that need to be dealt with and which the Committee has raised with the head of Her Majesty’s Courts Service.
I was intrigued to see the reference to judicial appointments and diversity, and it is not quite clear how the Government intend to achieve what they have in mind. The irony, to which the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) has sometimes pointed, is that the old system had started to generate greater diversity, albeit in a non-transparent way, because the Lord Chancellor was able to use rather informal powers to achieve greater diversity.
The new system does not seem to have taken us much further forward, so it will be interesting to hear what the Government have to say on that, but some of the problems lie in the professions from which judges are drawn and in the fact that Crown Prosecution Service-employed advocates have a limited ability to gain the judicial experience that would make them candidates for judicial offices. Those problems need to be addressed.
We will be particularly interested in the family courts provisions, some of which are in the children and families Bill, and in Westminster Hall on 24 May we will have a debate about family courts, when some of the issues that I am going to mention will be raised. One issue that is almost certain to come up is the problem of expert witnesses, including the cost, the duplication and the uncertainty surrounding qualifications, which we need to deal with.
One issue that the Committee has looked at closely and reported on, however, is one on which the Government appear to be moving in a direction that worries us, and that is the law relating to the interests of the child in family law proceedings. I reiterate what the Committee concluded in its report on the operation of the family courts. We stated:
“In our view it is obvious to the court that a child deserves a loving, caring relationship with both his or her mother and father. A statement which might be taken to qualify the principle that the best interests of the child must prevail could give the impression of a change in the law and could cause confusion. We heard evidence from Australia that the effect of the ‘shared parenting’ approach had not only confused parties about how the ‘best interests of the child’ test should operate, but can encourage a more litigious approach by parents in private law cases,”
which runs directly contrary to the Government’s desire to promote mediation and out-of-court settlements. I hope that the Government will move very carefully on that issue. The consultation process is not yet over.
The issue of mediation brings me to the fact that changes to legal aid will lead to more litigants in person in the family courts. Most members of the Committee start from the proposition that the courts are not a good place in which to resolve many of the family difficulties placed in front of them. There are few things more absurd than trying to use the formal process of a court to rule on whether a child can go to the scouts or guides on a Friday night or is required to be wherever their other parent lives. That is an unsatisfactory way to deal with such matters, so we are strongly behind the Government’s desire to see such issues dealt with much more through mediation. But when we find litigants in person in the family courts, the family courts will have to adapt to be able to deal fairly with those litigants in person.
Another feature of the Crime and Courts Bill is community sentencing. It is obvious that prison is essential for many very dangerous people; the recent case in Rochdale involving the abuse of young girls is ample evidence of when people have to be put in prison for the protection of society. But prison becomes a gross misuse of resources if we use it for those who would be more likely to give up crime if we dealt with them in other ways.
We have a responsibility to use taxpayers’ money to prevent taxpayers from suffering from crime and to keep them safe. We should therefore have a rational approach to a justice policy that achieves that objective. For many criminals, prison is relatively easy. If a person’s life outside prison is fairly disordered and disorganised, prison is not as great a hardship as it would be for some Members, for whom it would be a dramatic change in the life that they are able to enjoy.
While we were looking at the great success that Norway has in rehabilitation through its prison system, a Norwegian prison governor told us that one of the main problems with people coming to prison is that they do not take responsibility for their actions. What does the prison system do? It teaches them no responsibility at all; it takes away all responsibility and says, “We’ll tell you what time to get up, what you have to do and provide you with meals.” That is the end of responsibility. We need to change how we look at people who need to be made to take responsibility for their actions. That is why we welcome measures such as restorative justice and why the development of community sentences is so important. However, as the Government recognise, we have to win public confidence for community sentences.
We have to get to a place where the public do not regard the length of a prison sentence as the only measure of how seriously society takes a crime. Naturally, people want to express very strongly that they are not going to put up with certain crimes and that society will not stand for them, but if our only way of doing that is to add a few more years on to a prison sentence, we will often spend money in ways that do not prevent people from suffering from those crimes in the future. It is important that we develop the effectiveness of community sentences and the public understanding of them.
I hope that the Government’s approach to crime will also take account of the principles of justice reinvestment, which we set out in a report at the end of the last Parliament. They demonstrate that if we invest money soon enough, we can stop young people getting involved in crime in the first place. For that reason, I particularly welcome the Government’s commitment to early years education, which is one of many ways in which we need to be getting to children and young people at the stage when the likelihood that they might become involved in crime is increasing dramatically. Society seems so unaware of that.
I need to mention other justice issues. One is defamation. I am not going to get into the argument about that, because it has been so well explored elsewhere, including by the Joint Committee on the draft Bill. However, I do want to look at issues to do with the justice and security Bill, starting with the closed proceedings in civil cases. It is important to remember these proposals are not about criminal cases in which somebody might be imprisoned on the basis of evidence in closed proceedings, but about civil cases. The question is whether we can devise an acceptable procedure to stop Governments potentially having to pay damages to known terrorists and advocates of terrorism because the court cannot see all the information that is relevant to the case. I am not sure that we can do that, because it is very difficult and involves a very high threshold, but the stakes are high.
We should not confuse this with some wholly unacceptable procedure relating to criminal cases. It is about civil cases in which the Government are, in effect, the defendant in circumstances in which there is information that they cannot bring before the court. Public interest immunity does not solve that problem. The House will have to look at this very carefully. It must be clear from the start—I get the impression from the Home Secretary’s comments that it is now clear—that the judge, not the Executive, would decide whether such a procedure could be used. That must be a judicial and not an Executive decision. An Executive can trigger the process, but it must be a judicial decision as to whether the process can be used at all, even if this House has decided to go ahead with it.
The same proposed piece of legislation sets out to reform the Intelligence and Security Committee. I was a member of that Committee for 11 years, from its beginnings, so I have quite strong views about what needs to happen. There are certain key things about the Intelligence and Security Committee. It needs to retain confidence in the trustworthiness of its members; otherwise it cannot work in this field at all. It needs to retain the ability to report to the Prime Minister on things about which it cannot report to the House; otherwise it cannot draw attention to what might be serious problems, because to do so would be to give information to those who wish this country no good.
The most difficult issue for the Committee is the removal of the ability of the agencies to invoke a statutory bar on its examining operational matters. It is impossible to oversee intelligence without looking at operations; one would not understand what was going on. In practice, the agencies engage regularly and fairly extensively with the Committee on operational matters, but the statutory bar can be used as a refuge if an agency does not want to create a precedent by allowing the Committee to get involved in a particular area. Issues that are now coming to light demonstrate that if the Committee had had greater access earlier, it could have achieved a great deal more, to the benefit of proper democratic oversight and the long-term good of the agencies themselves. I have a lot of respect for the way in which the agencies developed their understanding of what the Committee was doing and were increasingly willing to engage with it fully, but at some points the statutory limitation on operational matters was used as a barrier. We must give the Committee the ability to send in an investigator such as an auditor who can look at any of the papers and files and then go back to it and say, “You don’t need to see much of this, but you ought to look at this particular file because it reveals a problem.”
We also have the draft communications Bill, which the House will have to look at carefully. It will come with draft clauses, which is a helpful approach. Its provisions are about who called whom, when, and from where, not about the content of the communications. Of course, the law enforcement agencies need some of this information to deal with matters such as those that the Home Secretary mentioned earlier, including paedophile cases and various kinds of organised crime, and they need to have access to whatever forms of communication people, particularly criminals, turn to if they think that there is a category to which such procedures cannot be applied. We do not want the Government to be able to gather all communications into some vast Government database, because we can be pretty confident that the scale of that organisation will mean that it gets mismanaged and will be open to abuse, just as in the past there has been abuse of the police national computer, for example. I am very glad that the Government are no longer taking that approach and are instead moving towards merely requiring communications providers to hold communications data for longer.
In that case and in others that I have mentioned, we should consider whether more use could be made of prior judicial authorisation. The system that we use not only for communications data, but for the interception of communications has an element of subsequent judicial review, but we do not use judicial authorisation. Of course, we do use that for a search warrant. If the police want to search somebody’s house, they go to a magistrate and ask for a warrant. That seems to be a perfectly good precedent that might be applied more strongly in the area of communications. I think that people would have more confidence if, rather than it being the Executive or the law enforcement body that gave permission, there was prior approval from the judiciary at the appropriate level, whether it be a magistrate or a High Court judge. That would depend on what was being considered—communications data or interception.
I want to make one last point about a Bill that was not in the Queen’s Speech. I did not expect it to be, although the Justice Committee encouraged the Government to include it. I hope that the Government will encourage and assist a private Member in taking up the matter. I am talking about a Bill to implement the Justice Committee’s recommendations on the presumption of death. Those recommendations would extend the scope of the private Member’s Bill introduced by our colleague, Tim Boswell, in the previous Parliament to help those who have had a missing family member for many years. Such people are unable to get any closure and cannot temporarily resolve the financial issues that arise when there is a missing person. Bank accounts may be drained by subscriptions and payments that the family cannot cancel because they have no authority to do so.
Legal provisions to deal with that problem could be put into a private Member’s Bill. There is widespread agreement around the House that that is desirable and it has been vigorously campaigned for by organisations that represent people in this appallingly difficult position. I therefore hope that the Government will assist a private Member to take the matter forward because it would be a welcome addition to the legislative programme. In my experience, few things are improved by passing a law, but the problems of people in that situation could well be improved by such a piece of legislation.
Mr Tom Clarke (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (Lab)
I am pleased that the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Mr Kennedy) is in his place, because I want to follow on from where he ended his speech. He referred to the discussions on the House of Lords. He knows that I have a high regard for him, but I was greatly surprised by his peroration, in which he appeared to chastise the Labour party, ignoring all the evidence, which I will come to in a minute or two, from the Joint Committee on the Draft House of Lords Reform Bill, the alternative report and the public debates that we have had. Although it pains me to say it, if he and his Lib Dem colleagues are worried, they ought to keep an eye on their leader, because the Joint Committee got the impression from his evidence to us that this was the most vital thing that was going on throughout the earth, and yet in the last few days his tone has changed considerably.
I pay tribute to my colleagues on the Joint Committee, including the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell) who is in his place. Many people worked extremely hard on that Committee and in preparing the alternative report. When we are told that difficulties are likely to be presented, I ask frankly—my views are not necessarily shared by others on the Joint Committee—why should they be? We had about 15 divisions in the course of our sittings. The talk about manifestos is not that relevant. The Conservatives said in their manifesto that they wanted a consensus. They certainly did not get it on the Joint Committee. When we took vote after vote, and when we listened to people giving evidence, what did we find? We found that the Government’s enthusiasm for the new Chamber—whatever it might be called—being elected is distinct from the views of other Conservatives in another place and here. The Government seem to fear the fact that a lot of their Members simply are not in favour of election, and that they might not carry even the very small Bill that they are putting before this House and another place.
We were required to consider a draft Bill. When we look at that Bill and compare it with what was said in the Queen’s Speech, which talks about “the composition” of the House of Lords, I find a considerable dilution of the task the Joint Committee was asked to undertake. Reference is made to composition, but there is nothing about elections, nothing about a referendum, nothing about funding or spending, to which I shall return in a minute or two, nothing about the extremely important role of this House—but merely composition. It was almost as if the Joint Committee had never met at all.
Let me put on the record where I am coming from on this issue. Lord Hunt, speaking for the Opposition in the other place said:
“The Official Opposition support an elected House. However, that must not be at the expense of primacy of the Commons, nor must it threaten gridlock or detract from our role as an effective revising Chamber. Further, these changes should take place only with the…consent of the British people.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 1 May 2012; Vol. 736, c. 2100.]
I entirely agree with that. If I mention more Members of the other place than I do Members here, let it be said that I have been incredibly surprised by the fact that, although the other place is rightly considered not to be democratic in its present form, it spent two days debating this issue. The issue that ended up being in the Queen’s Speech, however, is but a little mouse in its reference to “composition”, so I think it fair to take the views of the other place into account as well as those of right hon. and hon. Members here.
To be fair to the Liberal Democrats, they stuck to their manifesto commitment to a 100% elected Second Chamber with no referendum—I did not agree with it, but that is where they stood—but we must accept that there are many views on this crucial issue, particularly when we have an unwritten constitution.
The Joint Committee tried with great courage to obtain from the Government their estimate of what the costs would be, but we achieved no results at all. I tried to put it to the Prime Minister yesterday in the context of his support for the Queen’s Speech. Incidentally, I noted that his script made no reference whatever to the House of Lords; it came up only when he responded to interventions. This is the question I put to the Prime Minister yesterday:
“Can he tell us today what costing has taken place on the proposal in the Queen’s Speech and will he share that with the House?”
The Prime Minister replied:
“Certainly. The cost of a stand-alone referendum would be significant and it is worth taking that into account.”—[Official Report, 9 May 2012; Vol. 545, c. 24.]
If ever someone were to answer a question that was not put, that was it. Where are we as members of the Joint Committee and as those who supported the alternative report? The report was supported by Members of all parties—except, to be fair to them, as I want to be, the Lib Dems. Whatever our views—I have made mine clear—we cannot assess an issue as big as this one without looking at the likely costs. I highly commend the alternative report to right hon. and hon. Members. Those who prepared it were advised by Lord Lipsey that the changes in the draft Bill would amount to £177 million in the first year and £433 million by 2020.
I do not remember a single person raising the issue of the House of Lords when I was canvassing before the recent local elections and, indeed, before the general election two years ago. People are far more worried about issues such as unemployment, the economy, energy charges and the attack on the health service. It is right for the House to regard those matters as having greater priority as we take our time to decide what will happen if there is indeed to be another Chamber.
I referred earlier to the relationship between the two Houses as time goes on, and to the important question of primacy. I believe that, in a modern Britain, democratic representative government ought to mean that the House of Commons, elected as it is, retains its primacy. The Joint Committee decided that there was an unbridgeable gap, and I agreed with it. The more we listened to the evidence that we were given, the more I formed the opinion that this was as much a review of the House of Commons as a review of the House of Lords. I do not think that the issue should be dealt with in such a mean-minded way, through a mere reference to composition in the Queen’s Speech.
Of course our Committee sought advice from the Government. We sought legal advice. In response to two of our requests, the Attorney-General refused to give any advice at all. I ask Members to answer a question honestly. Is this the way to go about introducing a major change?
The Government, incidentally, had set up a Committee on the draft Bill, chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister, promising that we would have a report by December 2010. What did we find? At the very mention of referendums and power, the Committee stopped meeting, so we did not even have the benefit of that. We are told that we should have confidence in the coalition and that it will deliver, but I have seen precious little evidence that that is the case.
Because we did not have any advice from the Attorney-General, we relied on advice from people such as Lord Pannick and Lord Goldsmith, which clearly indicated that there was a strong contradiction between those who support election to the House of Lords, as I do, and the existing Parliament Act 1911. I believe that it was the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber who reminded us that that Act is 101 years old. Even then, however, Erskine May was warning us that this Parliament—this House of Commons—would not retain its primacy if there were an element of election elsewhere. We really cannot proceed with these issues without clarifying that vital matter. It is at the core of all the differences that may exist. Others may be settled, but that one cannot be.
Clause 2 of the draft Bill was criticised again and again, and was defended by only two people. The House will not be surprised to learn that they were the Deputy Prime Minister and the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, the hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), who is responsible for constitutional affairs. No one else supported clause 2, which was as big a shambles as the other elements of the Bill that the Government had presented to us for examination before coming up with the reference to composition in the Queen’s Speech.
The Clegg Committee clearly failed, but that did not mean that we should neglect our duties, and we did not do so. We could not agree on a number of issues, but that is no surprise. I hope that if a referendum is held and the British people have their say, we shall have a genuine, open debate that involves the people. I think that it ought to involve a body like the convention that we set up a number of years ago in preparation for the establishment of the Scottish Parliament. It was not just a small committee of politicians from both Houses, end of story; rather, it was a convention that consulted the entire population. There were elected people—local citizens, as well as representatives from community councils, business, the trade union movement and many other bodies and sectors. As a result, it came up with far better and more clearly worked out proposals for the Scottish Parliament than we have produced for what might be our new second Chamber.
The issue of a mechanism for deadlock—what happens if neither House agrees once there is an element of election in the other House—must be addressed. Also, the report, which I signed, recommends that there should be 12 bishops from the Anglican Church, and I respect the standing of that Church and its link with Parliament. However, in our modern society we must also consider people of other faiths, and if we have the convention that the alternative report recommended—and which I support—that will emerge.
I might have been a bit harder on the Liberal Democrats than I normally am, but I have to say to them—[Interruption.] Wait for what’s coming next. I have to say to them that if they truly believe that this Prime Minister is going to deliver the policies they had in their election manifesto, they have another thought coming. To put it more mildly, the Deputy Prime Minister said that his party was punching above its weight, but I have to say to the Liberal Democrats, “Be careful. You were invited to a rose garden; along the way lies the garden path.”
Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)
Yesterday was a great day for our Parliament. I am a big fan of such enormously traditional and historic ceremonies. They are a little like getting married, in that they give us the opportunity to make all sorts of new resolutions to do things better than ever before. Yesterday I was attending my second state opening, and this time I actually half-understood what was going on. It renewed my enthusiasm for the job I do. I hope it also enthused the coalition to keep going—to make the economy better and to improve our country for the sake of all of us—and I am sure that it did so. However, on some issues I want to urge the Government to go even further than was proposed in the Gracious Speech.
On the issue of sorting out our banking system, I have spoken to a number of members of the Monetary Policy Committee and to people at the top of small banks in Britain who share my grave concern about the lack of competition in banking. There is a groundswell of support among smaller banks for full account portability, so people can transfer their bank account number with them, rather than having to change all their accounts and all their online banking transactions—including, perhaps, their iTunes and Tesco online shopping accounts —every time they want to move banks. That is a huge disincentive both to people to switch and to businesses, which have enough on their plates at present. Especially now, when we are implementing the Vickers proposals, I urge the Government to look again at introducing full account portability. Instead of having a seven-day redirection service, it would be very easy to introduce a shared payments infrastructure. That would, at last, give us real competitiveness in our banking sector.
I also urge the Government to go further with regard to the European Union. I am sure everyone in this country agrees with them that we need to defend Britain against the British taxpayer having to bail out eurozone members, but I think the Government should be going further. We should now be proposing a new and better relationship for Britain within the EU. It is simply not possible for the EU to remain as it has been ever since it was started, with the same relationships for all 27 member states, while it continues to expand, with different member states having different needs, different economic situations and different interests. It is going to have to change, and I urge the Government to ensure that we are completely ready to determine what would work better for Britain.
The third issue on which I urge the Government to go further is regulation and red tape for businesses. The absolute, top priority, as Her Majesty said, is to get our economy going again, and nowhere more so than in the very small business sector. We must give young people and others who cannot find a job a direct and clear incentive to create one for themselves by starting a business. I urge the Government to look carefully at scrapping the entire burden of regulation on micro-businesses with, say, three employees or fewer. I envisage there being absolutely no regulation whatsoever—no minimum wage, no maternity or paternity rights, no unfair dismissal rights, no pension rights—for the smallest companies that are trying to get off the ground, in order to give them a chance. That would all change, however, as soon as the number of employees increased.
We could also get Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to provide a simple one-page online form for micro-businesses such as market stall traders, domestic cleaners, gardeners and carpenters. Such businesses, although they may employ people, are often outside the real economy, and when the owners retire or move to another area, they lose that entire asset and have nothing to on-sell. If we could wipe out such regulation for the very smallest businesses, set a flat-rate personal allowance and 20% flat-rate tax, including capital gains—with a turnover restriction, of course—that would get our economy going again and provide a direct incentive for those who are looking for work, particularly young people, to do something for themselves.
I urge the Government to go further in those three areas, but I am conscious that today’s debate is about justice and home affairs, and I want to focus on a massive revolution that would make the job of both Government and Opposition Front Benchers far less onerous. We need to do something for the very youngest in our society. I know that we plan during this Parliament to make it far easier for people to adopt, but we need to turn the situation on its head and to look at life from the perspective—with your indulgence, Mr Deputy Speaker—of the baby. This issue is entirely relevant to the justice and home affairs agenda. What we saw during last August’s riots was surely the result of a generation of children not being taught the difference between right and wrong, and not being brought up to empathise with other people and to respect their property. In many cases, they simply have not had the benefit of the loving upbringing that would enable them to develop the mental and emotional capacity to obey the law, fulfil their role in society and be decent human beings.
Of course, it all starts with the moment of conception. When a baby is born, it is effectively two years premature. Humans are unique in the animal kingdom. A new-born foal or calf can instantly feed and walk and do many things that babies simply cannot do, whereas humans have to be two years old before they can really do much at all for themselves. Interestingly, physical underdevelopment is only a tiny part of the story: the key is the mental underdevelopment. When a newborn baby is hot, cold, tired, bored or hungry, he does not know that that is the problem. He just knows that something is wrong, so he will cry, and he will look to the adult carer who loves him to sort him out and figure out what is wrong. So we, as loving parents or grandparents, or even as nannies or foster parents, will change him, feed him, burp him, jog him up and down or walk him down the garden. We will do anything to try to soothe his feelings, get him back to sleep and put him back into a state of rest and calm—that is what babies try to draw their parents into doing for them. Most of us are able to do that, and it is extremely successful for the baby.
Interestingly, when a baby is born he only really has the amygdala—the brain stem—that gives him the flight or fight self-preservation instinct. It is only between six and 18 months that a baby puts on a growth spurt of the frontal cortex, which is the empathy part of the brain; it is the part of the brain that turns someone into a human being. It makes the difference between an animal with a flight-or-fight instinct and a human being with the capacity to empathise, to feel someone else’s pain, to make relationships, and to form friendships and long-term commitments.
That growth spurt occurs as a result of loving attention—the peek-a-boo games, people saying, “Aren’t you gorgeous, I love you” and so on. I am not talking about you, Mr Deputy Speaker; I am merely giving you an example. I am quite sure that you were very securely bonded to your parents. Those peek-a-boo games and the love that a parent has for an infant stimulate that brain development and build the capacity in that infant to deal with the things that life will later throw at them.
This is not a niche issue that affects only the most troubled in our society, as research shows that 40% of British children are not securely attached by the age of five; they have not formed a secure and loving bond with their parents. When a baby does not form that loving and secure attachment, the frontal cortex does not develop properly. The brain scan of a three-year-old child who did form that bond shows a lovely “cauliflower-looking” brain, whereas the scan of a three-year-old who was neglected or abused as a baby shows something that looks more like a shrivelled prune. The earliest relationship between a loving parent and their baby, or an uncaring parent and their baby, determines the capacity of that human being throughout the rest of their life. As I say, 40% of children in Britain are not securely attached by the age of five.
There are no longitudinal studies tracking precisely the impact for those people, but, as with anything, the impact is on a spectrum. If someone’s capacity to hold down a job, to make friends at school or to not be bullied or become a victim is all set out by the age of two, the consequences can be very difficult for people who are not securely bonded. Such consequences can range from simply struggling, having bouts of depression throughout life, not being able to keep a relationship going or not having very good friends to those at the very desperate end, where people have literally been neglected or abused by the person upon whom they came to rely.
Let us consider what happened to baby Peter, who was so badly abused. What mother could allow some idiot to stub a cigarette out on her baby unless she really did not love him, did not care about him and was putting her relationship needs above those of her own relationship with her baby? Where babies are severely neglected and abused, it harms their whole lifelong capacity. Those who are neglected and abused now will, as adults, be the neglecters and the abusers. It is entirely natural to us, as human beings, to be the kind of parent to our children that our parents were to us. So sociopaths are not born; they are made by the earliest experiences in their life. Most of those occur when a baby is less than two years old.
So when we talk about adoption and fostering, and when we all express disgust at the fact that 6,000 babies under a year old are in the care system, it is not just that it is terribly tough on those parents who are the would-be adopters or terribly tough on those babies not having loving parents; the situation is fundamental to the entire life prospects for those babies. If they do not form a loving bond, their capacity throughout their life will be damaged irreversibly.
There is another impact on a baby who does not receive loving attention. When babies are left to scream and scream for hours and days on end—I am not talking about parents who, in desperation when they have had enough and tried everything, leave the baby to cry for an hour or two, but about parents who go out and leave the baby to fend for his or herself, which does happen—they continue to cry and eventually take refuge in sleep. When the baby is screaming his or her level of cortisol—the stress hormone in their bloodstream—rises and if it stays high, that has consequences for the baby’s immune system. When an infant is very neglected, bad health and poor health consequences go with that. People with mental health problems and other problems stemming from early neglect and child abuse also have very poor health outcomes, which are fundamental to their quality of their life later on.
If someone constantly has high stress levels, they develop a tolerance to them. Although some of us might find an exciting episode of “Z-Cars” incredibly thrilling, somebody with a high tolerance to their own stress levels would need to indulge in much higher risks to get the same level of stress. So, for example, going out fighting, getting into drugs, going out and stabbing someone or committing other violent crimes could be the only way for that person to get the same level of stress and excitement. People who have been badly neglected at an early age often have a predisposition to high-risk behaviour.
Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
Is my hon. Friend aware of the campaign run by Action for Children on reforming the law on child neglect? As I understand it, at the moment the law on child neglect is simply about whether a child has a roof over their head and does not cover emotional support, which is exactly what she is talking about.
Andrea Leadsom
I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I am aware of that campaign and many others, too. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has an excellent programme called “All babies count”, which is concerned about the mental health of babies. After all, that is a slightly obscure topic until one gets into it. Adult mental health has always been something of a Cinderella service for our NHS and when infant mental health is mentioned, it usually merely prompts the question, “What’s all that about?”
Our society has taken great care to develop an NHS that every man, woman and child in this country values and wishes to preserve, yet it is all about health and focuses on mental health far too little and too late. At the moment, when someone conceives, they are allocated a midwifery team and introduced to the health visiting team. If they get so far with problems, they might be introduced to the social work team. Unfortunately, there is great fear among parents of being introduced to the social work team because they fear that their baby might be taken away. They are therefore concerned about seeking help. Parents have a midwife and health visitor, who often do a fabulous job for the physical health of mum and baby while the mum is pregnant and when the baby is very young. When mum is not bonding well with her baby—she might be terribly post-natally depressed, as one in 10 women suffer from post-natal depression, but she might not know that she is suffering from it—the midwife and/or the health visitor might spot it but, at the moment, there is not much they can do. The bar is set so high for referrals to child and adolescent mental health services that someone almost needs to be at a crisis level before they can be referred for psychotherapeutic support for that earliest relationship. That is quite simply wrong.
When we talk about children being school-ready, we mean in the sense of their responding to their own name, understanding danger and understanding the word no, but those should not even be the questions that are asked. When parents are firmly bonded to their baby, they will take the trouble to teach their child about danger and to give their child breakfast. We are always firefighting. We should accept that everything we do for a baby from the moment of conception until they reach the age of two is developmental and that pretty much everything we do for them after they are two is about trying to put right damage that has already been done.
Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)
I am very interested in what the hon. Lady is saying. Is she familiar with the family nurse partnership programme that was introduced in this country a few years ago? The programme was about trying to avoid some of the dangers and consequences that she is talking about. The idea was not to have the social services involved in trying to clear up and deal with problems after they had developed, but to give support to young, first-time mothers—helping them with parenting skills, the bonding that is needed, feeding, playing and all the nurturing that goes into preventing some of the problems the hon. Lady has mentioned from developing. Does she agree that such programmes have an important role to play?
Andrea Leadsom
Yes. I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his comments and I am very aware of the programme he mentions. There are many other programmes, and they all have a valid role to play. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Indeed, I want to talk about a charity that I have been involved with for 12 years now—the Oxford Parent Infant Project, which has seven satellites around Oxfordshire. It works with families and their babies to improve the quality of attachment. OXPIP has had astonishing results over those 12 years. In 2009, I gave up my role as the chairman of OXPIP to fight my general election campaign, but I always intended that if I was fortunate enough to be elected to Parliament, I would work to build a Northamptonshire Parent Infant Partnership, which I have now done. That partnership was launched six months ago and we are trying to build a service that, like OXPIP, provides psychotherapeutic support for families who are struggling to bond with their babies.
What I really want is for this approach to be established through children’s centres. We do not need more overheads or more buildings. I am a co-chair of the all-party group on Sure Start children’s centres and it has become apparent from our recent inquiry into the impact of the un-ring-fencing of the early intervention grant that it is not the case that children’s centres are closing—far from it. Directors of children’s services are very committed to support for the youngest. What I have found astonishing from that inquiry is the fact that there is no common shared understanding of best practice in children’s centres. To say that they are about getting children school-ready is to miss the point completely. School-readiness should be a result of the earliest relationship if it is sound and solid. That is where we need to focus our efforts.
I would like to see parent-infant partnerships working in every local authority in conjunction with the children’s centres and as part of those teams—working with health visitors, midwives and social workers as a point of referral. Midwives and social workers have a very full role and enormous lists of clients or patients to see. Some midwives look after up to 600 families and it is ridiculous to assume that they can see mum and sort out whether she has a safe and secure relationship with her baby as well as treat those mothers and babies who do not have such a relationship. That simply is not going to happen. Even the Government’s excellent efforts to produce far more health visitors will not provide a complete solution to this problem. Health visitors need somewhere to refer cases—a specialist team such as a parent-infant partnership that can provide the psychotherapeutic support for that mother and baby, or father and baby or adoptive parents and baby to help them to form that early bond.
A week tomorrow, the Northamptonshire Parent Infant Project is having a one-day conference in my constituency to talk about the incredible work that can be done through early-years intervention to change our society for the better. This is not just about human happiness, although that is what drives me—the potential for all those babies to be so much better—but about the potential financial savings for our society. If we had one generation in which the vast majority of babies were securely attached by the age of five, instead of 40% not being securely attached by that age, we would radically reduce the cost to our mental health services, our prison services, our police and our social services, which are currently trying to pick up the pieces of failed early attachment.
At the conference, we will be making the case that early-years intervention and spending money in the very earliest years when babies are under two is a really good way to save money much further down the line. Research from the States suggests that a dollar spent when a baby is under two saves $19 further down the line. There is a huge argument for looking seriously at that type of service, from both a financial and a moral point of view.
Alun Michael (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom). If I may summarise what she has just said, it is that if we do not address child development, education and mental health, a heavy price will be paid in the criminal justice system and by victims. She is right: prevention is better than cure.
I have declared my intention to stand for selection as the Labour candidate in the election for police and crime commissioner for south Wales. I am not sure whether a formal declaration of interest is required. One friend said that in Sir Humphrey’s terms, it was courageous to stand for an experimental role at a time of draconian cuts in police cash and numbers. I do so in the belief that the role will be difficult and challenging, and that it cannot be left to chance. The commissioner will have a contribution to make on the issues that I want to raise.
The Government are taking big risks with police finances and numbers. There is real anger among police officers, who are represented outside the Houses of Parliament today, and among many others who have already left the police force although they did not wish to do so. That is why the shadow Home Secretary was able to wipe the floor with the Home Secretary earlier.
The problem goes beyond statistics on cash and police numbers. The Government are making major changes in the policing landscape. It is a muddle. Against the background of cuts that are being made too far and too fast, we have the loss of senior and experienced police officers. Last year, there were riots in a number of English cities and we still do not know enough about why they happened. We did not have a report of the sort Lord Scarman produced after the riots in the 1980s, and although the Home Affairs Committee has issued a good report it does not enable us to predict what might trigger similar events in the future. What is certainly true is that the loss of police officers, especially those who are senior and experienced, will make it difficult to deploy police in the numbers and at the speed they were needed last August should such events happen again.
It is unhelpful to have so much talk about the front line—a term that ignores the important roles played by people in the background who undertake work on terrorism, child protection and internet-related offending. I am disappointed that, as my right hon. Friend the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee said, it is far from clear what Mr Winsor means by the front line in his report, or what the chief inspector of constabulary or Ministers mean by that term.
My right hon. Friend referred to the reputation that the Serious Organised Crime Agency has earned in such places as Turkey, Colombia and the USA, as I have been able to hear for myself. I reinforce his request that the Home Secretary try to find some way of retaining that branding. Why not call that division of the agency the serious and organised crime arm? That would allow the branding to be retained, if not in this country at least in our relationships with forces abroad.
A more problematic issue is that we are unclear where the many responsibilities that lie with the National Policing Improvement Agency will end up. The Home Affairs Committee has asked many questions about that, but the answer we receive is “We’ll let you know in the fullness of time.” That is not good enough.
Much has been said about the intention to create a new professional body for policing. It sounds fine and dandy. Why should there not be a body for policing just as there is for workers in a variety of other professions, including medicine? The problem is that there is no clarity about what that professional body will be. It cannot be a body that is “owned” by chief police officers—a successor to the current arrangements for representing chief police officers. It needs to be able to focus on professionalism and training. We have seen very little so far about the resources, the structure and the arrangements that would be necessary for creating that body. It is an aspiration, but we have seen no details of what would deliver professionalism and help to reinforce the need for professional police officers to feel professional and respected and to be respectable in the work that they do.
I agree strongly with my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central (Tony Lloyd) on the need for opportunities and a clear future for our young people. In that connection, the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire made some pertinent comments. If that need is not addressed, we will build up problems for the future.
My decision to stand for Parliament resulted from deep frustration at working with unemployed young people and young offenders in the 1980s, during the time of the Thatcher Government, which to my mind was a complete and utter disaster. I felt that something had to be done to take a grip on the failures that that Government were creating, both in terms of building a strong economy and addressing the needs of young people. I am afraid that, under the current Government, we seem to be going at an accelerated pace down the road the Thatcher Government took us, and which the years of Labour government, thank goodness, managed to reverse to a considerable extent.
I want to say a word or two about antisocial behaviour, because that is the issue that affects many individuals, families and whole communities. In tackling antisocial behaviour, the antisocial behaviour order is a very important instrument. It was deeply disappointing when, in July 2010, the Home Secretary, in the words of the headlines, declared a death knell for the antisocial behaviour order. Little has been done since then either to deliver on that “promise”—if it was a promise; I would see it as more of a threat—or to deal with antisocial behaviour. Doing away with antisocial behaviour orders would not be a sensible contribution to tackling antisocial behaviour. Antisocial behaviour orders have been effective when used properly and intelligently, and I am pleased to say that in my area, the South Wales police and the local authorities that they work with have developed ways of using them that have been effective in protecting local communities.
The antisocial behaviour order is a simple and effective measure and it is regrettable that instead of improving its use and effectiveness—there is certainly potential for doing that—the Government are allowing it to be strangled in bureaucracy and red tape and undermining its effectiveness. I remind the House that the purpose of the order is to prevent and stop a series of events that damage the lives of local people.
It is a matter of fact that many people’s lives are ruined by a series of low-level nuisance activities—very often ones that do not quite reach the point where a prosecution or a serious police investigation is justified, but which nevertheless are ruining the lives of neighbours and individuals in the community. It is not a question of one serious incident; it is more like a movie film of minor irritation and low-level nuisance. It is a fact that antisocial behaviour orders have worked well in nipping that sort of activity in the bud.
The National Audit Office and the Audit Commission said in their report that our approach to antisocial behaviour worked, with 65% of the NAO’s review sample desisting after the first intervention and 93% after the third. That is an outcome to be desired because it stops the activity, and it is a fact that criminal records create an obstacle to employment and rehabilitation. By allowing things to continue, by not nipping things in the bud, one makes it more likely that offending will continue and an individual life will be ruined. The answer is not to ignore or condone that activity but to stop it. That is why the antisocial behaviour order is a civil order, based on evidence of nuisance activity to the civil burden of proof. Making such an order does not lead to a criminal conviction; if the individual ceases that activity, nothing follows. There is not a conviction. It is not something that stands in the way of their resuming a useful life. A breach of the order leads to prosecution on the basis of the criminal test of evidence and to a criminal conviction, but is not the aim of the order. The aim is to stop bad behaviour, and properly used the order has been enormously beneficial. I say to the Home Secretary: stop messing about with the antisocial behaviour order. Tidy up the system—increase its efficiency and by all means simplify it—but do not throw out the baby with the bath water by getting rid of the antisocial behaviour order.
Another gap in the Queen’s Speech is anything to deal with violence against women and domestic violence generally. We have been promised legislation in Wales, but there is nothing on that subject in the Queen’s Speech. That is another example of the Welsh Government and the National Assembly for Wales tackling an issue that is not of itself part of the criminal justice system, but where effective legislation would prevent people from coming into the criminal justice system through their offending. Many incidents of domestic violence, often against women but also directly and indirectly damaging to children, go unreported, perhaps until a wife or partner has been through seven, eight or more violent incidents. Prosecution and conviction are important, but that simple fact demonstrates the urgent need for systems of early support and intervention to be in place. Such systems require specialist support services, which may cost money in the short term, but save money in terms of police time, court and legal costs and NHS costs—repeated injuries can incur significant costs. Early intervention can help to avoid the family break-up that becomes inevitable following repeated and escalating violence.
Mark Hendrick (Preston) (Lab/Co-op)
Does my right hon. Friend believe that the situation will get worse now that the Government are withdrawing legal aid for victims of domestic violence?
Alun Michael
Yes, indeed I do, because the provision of legal aid can help to resolve the direct problem. That measure, combined with the cuts in local government services, particularly in England, which have led in some places to the ending of support and early intervention services, mean that serious problems are likely to arise and to escalate, as my hon. Friend says.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Jonathan Djanogly)
I must put the record right on this point. The Government are not taking away legal aid for victims of domestic violence. Indeed, we are keeping it for the victims of domestic violence.
Alun Michael
I note what the hon. Gentleman says and have no reason to argue with him, but I am sure that my hon. Friend will be looking very carefully at the small print of the proposals and the way in which the Government take them forward.
Violence generally is not only the top priority in crime prevention, but is very expensive to society. Without going into detail, I point out again that a project led by John Shepherd of University College hospital, Cardiff, in which a clinical approach—almost an engineering approach—is used to analyse where violence happens, the context in which it happens and its causes, has led to a 20% greater reduction in levels of violence in Cardiff in the past decade than has been achieved in equivalent cities. Given our scarce resources, we must target prevention and early intervention measures and work to understand the causes and nature of criminal activity. In that way, we can reduce the number of violent incidents, which has the benefits of reducing both the number of victims and the level of violence against victims, and of making savings to the public purse in the police and criminal justice system and in the health service.
I am pleased to see the Chairman of the Justice Committee, the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), in his place. I remind Ministers of the commitments they made to pick up a copy of that Committee’s report on justice reinvestment. I was a member of the Select Committee at the time that report was prepared. Essentially, it asks: are we spending money in the right ways, or are there are better ways to use our resources? I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman will agree that although some lessons may have been learnt from that report, many more lessons can be drawn from it, and that in many ways, when it comes to the criminal justice system, we are not spending money in the most effective way.
The report pointed out that most of the things that really affect levels of offending are outside the criminal justice system. That signals more strongly than anything else the need for strong partnerships and joint working by the police, other organisations in the criminal justice system, and those outside. We need to use the benefits of restorative justice, making offenders face up to the impact of what they have done. There are also lessons to be learned from relational justice. Some of the issues covered by the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire, to do with the way that babies and young people are treated, are often about failures of relationship, as well as moral failures.
We need to refresh the partnerships involving the police, local authorities and other agencies to cut crime. As Sir Robert Peel said when he established the first police service here in London, the purpose of policing is to prevent and reduce offending. He also said:
“The police are the public and the public are the police”,
which is a bit delphic, but I think it means that unless the police and the public are in tune—unless there is a good relationship between the police and the public—policing will not be fair and will not succeed in the basic aim of creating a safer society in which offending is not taken for granted.
The Home Secretary referred to internet-related crime. I applaud the emphasis that she placed on this modern scourge, but great care is needed. We need to be sure that we do not get things out of proportion. Given the vast growth in online retailing, I am not sure that the number of offences is that out of proportion to the numbers for retail crime in our shops. We need to be sure that the big figures do not just reflect the big increase in the size of internet trading. Care is needed because legislation should be the last refuge of any Home Secretary, not the first. We should not repeat the mistakes made over decades in the offline world, as laws rarely prevent what they forbid. I therefore encourage the Home Secretary to work this out with the industry and parliamentarians. It is not good enough to have the Government and industry deal with the issue alone; Parliament has a role.
The Home Secretary has in her team the Under-Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire), who, in opposition, took on an important role in this House, working on internet-related issues. I suggest that she listen to him, and to the members of the Parliamentary Internet, Communications and Technology Forum or PICTFOR, which succeeded PICTCOM, the Parliamentary Information Technology Committee. PICTFOR seeks to engage Members of this House in understanding internet-related issues. As the chair of that group, I offer our engagement in response to her welcome for that comment.
I am disappointed not to see something in the Queen’s Speech about sprinklers to prevent preventable fires in houses, especially those in multiple occupation. I encourage the Home Secretary and the Ministers on the Front Bench to get a grip on their colleagues in the Department for Communities and Local Government. I had a meeting with a Minister in that Department who seems completely oblivious to the fact that the Department’s approach, and its refusal to accept such a change, means that it is putting its head in the sand and putting lives at risk. Ann Jones, an Assembly Member from north Wales, introduced a Measure on the subject in the Welsh Assembly, so Wales is benefiting from taking steps forward on this matter. I spent time with the police service in Vancouver and saw how it has been able to reduce not only the risk to life but the amount of damage to property through the installation of sprinklers in new properties. I encourage the Government to stop ignoring a measure that is supported by the insurance industry and the fire service, and to follow the Welsh Government and Assembly in implementing such a measure.
On Lords reform, we ought to look not only at the composition of a new House of Lords, but at better methods of scrutiny and constructive debate. Perhaps we ought to be more imaginative and think more laterally, as my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central said—perhaps we should have a single Chamber but with different mechanisms—rather than just allowing the debate to grind on as it has for decades, which seems to take us nowhere.
My final point on home affairs relates to the Home Secretary’s reference to the item in the Queen’s Speech on enhancing border security. Frankly, the Home Affairs Committee has seen little indication of improvement in the work of the UK Border Agency and a great deal to be worried about. One of the problems is that it is not an agency at all. It is not a separate agency with its own directorate and a board to which it is accountable, but an integral part of the Home Office and, therefore, the direct responsibility of the permanent secretary, the Home Secretary and Ministers. They really need to get a grip on it, rather than thinking that a bit of cosmetics, such as dividing the Border Force from the Border Agency, will make the difference that is needed. Introducing responsibilities into the new National Crime Agency might help to make that difference, but it is confusing that that agency will have some responsibilities and that the Border Force is being taken out of the Border Agency.
To sum up, while Labour was in government crime fell by 40%, and that was not by accident. It was possible only through strong partnerships and effective policing by motivated officers. That was supported by sensible reforms, the provision of new powers, such as antisocial behaviour orders, new preventive work, especially partnership working through the youth offending teams and the creation of the Youth Justice Board, which I am glad the Government are now allowing to continue its good work, and halving the time it took to get young offenders before the courts. More could be done on that, because we still take too long to deal with young offenders. A society that fails to nip things in the bud when young offenders start offending, or even before they have been absorbed into the criminal justice system as a result of being caught and prosecuted, is condemned to live with the disastrous impact of a life of crime on victims, the community, the families of offenders and victims and, essentially, the offenders themselves. We cannot afford that and the Government should put more emphasis on the need to prevent crime in the first place.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
It is an honour to follow the right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Alun Michael). I am an avowed monarchist and bow to no one in my support for Her Majesty the Queen, who yesterday gave an excellent Gracious Speech to both Houses and demonstrated once again the wondrous duty she has done for this country over 60 years as monarch. Over the course of this year we will be able to celebrate those 60 years, and not only in this country, but across the Commonwealth and the rest of the world. Later this year, when London hosts the Olympics and Paralympics, millions of visitors to this country will be able to see our pomp and pageantry at first hand. It is one of those things that keeps the traditions of this country fresh and refreshed in everyone’s mind, so it was a matter of great pride to be able to get into the other place this time to witness the Gracious Speech at first hand.
When I campaign on the doorsteps, and not just for the local elections over the past few weeks, but solidly, week in, week out, over many years, the last thing people talk about is reform of the other place. That comes across loud and clear. They worry about their jobs, the economy, feeding their children, their children’s education, care of the elderly and care of vulnerable young people. The key issue that I think was spelt out in the Gracious Speech was that we are putting the economy at the heart of government and putting right what went wrong.
The other thing that comes across loud and clear on the doorsteps is that the people of this country recognise who put the economy into this state and who are getting us out of it. I am sure that the fear on the Opposition Benches is that we are on the right course and that by 2015 the public will have realised that, and that the people who put us in this mess in the first place will not be trusted to run this country again.
The clear issue then, as others have mentioned, is the centrality of the legislation on reform of the other place. I am one of those—I am quite open about this —who, on becoming a Member, believed in a completely elected second Chamber. I thought that appointed or hereditary peers making judgments was an anachronism, but in my two years in this place I have changed my view, because in the other place there are many people who would never be elected or, in fact, selected, but who are absolutely critical to the functioning of government and to scrutinising the minutiae of legislation. We will have an interesting debate about House of Lords reform, but I do not believe that it should clog up the business of this House for any length of time whatever. There are much more important issues on which to centre our attention.
Another issue that comes across loud and clear on the doorsteps is people’s fear of crime and the importance of punishing criminals, and we should review what happened in the previous Session. We passed legislation that introduces much stricter punishments on offenders and, for the first time properly, makes brandishing a knife in public an offence that will be punishable by a period of incarceration. We should remember, however, that the legislation is still being enacted, followed through and will be gradually introduced over this Session for the courts to utilise.
The most important thing is that criminals are caught, processed quickly through our courts and suffer harsh sentences, so that they act as a deterrent to those who might follow them and, equally, so that the public can feel confident that those who would cause them damage are being taken off the streets. That is the other key issue. The legislation has been enacted, so it is now for the courts to ensure that it is implemented.
One thing that has been brought home to me about our courts system, and in particular our magistrates courts, is the failure to provide proper interpreters for either victims or those accused of crimes. Cases often have to be adjourned or dealt with on a different day because courts do not have the right interpreter. That is a huge waste of court time and money—although it is all public money in the first place. Ministers have to get to grips with that issue, but it does not need legislation; it just needs proper organisation and facilities.
I have undertaken the police parliamentary scheme, and I commend it to all hon. Members in order to see at first hand the job that the police do in keeping us safe on a day-to-day basis, and to see the specialist units that combat specific types of crime. I have a concern, however. I promote the increased use of no-strike agreements in the public sector, and I want to see more of them in our emergency services and specialist services on which we depend, but if we have a no-strike agreement, as we do with the police, which makes it illegal for them to go on strike, we must ensure not only that they are on-side and understand their duties and responsibilities, but that we listen to them.
Having met the police on many occasions, I am concerned that we in Parliament are not listening to them properly, so I recommend to Ministers, in particular, that they hold face-to-face talks with the Police Federation, which has come up with plans that would cut the cost of policing throughout the UK, to ensure that we establish a demonstrable and fair position for all police officers, thereby saving in the public sector the money that we all want to see saved. At the moment there is a view among the police that they are not being listened to, and as a natural Conservative I fear that that is not the right place for us to be, so I caution our Ministers to hold proper discussions.
Having seen at first hand many of the specialist units that operate in the Metropolitan police, in particular, I have become much more informed about the risks that we run in this country today. That is why I welcome many of the Bills announced in the Queen’s Speech.
I firmly believe that the protection of vulnerable children is vital, and I commend my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) on her interesting speech on early years development, which is crucial. Another issue is that the police can tell whether a young person aged eight will be a criminal in their teens and 20s. The reality is that such young people have been failed by our system; many have been in care all their lives and have never had parental direction or loving, caring parents. It is vital that we change that—that we speed up the process of adoption and make sure that those vulnerable young people are protected and brought up to understand the differences between right and wrong and what a loving family is all about.
Andrea Leadsom
Does my hon. Friend agree that if we are really focused on what is right for babies, it will be essential to ensure that when adoption has to take place, it must be before the baby is two years old?
Bob Blackman
Before I came to this place, I was a councillor for 24 years, during which time I examined the problems of young people and the failure of the local authority to permit any adoptions whatever for an extended period. Early adoption, so that loving parents can take over looking after a baby, is crucial. Adoption used to take place very much quicker if, unfortunately, children were not wanted or their parents were not able to look after them. Now, of course, many thousands of children across the country are left in care for far too long and never get adopted. It is far better for there to be adopted babies rather than adopted young children. That is important.
I am delighted that we will be enshrining in law what the Labour party talked about when in power and we talked about in opposition—making sure that race will not be the single issue determining whether someone can adopt a child.
On the draft communications Bill, having spent 19 years working for British Telecom and having gone around the specialist units of the Metropolitan police, I have seen at first hand the huge increase in the use of mobile phones, texting and electronic data in general. The internet has transformed the whole of society. One issue for those who understand the technicalities is that it is one thing to detect when someone with a fixed internet protocol address joins the internet, but it is quite another when a dynamic IP address is used. If someone is a criminal or terrorist, they are likely to know about those technical aspects and avoid detection. We have to ensure that we do not fall into the trap of changing the law and putting an unnecessary burden on the vast majority of people in the country, while not catching any terrorist at all. That is my immediate concern.
I believe in the fundamental civil liberties of the individual—the right for people to go about their lawful business as they choose, with minimum interference from the state. We recognise, of course, that some liberties have to be given up so that general liberty is preserved. However, I am pleased with the clarification on the Bill—that we will not have a Government database of a huge amount of e-mail traffic. Goodness knows what the size of that database would be if it included the vast growth in e-mail and text messages. At the moment, there is software that will easily do searches of key words and strings of particular words to search all e-mail traffic across the UK. However, I suspect that that would not be helpful, as criminals and would-be terrorists would quickly develop a code that excluded all the tracked words.
I have discussed with the Met police paedophile unit the vast growth in the number of paedophiles who use the internet to groom young people for their horrible purposes. Without going into the details of what the Met police do operationally, they say that they are just capturing the tip of a very large iceberg. We must all be concerned that there are vulnerable young people who are being groomed by those evil people. Let us be clear: they are evil people who need to be caught and punished to ensure that vulnerable people are protected. It is therefore vital that the law is changed to enable the police to do more to trap those people and to make sure that they are suitably punished. That must trump everything else.
On processes for dealing with crime and the courts, I fear that with 43 police forces across the country acting independently, criminals, particularly organised criminals who carry out their crimes across the UK, have the opportunity of not being detected. A national crime agency that will deal with this right across the UK, ensuring co-operation between police forces and taking over responsibility, must be the right way forward.
I am equally of the view that our borders must be protected. A national border force that will ensure that people who lawfully come to this country can enter, but those who try to enter illegally cannot, must, likewise, be the right way forward. Interestingly, the Queen’s Speech suggests no changes to immigration law, and that is right. Instead, we need to ensure that the existing rules are operated properly and thoroughly so as to be fair to everyone concerned. I noted the comments by the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee about people entering the UK for family parties, weddings, other celebrations, and funerals, and I share his view that there are serious problems in that regard. However, many of those problems would be solved if the applicants were properly advised to put their application in correctly with all the relevant details to prevent their being not allowed to enter the country and then having to appeal, which is a costly and totally unnecessary process.
Mark Hendrick
As somebody who gets a good number of immigration cases, I have noticed that there are more and more refusals. I think that is linked to the artificial limits that the Government are putting on to non-EU immigration rather than necessarily the eligibility of people to travel to this country for events such as those that the hon. Gentleman mentioned. I would be interested to hear the Home Secretary’s comments on that.
Bob Blackman
I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s intervention. One of the key concerns of people who have chosen to live in this country, be they of whatever origin, is that far too many people are entering the country. It is right that people who have relatives in other parts of the world should be allowed, if they wish, to have them here to visit—that is the key word—for a short period and then return. However, those visits can tend to be rather extended, with people overstaying their visas and then no action being taken, over many years, to make sure that they return. These serious concerns are shared by many people right across the various different communities that make up our great British nation. The Government must look into the matter, because the people of this country clearly expect the sheer numbers of people choosing to come to join us and live here to be reduced drastically.
Mark Hendrick
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his generosity in giving way again. I agree totally with his analysis, but the Government’s measures to do away with appeals will not solve the problem. All that will happen is that people will put in a fresh application, which will create even more administration.
Bob Blackman
The issue of appeals is interesting. My caseload is similar to that of many other Members. When people are forced to lodge an appeal, it is almost always the case that they have failed to put the relevant information on the application in the first place. If people got their applications right, they would not need to appeal because they would be admitted rather than refused. The clear solution is to have proper advice and a proper process. People gaining permission to come to the UK before they get anywhere near booking flights is the way forward.
Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
I, too, have a large immigration caseload. One of the biggest problems that my constituents face is getting good quality, affordable legal advice so that they can progress their claims. However, the Government have taken away funding for legal advice for those who are seeking to remain in this country, some of whom have been here for more than 10 years and whose children are established in schools. Families are being ripped away from the places that they know. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that if we are to have a firm immigration policy, it needs to be fair? Fairness means that there is access to proper legal advice.
Bob Blackman
I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. I agree that it was disgraceful of the Labour Government to leave people for 10 years or more not knowing whether they had a legal right to stay in this country. I have inherited such cases in my constituency. The backlog of cases that had to be dealt with by the incoming Government was immense. There are sharp lawyers—actually, they are not sharp lawyers, but lawyers who are sharp at taking people’s money off them—who, when they have no case whatsoever, will charge people enormous sums of money to write short letters on their behalf. The lawyers who really annoy me are the ones who take money off my constituents and then write to me as their client’s MP asking me to do their job for them. I take the view that immigration rules need to be firm, fair and understood. The previous Government left people waiting, without solving their problems. [Interruption.] I am conscious of time, so I will not take any further interventions on that subject.
I am pleased that we will reform the position on defamation. Many of us who have been involved in public life for a long time know that going through the High Court when one has been defamed is not a cheap option. Anything that reforms that process has to be good.
I think that opening up the courts for television, if it is used in the right way, will quickly lose its novelty. I also think that it will help to get rid of the fear that people have of going to court, either as a witness or because of some other involvement in a civil case. We will get to a position quickly where people understand what really goes on in the British courts before they experience it. That is to be welcomed.
Overall, this is a strong Queen’s Speech, particularly in the area of home affairs. It has started a process that we want to see, and it will deliver a safer and more prosperous Britain for everyone who lives here.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. Before I call the next speaker, I point out that the last three speeches have lasted 24 minutes, 22 minutes and 21 minutes. If we carry on at that rate, nobody else will get in. People ought to be a little more restrained. We have eight more speakers to get in and I understand that the Front-Bench spokesmen want half an hour between them. Can we please try to ensure that everybody gets in, because people have been sat in the Chamber for a heck of a long time?
Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)
I shall do my best to follow your wise counsel, Mr Deputy Speaker. Thank you for calling me to speak in this important debate.
It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman). I confess that I did not agree with everything that he said, but I did agree with some of it. Especially interesting was his point about specialist police units. Many of those units do not qualify as front-line policing. That must be borne in mind when we debate police resourcing in this country. I will say a bit more on that later.
In debates such as this, it is easy to cover a whole kaleidoscope of issues, as many hon. Members have done today. I do not propose to do that in my speech, in the hope that if I speak primarily on one issue, Ministers might be more likely to listen to what I have to say. I hope so. The issue I have chosen to focus on is driving offences. I believe it correct to prosecute drink-driving vigorously. There is nothing clever, macho or in any way sophisticated in being over the limit for drink-driving. I greatly welcome the change in social attitudes that has taken place on this issue in recent years.
I believe that it is right, too, to have a proper punishment for people who drive while under the influence of drugs. I very much welcome the fact that this will be made a specific offence under the Crime and Courts Bill. I do not believe that there are any currently reliable statistics on how many people have been killed by drug-drivers, but there is one thing that we all know too well—that being drugged at the wheel and putting other people’s lives at risk is totally unacceptable and demands the toughest penalties possible. I hope that the introduction of this specialist offence will not only make our roads safer, but will bring home the message that people who are high on substances on our roads are not just a nuisance—they are criminals.
In the spirit of welcoming this change, I call on the Government to be bolder in this area. One way of doing so is by tightening up on other driving offences that also cause enormous suffering and harm. Chief among these, I think, is the menace of driving without a licence or without insurance.
Last year, I spoke in another debate in this place about the case of nine-year-old Robert James Gaunt. Robert was tragically killed in March 2009 while crossing the road in the village of Overton in my constituency. I do not know whether Members know where Overton is, but it is a beautiful rural village fairly near the English border. This young boy was killed by a driver who had no licence or insurance, who failed to stop and who did not report the incident. In fact, what is even worse, this driver even tried to cover up the crime by having his car re-sprayed.
In this Chamber, we do not play guessing games, so I will not break that convention by playing one today and I will not ask hon. Members to guess the length of that driver’s sentence. The answer will, I think, shock many people—it was a pathetic 22 months, which was at the very top end of the scale of what was possible. If that driver could have been charged with death by dangerous driving, the maximum sentence would have been 14 years. However, under the law as it stands, being uninsured and unlicensed is not enough to qualify as dangerous. I repeat: if someone takes to the roads with no licence and no insurance, kills a child and flees the scene, that does not qualify as dangerous driving. That is quite simply preposterous and it must change. [Interruption.]
The “Justice for Robert” petition to back longer sentences for that crime was signed by 1,300 people. [Interruption.] I agree with them totally, and it is on their behalf and on behalf of other people affected by this appalling crime that I call on the Government to go further in this area and change the law. [Interruption.]
Mark Hendrick
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Is it in order for the two Ministers on the Government Front Bench to be chatting, laughing and joking between them while one of my hon. Friends is discussing serious cases where people have been killed on our roads?
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
That is not a point of order, but I am sure that the Ministers were listening. Who knows, they might even have been discussing the case. We should not make judgments about others; otherwise we would end up with such points going around the Chamber. I am sure that everyone takes seriously the views of Members of all parties when they are speaking.
Susan Elan Jones
I would like to deal now with the issue of what is legally defined as “dangerous driving”—that is, where a court of law can prove that the driving was extremely negligent, not just bad or careless. Sentences here, too, can also be very short in cases where victims are seriously injured, even to the extent of being paralysed, but not actually killed. The maximum sentence for that crime is also two years, and of course most people are given much shorter sentences. I believe that the current average is about 11 months. Eleven months for wrecking someone’s life through reckless criminal actions? There seems to be to be very little justice in that. Sentences for assault are longer, even when the act is not premeditated. Why should a sentence be so short when the injury was caused by a car rather than a weapon? I sincerely urge the Government to consider tightening the law in that regard. I commend their introduction of new drug-driving laws, but I believe that they must be followed by proper laws to deal with other serious driving crimes. That is what my constituents want, and I hope that the Government will include such measures in their Bill.
I have done all that I can in my speech to be positive about a change in the law that I greatly welcome, for, as we know, it matters precious little whether someone is Labour, Tory, Liberal Democrat or a non-voter if that person is mown down by a vehicle steered by someone who is high on drugs. In welcoming that change, however, I must raise a question about the implementation of the policy, and especially about how it will affect areas such as mine in north Wales which are geographically spread out. Laws on paper mean nothing if there are unmanageable cuts involving the people who are needed to enforce them. Our north Wales police force faces 20% budget cuts, which means that by 2015 it will have to lose 179 front-line officers—the very people who will be needed to carry out roadside drug tests.
The cuts will also affect so-called “back-room” officers and other staff. They are not people who are drafted in to make cups of coffee or count paper clips; they are people working in forensics and labs, the very people who will be needed to analyse and process the “drugalyser” results which will be vital to gaining convictions. Without those people, the Government’s own excellent new law is likely to fail in its day-to-day implementation.
Whatever the differences between Members’ ideological and political viewpoints, I believe that Ministers are sincere when they tell us that they believe in localism. I offer a challenge to the Government. If they are prepared to offer referendums to people on whether they want mayors, why on earth are police and crime commissioners being foisted on us whether we want them or not? There have been various estimates of the cost of introducing them, including an estimate of £136 million over 10 years, and it is likely that elected officials overseeing forces in England and Wales outside London will be paid hefty salaries. Given that police forces face cuts of between 14% and 20%, how in heaven’s name does that policy make sense? No wonder Mr Rob Garnham, chairman of the Association of Police Authorities and himself a Conservative councillor, described it as the
“wrong policy at the wrong time”.
I have no doubt that the Government’s new and welcome policy on drug-driving will not be helped one jot by cuts in the number of trained police officers while police commissioners are foisted on us whether we want them or not.
Let me end by making three points. First, let me praise the Government for rightly introducing a new law on drug-driving; secondly, let me request them to consider introducing tougher laws on other driving offences; and thirdly, let me ask them to remember the words of one previous Conservative Prime Minister—I am sure that I need not remind them who it was—who famously said:
“Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”
Today, as we have seen outside and heard in the House, our policemen and policewomen also need the tools and the resources, so that they can get on with their unique and essential task of tackling crime.
Mary Macleod (Brentford and Isleworth) (Con)
Because another of the Home Secretary’s roles is as Minister for Women and Equalities and because the Minister for Equalities, the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone), is sitting on the Front Bench now, I want to focus my few words about the Gracious Speech on the contribution that women can make to our economy. The first line of the speech states:
“My Government’s legislative programme will focus on economic growth, justice and constitutional reform.”
I shall raise some points about the important role women can play in helping us to achieve economic growth.
Yesterday’s speech was, of course, delivered by a woman who has been an outstanding role model in this country and across the world, and it is wonderful to be celebrating her diamond jubilee this year. As I sat in the House of Lords Gallery listening to Her Majesty, I thought of another great female: Baroness Ritchie of Brompton, who passed away on 24 April. She did so much for women—especially in respect of Conservative candidates and helping more women achieve their potential in the House of Commons. As only 22% of current MPs are women, we clearly still need to do more.
Female entrepreneurs can certainly help to create economic growth. In the UK, 150,000 more start-ups would be created every year if women were to start businesses at the same rate as men do. If women here in the UK were to set up businesses at the same rate as women in the US, there would be approximately 600,000 more businesses, contributing about £42 billion extra to the economy. This is an important issue, therefore.
Some steps have already been taken. A women’s business council has been established, which advises the Government on how to boost the role women play in the economy. Funding has been announced for 5,000 female business mentors. The mentoring portal, mentorsme.co.uk, has been launched, providing a single point of contact for both those seeking mentoring and those who want to be mentors—and I would encourage anyone with business skills to become a mentor. There is also a £2 million fund supporting female entrepreneurs to set up in rural areas, under the rural growth networks scheme.
More can be done, however. My hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) spoke powerfully about the early development of children, and she also made a plea for us to scrap regulation on micro-businesses employing between one and three people. We must encourage new businesses and help them develop. The Federation of Small Businesses in my area recently talked about the national insurance holiday, a great initiative that gives a national insurance holiday of up to £5,000 in respect of a firm’s first 10 employees. It does not apply in London at present, but if it were to do so, that would greatly help my constituents. Also, it only covers the first year, and extending it to a second year would make a great difference to small businesses.
We must also further encourage enterprise education in schools and universities, so that many more young people, especially young women, consider the option of starting up a business. We must consider the child care options available to self-employed women, too, so they can run their business while also bringing up their children. Some women who sit on boards in the City told me recently that they would very much like to be female business angels, helping companies set up by women and also helping women create new enterprises.
Much more can be done for enterprise and to encourage women to become entrepreneurs. This month in my constituency we are having an enterprise event. All the women in the Hounslow area of the constituency have been invited to come along and talk with female entrepreneurs. We have some fabulous female-entrepreneur role models, and we must ensure that they can help inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs. Organisations including banks, StartUp Britain and chambers of commerce also have a role to play in this regard.
The second issue I would like to touch on is how women in the boardroom can make a difference to economic growth. We still have a lot of work to do here, but some progress has been made. This is an important issue, given the huge potential in having women at senior levels in business; we do not want to waste that talent, which could be contributing at such levels. Studies by McKinsey and others show the business benefits of having a more gender-balanced board. Companies with greater gender diversity significantly outperform their sector in return on equity, operating profits and stock price growth, not to mention increased quality of decision making and corporate governance. That is especially true where a board has more than three women members.
The work of Lord Davies and his committee has given this issue much more visibility in the City and elsewhere. Now, 15.6% of FTSE 100 companies and 9.6% of FTSE 250 companies have women board members. As we can see, there is still some way to go. We have set the FTSE 100 companies a target to increase that figure to 25% by 2015; changed the UK corporate governance code, requiring companies to be more transparent and to report on their policy for boardroom diversity; and encouraged head-hunters to adhere to a voluntary code of conduct.
We need to get more women into the boardroom, and more work needs to be done to develop the business case and to persuade the FTSE 350 companies of the benefits of gender diversity in the boardroom. We need to encourage chief executives and chairmen to act as ambassadors for change, and to meet “board-level” women who are ready to take up such positions. We need to identify priority companies on which to focus in increasing the number of women on boards, and to consider how best to increase the number of women in executive as well as non-executive board positions. There has been an increase in the latter, but not so much in the former. We need to look at every single level of the organisation in question to see what it is doing to encourage and promote women at all levels. We also have a role to play in monitoring and promoting examples of best practice. Careers advice is really important throughout women’s lives—not just when they are at school or leaving college or university—so that they have the confidence and ability to take up those critical positions.
There are other initiatives in the Queen’s Speech to help women. Flexible leave will help people to fulfil their potential and will provide support for families. Both parents can share the parenting responsibility and balance work and family commitments. Flexible leave will be really important in the long term and will help to make a real difference in getting women into senior positions in organisations.
The Queen’s Speech also refers to the modernising of adult social care. A lot of work is being done on the role of carers, who do an incredible job and do not get thanked enough for what they do. Often, they are elderly people. Given that we have an ageing population, this issue is becoming increasingly important, and I am very pleased that the Queen’s Speech addresses it.
Finally, the Queen’s Speech refers to the Government’s plan to spend 0.7% of gross national income as official development assistance from 2013. I congratulate the Government on the work that has been done on international development, but I want to encourage them to go further on micro-financing. The MicroLoan Foundation, a Chiswick-based charity that supports African women through micro-financing, has had 99% of such loans repaid. This is a great way to look at the longer-term economic sustainability and development of these countries, by supporting women and others, and helping them to get a great start in life.
I began by talking about the Queen and I will also end by discussing Her Majesty, because in the Queen’s Speech we also talked about reform of the rules governing succession to the Crown. I was pleased about that, because it is long overdue and we have wonderful examples among our monarchs. Queen Victoria was on the throne for 63 years and our current Queen is about to celebrate her diamond jubilee.
The Lord Commissioner of Her Majesty's Treasury (Michael Fabricant)
And Elizabeth I.
Mary Macleod
Elizabeth I too. We have so many examples of fabulous role models who have given years and decades of service to this country. Allowing female heirs to succeed to the throne when they are the first born is absolutely a step in the right direction.
These measures will all help to make Britain become even greater. We have never been a country that does not rise to the challenges that we face—indeed, we have faced and conquered them in so many different ways. This year of the diamond jubilee, and of the Olympics and Paralympics, is a year to celebrate who we are, what we have achieved and the potential of this country, and women are essential to this.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Order. I just want to make certain that everybody gets in during the remaining time available, so I am going to introduce a nine-minute limit.
Mr Virendra Sharma (Ealing, Southall) (Lab)
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I welcome you back to the Chair. It is great to follow my neighbour, the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod). I listened to her interesting contribution, and although I may disagree on a few issues, I did agree on others. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak in this important debate about the home affairs and justice elements of the Gracious Speech.
Before I come to some specifics, I wish to put on the record my general thoughts about the impact on my constituents of the Government’s proposals in the Gracious Speech. Given the country’s woeful economic position—thanks to the double-dip recession made in Downing street—my constituents will see little hope in these proposals. We face record levels of unemployment, with 1 million young people looking for work. They will see little assistance from a Government who are out of touch and fixated on giving help to millionaires but offering little to hard-pressed families.
Nothing is being proposed to get the economy back into growth, to create jobs or to tackle runaway energy bills and train fares. The picture is bleak for my constituents and other hard-working families in Britain. The Government, with such a thin programme of legislation, are effectively walking by on the other side of the road as ordinary people suffer; they are helping only their millionaire friends.
Let me first make some remarks about the Crime and Courts Bill and the proposal to set up the National Crime Agency to take on serious, organised and complex crime, enhance border security, tackle the sexual abuse and exploitation of children, and tackle cybercrime. That agency will be continuing the work of the Serious Organised Crime Agency, which was launched by Labour in 2006, and we wish it well. However, Labour Members are concerned that the Government have taken reform in this area backwards by scrapping the National Policing Improvement Agency. Chief constables are very concerned that scrapping bodies such as the NPIA will mean losing focus on crime-fighting and having to worry about the delivery of training, IT and other services instead. The Home Secretary has refused here, in this Chamber, to answer questions to confirm the budget for the NCA. With the loss of 16,000 officers, further cuts to the NCA will only undermine it even further. The loss of 16,000 police officers from the front line will have a serious impact on efforts to tackle serious and lesser crimes as well as antisocial behaviour.
That figure of 16,000 was the number of police officers deployed on the streets of London after the riots last summer. In my constituency, the community came together powerfully in partnership with the police to protect our religious places and businesses from the wanton criminality of the riots, but I fear the consequences if there was a repeat of those events with police resources so diminished. The 12% cut proposed by the Opposition could have been made without the need to cut front-line resources and officers, and the fight against crime could have continued successfully as it did over the lifetime of the Labour Government.
Bob Stewart
In what way would the hon. Gentleman keep front-line policemen under the Opposition’s proposals when cuts need to be made? How would he do it?
Mr Virendra Sharma
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that question and I shall answer it later in my speech.
The Government talk about enhancing border security, but the complete shambles over which the Home Secretary is currently presiding gives little confidence that that can be done. Reports from Heathrow at the weekend that, in order to clear the queues at passport control, UK Border Agency staff were taken off security checks and Customs work are very worrying. My constituency, like many others throughout the UK, has a problem with drug-related crime and at the moment the Home Secretary is giving the drug barons and terrorists a clear run through Customs and our borders as she fails to get a grip on this crisis.
One other area of concern, particularly to many of my constituents, is the Government’s proposal to remove the full right of appeal for a refused family visit visa. Like many other MPs, I deal with hundreds of visa cases on behalf of my constituents who often want family to join them for important family events such as weddings and funerals. Mistakes are and will continue to be made and natural justice demands a full right of appeal. Why is that element of justice and fairness being stripped away?
Another disappointment is the absence of a forced marriage Bill in this Queen’s Speech. Again, this is an issue in my constituency, and given the Prime Ministers’ words in January, when he stated that the Government were looking to make forced marriage a criminal offence, and following the conclusion of the Home Office consultation in March, why is no Bill proposed in this next Session of Parliament?
Before I finish, let me highlight a positive aspect of the Government’s proposals. The judicial appointments reform that will increase diversity in the judiciary is very welcome and long overdue. That said, there is very little positive to focus on in the Queen’s speech. As the Leader of the Opposition said, it is a message of “no hope” and “no change” and the Government
“just do not get it.”—[Official Report, 9 May 2012; Vol. 545, c. 14.]
Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma), although I have to say that I must have listened to a different Queen’s Speech. My hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod) did an excellent job of setting out exactly what is in the Queen’s Speech for business. Let me remind the hon. Gentleman that it contains provisions on reform of the banks, which we need to ensure stability, on cutting red tape, on the Green investment bank, and on allowing renewable development to continue. I should also point out that the Government have already introduced measures on youth unemployment through the youth contract and apprenticeships, so they are not sitting on their hands doing nothing as he was suggesting.
I want to focus on the proposals relating to home affairs and justice issues. First, however, let me say a couple of things about House of Lords reform, to which all parties made a commitment in their manifestos. I assume that all of them are unhappy with a scenario in which we have 92 hereditary peers and peers who are appointed by party leaders making decisions about our legislation. I hope, therefore, that all Members will want to facilitate a process that enables us to come to a rapid conclusion on this and that these proceedings will not be delayed as a result of actions by Liberal Democrat Members.
Tom Brake
I shall not because there is little time for other Members to speak.
Let me focus on the National Crime Agency, which I welcome. I have had discussions with Keith Bristow, who will be heading up the NCA. The Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee said that Keith Bristow was currently the only employee of the NCA so I am very pleased to have met 100% of its employees. Mr Bristow confirmed that for the first time we will have national tasking for the police, which I welcome. I am sure that most Members will be surprised to learn that there has previously been no capacity for national tasking. The real challenge for the NCA will be how the relationship between the chief constable, the NCA and the elected police and crime commissioners will work. How will they work together? Clearly, they will to some extent be pulling in different directions and might have different priorities. How that is managed will be key to the NCA’s effectiveness.
I understand that there will be some issues with funding in that transfers of money will sometimes have to take place if NCA resources are called on, so that issue requires some investigation. Also, at some point the issue of where responsibility for counter-terrorism should lie will have to be addressed, but I accept that it would have been inappropriate for that to happen before the Olympics. I regret that it has not been possible to identify ways in which some parts of the NCA could be subject to freedom of information considerations. It will have to work very hard to demonstrate through the annual reports it will produce and the information it is going to make available that it is completely transparent.
I strongly welcome the measures on freedom of speech and defamation, and I hope that the use of the word “insulting” will be addressed in relation to section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. An interesting alliance of groups will support such changes if they come forward. The changes on defamation are very welcome. I do not think that any Member of the House is comfortable with a situation in which the United Nations Committee on Human Rights describes our laws as discouraging
“critical media reporting on matters of serious public interest, adversely affecting the ability of scholars and journalists to publish their work”.
There is a need to take action and I welcome the fact that the Government are doing that.
On justice and security, I understand that the proposals on closed material proceedings will no longer apply to inquests. I hope that is true because the original Green Paper was far too wide in what it proposed. That approach will be restricted to national security issues only and there will be a requirement for a judicial approval process to be gone through before CMP can be invoked. I also welcome the plans to strengthen oversight of our security and intelligence agencies because there are concerns that our services have been involved in some activities that might make us all uncomfortable.
There has been a degree of confusion about the communications data proposals; even on Radio 4 this morning, we were told that e-mails would now be covered, whereas most Members will be aware that e-mails are already covered by existing communications data measures. However, we need to look at safeguards. We have a strange scenario in the UK, where there are about 500,000 comms data requests every year. I hope the Government will look at a sample to work out how many of them actually lead to something concrete in terms of helpful evidence or prosecution. If we can cut down significantly the number of requests, it will be much easier to involve a third party or a judicial process when issuing permissions. Currently, the volume of requests would seem to make that impossible. I hope that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 will be looked at as part of that process. I welcome the extra safeguards the Government are considering to extend the roles or powers of the interception of communications commissioner and the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.
I welcome the reform of laws affecting children. I have already referred to the campaign that Action for Children is running on the reform of laws on child neglect, to make sure that it is not just about children having a roof over their head, but about getting emotional support, which, as we heard earlier, is key to a child’s development.
When discussing the shared parenting proposals, my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), the Chair of the Justice Committee, highlighted the fact that we shall have to be careful not to encroach on the rights of the child. Children should be at the centre of the process, even though we want to support both parents in having access to their children.
I regret that there is nothing in the Queen’s Speech about equal marriage. I understand that it was not possible to include proposals while consultation is still under way, but there is a firm commitment.
The Queen’s Speech demonstrates for a second time that the coalition Government are committed to effective reforms of policing, the security services and the courts. We will be relying more heavily on policy that is based on evidence of what works and that achieves the right balance between civil liberties and safety and security.
Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)
I congratulate the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake). I agreed with his point about support for fostering, but not with much else.
This is only my second Queen’s Speech debate, and I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak. My disappointment is that this is a thin Gracious Speech, made up of bits and bobs and failing to address a double-dip recession in this Olympic and diamond jubilee year.
As we know, the Queen is visiting all parts of the UK this year. Despite the showers, she was warmly welcomed in Blaenau Gwent two weeks ago.
I am a supporter of constitutional reform and I hope that it will progress “quietly and quickly”—to quote the Business Secretary—but it is not a key issue for my constituents in Abertillery, Brynmawr, Ebbw Vale or Tredegar. Their concerns are, rightly, far more prosaic. They are concerned about unemployment, high energy prices and cuts in public expenditure that go too far, too fast. That is why they gave Labour councillors a resounding victory in Blaenau Gwent at the local elections last week.
In addition to home affairs issues, I will look at wider matters affecting Blaenau Gwent. Last month in the Financial Times, my right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling) explained that the private sector is unconvinced by the Government’s austerity strategy. It wants a plan for growth, if it is to create new private sector jobs on the scale required. Investment in assets such as roads and transport infrastructure is needed in Blaenau Gwent. Our unemployment there is 12.2%, and youth unemployment is 19.4%. We need jobs and we need them now.
Electrification of our Ebbw Vale to Cardiff line, with other valley lines, is hugely important to us. Evidence given to the Public Accounts Committee showed that Lille, a poor, former mining area in northern France, had benefited from high speed rail lines—not just construction jobs but sustainable, long-term jobs. There is a lesson there.
The Government say they will continue to work with the devolved Administrations. We have an enterprise zone in Ebbw vale and the opportunity to invest in infrastructure for a new motor sport complex, which would be a real game changer for us. The Welsh Government and Welsh Ministers are on side, but we need the Treasury to be imaginative and to support enhanced capital allowances there.
As we know, the Government have started shedding public sector jobs, but the private sector is nowhere near filling the employment gap. That is why Labour says, “You don’t bring the deficit down by putting people on the dole.”
Police officers are lobbying us today, including officers from Gwent. I am very concerned about the closing of police stations in my constituency and the loss of up to 167 police officers. No one wants to see fewer police officers working to solve serious crimes.
I turn now to public health. Welsh Government research shows that men in my constituency of Blaenau Gwent have the lowest disability-free life expectancy at birth in Wales, at just 54.3 years. Sadly, the Government have failed to take the decisive action needed to help tackle significant contributors to poor health, such as alcohol misuse. While the Prime Minister has belatedly backed a minimum price for alcohol at 40p a unit, which I welcome, it is still below the 50p recommended by the doctors, Alcohol Concern and many others. Action on advertising and sponsorship is needed. Alcohol Concern Cymru recently surveyed primary schools and found that children as young as 10 are more familiar with some leading alcohol brands and adverts than those for popular foods. That cannot be right. Sixty-two per cent. recognised Magners, a brand which until recently sponsored rugby’s Celtic league. Recognition was significantly higher among boys than girls, and among those who lived in south and west Wales. So we need more effective controls on advertising and sports sponsorship. It is essential to protect our children’s health.
As a former NSPCC campaign manager, I of course welcome proposals to improve protection of children in care and to speed up adoption. That is a key proposal for children, who will always need our laser-like focus to make their early years as safe as possible.
We await a draft Bill on adult care. Measures to regulate providers and ensure that residents get a fair funding deal are vital. Last week we heard that private equity company Terra Firma had taken over Four Seasons, which took over Southern Cross, which runs two care homes in my constituency. Residents and their families are dismayed by that pass-the-parcel approach. They want safeguards to ensure sound business plans, which the Government have so far failed to deliver.
In conclusion, we have heard much from the Cameron/Clegg double act about not landing our children with debt. Yet youth unemployment is nearly 20% in Blaenau Gwent. It is unfair that teenagers leaving school should find the heavy burden of this Government’s economic failure falling on their young shoulders. We want a fair deal on jobs, with money from a bankers bonus tax to help 100,000 out-of-work young people aged between 18 and 24. That is what people in the south Wales valleys think makes good sense and good government. They believe, as this rainy, wet April has shown, that this Queen’s Speech has been a damp squib. It deserves, then, to be given a very large thumbs down.
Gavin Barwell (Croydon Central) (Con)
As the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz)—I thank him for his kind words—predicted, I will focus my remarks today on one particular measure in one particular Bill announced in the Queen’s Speech. I have been lobbying for the measure for some months, and I hope the House will forgive me for focusing on a single issue.
On 26 June 2010, my constituent Lillian Groves, a 14-year-old girl, was killed outside her home by a driver under the influence of drugs. Subsequently, it transpired that he was driving a car that was not licensed in his name, uninsured, at 43 mph in a 30 mph zone. A half-smoked joint of cannabis was found on the dashboard, but sadly the police did not swiftly perform a drug test; only after Lillian passed away in hospital, some nine hours later, was the driver’s blood tested. Cannabis was found in his blood and he subsequently admitted to having taken cannabis, but the Crown Prosecution Service concluded that the level was not high enough—the family was never told what the level was—to warrant the more serious charge of causing death while driving under the influence of drugs. The man was charged with causing death by careless driving and causing death while driving uninsured. On 7 July, he was sentenced to just eight months in prison, and was released after serving four months.
Bob Stewart
When people do such things, why can we not ban them from driving for life?
Gavin Barwell
I think the issues here are the offence committed and changing the law. I will explain how the Queen’s Speech is doing just that, but first I will complete the narrative. The driver who killed Lillian lives locally, so the family have to confront the fact that, now that he has been released from prison, they will from time to time meet this man—who has never apologised to them for causing the death of their daughter—as they go about their business in their local community.
Lillian’s parents, Gary and Natasha, and her aunt and uncle came to see me at one of my surgeries in the autumn after the sentence had been handed down and shortly before the individual was due to be released from prison. A parent myself, I cannot say how high is the regard in which I hold the family. To suffer the tragedy of losing a child and not to be consumed by bitterness, but instead to focus on how to ensure that positive change can come out of such a terrible event, has to be commended by everyone. I also commend the Croydon Advertiser and in particular journalist Gareth Davies, who has worked with the family and designed a campaign for what they call Lillian’s law.
Lillian’s law is a package of measures. It has four elements, the first of which is a change in the law. At present, it is an offence to drive under the influence of drugs, but the law is not the same as in relation to drink-driving. There is no set level of drug in a person’s system above which they are held to be incapable of driving, so the prosecution has to prove that the person’s driving was affected by the drugs in their system, which is not easy. The second element is the licensing of equipment similar to the breathalyser alcohol test that can be used either at the roadside or in police stations. The third is a policy of tougher sentencing for those who commit such crimes, and the fourth is a series of random tests, similar to those carried out in the 1980s for drink-driving, to get across the messages, first, that it is unacceptable to drive under the influence of drugs and, secondly, that people who do so are liable to be caught.
After the family came to speak to me, I did a lot of research. To be fair, the previous Government were aware of the problem and had looked for ways to tackle it, but the work had become bogged down and a number of different Government Departments were involved. I therefore decided to go straight to the top and raised the subject in this Chamber during Prime Minister’s questions. The Prime Minister met the Groves family, took up their case and has worked with the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office and the Department for Transport to ensure that the first key element of the package—a change in the law—is included in the Crime and Courts Bill announced in the Queen’s Speech.
At this point, I wish to pay tribute to a couple of other people. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) has previously pursued the issue via a private Member’s Bill. I also thank my hon. Friends the Members for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) and for Orpington (Joseph Johnson), who have among their constituents members of the extended Groves family and have supported the campaign.
In yesterday’s debate on the Queen’s Speech, the Leader of the Opposition, perhaps understandably, quoted remarks by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries), who said that the Prime Minister and the Chancellor were
“two arrogant posh boys who show no remorse, no contrition, and no passion to understand the lives of others.”
I am very disappointed that my hon. Friend said those words. I can understand why the Leader of the Opposition quoted them, but I hope that he and other Opposition Members do not personally believe them. My experience is that Members on both sides of the House have a passion for understanding the lives of others and changing our country for the better. When we try to pretend that the motives of people who disagree with us about the means of doing so are malign, we do politics as a whole a disservice.
The experience of the Groves family, when they met the Prime Minister at No. 10 Downing street, was not of someone who did not have a passion to understand the lives of others, or of someone who, as the Leader of the Opposition said yesterday, was standing up “for the wrong people.” They met one of the very few Members of this House who can personally understand the experience that they have been through in losing their child—someone who took a great deal of time to listen to what they had to say and to understand the issue, and who then took up their cause. On a personal level, on their behalf, I thank the Prime Minister for what he has done. I would like to ask my hon. Friends on the Front Bench detailed questions about where we go from here.
I understand that drugs-testing devices for police stations are already being tested. Perhaps Ministers could give an update on how that testing is going. Will they indicate when they might be in a position to begin testing devices for use at the roadside? I understand that an expert panel is looking at what levels should be set for each drug. That applies to illegal drugs and some prescription drugs that, if taken in significant quantities, make it unsafe to drive a car. I wonder if we could have an update on the progress that that panel is making. I would also be interested to hear what the proposed sentencing policy is for the new offence that will be set out in the Bill.
I have about two and a half minutes left, so I should like to end by making a few comments on what the shadow Home Secretary had to say about police cuts, and on some of the questions that she fielded from Government Members. She tried to contend that Government Members do not know or understand the pressures that the police forces are under. In relation to my local borough operational command unit, I spent three days during this House’s ludicrously long holidays shadowing police officers in Croydon. I spent a day with a safer neighbourhoods team, a day with a response team, and a day with the robbery squad in Croydon. I saw for myself the enormous pressures that they are under, and I heard officers’ concerns about the combined effect of a pay freeze, pension reform and the Winsor review recommendations.
Government Members are certainly not unsympathetic to the case that police officers make, or ungrateful for the huge amount of work that they have done. I am particularly grateful for the work they did in my constituency in the wake of the riots. However, we find it very difficult when Opposition Members seek to avoid any responsibility for the financial mess in which the country finds itself. The level of deficit that this Government inherited is not solely the fault of the Labour Government —they had to intervene in a recession, and we understand that—but the Labour Government did make a contribution to the scale of that deficit.
The shadow Home Secretary was asked to say in detail where, if the Opposition’s proposal is for a cut of £1 billion in police funding, she would find the other £1 billion that is needed. She tried two arguments. First, she said that the scale of the cuts that the coalition proposes goes beyond what Labour would do, but that is not actually Labour’s policy. Labour’s policy is that the structural deficit should be dealt with over two Parliaments, rather than just one. That implies the same cuts over a longer period.
The second point that the shadow Home Secretary made was that growth was the answer; the problem was that the Government’s policies on growth were failing. We all want growth, but growth does not deal with the structural deficit. By definition, a structural deficit is one that remains, however much economic growth there is. The challenge to those on the Opposition Front Bench is still there. There is a structural deficit to be dealt with. The amount is agreed by both parties. If the Opposition do not support a particular cut that the Government propose, where will they find the money that is needed as an alternative? Until they come up with an answer to that question, they will have no credibility.
Mark Hendrick (Preston) (Lab/Co-op)
This Queen’s Speech is a joke, but not a very funny one. Thankfully, we all know that the Queen did not write it, although she had the unpleasant task of having to read it out yesterday in the House of Lords.
I will say a little about policing in Lancashire. As many people will know, Lancashire has the best police force in the country—it has been independently assessed as the best of the 43 police forces in England and Wales. The right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) is no longer in his place but has been replaced by one of his Lib Dem ministerial colleagues, now the only Lib Dem Member in the Chamber, which shows what respect the Lib Dems have for the coalition speech that the Queen delivered. If we look at the police force in the right hon. Gentleman’s constituency, we will see that it will lose 1,486 police officers, or 1,907 police staff overall, including front-line officers, so I was quite surprised that the first thing he talked about in his speech was House of Lords reform. Given the fact that his constituents are losing so many police officers, I am sure that they will be horrified that their parliamentary spokesperson is putting House of Lords reform at the top of his agenda. That just shows how out of touch the Liberal Democrats are. When I go into my local pub or club, my steward and my constituents do not come up to me and say, “What we really need, Mark, is House of Lords reform.” They are talking about crime on the streets, antisocial behaviour and the day-to-day problems they have to deal with.
In talking of day-to-day problems that people have to deal with, and why we need the police to deal with them, I should point out that the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly), is losing only 65 front-line officers in his constituency. I am sure that in leafy Cambridgeshire the public will not miss 65 police officers, but they will miss 550 police officers in my constituency, and they will miss almost 1,500 police officers in Carshalton and Wallington. I know that the Minister’s constituency has a bit of trouble now and then when Huntingdon Life Sciences is attacked and a few extra police officers have to be drafted in, but the seriousness of these cuts is lost on some Government Members.
The hon. Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell) says that Opposition Members accuse the Government of not being sympathetic to the lives that people face or to the victims of crime. I am sure that they are sympathetic, but we are talking about crime on a far bigger scale in many of our inner cities and in many parts of the country. That needs far bigger and more effective police forces that have to be able to deal with it.
We know that things are getting bad when the police themselves take to the streets to go on marches. There is a demonstration today in which thousands and thousands of police officers have descended on London, including officers from my constabulary in Lancashire, to protest about the 20% cuts in policing. Members of this House, as well as families and communities up and down the country, will be supporting them.
Fairly recently I met representatives of the Lancashire Police Federation, and they reminded me of a meeting I had with them four or five years ago, when Jacqui Smith was Home Secretary and they complained about changes to their working arrangements and pensions that took place under the previous Labour Government. When I met them a couple of months ago over a very nice lunch in Preston, they said, “Bring back Jacqui Smith”, but I am afraid that they do not have that option at the moment. What they are left with is a Home Secretary who basically does not give a toss—[Interruption.]
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Order. That is unparliamentary language. I ask the hon. Gentleman to withdraw that terminology.
Mark Hendrick
I withdraw the comment, Mr Deputy Speaker. Perhaps I should use a more appropriate expression and say that the Home Secretary does not care as much as she should do.
As I have said, Lancashire constabulary is the best of the 43 police forces in England and Wales. Let us look at the sort of money that is being withdrawn by central Government. In real terms—cumulative cash terms—in 2011-12 there was a 6% cut, in 2012-13 there will be a 13% cut, in 2013-14 there will be a 17% cut, and in 2014-15 there will be the magic 20% cut that police forces up and down the country are facing.
The Government base their predictions on those of the Office for Budget Responsibility and predict that council tax will increase by 3.4% per annum. The OBR might be giving a figure of 3.4% per annum, but the Government are telling local authorities to freeze council tax, as many Tory authorities throughout the country are, so, when authorities look at the money available to them, particularly through the police precept, they find that, if everybody sticks to the Conservative line on freezing council tax, they will not have that 3.4% to include in the budget and, therefore, will have to cut even more from the police budget.
We know that, if councils want an increase of more than 3.5%, they will also have to hold a referendum to get that budget measure through, costing them not only in a referendum, but through the likelihood of losing it. Constituents will not want to pay more for a service that is not as good. The Government have therefore been cynical to say the least in putting forward this estimate of a 3.4% increase in council tax.
If we look at central funding for the Lancashire police force, we find that its income will fall from £220.21 million in 2011-12 to £195.53 million in 2014-15, and that we are going to see funding gaps in the first year of £13.82 million and in the final year of £8.32 million. That is from a very lean starting point for Lancashire constabulary: 28.6% of its back-office budget has gone; 20% of its middle-office budget has gone; and now almost 10% of its front-line budget has gone, despite the Prime Minister indicating that there was no need at all to cut any front-line police.
On the impact, 5,000 police nationally have already gone, and some 550 police officers will go in Lancashire, along with 250 police staff. Lancashire’s record is, however, fantastic. Crime has gone down year on year since 2004; all crime is down by 34%; acquisitive crime is down by 45%; burglary is down by 36%; violent crime is down by 31%; and antisocial behaviour has fallen since April 2009, from 155,000 incidents to 100,000.
The situation is ridiculous. When Labour left office there were record numbers of police officers on the streets, with over 16,500 more than when we took office in 1997. The Government should urgently rethink the scale of police cuts and set out a proper plan to cut crime instead. The Queen’s Speech included nothing about crime, and the Government will rue the day they did nothing about it, because, although their constituents will not feel the cuts in the way that ours do, they will still pay the price.
Simon Reevell (Dewsbury) (Con)
I am grateful for the opportunity to make some observations about three matters raised in yesterday’s Gracious Speech: one proposal that should be straightforward, one that can be made so and one that I fear cannot. I should also declare an interest, as registered, not least because it includes prosecuting in the criminal courts, on which I shall touch.
The proposed offence of drug-driving does, as other Members have already said, actually exist. It is in section (4) of the Road Traffic Act 1988 and has been around since then. It involves
“driving…unfit…through drink or drugs.”
The difficulty is with measuring “unfit”, which according to the Act occurs at the point when
“ability to drive properly is…impaired.”
The test is designed with alcohol in mind, and drugs require a much simpler approach, recognising that possession of alcohol is legal but possession of real problem drugs is not.
Consumption of alcohol is legal, so Parliament sets a level beyond which the assumption is that driving is impaired. Prohibited drugs, which by definition are not legal, need no such tolerance. The possession of such drugs is an offence, so it would be bizarre to have a threshold for driving which was based on impairment. All that is required is a simple law stating that a person in charge of a motor vehicle while in possession of a prohibited substance commits an offence and that possession shall include that which is within the person. The difference between drugs in the pocket and drugs in the bloodstream would be reflected in sentencing and evidence would be obtained using the same technology as is used in compulsory drugs tests carried out for the armed forces and many other organisations. The same defences available to those charged with drink-driving, such as inadvertent consumption, would be available. I hope that the opportunity to deal with the matter simply and effectively will not be missed.
The second area is the proposal to extend powers to access communications. It is worth pausing to consider the current position, in which telephone traffic, the location of telephones, and the record and content of text messages are all used and provide valuable evidence, along with entries from Facebook, e-mail and the like. If the police recover an accused’s computer or telephone, web searching and web content will all feature at trial.
The proposals simply make the matter more straightforward in the context of the developing use of instant communication. It is difficult, if not impossible, to draw any real distinction between the fact of a text message and the fact of an instant message. It would be ridiculous if the difference between the text icon and messaging icon was the difference between the availability of evidence or otherwise. However, the role of messaging and the growth in its use has been huge. If it had been suggested in 2000 that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act would compel people to lodge all their private post with the Royal Mail for 12 months, there would have been uproar, but the suggestion for electronic messaging is the 2012 equivalent. It may be necessary, but as the powers change so much so, too, must the safeguards.
Legislation of that type, sold on the back of the fight against paedophiles and terrorists, ends up in the hands of a wide variety of public bodies for which its use is totally disproportionate. If the Government want that significant extension of the scope of the data that they can see, there must be real safeguards such as the identification of specific offences to which the legislation will apply; disclosure to police and security services only; and access via a High Court judge’s order to named officers only. The legislation can be made to work, but there has to be a recognition that although it is a progression, it is a significant progression and safeguards are necessary.
The third area is somewhat different. I am afraid that if it is read carefully, the consultation document on the increased use of closed courts sets out a policy that appears to have at its heart a desire to protect Governments from direct or indirect embarrassment. For decades, there have been examples of Government Departments appearing to regard the public interest as meaning, at least in part, that errors are hidden and omissions denied. Public interest does not mean that.
The proposals are at odds with our principles of open justice, and the justifications for the departure in the consultation document are few and unconvincing. If the British state ensures that it never again colludes with those who kidnap and torture in the name of justice, we will not need to worry about Norwich Pharmacal applications on behalf of the victims.
The measures are not proposed for the criminal courts, of course, but it is to the civil courts that the citizen comes seeking remedy against the state. To cloak those courts in secrecy is good news for those who fear accountability, but not for those who wish to shine light on the extent of their mistreatment by the state. I hope that the recognition that the proposal cannot be extended into the criminal courts, and the realisation that a Minister should not decide whether it should apply in the civil courts, is, in fact, the beginning of an acceptance that the proposal is simply wrong.
Mr Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)
This debate has taken place against the backdrop of a huge march by the country’s police officers. An estimated 30,000 police officers have been on the streets in London, not a stone’s throw away from here. They have been marching in their thousands against swingeing cuts to the police front line and the Government’s decision to cut 20% from police budgets. Today’s consideration of the broad aspects of the Queen’s Speech and its specific home affairs and justice aspects has to be seen in this context.
A few years ago, I took part in the police service parliamentary scheme, which was an ideal opportunity to see at first hand and to experience what policing meant at the sharp end. I was seconded to the city of Newport and spent a number of weeks witnessing what policing actually meant. It was an extremely valuable experience, particularly because I saw the multiplicity of problems that the police had to face in the conduct of their duties. As a result, my estimation of the police rose enormously. All Members should participate in the scheme if they have the opportunity to do so, because I have absolutely no doubt that their view of the police will be heightened enormously. One police officer told me that although they might have had some reservations about what the Labour Government were doing at the time, the investment in policing meant that it was transformed, particularly in our poorest communities. The current deep and rapid police cuts mean that the people who live in our poorest communities, and who need police support more than anybody else, will suffer most of all.
This afternoon’s debate has been good and wide-ranging. The hon. Member for Milton Keynes North (Mark Lancaster) spoke lucidly about the children and families Bill. The hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) referred to the banking proposals in the Queen’s Speech, the European Union and measures for small businesses. My hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd South (Susan Elan Jones) welcomed the introduction of an offence for drug driving, and in doing so made a very powerful statement to this House. My hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith) made a very strong speech covering children’s issues and alluding to his own personal experience. He also referred graphically to the situation in his constituency, which is one of the least well off in the country.
Some Members have been entirely supportive of the Government’s proposals, but others have expressed a variety of concerns and reservations. My hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central (Tony Lloyd) spoke about the future of policing, and his concerns were shared by my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Alun Michael) and repeated by many other Members. My hon. Friends the Members for Blaenau Gwent and for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma) made strong statements of concern about what is happening in their own, very different, constituencies.
In a multiplicity of ways, many of today’s speeches have highlighted the fact that the Government’s programme is woefully inadequate. At a time when most people’s standard of living is falling, when unemployment is high and may well get higher, and when insecurity is widespread and the prospects for our young people are worse now than they have been in living memory, it is almost unbelievable that the Government should make constitutional reform one of their priorities. My hon. Friend the Member for Preston (Mark Hendrick) was absolutely spot on when he said that when he went down to his local public house, nobody—I repeat, nobody—mentioned to him the need for Lords reform. I am sure that every single Member on both sides of the House would agree with him and say that that is exactly their own experience. Although nobody in the Government says that reform of the House of Lords should be a priority—they have changed their tune over the past few weeks—it has been given pride of place in Her Majesty’s Most Gracious Speech.
Let me be clear—I say this in particular to the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Mr Kennedy) —that Labour supports a reformed House of Lords, with a wholly elected second Chamber. However, we want the relationship between the Chambers to be properly codified, with the primacy of this Chamber upheld. We believe that this issue should be put to the people of the country in a referendum because it is a change of major constitutional significance.
The prominence given to this issue demonstrates better than anything else how out of touch the Government are. As the Labour party demonstrated in the local elections last week, the Government have no idea—
Mr Kennedy
It takes a lot for the hon. Gentleman, whom I like and admire very much from our European days, to provoke me, but he is accusing the Government of putting forward something that was in the coalition agreement, in our respective party manifestos and in the manifesto on which he stood when he was elected to the House last time around. He asks, “Why now?” It is not as if this debate has suddenly popped up in the last six weeks or six months, or in the couple of years since the coalition was formed; it has been going on for more than a century. Is the position of the Labour party not just complete emergent opportunism—“Make us virtuous, oh Lord, but not yet”?
Mr David
I have a soft spot for the right hon. Gentleman, but it is a bit rich of the Liberal Democrats to accuse the Labour party of opportunism. When the country is faced with an unprecedentedly difficult situation—now, of all times—coming forward with a piece of constitutional reform is a step too far, as far as most people are concerned. As Aneurin Bevan said, politics is all about priorities—that is the religion of politics. For the House at this time to spend what will inevitably be a long time debating this issue will send out a negative message. There is no doubt in my mind that the people of this country will take a dim view of the political priorities of the Government.
Mr David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)
Is it not a fact that those who like fish eat fish when the fish they are presented with is properly cooked and is attractive? Nobody in their right mind would say, “I like fish. Therefore, I am going to eat this piece of rotten fish.” Nothing could be more rotten and ill-thought-through than the legislation that the Joint Committee on the Draft House of Lords Reform Bill had to address.
Mr David
It is difficult to follow that. There is plenty of food for thought in what my right hon. Friend said. I am sure that there will be ample opportunity for those wise words to be considered in detail.
The Opposition will have to wait to see the detailed proposals on a number of the promised Bills in the Government’s programme before establishing our position. For example, on the draft communications data Bill, although we believe that the police and the crime agencies need to keep up with new technology to disrupt terror plots, we also believe that the privacy of individuals needs to be protected. There is also an issue with the Government’s approach. The justification for the legislation is based on secret information. Although we accept that this is a difficult area, we are uncomfortable that the justification for change is based solely on ministerial testimony.
As for other pieces of proposed legislation, let me make specific reference to the justice and security Bill, which was mentioned by the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) among others. Clearly, this Bill will deal with an important and sensitive area, and it is too important for anyone in this House to engage in party political games. We are willing to work with the Government—I hope they will respond positively—to increase both judicial and other independent scrutiny without undermining the protection of the public. This needs to be done in a way that maintains robust safeguards for individual citizens.
We also accept that action is needed with regard to foreign intelligence sharing, but we are concerned that the Government are apparently rushing ahead at full speed, despite the very real concerns expressed about their Green Paper proposals. Concern has been expressed by the Royal British Legion as well as civil liberties groups. To date, in our opinion, the Government have failed to make a strong enough case for closed proceedings in our civil courts, and before the Government bring any Bill forward, it is crucial that they produce more evidence to support their proposals.
A number of Members have referred to the Crime and Courts Bill. The National Crime Agency is essentially a reorganisation of the Serious Organised Crime Agency, which was established by Labour. We are concerned especially about the scrapping of the National Policing Improvement Agency, and we are very concerned about the NCA’s budget.
Earlier today, we had First Reading of the Defamation Bill, and I am glad to see that all the indications are that the Government are following through on the good work of the last Labour Government. The Electoral Registration and Administration Bill also received its First Reading today. This Bill has had a long gestation. We have not had time to study it in detail, but we acknowledge that the Government have moved on significantly from their earlier, rather extreme position and we certainly welcome that. We are in favour in principle, as we always have been, of individual electoral registration, but we are likely to want further movement so that as many people as possible have the opportunity to vote thanks to their inclusion on the electoral register. Democracy demands nothing less.
Unfortunately, on a number of home affairs and justice issues in respect of which we honestly expected legislation, none has been forthcoming. One omission relates to forced marriages. A Home Office consultation ended in March this year, but there is nothing about forced marriages in the Queen’s Speech. Another omission relates to the recall of MPs. I find that surprising because the coalition agreement stated:
“We will bring forward early legislation to introduce a power of recall”.
Well, the opportunity for it is now and we were expecting it, so where is it? Why have the Government not maintained the commitment given in the coalition agreement, and why have they not brought this legislation forward? It will be interesting to hear the Minister’s response to that specific question.
The Parliamentary Secretary, Office of the Leader of the House of Commons (Mr David Heath)
This is a five-year Parliament.
Mr David
The hon. Gentleman says from a sedentary position that this is a five-year Parliament, but he should not forget that the coalition agreement talked about “early legislation” being enacted, which we are clearly not seeing.
Then, of course, there is the Bill on lobbying. Again, the coalition agreement said:
“We will regulate lobbying through introducing a statutory register of lobbyists and ensuring greater transparency.”
Where, then, is the lobbying Bill? I see that the Minister is getting advice. Perhaps he will care to tell us what has happened to this Bill. Does he have it in his inside pocket to bring out at some time in the future? This is important for the Government, because we have all seen the horrendous scandals over the last few weeks and months. Surely the time to bring forward a lobbying Bill, so that we have a clear legislative process on this issue, is now.
Despite some of the speeches that have been made today, we have had a good debate which has highlighted the shortcomings of the Government’s very light legislative programme. It has also demonstrated beyond doubt that this Government lack a sense of mission and purpose. They are an enfeebled Administration, staggering from one crisis to another. Moreover, it is becoming ever clearer that they are a Government devoid of principle and of purpose.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Jonathan Djanogly)
The coalition Government have had a shared goal since entering office: to modernise the justice system so that it delivers better for the public. I want to respond to the many welcome contributions to what I considered to be a very thoughtful debate in the context of our overall ambitions for reform.
Our primary objective on home affairs and justice is to improve the system so that it keeps the public safe and secure and works to cut crime and reoffending. If we can deliver that, we will ensure that there are fewer victims and will raise public confidence. Not least owing to the vital need to control public expenditure in the face of the economic situation, we are determined to show that that can be done affordably, but we are also certain that any changes should be made without our sacrificing fundamental values in which we believe, such as freedom and liberty.
The shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), opened her speech with the Opposition’s standard line that the cuts have hurt but have not worked. It is true that the problems here in Europe and elsewhere in the global economy mean that it is taking us longer than anyone hoped to recover from the biggest debt crisis of our lifetime, but the one thing that would make the situation even worse would be for us to abandon our credible plan and deliberately add more borrowing and even more debt. That would jeopardise the recovery, and would jeopardise the low interest rates that are so important to families and businesses in this country.
I believe that we have already made a good start in delivering our home affairs and justice goals. We are making the police more accountable by moving towards the introduction of police and crime commissioners, and are changing the focus of our prisons to ensure that they are places of productive work rather than idleness. In abolishing ID cards and sorting out the DNA database, stopping the fingerprinting of children without parental consent and scrapping 28 days’ detention, we have also turned the page of civil liberties. We have taken real steps forward on efficiency, reorganising whole areas of justice so that they work for the public better and at a lower cost, while simultaneously bringing about a transparency revolution. All that represents good progress, but we cannot rest on our laurels. That is why the measures on home affairs and justice that we have been discussing today are important. They constitute a coherent and ambitious package which represents the next stage of justice reform.
My hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod) made some important points about the value of women to the economy and about how it could be developed, and also about the benefits of micro-financing. I fully support the view of my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Mr Kennedy)—I believe that the same point was made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake)—that House of Lords reform should not be used as a political football. Whether the Opposition agree is yet to be seen, although what Opposition Members have said today suggests that that is likely to happen.
The right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr Clarke) clearly has strong views on House of Lords reform. He questioned the Government’s position on consensus and the proposed costs of the reform. All those matters will be debated fully as we go up what I think he called the garden path, although I prefer to call it the yellow brick road. My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) observed that the issue should be seen in context, given the urgency of economic issues and the need to punish criminals.
On civil justice, we are building on the principles of efficiency and effectiveness that animate all our reforms by taking long overdue steps to sort out the operation of the family courts, to improve the performance of courts and tribunals, and to address the scandal of delays in our adoption system.
On criminal justice, we are legislating to ensure that we are smarter on crime and better at catching criminals. That is why we are making a step change in the country’s capability to tackle organised and serious crime with the creation of the new National Crime Agency. We must also make sure we are smarter at punishing and reforming offenders. Underpinning all our reforms, we are continuing to expose the false choice offered by those who say we have to choose between our security and our freedom. It is this Government who want to open up our courts to the public via television and who want to strengthen freedom of expression by reforming libel law, and it is this Government who are committed to enhancing judicial and parliamentary scrutiny of our security services while modernising the capabilities of the police and the courts so they can keep the public safe.
There have been many interventions on the subject of police numbers, including by the hon. Member for Manchester Central (Tony Lloyd). We must be clear that the effectiveness of a police force depends primarily on effective deployment of police officers. That is what leads to effective policing. Sir Denis O’Connor has supported that view, and that is where we continue to focus our efforts. The link between officer numbers and crime levels is not simple, but we know that effective deployment is what matters most.
I welcome the support of several Members—including both the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), and the shadow Home Secretary—for setting up the NCA. Through its wider, joined-up remit, the agency will build on the work of its predecessors in tackling organised crime, protecting our borders, fighting fraud and cybercrime and protecting children and young people from sexual abuse and exploitation. The protection of the public will be at the heart of all that this agency does.
As the Bill progresses, the House will want to probe and test its detailed provisions, and I note that the Justice Committee will be keen to review the NCA start-up, as its Chairman, my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), said. I am sure such issues will be scrutinised on Second Reading and subsequently, and I look forward to those debates.
I welcome the Justice Committee Chair’s support for many of the measures in the Crime and Courts Bill. The creation of a single family court will make the family justice system more accessible to the public and improve efficiency. Like him, I look forward to the Westminster Hall debate of 24 May, in which we will be able to consider the family justice system in more detail. I can also offer some reassurance on the question of litigants in person. I hope he is encouraged by the financial support made available by the Ministry of Justice to implement many of the recommendations of the Civil Justice Council for supporting litigants in person.
On immigration, the right hon. Member for Leicester East and others expressed concerns about the removal of a full right of appeal in family visa visit cases. As he will know, new evidence is often submitted on appeal that should have been submitted with the original application. The appeal then in effect becomes a second decision based on new evidence. The key point is that no other visit visa attracts a full right of appeal, and therefore this represents a disproportionate use of taxpayers’ money. Its removal was fully supported during consultation.
Keith Vaz
Will the Minister and the Home Secretary, who is also present, receive a delegation of Members of this House with an interest in these issues? I think a deal can be struck that will be fair to our constituents and that will help the appeal process. We want to look at the quality of the decision making as well as the appeal process. If the Minister is prepared to do that, and if the Home Secretary, through the Minister for Immigration, is prepared to meet the Chair of the Justice Committee, myself and others who have an interest in these issues, I think we can come to a compromise that is acceptable to all sides.
Mr Djanogly
Yes—[Interruption.] The Home Secretary has just advised me that the Immigration Minister would be delighted to meet the right hon. Gentleman and discuss this issue in the detail it deserves.
A number of Members raised the issue of broadcasting court proceedings. I would characterise the various contributions as having given a general—but, in some cases at least, a cautious—welcome to the Government’s proposals. The Government are committed to improving transparency and public understanding of the court system, and allowing broadcasting from courts will contribute to that. Of course, the filming and broadcasting of judicial proceedings must be carefully and sensitively undertaken, and I can assure Members that there will be no filming of victims, witnesses, defendants or jurors. There will of course be restrictions on the use of footage to ensure that it is only used sensitively and for informational purposes.
The hon. Member for Clwyd South (Susan Elan Jones) and my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell) spoke strongly in support of our drug-driving proposals. I can tell my hon. Friend that we are working to ensure that the necessary “type approval tests” for devices to be used in police stations are completed without delay.
The Government’s proposals to reform civil proceedings to enable the courts to take better account of sensitive material and prevent damaging disclosure of intelligence material have been of great interest to the House and the public, and we have had many valuable contributions on that. The Government are committed to ensuring that we can reassure our allies that the confidential basis on which they share intelligence with us can be protected, while ensuring that the courts are able to make real findings on the merits of cases where sensitive information is given. I think the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr David) said that he is opposed to closed courts. Let me say to him—[Interruption.] If he would like to make his position clear, I am happy to give way.
Mr Djanogly
There is a difference there, so we can yet persuade the hon. Gentleman. I am pleased to hear that, and we will do that.
Most people in this country are sickened at the thought of terrorists or suspected terrorists winning, as they have been winning, large sums in civil courts by reason not of their innocence, but because the authorities have not been able to use sensitive intelligence information which, if discussed openly, could endanger public safety in open court. We need a system—with checks and balances, admittedly—that will provide for this issue in the small number of cases where it is relevant.
Our core aim in introducing the Defamation Bill—
Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)
Before the Minister moves on, perhaps he can shed some light on a concern raised by the Royal British Legion and Inquest, about secret inquests. [Interruption.]
Mr Djanogly
I am advised that we are looking carefully at the issue, and we would be pleased to engage with the Royal British Legion and others on it.
Our core aim in introducing the Defamation Bill is to reform the law so that it strikes the right balance between the right to freedom of expression and the protection of reputation. As the points raised illustrate, there is a wide range of views on exactly what that balance should be and how individual issues should be dealt with. We look forward to an extensive and informed debate both here and in the other place as the Bill proceeds.
The draft communications data provisions provide for targeted, practical measures that are essential to enable our law enforcement agencies to keep pace with new technologies, with strong safeguards to protect civil liberties. We can protect the public while continuing to uphold civil liberties in an internet age. As the Home Secretary clearly set out, there will be no single Government database, no real-time monitoring of communications of individuals, and no new powers to intercept e-mails or phone calls of members of the public. That will address the concerns raised by several Members.
My right hon. Friends the Members for Berwick-upon-Tweed and for Carshalton and Wallington raised the issue of collection of data. I can assure them that we will be extending the role of the interception of communications commissioner to oversee the collection of communications data by communications service providers, and it will continue to be the Information Commissioner’s role to keep under review the security of information kept up to the end of the 12-month retention period.
Members clearly share views on the scourge of antisocial behaviour, to which several of them referred. Antisocial behaviour is an issue that really matters to the public, and for too many people it remains a nasty fact of everyday life. Despite the years of top-down initiatives and targets handed out by the previous Government, more than 3 million antisocial behaviour incidents are reported to the police each year and many are not reported at all. That is why this Government want a transformation in the way that antisocial behaviour is dealt with, and I thank hon. Members for their useful contributions and interventions. The Government have stripped away the targets that hampered professionals’ ability to crack down on this kind of crime. We will introduce more effective measures to tackle antisocial behaviour, including replacing the bureaucratic and ineffective antisocial behaviour orders, more than half of which are currently being breached at least once.
Mark Hendrick
The Minister will be aware that antisocial behaviour in Lancashire has been cut in recent years from 155,000 incidents per year to about 100,000 because of Labour’s measures. What does he think a 20% cut to policing will do to that?
Mr Djanogly
As I said, this is as much about how we use police officers as about the number of them.
Alun Michael
Does the Minister recall that I made the strong point that the Government are in danger of being guilty of surrendering the simple concept of an antisocial behaviour order, which has been effective in reducing antisocial behaviour by maintaining the restrictions that it imposes? Will he clear that up, remove the Home Secretary’s threat to get rid of ASBOs and simply make it easier to use that good mechanism?
Mr Djanogly
As I said, ASBOs are proving to have been ineffective and overly bureaucratic, and we are going to replace them with an order that is simpler to use and that works better.
May I congratulate theright hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Alun Michael) on his support for police and crime commissioners? Although I wish him well in his campaign to be one, may I say that this is somewhat of a volte face from his position when Labour was in government?
Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)
Will the Minister confirm that a breach of the proposed replacement for the ASBO—the crime prevention injunction—will not result in a criminal record?
Mr Djanogly
ASBOs are civil orders at the moment. [Interruption.] A breach can lead on to a criminal offence, absolutely it can.
The Government want people to have powers that really work, that can be enforced, that provide faster, more visible justice to communities, that rehabilitate offenders, where possible, and that act as a real deterrent to perpetrators.
Alun Michael
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Surely it should be possible to correct what I am sure is an inadvertent misleading of the House by the Minister—he would not have intended to do it. The ASBO is a civil order. A breach of it is a criminal offence, tested by the criminal quality of evidence.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Further to that point of order, I call Mr Djanogly.
Mr Djanogly
I think that is exactly what I said. If I did not, I am happy to reaffirm it.
The community trigger will empower victims and communities to demand that agencies take action against persistent antisocial behaviour problems. The Government will shortly set out our formal response to the consultation and our new powers, which will put victims and communities at the heart of agencies’ response to this problem.
The Bill dealing with families seeks to ensure that we tackle the root causes of delay in care cases as part of a wider package of reform that was set out in the family justice review. I am grateful for the interventions of my hon. Friends the Members for Milton Keynes North (Mark Lancaster) and for Harrow East in support of the Government’s intention to tackle the delay in care proceedings. I am also grateful to the right hon. Member for Leicester East for his support of the Government’s intention to legislate on a target of six months in care cases.
Reforms to the use of experts in family courts—on both the number and quality—have been rightly raised by the Chair of the Justice Committee. Proposed amendments to the family procedure rules and practice direction on experts were submitted to the family procedure rules committee in April. These amendments seek to ensure that expert evidence is commissioned only where necessary—this, in turn, will save time in proceedings.
On the quality of experts, Ministry of Justice officials have spoken to health regulators on developing minimum standards, and this will be an important area for my Department to improve.
Mr Djanogly
I think that question is for others in the Ministry of Justice and the Home Department to address.
The adoption clauses on ethnicity will also help to reduce the time children have to wait for an adoptive placement and will see more children placed in stable loving homes with less delay and disruption. My hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North gave a very well-informed speech on adoption and my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) spoke very well on the urgency of the early years of a baby’s mental development and the benefits of early intervention—
Business without Debate
Arpley Landfill Site
(12 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)
I thank the Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the right hon. Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Mr Paice), for the work done so far within the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on this difficult issue, the future of the Arpley landfill tip. I am also grateful to his noble colleague, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, with whom I met recently to discuss some of the issues that continue to prevail.
I wish to make a number of specific points about the Arpley site before making some general remarks about UK landfill policy within the context of the EU. It continues to be a disappointment that we fail to emulate those more enlightened countries that have, to all intents and purposes, eradicated the need for landfill sites altogether.
By way of background, Arpley tip is situated very close to the centre of Warrington. The site is huge, covering some 400 acres, and is currently serviced by up to 250 20-tonne lorries every day—that is 500 separate journeys. Up to 10,000 residents live within a square mile of the site and many thousands more are impacted on by the lorries, which wind their way through residential streets to get to the site. The current licence expires in 2013, after nearly three decades, and the operators, WRG—Waste Recycling Group—have submitted an application to continue operations until 2025, a further 12 years.
Not content with having put a landfill site in the middle of a rapidly growing town, the town’s planners decided in their wisdom to build a new housing estate, Saxon Park, less than a quarter of a mile from the entrance to the site. Indeed, the new estate shares an access road with the lorries that move in and out every day. From talking to the residents who bought the houses, it would appear that many of them received verbal assurances that the site would be closed by 2013, which formed part of their decision to buy. In summary, there are two distinct problems with the site and I shall address them both. The first is the logistical disruption caused throughout Warrington by the 500 daily road movements through residential areas to get to the site. The second is the very existence of such a site at such a location.
I will consider the road issue first. The site’s central location means that all the waste brought into the estate must be driven through urban areas. Although Warrington is relatively well served by motorways, Arpley is not and trucks leaving the M62 have to travel through built-up residential suburbs for several miles. The site has a single access road, which is connected to another local road, the Old Liverpool road, that is simply not designed to take such a large volume of traffic at such a velocity, yet all vehicles entering the site must travel along it before turning into the access route. The Victorian-era houses are set quite close to the road and are vulnerable to vibrations. Several have suffered structural damage.
To have to put up with such problems during normal daytime hours is bad enough, but despite a ban on vehicles entering the site before 8 am, many lorries enter the access road well before 7 am and we have seen photographs of parked-up trucks taken as early as 6.45 am. Given that the site operates on a Saturday, that means that residents in the Sankey Bridges area have their sleep patterns disturbed six out of seven days every week as well as having to endure all the dirt, flies and smells associated with a landfill site of this size. In fairness, the operator, WRG, has recognised the problem of unco-ordinated road movements and has proposed a new one-way system for trucks. However, even if that can be properly enforced, it brings additional problems because although those on the busiest part of the route will get some relief, many others will be blighted more than they were previously. It is a question of waking up Peter so that Paul can have a lie-in.
The real solution would be for WRG to use either rail or the ship canal to get the waste to its destination. Planning permission exists for a rail head on the site, but the site operator consistently refuses to make use of it, arguing that its suppliers do not have the facilities to transport waste in that manner. That is a circular argument because suppliers will not invest if they know that there are no reciprocal receiving facilities. A further solution could be to make use of the new facilities provided by port Warrington and the ship canal, although that would take longer to put into place. The reluctance of the site operator to entertain either of those solutions is disappointing and unacceptable.
The real issue at stake concerns the site itself, not just these logistical considerations. It simply cannot be right that a large district is blighted in this way given that from 2013 none of Warrington’s waste will go to landfill either in Arpley or anywhere else. I will return to that point later. First, I want to talk about a development that will exacerbate this issue. WRG proposes to reduce the overall footprint of the site, keeping it away from the end nearest to Saxon Park and stacking the waste higher. Obviously, that is good in that it keeps the waste away from houses, but WRG will gain because such stacking will increase the pressure and result in more landfill gas being produced.
Why does the stacking matter? It matters because previous safety concerns regarding the site will be exacerbated by such major restructuring works. At some point in the mid-1990s, several hundred cattle carcases that were either infected or believed to be infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy were dumped at Arpley—in many cases illegally. It now appears that the current site operator has no idea where those carcases were buried or what their condition is. No definitive research exists on the potential for prions from such carcases to contaminate soil and groundwater, but the best scientific advice is that human exposure to such carcases should be kept to a minimum. Indeed, the Government’s own adviser, Professor Smith, the chair of the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee, recently expressed disquiet about the safety of landfill sites that might have been contaminated in that way. In addition to the risks from animal carcases, Arpley produces other dioxins and poisons such as mercury. As was confirmed in a letter from the Environment Agency in March 2011, no emissions limits for those dioxins and poisons exist, which is concerning. Neither the status quo nor the stacking proposal that could make it worse are acceptable.
I want to talk about landfill policy more generally because an overall solution to this issue will be realised only when we markedly reduce the amount of landfill in the UK. Our track record in the UK is very weak. We send 50% of our waste to landfill, whereas the figure in Germany is 3%, in Holland it is 5%, in Sweden it is 5% and in Denmark it is 5%. Even France, which is a relatively poor performer, sends only 30% of its waste to landfill. Why do all those countries outperform us? First, let me make it clear that it is not because they recycle more—at least not principally so. Under successive Governments, we have increased the amount we recycle from 11% to about 45%. Even Germany recycles only about 55%. No, we are unique in western Europe in utilising so little of our waste to generate energy either from combustion or from anaerobic digestion.
The energy that could be produced in that way is local and relatively green. An oft-quoted example is Denmark in which every new housing estate has combined heat and power so that residents use their own waste to provide their own energy. Government Ministers talk about the hierarchy of waste with recycling being best, energy from waste being next and landfill being worst, but only the first part of that hierarchy is seriously attempted in the UK. I believe the problem is partly that some elements of the environment lobby, including Friends of the Earth, appear to believe that combustion is as bad as landfill. They are wrong to make the perfect the enemy of the good, and if they want to see how wrong they are, let them come to Arpley and see the landfill for themselves.
I make it clear to the Minister that this is not a plea for an incinerator in my constituency; nor am I trying to claim that incineration is more desirable than recycling. What I am saying is that burning waste and harnessing the energy is infinitely preferable to putting it into big holes in the ground. The fact remains that best-practice countries such as Germany recycle more and combust more than the UK, and that must be the way forward.
A recent report produced by the North West Regional Technical Advisory Body on Waste concluded that in 2008 waste from Warrington represented less than 10% of the waste sent to Arpley. A staggering 90% comes from outside the borough. I quote from the report:
“Warrington remains an anomaly, accepting waste that is vastly disproportionate to its own arisings.”
Furthermore, from next year even that tiny percentage will cease. The site will only receive waste from other parts of the north-west of the UK, mainly Liverpool and Manchester. In summary, despite Warrington’s managing to reduce the amount of waste it sends to landfill, we will be punished because neighbouring authorities have failed to do the same.
At one level, I am very encouraged by the new provisions in the Localism Act 2011, which I believe will introduce a new duty for local authorities to co-operate with regard to waste. I look forward to seeing how it can alleviate the issue.
I thank the Minister for listening patiently on a Thursday night with a one-line Whip. My constituents and I will be grateful for any words of support he can offer us. We shall be interested to hear what he has to say about four specific issues. If there are points that he cannot address today, perhaps he could respond to us in writing.
First, there is a hierarchy of waste—recycling is better than incineration and incineration is better than landfill—yet progress from landfill appears painfully slow. Could the Minister update us on his targets and progress? In particular, what more can the Government do to ensure that we begin to emulate the best in Europe in terms of anaerobic digestion and energy from waste—both in community-based and larger installations?
Secondly, given the general and clear direction of the Localism Act, can the Minister give an indication of what that might mean to a town where councillors of all parties are opposed to the granting of a new licence? If localism is to be meaningful on the ground, that must be a significant consideration in any planning appeal.
Thirdly, given that from 2013 Warrington itself will send no waste to landfill, how will that consideration be factored into the planning appeal process? We talk about the duty to co-operate, so surely that must be relevant. A town that produces no landfill waste should not be a dustbin for others.
Fourthly, will the Minister give me an assurance that the Environment Agency will be proactive on Arpley and satisfy itself that there is monitoring of the cattle carcases and of potential BSE issues? Furthermore, will he ensure that mercury and dioxin levels are monitored properly and that any risks are dealt with fast? In particular, can he give an assurance that a new licence will not be issued unless such checks are stringently and explicitly made?
Finally, I invite the Minister to visit the site with me and to meet some of the 10,000 residents affected by it. It cannot be right that in the 21st century a 400-acre site of that type is located so close to so many people who just want to live their lives. Enough is enough.
The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr James Paice)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South (David Mowat) on obtaining the debate. I gather that he was supposed to be having a debate in Westminster Hall on the Arpley landfill site but lost the opportunity when the House prorogued. I am pleased to have the chance to respond to the serious points he has made, and to recognise how diligently he has represented the interests of his constituents, including as he rightly said, holding a meeting with my noble Friend Lord Taylor of Holbeach. In regard to my hon. Friend’s invitation to me to visit Arpley, I am sure that I would thoroughly enjoy it, but I think I must defer to my noble Friend, who is the responsible Minister, as my hon. Friend well knows. That would be more appropriate, although there may be issues of propriety, given that the application is under consideration.
As my hon. Friend may appreciate, I may fail to respond to some of the points that he has raised; I certainly cannot pass judgment on the relative merits of the proposals made by WRG because, as he obviously is aware, the proposals are largely a matter for the relevant planning authority—in this case Warrington borough council—and they must be based on the merits of the application. They are also, as my hon. Friend said, matters for the Environment Agency, which regulates the operations at Arpley landfill through an environmental permit granted to the operator. The decisions made by planning authorities and the Environment Agency are also potentially open to appeal by the applicant. It is therefore important that Ministers, both in the Department for Communities and Local Government and DEFRA, remain impartial in case they are called upon at a later stage in an appellate role.
I also emphasise to my hon. Friend that it is the planning permission that is due to expire in 2013. The licence that he mentioned is, in fact, an environmental permit and that will not expire. Environmental legislation ensures that once granted, operators cannot rid themselves of their obligation to manage the site, so permits remain in force until they are surrendered and sites are returned to a satisfactory state. However, it is likely that the planning application, if granted, would require WRG to apply for a variation to its existing permit to ensure that any risks are reassessed and that appropriate measures are put in place to mitigate that risk.
I fully recognise the concerns, expressed by my hon. Friend, of those living very close to the Arpley landfill site and who may be faced with the prospect of a 12-year extension to the operations there. I am sure that my constituents would have very similar views—and yours, too, Mr Deputy Speaker. Residents living near the site—particularly those living in new housing developments built in the expectation that the site was nearing the end of its life—will perfectly naturally and understandably worry about the continued potential problems and the nuisance from traffic movements, noise, odour and so on from tipping, although I am pleased to hear my hon. Friend refer to the applicant’s proposals to alter traffic movements.
Decisions about the grant of planning permission are always in the first instance a matter for the relevant local authority, acting in accordance with national planning policy. It is during the planning process that concerns, many of which my hon. Friend has expressed, such as the height and the contouring of the site, should be considered, as well as issues such as the routing of traffic, the positioning of site entrances from the public highway and the opportunities for alternative transport by road and rail.
The Environment Agency is charged, along with other bodies, to protect human health and the environment, not just during the operation of the site but also for many years after the site closes. Modern-day landfill sites are subject to stringent technical standards to provide long-term containment of pollutants. Pollution control monitoring of such things as leachate—contaminated water on the site—and the capture and treatment of landfill gas produced from the breakdown of biodegradable waste are all part of that. Sites will remain regulated by the agency after final closure to ensure that the pollution control systems remain operational for the long-term aftercare period needed for landfill sites.
Tipping at landfills is carried out to achieve optimum waste densities in a site, so that its slopes are stable and encourage even settlement of the contours over time. Many factors, such the nature of the waste and the moisture content, determine the rate of landfill gas production. It is not just the issue of pressure, which my hon. Friend mentioned. It is important to capture and treat landfill gas—first, because it reduces the harmful greenhouse gas emissions of methane, and secondly, because it is a form of energy recovery from waste that can be utilised.
As my hon. Friend rightly said, the proposed restructuring of the site would involve over-tipping of some areas previously tipped and completed, but contrary to his understanding, we understand that this would definitely not involve disturbance of the Birchwood area where the carcases of cattle suspected of having BSE were deposited under direction from the then Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. If there was such a prospect, clearly the Environment Agency would have to consult partner agencies, such as the Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency, in assessing any risk from the disposal of suspected BSE cattle in the early 1990s.
The Government consider waste planning authorities to be best placed to create and to deliver waste management strategies for their areas. That means making sure that waste plans inform and are informed by relevant documents, such as the municipal waste management strategy, as well as by the relevant waste collection and disposal authorities working together—and demonstrating how they have done so under the duty to co-operate provisions of the Localism Act 2011—so as to provide effective and sustainable cross-boundary arrangements to meet their needs.
My hon. Friend challenged the Government’s record on landfill, but I assure him that we have been reducing landfill for some time. The number of operational landfill sites in England and Wales has fallen from more than 2,000 when the landfill directive was implemented in 2002 to fewer than 500 now. The amount of waste being landfilled has continued to fall year on year since 2002-03 and is now about 45% lower than a decade ago. We are already meeting our 2013 target to reduce the amount of biodegradable municipal waste sent to landfill. As my hon. Friend rightly said, considerably reduced landfilling helps to explain why many of the landfill sites that remain in operation are not being completed and restored within the time scales originally envisaged, or, as in the present case, are seeking extensions to their period of operation.
Landfill should be the waste management option of last resort and be used only for wastes for which there is no alternative use. The measures outlined in our “Review of Waste Policy in England”, published last June, will play a significant role in pushing wastes up the hierarchy and away from landfill by encouraging the right infrastructure, markets and culture to enable us to treat waste more fully as a resource. I have often said that one man’s waste is another man’s raw material.
Prevention also has a great part to play, and the amount of waste produced is 6% lower than in 2006. The landfill tax—£64 per tonne now, rising to £80 per tonne in 2014-15—remains a key driver to divert waste from landfill, but we want to do better than just diverting waste. We can be more optimistic about recycling—according to the latest figures, we recycle 42.5% of waste. We should also be using a range of alternative methods, including, as my hon. Friend rightly emphasised, energy from waste and anaerobic digestion, adopting the range of options that work best locally—although, as I think he implied, we should not underestimate local opposition to power from waste or anaerobic digestion plants. I have had to deal with both in my constituency.
Even with that push, however, it would remain likely that some waste that could be put to better use would end up in landfill. The introduction of additional restrictions may therefore be warranted to achieve our ultimate aim. As a starting point, we will consult later this year on whether to introduce a restriction on the landfilling of wood waste, with the aim of diverting the still substantial tonnages that end up in landfill to better uses up the waste hierarchy, and delivering clear environmental benefits. I cannot understand why people pour wood into landfill sites.
David Mowat
The Minister says we are making progress on reducing the amount of landfill, which is true, but it still accounts for about 50% of the total, versus 3% in Germany and 5% in the Benelux countries. Will he confirm that the Government’s long-term plan is to achieve similar figures in this country? That is a long way from where we are now.
Mr Paice
I can confirm that it is the long-term plan of the Government to eliminate landfill altogether; my hon. Friend is right to challenge us on that front. On the question of why we are well behind a number of other countries, I will not make excuses for the past, but we have historically had a much larger reliance on landfill sites, because we had a high number of mineral industries, and quarries that required a form of restoration and that were obvious sites for tipping. We also had the natural protection afforded by our largely clay subsoil. We start from further behind, but that is no excuse for not continuing to do better.
I hope that I have covered a number of my hon. Friend’s points. He asked me four questions at the end of his speech. I hope that I have answered the first point, which was about our ambition for waste prevention and the waste hierarchy. Our measures are already beginning to bear fruit, and we want the pace of change to continue and increase. On the second and third points, I defer to the Department for Communities and Local Government on interpretation of the Localism Act 2011, but on meeting the proximity principle—that is, recovering waste at the nearest appropriate facility—I am afraid that there is no expectation that each waste planning authority will deal solely with its own waste.
On the fourth point, I can certainly assure my hon. Friend that the Environment Agency will assess closely any application to vary the permit, and will satisfy itself that the proposals do not result in previously deposited waste posing an unacceptable risk to health or the environment. It will ensure that the permit provides the necessary monitoring of pollutants likely to arise in landfill. My hon. Friend has asked a number of parliamentary questions on the subject. I hope that the answers given by the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon), have addressed some of his concerns. The Environment Agency not only takes notice of what comes from a landfill site, but studies what goes in. From that, it can derive some evidence or indication of what likely pollutants might arise. For instance, there will be dioxins only if there is a significant level of chlorine products in landfill. That is something that the Environment Agency monitors.
I would like to re-emphasise a point that is of huge concern to me as Minister with responsibility for agriculture. My hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South mentioned the knowledge of where carcases likely to be infected with BSE are. As I have said to him, the Environment Agency believes that it knows where they are, and it has identified that the proposed changes are not in that area. If my hon. Friend has any evidence that might disprove that, clearly I would welcome seeing it, because obviously we want to make absolutely sure that there is no risk from that.
I thank my hon. Friend for raising his concerns, which I am sure would have been raised by other Members faced with a similar situation. He has rightly, in the interests of his constituency, raised the problems, and today’s debate gave me the opportunity to provide some reassurance that we have systems that are able to strike an appropriate balance between meeting the needs of society on the one hand, and the protection of people and the environment on the other. We are making great strides in dealing with waste in accordance with the waste hierarchy—a point that he rightly reinforced—and intend to continue to do that. I hope that he can take some comfort from my remarks, and I congratulate him on the debate.
Question put and agreed to.
Ministerial Corrections
Home Department
(12 years ago)
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James Brokenshire
We want the EHRC to become a valued and respected national institution. To do so, it must focus on the areas in which it alone can add value, and it must be able to demonstrate value for taxpayers’ money. We will respond to the consultation shortly. We will also appoint a new chief executive shortly.
[Official Report, 24 April 2012, Vol. 543, c. 252WH.]
Letter of correction from James Brokenshire:
An error has been identified in the response given to the hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Sandra Osborne).
The correct answer should have been:
James Brokenshire
We want the EHRC to become a valued and respected national institution. To do so, it must focus on the areas in which it alone can add value, and it must be able to demonstrate value for taxpayers’ money. We will respond to the consultation shortly. We will also appoint a new Chair shortly.
Defence
(12 years ago)
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Mr Llwyd
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what the total cost to the public purse was of spending by MOD Bicester on third party logistics organisations in (a) 2008, (b) 2009, (c) 2010 and (d) 2011; and what proportion of such spending in each such year was allocated to (i) Palletings, (ii) Hacklings, (iii) Metcalfe Farms Haulage, (iv) Kenyons, (v) Reason Transport, (vi) Andover Transport, (vii) Pertemps agency drivers, (viii) City Sprint, (ix) other private hauliers and (x) other couriers.
[Official Report, 30 April 2012, Vol. 543, c. 1143-1144W.]
Letter of correction from Peter Luff:
An error has been identified in the written answer given to the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) on 30 April 2012.
The answer given was as follows:
Peter Luff
[holding answer 26 April 2012]: The freight and courier contracts used by Logistic Commodities and Services Bicester to transport defence equipment are managed by Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) and are available for use by all Ministry of Defence (MOD) units. The cost of these contracts cannot be attributed to individual sites.
The total expenditure incurred in financial years (FY) 2010-11 and 2011-12 against each enabling contract is shown in the following table:
Contract | FY 2010-11 | FY 201142 |
|---|---|---|
Freight contractors | ||
DSV | 1.96 | 1.17 |
Plantspeed | 1.24 | 0.77 |
DB Schenker | 5.16 | 5.37 |
Parcelforce | 1.50 | 1.44 |
Palletways | 1.99 | 2.86 |
Sheldon and Clayton | 0.06 | 0.30 |
Charles Gee | 0.68 | 0.43 |
Severn Vale | 0.46 | 0,60 |
Wincanton | 1.26 | 1.10 |
NYK Logistics | 0.44 | 0.22 |
DHL | 12.39 | 15.14 |
Eddie Stobart | 0.32 | 0.25 |
GA Newsome | 0.15 | 0.29 |
CTS | 1.32 | 1.11 |
CitySprint (London) | 0.02 | 0.02 |
Ridgeway International | 0.95 | 1.45 |
Courier contractors | ||
CitySprint | 2.53 | 1.82 |
Total | 32.43 | 34.34 |
The total expenditure incurred for the use of Pertemps agency drivers by MOD Bicester in FYs 2009-10, 2010-11 and 2011-12 is shown in the following table:
Contract | FY 2009-10 | FY 2010-11 | FY 2011-12 |
|---|---|---|---|
Pertemps | 1.24 | 1.63 | 0.91 |
For those elements of this question for which we have not provided information, it has not proved possible to respond to the right hon. Member in the time available before Prorogation.
The answer should have been:
Peter Luff
[holding answer 26 April 2012]: The freight and courier contracts used by Logistic Commodities and Services Bicester to transport defence equipment are managed by Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) and are available for use by all Ministry of Defence (MOD) units. The cost of these contracts cannot be attributed to individual sites.
The total expenditure incurred in financial years (FY) 2010-11 and 2011-12 against each enabling contract is shown in the following table:
Contract | FY 2010-11 | FY 201142 |
|---|---|---|
Freight contractors | ||
DSV | 1.96 | 1.17 |
Plantspeed | 1.24 | 0.77 |
DB Schenker | 5.16 | 5.37 |
Parcelforce | 1.50 | 1.44 |
Palletways | 1.99 | 2.86 |
Sheldon and Clayton | 0.06 | 0.30 |
Charles Gee | 0.68 | 0.43 |
Severn Vale | 0.46 | 0.60 |
Wincanton | 1.26 | 1.10 |
NYK Logistics | 0.44 | 0.22 |
DHL | 12.39 | 15.14 |
Eddie Stobart | 0.32 | 0.25 |
GA Newsome | 0.15 | 0.29 |
CTS | 1.32 | 1.11 |
CitySprint (London) | 0.02 | 0.02 |
Ridgeway International | 0.95 | 1.45 |
Courier contractors | ||
CitySprint | 2.53 | 1.82 |
Total | 32.43 | 34.34 |
The total expenditure incurred for the use of Pertemps agency drivers at the LCS Bicester site in FYs 2009-10, 2010-11 and 2011-12 is shown in the following table:
Contract | FY 2009-10 | FY 2010-11 | FY 2011-12 |
|---|---|---|---|
Pertemps | 0.63 | 0.65 | 0.57 |
For those elements of this question for which we have not provided information, it has not proved possible to respond to the right hon. Member in the time available before Prorogation.
Energy and Climate Change
Luciana Berger
To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change how many officials in his Department were working on the (a) Green Deal and (b) Energy Company Obligation on (i) 1 May 2010, (ii) 1 November 2010, (iii) 1 May 2011, (iv) 1 November 2011 and (v) 1 April 2012.
[Official Report, 30 April 2012, Vol. 543, c. 1221-1222W.]
Letter of correction from Gregory Barker:
An error has been identified in the written answer given to the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) on 30 April 2012. Paragraph one makes reference to 49 officials having worked on policy when it should have read that 48 officials had worked on the policy.
The full answer given was as follows:
Gregory Barker
In May 2010 the focus was on Household Energy Efficiency when approximately 49 officials worked on the policy. After the election that policy was re-focused on a new longer term programme, the Green Deal.
From November 2010 to present day the figures are in the following table, broken down in the two areas:
Household energy efficiency | ECO | Green Deal | |
|---|---|---|---|
May 2010 | 48 | — | — |
November 2010 | — | 5 | 46 |
May 2011 | — | 5 | 49 |
November 2011 | — | 8 | 55 |
April 2012 | — | 10 | 56 |
The Green Deal and ECO policy teams also draw in support from officials across Department on, for example DECC lawyers, economists, scientists and statisticians.
The answer should have been:
Gregory Barker
In May 2010 the focus was on Household Energy Efficiency when approximately 48 officials worked on the policy. After the election that policy was re-focused on a new longer term programme, the Green Deal.
From November 2010 to present day the figures are in the following table, broken down in the two areas:
Household energy efficiency | ECO | Green Deal | |
|---|---|---|---|
May 2010 | 48 | — | — |
November 2010 | — | 5 | 46 |
May 2011 | — | 5 | 49 |
November 2011 | — | 8 | 55 |
April 2012 | — | 10 | 56 |
The Green Deal and ECO policy teams also draw in support from officials across Department on, for example DECC lawyers, economists, scientists and statisticians.
Means Testing of Free Bus Passes for Pensioners
Darlaston Road Crossing (Walsall South)
Written Ministerial Statements
National Careers Service and the National Careers Council
(12 years ago)
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The Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning (Mr John Hayes)
On 5 April 2012, I launched the National Careers Service, and published “The Right Advice at the Right Time” in which I said that we would establish an independent National Council for Careers.
I am now writing to announce that I have appointed Dr Deirdre Hughes OBE to be the council’s first chair. Dr Hughes has a wealth of experience in the careers guidance sector; she is a commissioner and member of the executive board of directors at the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES). She was recently awarded an OBE in the 2012 new year honours list for her services to careers guidance. She will be supported on the council by a team of experienced and dedicated specialists drawn from across the public, private and third sector, as well as from the careers profession, and with a range of backgrounds including HR, finance, and communications.
The National Council for Careers will be a driving force for excellence in careers guidance and will provide independent, expert advice to the Government on the future development of the National Careers Service.
The National Careers Service and the National Careers Council will transform the provision of careers guidance, which is a vital part of an efficient labour market which drives growth. I have today published a press release which gives more details including the names of the members of the council. It is available from www.bis.gov.uk.
Anti-avoidance
(12 years ago)
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The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (Mr David Gauke)
I am announcing a change in legislation to protect public finances and prevent tax avoidance. This follows a decision of the Court Justice of the EU which affects the way in which the UK treats certain face value vouchers for VAT.
It is the Government’s intention to introduce legislation as part of the Finance Bill 2012 that will have effect from the date of the announcement. This will align domestic legislation with the relevant EU directive and, additionally, protect revenue and guard against potential artificial avoidance of VAT through the use of face value vouchers.
Although the legislation will apply from 10 May, any VAT due arising from its operation will not become payable until after Royal Assent of the Finance Bill 2012. Until then, suppliers may continue to account for VAT under the current rules.
HMRC have today published a statement on their website explaining the change, together with a technical document containing draft legislation which the Government intend to include in the current Finance Bill by way of amendment. Copies of the documents will be deposited in the Libraries of both Houses.
Education, Youth, Culture and Sport Council
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport (Mr Edward Vaizey)
The Education, Youth, Culture and Sport Council will take place in Brussels on 10-11 May. The culture, audio-visual and sport issues will be taken on 10 May. I will represent the UK at the culture and audio-visual sections of the Council, together with Fiona Hyslop, the Scottish Minister for Culture and External Affairs. Shona Robison, the Scottish Minister for the Commonwealth Games and Sport, will represent the UK for the sport section of the Council.
Audio-visual
The Council is expected to adopt conclusions on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation. These conclusions follow on from the conclusions on Europeana adopted by the Council in 2010 and take account of a Commission recommendation on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation which was adopted in 2011. They note the developments in digitisation in recent years, identify key issues for further progress in this field and invite the member states, the Commission and Europeana to take further measures to maintain progress. The UK will support the adoption of these conclusions.
Culture
The Council will be invited to adopt a partial general approach on the proposal for a regulation establishing the Europe for Citizens programme for 2014-2020. This programme will follow on from an existing EU programme. The UK will support the adoption of the partial general approach.
The Council will also adopt a decision designating Donostia-San Sebastián (Spain) and Wroclaw (Poland) as the European capitals of culture for 2016.
Culture and Audio-visual
The Council will be invited to adopt a partial general approach on the proposal for a regulation establishing the Creative Europe programme for 2014-2020. The programme will follow on from the current Culture, Media and Media Mundus programmes. There will also be a debate on the proposal, on the basis of a presidency discussion paper, focusing on the proposed new loan guarantee facility for the cultural and creative sectors.
The partial general approach does not include the programme budget and the proposed loan guarantee facility. However, the UK will not be able to support it, as it does not provide for selection decisions—that is, decisions about which projects will be awarded EU funding under the programme—to be subject to member state scrutiny through the formal comitology arrangements.
In the debate, I will make clear that the UK is able to support other elements of the partial general approach, and also that we welcome the opportunity to consider the loan guarantee facility in the light of developments in the negotiations on the Multiannual Financial Framework.
Sport
The Council will be invited to adopt conclusions on combating doping in recreational sport. These conclusions refer to the European Union work plan for sport for 2011-2014 which highlights the fight against doping as a priority theme and established an expert group on anti-doping. They set out why doping in recreational sport is an important problem and support the extension of the mandate of the expert group to collate best practices and produce recommendations in this area by the end of 2013. The UK will support the adoption of these conclusions.
There will also be a policy debate on future challenges in the fight against doping including in recreational sport. The UK will state the important role which the EU and its member states have to play in the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) review of the World Anti-Doping Code and that article 10 of the code (regarding the sanctioning of athletes) needs to be amended. The UK will make clear that we are pushing for tougher sentences as part of the WADA review. The UK will also set out its views on the issue of combating doping in recreational sport and note that the education of athletes, particular younger athletes, is a key issue.
Any Other Business
The German delegation will present a paper on the draft Commission communication on state aid for films and other audio-visual work. The UK, France and Austria have assisted in drafting the paper and I will intervene to raise initial concerns regarding the proposals relating to territoriality, that is, the obligation on producers to spend a specific part of their production budget in the territory offering aid, and aid intensity, that is, the amount of aid available as a percentage of the production budget.
The Commission will provide information on its communication on a European strategy for a better internet for children and on the first report on the application of Directive 2010/13/EU (the audio-visual media services directive). I do not foresee a need to intervene on either of these items. Finally, the Cypriot delegation will inform the Council of the priorities for their forthcoming presidency.
Findings of Squirrel HT2 ZJ 247 Board of Inquiry
(12 years ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence (Mr Andrew Robathan)
I wish to inform the House today of the findings of the Army board of inquiry into the accident involving Squirrel ZJ 247 on 29 May 2008.
The purpose of the board of inquiry is to establish the circumstances of the loss and to learn lessons from it; it does not seek to apportion blame.
The board of inquiry was initially convened on 30 May 2008, but was dissolved on 25 July 2008 to ensure the independence of the board of inquiry. The responsibility for the inquiry was, therefore, removed from the training chain of command and was convened by the Commander Joint Helicopter Command on 28 July 2008.
At approximately 1538 hours on Thursday 29 May 2008, Squirrel helicopters HT2 ZJ 247, operating as one of a pair of aircraft during a training sortie, struck a set of three 33 kilo volt wires strung across the Kingscott valley, Devon. The aircraft was seen by the crew of the other Squirrel, and one eye-witness on the ground, to fall through a tree canopy onto the ground. Sadly, the two aircrew lost their lives. Our deepest sympathies remain with the families of those servicemen.
Following extensive investigation, the board concluded the accident was caused by Squirrel ZJ 247 striking the Kingscott valley wires. Contributory factors included the general lack of wire awareness, course details and maps providing little information of the wires within Kingscott valley, a lack of clarity of duties, tasks and responsibilities, and induction training and mentoring elements of qualified helicopter instructor training.
A redacted copy of the board of inquiry is being placed in the Library of the House and on the Ministry of Defence website on the conclusion of the inquest into the deaths of the aircrew. We have been as open as possible and have carefully considered the public interest arguments both for and against disclosure of the information in the report. We have ensured that each redaction is fully justified by an appropriate exemption in the Freedom of Information Act.
I remind the House that the purpose of the inquiry in identifying those factors which contributed to the loss is to identify lessons to be taken forward. The board and the chain of command made 38 recommendations, most of which have already been agreed and acted upon. Decisions on the remainder will be made in the near future.
The board of inquiry into the accident involving Squirrel HT2 ZJ 247 is now complete. I express my gratitude to the president and the board for their painstaking work.
Electoral Registration and Administration Bill
(12 years ago)
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The Deputy Prime Minister (Mr Nick Clegg)
I am announcing today that the Government are introducing the Electoral Registration and Administration Bill into the House of Commons. The Bill will tackle electoral fraud by speeding up the introduction of individual electoral registration (IER) in Great Britain. It will also modernise our electoral registration system, making it more convenient for people to register to vote. The Bill also introduces a number of provisions that will make improvements to the running of elections.
Last June we set out our initial proposals and draft legislation for the introduction of IER (Cm 8108). We published our proposals for consultation and for pre-legislative scrutiny by the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee (PCRC). Also, in July and September 2011, the Government published draft legislation in relation to certain provisions contained in the Bill concerning the administration and conduct of elections for pre-legislative scrutiny by the PCRC (Cm 8150 and Cm 8177).
We are very grateful for the feedback that we have received not only from the Committee, but from debates in Parliament and everyone who took the time to respond to our White Paper. The principle of introducing IER was widely supported by both the cross-party PCRC and those who responded to the White Paper. We listened to the feedback expressed about elements of the Government’s proposals and in our response to the PCRC and public consultation (Cm 8245) we announced a series of changes to the proposals. This included ensuring there were more safeguards in place so that as many eligible people as possible stay on the electoral register during the transition so that we can focus on those people eligible to vote but missing from the register. Since the publication we have been working with stakeholders to further refine our proposals. We have listened, and we have learned, and we are confident that our amended proposals will safeguard the completeness of the electoral register while improving its accuracy.
Today we are also publishing a set of documents alongside the Bill to help explain the effects of the proposals. This includes explanatory notes, a number of impact assessments including a statement of equality considerations and a privacy impact assessment, and a Keeling schedule to make it easier to understand the effect of measures within the Bill. It is also our intention that during the passage of the Bill we will publish draft secondary legislation with more detail on the system we will implement, to help inform parliamentary debate and enable those implementing IER to begin detailed planning as early as possible. Copies of these documents will be placed in the Commons Vote Office, the Lords Printed Paper Office, Libraries of both Houses and will be available online on the Cabinet Office website (www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk) and updated as planning for the introduction of IER progresses.
Veterinary Products Committee and Sub-Committees (Annual Report)
(12 years ago)
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The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr James Paice)
I have received the annual report of the Veterinary Products Committee and its sub-committees 2011, which has been published today.
Copies of the report have been placed in the Libraries of both Houses.
I am pleased to acknowledge the valuable work done by the distinguished members of the Veterinary Products Committee and its sub-committees and thank them for the time and effort dedicated in the public interest to this important work.
Foreign Affairs Council and Development Foreign Affairs Council
(12 years ago)
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The Minister for Europe (Mr David Lidington)
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs will attend the Foreign Affairs Council on 14 May. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for International Development will attend the Development Foreign Affairs Council also on 14 May. Both meetings will be held in Brussels and will be chaired by the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Baroness Ashton of Upholland.
Foreign Affairs Council (FAC)
Afghanistan
Building on commitments made at the Bonn conference in December, Ministers will consider what support the EU can provide towards civil policing in Afghanistan, looking forward to the NATO Chicago summit later this month. Ministers will also look forward to the Tokyo conference in July, where the international community will focus on ensuring the viability of the Afghan state.
This will also be an opportunity for Ministers, through agreed conclusions, to welcome the progress made in Afghanistan and reaffirm the EU’s commitment to supporting a stable and secure Afghanistan. We expect there to be a reference to making a commitment to an inclusive political process reflecting the views of all Afghans, including civil society and women. The conclusions are also likely to emphasise the importance of the Afghan Government making progress on governance and rule of law, including tackling corruption.
Middle East Peace Process
We are seeking conclusions that will reaffirm the EU’s position, that the changes across the Arab world underline the need for progress on the middle east peace process. We expect the conclusions to welcome the exchange of letters between the parties initiated on 17 April; and to call on the parties to pursue actions toward creating the environment of confidence necessary to ensure meaningful negotiations, and refrain from actions that undermine the credibility of the process.
Southern Neighbourhood
Ministers will review developments in Syria, Libya and Algeria.
On Syria, Ministers will take stock of the latest situation on the ground, following Kofi Annan’s expected briefing of the UNSC on 8 May.
On Libya, some partners may call for the EU to increase its post-conflict efforts in Libya, stressing the importance of the EU delegation being fully staffed and the EU playing a central role in co-ordinating member states’ input to the stabilisation effort.
We expect Ministers to follow up the EU monitoring report of Algeria’s parliamentary elections of 10 May. As well as reforms to Algeria’s constitution, the discussion is likely to cover the EU’s engagement with Algeria over the EU-Algeria association agreement. We see Algeria’s engagement, along with those of other countries in the region, as being an important factor in bringing stability, development, and economic prosperity to the region.
Mexico
There is likely to be a brief discussion of plans for the EU-Mexico summit, which will take place in the margins of the Los Cabos G20 summit scheduled for the 18-19 June. We support EU engagement with Mexico, which is a valued and important international partner.
Russia
Ministers will review the EU’s relations with Russia following President Putin’s inauguration and ahead of the EU-Russia summit in St Petersburg on 3 and 4 June.
Ukraine
Ministers will discuss the situation in Ukraine, including the continuing use of selective justice. They will consider the need to ensure free and fair parliamentary elections in October, and the importance of Ukraine making progress on a commonly agreed reform agenda. The discussion takes place against a backdrop of heightened tensions over the Euro 2012 competition, and the treatment of Yulia Tymoshenko.
Development FAC
Council Conclusions on Agenda for Change and Budget Support
We expect Ministers to adopt the Council conclusions for both the Agenda for Change and The Future of EU Budget Support with limited discussion. The coalition Government welcome both sets of conclusions and have ensured a strong focus on poverty reduction, results, increased transparency and value for money throughout.
2012 Annual Report on EU Develo pment Aid Targets
Ministers will discuss the findings of the Commission’s annual report 2012 on EU development aid targets. Council conclusions are expected to be adopted welcoming the report. The discussion is likely to focus on how to achieve the EU aid commitment to spend 0.7% of GNI on aid by 2015.
This report is welcome as a means to hold other member states to account and the coalition Government will continue to press others to fulfil their aid commitments.
Burma
Ministers will discuss the current situation in Burma. This will be an opportunity to set the direction for a properly planned and co-ordinated step-up in aid to Burma in response to the recent reforms.
Rio+20
Development Ministers may discuss Rio+20, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development.
Council Conclusions on food security under the Horn of Africa initiative
Commissioner Piebalgs will present the Commission’s approach to SHARE (Supporting Horn of Africa Resilience). The Council will adopt conclusions welcoming the approach and recognising the importance of support to build resilience in the horn of Africa.
Council Conclusions on Policy Coherence for Development (PCD)
Council conclusions will be adopted by Ministers with no discussion.
State of play on Joint Programming
Commissioner Piebalgs will present the latest situation in regards to joint programming. The coalition Government believe that any incentives for improved EU co-ordination, including joint programming approaches, need to come out of country-led processes, ongoing partnership discussions and must be owned by the partner country. We will not accept any Brussels-led processes.
International Family Planning
The Secretary of State for International Development will update the Council on the plans of the coalition Government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to address the urgent need for increased access to family planning in developing countries. The UK will be holding a global summit in London on 11 July 2012.
Abu Qatada
(12 years ago)
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The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mrs Theresa May)
Yesterday, the panel of the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights met and rejected Abu Qatada’s request for a referral of the Court’s 17 January judgment to the Grand Chamber.
This decision means that the rule 39 injunction preventing Qatada’s deportation has now been lifted, and our deportation action against him—through the UK’s courts—can now resume. As I told Parliament in my oral statement on 17 April, the assurances and information we have received from the Jordanian authorities mean that we can be confident that Qatada will be deported within the law, although the process could still take many months.
There are now two routes open to us. The first is to certify his appeal as clearly unfounded. This would prevent him having a Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) appeal before deportation. The bar for certification is set very high. It would apply only when an immigration appeal is bound to fail, and it is a decision which could be challenged by way of judicial review.
The alternative, if the case is not certified, is that Qatada may appeal my refusal to revoke his deportation order, resulting in a further hearing before SIAC with the potential for further appeals on points of law domestically and to the ECHR.
I am taking legal advice on these options and will make a decision shortly.
The panel of five judges also found that Qatada’s application was in time. We disagree with that finding. We will write to the Court reiterating our understanding of the deadlines for seeking referrals to the Grand Chamber. We will also request that the Court publishes clear guidance on this timing point for future cases.
Counter-terrorism Codes of Practice
(12 years ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (James Brokenshire)
The Terrorism Act 2000 (Codes of Practice for the Exercise of Stop and Search Powers) Order 2012 has been laid before Parliament today. This order introduces codes of practice for Great Britain and Northern Ireland, governing the use of terrorism stop and search powers. It reflects one of the recommendations from the Government’s review of counter-terrorism and security powers, published in January 2011. The review recommended that stop and search powers under sections 44 to 47 of the Terrorism Act 2000 which, when and where authorised, allowed police to carry out stops and searches without reasonable suspicion, should be repealed and replaced with a more focused power. This recommendation was based on the Government’s commitment to ensure that our counter-terrorism powers are both effective and fair.
The Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 provides the police with more circumscribed powers to authorise stop and search of persons and vehicles without reasonable suspicion (section 47A) in exceptional circumstances. This places the powers provided by the Terrorism Act 2000 Remedial Order 2011 on a permanent footing. The Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 also changes stop and search powers in the Terrorism Act 2000 (sections 43 and 43A) which require reasonable suspicion to enable searches of vehicles or their occupants. The powers contained within the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012, and the robust statutory framework provided by these codes, provide the police with the powers they need to protect the public while ensuring that there are robust safeguards to prevent a return to the previous widespread misuse of stop and search powers.
A further recommendation from the Government’s review of counter-terrorism and security powers was to introduce provisions contained in the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 which will enable the post-charge questioning of terrorist suspects. Post-charge questioning of terrorist suspects could help in prosecutions and may encourage terrorist suspects to assist investigations. In order to allow post-charge questioning to be commenced, and to make a number of other necessary changes, three orders have been laid which make changes to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) codes of practice C, G and H and introduce a new code of practice for the video recording with sound of interviews carried out under section 41 of, and schedule 7 to, the Terrorism Act 2000 and post-charge questioning of terrorist suspects under the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008.
The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (Codes of Practice) (Revision of Codes C, G and H) Order 2012 makes changes to the PACE codes of practice relating to detention, treatment and questioning (code C), power of arrest (code G) and detention, treatment and questioning of suspected terrorists (code H). Other than the changes to code H relating to post-charge questioning, the major substantive changes to codes C and H increase safeguards in the procedure to be followed by the police where a detainee changes their mind about wanting legal advice and aid the efficient operation of custody suites by clarifying what the custody officer can delegate to other staff. The changes to code G, alongside what is now section 149 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, deliver on three coalition commitments by giving guidance to police officers considering making an arrest on how to consider whether the individual was acting in self-defence, to protect another or to maintain discipline in a school.
The Terrorism Act 2000 (Video Recording with Sound of Interviews and Associated Code of Practice) Order 2012 and the Counter Terrorism Act 2008 (Code of Practice for the Video Recording with Sound of Post-Charge Questioning) Order 2012, introduce a new code of practice for the video recording with sound of interviews carried out under section 41 of, and schedule 7 to, the Terrorism Act 2000 and post-charge questioning of terrorist suspects under the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008. These changes will ensure the necessary safeguards are in place to enable the post-charge questioning powers to be commenced shortly.
Equality Act 2010 (Harmonisation Power)
(12 years ago)
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The Minister for Equalities (Lynne Featherstone)
I am required under subsection (11) of section 203 of the Equality Act 2010 to report to Parliament on the exercise of a harmonisation power provided for in that section.
This reporting requirement is triggered every two years, beginning now, with the second anniversary of Royal Assent to the Act.
I am accordingly today informing the House that no use has been made of the power in section 203.
Appointments and Diversity: A Judiciary for the 21st Century
(12 years ago)
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The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Kenneth Clarke)
The judiciary play a critical role in the administration of justice. It is therefore vital that we select candidates for judicial office on merit, through fair and open competition, from the widest range of eligible candidates. However, despite progress, the composition of our judiciary still does not adequately reflect the society it serves.
This issue matters for obvious reasons of fairness, efficiency and enhancing public confidence in the justice system. That is why in November last year I published a consultation which proposed a number of initiatives that aimed to address issues that had been identified with the current system of appointing judges. We have considered carefully the responses received to our consultation and are particularly grateful to the House of Lords Constitution Committee for their own inquiry into judicial appointments, which ran concurrent to our own consultation, as it provided important additional insight and suggestions surrounding our policy proposals.
We propose to take forward a number of the proposals, and these will be included in the Crime and Courts Bill, which has been introduced today. The proposals being taken forward include the introduction of part-time working to the High Court, Court of Appeal and the UK Supreme Court, as well as provisions that will enable the application of the positive action provisions to judicial appointments. These proposals will definitely not undermine the principle that all appointments will be made on merit.
The overall effect of these changes will be to achieve the proper balance between executive, judicial and independent responsibilities; improve clarity, transparency and openness; create a more diverse judiciary that is reflective of society; and deliver speed and quality of service to applicants, the courts and tribunals and value for money to the taxpayer, ensuring that our judiciary, which is already a byword for integrity, independence and excellence, evolves into a modern, outward-facing institution that is fit for the 21st century and beyond.
The House of Lords Constitution Committee report from their inquiry into judicial appointments made reference to a majority of our consultation proposals and the comments of the Committee have been referenced within our consultation response, which will be published tomorrow. However, their report also made comment on a number of issues that were not included within our consultation and as such I will be bringing forward a Command Paper towards the end of May to respond to these additional recommendations.
Our response to consultation is available online at: http://www.justice.gov.uk/consultations/closed-with-response.
Service Personnel (Deaths Overseas)
(12 years ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Jonathan Djanogly)
My hon. Friend the Minister for the Armed Forces and I wish to make the latest of our quarterly statements to the House giving details of the inquests of service personnel who have died overseas. As always, we would like to express our abiding gratitude to all of our service personnel who have served, or are now serving, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our thoughts remain with the families of those service personnel who have given their lives for their country in connection with the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. We particularly remember the families of the 15 service personnel who have died since our last statement in January.
In this statement we are announcing the current status of inquests conducted by the Wiltshire and Swindon coroner, the Oxfordshire coroner, and other coroners in England and Wales. This statement gives the position at 3 May 2012.
I have placed tables in the Libraries of both Houses to supplement this statement. The tables display the status of all current cases and the date of death in each case. They include information about those cases where a board of inquiry or a service inquiry has been held.
The Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Justice will continue to work closely together, seeking to improve our processes and to continue the Government’s support for coroners who are conducting these inquests. We would take this further opportunity to express our thanks to coroners and their staff, and to all who seek to support families and provide information, throughout the inquest process and afterwards.
To prevent a backlog of inquests from developing, both Departments have provided funding for additional resources since October 2007. Prior to 1 September 2011, these resources were provided to the Wiltshire and Swindon coroner, Mr David Ridley, because the repatriation of service personnel took place at RAF Lyneham, which was within his district. Following the transfer of repatriation ceremonies to RAF Brize Norton on 1 September 2011, we are now also providing additional resources to the Oxfordshire coroner. We wish to thank Mr Nicholas Gardiner, who recently retired as Oxfordshire coroner, and to wish his successor, Mr Darren Salter, well.
Current status of inquests
Since the last statement there have been 20 inquests into the deaths of service personnel on operations in Iraq or Afghanistan. A total of 537 inquests have been held into the deaths of service personnel who have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, including 24 service personnel who died in the UK of their injuries. No formal inquest was held in three other cases. In two of these cases the deaths were taken into consideration during inquest proceedings for those who died in the same incident. In the third case, where the serviceman died of his injuries in Scotland, it was decided not to hold a fatal accident inquiry.
Open inquests
Fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan
There are currently 44 open inquests to be concluded into the deaths of service personnel who died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Twenty of these involve deaths in the last six months.
The Wiltshire and Swindon coroner has retained 11 of the remaining open inquests, the Oxfordshire coroner has retained 14 and 19 are being conducted by coroners closer to the next of kin. Hearing dates have been set in four cases.
There is one remaining open inquest into deaths from operations in Iraq.
Inquests into the deaths of service personnel who returned home injured
Six inquests remain to be held for service personnel who returned home injured and subsequently died of their injuries. Those cases will be listed for hearing when the continuing investigations are completed.
We shall continue to inform the House of progress.
Transparency in the Justice System
(12 years ago)
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The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Kenneth Clarke)
The Government have today introduced legislation to enable the filming and broadcast of selected court proceedings in England and Wales.
As a first step, we plan to allow filming of judgments and legal arguments in the Court of Appeal. Cases in the Court of Appeal normally deal with complex issues of law or evidence, and victims and witnesses rarely appear in order to provide new evidence. Given the complexity of legal issues in Court of Appeal cases, we believe that allowing advocates’ arguments to be filmed in addition to judgments would be more likely to improve public understanding of the criminal justice system than judgments alone.
We are clear that this should not be at the expense of the proper administration of justice, and that protecting the interests of victims and witnesses must remain paramount. Existing reporting restrictions will continue to apply and we have no intention of allowing victims, witnesses, defendants or jurors to be filmed. However, we believe that television has a role to play in opening up the criminal justice system, and are therefore removing the ban on cameras in courts to allow broadcasting in certain limited circumstances.
The Government hope to see broadcasting extended to judges’ sentencing remarks in the Crown Court in due course, and we are working with the judiciary to achieve this.
A paper has been deposited in the Libraries of both Houses, providing more detail on our proposals to allow broadcasting of selected court proceedings.
Government's Legislative Programme 2012-13
(12 years ago)
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The Leader of the House of Commons (Sir George Young)
Following yesterday’s State Opening of Parliament, and for the convenience of the House, I am listing below 15 Bills which the Government intend to bring forward in the current Session:
Banking Reform Bill
Children and Families Bill
Crime and Courts Bill
Croatia Accession Bill
Defamation Bill
Electoral Registration and Administration Bill
Energy Bill
Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill
European Union (Approval of Treaty Amendment Decision) Bill
Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill
House of Lords Reform Bill
Justice and Security Bill
Pensions Bill
Public Service Pensions Bill
Small Donations Bill
In addition, a draft Care and Support Bill, a draft Local Audit Bill, a draft Water Bill and a draft Communications Data Bill were included in the Queen’s Speech. The Government intend to bring forward measures to maintain the ability of the law enforcement and intelligence agencies to access vital communications data under strict safeguards to protect the public, subject to scrutiny of draft clauses. Other draft measures for pre-legislative scrutiny will be published in the course of the session.
The Government also intend to bring forward a Scottish Law Commission Bill on Scottish Unincorporated Associations and Partnerships, if parliamentary time allows.
Following the resolution of the House of 13 October 2011, which invited me and the Procedure Committee to put in place a pilot scheme for explanatory statements on amendments to Bills, I will write shortly to the chair of the Procedure Committee with proposals for such a pilot in respect of two Bills to be introduced early in this session. I hope to make a further announcement soon.
Following the pilot for public reading stage of the Protection of Freedoms Bill in the last Session, I intend to bring forward proposals for a further pilot in respect of at least one Bill in the course of this Session. I will make a further announcement in due course.
Detailed information about each of these Bills can be accessed from the Number 10 website at: www.number10. gov.uk/queens-speech-2012.
Government's Legislative Programme 2012-13 (Northern Ireland)
(12 years ago)
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The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Mr Owen Paterson)
The second Session UK legislative programme unveiled in the Queen’s Speech on 9 May contains measures of relevance to the people of Northern Ireland.
The following is a summary of the legislation announced in the Queen’s Speech and its impact in Northern Ireland. It does not include draft Bills.
The list also identifies the lead Government Department.
1. The following Bills extend to Northern Ireland, in whole or in part, and deal mainly with excepted/reserved matters. Discussions will continue between the Government and the Northern Ireland Executive to ensure that where provisions that are specifically for a transferred purpose are included in any of these Bills, the consent of the Northern Ireland Assembly will be sought for them:
Justice and Security (Home Office/Ministry of Justice)
EU (Approval of Treaty Amendment Decision) (Foreign and Commonwealth Office)
EU (Croation Accession) (Foreign and Commonwealth Office)
House of Lords Reform (Cabinet Office)
Small Donations (HM Treasury)
Groceries Code Adjudicator (Business, Innovation and Skills)
Banking Reform (HM Treasury)
2. The following Bills may extend to Northern Ireland to varying degrees. They require the consent of the Northern Ireland Assembly in relation to those provisions in the devolved field:
Crime and Courts (Home Office/Ministry of Justice)
Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (Business, Innovation and Skills)
Public Service Pensions (Department for Work and Pensions)
Energy (Department of Energy and Climate Change)
Discussions will continue between the Government and the Northern Ireland Executive on Bills that might include provisions that require the consent of the Northern Ireland Assembly.
3. The following Bills will have limited or no application in Northern Ireland:
Electoral Registration and Administration Bill (Cabinet Office)
Defamation (Ministry of Justice)
Pensions (Department for Work and Pensions)
Families and Children (Department for Education)
Government's Legislative Programme 2012-13 (Scotland)
(12 years ago)
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The Secretary of State for Scotland (Michael Moore)
The legislative programme for the Second Session was outlined by Her Majesty on Wednesday 9 May.
The Government remain committed to reducing the deficit and restoring economic stability. This programme of legislation will focus on ensuring economic growth across the United Kingdom including Scotland.
We will implement important reforms of the banking system to promote a competitive economy and protect and sustain jobs. These reforms will also reduce risk in the system to help guard against a repeat of the financial crisis and provide greater stability in our banking system.
The Government will reform the energy market to help create a sustainable and greener energy future as well as supporting the transition to a greener economy with the creation of the new United Kingdom Green Investment Bank.
We will implement regulatory reform to reduce burdens on business and will take forward measures to reform the pensions system to make it fair and financially sustainable. We will create greater choice and flexibility for parents in how they share the care of their child in the first year, helping both parents to achieve a better work and family balance. A Groceries Adjudicator Bill will ensure large supermarkets treat their suppliers fairly and lawfully.
We will continue to take forward measures to renew the constitution of the United Kingdom by reforming the composition of the House of Lords, making the registration system for electors more secure and working toward the end of the male bias in succession to the Crown.
In this Session we will protect freedom of speech and strengthen the oversight of the security and intelligence agencies and bring forward important measures to prevent and reduce organised crime.
This statement provides a summary of the legislation announced in the Queen’s Speech and its application to Scotland. It does not include draft Bills. Fourteen of the 15 new Bills mentioned in the Queen’s Speech for this Session of Parliament contain provisions that apply in Scotland, either in full or in part.
In addition to the Government Bills listed here we will seek to support the Scottish Law Commission in bringing forward measures to reform the law in relation to Scottish Partnerships and Unincorporated Associations.
The Government are committed to the principles of the Sewel convention. As in the First Session of this Parliament, we will work with the Scottish Government to secure consent for Bills that contain provisions requiring the consent of the Scottish Parliament.
The Bills listed in section 1 will apply to Scotland, either in full or in part. The Bill listed in section 2 will not apply in Scotland.
Section 1: Legislation applying to the United Kingdom, including Scotland (either in full or in part);
Crime and Courts
Families and Children
Enterprise and Regulatory Reform
Justice and Security
EU (Approval of Treaty Amendment Decision)
EU (Croatian accession)
Electoral Registration and Administration Bill
Public Service Pensions
House of Lords Reform
Groceries Code Adjudicator
Small Donations
Pensions
Banking Reform
Energy
Section 2: Legislation that will not apply in Scotland
Defamation
Government's Legislative Programme 2012-13 (Wales)
(12 years ago)
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The Secretary of State for Wales (Mrs Cheryl Gillan)
The Government’s legislative programme for the Second Session of Parliament was announced in the Queen’s Speech on 9 May. The programme contains a wide range of measures that will apply to Wales, either in full or in part.
The Government are committed to working with the Welsh Government to secure agreement to any provisions that require the consent of the National Assembly for Wales. The following is a summary of the legislation announced in the Queen’s Speech and its application to Wales.
1. The following Bills, and draft Bills, would extend to Wales and deal mainly with non-devolved matters:
Banking Reform Bill
Crime and Courts Bill
Defamation Bill
Electoral Registration and Administration Bill
Energy Bill
Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill
European Union (Approval of Treaty Amendment Decision) Bill
Croatia Accession Bill
Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill
House of Lords Reform Bill
Justice and Security Bill
Pensions Bill
Public Service Pensions Bill
Small Donations Bill
Draft Communications Data Bill
2. Bills, and draft Bills, where some provisions may apply to Wales:
Children and Families Bill
Draft Care and Support Bill Draft Water Bill
3. Draft Bills with limited impact or no application to Wales:
Draft Local Audit Bill
Work Programme (Prime Contractor)
(12 years ago)
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The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Chris Grayling)
I am pleased to inform the House that there has been a recent change in the prime contractor network delivering the Government’s flagship Work programme.
Interserve, the international support services and construction group, on 4 May 2012 announced the acquisition of the Work programme provider, Business Employment Services Training Ltd (BEST), who are one of the UK’s leading providers of training and development for jobseekers and employers. Interserve is already involved in the Work programme through its Rehab Jobfit joint venture, which has contracts in Wales and the south-west.
This acquisition increases Interserve’s participation in this key area of Government policy and shows the continued appetite for further investment in the welfare-to-work market. I am delighted by this investment by Interserve which underlines the financial commitment being made by some of the UK’s leading employment and training organisations into helping the long-term unemployed find sustained employment through the Work programme.
Credit Union Feasibility Study
(12 years ago)
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The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb)
The Government have previously announced that we will work with credit unions to look at ways in which the future progress of this sector can best be supported.
A feasibility study looking at how credit unions could become sustainable and what more can be done to grow this sector, so that the affordable credit they offer gets to more people who need it, is now complete.
Credit unions have been doing a good job and we want to work with them to do more to give people on low incomes a real alternative to high cost lenders and loan sharks.
The feasibility study showed there is a market and demand from low income consumers for modern banking products and services, and that the total market could be as large as 7 million people.
Credit unions are ideally placed, serving their local communities, to help meet this demand and serve an additional 1 million people taking their membership up to 2 million.
So we are today publishing the feasibility study report to seek responses on the recommendations and what it means for the sector to ensure our plans reflect these views.
I will place a copy of the feasibility study report in the House Library later today.
Arrangement of Business
Baroness Anelay of St Johns
My Lords, with the leave of the House, I will make a short statement about business. It is usual to do so at this time in a new Session, to try to give the House a flavour of what the next week or two may hold. I know that, with the assistance of the opposition Chief Whip, Forthcoming Business will shortly be available to the House.
All of what I am about to say will be set out in our first edition of that Forthcoming Business. However, in summary, the debate on the Motion of my noble friend Lord Cope of Berkeley that an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty in reply to the gracious Speech will continue until the end of Thursday May 17—one day more than usual. I expect that the slightly, but not wholly, unusual amendment to the humble Address, in the name of the noble Baroness the Leader of the Opposition, will be both moved and, if necessary, divided upon on Wednesday, with the debate concluding on Thursday.
The following week, we will take a debate on the Olympics and two Second Readings. On Thursday, the Session’s series of Back-Bench debates will start with two balloted debates. I understand that the ballot for those debates will be drawn in the Minute Room next Tuesday, 15 May. It is possible to continue tabling Motions for that ballot until that time.
The following week, commencing 28 May, we will take a further Second Reading and a day of one-hour Questions for Short Debate, subject to a Motion later this week. I know that noble Lords are very keen on Questions for Short Debate and that it is an important matter for Back-Benchers. We will then adjourn a day early for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Recess.
The week of our return from the Diamond Jubilee Recess will be devoted to the Second Readings of the Bills carried over in the other place last Session, and a Thursday debate.
European Union (Approval of Treaty Amendment Decision) Bill [HL]
Crime and Courts Bill [HL]
Arbitration and Mediation Services (Equality) Bill [HL]
Online Safety Bill [HL]
Business of the House
(12 years ago)
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Lord Strathclyde
To move, pursuant to the resolution of the House of 28 March, that in the event of a Trusts (Capital and Income) Bill being read a first time in the same form as it stood at the end of the last session of Parliament, Standing Order 46 (No two stages of a Bill to be taken on one day) be dispensed with to enable the Bill to be read a second time pro forma.
Trusts (Capital and Income) Bill [HL]
(12 years ago)
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Queen’s Speech
(12 years ago)
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Lord Cope of Berkeley
That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty as follows:
“Most Gracious Sovereign—We, Your Majesty’s most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament assembled, beg leave to thank Your Majesty for the most gracious Speech which Your Majesty has addressed to both Houses of Parliament”.
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Lord Strathclyde)
My Lords, I am very pleased to be able to open the days of debate ahead on the humble Address. I spoke yesterday on a Motion to adjourn the House, and I said then that I would be speaking today to put some flesh on the bones of some of the constitutional announcements made in the gracious Speech.
We have agreed through the usual channels that for today and Monday the principal topic for debate will be constitutional affairs. I know that this is a subject which the House takes very seriously and is in many respects uniquely placed to comment on. I am pleased to see so many speakers signed up for this debate and I know that we will benefit from the expertise available in this Chamber.
We are an outward-looking and inclusive nation, and we adapt inevitably to the world changing around us. That is why the Prime Minister announced last year that we will reform the rules governing royal succession. With the agreement of 15 other Commonwealth realms of which Her Majesty is also head of state, we will bring forward proposals to ensure that a daughter will be treated the same as a son in the line of succession. Once we have agreed the way forward, we will bring forward legislation when parliamentary time allows. The detail is of course still the subject of discussions, but agreement in principle to take forward these changes has already been secured at the very highest level, as the Prime Minister and other Commonwealth Heads of Government made clear in Perth last year.
The Government will also bring forward legislation to tackle electoral fraud, by introducing individual electoral registration requiring electors to register individually rather than by household. In doing so, individuals will have to provide information to verify their application. This will update our electoral registration system, making it easier and more convenient for people to register to vote. New methods of registration, such as online registration, will also be looked at and our aim is to tackle electoral fraud, increase the number of people registered to vote and improve the integrity of the register. By 2015, every individual’s entry on the register will have been verified.
I am of course aware that the most significant change to our constitutional arrangements which was announced in the gracious Speech, and perhaps that of most interest to many speakers today, is the proposal to change the composition of this House. I know from a most useful and meticulous debate last week that noble Lords are fully appraised of the contents of the draft House of Lords reform Bill and the Joint Committee’s report on that Bill, and indeed the alternative report on it. In summary, the draft Bill proposed to change the way in which people come to this House. Nearly all are currently recommended by leaders of political parties. The Bill would change this so that most Members of the House of Lords would be elected directly by the people. In doing this, the Bill would bring democratic legitimacy to the reformed House of Lords. For the first time, the people who obey the laws of this country would be able to elect the people in the second Chamber who helped make those laws. The second Chamber will have a democratic mandate with which to do its work.
Furthermore, the size and membership of the House of Lords would be substantially reduced, and elected Members would come from all regions and nations of the UK. The House of Lords would also, for the first time, be able to expel Members who have committed serious offences. We intend to bring this Bill forward now because we believe the time has come for Parliament to take a view on what has become a well rehearsed issue. All three major political parties agree that reform of your Lordships’ House is needed. We all recognise the importance of bringing increased democratic legitimacy into our second Chamber. Now is the time to start taking actual decisions on how to make it happen.
There is not a single person who has joined the House of Lords since 1997 who cannot have been wholly aware of the proposals for change. Indeed, change has rightly been a feature of this House during this transitional phase, as the membership of this House has continued to evolve. Nor have our customs and conventions been set in stone over that period. Indeed, over the course of the last Session alone we set many uncomfortable precedents. By September last year, the proportion of Bills sent to Grand Committee in a full-length Session had fallen to a 10-year low, prompting a vote on the commitment of the Welfare Reform Bill—which, incidentally, turned out to be a resounding success. We witnessed the longest Committee stage of a Bill since the early 1970s and more Bills taking longer than eight days in Committee than did so over the entirety of the last Parliament.
We saw Third Readings of Bills take ever longer, with many important votes and amendments unnecessarily postponed until later stages or amendments being brought back time and again that had already been properly disposed of. We broke with convention by pressing amendments rejected by another place on the grounds of financial privilege. Even the Leader of the Opposition absurdly voted against the advice that she had previously given as Leader of the House. This suggests that, irrespective of the progress of proposals for reform, the House is already more assertive, more willing to challenge the primacy of the House of Commons and, on occasion, prepared to test the conventions around reasonable time.
The future of this House has been hanging in the balance ever since we embarked on the first phase of reform that the Labour Party started in 1998. It is now time to move on to the second phase. It seems so long since 1999, when the Labour Party said that the transitionary House would exist for only a very short period. That party promised us early reform, and in government it accepted by-elections to replace dead hereditary Peers because stage two would come along so soon. I very much hope that noble Lords opposite who are due to speak from the Front Bench will be able to explain Labour’s failure over the past 12 years, and why it never delivered the promised democratic legitimacy that Tony Blair yearned for in 1997—yet another failure.
Lord Cormack
I am most grateful to my noble friend for giving way. Is he aware that when Tony Blair made his last appearance before the Liaison Committee in another place, he made it abundantly plain that he did not think that this place should be subject to direct elections?
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, I am aware of that. I am particularly impressed that those questions were aimed at those in the Labour Party and my noble friend is now answering questions posed to them. I want the Labour Party to tell us whether it agrees with Tony Blair last year or in the late 1990s. That is the question we need to get to the bottom of.
The reform Bill that we introduce in this Session will take account of the work done so far. It will build on the commissions, White Papers and cross-party working groups, most of which were chaired by senior members of the Labour Party in government pleading with us to create a consensus so that they could get on with stage two of reform. When we come forward with our Bill, it will take account of the Joint Committee’s report and conclusions on the draft Bill, which will no doubt leave their mark on our proposals. I say, with the noble Lord, Lord Richard, in his place, that we are very pleased that the Joint Committee has broadly confirmed its support for a mainly elected House of Lords and are reassured that the Government and the Joint Committee agree on so many of its key elements.
I do not underestimate what a task it will be to resolve those issues that remain outstanding, nor to come forward with a Bill that will gain support across the parties in both Houses. We wish to proceed by consensus, and we recognise that that will be achieved only by bringing the Front Benches of all three parties with us—and, I hope, their Back Benches too. We do not expect simply to stumble upon a consensus; we have to build it. So the Labour Party will have to make up its mind what kind of second Chamber it is supporting, and will have to choose whether it is going to be part of that consensus.
Lord Elton
My Lords, will my noble friend confirm that he is now withdrawing the definition of consensus that he gave before Prorogation of being whatever the House of Commons would give a majority to?
Lord Strathclyde
No, my Lords. However, I think that my explanation of a consensus was misunderstood. Any student of this subject, as I have been over the past 15 years, will know that there is no consensus in the House of Commons without that consensus being made from all three main parties. That was the point. Unless there is a majority in the House of Commons, the Bill will not get passed, and unless it is supported right across the main parties, there will not be that majority in the House of Commons.
Lord Crickhowell
My Lords, unless I misheard him, my noble friend appears to have produced a new definition of consensus: that it is what is agreed by the Front Benches in both Houses.
Lord Strathclyde
No, my Lords. It would be very nice to have a consensus between the three Front Benches. I think that that is a condition of being able to create a consensus in both Houses of Parliament.
A moment ago, I said something extremely important that the Labour Party and the House need fully to understand. Consensus in Parliament will be impossible without the support of the Labour Party. The Government’s latest brave and sensible proposal is built on the White Paper by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, the White Paper by Mr Jack Straw when he was Lord Chancellor and the consensus created by my noble friend Lord Wakeham when he chaired the royal commission 10 or 11 years ago. If this Bill founders now, having had all this work done on it, then I am utterly convinced that it will be entirely due to Labour’s conniving and collective spinelessness. The spines are already quivering.
Lord Stoddart of Swindon
I am interested in what the noble Lord said about consensus and take account, particularly, of what the Joint Committee recommended. One of its recommendations—and this concerns consensus—was that there should be a referendum of the people about this. Will the Bill that will be presented to Parliament contain a clause insisting on a referendum before any reform for an elected House?
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, we have not taken a final view on the Joint Committee’s report and proposals. We are working on that now. I do not really see the case for a referendum any more than the Labour Party did in 1999 or when it kicked out the Law Lords or for most of the other constitutional changes that it made, but more of that in a moment.
Lord Grocott
The Leader seems to be making great play with his accusation that the Labour Party is not united on this issue and that we are therefore responsible should the Bill fail. Can I take from that that he is confident in his defence of his own position that there is complete unity on the Conservative Benches?
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, the noble Lord forgets that he and I have been debating this issue for very many years, I rather longer than him, and my position has been utterly simple and consistent, unlike the Labour Party’s. I have never believed that there was a consensus within the Conservative Party. There has not been one in the past 120 years, and there is not going to be one over the course of the next 10 weeks. That is precisely the point. What I want the Labour Party to do in a few moments is to tell us on what basis it will support this reform. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, will do so.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
My noble friend has just said that there has never been consensus in the Conservative Party and that there never will be. Why on earth, then, did we fight the election on a manifesto commitment to build consensus on reform of this place?
Lord Strathclyde
That is the point: the commitment was to build consensus across the parties to see whether Parliament would agree to reform. That is precisely the point and I thank my noble friend Lord Forsyth for saying that. The commitment was never to create consensus within the Conservative Party. Why on earth would I have bothered to try to do that?
Lord Anderson of Swansea
However, there was consensus—on any of the noble Lord’s definitions—in relation to the Steel Bill. When he says that he will give that Bill a fair wind, what does he mean? Does he mean the original Steel Bill or the one that was heavily truncated?
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, the only Bill emanating from my noble friend Lord Steel that has passed through this House was the one that languished in another place at the end of the previous Session of Parliament. I think it extremely likely that the Government’s proposals will include aspects of my noble friend’s Bill, and they should be discussed in that context.
I move on to the next part of this speech in support of the gracious Speech. I hope that, in a moment, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, will speak with his usual clarity. Out of nowhere, Labour now says that it will support a Lords reform package provided the Cross-Benchers are removed. I wonder what the Cross-Benchers did to deserve this. There has been no mention of it over the past 10 years, but suddenly the Cross-Benchers must be flung out of this House before the Labour Party will support the consensus. I say to the Cross-Benchers that they need to pick their friends rather more carefully.
Secondly, there is the codification of powers so that the newly elected House will have less power than the existing appointed House. This is a new sort of rich absurdity that has crept into this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, shakes his head; is he saying that he does not want codification of powers? The other day he seemed very keen on it. He will be able to reply in a moment.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
It is a great pleasure to intervene in the noble Lord’s remarkable speech this morning. The issue of powers, which has now been fully explored by the Select Committee and the alternative report, is very clear. With two elected Houses, there is a great danger of gridlock and a fight for legitimacy. That is why some codification is necessary. The issue of an elected House having fewer powers than this House is a red herring because this House does not use all its powers since it is not elected.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, the noble Lord has responded to my invitation to speak with clarity. Labour will support only a 100% elected House with a codification of powers that means that the elected House will have less power than the existing one. The noble Lord can quiver and quibble—he and his noble and learned friend Lord Falconer of Thoroton can do all those things—but in the end they need to be clear on all this. I wonder where all this nonsense came from. Throughout the past 10 years, no Joint Committee, White Paper or any aspect of this has ever mentioned that Labour was in favour of the codification of powers.
Lord Rooker
I will tell the Leader where it has come from. We want to make the primacy of the elected House a reality. You cannot make the primacy of the Commons a reality unless you do something about codification of the powers here. The refusal to take that seriously, as was shown by Clause 2 of the draft Bill, shows that the Government still have not got it.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, was a distinguished Minister with the previous Administration. At no time did he make those points in Parliament or within his Government, in all the Joint Committees that met or the White Papers that were published. They did not start quibbling about the primacy of the House of Commons then. The noble Lord, Lord Richard, in his Joint Committee has made an entirely sensible, reasonable and well argued case about the defects of Clause 2, and we will take those up. However, the Labour Front Bench in this House and, I suspect, in another place, has decided that it does not want to create a consensus, and that is why it has come up with these conditions.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top
I wonder whether the noble Lord has forgotten the establishment of the committee under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Cunningham, to look precisely at the powers, and so on, of this House before further action was taken on the composition of the Lords.
Lord Strathclyde
I am well aware of that, but it is pretty rum that the report from the noble Lord, Lord Cunningham, laid out a whole bunch of conventions that in the past two years the Labour Party, which supported it, has been very happily breaking.
What else have we got? Suddenly, in 2010, the Labour Party says that there needs to be a referendum. There is no explanation of what kind of referendum. I see that the Leader of the Opposition is now talking to her noble friend Lord Hunt; I hope that they are going to explain what they mean.
Let me bring this to a conclusion. The Labour Party’s position is that there should be no Cross-Benchers but codification to reduce the powers and a referendum before it wishes to create a consensus. Will the noble Lord and his noble and learned friend confirm that these are the Labour Party’s conditions and that it will block any consensus without them? The House will expect the noble Lord to give an answer.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
The Leader of the House has not yet mentioned another little time bomb that is ticking away—a committee that has been set up under the chairmanship of Bill McKay to look at how votes are carried out in the House of Commons and to exclude Northern Irish, Welsh and Scottish Members from voting on matters that are purely English, or designated as such. That is an important matter that relates to the reform of the House of Lords, but no mention has been made of it or how it fits in. Has the Leader of the House thought of that? Have the Government thought about it, and what are they going to do about it?
Lord Strathclyde
The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, refers to the West Lothian question. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, said that it was a question that was better not asked. In the House of Commons—and it is entirely a matter for them—they are looking at it to see what solutions they can bring. Those are solutions for another place; they are not for us.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton
The noble Lord is entertaining the House with a fascinating speech, but could he say whether, were the other place to change its voting on the basis of country of origin of the Member, he would expect this House to continue in the current way? Secondly, I have listened very carefully to many debates. It surprises me that the noble Lord the Leader of the House does not seem to recognise that the position on our Benches and around the House has always been a recognition of the primacy of the House of Commons. He maligns Members of the House by implying that the primacy of the House of Commons is a concern only on our Benches. Around the House there is a fear of a constitutional gridlock, not least because many members of the public and the media keep referring to this House as a legislature. It is not—it is a reforming Chamber.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, I have no problem with the primacy of the House of Commons as it stands and I am very keen to preserve it. What I am trying to find out is what on earth the Labour Party thinks.
Lord Strathclyde
No, I am not giving way to the noble Lord again; let me finish. The noble Lord will make a speech in a few minutes.
Lord Strathclyde
This is the last intervention I will take from the noble Lord.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
The Leader did not answer my question, which is a very important one. Let us suppose that the West Lothian question commission, which is chaired by Bill McKay, recommends that Members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland do not vote on purely English matters in the Commons, and then we have an elected House of Lords. What would be the position of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish Members in the newly elected Senate?
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, perhaps if the Labour Party had considered these issues in 1997, 1998 and 1999, we would not have to deal with them now. Back to Lords reform; we have been debating this issue for 15 years—
Lord Lawson of Blaby
I am most grateful to the Leader for giving way. However, on reflection, does he not consider it a little wrong that the whole burden of his speech, to which I have listened with great attention, is that he admits, with his characteristic honesty, that there is no consensus or agreement on the Conservative Benches either in this place or in the other place, and that therefore it is the duty of the Labour Party—the Opposition—to rescue the Government from their folly in putting forward this proposal at this time?
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, I do not think that it was particularly candid of me to express a view that there was not much unity on this proposal in the Conservative Party in this House, or, indeed, in the Labour Party in this House. Anyone who has read the debates that we have had over the past 10 or 12 years would have to be completely bonkers not to recognise that. However, that is not so true in the House of Commons. The Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats in the House of Commons have largely unified around all this. However, the point that my noble friend Lord Lawson makes is that we would not be in this position if, over the past 10 years, the Labour Party had not sought to reform this Chamber and make it more democratic. That debate must now come to an end. We cannot keep on talking about this. We have had enough of Joint Committees looking at draft Bills and of endless White Papers and royal commissions. We now need to move forward and make a decision. That is what this Government are going to do over the next few months.
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean
My Lords, before the noble Lord the Leader of the House sits down, may I ask him a question not about who did what when, or whose fault this is, but about the Joint Committee report? A little earlier he said that the Joint Committee supported a mainly elected House of Lords. However, he omitted to say—I will quote from what the Joint Committee actually said—that it agreed that the reformed second Chamber of legislature,
“should have an electoral mandate, provided it has commensurate powers”.
The noble Lord might acknowledge that this is not just about an elected second Chamber. The phrase,
“provided it has commensurate powers”,
is a very important one. I hope he will acknowledge that that is what the Joint Committee said, as opposed to what he omitted to say.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, I very much look forward to hearing the noble Baroness’s speech, when she will be able to explain exactly what she means, or what she thinks the Joint Committee meant, by “commensurate powers”.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, that was a remarkable speech by the noble Lord the Leader of the House. It was a remarkable display in which he sought to wash his hands of any responsibility for the Government’s failure to get anywhere with Lords reform.
As regards my party’s work in relation to reform of your Lordships’ House, it is widely acknowledged that the reforms which took place in 1999 improved the effectiveness of this House and that it is held in high regard because of the quality of its scrutiny and revising work. We should not underestimate the esteem in which your Lordships’ House is held. Of course, we wanted to move forward on the path of reform and we tried to seek consensus. As the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, knows, consensus on reform of your Lordships’ House is a jolly hard thing to achieve. I suspect that the noble Lord’s blustering this morning, in which he sought to frame the Labour Party for his own Government’s failures, was an attempt to disguise a fact: I wonder if they have a Bill prepared to present to Parliament at all, because on all the substantive questions put forward by the Joint Select Committee and in the alternative report we have yet to receive any answers. I hope that as we go through this debate—and when the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, winds up—we might actually get answers to some fundamental questions about the relationship between two elected Houses, which goes to the heart of our debate.
This is a curious debate to have when the country is in such a critical moment—is it not?—with the economy in recession, unemployment high and investment depressingly low. We have a Government who, having produced a tax cut for millionaires, are now watching passively as millions live in fear of unemployment and are forced to pay more in bills, fares and petrol prices. We desperately needed from the Queen’s Speech a policy for growth to create jobs, halt fare increases and tax the banks. But from this laissez-faire Government we have nothing. It is no wonder that business leaders this morning expressed their dismay at the lack of any positive budgetary proposals.
We have had the thinnest of Queen’s Speeches, which is wholly irrelevant to people’s lives—nothing on growth and nothing on jobs. Even on the biggest social issue that we face—care for older people—all we are to get is a draft Bill, with no guarantee to implement the much-needed Dilnot proposals. There is no high-speed rail Bill and no development Bill. Instead, there is a hotchpotch of a programme in which Lords reform was originally intended to be the focal point. Then we had the elections last week and the panic in the other place on the Back Benches of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. Lords reform has clearly been downgraded to reserve status.
Yet, in your Lordships’ House, we are now to enjoy two full days debating constitutional affairs. We will no doubt have a stimulating debate. I have no doubt that much that is new will be brought to that debate, but I wonder what the public will think of that sense of priorities when so much of our economy is at stake. I wonder what they will think of the Government and their endless tinkering with our constitutional arrangements. Already we have had legislation on fixed-term Parliaments and a reduction in the number of MPs. We have been gifted politicised police commissioners, with elections in November and real concern about the low turnout expected. England’s biggest cities were forced to have referendums on elected mayors and, even though the Government got a big raspberry for their pains, Ministers now want to implant mayors on regions and unwilling populations. A referendum on Scottish independence is to come. There is a huge amount of churn but very little coherence in these stand-alone measures.
I get no sense that this will enhance public confidence in our democracy. I get no sense that we are anywhere near increasing public involvement in our democratic processes. Voter turnout gets ever lower, and people’s interest in politics gets lower still. Nowhere is this piecemeal approach more neatly expressed as in the approach to House of Lords reform.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
It is worth waiting for, my Lords.
Let us pick up the point made by my noble friend Lord Foulkes. We have a government commission considering the West Lothian question and the place of Scottish MPs at Westminster voting on laws that apply only to England. The current terms of reference apply only to the Commons, but surely the same issues would apply to an elected second Chamber. That is readily apparent when one considers the potential referendum on Scottish independence. Independence for Scotland would of course be a game changer. Carwyn Jones, the First Minister for Wales, has argued that if Scotland were, unfortunately, to leave the UK, and fearing English domination of what is left of the UK, there should be a new Senate in which Wales, Northern Ireland and England should enjoy equal status. You do not have to agree with the First Minister to realise that we may well be heading for a new constitutional settlement of major proportions in which the second Chamber ought to be a constituent part. I put it to the noble Lord the Leader that the place of an elected second Chamber has to be considered as part of a more fundamental question about the future of our United Kingdom and its democratic arrangements.
The alternative report recommended a constitutional convention to look at the next steps on House of Lords reform. That is an excellent suggestion but I wonder whether the remit should not be widened to look at these pressing constitutional issues that we face as a United Kingdom, and perhaps we have a little time to do so.
The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, talks about the Labour position on Lords reform but what is the Government’s position? Briefings emanating from Conservative parts of the Government in the past day or so have suggested that the importance of reform has been downgraded. Threats to use the Parliament Act seem to have faded a little and there is even talk of a search for consensus. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, was at it again today.
Significantly, the Prime Minister’s call to arms in the Telegraph on Monday made no mention of Lords reform. On the same day, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Osborne, said that it was absolutely not a high priority. Even yesterday, Mr Cameron seemed rather lukewarm when it came to the debates in the other place. I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, rather gave the game away over the weekend. In his fascinating article in the Sunday Telegraph, he proclaimed, as usual, his belief in an elected Chamber but then predicted that the Bill might get killed off in the Commons. Indeed, it seems that that is the option of choice for most Cabinet Ministers, at least on the Conservative Benches. Yesterday the noble Lord went further in the Financial Times and said that an elected House would be more aggressive in challenging the decisions of the Commons. Of course it will, but I suspect that the noble Lord was just giving a signal to MPs of his own party in the other place and perhaps an invitation to ditch the Bill.
In contrast to the voices emanating from the Conservative Party, we have had the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Clegg, signalling his determination to press ahead with Lords reform, while his right honourable friend Mr Cable said, in a moment of supreme optimism, that we should get on with it quickly and quietly.
So what are the Government intending? What is their priority? Yesterday the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, talked of adapting the proposals in response to my noble friend’s Joint Select Committee report. The choice of wording in the Queen’s Speech, describing the Bill as being concerned with composition, is intriguing. The noble Lord said this morning that it means that the Government will bring forward proposals that have elected Members and a smaller House at their core. Therefore, I ask him or his noble friend Lord Wallace: have the Government decided to ignore the Joint Select Committee’s report and the alternative report on the inadequacies of the crucial part of the Bill—Clause 2? Has the wording in the Queen’s Speech been couched in neutral terms to allow for a discussion on reaching a consensus? That would be welcome but, as we have discovered, more meanings are involved in that than “consensus”. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, defines consensus as what the Commons thinks, although he now sees himself as being rather misunderstood. Mr Clegg thinks that consensus is what he thinks, but Mr Clegg is Deputy Prime Minister and is in a position of some influence. Why is he so reluctant to have a proper conversation about Lords reform? If consensus breaks down, look no further than Mr Clegg and the fact that when we had joint talks at the beginning of this Parliament, the moment substantive issues were raised by the Opposition those talks broke down and we were never invited to them again. Do not lecture this party on consensus. We stand always ready to talk to the Government about Lords reform. We will do everything we can to help reach consensus, but consensus is a three-way process in our current political system. So far there is no sign that the Government are prepared to listen.
I am intrigued by the wording on the Bill. I wonder whether it is cover for eventual government support for the Bill proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Steel. Perhaps, the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, has a plan B for a Steel-plus Bill to deal with the size of the House. The briefings from different parts of the Government have been confusing, but I want to be clear and I accept the invitation offered by the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, to say that if the Government press ahead with proposals for an elected House, it is inescapable that unless they can articulate the role, functions and powers of both Houses and their relationship with each other, the Bill will fall at the first hurdle. It would deserve to do so. That goes to the heart of the arguments put forward by the Joint Select Committee and in the alternative report.
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon
That is an interesting statement. Would we be right to conclude from it that, unless those conditions are satisfied, Labour will vote against the Bill?
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, we will of course have to see what is in the Bill. With the greatest respect to the noble Lord, we have been told by the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that the Government are busily pondering how to adapt their proposals in relation to the report of the Joint Select Committee. It is not unreasonable to say that we should see what is in the Government’s Bill, particularly given the ambiguity of the wording in the Queen’s Speech.
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon
I am grateful to the noble Lord for his patience. Anyone listening to his previous statement would have concluded that it would be a condition for Labour to have those powers defined before it supported the Bill. It is nice of him to tell us that that is not a condition. Clarity on this matter really would be useful.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
I am slightly confused. The noble Lord asked me whether the Labour Party would support the Bill. I said that we had better see what is in it. I can tell the noble Lord that it is an inescapable conclusion and quite clear from my reading of the workings of both the Select Committee and the alternative report that, unless we are clear about the respective powers of both elected Houses, it will be very difficult indeed to make progress.
Lord Trimble
I thank the noble Lord for giving way and I understand the importance of the issue to which he has just alluded. However, I suggest that another very important issue that might be a way of resolving these problems is to look more closely, which unfortunately the Joint Committee did not do, at procedures to resolve disputes.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
That is a very helpful suggestion. One way or another with two elected Houses, whatever is in the legislation on the respective powers, there will always be a need for procedures to deal with the situation when both Houses disagree with each other, particularly if both Houses claim equal legitimacy, as is likely to happen, and particularly if the upper Chamber were elected on a different system of voting where the arguments for legitimacy will be legion. The noble Lord is quite right to suggest that reconciliation machinery must be part of the package, but I do not think that that can substitute for absolute clarity about the respective powers and the role of both Houses if they were both elected.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, is widely liked and admired in your Lordships’ House. In his wind-up speech last week, he apologised for not answering all the points made, but he did not answer any of them. These points go to the heart of our debate. He was asked whether a second Chamber elected by proportional representation would not claim greater legitimacy than the Commons. He was silent. Asked about the applicability of the Parliament Acts, he was no more forthcoming. Instead, he said that the Government would set out their legal reasoning on the application of the Parliament Acts if a Bill were included in the Queen’s Speech. A Bill was included in the Speech. Will the noble Lord now tell me when the advice will be made available?
The advice must answer two questions. The first is on the use of the Parliament Acts in relation to a Lords reform Bill. The second is on their use more generally in application to an elected second Chamber. I remind the Minister that both my noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith and the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said that the drafters of the 1911 Parliament Act did not intend its provisions to apply in the event of a second Chamber being constituted on a popular basis.
On the question of cost, the Minister said that no estimate could be given because a final decision had yet to be made on the number of Members. However, there is nothing to stop the Government coming up with a series of different options based on different sizes.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, suggested that the primacy of the Commons was a wonderful obstacle against which one kicked. Of course it is, but primacy is at the heart of our constitutional arrangements. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, talked about involving conventions and of the House being more assertive, which I fully acknowledge; it is one reason why many people think that the House of Lords has become a more effective Chamber in the past 10 or 12 years. However, on the balance of power, the arguments between two elected Houses will be much greater than those caused by a non-elected House exercising a small degree of assertiveness.
Lord Lloyd of Berwick
Is it still the official position of the Labour Party that it favours a 100%-elected House? If so, how will it seek to solve some of the problems that the noble Lord mentioned?
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, we are in favour of a 100%-elected House. We debated hybridity last week. Our view on a mostly elected Chamber is that the 20% non-elected element would not feel confident about making a positive contribution in a House that would be much more political. One has only to think of what happened with hereditary Peers. I well remember, when my party was in government, that when we lost votes we counted up the votes of hereditary Peers, and if it turned out that we had lost because of their votes we made a great play of it. The same thing would happen with Cross-Benchers. They would be in an impossible position because it would be argued that because of non-elected Cross-Benchers the will of the elected majority in the second Chamber had been thwarted. In a non-elected House, I pay tribute to the great contribution of Cross-Benchers. However, a hybrid 80%-elected House would not work.
Lord Lester of Herne Hill
I have listened to the noble Lord’s very important and interesting speech. Does it follow from his argument that the Labour Party’s position will be that because of the West Lothian question and the examination of it, and because of the Scottish referendum, it would be more sensible to postpone consideration of parliamentary reform so that options such as a Senate and indirect elections from Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England should be contemplated—or is that simply a debating point?
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, it is an interesting idea. If we face huge constitutional change in the affairs of the United Kingdom because of the referendum and the potential of Scotland leaving the United Kingdom, one should at least put on the table the fact that there might need to be some kind of constitutional convention to consider what impact that would have on Westminster and certainly on the second Chamber. In the mean time, if a Bill is brought forward we will of course give it every consideration. None the less, it will have to deal with the issues of powers and relationships—we believe that it should be 100% elected—and one cannot duck the fundamental positions that my party has adopted.
Lord Rooker
Perhaps I may give my noble friend another example. We did not develop this matter in the Joint Committee, but it was raised. If we were to have a second elected House—80% or 100%, it does not matter—it would leave the United Kingdom as the only country in the world with two elected Houses and no written constitution. If you looked at the matrix of those with unicamerals and those without written constitutions, and then look at those with elected second Chambers, you would see that we would be unique. In other words, there is nowhere else we can go to learn about how you work with two elected Chambers without a written constitution for settling disputes. That is a barmy position in which to put ourselves.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
I agree with the noble Lord. He is absolutely right. Of course, this is not new. One has only to go back to the preamble of the 1911 Act because the drafters of that Act knew that too. That is why they said that if a Chamber were constituted on a popular basis—and noble Lords on the Lib Dem Benches frequently remind us of the distance between 1911 and 2012—new proposals would be needed for limiting and defining the powers of the new second Chamber. The position in 1911 was exactly the same as the one pointed out by my noble friend today.
We are on a truly uncertain journey. Last week, in a notable intervention, the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, asked how the public would feel about a constitutional change, which is really a deal got up by the two political parties in the coalition, whereby the Conservatives get extra Members in the Commons and in return the Lib Dems get control of the balance of power in the House of Lords. I wonder how the public would feel—as has been briefed in the past few days by a number of people close to the Conservative Party—if, in order to save the immediate future of the coalition, another deal might be got up in which the Conservatives do not get the extra seats after all and in return the Lib Dems drop their passion for Lords reform. What would the public think if that were to happen?
Indeed, how do the public feel about Lords reform? As a Birmingham resident, last week I took part in a ballot to decide whether we were to have an elected mayor, and I wonder why the people of Birmingham are not to be given a say on whether we should have an elected second Chamber. There is only one answer: Mr Clegg is frightened of a referendum and what the public would say.
The Government owe it to the nation to think very hard about the substantive issues that are likely to be raised in our debates on the Bill. I hope the Government will listen carefully to the words of the Joint Select Committee and the alternative group. I also hope that the Government will in the end realise that they owe it to the British people to decide and will agree that, whatever proposals come forward, there ought to be a referendum of the people.
Lord Tyler
My Lords, for the last 20 minutes or so, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, has been busily rewriting his 2008 White Paper, and some would say tearing it up. I thought that it was rather a good White Paper, but I do not propose to follow him down that route. The 11 hours of debate devoted to the reform of our House persuaded me not to concentrate excessively on that issue today. Indeed, I want to try to avoid yet more incestuous self-congratulatory introspection. Instead, I want to look at the wider context to which the gracious Speech rightly drew our attention, that of political disengagement, which is the context for all the proposals that have come forward.
I have been involved in party politics for more than 40 years, in common, I suspect, with many other Members of your Lordships’ House. Party politics has a place in binding together people of similar persuasions and allowing them to act in concert and to get things done. It is easy to malign political parties, but I would suggest that they are very necessary. Yet the ebb and flow of electoral fortunes, and the ability to throw the scoundrels out, are surely no longer sufficient to persuade people that our country is genuinely democratic, that it is a place where power is shared on an open and equal basis, and where citizens can influence the course of events by the strength of their vote and the power of their voice.
We should take some examples, notably the corrosive effect on public confidence of a series of scandals like “Cash for Access” and, before that, the “Loans for Lords”. The Government are again working to look at the issue of party funding, but to solve the problem, we need to be bold. It is all very well to search for consensus, but one day someone is simply going to have to take a decision. I trust that that will be done in this Session of Parliament, and I hope that it will form part of the other measures mentioned in the gracious Speech which are to be put before us. For my own part, the Kelly proposals to spend 50p per elector on removing the big donations from political parties should be a good starting point. Everybody understands that finding extra money for politics now has implications for public confidence, but surely it is urgent to look at the ways in which present funding is distributed so that we can avoid buying influence for the disproportionate sway of the few and instead buy equal influence for the many.
In the Queen’s Speech, as the Leader of the House has said, the Government have promised an electoral registration Bill. That may seem rather unimportant to many in your Lordships’ House, but in fact it is the bedrock of our democracy: those who are entitled to be on the register have a civic duty to be on it, and they need to be there. Since recent research by the Electoral Commission shows that we are failing to register nearly one in five people in this country—and disproportionately so in some inner city areas, of course—this is a very serious issue that demands the immediate attention of the Government. I am only sorry that the previous Government did not make more progress on it. In previous debates in this House we have heard of the potential risks associated with individual registration, but I think that we should consider this as a great opportunity to engage more people, particularly younger and more mobile people in inner cities. I strongly support the efforts of my noble friend Lord Rennard to ensure that registration—not voting, but registration—remains a civic duty backed by a financial penalty, as it always has been.
With that firm backstop, there are also opportunities to engage military service personnel in their barracks, students directly in their universities and other colleges, and 16 year-olds in school. That happens to have been the experience in Northern Ireland which has moved on most successfully to individual registration and where the legal requirement has been retained. Voter registration in school is an obvious corollary for the citizenship curriculum rightly introduced by the last Government. In Northern Ireland, it is a natural continuum and has been very successful.
However, there is still more to do to persuade people that their role in a democracy can make a difference. We live in a world where interaction across great geographical and social chasms is instant: students chat to their tutors online; consumers email chief executive officers and get a reply; and, crucially, people can see the value as an end in itself of open dialogue around the issues of the day. Across counties, countries and continents, people show that they are far from disinterested in policy and politics, but for all that technology, no citizen has been brought closer to Westminster, which remains a world apart. Individual politicians try to engage as best they can, but the system itself seems “sludgen” and inert to the public. Parliament is a paradox: manifestly, it is a seat of power and yet not obviously a place that appears to get things done.
Of course, there are no easy answers about how to strike the right balance between maintaining the principle of representative democracy—one person, one vote—and bringing the process of decision-making closer to where people now do their politics; if there were, they would have been produced many years ago. If political debate generates more oxygen on Facebook than at the ballot box, we have to do more than simply lament that fact; we have to work out how to persuade people that issues worth entering into a dialogue about—perhaps with a perfect stranger—are the same matters in which we in this Parliament are also engaged.
Liberals have always believed in the power, agency and freedom of individuals. Before our eyes, society has become more content to develop its own structures and conduct its own rules and proceedings, disengaged from the institutions of Parliament and party politics. Of course, at the same time, society is more sceptical—more frustrated—by the democratic apparatus prescribed for it by the state. These changes may fit our philosophical mould, but they are difficult to deal with outside the abstract. It is a challenge for all of us, the whole political system, in the coming years.
Of course, as we try to meet that challenge, we have the benefit of some direct, personal, overriding experience. When people know that their participation in a democracy makes a difference, they are more enthusiastic and more numerous. I hope your Lordships will forgive me a personal reflection. When I was first elected to the other place in 1974, my majority was just nine votes. The very perceptive electorate in Cornwall, on a very wild and wet February day, saw that the result might be close and so the turnout was 83%. In 2001, when I was defending a majority of over 13,000, the turnout collapsed to 63%. I am sure that many of your Lordships have similar personal reflections. There are similar stories in other countries too. The recent turnout in the second ballot of the French presidential election, over 80%, showed that people really felt that that election would make a difference and they could make a difference within that context.
The conundrum is in trying to maintain that interest and participation by maintaining the reality and perception that people can make a difference to what happens in their democracy. Reform of the party political financial situation and better, modern arrangements for the enfranchisement of potential voters are all important to that end, but we must also recognise that the present situation, when this half of Parliament is so very unrepresentative in terms of age, background and geographical experience, does nothing to persuade people that their political system is, or even can be, capable of listening to them.
We have heard much this week about “bread and butter” issues. What can a Chamber whose average age is 70 and where a clear majority of active Members come from London and the south-east know about the problems of working families in the north of Scotland or the west of Cornwall?
In the coming years, there will be changes that will be difficult for Parliament to accept. We should start with the modest changes to this House and its practices proposed by the group of the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad—I am disappointed that these have not been put before us as a package. We will have to do much, much more as we adapt to a world where people want to speak to us and see very quickly indeed that we are listening to them.
Let us make no mistake: economic crisis can reflect as well as magnify political dysfunction, when people feel that they have no capacity to influence or change decisions that affect them personally. In Greece, Italy and Spain, this very fact has caused desperate problems already, as we are witnessing again this week. In politics, as in economics, we must always be vigilant to make sure that we do not fall into the same trap. If we are out of touch as party politicians, as Members of your Lordships’ House and as a Parliament, we risk encountering that same dreadful fate—that the public simply wash their hands of us.
Lord Grenfell
Does the noble Lord not agree that the membership of this House is a great deal more representative of the many strands of society in the United Kingdom than is the House of Commons?
Lord Tyler
My Lords, I wish it were so, but I am afraid that the latest analysis shows that it is not, particularly in terms of age, of geographical basis and—I have to say—of background. It does a disservice to the other place to pretend that it is somehow totally unrepresentative and that your Lordships' House, particularly its active membership, is above all that and totally independent of party politics. I wish it were so, but it is not.
Baroness Hayman
My Lords, I wish to do no disservice to the other place whatever, but the noble Lord should not do a disservice to this place either. Geographical representation is varied, but, of course, that is what the House of Commons is there for—lower Chambers are there for representation by population. It does a disservice to the diversity and expertise of this House not to think back to the Welfare Reform Bill debates in this House and to our hearing from Members who worked in voluntary organisations for the elderly, from Members with disabilities—who offer huge expertise—from the ex-director of the Refugee Council and from people who have worked for the Child Poverty Action Group. To say that they did not understand the problems being described in welfare reform seems a grave disservice to this House.
Lord Tyler
My Lords, I do not think that I need respond to that. I accept and have great respect for the noble Baroness’s point of view—she has made a very eloquent, simple speech to your Lordships' House—but it does not follow on from what I was saying previously.
Lord Laming
My Lords, it is entirely appropriate that the debate on the humble Address should begin on constitutional affairs. I will try to step aside from the party political flavour that has just occasionally crept into the earlier contributions. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, will excuse me if I make just one comment on something he said—I hope that I heard him right and apologise if I got it wrong. He said that to build a consensus on the future of this House, it is necessary to seek agreement with the three political parties. Well, there are some others of us in this House. I hope that the noble Lord will feel that those of us who do not belong to a political party might have a contribution to make on matters of this kind.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, I am delighted to respond. The noble Lord will recall that in the cross-party talks which my own Government instituted, we had strong representation from the Cross Benches and the Bishops’ Benches. However, it is an inescapable fact that, in the wider scheme of things, if consensus is to be reached, we need the Deputy Prime Minister first of all to recognise that there has to be discussion on issues other than composition and membership. Essentially, that was the point that I was trying to make.
Lord Laming
I am most grateful to the noble Lord. Therefore, before we go, perhaps we may just make a contribution to this debate.
Constitutional affairs might seem dry to some people but, as has already been demonstrated across the House, they are immensely important to the well-being of our society. During the past decade, which is what I have been particularly interested in, there have been many changes. Even during the previous Session of Parliament legislation was passed that might have a marked effect on our arrangements for the governance of the United Kingdom. Some commentators seem to believe that for more than 1,000 years there has been little change, especially in your Lordships' House. That is manifestly not so. Every Member of this House will have direct experience of substantial changes in both local and central government. Even last week some of these changes were experienced for the first time, in the form of referendums for mayors, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, mentioned.
Time does not allow for—nor does there need to be—a rehearsal of the many changes that Parliament has enacted, both centrally and locally. However, whatever view we take of the merits of those changes, we can at least agree that the catalogue of change has been substantial. Of course, that is the way it should be. If our legislative institutions are to keep pace with the changes in society and remain relevant to the needs and aspirations of our fellow citizens—and, indeed, if they are to understand the concerns that have just been referred to—then of course change must be a constant in all our arrangements for government.
I recognise that there are many in this House who are better qualified than I to speak on these matters, so I will be brief. I shall therefore just pose three questions for consideration, particularly to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace. First, does he agree that during the Session that finished only last week, the Bills that came to this House, having previously completed every stage of consideration in the other place, were without exception, once again, greatly improved during their passage through this House? Thanks to the conscientiousness, skill and hard work of Peers across the whole of the House, the quality of scrutiny resulted not only in many sound amendments being made to those Bills but in the Government, having listened to your Lordships, very wisely bringing forward many amendments to their own legislation.
I hope that when the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, responds to this debate, he will begin by agreeing that this House conscientiously fulfils its responsibility to scrutinise and improve legislation. It is dangerous to raise that point, as there will be those who think that it is just another piece of self-congratulation; but I do not raise it in that spirit, nor do I do so with any notion of complacency. On the contrary, I have in mind something that I regard as much more important: the fact that many of us have a real concern about the effectiveness of the other place in scrutinising legislation and holding the Executive to account. Our society depends on a very strong House of Commons that fulfils its unique role in holding the Executive to account. I hope that when the noble Lord responds he will recognise that it behoves us all to ensure that Parliament is as strong as possible, and that our endeavours should be directed to the whole of Parliament and its standing in the community. It is vital to the well-being of our society that Parliament as a whole commands the confidence of our fellow citizens.
Lord Elton
My Lords, could the noble Lord elaborate on that? Are we to take it from what he has said that, in his view, as long as the House of Commons is in its current state, that has to be balanced in some way by the powers of this place?
Lord Laming
My Lords, that is a very important question. My own view is that I would like to see both Houses being more effective, particularly the House of Commons. I have a real concern about the position of the House of Commons, for reasons that noble Lords across the House will understand.
Secondly, many of us are very familiar with elections: elections to town councils, district councils and county councils, elections to the European Parliament and for Members of Parliament, not to mention elections for mayors and, soon, police and crime commissioners—and then, of course, there are the arrangements in the other countries of the United Kingdom. At first glance, that seems to be a model of democracy at work, an exemplar, but further examination reveals serious shortcomings. Does the noble Lord share my concern and that of many of us in this House about the extremely low turnout in almost all those elections? One commentator described the low turnout last week as nothing short of dismal. Another said that the British people have lost confidence in politics. We ought to take that matter very seriously indeed.
All of that has been set out even more effectively in a recently published audit report by the Hansard Society, which shows very well the lack of interest of our fellow citizens in engaging in the political system. It is incredible to think that around the world millions of people are denied a vote and that millions more may vote but know that their vote is a sham. Therefore, I hope that we all agree that if our democratic processes do not engage the active participation of our fellow citizens, they are seriously defective. This House is only part of a much bigger issue that we need to tackle. We need to ensure that our political and governance arrangements engage our fellow citizens and that they believe that casting their vote is of immense importance. There have been many criticisms of the low turnout in votes by trade unions. We should not be complacent about the low turnout in votes in our democratic processes. Very important constitutional issues are at stake. They should not be taken piecemeal. We ought to take this opportunity to look more widely and ensure that our processes of governance are, to use the common parlance, fit for purpose.
My third point is that we are indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Richard, and his committee and to those who produced the alternative report. Both those documents repay careful study. I suggest that timing is important and will need to be handled sensitively. I suspect that, at this time, most of our fellow citizens are primarily concerned about jobs, the cost of living, the care of elderly and disabled people, further cuts in public expenditure, the National Health Service, and so on—not to mention the fact that our troops remain in considerable danger. There is to be a referendum in Scotland that has the potential to put at risk the integrity of the United Kingdom. Therefore, I suggest, not out of complacency but out of opportunity, that we ought to avoid taking up chunks of parliamentary time on matters that are of little concern beyond Westminster and take the opportunity to look again, to do an audit of our systems to ensure that they are as effective as possible.
Our discussion has acknowledged that there is a wide measure of agreement that our procedures can and should be improved. We all agree that the House is too large. We all agree that that ought to be rectified, along with a number of other matters, not least issues of discipline. As has already been referred to, recommendations of the Leader’s Group report chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, are outstanding.
With boundary changes affecting the other place, the referendum in Scotland, the review of the powers of other assemblies, there are major upheavals ahead of us. Let us improve, where we can, the workings of this House. There is much that we can do, and we should do it, but let us also recognise that our constitutional arrangements are matters that go wider than this House. I hope that we will take this opportunity, because those arrangements are important to the well-being and health of our democracy.
Lord Wakeham
My Lords, it is a great pleasure for me to follow the Convenor of the Cross Benches. I have always had great respect for Convenors of the Cross Benches. I remember that when I arrived in the House as Leader the Convenor of the Cross Benches was Lady Hylton-Foster. I consulted her on the appointment of someone to an important position and said that there was a question as to whether they might be a little too old because they were 75. She looked at me as if I was absolutely out of this world. She told me how old she was and that was the end of the discussion. I have always treated Convenors of the Cross Benches with considerable respect.
Your Lordships will not be surprised to hear that I want to say a few words about Lords reform. As has been mentioned by both Front-Bench speakers, some 10 years ago I was the chairman of the royal commission which produced a report on Lords reform. Everyone will probably have forgotten what we said, but it was that the Lords should continue to be mostly appointed but that there should be a significant proportion of elected Members, particularly because we thought that the regions and nations of the United Kingdom were not well represented there and that that would be a way to increase the spread of membership. We recommended what is now, in common parlance, the 15-year non-renewable term.
I have to say that our report got an extremely bad press. A number of people said that it was an interesting report, well argued and everything else, but that it had come to the wrong conclusions. We did not mind that it got a bad press, because we expected that, although it was slightly embarrassing to me because it was at the same time as my youngest son was taking his A-levels and he had to write an essay on an article by a Guardian reporter which referred to the timid and cautious report of Lord Wakeham. When I saw the paper afterwards, I said, “I hope you told him that it was an extremely bold report”, to which he said, “No, Dad, I said that it was timid. I want to pass the exam”. That was the sensible thing to do.
The one bright spark at that time was the Labour Party, because it put in its manifesto that it had accepted the Wakeham report and would implement it. It was slightly embarrassing for me to have my name in a Labour Party manifesto, but it was encouraging. When the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, tells us about the need for a 100% elected House, I can remember a time when that was not quite the Labour Party’s position. That is not my recollection.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for allowing me to acknowledge the excellence of his royal commission report. He will remember that we tried, and produced a White Paper, but, alas, we did not get anywhere with it.
Lord Wakeham
It is another story as to why the noble Lord did not get anywhere with it. I will not bore the House with it now, but he and I know many of those reasons.
The main lesson of my report has not been learnt even to this day. Our report recommended a compromise, and that is why people did not like it. Everybody compared their ideal solution with our compromise, and our compromise looked weak and wishy-washy compared with what they wanted. We talked about a compromise; in the modern jargon, that is a consensus, but it is the same thing. We did not reach our consensus easily, I can tell you. One of my noble friends who was on the commission told me privately when we started, “I have already been party to a published document that said that there had to be an elected element in any reform of the House of Lords”. One very distinguished Labour Member of Parliament—a good many noble Lords will guess who I mean, but I shall not mention his name—came to me to say, “If the commission so much as discusses elected Members, I will not attend any more of the meetings”. I persuaded them both to stay. They both signed the report, and we got consensus. It is therefore possible for people of goodwill to get consensus.
What do I mean by consensus? I mean that all our preconceived positions, both of and within the parties, have somehow to be melded together in a form of compromise for a way forward. As my noble friend the Leader of the House has acknowledged, as a result of the Joint Committee report the Government have to think again about a number of the things which they are doing. If I may say so to the Labour Party, it, too, has to think again about the idea that it can have a 100% elected membership. It is quite simply unrealistic. A consensus outcome will not produce that. We have in Parliament a very big responsibility to get this right and to get consensus because, as people have frequently said, outside this Chamber there is no great interest in what goes on in here. They are not interested in what we do and for us therefore to try to put through a solution that was highly controversial within the House would be a grave dereliction of our total responsibilities as a Parliament. Consensus is therefore what we have to achieve.
Let me say three things about the position as I see it. First, the Government are right to try to see whether they can find a consensus. This issue has been hanging about long enough, and if it is possible to find consensus, we ought to move forward. Secondly, in my view a consensus will involve a partly elected and a partly appointed House. There will be some very tricky negotiations as to how they are going to achieve that. An issue which is now highly relevant, but was not realised 10 years ago, is the effect that that will have on the House of Commons. It has to be thought about very carefully. Thirdly, and of this I am quite sure, if the House of Commons reaches a consensus and sends us a Bill that reflects that consensus, the responsibilities of this House are clear. We should treat the Bill like any other coming before the House. We should give it a Second Reading, try to improve it in Committee and give it proper scrutiny in the normal way. This applies, I am afraid, particularly to noble Lords who do not like things going on as they are. All of us have a responsibility to act in accordance with our precedents.
Finally, I have been in this House for 18 years and was also in the House of Commons for 18 years. I had the honour of being Leader of each House. There are still Members of this House in all parties and of none who are of great distinction, but the place has changed in the 18 years I have been here—and not for the better. When I first came here, I remember Lord Callaghan and Lord Whitelaw getting up time and time again when their Governments were in difficulties to say, “I completely accept the right of your Lordships to pass this amendment, but is it wise?”. They were really saying that there is no point in a revising House passing series after series of amendments which will just be reversed when they get to the House of Commons. A revising House should be looking at the legislation that has come forward and seeking to improve it, particularly where the House of Commons is singing on an uncertain note. That is the moment to make amendments towards effective legislation, rather than sending back hundreds of amendments. I hope that people will not be offended if I suggest that we use with some humility the position that we are somehow superior in public perceptions and in our judgment of the public good. The House of Commons is the elected House, its Members accountable to their electorates, and we should not live in a world of wishful thinking, make-believe or has-beens.
The Earl of Sandwich
Would the noble Lord care to make a comment in his search for consensus on the original Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Steel?
Lord Wakeham
I will be frightfully indiscreet and say that if I were still in charge of business management, I would be 100% in favour of my noble friend’s Bill but probably would still not have given it government time to get it through, because I know perfectly well what happens. Every single amendment you can think of would have been added to it, and the timetable of the Government would have been lost. I have no idea whether that is the Government’s view, so while I am in favour of what he wants to do and think it a disgrace that we have not found the time to do it, I can see the difficulties of business management if you bring in a Bill of that sort when there is no consensus on the way forward.
Lord Wills
My Lords, unlike some other speakers, I think that constitutional affairs merit parliamentary time, even in a recession. Constitutional arrangements matter because, in the end, they reflect the distribution of power in our society and that perhaps matters even more in a recession. I welcome the Government's commitment to maintaining the impetus for reforming the arrangements for royal succession. That is very desirable, as the noble Lord the Leader of the House said. I had hoped that I could welcome the other constitutional measures proposed in this Queen’s Speech. I was the Minister responsible for the legislation which introduced individual voter registration in the last Government and I still support it, and I have long been in favour of a democratically accountable House of Lords. Yet I fear that the approach the Government are taking to both these measures not only weakens the case for them but is in danger of sacrificing the health of our constitution in the interests of short-term political manoeuvring.
I suspect that electoral registration will not feature much in the discussions over the next two days. It is a technical issue of interest to few voters but it is, as the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has already said, a matter of real significance because eligible voters cannot exercise that precious right to vote unless they are on the register. Individual registration is a desirable principle—citizens should be responsible for their own eligibility to vote—and can help tackle fraud, although the extent of electoral fraud should not be overstated. I note that the noble Lord the Leader of the House did not mention any judgment on the extent of fraud. He said that it had to be tackled, as of course it should be, but, as I will say later, it is not prevalent as he was suggesting. Nor, even when it exists, can electoral fraud be tackled entirely by individual registration. That is not a panacea.
Whatever the merits of individual registration, it carries with it the severe risk that significant numbers of people who are eligible to vote will disappear from the register and so be unable to vote. That was the experience in Northern Ireland when it moved to this new system of registration. More recently, the Electoral Commission has said that the introduction of individual registration, under the measure proposed by the Government, could mean that,
“the register could go from around a 90% completeness that we currently have to around … a 60% completeness”.
The fall-off in registration is likely to be particularly marked among young people and students, people with learning disabilities, people with disabilities more generally and those living in areas of high social deprivation. There is already a serious problem with the electoral register in the United Kingdom. The latest estimate from the Electoral Commission suggests that at least 6 million people who were eligible to vote were not registered to do so in December 2010. The introduction of individual registration risks making a bad situation significantly worse.
The previous Government tried to tackle that problem by tying individual registration to the achievement of a comprehensive and accurate register by 2015. In the last Parliament, the Front-Bench spokespersons in the other place for both the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats approved and supported this approach. This Government could have continued with that approach but have chosen not to, for reasons that they have never adequately explained. They are rushing forward individual registration while removing the key safeguard of linking it to the achievement of a comprehensive and accurate register.
Why might they have done that? Why might they abandon the careful non-partisan approach of the previous Government to this issue? The Leader of the House suggested today that threats to the integrity of the register were the reason for their haste, but the independent bodies that we have tasked with safeguarding the integrity of our electoral system do not share that assessment. Analysis carried out regularly by the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Electoral Commission found,
“no evidence of widespread systematic attempts to undermine or interfere with the May 2010 elections through electoral fraud”.
So why the rush? It is hard to avoid concluding that it is being driven by the pursuit of party political advantage. Most people agree—this is not really a matter of dispute—that those eligible voters who are not registered to vote are most likely to vote Labour when they do vote. The evidence suggests that the party that will suffer least, if at all, from any fall-off in registration is the Conservative Party. Electoral registration is only 90% complete in Labour seats; it is 94% complete in Conservative seats. That partisan effect will be amplified considerably by the boundary reviews in 2015. If conducted on the basis of such a flawed register, they will have the effect of increasing the number of Conservative seats and decreasing the number of Labour ones.
I ask your Lordships again to consider carefully the impact on our democracy if it turns out that the outcome of a general election has been determined by the fact that millions of eligible voters could not vote because they were not registered to do so and that this was the result of a government policy, deliberately pursued despite all the evidence that it would have precisely this consequence. I hope that the Government will think again about their approach and might be prepared to accept any amendments that might come forward to once again tie the desirable introduction of individual registration to the achievement of a comprehensive register.
Then we come to the proposal for House of Lords reform. This proposal is not being driven by partisan self-interest—it has become a prisoner of it. I do not want to say very much about this; I am sure other noble Lords will have a lot to say about it. In my view, though, and I speak as someone who supports reform, many of the arguments against it—the cost, the assumed excellence of the current arrangements, the paramount importance of achieving consensus as opposed to simply striving for one—could all have been produced to resist every advance in the democratic accountability of Parliament over the past 200 years, and often have been. In the complaints about there being too many politicians, I sometimes hear antidemocratic undertones that I personally find disquieting.
For all that I wish to see your Lordships’ House elected, though, there is one criticism of the Government’s proposed legislation with which I agree, and it is fundamental. When the White Paper was published, I and many others criticised it for its inadequate approach to the relationship between the two Houses of Parliament that would result from reform. Clause 2 of the draft Bill is clearly inadequate to achieve its objective of preserving the primacy of the House of Commons. Such criticisms have been powerfully reiterated by the Joint Committee report and the alternative report.
An elected House of Lords does not inevitably mean gridlock in our constitutional arrangements, but work has to be done to find solutions to this potential problem and the Government have failed to do it. There is no shortage of proposals—a concordat between the two Houses, for example, or some form of codification of the functions—and you cannot reform the composition of the House without also looking at the functions. Why have the Government rejected this approach and refused to look at it up until now? I welcome the fact that the Leader of the House said that the forthcoming legislation would take account of the criticisms of Clause 2, but the flaws in that clause have been manifest at least since the publication of the White Paper, and should have been foreseen before it was even published. Why have the Government left it so late? All the solutions to this problem, and there are several of them, have advantages and disadvantages. They need to be debated and the public need to be engaged in a discussion on this, but the Government have done absolutely none of this.
This Bill is recognised as coming from the Liberal Democrat part of the coalition. Why are they pushing forward with such a flawed proposal? I am afraid that it is hard to avoid the suspicion that they want to use what might be only a temporary position in Government to engineer a constitutional reform that, with proportional representation, would be likely to secure for them an influential position in Parliament for the foreseeable future.
Such a partisan approach would be bad enough but in the past few days, if we are to believe the heavily briefed stories in the press, the electoral problems of the Government and the need to appease Conservative Back-Benchers are going to cause reform of the Second Chamber of our Parliament, something to which all three main parties are committed by their manifestos, to be delayed, abandoned or, as I saw in one report, made subject to a post-legislative referendum—incidentally, a process hostile to the representative democracy that participants on all sides of this debate profess to support. That is all being brought into play by the short-term political difficulties of this Government.
It is disappointing that the Government’s proposed legislation on an issue of such profound constitutional importance should be so inadequately prepared. It would be shameful if such a lack of preparation were the result of the self-interested haste of the Liberal Democrats. It is an indictment of the Government that the future of this important constitutional reform now appears to be held hostage by the short-term political manoeuvrings of an unpopular Government.
Something could still be salvaged from this mess if the Government would only think again about their approach, accept that they need to do more work on securing the primacy of the House of Commons, use independent experts to advise them on this—something, as far as I am aware, that they have not yet done; certainly not in public—and then of course consult the public on possible solutions in a properly deliberative process, as I have talked about many times before in this House. Then, and only then, should the legislation be finalised before it is returned to Parliament with an adequately worked-through proposal. I hope that they will do that and ensure that Parliament does not once again turn its back on this long overdue advance in democratic accountability.
Lord Maclennan of Rogart
My Lords, I welcome the fact that we are having a discussion at the beginning of the Queen’s Speech debate on constitutional reform. I am, however, immensely surprised by the prioritisation in this galère of measures of the reform of the House of Lords. I accept that reform sometimes takes a long time. Indeed, what has been notified to us about the possibilities of changing the succession to the throne is very delayed; it has been more than 300 years since the Act of Settlement. I hope that that part of the Government’s programme will be concluded with all appropriate celerity.
It is also right to recognise the need for change when it arises in a conspicuous fashion. Perhaps the case of electoral fraud, of which the noble Lord, Lord Wills, spoke, is such an example. I, too, have some concerns about non-registration, which my noble friend Lord Tyler has already mentioned. It is important that people are notified of their opportunities and responsibilities, and that should be part of the legislation.
At this time, questions have to be raised about the traditional methods of constitutional reform in this country. Incremental change has a pretty good name among constitutional lawyers, and I understand why: it enables the elected Parliament and legislature to give detailed consideration to what is proposed. However, it has to be said that, at this time, when the future of the United Kingdom is under attack, to have an incremental response to the possibility of the nations of this country falling apart is not wise or sufficient to deal with the constitutional crisis in which we are placed. We have to consider as the top priority whether or not Scotland will remain part of the United Kingdom and the other constitutional changes that might be necessary in either circumstance. It is not only Scotland that would be affected by independence being sought and won but also Northern Ireland, Wales and England.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
Does the noble Lord think that if Scotland rejected independence but some form of what has come to be known as devo-plus was offered, the same circumstances would arise?
Lord Maclennan of Rogart
I think there is a need to recognise that all the constituent nations and, for that matter, regions of the United Kingdom need to rearrange their relationships whether or not independence is achieved. A step in that direction has been taken by the Scotland Act, but the fallout from that is considerable and we ought to be looking at the coherence of our constitution and the ways in which we can involve the public in influencing the direction in which that coherent constitution ought to go.
I am conscious that consensus may be difficult—indeed, impossible—to achieve, but public understanding of and assent to the rationality of what is proposed is vital. Consequently, I want this House to look more widely at the challenges that we face at this time. In his opening speech for the Opposition, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, recognised the impact that certain changes might have on other aspects of the constitution. What is quite wrong is to seek to bounce the citizens of this country into fundamental changes. The citizenry may reject such opportunities or challenges if they are offered a referendum, and in any event the example of the referendum on AV seems a classic case of how not to proceed with constitutional reform: there was no extensive publicity for what was involved; there was no consideration of what the alternatives were; and there was only about two weeks’ notice in some media and even less in the press. A referendum is not necessarily the answer for dealing with the complexity of the structure of government in this country.
We have been too complacent about the structure over a long time. I think that many of the reforms that were achieved at the beginning of the Labour Government’s period of office—which had been discussed with other political parties, including my own, and which, to some extent, were a result of cross-party agreement—were valuable. It was possible to achieve the introduction of the Human Rights Act and the Freedom of Information Act and, later, the establishment of the Supreme Court, although it had to be delayed, as it should properly have been, to enable full discussion to be held about its structure and contents, without affecting the whole structure of governance in this country. I can support that kind of incrementalism, but I find it very difficult to support a proposal that one House of the legislature should be reformed—and by that I mean re-formed, not necessarily improved—without looking at the relationship with the other House, considering whether it should be more representative of the nations and regions and without providing for the proper accountability of its Members. The notion of electing people once for 15 years seems to be remote from the idea of accountability. The proposal that the House of Lords should be in some way secondary to the House of Commons is neither secured not justified. There is a case for recognising that in the modern age in which we live, with the huge volume of legislation that is normally brought before Parliament, there could be some spreading of the load across two democratic Chambers, but that apparently does not form any part of the Government’s thinking.
I consider this House of Lords reform Bill to be ill-conceived, and I am not persuaded that the attitude that I am taking is letting the best be the enemy of the good. I do not regard it as good to have a hotchpotch of a Chamber that serious politicians would be very unlikely to want to be elected to when their careers would be cut back after one term at whatever age they chose to go in. I do not think that the position of the appointed people would be strong in such a situation, and the debate that followed would seem to be likely to be not whether the House should be further reformed but whether a second Chamber was necessary at all. We have seen that in other Commonwealth countries, including New Zealand, and in other European countries, including Sweden. I want a second Chamber. I have always advocated 100% elected, and I have always wanted to see it have much greater power over the Executive than the current Chamber has. That would consequently be a very considerable rewriting of the constitution, but none of that is appropriately achieved in this kind of step-by-step way which has none of these objectives in mind.
My view is that the country needs to have a much more extensive national debate involving the citizenry. The Scottish Constitutional Convention worked to unite the Scottish people. Unfortunately—we can see this with the benefit of hindsight—it did not include the impact on the rest of the United Kingdom as part of its mandate, and that impact has been real and is evident. Consequently, I would favour the establishment, in due course, of a convention that enabled the restructuring of our constitution to be deliberately conceived and involved not just articulate and already determined politicians.
Lord Wills
I think the noble Lord was just about to come on to my question. There has already been quite a lot of discussion about a constitutional convention—I have been in favour of one for many years—but there is a key question about its composition. The Scottish Constitutional Convention was largely constituted of the great and the good. I notice that the alternative report of the Select Committee also suggested already established figures in our society. Does the noble Lord see any merit in broadening it to include a demographically representative swathe of the British people to participate in discussions about the future of their own constitution?
Lord Maclennan of Rogart
I certainly want to see the convention being fully representative. Maybe it would operate differently in different parts of the country. Different public discussions should take place before any decision-making. This is immensely serious because the British public are so disengaged from politics and so disenchanted with their politicians. The convention should not necessarily be dominated by politicians. Representatives of all the civic organisations and different interests of our country ought to be considered in that context.
The convention in Scotland was not particularly dominated by politicians; representatives of the CBI, the church and the trade unions were involved. However, we cannot allow this simple debate between unionists and those who support Scottish independence to go forward without giving a clear indication that there are alternative opportunities to bring our system of government more into tune with the needs and dispassionate desires of the different parts of the country.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
Does the noble Lord not think it interesting and disappointing that we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, who is the principal spokesman on this matter for the Liberal Democrats, and not once did he mention the federal solution? I understand that it is still the policy of the Liberal Democrats. If it is looked at properly in the round, it ultimately provides a much neater solution for the second Chamber than the one that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, advocated.
Lord Maclennan of Rogart
I agree with what the noble Lord says about a federal solution probably being best. However, it would have to ensure that the considerations that my noble friend Lord Tyler mentioned about underrepresentation in the second Chamber were taken into account. He spoke of Cornwall and the north of Scotland in his remarks. As it happens, he is from Cornwall and I am from the north of Scotland so we have some voice. However, the reality is that this should not be done in a rush. We must consider the very different priorities of people living in Northern Ireland, people living in Wales and people living in Scotland. Subsequently, maybe people living in different parts of England will take a view. However, I cannot believe that it makes sense simply to consider the West Lothian issue, which has arisen as a result of devolution, by itself. It needs to be considered as part of the solution of the whole. Therefore, I hope that the Government may take longer to consider the broader issues of constitutional reform to which the Leader of the House did not refer today.
Lord Luce
My Lords, having listened to the debate so far, and thinking back over the discussions about this Chamber over the past 14 or 15 years, I cannot help feeling—I am sure noble friends will feel the same—slightly giddy. I have fortified myself with some water to keep me going.
I start by saying that I agree with the noble Lords, Lord Tyler and Lord Maclennan, and my noble friend Lord Laming that there is a serious gap between the electorate—the public—on the one hand and Parliament and governmental institutions on the other. There is no excuse whatever for complacency on our part in this Chamber, let alone in the House of Commons. However, knowing what the coalition Government’s proposals are, I find myself strongly in favour of a substantially reformed appointed House. Therefore, I do not support the coalition’s proposal.
The coalition has stated that it wants the role and function of the House of Lords to remain unchanged as a revising Chamber, which persuades Governments and the House of Commons to think again. Since that is the coalition’s objective, the task would be far more effectively performed if we were a substantially reformed appointed Chamber. On the other hand, had the coalition said that it proposed a second Chamber that was commensurate, or possibly even equal, in powers to the Commons, we would of course need to consider an elected Chamber, whether directly or indirectly elected. However, the evidence is absolutely clear that, although the Government want no change in the role of the Lords, the effect of their current proposals would be to undermine that very objective.
The arguments are borne out not only by the Joint Committee but by the alternative report, which make it plain that the Chamber, if elected, would be bound to be more assertive, and that the natural restraint that this House normally exercises would be unleashed. We can add to that the fact that the conventions of the two Houses would have to be reviewed along with a whole range of issues such as the level of expertise; the partisanship of the House; whether elections would produce a B team; whether there would be more constituency rivalry; whether there would be gridlock, as there so often is in the United States, and finding ways to deal with it; cost; hybridity; and many others. All those could be overcome if we were rightly going for an elected House, but I do not believe that that is the right way forward.
I have two reflections to make. First, we all know that our constitution has evolved over centuries. As has been said by other noble Lords, in our experience of how we do things, the best way forward is the pragmatic one and incremental reform. Looking at the Lords over the past 100 years, there was change in 1911, 1949, 1958, 1963 and 1999. More recently, there was further change with the introduction of the Supreme Court. In the words of Lampedusa in The Leopard, if we want to stay the same, things have to change. I hate the word “change”. “Things have to improve” would be a better way of putting it. That is the British way of tackling these issues.
Secondly, in recent years—certainly over the past 14 years—successive Governments have not been sensible in how they have proposed radical, big changes. That started in 1998 with the plan to abolish hereditary Peers without producing any coherent plan or cohesive approach to replace them in the Chamber. It was almost a flippant approach to the role of the House of Lords, with little sense of history. Since then, we have debated this issue until the cows come home. The Wakeham report and many other reports have stimulated that debate. However, in my view, which I think goes along with some of the views expressed by the noble Lords, Lord Maclennan and Lord Wills, we have not debated these issues in a sufficiently coherent context. That seems to be the heart of the problem. We cannot look at one arm of the constitution without considering the effects on its other parts. The interrelationship is of great importance.
I am glad that the coalition has reiterated that its overwhelming priority is to put the economy of this country straight. However, if that is, rightly, its priority, I submit that it is very dangerous to divert and dissipate its efforts on issues such as an elected House of Lords, for which there is no consensus. I propose a way forward to the Leader of the House and I put it in two categories. First, to give more coherence and consideration to the substantial constitutional issues, we should pick up the recommendations in the alternative report on the case for establishing a constitutional convention, but I suggest it as a permanent framework for the consideration of major constitutional issues, in which constitutional developments of major importance in either Chamber would be considered. The future proposed referendum in Scotland would be a major factor; the level of devolution would have a major impact on the constitution. Any changes to EU treaties and any referendums that flow from them would also be relevant, as well as whether there should in the longer term be an elected Chamber. All that should be embraced within a permanent framework of a constitutional convention.
Lord Wills
I hesitate to keep intervening, as I have had my say already, but I am very interested in what the noble Lord has just said. When I was the Minister for Constitutional Affairs, I was very attracted to exactly that idea of a constitutional council. It is desperately needed, and I very much welcome his suggestion today, but as soon as I raised the idea officials got extremely anxious and worried about the threats to Parliament, and the pre-emption of the Government of the day and Parliament in proposing these measures. Has the noble Lord given any thought to those sorts of concerns, which will inevitably be brought forward in response to the invaluable suggestion that he has just made?
Lord Luce
My suggestion is that we approach this in two ways. The big issues on constitutional aspects should be embraced in the constitutional convention, which should be a permanent framework. Secondly, having said that there is no room for complacency, I think that we should now get on with the pragmatic incremental changes that command a large degree of support—or many of them do, at least, and many were put forward by the Wakeham commission—while the broader constitutional issues are being looked at in order to improve the effectiveness of this House. As noble Lords know, there is no shortage of sensible recommendations, from the Bill proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, to the proposals from the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, on working practices. On many of those I believe that there could be common ground. There is already common ground that the appointments commission should be on a statutory basis and there are already discussions on the need to reduce the size of the House. There are plans and thoughts emerging on the retirement scheme for noble Lords and policies on disqualification and expulsion. We should look at fixed terms. The recommendations from the Goodlad committee have not been properly considered, but the proposals for improving the scrutiny of legislation and strengthening topical debate procedures, for example, would undoubtedly improve the strength of this House.
I believe that we have a forum in the Chamber, through the Campaign for an Effective Second Chamber, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, which could act as a forum for these pragmatic views to be drawn ahead and to try to achieve a consensus. That is the constructive way forward and an alternative way forward. When I last spoke on this subject last year, I said that, if the House did something like this, I would offer to resign as an incentive for the House to get on with it. If the House is prepared to do that, I am prepared to retire.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
My Lords, the Queen’s Speech contains a number of important constitutional matters. The matter of the royal succession is important and requires to be carefully negotiated with all members of the Commonwealth so that the unity of the Commonwealth, which has been so conspicuous under Her Majesty’s reign, may continue. There are also the proposals on electoral registration. I am disturbed by any suggestion that that should be motivated otherwise than by trying to achieve the fullest possible registration of voters in a proper way. I hope that that would be the motivation of any reform that is put forward. We are faced also with a major constitutional matter in relation to the independence of Scotland and possibly of other parts of the United Kingdom if that should occur. We need to consider those matters with great care.
However, I intend to restrict my remarks specifically to the House of Lords proposals and the proposal to deal with its composition. When William Hague was leader of the Conservative Party, he invited my noble friend Lord Hurd of Westwell and me to consider options for reform of the House of Lords with a view to achieving some kind of consensus. That is now rather a long time ago. I invited, as I was empowered to do, the noble Lord, Lord Richard, and the late Lord Russell to join us, but neither felt able to do so, with Lord Russell explaining that the leadership of his party at the time felt that it might not be desirable. I can well understand those responses because we had been appointed by the leader of the Conservative Party, which had recently suffered a rather severe defeat in the general election. But my noble friend and myself, with the help of Douglas Slater, a clerk here with great experience, considered the various options. The report has been published for a long time and was available to the Government and the Joint Committee, and was no doubt carefully considered.
My central point relates to the relationship between the two Houses. I have no doubt whatever that the primacy of the House of Commons, recognised in taxation particularly since 1671 or so, is founded on the fact that the House of Commons has over the years been elected—no doubt with a rather restricted electorate to start with, but gradually evolving into a general electorate over the whole country. That has given the House of Commons the responsibility, in accordance with the maxim that there can be no taxation without representation, for full control of taxation matters.
Since 1911 and 1949, the House of Commons has also achieved a primary position on general legislation. The true position now is that the elected House can prevent anything going on the statute book with which it does not agree and, after a reasonably short delay, can put on the statute book anything that it steadfastly believes should be there. Sometimes, as we know, as a result of consultations and consideration in this House, it wisely decides not to proceed further, as happened in relation to the process whereby people were detained without any particular procedure being followed. That process was eventually abandoned. However, generally speaking, the House of Commons—the elected House—gets its own way on posited legislation and prevents the enactment of any measure that it does not want. Therefore, I do not see that the undeniable governance difficulties in our country have anything to do with the democratic deficit, as it is sometimes called, whereby ordinary people cannot exert influence through their representatives on the laws which govern them.
The proposal for a fully elected second Chamber requires that the second Chamber, being fully elected, should have democratic accountability and democratic legitimacy. Therefore, I do not see why it should not be given the same authority as the other House, which is directly elected. That seems to me a fundamental point, which is well made by the Joint Committee. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Richard, who is now in his place, that I very much appreciate the clarity of the Joint Committee’s report, which constitutes an important development. The same sentiments apply to the alternative report, which was compiled by members of the same committee. It is not possible to print it as a government paper because of the desire for unanimity by the House of Lords, if possible. However, it was printed using government resources and is available in the Library. It seems somewhat unnecessary to make a distinction in this regard. Indeed, my remarks about the clarity and utility of the main report apply also to the alternative report. We are all extremely grateful to the members of the committee for giving a great deal of their time, effort and expertise to frame the report.
The report records the opinion of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, and the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, that the Parliament Acts would not affect the situation if the House of Lords—the second Chamber—became a fully elected Chamber. I firmly agree with that opinion as you have only to read the preamble to the 1911 Act to appreciate that the House of Lords did not operate on a popular basis at that time. I have no doubt that if it were fully elected it would operate on a popular basis, and we would have two fully elected Houses with full democratic mandates, given that we have universal suffrage throughout the nation. The Joint Committee recommended that if this were to happen it would be right to introduce legislation to distinguish clearly between the powers of the two Houses. I entirely agree with that but legislation needs to be based on reason. I see no reason for legislating to restrict the democratic authority of the second House, if it has a full democratic mandate, but to leave untouched the democratic authority of the first House.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
I am most grateful to the noble and learned Lord for giving way. If you accept the primacy of the Commons as the first base of the constitutional arrangement, it would still be possible to have two elected Houses provided you were able to set out their respective powers. However, inevitably, despite the universal mandate that would arise from the fact that people can vote for the second Chamber, it would none the less still be secondary to the primary Chamber, if it were so ordained through legislation.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
I am saying that the legislation needs to have a reason behind it. It is all very well to legislate, and I know that from time to time we see legislation which some of us think does not have much reason behind it, but on the whole we regard it as rather important that legislation which reaches our statute book should be grounded in reason. If the democratic mandate is the same for both Houses, it is difficult to see a reason for distinguishing between their democratic authority.
Lord Wills
I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord for giving way. Is it not possible to conceive of a democratic mandate for a revising and scrutinising Chamber? That is precisely the reason for it. It is not necessarily an inferior role, just a different role. That is what needs to be placed in the legislation. I think that most noble Lords who have spoken so far agree with that.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
That is tantamount to asking that the second Chamber be elected not to exercise full democratic authority but to have the authority only to do certain restricted things. That is not exactly an issue although it is certainly a possibility. I have never stood for election on the basis that we are discussing so I do not speak from great experience. However, I think that it must be a little difficult to stand for election if your election would result in your having very restricted authority. One could say, “My policies will not matter tuppence because the policies will be determined by the other electorate”. Such an outcome is possible in theory but would be difficult in practice. This issue has to be faced at some point and dealt with either by restricting the authority of those elected to the second Chamber in some way or by some other method. The other method one could use is that of introducing arbitration between the two Chambers, which has been hinted at in previous speeches. This is the absolutely fundamental and central point and has to be dealt with before we seek consensus when we are not sure what the consensus is supposed to be about.
Health Transition Risk Register
(12 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Earl Howe)
Mr Speaker, I shall now repeat a Statement made in another place earlier today by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Health on the subject of risk registers. The Statement is as follows:
“Mr Speaker, with permission, I would like to make a Statement on the publication of the Department of Health’s strategic and transition risk registers check.
In November 2010, the right honourable Member for Wentworth and Dearne submitted a freedom of information request, asking for the publication of the transition risk register relating to the planned Health and Social Care Bill. A similar request by Nic Cecil, a journalist with the Evening Standard, for the publication of the Department of Health’s strategic risk register, followed in February 2011.
The Government refused both requests on the grounds that the risk registers related to the formulation and development of policy and, as set out in the Freedom of Information Act 2000, were not required to be published. Appeals were then made by the applicants to the Information Commissioner. In both instances, the Information Commissioner ruled against the Government, arguing that the balance of the public interest lay in public disclosure. The Government’s view, to the contrary, is that the public interest is best served in this instance by officials and Ministers being able privately to consider such issues, including any risks. We therefore appealed the decision of the Information Commissioner, under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act, to the First-tier Tribunal. The tribunal was asked to consider whether the Information Commissioner was correct to find that, on balance, the public interest required disclosure of the risk registers.
On 5 April, the tribunal made public the reasons for its decision. For the department’s strategic risk register, it found in favour of the Government and so did not order its disclosure, but it came to the opposite conclusion with regard to the transition risk register. I have carefully considered the tribunal’s decision and have discussed it thoroughly with Cabinet colleagues. Following these discussions, I have decided to exercise the ministerial veto, as allowed by the Freedom of Information Act, in relation to the disclosure of the transition risk register. This decision represents the view of the Cabinet.
I have decided to veto, rather than appeal, the decision to the Upper-tier Tribunal, because the disagreement is on where the balance of the public interest lies and is a matter of principle and not a matter of law, as would be the focus of any further appeal. I recognise that this is an exceptional step. It is not one that is taken lightly.
There is no doubt that reform of the NHS has attracted huge public interest. But my decision to veto, while an exceptional case, is also a matter of wider principle and not just about the specific content of the transition risk register. In all departments, Ministers are required to balance the public interest in terms of disclosure with the need properly to consider complex areas of public policy. Good government demands that the analysis and management of risk is thorough and robust, whichever party is in power.
It is an essential aspect of good government, in the formulation and development of policy, that officials have a ‘safe space’ within which to formulate sensitive advice to Ministers, and that they feel free to use direct language and make frank assessments—and that the Government should, in exceptional circumstances, have the ability to reserve such privacy absolutely.
As the right honourable Member for Blackburn said in his evidence to the Justice Select Committee only last month, on 17 April:
‘There has to be a space in which decision makers can think thoughts without the risk of disclosure, and not only of disclosure at the time, but of disclosure afterwards’.
He also said there have been,
‘some rather extraordinary decisions by the Freedom of Information Tribunal, in which they suggested that it’—
by which he meant the exemption—
‘can apply only while policy was in the process of development but not at any time thereafter. That is crazy and it is not remotely what was intended’.
The Freedom of Information Act was drafted specifically to allow for a safe space for the development of policy, and I have acted throughout in strict accordance with the provisions of the Act.
The risk assessment process, carried out by civil servants and detailed in these registers, is an integral part of the formulation and development of government policy. It is strongly in the public interest that this process be as effective as possible. At the time the request for the transition risk register was made, many aspects of the policy were still at an early stage of their development. The Command Paper responding to the consultation had not been published. The Bill had not been published. It is therefore incorrect to say that the transition risk register does not relate to the development of policy as it fed, and continues to feed, directly into advice given to Ministers.
The Bill may have become an Act in March of this year but we are still in the process of policy development at the next level of detail. The value of risk registers is directly linked to the form and manner in which they are expressed, with the use of direct language. They do not, however, show the benefits of a policy. They are not, as impact assessments are, intended to reflect considered calculations of both costs and benefits. They are simply about identifying possible risks, in order to stimulate action to mitigate them.
If such registers are disclosed at sensitive times in relation to sensitive issues—as would have been the case here—it is highly likely that they would have been open to misinterpretation and misuse. The impact of this would be that future risk registers become anodyne documents of little use. Potential risks would be more likely to develop without adequate mitigation. That would be detrimental to good government and very much against the public interest.
Reflecting this, a detailed statement of reasons for my decision to exercise the ministerial veto in this case has been laid before Parliament. This decision to veto the disclosure of the register is not in any way a criticism of the Freedom of Information Act. The Act always envisioned that there would be times when the Government would need to protect the process of policy development, and this is one of those times. The Government’s right to make just such a veto is written into and is a proper use of the Act.
We have always been as open as possible about the risks and issues engaged in the modernisation of the NHS. First, there was the full public consultation, then the thorough examination by the NHS Future Forum, and the 50 days of detailed debate in both Houses, in addition to the detailed risks published in the impact assessment. Very few pieces of legislation have ever received this degree of public and parliamentary scrutiny. And on Tuesday, I went further and published a separate document that includes the risk areas covered in the transition risk register. This document also includes the actions taken to mitigate those risk areas. I have also published a scheme for publication, which sets out our proposals for reviewing and releasing material relating to the transition programme in future. Both of these documents are available in the Library and on the Department of Health’s website. These documents further confirm that the purpose of the veto was not in any sense to restrict public access to relevant information. It is to establish that publication of the risk register in December 2010 would have been contrary to the public interest.
This Government, more than any other before them, are committed to openness and transparency. Across government we publish business plans, departmental staffing and salaries, full details of departmental contracts and summaries of departmental board meetings. In the NHS, we have published more information about services than was ever previously the case—information that is not only shining a light on poor performance, but actually helping to root it out.
We now publish the NHS Atlas of Variation, exposing the variations in outcomes across the country. We have published data on mixed-sex accommodation, leading to a dramatic 95% fall in breaches. We have invested in new information collections—on A&E performance, on ambulance performance, and on clinical audits.
The decision to veto is about long-term principle and good government, not about limiting in any way scrutiny of NHS reform. Information relating to much of the content of the risk registers is now in the public domain. However, the important principle of the right not to publish has been maintained. I commend this Statement to the House”.
My Lords, that concludes the Statement.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Howe, for repeating the Statement on the health transition risk register. I should start by declaring an interest as chair of the Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust and as a consultant trainer with Cumberlege Connections.
As we have heard, the First-tier Tribunal, on appeal from the Government, found against them and ordered the disclosure of the register. The Government have decided not to appeal to the Upper Tribunal but, instead, a ministerial veto has been exercised since, as we have been told, Ministers regard this as a matter of principle, not law. I must say to noble Lords that I very much regret that decision.
The noble Earl, in repeating the Statement, made reference to what was intended when the legislation was brought in, but I have to say that we regard this as a major change of policy from the precedent set by the previous Government. Use of the ministerial veto in the past has been reserved only for issues of national security and Cabinet discussions. Applying the veto to what are essentially day-to-day matters of domestic policy is a step back towards secrecy and closed government. It is also a major change of policy in relation to publication of risk registers. The previous Government, under similar circumstances, released the risk register on the third Heathrow runway after an order from the Information Commissioner. This veto is very much a matter of regret, and I should like to ask the noble Earl a number of questions.
Can he explain to the House how the use of the veto in this circumstance meets the exceptional criteria that government rules require? Can he say whether it is now government policy never to publish risk registers, even if ordered to do so by the courts? In repeating the Statement, the noble Earl claimed that civil servants should be allowed to have frank and free conversations. However, this matter was considered in detail by the tribunal. Does he not think that the tribunal has therefore come to an entirely reasonable conclusion on that matter? Does he accept that the recording, reporting and treatment of risk are not optional activities but core responsibilities for any government department?
I should also be grateful if the noble Earl could clear up a number of confusions over statements made in the past 24 hours. In the blog post for Liberal Democrat Voice yesterday, the Deputy Leader of the other place wrote that it would also be right to publish much of what is contained in the risk register as soon as possible. Can the noble Earl explain exactly what that means? The noble Earl himself was interviewed on yesterday’s Radio 4 “Today” programme and it seems that he was really implying that the case for vetoing the release of the NHS transition risk register was a general and not an exceptional one. He said in the interview:
“It is about allowing civil servants to have frank and free conversations, uninhibited by the thought that those conversations are going to be made public”.
When it was put to him:
“You could apply that to any single freedom of information request of government discussions”,
the noble Earl confirmed:
“The effect of the judgment, if we had not vetoed, would be that Governments and civil servants shouldn’t be allowed to talk about key aspects of policy formulation, including the risks”.
I do not see how that could be said to come within “exceptional” criteria, and I should be grateful if the Minister could clarify the matter for the House.
The noble Earl also said at the end of the interview:
“We have every intention of publishing the risk register in due course, when we think the time is right”.
It is 22 months since the Government’s reform policies were published in the White Paper, 19 months since my right honourable friend Mr John Healey, to whom I pay great tribute for his persistence in this matter, put in his FoI request, and a month since the Health and Social Care Act received Royal Assent, so I ask the noble Earl when the time will be right for the risk register to be published. Although this is a matter of principle and therefore Ministers are not going to appeal again, apparently the veto is of only a temporary nature, and therefore it would be good if the noble Earl could explain to us exactly what was meant by his final comment.
Will the Minister come clean on the real reason the Government will not produce the risk register? The fact is that they had a huge amount of warning from people in the NHS, echoed by officials in private, about the impact of their very misguided changes to the NHS, and the reason for the register not being published is very simple: it is political embarrassment. Will the noble Earl also acknowledge that the Government have put the health service through an extraordinary amount of turmoil? Thousands of people have lost their jobs and fundamental change is taking place at a time when the real issues for the health service are meeting the Nicholson challenge of efficiencies, major reconfiguration and improving the quality of primary care. That latter point has been neglected in our debates and I think that it goes to the heart of many of the problems in the health service.
When the Government inherited the NHS, it was in a very good condition. Waiting lists had been cut dramatically and there had been huge investment in the infrastructure. The Government could have chosen to build on that; instead, they adopted fundamental change, pulling the NHS up by its roots and causing major confusion. It is a change that enjoys very little support within the health service.
Perhaps I may now take the noble Earl to the judgment itself, which I think goes to the core of this argument. It says:
“From the evidence it is clear that the NHS reforms were introduced in an exceptional way. There was no indication prior to the White Paper that such wide-ranging reforms were being considered. The White Paper was published without prior consultation. It was published within a very short period after the Coalition Government came into power. It was unexpected. Consultation took place afterwards over what appears to us a very short period considering the extent of the proposed reforms. The consultation hardly changed policy but dealt largely with implementation. Even more significantly the Government decided to press ahead with some of the policies even before laying a Bill before Parliament”—
I repeat: even before laying a Bill before Parliament. It continues:
“The whole process had to be paused because of the general alarm at what was happening. The public interest in understanding the risks involved in such wide-ranging reforms of the NHS in the circumstances just described would have been high, if not exceptional in this case. Risk registers would have provided the public with a far better understanding of the risks to a national institution which millions depended on”.
Yes, indeed. The argument for publication of the risk register when this House and the other place were considering this legislation is overwhelming, and I think that the use of the veto in this case is shameful.
Earl Howe
My Lords, I begin by welcoming the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, to his new responsibilities with the health portfolio. It is very nice to see him in that post but I pay tribute to his predecessor, the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, whom I think we would all agree fulfilled the expectations and requirements of her office with great distinction.
First, perhaps I may make a very emphatic statement. The use of the veto by my right honourable friend was not in any way an act that indicated political embarrassment. The reasons for the use of the veto were those that I read out in the Statement. Furthermore, the noble Lord’s point that this represents a fundamental change of policy is quite invalid. As he knows, the veto was used by the previous Government in matters of cross-government importance. In this instance, the Cabinet considered that the principle of “safe space” for civil servants was a matter of cross-government importance. Had it not taken that view, my right honourable friend would not have been able to exercise the veto.
The previous Government took a very similar stance in relation to risk registers. Indeed, they refused to release the Department of Health’s strategic risk registers in response to three requests under the Freedom of Information Act. Therefore, I suggest to the noble Lord that the position adopted by the Government of whom he was a member was not at all dissimilar to the one that we have taken.
The noble Lord asked why the Government consider the current circumstances to be exceptional. He himself read out a section of the tribunal’s reasons which uses the word “exceptional”. The tribunal and indeed the Information Commissioner regard this case as exceptional, as do we. It is important for me to say that the reasons why those views are taken may be different in each case. Nevertheless, both sides classified this as an exceptional matter. From our point of view, it is exceptional not only because these were highly sensitive issues for which a request for disclosure was made at a very sensitive time—namely, when policy was still in the process of formulation—but because of the wider considerations that I mentioned that run across government. For those reasons, above all, we believe that this is an exceptional case.
It is not true that the Government have said that the transition risk register will never be published. All documents, as long as they form part of the national archive, are published in the end but, quite apart from that, we have undertaken to review at regular intervals the sensitivity of this document and to judge whether the current circumstances still pertain. That is right and proper. It is very interesting that over the past few months my department has received no fewer than 546 requests for release of the transition risk register. I think that that is an indication of what departments would have in store for them had the veto not been exercised. I repeat that it must be possible for civil servants and Ministers to have private discussions without the fear that literally every week, or even more frequently, the public would wish to be told the exact nature of those conversations.
Do we consider the tribunal’s decision to be reasonable? I will not criticise it on grounds of reason but we fundamentally take issue with its conclusions. We believe that the balance of public interest most definitely lies in non-disclosure in this case. It is interesting that the noble Lord has given the House to understand that the Government are not keeping a close eye on the performance of the NHS. Of course, we are doing that. Indeed, as I hope the noble Lord knows, the performance of the NHS has not only been maintained since the 2010 election; in many respects it has improved. We have made efficiency savings through the Nicholson challenge. We have maintained financial control and low waiting times for elective treatment. The transition is being managed very effectively. I say that with great tribute to those in the National Health Service who have had a considerable burden of work to undertake to ensure that these changes take place in a structured way. It is proceeding well. The noble Lord failed to acknowledge that the NHS is basically in very good heart indeed.
I hope that that answers the noble Lord’s questions. I know that he will come back to this subject, perhaps even next week, but I do believe that the Government’s decision is the right one and, indeed, the only one.
Lord Falconer of Thoroton
My Lords, whether this is a discreditable attempt to cover up something that is embarrassing for the Government, I do not know; that is for others to decide. The Statement represents quite a significant change in the Government’s position towards the use of the veto. Everybody in this House would agree with the noble Earl that there needs to be a safe space in which policy is formulated. Safe space means that you can talk to your civil servants, they can talk to you, and it will not be disclosed. That was fully reflected in the Freedom of Information Act, which allowed for that safe space. Again, as the noble Earl rightly says, there is a balance to be struck between preserving that safe space and the interests of openness.
The importance of the Freedom of Information Act was that, instead of it being decided by the Government or officials, it would be decided in accordance with the law and enforced within the courts. I understood the noble Earl to say that the Government have no complaint with the application of the law by the First-tier Tribunal and that is why they are not appealing. The position, therefore, is that the law was properly applied by the tribunal and the statute said that it would be the courts that determined where the limits were to be drawn. Everybody recognised that, in very exceptional circumstances, the veto would be used. Ministers at the time referred to such circumstances as, for example, when an informer would be inadvertently named if there was disclosure or if our foreign position would be damaged in a way that people could not work out. What has happened here—the noble Earl was frank about this—is that the Government simply disagree with the courts about where the balance should be struck. What does the noble Earl feel that that says about the Government’s view of the rule of law?
Earl Howe
My Lords, the law governing the release of government documents is the Freedom of Information Act 2000. The Act specifically recognises that the Government are entitled to consider all aspects of policy formulation in private. It provides an exemption to allow that, but it also allows Ministers to exercise a veto on the release of information if they have reasonable grounds for doing so. We believe that we do have reasonable grounds for doing so.
Lord Mawhinney
My Lords, will my noble friend accept that, in trying to find a balance between disclosure and transparency on the one hand and long-term good governance on the other, he has made the right judgment? Will he accept that good governance cannot be traduced or undermined in any way because it is at the very heart of the legitimacy and credibility of what happens here and in another place? Will he accept, finally, from a noble friend, who was occasionally—only occasionally—a constructively critical friend during the passage of the Health and Social Care Bill that the openness with which he handled that Bill will add credence to the judgment that he has announced today?
Earl Howe
I can do little but thank my noble friend for his kind remarks. Indeed, if I may say so, during the passage of the Health and Social Care Bill, I always attempted to be as open as I possibly could with the House on all the matters that we debated. I think that that resulted in a much better Bill. I hesitate to do this, but it is instructive to look at the evidence given to the Justice Select Committee in another place last month by Jack Straw. He put the case that we are making in very graphic terms with which I agree. He said:
“If you talk generally about risk registers, it has to be possible for officials to say to Ministers that there are these risks without these going public. Given the assiduity of the British press, if you publish a raw risk register without any more information, you will set all sorts of hares running, but the document was not designed or prepared in that way. You have to say, ‘We think that we could be at risk here. We think we could be at risk there. Have you thought about this?’ In my view, that sort of information must be protected”.
I could not have put it better.
Lord Harries of Pentregarth
My Lords, I thank the Minister very much for his helpful Statement. The whole House agrees totally with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, that officials must have their private space to make their frank comments. Does the Minister agree that you have to draw a distinction between those frank comments and the risk register itself, which is something of a more formal document? The risk registers that I have seen lay out formally whether the risk is high, medium or low, and you could publish the risk register without at the same time publishing any frank advice that was given. Because the risk register has not been published, does that not itself give rise to possible misrepresentations? There is always the possibility of misrepresentation. If it is published it will possibly be misrepresented; if it is not published, it could also be misrepresented. Finally, I ask for further clarification about the noble Earl’s remark that if the risk register had been published that would set a precedent for the future so that advice would all be anodyne. That was the word the Minister used. Would not the opposite be the case? Officials who were trying to make their judgment about possible risks would be more likely to exaggerate the risks. If the risk register was published and it was discovered that proper risks had not been identified, those officials would be held responsible for not identifying those risks and weighing them with due seriousness. I was slightly surprised by the use of the word “anodyne”.
Earl Howe
If you talk to any Permanent Secretary in any department I guarantee that they would take issue with the noble and right reverend Lord on his final point. It is firmly the view of departments across government that if civil servants believe that what they say will reach the public domain immediately, they will not wish to embarrass either themselves or their Ministers by expressing their concerns in graphic language. I understand the noble and right reverend Lord’s point, but I disagree with it for that reason.
He made a distinction between certain parts of the risk register—between the nature of the risks described, their ratings and so on. He was perfectly right to make that distinction. We reviewed the content of the transition risk register following the tribunal’s decision and decided that it would be possible to publish material taken from the register to inform both Houses, and members of the public, about as much of the content of the register as we could. That is why the document that we published on Tuesday, which I commend to the noble and right reverend Lord, included key information relating to the risk areas in the register, an explanation of why we considered that to be a material factor, and the actions taken to mitigate those risk areas. We were as candid as we could be, given the decision of principle that I outlined.
Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, perhaps I may take a stage further the point of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries. Is there not a converse argument that where civil servants feel strongly, one way or another, about whether there is a risk inherent in a policy initiative, there should be a mechanism whereby that view can enter the public domain so that the public should be informed of strong divisions of opinion, even between civil servants? Is not the risk register on this Bill precisely one of those areas where strong views may have prevailed?
Earl Howe
The noble Lord may correct me, but he seems to be advocating a world where all disagreements in private between civil servants become public property. With respect, I disagree with that point of view, which would be the consequence of his position. Section 35 of the Freedom of Information Act explicitly allows for those disagreements to be kept private. There is no doubt about that. Both the Information Commissioner and the tribunal agreed that Section 35 was engaged in this instance, and was there for a reason.
There are several other reasons why we felt that there was a need to withhold information. The need for candour was one. I referred to the risk that publication of the content of the risk register would distort rather than enhance public debate. Another reason was that disclosure could in some instances—including in this case—increase the likelihood of some of the risks happening. Some risks in the register were theoretical rather than real. If people had thought that the risk was real, they might have taken action that would have made the risk a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nobody wanted that.
Lord Walton of Detchant
My Lords, having been heavily involved in debates on the Health and Social Care Bill—a Bill of extraordinary complexity and vast in its range—I find it very easy to see how civil servants involved in the handling of the Bill might well have been able to identify substantial potential perceived risks of proceeding with it at earlier stages of its development. However, as the noble Earl said, it is perfectly clear, first, that the Government had the right to keep information of such a nature confidential, even though at the end of the day it appeared that they were flouting a legal decision in order to do so. It was absolutely right that the Secretary of State had the right to impose a veto. In the circumstances, it was absolutely acceptable. Therefore, it is right that the matter should proceed as the noble Earl said.
However, will he not express just a little surprise, in the light of the massive clamour by the public and professional bodies during the passage of the Bill—which has all settled down now that the Bill is an Act—that there are those who perceive in this government decision the possibility of a slightly Machiavellian desire to suppress information that could in the ultimate be somewhat embarrassing? Having said that, I believe that the decision was obviously correct in the circumstances.
Earl Howe
I am very grateful to the noble Lord for his support—as I was throughout the passage of the Health and Social Care Bill. It would be wrong not to acknowledge that, to the outside world, the decision to employ the veto looks suspicious. Of course, Governments of whatever party are the subject of suspicion. I am sure that it is well known to noble Lords who served in government that there is very little one can do to dispel impressions of that kind, other than to stand up in Parliament and in public to tell the world what is true. I can only say to the noble Lord that I recognise that those who might take issue with the Government’s decision are entitled to a measure of disappointment, considering that we proclaimed from the rooftops our commitment to transparency. We believe in transparency, and this is apparently an instance where we are not doing what we said we would do. However, there are overriding reasons why it was important for us to take this position.
Lord Armstrong of Ilminster
My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Walton. As I understand it, the Government’s position on the disclosure of risk registers is a matter of principle. It is clearly crucial that an assessment of risk or a risk register should be comprehensive and candid if it is to be of any use. If it is not comprehensive and candid, and if those who compile it are prevented or discouraged from making it comprehensive and candid by having to look over their shoulders in the fear of premature publication, the risk register’s value will be reduced—and there will be a further risk that the Minister will say later, “Why wasn’t I told?”.
Earl Howe
The noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, with his immense experience at the top of government, is very familiar with decisions of this nature, and I am grateful for what he said. Perhaps I should make it clear that the decision the Government took was not a blanket decision about all risk registers. The law requires the Government to look at each case on its merits. We believe that a risk register of this particularly sensitive kind is an exceptional matter. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, pointed out instances of risk registers that might be less sensitive. He mentioned the one relating to Heathrow’s extension. I suggest that that was a less sensitive case. The matter was clearly on a smaller scale; it was less political; and it became an issue after the project had been closed down. Therefore, the release of the register was perhaps not altogether a surprising decision by the then Government.
Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames
My Lords, I apologise to the House for not being in my place when my noble friend read the Statement. However, I read the Secretary of State’s Statement in full. My noble friend mentioned that the previous Administration refused freedom of information requests for disclosure of risk registers on three occasions. Will he tell the House how many times risk register disclosure has been refused by both this and the previous Administration? Does he know that in Wales the Labour Administration have also refused disclosure of a Department of Health risk register? Does he discern any difference of approach to the disclosure of risk registers between this and the previous Administration?
Earl Howe
I am grateful to my noble friend. The answer to his final question is no, I do not believe that there is a difference of approach. I do not have data relating to all government departments but, as I said earlier, the previous Administration refused to release the Department of Health’s strategic risk registers in response to three freedom of information requests. Indeed, one of those was responded to by the right honourable gentleman Mr Burnham in language not dissimilar to that which I have used today. A search of my department’s freedom of information database indicates that, since the Act came into force in January 2005, the department has received six specific requests for risk registers. In no case was the request granted. My noble friend also referred to the Welsh example, which is a very interesting one. In April of this year the Labour Assembly Government in Wales refused to disclose a risk register, and it was a health register. The reasons given for withholding that register mirrored exactly those that we are using currently.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe
As the legislation focuses so much on GPs, can the noble Earl say whether the risk register made an assessment that there would be increasing delays for patients in getting to see their GPs during the transitional period and that those patients would be put at risk? Given that the Government abandoned the previously set targets for the time limit in which GPs have to see their patients, is he aware that patients in London have faced longer waits to see a GP, let alone the GP of their choice? Is that point covered in the recently published documents in the Library? If not, will he make sure that it is?
Earl Howe
There are two points in answer to that. I am aware that in London, in particular, there is an issue for some patients wishing to see their GP; indeed only two days ago I had a useful conversation with the Royal College of GPs about that very matter. However, that particular issue has nothing to do with the reforms that the Government have just enacted, but relates to the supply of GPs. We have many more GPs than we had 10 years ago. Unfortunately, however, we need more. There is a target every year for recruiting GPs but we have not quite reached that target in the past three years. We need to do something about that. Action is in hand to address the issue that the noble Lord has raised. However, I would impress on the House that it is not a reflection of the reforms. The reforms have only just been enacted, and we are only now just rolling them out.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
I am sorry but we are moving on to the next Statement, on defence. We have come to the end of our time on this Statement.
Defence: Carrier Strike Capability
(12 years ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Defence (Lord Astor of Hever)
My Lords, first, I am sure that the whole House will wish to join me in offering sincere condolences to the families and friends of Guardsman Michael Roland of the 1st Battalion, the Grenadier Guards; Corporal Andrew Roberts of 23 Pioneer Regiment, the Royal Logistic Corps; and Private Ratu Silibaravi of 23 Pioneer Regiment, the Royal Logistic Corps, who were killed on operations in Afghanistan recently. My thoughts are also with the wounded and I pay tribute to the courage and fortitude in which they face their rehabilitation.
The Statement is as follows:
“With permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to make a Statement on the carrier strike programme.
The strategic defence and security review considered the carrier strike programme, put in place by the previous Government, as part of a wide-ranging review of options for delivering effective future defence while dealing with the black hole in Labour’s defence budget and the unaffordable ‘fantasy’ equipment plan bequeathed to us by the party opposite. While the review confirmed that carrier strike would be a key capability in delivering Future Force 2020, it also recognised the unsustainability as a whole of the defence equipment plan we inherited.
The strategic decision on carrier strike which emerged from the SDSR process was to convert one carrier with catapults and arrestor gear to operate the carrier variant of the Joint Strike Fighter, facilitating greater interoperability with allies, with a decision on the future use or disposal of the second carrier to be taken at the 2015 SDSR. The decision was also taken routinely to embark 12 fast jets while retaining the ability to surge up to the previously planned level of 36 aircraft. As the House would expect for such a complex and high-value project, the strategic decision taken at SDSR was followed by the commissioning of a detailed programme of work to look at the costs, risks and technical feasibility of all aspects of the proposed solution. That study was expected to take 18 months, completing by the end of 2012.
Since I took on the role of Defence Secretary in October last year, my overriding concern, after current operations and the welfare of our Armed Forces, has been to ensure the deliverability of the MoD’s equipment plan and the achievement of a balanced and sustainable budget. That will give our Armed Forces the assurance they need to carry out the massive transformation that will deliver Future Force 2020—the concept for our Armed Forces set out in the SDSR. The carrier project is a large element of the equipment programme and I have worked closely with the new Chief of Defence Materiel, Bernard Gray, to assess the technical and financial risks involved in it.
It quickly became clear to me that a number of the underlying facts on which the SDSR decision on carriers was based were changing.
First, as the programme to convert a carrier to operate with a catapult system has matured, and more detailed analysis has been carried out by suppliers, it has become clear that operational carrier strike capability, using the ‘cats and traps’ system, could not be delivered until late 2023 at the earliest, considerably later than the date envisaged at the time of the SDSR of ‘around 2020’. Because Britain’s carriers will have all-electric propulsion, and therefore do not generate steam like nuclear-powered vessels, the catapult system would need to be the innovative electromagnetic version being developed for the US Navy. Fitting this new system to a UK carrier has presented greater design challenges than were anticipated.
Secondly, and partly as a result of the delayed timetable, the estimated cost of fitting this equipment to the ‘Prince of Wales’ has more than doubled in the last 17 months, rising from £950 million to around £2 billion, with no guarantee that it will not rise further. Technical complexity and the cost of retrofitting ‘cats and traps’ to the ‘Queen Elizabeth’ would be even higher, making it unlikely that it would ever, in practice, be converted in the future.
Thirdly, at the time of the SDSR, there was judged to be a very significant technical risk around the STOVL version of the JSF and some commentators were speculating that it could even be cancelled. Indeed, the STOVL programme was subsequently placed on probation by the Pentagon. However, over the last year, the STOVL programme has made excellent progress and in the last few months has been removed from probation. The aircraft has completed over 900 hours of flying, including flights from the USS ‘Wasp’, and the US Marine Corps has a high degree of confidence in the in-service date for the aircraft. The balance of risk has changed and there is now judged to be no greater risk in STOVL than in other variants of JSF.
Fourthly, further work with our allies on the best approach to collaborative operation has satisfied us that joint maritime task groups involving our carriers, with co-ordinated scheduling of maintenance and refit periods, and an emphasis on carrier availability rather than cross-deck operations, is the more appropriate route to optimising alliance capabilities.
When the facts change, the responsible thing to do is to examine the decisions you have made and to be willing to change your mind, however inconvenient that may be; doing what is right for Britain, not burying your head in the sand and ploughing on regardless, as the last Government so often did. A persistent failure to observe this simple principle is at the root of many of the MoD budget problems that we inherited from the party opposite. I do not intend to repeat its mistakes. The decision taken in the SDSR to proceed with a carrier strike capability, despite the massive challenges we faced with the MoD’s budget, was the right decision. The decision to seek to contain costs by going for ‘cats and traps’ on a single carrier with greater interoperability with allies, and the cheaper CV version of the JSF aircraft, was also the right decision based on the information available at the time.
But the facts have changed. I am not prepared to accept a delay in regenerating Britain’s carrier strike capability beyond the timetable set out in the SDSR, and I am not prepared to put the equipment plan which will support Future Force 2020 at risk of a billion pound-plus increase in the carrier programme and an unquantifiable risk of further cost rises. So I can announce today that the National Security Council has agreed not to proceed with the ‘cats and traps’ conversion, but to complete both carriers in STOVL configuration. This will give us the ability to use both carriers to provide continuous carrier availability at a net additional operating cost averaging about £60 million per year. As we set out in the SDSR, a final decision on the use of the second carrier will be taken as part of SDSR 2015.
We will switch the order for JSF aircraft from CV to STOVL, which we can do without delaying delivery, and by making this announcement today we can plan on the basis of the first operational aircraft being delivered with a UK weapons-fit package. We expect HMS ‘Queen Elizabeth’ to be handed over to the Royal Navy in early 2017 for sea trials. We expect to take delivery of our first test aircraft in July of this year, and we expect the first production aircraft to be delivered to us in 2016, with flying from the ‘Queen Elizabeth’ to begin in 2018 after its sea trials are complete.
We have discussed this decision with the French Government and with the United States. The French confirm that they are satisfied with our commitment to jointly planned carrier operations to enhance European-NATO capability. The United States, on whose support we would rely in regenerating either type of carrier capability, has been highly supportive throughout this review, and I would like to record my personal thanks to the Secretary of Defence, the Pentagon, the Navy and the Marine Corps for their high level of engagement with us. I spoke to Secretary Panetta last night and he confirmed the US’s willingness to support our decision and its view that UK carrier strike availability and our commitment to the JSF programme are the key factors. The Chief of the Defence Staff and his fellow chiefs of staff—all of them—endorse this decision as the quickest and most assured way now to deliver carrier strike as part of an overall affordable equipment programme that will support Future Force 2020.
This was not an easy decision to take, but our responsibility is to make the right decision on the basis of the facts available to us. Neither I nor any of my colleagues came into government expecting decisions to be easy or pain-free. I have a responsibility to clear up the financial mess we inherited in the MoD, just as we are clearing up the mess we inherited across government as a whole: to set a balanced budget and an affordable, deliverable equipment programme with manageable and bounded risk. This decision addresses one of the last impediments to me announcing the achievement of those objectives to the House, and I hope to be able to do so very soon.
But it is not just about balancing budgets, critical as that is. It is about the UK’s defence, secured by having an appropriate and sustainable military capability. This announcement delivers an affordable solution to securing that capability and, with two useable carriers, gives us the option of continuous carrier availability. It confirms the expected delivery of the first test aircraft this summer; of the first production aircraft in 2016; of the first carrier into sea trials in 2017; and of the first flight of the JSF from the deck of the carrier in 2018, with an operational military capability in 2020. It confirms the support of our principal allies, the United States and France, and that of the defence chiefs. It shows that we, at least, are not afraid to take difficult decisions when they are right for Britain. I commend this Statement to the House”.
Lord Rosser
First, I extend our sincere condolences to the families and friends of the three members of our Armed Forces who have made the ultimate sacrifice on our behalf in the service of our country.
I thank the noble Lord for repeating the Statement made by the Secretary of State in the other place. Yesterday we had the Queen’s Speech, which contained no direct reference to our Armed Forces or to defence. Today we have found out why. Defence policy is today an embarrassment for a Government who acted in haste when they came into office and were more interested in trying to score points than in embarking on a measured and considered strategic defence and security review with time for full and appropriate consultation before final conclusions and decisions were reached. They are a Government who were more interested in making unsubstantiated claims about an alleged £38 billion unfunded liability over the next 10 years, and judging by the Statement just repeated by the noble Lord, the Government’s approach has not changed on that score. They have withheld information from the Commons Defence Select Committee as to how that figure was calculated, and the National Audit Office figures did not support their claim either.
A key reason why money is now in short supply is because the growth in the economy which this Government inherited had been thrown away by them six months after they took office, has never been restored, and we are now in a double dip recession. The rushed strategic defence and security review made no real reference to north Africa, yet a few months later our forces were involved in action in the Mediterranean off the Libyan coast. In their foreword to the strategic defence and security review, the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister had declared, as they decommissioned HMS “Ark Royal” and sold off the Harriers at a knock-down price, that:
“In the short term, there are few circumstances we can envisage where the ability to deploy airpower from the sea will be essential”.
Fortunately, that view was not shared by those nations which did have an operational aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. The Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister went on to assert that the previous Government,
“committed to carriers that would have been unable to work properly with our closest military allies”.
They said that they would “rectify this error” by fitting,
“a catapult to the operational carrier to enable it to fly a version of the Joint Strike Fighter with a longer range and able to carry more weapons”.
Indeed, the Prime Minister asserted that the previous Government had got it “badly wrong”. The Government’s rushed strategic defence and security review then told us:
“Installing the catapult and arrestor will allow the UK to acquire the carrier-variant of Joint Strike Fighter ready to deploy on the converted carrier instead of the short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) variant. This version of the jet has a longer range and greater payload: this, not large numbers of aircraft, is the critical requirement for precision strike operations in the future”.
Do those words I have just quoted from the SDSR now represent government policy or not in the light of the Statement the Minister has just repeated, which says that the Government will switch the order for JSF aircraft from carrier-variant to STOVL? In view of the penultimate sentence in the foreword to the SDSR by the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, which says:
“We must never send our soldiers, sailors and airmen into battle without the right equipment”,
has the Prime Minister now changed his view? Does he now accept that the STOVL-variant rather than the carrier-variant of the JSF is the “right equipment” for our forces?
The Prime Minister has now come to the conclusion that the previous Government’s policy is right. However, the Statement repeated by the Minister seeks to hide behind a claim that the facts have changed. Apparently it has now been found out that the “cats and traps” system cannot be delivered until late 2023 at the earliest. Partly as a result of the delayed timetable, the estimated cost of fitting this equipment to the “Prince of Wales” has apparently more than doubled in the last 17 months, and the cost of fitting cats and traps to the “Queen Elizabeth” would be even higher. Perhaps a little more time spent on undertaking the strategic defence and security review and consulting more widely would have drawn attention to these problems of timescale and cost that the Government say have caused them to rethink their approach.
The Government had clearly decided that there was no likelihood of a problem with cost and timescale, because the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister said in their foreword to the SDSR:
“We will fit a catapult to the operational carrier to enable it to fly a version of the Joint Strike Fighter with a longer range and able to carry more weapons”.
There is nothing there about any possibility of a problem over timescales or costs, or a need to look at timescales and costs. We were also told that,
“at the time of the SDSR, there was judged to be a very significant technical risk around the STOVL version of JSF”.
The technical risk was apparently so significant that it does not appear to have been referred to in the strategic defence and security review as a reason for the Government’s decision to switch the order for JSF aircraft, a decision they are now reversing.
The fourth reason given for the change of approach is that,
“further work with our allies on the best approach to collaborative operation has satisfied us that joint maritime task groups involving our carriers … is the more appropriate route to optimising alliance capabilities”.
Surely that is the kind of issue that should be considered at the time of a strategic defence and security review, not immediately after it. No doubt it could have been considered as part of the SDSR if the Government had not been so determined to rush it through and end up with the policy U-turn that we are being told about today.
The Minister has told us in the Statement why the decision made by the previous Government on carrier strike capability was right and why the present Government’s policy has had to be abandoned. Perhaps the Minister can tell us the cost to the nation of the Government’s U-turn, and when the Government expect to make further announcements on their equipment programme in the light of Future Force 2020. Can the Minister also take this opportunity to put the record straight and confirm the National Audit Office finding that cancelling both carriers would have saved £1.2 billion but that, in government, his party agree that it is not in the national interest to do so?
At a time when cuts are having to be made, at the very least our Armed Forces deserve clarity and certainty of decision-making by the Government. On the subject of carrier strike capability that most definitely has not been the case. Since the Prime Minister took personal responsibility for this key decision in the strategic defence and security review, it is the Prime Minister’s competence that has been found wanting.
We support the policy U-turn announced today, which accepts that the previous Government’s decision was correct, but we do not support the taking of the wrong policy options previously by this Government under a rushed SDSR or the resultant waste of time and money. Let us hope that the decisions announced today will now provide our Armed Forces with the much needed clarity and certainty they deserve as far as carrier strike capability is concerned.
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, it is a bit rich for the Opposition to criticise when it was they who scrapped the Sea Harriers, a decision that a senior naval officer described as,
“one of the most disastrous military decisions ever undertaken”.
It was they who pushed the in-service dates of the carriers back two years, which drove £1.6 billion of costs into the programme with no capability gain, a decision which the Public Accounts Committee said set,
“a new benchmark in poor corporate decision making”.
I could go on.
I may not be able to answer all the noble Lord’s questions but I undertake to write to him. First, he asked if the Prime Minister felt that the STOVL was the right aircraft. I can categorically say the answer is yes, under the changed circumstances since we made the decision in the SDSR. The House should be aware that we are talking about a very capable aircraft. We have spent a lot of time debating Harriers. The STOVL-variant is a very much more capable aircraft than Harrier. It has a genuine day and night capability; it is bigger, faster and can fly higher for longer, and can carry more weapons. It has low observability—that is, stealth—and greatly improved survivability. It is a fifth generation technology and its sensors and systems integration make it a high-performance tactical ISTAR asset. JCA places the UK at the forefront of fighter technology.
The noble Lord said that he felt that the SDSR decision was wrong. The SDSR was about setting a strategic direction and we remain committed to reintroducing a carrier strike capability around 2020, but the Government made clear then that if costs—or facts—changed, we would not just plough on regardless. We said that we would spend time and money examining the option of carrier conversion and that is what we have done. A “main gate” decision will necessarily be the subject of a much greater level of analysis than that conducted for the SDSR.
The noble Lord pointed out that the B aircraft was on probation for a time. That is correct. As was said in the Statement, the STOVL programme was taken off probation in the United States in January 2012 after successful sea trials in November 2011 on board the USS “Wasp”. I have photographs here of the B-variant taking off from the USS “Wasp” which I am very happy to hand out to any noble Lord who would like them. The STOVL-variant is also required by the US Marine Corps and the Italian Navy. We are very grateful for the assistance that we have received from both the US Navy and the US Marine Corps.
The noble Lord asked how much money we had wasted. As of the end of April, we had committed £39 million on conversion investigations and a further £1 million on an air-to-air refuelling study. We do not consider this money to have been wasted. Changing the variant was considered the best course of action at the time of the SDSR and these costs were necessarily incurred. Without a detailed investigation of the impact of carrier conversion, we would not have been in the position today to have identified the significant rise in estimated costs and made the decision to call a halt to this programme. I think that I have covered all the questions, but if there were any others, I will check Hansard and write to the noble Lord.
Lord Lee of Trafford
My Lords, I join these Benches in the earlier tribute. Today’s Statement marks another sad chapter in the saga of the aircraft carriers. It ill beholds the Opposition to crow and to adopt the pose that they did today in their heavy questioning.
I have three questions. First, there appears to have been some change of heart or change of plan over the second carrier. My understanding was that the second would be mothballed, or possibly even sold; now it seems to be planned to be operated much more in tandem with the first carrier.
My second question is about the overall cost of the carriers. Where are we up to with our latest forecast of the cost of the two carriers? Thirdly, will my noble friend say a little more about interoperability, particularly with the French carriers?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, we have an aspiration to use the second carrier, but this will be an issue that the next SDSR, probably in 2015, will have to consider, particularly in the light of the cost of crewing it, which we estimate to be about £60 million a year. I can assure my noble friend that it is our aspiration to have the second carrier ready to assist when the first carrier goes in for a refit, or for any other reason.
I feel uncomfortable giving my noble friend figures for the overall cost of the carriers. We are in discussions with industry and it would be wrong to reveal too many of those figures.
My noble friend asked finally about interoperability. The key intention agreed by the UK and France, which my noble friend mentioned, has always been to co-ordinate operations to ensure that when one country has a carrier in maintenance, the other has one available. Our ability to deliver this assurance will be enhanced should we ultimately decide to bring the second carrier into service. The US has made it clear that carrier availability, rather than cross-decking or the capability of aircraft, is the key issue for it.
Lord Stirrup
My Lords, in welcoming this decision, which is not only the right decision but, realistically, the only possible one, could I for the sake of clarity ask the Minister to confirm three points? First, will he confirm that the initial Joint Strike Fighter aircraft to be delivered to the United Kingdom, which will be instrumented aircraft for test and evaluation flying, will be STOVL variants and that this has always been the case, because, at the time of the SDSR, it was too late to change the choice of variant for those aircraft? Secondly, will he confirm that the first carrier, now in build, is being built without cats and traps and, again, that this always has always been the case, since, at the time of the SDSR, it was too late to change that? Thirdly, will he confirm that, as a consequence, the timescales for the delivery of the aircraft capability and the carrier capability have not changed from the pre-SDSR assumptions as a consequence of this excursion into carrier variant?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble and gallant Lord for his support. He and I sat through all the SDSR meetings and had to make the original decision. I can confirm to him that the first B-variant will be delivered in July this year and that the second one, I understand, will be delivered in October this year. They are both B-variants and both test aircraft. The third one, which will be delivered within 18 months, is also a B-variant—so all the first three aircraft are B-variants.
The noble and gallant Lord then asked me to confirm that the first carrier was being built without cats and traps and that the time when it would come into operation would not change. I can confirm that that is the case.
Lord Gilbert
My Lords, I, too, welcome this Statement, which must have been very difficult for the Minister to deliver. It took him 13 minutes to read out the Secretary of State’s Statement, and all he had to do was get up and say, “Sorry, you were right; we were wrong”, but he did not do that. But that is where we are.
Leaving aside all that fog about changed circumstances, I was very interested in what he said about a refuelling study. Why on earth did the Ministry of Defence need to engage in a refuelling study? It was buying the plane from the Americans. Why did not just ask the Americans what arrangements they had or did not have? I suspect that the plane will not have any refuelling capability because it will probably do damage to the stealth of the aircraft.
While I greatly welcome this decision, I still do not think that we out of risk and danger completely with the B version of this aircraft. Less than a year ago, Rear Admiral Venlet, the officer in charge of the whole programme in the United States, said that, so far, the F-35B is using more runway than desired in its short takeoffs and landings and that it cannot land vertically with as much payload as customers would like. I would be grateful if the Minister could speak to those two points. I am not too concerned about the second one, because you can always drop off fuel and ordinance that you have not used when you are trying to land, but concerns about the takeoff distance need careful attention and the Minister should explain to the House where we stand.
Lord Astor of Hever
I am grateful to the noble Lord for his measured welcome of the Statement. I have far too much respect for him to criticise him for his subsequent comments. I am not briefed on the refuelling study with the Americans; I will write to the noble Lord and put a copy of the letter in the Library of the House. I am not aware of the problems of runway and takeoff associated with the B-variant. All the briefing that I have had on that from Royal Naval officers and civil servants has been very positive. They are all very happy with the plane’s performance, but, again, I will write t the noble Lord on this issue of runway and takeoff.
Lord Burnett
My Lords, I apologise for missing the first few minutes of the Statement. Will my noble friend explain what impact this decision will have on our amphibious capability and the amphibious role envisaged for these carriers?
Lord Astor of Hever
I can assure my noble friend that we are doing quite a lot of work on this issue. Previous studies have shown that this decision may offer great flexibility in the employment of the carriers in other roles, particularly amphibious roles. The carriers are central to our amphibious assault capability and are a leading example of the expeditionary forces that underpin the core principles of the SDSR. I can assure my noble friend that there is plenty of room on the carriers to embark a good number of Royal Marines and to operate helicopters to support them. The B-variant can land on austere runways on land in support of ground troops.
Lord Reid of Cardowan
My Lords, the Minister rather led with his chin on occasions in his Statement when defending his predecessor’s decision. I am going to resist the temptation and keep my hand rather firmly in my pocket. I very much welcome the Statement made today by the Secretary of State, not least because it has reverted to a decision that was taken by the last Government on perfectly rational grounds and in which I played a minor role at the beginning. My colleague the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, who is here today, played a much more major part.
The truth of the matter is that it is the easiest thing in the world for a new Minister, in a fresh dawn, to overturn the recommendations and decisions of their predecessor. A lot of political kudos can be attracted to that—a degree of bravura, a sense of decisiveness, ruthless leadership and so on. It is much more difficult for a Minister in a Government to overturn completely the decision of their immediate predecessor, and it takes a great deal of courage to do that. There is no political kudos—all that can be anticipated is criticism, “egg on face” quotes, and so on.
I congratulate the Government and the Secretary of State on having made the right decisions for the right reasons this time. This is right for the Armed Forces, for the security of the country, for the Navy and above all for the people who serve in the Armed Forces. In passing this commendation to the Secretary of State, will the Minister urge him to apply the same scrutiny and rationale to various other aspects of the SDSR, which, on the evidence of today’s decision, have been taken more in haste and in the pursuit of kudos than in the interests of national security of the country?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord for his welcome. This was a very difficult decision but it was right for the Royal Navy and for the country. In taking this decision, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State made no criticism of his predecessor’s decision. Things have dramatically changed over the cats and traps, and obviously with the B-variant. I will take the noble Lord’s other point, on bringing the same scrutiny to other aspects of the SDSR, back to the department.
Lord Davies of Stamford
My Lords, I do not think that anyone is going to be deceived by the attempts by the Secretary of State to make party political points or to make people see this as anything other than a discreditable shambles. It is very unfortunate. The Government would have done better to have come forward with a slightly more humble line and to have confessed that they had made a mistake.
Can we hear how many aircraft the Government are now proposing to procure? We still have not heard that. Does the noble Lord accept and acknowledge that, because the B version carries a lot of its weight in the form of its own lift fan, its range is much less—400 miles against 700 miles for the CV version? Its payload is similarly reduced, and therefore more aircraft will be required to give a similar military effect. Are the Government planning to purchase more aircraft to procure the same military effect? Will the Minister also recognise that if we simply restrict ourselves to purchasing the F-35B, we will have no deep-strike bombing capability at all once the Tornados have been withdrawn? Do the Government have any plans at all to replace that lacuna in our capability, which will emerge by the end of the decade?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, again I resent this criticism. I feel that it is the noble Lord who should be a little humble, particularly when the party opposite’s last single year in office saw a staggering £3.3 billion increase in the total cost of the 15 largest defence equipment projects. The noble Lord asked me how many Joint Strike Fighter B-variants we are going to buy. In the first instance we intend to buy enough Joint Strike Fighter aircraft to build up our initial carrier strike capability. We do not intend to make final decisions on JSF numbers until our next strategic defence review, in 2015 at the earliest.
I will just re-emphasise what the Statement said. We are getting our first and second aircraft this year. We are getting the first production aircraft in 2016. The first aircraft trials at sea, when we will have three aircraft, will be in 2018. The initial operational capability will be in 2020, when we will have eight useable aircraft. This is three years earlier than would be possible with the C-variant.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine
My Lords, I accept that it must have been a very difficult decision to take, but clearly the sums involved point us in that direction. However, I thought that the most intriguing part of my noble friend’s Statement was that the Chief of the Defence Staff and his fellow chiefs,
“endorse this decision as the quickest and most assured way now to deliver carrier strike as part of an overall affordable equipment programme”.
I wonder what the advice to the Secretary of State from the chiefs was when he came in in 2010. I suspect that my noble friend will not illuminate that point right now.
My other point is about the question of interoperability versus collaboration. This is clearly a setback to our co-operation with the French. The lessons of Libya will have told us that it is vital that we continue to collaborate with them. Will he reassure us that we will continue to work with them to optimise our joint capabilities?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, taking my noble friend’s second question first, I can reassure her on that point. I have had a number of discussions with the French military at all levels, and am very keen on pushing our relations with it. As for the chiefs giving their support, I understand that they all put their support in writing to No. 10. I cannot answer now the question about the advice that the Secretary of State received in 2010, but my noble friend might want to have a word with the noble and gallant Lord afterwards.
Lord West of Spithead
My Lords, this is clearly the correct decision, but I have two questions for the Minister. The first continues the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lee. The decision that had been taken before was that we were going to have STOVL and run two carriers. Looking at this Statement in detail, it is not at all clear that we are really going to run two carriers. It would be dreadful if, after all this going round in circles like an oozlum bird for two years, we end up with only one carrier running. I hope that we can be more positive about the fact that we will run two in order to ensure that we have a carrier 100% of the time, because that is good for the nation and for the defence of this country.
My second point runs on from that. Perhaps the Minister could get across to the Secretary of State, and to the rest of his Front Bench, that this is good news. We have a 65,000-tonne ship because if you surge 26 Joint Strike Fighters, of whatever variant, it has to be that size. It is not because some admiral woke up and thought, “Gosh, I’ll have a big ship”. It is done for a reason. We should be very proud that this nation is building two of them. Let us get a bit of whoomph and say, “Right, we’ve made a decision, this is a fantastic thing, tens of thousands of people are working producing these things and they will protect and look after our nation for 50 years”.
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, the second carrier is, as I said, an aspiration and we very much hope it will be possible. We will certainly always have one carrier at sea. The decision on the second one will have to wait until 2015, but it is our aspiration that it is going to happen. As for the noble Lord’s point about it being a good news story, of course it is a good news story and we are very proud of British industry. I was up in Rosyth and Govan a couple of weeks ago and saw the work. I am enormously proud of what we are producing up there.
Lord Lyell
My Lords, I hope there is time for one quick question from a mere accountant. Can my noble friend confirm the wise words of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, about the effectiveness and competence of the new STOVL version? I believe that we shall make a major saving in the cat and trap system, although there may be some shortfall in deliverability of the particular weapons system in the distance. Can he write to me, or let me have this afternoon, a quick sum on the saving of the cat and trap system, not least the time and availability in 2017-18 of the new version?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, I will be happy to write to my noble friend. I have a lot of figures here with which I shall not weary the House. I can tell him that to convert the “Queen Elizabeth” to cats and traps after she is built would cost between £2.5 billion and £3 billion.
Lord Greenway
My Lords, are we not in danger of short-termism? Following what the noble Lord, Lord West, just said, we will, we hope, end up with two immensely useful platforms that will last for 40 or 50 years and that will be able to take all sorts of strange aircraft about which we do not yet know. Therefore, the project going ahead as it is now is most useful.
Lord Astor of Hever
No, my Lords, I do not think that it is short-termism. We are in very good company with the B-variant. The US Marine Corps uses it; it is buying a lot of Joint Strike Fighters. The Italians are also going to buy them for their carrier. It is not short-termism at all.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
My Lords, although everyone seems happy that we are now back on the right track, can the Minister give us an estimate of the extra abortive expenditure involved in the unnecessary adventure of cat and trap?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, I have already given an answer to the second question. I will read it out again, but before I do I must say that I am very grateful to the noble Lord for assuring me that we are on the right track. I said that at the end of April we had committed £39 million to conversion investigations and a further £1 million to an air-to-air refuelling study. We do not consider that money to have been wasted. Changing variant was considered the best course of action at the time of the SDSR and those costs were necessarily incurred. Without a detailed investigation of the impact of carrier conversion, we would not have been in a position today to identify the significant rise in estimated costs and to decide to call a halt to the programme.
Queen’s Speech
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve
My Lords, we are in something of a cleft stick when it comes to reform of your Lordships’ House, and that is never a comfortable place to be. I think it is open to a Cross-Bencher to suggest a different way to move forward. It seems to me that it might even be a way that could be the focus for some consensus.
In the gracious Speech, the Government’s proposal has been definitively set down as changing the composition of your Lordships’ House but not its function. Of course, that invites the question: how do you change form without function? How do you alter the composition and leave the function intact? That goes to all the questions raised about greater legitimacy. It seems that people still aspire to more legitimacy—oh yes—but please not too much because then your Lordships’ House would question the primacy of the other place.
There may be a way through this. I offer it just as a suggestion, but it might even attract some consensus—without going into the different meanings of consensus, about which we heard a good deal this morning. First, we could have a statutory independent commission, but it should be a nominations commission rather than an appointments commission. Its task would be to nominate candidates to stand as independents. It would have to have a carefully drawn remit. Having done that, we would have a national election: one person, one vote, with people voting either for the party-political candidate of their choice or for the independent list. In that way, the proportion of your Lordships’ House consisting of independents could rise or fall. It might fall very low if the electorate felt that they wished to support the parties of their choice, not the independent list; or it might rise, reflecting the democratic will, if electors decided that they would prefer to support the independent list, not the parties not of their choice. Given the sad decline in enthusiasm for party-political politics, on which several noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, have commented, which I take very seriously, one way to regenerate enthusiasm for electoral politics might be to put a little distance between choice and choosing a party.
The independent commission would of course have to have a careful remit. I suggest that the following points might be important. First, it should take a serious view of what is independence. As your Lordships know, not everybody who sits on these Benches is an independent Cross-Bench Peer. The commission should try to maintain that these Benches consist only of those who have not and have not recently had any party-political affiliation or supported any party financially. One would need that criterion.
An independent nominations commission could also take account of the spread of current expertise of various useful sorts in your Lordships’ House. After all, it would know who was retiring, who was stepping down. It would have a broad view of the composition of the House for the next period. Given that broad view, it could ask the following serious questions. Do we have in this House enough industrial experience? Do we have enough doctors? Do we have enough engineers? Do we have too many Members—or, let us say, a great wealth of experience—of other sorts? In short, the independent list would have to be independent and contribute something distinctive to the House. That might work. It might allow us to have a House of which every Member had been nominated and every Member had been elected, but it would not allow any pure appointments.
I do not imagine that in the end the composition of your Lordships’ House would be so different from what it is today. In fact, it might be an advantage in that, in many ways, it would mirror diversity. It would achieve the separation of two functions, with those representing constituencies more deeply anchored and more expert in the regional basis on which they were elected, and those on the independent list being there only because they brought something distinctive in their combination of experience and expertise, preferably one that was up to date, and preferably a trade or craft that they practise.
This may not commend itself in the middle of the present debate because we have rather got ourselves impaled on the idea that, whatever else, a hybrid House is a nice looking compromise and people will stand for it. A hybrid House has great risks, which were mentioned this morning by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and a House without independence has some risks. I want to say a little about that.
If we assume that the function of your Lordships’ House remains scrutiny, it is not merely an activity that we undertake. It is underpinned in the process of the House by the possibility that the Government may not win every vote. They may either agree to bring forward an amendment that captures the spirit of the amendment that is then not pressed, or they may lose the vote on an amendment. That process of check and challenge is fundamental to scrutiny. There has been reference to the days before the 1999 reforms, when it was the self-restraint of the large number of Conservative hereditaries that allowed check and challenge to happen—a clearly unsatisfactory position. However, we could institute adequate check and challenge, and thereby retain our function of adequate scrutiny, if we could ensure a House that was composed in a more diverse way. I do not believe that that has to be at the cost of an electoral mandate.
Finally, would this House not be too legitimate—the other problem that all proposals hitherto would, in effect, have faced? It would be regarded as having a lesser and certainly a different sort of legitimacy from that of the House of Commons. It would probably be one in which the primacy of the other place could be preserved. There is my proposal: keep the primacy of the Commons, keep the function of scrutiny, have a wholly elected House and diversify the methods of election.
Lord Denham
My Lords, when on Monday and Tuesday of last week your Lordships debated a Motion not dissimilar to today’s, most noble Lords opened their remarks by saying that in their view this House badly needed a reform, but not that one. Much the same could be said about today. I confess I am somewhat surprised by this sudden passion for more reform. At the time I made my maiden speech in your Lordships’ House some 60 years ago, the composition of the House had remained unchanged for decades—if not centuries—but this state of affairs was not to last for long.
First came the Life Peerages Act 1958, which allowed Peers to be Members of this House for their own lives only and opened the way for those who did not wish to saddle their heirs with obligations that some of them would wish to avoid. The same Act brought in women as sitting Members of the House for the first time. This was followed in 1963 by the admission of female holders of hereditary peerages in their own right. At some point around this time, by tacit agreement between the parties, the creation of new hereditary peerages except in special circumstances began to be phased out. Then, of course, in 1999 came the cull of nine-tenths of the hereditary Peers of both sexes. Those are only the major changes that have taken place. Now, along come Her Majesty’s Government, asking your Lordships’ House to throw the whole thing away and start all over again. This House has already been reformed up to its eyebrows. It has been reforming itself, and it will continue such reforms so long as it is left by Her Majesty’s Government to do so.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top
My Lords, I rise with some trepidation to follow someone who, I now understand, entered this House before any women were allowed. That was in 1948, when I was probably about two and a half, so the noble Lord’s experience in this House is, I suspect, longer than that of almost anyone else here today. Experience is an important thing; however, I am sure he will understand that I do not agree with everything in his speech.
This debate is in the wider context of yesterday’s Queen’s Speech. I felt a sort of enormous disappointment with it, because coalition government may be something that we have to learn and understand—and progress in future—but we got the lowest common denominator of coalitions yesterday: it was about what little they could agree on rather than what hope and aspiration they could come to by getting the best from both parts.
As I come from the north-east, your Lordships will not be surprised to hear that my main anxiety was that there was little hope to give regarding the devastation in that region. I have tried at Question Time to make sure the House knows about the increasing joblessness and the effects of the recession there. I think that it is our role to give hope and optimism to the public but, try as I might, I find little comfort, let alone optimism, for the north-east to draw on in yesterday’s gracious Speech.
I also regret the lack of clarity around social care. We were disappointed by how little the health Bill delivered a way forward for social care, and there was much debate from these Benches about the need for much more clarity and a way forward. There is very little prospect of much progress on that coming out of the Queen’s Speech.
To come to the issue of the day, however, all of us who want and strive to be part of a vibrant democracy know that there are huge challenges. I hope that what has been going on in the rest of Europe over the past week, as well as the very low turnout for our own democracy, tells us that we are walking in very difficult waters, with many people who we depend on for a democracy—the electorate—becoming very disillusioned. We saw that in the low turnout last week.
The proposal to move to individual registration is one that I understand. It is important to keep our system intact and without fraud, but I suspect that what the Government bring forward will smack far more of seeking political advantage than of putting the system right. My noble friend Lord Wills talked about this from his experience in the previous Government. I started the journey in the previous Government when I was Local Government Minister in the 1997 Parliament. At that stage, voting systems and elections were the Local Government Minister’s responsibility; they moved after that. I got very interested in this subject and encouraged local authorities to look at how they could encourage more people to vote. There were some useful experiments around the country, although often they became very difficult to do because they needed a national register. I still think that we need to think about that and not wipe it off the agenda.
As we live in an increasingly mobile society, knowing who is entitled to vote and enabling them to vote where they are, rather than where they happen to have been on a particular day, is something that we need to look at. I am sure that I will be very unpopular on both sides if I say, “If we had maintained getting an identity card that really did tell you who was who, we would be able to eliminate fraud without some of the concerns and proposals that people are going for”. I will look at the Bill carefully, but I am concerned that if it comes forward in the way in which it has been talked about, it will lead to a reduction in registration rather than an increase, and that will not be in the interests of democracy.
Everyone has said a great deal on Lords reform, and I do not want to repeat it. The main justification for the Bill is that we should be democratic. My problem with the proposals is that I do not believe that the Bill will support the aim of a vibrant democracy. Indeed, I fear that if it were introduced and agreed in its present form, it would increase cynicism about democracy. We have a constitution that evolves and changes. The Government are wrong to think only about composition, or that composition can be sorted out effectively without dealing with the other aspects that are so important to our democracy and governance.
I fear, as I say, that the proposals would increase cynicism in the electorate. We cannot really tell people why we want reform, other than that we want to introduce a democratic element. We also cannot tell them what balance we are seeking between the two Chambers or what they can expect from the House Lords. Indeed, we are even saying that they cannot expect anything from us: once someone is elected for the 15-year term, they will not be supported in engaging with the electorate at all because that might disturb the balance with the House of Commons. When you try to explain this to teenagers, they look at you with incredulity. They simply do not understand it. I feel that the Government have to turn things round, look at the fundamentals and deal with them. Then they will be able to talk much more easily about the way forward.
I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, about the risks of a hybrid House. I started by supporting a mixed House, but the more work I did on it and the more I looked at other Parliaments and legislatures, the more anxious I became.
I want to make a point that I do not think has been raised before; I certainly have not heard it, but that might be my fault. Many countries that have a bicameral legislature in which both Houses are elected not only have a written constitution, as my noble friend Lord Rooker said earlier, but separation of the Executive and the legislature. In the distant past, I read an old Liberal Democrat document that espoused that. I am not saying it is their policy now, but if you embark on a course where you are very hazy about the outcome, you will often end up with unintended consequences. I make that point about electoral registration, but I also make it about Lords reform. We are far too cavalier in simply saying, “Let’s introduce democracy; everything will be okay”.
I believe very strongly in our system because I think the British people appreciate being able to see their Member of Parliament have a go at the Prime Minister or at Ministers. Ministers never like it, but it is a very important part of our democracy and our democracy would be much less without it. We must not embark on something that has a logical end in which you would separate the Executive from the legislature. There is that danger in some of the proposals before us, partly because they simply have not been thought through enough.
That interaction between the two Houses and the accountability of the Executive are at the heart of our democracy and our constitutional settlement. Trying to deal only with the composition of the Lords, without any consideration of its effect on the other two parts, is very short-sighted and may well be dangerous. It could end up with those unintended consequences.
In all these things, we need to work very hard on what the proposals mean for the constitution and governance of our country as a whole, and then we should put whatever we come up with to a referendum.
Baroness Shephard of Northwold
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong. She said that the noble Lord, Lord Denham, came into this House when she was two and a half, but I remind her of a much more recent date: 25 years ago, nearly to the day, she and I entered the other place as newly elected Members.
I declare an interest as a member of the Joint Select Committee on Lords reform. I am also one of the 12 members of the Joint Select Committee who produced the alternative report. Regrettably, I was unable to take part in last week’s debate as I could not stay until its conclusion, so I am grateful to have the chance to speak today in the light of the inclusion of Lords reform in the gracious Speech. I would like to pay tribute to chairman of the Joint Select Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Richard, who is not in his place. He guided and cajoled the committee to produce a very creditable report, despite our many different points of view on every issue. I would also like to thank my fellow committee members and, of course, the 11 committee members with whom I worked to produce the alternative report.
There are some 20 legislative proposals in the gracious Speech; Lords reform appears at number 18. The language that the Government have chosen to describe their intentions for Lords reform is, to say the least, delphic, referring to a Bill to change “the composition” of this House. What does it mean? With great respect to my noble friend the Leader of the House, who is also not in his place at the moment, I would not say that his contribution this morning, masterly though it was, was designed to be less delphic. Indeed, he is probably an oracle in his own person. However, if I were to use that kind of language, I think I would want to reassure constitutional reformers that I was with them, while at the same time indicating to voters that I understood their immediate concerns— the economy, jobs, social care, pensions, crime and border security—to be rather more pressing than constitutional change. If I had wanted to indicate those things, I might have used that language.
No doubt the Government are asked, as we all must frequently be, exactly what problem reform of the House of Lords is intended to fix. In fact, usefully, the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister answered that question in the White Paper and draft Bill. They said that the objective of the draft Bill was,
“to change the House of Lords into a more democratically elected second chamber”.
They added that the proposals would “strengthen Parliament”. These are fine objectives. I have sympathy with them and doubt that anybody would not.
I rather welcome the opaque nature of the Government’s commitment to Lords reform, as revealed by the gracious Speech, because I hope and believe that such opacity may buy some time, in the event of reform going ahead, to improve the proposals in the White Paper and the draft Bill before they are presented to Parliament. Last week’s rehearsal in this House of the arguments for, but mostly against, the proposals revealed not only that the Government’s analysis of the problem was flawed but that their proposed solution does not meet its own objective. The Government now have the opportunity, which I hope they will use, to take note of and act on the work of the Joint Committee, the alternative report and the many expert and experienced points of view expressed last week in this House to improve any future Bill.
In particular, they must accept that Clause 2 of the draft Bill is a nonsense. Clause 2 asserts that Commons primacy would be unaffected by an electoral mandate for the Lords. That was torn apart by the Joint Committee and the alternative report, and during last week’s debate. It is obvious that any proposals for elections to this House must perforce affect the House of Commons and, hence, the efficacy of Parliament as a whole. The clause was revealed as an assertion—nothing more—unsupported by any evidence to the Joint Committee, save that of the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister, Mark Harper. Indeed, worse than that, as has been touched on by several noble Lords today, it was revealed as an attempt to reassure House of Commons colleagues that they would have nothing to fear from the presence in their constituencies of paid, elected party Senators, elected for long, non-renewable terms by a different voting system but to the same Parliament, dealing with the same policy issues.
The Government must understand that one consequence of such a proposal would be a weakening of electoral accountability, and another the likelihood of conflict between the two Houses that the Parliament Acts could not resolve—grave consequences indeed of a measure that they claim would strengthen Parliament. If they are to proceed with this constitutional reform, they must find a means of solving the dilemma that has bedevilled reform for the past century: how can you achieve greater legitimacy for the Lords without challenging the primacy of the Commons? That matter was just raised by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill.
The Government claim that people are in favour of Lords reform because the three main party manifestos favoured it at the last general election, but that claim will not wash. Not only is it a stunning non-sequitur but it also ignores the obvious differences in the manifesto pledges, the fact that no party actually won the election and the fact that because all three parties offered Lords reform it was not possible to vote against it.
The issue is not distinguished by its salience in the public mind, then or—for that matter—now. The public say, backed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and all three main party leaders in the other place, that constitutional reform is anything but a priority. Indeed, that might have been the message from the eight major cities that last week rejected through referendums the proposals for elected mayors. Maybe voters were not attracted by the idea of more paid party elected politicians. Of course, for now anyway the Government have rejected, as we heard again this morning, the idea of a referendum on Lords reform on grounds of cost, while at the same time promising a referendum on Scottish independence and apparently being unable to tell us the cost of electing, paying and maintaining another 450 Westminster politicians. I believe that the public are unimpressed by those inconsistencies, and that does not help the Government’s case either.
I began my remarks by saying that I have sympathy with the objectives of the White Paper and draft Bill and I will conclude briefly by suggesting ways in which the Government might advance their cause. They need to understand that there is absolutely no consensus on their draft Bill within parties, in the academic world, between the two Houses and within them, or even on the need for a draft Bill. My noble friend the Leader has had a lot of fun with consensus and my noble friend Lord Forsyth had even more fun last week. But there are issues that need tackling, and which could be tackled now with a good degree of real consensus as identified in the Steel Bill and in the evidence to the joint Select Committee from the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and others, for Lords reform—issues such as the size of the House, retirement, dealing with misconduct, the separation of honours from membership of the House of Lords, means of appointment, and so on. Those issues have been considered by the Joint Select Committee in the alternative report, and the Government could make progress and achieve some reform by pursuing them in a way that would rightly be seen as beneficial.
The Government’s aim to strengthen Parliament through constitutional reform is a worthy one, but if they wish to succeed on the larger questions of election and conventions between the Houses, they must accept that their draft Bill as it stands does not meet their own objectives. They must think through the vast practical and constitutional implications of what they propose. In other words—and I cannot put it plainer—they should do the work, possibly through a constitutional convention or the like, before they seek to legislate. They must understand that if they present to Parliament half-thought-out constitutional reform, they will throw into chaos the very democratic machinery that is their only means of delivering other legislative change. Above all, since they claim to speak for the people, because Parliament is the voice of the people, they should give the people the chance to say what they think in a referendum. The price for democracy of getting it wrong is just too great.
Lord Owen
My Lords, I wish to speak about what I believe is the biggest constitutional crisis facing this country, and it is related to the eurozone. There is a feeling, which I think is profoundly mistaken, that somehow we can isolate ourselves from the constitutional changes that are being suggested for the eurozone. It is to the credit of the Government, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer that throughout this eurozone crisis they have been ready to accept that in order to get the crisis eased, or at best overcome, there will have to be substantial changes in the eurozone.
There is no point spending time arguing about what has been; the milk has been spilt and this fatally flawed eurozone design is with us here and now. It is in all our interests—that of the United States economy, the British economy, obviously the European economy but also the global economy—that this eurozone crisis is resolved. However, the greatest danger would be for us in this country to think that we can go on watching the eurozone crisis unfold and the constitutional changes which are being made, and not recognise that it has deep and profound consequences for the constitution of this country.
In today’s opening business the European Union (Approval of Treaty Amendment Decision) Bill was announced. It sounds very technocratic and would effectively mean accepting changes in the European treaty to create the European stability mechanism. I strongly support that. Europe needs that mechanism. We need this legislation to be passed and I am sure that we will try to ensure that that happens. The mechanism is meant to be in place by 1 July but today the leader of the Christian Democratic Union in the Bundestag warned that not only is the fiscal compact, which was due to be ratified in May, now likely to be postponed until June, and perhaps to the summer, but that it is not even certain that the ESM treaty will go through. There is profound unease about the piecemeal legislation being undertaken by Germany and the commitments that it is making. Finland is also causing great anxiety in that regard.
On top of this, it appears that there is now parliamentary deadlock in Greece. Today, Bloomberg calculates that Greece’s overall debt to private bondholders, the IMF and the ECB amounts to something like $517 billion. A default on that scale would have repercussions throughout the world economy, and could happen very quickly. If it happens, there will be immediate demands on this country to tackle a range of issues which affect the running of the eurozone. The UK has to have a position on this. That position will be all the stronger if it can be said to be that not just of the Conservative Party, or even its Liberal Democrat coalition partners, but of the Labour Party in opposition.
It is one thing for us to have good will towards the eurozone and to try to help it emerge from its current difficulties but quite another to think that we can make a massive concession, whereby we effectively accept a degree of integration which nobody in this country would contemplate for any part of the eurozone, without asking ourselves where it would leave this country. This very big concession would comprise far greater integration than there has been hitherto; in effect, it would create an economic government based on many of the proposals put forward for the medium term by Angela Merkel and Gerhard Schroeder. Those two German Chancellors—one current, one former—have said openly that the fiscal compact is just the beginning. They know that the German people will be persuaded to fund the eurozone and to put substantial sums of money behind it only if far greater integration is involved.
If that is the course that they wish to follow, we should wish it well but we need to extract a price from that negotiation whether as regards unanimity within the EU or an arrangement whereby the fiscal compact is introduced outside the European Union treaties but has within it a pledge that it will become part of those treaties within five years. We are told—I do not know whether it is true—that the deputy leader of the coalition, Nick Clegg, was behind that addition. That has considerable and profound implications.
There is a growing view, most recently expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, in a speech in Oxford, that a referendum on the European Union is inevitable. I believe it to be inevitable and it should happen fairly quickly. What are we going to say in that referendum? At the moment, if the referendum question was put in this country, it would be for a simple withdrawal. Can that be in the interests of this country? Consider the issue of the single market, for example. The Conservative Party, through all its long disagreements over the Common Market, the European Community and the European Union, never doubted that it wanted to be a member of EFTA. The noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, when Prime Minister often claimed, rightly, credit for the single market and our influence on the EU.
Are we ready to withdraw from the single market? Even Angela Merkel has said that if she, as she envisages, is to make these changes in 2013-14—changes that are far-reaching in their political consequences—there would need to be, for example, direct elections for the President of the European Council, which is an intergovernmental appointment that was agreed only recently after years of negotiation, first through the constitutional treaty and then the Lisbon treaty. Are we suddenly to have that position elected? Schroeder, with all the strength of a Chancellor who did actually introduce competitiveness into the German economy without devaluation within the European treaty and has a right to be heard, has made it clear that the European Council must give up powers and be transformed into an upper chamber with similar functions to the Bundesrat in Germany. They want economic government, far greater European integration and they see that as the way to rescue the eurozone.
We need to say what we want. What is the minimum that we want out of the European Union? My view is that an essential element is the single market and we cannot just be part of the European Economic Area, which is a sort of hand-me-down of single market provision in which Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein are involved. Are we ready to set our sights much higher and involve Turkey in a single market? There is absolute silence in Europe about the British position. It is not enough for a view on that to come just from the Prime Minister. I earnestly hope that just as this country is approaching the issue of a Scottish independence referendum with a recognition that the parties must get together and have a common view in this country—my understanding is that the Labour Party, the Conservative Party and Liberal Democrats are starting to have detailed conversations about how to deal with that deep constitutional challenge—so they should be looking at the question of how we deal with saving the eurozone.
I notice also that a former SPD Finance Minister said only yesterday that if he was in his former position, he would want a plan B to deal with a situation in which there might not be 17 countries in the eurozone. What will the British position be? It simply cannot be to concede just one more little treaty amendment as being made here on the ESM. We have already conceded that a treaty should be considered outside the European Union treaties on the fiscal compact.
The Government, particularly the Prime Minister, have learnt from the totally mistaken stance that he adopted in December. I was travelling around Europe talking to Finance Ministers in EU countries and no one knew what the British Government’s position was. It is not enough to go into these negotiations without it being well known where your bottom line is, what you are prepared to stick on and what your principles are. I say this: this big change in Europe cannot take place—an integration far greater than we have ever contemplated before for the eurozone countries—without we in this country having a clear line defining our constitutional bottom line and what we are rightfully to demand. That should not be done in a sort of “Flashman” way, thrust at people right at the last moment, but in a deeply concerned and considered way. We are part of these treaties. They belong to us as much as they belong to everyone else. Hitherto, they have always been based on unanimity on treaty amendment. Giving up unanimity on treaty amendment is a vast concession for us to make. I think we should be ready to do it if it accords with our view of how the European Union can be restructured; otherwise, we will watch, wait and slowly wake up, and before we know where we are we will have seen in front of our very eyes in a substantial part of the European Union the creation of a country called Europe, and we will say to ourselves, “How did we allow this to happen?”.
Our negotiating position must be reasonable and, as I said, it ought to have all-party agreement. It needs to be sustained up to and beyond a 2015 general election and it needs to be accepted by the people of this country. It is a long time since we had wholehearted consent in this country to our position in Europe, and then we kept it for only a very short time. In my view, such consent can be forged out of the present situation. I do not think that over the coming decades the people of this country will accept going into the sort of integrated eurozone that is now not only on offer but necessary. I would not accept it myself, but that does not matter. The people of this country have to be given the choice in a structured referendum and we must have a position in Europe that we can stand up for and negotiate for. There must be no flouncing off, no walk-outs and no empty chair. We must sit there with a view of how we will be Europeans and how, at the very least, there should be a single market involving far more than the existing countries in the EEA. It ought to involve Turkey, which is a substantial and major country.
If we could produce such a concept, it would be greatly welcomed in Europe, where people are only too conscious that they are being shunted from pillar to post as circumstances change. The most recent event is the Spanish banking crisis, which has the potential to cause a very serious crisis for the eurozone just because of the size of the country and the fact that it has 25% unemployment with youth unemployment at 50%. We are seeing more and more undemocratic measures taken to stoke up the system and keep it going. It is not pleasant to see interventions such as the forcing of technocratic Governments, first in Greece and then in Italy.
I dare say that these are bigger constitutional issues than have been debated in this House so far. I may be in a minority of one but I believe that the parties and leaders in this country, and particularly the Prime Minister, have a responsibility urgently to develop over the next few months a serious negotiating position for the United Kingdom and to stick to it in Europe over the next few years.
Lord Norton of Louth
My Lords, in the time available I wish to focus on constitutional affairs from two perspectives—those of process and substance.
I had the honour to be the first chairman of the Constitution Committee of your Lordships’ House. One of our first reports was on the process of constitutional change. That was in 2001. A decade on, the committee returned to the subject. Its report was published last July. In 2001, we expressed concern at the lack of a culture within government of dealing with constitutional issues. There was no coherence in the process by which constitutional issues were considered. The committee in its report last year—and I was again a member—noted:
“The evidence we have received points to this lack of coherence remaining a serious problem”.
Not only was there no coherence to government policy in constitutional affairs but there was no coherence to the process by which the policy was generated within government. As the report recorded:
“It is of particular concern when this inconsistency appears to derive more from political considerations than any sense of constitutional principle”.
It went on to note:
“There is a risk that changes to the constitution may be rushed through without any pause for thought as to their desirability or otherwise”.
The Government’s response to the report failed to assuage the committee’s concerns but rather reinforced them. The response demonstrated a failure to appreciate the qualitatively distinct nature of constitutional change. There was no grasp of the fact that the constitution stands apart from other legislative change. The constitution is not the creature of the Government to be changed at will on the basis of political whim. The Government are the creature of the constitution rather than the other way round. We cannot afford to follow the Government in the way in which they deal with constitutional matters. Parliament has to adopt procedures that ensure that attempts to change the constitution are subject to scrutiny of a different order from that of ordinary legislation and, indeed, subject to a much higher order of justification. There needs to be a compelling case for change and not simply an arguable case. On such matters one cannot afford simply to give the Government the benefit of the doubt.
As Sir Jeffrey Jowell told the Constitution Committee:
“The time has come to simply take a little more care with constitutional reform”.
We need, in particular, to be able to do what the Government are not doing: address how a change to one part affects other parts of the constitution. The academic and former Liberal Democrat MP David Howarth told the Committee that,
“we have no structural thinking going on about the interaction between the composition of the Houses … the electoral systems, the courts and so on. We have no thinking about how all this fits together into a system of government”.
We need to look holistically at our constitution and to understand the extent to which change does not take place in a vacuum. If you make major change to one part of our constitutional framework it has implications for the rest of that framework.
That brings me to the Government’s proposals for reform of this House. We are told that a Bill will be brought forward. I served on the Joint Committee examining the Government’s draft Bill and I have made the point before that we were limited in our examination. We addressed the Bill before us rather than looking at its wider implications. We looked at the relationship to the Commons and got rather bogged down in that exercise. We did not tackle the wider picture, nor for that matter did we address the principles underpinning change. We need to address the way in which change to one House affects the rest of our constitutional arrangements. The Government’s stated proposals are flawed in that they derive from no such consideration. In short, the process is flawed.
I turn to the arguments that are advanced for an elected House. To listen to those who advance the case for election, one would think that the case is self-evident: that there is an unanswerable democratic argument for change; that in having an elected Chamber we should be following virtually every other second Chamber in the world; and that there is overwhelming popular support for change. Let me deal with each of those claims. One can indeed make a case for electing the House on democratic grounds. However, one can make a case on democratic grounds for not electing the second Chamber. Democracy—demos kratia—is about how people choose to govern themselves. In a representative democracy, accountability is fundamental. In our system, Governments are chosen through elections to the House of Commons and collectively are answerable to the people through the House of Commons. There is core accountability. There is one entity—the party or parties in government—responsible for public policy and the electors know who to call to account at the next general election.
Knowing that, the Government tend to be responsive to the mood of electors in between elections. As long as the final say rests with the House of Commons, the Government are able to govern and remain accountable to the electors. Electing the second Chamber would not necessarily produce co-equal Chambers. What it is likely to generate is a House with more powers and/or a willingness to use extant powers to a far greater extent than at present, and it would be in a position to frustrate on occasion the will of the first Chamber and, in effect, the capacity of government to govern. Accountability would be fragmented. There is an argument for that. My point is that there is, equally, an intellectually coherent case—I believe a compelling case—for maintaining the core accountability at the heart of our political system. One cannot proceed on the basis that what is being proposed by government is self-evidently the sole democratic option; it is not.
Some advance the argument that those who make or help make law must be elected. One can make that case, but it is not as clear cut as those who advance it appear to believe. They are in effect prioritising the accountability of individual Members over the collective accountability of government. I prefer to maintain the accountability of government to the people.
What about the claim that if we move to an elected second Chamber we will bring ourselves into line with other second Chambers around the globe? If we sought to follow the global norm, we would vote for abolition; most legislatures are unicameral. Bicameral legislatures adhere to no clear norm. Of the 76 second Chambers that exist, only 21 are wholly directly elected. Seventeen are indirectly elected, 15 are wholly appointed and the rest are selected by a variety of means.
The powers of second Chambers are also difficult to classify, as Meg Russell records in her article in the January issue of the Political Quarterly. She records the number of elected second Chambers with an absolute veto power over legislation and states that it is inaccurate to claim that in no single case does an elected second Chamber challenge the primacy of the first Chamber. In some systems, such as the presidential system of the United States, the concept of primacy is irrelevant. In parliamentary systems where the first Chamber can override the second, it is, as Meg Russell says,
“relatively common ... for this to require some kind of special majority”.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
The information that my noble friend gave was very interesting, and new to me. Does it not contradict the mantra that we heard from my noble friend Lord Ashdown—sadly not in his place—who compared us to Belarus and others? Was he mistaken about that?
Lord Norton of Louth
My Lords, the simple answer is yes. Meg Russell’s article explains directly in what way the noble Lord was mistaken.
There is an additional point germane to the present case that is rarely mentioned. We are not working on a blank canvas. We are not establishing a second Chamber from scratch. We cannot simply take an extant second Chamber and transpose it to the United Kingdom. The Government’s proposals embody transitional arrangements, but there is no evidence that they have examined experience elsewhere of fundamental changes to second Chambers, and of transitions from one system to another. There has been some academic research, but relatively little. In the Joint Committee, I asked the Minister what study the Government had undertaken. A response in writing was offered, but as far as I am aware nothing was received.
I turn to public opinion. If people are asked whether they favour an elected second Chamber, they tend to say yes. My noble friend Lord Tyler reminded us of the figures last week. He included data reproduced in the Joint Committee report. He cited footnote 22 but did not report everything contained in it. What it showed was that it is quite possible to hold contradictory positions. In a Populus poll, 72% of respondents thought that at least half the Members of the second Chamber should be elected, while in the same poll 75% thought that the Chamber should remain largely appointed. It depends on how you ask the question.
We know from the Ipsos MORI poll of 2007 that electors privilege some of the functions of the present Chamber above the principle of having some Members elected. When one factors in options, that of election falls down the list. There is also evidence to suggest that the more people know about the House of Lords, the more they switch to favouring the existing House over an elected one. The picture is not as unambiguous as some claim.
On the argument that the issue has been discussed for more than a century, I made the point last week that the debate has been sporadic and rarely pursued at the level of first principles. Succeeding White Papers simply took the normative case as given and made no principled argument for change. The Joint Committee was limited by its terms of reference and did not address the case from first principles.
It has been argued that the Government’s proposals are a distraction from more important issues. This claim is made in respect of the economic situation. I wish to make it in respect of a more basic point about our political system. Last week, my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire, in responding—or, rather, failing to respond—to the debate on the report of the Joint Committee, drew attention to the lack of trust in politics. It is a serious concern. My noble friend did not address the fact that the Government’s proposals for the second Chamber—no accountability through re-election and no resources to respond to electors’ pleas for assistance—would do nothing to restore faith in politics.
What he missed was where the problem lies. It is not in the structures and processes of our political system: the problem is with those who run the system. Arguing the case for structural reform is a form of displacement activity, a way of shifting responsibility elsewhere: “It is not us, it is the system”. We will only restore trust in politics when we restore trust in politicians. That must be our principal focus. Without restoring that trust, there is no point in messing about with structures.
In short, we need a fundamental refocusing of our priorities. We need to consider what will restore trust in our political class. Changing our constitutional framework in an incoherent and ill-considered manner will do nothing to achieve that. If we are going to consider constitutional change, we need to begin by looking at our constitution holistically and making sense of where we are before deciding where we should be going. I have argued the case before for a constitutional convention and I reiterate the point I made last week that, if the Government really wish to take our constitution seriously, that is the route we should follow.
Yes, we can consider reform of this House—that is, reform within our existing constitutional framework. Changes to that framework are of a totally different order. The case for change has to be argued and its consequences fully explored. Assertion is simply not enough.
Lord Cotter
My Lords, my comments today on constitutional reform relate solely to Lords reform. The issue of Lords reform has been with us for many years and has been addressed and enacted in a measured way over recent times, and quite rightly so, but now we have a proposal in front of us for a radical change—namely, an elected Chamber—which we must consider thoughtfully and seriously.
A committee was set up to consider the proposals and our thanks go to those Members who took part, particularly as the committee was put under time pressure to produce its report now when more time was needed. That is why I wish to thank those Members who got together to produce their well thought out and extremely valuable alternative report, which has drawn attention to aspects of the proposed reform which do not stand up or add up. It has demonstrated the need for more constructive consideration to be given to the impact and implications of the reform as proposed.
How can it be right that reform is proposed without clearly examining the relationship between the two Chambers and how they will be affected? The alternative report recommends that this issue must be addressed. Surely none of us embarks on a journey or a change without working out the destination or how things will change. This is a major fault in the process.
Perhaps I may mention at this stage why I was asked to join your Lordships’ House. Although I had been an MP for eight years, I was asked because of my particular experience in the business world—I have been in business all my life—and, one hopes, to add something to my party’s business team. There is one thing I know: if you are in business, you do not embark on change without first working out what the end result will be. That is just common sense. To me, this is a gaping hole in the proposed process for reform; it does not make sense.
A further point made in the alternative report is on costings. This area is equally important—in fact, surely it is vital. The wider public are entitled and will want to know what the costs will be for the elections and for the salaries, expenses and costs of the representatives—the Senators, as they may be called. The public must know what costs they are going to have to bear. Are we to throw all the balls in the air and hope that they land in some order, or will we examine things in more detail?
One of the problems is that people do not understand what we do here and how we do it. The noble Lord who has just spoken made that point, as have others, but I wish to make it again. In my short six years in this place I have been impressed not only by the expertise but by the esprit de corps of this place, where people work hard to improve legislation. For eight years I was an MP just along the corridor, only 100 yards away, but did I understand what this place was doing? No, I did not. Moreover, I think that many MPs would agree with that comment. It is ridiculous that we did not appreciate the work being done here. Now I do, however, and that is why I say that we have a vital and important role to play. Our elected Chamber is under government pressure because Governments of all colours want to push through their legislation quickly. That happens in an elected Chamber, and there is a danger that with a second elected Chamber, that sort of pressure will be put on it as well. I hope that we may now be better able to put the message over to the other place about what we actually do, and indeed to the public themselves.
I can truly say that I have been accosted in the street many times by ex-constituents of mine who tell me how much they appreciate the work being done in the House of Lords and the measured way that we approach and decide things. That has happened in the street, on buses, in trains and so on. I do not think that anyone has ever come up to me and said, “You are a whole load of rubbish”, far from it. Colleagues have referred to the various ways of assessing opinion, and I shall quote just one example from the debate last week. My noble friend and colleague Lord Phillips referred to a public meeting he held to consider whether to elect this House or not. At the start, quite a number of people were in favour of election, but after all points of view were fairly represented there was a complete switch to acceptance of the House of Lords as it is. That emphasises the need for us to get the message out about what we really do here.
I can personally attest to my admiration for the work that is done in this Chamber. I can well remember that not long after I joined the House, in the spring/summer of 2007, the Government of the day were trying to press forward with the corporate manslaughter Bill. All parts of this House, as well as people elsewhere, wished to see that legislation become law because of its importance. However, resistance in this House ensured that there were five rounds of ping-pong on that legislation, right up to within hours before we were due to go into the Summer Recess. The Government kept saying no, but at the last minute they changed their mind on what was a small but very important issue. Surely we must all also accept the fantastic role recently played by the House of Lords when it came to assessing the Health and Social Care Bill. I sat on our Benches and looked at people opposite and around the Chamber and listened to people who had experience in the health field and really knew all about it, and it really impressed me that we were producing such a strong case for reconsideration of that Bill.
Just the other day, a small issue came up. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, is not here today, but he supported my colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, and others, as they raised a very important issue with regard to those who have been affected by asbestos. It was a small but very important issue of compensation. Fortunately, the argument was made well here and the Government conceded the point, and I was delighted to hear that. There are many other occasions that people who have been here longer than I can relay as well. Somebody is nodding their head; I think they did.
The expertise of this House is based on the wide experience people have. I could not do better than refer those who may have missed it to the intervention by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, earlier in this debate. With great clarity—clarity I can never achieve—she spoke about the breadth and quality of experience this House brought to consideration of the Welfare Reform Bill, as an example. She was so clear, it is worth rereading.
I realise that I have repeated some points made by others. This is usually not considered to be a very good thing to do, but on this occasion I think it is, because those of us who have concerns need to reinforce each other. The more who stand up to say they are concerned the less those who are going to be ticking the boxes afterwards will have to say, “Mmm, yes, right, whatever”. So I have no hesitation in having repeated points made by various colleagues.
The Government have quite rightly said that we must concern ourselves with growth and the economy, and we all agree on this. This is another reason I believe that we should not embark on such a radical proposal as an elected Chamber at this time, particularly since so much time will be needed, with so much still to be resolved. We all know, whatever is said to the contrary, that the public are not having sleepless nights worrying about constitutional reform. No, they worry about jobs, their families, education, the NHS—the issues that really affect them—and it is our duty to address those issues.
I am speaking today because the proposed reforms are contentious, not properly worked out—as has been said by many colleagues—and could be contrary to the public interest. Like others, I want to devote my time to doing all I can, with colleagues, to address growth, business and the economy, to ensure that our youth and all people get the education and help they need to get the jobs they need. We need passion and determination to be directed to the real issues of the day: our people’s needs and their wishes.
Lord Roberts of Conwy
My Lords, this Queen’s Speech has been delivered against a deeply troubled global economic and social background, for which there is no clear, universally accepted, credible remedy. Although the precise nature of the crisis varies between continents and countries, there are unifying threads and common themes. We all want a return to growth, higher employment and prosperity, but the ways of achieving these desirable ends differ among economists and political leaders.
So much that was achieved in the past was financed by debt and resulted in unsustainable deficits, making reductions in public expenditure and austerity our first priority as a sound basis for an eventual return to sustainable growth. I am glad to see that that is noted in the Queen’s Speech. But, of course, austere measures are as popular as public flagellation and result in mass protests, strikes and violent expressions of public anger. When a return to high spending is hoist as a banner before the public as an alternative way out of trouble, social unrest translates itself into a will to political and governmental change. We have seen such changes in Europe recently and are likely to see more. Former President Sarkozy was the 11th European leader to fall since 2008. What happens if and when the higher-spending policies fail for one reason or another is anybody’s guess, but we bear our memories of the 1930s in Europe and the rise of the dictators very much in mind. Who can deny that the extremist clouds are already gathering? However stormy the outside world becomes, we in this sceptred isle want above all else to maintain and preserve stability. It is against that criterion that I judge the measures proposed in the Queen's Speech and what the Government will do.
Compliments to the coalition Government have been few and far between in the fraught weeks behind us, but their steadfast adherence to the policy of deficit reduction is truly commendable. The policy may not be radical enough to eliminate the deficit in this Parliament, but it is on the right lines and must be stuck to come what may. Austerity does not rule out positive measures to stimulate growth—far from it—and there is much that can be done to encourage growth. We should talk more about such measures—do austerity, talk growth; one leads to the other.
We need a wide-ranging change of ethos in our society—a reassertion of our traditional principles and values derived from our Judeo-Christian, classical cultural inheritance—to restore our British national spirit to its strength and vigour. We must express these principles and values, embody them in ourselves and encourage their embodiment in the work of other people.
Attacking our long established institutions in the name of reform and modernisation is not part of the change required and will contribute nothing to the country’s well-being—quite the opposite, it is an irrelevance that will add to the nation’s discontent. The draft House of Lords reform Bill, which we have referred to today, falls into this category. Mercifully, it was holed below the waterline by both reports discussed at the end of the previous Session. An elected House of Lords cannot be reconciled with the primacy of the House of Commons. I said that the Bill was holed below the waterline; after the speech of my noble friend Lord Norton, I think that it was blown out of the water, sky high, by salvo after salvo fired from cross-party lines.
One aspect of that earlier Bill which escaped close examination was why the Government were so badly and so persistently in need of it at this critical time of all times. There were a number of superficial answers that did not stand up to scrutiny, relating to party manifestos and coalition commitments and so on, but is the real reason that an elected House clears the way for greater executive power? It is part of the continuing battle between Crown and Parliament, as my noble friend Lord Elton pointed out in our debate on 30 April.
My noble friend Lord Phillips of Sudbury highlighted in the same debate the fact that the previous Labour Government were defeated only six times in the Commons during 13 years, compared to 528 times in your Lordships’ House. He went on to say that:
“In the nearly two years of the coalition's term in office, there have been no defeats in the other place but 48 in this House”.—[Official Report, 30/4/12; col. 2066.]
Those 48 defeats may be taken as a tribute to the principled robustness of your Lordships compared with the docile diffidence of the other place but I doubt whether the Government view it that way—Governments do not like defeats. In the course of that fascinating debate, there were a number of deprecatory references to the extensive use of the guillotine procedure in the other place. Few of us would be surprised if an attempt was made to establish a similar procedure here to limit time for debate. It would be strongly resisted, on all sides, because we are aware that we are among the last bastions of the citizen’s rights and liberty, if not the last. If this was to become an elected House, we may be sure that such pressures would be brought to bear on Members that the Executive’s ambition to establish guillotine procedures would be forced through. In that dread event, the oligarchy that is the Cabinet and its head, the Prime Minister, would rule supreme, without let or hindrance, short of an outright rebellion by elected Members.
Without being mildly paranoid about this possible change in the nature of our democracy, allow me to remind your Lordships, yet again, of the precarious, perilous situation that the western world is in. We were certainly reminded of that by the noble Lord, Lord Owen, just earlier this afternoon. We are reminded time and again of the 1930s and the rise of the fascist dictatorships. Could a time come when very firm government is necessary in this country and the services of a Napoleon of Notting Hill, with Cromwellian propensities, are required? Of course, it is a fanciful notion and we are not there yet.
However, I do not rely on history not to repeat itself. The constitutional convention proposed in the alternative report has listed among the issues it might consider:
“The relationship of the House of Lords to devolved assemblies, in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland”.
As one of only two parliamentary Conservative Peers with a home in Wales, a Minister of the old Welsh Office for more than 15 years and an MP for a Welsh constituency for 27 years, I wholly approve of that convention proposal as it applies to Wales. It is high time to examine not only the relationship between the National Assembly for Wales and this House, but the entire relationship between that body, its Assembly Government, and this UK Parliament and its Government. The truth is that there is little cohesion between the devolved and centralised bodies. I sense that the same is true of Scotland and Northern Ireland in different ways and to different extents. We have all drifted apart. It is no wonder that there is deep concern about the future prospects of the union.
The coalition Government have pursued a helpful, indeed promotional, role towards devolution in Wales. They held a referendum last year to confirm, or otherwise, the grant of additional powers to the Assembly under the 2006 Act. The referendum affirmed the grant of those powers, on a fairly low turnout. Subsequently, the coalition Government established a commission, chaired by Paul Silk, a former parliamentary official here at Westminster and a highly respected officer of the Assembly, to examine how the Assembly Government might be made more accountable, a transfer of selected fiscal powers to the Assembly, and what further constitutional changes might be appropriate. Wales is thus being encouraged to follow the path already taken by Scotland—a path eagerly sought by some leading members of Plaid Cymru for some years. Whether the Welsh electorate are tempted to seek independence depends on circumstances: the leadership they are given and their response to it.
Much depends, too, on the regional policies pursued by the United Kingdom Government, which are less favourable to Wales both as regards representation in the other place—to be reduced by 25%, if the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act comes into force—and, I suspect, as regards economic development in the broadest sense. Since the advent of devolution, the focus of UK government policy has, understandably, been on England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have been left to do their own thing, especially in the devolved areas of government. That is not always for the best in terms of results, and that begins to show over time.
Ardent pro-devolutionists continue to sing the praises of the achievements of their cause, but the outcomes are not always as good as they would have us believe. In education, health and employment, for example, Wales visibly lags behind. The National Assembly’s early ambition to raise Welsh GDP above the UK regional average has totally failed. Unemployment is high, which was to be expected because so much employment was created in the public sector and is unsustainable in austere conditions. Devolution is indeed a process and, like all processes, it will come to an end in time if it fails the people whom it is intended to serve.
Lord Cormack
My Lords, I am delighted to follow my noble friend Lord Roberts of Conwy. We entered another place on the same day in June 1970 and have been friends ever since. I am also delighted to have been able to listen to the novel but extremely important speech of the noble Lord, Lord Owen, who, unlike most of us, did not talk about reform of your Lordships’ House but with expert knowledge drew our attention to issues on which it is surely important that the Government should focus. I could not help but think during his speech that there is probably no other forum in this country—certainly not at the other end of the Corridor—where a speech based on such knowledge and expertise could have been delivered. The noble Lord will forgive me if I do not follow him; I am not equipped to do so. I want to talk on the subject on which we have focused our attention today.
There was a very interesting moment when the Deputy Prime Minister and Mr Mark Harper went to give evidence to the Joint Committee. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, is not in his place, because I wanted to pay him a tribute—or at least to quote him. In the inimitable way in which we all know that the noble Lord speaks, he looked at the Deputy Prime Minister and, very respectfully, said: “Mr Clegg, are you a House of Commons man or are you a man from the House of Commons?”. There was a look of blank incredulity on the Deputy Prime Minister's face. He really had not a clue what the noble Lord was talking about. Therein lies so much.
I like to think that I was a House of Commons man. I sat there for almost exactly 40 years, and I shall always look back on those years with great affection and a feeling of real gratitude. As Horace Walpole once said, there is no greater honour that any British—he actually said English—man could enjoy than being elected to represent a constituency in the House of Commons. A century or more later, Anthony Trollope said something very similar.
I still believe that. It is not that I do not enjoy this place; I do. I feel proud and honoured to be here. I believe that this place has a collegiate atmosphere that the other place does not and, indeed, never could have. It brings together a group of men and women of real, varied experience and expertise such as you would find in no other parliamentary assembly in the world. However, I still look down the Corridor to the place where there is an unambiguous democratic mandate. That is the great thing about our system: we all know where the buck stops.
Not everything is perfect in the House of Commons. My noble friend the Leader of the House, in a remarkable and frank interview that he gave to the FT earlier this week, talked about the elected second Chamber inevitably becoming far more assertive, and that is right. I would like to see the House of Commons become far more assertive, because it has become far too much the creature of the Executive. That is partly the fault of having had in recent years Governments with enormous majorities. If any man ever said a true thing, it was the late Francis Pym—Lord Pym—when he said in 1983 that he did not want the Government to have too big a majority. He was sacked for his pains, of course.
The trouble when you have a big majority, be it Mrs Thatcher’s majority of 1983 or Mr Blair’s of 1997 or 2001, is that it is very easy for Parliament to be the creature of the Executive. That is added to by the fact that the Executive are drawn from the legislature, and therefore there are always a fair number of very ambitious young men and women who are a little reluctant to cross swords with the powers that be. That is part of our system, and we all accept that, but I would like to see the Commons become more assertive. Through its new Backbench Business Committee, which seems to have got off to a very good start—I am delighted about that—I would like it to tackle the Government head-on on the subject of the timetabling of Bills, because the programming of Bills is inimical to true parliamentary democracy.
We do not have that here, and it is one of the greatest attributes of this place. We cannot, of course, veto ultimately but merely hold up. We can delay, at the most, for a year but we can and do say, “Think again”. When your Lordships in this House look upon Bills—we have seen this happen recently, because not all legislation presented to us by the coalition Government has been impeccable in its drafting or in anything else—we have seen what was the Health and Social Care Bill improved beyond measure. We have seen the Welfare Reform Bill and the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill improved in this place, while at the same time Members in this place have recognised that they cannot stop the will of the elected House. I believe that we do not sufficiently accept, or many of us do not, how crucial to our unwritten constitution and our democracy that is.
I was talking recently to the ambassador of a major European country. He said to me, “We do not have a House of Lords and we would not invent one, but you have this assembly of extraordinarily varied and talented people, drawn from all walks of life and all backgrounds. Why are you thinking of getting rid of it”? It is not hampering democracy but buttressing democracy. It is adding to our system, not detracting from it, and we all ought to recognise that.
If it ever came to a referendum, I have absolute confidence that if these things were truly explained from public platforms around the country—colleagues have referred today to people perhaps not fully understanding how this place works—and the alternative of, as my noble friend Lady Shephard of Northwold said, 450 paid politicians were offered in exchange, I think that we would have a result similar to the one in the north-east when the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, then Mr Prescott, was confident that there would be an elected assembly, people were given the chance and they said no. Last week we saw something of the same in the series of referendums on mayoral office in many of our great cities. In the second city of our land, Birmingham, candidates were already lining up but the people said, “Hold on a minute—we don’t want that”. I think that they would say much the same in a referendum on the future of this place, but I hope that it does not come to that.
We will have before us a Bill to do with composition. Earlier today I sat in, as I am sure some of your Lordships did, on the Statement on the aircraft carriers. The Minister presented it very effectively and was congratulated in all parts of the House—some of the congratulations were slightly barbed but that is only to be expected—but he made the point that the Government recognised that a change of course and of policy was necessary. I hope that when they have listened to this debate and they come to draw up the Bill, they will realise that a change of policy is necessary here too.
The Government should focus on the word “composition”. What does it mean? It refers to those who are here and perhaps to how they get here. We know that there are issues on which there is a degree of true consensus—and how that word has been distorted—right across the Benches in this Chamber. We all recognise that we have to look at such things as size, retirement and expulsion—a range of things that the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood, in one of his speeches on his Bill, referred to as “housekeeping issues”. That is partly the case, but they are more than that. There are things that could make this Chamber so much more effective than it is already.
This morning I was talking to a Minister who said to me, “I hope you will make the point about the committees on Europe”. I promised that I would, so I will do so. In the House of Commons there is one committee dealing with European matters, chaired by the redoubtable Mr William Cash, whose views on Europe are of course entirely neutral, who has no fixed aim or agenda himself, and who chairs that committee with a draconian aplomb of which only Mr William Cash is capable. What do we have in this House? We were reminded yesterday, when the noble Lord, Lord Roper, stepped down from the European Union Committee and my noble friend Lord Boswell of Aynho was appointed to take over. There are eight sub-committees dealing with a range of issues, so effectively that there is no other country in the EU that produces reports of rival quality. That seems to be acknowledged whenever one talks to politicians and commentators in this country and beyond. Does that not add value to our system? Would it be possible to find the people for eight committees at the other end of the Corridor, taking into account their myriad responsibilities in their constituencies? Do not let us forget that because we do not have constituency responsibilities, we can bring to our work a degree of objectivity. We also do not have to face elections, and that brings objectivity too. We can bring that to our work, as well as more time to study and to take part in deliberations.
Last week I talked about form and function. If we are to look at the future of our parliamentary system, it is terribly important that we look at the function as well as the form—who can do what best? Although this place is not perfect, and no human institution ever was or will be, I believe that we have here an assembly of real worth and real renown, and I believe it would be a constitutional tragedy to get rid of it. The Business Secretary, Mr Cable, said we should do it quietly and quickly—my noble friend is nodding at me from the Front Bench, and I shall sit down in just a moment—like burying Sir John Moore at Corunna:
“We buried him darkly at dead of night”.
They are not going to do that here. We have got to be prepared to put up a real fight if it is necessary, but I beg of my noble friend on the Front Bench that it will not be necessary so that we can reform this institution constructively and properly without creating unnecessary competition with the other end of the Corridor, creating a House that is not complementary but in conflict, because that is what we would do, and in the process exposing something else. Yesterday in this Chamber Her Majesty read the Speech from the Throne. That is what this debate is all about. Do we really want to suggest by implication that one has to be elected in order to be legitimate? I think not.
Lord Soley
It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, who I have exchanged views with on many occasions in the House of Commons. A number of the things that he said today I readily agree with. The thing that saddens me about the Queen’s Speech on this issue is that there was not a very simple line saying, “My Government will bring forward a Bill to set up a constitutional convention to look at the wider aspects of the constitution”. That way, I line myself up very solidly behind the alternative report on the draft Bill. The alternative is a constitutional one.
It is often said that we have been promising this for a hundred years and should get on with it. The reason we have been promising it for a hundred years and the reason it has not happened is a lesson worth learning, and it is one I had to learn over several years. It is this: you cannot reform the House of Lords on its own. As the noble Lord, Lord Cotter, said, people regard the House of Lords as something rather untidy hanging off the body politic. It is a bit like a long, dragging thread from a well knitted, attractive jumper. You feel you ought to pull it off and get rid of it because it is unattractive, but if you do so, you might end up with a very attractive jumper or you might end up with a tangled mass of wool with no recognisable purpose or pattern.
One of the things we sometimes forget, which has been touched on a number of times, but let me say it again, is that in a strict sense this House is not a legislature. We do not legislate. In a way, we have adopted what Walter Bagehot in the 19th century would have called the monarch’s role to advise, to warn—in our case, to revise—to be consulted and all those things, but we do not legislate because the House of Commons, quite rightly as the elected Chamber, can reject virtually anything that we do. In that sense, we are not legislating. If you believe we are, then any civil servant who suggests that certain clauses go in a Bill that were not envisaged in the original Bill—and it has been known to happen on many occasions—is legislating, but the clause gets passed into law only if the Minister and the House of Commons agree. We advise, warn and revise, and that is a very important role. Unless we ask ourselves the key question about the purpose of our second Chamber, it becomes a bit of a nonsense to try to decide who should be in it because our problem is that to change that without changing anything else is, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton, very effectively said, not to recognise the complexity of a constitution. It will change the way that other parts of it work.
If we decide to go down the road of election, we will end up, in effect, with a written constitution, as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, put it very well. There is a case for a written constitution. However, any Government who set out to write one will find that the rest of their programme goes out of the window as they spend the next four or five years trying to decide what should and should not be in it. The very least that you would need to do is write down a clear set of rules on the respective powers of the two Houses. However, you would have to do much more than that. You would also have to decide the role of the Church of England—the role of the bishops—in relation to the state. A whole range of other things come into it. Therefore, a wholly elected House, although a perfectly legitimate idea, is one that you cannot just put forward without recognising that you are changing everything else. As has been suggested by a number of people, a partially elected Chamber raises as many problems as it solves.
As a one-liner, I say that the idea of having people elected for a long period—say 15 years—is a nonsense. Bear in mind that the reason for it is to discourage someone from then going into the other Chamber. If you are a 25 year-old who is elected to this Chamber for a 15-year term, you might well think of going into the other Chamber when you are 40. That is a good age to go into it. I went in at that age so there must be something to be said for it.
The key issue here is, again, scrutiny. If the House of Commons did scrutiny well, it would call into question the role that this House has now. Scrutiny is what this House does best. If the House of Commons suddenly started doing scrutiny well, you would have to ask, “What is our role?”. The House of Commons is the political cockpit of the nation and it is important that that is so. However, inevitably, the political cockpit on the Floor of the House of Commons translates to a large extent, although not wholly, to the committees of that Chamber. That means that the detailed scrutiny of Bills will be different from what it would be if that were not the case, which raises a second question. If you elect the second Chamber, why will the political cockpit not be on the Floor of that Chamber and translate into its committees? Then you ask the key question again: what happens to scrutiny? It is the scrutiny role of this House that sets it out as being very effective and important. I would have no objection to certain changes if we were clear about what we would put in place instead.
Embarking on Lords reform without taking into account the impact on the rest of the constitution is a very serious matter. As I have said on several occasions in this place, the United Kingdom is the most successful political and economic union that the world has ever seen. I feel very strongly about this issue. Union was brought about to deal with the fighting that was taking place in England, Scotland and the other parts of the United Kingdom. It ended up being, in effect, a federal system without a federal structure. In recent years, we have quite rightly devolved power to Scotland, England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the great cities. We have elected mayors and we will now elect police commissioners. I am not opposed to that, although by having more elections we will not get rid of the apathy of which we rightly complain, and about which the noble Lord, Lord Laming, spoke eloquently. If people are to identify with elections, it is important that they feel that they are relevant to them and their lives. Incidentally, that is not just about the role of the elected person. It is also about something that troubles all western nations, not just the United Kingdom. It is not just about the allegations of lining our own pockets or whatever. It is also about the relationship between the media and politics, which makes it very difficult for individual politicians to establish any reputation other than a bad one. It is very easy to get one of those.
What I am trying to say is that, if you are going to devolve power, as I think we will continue to do, you have to put that in the context of constitutional change. If you just embark on looking at the structure of this place—the House of Lords—what are we going to do if the Scots vote for independence? As I have indicated, I very much hope that they will not, and I do not think that they will. I have enough confidence in the people of Scotland to see the disadvantages of it for them and for everyone else in the United Kingdom. But let us suppose that 30% vote in favour of independence and it becomes something of a running sore, and that a similar development happens in Wales, which is already there to some extent. One option that you have to ask yourself, as well as looking at the West Lothian question, which is being examined elsewhere at the moment, is about the possibility of a second Chamber that represents a federal United Kingdom. It should not be ruled out. But if you are going down the road of increased devolution, we have to address where we pull the United Kingdom back together. It is all very well devolving power, and I am in favour of it, but devolve it too far and you end up with a splintering and breaking up of the union. You need somewhere you can bring it back together again.
It is true, therefore, that you could consider a second Chamber that reflected the federal structure of the United Kingdom, which came about in theory when we united with Scotland 300 years ago. I am not suggesting that we do that, but it would be an act of lunacy to just look at the structure of the House of Lords without being aware of all the other things that we ourselves are doing in devolving power in both Chambers, and what both Chambers are doing. That brings me right back to the beginning of this argument that there is a case for a constitutional convention that can take this process step by step, looking at it in relation to what is happening in the other Chamber or other parts of the United Kingdom. You do what we have done very successfully in this country for 100 years and evolve the constitution. It has worked very well for many years, and I hope that it continues to do so.
Lord Lee of Trafford
My Lords, in the debate last June on reform of this House, I made clear my total opposition to an elected House and the wholly unnecessary destruction of a great British institution. Nothing that has happened, certainly not the Joint Committee report, has altered my view. Indeed, what has been confirmed is that any fundamental change will lead to endless arguments and uncertainty on primacy, coupled with all the disadvantages of hybridity. I said in that debate that there was near zero public support, near zero media support and near zero support from serious political commentators for an elected House. Nothing has changed.
I certainly support evolutionary change, very much on the lines of Steel mark I; at least we have more consensus there. I have an open mind on variations to the existing methods of appointment. But no one can seriously believe that the knowledge and experience within your Lordships’ House can be matched by senators elected on the lines proposed. Let us be absolutely clear that the drive for an elected Lords is Lib Dem driven. I fully respect my party’s long-held view that in this day and age anyone involved in the legislative process should be elected by the people. That is an entirely legitimate position, but please do not try to convince us that it has any practical merit or, indeed, accountability.
The gracious Speech talks of reforming the composition of the Lords, but the long grass is growing longer. The Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and others are falling over themselves to emphasise that Lords reform is not their top priority. Even my noble friend Lord Tyler, perhaps the arch-zealot for an elected House, did not over-focus on Lords reform today. But with Tory MP after Tory MP denouncing an elected Lords post appalling election results and with considerable unease in Tory ranks, is it not obvious to all that the only reason why this measure is being pursued at all is the Lib Dems’ coalition lock?
I have to say that I question the morality of this. It is one thing to negotiate changes or improvements to normal proposed legislation; indeed, that is a legitimate part and parcel of coalition political life. But is it right that a minority coalition party, indeed a partner with only 9% of the total seats in the Commons, should effectively blackmail—that is what it is, and I take no pleasure in saying this—the clear majority partner to drive through major constitutional change on the flimsy pretext that this was in the three parties’ manifestos at the last election? The issue comprised 116 words out of a Labour manifesto of 60 pages; 43 words out of 118 pages of a Conservative manifesto; and only 19 words—yes, 19—in a 103-page Lib Dem manifesto. Who seriously believes that anyone voted at the last general election because of these thin references to Lords reform, as my noble friend Lady Shephard said earlier?
Lord Tyler
I am grateful to my noble friend for giving way. I sincerely respect the sincerity and consistency with which he has advanced his views and hope that he will do the same for me. However, I must draw his attention to the fact that not just at the election but in the discussions that were held after it there was absolute unanimity between the two parties in the negotiations on the coalition agreement that this issue was to be part of the programme. Everybody involved in those discussions agreed to that. It was not a case of the minority party blackmailing the majority party, to use his term. That simply was not the case and I hope that he will therefore withdraw that word.
Lord Lee of Trafford
I will not withdraw that word. I hear what my noble friend says, respect his sincerity and accept what he says about the original composition and agreement of the coalition. However, I suggest that the situation has radically changed. I do not believe that the Prime Minister has any real commitment towards, or belief in, an elected House.
Recent quotations from senior members of my party are, frankly, a mixture of the naive and the bizarre, with our president, Tim Farron, quoted in the Observer saying that Lords reform could be got through in two weeks were it not for,
“a few Right-wing extremists”.
I have been called many things in my time but never a right-wing extremist. Vince Cable, quoted in the Guardian, apparently told Sky that the Government should implement Lords reform “quietly and quickly”—some hope of that happening. Nick Clegg himself, in his article in Monday’s Guardian entitled “The Centre Will Hold”, said that,
“the third mid-term lesson is that we can only build a better economy with a better politics”.
He went on to urge injecting democracy into the Lords. I confess that the relationship between the economy and House of Lords reform is a total mystery to me.
I firmly believe that any major constitutional change should be decided by a free vote in both Houses and a referendum of the people. Pleasingly, the Joint Committee also favours a referendum. How my party—the party of localism and community politics—whose policies are decided by party members who argued strongly and campaigned for a referendum on AV, can oppose a referendum is beyond me. To argue that we need elections to give this House legitimacy, as my leader does, but to resist allowing the people to have a say on the policy that would bring this about is surely an absurd and questionable stance. I hope that my party will reconsider its attitude to a referendum. Indeed, I heard my noble friend Lord Ashdown support a referendum in an interview yesterday.
As a democrat, I believe that if Parliament on a free vote and the country in a referendum vote for an elected House, then so be it. However, what I will oppose all the way is an unwanted and unnecessary Bill that is driven through on a whipped vote, possibly using the Parliament Act, and without consulting the people. That was described by my noble friend the Leader of the House in Wednesday’s Financial Times as “the nuclear option”. For me, the future of this great and effective House, which is part of our national heritage, transcends party politics.
Lord Naseby
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to listen to the noble Lord, Lord Lee, not least today when he produced a very brave speech, as it is not always easy to criticise your own party. He did it with finesse but with a thrust of the sword getting through to the heart.
The gracious Speech is clearly the most important speech made by the Government of the day. This one falls into three parts. I greatly welcome the first, the primacy of trying to get growth in our country and continuing to reduce the deficit. Some Bills in the gracious Speech will help that, including the energy Bill, provided that we as a nation face up to the increasing cost of nuclear fuel. There is the banking Bill, although we have to be rather careful not to make banking such a difficult profession to follow that we undermine credit to small and large businesses in the United Kingdom. However, what is missing from the tenor of the gracious Speech is a real crusade to achieve the real and necessary objective. I am very conscious of what is happening with the business rates of small businesses and retailers up and down the country. I hope that those on the Front Bench will listen to the suggestions in today’s Financial Times from the chief executive of Sainsbury’s.
The second objective listed in the Speech is tackling crime. I say, well done. There are huge threats to our country from very nasty people out there. We all know about al-Qaeda in a lot of detail. I happen to know in great depth about the Tamil Tigers, and there are other equally nasty factions out there, all of which wish to undermine society, whether it be in the West, the Middle East or Asia.
The third objective is, needless to say, the one that we have all focused on, which, frankly, sticks in the gullet: reforming the composition of your Lordships’ House. It is totally irrelevant to the needs of our country today. Our Leader of the House, my noble friend, much to my surprise, gets on the front page of the Financial Times, where he suddenly changes tack. He admits that such reform will create a much more assertive House. I have again read his speeches, and this is the first time, as far as I can see, that he has openly come out and made it clear that the result, if the reform were to happen, would be a highly assertive House.
I do not want to go back over what I said the other day on the committee report, but I have to repeat that were I fortunate enough, and some 15 years younger, to stand for the half million electors of Northamptonshire, I could hardly turn around, if elected, and say, “I am terribly sorry, but I can’t have anything to with matters of supply”. Even more importantly, if the nation is considering whether or not to go to war, I can hardly say to the half million people of Northamptonshire, “I am terribly sorry; I am not allowed to do that bit”. That is not tenable and it is high time that someone somewhere understood that point.
The Leader stated that he wanted a consensus. I have commented on that in some depth. There is a simple answer: call my noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood into the Leader’s study and say to him, “We the Government are prepared to resurrect your Bill and see it through”. That is quite simple. Send my noble friend Lord Steel a message, sit him down in the study, give him a drink and tell him that that is the way forward. At the same time—this is probably the more difficult bit—the Government have to be honest with the people of the country and say, “That is the end of discussion about reform of the Lords”. It is a bit like killing a rabbit. You have to do it properly to ensure that the animal does not suffer.
At the moment the animal, the body politic, is suffering. If that approach is not to be accepted, all the issues of cost, representation, primacy of the Commons and the daft idea of being elected for 15 years will come swelling back for discussion on the Floor of your Lordships’ House. Do we really want to spend hours, days and months bogged down in a mire of a debate on issues that we have discussed so often and for so long? Perhaps I may emphasise my point of view. Nearly 40 years ago I had the privilege of being elected for the constituency of Northampton South by the princely majority of 179. I came into politics with a certain conviction, which I admit was influenced greatly by my readings of the Civil War, as some of my colleagues will know well, and over the years I grew more and more conscious of the importance of the primacy of the House of Commons and the sanctity of the role of MPs in that House.
Therefore, if push comes to shove and we are to have this lengthy debate, I shall move amendments, speak at great length and vote. I am prepared to work very long, very late and very often, and I shall go as near to a filibuster as I can under the rules of this House. I do not want to do that but I will do it to frustrate a Bill of the nature that I have just talked about.
I finish on the thought that there are huge problems out there, as every Member of your Lordships’ House knows. We are all tuned in to what is happening—we are not in a Chamber that is cut off. Not least, all of us are very aware that families and businesses, young and old, are facing great difficulty, and they are all looking to the politicians for leadership. I suggest that in this Chamber we should be putting forward proposals, suggestions and policies that will help the economy; that is where we should be assertive. The depth of experience across this Chamber in commercial, industrial and financial matters is second to none in the nation and there is certainly a great deal more of it than is to be found in the other place.
Therefore, in the months ahead let us spend our time helping our nation to get out of the difficulties that we are in, rather than reflecting on the whims of a few politicians who believe that somehow or other making this Chamber democratic is going to help our nation.
Baroness Miller of Hendon
My Lords, before I begin, it is my duty to apologise for the fact that I was not here when my noble friend Lord Strathclyde, the Leader of the House, opened the debate this morning. Indeed, I missed a tiny bit of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, who is sitting in his place, but I shall read Hansard. I am afraid that my absence was absolutely beyond my control. I was stuck not in traffic but in a position that prevented me from being here. I hope that the House will forgive me.
I now ask forgiveness for something else. I shall return to the subject of the House of Lords, of which I think we must all have had enough today, and I have been rushing through my notes to see whether I can take out the bits that have already been covered.
Yesterday, Her Majesty announced:
“A Bill will be brought forward to reform the composition of the House of Lords”.
My noble friend has already mentioned the use of the word “composition” and my noble friend Lord Cope of Berkeley, in his excellent speech yesterday proposing the Motion for the Loyal Address, described this cryptic term as “opaque”. The noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon, made a similar complaint in her speech on the same Motion, and I, too, have no idea what the Government, or the coalition, have in mind. I felt very bad about that until I heard my noble friend Lady Shephard say that she did not know what it meant, and then I thought, “Well, if she doesn’t know, it’s not quite so bad if I don’t know either”.
Nor do I understand, considering all the publicity that there has been on the subject in the past few weeks and the forest of conflicting kites that have been flown, why the Government have been so coy about spelling out their plans in a little more detail for the purposes of the Queen’s Speech. As we have been left to speculate on the Government’s intentions on this important constitutional topic, I am going to make just a few points of my own in the hope that when the Bill finally emerges I will not need to address your Lordships in any detail at its Second Reading.
First, perhaps I may point out that, contrary to the mantra repeated by numerous speakers in debates in your Lordships’ House and the other place, as well as in talk shows and discussions on television, reform of the House of Lords was not—I repeat emphatically, was not—in the manifestos of all three parties at the last general election. The Conservative manifesto, which I shall quote precisely, said:
“We will work to build a consensus for a mainly-elected second chamber”.
In producing a draft Bill that was thoroughly examined by a Joint Committee of both Houses and rejected by it, and then by the alternative report written by half of that committee, and effectively demolished by the 74 speakers on the debate on the reports, the Conservative Party has fully and effectively honoured its election promise. It has established beyond question that whatever number of votes constitutes consensus, one is not even on the horizon on this subject. Moral obligation met: move on.
Why is this veiled threat about the constitution of your Lordships’ House still hanging over our heads? Is it because of the pact with the Liberal Democrats in the programme for government,
“to establish a Committee to bring forward proposals for a wholly or mainly elected upper chamber on the basis of proportional representation”?
As I have pointed out, a draft Bill was published and the Committee was established. It has duly reported and it rejected the coalition’s manifesto-based proposals. I repeat: moral obligation met, so we should move on, especially as the electorate was not even invited to vote on it. More than that, last year the electorate, in an entirely democratic referendum, roundly rejected the idea of introducing proportional representation into elections for one branch of Parliament. Why, if it is not suitable for the House of Commons, should it be suitable for the House of Lords?
I remind the leaders of my party, in case hidden in the enigmatic announcement in the Queen’s Speech there is some intention to agree with the Liberal Democrat request for a PR election, that our 2010 manifesto said:
“We support the first-past-the-post system for Westminster elections”.
I believe that we are entitled to expect the Government to adhere to this and to honour what they promised.
In a television interview last Sunday, the Chancellor proclaimed the need to focus on what is relevant, and on Monday the Prime Minister, in an article in the Daily Telegraph, repeated that. In the Daily Mail published yesterday, only hours before the Queen’s Speech, he said:
“I must focus on what can be done, what must be done now”.
I say with all the respect in the world to the leaders of my party, what the country does not need now, and what does not need to be done now, is to tie up both Houses of Parliament in hours, days and weeks of a long drawn out sterile argument about an elected Chamber, for which it is clear that this Government have absolutely no mandate, and for which there is absolutely no consensus among the parties, or between the two Houses, or even within the parties themselves.
Furthermore, there is absolutely no call for it by the public. If your Lordships were to ask the next thousand persons walking past the front of the Houses of Parliament, “What are your political concerns?”, we can be sure that it would be the economy, unemployment, housing, immigration, and the cost of fuel. It would not be the composition of the House of Lords.
Let me make it clear that I am not implacably opposed to any change in the composition of your Lordships’ House. I believe that the process of electing replacement hereditary Peers now has to cease. It was intended as a temporary measure after the 1999 Act, during the final stages of which I wept in this Chamber—I am doing it again; noble Lords must not laugh at me as that will make it worse—at the wanton and partisan destruction of more than 800 years of our history. The present hereditary Peers have earned their places for life at least as much as some Members whose qualification for membership has been that they are chums of one of the Prime Ministers—the present one or one that went before. That is not very satisfactory.
I agree with the rejected draft Bill and with the Joint Committee that there is a case for limiting the size of your Lordships’ House. In recent times, under the successive leaderships of the major parties, like Topsy “it just growed”. It is clear from the difficulty in finding space on these Benches in the Chamber, or in the car park or the Peers’ Guest Room, that we must limit our numbers. Some anomalies were recently resolved by the Bill introduced by my noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood, to which I trust the Government will now give fair passage in the other place—despite the mysterious proposed new Bill that they are talking about. This will allow Members to retire.
The United Kingdom is not the only country with a legislature that includes an appointed second Chamber. The Canadian Senate—sometimes called the Red Chamber—is wholly appointed, but with a term limit based on age. I declare an interest here. I know that I am not as young as I was, but fortunately, in my opinion, I am in possession of all my marbles. Black Rod and his staff would have a very hard job pushing me out of the door if it were decided that in future age was the criterion instead of the ability to do the job and contribute to the working of the House.
Finally, I turn to the future problems that any act of purposeless political correctness would create. At the time of the campaign to eject the hereditary Peers, I warned that it was one step on the slippery slope to salami-slicing our constitution and electing the second Chamber. I looked at my speech to make sure that that was what I said. I was right, and here we are. Therefore, I now warn any of those gullible enough to swallow the specious, pseudo-idealistic argument in favour of such a Chamber that the road on which the Bill is embarking will inevitably lead to calls for an elected head of state. Why would we risk unleashing anything like that? We should think carefully before taking forward any of these dreadful proposals.
Lord Mawhinney
My Lords, like most if not all speakers, I came with a prepared speech. However, this is a debate so I will start by acknowledging and expressing appreciation for three speeches. The first was that of the noble Lord, Lord Owen. He raised sombre, significant, far-reaching and urgent points. I very much hope that the Government will address them in the depth that they deserve before the debate on the gracious Speech winds to a conclusion. Secondly, the House is indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Laming, for his insightful and true criticisms of the House of Commons scrutiny procedure. The third speech that I acknowledge with appreciation is that of my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth, who set out a compelling intellectual case. I say to my noble friends on the Front Bench that no Bill will go anywhere unless the points raised by my noble friend Lord Norton and the noble Lord, Lord Laming, are addressed to the satisfaction at least of this House.
The convention is that we are debating the constitution, and I will do that. However, as this is my only chance to speak on the gracious Speech, I will very quickly say how much I welcome the proposal to legislate on adoption. It is high time that Parliament put in its place political correctness at the expense of children. Secondly—this may differentiate me from a few Members on these Benches—I compliment the Government on their continued commitment to spending 0.7% of GDP on aid. No matter how difficult times are—and I acknowledge them to be very difficult—the truth is that we are all better off than the poorest in the world, and it is appropriate for a British Government to recognise that reality. The Government have to do more about the effective delivery of that aid, but I welcome their acknowledgement of the need for it.
As to the constitutional aspects of the gracious Speech, I wish to refer to two of them. At the heart of our constitution is free speech, and I welcome the Government’s commitment to bringing forward legislation to improve and modernise the laws of defamation. Some noble Lords will know that I have to declare an interest because I had the privilege of chairing the Joint Committee on the draft Defamation Bill. I have some reason to believe that the Government found our report helpful and I look forward to reading the Bill to see just how helpful they thought it was. However, there are big issues in the constitutional position of freedom of speech: the “chilling effect” that takes place at the moment; the need for mediation and arbitration as an alternative to rushing off to court; the cost of defamation proceedings; and the need to address the anonymous contributions on the internet. This is an important constitutional Bill and I welcome it.
On House of Lords reform, I have to be honest with the House and say that, as a former chairman of the Conservative Party, I am a little surprised that we are addressing such a Bill from a Government in which our party has a majority, given the history of the Conservative Party and its relations with your Lordships’ House. But there you are: life continues to be surprising. If my noble friends were trying to surprise people, at least they had a success with me.
I go back a long way with the noble Lord, Lord Lee of Trafford, from when we were both kid MPs. We have a friendship that dates back a long way and I pay tribute to the bravery of his speech. This was also acknowledged by my noble friend Lord Naseby. It brought to mind something which I read in the Independent the other day, which was a Lib Dem spokesman saying that even on the doorstep in the local elections, Lords reform was not raised. If Lib Dem campaigners cannot get people on the doorstep to talk about Lords reform, then there really is no interest in the country about doing anything.
We hear that something has to be done because there are 800 of us. I would gently remind your Lordships that that is not because of some divine intervention—unless Tony Blair has a status of which I am unaware. He flooded the place, and an incoming Government who needed to have some balance for legislative reasons had to respond. There is no argument that the numbers need to go down; it is the proposal at the heart of the proposed Bill which is the problem.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Solely; we are not legislators but revisers and reviewers. If we were legislators our will would prevail, at least some of the time, but ultimately our will does not prevail. I, for one, utterly reject the idea that we have to be democratically elected because we are not legislators in the pure sense of the term.
As someone who has in his time drawn up election addresses on behalf of the party, I am hugely unimpressed. Never mind what the words say—the noble Lord, Lord Lee, has given a helpful indication of their importance—the truth is that the party’s election address is not a matter of great consultation among the party, and not even among the MPs. I know that because I have been there, done that and got the T-shirt. For those of your Lordships who have never stood for election, I can tell you that the party’s election address arrives long after individual candidates have written their own local election addresses. To suggest that what is written at party headquarters and released half way through an election becomes a binding commitment on every candidate is nonsense. It is not even worth the time to argue about it.
Then we move on to consensus. I was intrigued by the speeches of the Leader of the House and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and indeed by that of my noble friend—and personal friend—Lord Wakeham. I am more confused than I was when this debate started. I have no idea what “consensus” means. Is it Front Bench/Back Bench? Is it the majority? Is it arm twisting to get a deal somewhere in the middle? Is that what consensus is? I have to say to your Lordships that if I had used language as loosely as that when I was seeking to get my university degrees in science, I would have failed, and if I had done that I would not be here today. Let us talk about what it is we actually mean, because if we try to conduct this debate on the basis of jargon, the country will suffer.
Let me add my support to something that others have said: this issue needs to focus on structures, on relationships and on primacy. It needs to outline the difficult questions and to find broad agreement on what are and should be the answers to those broad questions. I hope that my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth will forgive me because I think I have said what he said, but not with the elegance or the intellectual rigour. However, the point is well made and I want to support it.
The public priority was mentioned at the very beginning of the gracious Speech in the words:
“economic growth … reduce the deficit and restore economic stability”.
That is what the public are focused on at the moment: jobs, investment and small businesses. The gracious Speech acknowledged that and then moved on. Perhaps I may say to my noble friends on the Front Bench that for public confidence, competent delivery and persuasive communication are the essence of good politics. I can speak from experience as the Conservative Party chairman in the run-up to the 1997 general election. If the public lose confidence, it is virtually impossible to get it back, and it is against that background that this debate needs to be conducted.
My right honourable friend the Prime Minister said something the other day which I cannot have been the only one to have noticed. He said, “I believe that Parliament can handle more than one thing at a time”. Parliament can handle more than one issue at a time but, if that issue is trying to get people elected into this House, it may just be that the Prime Minister will need to revise his judgment.
Baroness O'Loan
My Lords, before I begin I would like to apologise to the House for the fact that I, too, was unable to be here for the beginning of the debate this morning. I was unavoidably delayed in the course of my journey here.
I wish to speak on the issue of the reform of the composition of the House of Lords, on which Her Majesty informed your Lordships’ House that a Bill will be brought forward. The final days of the previous Session were marked by lengthy debate in your Lordships’ House on this matter, and the one point on which there appeared to be wide-ranging consensus, using the commonly understood meaning of the word, was that the draft House of Lords Bill presented during the previous Session was not capable of enabling the complex processes of legislative enactment and all the other functions of the current parliamentary system in a way that would allow the proper development of the law. Indeed, a risk that the parliamentary system would become deadlocked by virtue of the opposing democratic mandates of the two Chambers was regularly identified. This is happening again today.
What the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, said this morning indicates that there has been little change from the Bill with which we were presented in the previous Session, despite the valiant efforts of so many Members of this House. The noble Lord told us that Members will be directly elected; the second Chamber will have a democratic mandate; size and membership will be dramatically reduced; elected Members will come from all regions and nations of the UK; and we will be able to expel Members who have committed serious criminal offences.
Millions of words must have been written and spoken on this topic over the years and I almost hesitate to add to them. There clearly is no consensus on the matter between the parties currently in government. A report published in April 2012 by Mr Oliver Heald, a Member of the other place and chairman of the executive committee of the Society of Conservative Lawyers, with a foreword by the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, chairman of research at the Society of Conservative Lawyers, stated that the Government’s proposals would,
“jeopardise the Government’s ability to govern effectively … weaken the relationship between the two Houses of Parliament … blur the constituency link between MPs and their constituents and lead to conflicts at local level … reduce the quality and extent of the pool of talent available for the Second Chamber … increase election costs by at least £100 million and add to the complexity of the voting system and … increase the cost of running the Second Chamber by tens of millions of pounds each year”.
This was a fairly succinct statement of the flaws in the Bill that was presented to us in the previous Session.
I do not speak in favour of the existing system of appointment to this House by the parties. The reality is that of our 830 Members, all but about 80 were either appointed by the parties or are Peers by virtue of heredity. Twenty-six are here because they are the current holders of office in the Church of England. We have a number of former Speakers of the other place. Only 50, I believe, have been appointed by the House of Lords Appointments Commission since its creation in 2000. They are appointed as non-party political Cross-Benchers. So 90% of our membership is party-appointed or government-appointed. One hundred and ten have been appointed since the election in 2010, despite both the Government and the Opposition having articulated their concerns about the number of Peers in the House. Actually, there is a simple solution to this: stop appointing for a while.
I support the proposal for a statutory appointments commission, particularly one that would include transparently appointed members of the public. I heard with interest the views of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, on the contribution—and indeed the value—of the Cross-Benchers. It continues to be my view that there must be space in any second Chamber for the views of those who, like me, could not subscribe to party politics, and who are not prepared to find themselves being whipped into Divisions, saying to one another, “We should not be doing this”.
It would seem unlikely that a 100% elected house could deliver the diversity and range of experience that exist in the Chamber. Current processes provide diversity in this place. We have 22% women. We have 5.8% ethic minority Members—2.1% higher than in the other place. We have representatives of all the established Christian churches and the non-established Christian churches, and members of the Muslim, Sikh, Jewish and Buddhist communities. We have gay Members. We have very active and effective Members with disability.
Combined with the range of expertise in the House—which, despite protestations to the contrary, is extensive and significant—this diversity facilitates the work of the House well. As other noble Lords have said, we saw this in the previous Session in the amendments that were made to the Welfare Reform Act, the Health and Social Care Act, the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act, et cetera. We need more diversity but at least we have some. Given that election to the other place has not produced such diversity, one must ask whether election to this House would preserve the levels of diversity that we currently enjoy.
It is this system that the parties now seek to change. More than this, we have the frequently articulated problem of those who would wish to resign or retire, for a multiplicity of reasons—not least that having reached a distinguished age, and having made a significant contribution over the years, they now feel that they must continue to serve because that is their duty as a consequence of the honour that was bestowed on them by Her Majesty when their peerage was created. We have also the issue of dealing with those whose conduct is not commensurate with membership of the House. The Bill presented by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, which passed through this House during the previous Session, dealt effectively with these issues. The Bill was not given parliamentary time in the other place. The passing of a Bill with similar provisions would enable both a more effective Chamber and proper consideration of the impact of the creation of a second elected Chamber.
As one who came to this House only two years ago, I have observed the workings of the Chamber with interest and, on occasion—I have to confess—with some mystification. However, it has been almost always with a great admiration for those who play their part in the legislative process and who work very long hours debating word by word the content of legislation which has very often gone through the other place without proper consideration. Indeed, on occasion, I have asked Members of the other place how it was that legislation came to us in the form in which it did and why there had been no challenge to very obvious inconsistencies, or to provisions which would either produce manifest inequity or create a situation which would not enhance the law. They have often answered either that they expected the Lords to do it or that there was no time in the Commons. This was in spite of the fact that, having rushed draft legislation through the other place without proper consideration, Members of the other place complained that they then had no work to do while the painstaking work was being done in this House.
All this leads me to believe that reform of the parliamentary process is multi-faceted, involving not only consideration of matters of election or appointment, the conventions applicable to the relationships between the two Houses and the balance of power but also the way in which the other place functions and the impact of that on any reform of this House. Reform must deal with the presenting problems and the underlying issues, which are not just those of patronage and competition between parties but of the way in which our laws are made and our Governments scrutinised.
We are now in a double-dip recession. It could be a decade or more before we emerge, as we will, from it. At such times, one of the aims of governance must be to limit public spending and public borrowing requirements while protecting our existing constitutional rights. During the previous Session, for example, we agreed processes for the costly election of police commissioners who would be very well paid. I fear that we will come to regret those measures, particularly if the consequence of the election of police commissioners is even the perception of the politicisation of policing, which this country has managed to avoid since the establishment of policing as we know it in the 19th century. Now we are being asked to contemplate elections to this House. The question in these constrained times, when the general view is that there is no major interest in changing the House of Lords, must be what the cost would be. No figures were provided by the Government during the previous Session. Comparisons with the cost of elections to the European Parliament may be relevant here. Seventy-two United Kingdom Members were elected at a cost of £103 million in the previous election. We are proposing to elect some 300 or 400 Members of this House. In the absence of detailed costings in the alternative report on House of Lords reform, it is difficult to envisage how the election of 300 or 400 members from constituencies across the United Kingdom could cost only £113 million. If one were to extrapolate it, the cost of an election to this House could presumably be in the order of at least £200 million. If the UK is to spend £200 million per election, the process must be right, but, more importantly, the outcomes in terms of saving expenditure at a time of grave economic distress must be proven. It would be unacceptable, to say the least, were the Government to refuse to produce any risk register on reform of this House in all its elements.
The Government did not produce any prediction of the cost of an elected House whose Members would be paid a salary which would probably be at least twice the national average salary but slightly less than the income paid to Members of the other place. We know that the cost of Members in terms of Peers' expenses and financial support amounted to £18 million in the financial year 2010-11. In the other place, £185 million was spent on the pay, staffing and expenses of Members. So the membership costs of other place are 1000% of the cost of this place. At a time of financial stringency, when questions are legitimately to be asked about how public money is spent, it is hard to justify an increase from £18 million to the suggested £300 million or £400 million that it would cost to run an elected, paid House.
With an ageing population, requirements for NHS care for such disabling and restrictive conditions as osteoarthritis and sight loss will inevitably increase. For the cost of elections only to this House, we could currently provide 1,000 cataract operations. For the projected cost of an elected Chamber, the NHS could liberate at least 650 individuals from severe pain and mobility problems consequential upon osteoarthritis of the knee, with consequential savings for health and social care services. I acknowledge that it is inevitable that a second Chamber will cost money. My sole question is how the Government can assure us that what they are planning will actually work in terms of the delivery of parliamentary services to the people who pay for them. Until such time as we can assure the public that any proposed system would work, would produce the requisite 1evel of commitment and debate and challenge to government, and would ensure that it was democratic, we surely have a duty to be cautious.
I would now like to revert to the issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Laming, about the loss of confidence of people in politicians and hence, I would suggest, in democracy. The Committee on Standards in Public Life survey in 2011 showed that the percentage of people who think MPs are dedicated to working well for the public dropped from 46% to 26%. We now have organisations like Citizens UK and London Citizens, which are mobilising to identify key issues and to try to compel candidates for election to commit to making specific changes.
The people are rejecting the processes through which we are moving at present. Creating more elections will not solve the deficit in confidence. This confidence is earned as people see politicians of this Chamber and the other place actually working for the benefit of the people. What is undoubtedly required is transparency as to the process of how people come to membership of the House. There is an overwhelming need for the ability to demonstrate why the proposed arrangements could work as suggested.
Finally, I have referred to any risk register on the issue. If one does not exist, then as any Bill is drafted it should be accompanied by a serious analysis of the risks and necessary controls to secure a viable working Parliament. The operation of the current conventions, the presumption of the primacy of the other place, the consequences of the responsibilities of an elected Peer to their constituents, who will want accountability if they are to be required to pay £300 million or £400 million a year for it—otherwise there will be talk of another gravy train—cannot facilitate such a viable Parliament.
The starting place for this debate must be consideration of how the whole Parliament works, or does not work, and what is necessary to make it capable of serving the people better.
Viscount Eccles
My Lords, in expressing pleasure at following the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, I wish to follow up her theme of the loss of public confidence in our political system. Before that, I reflect that if this were a two-day cricket match and I could dictate that stumps are drawn at 6 pm, I would be able to continue on Monday afternoon, as I would not be out. However, it was not to be. I did not speak in the Richard report debate; nor do I want to refer to composition today, except to say that I may be an early example of indirect election. I was re-elected to this House by a vote of the whole House, and in being re-elected, I showed that you can be elected and enter this House twice, and can achieve sufficient accountability to get in the second time.
However, my interest is much more in the wider issue of public disenchantment with our political system. Turnout in the local elections was 31%. It was 24% in Nottingham, where there was also a referendum on whether to have a mayor. As has been pointed out, maybe that referendum was lost simply because of the thought that a mayor would cost money. It could of course be that the electorate could not see that the benefits would outweigh that cost.
In pursuing these matters, we within the Westminster system seem to think that changes to the constitution will work the oracle. That may well be the wrong target. It might be that it is not the structure which is at fault—here I follow my noble friend Lord Norton—but behaviour within the structure. As the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, said, the public may want more democracy, but they do not want more party politics. I just add to that, more three-party politics, because I defer to those who would like to analyse the BNP and UKIP, which I do not want to add in.
The question is: why do the public dislike the present three-party politics and are they sensible to be doubtful about it? I wish to make the case that they are sensible to be doubtful about it. The first thing that they see is that the possibilities of our political system have greatly changed. The big things have gone. We do not declare world wars any more. We do not have an empire. Instead, we see the global economy, the fall of communism, the rise of China and India and, as the noble Lord, Lord Owen, said, Europe. If I was a member of the voting public without the special ability to look at things in depth through the benefit of the committees of this House, I would say that we are in a dead muddle about Europe. We do not know what we think about Europe. That will not do, but that is the perception of a large proportion of the electorate.
As politics is about power, and as our power has been eroded in the past century, it is not so surprising that people get more doubtful about our political system. However, all the while, knowledge has expanded; all the while, science has marched gone, delivering material progress of an unprecedented kind. The average per capita income in real terms in the United Kingdom today is four times what it was in the depression of the 1930s. At the same time that the big canvas, the larger, simpler canvas, has shrunk, the smaller, much more complicated canvas has taken its place. The canvas of economic and social issues, human rights and all sorts of other issues has become much more complicated. We could not envisage making the simplicity of the speeches of, for example, Mr Gladstone or Mr Disraeli.
The electorate know that it is not the political system that has driven that material and scientific change. It may at times have added to it by being a bit clever here and there; or subtracted from it by being a bit silly here or there; but that has not been driven by the political system, because many political systems have achieved the same sort of material progress.
The majority, who are doing all right in general, who are not doing too badly, who are not the disadvantaged or—like me, by definition—the vulnerable, are uncertain about the political system and think that its propensity to make mistakes may outweigh its possible benefits. As there are always many things on which public money could be spent, there is one unforgivable achievement. That is to manage the national finances and run out of money. Is it any surprise that there is a degree of genuine and justifiable disillusion out there?
Of course, there has been another major change—the fall of socialist economics and the disappearance of Clause 4. The media still talk about right and left¸ but we talk about the centre ground. I do not know, in this muddle in the middle, where right or left are in our political system now. None of the three parties seems to have a unique set of core values that identify it as either right or left. The overlap is continuous, and you will find people all around this House and in all parties who have a value that they share. The electorate recognise this; they do not want politicians to keep talking to them about core values, because they do not believe that in any real sense they exist.
To return to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, what is the role or relevance of adversarial party politics? I do not think the public value it. Instead, they value sound management and administration—if I may say so, the politics of Boris Johnson rather than the ideology of democratic legitimacy. While the political elite enjoy argument, mostly based on theory—in the elite I include think tanks, lobby groups and special advisers—the public look for consensus solutions to mundane matters, such as which drugs the NHS should be prescribing and which it should not, the queues at Heathrow and even aircraft carrier decisions, and all to be done without running out of money.
What has Parliament’s response been to date to this pragmatism and common sense? Masses and masses of legislation. The noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, reminded us in the debate on the report of the noble Lord, Lord Richard, that 10,000 pages come in and only 4,000 go out. That is an unsustainable trend. You cannot go on like that; it makes no sense to anyone. The assumption in the system is still that we can impose change, and changed behaviour, on the electorate. That assumption is out of date and the electorate do not believe it can be done, nor do they believe that that tax capacity is there to pay for the programmes. As we add to the law, we need Bills about litigation because there is more of it, which is hardly surprising if you have more law.
Are there any hopeful signs? We seem to be moving towards pre-legislative scrutiny and draft Bills. We are a long way from stabilising the length of Halsbury’s Laws of England or Tolley’s Tax Guide, but then politics is always the art of the possible, and maybe we recognise that we need a much deeper understanding of what realistically can be done and of how best it can be done. We need to slow down and deepen that dialogue because the centre ground, which I am sure we all agree we should be on, implies a search for consensus, whatever you may want that word to mean. I would want it to mean that something came through this House and the vote was not called, because everyone knew that if it were called it would be lost. In that search for consensus, it may be that there is not much wrong with our constitution—it is probably the behaviour within it that needs to change.