Tenant Fees Bill

Baroness Fookes Excerpts

Monday 5th November 2018 Grand Committee

Relevant document: 35th Report from the Delegated Powers Committee

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Fookes) (Con)]

My Lords, I am always required to announce that should there be a Division in the House, we will immediately adjourn for 10 minutes. It seems highly unlikely this afternoon.

Clauses 1 to 4 agreed.

Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Baroness Fookes Excerpts

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Thursday 23rd February 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Fookes) (Con)]

I call Amendment 31. I am so sorry, I turned over two pages. I was not trying to hurry the House unduly. Amendment 15.

Amendment 15

Moved by

Wales Bill

Baroness Fookes Excerpts

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Tuesday 15th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain]

I understand that. I understand my own amendment. It refers to public services.

The Minister is saying that there should be common standards. Wales already has entirely differently configured public services. That is the beauty of devolution. There is a learning experience between the different constituent parts of the United Kingdom about where best practice occurs. In some areas, it is in Wales. We have not had a doctors’ strike. I do not think we have had the same teachers’ disputes. We have not had the same local government disputes. We have not had the same firefighter disputes. Why is that? It is because these are devolved public areas run in a different way in Wales, with a different system of employee/employer relations provided for—we believed until this Bill tried to overturn the provisions of the Supreme Court ruling—in the devolution settlement. I echo the great eloquence and legal authority of the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, in saying that this is massive diminution—to use his phrase—of the authority of Wales. Indeed, it is a direct challenge to the Supreme Court, where it may well end up. As my noble friend Lord Murphy said, I do not think that is where the Minister wants to be in his private view of the future, even if that is where he is going to end up if he sticks to this stance.

The noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, underlined that the Supreme Court caught the UK Government by surprise. She was very frank about that. It perhaps even caught me by surprise by interpreting the devolution settlement in the way that it did in a very convincing way. I hope that the Minister recognises that he is now seeking to undermine that.

I remind the House of what my noble friend Lady Morgan of Ely said; she said that the terms of the Bill will prevent Welsh Government Ministers exercising their legitimate functions in public services in how they treat their employees and how they operate their industrial relations from training time to facility time to all the matters that are essential to running public services in Wales effectively.

My legal advice is that the Minister’s position is flawed. He may deploy government lawyers to contest that, and then we will see in the courts. We will have the Wales TUC and the Welsh Government and, I suspect, all the people of Wales right behind them challenging the UK Government’s position.

The question I shall conclude on is: are public services in Wales devolved or not—not just the policies, but the delivery, which depends on employees and the relationships between employees in the public sector and their managers being very good? That requires good industrial relations, and Wales has been able to achieve that. Wales would continue to be able to achieve it under the devolution settlement if this amendment were accepted.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Fookes) (Con)]

I am not clear whether the noble Lord wishes to withdraw the amendment or press it.

Wales Bill

Baroness Fookes Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 31st October 2016 Lords Chamber

Clause 2 agreed.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Fookes) (Con)]

The instruction of 26 October suggests that Clause 3 will be dealt with later.

Clause 4 agreed.

Scotland Bill

Baroness Fookes Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2012 Lords Chamber

Clause 1 agreed.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Fookes)]

The Question is that Clause 2 stand part of the Bill.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

My Lords—

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees]

Perhaps I should explain to the noble Lord that we have to agree that Clause 2 stand part of the Bill before we reach Amendment 1.

Clause 2 agreed.

Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Baroness Fookes Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, Amendment 18 would remove the flexibility for the Prime Minister to have the general election up to two months earlier or two months later than the five-year term. Amendments 22 and 23 in my name would delete just the power to call the general election two months earlier.

I thought it was important that we should have the opportunity to scrutinise this provision. In the Explanatory Notes, the Government explain that they have put this in,

“to accommodate short term crises or other conditions which might make it inappropriate to hold the election on the scheduled date, for example, a repeat of the foot and mouth crisis which led to the postponement of the local elections in 2001”.

One can see that there could be some sense in allowing for such possibilities but I wonder how carefully the Government have thought this provision through. The foot and mouth epidemic ran for some considerable time and it was possible for the Government to react in the way that they did in postponing the local elections in that year. However, could other disasters be anticipated so that the Prime Minister would know that he needed to call a general election earlier than the prescribed date or, indeed, later? Might not the power to call a general election two months earlier be open to abuse? I am not suggesting that this Government would abuse it but we are legislating for the indefinite future.

A Government might anticipate disastrous figures that were about to be published. I seem to remember that Harold Wilson was of the view that he lost the election in June 1970 because there were bad trade figures—something to do with airplanes, if I remember aright. Indeed, this Government might anticipate that some terrible figures might come out on unemployment or they might anticipate that there was going to be a major social protest, as is due to occur next Saturday. As time goes on and the Government pursue their deflationary and contractionary policies more and more ruthlessly, who is to say what protests may not emerge? Therefore, the Government might think that it was not expedient to hold an election when they were liable to encounter such expressions of public opinion and might contrive an excuse to get the election in just a bit ahead of the unfortunate event that they anticipate. Might not the power to defer the general election by up to two months equally be capable of abuse? A crisis might comprise the governing parties doing badly in the opinion polls and the turkeys wanting to postpone Christmas.

Should not the clause be amended? If the Government have a majority in both Houses, I worry that they will very easily secure their majority for the order to bring the election forward or to postpone it. We need to tighten up these provisions. I suggest that we should take out entirely the provision for the Prime Minister to bring the general election forward by two months. Amendments 22 and 23 would do that. We should remove that temptation to manipulate the arrangements. We should also tighten up the drafting to specify the kind of circumstances that would constitute a genuine crisis and justify the postponement of the election by a couple of months—perhaps as a result of an epidemic, a natural disaster or the outbreak of war; although our warrior Prime Minister might be tempted to declare another no-fly zone over Brussels to attract the Eurosceptic vote and achieve some kind of Falklands effect. You never know.

Amendment 24, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, indeed attempts to address this problem. I suspect that his amendment is not stringent enough. It is expressed with a high level of generalisation and may need to be amplified and expressed in greater detail. The Liberal Democrat amendment, Amendment 25, also seeks to address this problem, but would drag in the Speaker and require a super-majority of two-thirds. Those would certainly be safeguards against abuse, but there are other difficulties with that. The Government’s amendment, Amendment 26, states that the Prime Minister must give reasons when he lays the order, but that would add nothing in practice. The Prime Minister is hardly going to lay the order and say to Parliament, “I am not going to tell you why”.

These provisions need further thought and tightening up. If the Government cannot satisfy the House today, we may need to revisit this issue on Report. I beg to move.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Fookes)]

Perhaps I may point out that if the amendment were to be agreed, I could not then call Amendments 20 to 24, by reason of pre-emption.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Baroness Fookes Excerpts

Monday 13th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

Of course, the support of Ed Miliband—and I have a great respect for him—will help the AV campaign. However, I do not think that it will help it as much as the wide range of support for the first-past-the-post campaign in the Labour Party, which has a whole galaxy of supporters. That still does not argue the case about the differential in the turnout. The Liberal Democrat that I mentioned was arguing from his point of view the fact that it would be for Liberal Democrats to have the referendum on its own so that they could concentrate on the change that was necessary and get the enthusiasts and activists to turn out.

I urge noble Lords to support the deletion of this clause. It is the first in a group of amendments that would have a similar effect in different areas and in different ways. The amendment would eliminate the probability, or certainty, of confusion of the electorate in the campaign and at the polling booths. If we do that, we will have produced a far better Bill than we received from the other place.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Fookes)]

I point out to noble Lords that if this amendment were agreed, I could not call Amendment 39A by reason of pre-emption.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My Lords, I very much support the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, on this amendment. I have always taken the view that we should be working overtime to ensure that the referendum vote on the alternate vote system is not held on the same day as the local elections. I have never really understood that anybody can argue that the two issues, as the noble Lord has pointed out, would be completely confused.

One thing that we have established on the debate that we have had on the alternate vote is that it is not just a simple change in how we carry out voting. It is incredibly complicated, and we need an extensive debate to clarify these issues. I am not saying that the British electorate are made up of people who are so extraordinarily thick that they do not understand. Let us face it—many of us in this House have been on a seriously steep learning curve as to what the alternate vote is about. When I came here, I thought that there was only one alternate vote; I find that in fact there are four different variations of the alternate vote. It is extremely complicated and a very major change in our constitution. It is a serious change in how we carry out our elections, and not something that should just be thrown in as a referendum at the same time as local elections. It is something that the country should debate and consider very seriously, because it will in perpetuity change how we hold elections in this country and change, also, the outcome of these elections.

I had great discussion with my noble friend Lord Tyler, who claimed rather interestingly that if we had the alternate vote, it would make what he described as a balanced Parliament—which I have always more pejoratively described as a hung Parliament—less likely. That is a very profound statement for my noble friend to have made, because he is actually saying that the Liberal Democrats are advocating an electoral system that will disadvantage them in general elections. That shows an altruism that I did not think existed in the Liberal Democrats. It has really opened my eyes. It has also changed where I come from, because the reason why I am trying to delay the alternate vote referendum is because I want to see the alternate vote soundly defeated. On the other hand, if the alternative vote system will make it less likely that we will end up with coalition Governments, I should be supporting it.