Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe]

My Lords, first, I am grateful to the Leader of the House for the statement at the beginning of the debate today, and I particularly welcome the indications from the Government that they have slowed down their approach and will take more time to deal with this issue. That has been welcomed by the House and the country generally. Secondly, I urge that we ensure that as we slow down and examine this issue carefully, we do it to our own timetable and are not responding to the timetable set down by others, such as the USA.

I come at the Government’s proposal with a degree of scepticism. I am sure that I am in line with many of the population. This is not because of a lack of sympathy or abhorrence about what has happened to the Syrian victims. There is concern for them and the Syrian population as a whole, and there is concern for the wider implications of the consequences that might arise from any military action on which we embark. I can be quite honest that my scepticism is based to a degree on the fact that, like others who have spoken today, I gave full support to the intervention in Iraq and subsequently going into Afghanistan. As time has gone by and I have seen what has happened, I have come to regret the decisions that I took at the time. I am very anxious to ensure that as I approach this issue, we do not repeat some of the errors of the past and what has happened in the recent past. I say this in a week especially when more than 50 people were killed in Baghdad and after a report from the United Nations that last month alone more than 1,000 civilians were killed in Iraq. This continues to escalate on a worrying scale.

The test that we ought to be exercising increasingly, even though people say that we should not be conditioned by what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan is: have we improved the quality and safety of life for the people in Iraq? A number of our ambassadors have posed the same question indirectly. We should also be asking whether our actions have improved the quality and safety of life for our citizens here in the UK. I read Mr Blair’s article in the Times and went through the barricades that now surround this building, which were not there 10 years ago. When I look at our public buildings around the country and our utilities and see the extent to which they are surrounded and guarded, which was not the case a decade ago, and I look at the cost and burden to the public, it is not difficult to understand why this time round the public are extraordinarily against what is being proposed by the Government. It behoves us to take account of that and to pick up the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mayhew, that we cannot ignore the knock-on effect on our troops if we decide to move forward without the full support of the people. I hope that we will not rush headlong into further action.

It is 10 years since we went into Iraq and it is high time that the public and we ourselves saw the Chilcot report. When can we expect to see it so that we can start to learn some lessons that we might apply in the future? The public and Parliament are entitled to know all the evidence about the use of chemical weapons, which it is now indicated we will get. Who is responsible for ensuring that every effort at UN and diplomatic levels will be made and will continue to be made? The public will be looking for that more than perhaps Parliament has expressed they will.

I am not going to repeat some of the points that have been made about the UN, but more work needs to be done at that level and on an international basis. We have had quite a remarkable debate today, and I should like to suggest to the Minister—I put this in a positive way—that so many suggestions and proposals have emerged, which I sense have not been addressed by the Government in their full respect, that he should ask his officials to take the debate away and draw up a document in which we can see those suggestions and proposals. We will learn about where the Government have taken appropriate action, or think they have, or where no action on the lines that some people have suggested has been taken. This should be drawn to the attention of the Foreign Secretary and he should be required to report back to us on the actions to be taken, with a full report then placed in the Library of the House.

Civil Service Reform

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Tuesday 19th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, my noble friend is right to point out that a number of things fit together here. Extending the role of Parliament in holding the Government and the Civil Service to account, which is part of what the Constitutional Committee will be discussing, will be continuing with what has evolved over the last 20 years with the relevant Commons committees. The question of the management skills of Ministers is very much a cross-party thing that we all need to discuss a great deal more. We do not currently train Ministers. We also need to discuss the changing role of the Civil Service itself. One point I did not answer for the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, was the question of the impact of these proposals for ethnic minorities and women. I remind the noble Baroness that for the first time, some six months ago, we reached the point at which there were more women than men at the level of Permanent Secretary. That is a real breakthrough. We have also had our first ethnic minority Permanent Secretary. Having a close female relative rising up the Civil Service, I hope this is a trend which will go further.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe]

I welcome parts of the Statement, and I welcome the conversion of the Minister who made the Statement in the other place. He was the man who was in charge of the Next Steps programme in the 1990s, which broke the Civil Service down into smaller pieces and split it up. He is now happily seeing the errors that were made, and bringing parts of it back together again.

I am concerned about the way in which we keep moving forward with changes in public service operations without actually speaking to the customers or the taxpayers. This is another example where the default position will be open policy making, where in fact the taxpayers and the citizens have not been involved one iota in this exercise. If they had been, we would have heard more complaints. I have a former connection with the Inland Revenue as I was the general secretary of the Inland Revenue Staff Federation. If you go online now, you do not necessarily get answers to internet inquiries; if you go on the telephone, as was recently published, you wait longer for a reply from the Revenue than you did two years ago; and if you come into the country, you queue longer at one and two o’clock in the morning. In so many areas of the departments the Minister has just mentioned the Civil Service is falling down. Now we are faced with a cut from 500,000 down to 380,000 civil servants within the space of three years, on top of the other changes already taking place. I think an awful lot of taxpayers are going to be very unhappy indeed with the services that they will get in the next few years, unless there can be a quite different approach to that which we have adopted so far.

I hope there will be a way in which we can look at how we measure efficiency. Take two building societies, A and B, and put them together. Get a new computer system, cut the number of staff employed, and you can say that you have increased the company’s efficiency. Invariably, in practice you find that the customer suffers and waits longer for services from that combined building society. We have tried to bring the same principles to bear within the Civil Service. I hope we can have a clearer definition of what efficiency means. I am not against changes, or reductions in numbers, provided that ultimately the service will be better. However, there is nothing in this statement to prove that it will be.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I accept that challenge. The effectiveness of these proposals will indeed need to be challenged precisely in terms of how they impact on the quality, effectiveness and speed of delivery, and the satisfaction of the citizens who are receiving those services. Before we close, I remark that this is also part of a long process of change in the Civil Service. The proposals in the plan for bringing together some core services across Whitehall—the management of major projects, human resources, digitisation—are also part of trying to make a more economical and unified Civil Service. As I have observed in the five departments I have worked across since I joined the Government, there are real cultural differences between a number of departments across Whitehall, and we will benefit from bringing departments together, rather more into a single corps. We have also been looking at the estate of the Civil Service, and making a number of changes which make for more effective use of that estate. This will also provide a number of efficiencies and savings. However, I accept the challenge that a number of noble Lords around the House have made, which is that the impact of all of this will be seen in the quality of the services that are provided, we hope, with much greater productivity, efficiency and effectiveness in three to five years’ time.