Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013 (Transitional Provisions) Order 2015
Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts(8 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Cormack
For a start, we do not know exactly how many are not on it. The figure of 1.9 million has been quoted. It is inevitable that by the time we reach 1 December, that figure will shrink considerably and between then and the crucial elections that will take place in Scotland and elsewhere next year, I believe that the figure will be much smaller still, and I very much hope that it is. But we also have this balance between completeness and total accuracy. The noble Lord, Lord Wills, made this point in his very fair speech. We know from experience in Tower Hamlets and elsewhere that there have been occasions when the electoral register has been manipulated and democracy has been brought into disrepute. We know that for a fact. What we want is a register of total integrity. That is why I agree with the noble Lord and my noble friend Lord Empey that proof of identity should be a requirement. I also believe that postal votes should not be supplied on demand because that lends itself to abuse.
It has been said that this is a very different debate from yesterday’s. Of course, it is. Given the opportunity to speak yesterday, I would have argued that the constitutional priorities should be the most important ones for this House. But the House spoke as it spoke and, even though I may regret that, I had sympathy with the arguments advanced so brilliantly by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, and others. We are where we are, as they say, and we must see what happens. However, I use this opportunity to say to the House that we must be very careful about using the power that we have. Today, we quite rightly have it, and that was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, when he quoted from the Act. Of course, we have the right to reject this order today if we choose to do so. However, as one who believes passionately in this House and its integrity, and who believes equally passionately—nay, perhaps more so—in the supremacy of the other place, where I had the honour to serve for 40 years, I say to the House that we must be very careful how we use our power.
Although I have very considerable respect for the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and many of his colleagues on the Liberal Democrat Benches, I say this to them: they believe in a number of things very firmly and, I accept, with complete honesty. They believe in the supremacy of the House of Commons, as they tell us repeatedly. They believe in proportionality and many of them do not believe in your Lordships’ House, but some do—
Lord Cormack
I will not give way at the moment. I wish to complete what I am saying. What I say to him, very quietly and in a spirit of collegiality, is that they must be a little careful how they use their votes because if they were proportionately represented in this House following the last general election, there would at the most generous estimate be 60 of them and more likely 50. I think 83, 84 and 81 voted in Divisions last night. Had they led by example, practised a self-denying ordinance and put only 55 into the Lobby—that being the difference between 60 and 50—the last Division would have gone in favour of the Government. The previous one would have been very finely balanced. I say to them, please be careful how you overuse the power you have accidently got when you are speaking in the House where you have 104 more Members than in the elected House. That is something everyone in this House should take into account. When we come to address—
Lord Cormack
I am not obliged to give way and at the moment I am not giving way. I will in a moment. When we are debating the franchise for another place, we have to be especially careful how we exercise our judgment as well as our vote. I will give way.
Lord Lea of Crondall
I am most grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. He has on two or three occasions emphasised the supremacy of the House of Commons. I understand that the House of Commons, despite the enormous importance of this question, did not discuss it at all. This House is discussing it. Can he confirm that that is his understanding?
Lord Cormack
Yes, but I am not in charge of Government business. The other House has the opportunity to accept or reject. As the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, perfectly rightly pointed out, so do we. All I am doing is saying that we should be particularly careful when exercising judgment on an issue that pertains wholly and entirely to the elected House. We need to bear that always in mind. I will give way to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler.
Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill [HL]
Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Lea of Crondall
“Charity Commission annual report to refer to principles of best regulatory practice
(1) Schedule 1 to the Charities Act 2011 is amended as follows.
(2) In paragraph 11(1)(c), after “16)” insert “including the extent to which, in its opinion, it acted in a proportionate, accountable, consistent, transparent and targeted manner (see section 16(4))”.”
Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
My Lords, I will take just five minutes to move this amendment because I set out the reasoning at considerable length in Committee on 1 July, and the case that I made then still stands. I will restrict my remarks to developments since that time, notably at the United Nations. There are two main issues, and I contest the two main premises of the letter dated 13 July from the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Bridges of Headley, in response to the questions that I posed on those issues then.
However, before I turn to those issues, perhaps the Minister will respond to a separate point that I made in Committee. The commission’s normal registration procedures can take a couple of years in what it considers to be a complicated case. They clearly do not match the requirements of a charity with a limited lifespan—in our case, of a little over one year. If ground-breaking fixed-term charities can in practice be arbitrarily ruled out for such reasons then it crosses the border between being simply an operational matter and a matter of public policy and the Government should address it. I would be grateful if the Minister will consider it before Third Reading.
I will now address the issue of the accountability of the Charity Commission, hence the reason for my proposed amendment to the present Act. My first bone of contention is the disingenuous way in which the commission went about blocking the application of the Hammarskjöld Inquiry Trust. This was purported to be—not exclusively, it said, but indispensably—on the grounds of the claimed lack of interest in the trust’s work on the part of the United Nations. This has indeed been the main bone of contention of the trustees as a body since we first made contact with the Charity Commission exactly three years ago. The Minister’s letter sidesteps the undisputed fact that the commission’s claim to that effect is now clearly seen to be plain wrong. As the Minister’s reply does not address that fact, I ask him once again whether he will take this opportunity to accept that that is so. If he wishes to deny it in the face of the pellucidly clear evidence now before us, on what grounds does he do so?
Lord Bridges of Headley
My Lords, I understand that the noble Lord, Lord Lea, was obviously frustrated by the approach of the Charity Commission when he tried to register the Dag Hammarskjöld trust, and that his impression of the commission has been informed by and reflects that particular case. I must say that waiting several months for a response to a letter does not seem to be good customer service and I, too, would have been extremely frustrated.
For most charities with standard charitable purposes, the process for registration with the Charity Commission is quick and straightforward. In 2014-15, the commission registered over 4,600 charities. For organisations with purposes that are innovative or do not fall within previously recognised charitable purposes, the process of registration can indeed take longer. The law does not recognise wholly novel charitable purposes, but purposes can still be charitable if they are analogous to or within the spirit of charitable purposes specifically identified in the 2011 Act or if they were charitable purposes recognised by the common law before 1 April 2008. Where people want to register as a charity an organisation which has purposes that may not fall clearly within established categories of charitable purposes, the commission must proceed with caution in assessing whether the organisation really has been established for purposes that are charitable in law.
I turn to the specific issue of the Dag Hammarskjöld trust. I do not know all and every detail of the case and it is right that I should not, as the commission is operationally independent. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Lea, said, I have written to him responding to some of the specific questions he raised in Committee about what the Government knew about the case. I apologise to the noble Lord, but I cannot at this Dispatch Box add to the detail that was in the letter sent to him. I regret that, but I absolutely cannot—it is a very detailed case.
On his amendment—which is really what we are debating—the Charity Commission already reports its performance against principles of best regulatory practice, usually framed in terms of proportionality. It does this in its annual report, in its annual Tackling Abuse and Mismanagement report and in stand-alone case reports. I hope your Lordships will forgive me for not repeating the detailed ways in which it does all this as I set it out in Committee at length. This amendment, by highlighting one particular aspect of Section 16, casts doubt on the extent to which the commission should report on other aspects of its general duties. It is, in that respect, undesirable.
Finally, I hope the noble Lord, Lord Lea, will reconsider the offer from the Charity Commission’s chairman to meet him and discuss this case. I fear that I have not been able to reassure the noble Lord that his amendment is not necessary—although I hope that I have done so. I assure him that his difficulty in trying to register the Dag Hammarskjöld trust was not representative of the norm.
Lord Lea of Crondall
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply. On the first point, he clearly does not feel that there is anything amiss with the accountability of the Charity Commission. I think he is hiding behind the phrase “operational matter”. When a matter of this importance is put before the House, and with the detail that I have presented, is it not incumbent on the Cabinet Office or the Minister and his officials to look further into it? In other circumstances or areas, one could call it a miscarriage of justice.
As to the question of co-operation regarding the unfinished business of the United Nations arising from the work of the Hammarskjöld Inquiry Trust, we will now have to await the findings of the Secretary-General as he presses the British and other Governments on their failure, to date, to release all relevant records to the UN. It will then be up to the United Nations, not me, to decide whether to point the finger at anyone.
There is one thing of which I am increasingly certain. Historians will take note of the high likelihood of the existence of a second plane and, similarly, of the high degree of suspicion that there was subsequently a cover-up by certain Governments, not excluding the British Government then and subsequently. In time-honoured words, history will be the judge. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment
Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)
My Lords, I want to speak in favour of the insertion of the proposed new clause, and declare an interest as a former chief executive and now vice-president of a campaigning charity, Carers UK.
Last week, I gave a lecture on 50 years of the carers’ movement in which I argued that the fact that carers, their needs and their contribution are now so widely recognised is due almost entirely to the work of campaigning charities such as Carers UK, which have enabled the carer’s voice to grow strong and influential in bringing about policy change. Just to support what my noble friend Lady Hayter said about leading the world, I say that the carers’ movement is indeed an example to the whole world; it is in contact with emerging carers’ movements throughout the world and is a global influence.
I want to ensure that such organisations are confident in the legitimacy of their actions, whether it be campaigning for a change from which all will benefit or opposing a proposed change which is likely to disadvantage that client group. I know that it can be said there is nothing which currently inhibits such action on the part of charities and I believe that the Charity Commission may revise its so-called CC9 guidance to make sure that this is understood. However, like my noble friend, I believe that the passage of the lobbying Act has had the effect—I know that it was not the effect that was necessarily intended—of limiting campaigning by charities. We saw this clearly in the run-up to the general election, where charities did not have the strong voice that we normally expect at such times. It has made charities nervous; it has diminished their confidence. The insertion of the proposed new clause would go some way to remedying this situation and re-establishing that confidence. I emphasise that I want that confidence to be re-established not for the benefit of the charity but for that of the recipients of that charity’s services, by influencing policy in the way which is such a proud tradition in our country.
Lord Lea of Crondall
My Lords, in supporting the amendment, perhaps I may revert to a point which came up in Committee. It concerns what exactly we are to believe is the position under the present law.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, gave a long disquisition on party political support—which we knew was not charitable—but there are many examples of where the objection “this is political” is used against the registration of charities which in no sense are party political. The charity that I have been the chairman of is an example which your Lordships have heard about possibly to the point of tedium, but it demonstrates the fact that the dividing line at the moment is drawn in a place which the Government say is different from where it actually is drawn. It is drawn somewhere in the murky middle by arbitrary and subjective decision by the Charity Commission, which is dangerous for its credibility.
I have raised the example of an anti-EU charity putting out in a press release a narrative beginning, “In the latest outburst from the gauleiter of the European Commission, Mr Juncker”. As I pointed out, “gau” and “leiter” are two quite straightforward German words—“gau” means district and “leiter” means leader—and until 1933 there was nothing wrong with “gauleiter”. But ever since 1933, there has been a lot wrong with “gauleiter”. And so that is not political. How on earth can the Minister defend the arbitrariness and subjectivity of the commission when it pronounces that it objects to the Hammarskjöld inquiry commission on the grounds of it being “political” and says not a word about other charities which find favour with it?
Lord Judd (Lab)
My Lords, I spoke at some length on this issue in Committee and will therefore not try the patience of the House on Report by repeating all that. I simply say that, as somebody who has worked in the charitable field for quite a lot of my life—I have been chief executive of more than one charity; I have been an honorary officer and a trustee, and I am currently a trustee of one charity—there is an underlying issue here which is of profound importance.
Charities with great experience of front-line engagement have come to realise that they are sometimes aiding and abetting the problems which exacerbate the difficulties faced by those whom they are trying to help, because they are removing the unpalatable symptoms of what is wrong and disguising what is causing the problem. They have come to see that through the experience of their own work. There are many trustees and many staff in some of what I think everyone would on balance agree are the better, more experienced charities who have come to realise that they simply cannot go on doing this, because they are treating symptoms and settling for that, and that one of the most important things they can do in the service of those whom they seek to help is to advocate their situation and to seek the changes which will overcome the causes of the problems of those who are the victims, and that it would be dishonest to do anything else.
Personally, I find the way in which the law on charity has operated in recent years to be perfectly acceptable, and charities have responded to that very well by recognising that they have a duty to ensure that what they are advocating really does arise out of the experience of what they are doing. That is not just a matter of legal, moral responsibility; it is also one of effectiveness, because if they can be seen to be speaking out of real experience that is a very strong muscle in their campaigning.
However, we have to face the reality that there are those who have never been comfortable with this situation and there have been noises in recent years that people would like to curb the sector. That in my view would be disastrous and totally unacceptable and unfair to those who are really trying on our behalf, sometimes valiantly, courageously and bravely, to do the things that are necessary. From that standpoint, to have it explicitly stated in the Bill has great merit. I am therefore glad to see the amendment here and I hope that the House will find its way to endorsing it.
Lord Bridges of Headley
My Lords, I have no difficulty at all in accepting the premise of the amendment—and much that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, said—which states that charities should be free to campaign where that is an effective means of furthering their charitable aims. Speaking up for their beneficiaries, who may have no voice in the democratic debate, stands long in the tradition of the charitable sector. Yes, it may be uncomfortable for some to hear the hard truths that they are told, but that is democracy at work and freedom of speech in action.
Charities have always campaigned, which is as it should be in a free society, and charity campaigns have brought about much good, opening our eyes to issues others have overlooked, often resulting in beneficial changes to the law. Examples are legion and stretch back over generations, and long may that continue. My objection to the amendment is not therefore that what it says is wrong. Indeed, it is not even seeking to have the right to campaign reflected in law, for it already is enshrined in law, through case law, as the noble Baroness said. My concern is that seeking to compress that case law into an amendment in the Bill is difficult, to say the least, and would be likely to inadvertently shift the boundaries of what is permitted under the law in unanticipated and unhelpful ways.
As well as being fraught with difficulty, such an amendment is unnecessary. The implication of the case law is set out in Charity Commission guidance CC9 and, with very few exceptions, that guidance is well understood and observed. Unlike primary legislation, commission guidance can be updated, with proper consultation, to ensure that it remains congruent with case law and up to speed with developments such as the rise of social media.
The introduction of the Transparency of Lobbying Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act, to which a number of noble Lords referred, has recently made the relationship of the law and lobbying a matter of intense debate, and I can understand why. That Act is part of electoral law, and this is clearly not the time to rehearse that debate. However, the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, was one of many noble Lords who referred to the so-called chilling effect that it might have had at the last election, so I am pleased that my noble friend, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, has explicitly called for evidence from the voluntary sector and from noble Lords in his ongoing review of the third party campaigning rules that were updated by Part 2 of that Act. A clear view of the evidence about what impact the updated rules have, or have not, made in their first year is exactly what is needed on an issue that has aroused such strong feeling. The Charity Commission would obviously need to take account of my noble friend’s findings should it decide to review CC9. If there were any such review, the commission has committed to say so publicly and consult widely and wisely.
On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lea, the Charity Commission does indeed take action in cases where charities of all political persuasions are seen to have crossed the line. During the last election, a charity that was making a point that could be construed as being supportive of the Conservative Party was pulled up short. I therefore do not think it strictly true to say that it does not take action.
This Government welcome and support the campaigning role of charities, properly regulated and properly understood, and acknowledge the benefit that that brings to wider society. I hope that on that basis, and given what I have said to reassure the noble Baroness, she will feel able to withdraw her amendment.
Lord Lea of Crondall
The Minister has totally misunderstood the purport of my question, which I will repeat. It is clear that the dividing line about what is political has nothing to do with support for a political party. What the Minister just said is a red herring. Of course, things can be ruled out for direct or indirect support for the Labour Party or the Conservative Party. My point was this. That is not in practice the dividing line drawn by the commission, where party political support is ruled out and other matters are ruled in.
Lord Lea of Crondall
I would like, on the second time of asking, with the permission of the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth—from a sedentary position if you please—to have an answer to the question that I posed in Committee that was not answered and I now repeat.
Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill [HL]
Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Judd
Does the noble Lord agree that this is not altogether simple? He and I clearly agree on this important matter, but it is not simple because if a charity finds itself strongly advocating a position and a political party is doing the same, that is open to misinterpretation. We have to be absolutely clear that the way in which the law is administered is also transparent. There have been arguments that campaigning should be curbed in the last year before an election. It is absolute nonsense for a charity, which feels strongly, passionately and morally obliged to put forward a case because it wants policy change, to have to lay off in the year of a general election. That would be condoning something they believe is wrong and that is not what any of us would want to imagine happening in Britain. It is very important that the Charity Commission is held to account; that the whims of a particular commissioner are not prevailing and that, from an objective, analytical position, very strict rules are fairly observed.
Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
My Lords, I am happy to be associated with this probing amendment. As I suspected, there is scope for talking at cross-purposes about the commission’s present understanding of “political”. I have been at the receiving end of an objection on the grounds of that word. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, whose attention I do not have at the moment, equates “political” with “party-political”. As I understand it, that is not the Charity Commission’s feeling about the word. I have been at the receiving end of criticism that this is political, but when I speak to Amendment 15 no one would think there is anything party-political about it.
I will give one illustration from the press in the last six or nine months, to show why there is a need for a minimum of clarification on this question. We all get round-robin emails from organisations: we agree with some and disagree with others. This is one about a breakfast discussion to be held on Wednesday 15 October 2014, arranged by a Eurosceptic organisation concerned with EU regulatory issues called the CSFI; someone will probably know what this stands for. It said that the CSFI was,
“now accepting online donations via the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF). This is the most cost-effective way for the Centre to collect one-off donations online, which can also be GiftAided. To support the Centre, please click here”.
That clearly establishes that this is an all-singing and all-dancing registered charity as I understand it, or else it could not enjoy the benefits of the gift aid scheme. The first sentence by the director, Mr Andrew Hilton, states:
“As I am writing this, the Commission’s new gauleiter”—
being the European Commission—
“Mr. Juncker, is busy trimming the edges of the various portfolios he has offered individual Commissioners”.
Noble Lords who speak some German will know that, until 1933, “gauleiter” was a pretty everyday word, with “gau” meaning “area” and “leiter” meaning “leader”. But since 1933, no one would think that “gauleiter” was without very strong connotations and, I would say, strong political connotations. On the basis of what I have come across, this should be viewed by the Charity Commission as being out of bounds because it is political.
The Minister has a very sharp brain, so my question to him is this: does he acknowledge that there is an issue here? How should the commission go about its business if an organisation which can get gift aid refers to the President of the European Commission as the new gauleiter, while in other areas it says, “You cannot get Charity Commission registration because you are political”? That is my question.
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)
My Lords, the noble Baroness and some other noble Lords know that I have been asked by the Government to review the operation of Part 2 of the transparency of lobbying Act, which is the part referred to by the noble Baroness in her amendment and is about third-party campaigning. I am doing so on a strictly non party-political basis and the review is going to be evidence-based, as was my review of the Charities Act. I have been working hard to make sure that as much evidence as possible from right across the political spectrum is gathered in. I have been to all the devolved Administrations and have ensured, with the team at the Cabinet Office which is helping me—it is a terrific team whose members are working hard, so I shall place that on the record now—that every candidate in the general election has received a questionnaire, that every returning officer has received one, and that we had a question for the public on our website which we publicised as far as we could through bodies like the NCVO and the CBI.
We now have an outstanding call for evidence that is more detailed in its questioning and will run until the end of July. Moreover, I have had a great many face-to-face meetings with people from all parts of the political spectrum and our commercial life. I have to tried to ensure that, as far as possible, all the leading interested parties in this area have had a chance to put their point of view and have it recorded. We have tried to do a lot of the meetings on the basis of Chatham House rules so that people can speak frankly. We say, “Tell us what you really feel and later on, when we make a call for evidence, we shall want you to go public and on the record”. However, in order to amplify and get the colour and context of these things, at this first stage we will treat their remarks in confidence.
The report is due by the end of the year, subject to the figures on actual spending that we need from the Electoral Commission. The commission’s second set of returns is due around the middle of November, so we will be a bit pushed, but I hope that we can do it. As I say, my report will be evidence based. So however my noble friend is going to answer this debate now, I say to the noble Baroness, the noble Lord, Lord Lea, and anyone else in the Committee—indeed, everyone in the House—that if they have information they think would be helpful and should be consulted on and included in the review, please get in touch. Firm factual evidence is a good basis for making recommendations, while rumour and myth are a bad one, and I am anxious to ensure that we get down to a hard evidence base. Obviously people can then debate the conclusions that can be drawn from it.
I shall not comment on the noble Baroness’s amendment this afternoon; I am not going to run before my horse to market. I want to collect the evidence, I am sure that Members of your Lordships’ House have a great deal of it, and I hope that they will ensure that I get it.
Lord Lea of Crondall
“Charity Commission annual report to refer to principles of best regulatory practice
(1) Schedule 1 to the Charities Act 2011 is amended as follows.
(2) In paragraph 11(c), after “16)” insert “including the extent to which, in its opinion, it acted in a proportionate, accountable, consistent, transparent and targeted manner (see section 16(4))”.”
Lord Lea of Crondall
My Lords, Section 16(4) of the Charities Act 2011 sets out the commission’s general duties and Schedule 1 provides that it should have regard to and report annually on its performance on accountability, consistency and transparency. I will present a case from my own experience for why we need to strengthen this section to require the Charity Commission to report on the extent or degree to which it has actually done so. As I say, I am influenced by a particular case and, whether or not I technically need to declare this as an interest, I certainly do so.
The case in question arises from the fact that I have had a long-standing interest in why the then Secretary-General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, died in a plane crash, or immediately afterwards, in Northern Rhodesia in 1961 on his way to meet the leader of the breakaway Congolese province of Katanga, Moise Tshombe, and the British Under-Secretary of State, Lord Lansdowne, along with the British high commissioner to the Central African Federation, Lord Alport, and his private secretary, Sir Brian Unwin. There was immediate and widespread speculation as to whether or not it was an accident. The United Nations carried out an internal inquiry, which reported in 1962, with an interim verdict of not proven—as they would say in Scotland—but the United Nations General Assembly then resolved that, if cogent new evidence came forward, the Secretary-General was empowered to draw it to its attention.
Fast-forward to 2011 and a book was published by Dr Susan Williams which produced some cogent new evidence. I, with others, established in 2012 the Hammarskjöld Inquiry Trust, a legal trust. I do not need to explain to everybody here that lawyers will distinguish a legal trust, which anyone can establish just like that, from a registered trust, which is registered by the Charity Commission. Its purposes were:
“To advance public knowledge and understanding, by seeking to ascertain first the true circumstances of the death of the Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, in 1961 and secondly the true circumstances leading thereto; to make available the results thereof to the United Nations and more widely as the Trustees shall determine”.
This was in the preliminary submission of the purposes of the trust, of which I have a copy, but more of that in a few moments. Suffice to say that it was the start of my experience over the past three years with the Charity Commission.
The modus operandi was that having first appointed a group of trustees of good standing from Europe and Africa, our first job was to appoint an “international commission of jurists”—I use the phrase descriptively—to carry out, over a 12-month period, an examination of new evidence on this matter of national and international importance; and to put together the resources needed for it to carry out its work. I chaired the trust.
The commission of inquiry that we appointed was chaired by the right honourable Sir Stephen Sedley, a Lord Justice of Appeal from 1999 to 2011 and a member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Its members were Judge Richard Goldstone—inter alia the first chief prosecutor of the UN international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda; Hans Corell from Sweden, a former deputy secretary-general for legal affairs of the United Nations; and, last but not least, Wilhelmina Thomassen, a judge in the Supreme Court in the Netherlands who had been a judge of the European Court of Human Rights.
We told the Charity Commission right from the start, very clearly, that this was a time-limited exercise. If there was cogent new evidence found, our idea was that the commission of inquiry would report by the autumn of 2013 and that there would be no need for the trust to carry on much longer than that once it had presented the report to the United Nations in New York.
In being time-limited it is perhaps an unusual trust—perhaps the Minister will comment on how unusual it is or is not—but it is none the worse for that. Again I stand to be corrected but there is certainly nothing in the legislation that states it is not possible to register a short-term trust. The significance of this consideration will become clear.
To cut a long story short, seemingly endless obstacles were put in our way. First was the contention I mentioned in the previous debate that the trust was “political”. I return to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire: no one would remotely say that there was anything party-political about it. However, inter alia, one of the objections raised was on the grounds that it was “political”. Secondly, there were various arcane discussions about the objectives and whether or not we would meet, for example, the test of promoting a sound administration of a law. Where that came from I do not quite recall.
Then we were told that the commission had ascertained that the United Nations was not interested. I will come back to that because it turned out to be not only untrue but the total opposite of the truth. In the background, there was a growing sense among the trustees that, as in a novel by Kafka, this process would never reach a conclusion. This is my answer to the tendentious explanation now given by the Charity Commission that we simply omitted to put in a formal application. I use “tendentious” because it had been made clear to us that, first, we had to satisfy a sequence of tests put to us before it was likely that we would get the green light. That was the process that it presented to us. It was the commission, which, when we had dealt with one objection in preregistration which would stand in the way of a successful application, simply came up with a new one. All that took place over 12 months from August 2012.
I fast-forward to the publication of the report in September 2013 from the commission that the trust appointed. The commissioners found that there was cogent new evidence that the crashed plane had been the subject of some form of attack as it circled Ndola airfield and that the key to this would be to access intercept records from the Cyprus listening post of the United States National Security Agency—likely to be held in its archives in Washington.
I presented the report to the United Nations in New York in October 2013. In the spring of 2014, the Secretary-General wrote a memorandum to the General Assembly recommending that it be an item for the agenda of the session of the General Assembly commencing last September. This was agreed and, in December 2014, a resolution drafted by the Swedish Government was adopted. It ultimately carried signatures of some 60 countries, including South Africa, and 35 European countries, including Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, but not the United Kingdom, France and Belgium. It decided inter alia that the UN should establish its own panel to carry out follow-up investigations. These have just concluded but its report and any further recommendations from the Secretary-General have not yet been published.
Despite all this, at no point in the last 18 months have we received—until yesterday and I am just coming to that—any acknowledgement, let alone an apology, from the Charity Commission, in terms of retracting its contention that there was no evidence of interest on the part of the United Nations. The importance of that is obvious: it has made that a sine qua non of continuing. Indeed, one of our colleagues, the noble Lord, Lord Malloch-Brown, a former Foreign Office Minister and a former deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, wrote on our behalf to the Charity Commission on this very point, with no substantive reply.
I shall complete the story. I wrote to the current chairman of the commission, Mr William Shawcross, on this aspect on 26 February this year and received no reply—until, surprise, surprise, I received a reply from him yesterday dated 25 June. He partially changed his tune by acknowledging the UN’s considerable interest, which was palpable, but still did not acknowledge that it had made a big deal out of this, that we had been right about it—and that the commission had certainly been wrong to be dogmatic about it, or that perhaps it had received its steer from biased sources.
In his letter, Mr Shawcross apologised for the delay in answering my letter—after four months; make of that what you will—but then went on to the now all-too-familiar routine along the line that the attitude of the United Nations to the work of the trust was only one aspect of its consideration and that there were others. However, even on the narrow point, how did it come about that we were advised that a positive message of support from the UN would be very significant for the commission’s decision? We have now, as a trust, given up chasing after the moonbeam of Charity Commission registration, so this is by way of a valedictory set of observations from me, regarding a time-limited trust which has now completed its work, given that the follow-up procedures within the UN are now well in hand.
Lord Bridges of Headley
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lea, for the explanation behind his amendment. I shall pick up on the final point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter. I will need to write to her as regards the complaints procedures and the changes to be made in respect of the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman.
Perhaps I may begin by focusing on the actual words used by the noble Lord, Lord Lea, in his amendment,
“a proportionate, accountable, consistent, transparent and targeted manner”,
and whether the annual report of the Charity Commission should refer to these. I draw the attention of noble Lords to the annual reports of the Charity Commission headed Tackling Abuse and Mismanagement in Charities, and the stand-alone case reports in which it applies the principles of best practice. However, I should add that the commission tends to frame this in terms of proportionality. The Charity Commission’s annual report for 2014-15 was published just yesterday—I am sure that noble Lords took it to bed with them last night to read. In the section on promoting compliance, the commission explains its approach:
“We use our powers proportionately according to the nature of the issue, the level of risk, and the potential of impact. However, even where we have regulatory concerns, it may not, in some instances, be proportionate for us to formally investigate a charity”.
The commission’s annual report also includes a paragraph specifically focused on how it is supporting the Government’s commitment to better regulation. There is furthermore an extensive section on enabling, which sets out not only the commission’s permissions casework—making schemes and so on—but also the work it has undertaken to prevent problems arising in the first place by making trustees aware of their duties and responsibilities, which is a key principle of proportionate regulation.
I turn now to the Tackling Abuse and Mismanagement in Charities reports. In these the commission is at pains to include some cases which show that it does not always have to make significant regulatory interventions, especially when the trustees who co-operate are either able to put the problems right themselves or can demonstrate that the initial concerns cannot be substantiated. For example, last year’s report set out the commission’s proportionate approach, stating that:
“As an independent, non-ministerial government department with quasi-judicial powers, we operate within a clear legal framework and follow published policies and procedures to ensure that we are proportional in our approach to tackling abuse and mismanagement”.
Finally, the commission’s published framework explains how it approaches all its work and helps to ensure that it continues to be proportionate, accountable, consistent, transparent and targeted. It sets out three questions that the commission answers before taking any action: first, does the commission need to be involved; secondly, if it decides that it does need to be involved, what is the nature and level of risk; and thirdly, what is the most effective way of responding? The commission prioritises issues that fall within three areas of strategic risk affecting charities: fraud, financial crime and abuse; safeguarding issues; and concerns about the terrorist abuse of charities. I hope that I have addressed the substance of the amendment, and furthermore these words are set out under Section 16 of the 2011 Act. The commission needs to abide by them in all it does.
Lastly, I want to address the specific case that may have given rise to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lea. As I hope he will understand, I am not able to go into the details of this case as it is an operational matter for the independent regulator, the Charity Commission. However, as the noble Lord said, he has been in correspondence with the commission and I understand that the chairman has replied and offered to meet him to discuss the case. I hope that the noble Lord will accept that offer. With regard to the specific questions that the noble Lord asked me directly, I will need to write to him in response.
I draw the Committee’s attention to the wider issue of registrations of charities. I point out that we know the number of registrations applied for and the numbers rejected. This year’s report sets it out in detail on, I think, page 41: last year there were 7,192 applications to register, 4,648 registration applications were approved, 2,248 charitable incorporated organisations were registered and 34 registration applications were formally refused.
I am concerned that the amendment that we are considering is not necessary. The commission already explains in its annual report how it is enacted in line with the principles of best regulatory practice. I therefore hope that I have been able to reassure the noble Lord, Lord Lea, somewhat, and that he will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Lea of Crondall
My Lords, I totally expected that the Minister would be unable to reply to my questions today; that is why I said, and he has confirmed, that he should write to me about the questions that I have raised—before Report, I think he said—and no doubt put a copy in the Library. I am slightly surprised that in the circumstances, since he is aware of the broad outlines of the case, he has had nothing to say about the special circumstances of a short-term trust. Is this a lacuna in the procedures of the Charity Commission, as I suspect?
I stretched the limits of the procedure in the time that I took when I made my opening speech, so I will leave it there at the moment and study the Minister’s reply. Incidentally, with no discourtesy to Mr William Shawcross, no, I have no wish to meet him, given the nature of the reply that he eventually gave to my letter. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment for the moment.
Lord Lea of Crondall
“( ) privately funded educational institutions, except universities;”
Lord Lea of Crondall
My Lords, I tabled this amendment to help clarify what Clause 13 is not, as much as what it is. I would like to ask the Minister how widely this clause can be interpreted. I do not want to wake up one morning and find that it means something quite different from what I thought it meant. I would like to clarify that it is not an opportunity to open up a further shift towards helping taxpayers invest, with socioecononomic income distributional consequences, in private education rather than public education. I do not think anyone would deny that that is a consequence of the charity status of public schools in this country. I repeat that my purpose is to ensure that we all put our cards on the table as to what is going on here and what may be open to interpretation. We do not want to wake up one morning in four years’ time and say, “Well, people kicked the ball through that goal and you did nothing about it. Are you stupid or something? You didn’t keep your eye on the ball”.
I do not know how we are going to avoid the spectre that I am talking about but I will put my question to the Minister in two parts. First, will he comment on my anxieties or analysis of what this may lead to? Secondly, if he wants to reassure me—not me, I am sure he does not wake up in the middle of the night and think, “I’d like to reassure the noble Lord, Lord Lea, of something”; but if he wanted to reassure people—that this does not have any wider consequences in the sphere that I am talking about, what is wrong with this amendment? The answer can only be that it is redundant or offensive. I would like to know which it is. Is it redundant or is it offensive and if so, why? I beg to move.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, and I both have amendments down for Monday’s Committee sitting which relate to the issue of public benefit and public schools, and specifically the provision of their facilities for use by others. We all know that this is a delicate and sometimes politically controversial issue. What I want to say on Monday—although I realise with horror that I am supposed to be speaking in a debate on Gaza at the same time—is that now that private schools in Britain with charitable status have some wonderful sports, music and drama facilities, the question of how far they make them available to their communities is one that we cannot entirely ignore.
It happens that a charity which I chair has benefited from very good partnerships with a small number of public schools which do this precisely because it demonstrates that there is a public benefit, and I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, will be saying much the same thing. We will return to this issue on Monday, but one has to be careful not to go on an all-out attack on schools with charitable status. Nevertheless one would wish to insist that public benefit does mean what it says in this and other areas. As I say, we will return to these matters on Monday.
Lord Bridges of Headley
The noble Baroness makes a good point. The overarching check will be that it meets the twin ends of the social investment to make some financial return and ensures that—the noble Baroness mentioned Eton—its charitable mission is fulfilled. We will have to make sure that it does.
Lord Lea of Crondall
My Lords, it would be going a bit far for me to say that I do not believe a word of this and that I have got the t-shirt—but not very far.
To caricature—although not a lot—the purpose of the Charity Commission is to do with tax relief. The bigger the tax rate, the bigger the tax relief. That is why it is good for public schools and good for the socioeconomic distribution of income and wealth in favour of the rich. It is not only me saying this: every study that has been carried out for the OECD, through to Milburn and so on proves that. The Minister may wish to caricature me as or put me in the category of a dinosaur from an earlier age—that is entirely his privilege. However, I am talking about what the analysis is today—and that is the analysis of today.
We have a growing problem in Britain in this regard and I would like to think how to move this issue forward before Report. We are obviously miles apart on the analysis—not the politics—of what these kinds of investment would do to the socioeconomic distribution. The answer is regressive. That is the analysis on which 99% of economists would agree.
There have to be safeguards. Things need to be said about this which have not been said so far. I see the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, wants to say something useful on this.
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts
Probably not but I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. He is making a case for using charitable status for social engineering—fair enough, that is a perfectly good argument—but that is not what we are discussing in the Bill. Social engineering is a different issue. I have heard his callings and those of Members on the other side of the Committee on other occasions. There is nothing wrong with that but it is not what we are driving at on this occasion. We are talking about how to make charities more effective and how to widen the pool of money that is available for social investment.
Lord Lea of Crondall
Yes, I know the speech. I have great regard for the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, but my truth is much more truthful than his truth, which is that charities are about socioeconomic distribution towards the regressive. If you put my caricature up against his caricature, the jury will ultimately decide. At the moment, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Iraq: Nimrud
Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts(9 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Lea of Crondall
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to encourage Arab states and Iran to condemn the destruction by Islamic State forces of the remains of ancient Nimrud, northern Iraq, and demand that they desist.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, the Government utterly condemn ISIL’s wanton destruction of cultural heritage sites in Iraq. We are not alone. The United Nations Security Council, the head of UNESCO, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Arab League have all condemned ISIL’s systematic destruction of historic sites and relics. We will continue to work with Arab states, including Jordan and Saudi Arabia, to counter ISIL. We recognise the important contributions they are making to the global effort.
Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for that reply. Does he agree that in destroying these iconic sites in Mesopotamia, ISIS is trying to destroy what are part and parcel of everyone’s civilisation, our common civilisation, with elements imparted into all three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and that this is the moment for leaders, both political and religious, in the West and the Middle East to proclaim this together? Does he also agree that those considering joining ISIS from this country, from Britain, should be asked rather sharply to acknowledge that attempts to justify such acts of iconoclastic vandalism are as arrogant and as threadbare as any that could be found for bulldozing Stonehenge?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, the noble Lord mentioned iconoclasm. It has been an aspect of a number of religions including, sadly, Christianity in the past. When I, from time to time, give tours of Westminster Abbey for charity, I point out to people the various bits of destruction that the Puritans had executed there, as in many other churches around Britain. We are faced with a radical ideology, which has a particularly narrow definition of Islam, in which iconoclasm is part of what it wishes to do.
Regulatory Agencies: Monitoring
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire
That was a good joke, my Lords, but this is a highly complex area in which quite naturally Parliament wishes some regulatory bodies to have a good deal of independence from the Government. There has been much discussion in this Chamber recently about the Equality and Human Rights Commission and how that should be maintained at considerable distance from the Government. On the other hand, the Care Quality Commission, for example, rightly is regarded as something which needs to be close to ministerial responsibility and on which Ministers are expected to answer to Parliament.
Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
My Lords, I take the point that one does not wish to suggest that each regulatory body should be second-guessed day to day by any parliamentary process, but would it not be useful from time to time, given that many of these regulatory bodies are governed by secondary instruments covered by our committee structure here, to see what is happening at the interface, for example, with energy and transport? There are so many bodies where the interface is confusing. Consumers do not know where to go and are maybe pushed from one thing to another. Occasionally, some process should be found to review the accountability to the government department and, hence, to Parliament.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, these reviews do take place. The Environment Agency and Natural England were jointly subject to a triennial review, precisely to look at the degree of overlap. The noble Lord may recall that the Public Bodies Act examined the need for a number of statutorily established bodies that were set up a very long time ago and that the Deregulation Bill also touches on issues like this—125 triennial reviews of non-departmental public bodies have already taken place. I was interviewed for the triennial review into the Civil Service Commission, for example, which I think will recommend an expansion of the responsibilities of that body. A good deal of toing and froing is under way. Parliamentary committees and the National Audit Office also monitor the management of these bodies.
Boko Haram
Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts(9 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, of course we are working closely with the Nigerian Government on a whole range of issues such as this. The north-east of Nigeria has been neglected compared to the north-west—not only to the south—and the noble Lord knows well the extent to which the oil wealth is now in the south but the northern elite that used to think it ran Nigeria feels excluded. There are many levels of different tensions that are reflected in this.
Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
My Lords, given that we do not run Nigeria like we did until about 1960, and given that we have to be sensitive about the views of the Nigerian Government on overseas countries, of which we are one, being party to all the security concerns within the country, will the Minister comment on the degree to which he feels that the Nigerian Government are being open to other countries that wish to be of assistance, whether on a bilateral or multilateral basis?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, we are working very closely with the Nigerian Government. Of course, we are not trying to pretend that we are a colonial power coming in. We are an ally and we are concerned about the security of the whole of the broader Sahel region.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts(9 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
My Lords, I find this a very troubling debate. The situation is getting worse and we do not know what to do about it. I begin by quoting the special rapporteur’s report last year, which states:
“In practice, manifestations of collective religious hatred frequently overlap with national, racial, ethnic or other forms of hatred, and in many situations it may seem impossible to clearly separate these phenomena. As a result, the label ‘religion’ can sometimes be imprecise and problematic when used to describe complex phenomena and motives of collective hatred. Nevertheless it remains obvious that religions and beliefs can serve as powerful demarcators of ‘us-versus-them’ groupings. Unfortunately, there are many examples testifying to this destructive potential of religion. At the same time, one should always bear in mind that anti-hatred movements exist within all religions and that most adherents of the different religious and belief traditions are committed to practising their faith as a source of peace, charity and compassion, rather than of hostility and hatred”.
What can we say? Where is the new intellectual paradigm, if I may call it that, to reconcile this vast contradiction between what is professed as the peaceful role of religion and the growth of this demagoguery and hatred? I believe that socioeconomic inequality and population growth have something to do with it; and I wish that the Roman Catholic Church would move in the direction in which the Pope seems to be going on the question of birth control. That is because many of the problems are in socioeconomic groups C, D and E on a world scale—in other words, in poor and poorer countries.
We will be accused of imperialism if we try to, as it were, lay down the law. That is extremely frustrating, possibly exasperating. So we have to ask why the United Nations cannot take stronger steps. I ask the Minister: what initiatives can the Foreign Office, in conjunction with Europe or otherwise, take? I speak as a middle-of-the-road member of the Church of England—perhaps we all ought to put our cards on the table. How can we, in our tradition, get better adherence mechanisms? There was something called the Rabat Plan of Action, but what sort of brainstorming can the Foreign Office put into achieving stronger adherence mechanisms in relation to the reports and findings of the special rapporteur? When push comes to shove, the question is: how can the big nations of the world simply ignore these things? It is a tricky political problem but we have to be a bit franker about it. One of the excellent briefing notes from the Library states that Article 18 is now an orphan. I am afraid that that rings a bell, does it not?
We all want to be tolerant but we do not want to be tolerant of other people’s intolerance. We know this in our religious traditions. There has always been—as many of us were brought up to believe—a belief that our religion had the exclusive knowledge of the truth, and that other religious beliefs were next door to apostasy. We have to become more secular at the same time as recognising that religion has more to contribute in the world. My noble friend Lord Desai was getting near to a good point. The post-Marxist analysis suggests that we no longer have the struggle of capital and labour, nor do we have the struggle of the colonised versus the coloniser. Does, as the rapporteur says, the identifier become something against the other? It is impossible in this debate to say anything useful in five minutes but I hope that the Foreign Office will think about what stronger adherence mechanisms could be promulgated for a world discussion. I hope that we can get India, China and other great nations on board to do something like that because I cannot see any other way forward.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I thank the noble Lord for that contribution.
The situation in Iran and across the Middle East, the question of south Asia, what is happening in Burma, Indonesia and the new laws set out in Brunei—a great many countries have been mentioned. Sadly, however, we have not mentioned the Central African Republic, where Christians, or people who call themselves and identify themselves as Christians, are killing Muslims, and people who call themselves Muslims are killing Christians. I regret to say that they are probably using the religious symbol as an excuse for competing with the others. We have to recognise that not just modernity, but rising population and shortage of resources fuel some of those conflicts that appear to be religious.
Lord Lea of Crondall
The Minister will be aware that I was not the only one who asked a specific question about what steps the Foreign Office is considering, and whether there is any brainstorming there, as to how to strengthen the adherence to the famous article.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I have two minutes left, which is why I am attempting to run through this. I promise I will write to the noble Lord, in so far as I can. I have already explained that the Foreign Office is actively engaged in all of this in terms of internal education and our constant dialogue with others. We have, again, come back on to the Human Rights Council so we are working across the board on this issue.
The debate has demonstrated our concern with the large number of countries in which religious toleration is absent and where there is discrimination against minorities within each religion and against different religions from that which is the official religion of that country. I can assure your Lordships that the Government are actively concerned with this. We see it as something that the British Government must actively work on, at home and throughout the world, as one of the important ways in which we help to maintain our open and tolerant society and to strengthen those principles of liberal, open societies across the world.
Qatar: Migrant Workers
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I thank the noble Baroness for raising the question of domestic labour, which is also an issue across the GCC. In the UK’s contribution to the debate at the UN Human Rights Council, our representative made two recommendations; first, to:
“Reform the sponsorship system, removing the requirement for foreign workers to obtain permission before leaving Qatar or moving jobs”,
and, secondly, to:
“Reform the Labour laws to ensure domestic workers are legally protected and to improve the enforcement of these laws ensuring the rights of foreign workers in Qatar are guaranteed”.
Lord Clinton-Davis (Lab)
Does the Minister agree that the views of Her Majesty’s Government can be very influential in this matter? Does he further agree that presenting views officially and not being silent would serve an immensely positive purpose?
House of Lords: Labour Peers’ Working Group Report
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Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, strongly welcome the report. My noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton and my good friend Lord Grenfell, now ensconced in Paris, have done a remarkable job. They have taken on board a clear change of mood in the country about the question that we are trying to answer. A degree of repetition and predictability had come into the debate regarding elect/appoint, to which the answer was primacy or non-primacy. You cannot get on a horse called Primacy of the House of Commons while at the same time getting on another horse going in the exact opposite direction called Elect, without having to have a kind of Supreme Court role in the middle.
It is indicative of the value of the report that the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, a speaker of some distinction on these matters on the Conservative Benches, has expressed his appreciation for the open-mindedness with which the members of the Labour Party commission have approached this question. I think that that is significant.
Something whose significance I do not know—maybe a member of the commission could answer this later—is that for the past couple of hours, the annunciators have referred to the Labour Peers’ Working Group report on the future of the House of Lords and its place in “a wider constitution”. The actual terms of reference were to consider long-term proposals for reform of the House of Lords and its place in “the wider constitution”. I have been thinking about that. “The wider constitution” suggests that we have a fixed constitution and we have to find how the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fit within it. If we are starting to use the phrase “a wider constitution”—although it may be that I am just picking on an accidental usage of the indefinite article on the annunciators—given what is happening in so many related debates at present, that may be apt. I think that we are indeed now talking about the place of reform in “a wider constitution”—in other words, a constitution that does not look exactly like the one that we have at the moment. That has been an interesting change in the past few months.
To mention one context, whatever happens in the Scottish referendum, there will be shifts in some ways between the balance in London and Edinburgh. Need one say that the role of the Treasury comes into this? Then there will be knock-on effects of any Treasury changes in the rebalancing of the north and south of England and so on and looking at whether there is too much centralisation in the great wen called London.
That relates to the discussions that we have had about how people get into this House and the imbalance in the socioeconomic groups that they come from. We have exacerbated that problem by the way in which, as some people have pointed out, our expenses system makes it pretty tough for people living in the north of England, who have a genuine need for a second home, to keep up a second home here for 365 days a year for only 120 days’ expenses. That is also relevant to how we see our role fitting in with the changing perceptions around the country of what we want politicians for, whether we in this House are politicians and so on. I say to my noble friend Lord Whitty that simply electing “another lot of politicians”, selected in exactly the way that the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Clifton, referred to, prima facie cannot be the answer to the question that has been posed.
All these thought-provoking problems lead us to the criticism that has been made that it is not really a sensible idea to throw everything under the sun into a convention. We all have experience of these matters in different fields. Surely the point can be made that we could have some sort of umbrella framework commission to see precisely how things interact within the scope of those examinations. I do not think that it would mean a royal commission report volumes thick; it would not need to be much longer than this report, as clear thinking by people with experience is what is needed.
I have two other remarks to make. One is about size. I hope that the Liberal Democrats will appreciate the hubris of their demand in 2010 that the proportions in this House reflect the results of the previous election; it is most unlikely, if one were to take that literally, that that would be very good news for them a year from now. I am not saying this in any spirit of trying to be clever about it but it simply shows that one needs a long-term interparty agreement, possibly chaired by the chairman of the statutory Appointments Commission once it becomes statutory—not, by the way, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, in order to have anyone else select which members of the Conservative Party become Conservative Members of this House but simply to get the balance between the parties. That is certainly overdue.
My other remark is that we have to look at the internal workings of the House. I support some of the points made by my noble friend Lord Whitty about our committee structure. If we are going to elect everyone, we might start by electing members of our committees.
Lord Borrie (Lab)
My Lords, it is a delight—as it would have been on other occasions—to follow the noble Viscount, Lord Tenby. We have known one another for many years now and I am not surprised that he has given a measured and generally favourable comment on the report that we are debating. He has said all I need to say about the excellence of this report. My noble friend Lord Lipsey need not fear that the only people round the House who would welcome the report would be those in one particular political party. We have found this afternoon that many of the comments, and many of the conclusions of the report, have been supported on all sides. I am sure that my noble friend Lady Taylor must be very pleased with the outcome of this debate.
I want to comment on two matters, both of which the group regarded as either too difficult, and therefore put into the “too difficult” tray, or in some other way not appropriate for it to go into, perhaps owing to a large number of disagreements.
The first is the matter of religious groups. Here I come in to attack the Bishops’ Benches, and I am glad that there are two of them there now because there was a danger a short while ago that nobody would be there. In recent years various religious groups have increasingly found membership of this House by the Appointments Commission, and the rest of us in this House have welcomed that a Sikh, a Muslim or two, rabbis from the Jewish faith and, of course, quite a few non-conformist Christian groups have been so represented. In other words, Bishops are no longer the only people representing a particular religious faith.
Perhaps, of course, I should emphasise that the Bishops have a specially privileged position. The matter has been raised by a number of noble Lords this afternoon and my understanding is that, at any given moment, the two Archbishops, the Bishops of Winchester, London and Durham, plus 21 other Bishops in accordance with the seniority of their appointment, are eligible to sit in this House. That is a total of 26. Compared with the other religions that I mentioned, which may have some limited representation through the Cross Benches, that is an extraordinary number which could hardly be justified in the long term. However, when changes are made in this House, the short term seems to become the long term. I am not sure whether the Bishops would agree with me but surely, in any new House, the representation of Bishops must be changed. [Interruption.] There we have the usual mix of views from the Liberal Democrat Benches.
Lord Lea of Crondall
I ask my noble friend Lord Borrie to note not only the long history of many centuries but that the established church is part of the equation, as are prayers at the beginning of the Sitting. This would widen considerably what the constitutional commission would look at. Could this not be considered by a different constitutional commission? That needs to be thought about.
Lord Borrie
I note what my noble friend is saying. My feeling is that, despite this being a difficult question in terms of history—and it certainly seems to be regarded by a number of colleagues through the House of Lords generally as an embarrassing question to raise—I would like to hear whether the Bishops have any agreement at all with me as regards the 26 Bishops who are entitled to sit being a permanent feature of this House.
The other matter in the group’s report that I want to mention was one that was put off for some future discussion—the position of the Lord Speaker. Since we changed from having a Lord Chancellor, we went fairly quickly into creating a Lord Speaker, who, together with the work of the deputies, some of whom we have seen today, does a remarkably good job. However, a matter alluded to several times this afternoon is the large number of Lords and the fact that, at Question Time in particular, there is great competition between large numbers of new Members in particular to catch the eye of the powers that be. It is not the eye of the Speaker, as it would be in the House of Commons. There may be four or five people on one side and two or three on the other—but the job of choosing between them is not that of the person sitting where he or she would best be able to see where the voices are coming from but of someone sitting on the Government Front Bench. Nearly half of those in the House are sitting behind that person and therefore cannot be seen; the Leader of the House or the Whip tasked to consider that matter does not know who is getting up behind him or her. Of course, it is so often the case that the person with the loudest voice is the one heard best.
Would it not be better if the task that we give to a non-independent person, the Leader of the House or the Whip, no matter how fair they try to be, was done by the Chairman or Speaker? We have put that issue aside as the years have gone by. I can see that the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, in his role as Deputy Speaker, is doing what I do not think he is supposed to do—he is shaking his head. I do not think that he is supposed to give an indication of his view. Perhaps he can nod, but not shake.
There are certain matters that the group considered and put into the “too difficult” box, and it is a pity that it will be years before we get any conclusion.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
The House has a structure of committees that regularly discuss House procedures. I am not able to give any commitment. We have already discussed within this Parliament the question of the role of the Lord Speaker, for example, and the House decided at that point that it did not wish to move further. It is unlikely between now and the next election that major changes will be agreed and made, but it is certainly quite appropriate that further discussions should continue.
On the question of the size of the House, the figure of 450 Members suggested in this report was in the Government’s Bill. In the long run, we might also have a smaller House of Commons if more power is devolved to the regions and the nations. Indeed, the Conservative proposals that fell saw a House of Commons of 600 rather than 650. How to move from here to there is of course the most difficult issue. Do we go for an age limit or for a time limit—or, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, suggested, a post-election weeding out within each group, which would be a wonderful series of bloodlettings within each of the two groups?
A member of the Supreme Court talked to me some months ago about the statutory age of senility. It is a wonderful concept which, for judges, is slowly being reduced from 75 to 70. The suggestion is made here for the Lords’ statutory age of senility to be 80. I realised the last time we debated this that I will hit 25 years of service in this House within a couple of months of reaching the age of 80—and that, clearly, is the point at which I should do what Lord Grenfell did so gracefully and retire. We should all accept that we cannot move from where we are to where we would like to be without a number of us retiring. The suggestion that I think I got from the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, that those of us who are here already should somehow be exempt from the changes, is not possible.
The reason I will not give any commitment about future lists, although I am not aware of any list at the present, is that we need to keep renewing and refreshing the House. As the noble Lord, Lord Gordon of Strathblane, said, experience and expertise go stale. When I joined the House, it had an average age of 67. It now has an average age of 70—I have just passed it. It has 139 Members over the age of 80 and only 131 under 60. That House is a little difficult to defend.
Lord Lea of Crondall
Does the Minister not accept that most people think that the major motive of Governments in having extra lists is that they will have a net increase in their number here. The idea that it is motivated by renewal of the House is not how the dark arts of 10 Downing Street operate.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I am not an expert on the dark arts of Downing Street—perhaps the noble Lord is. I simply stress that the question of age balance is important, and the idea of a House that stops recruiting new Members and simply grows older and older relatively gracefully is not one that we would accept or recognise.
Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill
Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)
My Lords, first, perhaps I may say how glad I am that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, tabled this Motion today. I pay tribute to him because he was willing to take the lead on this important issue and for all the hard work that he has done behind the scenes, keeping me and the commission in touch with what is going on. I also pay tribute to the Minister and the Leader of the House, who I know are genuinely anxious to get a real consensus on this issue.
The Minister has basically offered a five-week period of consultation. I remind your Lordships that the Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee recommended a pause of six months. The commission believes that six months is unnecessary, but five weeks is a very short period indeed. I can say that the commission will do all it can to help the Government during the consultation period, but if it turns out that five weeks is not long enough to get the kind of agreement that we all want on this crucial issue, I remind the leadership of some new advice which has just come from the Electoral Commission, which states:
“Should Parliament decide that a period of consultation is desirable before the Bill makes further progress, we would recommend that the start of the regulated period for the 2015 general election be delayed by an appropriate period”.
It goes on to say that that would give it good time to draw up its advice and educate the charities. Therefore, if the Minister finds that this five-week period is not long enough, there is an alternative that would still enable the Bill to get through in time for the 2015 election: namely, to heed the advice of the Electoral Commission. Meanwhile, I repeat that the commission will do all it can to support the Minister in this consultation period.
Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
My Lords, the question has been posed as to whether this consultation has any effects on other parts of the Bill. This is the time to say that the question of consultation, which has been completely left aside in Part 3, has consequences a fortiori—and what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The trade unions have supported and are part of the coalition with the NGOs. The voluntary sector is huge, and trade unions are probably a bigger part of that sector than is the rest of civil society. I want to put the point on record that the time for more consultation should apply also to the trade unions, otherwise they will feel discriminated against.
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, for the excellent report of his commission, which has performed a service to the whole House and to everybody involved in the debate throughout the country.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, for tabling his Motion today. It has performed an extremely useful purpose in concentrating minds, particularly within the Government. I would never say that the Government have been running around like headless chickens, but there has been a great deal of activity over the weekend and into today, to try to find a compromise which will do what a lot of us want. This is no excuse; anybody who heard my speech at Second Reading will know that my views on Part 2 of the Bill are not terribly complimentary.
The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, referred to serious damage to the relationship between the Government and civil society as a whole. We have an extraordinary position in which on the one hand the Government are saying that black is black and, on the other, pretty well the whole of civil society is saying, “No, it is not. It is actually white”. Who is right in this instance? A great deal of scrutiny and investigation is required. The question is whether it needs a special Select Committee or whether it can be done through the normal processes of this House, augmented by enhanced consultation by the Government with all corners of the House, with everybody outside and with the whole of civil society in the mean time. Is five weeks long enough? Ideally, we would have longer, but we can do the job in five weeks.
We are often told that the purpose of this House, particularly in Committee and on Report, is to scrutinise legislation and revise it. Will my noble friend Lord Wallace give an absolute assurance that, as this scrutiny takes place with the groups in this Chamber and as there is further discussion and negotiation with outside bodies, the Government will be serious and honest—and will not, when we come to Committee, take the typical attitude of all Governments to Bills, which is to defend the status quo and the wording on their Bill, then give way when they are really forced to? As far as Part 2 is concerned, are the Government really going into this with an open mind? It is not just a matter of reassuring the third sector or civil society that the words in the Bill will not harm them, but of taking seriously their view that the Bill will harm them and of looking at ways of changing the Bill so that not only will it not harm them but civil society generally will accepts and be confident that it will not. Are the Government open to change in a serious way on Part 2? That is the fundamental question that we have today. If my noble friend can guarantee me that that is the open-minded approach that the Government are going to take in Committee and on Report, we can be justified in going ahead with the revised schedule, taking Part 2 later on and going to Report in January.