House of Lords: Membership

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, indicated—and I congratulate him on his timeliness; this is an ingenious way of tabling a debate—the central issue behind the dreadful mess that we are in is the irresponsibility of people increasing the size of the House, on this pretext or that. The connection between that and the memorandum of the Clerk of the Parliaments is palpable. You cannot go through these paragraphs without seeing that this problem would not be so acute or even here at all if we were in a sensible constitutional position. In this country we seem to have been able to make up a constitution through a so-called coalition agreement for Government, but when I lecture on behalf of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy in Mozambique, the one thing I tell them they cannot do is invent constitutions as they go along according to short-term political considerations. That is what we are doing in this country and it is shameful.

To be even-handed, I blame all the three major political parties, but perhaps some more than others. I will just run through the charge sheet because it has a bearing on what we can do about it. The first mea culpa is for the Labour Party, but as my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath will confirm, in response to an invitation from Tony Blair some six or seven years ago, the Labour Party wrote a memorandum, which I helped to draft, on the future of the House of Lords. It included all the elements that were subsequently picked up by the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, and sold to the noble Lords, Lord Cormack and Lord Steel. It largely became the Steel Bill. There were people in all three political parties with an answer; they were not just whingeing about it.

Now we have this absurdity, and I shall come on to the Liberal Democrats. We stopped kicking the ball in the right direction when there was a change of Prime Minister on the Labour side, but the most absurd formula, of course, is the one written as a holy writ in the coalition agreement. It says that the pattern of this House should reflect the voting in the last general election. What an absurdity; what a shameful absurdity in constitutional terms. Yet Mr Clegg and his followers, with a straight face, express the belief that it is fair. We do not need much of a crystal ball to speculate about what might happen after the next election. If, as I hope, Labour gets in with an overall majority and we were to apply that formula, what would the Liberal Democrats be supposed to do? Half of them would commit hari kari. It would be painful to watch, but that is the logical result of their position.

Finally, the Clerk of the Parliaments is someone who can look at this position dispassionately and for the long term. When he wrote the first draft of this memorandum, which a lot of people saw, it had in it a suggestion that the three party leaders ought to get together and agree a formula on this very question, but then he was nobbled. I do not think that the Clerk of the Parliaments should be nobbled by the party leaders, but the first draft had that suggestion in it, and now it is not there. It was the final paragraph, and it has now gone. I think that this is a case of the politicians getting above their station in this matter. We ought to allow the Clerk of the Parliaments to speak for the constitutional requirements that lie behind debates of this kind.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we are getting into very difficult constitutional questions here. Again, I have heard discussions about this among some of my noble friends. A Labour Party that wins a majority of seats in the House of Commons on perhaps 35% of the vote and a 60% turnout raises the question of whether that is really a majority or not.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I am sorry to press the point, but is that not precisely the doctrine of the coalition agreement—the formula should reflect the results of the last general election—or is it only to suit this particular Government at this particular moment in time?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, it is that in new appointments, one should head in that direction. I speak for a party which received no nominations to this House for several years under Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative Government. Let me say—

Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

I note, however, the point that the noble Lord has made.

Let me now turn to the second part of the Bill. Part 2, put simply, requires those who want to influence the outcome of a general election to be transparent in doing so. The changes proposed update a system of regulation which has been in place at the past two UK parliamentary general elections.

Noble Lords will no doubt be aware of the influence that third parties can have on elections. This influence is often very positive, but we believe it should be proportionate. Despite existing controls, there is a real risk of distortion by those who seek to unduly influence the outcome of the election. The Bill takes forward a number of important measures to prevent this occurring.

Expenditure will now be more fully recorded and disclosed. Donations to third parties will now have to be published in advance of an election, rather than after. Certain third parties will also have to provide a statement of accounts. The spending limit for third parties will be lowered. Thirteen years ago, the existing spending limit was fixed in legislation at 5% of the maximum campaign expenditure limit for political parties. This amount was considered quite generous by the organisation that recommended it, the Committee on Standards in Public Life. The committee also noted that groups of third parties could outnumber expenditure by candidates or political parties. That argument remains valid today. Reducing the limit to 2% of the maximum campaign expenditure limit for political parties combats the risk of third party expenditure being used to influence elections. The reduction to a lower, but still very significant, sum is justified. To that same end, the Bill also introduces a measure that will prevent third parties directing the entirety of their spending limit at a single constituency or local area. It will become more difficult for large, well-funded campaigns to overwhelm the local political landscape.

The test for determining if a third party’s expenditure is in fact controlled expenditure is the same in both the Bill and existing legislation. Only expenditure that can,

“reasonably be regarded as intended to promote or procure electoral success”,

of parties or candidates will be regulated and count towards a third party’s spending limit.

Currently only expenditure on election material is regulated. This Bill extends the range of activities that are regulated to other activities such as public rallies and organised media events. This is the same list that applies to the activities of political parties. It implements a very sensible recommendation by the independent regulator, the Electoral Commission.

I should also make clear what this Bill does not do. Noble Lords will be aware that some charities and other organisations have expressed concern that the Bill will prevent campaigning on policy issues. I can reassure the House that only those campaigns that promote electoral success will be regulated.

It is the Government’s belief that the vast majority of charities or other groups campaigning for their preferred policies will not be affected by the Bill. This belief is based on the guidance of the Electoral Commission and its experience of regulating third parties at the 2005 and 2010 UK parliamentary general elections. At those elections charities and other campaign groups were not prevented from engaging with, commenting on or influencing public policy.

No elements of this Bill will deprive third parties of the ability to make a contribution to political debate. The regulatory requirements strengthened by this Bill are proportionate. Third parties will not be precluded from campaigning. They will simply be brought into an enhanced spending and donations reporting regime. As a result, the process as a whole will become more transparent.

I now turn to Part 3, which addresses a gap in enforcing existing duties. Section 24 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 requires unions to maintain a register of their members’ names and addresses, and, so far as is reasonably practicable, to keep it accurate and up to date. I hope noble Lords will agree that this measure always was, and remains, reasonable.

Under the Act, however, union members, employers and the public cannot be wholly assured that a register is up to date. The Bill therefore requires unions to provide an annual assurance to the certification officer. Those with more than 10,000 members will be obliged to appoint an independent assurer. The Government are keen not to inhibit the operation of small unions—

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

I thank the noble Viscount for giving way. Does his last comment imply that certification officers have had problems with the current regime?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

One of the issues that we wish to address is the fact that the certification officer has a passive mode so that anybody who wishes to make a complaint can do so, but only if he is a union member.

As I was saying, the Government are keen not to inhibit the operation of small unions, so those with 10,000 or fewer members will be required to submit an annual self-certification that their membership list is up to date.

The Bill will also enable the certification officer proactively to investigate possible discrepancies in the register. He will be able to require documents to be submitted and to appoint an inspector. If a union is non-compliant with the duties in Section 24, the certification officer may make a declaration and a civil enforcement order. Unions will always be given an opportunity to make representations before a declaration or order is made.

I look forward to these measures benefiting from the scrutiny of noble Lords. The Government are committed to implementation which is both effective and proportionate, and we will support the transition by producing guidance. I am aware of concern regarding the impact of the proposals, and I hope to reassure noble Lords now. First, I reiterate that the Government are not challenging the vital role that unions play representing their members’ interests and contributing to public debate.

Secondly, I reassure noble Lords that these proposals do not breach human rights to privacy or freedom of association. If a union is non-compliant with duties under Section 24, it is important that every opportunity is given for that to be remedied. The investigation powers will be proportionate: the certification officer can require information only where he deems there is good reason to do so. Existing safeguards in the Data Protection Act and the Human Rights Act will apply as they do elsewhere. The Bill also includes additional protections to prevent the unauthorised disclosure of member data. These provisions will not allow employers unauthorised access to such information.

I believe that these proposals are reasonable. By proactively providing an annual assurance, unions will give even greater credibility to the important voice that they have in public debate. I also hope that unions themselves will recognise the benefit: many unions have up-to-date registers but there is anecdotal evidence of doubt that that is always the case. The annual assurance process will bring greater credibility in future about the result of ballots; for example, in electing a new general secretary.

This Bill will shine the light of transparency on those represented by consultant lobbyists as they meet key decision-makers in government. This Bill brings further clarity on the influence third parties have on the outcome of elections. This Bill will provide assurance that trade unions have accurate membership records, given that their influence extends far beyond their members. This Government believe that transparency generates accountability.

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[Lord Lea of Crondall]

My Lords, the Bill takes us back to the insulting doctrine that trade unions are the enemy within. When I first saw it, I was rather shocked—but then I thought that it must be some sort of spoof written by the provisional wing of the Committee on Public Safety. The first point which I ask the Minister to comment on is that it is very asymmetrical so far as trade unions and employers are concerned. How can he say that all these requirements should be placed on trade unions, at vast cost, without parallel requirements being placed on employers?

In the published material that one finds, with difficulty, in the Printed Paper Office as the Part 3 financial assessment, we have a fascinating set of paragraphs on pages 3 and 4. It is headed:

“Evidence Base … Problem under consideration”,

and it is worth reading. It says:

“An increase in an individual union’s membership diversity and membership turnover is a key reason why managing a large database of members is complex. It means that the information held in the unions’ registers will decay rapidly. In addition, the information held on the registers will decay for other reasons: changes of addresses; and deaths, divorces, and marriages … All of these changes may undermine the accuracy of union registers, unless adequate and relatively frequent management procedures are in place to resolve inaccuracies and maintain the register. Some of the reasons for inaccurate data are explored in more detail below”.

We get fantasy piled upon fantasy as we come to that more detailed explanation, which goes into gross and net flows by work status, the high degree of churn in the UK labour market, and the flow estimates of the size of movements between the three main labour market statuses of employment, unemployment and economic activity. So it goes on.

Then the material comes to the “Rationale for intervention”. I wonder how all these people came to be so readily brainwashed, but I have to read it. It says:

“Given the complexity of maintaining up-to-date registers there is a danger that trade union members, employers and the general public will not be confident that unions are complying with their duty to maintain an accurate and up-to-date register. And, as trade union activity has the potential to affect the daily lives of members and non-members, the general public should be confident that voting papers and other communications are reaching union members so that they have the opportunity to participate, even if they choose not to exercise it”.

It then goes on to the division between unions with more than 10,000 members and those below that figure.

As my noble friend Lord Monks pointed out, it says that,

“the Certification Officer will … be given powers enabling him to both act on his own authority to appoint inspectors and require documents to be produced to help investigations. The powers will provide a mechanism by which the general public and employers can ensure that trade unions are complying with their duty to maintain an accurate and up-to-date register”.

After all that, we come to the policy objective. I will read out one more passage. It says:

“The policy objective is to give greater assurance that unions comply with the existing duty to maintain a register of members’ names and addresses. However, we wish to do this in a way which minimises the burden on the union in providing this assurance and is not prescriptive … the intended effect of the policy is to ensure that members, the general public and employers are confident”,

et cetera. My reaction is, “You must be kidding”—but then it dawned on me what was going on here. There are two groups of civil servants being instructed by the Secretary of State to provide a case for this. One set of civil servants, job team A, is asked to write one set of arguments. In the next paragraph, job team B is asked to demonstrate the absurdity of the arguments presented by job team A.

Having cracked the code on this, I realised that it is all very logical—right down to the detail of why the sum involved is an extra burden on the trade unions of £420,000. That has been arrived at by using the salaries of trade union officials from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, which says that the basic hourly median pay for officers of non-governmental organisations —that obviously implies voluntary organisations—who are the closest match to a trade union official, is £12.03 an hour. The basis of all this is that union officials doing all this stuff are paid that, on average, but I suppose that the people who have to provide all this stuff in Whitehall have telephones and might ring up any trade union to find out more directly.

I return to the main theme that many of my colleagues have brought out: why are we picking on the trade unions and making them keep their lists up to date for transparency, which we simply do not do for shareholders’ lists, boards of directors or banks? We are now insisting that we have to do even more for the most openly democratic and transparent organisations of any size in the country—the trade unions.

I will use a different word from that used by my noble friend Lord Whitty: I say that this is just party-political vindictiveness. I am very sad to hear that, because over many years of my working life we have had very good working relations with Conservative Governments, such as those of Mr Macmillan and Mr Heath. We had acceptance from them as social partners, and they would not have dreamt of this nonsense. I hope that in Committee we will have time to move away from the idea that a Secretary of State can say to Whitehall, “This is what we want to do; find reasons for it”. They have failed in that, because there are no good reasons—it is absurdity.

As my noble friend Lady Donaghy said, you do not need a lobby if you are chairman of a company in the energy field, whether it is a nuclear power station or anything else; you are probably president of the CBI and talk to the Prime Minister every day of the week anyway. To take another, more practical example: KPMG’s employees are scattered around Whitehall. Does it need a lobby? Of course not.

This is a quite extraordinary development, but I have reached the 10-minute limit so I will leave the issue there. As far as I can see, though, there has to be much deeper consideration by the Government. As things stand, my view is that the Bill should simply be withdrawn as an outrage to democracy. When I go to do work for the Westminster Foundation for Democracy in Congo or Mozambique, these are some of the practices that we state that you do not do—and we should not do them here.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I was about to come to precisely that distinction because it seems to me to be the nub of what we will have to discuss when we deal with Part 2. There is a line to be drawn between the promotion of policies and the promotion of the success or defeat of particular parties or candidates. Policing the line between informing and educating the public during a campaign, promoting particular policies during a campaign and, on the other side of the line, supporting or opposing particular candidates or parties during a campaign, is the point on which we need to focus during Committee and Report. I am concerned that this is not an easy line to define. We want to make sure that there is as small a grey area as possible. At the all-Peers meeting, the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, quoted a leaflet which had been put round his constituency the day before he lost an election which had a very large headline saying, “We are not telling you who to vote for”, and then a lot of small print which did. That is the sort of thing that we will have to look at in detail.

This measure is not aimed primarily at charities. Indeed, of the 30 organisations on the list, three are the campaigning non-charitable associated bodies of charities, but none is a charity. Charities should not be caught by this measure. After all, charities law limits how far charities can become involved in partisan campaigning. Charities should be involved in political campaigning. I recommend that noble Lords look at the list to see how far we can come to an agreement on the borderline. The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, talked precisely about the borderline between current activities and controlled activities, and the chilling effect of having an uncertain definition of that. However, that is where we are. From the discussions I have had with people over the past few weeks, I have the slight impression that a large number of charities had not actually read the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act until this Bill was produced. Having looked at the language of that Act, a number of charities are telling us that they are not happy with that language as it stands. We have entered a discussion that we should perhaps have had earlier. The Government started on the assumption that the language of PPERA was fine because we had—

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

My Lords—

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

May I just finish my point? We had been through two elections with that language and charities do not appear to have found it difficult. If charities are now telling us that they find that language difficult, clearly we need to have a rather different discussion. I give way.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I thank the noble Lord for giving way. He may not be able to answer my next point tonight. However, as I understand it, charities registered with the Charity Commission cannot be so registered if they have political purposes. Therefore, will the noble Lord comment on, or write to me, about what he means when he talks about charities having political purposes?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I hesitate to go into a definition of politics as the noble Lord, Lord Norton, will immediately correct me. The promotion of particular policies, particularly broad policy areas, is a natural and accepted part of what charities and faith bodies do. That is a normal part of civil society. Part of my puzzlement, in listening to one or two of the speeches tonight, is that civil society is itself broader than the charitable sector. There are campaigning bodies in civil society which are not, and should not be, charities. Charities promote particular ideas, developments and social objectives which are also unavoidably political objectives, but they are not necessarily partisan objectives. That again is the line that we need to draw. I note that the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, said that charities are already unhappy about PPERA. Having looked at it, there are a number of difficult questions that we need—

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Government are concerned that there is insufficient public understanding when, for example, a union calls a strike vote, that those being polled are those who are currently working. They wish to assure the members and others in society that the lists are accurate. This is not just for unions. Companies are also expected to maintain an accurate register of their members and shareholders and to keep it up to date. This will cover a range of different bodies. I give way once more and then we must finish.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

Is the Minister aware that that is not the reason given in the explanatory document?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we will return to the explanatory document at a later stage. This has been an extremely vigorous evening. We look forward to several days in Committee and on Report. The Government will consult a range of stakeholders between Second Reading and Committee, and we will continue to consult between Committee and Report. This House will, as the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, assured me very vigorously, look in detail at the language of the Bill and also look back at the language of PPERA, and, we hope, produce something of which we can all be proud at the end of the day.

Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

My Lords, this has been a very well informed debate. It is not to be unnecessarily partisan but rather to get my one party point out of the way first that I say that it has been a great strength to the Labour Party’s position that it has thought through many of the questions which have been posed for answer today. That was in effect set out by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, in opening from our Front Bench.

The speeches by the noble Lords, Lord Wright of Richmond and Lord Dannatt, reflected great diplomatic and military experience. It is perhaps not often recognised by people who have not been in the military that the logistics involved in anything that is being talked about are very considerable. If you do not have Brize Nortons scattered around the eastern Mediterranean, you have to get the stuff to Cyprus first and so on. It was with some incredulity that I kept reading that something was going to happen on Sunday, leaving aside the point, also made very tellingly, that the chemical weapons dumps are apparently spread around Syria and that to take them, or to do anything to make sure that they could not be used again, you would have to have thousands of boots on the ground. I ask the Minister to comment on that particular point in his reply. That rather suggests to me that that is probably true. We have a few days to reflect on where we are trying to get to. As the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, said, regime change is now not apparently our objective. If it is not, I do not quite follow the logic of some of the speeches that have been made.

I will pick one example from the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, who can correct me if I am wrong. Why, I ask myself, can we not arraign the President of Syria before the International Criminal Court and charge him with offences which, if proven, would cause him to spend the rest of his life in The Hague? I thought he meant by his argument that because that is very difficult we do not have to go through a process of jurisprudence. The noble Lord is a lawyer—I do not understand it. Who will take the President of Syria to the International Criminal Court, or does he not believe that we have a procedure other than a military one, which clearly is not a juridical procedure?

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

How does the noble Lord propose to get President Assad to the International Criminal Court physically?

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

Indeed. The question about what we did in Yugoslavia, et cetera, comes up. The noble Lord is shaking his head as if to say, “Therefore we should assassinate him”. I am sorry—I have given way once, and the noble Lord did not give way to me.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

Justify your accusation.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I am just putting the point that if we think that some surgical strike can stop his authority being exercised to do these things, why do we not make more of the procedure? If we think he is guilty of an offence under the chemical weapons convention, should we not give more thought to how we bring him before the International Criminal Court, and would that not be a productive way of engaging with the Russians, perhaps, as someone has suggested, with a conference of the parties signatory to the convention on chemical weapons?

The Foreign Secretary is fond of using a sort of metaphor in this debate that if the Security Council fails to do what we want—I think this is how the argument runs—we should ask what we call the international community to act. That has been said so many times. I ask the question: what, in this context, is the international community supposed to be if it is not just the less than 10% of the world who are our friends in this regard?

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, for that extremely constructive speech, and by saying that this is very much an area in which the Government are looking for the widest possible consensus across the parties. I have spent much of the past two days working within the coalition on making sure that we have an agreed position. Perhaps I can say that one of the many areas in which this is not another Iraq is that we have been going through a very carefully constructed series of discussions and consultations within the Government. As the Opposition Front Bench will also know, there have been a series of discussions with the Opposition to try to make sure that everyone is as closely as involved as possible and that the information is exchanged as broadly as possible. Therefore, in all sorts of ways this is not Iraq 2.0.

This has been a take note debate, so of course the first thing I should say is that we will take note of the very many concerned and cautious speeches that we have heard in the course of the past few hours. The mood has been very sober and very concerned, although some noble Lords have perhaps not followed the newspapers as well as they might have. As I will come on to say later, the suggestion that we ought to try the diplomatic track appears to ignore the enormous efforts the Government have been putting in in recent months. As we have heard tonight, the shadow of Iraq falls over all our discussions.

I will stress one obvious thing. One or two noble Lords have talked about a unilateral operation. This would in no sense be a unilateral operation. Indeed, a number of other Governments have asked if they might be included in the operation, and the levels of support are large for some response to this clear breach of international law. The Arab League has condemned it and a number of other Governments have condemned it; the Turks have been very clear and the European Union has been very clear—this is not the sort of position in which we found ourselves in March 2003. We have a much broader coalition and much clearer evidence. Much of that evidence is open evidence. A lot more is in widespread diplomatic telegrams of not particularly high classification. The regime is thought to have used chemical weapons in much smaller quantities on somewhere between 10 and 14 previous occasions. On some of these, there appears to be sufficient evidence to report them to the United Nations.

What was different about this intervention was that it was on a much larger scale. As my noble friend the Leader of the House said in his opening speech, there were attacks on 11 different locations in the Damascus area. That is very hard to cover up. It also suggests that it is unlikely to have been an operation conducted by a junior officer on his own. It was clearly conducted by a large series of simultaneous operations, suggesting a senior command structure, and it was conducted in Damascus, close to the central command structure of the regime. Of course, it is possible that we may discover that President Assad was not previously informed, but this is not a rogue incident that happened in Aleppo, Homs or somewhere else; it happened in 11 different locations in Damascus. That suggests that we have much stronger evidence, not a dodgy dossier of the sort that one or two noble Lords have suggested that this might again be.

The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, asked what chemical was used. All the evidence we have suggests that it was diluted sarin, which is one of the many chemicals banned by the chemical weapons convention, but as she will know, the chemical weapons convention bans the use of all poisonous chemical agents in warfare or conflict of this sort.

There is compelling evidence, and more compelling evidence will be presented as the UN inspectors provide what will be a preliminary report. I again remind the House that the inspectors have not been asked to attribute responsibility; they were asked simply to confirm that chemical weapons have been used. The scale of this chemical weapons attack suggests something that is way beyond the capacity of the opposition to have conducted. The projectiles used were those that no one has any evidence that the opposition has access to, and the attacks were made on opposition-controlled areas. Therefore, the very strong probability is that this was an Assad-regime attack and that it was ordered by people relatively high up within the current regime.

On the legality, we have heard a number of very expert speeches, in particular that of the former Attorney-General, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, who rightly said that we have to include a large number of considerations, including that force should be used only as a last resort. That picks up what the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury said about the just war doctrine. There are occasions when one has to use force, but one should be extremely cautious about how one approaches it. That is the approach that the Government are taking.

The noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, suggested that perhaps chemical weapons were all over Syria and might therefore be in the hands of the opposition. We have seen no credible evidence or reporting that any terrorist group in Syria has acquired regime chemical weapons stocks.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

Given their very wide spread, it is very likely that to control them in some way you would have to have boots on the ground.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

So far as we know, the weapons are still well controlled by the regime, and one of our expectations is that if there are indications that the regime is losing control of them, the Russians as well as others will be very concerned about that loss of control.

A number of noble Lords have talked about punishment. I regret that one or two of our American allies have used the word “punishment”. The intention is deterrence, not punishment. The intention is a limited and proportionate response that will deter the regime from thinking that it can use chemical weapons again. The risk of inaction, about which my noble friend Lord Ashdown and the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, have also spoken is that if we do nothing the regime is likely to assume that it can use chemical weapons again, and in larger quantities if it wishes. The argument, therefore, for a limited, carefully calibrated and proportionate response is to say, “Thus far and no further”.

Defence: Trident Review

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Tuesday 9th July 2013 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether their review of Trident will include the issue of non-proliferation.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the starting point for the review of alternatives to a like-for-like replacement of Trident was that the UK will continue to comply with its international obligations, in particular with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

My Lords, we know that the alternatives review will address the issue of options for replacing the Vanguard submarines. Will it also consider whether, relatively soon in a submarine’s lifetime, its missiles will need a new warhead? The Government plan to consider that question in the next Parliament, deferring the timetable for consideration in this Parliament given in the 2006 White Paper. Secondly, is it possible to develop a new warhead without testing it and therefore without rescinding our moratorium on testing and indeed contravening the provisions of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty? If it is not tested, how can we be assured that any new warhead would be effective?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the British Government, under both the previous and the current Administrations, have been strong supporters of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. We have developed sophisticated means of simulating the testing and checking of warheads. This is one area in which we are now co-operating with the French: on the sophisticated facilities available for examining current nuclear warheads and considering further developments in design.

House of Lords (Cessation of Membership) Bill [HL]

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Friday 29th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I look forward to many enjoyable days at the end of the year discussing this and other questions on another Bill than the one before us at present. At the present moment—

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

My Lords—

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I have given way a great many times, and I think that I ought to draw what I hoped would be my brief remarks to a close. The Bill proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, is an extremely modest and incremental proposal. The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, has already given notice that he intends to table amendments in Committee, but I trust that the Bill will pass relatively quickly through this House and will be perhaps an indication that there are at least some ways in which this House is willing to move on reform. On that basis, I hand back the wind-up to the noble Lord, Lord Steel.