Brexit: European Arrest Warrant (European Union Committee)

Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan Excerpts

Thursday 8th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord O’Neill of Clackmannan (Lab)]

My Lords, the referendum campaign, when it was not concerned with economic matters, dealt with such issues as freedom from Brussels and release from the Court of Justice yoke. The leave campaigners were concerned with reclaiming our ability to make our own laws, coupled with a reduction in immigration and a greater ability to expel foreigners who broke the law.

These slogans slipped easily off the tongue of the law and order brigade. The impression was created that the EU was somehow a source of lawless anarchy on the streets of Britain. Even allowing for the fact that much of this nonsense was believed by elderly voters, and the fact that the European Court of Justice had become the highest court of appeal, there was little to justify the claptrap that surrounded this issue—to the extent that it was considered at all.

However, the misguided strategies of the remain campaign resulted in little attention being paid to the benefits of EU membership in police co-operation, smoother jurisdiction processes and, in particular, the EAW. When this committee took evidence on the warrant procedure—I am indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Jay, for his succinct presentation of our findings—it became abundantly clear that it had been a great success. It enabled speedier repatriation of the accused from one member country to another. We were able to extradite accused prisoners from the UK and secure the return of others from other member countries more quickly. Put simply, we were able to get rid of the bad guys we did not want and get the bad guys we did into court as quickly as we could. In the past this process had taken months or even years, and now we were talking in terms of days and weeks.

There had to be safeguards, and the final one was the right to appeal to the European Court of Justice. But, in the eyes of the Brexiteers, this is a kangaroo court dominated by foreigners. It was against that background that the committee took evidence which informed our report. I have sat on Select Committees in both Houses of Parliament for the best part of 25 years, and I have to say that I have never been on a committee where the weight of evidence was so overwhelmingly in favour of the European arrest warrant. I have been on committees where the arguments were finely balanced and there were possibilities for debate—but here we had an almost frighteningly monolithic response to the questions that we were asking.

What became clear was that, in the eyes of our witnesses, the EAW was a good thing, that something similar should be retained after departure from the EU, and that this was not going to be easy to achieve since the only two countries that had arrangements—namely, Iceland and Norway—had arrangements that had never been put into practice or really tested. Even then, those countries were members of the European Economic Area and part of the Schengen agreement; you might say that they were almost in the EU but not quite, and there was not the antipathy towards the EU that there could well be in a post-Brexit Britain. The fact is that the arrangements developed for Iceland and Norway took an incredibly long time and, despite the rigour of that process, have never been tested.

When we presented the report, we got a response from the Government that was, at best, Panglossian blind optimism and, at worst, convoluted obfuscation. It was quite appalling. In the rather more robust surroundings of the other end of the Palace, we probably would have had in the wretched civil servants who wrote the response to explain it to us—and, as we used to get in primary school English when I was in Scotland in the 1950s, “parse the following”. We would have had to get them to explain the convoluted nonsense. The fact is that there is quite a clear reason for this—because there is no easy answer, if there is an answer at all. We cannot have an acceptable set of legal procedures that sit easily alongside the Court of Justice but do not give the Court of Justice its due place in the eyes of the 27—or, for that matter, the eyes of the 29, because we are also talking about Iceland and Norway here.

If there is any issue on which the Brexiteers have now been shown to have no clothes whatever, it is this one—and, if they want to get dressed, they will have to move a long way and will have to reconsider their opposition to the European Court of Justice as the starting point. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say. Although I have great respect for him, I suspect that the text that he will have to read out today will be little better than the dreadful letter that we had in response to our evidence.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan Excerpts

Tuesday 30th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord O’Neill of Clackmannan (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by saying that I am a remainer who would like to have the opportunity to vote for a second referendum Bill but not, I think, in the context of this piece of legislation. The Bill has been dismissed by some as merely an enabling—that is, it is primarily about process. I would add a cautionary note here and say that when we deal with matters of process we very quickly become engaged in areas of substance. The Bill has a number of areas where more work needs to be done. This is nothing new: in my experience of the Commons, and even of this House, a Bill that starts at Second Reading, goes through Committee and Report and ends up here, results in many different amendments. Certainly, this Bill is not the finished article. The range and complexity of the topics it covers and the need for much of it to be agreed with EU negotiators means that there is still much to be done. That may be proposed as an excuse for its inadequacies—if that is the right word—but there are certain areas where it is not a get-out clause for Government.

A number of noble Lords have referred today to the so-called Henry VIII powers, and I believe that this is such an area, because it will not go away. The Constitution Committee has pointed out that there may well be some areas where change can be achieved only by the use of Henry VIII-type measures—declaratory ones, or certain forms of statutory instrument. It is a general rule, however, that it is unacceptable for primary legislation to be amended by any means other than the full parliamentary process. If it is not subject to parliamentary scrutiny, that is quite likely to prejudice the acceptability of a lot of other changes that the Bill intends to enact.

Withdrawal from the EU is controversial. The referendum result was not overwhelming. A majority of one is enough, but it is incumbent on the Government to achieve a working consensus. This is not a binary, winner takes all, process. The Scottish independence referendum was an electoral civil war in Scotland, from which the country has not yet recovered, and that referendum resulted in a far bigger majority. I mention this because there is still a pronounced fragility about the state of the union as far as Scotland is concerned. Reference has been made to Clause 11, and the problems that this presents not just to Scotland but to Wales and Northern Ireland. There are those who will be quite happy to exploit some of these difficulties for their own purposes.

I would like to think that the Government will give this area a far higher priority, that process is dealt with here quickly and that the amendments acceptable to Parliament, Assemblies and both Houses can be produced in good time. If we do not do that, we could be dealing with withdrawal Bills of a rather different character before too long.

The Government have said that everything is moving and will be okay. So far the record does not suggest that we can take that with a great deal of confidence. Nevertheless, if the Government are going to come to this House with the amendments that everyone seems to recognise as desirable, they will have to do so quickly—before Report and Third Reading. I would like to think that if we can do that, we may not get other challenges to the unity of the United Kingdom, let alone our relationship with Europe. It is, however, fair to say that if we can get legislation that covers a wide range of the necessary amendments—those that most members of this House would be prepared to accept—then it would be only reasonable at that stage to have the opportunity of a truly meaningful vote on the settlement. Then, if required, we could put it to the country as a whole.

However, time is not on our side and we need to address this with a far greater degree of urgency. But the urgency with which we must address it should not be regarded as an excuse for driving the Bill through on a series of timetable Motions or threats of a kind that would simply recreate the current resentment, which we have a chance to diminish in the very near future.

Carillion

Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan Excerpts

Monday 15th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord O’Neill of Clackmannan (Lab)]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that the supply chain is of some significance here? Is he also aware that many of the companies engaged in that supply chain at the second and third-tier levels employ fewer than 10 people? I should say that I have declared my interests in the register. Given the payment structure which Carillion adopted, many companies in the supply chain have completed the work but are still waiting to be paid because of the 120-day period between completion of the work and payment being made for it. From what has been said today, these people seem to have been forgotten about. They have done their duty under their contracts with Carillion and have now been left hanging with no prospect of payment or of getting any kind of money for the supplies they have utilised and the workforce they have engaged.

[Lord Young of Cookham]

The noble Lord asks a very good question—so good that I asked it myself when I met officials earlier today. It is a serious issue that there may be circumstances where Carillion has been paid but the money has not filtered down the supply chain. I have made inquiries about this. The priority of the official receiver is to maintain continuity of service and I gather that there is provision within the resources available to the receiver, in the circumstances that the noble Lord has just mentioned, for the payments that have not filtered through to be made, in order to ensure that continuity of service is provided.

Government Procurement Policy

Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Sugar for securing this debate and doing us the courtesy of indicating in advance what he would talk about. I will not follow him today; I should like to discuss some of the procurement issues surrounding the construction industry. It is an industry that accounts for some 8 per cent of our GDP and involves 230,000-plus companies, the overwhelming majority of them very small. Forty per cent of the industry’s budget is accounted for by government procurement, or certainly by public expenditure, be it through local authorities, health boards or central government itself. I declare my interest as chairman of the Strategic Forum for Construction, which seeks to advise the Government on certain aspects of the construction industry.

I realise that we are debating this subject some five days in advance of the autumn Statement. We have been advised in advance by Francis Maude that there will be a pipeline for construction projects so that the industry can prepare itself, either to bid or to do work, over the next three years. This is to be welcomed. One can only hope that the pipeline will be long and very wide. More often than not, it is to the construction industry that we look for economic stimulus and a pick-up in the economy. However, the other side of this coin is that the Government will be looking for a 20 per cent reduction in construction costs over the next three years. In the pit of a recession, the industry will have to get itself together in ways that will enable these savings to be made.

It is fair to say that there has been much improvement in the construction industry of late. Therefore, in some respects, the challenge of cost savings of the kind that have been indicated will not be quite as difficult to achieve as some people might have thought in the past. However, it would be criminal if these savings were to be achieved by scrimping on materials or through unnecessarily and potentially dangerous speeding up of construction times, both of which, although understandable, are not defensible and very often have serious implications for the lifetime costs of a project, which are rarely given adequate consideration by those who procure on behalf of us, the people whom we entrust with that task.

I also hope that, in this pursuit of cost reduction, we will not see some delaying of payment processes, because, as I said at the beginning of my remarks, the overwhelming majority of firms in the construction industry employ fewer than 10 people. They live on order books which, in good times, can be 12 weeks and which, in times which are not bad, are about six. At the moment, some of them are surviving—those who do survive—on three-week programmes of work. These people depend on speedy payment. We had from the previous Government, and I think that it is the intention of this Government to sustain it, an undertaking that payments to firms through the public purse should be achieved within 30 days wherever possible. I would like to think that it would be incumbent on major contractors who are in receipt of these payments to pass them down the food chain to the smaller players. It would be helpful to hear such a reassurance today.

There is no silver bullet to achieving greater savings or efficiencies—today’s debate has indicated the shortcomings of so many aspects of this—but I would like to identify one source of what might be greater efficiency in procurement in the construction industry: building information modelling, or BIM in the shorthand of the industry. The construction industry has come rather late in the day to what engineers would have called CAD/CAM in the past—the digitalisation of construction plans and the involvement of everybody in seeing three-dimensional pictures of what a building is going to look like and what its specific requirements will be. Hitherto, this has been the preserve of architects and the engineers. It is fair to say that, in a number of instances, architects and engineers have started to embrace it. In 2010, a McGraw-Hill survey suggested that some 35 per cent of these people are now using BIM techniques, but only 23 per cent of contractors, of whom only 7 per cent are employing them on 30 per cent of their projects. So we are talking still about a relatively small area of the construction industry. However, if you go abroad, to the United States and to North America generally, you will find that this is more than the order of the day. A few months ago, I had the opportunity to visit Japan to look at how they were building their nuclear power stations. All of it was done using three-dimensional, and in some instances four-dimensional, screen work.

BIM would mean that all the cards were no longer in the hands of architects, designers and engineers. The work could be accessed by people further down the supply chain, who could point out that, if they did not build something in quite the way prescribed, they would be able to insert the boilers, the pipework or the wiring systems far more easily. And so you would not have what is known as “emerging work” coming up, the cost overruns or the delays. It would mean that you got it right first time, that you took the time to plan it in such a way that you would not be desperate to cut the first sod but rather to do the work in a rigorous way.

There is no end of academic papers being produced on this subject at the moment, but the interesting point is this: to do this will require the client in the first instance to be far more rigorous and precise in the detailing of the specifications which the contract will have to include. It will also put the architects, the designers and the engineers on their mettle to make sure that they do it. If we could get that, we could get the savings, we could get the extra work and we could get the stimulus that this country so desperately requires in its presently dire economic circumstances.