Queen’s Speech

Lord Wills Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we have spent some considerable time on this debate with the agreement of all the usual channels, and I sometimes fear that the House of Lords loves nothing better than to talk about itself at considerable length. We have heard a full array of opinions, with the debate ranging very widely over constitutional theory and the principles of democracy, but that makes it impossible for me to answer all the points made, for which I must apologise. Some interesting and novel ideas were expressed. Among them I particularly noted the fascinating ideas of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, on reshaping the parliamentary oath, and I think that they deserve fuller consideration before any of us respond.

I start by referring, as have many noble Lords, to the wider context of political disillusionment and the coalition Government’s response to it. I know that it concerns a great many of us and it ought to concern us all. Reform of this place and the opening up of Westminster is part of the response but the Government are very clear that the localism agenda, bringing power back down again to local communities and local authorities, is a necessary part of re-establishing public trust in what to many of them seems remote government. Professor Sir John Baker, in his evidence to the Joint Committee, listed the balance between central and local government as one of the constitutional issues that ought to be dealt with by a special procedure.

Over the past 40 years the balance between central and local government has shifted quite radically under successive Governments, through the process of legislation and statutory instruments, without considering whether it was fully constitutional. This Government are now trying to shift that balance back.

A number of noble Lords—the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, and others—held that the key to British democracy is the direct link between the local voter, their MP in the Commons and the ability of Members of Parliament to challenge the Prime Minister on that voter’s behalf. With respect, I suggest that the declining turnouts in general elections indicates that a rising number of voters do not feel that that single link carries the full weight of their confidence or trust. It is too distant and too remote, which is something that we all need to think about as we try to rebuild trust.

We also had a number of arguments from former Members of the other place about the threat of competition in democratic representation. There was a theory, which I understand, that there can be only one territorial representative. That is what I think of as an MP’s freehold, or at least an MP’s leasehold for five years, and is not unlike a parson's freehold. I am not sure how the public respond to that argument either. I should perhaps add that between 1997 and 2005 the then Labour MP for my constituency in Yorkshire, Shipley, delighted in putting on his website that the village of Saltaire included a whole raft of representatives: a Member of the European Parliament who lived there; a Member of the House of Lords—me—two local councillors and the MP himself. In fact, we campaigned together on local issues. Although we represented three different parties, we did not fall over each other. I doubt whether the greater empowerment of local councillors will threaten MPs.

The noble Lord, Lord Wills, and others raised the question of the individual electoral registration Bill, which has now been published and will shortly be introduced. We have put a number of extra safeguards into that Bill, such as using data matching to confirm the majority of existing electors and automatically retaining them on the register, which we are confident will ensure the completeness of the register during the transition. However, we look forward to detailed scrutiny of the Bill when it comes to the House.

[Lord Wills]

As this is so important—I know that it is very late—I would be grateful if the Minister would say what gives him such confidence that the register will be so comprehensive. It is not comprehensive now. Every independent expert thinks that the way in which the Government are introducing individual registration will make it even more flawed. When I was the Minister and brought in most of the measures that the Government now think will make the register comprehensive, I was not confident that they would make it comprehensive. It was because I was not so confident that we tied the introduction of individual registration to the comprehensive nature of the register. Why is the Minister now so confident that there will be a comprehensive register in the next two years?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The Bill has just been published and we shall be discussing this in some detail. I am not entirely confident that any means can achieve a totally comprehensive, accurate and complete register. I spent two weekends working in the Bradford West by-election, going along roads where the houses had several names on the bell-pushes but no one on the register. That demonstrated to me that, in a number of places, the register is already quite inaccurate. The Friday that I spent with a community association in south Bradford, where I discovered a large number of people who positively do not wish to be on the register, also demonstrated the sort of problems that we are up against. We shall discuss this further, and the Government are very well aware of the concerns that we all have.

Let me just mention the issue of judicial diversity. On 28 May we shall have the Second Reading of the Crime and Courts Bill in this House, and judicial diversity is one of the issues that will come up then.

A number of Peers have mentioned the royal succession. I am glad that that has received a welcome. The noble Baroness, Lady Symons, suggested that we should move on to primogeniture in hereditary titles. I have to say, individually, that I look forward enormously to the Private Member's Bill which I suggest she might like to introduce on that subject.

I move on to the question of Lords reform, which most Peers have been discussing in this constitutional affairs debate. It was suggested that the Government and Parliament were not capable of handling Lords reform and a range of other issues at the same time. Given that during the final three years of World War II we fought the war and introduced a number of radical social and educational reforms, that assertion seems a little strong.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, asked when we would see the Bill—to which I of course answer, with immense confidence: “Soon”. However, we are still considering the conclusions of the Richard committee and the alternative report that were published only recently. Those considerations and related discussions will feed into the final shape of the Bill.

Elections: Registration

Lord Wills Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, there are two problems with registration for 18 to 25 year-olds. One is the question of how far they are motivated to register. The other is simply how good the Government are at catching these people and making sure that they fill in forms. I am informed that the number of young men registered with a doctor is remarkably low. This is the biggest single hole in our registration. The percentage of 18 to 25 year-olds registered to vote is around 56 per cent. The percentage of people over 25 who are registered is well over 90 per cent.

[Lord Wills]

My Lords, the Minister will recall the debate that was held in your Lordships’ House at the beginning of January about electoral registration, where there was widespread concern from all sides of the House about the Government’s approach to individual registration and how it will cause a decline in electoral registration, including among young people. There was also concern that that decline in registration would benefit only one political party—the Conservative Party. In the light of that, the Minister will recall that there was widespread support from all sides of the House, including from the Conservative Benches, for a cross-party approach to addressing these problems. The Minister then undertook to go away and discuss with his colleagues such a cross-party approach. Can he update the House on how he has got on with his discussions, three months later?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That is a very good question. I have discussed that with colleagues, and we are continuing to discuss it, and I thank the noble Lord for maintaining the pressure on it. We have a real problem with how to get 18 to 25 year-olds caught up within the general system of interaction with government agencies. They move around much more frequently; they move between home and university; and they tend not to get caught up by a number of the ways in which government interacts with people.

Terezin Declaration: Holocaust Era Assets

Lord Wills Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wills]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, on securing this debate on a subject that summons up the pain and tragedy endured by so many millions in Europe for so many years in the last century. The Terezin declaration by 46 European countries was an important step in healing wounds that remained from those terrible years. I speak as someone whose father lost close family in the Holocaust in Austria and in what was then Czechoslovakia. Nothing can undo the evil that was done, but restitution does at least recognise that evil was done. As the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, said, it is not so much the material recovery of property that matters as the recognition of—the bearing of witness to—the fact that such evil was done. Without it, it is difficult to see how there can be any closing of the books or any defining atonement.

Of course, the restitution of assets is not the only way for such recognition to take place. The German artist Gunter Demnig, for example, created the idea of Stolpersteine: small memorials positioned in places associated with victims of Nazism. There are now hundreds of them in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and other European countries commemorating not just Jewish victims but Romany, homosexual and Christian victims of the Nazis, and many others as well.

Notwithstanding that, the restitution of assets has a crucial part to play in this process—and not just for the victims of the Nazis. The people of central and eastern Europe suffered not only from their tyranny but also from that of the communists. This country has a special relationship with Poland, which lies at the centre of this debate tonight; 35,000 Polish service personnel fought gallantly alongside us in the Second World War. More recently, thousands of Polish men and women have come to work in our service and manufacturing industries, making a significant contribution to economic growth in this country. It is regrettable that Poland appears to be the only post-communist European nation without legislation on the restitution of assets stolen by the Nazis and expropriated by the communists.

I am sure that everyone in your Lordships’ House understands the suffering that Poland endured in the 20th century and how complex and difficult these issues are. Of course, we all recognise the economic problems with which Poland is struggling, along with every other country in Europe. However, when the Terezin declaration was made, all the signatories recognised such difficulties and other signatories have made progress with implementation despite experiencing problems similar to those in Poland. We must hope that Poland, too, can now finally make some real progress on this matter.

Her Majesty’s Government showed the importance that they attach to these issues when nearly two years ago they appointed Sir Andrew Burns as the first envoy for post-Holocaust issues. I would be grateful if the Minister could update the House on the work that Sir Andrew has been doing since then. I would also be grateful if the Minister could set out what steps Her Majesty’s Government are taking to encourage the implementation of the Terezin declaration by all signatories before the 70th anniversary of the end of World War Two in 2015. I understand that the Minister, as he has on previous occasions when this subject has come up in your Lordships’ House, may well choose to withhold substantive comment until after the review conference on the declaration that is to be held later this year, but perhaps he could undertake now to report back to your Lordships’ House on the outcome of that conference and set out what further steps Her Majesty’s Government may think will then be necessary to ensure that all the signatories to the Terezin declaration implement its provisions by 2015.

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns]

My Lords, before my noble friend Lord Palmer rises to speak, since this is a self-regulating House and we may sometimes adopt different procedures, I can say that a great deal of understanding has broken out over the procedure to be adopted on the Scotland Bill. The usual channels have had a brief meeting and we have discussed these matters with the relevant Back-Benchers of both the Opposition and the Conservative Party who have a great interest in the amendments that they have tabled to the Bill. There is an understanding between the usual channels and interested Back-Bench Peers that we will conclude the whole of the Report stage of the Scotland Bill on Wednesday, and there is an agreement that that can be done without the need to return to the Bill tonight. This may be of assistance to noble Lords and to the staff of the House. I apologise to my noble friend Lord Palmer.

Electoral Register

Lord Wills Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, my noble friend asks several questions. We value the independence of the Electoral Commission as an umpire for this system. We recognise that the integrity of the system depends on the trust and confidence of all parties involved. We noted the calls from around the House, including from the noble Lord, Lord Wills, last Thursday, for a new all-party group to ensure that confidence is maintained. I have fed that in to fellow Ministers.

[Lord Wills]

My Lords, I welcome the response from the Minister on cross-party talks and very much endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, said. Does he agree with the assessment of the Electoral Commission that the approach being taken by the Government towards implementing individual registration risks even more millions of eligible voters falling off the register?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Electoral Commission’s estimate that there might be as many as 10 million electors missing was very much a worst-case analysis. We are proceeding from that basis and have to ensure that we achieve a much better result than that. As the noble Lord will know, experiments with data-matching have been achieved. We are considering how one might “nudge” people as they visit the benefit office or apply for a driving licence, and in various other ways, to think about their civic duty to register.

Electoral Registration

Lord Wills Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2012 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Wills]

That this House takes note of Government policy on electoral registration.

[Lord Wills]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to introduce this debate, which takes note of the Government’s policy on electoral registration. This is often a highly technical issue, but it is always an important one. The struggle for the right to vote defines the history of our democracy but electoral registration makes that right a reality. This debate is a timely one, as the Government have embarked on a significant change to electoral registration, with potentially profound consequences for the health of our democracy.

Many issues could be addressed under the rubric of this debate. For example, it would be possible to explore why the Government have been so dilatory in pursuing proposals put forward by the previous Government to ensure that service personnel serving in conflict areas can cast their votes themselves. It would be possible, for example, to discuss the abolition of the edited register. There is also a range of other more technical issues that could be discussed. I hope that the distinguished noble Lords who will follow me in this debate will address some or all of these issues.

I want to focus on the introduction of individual voter registration. Most people, in all political parties, believe that the Government are right to bring in individual voter registration. The previous Government legislated for it—and I declare an interest as the Minister who brought in that legislation. I did so because I believed that it was right to do so. It is right, as a matter of principle, that citizens should be responsible for their own eligibility to vote. Individual registration can help to tackle fraud, although, as I will discuss later, the extent of fraud should not be overstated nor is individual registration a cure-all for it where it does exist. However, there is widespread concern about the way that the Government are introducing this change. I am particularly worried by their abandonment of the bipartisan approach adopted by the previous Government. I am also worried about the damage that they risk doing to the efforts to secure a comprehensive register, which must be the foundation of our electoral system.

For all its merits, the introduction of individual registration carries with it the severe risk that significant numbers of people who are eligible to vote will not be registered to do so and so will be unable to vote. This was the case in Northern Ireland when it moved to this new system of registration a few years ago. The report by the independent Electoral Commission on the experience in Northern Ireland found that the new registration process disproportionately impacted on:

“Young people and students, people with learning difficulties and other forms of disability and those living in areas of high social deprivation”.

That report concluded—and this is important, because of the specific circumstances of Northern Ireland—that:

“While these findings relate directly to Northern Ireland, they are not unique and reflect the wider picture across the UK. They present a major challenge to all those concerned with widening participation in electoral and democratic processes”.

In evidence to the Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee of the House of Commons, Jenny Watson, the chair of the Electoral Commission, said that it is possible that, under the Government’s proposed changes,

“the register could go from around a 90% completeness that we currently have to around, say, a 60% completeness”.

There is already a serious problem with the electoral register in the United Kingdom. The latest estimate from the Electoral Commission suggests that at least 6 million people who are eligible to vote were not registered to do so in December 2010. The fact that so many people who should be on the register are not, despite all the measures taken by the previous Government to increase registration—measures which I am pleased to see the current Government are taking forward—shows how intractable this problem is. It damages our democracy when so many eligible citizens cannot vote because they are not on the register.

The introduction of individual registration risks making a bad situation significantly worse. That is why its introduction was delayed for so long. The improvements it is likely to bring to the accuracy of the register are balanced by the deterioration it is likely to bring in the register’s coverage. The previous Government sought to reconcile these competing objectives by tying the implementation of individual registration to the achievement of a comprehensive and accurate register by 2015, as far as it was practicable to do so. This timetable allowed for a phased introduction of the new system. However, that Government showed their commitment to meeting the timetable by giving the Electoral Commission the power to oversee the process independently and the obligation to report annually to Parliament, so that if Parliament wanted to make any changes as the system progressed it could do so. We also gave the Electoral Commission substantial new powers to carry out these objectives.

The previous Government spent a great deal of time and effort building cross-party agreement on this approach. In the debate in the other place on 13 July 2009, which was the major occasion when this issue was debated there, the Front-Bench spokespersons for both the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrat Party supported the government approach and the timetable, and they did not vote against it. The present Government could have continued with this approach, but for reasons that they have never adequately explained they did not do so. They are rushing forward with the timetable for individual registration and removing the key safeguard of the requirement for a comprehensive and accurate register.

That is not all. The Government threaten to make the register even less complete by proposing to remove the civic and legal duty to register to vote, and to abolish the annual household canvass in 2014. I am sure the Government will say that they are taking measures to mitigate these potential risks just as the previous Government did—and I give them credit for that: they are—but nobody can be confident that such measures will solve the problem.

So why have the Government abandoned the previous Government’s careful, non-partisan approach to this important issue? They have suggested threats to the integrity of the register as a possible reason for this haste. In the words of the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, a few months ago in this place:

“for the first time certainly in my lifetime, the integrity of the voting system was starting to be called into question”.—[Official Report, 31/10/11; col. 974.]

So, by implication, the Government appear to be arguing that the need is so urgent that there can be no delay in bringing in a measure that can help tackle electoral malpractice. But independent bodies tasked with safeguarding the integrity of our electoral system do not share this assessment. The analysis carried out by the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Electoral Commission, for example, into the 2010 elections stated that,

“no evidence of widespread systematic attempts to undermine or interfere with the May 2010 elections through electoral fraud”,

was found. They said:

“we are not aware of any case reported to the police that affected the outcome of the election to which it related nor of any election that has had to be re-run as a result of electoral malpractice”.

There is never any justification for complacency about even a single incident of malpractice, but the evidence does not suggest that the level of electoral malpractice justifies the risk that the Government are running with the electoral register.

A report in 2008 from an independent body, the Rowntree Reform Trust, concluded:

“It is unlikely that there has been a significant increase in electoral malpractice since the introduction of postal voting on demand in 2000”.

It added that any malpractice that had taken place,

“related to a tiny proportion of all elections contested”.

Nor will individual registration, for all its merits, address all the cases of malpractice. The Association of Chief Police Officers and the Electoral Commission have concluded that the very nature of recorded electoral malpractice changes; as measures are introduced to tackle one form of malpractice, the problem shifts to other forms of it.

Indeed, I would say that the Government themselves do not see the problem as disproportionately pressing, because they scrapped ID cards. Whatever the justification for scrapping ID cards, they did scrap them. Whatever problems noble Lords may see with them, ID cards would have helped tackle the single largest category of alleged malpractice, which is voting offences, which includes personation at a polling station. The Government scrapped ID cards despite a recommendation by the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Electoral Commission that to strengthen the security of the electoral process, the Government should review the case for requiring proof of identity of voters at the polling station.

The weakness of the Government’s case for their approach is matched by the damage they risk doing. They risk excluding millions from their democratic right to vote. Their approach junks the principle, followed for good reasons by successive Conservative and Labour Governments, that fundamental constitutional change, particularly when it relates to the electoral system—the very wiring of our democracy—should only proceed, wherever possible, on a bipartisan basis. Their approach means that the boundary reviews in 2015 will be conducted on the basis of a profoundly flawed register, and therefore will subvert all the high-minded principles that the Government have advanced for these boundary reviews.

The increasingly unrepresentative register that is likely to result from the Government’s approach will restrict the pool of those available for jury service, and so it will threaten the quality of justice in our country. Scope has warned that,

“the transition process must be handled carefully so that it doesn’t inadvertently exclude disabled people”.

Finally, the Government’s approach risks turning our electoral arrangements in this country into a matter for partisan dispute for the first time in over a century, and this is potentially toxic for our democracy. Most agree that those eligible voters not registered to vote are most likely to vote Labour when they do vote. It is true that the Liberal vote in the inner cities is also likely to suffer. The Electoral Commission has found that,

“under-registration is notably higher than average among 17-24 year olds … private sector tenants … and black and minority ethnic (BME) British residents”.

It also found that the,

“highest concentrations of under-registration [are] most likely to be found in metropolitan areas, smaller towns and cities with large student populations, and coastal areas with significant population turnover and high levels of social deprivation”.

The evidence suggests that the party that will suffer least, if at all, from a fall-off in registration is the Conservative Party. Electoral registration is only 90 per cent complete in Labour seats, but 94 per cent complete in Conservative seats.

Politicians and Parliament have been falling into disrepute in recent years—it is a matter of grave concern, I know, to everyone in this House and in the other place. I ask your Lordships to consider the impact on the health of our democracy if it turns out, as it might, that the outcome of a general election has been determined by the fact that millions of eligible voters could not vote because they were not registered to do so, and that this was the result of a government policy deliberately pursued despite all the evidence that it would have precisely this consequence. Whatever the motivation behind the Government’s precipitous abandonment of a bipartisan approach to individual registration, they still have a chance to return to the approach adopted by the previous Labour and Conservative Administrations.

Independent bodies have now reported on the Government’s approach and expressed concerns about it. The House of Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee, on which the Government have a majority, has noted,

“serious concerns that the Government's current proposals will miss an unacceptably large number of potential electors”.

The Electoral Commission has argued that the UK Government and UK Parliament should make a number of changes, including requiring electoral registration officers to run a full household canvass in 2014, abandoning the government proposal to allow voters to opt out from registration, publishing a detailed implementation plan, considering how to ensure the change is delivered consistently and ensuring that sufficient funding is available for the activities involved in implementing the change from household to individual electoral registration.

I hope that the Government will now take the concerns of these independent bodies more seriously than they have done up until now. I suggest to the Minister that one way of addressing all the problems that the Government’s approach risks creating would be to set up a working group, consisting of representatives of all the political parties represented at Westminster, to agree how best to tackle the problems that have been so widely identified and by independent bodies. There are many distinguished Members of your Lordships’ House, many of whom will speak in the debate today, who I am sure could make a major contribution to such a working group. I recognise that the Minister may not be in a position to respond substantively to this suggestion today, but I would be grateful if he could agree to write to me with a considered response if he is not able to do so today. If he rejects this proposal, could he set out in detail whether he accepts that the introduction of individual registration will lead to increased numbers of eligible voters falling off the electoral register? If he does not, can he guarantee that this will not happen?

This is a technical issue but, as I hope I have indicated in these remarks, it is one with potentially profound consequences for our democracy. I hope the Minister will not brush these concerns aside, but respond to them constructively and in a way that can re-establish the bipartisan approach that should always characterise public policy on such constitutional issues.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I take that point on board and we will feed it back into our considerations, as and when the issue of electronic voting comes up.

I was commenting on whether the physical act of voting in a particular place, within a particular community, or—for those who are deeply committed to single-Member constituencies—within a particular constituency, ought not to be part of the way in which the citizen relates to his community and thereby to his state. We should not entirely rule out the importance of that.

A number of noble Lords asked about pilots. The Government, in their response, will discuss some of what has been learnt through the attempts at data-matching—comparing different databases, not integrating them. A certain amount has been learnt and this is part of the way forward for picking up those who would otherwise have been missed. Again, we have been looking at international comparisons of electoral systems and the Electoral Commission has produced a useful paper on them.

Other uses of the register were raised by the noble Lord, Lord Borrie, and others, ranging from the letter I received from a number of charities, which talked about the importance of access to the register in order to send out fundraising letters, to commercial use and credit checks, as well as jury service, which is also part of the citizen’s obligation to the state.

The noble Viscount, Lord Astor, asked about members of the armed services. The new employment model for the armed services will enable many more armed services members to have a longer-term home base. We already know that a number of service members are registered from their home base, and the number of those who are voting from abroad by postal votes may therefore indicate that the system is underestimating those who are able to vote. A number of us have family members serving abroad. My wife currently has a proxy vote for our son, who is on postdoctoral study in the United States. That issue also extends to the armed services. The new employment model will therefore help considerably with the levels of service registration.

The question of fraud has been raised. That is part of the issue of integrity. There is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, remarked, some not insignificant fraud in particular constituencies, and I am well aware that it takes place. Therefore, we have to maintain an effective system of checks, and that is part of the reason why we have to close down late registration and late applications for postal votes some days ahead of each election in order to provide sufficient time for adequate checks.

The noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville, raised the question of—

[Lord Wills]

Before the Minister leaves the question of fraud, does he accept the repeated judgments and findings of independent bodies such as the Association of Chief Police Officers, the Electoral Commission and the Rowntree Reform Trust about the very limited extent of systemic fraud in our elections?

Lord Wallace of Saltaire: Instances of fraud are very much localised in particular communities and constituencies; they are not systemic throughout the country. That is not to say, however, that they may not be significant in particular constituencies and in particular instances. To say that this is not widespread is not to say that it may not be significant.

[Lord Wills]

Perhaps I may press the noble Lord on this point, because it is fundamental to this debate. Does he accept the findings of those independent bodies? Just a yes-or-no answer will do.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I am not familiar with those particular reports. We wish as far as possible to prevent fraud in the system. That is an important part of any approach to the electoral system. We have to have the maximum degree of trust in its integrity.

On the question of the full household canvass in 2014 and ensuring that for 2015 we have as complete a register as possible, the Electoral Commission has suggested carrying out a canvass in early 2014, rather than in late 2013. These subjects are still under full discussion, but the Government are of course well aware of the importance of having as complete a register as possible, both through the transitional period between 2013 and 2015 and after the election, as a basis for the new boundaries.

Lastly, the noble Lord, Lord Bach, asked when Peers would be allowed to vote in general elections. I rush to assure him that that is of course an issue that will be caught up with the House of Lords Reform Bill, which I know he is much looking forward to—as are so many other Members of the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Both the Government and the Electoral Commission are looking at how we manage to ensure that an adequate canvass is maintained throughout the transition period and after. There are regular consultations between electoral registration officers, the Electoral Commission and the Government, and they will of course continue.

This has been a useful debate and I just wish to end where I began. The Government are still in listening mode. We are all committed to a transition from a household system of registration to a system of individual registration, and we all have a strong interest in ensuring that the new system which emerges is accurate, complete and widely trusted. That is our aim; we shall continue to consult and will then take the Bill through both Houses while continuing to listen as the Bill goes through both Houses. I trust that when the new system emerges we will find that we have achieved those aims as far as is possible in a highly mobile society. We live in a country where a substantial proportion of those who have contact with the state are not necessarily British nationals, and some of those who have contact with the state and fill in forms are functionally illiterate or do not fully understand English. Nevertheless we aim to overcome those problems as far as we can and achieve, we hope, as complete and accurate a register as we can, both for the next election and as a basis for the next boundary review.

[Lord Wills]

We have had a very wide-ranging and useful debate. I am grateful to all those noble Lords who have contributed their experience and wisdom, and in the case of the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, some valuable historical insights as well.

There is a consensus across the House that this is an important issue, and I think there is also agreement on the diagnosis of the problem. My noble friend Lady Kennedy placed this in the wider context of the state of our democracy. There is widespread agreement, which I am glad to see the Minister has noted, about the importance of the 2014 canvass. We heard some very powerful speeches in favour of the legal requirements and graphic illustrations from the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, as well as powerful speeches from my noble friends Lord Borrie, Lord Beecham and Lord Bach. There has been a widespread feeling that it is very important that this subject is approached on a bipartisan basis. We heard that from the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, from the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge—

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

On an all-party basis.

[Lord Wills]

The noble Lord is quite right to correct me on that. When I say bipartisan, I actually mean a cross-party, all-party basis. We heard a very important speech from my noble friend Lord Lipsey illustrating the dangers of the Government’s approach. I very much hope that the Government and all Members of this House will study his speech in Hansard because he illustrated with great precision the dangers of the approach that the Government are taking on this. My noble friends Lord Kennedy and Lord Bach also placed great emphasis on this.

The noble Lord, Lord Lexden, quite rightly raised the question of overseas voters, and although there are issues about expatriates and those who do or do not pay tax, there is a very real issue about those who are on international service working for international organisations or studying abroad but particularly those who are working for organisations such as the United Nations. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, who is not in this place today, raised this with me when I was a Minister. We were looking into how we could address this problem. I am not sure where the Government have got to on this, but maybe the Minister will take that away and look at it.

The noble Viscount, Lord Astor, very importantly raised the question of service voting. There were plans to deal with this issue under the previous Government but they seem to have been put on the shelf by this one. I hope the Minister will take them off and get on with it. It is a very important issue, as I think all sides of this House recognise.

I am grateful to all those who came forward with positive solutions—the important issue of ring-fencing mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, and the useful and helpful contribution from the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, on trying to get electoral registration tied into the way that citizens interact with the state. These were both measures that I tried to introduce as a Minister and I regret to say that I failed. I failed to get ring-fencing and to secure the sort of measures that the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, was advocating. I hope that this Government will be much more successful than I am in taking these measures forward. They are very important. We heard some far-sighted contributions from my noble friends Lord Maxton and Lord Reid about the importance of electronics and information and communication technology. This has to be part of the future.

Finally I am grateful to the Minister for his constructive and reasoned response. I am slightly surprised about how insouciant he appears to be about the risks of the register being damaged significantly by the approach the Government are taking. There is no evidence to support such insouciance, but I welcome his undertaking to explore further this question of a cross-party group. I particularly welcome the suggestion from the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for a more independent component as well as the cross-party complexion of it. I hope he will set this up quickly so we can deal with all these issues.

I am not sure how I am meant to conclude this new form of debate, but I have said all I should so I am now going to sit down.

Motion agreed.

Constitutional Change: Constitution Committee Report

Lord Wills Excerpts

Wednesday 7th December 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Wills]

My Lords, I agree with almost everything that the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, has said. I follow other noble Lords in welcoming this report. Once again, this committee has performed an invaluable service by producing a report that is thorough, wise and timely, too, in view of the energetic way in which this Government have been pursuing constitutional reform, though not always fruitfully. I share the hope expressed by other noble Lords today that the Government will rethink their response. I speak as someone who was a Minister in the last Government responsible for constitutional reform. The Government are in grave danger of repeating the mistakes that we made in government.

In light of the general welcome given to this report and to all the committee’s reports, I hope that it will not be considered sacrilegious if I spend a few minutes taking issue with it. I want to take issue with only a limited section of the report, but it is precisely because it is so limited that I take issue. Only six paragraphs out of 105 in the report are devoted to public engagement. The committee rightly stresses the importance of process in constitutional change, but one of the main reasons, if not the main reason, that it is so important, is that proper process is most likely to secure the public consent to change that in turn is most likely to ensure that it endures. That is crucial with constitutional change. Surely in the light of this, the issue of public engagement deserves a little more scrutiny than the 6 per cent of this report that is devoted to it. The committee spends rather longer on the question of consultation, although its focus seems to be primarily on the established institutions of power, primarily in Westminster rather than the general public. It offers sensible and balanced views, in my view, on Green Papers and White Papers and prelegislative scrutiny, but is more or less silent on how consultation with the public should be carried out more widely, with whom exactly and for how long, and how that should influence public policy, and where such consultation fits in our system of representative democracy. Yet these are all crucial questions, in my view. It is not as if there are no other models available for the committee to scrutinise, but it mentions only one—from Canada—and that is almost in passing.

There is an uncharacteristic lack of rigour in the perfunctory conclusion that the committee reaches that,

“no one model … should be adopted for all proposed changes. Nor is public engagement at this stage of the process always a necessary requirement. However, if not undertaken, the government should be able to justify their decision not to conduct a public engagement exercise”.

It would have been helpful to future Governments embarking on constitutional change if the committee could have given a few more reasons for this conclusion. It would have been even more helpful if they had attempted to explore different models and when it might be appropriate to use them.

Of course, it is difficult to reach definitive conclusions about the best mechanisms, and I agree with what my noble friend Lady Jay rightly said on this. As she also pointed out, there is a risk of public engagement degenerating into little more than a box-ticking exercise. But those difficulties and risks should not be used as an excuse for not exploring further this important issue. For more than a decade, every Minister bringing forward constitutional legislation—and I was one among many—has remarked on the state of our democracy. My noble friend Lady Taylor made some very important points about this today. There has been a well documented decline of trust in politicians, increasing disengagement from the formal democratic process, with disadvantaged groups and younger people increasingly unlikely to vote at elections. We have seen the weakening of old, collectivist structures and historic social identities and the rise of a professional political class. It has all served to undermine engagement with the party politics on which our system of representative democracy depends. How to re-engage the public in democratic politics is a huge challenge facing everyone, both Houses of Parliament. Nowhere is that more important than in the process of constitutional change that addresses the wiring of our democracy, which is why, as other noble Lords have pointed out, it is not like other legislation.

As my noble friend Lady Jay pointed out, it is not easy to see how best to do this without compromising our system of representative democracy, which we should continue to cherish. The difficulties can be seen, for example, in the entanglements that the other place is getting itself into in dealing with petitions. Representative democracy is precious, and we should never cease reminding ourselves if that, in the current climate, because it allows for the fairest distribution of power among all citizens, offers space for scrutiny and deliberation on complex issues and does so continually as such issues arise, which makes for better policy. It fosters the articulation of the needs and aspirations of the inarticulate and protects the interests of minorities, all of which are hallmarks of a decent and civilised society. Representative democracy should not be replaced or threatened, but that does not mean that it cannot be adapted to new circumstances.

Referendums can have their place in this. The arguments for and against their use have been well set out in an excellent previous report by this committee, but referendums are not the only way of increasing democratic engagement. As I have said, I would have hoped that the committee would have spent a bit more time exploring this issue in its report. It had a starting point in a policy paper called A National Framework for Greater Citizen Engagement, which was published over two years ago by the then Government and which explored the use of mechanisms such as citizens summits as well as referendums. That paper set out proposals for when national policy formulation could benefit from greater public participation and, in the view of that paper, those circumstances included significant constitutional change.

I have set out previously my view that any new mechanisms to re-engage people with democratic processes and improve policy formulation will succeed only if they fulfil five conditions. Briefly, they are: first, they must register with the public, which means that they must be regular and pervasive; secondly, they must be credible and people must believe that they matter— I will cease there.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wills]

My Lords, before more important things interrupted, I was just reaching my conclusion. I hope that the Committee will look at ways to engage the public on this very important issue. I set out, as a starting point, five crucial criteria which, in my view, any new mechanism for engaging with the public must fulfil.

First, the mechanisms must register with the public. In other words, they must be regular and pervasive. Secondly, the mechanisms must be credible. People have got to believe that they matter and are not a box-ticking exercise. They should be open and transparent; participants must be aware in advance of the status of the consultation and what it can achieve; there must be a shared understanding of when and how these mechanisms will be used—the committee is absolutely right to have drawn attention to that in this report; and government must not engage consultation just for the sake of it, with no discernible outcome.

Thirdly, engagement mechanisms must be systemic; otherwise people could all too easily regard them as a version of a tactical device. Deliberative assemblies such as citizens’ senates should represent, in my view, a permanent change to the process of policy development. Fourthly, they should be as representative and accessible as possible, involving a broad spread of the population, not just the usual suspects. Finally, such new mechanisms must also, and always, be consistent with the primacy of representative democracy. They should never replace parliamentary consideration of issues. They should always feed into them.

These propositions are just one starting point for what I hope will be a new and characteristically magisterial report by this committee on how best to engage the public in the process of constitutional change. The issue deserves nothing less than such a report to follow the one in front of us today—a report which, despite my criticisms, has made an important contribution to the debate over the future of our constitution, for which we all owe the committee our thanks.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine]

That is a well rehearsed point, I know, from the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth. My rebuttal to him at the time that we had this discussion in Committee was that all public policy can be construed as political; we nevertheless go through a process of giving it substance through law and deliberation prior to it becoming law. That was why it was quite right for it to go through Parliament. There is a philosophical imperative in respect of this public policy measure not just to have it for a single Parliament but to have it as good practice enshrined as a constitutional convention. That was the basis on which we introduced it.

[Lord Wills]

I could not resist the noble Baroness’s invitation to intervene on her. I want to make two points. First, on the point of the parliamentary Bill and the boundaries, it is of course quite right that both partners in the coalition had expressed their intention to reduce the size of the House of Commons. However, they had very different numbers, which have crucial implications for the outcome. Therefore, it is completely proper, as the committee said, that this should have been open to all sorts of prelegislative scrutiny. Secondly, the point the noble Baroness made about the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill proves the point that the committee was arguing: that Bill was precisely in the interests of the Executive, and it is the need to fetter the Executive that a lot of the measures put forward by this report are aimed at.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine]

If the noble Lord were to read what the report says on the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill, he will see that there were contested opinions as to whether it amounted to better governance or merely the Executive overriding to their advantage.

The important examples of the need for proper constitutional process do not necessarily lie in this Parliament but in previous Parliaments; for example, the change to the role of the Lord Chancellor in 2008—noble Lords have referred to it already—or, as the committee mentions, the handling of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill in the closing stages of the previous Parliament, which ran a full five-year term, and where the previous Government, with eight years of power till 2005, should have introduced their Bills in the early part of the previous Parliament rather than leaving it to the wash-up. The Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, which had significant implications for habeas corpus, was not subject to prelegislative scrutiny and, in my view, it should have been. There are some Bills that require flexibility and, as long as justifications are provided for deviation from good practice, we should take each Bill as it comes.

Let me turn to public engagement, which is emphasised in the report. It is, of course, right that in constitutional matters, more than in any other area, there should be at least a minimum awareness in the country of what is proposed and, preferably, meaningful consultation on the merits of the proposals. The nub of the problem lies in what threshold we apply. Noble Lords will be aware of the new e-petition system whereby 100,000 votes on a Downing Street petition can trigger a discussion in Parliament on public policy. As we have seen from the anti-European Union debate recently, a mere debate publicises an issue but does not lead to changes and therefore can disappoint. Consultation that leads people to think that they have a say without it being reflected in substance just makes the electorate more cynical. Another factor is the appropriateness of public engagement. The e-petition system calls forth rather esoteric and special interest issues, and I will give the Committee a flavour of them. Recent petitions include: Convicted London rioters should loose all benefits; Fight for BAE Systems Jobs; and Protect Police Pensions. Some of these may be areas where a debate might be sufficient to deal with them, but the people who have signed the petitions would wish the Government to take action. So, yes, there should be public consultation, but it should be meaningful.

Let me go to the most controversial recommendation. I beg the indulgence of the Committee in going on for a minute or two extra since I have lost some time. The report proposes that legislation should be accompanied by a ministerial statement and provides a comprehensive list of what should be covered in that statement. It further asks the Minister to justify why the Government might agree or disagree with the responses given. The Minister would also be required to set out the extent to which rigour was applied in Cabinet committee. It stops short of asking for a justification of Cabinet decisions, but that is not far off. This perhaps goes too far, and the Government’s response—that they will consider these matters further—is the right one. In today's age of spin, we cannot expect that the internal deliberations of policy within government would not be subject to speculation about who said what, when and for what motive. That would not increase confidence in the Government but would, in fact, decrease it. Having read the multitude of diaries that appeared within months of the previous Government's departure, I come from the perspective that those of us outside are better off not knowing how carelessly or, indeed, controversially serious decisions are made. I suspect that there is at least one member of the committee who would rather that his advice to Cabinet had not been the matter of such intense speculation in the aftermath of the Iraq war.

There are several good things in the report, which have been mentioned by noble Lords, on First Reading and Second Reading timescales and so on. I wholeheartedly agree with them. On the whole, the report is excellent, and while I share some disappointment about the Government’s response, I look forward to the summing up by the Minister. In the words of the noble Lord, Lord Desai, I look forward to hearing him face the music.

Poland: Restitution of Property

Lord Wills Excerpts

Monday 5th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am aware that the issues of restitution of communal property are in some ways rather different from restitution of individual property. I stand to be informed by the noble Lord on the case before the European Court of Human Rights, and he is of course correct to say that we are, in a sense, in the second round on the issue of restitution. There was a first round in the years immediately after the Second World War. The second round began with the end of the Cold War and the whole set of issues that then opened up regarding restitution from post-Communist Governments.

[Lord Wills]

My Lords, when do Her Majesty's Government expect full implementation of the Terezin declaration by all countries, including Poland? What measures are Her Majesty's Government taking to ensure that this might happen before the 70th anniversary in 2015 of the end of World War 2?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, these will be very much the topics for discussion at the review conference next year.

Transparency

Lord Wills Excerpts

Thursday 10th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wills]

My Lords, it is a pleasure and a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Gold, in his maiden speech. He comes to this House with a most distinguished career in the law and his speech today demonstrated to all noble Lords what an asset he will be to our debates. I understand that when he stepped down as senior partner at Herbert Smith, the law firm that he mentioned, a note was circulated to staff saying that,

“he has brought his own special type of magic to everything he has done since he walked through the doors of Herbert Smith”.

I am sure that all noble Lords who have heard his speech today will be looking forward to seeing more of that magic in this House.

I join previous speakers in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Elton, on securing this debate on such an important issue. Transparency is crucial in the securing the accountability that is fundamental for the health of a democracy. I also congratulate the noble Lord on what to my ears sounded like a most cogent case for transparency. I declare my interest as a member of the advisory council of Transparency International UK.

I start my substantive remarks by congratulating the Government and the responsible Minister, Mr Francis Maude, on their commitment to transparency through the open data programme. That was started by the previous Government, and was a particular project of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. I am sorry that in an otherwise compelling speech the noble Lord, Lord Elton, did not acknowledge that fact. On this point, I was also sorry that such a distinguished historian as the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, in congratulating the Government on bringing in the 20-year rule, somehow omitted to mention that that rule was legislated for by the previous Government. Airbrushing history in this way is the opposite of transparency.

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield]

My Lords, I take the noble Lord’s stricture on the chin. He is absolutely right, it was an omission, but it was inadvertence rather than malice.

[Lord Wills]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for setting the historical record straight.

I congratulate the Government on the way in which they have taken on the open data programme with real determination and vigour. I was going to rehearse some of the merits of it but the noble Lord, Lord Elton, did it far better than I could. This promises significant immediate constitutional benefits in transferring power to citizens and less immediate but potential longer-term benefits in improving value for money in delivering public services through greater engagement of users. It will also encourage innovative developments by not-for-profit organisations and businesses. Again, the noble Lord set out just how quickly people can take advantage of all the opportunities opened up by this programme. Confidence in the ability of the programme to deliver results must be increased by the setting up of the Public Sector Transparency Board and its distinguished and experienced membership, some of whom I had the privilege of working with when I was a Minister with an interest in this area in the previous Government.

While the Government should be given credit for their achievements in this area, elsewhere their commitment to transparency is not quite so clear. We have already heard from my noble friend Lord Prescott on one aspect of this, but I want to focus on the Freedom of Information Act. When I raised this issue in your Lordships’ House, the responsible Minister, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, responded to my criticism by accusing me of rewriting history because:

“There has been an absolute tsunami of transparency. My right honourable friend Francis Maude has been frightening the life out of Whitehall and his ministerial colleagues by the way he has been forcing through transparency”.—[Official Report, 10/10/11; col. 1455.]

That is perhaps not the most fortunate choice of image for those of us who believe in the benefits of transparency but, more importantly, his response wrongly conflates the work on open data and on freedom of information. They are not the same. There is one critical distinction between them: the open data initiative, for all its considerable merits, is a top-down programme. The Government decide what data sets to release. In contrast, the Freedom of Information Act allows the citizen to decide what information they want to have, and then there is an established process that decides what should be released and what withheld.

Those are twin approaches to securing greater transparency and they ought to be complementary. However, there is an asymmetry in the Government's approach, with enthusiastic progress being made on open data while freedom of information has more or less stood still so far—in fact, in some key areas it is actually going backwards. We are a year and a half into the lifetime of this Government and so far they have done virtually nothing to extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act beyond the actions already set in train by the previous Government.

I have been criticising the Government about this for many months so, after all these criticisms, I was delighted to see just this week that an exchange in the other place suggested that the Government are at last consulting on extending the Freedom of Information Act to other organisations. I hope that those consultations will be followed by action in the near future, and another 18 months or so will not be allowed to pass before anything happens.

On its own this lack of progress to date would be disappointing, but what is worse is that two landmark Bills brought forward by this Government, both referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Elton, actively restrict the scope of the right of the citizen to secure information under the Freedom of Information Act. The Localism Bill envisages that a growing proportion of local authorities' functions will be carried out for them by other bodies under contract. As it stands, that will significantly weaken the right of the citizen to make freedom of information requests about those functions. I tried to help the Government to remedy what I hoped was an unintended consequence of their legislation by submitting amendments both in Committee and on Report, but all were rejected out of hand. As a result, far from increasing transparency as the coalition agreement promised, the Localism Bill decreases it.

That is not all. Under the Health and Social Care Bill, NHS work will be performed in future either by NHS bodies or by independent providers. Although the independent providers will not be directly subject to the Freedom of Information Act, they will be subject to a contractual obligation to co-operate with the commissioning bodies in answering freedom of information requests. So far, so good. However, the disclosure clause applies to information held on the commissioning body’s behalf,

“for the purposes of this Agreement”,

and the standard NHS contract goes nowhere near covering the full range of information currently available under the Freedom of Information Act from public authorities. It appears, for example, that any request for the provider’s correspondence with suppliers whose products have proved to be substandard are likely to be met with the response that this is held for the provider’s purposes, not the commissioning body’s, and therefore is not subject to disclosure.

It gets still worse. The shredding offence in Section 77 of the Freedom of Information Act applies when an authority or a member of the authority’s staff deliberately destroys, amends or conceals a record after it has been requested in order to prevent its disclosure, but if a contractor shreds a record in order to avoid having to pass it on to the commissioning body to answer an FOI request, the contractor commits no offence. Again, if a public authority claims that it does not hold requested information, the Information Commissioner can investigate whether this claim is true; but if a contractor claims that it does not hold particular information, there is no mechanism for validating that claim. The contractor would not be subject to the commissioner’s jurisdiction. In fairness to the Government, they have not ruled out addressing these issues; they have simply pushed them into the long grass, beyond post-legislative scrutiny of the Freedom of Information Act, and there is no guarantee at all that even then they will take action.

In the mean time, which may stretch on for years, citizens will be denied access to information that they currently have about areas of potentially great concern to them, covering all the range of local authority services and what could turn out to be matters of life and death in the NHS.

In conclusion, the report card on this Government’s commitment to transparency and information is mixed. Where they remain in control of the data released to the people they serve, the commitment should be applauded. However, where the citizen is more in control, then this Government have been pedalling backwards in crucial areas. Sadly and regrettably, this tarnishes their record.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Warsi]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Elton for tabling this debate, which has proved to be wide-ranging. I also thank the other noble Lords who have made contributions today, raising important points, challenges and even kind plaudits. This is a timely debate because we are at an important milestone in our journey towards transparency and open data. I will briefly remind noble Lords of the background to this agenda and then give a quick round-up of progress to date. I will then deal with some of the specific points raised in the debate and cast a forward look towards the Government’s ambitions for transparency, which will be set out in a White Paper to be published in the spring.

In opposition we developed plans for a more open way of doing government. We envisaged a time when people knew that they could easily and quickly find out: which parts of government and which initiatives cost what, whether on a regional or national basis; who in government, whether a civil servant or a special adviser, did what and what they were being paid; which government contracts were coming up, and so on. We had a vision that people could choose public service provision using the same customer feedback techniques that so many of us are now used to when, for example, researching hotel options or flights on TripAdvisor, or shopping on Amazon.

The noble Lord, Lord Elton, gave the example of the Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery, which reported that mortality in coronary surgery had fallen by a fifth over five years. The professional body attributed this result to the public reporting of outcomes. We are not just talking about cost accountability; we are talking about data that save lives through the spread and adoption of best practice. As I said, it is a journey. Open data are the means and open government is the end.

Since the election we have ensured that we progress on this journey at great speed. In May of last year, just two weeks into the coalition Government, the Prime Minister sent a letter to all Secretaries of State, setting out the Government’s specific commitments on transparency. Much of the data that we released initially were about Whitehall, Westminster, people and money. However, important though this is, the example of cardio surgery shows vividly that there is more to open data and transparency than accountability. Following the success of the previous year’s data releases, on 7 July 2011 the Prime Minister publicly set out a second series of further open data commitments, targeting key public services, including health, education, criminal justice, transport and more detailed government financial information.

Today we have an astonishing amount of data on data.gov.uk, with over 7,500 data sets, more than any other comparable transparency service in the world. Much of this is big, complex and not necessarily accessible to the public. In many cases it is used by the professionals, whether that is the surgeons I described earlier or local authority commissioners, NHS managers, school authorities or welfare services.

We are also seeing data being repackaged and released for citizens to use. For example, FixMyStreet helps users to find the right telephone number or form to report local problems, ranging from dog fouling to broken street lights to pot holes. Since its launch, FixMyStreet has received more than 90,000 citizen reports. The website police.uk allows users to use offences reported in their locality by entering a street name or a postcode. It includes a range of offences such as theft, shoplifting and criminal damage and has received more than 430 million hits since its launch. By May of next year this website will show what has happened after a crime has been reported to the police and you will be able to track that crime’s progress through the courts.

We can also use public data to build economic value, stimulating innovation and enterprise in the UK’s knowledge economy. A growing market place has already sprung up in the health sector as a result of open data and transparency. Companies such as Dr Foster and CHKS are at the front of this growing industry with an estimated total value of around £50 million per annum. Estimates of the total potential growth contribution of open data-based markets vary from about £16 billion per annum to about £90 billion per annum.

The Chancellor’s and Business Secretary’s growth review on 29 November will contain a series of commitments to liberate new data to support enterprise and growth in sectors as diverse as life sciences and digital technologies. In addition, a public data corporation will bring together data from government bodies such as HM Land Registry, the Met Office and Ordnance Survey into one organisation, providing easily accessible public information as well as driving further efficiency in the delivery of public services.

I will now respond to some of the specific issues raised by noble Lords in this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Elton, raised the issue of the recommendations of the O’Hara report and the outcome of the open data and public data corporation consultations. These issues are being seriously considered and are broadly welcomed by the Government. We are positive about the specific recommendations and we will respond in a White Paper, which is due to be published in spring.

In relation to international aid, the Government believe that greater aid transparency is essential to efforts to improve results from development to co- operation worldwide. The Secretary of State will be seeking agreement by donors to implement the aid information standard developed under the UK-led International Aid Transparency Initiative.

A question was raised in relation to EU-level action to improve transparency in the extractive sector to match the standards being set in the UK. The Government are supportive of that.

My noble friend Lady Benjamin raised an extremely valid point. It is amazing to see how shining a light on the decisions that people make can have a positive impact on behaviour, including behaviour around the employment and engagement of people from diverse backgrounds. I will write to her in relation to the specific amendment that she proposes.

The noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, raised yet more benefits of a drive towards transparency and data release. I will ensure that his comments are seriously considered.

I welcome the comments of my noble friend Lord Gold and congratulate him on a both humorous and thought-provoking maiden speech. His work for the Conservative Party is hugely appreciated; he brings much wisdom, calmness and sound judgment to his role as chairman of the Conservative Party disciplinary committee.

I am sure that my noble friend listened carefully to the substance and style of this morning’s contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Prescott. I am disappointed that the noble Lord feels that disclosure has been somewhat political; the public have a right to know and the Government are committed to openness. He raised a specific question about the level of £500, which was established as a minimum requirement for departments to release information. DCLG, in line with its past releases, chose to release information on transactions lower than £500. The point that the noble Lord made about the casino dinner was released in response to a Parliamentary Question to DCLG, which was answered factually. Sir Gus O’Donnell has received a letter from the noble Lord, and DCLG will respond directly to him in the next couple of days.

I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Wills, is encouraged by the Government’s consultation on extending the Freedom of Information Act. The Government have introduced provisions in the Protection of Freedoms Bill to extend the Freedom of Information Act to companies wholly owned by multiple public authorities, whereas currently the Act applies only to companies wholly owned by a single public authority. This will bring more than 100 more bodies within the scope of the Act. We are not stopping there. We are currently consulting on the possible inclusion of more than 200 bodies within the scope of the Freedom of Information Act, on the basis that they provide functions of a public nature—these include harbour authorities, exam boards, the Local Government Group and the NHS Confederation, to name but a few.

[Lord Wills]

Before the Minister leaves that point, can she answer the question asked by my noble friend Lord Hunt about when the Government will take action on the consultation that she has just mentioned?

[Baroness Warsi]

The Government’s recent open data consultation consulted on an extension to the types of organisations to which the open data policy could apply. The Freedom of Information Act will also be subject to post-legislative scrutiny to see how it is working in practice. Further policy in this area will be developed. At this stage I do not have a specific timeframe, but I can write to the noble Lord once I have further information.

My noble friend Lady Byford asked some important questions about how what we are trying to achieve appears to be hindered by how we achieve it. The Government are committed to achieving the very benefits that she highlights and will give serious consideration to the challenges she raised, which could stand in the way of those benefits. She also raised an important point in relation to privacy, and I can assure the noble Baroness that we will not extend transparency at the expense of privacy. Personal data will be handled in accordance with the provisions of the Data Protection Act.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, raised some important points about politicians. All politicians, all of us who are in the public sphere, must be committed to the very basis and essence of this agenda; otherwise, we will be accused of hypocrisy, not just by each other across these Benches but by the public. I can assure him that all those in this Government are committed to that very basis of transparency and openness. Our goal is for participation and engagement—