House of Lords Reform Bill [HL]

Lord Beith Excerpts

Friday 3rd February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Low, even though I disagree with both his view on the role of democracy in the House of Lords and the picture he paints of what might be the necessary consequences of having more than one elected body in the country fulfilling different purposes. We have many elected bodies in this country, including local authorities. Their existence does not destroy the accountability of the House of Commons for those things for which it has responsibility.

I am very glad that we have the opportunity to discuss this topic today. That is our debt to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. I should make clear that I am a member of the Lord Speaker’s Committee on the Size of the House, which the noble Lord, Lord Low, mentioned, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Burns. The task of that committee is to consider whether there are ways in which the size of the House could be reduced for which widespread agreement could be secured and which could be brought in relatively quickly. I commend to Peers the short consultation paper that the committee has produced, inviting them to give their views if they would like to do so. The Burns committee is not about fundamental reform of the second Chamber, such as the creation of a predominantly elected Chamber. It neither precludes nor advances such a change.

Fundamental reform was in the 2010 election manifesto of all three parties and the Bill to bring in a predominantly elected second Chamber received a Second Reading in the Commons with a majority of 338—that is on a scale comparable to the Article 50 vote on Monday. But that Bill was blocked from further progress by a minority of Tory MPs who were totally opposed to any elected second Chamber and who hold views similar to those of the noble Lord, Lord Norton, and by the Labour leadership, who were committed to reform but unwilling to support any timetable for the Bill, without which it could not be carried through.

We are now in a new situation. It would be an extraordinarily optimistic person who thought that we could get through legislation on Lords reform in a Parliament which will be overwhelmed by the vast corpus of primary and secondary legislation that will be involved in leaving the European Union. Perhaps the noble Baroness shares the tendency to political optimism which is often a characteristic of Liberal Democrats.

Her Bill has many similarities with the coalition’s proposals and with Liberal Democrat policy. It provides for what we regard as the essential ingredient of democracy while recognising that the second Chamber should be elected on a different basis from the Commons and on a different timescale. However, retaining all existing Peers except hereditaries as non-voting Members outnumbering the voting Members would produce a very strange assembly with obvious tensions. The noble Baroness may be making a massive concession before the process of negotiation has even begun in order to get turkeys to vote for Christmas.

However, the House of Lords will change in this Parliament, despite the impossibility of major Lords reform going through. It will change because of the repeal Bill—which I refuse to call “great”. In any case, it is not a repeal Bill but a re-enactment Bill. I do not remember that the great Reform Bill was ever called “great” until after it had been passed—and some of its opponents probably still did not call it that.

The task facing both Houses, but especially the Lords, is massive. A huge area of law will be covered by statutory instruments and Henry VIII clauses, many of which will not have been discussed in the Commons. Transfer of EU law cannot be achieved without numerous consequential changes, with many matters of policy dealt with in secondary legislation. Alongside that problem, Governments will continue from time to time to threaten dire consequences for the Lords if this House causes the Executive any serious difficulty or inconvenience. These range from the various Strathclyde proposals to remove powers—on the shelf at least for the time being—right through to the creation of a large number of new Peers to give one party a majority, or even to abolition.

All this is extraordinary, given the resistance to reform. It must mean something. What are we otherwise to understand from some of the language used whenever the Lords threatens to exercise its ability to send a matter back to the Commons? Sir William Cash said in the debate in the Commons on Monday:

“If the House of Lords were to attempt to stand in the way … it would be committing political suicide”.—[Official Report, Commons, 31/1/17; col. 838.]


Quite what that political suicide consists of he did not make clear, but the language was not that different from the initial response of Ministers to the Strathclyde proposals when they were first published—even though there was some welcome pulling-back by the Leader of the House shortly afterwards.

The threats are constantly used and they come, extraordinarily, from those who we assume are not in favour of fundamental reform of the Lords but would be prepared to change it in circumstances where it posed them too much difficulty. The threats are used mainly when the House of Lords considers exercising its right and duty to ask the elected House to think again—usually about a specific subject within a Bill or statutory instrument. Such a role will be needed if some of the statutory instruments under the repeal Bill are used to make substantial policy changes which should be dealt with in primary legislation. If that happens, at some point the Lords will have to send something back to the Commons and demand that it be reconsidered.

It can be said that the Executive are getting the best of all worlds: a House of Lords which, if it causes Ministers any significant inconvenience or delay, is put on notice that it will be curtailed in unspecified ways. The fact that the House has no democratic legitimacy of any kind is used as the argument to prevent even the exercise of its traditional role of making the elected House think again. There is something ironic about the Executive threatening the Chamber with fundamental change when reform has been prevented by the two parties that have been in a position to bring it about and failed to do so.

In my view and my party’s view, it remains impossible to justify the continuance of appointment and patronage as the predominant means of deciding who serves in the second Chamber of the legislature. That one of the two Chambers of our Parliament should be created almost entirely by patronage and appointment is unconvincing to any audience of British schoolchildren, let alone to visitors from relatively new democracies who have struggled to get rid of unelected power. The second Chamber should have democratic validity: not a mandate like that of the House of Commons, based on the most recent general election, but a system which ensures that its legislators are chosen by the people and serve for longer periods than a single Parliament, and that the second Chamber operates within the powers conferred by the Parliament Acts, recognising the primacy of the Commons. This Bill is an attempt to achieve that objective. Although it has defects and problems that will be discussed, it is an opportunity to launch that discussion again.

Northern England: Opportunity and Productivity

Lord Beith Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, not least because only a few hours ago I was listening to him on the radio asking searching questions about the philosophy of Nietzsche. I thought it was going to be a sharp change of gear but actually he brought some of the same broad perspective to his very enjoyable speech today.

I welcome this report and the suggestions it makes. I want to look at it alongside another valuable report—the North East Chamber of Commerce’s manifesto for the year ahead. I pick out one thing initially from the latter report: dismay at the failure to make progress on the devolution deal for the north-east of England. You might think that where every local authority in the region has Labour leadership they would manage to agree with each other and make progress, but no such thing has happened. They disagree with each other and the Government have not been helpful either. I would like to see the Labour Party get its act together and start to reach agreement on the devolution process and the Government to stop making as a precondition of progress on devolution the creation of an elected mayor, which is not a relevant concept for this kind of region. The two sides should now get together and start making some progress.

However, there is a lot more we need in the north-east of England. Sometimes when people from my part of the world hear debates about the north they feel that quite a lot of it is about the Midlands, rather than areas which are to the north of much of Scotland and feel that sense of remoteness as well. We have a superb higher education sector in the north-east of England but there is also a large skill shortage, which the IPPR report points out. We therefore need to strengthen both our further education sector and access to it, which is very difficult given the large distances involved in much of our region. In my home town of Berwick, for example, it is no longer possible—because the Labour council would not agree to it—to have support for young people going to further education colleges in Newcastle. The only feasible way to do that is to go by train. Lots of people are denied the access that would improve their skills and give them opportunities in the labour market. As the IPPR report identifies, partly as a consequence of this we are short on the knowledge-based industries and the rate of progress and expansion of knowledge-based industries is slower in the north-east than nationally and the skill shortage must be part of that.

Of course, there are infrastructure improvements we want to see. I spent a lot of my time in the Commons arguing for dualling of the A1 and I am still arguing for it because progress even on what was agreed under the coalition is still slow. When we hear talk of HS2 we are actually more interested in what happens to the east coast main line and increased capacity and improved reliability on it. There are many infrastructure decisions which, as other noble Lords have pointed out, would make a huge difference to our potential in the region.

Brexit features in both reports and both sound loud warning bells about the dangers in a region where 58% of exports are to European Union countries. There is a particular fear about a potential period in which we may have left the European Union—and the Prime Minister has not shown herself interested in staying in the single market or the customs union so it may be on this basis—and still do not have new trade deals with other countries to fill any of the potential losses when exporters to Europe will find themselves faced with tariff barriers and non-tariff barriers, which are sometimes more significant than the tariff barriers for being able to export into a country or a whole region such as Europe. We really need a different approach.

[Lord Spicer (Con)]

I am terribly sorry that I did not hear the beginning of the noble Lord’s speech, but he is on about Brexit and the north-east.

[Lord Beith]

I apologise to the noble Lord, but he is depriving me of the opportunity to make a very important point, with which I want to conclude.

The process of dealing with Brexit requires communication between the Government and the north-east of England. In November, I read in the Evening Standard that the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, David Davis, had agreed with the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, that he would have a monthly face-to-face meeting both before and after the triggering of Article 50, so that the position of London could be understood at every stage of the negotiation. As far as I know, there is no such arrangement for the north-east of England. The IPPR report suggests a resilience committee to deal with that and open up that communication. In some way or other, the Government have to listen to the north-east’s special concerns and set up a mechanism to ensure that it is listened to throughout this process.

Lobbying (Transparency) Bill [HL]

Lord Beith Excerpts

Friday 9th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, I am glad we have the opportunity to debate this Bill because there is no doubt that the scale and opacity of lobbying is a problem. What is more in doubt is whether as presently constructed it will materially assist us in dealing with and regulating the problem. I have some reservations about it and some suggestions on what to include in it which might do more to assist us than merely extending the register on a very large scale, as the Bill proposes. Indeed, I fear that the Bill could be crushed under its own weight because of the sheer number of people who would be drawn in to the definition of a lobbyist. There are people about whom there is no doubt that if they raise a matter with public officials, they are doing so on behalf of the organisation they work for, but the net would be very wide. It would include the garage manager who calls the Environment Agency because he wants a bit more time to comply with the requirements that have been set or the teacher who writes not to her own Member of Parliament but to the Secretary of State for Education to say that the new curriculum proposals are extremely unhelpful. A huge range of people would be caught in that they would be required to be registered, but it would not really get us very far.

Although I can see the underlying logic of asking why people who are commercial lobbyists working for several different interests should be registered while in-house lobbyists are not, at least with the latter you know who they are lobbying for. We know that they are people working for an organisation and are likely to advance its interests using whatever opportunities they have. So the question is: how can we make sure that the process people are engaged in when they are lobbying is more transparent than it has been in the past? It is on that area that the Bill could more usefully concentrate.

So far as commercial lobbyists are concerned, we would be in a better position if we knew more about their sources of finance; that is, if we knew how just much money companies are paying commercial lobbyists to lobby on their behalf. The fact that under the register system at the moment a firm can declare no clients at all seems suspicious. If there were further requirements for financial declaration, the question of who is paying the piper could be asked more effectively. That is an area in which commercial lobbying could be addressed by improvements in the legislation.

On the wider range of the Bill, again, rather than looking to alter the register, why do we not improve the information that is available about the lobbying that is taking place? Meetings can be covered by very brief and insufficient descriptions such as, “Defence matters are being discussed”. That could be anything from the potential threat on the eastern borders of NATO’s territory to the precise details of the next warship order—if there ever is a next warship order—that the department is going to place. Even in areas where there are not the same confidentiality requirements as might be imposed in defence, if the matter being discussed is “aviation” or “the railway industry”, that is not enough to provide an explanation of what lobbying is taking place. It would be helpful if all these statements could be gathered together on the government website and that was searchable. That would be a distinct improvement on the current arrangements, and I ask the Minister to look at this.

Whose meetings should be involved? I refer back to what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. Meetings with special advisers are clearly sought after by lobbying organisations to press their case because they play a crucial role. It is unimaginable that they should continue to be left out of the process. Meetings with special advisers therefore ought to be included. Noble Lords will recall that before my time here the House agreed to that, and an amendment to that effect was removed in the Commons in the course of the exchanges between the Houses on that Bill. It is something that we ought to return to. There is a series of quite specific things which could gather up the lobbying that is taking place more effectively than trying to impose a regime right across the activities of the entire commercial and public sectors. That would be a huge task.

Several comments have been made about the 2014 legislation. I am in favour of post-legislative scrutiny. It is important that there should be some scrutiny of that legislation. After all, an awful lot of things were said at the time not only about the lobbying aspects of it, but even more about the impact of other parts. It would be a bit of a challenge for a committee to retain its non-partisan approach when carrying out such scrutiny, but the Bill before us today is a reminder that that Bill was only part of a process that needs to be continued. However, in continuing it we should concentrate on what will improve our knowledge of what is going on rather than simply create a mechanism so wide and involving so many people that a lot of money would be spent to very little outcome.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe]

My Lords, I am grateful to all Peers who have contributed to this very interesting debate, and I will endeavour to answer as many of the questions they have raised as I can. I start with the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, who is opposed to the Bill. However, having heard him and then the Minister’s response, I rather wish that he was back in government. There is a balance to be struck. Often my Front Bench say to me that I am too nice to people. However, when I hear the Government respond in the way they have, I look for that little bit of anger inside me that rarely comes to the fore. As I said, there is obviously a balance to be struck, but almost every speaker today has said that the existing law is not working and is not fit for purpose—it is not producing anything.

The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, talked about the burden that the Bill would impose. I conceded that there would be an added burden, but I responded to that in terms of my practical experience of life and talked about how, by using technology—I underline technology very much, and my noble friend Lord Howarth picked up on that too—we can do things much faster than we ever did before without placing a great burden on people.

Several noble Lords spoke about the diaries and I will come back to that. When I read through the previous debate on this matter, I was rather attracted to the concept of diaries being developed and of them being at the heart of this issue. However, the more work that I have done—my noble friend Lady Hayter put her finger on this—the more I have seen that in many respects the diaries are not fit for purpose. That is especially the case when one learns that many Ministers keep two diaries—one for public presentation and the second for other activities that fall in the political field, where indeed lobbyists turn up as well.

I freely concede that definitions are not easy, yet the Bill would broaden the definition of lobbying, making it significantly wider than it is at present. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, said that spads should be included. I believe that many more people beyond spads should also be included. For many years I have campaigned on alcohol issues and I speak to people at the middle levels of the Civil Service. The noble Lord said that they are the decision-makers. They do not take the decisions but, by God, do they have an influence on when the decisions are made. We need a register that covers the contingency, and it needs to be extended to take in the people at those middle levels right across the public service. They are very influential people indeed. Ministers come and go but many civil servants stay, and that must be borne in mind.

The noble Lord mentioned APPGs. We should have put those on the list to be covered and I regret that we overlooked that. If he would like to include that in an amendment, we would be prepared to look at it. If the noble Lord has any other specific issues that he would like to discuss with me, I am happy to accommodate him and to make changes. I am very much in the mode of trying to keep this moving forward seriously. When I look at what we have before us and what it is costing, I think it truly is a scandal. There has to be a change and very quickly. The Bill presents the alternative.

I am grateful for what was, as usual, an outstanding speech from my noble friend Lord Howarth and for his support. Like my noble friend Lady Kennedy, he highlighted the influence of lobbying across such a wide front. That is not just in the UK but worldwide. Capitalism is now running around the whole world. It is quite unaccountable in many areas and this legislation is an attempt to bring it to book.

My noble friend mentioned digital technology, which is very helpful. He also raised the issue of “commercial in confidence”, which is used in many instances to avoid answering the direct questions that come from parliamentarians. That should be brought to an end.

The noble Lord, Lord Beith, talked about the difficulty of definitions around the edge, and I do not deny that. However, I think he took it to the other extreme, and I am happy that he was corrected by other speakers.

Without a doubt, there are problems around websites. The noble Lord also raised the point about diaries, which I will come back to. The diaries are a step in the right direction but they do not provide all the information that we need to answer the kind of criticisms that we are getting.

The noble Lord, Lord Beith, talked about who should be involved. Again, I emphasise that we need to go way beyond those presently defined in the Act. There is a sensible point between when someone is lobbying and not lobbying and who is involved. I believe that that balance is provided in the legislation I am proposing. The noble Lord proposed post-legislative scrutiny as an alternative—

[Lord Beith]

Not an alternative.