Lord Borrie
Main Page: Lord Borrie (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Borrie
Lord Borrie
My Lords, we now come to the long list of bodies, listed alphabetically, that are scheduled in Schedule 1 for abolition. The council to which the amendment refers was only recently created by the Tribunal, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007. It is an advisory non-departmental public body sponsored by the Ministry of Justice. Its main functions are to keep the administrative justice system under review, indicate how the system might be made more accessible, more fair and more efficient and make any proposals needed for desirable change. It is a successor body to the Council on Tribunals set up in 1958 on the recommendation of the Franks committee. Sir Oliver Franks—later Lord Franks—was the chairman. It was called the Committee on Tribunals and Inquiries—an eminent body—to which I recall giving evidence, with others, from the Society of Labour Lawyers in 1957. The later Leggatt report of 2001, chaired by Lord Justice Leggatt, proposed not abolition—as this Government have—but to advocate a wider remit for the Council on Tribunals to focus particularly on the needs of users—or consumers, if you like—across the whole administrative justice landscape.
Those noble Lords who were here for the first Committee sitting may recall that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, intervened and made the point that the Council on Tribunals had,
“played a significant part in the development of administrative principles of good practice”.—[Official Report, 23/11/10; col. 1023.]
The noble and learned Lord went on to mention a number of areas, including welfare, fiscal disputes and many other kinds of disputes, which over the years have been dealt with by tribunals of all kinds. They have become famous for their work and have taken a greater and greater part of judicial work than ever before.
Following our Second Reading debate on 9 November, in which I queried the inclusion of the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council in Schedule 1, the Minister helpfully wrote to me a letter, dated 16 November, that was also placed in the House of Lords Library. In this letter the Minister agreed with me that the council and its predecessor body, the Council on Tribunals, had done a useful job, but went on to say that oversight of administrative justice policy was now a function of the Ministry of Justice. A body like this council—or the council as extended by the 2007 Act—should continue to exist only if it was “needed to provide impartial advice”.
The purpose of bringing forth this amendment is to remove this council from the list of potential bodies to be abolished. My contention is that this body is still needed to provide impartial advice. The council and, for five decades, its predecessor, the Council on Tribunals, invariably consisted of judges, practitioners, academics and others from various backgrounds, acting, of course—because this is the only basis on which they would belong to such a council—on a part-time basis. The Government and the relevant department—the Lord Chancellor’s Department, later the Ministry of Justice—had the benefit of a number of people with knowledge of the workings of tribunals, which could go to the work of the Council on Tribunals, be published in its specific reports and its regular annual reports. Although I express an interest as a former academic, the academics who were appointed to the Council on Tribunals often had knowledge of foreign systems of law that helped to feed into and inform the discussions of the Council.
Full-time civil servants within the Ministry of Justice have their value and place. They are important people. I certainly do not wish to denigrate them. However, full-time civil servants cannot replicate the breadth of knowledge and empirical experience that is so useful when an advisory body like this is called in to assist. I believe its abolition would be a serious loss. I beg to move.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I am sure that the proceedings of this House will be widely studied. I am certain that the Government want to take note of all that is said in the debates on this Bill. But I return to my previous comment to the noble Lord, Lord Borrie, and hope that he will withdraw his amendment.
Lord Borrie
My Lords, in this debate there has been not a single person who has given support in any way to the Minister’s propositions. Not a single person in this debate, which has gone on for an hour and a quarter, has done other than sit on their hands or support the amendment, which I am glad I put forward. It is normal for someone in my position, who is summing up and is to determine whether there should be a vote or not, to give some mention of his supporters. I have been most fortunate because support has come from the experienced noble Lord, Lord Newton, a former chairman of the council, from the noble and learned Lords, Lord Lloyd of Berwick and Lord Howe of Aberavon, my noble and learned friend Lady Scotland, and from the noble Lord, Lord Pannick.
The second thing that someone in my position normally does is say what a good debate we have had. But we have not had a good debate because the only propositions on the other side were from the Minister, who I am bound to say, on the same lines as the noble Lord, Lord Newton, was a great disappointment. He stuck closely to the brief, which clearly had been prepared long before this debate began. There is nothing necessarily wrong in doing that in part; but, surely, after all the points that have been made in favour of this amendment from all sides of the House, there could have been some give—some notion that, instead of just saying, “This body has outlived its usefulness; all its work can now be done by civil servants in the Ministry of Justice”, something positive could be given. Nothing was given. My view is that we should go to a vote on this amendment and I appeal to noble Lords from all sides of the House to support the view that this body should be removed from the list of bodies to be abolished in Schedule 1.