House of Commons
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Oral Answers to Questions
(14 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)
1. What steps he is taking to improve rates of early detection of cancer.
The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Andrew Lansley)
Late detection of cancer is one of several reasons why our cancer survival rates are below the European average. That is why we will focus on improving those outcomes and achieving better awareness of the signs and symptoms of cancer. These aims will be part of our future cancer strategy.
Lilian Greenwood
Over half the men who receive a testing kit under the national bowel cancer screening programme throw it away. What action is the Secretary of State taking to improve the take-up of screening, particularly by men, and what provision has he made within the NHS budget for the extra costs of increased take-up?
Mr Lansley
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that question, and I have had the privilege of twice visiting the national bowel cancer screening programme at St Cross hospital in Rugby—it looks after people in parts of the midlands and the north-west—and indeed, I have visited the Preston royal infirmary, which deals with bowel cancer screening follow-up. As I said in my first reply, one of the things we aim to do is to increase awareness of the signs and symptoms of cancer. It is unfortunate that, as a recent study established, only 30% of the public had real awareness of what the symptoms of cancer would be, beyond a lump or a swelling. We have very high rates of bowel cancer, so it will be part of our future cancer strategy to increase awareness of those symptoms and to encourage men in particular to follow up on them.
Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)
The recent inquiry of the all-party parliamentary cancer group into cancer and equalities heard expert evidence to suggest that if people can survive the first year of cancer, their chances of surviving for five years are almost identical to the chances in the rest of Europe. Does the Secretary of State therefore believe that a one-year survival indicator is a good idea both for encouraging early diagnosis and for matching the survival rates of the best in Europe?
Mr Lansley
My hon. Friend makes an extremely good point. When we set out proposals for an outcomes framework, I hope that he and others will respond, because that is one of the ways in which we can best identify how late detection of cancer is leading to very poor levels of survival to one year. I hope that we can think about that as one of the quality indicators that we shall establish.
Diana R. Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
I welcome the Secretary of State to his new position and wish him well in his role. I understand that he is keeping the two-week target for seeing a cancer specialist, but abandoning the work that the Labour Government did on the one-week target for access to diagnostic testing. Professor Mike Richards stated in the annual cancer reform strategy that improving GP access to diagnostic tests is essential to the drive for early diagnosis of cancer. Can the Secretary of State spell out some of his current thinking on what the alternative would be if we no longer have the one-week target?
Mr Lansley
Let me make it clear to the hon. Lady and the House that only 40% of those diagnosed with cancer had actually gone through the two-week wait. Establishing a better awareness of symptoms and earlier presentation across the board is, as we have been discussing, important to achieve. I am afraid that the hon. Lady is wrong: I have not said that we are abandoning any of the cancer waiting-time targets at the moment, but that we have to be clear about what generally constitutes quality. For example, seeing a cancer specialist without having had prior diagnosis is often pointless, whereas getting early diagnosis is often a serious indicator of quality.
Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)
2. What assessment he has made of the effects on NHS waiting times of NHS targets in the last 10 years.
The Minister of State, Department of Health (Mr Simon Burns)
Targets focused the NHS on bringing down waiting times, but also put process above clinical judgment and patient choice. Changing the way in which we manage waiting times will empower both patients and clinicians. NHS targets have dictated clinical priorities and harmed patient care. Focusing on long waits has meant less progress on reducing average waits than could otherwise have been achieved.
Derek Twigg
I noticed that in his answer the Minister did not say that any assessments had taken place. How many representations has he received from clinicians, people working in the NHS and the public demanding the removal of the 18-week target, for instance? Targeting is about making people better and getting them seen more quickly, so is not the real reason for dropping targets the fact that the Minister wants to undermine the NHS again?
Mr Burns
I am sorry, but the hon. Gentleman, for whom I have considerable respect, is just plain wrong. There have been a number of representations over the last seven weeks or so. In addition, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and his shadow team went round the country over the past five years, they were constantly told by GPs and clinicians from hospital to hospital that politically motivated targets were distorting clinical decisions and patient care.
Mr Stephen Dorrell (Charnwood) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that by far the most important way of improving the service delivered by the NHS is to focus on the three key indicators of clinical outcomes, patient experience and value for money? Can he assure the House that the Government will pursue those, particularly against the background of increasingly scarce resources, in order to deliver the objective we all have: a better-quality NHS?
Mr Burns
I am extremely grateful to my right hon. Friend, who is absolutely right, and I can give him the categorical assurances he is seeking, but I would also like to add one more: we need information to empower patients, because if patients are going to be at the heart of the NHS they must have the information to take the decisions that are important to their health care.
Mr Speaker
Order. May I gently ask the Minister to face the House? I am sure that Opposition Members will want to see his face.
Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)
We do, Mr Speaker, very much; we want to see him squirm.
First, let me say that we welcome the Minister back to the Department of Health; he was a Minister in the Department 13 years ago. As I have said before, we trust that he finds the NHS in much better condition than when he left office. Last week we had an independent verdict on those 13 years. The independent and respected Commonwealth Fund said that the NHS was one of the best health care systems in the world, and, indeed, that it was top on efficiency: a ringing endorsement of Labour’s stewardship of the national health service. That verdict reflects the huge progress on waiting times that has been made over those 13 years. So does not the abolition of the 18-week target, which the Minister announced last week, put all that progress at risk? Will he today give us a straight answer to this question: can he guarantee that waiting times will not rise, and that patients will still be treated within 18 weeks?
Mr Burns
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for the kind comments at the beginning of his remarks; things went downhill thereafter, but that is politics.
The right hon. Gentleman needs to understand that patients have to come first in a national health service, and the trouble with the approach he took was that he wanted politicians and bureaucrats to micro-manage it from the top down, rather than having a bottom-up system that listened to local people. One of the key aims is to ensure that people get the finest and best treatment possible, and I am afraid that his approach—a straitjacket of targets in certain areas—did not work then, and will not work now.
Andy Burnham
I shall take that as a no, because the Minister did not answer the question; he could not give that guarantee. He says that we must put people and patients first, yet at a stroke he has taken power away from patients and handed it back to the system, turning the clock back to the bad old days of the Tory NHS. Let me quote some comments by Jill Watts, chair of the NHS Partners Network, which represents private providers. In the Financial Times on 18 May, she is reported as saying the following about the loss of targets:
“Waiting times will go up and if people want a procedure they have a choice: they can wait or they can look to pay”.
Is that not always the Tory choice on the NHS: wait or pay?
Mr Burns
The right hon. Gentleman is not right. We have not taken that attitude; we never have taken that attitude. We want to have a system whereby the health service is not in a straitjacket of targets that disrupt and distort clinical decisions. We want to empower clinicians and GPs to take decisions about who should be treated when according to their clinical judgment.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
3. If he will take steps to increase the number of dentists providing NHS services in Chesterfield; and if he will make a statement.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Anne Milton)
I assure the hon. Gentleman that the Government have committed to improving access to NHS dentistry, and the introduction of the new dental contract, focusing on achieving good dental health and increasing access to NHS dentistry, will be vital.
Toby Perkins
I thank the hon. Lady for her response. The Stubbing Road medical centre is a brand-new building in Chesterfield providing doctor services to people who are among the most deprived in Derbyshire. One floor there was also meant to provide dental services, but in the last week we have been told that that might not—indeed, that it will not—go ahead, although the primary care trust is paying the rent on the building and its new suite. Can the hon. Lady assure the people in the Rother ward who have been waiting so long for those services that the guarantee that everyone in Chesterfield will have access to an NHS dentist by March 2011 will remain in place?
Anne Milton
I cannot comment on the specific circumstances, but I would be happy to meet the hon. Gentleman if he would like. I must point out to him, however, that the number of people now seeing an NHS dentist remains lower than when the previous Government introduced the new contract in 2006. He mentions children, but there is no doubt that the inequalities in the oral health of children are scandalous.
Mr Speaker
Order. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will apply the ingenuity required to stay within the terms of a question relating to Chesterfield.
Sir Paul Beresford
Thank you, Mr Speaker. Given my declared interest, it was too great a temptation not to contribute.
Does my hon. Friend not agree that for dentists, the biggest disincentive to providing an NHS service in Chesterfield—and, in fact, in the rest of England too—is the contract that she just mentioned, with its targets, its “units of dental activity”, its clawbacks and so on? Will she ensure that any new system that she introduces enables and encourages dentists to offer a choice between national health and private dentistry, thus encouraging those who have opted out to opt back in again?
Anne Milton
I thank my hon. Friend for his question—he speaks eloquently and with much knowledge on this subject—and for highlighting the perverse incentives in the contract. It is absolutely critical that we take those out of any new contract.
Dr Daniel Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)
4. What steps he plans to take to implement the Government’s proposals to end the target culture in the NHS.
The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Andrew Lansley)
On Monday 21 June I published a revision to the NHS operating framework in which I removed the central management of three process targets that had no clinical justification. We will carry on focusing on quality and outcomes, getting rid of top-down process targets.
Dr Poulter
Does my right hon. Friend agree that meeting targets does not necessarily mean improving health care, and that the last Government were far too focused on the process of health care, rather than on improving the patient experience?
Mr Lansley
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I was here just a few weeks ago, announcing a public inquiry into the events at Stafford general hospital. Of course, in that hospital the adherence to ticking the box on the four-hour target was one of the things that contributed to the most appalling care of patients. We have to focus on delivering proper care for patients—the right treatment at the right time in the right place—and delivering the best outcomes for them. We will focus on that—on quality—not on top-down process targets.
Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)
Is it really true that the coalition Government are going to scrap the right for people to see their GP within 48 hours? If so, will the Secretary of State publicise that, so people know that the right has been reduced? If it is true, is he not just axing public service quality under the pretence of dealing with so-called bureaucracy?
Mr Lansley
It is astonishing—the Labour Government spent money trying to achieve the GP access target, and the hon. Gentleman might at least have recognised that the latest data, published two or three weeks ago, show that public satisfaction with access to their GPs, and the things that the Labour Government had been paying for, had actually gone down. A consequence of the 48-hour access target was that patients were unable to access their GPs more than 48 hours in advance. Is it not reasonable to expect GPs to be able to manage their own services in order to deliver better patient experience and outcomes across the board? I think we can reasonably expect that.
Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)
It has been reported today that historically speaking, as a result of targets, an obstetrician in a hospital could herself have a caesarean section but then have to refuse one to a patient, because of the pressures that targets put on the local NHS trust. Can the Secretary of State give us an assurance that any woman in the NHS who needs a caesarean section will have one, and that no targets will be imposed?
Mr Lansley
My hon. Friend is referring to World Health Organisation targets, which have not in themselves been applied within the NHS, and it certainly would not be my intention to impose such targets. I agree with the implication of her question, which is that a woman who needs a caesarean section should have access to one. I am also well aware that when a woman does not require a caesarean section we should seek, through a process of discussion and providing information, to avoid that wherever possible. Birth should be considered a normal event, rather than being subject to excessive medicalisation.
Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)
5. What his most recent assessment is of the adequacy of the level of support provided for people with low vision.
The Minister of State, Department of Health (Mr Paul Burstow)
It is for primary care trusts and local authority social services departments to make decisions on commissioning, having assessed the evidence and needs in their areas, and taking account of standards and best practice.
Mrs Moon
Is the Minister aware of the excellent scheme in Wales that allows people with low vision to refer themselves to a high street optician or consulting ophthalmologist, and thus to have almost immediate access to the aids and support that they need? More than 87% of people are seen within two weeks under that scheme, whereas some areas in England have an 18-month waiting list, so will he examine the scheme to see whether it can be introduced in England?
Mr Burstow
I am grateful for that question. Obviously, the devolved Administrations are responsible for health care in their own areas, so we have an opportunity to learn lessons from each other. This Government will examine the evaluation of the scheme that the Welsh Administration are undertaking to see whether it provides any lessons for our system.
Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
Will the Minister say whether the money provided by the primary care trust is ring-fenced? Will he ensure that the time-sensitive nature of such conditions, especially wet and dry macular degeneration, will be taken into account across all the English PCTs?
Mr Burstow
We need to achieve that not by ring-fencing budgets but by making sure that clinicians can deliver clinically evidence-based practice so that those with age-related macular degeneration receive the treatments that they need. Ring-fencing is not the way to go; we need to ensure that local commissioners have access to the right evidence, are empowered by patients and listen to clinicians, in order to deliver the right services.
Mary Macleod (Brentford and Isleworth) (Con)
6. What steps he plans to take to increase the level of expertise among cancer surgeons.
The Minister of State, Department of Health (Mr Paul Burstow)
I thank the hon. Lady for her question—to which the answer is that we recognise the crucial importance of high-quality surgery in improving outcomes for cancer patients. Since 2003, cancer-related surgical training programmes have been developed when new technologies and procedures have proved that patients would benefit from their introduction. Through the national cancer action team we are supporting training in laparoscopic surgical procedures for colorectal cancer, and we will be introducing surgical training for lower rectal cancer.
Mary Macleod
As procedures for cancer surgery, including robotic surgery, are getting more and more complex, does my hon. Friend feel that there is a case for an earlier selection of specialism for surgeons, to ensure that the NHS maintains its reputation for clinical expertise and to influence positively cancer survival rates in the United Kingdom?
Mr Burstow
As I said in my original answer, we recognise the crucial importance of high-quality surgery. The hon. Lady has made the important point that we must equip our surgeons with the right skills to carry out highly complex and specialist procedures. That means that we must deliver specialised training for that purpose to our existing work force.
Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)
Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that the 18% fall in the breast cancer rate between 1998 and 2008 was due not only to the expertise of cancer surgeons but to the target culture to which he is so opposed? What would he say to the 3,500 women who, because of those targets, did not die in 2008?
Mr Burstow
I imagine that that would be an answer the previous Government should be giving, and they should be sorry. [Hon. Members: “What?”] The reality is that this Government are clear that we are sticking with the targets in relation to cancer, but we are also clear that we need to raise awareness of the signs and symptoms of cancer, and ensure that people present themselves at an earlier stage and get access to the appropriate diagnosis, so that they get the right treatment.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
7. What steps he is taking to encourage healthy eating.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Anne Milton)
I thank the hon. Lady for her question. May I correct the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner), who suggested from a sedentary position that one of us might be getting the sack, by saying that I doubt it, because it is the previous Government who have just got the sack? In answer to the hon. Lady’s question, I say that there is no doubt that anything that the Government do must have a strong evidence base. It is for individuals to take responsibility for their health, and that includes healthy eating. However, the Government can help people make better choices—for example, by providing information, advice and so on.
Kate Green
I am little disappointed in that answer. Maternal nutrition before and during pregnancy is essential to the birth of a healthy baby. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has shown that a healthy diet costs a minimum of £43 a week. A young woman on jobseeker’s allowance receives only £51.85 a week, so can the Minister explain what she will do to ensure that young women on such low incomes can choose a healthy diet?
Anne Milton
I am sorry that the hon. Lady was disappointed. Clearly, she does not feel that the Government should take a strong evidence-based approach to public health. I should point out to her that although life expectancy has increased, the gap between the rich and the poor has widened. If we look at the difference between spearhead areas and the country as a whole, we can see that the gap went up by 7% for men and 14% for women. We are determined to reverse that.
Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) (LD)
Will the Minister join me in condemning the vote in the European Parliament not to back the traffic light system of food labelling, which is the clearest way of communicating nutritional messages? That followed a lot of lobbying by companies such as PepsiCo, Tesco and Kellogg’s. What will she do in terms of speaking to European colleagues to get that important scheme back on the agenda?
Anne Milton
Again, the hon. Gentleman raises the point that anything we do must have a strong evidence base. We are considering a number of schemes at the moment. What is important is that people have the information on the pack of food that they buy, so that they can make good choices about what they eat.
Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)
Last week’s Budget scrapped the health in pregnancy grant, which helps all pregnant women to eat healthily in the final 12 weeks of their pregnancy. The previous week, the Government scrapped the free school meals pilot for 500,000 children, thrusting 50,000 children back under the poverty line. They have also scrapped free swimming for under-16s and pensioners just as the long summer holidays begin. Is that not the most extraordinary start for a Government who promised to rename the Department of Health the “Department of Public Health”? With so many broken promises in their first seven weeks, how can we trust a word that they say about public health?
Anne Milton
The hon. Lady and I have exchanged niceties in a slightly calmer atmosphere in another setting. I find it staggering that Opposition Members cannot understand that what matters is not what we spend but how effective that spending is. They simply cannot understand it. In fact, Labour has said that it would cut the NHS, whereas we have said that we will not. The sick must not pay for Labour’s debt crisis. We did not get us into this mess, but I would point out to the hon. Lady that everything that we do must be based on evidence. It is not what you spend, but what you spend it on, that matters.
Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)
8. What recent representations he has received on the new community hospital for Eltham; and if he will make a statement.
The Minister of State, Department of Health (Mr Simon Burns)
The Department of Health is in contact with strategic health authorities regarding ongoing community hospital programme funding. This includes contact with the London SHA for Eltham and Mottingham community hospital and other schemes in the region.
Clive Efford
I am grateful for that answer, as far as it went—but there is a great deal of expectation in the community in Eltham that that project will be delivered. It has been in the pipeline for quite some time and will provide 40 respite beds, diagnostics such as blood tests and X-rays and, I hope, dialysis at a local level, as well as a GP-led walk-in urgent care centre. May I urge the Minister to revisit the project, and when I ask a future question, to come back with a better answer?
Mr Burns
I am a bit perplexed by the hon. Gentleman’s comments, because I have answered the specific narrow question that he asked—but let me try to cheer him up, if I can. We understand that he has been a redoubtable campaigner for the hospital, and we support the principle of community hospitals. The Department, as the hon. Gentleman knows, allocated £4.58 million to help the community hospital in Eltham and has already given about £1.9 million to NHS Greenwich, the primary care trust, for it. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will not have to come back to me with another question, because I trust that I am now going to cheer him up: I can announce today that the balance of the money will be paid and made available during the current financial year.
Mr David Evennett (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on that announcement, which will bring considerable pleasure to people in south-east London. He is well aware that proposals are being made within our area of south-east London to reorganise health provision, which are causing considerable concern. Will he ensure that vital services are maintained in our area for patients?
Mr Burns
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. As he rightly says, I am aware of the situation. As he will be aware, we believe that local people, local clinicians and local GPs should have an input into any reconfiguration of health care provision. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said when he announced the changes to the criteria, there will be an assessment of whether they apply to the reconfiguration to which my hon. Friend refers. Once that has been done and decisions have been reached, we will be able to move forward in the proper way.
Jim McGovern (Dundee West) (Lab)
9. What plans his Department has for health warnings on labels of alcoholic drinks.
Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)
10. What plans his Department has for health warnings on labels of alcoholic drinks.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Anne Milton)
A public consultation on options for improving health information on the labels of alcoholic drinks closed on 31 May. The responses to that exercise are now being analysed, and we will set out our plans for next steps through announcements in the coming months.
Jim McGovern
I welcome all those on the Government Front Bench to their new posts. The tobacco health warning regime introduced by the previous Government has produced excellent results in improving the health of our citizens. Does the Minister believe that a parallel scheme for alcohol would achieve similar progress and benefits?
Anne Milton
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his warm words of welcome. It is important to note that sometimes such warnings are not transferrable between products. As he rightly says, there have been a number of initiatives on smoking that have, without doubt, had an impact on the number of people who smoke and the number who have given up. Whether those are transferrable to alcohol we do not yet know, but we will be looking at all the evidence available.
Nia Griffith
The Minister will be aware of a recent Alcohol Concern report that points out that a minimum alcohol price of 50p a unit would cost a moderate drinker only about 23p a week, but would reduce alcohol-related illness significantly, and would save the NHS millions. What discussions has she had with colleagues in other Departments about such a minimum price?
Anne Milton
We have had a number of conversations about all aspects of alcohol policy, and what to do about the 7% of hospital admissions that are due to alcohol and the £2.7 billion cost—some estimates put it much higher, at about £5 billion—to the NHS. Without doubt, we have to change the public’s relationship with alcohol. We are committed to a ban on selling below-cost alcohol, which is important—but it is also important not to disfranchise responsible drinkers, as plenty of people enjoy alcohol responsibly. What we have to do is stop irresponsible drinking and protect people’s health.
Mr Don Foster (Bath) (LD)
I thank the Minister for that answer. She will recognise the problems that binge drinking causes our health service, our police and our local communities. I am delighted that she has recognised that there has been an agreement to ban the sale of alcohol at below cost price, but will she assure us that the Government are taking this issue seriously, and that we will hear an early announcement?
Anne Milton
The hon. Gentleman is right; this is a cross-departmental issue. This is not just about health; it is important for local government as well. We need a multi-faceted approach. As I have said, we will look at all the evidence to see what works, and to make those changes not only in law and order, as he pointed out, but in people’s health.
Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)
There are cross-references between the labelling on alcohol and on other products, and the evidence clearly shows that with food labelling, the public find colour-coded, front-of-pack labelling far easier to understand. What has the Minister learned from that, and will her Department, with other Departments, seek an opt-out for retailers that want to continue, voluntarily, with front-of-pack colour-coding on their products?
Anne Milton
It is important not to pre-empt the consultation that has already gone on, and to collect all the evidence together. To find out the best method for getting that information to the public in a way that they find accessible, we have to look at what works.
Mr Dominic Raab (Esher and Walton) (Con)
11. What steps his Department is taking to increase participation by local people in NHS decision making.
The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Andrew Lansley)
I have stopped top-down reconfigurations where the NHS has not listened to local people. Our coalition agreement is clear that we will give patients more control over their own health care, and give patients and the public a stronger voice in the design of local health and care services.
Mr Raab
NHS managers have justified cuts in community hospitals in Walton, Cobham, Molesey and other parts of the country on efficiency grounds, but in 2009, because of targets, almost 1 million patients were discharged and then readmitted within 30 days, at a cost of £1.6 billion. What plans has the Secretary of State to strengthen local democratic control over community hospitals and the vital services that they provide?
Mr Lansley
My hon. Friend has raised an important issue. Let me make two points. First, we need to strengthen not only the local public and patient voice but the voices of GPs who are involved in commissioning, so that they can act on behalf of their patient population in commissioning the services, and design of services, that they need. Secondly, as I have made clear in the revision of the operating framework, we must look at results. When someone goes into hospital for treatment, we must consider not just their treatment in the hospital, but their subsequent rehabilitation and re-ablement. I believe that that will allow greater use of intermediate care beds in the way that my hon. Friend has described.
Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)
I thank the Secretary of State for agreeing to meet me—together with representatives of my local primary care trusts, local mums and midwives—to discuss maternity services in Salford. In the light of his new criteria for reconfigurations, will he confirm that he is prepared to reconsider the decision to close Salford’s maternity services, and to recognise the views of thousands of people throughout Salford and Eccles, including me, who opposed it at the time?
Mr Lansley
The right hon. Lady knows that we will meet to discuss the issue. However, as I said when I was in Greater Manchester, it is not for me to reconsider the application of the new criteria from 21 May. That is for local people to reconsider. It is for GPs, the public, local authorities and, indeed, PCTs in Salford and district to start thinking about what they consider to be viable and successful future services for mothers-to-be.
Mr Edward Timpson (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)
In helping local people to become more involved in NHS decision making, will my right hon. Friend agree to consider my Ambulance Response Times (Local Reporting) Bill, which received its Second Reading during the last Parliament? The Bill requires all ambulance trusts to publish local as well as regional response times and patient outcomes so that—as is already the case in Crewe and Nantwich—they have access to those details and can deliver better response times, with the help of local initiatives such as Community First Responders.
Paul Goggins (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)
12. What his policy is on maximum waiting times in accident and emergency departments; and if he will make a statement.
The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Andrew Lansley)
From April 2011, the accident and emergency four-hour waiting time standard will be replaced by a set of clinical quality standards, developed with clinicians, which will support quality care without the damaging distortion of the four-hour tick-box target. On the basis of clinical advice, I have immediately reduced the threshold for meeting the four-hour standard from 98% to 95%.
Paul Goggins
I am sure that the Secretary of State will want to join me in congratulating the staff at Wythenshawe hospital in my constituency. Last year 85,000 patients were seen in the accident and emergency department, 98% of them within four hours. Can the Secretary of State explain to my constituents why he has decided that this year 4,500 of those patients will not need to be seen within that time?
Mr Lansley
As I told the right hon. Gentleman, I made that decision on the basis of clinical advice. It was clear that the 98% standard was distorting clinical care for patients. There is no benefit for patients if, for the purpose of meeting a four-hour target, they are discharged inappropriately, transferred to wards when they have not been thoroughly looked after in the accident and emergency department, or indeed put in an observation ward for 48 hours, which is under the scrutiny of the accident and emergency department but ticks the box. None of that helps patients. I will focus on what is actually in the best interests of patients, and delivers the right outcomes for them.
Phil Wilson (Sedgefield) (Lab)
13. What assessment he has made of the effects on public health of plain packaging of cigarettes.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Anne Milton)
Evidence of the impact on public health of plain packaging of tobacco needs to be developed further, because no jurisdiction globally has yet introduced it. However, Australia will do so from 2012. We will monitor developments there with considerable interest.
Phil Wilson
Smoking costs the NHS £2.7 billion a year, six times the cost of a new hospital for north Tees and Hartlepool. In the north-east, approximately 10,000 children between the ages of 11 and 15 are smoking. We want all of them, not just half of them, to lead a fulfilled life. Will the Minister ensure that the assessment of plain packaging is expedited, so that we can be given an answer as soon as possible?
Anne Milton
The hon. Gentleman is right to raise the impact that smoking still has on the health of children in particular—I believe that 200,000 take up smoking each year. We still have 80,000 smoking-related deaths in this country. It is important to watch what happens in Australia and see where the evidence points for the future.
Vernon Coaker (Gedling) (Lab)
14. What his policy is on provision of healthcare services to those with autism.
The Minister of State, Department of Health (Mr Paul Burstow)
We are committed to addressing the health care needs of people with autism and are fully supportive of “Fulfilling and rewarding lives: the strategy for adults with autism in England”. Consultation on statutory guidance for health and social care bodies to support the strategy will begin shortly.
Vernon Coaker
May I thank the Minister for that reply? We have all been inspired by the parents of children with autism. One thing that they depend on perhaps more than anything is respite care. That provision has improved in the past few years, but with the pressure on budgets, will the Minister do all he can to ensure that respite care does not become an easy target for cuts, given the importance of the service to parents of children with autism?
Mr Burstow
I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that question. He is right; carers are a valuable and valued resource. They make an incredible difference to the quality of life of the people for whom they care. The Government are determined, as we have outlined in the coalition programme for government, to develop respite services further and make them available through direct payments for those people.
Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)
Given the success of central Government in persuading child and adolescent mental health services to take the needs of those with learning difficulties more seriously, will the Minister commit to doing the same for those with autism, given that only 11% of CAMHS have specialist provision? Will he make a commitment to do the same thing for those with autism, please?
Mr Burstow
The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. We shall be getting some guidance from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in a year’s time, and absolutely the answer is yes.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
May I congratulate the Minister on his new role. As my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) mentioned, carers of people with autism rely on respite care. However, carers organisations are reporting that cuts to local authority funding are already leading to cuts in funding for charities and other providers of support care. How do the Government plan to deliver the promised increase in access to respite care through improved community support provision, when that is already starting to fall away?
Mr Burstow
The hon. Lady makes an important point, but perhaps she will be a little cautious with her question, not least because the previous Government made a lot of promises to carers in respect of the amounts of money that were to be invested, only for carers to find that on the ground the money was not delivering changes in services. So this Government are determined to ensure that we not only make promises but deliver on them. That is the commitment that this Government have made.
Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)
15. What percentage of patients at Warrington Hospital were treated within 18 weeks of referral in the last 12 months for which figures are available.
The Minister of State, Department of Health (Mr Simon Burns)
At the Warrington and Halton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, in the 12 months up to April 2010, 93.2% of patients admitted to hospital for treatment and 97.8% of patients whose treatment did not require admission to hospital waited 18 weeks or less from referral.
Helen Jones
I am grateful to the Minister for that reply. What percentage of patients does the Minister now believe will be treated within 18 weeks, and which people exactly does he think deserve to wait longer than that?
Mr Burns
May I reassure the hon. Lady that in my lexicon no one “deserves” to wait longer. What I want, and my right hon. and hon. Friends want, is a first-class health service that makes decisions based on clinical reasoning and gives treatment swiftly and relevantly to those who need it. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has made some changes to some of the targets to ensure that clinicians and clinical decisions dominate, not political decisions by politicians and bureaucrats.
Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)
16. What progress he has made on establishing his proposed commission on funding long-term care; and if he will make a statement.
The Minister of State, Department of Health (Mr Paul Burstow)
The coalition agreement sets out our plans to establish an independent commission, which will consider how we ensure responsible and sustainable funding for long-term care. Further details on the commission will be announced shortly.
Stephen Twigg
I am grateful to the Minister for his response. Can he assure us that when the commission is established it will consider all options for funding long-term care, including a compulsory inheritance levy?
Mr Burstow
The Government’s intention is not to fetter the commission but to allow it to do its job.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
17. What recent representations he has received on the appropriateness of the remit of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence; and if he will make a statement.
The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Andrew Lansley)
Since 7 May, the Department has received about 120 representations from hon. Members, noble Lords and members of the public on a range of issues concerning the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, including its remit.
Philip Davies
May I urge the Secretary of State to get NICE to go back to what most people think it is for, which is monitoring the cost-effectiveness and clinical effectiveness of drugs? Many people do not think that it does a particularly good job on that, anyway, but it is currently indulging in empire building, with its ridiculous drivel in recent weeks about smoking breath tests for pregnant women, compulsory sex education for five-year-olds and subsidies for food companies to make healthier food. Surely it ought to go back to what it should be doing, and do it better, rather than empire building, as it is doing.
Mr Lansley
In 2005 the previous Government charged NICE with producing public health guidance as part of its work. As I establish a more integrated and effective public health service, I shall consider how the advice of NICE fits into that strategic framework.
Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)
T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.
The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Andrew Lansley)
My responsibility is to lead the NHS in delivering improving health outcomes in England; to lead a public health service that improves the nation’s health and reduces health inequalities; and to lead the reform of adult social care that supports and protects vulnerable people.
Mike Gapes
When the new Secretary of State intervened to stop the reorganisation of health services in London, he said that there would be no forced closures. Can he give me an unambiguous and categorical assurance that he will not allow the closure of the accident and emergency department, the children’s surgery or the maternity services at King George hospital in Ilford? Yes or no?
Mr Lansley
The hon. Gentleman’s question seems rather churlish, given that he wanted to stop the top-down configuration that NHS London imposed so that people in his area—GPs, the local authority, local people and patients—could have an opportunity themselves to decide how services might best be designed for local people. That is the pledge that I have made. Those criteria will enable that process to be led locally, rather than imposed and forced on people.
Lorraine Fullbrook (South Ribble) (Con)
T4. St Catherine’s hospice is used by many of my constituents, and they will be pleased to be able to go ahead with the hospice’s planned improvements, which will be funded through the capital grants programme. Does the Secretary of State agree, however, that the excellent work of such hospices goes far beyond the hospice building? What will his Department do to ensure that hospices play a greater role in providing services to the local community?
Mr Lansley
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend, who will know that I entirely understand and applaud the work of St Catherine’s hospice, because we have visited it together. She makes a very important point, because those whom I know in the hospice movement want to think not just about the service that they provide in their buildings, but about an holistic service for patients’ families and for those who require palliative care. I might just say that on Saturday I made it clear that up to £30 million will be available in this financial year to support children’s hospices, specifically, in extending their work so that they can provide a service in the community for children with life-limiting illnesses.
Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)
The right hon. Gentleman will remember our exchanges at the election hustings, where there was a real difference between us: we said that we would protect the NHS budget in real terms, and I stand by that commitment; the right hon. Gentleman said that he would increase the NHS budget. After last week’s Budget, however, we now know the price of that commitment: 25% cuts to social care will mean vulnerable people either left without the support that they need or facing higher charges to pay for care, and huge pressure on carers. It means also that the NHS itself stops working, because it cannot discharge people from hospital when there is no support in the community. That unbalanced approach to public spending is dangerous and will decimate services on which the NHS depends. Is it not time to drop a pledge that had more to do with votes and nothing to do with people’s lives?
Mr Lansley
So there we have it, Secretary of State. [Hon. Members: “Secretary of State?”] I meant “Mr Speaker”—you are far more elevated than a Secretary of State, Mr Speaker.
The shadow Secretary of State’s belief is that the NHS budget should be cut. I fail to see how that could help social care. We are going to look much more positively at how we can join up the work of the NHS and social care. What my colleagues and I have announced on 30-day support for patients leaving hospital, including rehabilitation and re-ablement, will do precisely that, relieving some of the pressures on social care by seeing the NHS as a more holistic service for patients.
Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)
T5. Does the Secretary of State accept the conclusions of the Science and Technology Committee’s report “Evidence Check 2: Homeopathy”? Earlier, the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Guildford (Anne Milton) gave a commitment to an evidence-based approach and today the British Medical Association passed a motion about homeopathy. Given the financial constraints in which we all share, can the Secretary of State defend spending millions of pounds of NHS money on methods that simply do not work?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Anne Milton)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. He obviously knows how much is spent on homeopathic treatments, although no one else seems to know exactly. The decisions should be taken by doctors locally, and the effectiveness, safety and efficacy of a treatment should be taken into account. The estimate is that 0.001% of the drugs bill is currently spent on such treatments. At present, we are looking at the Science and Technology Committee’s report. We hope to respond to it before the summer recess.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
T2. My right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State referred to the Commonwealth Fund report, which said that Britain’s NHS was the most efficient. Does that not make it clear that after 13 years of a Labour Government, the NHS is not just so much better for patients, but efficient? To say that it is not is an insult to the people who have worked so hard to make it great.
Mr Lansley
I have looked at the reports of the Commonwealth Fund for a number of years; it regards the NHS as efficient because it spends relatively little in comparison with other health economies. In this country, we need to recognise that the NHS does not spend very much in comparison with other countries but it could spend it more efficiently. There has been declining productivity for 10 years. [Interruption.] The shadow Secretary of State needs to recognise that NHS management costs went up by 63% while nursing costs went up by just 27%. My colleagues and I are committed to halving NHS management costs and to reducing the costs of the NHS, through efficiency, by £20 billion. Every penny of that will be reinvested in meeting the rising demand for the NHS and the improvements in quality that we require.
Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD)
T7. What encouragement is the Secretary of State giving to primary care trusts to restore minor injury services to towns such as Melksham in my constituency? It saw its minor injuries unit close under the last Government.
The Minister of State, Department of Health (Mr Simon Burns)
I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that question. It is up to local communities and local health providers to identify what they believe are the local needs of their communities and then go through the procedures, measures and mechanisms to seek to achieve what they want—in this case, that could be a new A and E. It is not for Ministers to promise such provision; there are proper procedures, from the local area upwards, for achieving such aims.
Mr Speaker
Order. I have just had Members complaining that they cannot hear. The Minister must face the House. It is a very simple point; I have made it to others and they have understood it.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
One of the concerns of a great many of us recently has been the availability of cancer care drugs. [Interruption.] Right across—right across, Mr Speaker, the whole United Kingdom, and Northern Ireland in particular, a great many people have not been able to access cancer care drugs and have had to endure sickness and illness without them. Can the Secretary of State assure the House today that cancer care drugs will be made available and that those who are ill and suffering from cancer can rest easy?
Mr Lansley
We have been very clear that it is a scandal that we have some of the finest cancer research anywhere in the world and some of the best cancer medicines have been developed in this country, yet in the past in this country NHS patients have often been the last to have access to those drugs. That is why at the election we made it clear that we will introduce from April next year a cancer drugs fund, the purpose of which will be to ensure that patients get access through the NHS to the cancer medicines that they need, on clinical recommendation and advice, and that they are not unduly delayed in getting that access.
Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)
T9. I am sure that the Secretary of State will remember visiting my constituency earlier in the year and listening to constituents’ concerns about the withdrawal of spinal injections on the NHS. Given that the PCT’s decision is set to become another example of the postcode lottery in the health service, will his Department consider the ongoing debate about spinal injections in York and support the attempts of my constituents as they seek to shape local health services around their specific needs?
Mr Burns
I am a bit confused as to where to look. [Interruption.] Right, I will look forward.
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State well remembers his visit in April to meet the York and District pain management support group. He made it plain at the time that it should be for GPs and their patients to decide what treatment should be given, as opposed to a decision by the PCT to veto spinal injections for all sufferers of long-term chronic back pain. We will, in due course, set out our proposals to put more power in the hands of patients and GPs.
Vernon Coaker (Gedling) (Lab)
T3. Does the Minister agree that it is crucial for patients to have information if we are to make a reality of choice within the NHS? In that respect, does he agree that if we are to give people a real choice as regards the choose and book system that GPs operate, there is a need to ensure that patients have the information about the success rates of different hospitals, and different surgeons, as regards operations?
Mr Lansley
I agree with the hon. Gentleman—it is just that that did not happen under a Labour Government in the way that it should have done. For example, the national quality registers in Sweden have 69 areas of clinical practice for which such comparative data are published. I have made it clear that one of our priorities is that we focus on outcomes and on giving patients real empowerment. To do that, information for patients on outcomes will be absolutely critical.
Dr John Pugh (Southport) (LD)
T10. I have here a letter from my local PCT indicating that the clinical review of the safety of a proposed children’s walk-in centre in Southport is to be conducted by Dr Sheila Shribman and the Minister’s Department. Will the Minister arrange to meet me and relevant officials to ensure that the Department is properly aware of the background to this vital access issue and that we have a clinical network suitable for patients, as well as for practitioners?
Anne Milton
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that question, of which he gave our office prior warning. It is important that decisions made locally focus on outcomes for people, that they are about choice, that they have support from local clinicians and commissioners, and that they are based on sound clinical evidence. I would be happy to meet him to discuss this further.
Mrs Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)
T6. Every year in the north-east, 300 children are born with congenital heart disease. These very sick children receive expert treatment locally in the world-class cardiothoracic unit at Newcastle’s Freeman hospital. Can the Minister assure my constituents, who value this vital local service, that the findings of Sir Ian Kennedy’s review of children’s heart surgery centres will be implemented without financial constraint?
Mr Lansley
I should tell the hon. Lady that it is premature to make any commitment about the review, because we now need to have proper engagement with local people, patients and those who are responsible to focus on how we can make absolutely certain that the outcomes that we achieve for children requiring cardiac surgery are as good as we can possibly make them.
Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)
Will the Minister review the problem of highly priced patient lines and introduce competition so that patients in Harlow and elsewhere no longer pay extortionate prices to watch TV or make phone calls?
Mr Burns
I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend for raising an issue that I know is of concern to many people. Although I cannot make promises about the outcome of any review, he has my assurance that we will be looking into this, and that we take on board the concerns that have been expressed over a number of years.
Mr Nick Raynsford (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
The Secretary of State has halted the reconfiguration of services in south-east London, which was clinically led, the subject of detailed public consultation and approved by the reconfiguration panel. The outcome is to leave my PCT and hospital trust acutely troubled about their ability to deliver the improved health services that were promised under “A picture of health” and to meet their financial targets. What does that say about the Government’s commitment to evidence-based policy making?
Mr Lansley
What we have done in London is to give those who would be most affected by decisions to reconfigure services the opportunity, where decisions have not already been made, to have a local say. That includes patients, the public and GP commissioners. The delay, in so far as there is any delay, need not be great if those proposals are fully subscribed to by local people and by their GPs as commissioners.
David Tredinnick (Bosworth) (Con)
Would my right hon. Friend accept that there is widespread anecdotal evidence of the effectiveness of homeopathic medicines? There are 500 doctors in this country who use them, and nobody is obliged to have them if they do not want them. Will he therefore heavily discount the illiberal views of our hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert)?
Anne Milton
May I thank my hon. Friend for his question and pay tribute to him for his continued and persistent lobbying on this subject? I gather that he has been elected a member of the Select Committee on Health, so I welcome him to that position and I am sure that we will meet again at some point.
What is important is that decisions about treatment are made by clinicians, and they will base their decisions on the safety, efficacy, efficiency and outcomes that a particular treatment will provide.
Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)
The North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust believes that its strategy for one hospital to replace the North Tees and Hartlepool university hospitals is the right strategy, despite the project being dropped by the Government. Does the Minister accept that the trust’s strategy to provide a new hospital and health facilities closer to communities to meet their health needs is correct, that the trust should be encouraged to press ahead with alternative funding models that could still deliver the new hospital, and that its members and the public at large can expect Government support to realise that strategy?
Mr Lansley
What I would look for is for the foundation trust to meet the criteria that I published on 21 May in relation to any reconfiguration of services that it proposes for its area. As a foundation trust, I would also expect that, having secured the freedoms associated with that status, it should not ask the Department of Health to meet the whole capital cost of whatever it proposes.
Speaker’s Statement
Mr Speaker
I will now announce the results of the election of members of the Backbench Business Committee. No ballot was required for the election of the following: Mr Peter Bone, Philip Davies, Jane Ellison, John Hemming and Mr Philip Hollobone.
In the ballot today, the votes cast for the candidates were as follows: Mr David Anderson, 99; Katy Clark, 57; and Alison Seabeck, 92. Mr David Anderson and Alison Seabeck are elected. I congratulate all those elected.
Points of Order
(14 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. This morning we lost an hour and a half of valuable debating time in Westminster Hall on the issue of apprenticeships, when the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham), whom I informed that I would raise this point of order, did not turn up at the appointed time. Incidentally, the Minister for apprenticeships, the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes), was not present at the appointed time either, and the debate fell. To lose one Member might be considered unfortunate; to lose two seems like carelessness.
Is there anything that you can do, Mr Speaker, to reinstate the valuable time for that debate so that hon. Members such as myself who took time to prepare a speech can have the opportunity to deliver it to the House and have it recorded in Hansard? Could you also have a word with the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority to see whether it will allow Conservative Members to claim for alarm clocks?
Mr Speaker
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his point of order and for giving me advance notice of it. I understand that Members are disappointed to have missed the opportunity to debate the national apprenticeship scheme. I have received a letter of profuse apology from the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham), which I appreciate and I think the House will appreciate.
The smooth conduct of business requires keeping to set times for the start of debates, and it is important that all Members grasp that at the outset and keep it in the forefront of their minds. It is perhaps an object lesson for all of us early on in the new Parliament. I note the request that the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) made for the matters in question to be aired on another occasion. I cannot commit at this point, but I hope that there will be another chance for those important matters to be debated in the House.
As the hon. Member for Gloucester is in the Chamber, I think we would be pleased to hear from him.
Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Speaker. May I offer the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) and the House the same unreserved apology that I gave you earlier for my poor timekeeping this morning?
Mr Speaker
I am extremely grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I think that quite enough has been said. [Interruption.] Order. Members are getting ahead of me—or they think they are—but I know what I was thinking and they do not. They will now see what I was thinking, which is that it would be helpful for the House to hear from the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes), who is in his place. I know that he will be happy to comment.
The Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Mr John Hayes)
That was literally irresistible. Of course, I should have been in my place as well. I arrived as the sitting was suspended by the relevant member of the Panel of Chairs. I apologised to him then, and I have also dropped a note to you, Mr Speaker, as you know.
Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I note that the particular bird has flown, but is it in order for a Member on the Front Bench to berate, scoff, scold and hiss at the Chair when a Member is trying to ask a question? Do you recognise that it is disrespectful to the House and the Chair, and, importantly, it also impedes a Member from asking a question and getting a sensible answer from the occupants of the Front Bench? Will the Speaker make it clear that his order covers not only Back Benchers but Front Benchers?
Mr Speaker
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about the last point. The writ of the Chair applies to all Members, irrespective of whether they sit on the Back or the Front Benches. On his particular point, I must say that nothing was recorded. I was focused at all times on the questions being asked, those seeking to ask them and Ministers answering them. However, respect for the Chair is important, and respect by one Member for another’s right to be heard without interruption is extremely important. I hope that it will not be necessary in the course of the new Parliament and the new politics for that point to have to be made again from the Chair. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for highlighting an important matter.
Mrs Anne McGuire (Stirling) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Last week in the Budget statement, the Chancellor said:
“Today there are some families receiving £104,000 a year in housing benefit. The cost of that single award is equivalent to the total income tax and national insurance paid by 16 working people on median incomes. It is clear that the system of housing benefit is in dire need of reform.”—[Official Report, 22 June 2010; Vol. 512, c. 174.]
In order to drill down into that—I promise I will get to the point of order in a second—I asked, with my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz), a parliamentary question of the Department for Work and Pensions. I had a reply today, which said:
“The information requested is not available.”
Has the Chancellor sought to rescind his statement about the £104,000 housing benefit? It has become common currency in the debate about reforming housing benefit, yet the Department tells me, as a Back Bencher, that the information is not available.
Mr Speaker
I thank the right hon. Lady for her point of order. I think that she is continuing a debate with some force, eloquence and insistence. She is an experienced Member and a distinguished former Minister, and the opportunity exists for her to table follow-up questions. I have a hunch that it will not be long before she avails herself of it.
Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)
Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker.
Mark Lazarowicz
My right hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Mrs McGuire) referred to the question on that subject that was tabled in my name. In fact, I have tabled a written question today asking the Chancellor to give the evidential basis for the statement that he made in the Budget last week. Could you urge him to give a speedy answer to that question, in order to reassure the House that his assertions in the Budget speech were based on fact?
Mr Speaker
I do not think that it would be right for the hon. Gentleman to seek to draw me into these interesting exchanges. He has tabled a question, and an answer might be forthcoming. I note his reference to the importance of evidence, and I simply note in passing that we would be establishing a new precedent in the House if we were to regard it as mandatory for a Minister to provide evidence for the arguments that he or she was making.
Steve Rotheram (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Have you or your office been notified as to whether the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport will be coming to the House to apologise for the distress that his unacceptable comments about the Hillsborough disaster have caused to the families of the 96 who died, and to people right across the political and football divide?
Mr Speaker
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his point of order, and I understand the very strong feelings—including those of constituents—that will have motivated him to raise it. In response, I would say that the remarks complained of—which I am neither justifying nor condemning—were not made in the House, and that my clear understanding is that the Secretary of State has apologised for them. He has made a public apology, and the question of whether he seeks to make an apology or any other comment on the matter in the House is a matter for him. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) for raising the matter, and I hope that he feels that I have given him at least an informative response.
John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) (LD)
On an earlier point of order, Mr Speaker. In the previous Parliament, the Procedure Select Committee decided to establish a process whereby hon. Members could approach the Committee if they were unhappy with the nature of the answers that they received to written questions. I understand that, in this Parliament, we will continue to offer such an opportunity for people to put their complaints to the Committee, once it has been created.
Mr Speaker
That is a useful contribution to the continuation of point of order exchanges.
Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I understand that important announcements have been made today on the abolition of the regional development agencies and the setting up of new local government structures to replace them. May I implore you, sir, to use your good offices to press Ministers to make statements of that nature in the House first, so that they can be properly debated?
Mr Speaker
I can say to the hon. Lady that I am aware of concerns about this matter, and there will be an opportunity to explore it. On the procedural point that she raises, I am conscious of and looking into the matter. I hope that that is helpful.
Opposition Day
Local Government Financing
21:59 - The House divided: - Ayes: 243 / Noes: 335 - Question accordingly negatived.
22:15 - The House divided: - Ayes: 334 / Noes: 243 - Question accordingly agreed to.
Mr Speaker
I inform the House that I have selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister. To move the motion, I call Mr Grant Shapps—[Interruption.] I beg the hon. Gentleman’s pardon; I apologise. I call Mr John Denham.
Mr John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) (Lab)
Force of habit, Mr Speaker.
I beg to move,
That this House regrets the decision of the Government to introduce £1.165 billion of cuts to local government funding in England in the current financial year; regrets the Liberal Democrat members of the Government supporting cuts they opposed during the general election campaign; notes the promise in the Coalition Agreement to “ensure that fairness is at the heart of those decisions so that all those most in need are protected”; regrets that this programme of cuts fails to meet this test of fairness, as they fall disproportionately on the hardest-pressed communities; notes with concern the principle set out by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State on 10 June that “those in greatest need ultimately bear the burden of paying off the debt”; condemns the failure of the Secretary of State to tell the House or local authorities where £504 million of cuts to funding will fall; further regrets the failure to consult local government on the allocation of the cuts; further notes with regret that the Government’s further decisions on the Future Jobs Fund, housing and support for neighbourhood policing will weaken the ability of local councils to shape and deliver services in their areas; regrets the failure to make any progress on implementing the previous administration’s commitment to Total Place, enabling local authorities to deliver real efficiency savings and contribute to reducing the deficit while protecting frontline services; and resolves that decisions affecting local government spending should be based on the principles of fairness, protection of frontline services and promotion of growth.
I was interested to hear the earlier exchanges about Ministers not turning up for debates. May I say how disappointed I am that the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government has not bothered to turn up for this one? In 10 years as a Minister, I always respected the strong convention in the House that if a shadow Secretary of State chose to lead an Opposition day debate, the Secretary of State would respond. I am very disappointed that, on the first Opposition day debate on a Communities and Local Government topic, the Secretary of State could not be bothered to be here. The truth is, of course, that he is too scared to be here. He is too scared to explain the series of blunders that he has already made over these cuts. He is so scared of defending what he is doing that he prefers to treat the House with disdain. So we shall have to make do with the Minister for Housing, the right hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) instead.
I remember when my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) and I insisted that building firms who took public money to build social housing should train apprentices. When they did so, the current Minister described it as ludicrous and counter-productive. We have all seen the minutes of his meeting with the Prime Minister’s adviser on local government, the leader of Hammersmith and Fulham council, at which it was agreed that it was a priority to raise rents in the social sector to equalise those between social housing and the private sector. So we know where he is coming from—he has got form.
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
I have something of an interest in what goes on in Hammersmith. I heard the Minister for Housing say from a sedentary position that he was not at that meeting. Perhaps he would like to clarify that, because my understanding is that he was not at the main part of the meeting, discussing the demolition of council estates and the ending of social tenancies—although he has learned the lesson and is now proposing to do just that—but he did get there for drinks and canapés at the end.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
While reflecting on the past, would the right hon. Gentleman like to apologise for the unprecedented situation that occurred when he was Secretary of State and his own permanent secretary disavowed the key policy of unitary status for various areas? The permanent secretary had so little faith in that policy that he went public with his view that it was a waste of public money.
Mr Denham
I am sure we all wish the former permanent secretary at my Department well in his new position as permanent secretary to the Scottish Government. I took the right decision on Norwich and Exeter, and I was right to back the desire of those cities to run their own affairs. It was a decision that I reached after many months of careful consideration, along with my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne. I have to say that it was all too typical of this Government that, within two days of the new Government being formed, the Secretary of State—who talks about localism—decided to quash the aspirations of those councils to run their own affairs, in a timescale that meant that he could not possibly even have read the evidence that had been submitted by so many councils. I will return to the attitude of the Secretary of State in due course.
On 10 June, the Secretary of State announced £1.165 billion of cuts in local government spending in England in the current financial year. Because those cuts were so big, the Secretary of State should have come here to defend them. They were part of the £6 billion of cuts proposed by the Tories during the election. We opposed them as too early and too damaging to economic recovery. The Liberal Democrats also opposed them. As the right hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne)—now a Liberal Democrat Cabinet member—said during the election campaign:
“If we took Tory advice and cut spending and raised taxes precipitately, growth would stop. Unemployment and benefit spending would rise further. Tax revenue would stall.”
But now he has taken Tory advice, and he will be held to account for what happens.
Now the Lib Dems support these cuts, and their credibility as a progressive alternative to the Tories is shot to pieces. These are cuts that no local council had any chance to prepare for, coming as they do well into the financial year. As the Tory leader of West Berkshire council told us,
“This is unprecedented. We have never faced cuts in the middle of the year.”
As the Tory leader of Telford said,
“this is money that we had planned to spend this year and will now have to be cut.”
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend is right to be furious that the Secretary of State is not attending the debate. The Secretary of State seems to see himself as some sort of Conservative John Prescott. Does my right hon. Friend share my feeling that that fine gentleman would have been proud to stick up for his Department instead of letting it take the majority of the cuts, and would have come here to defend his decision rather than skulking off to the scene of former crimes?
Mr Denham
My hon. Friend makes a good point. Despite some apparent superficial similarities between the two gentlemen, one thing is clear: John Prescott never ran away from a debate or argument, unlike the Secretary of State—[Interruption.] I did not say he never ran away from a fight; I just said he never ran away from an argument.
The truth is that the cuts were not only made too fast, but made without consultation. There was no discussion with local councils about whether or how they could be made. The Local Government Association initially put out a press release welcoming the fact that it had been promised consultation, but ended up sending a desperate letter two weeks later saying, “Will you please tell us what’s going on?” The cuts came ahead of the Budget, which sets out cuts of 25%, 30% or 35% to local council services.
Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the basis of the cuts is simply party political prejudice, which is why they were done so quickly? Otherwise, how could deprived Salford have twice the rate of cuts of affluent Trafford?
Mr Denham
My hon. Friend makes two important points, both of which I will deal with, about the unfairness of the cuts and the real agenda l behind them. Of course the deficit needs to be tackled, and we set out our plans to reduce it by more than half over four years. That was a tough enough target, but the cuts now laid out go much further than we would have gone; they go much faster than we would have gone; and are being done in ways that we would not have chosen.
Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend share my concern that the cuts will be felt disproportionately in heartland areas that have suffered a great decline in manufacturing, such as Stoke-on-Trent? I am particularly concerned about their impact on the Supporting People programme and the money providing care for people in the community. How can we plan for that?
Mr Denham
This is an important debate. The way in which the Secretary of State is handling these first cuts warns us all of what lies ahead and the unnecessary damage that will be done to the local services on which the people we represent rely. When he made his cuts, he had choices to make about how to make them—to make them fairly, or not to make them fairly. So let us remember the promises that the right-wing coalition made:
“We are all in this together. I am not going to balance the budget on the backs of the poor”,
said the then shadow Chancellor, now the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
“Our core aim is to hard-wire fairness back into national life”,
said the Deputy Prime Minister during the election campaign. The right-wing coalition document states that
“we will ensure that fairness is at the heart of those decisions so that all those most in need are protected.”
So what did the Secretary of State do?
Let us take two boroughs next door to each other in the same conurbation. One is 15th in the deprivation index; the other 178th. One has 27,000 people on housing benefit; the other has 13,000. One has 11,000 unemployed people; the other has 8,000. One has an average weekly income £40 below the other. One is poor; the other comfortable. So what does “We are all in it together” mean? Which one gets the bigger cut under the right-wing coalition? The poor one, of course! Salford loses twice as much as Trafford. And that is not an isolated example. According to the Secretary of State’s own figures, Newham, the sixth most deprived borough in the country, loses £4.6 million, while Richmond, the 309th most deprived borough, loses less than £1 million. In the Prime Minister’s district council, there will be no cut. His county of Oxfordshire, which has a deprivation index of 10.85, gets a cut of 0.7%.
If we look at the Deputy Prime Minister’s area, we see that Sheffield has a deprivation index of 27.8 and a 1% cut—perhaps the real price of coalition. As for the councils losing the highest proportion of the their income, they are in places that have been left behind—the Lancashire mill towns like Burnley, the ex-coalfield areas like Ashfield and the struggling seaside towns like Hastings. Among the metropolitan boroughs, it is the poorest that lose most. Why? Because it is what these Tories and Liberal Democrats believe in. As the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill)—who I see is not here to answer this debate either—said at oral questions with refreshing honesty:
“Those in greatest need ultimately bear the burden of paying off the debt”.—[Official Report, 10 June 2010; Vol. 511, c. 450.]
The poor will pay most, and that is what this right-wing coalition is all about.
Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)
The right hon. Gentleman cannot honestly defend the previous funding regime that saw authorities such as mine in East Riding receive hundreds of pounds less per pupil than those in neighbouring Hull. Is he suggesting that he wants to have cuts dished out to authorities that are already disproportionately doing badly out of the funding, which would mean deprived pupils in my area doing even worse than deprived pupils in neighbouring authorities?
Mr Denham
There is the true voice of the Tory shires. The truth is that the local government funding formula—widely debated, widely discussed, widely consulted on—does give a weighting towards those areas with the highest social need and the highest deprivation, because the challenge of delivering services in those areas and of bringing about the equality of outcomes that we should all seek is greatest there. I do defend that. I do defend programmes like the working neighbourhoods fund, which has been targeted by this coalition Government, and through which money has of course been spent in areas of higher worklessness. It is because of that that those areas saw more people coming off incapacity benefit as local authorities used that money to help get people off benefit and into work—something we hear so much cant about from Government Members. So I say to the hon. Gentleman, yes, I do defend that approach.
Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)
Is my right hon. Friend aware that during the opening of yesterday’s debate on the Budget, in an exchange about cutting benefit to the long-term unemployed who are seeking work, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions referred to pensioners living in houses that were too big for them and that they were unable to look after. Does that not give away what is really behind these benefit changes—that the pensioners and the poorest in our communities are going to pay the price?
Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that another area where the coalition’s words are just not matched by its actions is in the talk about big societies and strengthening civic society? The reality of the cuts in Birmingham is a slashing of grants to those very voluntary organisations that our city relies on to provide the services that supplement those of the local authority and statutory agencies, which ordinary people need.
Mr Denham
I have some sympathy with my hon. Friend, as I have been involved at a local level in working the voluntary sector’s Shopmobility scheme, which the local Conservative council wanted to cut. Here was an organisation that had only a small amount of public money but engaged huge numbers of volunteers, enabling thousands of people to get around the town centre. It is funny, is it not, that that should be the Tories’ first target, despite all the talk about the big society?
Mr Denham
I shall give way again in a few moments, but I want to make a little progress.
What is quite clear is that all this is not an accident; it reflects the values of the coalition. I have talked so far about the Secretary of State’s figures. When he published the written ministerial statement, he said with great flourish that no council would lose more than 2% of its budget this year. That is bad enough; it is not trivial. It feels about 30% worse than that, however, if we take into account the cuts implemented from today. By the time most councils have been able to put cuts into practice, it is going to feel like twice that level of cut.
The truth is far worse, because the Secretary of State consciously withheld the true situation from the House. In the figures that were published, over £500 million of the £1.16 billion of cuts was not allocated to local authorities, so no one could tell what the impact would be: it was kept secret—kept under wraps, kept from this House. A few days before, the centralising, dictatorial Secretary of State had instructed local authorities, under threat of punishment by law if they refused, to publish details of every item of spending over £500. As his hapless Minister told the House, no one had even bothered to work out what that would cost local taxpayers; it was just another diktat from behind the big man’s desk. Yet the same Secretary of State who can tell councils what to do down to the last £500 could not manage to tell this House or local councils where he was cutting £500 million. It is ridiculous.
Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the current cuts in local government belie any notion of fairness or progressiveness? The London borough of Tower Hamlets is the third most deprived borough in the country yet it faces one of the largest cuts: £9 million, of which £1 million is from the working neighbourhoods fund. That is in addition to a likely £55 million of cuts over the next three years. We should compare that with the figure of £1.3 million for the London borough of Richmond upon Thames, which includes the seat of the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, the right hon. Member for Twickenham (Vince Cable). How is it possible that the poorest have to suffer so much compared with one of the richest boroughs in the country?
Mr Denham
My hon. Friend makes a very good point, and also underlines the point I am about to make, because on the original figures published by the Secretary of State, the Tower Hamlets cut was nowhere near as big as that. Earlier, I used the example of Newham, for which his table gives the figure of £4.6 million, which was the biggest cut in London. Now that the dust has settled, however, we find that Tower Hamlets is up there as well, with a figure of about £9 million, and Hackney loses £8.6 million—but as my hon. Friend said, “Don’t worry, because Richmond is still doing all right.”
Dr John Pugh (Southport) (LD)
I rise to say a few words in the interests of fairness, because the right hon. Gentleman obviously thinks that, apart from eating babies, there is very little the coalition does not do. Can he tell us which of the £40 billion of unallocated cuts the Labour party was likely to implement were going to fall on local government? That would be a transparent, open, rational and reasonable thing to do.
Mr Denham
The hon. Gentleman needs to explain something to his constituents: why he is supporting a cut that goes tens of billions of pounds deeper than the plans we set out. That is what is causing the pain. During the election campaign, he opposed the cuts I am talking about. He and his party colleagues said that these £6 billion of cuts would damage the economy. He is the one with questions to answer for his constituents, such as how he managed to run an election campaign against a VAT increase and these cuts, yet here he is standing up in the House defending the cuts—and no doubt in due course defending the VAT increase as well.
Sajid Javid
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. Why does he treat Members as if they are fools? If he wants the truth, it is that his Labour Government’s funding formula was based on petty party politics and had absolutely nothing to do with the needs of individuals. If we want to use examples, the schoolchildren in my constituency of Bromsgrove get £900 less per annum than those in neighbouring Birmingham. The reason for that is very simple: over the past 13 years areas where there are Labour voters got far more money, and the truth is that what we are doing is, in this terrible economic climate, restoring some fairness in the system.
Mr Denham
I think the whole House should take full note of that intervention, because the statement of principle we have just heard from the hon. Gentleman flies in the face of the commitment made during the general election by the then shadow Chancellor, now Chancellor, who said:
“We are all in this together. I am not going to balance the budget on the backs of the poor.”
We have now heard the authentic voice of the Conservative party, however. Irrespective of any economic challenges faced by this country, the Conservatives would have wanted to hammer the poor, and that is what they intend to do. It will not come as any surprise to Labour Members to know that that is what the Tories stand for. What the Liberal Democrats are doing supporting it, I have no idea.
Mr David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend not agree that the interventions he has just taken from the hon. Members for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) and for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid) both demonstrate that the coalition is intent on redistributing grant away from the poorest boroughs and the poorest education services and towards the better-off? Does that not completely give the lie to the idea that the so-called pupil premium will put more money back into the very boroughs and authorities that those Members have just attacked?
Mr Denham
My right hon. Friend, as always, is absolutely right.
I must say that this debate is turning out to be rather more useful than I expected. Just a small scratch on the surface of the Government’s supporters tells us what they really believe, stand for and intend to do. As a number of Members have said, this has got nothing to do with the economic crisis or the deficit; they just think that our spending more money in the areas of greatest need was the wrong thing to do. Let us agree that that is the difference between the Government and the Opposition.
Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)
I wonder whether my right hon. Friend is experiencing, as I am, a slightly spooky feeling of déjà vu. If we think about political gerrymandering, we all remember the days when Westminster and Wandsworth were able to levy zero council tax because of the fix that had been done on the allocation and distribution of grant. What we are seeing from Government Members is history replaying itself. We are seeing not a new, centrist, Cameron-friendly Tory party but the same old right-wing Tories, determined to balance the books on the backs of the poor.
Mr Denham
My right hon. Friend is right. She too has done the job that I did until the election, and she knows that there are many people in local government who are not of our party, but who have a genuine commitment to the communities they serve and by whom they were elected. Among the people who have been kicked in the teeth by these budget cuts are the locally elected representatives of this Government. The Tory leader of Blackpool council said:
“We are one of the most deprived areas in the land and we shouldn’t be singled out like this.”
He had better not go to the East Riding or Bromsgrove, because he will get a different message. He continued:
“I understand that some of the leafy lanes of Surrey and places have got away with it; well that can’t be right.”
The Lib Dem leader of Burnley council said:
“we are a deprived borough but once again we are suffering. I am disappointed and sick of us being kicked by budget cuts in Burnley.”
Andrew Gwynne
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, who is making a very good case. Is he as surprised as I am that members of Liberal Democrat-controlled Stockport council, who were extremely vocal in the run-up to the election about the fact that their grant settlement was not enough, have not uttered a single word of protest at the cuts now being forced on them?
Mr Denham
If I may, I will just complete the point I was making by giving one last example.
We were told that there would be a 2% limit on cuts; however, Corby council faces a cut of 15% in one year, because the figures did not include the housing and planning delivery grant. Corby council did the right thing: it gave planning permission for houses and economic development—and now it has had to pay for that with a 15% cut. I now give way to the hon. Member for Croydon Central.
Gavin Barwell
I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. He is trying to make the point that the previous Government allocated money on the basis of need. Does he recognise that the result of the introduction in 2006-07 of the fourth block into the funding formula, according to the London Councils report, has been a shift in local authority funding
“from a relative needs basis towards a per capita basis, causing an arbitrary redistribution in funding between high-need and low-need authorities”?
That is the result of the policies his Government introduced, and he did nothing to correct those decisions.
Mr Skinner
Does my right hon. Friend agree that we should not be too surprised at what this Tory Government are doing to shift the balance towards the wealthier areas of Britain, because every pit in Bolsover was shut by the previous Tory Government, throwing thousands of people on to the dole and creating deprivation that hitherto had not existed? Now the Tories are doing it again, but there is a difference because this time they are doing it under the cloak of so-called “respectability”, using those tinpot Liberals to cover for them. The Liberals will undoubtedly have to pay for it at the end.
Mr Denham
My hon. Friend is absolutely right about that. One of the things that we need to recognise is that, sadly, in large areas of the country, particularly in my own area of the south, as well as in the south-east and the eastern region, local government has for too long been divided between the Tweedledum of the Tory party and the Tweedledee of the Liberal Democrats. The Liberal Democrats have often got away with claiming that they were a progressive alternative to the Tories, but that will no longer be allowed to stand. Somebody has to speak up for the people of the areas suffering cuts, and it will be the Labour party.
John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) (LD)
There are perhaps two arguments here. One argument is about whether the cuts should be made now or later, and the other is about how they should be allocated. My personal view is that we must ensure that we fund local authorities on a needs basis—there is no question about that. The basic questions in this debate are about whether or not cuts should be made earlier and whether the quantum should be the size it is. If we do not do this, the interest rates will be higher. If we follow the Labour party’s advice, we will actually have greater cuts because we will have to pay a higher interest rate on a higher level of debt. That is the fundamental truth of this argument, so the right hon. Gentleman is arguing for greater cuts in the long term.
Mr Denham
No, I am not going to give way, because it was not worth it last time. The hon. Gentleman spent an election campaign saying that the cuts should not be made now, but he has spent every week since the election saying that they should be. That is ridiculous and he cannot expect to be taken seriously.
Ms Louise Bagshawe (Corby) (Con)
When I was in my office, after a meeting, I heard the right hon. Gentleman take the name of Corby in vain. May I point out to him that the cuts allocated to Corby borough council are merely 1.1%, which puts it in the lower half of councils receiving cuts? Is the shadow Minister aware that Pat Fawcett, the Labour leader of Corby borough council, complained bitterly at the funding settlement that Corby received when his Government were in power?
Mr Denham
I should make some progress, because I have further important points to make to the House—unfortunately, the Secretary of State is not here to defend his case. When he made his announcement, he tried to sweeten the pill by promising local councils greater freedom in spending what was left of their money; he said that £1.7 billion would be taken outside the local government ring fence. That was fair enough, because that is the same direction of travel that the Labour Government had set and I am not going to argue with it, but what has happened since? This Government have now been forced to admit that it was all a mistake and that the figure was not £1.7 billion after all, but £1.2 billion, so we have another disappearing half a billion pounds. How could that be? The truth is that the Secretary of State and his Ministers are not on top of their brief, and they do not understand how local government finance works or where the money goes.
All that would be bad enough, but that is not all. What is being revealed bit by bit is this Government’s limited vision of local democratic government. The country faces a major challenge as we and the world recover from a global recession, and effective, democratically accountable local government must be part of the solution, not part of the problem, but it is now clear that this right-wing coalition does not understand how important local government must be.
It is not just about the unfair cuts, the impact on front-line services and the impact on growth. It is quite clear that there is no decision too small for the Secretary of State to intervene in. We wanted local councils to be able to decide whether planning powers should be used to control the spread of houses in multiple occupation and to let them decide what was best for local people, but now the Secretary of State is tearing up those rules. Who is going to decide what is best for local people? He is. We wanted local councils to have a say in the big planning decisions that affected more than one district. Who will decide now? The Secretary of State. He wants to set the council tax in every council, how often the bins are collected and how often councils can communicate with the public. He imposes cuts from the centre and will not talk to local councils about how to do it—no wonder he will not turn up to speak in the House. Remember the power of general competence? Remember the Prime Minister, when he was Leader of the Opposition, saying that councils would be free to do whatever they like as long as it was legal? That did not last long under this Secretary of State. He needs to learn that there is a lot more to localism than sitting behind a desk in Whitehall giving orders to local councils.
Councils need to be leaders, shaping and delivering services in their area. Under Labour, councils were better financed—we reduced ring-fencing and targets and believed that local councils were often best placed to decide what was best for local people. Labour local councils had the lowest council taxes and Tory councils had the biggest increases. We trusted councils to deliver the things that local people wanted. That is why local councils were the right vehicle to deliver the 18 million free swimming sessions for pensioners and kids that will now be scrapped. The views of the Tory leader of Derby council will be shared by many. As he said:
“The withdrawal of funding for the free swimming scheme is very disappointing because we consider this to be a resounding success in Derby.”
It was our belief in local government that made us see why local councils should take the lead on council and social housing and in supporting the Kickstart schemes, all of which are now on hold or scrapped. That is why local councils were the right people to lead in tackling worklessness, and why so many local councils, including Tory councils such as Kent and Hampshire, were big bidders for and big users of the future jobs fund. They could see that it was right to offer real jobs to young people in their communities. Now, up to 80,000 jobs for young people will be lost.
We trusted local councils—Tory, Lib Dem and Labour. Yes, sometimes they let us down. I remember when the Tory-Lib Dem coalition in Birmingham failed to spend its working neighbourhoods fund money; perhaps we should have realised that that was the shape of things to come. However, many other councils repaid that trust many times over.
It was right that local councils led on Building Schools for the Future. There are now 750 schools in 90 local authorities whose schemes are on hold and in doubt.
Alison Seabeck (Plymouth, Moor View) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend has set out in an extremely worrying way the effect of this right-wing Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition and of its cuts. Does he acknowledge that the coalition has not in any way flagged up the potential savings before going straight into the cuts programme? The Total Place project was one through which Tory councils in London and elsewhere said that they could make significant savings of tens of millions of pounds, yet there has been no mention of it from the Government. Will my right hon. Friend comment on that?
Mr Denham
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I shall move straight to that point. It is very clear that the right-wing coalition is handling these cuts in a way that is creating much deeper damage than is needed. My hon. Friend should not be in any doubt: cuts would have had to be made under our deficit reduction programme. They would not have been as big or as fast, but difficult decisions would have had to be made none the less. There are big efficiency savings to be made, many of which were set out in the report that we published before the election, written by Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester city council, and Sir Steve Bullock, mayor of Lewisham. They set out very clearly the savings that could be made from sharing services, sharing staffing and reducing layers of management, but those changes need to be properly planned and implemented consistently over several years, always putting citizens first. The Government’s approach of badly planned, short-term, unfair cuts and arbitrary suspension of key investment makes efficient savings impossible and ensures that the cuts will fall on front-line services and their users, not on the back office.
In government, we recognised—this was the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Alison Seabeck) made—that the only way to make the best use of local public service spending was to look at it as a whole. We need to look at all the money spent on children, older people, offenders and drug and alcohol problems as a whole. Rather than worrying at the outset whether it is police money, health money, school money or council money, we need to look just at how best to use it.
We know that the most expensive children—the ones who are disruptive at school—are often those whose families are of most concern to social services. They cause the most nuisance to local people and the police and they probably have the highest need of adolescent mental health services. So we worked with local government and the Local Government Association to show that we could produce better services much more efficiently if we brought together all the money that is spent on that group. Our Total Place pilot showed that when we do that, we get a better service at lower cost.
The LGA says that government as a whole could save £20 billion over five years. I am cautious about the details behind that figure, but it is significant. That is what councils think they could offer to cut the deficit while protecting front-line services. That should be taken seriously.
Mr Betts
I completely agree with my right hon. Friend’s analysis of Total Place. It is a way forward; it is not going to deliver immediate savings, but with proper planning it could deliver. However, it cannot be delivered properly through central diktat from the Secretary of State. If improvements are to be delivered, there has to be a real transfer and devolution of power not merely from the Department for Communities and Local Government, but from the Department for Transport, the Home Office and all other Departments, to allow local authorities to take the lead at local level.
Mr Denham
I agree with my hon. Friend, and I welcome him to his position as Chair of the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government, to which he will bring considerable experience and knowledge. That is exactly what we offered local government and local services in our last Budget, which offered a wide range and scope for local services to pool their money and use it in new ways. That is why I was confident that we could both deliver our deficit reduction programme and protect front-line services, but as my hon. Friend says, it can work only when it is backed from the top. There is no mention of it in the Budget or in the Red Book, and every Government policy works against that sensible, coherent approach. The Government are not just slashing local spending: they are fragmenting it. There is no point in giving councils more and more control over disappearing funds if, at the same time, school spending is disappearing into academies and free schools, if the chance to work with health money disappears into hundreds of GP budgets or if police funding rides off into the sunset with an elected sheriff. [Interruption.] I am sure that the hon. Member for Meon Valley (George Hollingbery) is right. I shall come to him in due course.
I do not know whether the Secretary of State simply lost all those arguments or whether he never made them, but he has not done well. I shall give way now to the hon. Member for Meon Valley and later to the hon. Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford).
George Hollingbery
I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. First, I make the point that in 13 years of Labour rule, there was little or no integration across local services. Indeed, we could honestly say that silos grew a great deal more than they merged together. We do not need central rules to make that integration happen; in Hampshire, we have Project Integra and PUSH—the partnership for urban South Hampshire—so he will know that there is plenty of co-operation at local council level.
On central control, does the right hon. Gentleman agree that when Winchester city council, of which I was a member for 11 years, made an assessment of the amount of spending it could control under the last Labour Government, it was below 5% of total spending?
Mr Denham
It is useful to have a discussion with a Hampshire MP, as we are both familiar with PUSH, but this is exactly my point: that partnership is very good and very important, but it is limited to the powers held by the local councils. Until those councils are able to help to lead and shape health spending and law and order spending in the area, we will not get the changes that we need.
The hon. Gentleman’s second point is also reasonable, but he overstates it. He calculates that Winchester council did not have the budget for Winchester university—well, no, but nor should it. Winchester council did not have the budget for Winchester prison, or for the benefits bill in Winchester. Not every piece of spending is amenable to transfer to local authorities. However, together with local Government—particularly over the past few years—we did set out that stronger vision for local government. I am desperate that we should not lose that vision, and not just for the purpose of a party political debate here.
The integration of local services is critical now. If the Government prove me wrong I shall be the happiest person in the world, because we shall then have the chance to deliver front-line services that people want in a way that genuinely saves money. Every Member, on whichever side of the House they sit, should be interested in that debate.
Not so long ago, when he was Leader of the Opposition, the Prime Minister said, “If you want to know what a Conservative Government would look like, look at Conservative councils.”
I am happy to give way to the hon. Member for Mole Valley, if he still wishes to intervene. It seems that he does not.
What the Prime Minister said constituted a fair warning. As some of my hon. Friends have already observed, what we are seeing is not the unavoidable consequence of a global recession or even of a Labour Government. The aim of the Tories, limply propped up by the Liberal Democrats, is and always has been to roll back an effective, caring and active state. Their vision is of the budget airline council, the sink-or-swim council, the no-frills council, where town halls offer only the bare minimum of service and people must pay twice to get a good service. I think of councils such as Wandsworth, whose leader said that the council wanted to
“increase charges as far as possible beyond inflation...It is worth taking a trial and error approach”.
I think of councils such as Hammersmith and Fulham, which promise to protect the elderly and then hike up their charges. That council’s leader has said:
“To continue building and publicly investing in the ‘social rent’ template…makes no sense.”
I think of the Tory councils in London that want to knock down the homes of secure tenants and offer them insecure homes at a much higher rent, and of the threats to the future of secure council tenancies that the Minister for Housing has never denied. It is all there.
Yes, the country faces hard decisions as we recover from the global recession, but none of that justifies an ideologically driven attack on the basic idea of decent local services provided by well-run councils. We all know what the Tories are up to, but what are the Liberal Democrats doing supporting them? The answer is that they have sold their souls, and have forfeited the right to call themselves a progressive alternative to the Tories.
The Minister for Housing (Grant Shapps)
I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from “House” to the end of the Question and add:
“regrets the doubling of council tax under the last government, its cuts to services such as rubbish collections and its legacy of public debt; expresses concern that the prospect of paying for £70 billion a year in debt interest represents a total of more than is currently raised from council tax, business rates, stamp duty and inheritance tax combined; welcomes the new Government’s immediate support for frontline services by protecting £29 billion of formula grant, removing £1.2 billion of ring-fencing and abolishing red tape such as the Comprehensive Area Assessment; backs the support for hard-working families and pensioners through a council tax freeze and the abolition of the previous government’s plans for new bin taxes; further welcomes the scrapping of the unfair ports tax which threatened to harm Britain’s whole manufacturing sector; supports the reductions in business rates for small firms; acknowledges the significant efficiency savings already delivered by local government but believes that there is further scope for savings through joint working, professional procurement practices and radical town hall transparency; and asserts the importance of delivering local economic growth to all local communities across the country, assisted by new financial incentives, and of giving new freedoms to councils to allow them to focus their help on local priorities and those most in need.”.
I was a bit surprised to hear the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham) attack the Secretary of State, who had taken the trouble to write him a personal note—it was delivered by hand to his office at 11.30 this morning—explaining that he was attending a regional Cabinet meeting in Yorkshire to talk about the announcement that was first made in the Budget statement last week of a £1 billion fund to help the very areas of the country that the right hon. Gentleman has just complained will lose funding.
Stephen Hammond (Wimbledon) (Con)
I saw the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham) shake his head. The personal letter was put on the letterboard by me this morning, and my office telephoned his office twice to ensure that it was there.
Grant Shapps
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for clarifying that. I now understand that the note was in the right hon. Gentleman’s pigeonhole, and that the telephone call—[Interruption.]
Clive Efford
On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I am not sure whether I heard it right, but I believe that we have just heard an announcement of a £1 billion fund. I wonder why that was not announced in a statement to the House.
Mr Speaker
Before I respond to the point of order, I shall be happy to hear a statement or clarification from the Minister, from whose lips I think the words came.
Grant Shapps
The fund was announced in the Budget, Mr Speaker. If the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) was present last week, he will have heard the Chancellor of the Exchequer announce it at this Dispatch Box. Let me clarify another point. My hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) also mentioned that he had telephoned the office of the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen to check that the letter had been received. I am very surprised by the rather discourteous and disingenuous comments about my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State.
Mr Blunkett
Is this the £1 billion that the Government have just announced that they are withdrawing as a result of the abolition of the regional development agencies, which they promised before and after the election that they would abolish only if there was no support at local level?
Grant Shapps
I will come in a moment to the RDAs that were set up by Lord Prescott. In the meantime, I can tell the right hon. Gentleman that this is a new £1 billion—the regional development fund £1 billion announced in last week’s Budget and designed to help— [Interruption.] Labour Members do not want to hear about this, but it is designed to help in exactly the kind of constituencies that they have come here today to complain are being underfunded. They do not want to know that this coalition Government are doing something to help those areas. That is the truth.
We live in grave financial times, and the previous Government bequeathed a scorched-earth policy. As Labour’s departing Chief Secretary declared, “I’m afraid there’s no money left. Good luck.” [Interruption.] They do not want to hear that either, but it was what the note said, and it also happened to be true.
We inherited spending commitments funded by a litany of IOUs scrawled on the back of fag packets and a toxic legacy of debt from an Administration who went on a spending spree with the nation’s credit card. Our most immediate priority is therefore to reduce the nation’s chronic public spending deficit to pave the way for economic recovery.
Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman describes again this picture of deals scrawled on the back of fag packets. Would he like to make a comment to my constituents in Wirral who work for companies that spent a great deal of time working hand in glove with the RDA and the Government to protect our local economy and have been thrown into disarray by the policy being made on the hoof by the new Government? I will listen to anything the Minister has to say that will help us protect our local economy, and I will be grateful for his comments.
Grant Shapps
I welcome the hon. Lady’s intervention. She was not here in the last Parliament, but had she been she might have read our green paper, which describes in detail our plans for the RDAs. Labour Members seem to think that when there is a change of Government, policies should just roll on even if they have not worked. The RDAs were a case in point, of policies that cost a lot of money and got us nowhere.
The prospect of paying £70 billion in debt interest is of deep concern, but apparently not on the Opposition Benches, where it is as if the money has not run out, the party is not over and we can just carry on spending imaginary funds. That £70 billion in debt repayments is more money than the council tax, business rates, stamp duty and the inheritance tax collect put together. That is the size of the deficit we are up against. So we need to tighten our belts. Ministers are cutting their pay, and it is also fair to ask local authorities to pay their part towards the £6.2 billion public sector savings required this year.
Hazel Blears
Does the right hon. Gentleman believe that it will help the nation’s finances to cut the future jobs fund and the working neighbourhoods fund and to throw more young people on the dole so that they will not be paying tax and national insurance? Does he really think that that adds up to a credible economic policy?
Grant Shapps
Well, I heard with interest what the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen had to say about some of the funds. The truth is that existing commitments are being honoured and a new fund is going to be set up to pull together the many different streams that currently help people get back to work. It seems to me that again Labour Members see any change that did not emanate from Labour during the 13 years in which it was in Government as a problem and are willing to attack it.
Grant Shapps
I shall give way in a moment after making a little progress.
So the £6.2 billion immediate savings this year are the priority to tackle the inherited £156 billion deficit. It is worth saying it again—£156 billion. [Interruption.] They do not want to hear it, because the figures were in danger of bankrupting this country—of putting us into a Greek-style crash. But to hear the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen today from the Dispatch Box, one would not believe that he was speaking for the same party that sat on the Government Benches and took this country to the edge of that fiscal position.
Now with this fiscal challenge we also have an opportunity. Our actions to rebalance the public finances give us a chance to decentralise power, to weaken the command-and-control apparatus of the central state. Devolution is the solution; the centralised state the problem. We need to cut wasteful spending, but let us put local councillors and local people back in the driving seat.
Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)
On that very point, we hear a lot about how we could have saved money from efficiency savings, and that is a laudable thing to talk about, but the Lyons report in 2007 said that targets and inspections inhibited councils’ ability to serve their locality. We know that targets and inspections cost more than £2.5 million a year, so if Opposition Members were so anxious to find efficiencies why did they not start by stopping that ridiculous top-down inspection regime?
Grant Shapps
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for mentioning some of the top-down inspection regimes, such as the comprehensive area assessment, a £39 million programme responsible for—get this—wasting 151,000 days of local government officers’ time each year, and for what purpose, what advantage, what great body of knowledge that could somehow be used? The answer is that the previous Government did not know when the money had run out and carried on spending it ad infinitum.
Chris Leslie
Will the right hon. Gentleman scrap the Audit Commission? Will there be no audit or inspection?
Grant Shapps
We certainly will have inspections and a basic template. The question is: how much inspection do we need? I invite any Opposition Member to explain how spending 151,000 days of officer time answering a comprehensive area assessment was of any use to local residents. Opposition Members talk about localism, but they do not get it. They talk about the principles of handing over power, but they do not understand that when—according to 2006 research—officers in town halls spend 80% of their time servicing the needs of Ministers and Whitehall and only 20% of their time looking after local residents, they no longer serve the democratic values of local people. That is not localism; what we are describing today is localism.
In these tough times it will be our goal to protect those in the greatest need—local residents and, especially, struggling families and pensioners. Under Labour, council tax more than doubled. We will work with local councils to freeze council tax for a year and, if we can afford it, for another one. Scotland has done it, with band D council tax now £290 a year less than the comparative figure south of the border. We want that to happen in England, too.
Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)
The right hon. Gentleman just mentioned the need to protect those most in need. Will he comment on the remarks by Blackpool’s Tory council leader, Peter Callow, who said:
“We are one of the most deprived areas in the land and we shouldn’t be singled out like this. I understand that some of the leafy lanes of Surrey and places have got away with it; well that can’t be right”?
Grant Shapps
The hon. Lady will no doubt welcome the £1 billion fund for regional assistance.
Grant Shapps
Which is new money and was announced last week. No doubt the hon. Lady in her next intervention will welcome that money, which would presumably go to areas such as that the one she describes.
Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)
Will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that that £1 billion is additional funding—on top of the money that would already have been made available to RDAs and to local councils in order to support regeneration in their areas?
Grant Shapps
I may be living in a parallel universe, but I and Government Members were here last week for the Budget, when all that was described in a great deal of detail, including in the Red Book, which explains that the fund is new and comes out of the total spending envelope. It is fairly straightforward.
Let us make some progress. We will scrap Labour’s plans for new bin taxes, which meant even higher tax bills for local families and harmed the environment by encouraging more fly-tipping and more backyard burning. We need to go green, but we cannot have the bin bullies and the town hall Taliban who seemed to look after town halls before. Instead, we are going to embrace opt-in schemes, such as Windsor and Maidenhead’s recycle bank initiative, through which families are rewarded for recycling and doing the right thing. We will encourage people to do the right thing, rather than punish them when they do not.
Incentives can work for councils, too. Let us reward local authorities for driving economic performance in their area, and for building new homes. Incentives can work for councils in all sorts of ways.
Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)
On the issue of building new homes, I understand that one of the areas under threat is the Kickstart programme, which was to support private construction by getting sites that had fallen during the recession under way again. Does the Minister agree with the chairman of the Home Builders Federation, who said:
“Cutting Kickstart money, that creates immediate benefits in terms of local jobs and for the wider economy is a cut on investment not waste. Public money invested through Kickstart pulled in many more times that in private sector investment”?
Is there not a false economy in the cuts that are going ahead, which put more homes in jeopardy and do not make sense to the business community?
Grant Shapps
The right hon. Lady will share the concern that I had at turning up at a Ministry and being told that the £1.5 billion that had been presented to the Building Britain’s Future fund exactly a year ago, in July 2009 when programmes such as Kickstart were announced, just did not exist. We are now having to do what we can to support those important programmes. She can expect to hear further announcements on this front.
Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)
If all the programmes that the Opposition are concerned that we will cut were so valuable, why were so few houses built under the last Administration? Why are there 1 million people not in education, employment or training—NEETs—in this country if the programmes were working so well?
Grant Shapps
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, not least because of what happened in the debate on housing here just last week. The Opposition claim to be passionately interested in housing, but there was nobody at all on the Opposition Benches then: not a single Opposition Member turned up for a debate on a subject that they claim to care about so passionately.
Perhaps the answer lies in the figures on housing. We have only to look at the figures for house building last year, for example: fewer homes were built than during any peacetime period since 1924. It is not as if the top-down approach was working; the more the previous Government tried to centralise, dictate and impose housing on local communities, the fewer homes were built. That is why we intend to turn their policy on its head and ensure that in future incentives drive house performance and house building in this country.
Grant Shapps
I give way to the Chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee.
Mr Betts
Will the Minister clearly explain what his targets are for the number of social houses that should be built in this country each year? How will the building of such housing be achieved? What policy mechanisms will he use, and where is the funding to deliver the programme?
Grant Shapps
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. We are not going to set targets because they did not work. [Interruption.] There you go—they have heard it. We all remember the target of 3 million homes by 2020. Remember the former Prime Minister standing at this Dispatch Box and announcing that target? We all remember the 240,000 homes that were to be built every year. What is the figure for house building this year? Probably about 110,000 to 118,000—something in that region. There is no point in announcing targets that do not happen; all that does is bust aspiration. Instead, we will take a practical approach in which communities are encouraged with powerful financial incentives to build homes. Our matching of council tax revenues for a six-year period will achieve a great deal of that.
Grant Shapps
I want to make a bit of progress, then I shall give way again.
We are going to drive economic growth through local action and initiatives such as the incentive plan, and by replacing Lord Prescott’s and Lord Mandelson’s regional development agencies with locally led partnerships, based on natural economic areas—not arbitrary Government offices for the regions that happen to suit Ministers. We will also drive growth by giving councils new powers to levy business rate discounts for local shops and firms, by finding practical ways to introduce automatic small business rate relief and by abolishing Labour’s unfair ports tax, which threatened to harm the entire manufacturing sector in this country—at least the bit that the party had not already harmed through its economic policies.
We are doing all we can to help local government under difficult and pressing circumstances. No local authority will face a reduction of more than 2% in any revenue grant that has already been allocated.
Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)
Why does the council in my constituency face a cut of 1.08%, whereas no Government Member’s local authority is facing cuts of anywhere near that? Is that an act of ideology or malice? Or is it that, as the Minister with responsibility for planning said,
“Those in greatest need ultimately bear the burden of paying off the debt”.—[Official Report, 10 June 2010; Vol. 511, c. 450.]?
Grant Shapps
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that, but district councils all over the place are taking larger cuts. If the Opposition are now going to spend their time looking at random distributions, trying to pick out patterns and then playing them back, I am afraid that that just demonstrates that they really have not got it. They have not understood the financial crisis in which they had taken this country right to the edge, or appreciated the depth of the problems that they had taken the country into. That is clearly demonstrated by their input today.
Andrew Percy
The Minister will recall that a few moments ago, when I tried to raise the issue of school funding, my concerns about deprived areas such as those in Goole that I represent were laughed off with some smugness by Labour Members. Can we have an assurance that unlike the situation under the previous Government, who simply ignored the problem, pupils who live in very deprived areas in Goole will not be penalised for the simple reason that other parts of the East Riding are wealthier?
Grant Shapps
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. Of course, the pupil premium is designed to achieve precisely that. We are absolutely doing everything we can to try to protect people and share out the burden of the very difficult decisions that have to be made—decisions that were ducked by the Opposition when they were in government. Labour Members could not outline one penny of how they would have reduced the local government budget—not one single penny. I invite the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen to come to the Dispatch Box if he now wants to explain where the cuts were going to come from. Until Labour Members acknowledge that they had no answers and were not proposing alternatives, they will not have earned the right to lecture anybody about what should and should not be done by way of making these difficult cuts, because we have not heard anything about it from them.
We have protected the £29 billion formula grant—the main source of funding for front-line services such as rubbish collections, street cleaning and libraries. Moreover, we have not cut any of the main Supporting People budget, which is in excess of £1.6 billion, despite needing urgently to cut funds from this year.
John Hemming
Does the right hon. Gentleman share my mystification as to why Labour Members are fussing about whether there is a cut of 1.08% or 1.1%, given that the real situation is that over the next five years we potentially face cuts of 25% in real terms, and we should be planning and preparing for that now?
Grant Shapps
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The simple truth is that Labour Members still have not understood the depth of the problems that they have got us into. Until they acknowledge that and start to address it themselves with some real plans, and identify where some of the money is coming from, nobody will take seriously their complaining and calling of Opposition day debates about this subject.
We will continue to remove the ring fences from non-school revenue and capital funding. This year, we have de-ring-fenced £1.2 billion, and we intend to go a lot further. This gives councils the extra flexibility they need to concentrate on local priorities and to protect these front-line services. We are also reducing the management burden imposed on local authorities from the centre, cutting down on undemocratic and unaccountable quangos, and putting local government front and centre in meeting local residents’ needs. When we took over, there were 27 different quangos relating to the Department for Communities and Local Government. Again, I invite the shadow Secretary of State to come to the Dispatch Box and explain how he was going to hand power back to local people by removing even one of his 27 quangos.
As with every profession, local authorities will need to take some difficult decisions about how to prioritise their spending. Local authorities have already made great strides in achieving efficiencies, but they need to do more. There is still a lot more potential to gain through new practices—for example, shared services, joint working and smarter procurement. Perhaps most important, however, will be radical town hall transformation. We must be clear that councils will need to build in improved productivity as a matter of course. They need to learn from the best commercial practices. Sainsbury’s does not go out and tell people that good food costs more when it comes from Sainsbury’s, but that it costs less, and public services are going to have to do the same thing. In the public services, in future, we have to get more for less. I know that that is a concept that Labour Members struggle with, but it is the reality of the financial mess that they have left us in.
Brandon Lewis (Great Yarmouth) (Con)
I am proud that in Great Yarmouth our council, which faces a 2% cut, has reacted by saying, “We can deal with this. We realise the situation that the previous Government has left us with, and we’ve got to get more efficiencies.” That is a good and positive move forward. In my view, having spent many years as a councillor and council leader, the best thing for our councils is to get rid of some of the ring-fencing and the tick-box culture that wastes officers’ and members’ time and give them back the ability to make real decisions about real things locally, which means they are more accountable and that our residents will care more about what they do. Does the Minister agree?
Grant Shapps
I am most grateful to my hon. Friend, who gives us an opportunity to talk about matters such as the comprehensive area assessments, which somehow, through ticking boxes and using—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) says from a sedentary position that we have done all that, but the truth is that £39 million was still being spent on that budget on the day we entered office.
Rather than having a tick-box culture, in which town halls are answerable to Ministers, there is a better way, and it is the one that my hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis) has identified—local people being the ones to whom officers are answerable, through the ballot box. That is a radical concept that can be expanded much further by allowing councils, by the end of this year, to publish online details of all their spending, tenders and contracts over £500. That will be proper transparency and empower a new army of armchair auditors to go through local authorities’ books and help identify wasteful spending, helping to protect front-line services. [Interruption.] I hear Opposition Members calling out, “Well, that will help.” As a matter of fact, we really do think that it will help in a dramatic way, and I will explain why.
We are going to extend the idea to national Government with a higher limit of £25,000, and this is how it will work. In my Department alone, openness and publishing this stuff online would have avoided, for example, the scandal of £134,000 being spent on 28 luxury socialist-red sofas by a Parisian designer, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, which were bought as part of new Labour’s—get this—efficiency initiative. That pretty much sums up its approach.
Transparency would, I imagine, also have stopped the scandal of my Department spending £73,000 on a serene green tranquillity room for stressed-out staff and Ministers to
“relax and refuel in a natural ebb and flow.”
Proper accountability would surely have stopped the £6,000-apiece deluxe chrome coffee machines fitted at each of the white elephant regional fire control rooms, which are completely empty, by the way. Come hell or high water, we would at least have known in future that officials would have had a nice cup of cappuccino even as disaster struck and the phone system failed, as it famously does in those buildings. That is what transparency and openness will deliver—it will mean that people can see what is going on inside government, both nationally and locally.
Mr Slaughter
I wish the Secretary of State had bothered to come, partly because this is so incoherent and we might have had something a bit better, but mainly because I wanted to pay him a compliment for proposing to cut a bit of town hall waste. He said at the weekend:
“Councils should spend less time and money on weekly town hall Pravdas…our free press should not face state competition from propaganda on the rates dressed up as local reporting”.
My Conservative council spends £750,000 on just that type of propaganda. When will the Government cut that, and in addition to consulting the councils themselves, when will they consult local people, MPs and newspapers about the problem? It is a disgrace.
Grant Shapps
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his particularly eloquent contribution. Local authorities spending their time publishing weekly newspapers, or weekly Pravdas as the Secretary of State described them, is just not their role. We talk about front-line services, supporting people, homelessness and priority programmes to ensure that the sick, elderly and vulnerable are protected, but Opposition Members want to talk about local weekly Pravda newspapers published by local authorities. It simply is not the answer. What we want to do is ensure that local authorities are engaged in front-line services that help their population, not services that rival the local newspapers. We want to allow the local newspapers to operate without interference from local authorities.
Everyone knows that money is tight. Every strategy that we employ nationally and locally should focus on getting more for less. Innovation and efficiency must be king. The emergency Budget makes it clear that there are challenging times ahead. We want to ensure that local government is fully engaged with the next spending review. In particular, we expect councils to be involved in the series of events over the summer to discuss and debate various aspects of public spending. We will use the spending review to drive decentralisation across local government and national Government.
Toby Perkins
The Minister has said a couple of times that councils will have to do more for less. As a member of the best value and efficiency scrutiny panel on Chesterfield borough council for the past seven years, I know just how hard our council and many others worked to produce the efficiencies demanded under Gershon. Can the Minister tell us of any council leaders who have not been trying to give more for less in the last years of the Labour Government?
Grant Shapps
I accept that the hon. Gentleman and local authority leaders and councils throughout the country work hard to do those things. However, sometimes just doing something in a closed situation is not enough and we have to invite the whole general public to take part. We need to publish the stuff online, make it fully transparent and let people see what is really going on. As I explained in the context of my Department’s responsibilities, if that had been done, I do not believe that those tens of thousands—and even hundreds of thousands—of pounds would have been wasted on pointless projects. On a smaller scale, there will be examples in town halls throughout the country of money being spent on unsustainable projects, which best value committees sometimes do not reach, but a large army of armchair auditors will. It is called the general public; it is called transparency, and it will work effectively.
Chris Leslie
Will the Department also publish items that cost £500, so that the position between local government and central Government is fair?
Grant Shapps
Central Government obviously have a large budget—[Hon. Members: “Ah!”] They do have a large budget, so the limit will initially be set at £25,000—[Interruption.] Opposition Members are making a great deal of noise, but each of the projects that I mentioned a moment ago would have been captured under such a system. We would have known about the red sofas, the tranquillity centre and all the adverse expenditure. That would have helped. One has to wonder at the Opposition—after 13 years without such transparency and openness, when the coalition offers to open up government, they just want us to go further. That is fantastic, but they had 13 years in which to go much further, but they did not and they wasted taxpayers’ money.
The coalition agreement makes it clear what to expect. The time has come to transfer power away from Westminster and Whitehall into the hands of communities and individuals. We will make rapid progress because we have already announced several shake-ups of power. The move to a more democratic planning system will sweep away arbitrary top-down targets and hated regional spatial strategies, introducing powerful financial incentives to local people instead.
The previous Housing Minister is no longer in the Chamber, but I am a fan of his blog. I note that this week he writes:
“DCLG ministers are changing the planning system.”
He adds:
“Ours was too top-down”.
Hon. Members can read that online—a road to Damascus conversion from Labour, now in opposition. The new coalition intends to prove that Ministers can be localist in government, just as we can in opposition. There will be no switch-around.
Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)
In the spirit of transparency, will the Minister confirm that the £1 billion fund that he mentioned earlier is the regional growth fund to fund regional capital projects in 2011-12 and 2012-13, to which the Red Book refers? If so, the Red Book mentions no figures, but he has gone a little further. Would he care to speculate on whether he will decide who gets the regional growth fund, or will he hand it over to local authorities to determine their own regional capital projects?
Grant Shapps
Yes, that is the same fund, and it was mentioned to the House verbally, at the Dispatch Box, by the Chancellor on the day. No, I cannot confirm how it will be divided up. Members would quite properly expect that to be announced in a statement to the House from the Dispatch Box, and they would not expect me to do that today, because today’s debate—[Interruption.] It is a bit rich of Labour Members to express surprise. We had 13 years of spin and statements on every breakfast TV sofa in the country but, now that they have now switched sides and gone into opposition, they are making a big deal of this. I can assure the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) that that statement will be made to the House from the Dispatch Box in due course.
Claire Perry
I am fascinated by the disclosure about the tranquillity room. I have had many people coming into my surgery recently who have been really struggling with their household budgets and housing problems. The idea of a tranquillity room is quite entertaining, but it is also deeply insulting to hard-working British people. How will the Minister use the tranquillity room? What does he intend to do with it?
Grant Shapps
I think that it would be only right to invite people to come and try out the tranquillity room. It was paid for with the hard-earned money of the people outside the House, when the previous Government seemed to think that it was a good idea to spend hard-earned taxpayers’ money on building tranquillity rooms and putting in expensive sofas. This is an indication of how they talked about helping the poor when they were really helping themselves by refurbishing their offices with bizarre and extraordinary furniture.
Gavin Barwell
Has my right hon. Friend been able to ascertain whether the room was given ministerial approval and, if so, which Minister gave that approval?
Grant Shapps
I cannot tell my hon. Friend how the approval process used to work, but I can tell him that, in the new Department for Communities and Local Government, that kind of expenditure would never be signed off without someone political taking the decision right from the outset.
We have announced that we will move away from the wasteful inefficiency of central targets and towards incentives involving more carrot and much less stick. Last week, we scrapped the comprehensive area assessment, saving the taxpayer £39 million.
Mr Blunkett
It will help us over the next five years if the right hon. Gentleman can give us an answer to this question. Is he seriously suggesting that every sum over £5,000 spent in government will be individually signed off by a Government Minister?
Grant Shapps
No, I did not mention the figure of £5,000, but I did say that decisions approaching anything like the levels of the £134,000 spent on Parisian-designed sofas would require sign-off—and they would not get that sign-off, either.
We have introduced a Bill to stop council restructuring in Devon, Norfolk and Suffolk, which will save the taxpayer £40 million of unnecessary costs. This was a botched restructuring; even the accounting officer at the DCLG had no confidence in it, and issued a letter of direction to the former Secretary of State about it. There was no reason to spend that £40 million, but the Labour Government did not believe that the country was in a financial mess. They seemed to miss that point entirely.
There is more to come. We will promote locally led joint working, building not just on the Total Place pilots, but on innovations—such as joint chief executives— being championed by many councils. In the Queen’s Speech, we announced a localism Bill that will free local government from central control and give voters more power over local government and over the way in which money is spent. As part of this, we will introduce a new general power of competence for local authorities, so that they are free to give local communities exactly what they want.
The public coffers are nearly empty, and the nation’s credit card is maxed out. Shadow Ministers are fighting the wars of yesterday, trying to justify why their pet projects were notionally signed off by the Treasury, but ignoring the huge elephant in the room, in the form of a looming public debt of £1.4 trillion. But in these tough times, we are defending the interests of families, pensioners, small firms and the underprivileged. We are empowering councils to put the front line first, and to make the right choices on how best to protect the vulnerable and the needy in our society. We are putting councillors and the people in charge of going through the state books and highlighting waste and inefficiency, rather than relying on unelected and unaccountable quangos and regional structures. There is a difference between this Government and the last one: we trust people. That is something that the centralising, nanny-state, interfering Labour Government never did.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Order. As the House will see, this is a very popular debate. Mr Speaker has imposed a 10-minute limit on speeches, but if Members do not take 10 minutes, more will get in.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
I am still trying to understand what the Minister has just said. It seems to me that he is applying the solutions of the 1980s. I do not know where he was at the time, but some of us were in local government and on the receiving end. I am sure that some of my colleagues will remember how capital programmes and rent revenue accounts were capped. The Minister talked about transparency, but I remind him that the Labour Government introduced the freedom of information legislation, so there are no accolades for him there. When I was involved in local government in the 1980s, we used to get a green memo—he mentioned Government interference—prodding us to privatise all sorts of things, from public transport to public toilets. So we need no lessons from the people over there.
I hope that the Minister will clarify the position on regional development agencies. What will happen to Advantage West Midlands? Many people will know that it has been very important to the west midlands economy. In fact, only a couple of weeks ago I received representations from small businesses in the area expressing concern about the threat to abolish that organisation. Let us consider Ansty business park. When we created a business park at Warwick university about 25 years ago, we were criticised by the then Tory Government, but later on it became the greatest thing since sliced bread. People in Coventry see the Ansty business park as preparation for the economic revival—
Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)
Did Advantage West Midlands not waste a lot of taxpayers’ money when Ericsson was persuaded to go to Ansty business park—a completely unnecessary move?
Mr Cunningham
The hon. Gentleman has his facts wrong. It was Ericsson that wasted public money, because it misled everyone—including the Tory council in Coventry—into thinking that it was there to stay. The hon. Gentleman must not distort the facts.
The Secretary of State has sent a circular out to local authorities, but we want to know whether the Kings Hill and Keresley housing project will go ahead. I asked the Minister to clarify that last week, and I was told that Coventry council would be allowed to settle the matter. However, when the Tories were in opposition, they said that one of the first things that they would do was cancel that project, because it was being built on the green belt—which the hon. Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) knows something about, as Warwick district council is the planning authority and has been passing the buck.
If we are talking about the 1980s, let us remember that manufacturing in the west midlands was decimated, to say the least. In Coventry, we lost thousands of jobs every week. Are we going back to that? That is what the Government’s proposals will mean. The Minister talked about council house building being the lowest since the war, but I do not remember many council houses being built in Coventry in the 1980s. I certainly remember that council houses were sold off and not replaced. The Minister has a lot of explaining to do there.
The other area of concern is what will happen to the voluntary sector especially, and to the much vaunted public sector, which the Government keep on about attacking. How much funding can the voluntary sector expect, if funding to the public sector is reduced? As in the 1980s, the public sector will be the whipping boy for the measures that the Government want to take. I could see their strategy when they were in opposition. They went on about gold-plated pensions and big salaries for chief executives. That is fair enough—we have to do something about it—but it obscured and masked the fact that many people in local government are on low pay, and they are the people who will be attacked. I was in contact with Coventry city council today. The real impact, by the way, will not be known until October or November, because the Government themselves do not yet know which cuts they are going to inflict—they have not worked out the details—not only in Coventry but in the rest of the country.
The Government blame us for the economic crisis, but I remember when it broke. The Conservatives thought that we just needed to bail out Northern Rock and that the crisis had just happened in this country, but it actually happened with Lehman Brothers in America. How any British Government can control what goes on in the American economy defies logic. It was only later that the Conservatives worked out a strategy. Incidentally, the present Governor of the Bank of England went along with the economic stimulus—the same man now advising the Government to go down the road of wholesale cuts. We had a programme to do that over four years, but theirs is a knee-jerk reaction. In other words, they have panicked, they are not in command of the economy and they do not have a strategy to get the country out of this situation.
This is a typical Tory ploy. In the ’80s, they used the Labour Government of the ’70s to try to justify some of their policies, but they missed something out. Before that Labour Government of the ’70s, we had a Tory Government. Do we remember the three-day week? Do we remember the OPEC crisis when petrol prices went through the roof? The American economy had problems because the American public reacted to the prices at the petrol pump. We then inherited, as a minority Government, a previous Tory Government’s problems, and I predict that, in the future, we will be picking up the pieces once again for the damage that these people have done.
Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley) (Con)
I always find that the shadow Secretary of State’s speeches display a convenient forgettery: he gets out his paint brush, forgets the damage that he and his predecessors did to local government, comes up with a few colourful pieces and ignores the fact that, time after time, the Communities and Local Government Committee told him and his predecessors where they were going wrong—and now he has suddenly changed his tune.
Under Labour, the local authorities central grant became less fair as the funding formula was progressively manipulated to the disbenefit of London and the south-east. Many services, along with funding, were moved to regional authorities and quangos, capital receipts were centralised for Government selective redistribution, and local government was crushed with inspections by most Departments of State and by targets in their hundreds if not thousands. New scheme after new scheme was brought forward and money applied to it, but it was allocated specifically, carefully and frequently politically by the Labour Government.
Like it or lump it, the committee structure, which enabled every councillor to have a say before decisions were made, was removed, and a new system of executive decisions inspected afterwards by committees was landed on councils regardless of cost increases. Standards committees and the standards quango were set up, again costing money, for frequently frivolous complaints that were easily dealt with under the previous regime. Central Government imposed rules and regulations on the private sector, making competing for local government functions utterly pointless, and the so-called best-value legislation was imposed, further limiting local authority freedoms.
Most of the centralising and manipulation was introduced by the then Deputy Prime Minister, with his clear desire to make local authorities effectively direct agents of his Department. The effect on local councils’ morale was disastrous, and many complained that although they were local councils they were no longer local government. Incentives for lateral thinking to improve services and cut costs were destroyed, and local authorities in London and the south-east lost grant funding as the formula was changed three times. Even under the Conservatives, Surrey and places such as Wandsworth got among the lowest grants, but he came in and hit them with three funding formula changes, the last of which is notorious in Surrey. Under that change, it did not lose just a few million; the year-on-year loss to Surrey county council was £39 million. Event the Audit Commission pointed out the grant funding bias.
Over the years, the local government Select Committee, in its various guises, has increasingly pointed out the diminution of the freedom of local government. The last report was emphatic, and was swept aside. Latterly, there have been some gestures from various Secretaries of State. With a great flourish, one Secretary of State announced that the number of targets set by her Department would be diminished. The number had risen under her and her predecessors to well over 1,000. She was right; she did reduce the raw numbers. However, much of that was offset because there was a combining of targets, so they were still there, and there was increasing auditing of decisions made under the new freedom regulations. Although her Department tried, others did not, of course, so the number of targets increased.
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, along with his Ministers, now have a unique opportunity, as the Minister has just said, to give local government back its freedom. From the removal of regulations, a massive reduction in Government expenditure and the removal of constant auditing will come enormous savings. From the point of view of the council tax payer, many of those savings may be quadrupled because it will be a case of reverse gearing.
I hope that my right hon. Friend will be generous enough to consider a few thoughts. Most of us believe that Government and local government should be small and efficient. To expand on one of the Minister’s comments, the supermarket-type motto of “more, better, for less” is appropriate at this time. For local authorities to say that they are surprised about cuts is astonishing. They are not numerically dyslexic; they have been looking at these; they know they are coming; they have been working towards them.
In order to enable local authorities to respond, there must be a huge bonfire of regulations and inspections. The savings to local councils could amount to millions upon millions of pounds each from that alone. The reduction in the costs of the Audit Commission will be commensurate, as should the reduction of officials in the Department. Among the restrictive legislation that my right hon. Friend must remove should be the various incremental changes that made competitive tendering of the private sector for council functions non-competitive tendering. Local authorities should be encouraged to divest themselves of unused or unwanted properties by being able to retain the capital receipts, at least in part, for their own use. The business rate portion of Government grant should be separated from the actual Government grant.
Furthermore, I suggest that my right hon. Friend and his officials look at a slightly different approach to central funding. Education amounts to approximately 60% of local government expenditure. Under the previous Government, that was predominantly funded directly to schools, but through local education authorities. With the move for more independence of state or local authority schools, it would be timely to stop the previous Government’s pretence and fund the schools directly.
If that were the case, the slight adjustments for local authorities could be effectively funded by the national business rate, distributed by a fair equalisation formula and by the council tax, which councils should be allowed to set themselves without interference. That would mean that local council tax payers—of course, they are almost always voters—would have a much more direct relationship with the local council in respect of its council tax and services.
In addition, if council tax benefits were paid directly to the recipient and estimated on a fairly applied standard spending assessment basis, to use an old phrase, there would be a further incentive for these people to put pressure on their council. By that I mean that if the local authority set the council tax higher than had been estimated, those on benefits would have to pay more. Equally, where an efficient council sets a lower tax, the benefit recipient would pocket the difference.
Many Members want to speak, and the Minister has talked about many things. He has to build much more on those things to produce a bonanza Bill that cuts regulations. There is now a unique opportunity to turn back what the previous Government did to mutilate, damage and brutalise local government in this country.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
May I take this opportunity to say how pleasing it is to have not one but two Lancastrians as Deputy Speakers?
I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I rent a constituency office from Tameside council and have parking permits from both Tameside and Stockport.
I pay tribute to the work done by all councillors, irrespective of party affiliation. Having served as a local councillor for 12 years before entering the House, I fully understand how difficult the role is. It is often a thankless task, yet to serve local communities in local government is also a massive privilege and honour. I do not think we do enough to recognise the work of those who serve in local government.
I also want to place on record my tribute to Councillor Roy Oldham CBE, who served as leader of Tameside metropolitan borough council from 1980 until this year. Those 30 years at the top made him the longest serving council leader in the country, and his achievement in transforming the borough from sleepy backwater into one of the leading metropolitan districts in the country—the best in the north-west according to the Audit Commission—is a testament to his drive and vision to make the borough a leading council. Roy is currently recovering from illness and I wish him well. I am sure the new council leader, Councillor Kieran Quinn, will want to make his mark on the borough too, and build on the excellent achievements of the past few years. It will be a tough job, not least because of the tightening financial situation, but I am sure he will do his best for the area and I have every confidence that Tameside will continue to be at the forefront of local government.
The recent Budget was called the “unavoidable” Budget, and some important choices were made in it that will impact heavily on local government. There was a certain irony in the use of that term, however, as the report earlier this month from the new Office for Budget Responsibility indicated that the previous Government’s fiscal plans would have eliminated the bulk of the structural deficit by 2015. So these cuts that go so deep so quickly may not make the economic sense that the Government would have us believe. Clearly, they have decided to go further and faster, but these cuts seem more ideologically driven than based on sound economic fact. We will soon find out both if the Conservative-Liberal Government have been correct and about the wisdom of these actions.
It appears that the local government sector and workers will be facing the worst situation for a generation as the Chancellor tries to cut spending just as Baroness Thatcher did but in half the time. That will mean brutal cuts in the budgets of all Departments. The Chancellor is talking about 25% cuts across the board, but as we are told that the education, health and defence budgets will get off relatively lightly, I strongly suspect that other budgets, such as that for the Department for Communities and Local Government, will have to be cut by much more than a quarter. We will see what the real cost is to these Departments.
I urge caution. We need to be careful in how we address the local government cuts. Many local agencies now work in very close partnership one with another, so a cut in one area may well be to the serious detriment of activities in another. Budget cuts in local government will not be in “silos”, as all agencies are now largely linked up. We therefore need to look at the interactions between various services. It is easy to cut the aids and adaptations budgets for adult social services, but if the result of cutting a £100 handrail for an elderly constituent is to have to pay thousands of pounds for a hip operation in the NHS, that will not have saved the public purse.
We must not miss the bigger picture. If the cuts start to dismantle these working arrangements, service provision will be back as it was in the 1980s: Department-based, with no thinking outside the box and little joint thinking. For example, interrupting good local management on antisocial behaviour, family intervention and domestic violence will have a real impact on the communities I represent—on people who truly depend on services that no one else will provide and that no one else is better placed to co-ordinate.
As I have said, the scale of the cuts poses a serious challenge to local authorities’ ability to deliver services that meet the expectations of people—in my constituency, especially people who live in Stockport and Tameside—over the coming five years and beyond. The Tameside part of my constituency will be particularly affected. It has been ranked as an area of high deprivation, the 56th most deprived local authority area in England. Already, the changes to benefits and tax credits will have a disproportionate effect on Tameside residents due to the existing high levels of income deprivation, and may lead to even more people calling on council services in their time of need. This will be happening at the same time as further funding cuts to the council and its partners start to bite—a double whammy for the people of Tameside and the people of Reddish, to whom I will turn later in my remarks.
Tameside had expected to receive some £23.5 million of area-based grant funding in 2010-11. That has been reduced by £2.34 million—about 10%. Services will clearly be cut at a time when demand will inevitably rise, so Tameside is already anticipating and preparing for a number of hard choices over the coming years. The council has developed a medium-term financial strategy. It expects cuts of up to 10% a year for area-based grants and specific grants—about £5 million in total—on top of cuts to formula grant funding and restrictions on council tax, with a possibility of reductions in capital funding as well.
There will also be an impact on voluntary and community sector grant funding, a sector which contributes significantly to the capacity to deliver improved outcomes through community-based work. Activities to provide opportunities to young people may have to be reduced, along with youth provision, which is non-statutory, in order to ensure that work with vulnerable and looked-after children is maintained. It is therefore crucial that the council and its partners be able to maintain their levels of investment, both grant and mainstream, in effective prevention work. This Government must be clear that local government plays a vital role in delivering crucial services across communities and should be a spending priority, rather than taking more than its fair share of the burden.
I am also extremely concerned about the knock-on implications for regeneration in my constituency. Excellent work has been done by the Denton South Partnership in Haughton Green, one of the deprived parts of my constituency. This has been a model of effective partnership working, bringing together all the agencies such as the council, the primary care trust, the police and local housing associations. I pay tribute to the work of David Howarth, the chair, and all the members of the partnership. However, such a proactive approach to solving problems will go if all the partner agencies face the same budget reductions, which will lead to massive disinvestment in the communities where help is needed most.
I turn briefly to the Stockport part of my constituency, where there is also a great deal of concern. Cuts of £1.69 million to the area-based grant—
Toby Perkins
My hon. Friend is highlighting the extent to which the cuts, which would not have been made under a Labour Government because of our commitment to supporting people in their efforts to get work, will be targeted at the most deprived people in our communities. Does he agree that targeting areas in which disadvantaged people are out of work is a particularly cruel measure for this Government to take?
Andrew Gwynne
It is, and I agree fully with my hon. Friend. Parts of my constituency are still trying to recover from the previous Tory Government’s attack on those communities, despite the great work of the last Labour Government, and that progress needs to be maintained.
The area-based grant is finance used to help various services, such as those for deprived and vulnerable children. What is the alternative to cuts in services such as family intervention? If those services are cut locally, more children may be taken into care because there is no early intervention to fix problems quickly, which would cost the taxpayer significantly more. It costs approximately £24,000 a year to take a child into care. The cuts could well impact more harshly on less affluent areas of Stockport, such as Reddish. Liberal Democrat Stockport council does not do anything like enough for its most deprived communities, including the Reddish wards. I am concerned that they will be an easy target for the kind of cuts we now face. So there are a number of concerns for constituencies such as mine, because the Government’s announcements will hit a host of services that affect local people. It is clear that the areas that will be most affected are poorer areas in the cities and metropolitan boroughs. Labour has a strong record of increasing funding for local authorities in those areas and using them to deliver national priorities by harnessing the best locally.
This Government clearly have a new view of localism, which does not take much account of local people. These cuts fail, as they break all promises not to balance the books on the backs of the poorest, and they show that the Government’s claims of fairness are pretty empty and do not seem to look much beyond the world outside the comfortable home counties.
Mr Deputy Speaker
I am sure that Members will wish to respect the conventions associated with maiden speeches; I call Paul Uppal.
Paul Uppal (Wolverhampton South West) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and may I belatedly congratulate you on your elevation and appointment? I also congratulate all Members who have delivered their maiden speeches in this House. I have been privileged to listen to many discussions and many maiden speeches, and I have waited patiently, deliberately not rushing to make this speech—after all, in reality, I have probably been waiting for more than a quarter of a century to make this speech. That long wait commenced during a particularly inspiring lecture by one of my A-level politics tutors on a wet Wednesday afternoon, so a few weeks, and indeed a couple of hours, are a small price to pay.
I have not traditionally been an individual who has subscribed to a fatalistic view of life, but I have found my scepticism tested by the fact that my majority of 691 that has bought me to this great House is exactly the same as that of another young Conservative Member of Parliament who won the seat of Wolverhampton South West for the first time in 1950—one Enoch Powell. I make that statement with my tongue firmly pressed against the inside of my cheek and an ironic smile on my face. I also appeal to all Members of the House to take me to one side and proofread any of my speeches should I feel compelled in 18 years’ time to make a controversial speech at the Midland hotel. That is unlikely to happen, primarily because the hotel is no longer there, but I have lived enough of a life to know that one should never say never—I ask the Hansard reporters to note that my tongue is now firmly affixed to the other side of my cheek.
Am I here as the product of karma or kismet? I do not know, but I do know that by uttering those words I have probably created some confusion among those who record our statements, as I have introduced some Punjabi words into the rich texture of the records of Hansard. I have to state that I felt honour-bound to do that as I am the first Sikh Member of Parliament to sit on the Conservative Benches.
As is customary during these speeches, I would like to pay tribute to my predecessor, Rob Marris. During the last few weeks of the election campaign, although we were political adversaries we did manage to have many convivial chats and conversations, and during those last few weeks I found Rob to be a man of his word and a thoroughly decent bloke. He was an assiduous consistency MP and will undoubtedly be a tough act to follow, but I will endeavour to fill those extremely large shoes.
In terms of the Wolverhampton South West constituency, perhaps one of the most impressive sights to meet anyone coming in from the city centre is the Molineux stadium, which is home to Wolverhampton Wanderers football club. I am delighted to say that I am a season ticket holder and fan, and I am even more delighted by the fact that we stayed in the premiership this year. The seat is entirely urban and it is also home to the Express & Star newspaper, the country’s largest regional newspaper, which reaches more than 136,000 regular readers. One thing that does stand out for the Express & Star is that, uniquely, it has more than nine editions, covering local areas across the west midlands and maintaining a community base that is not just Wolverhampton-centric.
The constituency is also home to the brewer Marston’s, and only recently I was honoured to be present at the opening of its new visitors centre. I would heartily recommend anybody visiting Wolverhampton, including fellow Members, to sample our fine local ale during a visit to the constituency. I could speak at length about the history of the city and its prominent attractions, but that would be to miss out the greatest strength and asset of Wolverhampton—its people. Wulfrunians are famed for a no-nonsense approach to life; they say it as it is, approaching life with an open mind and refreshing honesty. In many ways that attitude mirrors my own personal experiences of growing up in a Sikh family. It is a Punjabi tradition to live life to the full and with “dhel”—that is a Punjabi word for a generous spirit and courageous heart. That, in essence, sums up the vast majority of Wulfrunians. One will not find a city populated by a more decent people, who always speak straight from their soul. As my family always told me when I was growing up, “Real friends will tell you the truth. It is acquaintances who will tell you what you want to hear.”
In Wolverhampton, I have spoken to representatives of various bodies about health care in the city, and that is why I have chosen to make my maiden speech in this debate, which is essentially about funding. We have the Phoenix centre, a walk-in centre that offers a wide variety of treatments, along with the Gem centre, which I passed every day during the general election campaign. However, through my discussions with various individuals and numerous bodies I have uncovered a great deal of frustration with the fact that for the last six years, under the last Government, just under £100 million of private investment in health care provision in Wolverhampton had not been spent, after discussion after discussion after procrastination. It would appear that after years of waiting to spend this money, we now have a stalemate and it seems likely that with the passage of time, Wolverhampton and my constituents will have missed out on more than £100 million of investment in health care because of dithering, indecision and inaction. I am not interested in apportioning blame, but have chosen to raise the matter as I feel passionately about it. The issues raised by such inaction could provide guidance to legislators and executives both nationally and locally. I am stoical in my view that we cannot change what happened yesterday, but we can change tomorrow.
To get to the nub of the issue, Wolverhampton has been involved in a dialogue with a LIFTCo—a local improvement finance trust company. A LIFTCo is essentially a PFI initiative to push forward service-led initiatives to bring about radical change in primary and social care. We can talk long and hard about the pros and cons of PFI initiatives, but, through my discussions with various bodies, I have discovered that total inaction is universally perceived to have been the worst option. I shall not go into the minutiae of the detail, but essentially the public and private sectors have come together in good faith but, over a period of time, either the private sector has lost faith or the project has fallen away, as everybody feels that they are at a total impasse. I feel that the reason for that is that, eventually, somebody has to make a decision and ultimately take a risk. In the past few years, “risk” has become a somewhat dirty word associated with young men wearing garish braces and shouting colourful language across trading floors, leading ultimately to the likes of us picking up the bill for their recklessness. That is the point—in essence, I am talking about calculated risks and about people moving outside their comfort zone.
Perhaps I can illustrate my point more graphically by reciting another conversation with a similar colleague who has done a great deal of work on the role of young men in street gangs. I know I am veering away from the issue of health provision, but the subject of individual risk-taking is just as pertinent. My colleague spoke to many young men about their dreams and hopes and why they had eventually become gang members. One individual story jumped out more than the others. A group of teenagers would regularly meet at a park and it happened that their central meeting point revolved around a set of gymnastic parallel bars. There was a pecking order and young men would impress their peers and, importantly, young women by showing off their prowess on the bars. One day—almost inevitably—somebody fell off and, because of the resultant scratches and bruises, the local council felt honour-bound to remove the bars after health and safety got involved. After a few years the youngsters had formed a gang and a pecking order became established, with antisocial behaviour becoming a badge of honour.
Having been a young man once, I can vaguely remember the desire and the engine that would drive a person to seek acceptance and admiration from their friends and to impress members of the opposite sex. Luckily for me, a sports field was my arena, but it comes back to that basic point: if we endeavour to eliminate risk, we emasculate society and it appears that young men in particular feel that acutely. To put this as bluntly as possible, in terms of our public-private service providers we need to put radical thinking and calculated risk taking and decision making at the centre of provision.
The motives of officers should not be just their salaries and pension pot at the end of their careers. I am under no illusion that this will be easy, but I dare say that governance of any sort over the next few years will be challenging. I—like many Members, I suspect—am always interested in the discussion of ideas, but some have said to me that that does not always happen in the Chamber with the new modern politics.
Forgive me if I have strayed on to controversial ground, but as I suggested earlier, straight talking and a no-nonsense approach is the Wolverhampton way. In that vein, I would make a plea for all Members to revisit the issue of postal voting fraud, which, I am sad to say, appears to be alive and well in many of our metropolitan areas. Since I was elected, I have been approached by numerous individuals in my own constituency who have spoken to me about the issue. In my case, it worked against me; I would say to Opposition Members that there might be cases where it will have worked against them. In any event, we are all very much at a crossroads. I can envisage a time soon when very easily and quickly we will all face an escalation of a fraudulent race here, as each side endeavours to outdo the other. I hope that Opposition Members will trust my motives for wading into this area, as it damages us all in this House and damages our reputation as a country.
It is all too easy to stereotype the motives of Members as partisan, mischievous or surreptitious. As a child, I often faced brutal stereotyping on my daily journey to school, but even more painful was the pigeonholing inflicted on me on my first day in a new primary school: I was placed in a remedial class for a few years because the natural assumption was that I could not speak English. I say that to illustrate that we are almost all guilty of occasionally judging a book by its cover. So when the Conservatives are castigated for being uncaring over the next few years, I ask hon. Members to remember that I am somebody’s son, father, brother, husband, cousin and friend, and that in their eyes one could not find a person further removed from that caricature.
I thank hon. Members for their patience and indulgence in letting me speak, and I hope they will forgive me if I have troubled any sensibilities. This great House is nothing if not a reflection of the individual stories of its Members, and I hope that by adding my perspective I have added to the strength of its foundations and the breadth of debate.
Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)
Let me begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) on his excellent maiden speech. He certainly covered the attributes and aspects of his constituency. I congratulate him on the special place that he has achieved in parliamentary history and in the history of the Conservative party. It was good to hear his very generous comments about his predecessor, Rob Marris, who was respected for his honesty, integrity and friendship on the Labour side of the House. I think that is appreciated.
I was just having a brief discussion with my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) and my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) about the good things that come out of Wolverhampton. Unfortunately, Wolverhampton Wanderers managed to sell to Sheffield Wednesday one Leon Clarke, whom the hon. Gentleman might remember. Leon Clarke finally scored a goal in the last game of the season, when we were struggling to avoid relegation. In celebrating his wonderful goal, he ran to the advertising hoardings and kicked them, breaking his toe, and was then substituted. I do not think it is true that everything that comes out of Wolverhampton is necessarily first class and admirable.
Let me move on to the debate. The Opposition have made it very clear that we have major reservations about the immediate impact of the cuts and about the proposals for the medium term. We believe it is unnecessary for the cuts to come immediately and that they go too far in the immediate term. We also believe that they are unfair in a number of respects. Bringing in cuts part way through the year has forced local councils to make the cuts that are available to them, which are not necessarily the cuts they would make if they had a bit more time to plan and bring them in properly. We also disagree fundamentally with the way the cuts have been targeted at funds that are themselves targeted at areas of deprivation. They are cuts against deprived communities, and they are the sort of cuts that the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Andrew Stunell), would have been on his feet protesting about only a few weeks ago.
I want to raise two concerns about where the Government are headed—with their approach to housing and their approach to the general cuts to local government that will be announced in the next few weeks. I did not get an answer earlier from the Minister for Housing about housing targets: he said that the Government did not have any. I did not get an answer about likely numbers, how that area will be funded or what the funding mechanisms will be. I have a real worry regarding the comments of Liberal Democrats about the last Government not building enough houses. I have some sympathy with those sentiments because I think that although we did brilliantly on the Decent Homes programme, we did not build enough social houses to rent. That needs to be rectified, but does any Lib Dem in the House seriously believe that this Government will do better, when they have no idea how that will be achieved? That is complete nonsense.
The problem is that people are going to be much more careful about committing themselves to buying a house as we head towards a situation in which spending will be reined in, people will be fearful of losing their job, wages will fall and benefits will be cut. The likelihood is that the housing market will stagnate, at best, in the next few months. Whether a double-dip recession and the economy going down will produce a slowing down of the housing market, or whether a slowing down of the housing market will produce a double-dip recession, is a chicken-and-egg argument. The likelihood is that economic activity will stall and the housing market will stall.
If fewer people feel able to commit to buying a home, there will be more pressure on social renting and local authority waiting lists, so what have the Government done? The first thing they have done is to suspend the Kickstart programme and schemes whereby local authorities were going to build houses directly for the first time in a long time. Labour and the Lib Dems welcomed that approach when it was introduced, but the Lib Dems are now cutting and stopping it. That is the reality of the situation. If local authorities are no longer allowed to build, what are the alternatives? I have not heard any. We have been promised an announcement at some stage in the future.
We have also been told that the reforms to the housing revenue account have been put on hold. That was one of the few opportunities for local authorities to return to council house building. If they could depend on a given rental stream for the future, they could perhaps use prudential borrowing for that purpose.
The housing association building model depends on cross-subsidies from the selling of homes. If the private sector housing market is stalled, those cross-subsidies will not be available. We do not know what will happen to social housing, because there is complete silence from the Government. All we know is that people who are in social housing will have a tougher time with the housing benefit rules, and some may be forced out of their houses into private rented accommodation.
Caroline Flint
What does my hon. Friend make of the idea of providing help for people who wish to move to another part of the country to find work? None of us would oppose such an arrangement, but given the absence of any policies to create more affordable housing opportunities around the country, how exactly would it work?
Mr Betts
Obviously it would be up to the Government to make any such announcement, but the idea that people should move from communities in the north, where there may be enough housing, to find jobs in the south, where there is a particularly chronic housing shortage, beggars belief. What would people on waiting lists in the south think of someone who arrived there and said, “I will have that house as a matter of priority, because I am moving down here to work”? The policy has not been thought through.
If any Member on the other side of the House can tell me where the mechanism and the funds will come from to enable new social rented housing to be built, I ask him or her to stand up and do so. So far, I have heard nothing from either the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats. There are no funds for council house building—they have been stalled—and the funds for housing association building are limited. Given the reduction in cross-subsidy from the selling of homes, any money that the Homes and Communities Agency may have to fund housing association accommodation will produce fewer houses. Fewer social houses will be built as a result of this Government’s policies, and I am aware of no commitment from Ministers to rectify the position.
What will the Government do about the overall funding situation? We have heard about 25% cuts, and also about protection for education. Presumably Departments other than those dealing with schools and defence will take a bigger hit. We are assuming that councils will receive at least 30%, but the arrangement is not fair, because we will have to protect adult social services and children’s services. What is left? Libraries, parks, recreation, street cleaning, the environment and refuse collection. It is no use the Secretary of State telling local authorities how to collect their refuse. Will they have the money to pay for one refuse collection a week?
Then we must consider the differing impacts on various councils. I opposed individual council tax caps when our Government introduced them, and refused to vote for them, but let us assume that they are imposed now. At least authorities will receive the same amount of money from council tax, but there will be cuts in their Government grant. Councils with the most deprivation in their areas receive a bigger amount of grant than those with the least deprivation, which receive more of their money from council tax. Council tax is to be frozen but Government grant is to be cut by 25%, which means that the councils that will suffer the biggest cuts in their overall budgets are those with the most deprivation. That is unfair, and we fundamentally oppose it. The Liberal Democrats used to oppose it as well, and it is time that one or two Members on the Government Benches, including the Minister, started to explain how they will make the system fair.
The fact is that the most disadvantaged councils and communities will be hit hardest by the 25% cuts in Government funding. In their areas, library, recreation and street cleaning budgets will be cut in half. If the Minister does not agree with that, he must explain why my figures are wrong. If such facilities as adults’ and children’s services are protected from the 30% cut in the grant, the impact on other services will be dramatic, especially in areas that receive a large amount of Government support because of deprivation.
George Hollingbery
I look forward to working with the hon. Gentleman on the Select Committee. It seems from his eloquent speech this afternoon that I have a great deal to learn. I have to say, however, that I am a little tired of Opposition Members targeting the “Tory shires”, as if that were a pejorative term. We rightly receive less Government support for our citizens than more deprived boroughs, and I accept and understand that. However, the spending that comes to us is for our more deprived citizens, and cuts to our budgets, which have not been topped up as much over recent years as those in others places, are very important to us. We may be wealthier parts of the country, but the people we are looking after are not.
Mr Betts
In the end, the Government grant reflects the amount of deprivation in an area. Clearly, there are deprived people even in affluent areas, but it is about the total amount of deprivation. Certainly other communities have more deprivation and that is why they get more Government funding and they will be harder hit. That is the point that I am making.
Right at the end of the Minister’s speech we got a vague mention of Total Place. It is important that it is developed, but it should not be seen as a panacea. Total Place is at the pilot stage; it has produced some very interesting results and ideas about how public money can be spent better across Departments. The Government have to allow local authorities to take the lead on these matters. The DCLG must get a grip of its colleagues in other Departments and let go of the controls that exist, but that will not deliver overnight savings of 25%. We will not achieve 25% or 30% cuts by efficiency savings; there will be real damage to public services. We must recognise that, and the Government must explain and justify the cuts.
The Secretary of State says that his three priorities are localism, localism and localism, but let us take what the Minister said about refuse collection and people in town halls dictating things. Where is the dictation? The Secretary of State in his new spirit of localism is telling every council in this country how it must empty the bins. It is absolute nonsense. How can we have any trust or faith in a Government who talk about localism and setting local councils free when that is one of their first policy announcements?
It is clear that the Budget package was regressive. That has been shown by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. There was an interesting report in the newspapers at the weekend of an investigation into the totality of the Government cuts by Tim Horton and Howard Reed on behalf of the Fabian society. It showed that when one takes not merely the tax changes but the housing benefit changes and the spending cuts, including local government spending cuts, the poorest 10% of our community will have their spending power cut by six times as much as the richest 10%. That is the impact of the Government’s policy. The Budget was not fair and the cuts that have been made so far to local council budgets are not fair. The deficit is truly being cut on the backs of the poorest in our communities.
John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) (LD)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) on his excellent maiden speech. I am pleased that other hon. Members share my concern about how easy the Labour party made it to defraud the electoral process. Obviously, people know in Birmingham how the Labour party stole 4,000 people’s votes in Bordesley Green ward and that 273 votes were arrested in Aston ward.
I must explain where I come from. I was a city councillor for 18 years. I believe that local government can do a lot for the communities that it serves. Local councillors from all parties have at the heart of their objectives to serve the whole community, so it is sad that we find ourselves in this situation. Let us recognise that. Part of the situation is an international problem; part of it is an exacerbation of the international problem by the failure of the Labour party. Like Germany, we should have entered this difficult situation in surplus. Instead, we have a deficit akin to that of Greece. Labour Members fail to recognise that there was a sovereign debt crisis in April across Europe. It drove up interest rates on sovereign debt for the countries with the bigger problems—the PIIGS: Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain. Those countries are having to make perhaps more extreme adjustments to their public sector spending than we are.
It is not unreasonable to say that the circumstances now are different from those in, say, March, and that we have to approach things in a different way. Six billion pounds is a lot of money, but it is a relatively small proportion of the deficit of £150 billion. Cuts of 25% in real terms are a lot, but 1% is a movement in the right direction. It is not a massive shift, but it is sufficient to reduce the interest rates paid on Government debt. By doing that, we do not have to make cuts as great as the Labour party would have done had it continued with its strategy, which I believe would have been derailed in any event.
Regardless of what we would like to do, we are driven down a route of making very serious economies. I do not think that people have fully recognised that. We had a debate earlier about 1.08% cuts as opposed to 1.1%. That pales into insignificance when we consider that we have to find 25% cuts in real terms, even over five years. We also have to recognise that it takes time to reorganise things.
The Opposition spokesman complained about Birmingham not spending all the money it had. Birmingham was well aware that financial difficulties were coming down the track and that spending all the money, as the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and the Labour party did—and then told us that we had no money—was not the right strategy. It is worth keeping some few millions in the cocoa tin so that when we face the difficulties after the general election we do not end up in such a mess that we say, “All the money’s gone.”
Birmingham made an initial announcement of £12 million savings. It is probably more like £20 million. Those figures can be worked out quite straightforwardly. They pale into insignificance when compared with what has to be saved over five years—£250 million to £300 million. That has to be planned now.
The hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) explained that we could protect adults’ and children’s services. I am sure he is aware that, of the budget of metropolitan authorities such as Birmingham and Sheffield, something like two thirds is spent on adults’ and children’s services. The schools grant goes directly to the schools. I am not sure that it will be possible to protect those services. Part of this debate has been the question, “Do we have to do this?” The answer is obviously yes. Another part of the debate is how we make cuts in an equitable manner.
Angela Smith
In Sheffield, the Lib-Dem council has followed a policy of redistributing money from deprived areas to the richer areas of the city. That pattern is now being replicated nationally. Is that fair?
John Hemming
I cannot comment on the detail of what has happened in Sheffield. I agree with the argument that deprivation has to be taken into account. There is no question about that. The idea of the pupil premium is that the money follows the individual rather than catchment areas from the national census. One of the difficulties with many of the calculations is that they have been done not on an individual basis but on a categorised basis.
The hon. Member for Sheffield South East makes a good point that if we cut the Government grant and do not look at the aggregate local government spend, that has an effect. There is an issue to be looked at there. People have asked whether we should cut 25% here, 26% there, 23% there and 27% somewhere else, or whether, given that we face such a severe problem, the same figure should be cut everywhere on a formulaic basis. I am quite tempted by the latter argument. I think that that method was used in Sweden, which faced a serious problem. It had the same sort of deficit and it went through the process of getting rid of it.
John Hemming
One has to make judgments on the time scale based on the effect within the markets. We are not talking about paying off the debt over five years. There will still be net borrowing in the fifth year.
Alison McGovern
Will the hon. Gentleman comment on how effective we will be in paying back the deficit, making these cuts in-year and cutting programmes to which commitments had already been made? Surely that is waste.
John Hemming
First, there needs to be an understanding of terms, because I heard the phrase, “paying back the deficit”. However, the deficit is the forecast difference between income and expenditure in the financial year, the debt is the amount of money that the country as a whole has borrowed, and there is often a lot of confusion between the two figures. This year, if we borrow another £150 billion, that will be added to the debt, and next year, if we borrow some more, that too will be added to the debt. Although we are talking about reducing the debt during this Parliament as a proportion of gross domestic product, our financial strategy does not talk about paying back the debt in cash terms. In fact, at the end of this Parliament we will end up with a higher level of debt, so in comparison with Sweden we cannot pay it back. We would like to do so, but we cannot do things that quickly.
We have to make people confident that the country is solvent. The country could be liquid at this stage without any great difficulty, but we have to make people confident that it is solvent and capable of paying back the debt so that the interest is paid. We are not paying back the deficit, however. The deficit is the amount borrowed each year. [Interruption.] I have another four minutes and am quite happy to explain to the Labour party the basics of finance, because there is a lot of confusion about debt and deficit. “Deficit” is the amount of money borrowed each year on a net basis—[Interruption.] I shall get through to Opposition Members at some stage.
Alison McGovern
I really do understand the difference between debt and deficit, but will the hon. Gentleman explain how the waste of cutting programmes in-year will help to reduce the deficit?
John Hemming
That will reduce the deficit because we will spend, and therefore, have to borrow, less money this year. That is not complicated. If we spend less money, we do not have to borrow as much, because the money that we spend has to be borrowed on the gilts market. It would be nice if the reduction were done more cost-effectively at times, but £6 billion is not so great in comparison with the overall deficit. It is appalling for local authorities to pretend that they did not know that cuts were coming down the track, that the country had a major financial problem and that they had to do something. There will be difficulties, but Total Place is part of the solution rather than the problem, and there is no question but that we have to do something.
In the past I have explained how, through various regulations, the people who go round and wash people’s feet are different from those who go round and cut their toenails, because they have to have different qualifications. That is not an efficient way of providing public services. If, through Total Place, the same person can go round and wash people’s feet and cut their toenails, that will be more cost-effective and involve less travel time—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie) should make an intervention if he wants to speak.
Chris Leslie
Did the hon. Gentleman mention in his manifesto that he would cut so much money from his local authority area?
John Hemming
Interestingly, we did not ring-fence anything in our manifesto. We were clear that there was a severe financial problem and spending cuts would have to be found. The Labour party revealed so little in its budgets and concealed most of the figures and budget cuts, so it was difficult to put all the figures together, but Members will find that, when I explained the situation in debates during the general election, I made it clear that we faced serious problems. If the Opposition are going to have such a row about what is a minor point compared with the overall magnitude of the difficulty, I do not know what will happen over the next few years. There are some real problems to face, and we need to maintain services.
The point that the hon. Member for Sheffield South East made about adults’ and children’s services was very important. In Birmingham we use the brighter futures programme, and there are ways of working more closely with the people whom we support in communities, and of working with mutual bodies to try to ensure that services are provided. There have been problems with assessment systems in the past. The simple approach of just changing the priority on assessment did not result in any savings, because off the back of that, all the assessments were changed. There are serious problems, and the Opposition should recognise that they are responsible for them. They should try to be part of the solution rather than the problem.
Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) on his maiden speech, which he delivered with grace and a sense of humour. I am delighted that he is the first Sikh Conservative Member and wish him the greatest of success. Grace and a sense of humour might well be qualities that will stand him in good stead in the coming months. I also congratulate you on taking up your position, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have no doubt that you will be a great champion of us Back Benchers.
When I came to this debate I thought, “Local government finance? It’s going to be bland, techie, full of references to area-based grant, formula grant, specific grants, ratios and numbers,” but I have been pleasantly surprised, because the debate has been lively and, on occasions, combative. That is quite right, because it shows how much all of us care about our local authorities and how important the services are to the people whom we represent. We must never forget that, behind all the technical jargon that we sometimes hear, we are talking about people who are struggling to bring up their children; people who are often trying to hang on to a job; people who are sometimes caring for their elderly parents, with the tremendous stress that that puts them under; and people who are looking constantly for work in this difficult economic climate.
Under this Tory-Liberal Democrat Government—I refuse to call it a coalition, because it is what it is, a Tory-Liberal Democrat Government—the prospects look extremely worrying. We have already had £6 billion of cuts, but the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming) said that that is not a great deal of money and does not know what we are all worried about. Well, I can tell him this: to my local authority it is a great deal of money. It is significant, but I have no doubt that further bad news is on its way, and that tremendous cuts will be made in the autumn. If they are signified by the same unfairness and north-south divide that we have already seen, Opposition Members will have a great deal to worry about. [Interruption.] I am delighted to welcome the Secretary of State, who has just taken up his seat on the Treasury Bench. I trust that he has hurried back from Bradford, and at the end of my speech I shall make a couple of remarks in which he might take a personal interest.
The Deputy Prime Minister once said that he wanted to see deep and savage cuts, and then he rowed back from that tremendously. However, he is about to have his wish fulfilled, and that is a bleak prospect. He also said:
“There will be no return to the kind of cuts we saw in the Thatcherite 1980s”;
“We’re not going to allow a great north-south divide to reappear”;
and, most interestingly of all, that
“the coalition will ensure that the cuts are fair and we will protect the poorest and the most vulnerable.”
He is wrong on all counts. He will face not only the wrath of his enraged constituents in Sheffield, quite rightly given his decision on Sheffield Forgemasters, but the anger of families throughout the country who will feel the brunt of the cuts that are made in local government services.
The Minister for Housing, the right hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), who opened the debate, claimed that the Government were essentially about fairness, and we heard about them wanting to hard-wire fairness into the country’s DNA. Let us straight away end that myth about fairness. Salford still has high levels of deprivation, but we are going to lose 1.1% of our budget, and Salford is of course Labour controlled. If we look at the different impact of the cuts on neighbouring Trafford, which is Tory controlled, we see just how fair those cuts are.
Compared with Trafford, Salford has double the number of people on housing benefit and council tax benefit; 3,000 more unemployed people; average earnings that are £40 a week less; and almost double the number of children in workless households. So, how is it fair for the coalition to reduce Salford’s budget by 1.1% compared with a cut of just 0.6% in Trafford? How is it fair that Salford loses £3.5 million and Trafford just £1.5 million? That cannot be fair, because we in Salford have made considerable progress since 1997. We have seen a huge fall in unemployment throughout our area, but people are still looking for jobs, and we need to get them back to work. We will not do that, however, by cutting the council’s funding to tackle worklessness. The working neighbourhoods fund—cut. The future jobs fund—cut. That is short-sighted and damaging and will crush the hopes of many young people in our communities.
Angela Smith
Will my right hon. Friend comment on the fact that the working neighbourhoods fund areas account for 71% of the reductions in incapacity benefit claimants since 2004?
Hazel Blears
My hon. Friend has made the extremely important point that despite what some Government Members have said, the working neighbourhoods fund is a long-term programme that is beginning to get results. We are seeing from the evaluation that it works in an intensive, neighbourhood-focused way and is getting people from some of the most difficult cases of intergenerational unemployment back into work. What do we see now? We see a Government who profess to want to reform the welfare system and get people back into work cutting the very programmes that can succeed in our communities.
Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)
Perhaps I misheard, but I thought the shadow Secretary of State said earlier that if his Government had been returned, there would have been £40 billion of cuts from their side of the House. Would any of the schemes that the right hon. Lady has just mentioned have been affected, or would other schemes, on which people also rely, have been cut instead?
Hazel Blears
We would have made cuts because of the deficit; we have been absolutely straightforward about that. However, we would not have taken an extra £40 billion out of the economy while the recovery was fragile. Wanting to get rid of the deficit totally in the space of one Parliament is reckless and damaging. We will see the effects in each of our communities in the months and years to come.
The one thing that I think we would have protected are the programmes to get people back to work. If we get people back to work, they will pay tax and national insurance and we will not pay out for them in benefits. That is basic common sense. Cutting the future jobs fund and the working neighbourhoods fund, and making sure that the young people involved face the dole, is totally the wrong approach.
We have said that there should be no return to the 1980s. I remember that, in the 1980s, two of my wards in Salford had 50% male unemployment—half the men were out of work. There was 70% youth unemployment. That sounds Dickensian now; it sounds like 100 years ago, but it was not. It was only in the 1980s, as a result of that last Tory recession. There is no way in the world that we Labour Members want to go back to those days.
In Salford, we were also eagerly awaiting a Kickstart bus service. That sounds like a small affair, but it would have linked the whole of the outer part of Salford with MediaCity and Salford Quays. There are fantastic opportunities in MediaCity for getting new jobs in the creative and digital industries. We need to have public transport, so that people in our outlying areas can take advantage of those new jobs. That bus service is now under threat as a result of the cuts. Does it not make sense to fund a bus service to enable people to access the jobs on offer, instead of asking—or even forcing—them to move home? That is simple, basic common sense, but the provision is going to be cut.
We have seen cuts of £600 million in the housing programme, £300 million of that in the market renewal pathfinder programmes: all are targeted at low-demand areas in the north of England. Again, we are seeing the Thatcherite cuts and the north-south divide, with a disproportionate effect on northern cities. We are also likely to see damaging cuts to the police services. If there are going to be 25% cuts—at the Home Office, for example—that will involve about 4,000 police community support officers. The Minister who will wind up the debate is a Greater Manchester Member of Parliament. I should like to hear from him just what effect the cuts will have on the number of PCSOs in Greater Manchester; as I am sure he will know, PCSOs are hugely valued by the community.
As the Secretary of State knows, I am always a constructive politician. I should like to say a word or two about the Total Place programme, which I set up when I was Secretary of State. It is not simply about squeezing out efficiencies—yes, it is about bringing back-office services together, having call centres, not having 10 personnel departments and not duplicating all our services, but it is also about much more than that. It is about integrating services, redesigning the whole way in which public services work, bringing together the budgets of policing, health, education, regeneration and economic development and saying to a local area, “That’s your total budget. What are your priorities? What do you want to get out of that investment?” The local area then has the freedom to decide.
In Cumbria, total public expenditure on all those services is about £6 billion. That is a lot of money by anybody’s reckoning, and I genuinely believe that if there is imagination and creativity about public service reform, we can make some cuts and big savings without necessarily affecting the front-line services on which all our people depend. Today I found out from the Library that the figure in Greater Manchester is £22 billion. If we bring together health, education and policing in Greater Manchester, we will see that we are often dealing with the same families with multiple problems, each relating to those public services.
When I was policing Minister and responsible for antisocial behaviour, we brought in the family intervention projects. We were spending £250,000 on each of the families involved; multiple interventions were not really changing their behaviour. When we got one worker with sufficient clout in the system to get health, education and policing all working together, the families cost us about £30,000. We called the worker a “muscular social worker”—and I can tell Members that they had to be pretty muscular. Doing that saved money, and 80% of the families changed their behaviour sufficiently for them no longer to face eviction for antisocial behaviour. The initiative saved money, it was commonsensical and it worked.
I urge the Government not to look at Total Place as simply an administrative efficiency measure; it is actually about fundamental service redesign. The Department for Communities and Local Government will need to press every other part of the Government to get on board. We have all tried our best, but Government Departments build empires and take power back to themselves. If we simply have cuts across the board without using our intellect and imagination, we will not make the progress that we want.
The Secretary of State has said that his priorities are localism, localism and localism. What we have seen today has given the lie to that. There has been no consultation with local government about the cuts. There has been no transparency; we do not know where £500 million of cuts are going to fall. There has been no involvement of local people. The Secretary of State’s promise has proved about as meaningful as the Liberal Democrat pledge on VAT. He has a long way to go.
The cuts are a bit like those of the 1980s, as they are targeted on the poorest. There is at least one other consistency. When the Secretary of State was leader of Bradford city council, he was known—perhaps not entirely affectionately—as “the beast of Bradford”. Teachers, caretakers, maintenance workers, crèche and nursery staff, social workers and council officers all lost their jobs. His ambition was to cut £50 million from the council budget and turn it into a holding company that met two or three times a year when the contracts would be handed out. Under the control of the right hon. Gentleman, Bradford city council was described as an example of Thatcherism at its most red-blooded. I wonder whether he told the people of Bradford this morning what he had in store for them. Heaven knows what he has in store for us, but we Labour Members will protect the poorest and most vulnerable, who depend on our council services. We will have no return to the Thatcherite 1980s.
George Hollingbery (Meon Valley) (Con)
I offer my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal), whose eloquence was wonderful to hear. I am delighted to have been in the Chamber for his maiden speech.
The motion today is full of regrets and objections. It harks back to the programmes of the previous Government and makes veiled demands for the reinstatement of spending, but the context is an unprecedented deficit of £156 billion, bequeathed to the coalition Government by the Labour party. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor and many of his Front-Bench colleagues have spent several of the past few days rehearsing the reasons why we need to make savings. They have talked about the need to rebalance the economy, restructure our finances and grow the private sector.
The position in which we find ourselves is wholly unsustainable. As many as 30% of the work force in some areas of our country work for the Government. In 2015-16, social security and tax credit bills are projected to be £222 billion—that is, £3,580 for every man, woman and child in this country. Debt interest payments alone will rise to nearly 10% of all Government spending in the same period. Can it be any surprise at all that international markets have been spooked and that until last Tuesday, our share price—in the form of the price of sterling—was falling away on international markets?
Do Labour Members really think that there could not have been a debt crisis here? I assure them that there could. If credit spreads on UK Treasury stocks had started to move out, that would have been an unmitigated disaster for all of us—every penny borrowed would have begun to cost more and more.
That is the context of the coalition Government’s proposals to make savings of £6.22 billion this year, in year, of which £1.165 billion is to come from local government. The question is whether this is a fair proportion for local government to shoulder, and the simple answer must be yes. Local government represents about a quarter of all UK Government spending, and the reductions proposed are about 20% of spending, so merely in straight proportional terms, this is a fair amount for local government to shoulder.
Of course, as we must all admit, any in-year cuts are very difficult to find; particularly those of us who have been in local government will understand that. With budgets already set, it is a serious challenge to row back. However, the proposals make it clear that huge efforts have been made to protect front-line services, and they make it easier for local councils to prioritise the programmes they feel are most important to their local communities. Including guarantees for funding for schools, Sure Start and other programmes, no council will see its revenue grants cut by more than 2%, and no region by more than 1%.
Formula grant totalling £29 billion has been protected, thus directly supporting front-line services as used by our constituents. Some previously ring-fenced grants have been freed up for authorities to spend as they see fit. This reduction, from 10.6% to 7.7%, represents a welcome first step along the road to phasing out ring-fencing altogether. I recognise, at this point in my remarks, that I am now going down the technical, dry, percentage route that we were warned about a moment ago. The Government have committed to freezing council tax for at least one year, and will seek to do so in the following year, in co-operation with local authorities.
Looking at the motion before us, it is difficult to accept its argument that this programme
“fails to meet this test of fairness”.
It seems to me that every effort has been made to ensure that these cuts have as little impact as possible on council tax payers and, of course, on recipients of services. More than half the savings come as reductions in revenue grants, but in total this represents two thirds of 1% of total revenue funding. Surely no one would suggest that that should be impossible for councils to find. The balance comes in reductions in capital grants, about half of which are specifically allocated.
A number of those savings will seem non-core to many authorities. In my experience, LABGI—the local authority business growth incentives scheme—is regarded by many local authorities as free pocket money. It has done very little to incentivise the building of new businesses, certainly in the area that I come from. I also believe that the housing and planning delivery grant has done little to increase the rate of building of houses and, in any event, current market conditions dictate that there is little that local authorities can do to influence completions at this stage. Even in more difficult areas, such as reductions in funding for the Department for Education and for Supporting People, the changes are targeted at non-core spending.
The motion asks us to condemn
“the failure of the Secretary of State to tell the House or local authorities where £504 million of cuts…will fall”.
I believe that the figure of £504 million is derived from the excellent Library note on this issue. An avid reader of standard note SN/SG/5573 will have seen this text on page 4:
“Of the remaining grants, it was not possible to make allocations to individual authorities as, in most cases, the allocations have yet to be finalised”.
It further says, on the same page:
“Section 4 of this note, reproduced from Annex C of the additional paper, explains the precise changes made to each grant and why, in some cases, it has not been possible to allocate the grant money to individual local authorities”.
I recommend to Labour Members the detailed explanations on pages 9 to 13.
One smaller area of direct savings that I particularly welcome is the abolition of comprehensive area assessments. Having been involved in the “Baby Brother” version applied to district councils, I can personally attest to the uselessness and extraordinarily intrusive nature of these Big Brother-style information-gathering exercises. As the portfolio holder for performance management on Winchester city council, I was responsible for the production of much of the data required, almost none of which helped us to perform better or to manage anything better.
I have two examples that are particular favourites, one of which I will share with the House. It concerns the average time taken to re-let a council house. We had a number of council dwellings that were extremely hard to let, and we worked at that imaginatively and finally began to let them reasonably productively. However, our performance got considerably worse, because it was based on an average of the number of days taken to re-let a council house. That particular statistic took a lot of gathering and managing, but it never once contributed to a single change in a management decision or any improvement in services. The real point about nearly all those figures is that they were never used for anything other than to tick boxes. We collected the data, we sent it in, and the box was ticked. On a similar basis, I very much welcome the commitment to abolish the Standards Board for England. Never has an organisation been so abused for political and personal rivalries as this cumbersome and bureaucratic quango. I, for one, will not mourn its passing—nor, I expect, will many other people.
Finally, I would like to address the ideas involved in the Total Place initiative. I strongly believe that innovative local council officers and deliverers of local services are already more than capable of delivering changes such as those envisaged in Total Place. In southern Hampshire, we have PUSH—the partnership for urban south Hampshire—about which I had words with the shadow Secretary of State earlier, and the Integra arrangement for waste recycling. Only last week, I had a meeting with John Bonney, Hampshire’s chief fire officer. He supports the ambulance service with community responder units that can often respond much faster than ambulance services, and he has saved more lives that way than he manages to save even through fire prevention. A huge amount can be done through initiatives such as Total Place, and that requires the breaking down of silos that was referred to a few moments ago.
My problem with Total Place is that the documents that back it up are of such byzantine complexity that I cannot find my way through them. The practitioner’s guide is so full of flow charts, extraordinary diagrams and management-speak that I, as somebody with an MBA from a decent school in the United States, struggled to make head or tail of it. I therefore say this to the Secretary of State: let us not lose the principle of Total Place, but please let us not follow the terrible bureaucratic nonsense that appears to have been emerging as an end part of the process.
We all regret that cuts have to be made in local government spending at this time. However, these balanced proposals make those cuts in as fair a way as possible, across services in as balanced a way as possible, and without hitting front-line services more than is necessary. I commend them to the House.
Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)
May I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) on a very thoughtful and witty maiden speech?
It is with no pleasure that I stand here today to talk about the impact of the coalition Government’s cuts on my constituency. Like many others who have already spoken, I fully recognise the need to reduce the deficit, but the cuts that have been forced on my constituents in the past few weeks are in no way fair or well thought out; in fact, the reverse is true. The cuts to local government are patently unfair. They run the risk of damaging our fragile economic recovery and, put simply, they are too much, too soon.
My local authority, the London borough of Lewisham, has already had its budget cut by £3.1 million for this year. London Councils suggests that the capital will lose £355 million in the same period. Of the 15 boroughs in London to suffer the largest overall reductions in their area-based grants, 13 are Labour-controlled authorities in places such as Newham, Hackney and Haringey—proof, if anyone needed it, that these cuts will hit the poorest parts of London hardest.
In Lewisham, more than £500,000 has been slashed from the Connexions service that provides careers advice to young people, £75,000 has been taken away from projects set up to tackle teenage pregnancy, and £425,000 has been lost from business support and enterprise development services—not to mention the axing of the £135,000 grant that enabled the council to provide free swimming for children and pensioners. These are cuts forced on Lewisham’s Labour council by the Tory-Lib Dem Government.
These cuts do not make sense. Take the £425,000 of cuts to LABGI. Under the previous Government, the local authority business growth incentives scheme did exactly what it said on the tin—it provided money to reward growth in the economy. In Lewisham, this money was vital. I know that my experience of how it was used is very different from that of the hon. Member for Meon Valley (George Hollingbery), but I found that in Lewisham it made a real difference.
Despite being one of the most populous inner London boroughs, Lewisham has the third smallest business base in the capital. Roughly 70% of Lewisham residents who work leave the borough every day to do so, and more than a third of the work force are employed in the public sector, the highest proportion in London.
Last week the Chancellor spoke of an emergent private sector, with new jobs and companies springing up to replace what is lost in the public sector. He announced incentives for companies to set up outside London, and today we have heard more about the regional development fund. However, what about the parts of this capital city that need a bit of extra help? What about the parts of London that will be hit hardest by job losses in public services?
In Lambeth, Southwark, Lewisham and Croydon, 185,000 people work in the public sector, 30,000 more than the public sector work force of Tyne and Wear. In an era of public service retrenchment, where will the new jobs come from? LABGI could have provided some stimulus, and my fear for Lewisham is that the private sector will not magically emerge to fill the jobs gap left by what will be a decimated public service.
Let us be clear: the cuts in local government will cost jobs. The first swing of the axe has already meant job losses at Lewisham council, but the impact of the cuts to local government will stretch well beyond the town hall. Many private companies depend on public sector contracts, and as those dry up, so too will the jobs. Some 35% of Lewisham council’s money is spent in the private sector. As the cuts start to bite, the amount of money spent with private companies will fall.
What worries me most about the package of cuts, though, is what it says about the approach that the coalition will take to local government over its whole term of office. The Secretary of State has allowed local government to shoulder nearly 20% of all the cuts announced in May. In October, of course, we have the spending review to look forward to. Will he allow the same thing to happen then?
The Chancellor has already indicated that virtually all Departments will be expected to make 25% cuts over the next four years. If that is passed directly on to local government, the consequences will be stark. Yes, savings have to be made and parts of the public sector have to work more closely together, but please let us listen to what councils up and down the country are telling us. Let us recognise that some budgets, especially in inner-city authorities, already face massive cost pressures—adult social care, environmental services and child protection to name but three.
Ensuring that the streets are swept regularly and that the bins and recycling are collected on time is the least that the public expect from their council. Ensuring that children can grow up in a safe and secure environment should never be put at risk because of money, and providing dignity for our older citizens is the least that 21st-century Britain should expect, but in the light of 25% cuts those things cannot be taken for granted.
Adult social care is probably one of the biggest challenges facing local authorities. Excluding money spent on schools, nearly £1 in every £3 of council money is spent on it, the vast bulk of which is spent on the elderly. In the next 10 years, the number of people living beyond 85 is expected to increase by 25% in London. In the home counties, it is expected to increase by 100% in the same period. How we finance care packages for the elderly has to be addressed, not by scaremongering about death taxes and the like but by having a grown-up, sensible debate about the options.
My nan recently passed away after three years in a nursing home. She sold her house to pay for her care, using her modest savings as well. My parents did not begrudge the use of her money to pay for her care, nor did I. She was looked after in the way that I would have wanted at the end of her life, and that was all that was important. What I do begrudge is the fact that the system is not fair. My parents did not play the system to shift the cost of her care on to the state, but others do. It is local councils up and down the country that, year in and year out, have to deal with the implications of the unfair system that is already straining under the escalating costs associated with demographic change.
As others have said, we must not consider local government in isolation from other public services. Under the previous Government, Total Place explored how to deliver better public services for less. However, as was said earlier, it was not about slicing great big chunks out of existing budgets but rather about doing things differently. The Government’s Back Benchers constantly bray about the Labour Government and what Labour would have done to reduce the deficit had it got back in. I accept that Total Place would not have provided immediate answers, but I believe that in the longer term, we can transform our public services by working more closely together across organisational boundaries rather than by directing money off into an ever-increasing number of silos.
Finally, I ask the Minister how he would go about explaining to front-line social care staff that 30% will lose their jobs because the private sector has shrunk nationally—by much less than that, it has to be said. The state should shrink, but why should it shoulder such a high proportion of the burden? The new Tory-Liberal Government are going beyond Thatcherism in their determination to scale back the state. They claim to be doing it in the name of cutting the deficit and building a big society. Call me cynical, but it seems to me that it has much more to do with ideology than anything else.
James Morris (Halesowen and Rowley Regis) (Con)
I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) on his fine maiden speech.
I know that Opposition Members want to fight the battles of the 1980s, and it is important to set this debate in its historical context. As all hon. Members will know, successive Governments have centralised power to themselves over the past 50 years. We live in one of the most centralised countries in the developed world in terms of the relative powers and funding of central and local government. Over the past 30 years there have been several reviews of those powers, going back to the Layfield and Lyons inquiries. In the last Parliament there was the Communities and Local Government Committee report on the current state of central-local relations, so a lot of blood has been spilled in the debate about the financing and funding of local government over the past three decades. There has been a lot of philosophical inquiry but very little action. The current economic and fiscal crisis provides a unique opportunity for those of us who have been banging the drum for decentralisation and localism over the past two to three years. That is why I welcome the coalition Government’s commitment to a fundamental review of local government finance.
In 1890, 23% of local government revenue came from central grants, with the rest coming from local taxation. As we stand here today, that position has been almost completely reversed. The central point of today’s debate, which has revolved around cuts and the 1980s, is that, as we all agree, we have rising demand from the public for services. We also have rising expectations from citizens and users of the services provided by local government, and a public perception that local government is accountable for the delivery of those services. However, as hon. Members have pointed out, local politicians control democratically only 5% of total local expenditure, with myriad other organisations spending the rest. As many Members have said, we have a unique opportunity today to rethink some of the assumptions on which the powers, functions and funding of local government are based.
The Opposition talk as though the idea of cuts in local government spending were an invention of the coalition, but if we look back at the Budget of 2008-09, we see that the previous Government were already contemplating local government spending cuts in excess of 20% over four years. There is a considerable mismatch between the last Government’s rhetoric and their reality.
The first half of the previous Government’s time in office was characterised by what I would call a Prescottian regionalisation—the creation of a great deal of institutional complexity and an unaccountable regional tier of government that served little or no purpose. The second half of the previous Government’s time in office—the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham) played a part in that—was spent in an attempt to unravel the mistakes of the first half.
Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)
I am fascinated by the hon. Gentleman’s history lesson, but I must point out that a Conservative Government—the Thatcher Government, I think—introduced regional offices and regionalisation.
James Morris
Under the previous Government, that regionalisation became an embedded policy. It was unaccountable, undemocratic and served no purpose in economic development or improving local government’s accountability.
James Morris
I will not give way again.
Despite attempts by Labour Ministers in the Department for Communities and Local Government to get traction on the localist agenda, there was no commitment to it from the top. The Prime Minister and other Cabinet members simply had no trust in local government or communities and were philosophically unable to let go and let local government get on with its job.
Institutional complexity goes to the heart of the relationship between central Government and local government in this country. In the past two decades, particularly the past 13 years, it has been characterised by excessive, top-down, performance management culture. Recent figures show that the annual cost of regulating local government from Whitehall was estimated at more than £2.5 billion. The distorting effects of that top-down performance culture could be considerably greater on the shape and management of public services in this country.
The right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) elevated the debate with her discussion of Total Place. I agree that the recent Total Place pilots revealed the true cost of not only compliance but public spending flows in local areas. We certainly need to build on that. Her example of Greater Manchester was compelling and shows that, once we get a grip on and an understanding of the total public expenditure that flows through an area, the implications for the shape and potential reform of public services, and the relationship between local government, the health service, the police and other aspects of delivering public services locally, are great. We need to build on that. I am therefore grateful to the right hon. Lady because her contribution elevated a debate that had been characterised by a rather knee-jerk reaction to every single item of the cuts. If we are truly to start reforming the relationship between local government and other public services, we need to identify the precise public spending flows through different areas.
The performance management culture, which other hon. Members have discussed, needs to be stopped. I therefore greatly welcome the Secretary of State’s removing the comprehensive area assessment. That performance management culture, which has dominated local government in the past 13 years, needs to be replaced by an age of innovation, spurred by the fiscal context in which we live. That is why I am keen for the coalition Government to press ahead with the work on the Total Place pilots. The fiscal position demands that we ask fundamental and difficult questions about local government’s role in providing local services.
Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)
Given that the average budgetary cuts for local authorities are 0.7%, how can a 1.2% cut for a borough of mine, Redcar and Cleveland council, with some of the poorest rural wards, and a cut of 1.3%—the sixth highest in the UK—for Middlesbrough local authority, with some of the poorest urban wards, be justified? How can innovation be introduced equitably across local authorities if the budgetary cuts in some areas are double those in others?
James Morris
As other hon. Members have pointed out, we have to deal with the fiscal situation. Even if there had been a new Labour Government, local government would have had to find considerable savings and efficiencies to drive innovation.
Andrew Griffiths (Burton) (Con)
In my constituency, unemployment trebled in just over two years under the previous Labour Government. Businesses and households in my constituency had to tighten their belts. They have had to make substantial savings in their business incomes and their business and household expenditure. If I told them that they had to cut just 1% of their household budget, they would think that that was getting off lightly.
James Morris
My hon. Friend is right. The disciplines of the private sector are valuable and, in difficult times, we must be spurred on our way by looking innovatively at how we deliver services. We should not be afraid. Some hon. Members were derisive about the idea of a limited local authority, but it is perfectly valid to view local authorities as commissioners of services, not necessarily providers of all of them. We should consider innovative relationships between local government, social enterprise and the voluntary sector, and innovative ways to protect vulnerable people through relationships with social enterprise and the voluntary sector.
Opposition Members also made derisive comments about putting information in the public domain. An open and transparent information-sharing culture for local government and the public sector is precisely one of the ways in which we will drive innovation, reduce cost and continue to deliver excellent public services. There is no contradiction between those things.
It is important that regional quangos, operating as agents of central Government, do not dictate to us. We have heard little about democratic accountability and local people in the debate. We must ensure that we revert to the idea that funds that are controlled locally are spent in a way that is democratically accountable to the people. I am sure that my constituents in Halesowen and Rowley Regis would look forward to that.
We have the opportunity to decentralise power and simplify the institutional complexity so that we can truly reconnect local government with 21st-century citizens.
Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)
I welcome you to the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker.
I want to comment on two aspects of local government cuts that will affect the residents I represent in Wirral. I cannot claim to have as much experience of local government as some hon. Members, but I served as a local councillor for four years, which taught me a great deal about the impact that the cuts will have. I would like to bring that experience to the debate. I want to talk about employment in Wirral, our sense of place and the effect of the cuts on our localities.
In Merseyside, the future jobs fund helped 2,800 people find work. The impact of that cannot be underestimated. The employment picture in Merseyside, including Wirral, has historically been fragile. It was important that the Government stepped in during the downturn to help protect our position.
Richard Harrington (Watford) (Con)
Would the hon. Lady like to comment on my research in my constituency, which found that the future jobs fund provided many people with short-term activities, but few long-term jobs afterwards?
Alison McGovern
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and I would like to comment on it. It is too early to say, but I can comment from my own experience of meeting people—young people, especially—who have gained work through the future jobs fund. They told me that it was vital to keep their CV consistent over time, and that, although the job might have been short term or perhaps not in the sector they wanted to go into eventually, it gave them good, work-based experience that they could put on their CV. That could help them to find work, perhaps in a different sector, once we came out of the downturn. I cannot emphasise enough how important that continuity is. It was so important in places such as Wirral, and in Merseyside and the north-west generally, that the Government stepped in and helped to protect our employment picture. I shall say more about that in a moment. If we also consider the cutting of the working neighbourhoods fund, which was doing a great deal to address the really deep-rooted problems of unemployment in my part of the world, protecting employment through local government in Wirral starts to look a lot more difficult.
In a wider sense, we shall feel the impact of the regional development agencies being abolished in the emergency Budget. It is interesting to note that the Government seem to be all over the shop when it comes to RDAs. Perhaps the Minister would like to comment on the observations that have been made about listening to the views of local business, local authorities and perhaps local Members of Parliament on the importance of RDAs. The Budget has abolished them, however, and that will cause great difficulty in my area.
The local authority serving my constituents in Wirral has done important work on apprenticeships. The Government have said that they are keen to support apprenticeships, and that is fantastic. We all agree—brilliant! Let us get on with it! I do not see, however, how the local government cuts are going to help Wirral. We were at the forefront in providing the Wirral apprenticeships scheme, which worked alongside the private sector to increase the number of apprenticeships. The cuts will cast a shadow over the local authority officers who were working on that programme. I do not believe that the cuts will help to reduce the deficit over this economic cycle. I think that they will put people on the dole, which will increase the burden on the state. That is incredibly unfortunate.
Mr Kevan Jones
Does my hon. Friend agree that a misapprehension is being peddled—that making cuts in the public sector will have no effect on the private sector? For example, in local government in the north-east, £16 billion has been taken out of the county of Durham. That will directly affect not only suppliers to the county council but future building projects.
Alison McGovern
I could not agree more. If Conservative and Liberal Democrat Members do not agree with my hon. Friend and me, they are welcome to come and meet any of my constituents who run small businesses that have been helped by Invest Wirral or the regional development agency, or who have found apprentices through the Wirral apprenticeships scheme, and to ask them their views on working with the local authority, and on working alongside the public sector so that the public and private sectors can work together to address unemployment. That is the reality that we have seen over the past 13 years.
Alison McGovern
I am glad that the hon. Gentleman asked me that, because there has been a misapprehension that Labour had no plans when we were in government, and that we did not set any of them out. That is all very convenient, but the proposals were in our March Budget. There was a great deal of discussion about efficiencies, about what we would have done with the future jobs fund and the working neighbourhoods fund, and about how we would have looked at those funding programmes. All the detail is in our March Budget. My problem with the proposals in last week’s Budget is not that we have to make cuts or that we have to reduce the deficit; it is the timing.
I want to talk about place shaping, and about the things that make Wirral a great place to live. I have spoken before about the importance of sport, the arts and culture to who we are in Wirral. The cutting of the free swimming programme will not help the Oval sports centre in my constituency to be successful. The cutting of free school meals will not help Grove Street primary school to carry on its great work on increasing food sustainability and nutrition. Getting rid of the libraries modernisation fund will certainly not help Wirral to bring our libraries up to the standard that my constituents expect.
The cuts could, of course, help to reduce the deficit—I do not disagree with that at all—and there are certain efficiencies that we might need to look at. My argument is that we are talking about marginal amounts. Cutting the libraries modernisation fund will not have a massive impact on reducing the deficit. The thing that will reduce the deficit is getting people back into employment. If we cut the deficit at the expense of all the things that people have come to rely on, we shall see a hollowing-out of town centres, and the retreat of the Government from supporting people in the things that they want to do in their lives. I do not think that that would be worth while. The impact of the cuts on employment and on the things in our communities that we hold dear will be very grave in Wirral.
It is worth mentioning the differential impact of the cuts. Wirral will be hit a lot harder than those in nearby Cheshire, or in Oxfordshire, who will not feel the same impact at all. For the past 13 years, the Labour Government made great strides towards resetting the economy. People no longer had to leave Merseyside to get a job. We have done great work on that, and it needed to continue. I fear that this withdrawal of the state from our area will result in our sliding back into the problems we had before. The Government’s proposals represent a withdrawal of activist government.
The Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Andrew Stunell), has spoken about removing layers of government, as though it were possible simply to cut away pieces of the work being done by regional development agencies or local authorities, and to hand the money over to someone else, in the expectation that the work would still be done. My experience of local authorities might be limited, but I believe that to be unrealistic. The regeneration practices that local authorities have developed should be prized and used, and their proactive work with RDAs should not be overturned overnight in order to remove a layer of government. That is phraseology for the sake of it, and I do not think that it will help our country to develop economically.
Andrew Gwynne
My hon. Friend is making an excellent case for regional development agencies. One of the important roles of the RDAs was to put in place regional programmes of investment for major transport schemes. Does she think a region such as the north-west would be able to put together a major programme of transport improvements if it were left to the individual local authorities from Cumbria down to Crewe?
Alison McGovern
It would not be able to do it. Travel-to-work distances are a problem in Wirral—compared with, say, south-east England—and we simply do not have adequate connectivity to centres of employment such as Manchester, Warrington and the north Wales coast. The RDA was doing fantastic work in addressing that connectivity problem, working hand in hand with local authorities. I do not think that the Government fully understand those practices.
Certain ideologies in the Government are driving the cuts. The first is that less government is better. Conservative and Liberal Democrat Members might say that, but I believe—please forgive the truism—that better government is better. This is not the time for the state to withdraw entirely. Secondly, the Government believe that pure deficit reduction is all that matters, and that reducing the deficit will itself drive growth if we demonstrate to the City and the markets that we are being tough. I do not think that there is any evidence for that. I am a great believer in evidence-based policy making, and I would like to see some evidence for that.
Gavin Barwell
The hon. Lady asks for evidence: a report from Goldman Sachs looks at every fiscal correction in major world economies since 1975 and shows that those based on reductions in spending work and actually boost growth.
Alison McGovern
I always look carefully at reports from the likes of Goldman Sachs, PWC and others—and one thing that being a local councillor taught me was never to believe at first glance what the consultants say. However, I will certainly look into the report that the hon. Gentleman mentions. I have an open mind.
The Government want us to believe that there is no alternative. I have mentioned already that Labour’s Budget in March detailed much that we could do to find efficiencies, and talked about many of the things that we have heard from the Government. The question is not about reducing the deficit: it is about the timing and the manner in which it is done. I can only hope that my words today will make the Government realise some of the impact that their actions will have on my constituents in Wirral.
Chris Kelly (Dudley South) (Con)
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me to make my maiden speech, and I congratulate you on your new position. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) on his excellent maiden speech earlier.
Today is an Opposition day, so there are even more Labour Members than usual on the Opposition Benches. I am therefore more grateful than colleagues who made their maiden speeches in earlier debates that it is a tradition of the House to listen to a maiden speech without interruption or intervention. I am also pleased to see several fellow black country Members. I am incredibly proud to be black country born and bred. In fact, I could not be more proud of the area I have always called home.
As the new Member for Dudley South, I thank my predecessor, Ian Pearson, for his service to my constituency and its residents. From the moment that I was selected in September 2007, Mr Pearson was always courteous towards me—so courteous that in February this year he announced he would not contest the general election against me. Mr Pearson was elected in a by-election in December 1994 in Dudley West, and went on to hold several ministerial posts between 2002 and 2010. If I may say so, Graham Postles fought a valiant campaign for the Conservatives in 1994, but so much in politics is down to timing, and Dudley West was Tony Blair’s first by-election as leader of the Labour party. It was therefore the first significant victory of the new Labour era, when Labour Members declared that they were the political wing of the British people. As they left the country on the verge of bankruptcy, that claim now has a hollow ring.
I also wish to pay tribute to the former Conservative Member for Dudley West, Dr John Blackburn, who sadly died following a heart attack in the Palace of Westminster in October 1994. I never had the pleasure of meeting John, but I know that he was widely admired by his constituents and even by his political foes. He was a hard-working local MP, and I intend to conduct myself during my time in this Chamber very much in the same manner. John’s widow, Marjorie, is a supporter to this day and has been extremely kind to me during my time as the candidate in her late husband’s old constituency.
If I may, I wish to pay tribute to the late former Member for Coventry South-West, John Butcher, or Butch as I knew him. If I won my seat, Butch and I were due to have dinner to celebrate and to discuss what he called the pitfalls of being an MP. Sadly, we never had the opportunity to dine together in this place.
Dudley South lies between Birmingham and Wolverhampton on the western fringe of the west midlands conurbation. We local people are fiercely proud of Dudley’s own distinctive identity and heritage. The constituency is situated to the west of Dudley town centre and largely consists of residential suburbs and some rural fringes on the border of glorious south Staffordshire countryside. Wards include Brierley Hill; Brockmoor and Pensnett; Kingswinford North and Wall Heath; Kingswinford South; Netherton, Woodside and St Andrews; and Wordsley. Within my constituency, we have the Merry Hill shopping centre, now managed by Westfield, as well as the largest secure trading estate in Europe in the Pensnett estate, along with dozens of smaller trading estates employing many thousands of people in small and medium-sized businesses.
The businesses of Dudley South are the backbone of the British economy and typically employ no more than a dozen people each. It is the creativity and ingenuity of so many of my constituents—making, designing, building and fabricating myriad goods—that is so important to the viability of the British economy. I come from a business background and can see all around my constituency that the entrepreneurial spirit of local people is undimmed by 13 years of red tape, bureaucracy and increased taxation.
Many families in Dudley South are football households. The vast majority of my residents support either the Baggies—West Bromwich Albion, for those who do not know—or Wolves, as I do. In fact, I went to my first game at Molineux when we were in the old fourth division, and three of the four stands were then crumbling wrecks. Many of my constituents know me as a businessman from a well-known local company, headquartered literally in the shadows of the Hawthorns. However, for those constituents who are not Albion fans, I should add that the business also employs people in Kingswinford.
Not only am I proud of my constituency and my area, I am proud of my country. I am fortunate to have travelled extensively, but no matter how exotic or cosmopolitan the destination, I have always yearned for England. Part of that is the people. The people of my borough are decent people who strive to do the right thing by society and, most importantly, by their families. As they told me during the general election, they get frustrated when they see others ahead of them who have not “done the right thing”. Their sense of fairness was seriously challenged by the last Government. I am pleased to see this coalition Government restoring that sense of fairness and balance while addressing the scale of the deficit and debts bequeathed to us. That sense of fairness has been severely tested over the last 13 years as we have seen neighbouring Sandwell metropolitan borough council receiving far more per head from Whitehall than Dudley metropolitan borough council. That massive disparity cannot be fair, and my constituents have also expressed their unhappiness in large numbers about many of the local government funded quangos with questionable track records of productivity and efficiency, and a democratic deficit, when my constituents struggle to make ends meet and pay their council and personal tax bills.
I was born in 1978 under James Callaghan, but I am a child of Thatcher. I was honoured to receive letters from the former Prime Minister both during and after the election, and they now hang proudly on my wall. Baroness Thatcher truly is a guiding inspiration. She comprehensively proved that one person can make a positive difference. My political interest began at the age of 14, when I wrote to the Express and Star, still the largest circulation local paper in the country, about the increase in the entry fee at the local swimming baths. I then joined the Conservative party in 1996 at the age of 18 when I arrived at university in Headington in Oxford, to be greeted by the beaming faces of my hon. Friends the Members for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly) and for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson). The former was at that time the Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for Oxford East, and the latter was the chairman of the university Conservative society. In 1996, who would have believed that, come 2010, Justin Tomlinson and I would join Jon Djanogly, who has been an MP for nine years already, on the Government Benches?
It is a huge honour to represent Dudley South in this Chamber, and I will work tirelessly to get a fair deal for my residents.
Mr David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Dudley South (Chris Kelly) and welcome him to the House. He paid a decent tribute to his predecessor, Ian Pearson, and I too regret that he was not able to eat with John Butcher, whom I knew and who was a very decent man. I was warming very much to the hon. Gentleman’s speech until his eulogy for Baroness Thatcher, who we remember in a slightly different vein in my city of Sheffield, compared with those new Members who see themselves as her children. Children can have a blinkered view of their parents, and sometimes we see them through a glass darkly.
May I apologise to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, if I am not here for the whole of the rest of the evening? To put it delicately, it is not just the dog’s legs that are crossed.
I am pleased that the Secretary of State has returned from west Yorkshire. He may be able to confirm that the Prime Minister this morning did an interview on Real Radio in west Yorkshire and told the story of the making of the coalition. He invited the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg) to supper at his house and presented him with ham and baked potatoes. I am not sure who was the ham and who was the baked potatoes. It might be apocryphal, but I believe that the Deputy Prime Minister asked the Prime Minister where the vegetables were, and the Prime Minister said, “You’re addressing them later to put the coalition together”. Of course, that is based on a very old story, and I apologise for recycling it.
I want to deal with issues of contradiction. Who, in this House, could not be in favour of decentralisation, devolvement and localism, which some of us have preached and practised throughout our lives? However, what is taking place is not the decentralisation of power, but the decentralisation of pain and of the implementation of policy that will cause pain; it is not the devolvement of decision making, but the devolvement of responsibility for actions taken by central Government that will have to be inflicted on people—I underline, on people—at a local level. We can take out so much resource and argue in the long term about Total Place, of which I am totally in favour, but we should not quickly take out the billions—not millions—of pounds that, over the next four years, will be withdrawn from local government. If we take one in four pounds—perhaps even one in three—out of local government spending, we will take it not out of bureaucracy, but out of the lives and well-being of ordinary people. As has been described this afternoon, the people who deliver adult services or child protection, who open and staff the leisure centres, who provide library services and clean the streets, are not bureaucrats; they are people delivering at the sharp end services that have already been pared back over many years.
I want to outline the danger, in this contradiction, of believing one’s own rhetoric—I have done it, so I should know—because Members will find that it catches up with them. It is possible to play off one set of people against another, as the Secretary of State for Work and Pension did yesterday when he said, “If we don’t cut the welfare budget more than we intend at the moment, we will have to cut it out of education, housing or other services.” That will turn the nearly poor against the very poor; it will turn those who aspire to something better against those whom they resent. The hon. Member for Dudley South was right about people feeling that, on occasion, there is unfairness—we were victims of that feeling at the general election—but we should not mistake resentment for unfairness. People often feel resentment towards those who do not have a job and are on benefits; they often feel resentment that someone is getting something they are not. However, we must not mistake that for an issue of fairness, because fairness is about protecting those who are most vulnerable. In the years ahead, local government will not have the capacity, as we had in the early ’80s, to protect our people.
In the seven years when I was leader of Sheffield city council, we experienced the most enormous reductions in the local authority budget at a time when we had a broader base for local government expenditure. We had the national business rate, as it is now known, and the local domestic rate. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), who has been kind enough to wait around this afternoon, took over from me as leader and had to continue dealing with those expenditure cuts. We were able to raise the local rate, and amazingly people continued to vote for us in a way that would not be possible today. However, if council tax is frozen—in other words, if it is capped universally—if resources are dramatically reduced, if the health service is ring-fenced and so unable to help by intervening and crossing boundaries, and if there is no longer joint funding, as there was in the 1980s after it was introduced by Barbara Castle, those services will inevitably be decimated.
If a party is really about cutting expenditure, not services—and I wonder whether some people in the coalition want to cut the latter and not just the former—it must do so over a substantial time scale. Otherwise, next year and the year after, there will be the most enormous cutbacks in expenditure—to pay for redundancy payments for thousands of local authority workers. The benefits that will have to be paid to them and the loss in tax and national insurance will add up to the billions that the previous Government managed to cut from the welfare budget—£4 billion a year was eventually saved by a reduction in wasteful expenditure on cutback and retrenchment.
We are in a dangerous situation. We might find that, having cut expenditure and services, resentment and bitterness arise in a way that will lead to the kind of disturbances and lack of social cohesion experienced in the early 1980s. Fortunately, Sheffield was the only major town or city that did not experience disturbances at that time. I hope that that will be true of Britain as a whole in the future. However, great care needs to be taken, not just to involve people, to talk to them and to learn what they can contribute towards their services, but to preven the plug from being pulled on other aspects as well. This year’s round of cuts is so unfair because aggregate external funding—to use a technical term—is designed for specific funding for specific purposes targeted at the most disadvantaged. That is what the area-based grant, the working neighbourhoods fund and the local enterprise growth initiative are about. Incidentally, the latter also triggers funding from Europe and external funding from elsewhere that will also be lost. Pull that out and we pull the plug on those services.
Some have said that we can un-ring-fence expenditure and everything will be fine. The Minister of State, Department for Education, the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb) gave me a written reply recently in which he referred to ring-fencing. It read:
“This flexibility means that reductions in spending could be managed without a reduction in jobs or frontline services.”—[Official Report, 28 June 2010; Vol. 512, c. 423W.]
That is either duplicity or complete naivety. In the four years ahead, we cannot afford for ordinary people to have their services destroyed because Ministers and Treasury officials do not understand the consequences of their actions. If that happens, we will regret it for many years to come.
Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) and to be in the Chamber for the maiden speeches of my hon. Friends the Members for Dudley South (Chris Kelly) and for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal). Their speeches distinguished themselves from those of the Opposition, who seem to be seeking to renew some of the battles of the past 13 years, and seem to have failed to recognise that the world has moved on.
It is appropriate that we are discussing local government funding in the context of the Budget debate of the past few days, which, it is important to remember, was an emergency Budget debate that arose as a consequence of the severity of the economic position in which the country finds itself—even worse than was expected. I want to consider why the local government funding debate is necessary and what other sectors have done already, and I want to put in perspective what local government is being asked to do and how it may do it. It is entirely appropriate that local government should make its contribution to tackling the budget deficit. Labour has left behind one of the largest budget deficits in Europe, and we are borrowing one pound for every four that we spend, increasing our national debt by £3 billion a week. The crisis in the eurozone shows that the consequences of not acting are severe, in terms of higher interest rates, sharper rises in unemployment and potentially even the end of the recovery. Those issues are recognised in the country.
It is now seven days since my right hon. Friend the Chancellor stood at the Dispatch Box and gave his Budget statement. As a new Member, I have had to come to terms with the massive amount of e-mail and letters that Members receive. On the Budget, I have had plenty of correspondence—from think-tanks and lobby groups—but since last Tuesday I have had very little from the electors in my Rugby constituency. The reason is that there was little in the Budget that electors were concerned about or surprised about—despite the protests of Labour Members, who do not want to hear about the true state of the public finances. The people in the country understand and support the measures that we need to take. These measures are necessary as a result of past mistakes, and the coalition Government have been forced to take strong and decisive action to sort out the deficit and ensure that confidence is not lost in UK markets. The public understand that the action being taken is unavoidable and that Britain must build a new economic model founded on the principles of freedom, fairness and responsibility.
The private sector has already borne the brunt of the recession, and it is important that this responsibility is shared by all of us. The private sector endured job losses and business closures during the dying days of the previous Government. Businesses have been forced to make savings, to cut back and to make redundancies, so it is only right that this pain is shared by all, because we are all in it together.[Laughter.]
I ran a business for 25 years, and I know that no matter how tightly run an organisation is, there are always additional cost savings that can be made. Here we are looking at additional cost savings of between 1% and 2%; they are there if people look hard enough. It is interesting that the Local Government Association briefing document issued today makes
“a comprehensive and open offer to Government to work with them to… reform the state to achieve the required savings”.
That shows that there is clear acceptance of the need for savings and a desire to get on with them.
There are many examples of current public sector waste. The Minister told us about some of them earlier when he spoke about tranquillity rooms, cappuccino machines and Pravda-style magazines. An article in The Sunday Times of 13 June showed that local government still “doesn’t get it”, as it is advertising well-paid non-jobs. Brighton and Hove city council is recruiting four new “strategic directors” on £125,000 each; their job is to “look outwards”. An “internal communications change consultant”, the article also mentioned, is being recruited in Sheffield at a cost of between £380 and £400 a day. A “community development co-ordinator” in east London—
Mr Kevan Jones
I am fascinated by the hon. Gentleman’s examples, but should he not be telling members of his own party in local government to practise what they preach, as most of the councils concerned are Tory and Liberal Democrat councils?
Mark Pawsey
The message is going out loud and clear: this kind of waste cannot go on and should not happen. It is entirely right for the Government to conduct a full review of local government finance and right that that review should restore to our councils a general power of competence. For far too long, councils have been dictated to by central Government. Reference has already been made to the estimate that only 5% of local government spending is controlled by elected councils. That means that of the £7,000 a head spent on local public services, only £350 is under local democratic control.
I was a councillor for five years, and in that time I became increasingly frustrated with Government interference, much of which prevent my colleagues and me from doing our job. It is for that reason that local government has often been described as a delivery arm of central Government. We often took decisions not because they were the right ones for our community, but because the Government had told us that that was what they wanted us to do and they applied pressure through directives, centrally set targets, inspection regimes and the final sanction of taking away grants. It is refreshing for all involved in local government—both officers and councillors—that the coalition Government plans set out to provide councils with the freedom and the resources to concentrate on local priorities and deliver front-line services by stopping the ring-fencing of central Government grants.
Tom Blenkinsop
Does the hon. Gentleman regard the recent Department for Work and Pensions policy of “on yer bike” as a centrally driven target?
Mark Pawsey
It is not centrally driven at all.
The changes will be made by local authorities and I believe these changes, restoring freedom to local authorities, will encourage more people to put their names forward for the role of councillor. The previous Labour Government presided over more than a decade of economic prosperity during the ’90s and the early part of this decade—and they should have been taking advantage of that; as we said, they should have been mending the roof while the sun was shining. They failed to do so, and it falls to the coalition Government to implement the efficiency savings, to cut the quangos and to reduce the regulatory burden, as is so desperately needed.
According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers report entitled “Mapping the Performance Landscape”, commissioned by the Department for Communities and Local Government in 2006, it was estimated that a typical council spent £2.6 million a year in reporting performance information to central Government. The previous Government also failed to heed the warnings provided by the very councils that they so tightly guarded. In a comprehensive area assessment published in January 2010, the councils were warned that
“the burden of inspection has not been reduced as a consequence of Comprehensive Area Assessment”,
and
“nearly two-thirds of respondents to the latest CAA watch survey disagreed or strongly disagreed that the burden of inspection was being reduced as a consequence of CAA.”
It is time that central Government stopped smothering local councils and provided them with the level of authority they need to get on with their role of serving and responding to the residents who elect them.
I believe that Labour Members are overstating the effect of the changes that local government is being asked to make. We should remember that this is an emergency Budget in which local government is being asked to contribute £1.166 billion-worth of savings to the £6.2 billion of cross-government savings for 2010-11.
Mark Pawsey
I am running out of time, so I will proceed, if I may.
Removing restrictions on how local authorities spend their money is a vital part of allowing them to deliver efficiencies and focus their budgets on front-line services. I refer again to the statement released by the Local Government Association, which understands the need for the plans that the Government are introducing.
In some areas, certain groups have had massively more than their fair share of funding, so it is only right that, during such times as these, they should reduce the burden. Let me cite the example of the £30 million that will be saved by ceasing the Gypsy and Traveller sites grant. Here is a relatively small community that has benefited hugely and, in my view, disproportionately from public expenditure and is a matter of great concern to the settled community in places such as Bulkington in my constituency. By way of showing that further savings can be made, I refer to my home Rugby borough council; by not replacing its chief executive, it is enabling savings of more than £100,000 a year. Another example is Warwickshire county council, which is estimated to have made savings of £19 million in value-for-money savings in 2008-09. So there are early signs that the councils themselves recognise the need for radical reform, which needs to begin immediately, and they are tackling the challenges posed by the new Government.
In addition to seeking savings in expenditure, the Government are taking steps to minimise the effect of council tax on individuals and businesses, and are providing support for hard-working families through a council tax freeze. They have demonstrated immediate support for front-line services by protecting £29 billion of formula grant. Unlike the Labour party, the coalition has listened to advice from those affected by poor over-regulation.
In conclusion, I believe the proposals on local government finance are reasoned and proportionate, and appropriate in difficult economic times, and I shall support the amendment.
Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)
May I welcome you to your new position, Madam Deputy Speaker? I know that you will watch over our proceedings carefully but firmly. I also want to congratulate the hon. Members for Dudley South (Chris Kelly) and for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) on their maiden speeches. The hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West, who is no longer in the Chamber, said we should think of him as a good and decent person, and I have no doubt that he is, but he is going to have his compassion—and, dare I say, his sense of social justice—tested by the proposals we are discussing today and those to come in the weeks and months ahead.
I also recommend that the hon. Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) look back at his speech today, because I think he has highlighted an important difficulty. Although we all want to decentralise, it can be tempting to suggest that we should take control when we think things are not being done quite right at the local level. He gave the example of the high salaries paid to some staff under the Tory-Liberal Democrat council at Brighton and Hove. That might point to another suggestion for the Secretary of State: that he should have some jurisdiction over local government salaries, as well as knowing about every budget over £500 that is spent in local government.
Mr Kevan Jones
Is it not the case that in my right hon. Friend’s own authority in Doncaster the Government have appointed a chief executive on what might possibly be considered a very high salary?
Caroline Flint
Yes, they probably have done that, but I have to say that I am in full agreement with what my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State had decided in relation to Doncaster, as it is important to get our services running properly, and the current Secretary of State has followed through that decision, so I do not think there is any disagreement between the two Front Benches on this. The proof of the decision, however, will be in what happens, and whether the salary paid to the chief executive is justified by our getting some results—sooner rather than later, hopefully.
The hon. Member for Rugby and others have said that Labour Members want to refight the battles of the 1980s. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that I do not want to do that, but neither do we want a return in our communities of the devastation that the ’80s caused. Doncaster and other parts of south Yorkshire, as well as other areas of the country and of Wales and Scotland, have been on a journey over the last 13 years. There is a long way still to go, but progress has been made. Public investment went into detoxifying the coal pit areas in order to make them fit for other uses—to regenerate for leisure but also for jobs. That required a willingness to make sure that that land was not left barren and unusable by local communities. In ’97, some primary schools had toilets that were outside and in a dilapidated state. We not only fixed the roof on many of our schools, but we brought the loos indoors so that the kids could use them appropriately and properly.
We have had to deal with a lot of work like that. As has been mentioned, we inherited housing stock that was by no means of a decent standard. We had to make some tough choices by spending money on improving that stock, while realising that that might prevent us from building more homes. Before the recession hit we were, however, up there, reaching our target of 240,000 newbuilds each year. Unfortunately, the recession got in the way, but we were on that journey, making progress.
Mr John Leech (Manchester, Withington) (LD)
How many council houses did the previous Government build in the last 13 years?
Caroline Flint
Not enough, actually, and for the reasons I outlined. First, we inherited a situation in which councils where people had sought the right to buy were not getting money back from that in capital receipts. Under the right to buy, the better homes were, of course, sold off earlier, which meant that the housing stock that was left was very poor. We addressed how we might improve the social housing sector by looking at not only council housing but housing associations.
I must say that we also took some tough decisions with our own Labour authorities about how they should improve their approach to social housing across the piece. That included making sure that tenants in both housing association stock and council housing had more of a say. We wanted to get rid of the idea, which tarred the Labour party, that every council tenant had to have their front door painted the same because it was a council home. We brought innovation and reform into the sector, and we can be justly proud of that.
However much the Con-Dem Government pretend otherwise, it is clear that the cuts in local government funding will hit hardest not Tory and Liberal Democrat Members, or vast numbers in their constituencies—although I recognise that there are areas of deprivation in every constituency—but those communities and families who are vulnerable and need support, and which Labour Members disproportionately represent. Doncaster council has already had more than £4.5 million in funding cuts, and we have more to come: 20% of Doncaster funding—almost £80 million—is vulnerable.
As Labour Members have said, that money is linked to deprivation and need. Members on the Government Benches took issue with Opposition Members; they suggested, “You’ve had all the money coming your way. It’s not fair that you’ve had all that money for your constituencies’ families and communities.” I do not take any joy in the levels of inequality in my constituency. I came into politics to make sure that people had a chance to have a better life and to address social, economic and health inequalities. In 13 years, we had improvements in our schools, improvements in health, improvements in housing and improvements in skills and jobs. The danger is that the journey stops here today because of the Con-Dem Government and what they will do, because they will stop that progress in its tracks.
In Doncaster, £800,000 will be cut from careers advice for young people, which helps young people to look for apprenticeships or full-time work. There will also be a cut of £150,000 in funding for activities for young people, including for disabled children and young people. Schemes such as the local enterprise growth initiative and the working neighbourhoods fund, which encourage investment, support local businesses, help to create jobs and boost incomes, and which in the long run save money, all now face an uncertain future.
I attended the Thorne carers forum just a couple of weeks ago. It was a day to get carers to come in, have a bit of relaxation, meet some of the different agencies that provide support and to enjoy themselves—to take some time out from their daily activity, which is filled with love but also with difficulties. I wonder what they are thinking about what will happen, because they will probably not get support for the core funding for that event, as it is discretionary, but it means a huge amount to those people, giving them a bit of respite in their daily lives.
At the weekend, I spoke to Maureen Tennyson at the Edlington gala. She is a key activist in Neighbourhood Watch and in tackling antisocial behaviour in our neighbourhood. One problem we have had is with private landlords who buy up cheap properties and then misuse that responsibility by either leaving them empty, letting them become derelict or not taking control of their tenants. There is concern about the selective licensing scheme we are getting going; people have worries in respect of the work being done to get that under way and to make some of these landlords get a licence or not be allowed to let. That will have a huge impact on neighbourhoods where in one street there might be a mixture of private ownership, private rented and council property alongside each other. This is one of the biggest blights. The people who make the money do not live in those communities, and if there is any action to cut back in this regard, the Government are saying a really big “We don’t want to help you” to people in Edlington and elsewhere.
Sajid Javid
We are all in this House to help vulnerable people. Does the right hon. Lady not accept that in 13 years in power her Government increased inequality between the richest and poorest in our society and reduced social mobility? Does she not realise that the best way to help the very people she is talking about is to help them to find jobs and to create opportunities, not make them live off her handouts?
Caroline Flint
There is a case for arguing that the rich got richer, but at the same time we took thousands of children out of child poverty. I will tell the hon. Gentleman something else: cancelling the extension of free school meals to low-income families has prevented 50,000 more children from being taken out of poverty, so I will not take any lectures on fairness and tackling inequality. The Government could have got some extra money by doing what we suggested—by taking more money off the bankers, out of their bonuses—but they fell short on that. There are plenty of other areas that could be looked at, such as Government support for private education, in order to save some money for our schools. Some £100 million comes from Government to support private education in different forms. Perhaps we could look at making a cut there.
Caroline Flint
If I can make a bit of progress, I might come back to the hon. Gentleman; I have only two minutes left.
The cost to society will be huge if we take short-term decisions that fundamentally disrupt some of the progress that has been made in different communities. The point has already been made strongly about Total Place programmes: it is not just about people putting money into a pot; it involves a difficult journey, getting different organisations to put their separate cultures to one side and come together for the community good. That is not easy, but we have made that progress by bringing health closer to local authorities. I am very glad that we now have a jointly appointed public health director, and that we see joint commissioning happening. My worry is that if local authorities and local government retreat, others will retreat as well. They will go into a bunker silo mentality. It happens at Government level, but it also happens at local level, and what we will see is a retraction.
As my colleagues have said, it is one thing for hospitals to make sure they have policies that mean that older people leave hospital more quickly. That is quite right, but if adult social care in the community is undermined, where will those older people go? Where will the support be to make sure the plan is put into action—that Elsie or Sam can ensure that their home is adapted before they leave hospital, so they can actually be at home? The danger is that what is happening is very short term.
The private sector depends on the public sector for growth and for contracts. For example, there is no doubt that Yorkshire Forward, the regional development agency, has been fundamental in helping our airport to get off the ground—literally, as it were. What is going to happen about the investment that RDAs are providing? What assessment has been made of the loss of private investment following the abolition of the RDAs?
There is a lot at stake here. Of course we have to make cuts and reduce the deficit, but our plans showed that we could do it in a meaningful way that did not put communities on hold or even take them backwards. That is the danger of the proposals before us tonight.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
I want to start by adding my congratulations to my hon. Friends the Members for Dudley South (Chris Kelly) and for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) on their excellent maiden speeches. I am sure the rest of the House will join me in hoping that they will speak again in this Chamber in the very near future.
Today’s debate is very important. As Members will know, local government financing represents approximately 25% of Government spending and is responsible for delivering many of the essential front-line services our constituents rely on. Such a level of spending therefore cannot be immune to the spending cuts forced on us by the parlous state of the finances we inherited from the Labour Government. The historic local government funding formula has for far too long been used, especially by the Labour Government, not as a political tool but as a political weapon—a weapon with which to beat the shire counties of England for having the temerity to vote Conservative.
Local government finance is a particular concern to me and to my constituents, as my constituency suffers greatly under the historic funding regime. This year, each child in North West Leicestershire is having £3,888 spent on their education, compared with the £4,497 spent on each child in the city of Leicester—a difference of some £600 per child per year, and the disparity is increasing. Last year, the difference in funding was £550 per child.
Andrew Bridgen
Let me make a little progress and I am sure the theme will become clear.
That funding difference is putting the children of North West Leicestershire at a major disadvantage. The two biggest senior schools in my constituency—Ashby and King Edward—are disadvantaged by nearly £1 million and £500,000 respectively each year compared with the city of Leicester. That simply is not fair.
Perhaps the biggest unfairness emerges when we consider the level of deprivation in North West Leicestershire. According to the last census, in one ward in my constituency 468 children were living in income-deprived households, yet their educational needs were funded by £600 less this year than were those of pupils in the city of Leicester. That cannot be right, and I look forward to the pupil premium redressing this unfairness.
Despite these funding shortages, Leicestershire county council is performing excellently and is a four-star council. According to independent inspectors,
“the Council is good at managing its money and making savings to spend on the most important services”.
The independent inspectorate also comments on how
“Leicestershire County Council manages its finances well. Council tax is low compared with other areas and it provides a wide range of good and excellent services. This means it provides good value for money. In 2008/2009 it saved almost £11 million and it is on track to make further savings this year. These savings are then spent on improving services”.
It is vital that well-run local authorities such as Leicestershire be looked at sympathetically when it comes to departmental spending cuts. Fit organisations have little fat to cut away; it is the bloated authorities that have been disproportionately funded and badly managed that should be looking at trimming their organisations. Perhaps they will decide not to do that, and to pass on the costs of their inefficiency to the long-suffering taxpayer. I urge us to remove the cap on council tax increases, which will allow them to do just that. Councils that choose to take that path will then expose their profligacy, waste and poor management to the wrath of the electorate, leaving them fully accountable for their actions—hopefully through the ballot box.
It is not just in education where my constituents are suffering the effects of the previous Labour Government’s policies, but also housing. The Labour district council in North West Leicestershire, before being relieved of office in 2007—with the biggest swing in the country against Labour in those elections, but that is another matter—left the council housing stock in a lamentable state, rated as “poor”, with no stars. Despite this, owing to Labour Government policy we have the ludicrous situation in which a third of all the rents we collect every year are passed back to central Government to maintain housing stock in other areas, despite the fact that a third of our housing stock is classified as “sub-standard”, that we have elderly residents who are still forced to rely on solid fuel for heating and water, and that rents are increasing. We need to end this unfair and inefficient arrangement. I also look forward to councils being able to retain moneys raised by selling council houses, so that they can be re-invested in building new council houses in the district.
When the Opposition talk about local councils not building social housing, they might want to consider the fact that, in answers to questions in the last Parliament, the Government conceded to my right hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) that the £200 million a year collected in local council rents nationally was not even spent on housing but simply entered the general taxation coffers. Despite this, they have left us with the largest deficit in the history of this country at £156 billion.
There is a comparison to be made between the financial management of the previous Labour Government and the management of North West Leicestershire district council when it was under Labour control. During those sad 33 years of Labour control, my constituents faced an above-inflation council tax rise year in, year out.
Toby Perkins
The hon. Gentleman says that his constituents suffered under a Labour council for 33 years. If it was so terrible, why did they keep voting for it?
Andrew Bridgen
I think we needed to have a shake-up of the Conservative party in North West Leicestershire, which came in 2007. When the people of my constituency make their minds up, they make their minds up, and we had the biggest swing against Labour in those elections, as I pointed out.
Even in the year when it was thrown out of office, the Labour council increased council tax by 4.1%, and its performance was rated as weak and some way behind that of comparable councils. Three years later, the situation is somewhat better. The council is now rated adequate and is improving year on year. This has not been achieved by the Labour methods of tax and spend. As Winston Churchill said, for any society to believe that it can tax itself to prosperity is as ridiculous as a man standing in a bucket and believing he can lift himself up by pulling on the handle. The Conservative-controlled district council has introduced below-inflation increases of 2% in 2008 and 2009, and this year has introduced the sort of increase that the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) would doubtless describe as “a 0% increase”. Much to the relief of local residents, the council is improving services through prudent financial management and by trimming away the fat of previous administrations.
The east midlands and Leicestershire have fared little better under Labour on other essential public services. On policing, based on the 2009-10 budget and the 2008-09 crime survey, the east midlands region has the lowest grant relative to the number of crimes in the whole of the UK. The east midlands receives just £1,330 in grant for every crime, whereas the north-east region receives an extra £800 per crime to deal with the offences in its region. Let us consider what happens with other essential services. The combined fire service of Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland is the lowest funded per capita of any shire county fire service in England. Those and many other inequalities must be borne in mind when funding decisions are made.
I must reiterate that the fat, bloated local authorities are the ones that need to put their house in order when it comes to the inevitable cuts, which must be made this year, next year and for several years to come because of the awful financial legacy of the Labour Government. In conclusion, all I ask on local government financing is for a fair settlement for the east midlands, for Leicestershire and for my constituency of North West Leicestershire.
Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)
Members on the Benches opposite are, understandably, repeating this desperate mantra about “unavoidable cuts”. I suppose they think that if they can cling to that enough and repeat it often, somehow it will become true. These announcements of reductions—these swingeing cutbacks of public services—are not unavoidable; there are alternative strategies. Taking out 25% of public spending in these unprotected departmental expenditure limits within such a short period of time—four years—is to act too quickly and too harshly. There is no consensus among economists—that is certainly the case globally, let alone in this country—that this approach is the only way to protect our triple A rating and is essential in order to avoid a Greek-style arrangement. I suspect that either there is a little naivety on the part of the Liberal Democrats in propping up this ideological zeal to reduce public spending, which has always been present in the right wing of the Conservative party, or the Liberal Democrats—at least some of them—have sold their souls in order take on the trappings of high office. I hope that is not the case, but I am sure it is beginning to look to many of my hon. Friends as though it might be.
In my constituency, in Nottingham, the first tranche of service cutbacks—taking out the £6 billion and having £1 billion of reductions in local government spending—meant £4.5 million taken out of Nottingham’s front-line services. Some £2.7 million has been taken out of the education area-based grant—that money is not just for the one-to-one tuition that we were hoping to have for children in most need, but for the school transport budget, the special educational needs budget and so on—and £1.2 million has been taken out of the working neighbourhoods fund. The title of that fund does not really capture what it does, because the fund helps to combat teenage pregnancy and ensures that welfare rights advice is given to people. It provided the money that went hand in hand with the future jobs fund to help to get young people off benefits and into work. Millions of pounds have been taken out of these services, with £350,000 being removed from road safety spending and £2 million from the transport capital grant.
Chris Leslie
I know that will affect the constituency of the hon. Member for Sherwood (Mr Spencer), as it neighbours mine.
Mr Spencer
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that Nottingham city council might have been assisted if it had not had to dispose of three chief executives before their contracts expired, because they could not get on with the Labour-controlled city council, and pay them settlement fees in excess of six figures?
Chris Leslie
No, I would not agree. The tactic of the hon. Gentleman and of many hon. Members on the Benches opposite is to pick one or two anecdotal examples of problems, creating from those a whole story about how the public sector is rife with inefficiency and difficulties, and has to be culled. I presume he thinks that the only way forward is this fantastic private sector drive, which is always correct in all circumstances. There are examples of poor practice in the public sector, just as there are in the private sector. All I say to him is that taking 25% of public spending out of these vital services within four years will affect his party and the Liberal Democrats at the ballot box, particularly in the local elections next year; it will be interesting to see the reaction from the Liberal Democrats then.
We are all constrained by time in this debate, but I wish to raise a couple of points, especially on the local government finance particulars that have not been addressed so far. Some of my hon. Friends have mentioned the difficulties created by the in-year reductions in the first wave of announcements. Strangely, there will probably be four chops of the axe: the first announcement at the end of May/beginning of June; the Budget; the spending review coming up in the autumn; and another Budget in March. One consequence is that the ability for any sensible local authority to plan ahead carefully, cautiously and sensibly on a medium to long-term framework containing some understanding of what settlements it might achieve, given that the vast bulk of local government money comes from grant, has gone entirely. No sane or sensible local authority will be able to make any decisions about how it proceeds for the medium term until it has heard what is in the spending review. The danger in making some of the reductions within this mid-year period is that the short-termism will create extra harm, because changes will not be thought through or evidence based, and unfortunately they will probably hit those in most need.
Another consequence of this short-termism is that it affects some of the carefully constructed partnerships between public agencies within localities, which we have all been hearing about. We all, of course, want Total Place and we want local authorities to work together, be it at local strategic partnership level or under the local area agreement frameworks. Those partnerships have been shattered into smithereens because each public agency will retrench into its shell, with local authorities having to focus very much on their own situation and being unable to pool discretionary resources with other agencies. I am sure that the same will be the case in respect of police authorities, health bodies and others, and I very much regret that move.
The Government also decided to scrap the local area agreement reward grant. Again, this is a technical area, but the grant was important in process terms because it encouraged some sharing of objectives between central and local government. Not every front-line service is determined by a local authority alone. Of course, as we have heard, all sorts of services depend on central and local government working in tandem. Driving a coach and horses through the local area agreement framework will mean that local authorities will have absolutely no incentive to work in partnership with central Government, because in doing so all they have been given is a slap in the face. That is a great pity, because although this approach may not necessarily be noticed by our constituents, it is a crucial piece of the jigsaw that made a big difference.
The notion that the Government have been so generous in removing the ring-fencing from a series of grants after they took the axe to area-based grant that already exists is worrying. If the first thing that the Government decide to cut is that budget, which already contained a degree of flexibility and involved local authorities having an amount of freedom—local councils were getting used to working without the constraints of the centre—and straight away the front-line thing that goes is the area based grant and that flexible money, what will be the reaction of any local authority when the next tranche of money is magically un-ring-fenced? Naturally, those will be the next sums of money to go through the exit door, be they for the de-trunking of roads or for housing market renewal—the Government say they are removing some of the ring-fencing from that. Those will be the items of expenditure that will probably be cut next, because that is the signal that the Government are sending.
Gordon Birtwistle (Burnley) (LD)
The housing market renewal grant was obviously spent on renewing areas. Does the hon. Gentleman think that spending 10% of the total money—more than £300 million—on mini-quangos that simply passported the money through was sensible? Last year, more than £33 million was spent on these quangos, which basically just passported the money through. That has now been running for four years. More than £130 million, which could have been paid direct to local authorities to deliver the programme, was sent through totally unnecessary quangos set up by the Labour Government.
Chris Leslie
The hon. Gentleman can make these points, but they are dancing on the head of a pin. I think it is important that this money goes to the front line and gets spent, but it certainly will not help to cut these sums of money by a quarter—probably more than that—over four years. The hon. Gentleman seems to have these issues completely out of proportion. It is also interesting that in a written answer to me, the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), had to correct the announcement that the Government had made to the House about the un-ring-fencing of so much money. They discovered that a mistake had been made when they said that £300 million of private sector renewal moneys and the housing and planning delivery grant had been un-ring-fenced. It turned out that that money was already flexible, so their totals were changed entirely.
I want to talk about one or two other points that have not been mentioned much. Capital spending on infrastructure and on the improvement of the basic facilities in many of our constituencies is essential. Not only is capital grant being reduced significantly, but a little-spotted change was announced in the Budget in respect of prudential borrowing and the freedom that the previous Administration gave to local authorities so that they did not have to jump through all sorts of Treasury bureaucracy to be able to access capital loans from the Public Works Loans Board. An item in the small print in the Red Book now states that local authorities will have those requests from the PWLB scrutinised far more closely than before. In other words, it is a return to the days of centralism, if they get that money at all. Local authorities will have less capital grant as well as less ability to access PWLB money.
Does that mean that local authorities will have to go for bond finance, which is more expensive? I would certainly like to hear more from the Government about that; there was not an announcement in the Budget about bond finance. I would also like to hear where we stand in terms of accelerated development zones, tax increment financing and other measures that would be useful in encouraging innovation in the way in which local authorities access capital markets.
My final point concerns the choices that local authorities face and where they go with these difficult decisions. Many Government Members might have local authority members who are happy to take on the full burden of the reductions in the services that affect their constituents who are in most need. Many Labour authorities—and indeed, those run by the Liberal Democrats as they used to be—might want to try to temper that and to consider raising revenue from other sources. Traditionally, council tax has been the only option, although there is a quasi-capping arrangement going on with the supposed one-year council tax freeze deal. Most local authorities will probably be fairly daft not to accept the money that is on the table, although it is entirely unsustainable. There is no way that the Government will be able to extend that for long. After we have gone past this first year, we should be aware that the gearing ratio means that local council tax increases could easily be of the 10% to 15% variety. Does that mean that the Secretary of State will bring capping back in? Again, so much for his localism.
I suspect that the real burden will end up hidden away in the fees and charges that all our constituents have to pay, with a return to the easyJet council model—it will be hidden not just in planning charges, parking charges, swimming and library charges and so on but in those social care charges that hit the poorest most of all. Unfortunately, this is an ideological set of changes— although I hope that the Liberal Democrats will think again—that are certainly not in the interests of any of our constituents.
Mr Marcus Jones (Nuneaton) (Con)
First, I congratulate my fellow west midlands colleagues, my hon. Friends the Members for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) and for Dudley South (Chris Kelly), on making excellent maiden speeches.
I have listened intently and with great interest to the debate. Opposition Members seem tireless in their criticisms of the measures that the coalition Government are having to make. I am afraid that the debate has been a little like a stuck record—technology that we were quite used to in the 1980s, and which they seem to hark back to. At that time, I remember that many small and medium-sized businesses occupied our industrial estates in my constituency. That was the case until the mid-1990s, but unfortunately after 13 years of Labour Government many of the industrial units that I remember that used to be full with people in employment now stand empty. I hope that the coalition Government will put that right by refreshing and rejuvenating the private sector.
Opposition Members make no apology for mortgaging our country to the hilt and they still seem to want to keep spending and spending. They talk about reducing the deficit, yet we still hear no tangible sign of how Labour would get us out of the black hole in the public finances that they spent many years putting us into.
Not only were the previous Government profligate with the public finances, but they were also profligate with their constant diktat to local government. Local councils have been subjected to the constant and never-ending grip of the previous Government, obsessed with performance management, inspections, ring-fencing and general micro-management.
Let me touch on the performance management regime operated by the previous Government. It spiralled completely out of control, with councils at times being asked to report on matters over which they had little or no influence and in which they certainly had no decision-making power. Under that regime, by 2008 a typical council was spending £2.6 million a year reporting performance information to central Government. That additional burden also cost front-line services. For example, essential services such as bin collections have been reduced. That has all happened in spite of the fact that council tax virtually doubled under the previous Government, not to mention the spiralling cost of fees and charges to the public—a practice that was actively encouraged under the previous Government, particularly by Lord Prescott, about whom we have heard quite a bit today.
The previous Government should have used the line “less for more”, such was their contempt for local government and communities across the country. Reducing core services and doubling council tax is the legacy of 13 years of Labour Government. I need only look at my local council, Nuneaton and Bedworth—a council on which I was privileged to serve, and where I saw at first hand examples of how the heavy-handed clunking fist of the previous Government affected local government and the ability of local councillors to represent local people and make local decisions.
While it was under Labour control, the council was given a comprehensive performance assessment. Many Members who have been in local government will probably have enjoyed that experience. The Audit Commission gave the council a weak rating. On advice, the council responded by embarking on a two-year process of CPA voluntary engagement. That wasted thousands of hours of officer time, employed a number of additional consultants at a substantial cost to the authority and caused additional layers of bureaucracy that were added to the council’s structure. What were the outcomes for local people? They were negligible and certainly not proportionate to the resources expended over several years.
I have no doubt that the comprehensive area assessment will be just as onerous, as my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) pointed out. I therefore welcome the decision made by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to abolish the CAA, which, I have no doubt, will reduce the inspection burden and free up vital resources to deliver services. My right hon. Friend has made an excellent start and my hope is that he will go further and work with the Local Government Association, which has suggested today how £4.5 billion of savings could be achieved through:
“Reducing the regulatory burden on councils and pruning out the maze of Quangos, middlemen, bureaucratic funding streams and audit arrangements in order to protect front line services on which the most vulnerable depend.”
I also welcome the decision by the coalition Government to announce further removal of ring-fencing. The planning delivery grant is a prime example of how ring-fencing often fails, with councils often having almost to invent projects on which to justify spending grants. Again, my local authority was no exception when it was under Labour control. I recall it spending nearly £70,000 of planning delivery grant on audio equipment for the council chamber to improve the facilitation of council meetings. Until that point, and for some time thereafter, the council did not even hold planning meetings in the council chamber. When it did, the new audio system did little to add value to the planning process or to aid the expeditious construction of new property and houses in the area.
My experience tells me that councils will cope and adapt to the changes that the coalition Government are being forced to make. Many councils have already had to learn to work smarter in the past few years and are working with other authorities to deliver services in a smarter way. That can work especially well. My local authority has shared services such as payroll, IT, building control and procurement successfully with other local authorities. No doubt, councils up and down the country will be looking into putting shared arrangements in place. That is an extremely sensible and cost-effective move.
To conclude, I am glad that there appears to be such clear water between the Opposition side and the Government side. We acknowledge the tough times ahead, we are dealing with our debts head-on, we acknowledge that things will be difficult for local government in the next couple of years and we intend to allow councils to make their own decisions based on local need. We intend that local councillors will be freed from the central Government straitjacket that has strangled local government for so many years, so that they can do what they think is right for local people. That approach is diametrically opposed to the stance of Opposition Members, who are burying their heads in the sand regarding the debt that they are responsible for. They also seem to want the Government to keep our councils in their pocket—to keep them in a straitjacket and dictate how and where they must spend their money regardless of priorities. The very motion that they have put forward this evening explains that.
I know which approach I would prefer if I were still a council leader. I also know, from my dealings with local government and from my contact with fellow Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors, which they would prefer—more autonomy for local authorities, not less, and I am sure that this coalition Government will provide that. That is why I support the Government’s amendment.
Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)
I am very pleased to contribute to the debate, because it is important to remind everyone of the key role that local government plays in the delivery of services to our communities. I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett), who is not in his place, for outlining the importance of council services to vulnerable people. That is why we need to take a detailed look at where the £6.2 billion of additional cuts are falling. I shall speak later about the huge impact that the £16.8 million of additional cuts, in-year, to Durham county council’s budget will have in Durham city.
Perhaps we should not be surprised by the coalition Government’s callous approach to local government and the communities it serves, because, although the coalition document says a lot about enabling communities to run services, there is not a single mention of how those services will be paid for. Neither is there a single mention of what will be lost by those communities in terms of services that they will no longer get from their local councils. I am surprised that our Liberal Democrats in Durham, who are normally very good at saying how they support localism, have been strangely quiet in the past few weeks. Not one of them has come forward to condemn the outrageous cuts being inflicted on north-east councils.
The Labour-led council in Durham has shown how dreadful the cuts will be for our local communities. The Department for Communities and Local Government has said that it will make a cut of £6.34 million, but it has announced only the cut to the area-based grant. There is, in fact, a cut of £16.8 million, because other cuts that have not been clearly identified have been passed on to local government in relation to transport capital, the housing and planning delivery grant, the local area agreement reward grant and many other areas. The cuts to Durham county council are savage already, even before the comprehensive spending review in October, which we know will go even further.
The two Government parties have to answer a number of questions. The headline percentage decrease reported by central Government has been calculated only against the area-based grant reduction. When other cuts are taken into consideration, the cut to Durham’s budget will not be the 1% presented by the Government, but 4%. Why is there this lack of clarity?
Analysis of the reductions in grants shows that northern authorities have received the largest decreases in funding, with 31 of the top 50 authorities being in the north. That will add to the problems that we have in trying to rebuild the economy after the recession and in trying to improve life chances in some of the most disadvantaged communities in the country. That is not fairness. Why are the Government taking that approach?
Perhaps more outrageous still, considering the size of the reductions being made, is how they relate to the index of multiple deprivation. There is a strong trend of the most deprived authorities receiving the largest budget cuts. It is simply wrong that the poorest authorities seem to be the least protected. Again, the Government must make it clear to the Chamber why they are attacking the most disadvantaged communities in the country the most.
We have to get past the idea that the cuts are simply cuts to waste, because they are cuts to real services. Durham is experiencing a cut to its extended schools start-up costs. Providing those services is not profligate; they help parents to go to work and they give vital support to children.
Chris Heaton-Harris (Daventry) (Con)
How much of the cuts, in percentage terms, does the hon. Lady think that the top officers in Durham have taken on board themselves and how much does she think is being passed down to front-line services?
Roberta Blackman-Woods
It is because the hon. Gentleman’s Government have cut the area-based grant and additional services that the cuts have to fall in the ways that I am describing. It would have been much more sensible not to have—[Interruption.] Is the hon. Gentleman going to listen to my answer or not? What I am saying to him is that if we did not have these additional cuts in-year and if there had been a proper programme of consultation, it might have been possible—[Interruption.] Will the hon. Gentleman let me finish? It might have been possible to identify other cuts that would not have had such a direct impact on front-line services. The way in which his Government have made these cuts has led to the attack on front-line services.
Chris Heaton-Harris
Let us just say that a reasonable percentage of the cuts have been in the amount spent on the officers in Durham county council. Can the hon. Lady tell us how much the Labour county councillors on Durham county council have cut their allowances?
Roberta Blackman-Woods
Clearly, the hon. Gentleman did not listen to the answer that I gave him and does not understand the impact that a cut to area-based grant and other grants has. As I was saying, there will be cuts not only to extended schools start-up costs, but to the careers service and to the Supporting People budget, so they will affect both young and older people.
The cuts are not just to the public sector. The Government parties have demonstrated again today that they do not understand the links between the public and private sectors. On Friday, I visited one of the private nursing homes in my constituency to discuss the problems that it was experiencing with its budget. The entire business of that private sector delivery organisation is being affected by the requirement for the local authority to raise its residential allowances, which will lead to a loss of jobs in the private sector. It also makes no sense to cut the working neighbourhoods fund and the local enterprise growth initiative, especially in Durham, where the unemployment level is higher than the national average.
Do not get me wrong. The council and the regional development agency have worked hard in the last few years to try to ensure that unemployment remained at much lower levels than those experienced in the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s, and they were very successful in that regard. However, they need the working neighbourhoods fund and support for local business if they are to ensure that unemployment does not rise further. According to the council, it has received funds in the past for projects to help people into work, deal with worklessness and enhance job creation, but those are the funds that are being cut now. I consider that action to be disgraceful, short-term and short-sighted. It shows no understanding of the need for measures to encourage people to seek employment. Furthermore, the loss of funds from the Home Office will reduce the amount of resources for tackling antisocial behaviour.
I could go on and on with the list, but my main point is that if local people were asked where to make cuts, I very much doubt that they would prioritise cuts in services that seek to tackle antisocial behaviour or help people back into employment. We all know that cuts have to be made, but the top-down way in which these cuts are being inflicted means that local authorities cannot have full control over the areas that they would protect and those in which they would make cuts. It also means that they cannot consult local people. Such a degree of centralisation imposed by the Government parties, whose members say that they support localism and devolution, is breathtaking.
As well as not allowing local government time to produce a sensible framework for reducing the deficit, the Government have provided no clarification in respect of key programmes. In the case of Building Schools for the Future, that is leading to considerable uncertainty in our communities about whether new schools will go ahead. We need clarification as soon as possible. My local authority wants an open dialogue with the Government, and greater consultation within the sector on the timing, extent and detail of future reductions so that they can plan for them properly—and, critically, so that they can ensure that those who are most vulnerable are protected as far as possible from the impact of the cuts that must be made.
Why are the Government parties picking on existing policies—particularly those designed for the long term—that seek to reduce inequality? I have two examples in mind: free school meals and free swimming. The task of protecting and improving health must not depend entirely on the national health service; we also need local policies and services that help our young people to develop healthier lifestyles and a more sensible approach to their eating habits. The way in which the Government’s cuts are attacking free school meals will ensure that a central plank is removed from our plans for reducing inequality for the future, and I do not consider that acceptable.
Mr Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)
I pay tribute to my hon. Friends the Members for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) and for Dudley South (Chris Kelly), who made their maiden speeches today—although they caused me a little pain by referring to the mighty rise of Wolverhampton Wanderers and West Bromwich Albion, as I recalled that Nottingham Forest’s efforts to achieve promotion this year ended in dust. Fortunately, I was able to console myself then with the knowledge that, come the summer, England would probably win the World cup.
I am becoming increasingly frustrated by the series of Opposition Members who say, “We would have kept this or that bureaucratic scheme that would have protected vulnerable people,” in the next breath say, “We would have made £40 million worth of cuts,” and in the next breath do not specify where they would have made those cuts.
Roberta Blackman-Woods
Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will tell us what is bureaucratic about free school meals, especially given the universal pilots in Durham and other areas.
Mr Spencer
A number of schemes have been tied up in bureaucratic nonsense, and local authorities have had to jump through a number of hoops to deliver centrally issued targets that create an enormous amount of bureaucracy for local authorities. I shall say more about that shortly.
It is little wonder that the country’s national finances were brought to the brink of an abyss, given the last Government’s lack of vision and basic financial understanding. We only just avoided the intervention of the IMF in our finances; we were very close to that, as has been widely recognised.
Chris Leslie
What evidence has the hon. Gentleman that we were on the brink of having the IMF called in?
Mr Spencer
It was widely recognised—globally—that this country’s finances were in dire straits. Global economic markets were betting against our economy. We were saved only by the markets’ recognition that an election was coming, and that hopefully a Conservative Government would take over. We are in the fortunate position that the coalition has tackled those issues and saved this country from the enormous abyss it was facing.
The only way to deal with local government is to give power back to local government. Local people are much better placed to make local decisions. I welcome the decentralisation of local government and its management, and I sincerely hope that when we pass that power down the structure, better decisions will be made. I am very much encouraged by the thought that that will happen.
I am quite frustrated by the number of Opposition Members who have said that the leafy shire counties are all right thank you very much. Hon. Members should come and look at Nottinghamshire and at Sherwood. We have some challenges and some areas of real deprivation, such as Ollerton, Rainworth, Blidworth and Bilsthorpe right in the middle of Nottinghamshire county.
Toby Perkins
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for referring to some of those areas, many of which are former pit villages. I have played cricket in a lot of them. The hon. Gentleman fails to understand that the areas he is on about are precisely the areas that are going to suffer from the cuts that his Government are making. We are talking about rich, southern shire counties such as Surrey, not his constituency. The hon. Gentleman is arguing for cuts that will greatly affect those mining villages.
Mr Spencer
The simple fact is that those areas of Nottinghamshire face enormous challenges. I am glad that the hon. Gentleman recognises that some of the shire counties face the issues that many hon. Members claim exist only in Labour seats. We are going to have to deal with the enormous mess that the Labour Government left and tidy up some enormous problems. That will be a really big challenge, make no bones about it. Conservative Members recognise that it will be a big challenge. I do not think that Labour Members recognise what an enormous problem that is going to be.
Nottinghamshire county council was under the control of Labour for 28 years. In the last 10 years of that Labour control, the council tax doubled. That is the sort of pressure that Labour-controlled county councils put on people in the villages I mentioned—on pensioners and vulnerable people. That was a great shame. Fortunately for the people of Nottinghamshire, the Conservative party took control of Nottinghamshire county council. The increase in the council tax this year under Conservative control was 0%. I am proud of that, and the council will attempt to deliver it again next year. It is about protecting and reducing the cost imposed on pensioners and vulnerable people in those areas.
The hon. Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods) mentioned Building Schools for the Future—a good example of how bureaucracy is built into policies. BSF was quite a good scheme. Two schools in my area—Dukeries college and Joseph Whittaker school—are desperate to be rebuilt. The county council had to spend £5 million to get itself to a position in which it could bid, and we have not laid a single brick. That £5 million could have been spent on improving the schools rather than jumping through the hoops that the previous Government required.
Fortunately, the county council is now able to prioritise and use the money available to it. One of the statistics that sticks in my mind is that for every £7,000 of Government spending available locally only £350 is not ring-fenced and is available for local authorities to spend in the direction that they want. That is a shocking indictment of the centralisation and control and ring-fencing that has taken away local autonomy and the ability of local people to make local decisions. Fortunately, some councils under Conservative control are able to make the most of that £350 and prioritise things such as new pavements, filling potholes and trying to recover some of the damage done by previous administrations. I very much welcome that.
The one thing that has really impacted on my constituency is the removal of the regional spatial strategy, and I am particularly grateful to the Minister for doing that straight away. It put enormous pressure on the green belt of Nottinghamshire in my constituency. I am grateful that we can now have a grown-up debate in Sherwood about where housing is to go and what sort of housing it should be. The sort of housing is just as important. In areas of my constituency we have had to build large houses where they are inappropriate. We would be better building social housing so that vulnerable people could be housed and younger people could get on the housing ladder. In other areas, pensioners who live in four or five-bedroom houses on their own would like to move but cannot because there is nothing suitable locally. I welcome the fact that we can now have a grown-up debate about what sort of housing we put into Sherwood and where. We are desperate for the correct sort of housing and for the employment that goes with it.
Before the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham) left his place, he referred to Ashfield, my neighbouring constituency, and I would have welcomed his coming to look at the town. I was at a manufacturing company that falls under Ashfield district council in the town of Hucknall, called F. J. Bamkin and Son, which made socks for the Ministry of Defence for many years until the previous Government passed the contract to a far eastern supplier and, sadly, put enormous pressure on the company.
The most important thing that we can do is to remove some of the ring-fencing from the money that is passed to local government, and remove the enormous amount of bureaucracy that local authorities find in their way and the hoops that they have to jump through in order to tap into that money. Then, just maybe we can not only ensure that local people make the right decisions for their local areas, but protect the vulnerable people who were so badly let down under the previous Administration.
Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)
This is the first opportunity I have had to congratulate you on your appointment, Mr Deputy Speaker. I congratulate also the hon. Members for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) and for Dudley South (Chris Kelly) on their confident and assured maiden speeches. I wanted to find something in common with them and my constituency, and I noted that they both support Wolverhampton Wanderers, who are managed by Mick McCarthy. He is a Barnsley lad, and I now represent a part of Barnsley—I say that in case people are not aware of where Penistone is. Mick McCarthy is known to frequent a wonderful Indian restaurant in my constituency, the Dil Raj, in Dodworth, so there is the connection, and one of which I am proud.
I, like many hon. Friends, have a background in local government. I was a councillor in Sheffield for almost 10 years, and if I learned anything in that time it was that local government is absolutely vital to the smooth, coherent running of our society. Without it, our way of life would soon deteriorate, with all our constituents suffering the consequences. However, I must tell hon. Members what the coalition Government seem intent on doing, because we now know what the big society means. It means looking after oneself and doing things for oneself; it means, “I’m all right, Jack”. Potentially and most worryingly, it means an erosion of the principle of democratic, elected accountability for the delivery of local services. That approach is based on an ideological belief in the small state; it is not the “needs must” approach that Government Members have touted in recent weeks.
My constituency straddles two metropolitan boroughs in south Yorkshire, Barnsley and Sheffield. Both have every reason to remember the last time the Tories were in government, as they suffered deeply from the unfair cuts that were imposed on south Yorkshire local authorities. Judging by the cuts that the Department for Communities and Local Government has already announced, it looks as if they have much to fear this time around. It is not as if they are poor, inefficient authorities; they are not. Barnsley metropolitan borough council is renowned for the quality of its leadership and its efficient use of resources, and for having one of the best leaders in local government, Steve Houghton. Recently, through careful financial planning, it managed to freeze council tax for old-age pensioners and to give the under-16s not only free swimming but free bus passes. I applaud Barnsley on that achievement, which is now under threat.
Sheffield city council’s efficiency has been praised for many years, or at least it was when it was Labour controlled. The Audit Commission awarded it four stars on many occasions, and, although it is right that local authorities should be as efficient as possible, the recently announced £1.65 billion of cuts to local authorities will have significant detrimental impacts on services, especially in places such as Barnsley and Sheffield. More worryingly, it very much looks as if metropolitan authorities are being asked to take a larger share of the cuts, with a reduction of £12.22 per head in those areas, compared with an average of £8.75 for English authorities as a whole. If any Government Member can tell me what is fair about that, I will be incredibly impressed. I do not think that they can.
Further analysis shows that cuts have been made disproportionately in some of the most deprived areas in the country. For instance, Blackburn is ranked at No. 5 on the scale of multiple deprivation and it sees a cut of 1.7%. Meanwhile, Calderdale, ranked at No. 107 on the scale, suffers a 0.6% cut—less than half that suffered by Blackburn. Interestingly, while shire councils see only a small cut of 0.3% in their budgets, the mets are cut, on average, by 0.9%. The right hon. Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne) says that we are all in this together, but yet again it seems that some are in it more than others. In typical Tory style, it seems that those with the least are being asked to pay the price for Tory ideology.
How will people’s lives be affected by the cuts already announced and those that will come later? In a report to be published shortly, the New Local Government Network concludes that many chief executives are saying that libraries, sports centres and street cleaning will be particularly vulnerable. Those of us with a background in local government know that all too well—we remember the last time around.
We hear from the Government Benches about the glories of decentralisation, but let me remind Government Members that in 1995 Sheffield set the budget that it wanted to set, to avoid cuts to libraries and street cleaning. It was told by the Tory Government of the time to go back and reset the budget in June that year; the budget was declared illegal. That is not what I call decentralisation.
Dan Rogerson (North Cornwall) (LD)
I hear the issues that the hon. Lady has raised, particularly on behalf of the metropolitan borough that she represents. However, does she recall her Government voting for capping motions in the last Parliament, to cap police authorities and other authorities, which were subject to her Government’s decisions to restrict the rates that they wanted to set in their areas?
Angela Smith
I do indeed remember the capping. I am with my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) on this: I do not believe that capping is right. However, the situation in 1995 was incredibly desperate. By that time, we had suffered 15 or 16 years of year-on-year cuts. In the mid-1990s, there was less cash for the housing budget, in real terms, than we had had in 1979. By the time Labour came to power in ’97, there was a backlog of £1 billion in the housing budget.
I accept criticism of Labour’s record on affordable housing and new housing; I think that the previous Minister for Housing accepted it. But we had a massive backlog of disinvestment to deal with.
Angela Smith
We had 13 years, but we dealt with it and now almost every single council house in this country is up to standard.
Many chief executives are expecting a tsunami of cumulative funding cuts, with many saying that they will ramp up charges for sales, fees and services. The hon. Member for Sherwood (Mr Spencer) talked about local government bureaucracy, particularly in relation to the example of free school meals given by my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods). Finland manages to provide free school meals for every child from four to 19, without the bureaucracy mentioned by the hon. Gentleman. I do not accept his argument, and the cuts to free school meals pilots will not be forgotten.
The revenue cut for Barnsley is £2.75 million, a 1% cut to be put in place over a nine-month period—or, when other cuts are added, a £3.2 million cut in cash terms. However, the main focus of the cuts in Barnsley is the £1.7 million cut in the education area grant, whereby vulnerable children will be disproportionately affected. When that is coupled with a cut of £750,000 to the working neighbourhoods fund, it becomes obvious that the deprived, and those who most need help in Barnsley, are being targeted by the coalition.
Sheffield is England’s fourth largest city and ranks at No. 63 on the scale of multiple deprivation. Its cut is £6.5 million, or 1% of its budget, over nine months. This cut in funding has to be put alongside the withdrawal of £12 million of funding for the cleaning up of the Outokumpu site, the withdrawal of £12 million of funding for the redevelopment of the city centre, and the cancellation of the £80 million loan to Forgemasters, all of which mean that the coalition seems to have taken a sledgehammer to the city, making Sheffield probably one of the worst affected cities in terms of the impact of the coalition’s ideological approach to government.
If that were the end of the story, it would be bad enough, but on top of these cuts the national funding for local transport plans has been reduced by 25%, with a number of major schemes, including improvements to the road network, now being put on hold. In addition, the local integrated transport authority has indications of a 38% cut, which could mean for Barnsley a cut of £4.2 million. Government Members ought to tell me how people in Barnsley are going to get to work if their bus services and transport networks are to be so severely impacted by the cuts that are on the table. Interestingly, one of the aims of the coalition was a greener future. With cuts on this scale, there is no doubt that more people will be forced to use private cars. Even more worrying is the fact that, yet again, it will be the poor and the old, and those who cannot afford to use a car, who will suffer the most.
According to the Chancellor, this is only the beginning, with Departments being asked to make, on average, 25% cuts in their budgets as the required outcome of the comprehensive spending review. However, with spending on health and international development protected, the cuts in some Departments will have to be much larger than 25%. I started by saying how important I believe local government is. With, in some cases, cuts of about 38% being talked about, I fear very deeply that there are many things that local authorities will not be able to do in future.
Let us settle once and for all the claim that this coalition is progressive. The poor, the vulnerable and the least well-off will suffer the most as these cuts bite. As Brendan Barber has said,
“Not just the poor, but those on middle incomes will pay a heavy price for the government’s rush to close the deficit…and rising joblessness will add up to a perfect storm”.
Never mind fixing the roof while sun is shining—this coalition Government are set to trigger the perfect storm.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Hoyle)
Order. Before I call the next Member, I remind the House that we have quite a lot of Members who want to speak. It would be very helpful if we could shorten speeches, because I would like to try to ensure that everybody contributes.
Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for inviting me to speak in this debate. First, I join other Members in congratulating my hon. Friends the Members for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) and for Dudley South (Chris Kelly) on their very fine maiden speeches.
What we have heard from Labour Members throughout the debate has been a reinvention of the past 13 years. They have talked about a number of schemes that are desperately important, very much needed, and must be funded, many of which, I am sure, have been very welcome and have done sterling work. However, the question is: where was the money going to keep coming from? At the front of the Red Book, there is a stark chart showing that for 2010-11 Government receipts were to be about £578 billion and Government spending more than £600 billion. That is unsustainable even in the short term, and that is why this Government are having to take the very tough decisions that have been discussed at great length today.
The hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) talked about decent homes funding. I would like her to explain to my local arm’s length management organisation, Charnwood Neighbourhood Housing, why it thought that it was going to be bidding for decent homes funding and then found that that money had been diverted to build more social housing. I do not disagree that more social housing may be needed, but that was another example of game changes in the middle of the year, about which Labour Members have complained so bitterly.
The hon. Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods) talked about free school meals. Perhaps she could explain to a constituent who recently wrote to me about this why she and her husband, who are still together, struggling on a low income, and who really need free school meals for their children, are unable to get them, while children of parents who have split up, with at least one parent certainly able to afford school meals, are getting them.
Angela Smith
May I remind the hon. Lady that the free schools meals pilot was about giving them to all children?
Nicky Morgan
That brings us back to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Mr Spencer) made about bureaucratic schemes, in many of which the help is not getting to the people who actually need it.
This has been an interesting debate, and it was particularly interesting to listen to the three former Secretaries of State and the former Housing Minister on the Opposition Benches. I feel I should declare that I have never been a councillor, and I have learned a great deal about local government finance this afternoon, not least all the acronyms. I speak in this debate as a council tax payer, and I agree that local government is incredibly important. For many people who have come to my surgery so far, their experience of government comes from dealing with local government, whether through the administration of benefits, council tax, rubbish collection, social services or particularly education, the funding for which I shall come on to in a short while. The Local Government Association has said that town halls have already committed to making 4% efficiency savings this year, so they are leading the way where the former Government failed to do so.
As I mentioned in an intervention, one of the former Secretaries of State said that Labour had identified £40 billion-worth of cuts, but we do not know where those cuts were to be made. I believe that everybody in the House agrees that cuts have to be made. The former Housing Minister, the right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint), talked about progress having stalled. I suggest to her and other hon. Members that progress stalled when the former Government ran up a deficit of £156 billion, which will lead to £70 billion of interest being paid—more than the budgets for education and many other things put together.
There has been little mention of council tax levels—although since I scribbled a note saying that, council tax has been mentioned. The level has increased, and in fact in Charnwood it more than doubled in the 13 years of the Labour Government. That has hit those on fixed incomes, particularly pensioners, very hard. I was approached by many pensioners during the election campaign who talked to me about how they were struggling to make council tax payments on a fixed income.
There has been talk this afternoon about ring-fencing. I welcome the fact that the Government have scrapped £1.7 billion of ring-fencing and got rid of the comprehensive area assessment, and that the £29 billion formula grant remains intact. Talking of the comprehensive area assessment, councils across Leicestershire used to employ 90 full-time staff to prepare 3,000 individual data items, leading to 83 inspections at a cost of £3.7 million a year. I defy any hon. Member, particularly any Opposition Member, to tell me that that could not be better spent on front-line services.
I am conscious of your exhortation not to speak for too long, Mr Deputy Speaker, but I wish to make two more points. First, we have heard a lot this afternoon about decentralisation, and I particularly welcome the Government’s first move to abolish the regional spatial strategies. That is a huge step forward and has been welcomed enormously by my constituents. They recognise that new houses need to be built, but they are incredibly concerned about where they are to be built. It is welcome that elected local councillors will make decisions about that.
I agree entirely with what the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) said about the need for creativity and innovation in the delivery of services. That is absolutely right, and there has been too much overlap between what central and local government do. I am sure that we all have talented councillors in our constituencies, and many Members have spoken about their local government experience. Talented councillors and staff do not need Whitehall and central Government breathing down their necks.
I am sure I am not the only Member who is happy to say that they do not want to say too much about local planning matters, particularly when they boil down to extensions here or there, and so on. I am happy, and believe it is right, to leave it to the local planning authority and planning committee members to decide on such matters. This Budget provides an opportunity to reinvigorate local authorities by allowing our local councils really to take charge of local issues. I wish to make a plea to the Government and the Minister, however. I am concerned about recent changes to legislation on the conversion of houses to HMOs—houses in multiple occupation. Although I welcome the fact that local authorities are to make decisions on that, as they know their local areas best, if they are to do so they need regulations that have teeth. In my constituency, the conversion of houses into student-occupied homes is a matter of real concern.
Total Place has been mentioned this afternoon. I am not an expert, but I know that in Leicester and Leicestershire, Total Place has been considering drug and alcohol treatment. It is a huge step forward, which is to be welcomed, and I endorse comments from hon. Members of all parties about the way in which Total Place has worked. I hope that it will continue.
The trouble with speaking late in a debate is that other hon. Members often steal one’s thunder, and my hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen), who is no longer in his place, did that effectively when he spoke about spending on education in Leicestershire, so I will not say too much about that. However, I left the Chamber earlier to meet some schoolchildren from De Lisle school in Loughborough. When I told them that I hoped to speak in the debate, they immediately asked what I would say, and I said that I would talk about funding for education in Leicestershire. My hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire pointed out that the funding gap between schools in Leicester and in Leicestershire is now £600. The trouble is that there is no difference in national pay rates for staff, so schools in Leicestershire have less to spend on other things if they rightly want to retain a decent staff-pupil ratio. They were penalised when the direct support grant was introduced because Leicestershire had topped up school funding. The difference between average funding in the country and that for our schools in Leicestershire meant that a 300-place primary school in Leicestershire would be £99,000 worse off every year. That cannot be right.
My hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire also mentioned police funding. In Leicestershire, we have received £9 million less than the average in the past four years. Despite all that, Leicestershire county council still managed a four-star rating. That shows that, with good management and good political leadership from councillors, local authorities can run services to a high standard on less money than they would ideally like.
I support the amendment. The Opposition have totally reinvented and forgotten the past 13 years, and all the projects and schemes that have been mentioned. The Government are now taking tough decisions, which mean that, in several years, we can fund our services fully, and help the vulnerable and the poor who have been mentioned in today’s debate.
Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)
The Budget is bad news for Birmingham, a proud city, which suffered grievously in the 1980s and now faces unprecedented cuts in public investment. Why? The Con-Dem alliance says that it is Labour’s legacy, but it is nothing of the kind. The Greek defence that it prays in aid is but an excuse for the modern Tory party—modern-day Leninists—to cut back the role of the state nationally and locally. As for the Liberal Democrats—a hollow shell of the once great, progressive party of Lloyd George, Beveridge and Keynes—never have so few let down so many for so little: a handful of ministerial cars and Red Boxes.
Birmingham was the birthplace of municipal government and municipal enterprise. It is Europe’s biggest council, which employs more than 40,000 and funds thousands of community projects and voluntary initiatives. It is a key purchaser of goods and services from the midlands economy. It is also, historically, a champion of the people of Birmingham. In the best traditions of Chamberlain on the one hand and Dick Knowles on the other, next Tuesday, Sir Albert Bore and the Labour group on Birmingham city council will table a motion for debate that calls on all councillors to stand up and be counted in opposition to what the Tories said they would not do and the Liberals said they should not do: put up VAT. The motion calls on councillors to speak out against a broken promise—an unfair tax that will hit pensioners, the unemployed and the poor hardest, and a jobs tax, which will hit the economy of the midlands, from house building to retail.
Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)
My hon. Friend’s comments about the motion that the Labour group in Birmingham will table remind me of what happened at a Sefton council meeting last week. The Labour group there tabled a similar motion, and I hope that the same result does not occur in Birmingham, because the Liberal Democrat and Conservative councillors in Sefton decided not to turn up to debate how to deal with the Budget crisis and the Government’s national cuts.
Jack Dromey
It would appear that, in your local authority, they have found Lord Lucan, and they are now looking for the Liberal Democrat and Tory councillors. In Birmingham, they are going to have to stand up and be counted.
There is a grotesque contrast between the £2 billion levy on the banks—not on the bankers, by the way—on the one hand, and £11 billion off welfare and £12 billion on VAT on the other. I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the leadership shown last night by the truly honourable Members for Colchester (Bob Russell) and for Portsmouth South (Mr Hancock) when they voted against their own Government in opposition to the VAT increase.
The shadow Secretary of State was absolutely right to point out earlier that the areas with the greatest needs should not bear the brunt of the cuts. Birmingham has great problems of multiple deprivation and high unemployment, yet, as a consequence of the Budget, it will see the biggest cash reduction—more than £12 million. It will have the largest cut in area-based grant in any local authority in Britain, at £8 million, and the seventh largest cut to the school development fund, at £633,000. That money was designed to help struggling schools to succeed.
Birmingham will have the second largest cut to Connexions, at £2.7 million. This will harm the ability of our city to help the young into work and to get apprenticeships. It will also have the largest cut to the children’s fund, at £1.14 million. That will damage the capacity of our city to reach out to disabled, disadvantaged, troubled and sometimes abandoned children. It will also see the largest cut to the working neighbourhoods fund—a highly successful programme of concentrated, co-ordinated, community-led action to get Birmingham’s citizens off benefit and into work.
I have seen these programmes at first hand, in the form of the remarkable Employment Needs Training Agency in my constituency, and three excellent employment Connexions contracts focusing on the long-term unemployed, lone parents, ex-offenders, those who have engaged in alcohol abuse, and those who lost their jobs under Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s and never worked again. Those programmes have an outstanding track record of reaching out to those people, giving them hope, and helping them to rebuild their lives and get back into work.
Nadhim Zahawi (Stratford-on-Avon) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman speaks eloquently about the problems in Birmingham without telling us how we got there in the first place. Does he think that borrowing £500 million, not every month or every week but every day, represents responsible behaviour towards the people of Birmingham?
Jack Dromey
We have a problem as a consequence of people like you: bankers.
Jack Dromey
There are more bankers on the Government green Benches than there are in the square mile of the City of London.
Those admirable community projects’ money will run out in March 2011, and they are now facing a cut of up to one third. The impact of that on those projects and those communities will be absolutely devastating.
Sajid Javid
I am a former banker. I can see that the hon. Gentleman is probably still a trade unionist, rather than a former trade unionist. Does he realise that his party lost the election because it brought our country to the brink of bankruptcy? We are having to impose these cuts because of everything that you did or failed to do. They are your cuts, and there is no point in complaining about them now.
Jack Dromey
Thank you for owning up to your former occupation. I wonder whether you wish us to take any other offences into consideration—
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. Members must show a little more respect. There must be less of the “you”, and they must go through the Chair.
Jack Dromey
I was fascinated by the earlier contribution of the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), in which he demanded equal treatment for Bromsgrove and Birmingham. Forgive me for saying this: if you cannot tell the difference between Eton, Esher and Erdington, I can.
The cuts falling on my city are in grotesque contrast to what is happening in West Oxfordshire district council area, where not 1p is coming off the working neighbourhoods fund. Whose constituency falls into that area? It is that of the Prime Minister.
It is vital that we have an intelligent approach to the role of government. We have the example in the west midlands of Advantage West Midlands, a hugely successful organisation responsible for creating and safeguarding tens of thousands of jobs, but now facing abolition. It is no wonder that leading voices in the private sector are speaking out in opposition to that decision, which would be folly if we believe in the importance of a renaissance of our manufacturing base. However, the issue is not only the work that AWM does in promoting our manufacturing economy. It is also the work that it does in terms of the big society. I was at the opening of the Perry Common community hall the Friday before last. That was an excellent community initiative, with inspiring leadership from a local community that has been through very tough times. That community hall could never have been opened without half the money being made available by AWM. Can we therefore stop posing big government against big society? What we see in Perry Common is an ideal combination of big government and big society working together.
Ms Bagshawe
The right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) has so far failed to explain exactly where Labour would have found savings in the unlikely event that it had been returned to power. As the hon. Gentleman is in love with every single expensive programme, can he indicate where we might be able to cut to save some money?
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. May I remind Members that they should come into the Chamber a little earlier if they want to intervene? We are up against time.
Jack Dromey
Our approach was fundamentally different. We think that it is folly to cut savagely and quickly. It risks threatening the economy with a double-dip recession, and it is cities like Birmingham that would suffer grievously as a consequence.
We are already seeing the consequences of what the Con-Dem alliance is doing, not only in government but locally in the council chamber. The parties have been in power for six years. Earlier this year, 2,000 job cuts were announced, hitting hard nurseries, youth services, park rangers and the most vulnerable in our community—those in local old people’s homes. I was in an old people’s home in Kingstanding and I met excellent men and women. After our discussion, an 80-year-old woman took me to one side and told me the story of how she had had a double mastectomy and her wounds opened up at 3 o’clock one morning. She could not get help, because there were no longer wardens on site. She had to ring a call centre 150 miles away. She was eventually told to ring 999, but mercifully her son was 3 miles down the road and he came out to take her to hospital.
My view is simple: the good men and women of Birmingham who built that city and this country, and who are now in the twilight of their years, deserve better than to be abandoned by this Con-Dem alliance. You will; we never will.
Michael Ellis (Northampton North) (Con)
Perhaps we could inject a dose of reality into the debate at this late stage. Listening to speeches by Labour Members, I could not help but be struck by the old adage, which they have obviously forgotten, that “You can’t spend what you don’t have.” Interestingly, Labour members have clearly adopted the posture of collective amnesia when it comes to why this country is in this financial state and this economic mess, and why substantial savings are necessary in the Budget: it is because of their mismanagement of our economy. Why is it that of every £4 spent in this country, £1 is borrowed? How prudent is that? Why is it that 1 million nursing hours a week are spent on paperwork? It is because of Labour. Why are there as many managers in the national health service as there are beds? It is because of Labour. Why is it that the police spend 22% of their time on paperwork and only 14% on patrol? It is because of mismanagement by Labour.
Labour had 13 years to make the so-called improvements that it now claims we ought to make. Why did it not make those improvements? With the greatest respect, Labour Members are suffering from what can be called ostrich syndrome. They are sticking their heads in the sand, but the problem is that their hindquarters are still exposed. The hindquarters of this ostrich are there for all to see. It is disrespectful to the electorate to think that they are not intelligent enough to know why we are in this position. Why else did Labour achieve only 29% of the vote in last month’s general election—its lowest in quite some time? The electorate can see who is responsible for the state of the nation’s economy—Labour.
Speakers today and yesterday have railed against threatened cuts and savings, but these are Labour cuts. All day, public bodies have been cited and lists of endangered services highlighted, but Labour Members have made no acknowledgement of who pays for them—the taxpayer—and no suggestions about what Labour would do in respect of the cuts that are so obviously necessary. After all, we hear from some of them that billions of pounds of cuts are necessary and would have been necessary had we been in the unfortunate but highly unlikely circumstance of a Labour victory last month. Again, however, there is no collective memory of these issues.
Labour’s tax-and-spend policies ended on such an irresponsible note that its Ministers were making spending commitments in the dying weeks of the last Administration which the country simply could not afford. “Grossly irresponsible” is not a sufficient phrase. Those outside this place who were led up the garden path by Labour will realise that when programmes have to be cut, these are Labour cuts. Labour acted like a tenant who has fallen out with their landlord and decided in the last few weeks of their tenancy to spend as much as possible on utilities and then do a runner on the last month’s tenancy arrangement.
In common with a number of largely rural shire counties, which have been spoken of with some disrespect by Labour Members today, Northamptonshire residents suffered severe prejudice in terms of central Government funding during the 13 years of the Labour Government. Strangely, this phenomenon was not evident in Labour-held or Labour-marginal areas over those 13 years. The funding that Northamptonshire receives is based on out-of-date statistics calculating our population at several tens of thousands—about 10%—less than the reality. In a county whose population has been increasing exponentially—Northamptonshire is the fastest growing county in the country—the use by central Government of these seriously out-of-date figures under the Labour regime has had an unfair effect on Northamptonshire.
No doubt Conservative Ministers will be looking at these figures in due course, but I want to emphasise the point. I spoke this morning to the leader of Northamptonshire county council, who confirmed that Northamptonshire is the fastest growing county in the United Kingdom. The Office for National Statistics’ figures are two years out of date. More than 10,000 more people live in Northamptonshire than the statisticians think, and of course those people use Northamptonshire schools, bin collections and the like. This imbalance between the fastest growing county and our underfunding costs the county £5 million a year—the equivalent of 2% on council tax. Yet Northamptonshire has the lowest council tax in the United Kingdom—£30 a year lower, at band D, than the second lowest placed.
Local government finance accounts for 25% of the budget, so what needs to happen? Well, there needs to be decentralisation, and I am delighted to see that the coalition Government are already moving in that direction. There needs also to be an end to the obsessive red tape that Labour Members have created—the bureaucracy, the extreme state control—and there also needs to be an end to the top-down diktats. We need the axing of unelected and ineffective quangos, while radical reform of the planning system is also necessary to give neighbourhoods far more power to determine the shape of the places in which their inhabitants live.
In Northampton North, the constituency that I have the honour to represent, there have been examples—one in particular in the Booth Rise area—of how we have suffered under the Labour Government’s style of planning regime. Despite opposition from local residents, from the local councils, from the planning committee on the borough council and from Members of Parliament—including my Labour predecessor, I might add—a decision was taken to build 111 compact homes on green-belt land in a gateway area to the town where traffic is already heavy. That was pushed through by a Labour-created quango. Around the country, people are left feeling entirely disconnected from the powers that make these decisions.
Michael Ellis
I will not, forgive me; Mr Deputy Speaker has indicated that we are in a rush.
In conclusion, we need to introduce new powers to help local communities to save facilities and services threatened with closure, giving communities the right to take over local state-run services. We need to cut the red tape and look with reality, unlike Labour Members, at what needs to be done to improve this country’s economy and to improve the state of democracy for our local people and their elected representatives.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
When the hon. Member for Northampton North (Michael Ellis) suggested that we were going to get a dose of reality, I was hopeful, but, sadly, those hopes were dashed. It is ironic that on a day when the Secretary of State should have been here answering the charge of betraying local councils, he should instead—like the spectre of Tory cuts past—return to Bradford, where he would no doubt have asked for many other crimes to be taken into account. What we are seeing, of course, is simply the return to the Tory cuts from which local government suffered so badly in the 1980s.
One thing that stands out from this whole debate is the fact that the Liberal Democrats have not been involved in it. As far as I am aware, there has been only one contribution from them—from the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming)—yet the Liberal Democrats were supposed to be the party of local government. Here we are discussing 20% of the total cuts being made this year falling on the local government sector, and the Liberal Democrats are absent—absent without leave. I think it is simply scandalous that a party that prides itself on its contribution to local government should refuse even to engage in the debate.
Local government has not had a fair deal. Even in the current climate, local government has taken far more than its fair share of the cuts that have come this year. The cuts coming in future years will undoubtedly fall most substantially on the most deprived people in our communities.
Given the limitations of time, I want to focus on one particular area—the impact of the cuts on the voluntary sector. I spent the weekend at the Old Whittington and Brimington galas in Chesterfield. There were numerous examples of great community groups there. In every single case, they were worried about the funding they would receive. How can the Conservative Government possibly create the big society when the voluntary sector, which will be fundamental to it, is going to face such substantial cuts in their funding when these local government cuts go through?
What needs to be acknowledged is the vital role that local government plays in our society as the founding stone and bedrock of democracy. As to the funding cuts to area-based grants, they will specifically target the most deprived communities. What we have seen, then, is an ideological Budget and an ideological decision that specifically disadvantages the poorest people and reduces the ability of those in the more deprived communities to work their way out of poverty. It is a strategy of diminishing local government and scrapping the measures that would demonstrate the damage being done. Many of the measures the Government are currently taking will, under the cloak of reducing bureaucracy, actually reduce the accountability of local government and other public sector organisations, and reduce the ability of the public to hold those services to account. It is all part of the seizing of power by the Secretary of State under the cloak of localism.
These measures will reduce the ability of councils to provide their services. Council leaders know that when they want to provide their services they will be told they have more power, but they will not have the money to deliver the services, and neither will they have the ability to raise the money, because the Secretary of State is informing them that they cannot increase council tax. Therefore, what they will actually have is simply a choice between scrapping services, which will disadvantage the most deprived people in our community, and hiking up charges for a whole raft of services, which will mean fewer people access them.
If the Secretary of State genuinely wants to make efficiencies, then let us see a commitment to Total Place, which is the ideal way of supporting partnership working to deliver the changes to communities and of reworking spending to be more efficient. That will also engage other organisations to work with local government, so we can create a progressive society out of the situation we are in, rather than our having these savage cuts that will disadvantage the most deprived people in our communities.
Gavin Barwell (Croydon Central) (Con)
I will try to limit the length of my remarks to five minutes so as to allow others to speak.
The shadow Secretary of State set the tone for the debate. There was some good knockabout, but one got the impression that he does not actually understand the system that he was administering until very recently, and he had nothing to say about the fundamental problems with local government finance in this country. The reality is that councils are too dependent on central Government for their funding, and too much of the money that they get from central Government is controlled by central Government in respect of how they can spend it. Also, the grants system that is used to distribute money is hugely complex, not transparent, unpredictable and unfair.
Let me give an example involving my own local authority. In this financial year, Dorset county council received the largest increase in the country: 7.1%. The England average was 2.6%, and Croydon got 1.5%. I will not take up time by going back over the past four or five years, but the pattern is repeated. Has Croydon suddenly lost a large chunk of population, or are we suddenly a much more affluent place than we were a few years ago? No. The system makes no sense whatever.
The London borough that is most similar to us is Enfield. It receives £423 per head of population, whereas Croydon receives £348. If we received the same level of funding as the borough that is most like us, we could cut council tax bills by £200 per head. In London, we have the nonsense of the area cost adjustment that divides London up into three areas and pretends that the London borough of Croydon can pay people a lot less than the London borough of Sutton right next door. That is complete nonsense. The system is in urgent need of reform, yet we have heard nothing from the Opposition about any of these issues.
On savings, let me repeat something that I said in the Budget debate. Almost every Labour Member who has contributed today has said that we are driven by some kind of ideological passion to slash public services. The NHS saved my life when I was seven years old and had lymphatic cancer, and I also have two sons at state school. The most urgent issues in my constituency are the need for more police officers on the streets and the need to do a better job of repairing our roads. I did not come to this place to slash public services, but I and my constituents know that the Government cannot continue to spend money that they do not have. That does not work in the long term.
There is real scope for making savings in local government—my council saved 6.8% in the previous financial year—but there is no doubt that the level of savings envisaged over the course of this Parliament is significant and will lead to some really tough decisions for local authorities across the country. I have to say to Opposition Members that although the Chancellor has proposed going further than the Labour party was proposing, we are protecting fewer departmental budgets so in terms of the unprotected Departments there is actually very little difference between the plans. People who have sat here listening to the debate all day, as I have, would not have got that impression, however.
May I end by making a few pleas to my Front-Bench colleagues? They can do a number of things to make this situation easier for local authorities. First, they can press forward with the proposal for a general power of competence. In London, we used to have a mutual arrangement between the borough councils to buy insurance, but it was ruled to be illegal. Bulk purchasing of that kind can save local authorities sizeable amounts of money. I also agree, actually, with something that was said by the Opposition about the Total Place initiative. Croydon was a pilot for early years, to which a lot of bureaucracy is attached. There is real potential to drive up savings over the long term in that regard.
Finally, I ask that we look at the possibility of working across the public sector. In Croydon we have a PCT that is coterminous with the council. There are separate finance directors, separate human resources departments, separate properties. If we can bring the different bits of the public sector together, there is huge potential for saving money and protecting our front-line services.
There is so much more that I could have said, but other Members want to speak so I will take my seat.
Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)
I keep hearing from Tory MPs claiming that these are Labour cuts. Well, it is quite simple: if you do not like the cuts or do not agree with them—if you think they are Labour cuts—vote against them; do not impose them. It is a very simple point, but it is an opportunity open to all Members on the Government Benches, both Tories and Lib Dems.
Of course, the reality is very different. The truth is that these are Tory and Lib Dem cuts, and they are enjoying making them. The face of the Secretary of State says it all: he is looking forward to them, and he has form on this, as other Members have said. If it is not the ideological passion of the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell) to make these cuts, then what is it? Economists have shown us that if we make these cuts now, they will be far too deep and far too early for the economic recovery to be sustained.
Cuts in-year in local government are unheard of. They are unplanned, and they undermine what councils and local people want to achieve in their communities. I spent 15 years as a local councillor, and I remember when the then Secretary of State was first getting started on this issue. I remember the leaky school buildings, the outside toilets, the teachers buying equipment out of their own pockets. I am proud that Labour fixed the roof while the sun was shining. I am proud that we built new schools, bought the textbooks, employed the support staff who freed teachers to teach, and provided free nursery places.
My friends’ children have older brothers and sisters who went through the nursery system and went to school before there were free nursery places—before Sure Start was available to them. Their parents tell me the difference that the younger children have seen as a result of that Labour investment, of which I am very proud, and I will fight hard to protect it, as will other Labour Members.
While I was a local government children’s services spokesman, I saw at first hand how many essential services are provided by education departments and social services, and the difference they make to the children and families who depend on those services. Sure Start children’s centres are among a number of such examples. However, under threat from these cuts is the extended schools grant. It makes a huge difference to children who otherwise would not have breakfast to be able to go to breakfast clubs. It makes a huge difference that children can go to after-school clubs, and that working families are able to get by. The cuts to those grants will make a profound difference. They will cause real hardship for many children, young people and their families.
Thanks to the services now available, vulnerable children have a much better chance in life and an opportunity to get out of the cycle of deprivation, neglect and poor health that was previously the lot they faced in life. So the cuts in those services really will hurt those who can least afford to suffer them.
In Sefton we are facing £2.1 million in education service cuts. Cuts in local education services mean not the money that is going straight to schools, but the money that is there to support schools. So it is smoke and mirrors to claim that these cuts will not affect schools: they will, and badly.
The Labour group called a meeting in Sefton, and the Tory and Lib Dem councillors refused to turn up to take part in a debate about where the cuts should fall and how the budget should be managed. That was an abdication by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in Sefton, and the same tactic is clearly being tried by the Government, because they are asking councils to make cuts with no guidance, in-year, and yet the worst is still to come. A further £504 million of cuts have yet to be specified, so the worst is yet to come in this year. What the right-wing Tory-Lib Dem coalition Government in Parliament are doing is the same as what the right-wing coalition in Sefton is doing: they are abdicating their responsibility and they are going to hit the poorest hardest.
Brandon Lewis (Great Yarmouth) (Con)
In light of the time, I shall be very brief. My hon. Friends have well made the point that the tough decisions that our Front-Bench team and the Government are making are based on the deficit that we have inherited, and that that is a problem that we must deal with. I shall not take up time discussing that issue, because it has been well covered.
I wish to discuss my experience as a councillor for more than a decade under the old Labour Government; I was also a council leader. When I listened to the shadow Secretary of State waxing lyrical about what the Labour Government did on local government and what they had planned I did not recognise the fairy tale being told. The local government that I remember as a councillor and council leader is one where my officers wasted countless weeks throughout the year; they were not providing front-line services and were not looking at how we could do more for our residents, but were ticking boxes, filling in forms and keeping different auditors and quangos happy. At the time of the recent announcement of cuts for local government, I was on BBC “Look East” talking about Great Yarmouth and its 2% cut. Labour Members would say that this has happened only in certain areas, but that is not the case because Great Yarmouth’s authority had one of the biggest cuts.
My local authority, which I am proud of, has turned around and said, “We can deal with this. Any good business can deal with a 2% cut, so we can deal with it and we will do so without dealing with front-line services.” I said to the leader of my local council, “If we could wave a magic wand and if central Government could make life easier, faster and better for the council and, more importantly, for the residents of Great Yarmouth, what thing could we do? Is it to provide more money?” He said no.
When I speak to councillors—I found that this was the case when I was a councillor too—I am told that this is not necessarily about the money, but about the ability to deliver services. It is about the ability to have real power and to make decisions locally on matters that matter to people locally. I fully support the Government and I give great credit to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the work that the Government are doing so quickly to devolve power to local authorities. I say bring on more, so that we can get residents in areas such as Great Yarmouth to see that their council matters and their vote matters, because their councillors will be making decisions that will affect their lives, not ticking boxes for central Government and suits in Whitehall. I will therefore be fully supporting the amendment, and I say that the more power we can give to local councils to deliver local powers locally with residents, the better.
Chris Williamson (Derby North) (Lab)
Local government has been at the vanguard of progressive change for more than a century. Some of the most significant and innovative advances originated in local government. The introduction of modern sewerage systems in our towns and cities, the replacement of slum dwellings with decent public housing, the development of comprehensive schools and the provision of care for elderly and disabled people are just a few examples of the improvements brought about by local government.
When the Tories were last in power they did their level best to annihilate local government, and now that they are back they have set their sights on finishing the job. It is the local government equivalent of the return of the Daleks, with the right hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr Pickles) playing the role of Davros, the supreme leader of the Daleks, determined to exterminate progressive local government once and for all, aided and abetted by the Cybermen Liberal Democrats. The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government should be standing up for local government, not seeking to strike it down.
Given the Secretary of State’s dismal record as leader of Bradford city council, where he first gained his notoriety for vicious cuts, we should not be too surprised that he is now using the national stage to inflict his cuts agenda on the whole country. An article published last year in The Independent reminded us about his period as leader of Bradford city council. It stated that
“having gained control of the Conservatives’ only inner-city council”
he
“set about an unprecedented round of cuts, sell-offs, price rises and job losses. At the first meeting, £5.8 million was cut from the budget, chiefly in education. Council rents went up. So did charges for leisure centres, car parks, school meals, home helps, meals on wheels, OAP luncheon clubs and cemeteries.”
He did not finish there. The article goes on to say:
“Teachers, caretakers, maintenance workers, crèche and nursery staff, social workers and council officers all lost their jobs. Old people’s homes were sold off and Benefit Advice Centres closed.”
Sounds familiar, does it not?
The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Eric Pickles)
The hon. Gentleman should realise that the only people who sold off old people’s homes were in the Labour council that followed. He should realise that there were more teachers at the end of my period as leader of the council. The people who cut the teaching numbers were in the Labour council.
Chris Williamson
As Corporal Jones used to say, “They don’t like it up ’em,” do they? The sad fact is that the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government knows from his period as council leader that his cuts package will hit the poorest areas the hardest and he knows that some of our most vulnerable citizens throughout the country rely on the very council services that he wants to destroy. He knows, but he just does not care. He also knows that despite the local government aberration that was Bradford city council under his leadership, it was local government that helped to lead the resistance to the malevolent policies of Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s Administrations. It was local authorities—
Chris Williamson
No, I will not give way. It was local authorities such as Derby county council that resisted the Tories’ wicked attempts to starve the miners back to work during their year-long strike. What Derbyshire county council did was to ensure that the miners’ families had enough food to eat. It was councils—
Chris Williamson
No, I will not give way. It was councils such as Derby and Nottingham city councils that resisted the Tories’ absurd bus deregulation policy by establishing arm’s length public transport companies. The Secretary of State knows that by emasculating local government, he will make it much harder for councils to stand up to this Con-Dem coalition, yet in true Orwellian double-speak he recently told the ConservativeHome blog site that he was
“completely committed to localism and handing power back to people”—
that is, handing power back to people to make cuts.
Sajid Javid (Bromsgrove) (Con)
I think I have three minutes to make my speech, and I thank the hon. Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson) for sitting down.
We have heard so much hot air from the Opposition, it is unbelievable. I am glad to be able to speak at the last minute, so that we can have some common sense. I do not think that the Opposition realise that they lost the general election. They lost the general election because they have no idea of the economic damage that they have done to our country. They have done that damage throughout our economy, including in local government finance. They have done that damage in local government finance because they have not understood that the allocation of local government funding should have been based on the needs of individuals in each constituency and not on petty party politics. When we look at the areas in which local government funding fell, we can see that wherever there were Labour voters, that was where the money went. It was not based at all on the needs of individuals.
As the Government make the reforms, we must ensure that the changes reflect the needs. Let us take one example from my constituency. Local school children got £900 less per head per year than those in neighbouring Birmingham. If anyone from the Opposition thinks that there are not vulnerable people in Bromsgrove, they are welcome to come and visit and I shall take them around myself and show them just how similar parts of my constituency are to urban Birmingham.
No matter what the constituency, none of them are uniformly affluent or poor. Areas of wealth and deprivation exist in them all and the needs of the vulnerable in my constituency are no less valid than those of the vulnerable in the constituencies of Opposition Members. As we are forced to make Labour’s cuts to local government spending, it is essential that we also devolve local decision making and cut bureaucracy. Let me end by saying that we must make sure that never again is local government funding allocated according to petty party politics. It should be allocated according to local need. I support the amendment.
Mr Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)
We have had the benefit of a full day’s debate and, by goodness, we needed it to draw out from Members on the Government Benches the full colour of their rhetoric.
Let me pay tribute to the two maiden speeches made today by the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal), who, with great elegance and lightness of touch, paid tribute to both his Sikh heritage and his predecessor, and by the hon. Member for Dudley South (Chris Kelly), who also praised his predecessor.
May I thank all Labour Members, who have contributed so strongly? My hon. Friends the Members for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) and for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) spoke about the shambolic way in which the Government have dealt with the programme of cuts, and my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish also talked about the holistic nature of agencies in local government. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), who chairs the Communities and Local Government Committee, gave a forensic dissection of the drift and incoherence of Government policy on social housing, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) rightly picked up on the human aspects of all this.
Other good speeches came from my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), who talked about how unfair the cuts are, from my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern), who talked about the impact on the future jobs fund in her constituency, and from my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett), who reminded us in his powerful speech that it is the people who sweep our streets, who teach and who look after our elderly who are most affected. My right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) made the point, which Members on the Government Benches would do well to listen to, that we did fix the roof while the sun was shining.
My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) talked about the Conservative party as modern-day Leninists. I wonder whether the Secretary of State, as a modern-day Stalinist, would agree with that. My hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) talked about the impact on the voluntary sector and the big society, and, finally, we had a bravura performance involving Daleks and, again, the Secretary of State, from my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson).
Those speeches, and the examples that hon. Members have given, have shown that the impact of the cuts is being felt already. As the Financial Times survey of 22 June showed, Connexions Positive Activities for Young People and free school meals are highly visible services that will be cut the most. The Chairman of the Select Committee also pointed that out. Just as there was nothing in the Government’s Budget for younger people, so there is nothing for younger people in these cuts. The Government are removing subsidies from the six-month offer and they are ending the second tranche of the future jobs fund. All that means 40,000 to 80,000 youth jobs going.
Those decisions are not based on evidence. The editor of the Local Government Chronicle has said that in this short-term world—the short-term world that Members on the Government Benches inhabit—it is judgment and ideology that are key to decision making. As I used to be told at school, it is like the old speaker’s notes, “Argument weak here, shout like mad,” for those on the Government side.
Analysis of the future jobs fund shows that there was significant improvement in relation to the 12% figure up to the end of January 2010. As the leader of Barnsley council said, the Government have scrapped the scheme when it was just getting going. The future jobs fund worked towards success and breaking a vicious cycle.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham), in his excellent speech, talked about the way in which the Government have ignored Total Place and the way in which free schools, elected police officers and NHS commissioning are all part of pushing towards silo government. The Government are taking up positions based on departmental silos to avoid taking collective action across departments. What about their new policy proposals? Where will the equity be in schemes that will cream off significant amounts of money? What will the position be for students with special educational needs, for example, in the new free schools? Total Place shows what can be done, but, unfortunately, the Government parties seem to have a completely confused approach to it. The danger is that their shambolic representation of this issue will entrench inefficiencies as those silos and the salami-slicing of budgets set in.
What do the Government expect to fill the vacuum? The voluntary sector and the big society. Although the coalition expects third sector bodies to play a key role, the cuts that have been announced will be a triple whammy for them. As was pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Richard Burden), councils will cut the sums that third sector bodies currently receive. The resulting financial pressure will restrict the capacity of those organisations at the very time when they are expected to take on a greater role—another point made by many Opposition Members.
In what environment will those third sector organisations that are expected to fill the void be expected to operate? Will they be able to secure proper service level agreements and guarantees, given that councils will be under significant funding pressures throughout the current Parliament? What will be in it for them, and will they even be able to perform that rescue job when their capacity has been hit in the ways that I have described? No wonder so many of those bodies and their representatives—the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, the chairman of the Charity Commission and the chief executive of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations—are criticising what the Government are doing. As Stephen Bubb has said, “If politicians in government would only recognise that there is a cost to volunteering, and that charities and other third sector organisations can’t simply expand their volunteering to fill the gaps.”
Many charities rely on public money to function, and funding from central and local government now accounts for 36% of charities’ incomes. Apparently, the Secretary of State warned Tory councillors last Friday that they might experience cuts of between 30% and 40% during the current Parliament. No wonder—again—that third sector bodies such as Age UK, and outside experts such as the King’s Fund, say that the Government’s actions will leave councils with almost no money with which to support people in their own homes.
What about George Osborne’s other great white hope—[Interruption.] What about the Chancellor—for now—and his great white hope, the private sector? As Opposition Members have pointed out quite straightforwardly, no account has been taken of the existing dependence on public contracts. No attempt has been made to squeeze out or drop out. Many refuse contracts are already outsourced; how will those contractors cope with Comrade Pickles’s latest diktat about weekly refuse collections? [Interruption.] I refer to the right hon. Gentleman the Secretary of State.
The cuts faced by local government are part of a continuum: savage public sector cuts that will have a devastating effect on local economies. They should not be viewed merely within the framework of job losses in town halls or recruitment freezes. The ability of councils to boost economic development in deprived areas has been taken away, and those in the poorest communities will suffer most. Reports from the Greater Manchester business leadership council have already shown that public sector job cuts can push retailers into relocating from towns and cities with high public sector employment.
These Budget measures will lead to 725,000 job losses up to 2015. What structural abilities will be available to sort this out, given that the Government are leaving the regional development agencies in limbo and there are no successors around? The Government need to be wary of the dangers of a squeeze on public pay. With a work force demonised and demoralised by them, where will it lead us?
Given the way in which these cuts have been made, I want to make a final point about the financial structure. [Interruption.] If the Secretary of State had been here for most of the debate, we might have taken a little more notice of what he has had to say. What I want to say is that this huge leap in the dark—[Interruption.]
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Order. Will Members contain themselves just a bit as we approach the end of the debate so that we can hear all the contributions, as opposed to all the private conversations that are taking place?
Mr Marsden
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.
This huge leap in the dark is based on the market fetishism and sado-monetarism that are practised by so many Members on the Government Benches. The Office for Budget Responsibility has shown that the Budget of my right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling) was prudent in its estimate of the budgetary outlook.
Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr Marsden
No, I will not give way.
Government budgets are not like those of individual businesses or households. Cutting Government expenditure automatically reduces the income of private businesses and households. As the well-known economic expert on local government Tony Travers has said, Britain is about to submit itself to an enormous economic experiment. But it is Government Members who are submitting people to it and it is the people we care about who are going to suffer as a result of it. It is good that so many Labour Members have talked about the human impact on individuals of cutting programmes such as connecting communities, Connexions and Positive Activities for Young People.
Local Government, as my protesting workers in Blackpool said to the council yesterday, is about connection and so-called social cohesion. Ultimately, it is about human respect and impact on individuals. While we have hollowed-out policies being put over by hollowed-out people opposite, we will not flourish. That is why we have moved this motion tonight.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Andrew Stunell)
It has been a lively debate with plenty of passionate opinions and not too many facts from those on the Opposition Benches. Thirty three hon. Members have contributed to the debate, and before I deal with as many of their points as I can, I pay tribute to the hon. Members who made maiden speeches today— the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal), who demonstrated a light touch but also a determination to stick up for his constituents, and the hon. Member for Dudley South (Chris Kelly), who is local and proud of it; his sense of fairness, he thinks, is embedded in his constituency.
We in the Government are under no illusion that local authorities face significant challenges, but deficit reduction and continuing to ensure economic recovery is the most pressing issue facing Britain today. Given that fact, it is fair that local authorities make a contribution to that reduction in Government spending—a proportionate reduction. It will enable the Government to take immediate action to tackle the UK’s unprecedented £156 billion deficit inherited from the previous Government.
Andrew Stunell
I will give way in a moment, but let us be clear that for every £300 of income we are getting, we are spending £400 and putting the extra £100 on the credit card; £156 billion is going on the card this year, adding to £1,400,000 billion of debt. Putting that right does not guarantee recovery, but failing to put it right guarantees failure of the British economy.
No local authority will face a reduction in its revenue grant of more than 2%, where councils have received final allocations. I want to nail one of the myths that came up in the debate—the idea that the other grants somehow are tilted against the north, or the inner urban areas. The housing and planning delivery grant reduction has an impact of £1.45 per head in the metropolitan boroughs. In the shire districts, which Opposition Members thought were getting a free ride, the cost is £3.10 per head. The south-east is paying 90p a head, the north-east is paying 70p a head. Opposition Members’ charge is completely misplaced.
The £29 billion of formula grant—the main source of funding for local government—will be protected. There are no controls on how that money is spent in these reductions. The ring-fencing of non-schools revenue and capital funding is reduced from 10.6% to 7.7%.
Andrew Stunell
I will give way in a moment, but I want to tell the right hon. Gentleman one or two facts that he has failed—
Madam Deputy Speaker
Order. Mr Blunkett, the Minister is declining to give way at this point, and he says that he will give way later on.
Andrew Stunell
I shall give way in a moment, when the right hon. Gentleman has listened to this statistic. [Hon. Members: “Oh!”] Well, a few facts would not go amiss in this debate. In 1998, 4.6% of local government expenditure was ring-fenced. The previous Government put it up to 14%, and we are getting it down to 7.7%. That will give councils the freedom and flexibility that they need to concentrate on local priorities and to protect the front line.
Mr Blunkett
Will the Minister repeat the statistic that he gave on the £29 billion revenue support grant and explain how it will be protected? What will a 30% cut in that grant mean in real terms to local government over the next four years?
Andrew Stunell
My point was about the £6.2 billion of cuts that have been referred to throughout the debate. The decisions on the comprehensive spending review are not mine to reveal.
Andrew Stunell
About the time that, instead of simply banks failing throughout the world, countries were failing throughout the world.
We expect councils to continue to protect essential, front-line services this year. The decision on where to make the changes to their budgets is one for them to take. We have given them the flexibility that they need to deliver that, and, with local government accounting for about one quarter of United Kingdom public sector spending, the level of cuts that they are taking is proportionate. In the context of greatly reduced public finance, it is right that all parts of the public sector bear some part of that.
Like Opposition Members, I wish that this programme were unnecessary or avoidable, but unlike them I remember my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, when he was the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, warning them time and again, year after year, Budget after Budget, that they were following a path to fiscal destruction. On uncontrolled debt, unregulated banks and unfounded public spending, they would not listen then and do not want to listen now. They hollowed out Britain’s economic base, mortgaged Britain’s financial future, gambled on the banks and blew away our manufacturing industry, and now when the bailiffs are at the end of the street, they still want to spend, spend, spend.
It is time that the Opposition got real, faced up to their catastrophic destruction of this country’s public finances, hung their heads in shame and confessed that their misplaced love affair with the casino bankers leaves this House, this Government and the British people with no choice but to tighten our belts, pick up Britain’s economy and get it going again. I urge the House to support the Government’s amendment.
Question put (Standing Order No. 31(2)), That the original words stand part of the Question.
Bus Services (Milton Keynes)
(14 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)
I am grateful to have secured this debate. I requested it because of the significant level of disquiet in my constituency and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Mark Lancaster) over the new network and timetable introduced by Arriva buses throughout Milton Keynes on 25 April. The new network and timetable were introduced with hardly any proper consultation, and there have been significant complaints about the punctuality and reliability of the new services.
It is fair to say that, in the seven or eight weeks for which have been a Member of the House, I have had more letters and e-mails on this subject than on any other. On 11 June, my hon. Friend and I attended a forum organised in Milton Keynes. It was a protest meeting organised by the Milton Keynes older persons forum, and I congratulate Peter Ballantyne and his colleagues on organising it. I have never been to such a packed public protest meeting—it was literally standing room only. That gives an indication of the level of disquiet in Milton Keynes over the new bus system.
Before detailing the concerns expressed and outlining what I hope are some of the possible solutions, I shall explain why the design and geography of Milton Keynes makes the provision of good bus services more complex than in many other cities and towns. Unlike most towns and cities, the normal pattern of travel is not just in what one might term a hub-and-spoke arrangement, under which the broad direction of travel is from outlying residential areas into the urban centre, where most businesses, shops and leisure activities are. There is that travel in Milton Keynes, but our grid system disperses places of employment, leisure and retail throughout the city. So the patterns of travel are not just from the outskirts into the middle, but multi-directional at any given point in the day. That presents a challenge to bus operators to put in place an effective system.
Mark Lancaster (Milton Keynes North) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful case on behalf of his constituents and is to be congratulated on securing this important debate. Of course, the added complication in Milton Keynes is that about 80% of the unitary authority is rural, so as well as a rather complicated grid-row system we have the rural bus network that makes it even worse.
Iain Stewart
My hon. Friend makes an important point. Some of the villages in his constituency, as in mine, either do not have a bus service at all or have such a limited one that it is not reliable for people without cars. Little Brickhill, in my constituency, is one of the villages that lost its post office jut over a year ago. Now the residents there do not have a bus service to get to the nearest post office in the town, so they have had a double whammy in the loss of services. That is an important additional aspect to devising a good bus network.
The other curious and unique feature of Milton Keynes is that the grid road system has fast roads skirting around each of the residential areas, so that cars and buses can travel at high speed. It presents a trade-off between the speed of services and accessibility. There is a choice of either driving buses down the grid roads, which are far away from most people’s homes, or going into the estates, which inevitably lengthens the journey. I appreciate that the bus operators have a difficult task in marrying up those two objectives.
Arriva stated when it introduced the new system that it wanted a faster network. That is what it has achieved, but it has done so at too great a cost to many of the services people rely on. There has been significant opposition to the changes, as I detailed earlier.
I will spare the House a detailed analysis of the individual routes that have changed, but I hope the following gives a little flavour of some of the problems that have arisen since the changes at the end of April. I have had letters from students who have either been late for their exams or missed them altogether; they could not rely on a bus service to get them there in time. Similarly, patients have either missed their hospital or doctor appointments, or been unable to attend them without an inordinately long journey, which they are sometimes not physically capable of making. They are therefore forced to rely on the charity of neighbours or families to transport them, or to face the expense of a taxi.
The Stony Stratford business association wrote to me about its considerable concerns about a downturn in trading following the changes. That is because a direct service into Stony Stratford, which many pensioners used, was lost. I have had reports from volunteers and carers, saying that they are now finding it so difficult to get to the homes of the people they are looking after that they have had to reassess their commitments. Finally, I have had reports from employees, who used to enjoy fast and frequent service to their places of work, but now have to endure such a long and convoluted journey that they are often late into work and have to use up their lunch hour to make up time. These are serious disadvantages, and I believe that many of them are a product of insufficient consultation among Arriva buses, the parish and town councils and different organisations in Milton Keynes.
I have also received complaints that Milton Keynes council itself has not been attentive to the implications of the changes and that there has been a lack of co-ordination. It spent a considerable amount of money putting up fancy new signs saying “this is where the buses come”, and it has put up fancy new bus stops at great expense, which are now not used. There has been a considerable waste of money, which I do not think should have happened. Advertising and notifying passengers of the changes have also been a problem. When I raised that subject briefly in Transport questions a couple of weeks ago, the Minister kindly indicated that he might look at changing the regulations that govern this matter.
The situation is getting so bad that I understand that the traffic commissioner is now aware of the problem and is actively considering whether to intervene if the proper notification from different organisations in Milton Keynes is forthcoming. I do not want to spend this evening looking for scapegoats, going into who caused the problem and who did not do what. I am more interested in solutions and learning any lessons that might be applicable elsewhere.
There have been some positive developments. A new bus users group has been set up by the council, which is starting to act as a good conduit for complaints. Arriva is now looking at adjusting some of the routes to ameliorate some of the major problems that have arisen. It is a helpful development that the remit of Passenger Focus has been broadened to include bus services, which have always been the Cinderella service compared with train services.
I appreciate that it is right for much of the detail to be resolved at the local level rather than coming before Parliament, but I have sought to raise this subject in the House because I think we can learn some lessons from this unhappy state of affairs that may be helpful across other areas of the country. The Minister has kindly indicated that he will look at the notification period and I hope that that might be extended to review the process of consultation, as different groups in the affected constituency must be involved if there is to be a major restructuring of the bus network. I suggest that that should include not just unitary authority councils, but parish and town councils, and I also suggest it should include the local hospital and GP practices, because if people are unable to get to their appointments in time, that is a serious public health issue. It is vital that schools are involved as well, because if pupils cannot get in to sit their exams on time, or simply cannot arrive on time for ordinary classes, that is an issue. Milton Keynes has such a low housing density that schools have large catchment areas, so pupils have to travel considerable distances.
Mark Lancaster
There might have been more than 450 people at the meeting that my hon. Friend and I attended. Does he agree that they expressed great anger that there was almost no consultation and that they did not have the opportunity to make their voice heard about the changes that were made?
Iain Stewart
My hon. Friend is exactly right. If people had been consulted at the outset, many of these problems could have been avoided.
There is a trade-off between having a fast route between any two points in a city and having the route go through the main residential areas, but it is surely not beyond wit and wisdom to have a two-tier service with, perhaps, one express bus that does not call everywhere and the next bus as a stopping service that goes to all the different residential areas. These details should be worked out between the operators, the council and the different groups that I have identified, and I would also include local employers in the consultation. I am pleased that the coalition Government agreement has a provision to encourage greater co-operation between councils and bus operators, and I am interested to hear what further comments on that the Minister might be able to make.
Finally, I ask the Minister to take account of the evidence from Milton Keynes and other areas where there are bus problems and to look again at the effectiveness of the provisions of the Local Transport Act 2008, particularly in relation to quality partnerships and contracts. I know they were introduced fairly recently, but I think it is appropriate now to review their effectiveness and consider what further changes might be made.
The decentralisation Bill is due later this year. We want to encourage greater devolution and decentralisation, and also open-source planning that leads to properly sustainable communities. I hope that that Bill might be an appropriate vehicle through which to address the changes I have discussed in this debate.
I do not believe it is right for central Government to be overly prescriptive in determining what bus system operates in what area. What works in one area might not be applicable elsewhere, and, as I have said, Milton Keynes is unique in its design. However, I hope that by raising this subject I have brought to the Minister’s attention the fact that there is serious disquiet in Milton Keynes, and I would be grateful to learn of any steps he might take to encourage greater co-operation and consultation. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to raise this issue, and I hope my postbag on it will start to decline after this debate.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Norman Baker)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart) on securing this Adjournment debate and on the effective way in which he presented his case. I understand that he is a keen marathon runner, so he will be quite used to making his journeys through urban areas at high speed on foot. However, for the rest of us who only run for office, public transport is often required for such journeys, so I am pleased to have the opportunity to discuss the subjects he has raised tonight.
Buses play a hugely important role in our transport system. More journeys are made each year on buses than on all other public transport modes put together. Where a bus network works well, the bus can provide more than mere convenience. It is no exaggeration to say that a good-quality bus service can be a lifeline, particularly for those who do not have access to a car.
The best bus networks exist where local government and operators work productively together. However, for this to happen, central Government need to provide an appropriate legislative framework that enables innovation and creativity from bus companies, and provides local authorities with the flexibility to use their local knowledge to manage their bus networks in a fair and logical way. Local government needs to work closely with operators and the travelling public to ensure that we have a local transport network that works for everyone, and transport operators need to listen to the views of their passengers to ensure that their decisions reflect those views and the views of locally elected representatives.
Cities and large towns evolve and grow, and it is inevitable that local transport provision changes to reflect this. This is especially true for ambitious cities such as Milton Keynes, as evidenced by the extensive redevelopment of the Milton Keynes Coachway station, to be completed later this year. I suspect that that project will bring huge benefits to the city, and I very much hope it will inspire other cities to consider similar projects.
However, in respect of the specific issues my hon. Friend raised, I acknowledge that when changes are made to timetables, they should be implemented in a way that minimises disruption for passengers. While there is currently no requirement for bus operators formally to consult local residents, we know that the best operators work closely with passenger groups and local authorities to ensure that they are listening to the voice of the passenger when these decisions are made.
I am aware of the particular public meeting to which my hon. Friend referred. I have in front of me an extract from his local paper, which points out that hundreds of people vented their anger at that meeting, which was held at Christ the Cornerstone church on the Friday in question. I note the concern expressed there, as reported in the press: that there was no public consultation before the changes were imposed, that several services were axed, and that route changes left some estates bypassed altogether. The fact that hundreds turned up to that meeting demonstrates the importance of the bus network to Milton Keynes, and the wish for people to be properly consulted about bus changes in their areas.
Of course, there are times when decisions are made that inconvenience local residents. Even when a rerouted bus service results in more people having access to local transport, that is of cold comfort to those who find that the bus that used to stop outside their front door now does not pass through their neighbourhood. I certainly agree that if we end up with expensive signs and new bus stops that become redundant, that is not a good use of public or private money. However, I am keenly aware of the importance of stability for passengers. A passenger who catches a bus today wants to know that the route will still be running next week. With stability in the network, passengers are able to build up a habit of using the bus, and are even able to look further afield for employment opportunities, confident that the bus they rely on to commute will not vanish overnight. This predictability is of course in the interests of the bus companies themselves as they seek to grow their business.
The Competition Commission is undertaking a large-scale inquiry into the bus industry. Competition is, I know, a concern of some residents in areas such as Milton Keynes, where bus services are largely provided by a single bus operator. I do not believe that it would be right or sensible tonight to pre-empt the commission’s report by introducing wholesale regulatory changes before it has published its findings. My hon. Friend referred to the Local Transport Act 2008 and mentioned the possibility of a review. In a sense, a review is taking place through the commission’s inquiry, which is looking at the regulation of the bus industry. That, in turn, will advise Government on whether further changes are necessary or not. We await the results of that with interest.
However, clearly some areas can be considered while the inquiry is ongoing, and my hon. Friend has raised some of them today. The Department for Transport has just completed its own consultation to explore some ways in which changes to the regulatory framework may help. For example, we sought views on whether it would be appropriate to extend the notice that an operator is required to provide before altering an existing service—my hon. Friend covered that point in his contribution. Currently, a bus company in England is required to notify the traffic commissioner 56 days in advance of any change. That is not the case in Scotland, where a bus company is required to have provided an additional 14 days’ notice to the local authority before submitting such an application to the traffic commissioner. I can assure my hon. Friend that I am actively considering whether it would be appropriate to adopt a similar arrangement across England as well, and I hope to make an announcement shortly.
As my hon. Friend will be aware, local authorities already have a wide range of powers at their disposal, including the power to tender additional bus routes where they deem them to be necessary. That already happens in Milton Keynes, as it does right across the country, and I am sure that Milton Keynes council is examining the situation closely. I am informed that 17% of the bus mileage in his area is subsidised in this way; that figure is broadly in line with the national average outside London.
All local authorities in England have the powers to introduce different degrees of local regulation, through the use of a voluntary partnership agreement, the introduction of a quality partnership scheme or London-style franchising through the use of a quality contracts scheme. There is no reason why partnership agreements cannot include requirements for the operator to notify passengers before making changes to services or fares. So, in a sense, the tools to achieve what my hon. Friend wants are available if Milton Keynes council and others want to use them. In my view, local transport should, in the main, be managed at the local level, where local knowledge can be used to greatest effect. I can give him my assurance that the coalition Government are committed to this decentralisation.
I am aware that earlier this year the south-east regional transport board recommended the withdrawal of funding for the central Milton Keynes public transport improvement scheme, and that that came as a blow for Milton Keynes council, which had set a stretching target to increase bus patronage from 9.3 million in 2007-08 to 11 million in 2010-11. I am sure that the local authority is investigating whether it is possible to seek other routes for funding this proposal, either in its original form or some variant thereof. I understand that the council is looking at directing some of the revenue it receives from parking towards improvements in bus services, as well as seeking improvements in punctuality through its new punctuality improvement partnership, and I welcome that initiative.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Budget statement confirmed the coalition Government’s commitment to a number of major transport schemes, and I will take the opportunity to repeat that commitment today. It is not, however, only major urban transport investment that yields big results. In comparison with major projects such as the upgrade to Birmingham New Street station or the extension to the Manchester Metrolink, proposals to improve local bus services may seem, and indeed are, very small. But it is important that we do not lose sight of the significant impact, both positive and negative, that small changes can have.
Although every area of government is going to have to work in a more efficient way, a local bus network is vital to a local economy, as it provides access to employment, goods and services for a huge number of people and more than 5 billion passenger journeys a day are made on local buses alone, so we need to ensure that the investment in services continues. Altogether, local and central Government provide about £2.5 billion in support to the bus industry, and it is important that we not only continue to provide financial support for services, but ensure that this money is allocated in a way that provides the maximum benefit across the board. Bus service operators grant, for example, directly provides operators with more than £400 million in support for bus services. The benefits of that grant are clear: it ensures that the bus network remains as broad as possible, while keeping fares lower and bringing more people on to public transport, with the obvious benefits of reducing congestion, lowering carbon emissions and improving air quality in our towns and cities. However, no matter how clear the benefits of such investment are, it is important that the Government get as much value as possible from every pound invested in services and it may be that we can increase the benefits of this grant even further. My hon. Friend may be interested to learn that I am considering whether it would be sensible to reform the way this grant is allocated, to ensure that it provides the maximum possible benefit for passengers. In general, I am determined that we should have a bus system that delivers good value for the taxpayer and good value for the fare payer.
Let me pick up on one or two points that my hon. Friend raised. First, I am pleased that the Milton Keynes older persons forum has been so active in this matter and I want to pass on my thanks to its members for their efforts in this regard. I am pleased that the new bus users group has been established and I hope that what I have said tonight, coupled with the steps being taken locally in Milton Keynes, will mean that we end up with an improved bus service and more satisfaction than was clearly shown at the public meeting attended by my hon. Friend and others. I know that my hon. Friend has been active in this case with Arriva and I hope that he will continue to be so in the interests of his constituents. I am sure that he will, and that my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Mark Lancaster) will do likewise.
In conclusion, I hope that this goes some way to assure my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South and his colleagues that I am considering a number of different options for improvements to the way central Government can assist local authorities in managing their bus networks. I intend to make further statements to the House once I have come to a conclusion on the best way to achieve our shared aims.
Question put and agreed to.
Ministerial Correction
(14 years, 5 months ago)
Ministerial CorrectionsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Advantage West Midlands
(14 years, 5 months ago)
Ministerial CorrectionsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Christopher Pincher
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills how many people are employed by Advantage West Midlands; how many people compose the non-executive Board of Advantage West Midlands; and what the total cost to the public purse of payments to (a) employees and (b) Board members is to date.
[Official Report, 17 June 2010, Vol. 511, c. 530W.]
Mr Prisk
The following tables show:
Number/£ | |
|---|---|
Number of employees headcount (full-time equivalent (322)) | 346 |
Cost (£) | 18,358,000 |
Staff numbers are as at the snapshot reference date 31 March 2010 and cost is for the financial year 2009-10. Costs for payroll employees are defined as pay bill i.e. salary, ERNICs and pension; and
Number/£ | |
|---|---|
Number of board members (including chair) | 15 |
Cost (£) | 231,412 |
Board member costs are from the 2008-09 financial year and include chair pension costs and board travel expenses. Board members now receive a remuneration of £8,666 per annum for minimum of two days per month with no pension entitlement.
The chair receives a remuneration of £81,718 per annum for three days a month and receives a pension.
Under the RDA Act 1998 an RDA board must have 15 members with the majority being business positions.
Letter of correction from Mr Mark Prisk:
In my reply of 17 June to the question from the hon. Member for Tamworth (Christopher Pincher) I said “The Chair receives a remuneration of £81,718 Per annum for three days a month and receives a pension.” I regret that due to an administrative error this is incorrect and the answer should have indicated that the Chair receives the same remuneration for three days a week.
The correct answer should have been:
Mr Prisk
The following tables show:
Number/£ | |
|---|---|
Number of employees headcount (full-time equivalent (322)) | 346 |
Cost (£) | 18,358,000 |
Staff numbers are as at the snapshot reference date 31 March 2010 and cost is for the financial year 2009-10. Costs for payroll employees are defined as pay bill i.e. salary, ERNICs and pension; and
Number/£ | |
|---|---|
Number of board members (including chair) | 15 |
Cost (£) | 231,412 |
Board member costs are from the 2008-09 financial year and include chair pension costs and board travel expenses. Board members now receive a remuneration of £8,666 per annum for minimum of two days per month with no pension entitlement.
The chair receives a remuneration of £81,718 per annum for three days a week and receives a pension.
Under the RDA Act 1998 an RDA board must have 15 members with the majority being business positions.
Westminster Hall
Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Mr George Howarth (in the Chair)
We are in some difficulty because the Member who has secured the debate is not in the Chamber. We cannot commence without him, so the sitting will be suspended until 11 am.
Housing Need (London)
Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Howarth. You will be aware that we have just lost an hour and a half of precious parliamentary debating time because of the failure of the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) to turn up on time. The situation was compounded by the failure of the Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes), to turn up in time for our 9.30 am debate. That debate was on the very important subject of apprenticeships. Is there any way in which we can reinstate that hour and a half of parliamentary time, which was lost because of tardiness that would not be tolerated of any apprentice throughout the country? Is not such a situation a contempt of the House, particularly given the number of hon. Members who would like to speak in this housing debate? Given that the hon. Member for Gloucester did not see fit to turn up on time for his debate, the hour and a half that was lost could have been used for the housing debate.
Mr George Howarth (in the Chair)
There is, unusually, a point of order in the hon. Gentleman’s comments, but I think he was straying towards making a political point at the end of his contribution. The reality of the situation is that it is open to the hon. Gentleman whose debate was lost earlier or any other Member to apply to the Speaker for a further debate through the normal procedures. If any Member considers that the subject of the debate that was lost is important enough, that debate can be held, but it will have to be the subject of a separate application. I do not think that what happened was a contempt of the House, although it might be seen as discourteous.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
I am very pleased that we are having this debate, although I am sorry that it will last only an hour and a half. I am sorry that the previous debate collapsed, but we could well have used three hours to discuss housing in London, so it seems that a monumental parliamentary opportunity has been lost. I hope that the hon. Members concerned will reflect on the situation because we are sent here to represent the people and to try to deal with their problems.
I am resuming the debate on housing in London. There is a slight feeling of déjà vu—the actors in the theatre have changed only slightly—because we have discussed housing needs in London many, many times before, and I suspect there will be many more debates on the subject. London Members know that there is no bigger issue, no greater stress and no greater problem that faces all our constituents than housing, whether that relates to people who are trying to buy, people who are trying to get social housing, people who are going through the problems of being a leaseholder or people who are living in private rented accommodation.
The levels of housing stress with which MPs deal are absolutely enormous, but I need not go over that in too much detail because hon. Members in the Chamber will be well aware of it. The levels of stress associated with problems of overcrowding, and of uncertainty and insecurity of tenure, lead to ill health, underachievement in school, family break-up and unemployment, and they have a wholly corrosive effect on our society. I am not asking for something special because we are talking about London. I am asking for recognition that the whole country faces serious housing problems and that they are even worse in London than throughout the rest of the country.
One could quote many relevant statistics at great length. I shall not cite a vast number of figures, but I would like to run through some information that was helpfully provided to me by Crisis. Reading across the piece, the average house price in London is £362,000, which is £140,000 higher than that in the rest of the country, and the average income is £26,000 a year, which is £6,000 more than in the rest of the country. The gross annual income needed for a mortgage in London is £93,000—it is £109,000 in my borough—so we can easily see the disconnect that exists.
Total local authority stock in London is 432,000 and housing association stock is 350,000. The number of new lettings by local authorities was around 23,000 last year, with 22,000 lettings by housing associations. Some 353,000 families are on the waiting list for social housing in London, of whom 52,000 are in temporary accommodation, while the number of households accepted as homeless is 12,000, although that relates to the last year for which figures are available. All that information shows that buying anywhere is unaffordable, that there are huge waiting lists for social housing and that the number of homeless people is rapidly increasing. The 12,000 London households accepted as homeless represent about a fifth of the total for the whole United Kingdom.
Mr Andrew Love (Edmonton) (Lab/Co-op)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. I apologise that I will need to slip out of the Chamber part of the way through it, but I hope to be back at the end.
I want to raise with my hon. Friend—and indeed all hon. Members present—the human tragedy behind those figures. People are living in temporary accommodation for four, five or six years. They move constantly and are unable to settle anywhere. The children of such people are really badly affected by continually having to up sticks to move to other accommodation. Should we not be most concerned about that situation?
Jeremy Corbyn
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I recall that in the halcyon days when I was chair of housing for Haringey council, we were able to build a large number of council houses, some of which were very good properties. We were determined to build good-quality properties not because we had a desire to spend vast sums of public money, but because we had a desire to conquer the problems of housing shortage and the stress that goes with it. Three quarters of the people in this country who are in temporary accommodation are in London, and my hon. Friend is right to point out the effects that that has.
All hon. Members have seen people in our advice bureaux who are living in their third or fourth piece of temporary accommodation and whose children have had to move schools or make very long journeys to stay in the same school. Those people are unaware of what will happen to them because of the lack of security that surrounds such a situation. We have a very serious problem indeed. I mentioned the corrosive effects of housing stress in London. One such effect is overcrowding, a second is uncertainty, a third is the problems of private rented accommodation, and a fourth is very high cost, which is the matter that I want to move on to.
If someone secures a council or housing association tenancy in London, the rent for a two-bedroom flat will be, broadly speaking, £100 to £120 a week. That is a reasonable rent—it is an economic rent, not a subsidised rent—that allows people to live somewhere reasonable, secure and safe. However, this country’s very bad record on building social housing over the past 20 years or so means that the number of people re-housed by local authorities or housing associations is low. Most local authorities say, “We cannot possibly house you; you’ll have to go into private rented accommodation.”
Councils therefore assist people to get private rented accommodation and have, in some cases, an over-close relationship with various letting agencies. The rents in such accommodation are often very high. They can be £250 or £300 a week, but I have even come across rents of £400 a week or more. If the people concerned are unemployed or on benefits, those rents are largely paid through housing benefit. For them, having a private rented place with the rent paid initially sounds like a reasonable option, but two problems can emerge. One is that such people are left in an enormous benefit trap, because if they succeed in finding a job, they will lose all or most of their housing benefit, and they therefore cannot possibly take a job unless it is incredibly well paid. One needs an awfully large salary to be able to pay £400 a week in rent. I suspect that that figure is far more than hon. Members in the Chamber pay for their mortgage monthly.
As a country, we are therefore pouring billions of pounds in housing benefit every year into the pockets of private landlords who do not give security and often provide inadequate accommodation. It is often very difficult to get them to carry out repairs, as I am sure that all Members in the Chamber who have corresponded with private landlords to try to make them carry out repairs have found. We must bear in mind the benefit trap and the huge cost to the whole country. It is fairly obvious, as a point of principle, that it would be far better to invest our precious national resources in building homes for affordable rent through councils and housing associations, rather than pouring the money down the drain by putting it in the pockets of private landlords through the housing benefit system. None of that is particularly new.
Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)
The hon. Gentleman and I have held similar views on those matters for many years, and I have not changed mine. Does he agree that we ought to encourage local authorities to use their powers to acquire all the residential properties in their boroughs that are sitting empty? There are now powers for local authorities to take over the management of such properties, albeit not their ownership, so that they can let them at affordable rents, rather than pushing people into the private sector which, as he rightly said, makes things impossible for those who want to get back to work because of the benefit trap.
Mr George Howarth (in the Chair)
Order. Seven Members have indicated that they wish to speak in the debate, so lengthy interventions are not fair to them.
Jeremy Corbyn
I take your point and I will be brief, Mr Howarth, because I want all Members who wish to speak to have an opportunity to do so.
I largely agree with the points made by the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes). Local authorities do have the power to buy on the open market and to take over empty properties, and they should use that power. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge) was chair of the housing committee in my borough in the 1970s and undertook an enormous purchase of street properties throughout the borough, which did a great deal to preserve its street character and to house many people who would not otherwise have been housed. Clearly, there will never be enough land for new build in central London, so that is one way of dealing with the problem.
I want the Minister to answer four simple questions. I am sure that he will give me positive answers to them all because I know him to be a decent, reasonable and helpful chap who wants to deal with the housing problems in London, even though he does not represent a London constituency—there is no crime in not representing a London constituency. [Interruption.] I do not wish to be controversial, because that is not in my nature. The statements that the coalition Government have made over the past few weeks are disturbing, to say the least. They initially said that they would continue investment in infrastructure in our society, which I took to include the current building programme and the enhanced building programme for council houses—the Minister can confirm whether I am right or wrong. However, last week’s Budget included a statement on housing benefit that is absolutely devastating for those of us who represent London constituencies. It is devastating for the whole country, but its effect will be particularly acute in London.
I should tell the Minister that 30% of my constituents live in private rented accommodation, that about 40% live in local authority or housing association properties, and that the remaining 30% are owner-occupiers. Many of those in private rented accommodation are in receipt of housing benefit. I will quote again from the information helpfully provided by Crisis:
“From Oct 2011, Local Housing Allowance (the new form of HB…) will be set at the 30th percentile (rather than the 50th as now). This is probably the most serious of the cuts and will mean many more people will face shortfalls and/or find it very difficult to find and sustain a tenancy. It will be particularly difficult in areas where more than 30% of the private tenants are benefit claimants. This may well lead to an increase in homelessness.
From April 2011, rates will be capped (from £250/week for a 1-bed to £400/week for a 4 bed). This will mean certain areas are likely to become no go areas for claimants, particularly larger families, with significant implications for mixed communities and community cohesion, through changes to the 30th percentile will affect more people…Alongside this, working age people in social housing will no longer be able to claim HB on a property deemed bigger than their needs. This is designed”,
apparently,
“to tackle under occupancy. From 2013/14 onwards, Local Housing Allowance will be uprated on the basis of the Consumer Prices Index, rather than on the basis of local rents.”
Non-dependent deductions are another issue. When taken together, those proposals will be absolutely devastating for those of us who represent high-cost, inner-urban areas. They will, in effect, start a process of the social cleansing of claimants across London.
Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)
Bearing in mind your earlier strictures, Mr Howarth, I will be brief, and I am sure that all Members wish you a happy birthday.
With regard to the figures that my hon. Friend quoted in relation to private sector leasing, is the situation in his borough the same as in mine, where the majority of those PSL properties are former local authority properties that have been bought from the council and are now being leased back to it? Does he agree that one needs a strong stomach and a sense of irony to look at housing in London today?
Jeremy Corbyn
Many of them are ex-local authority, although not all. I am constantly astonished when I speak to people in my constituency who are living in ex-council flats that are privately rented and are paying twice, or three or four times, the rent of their next-door neighbours who are still council tenants. What is going on in London is absurd and obscene. I hope that the Minister will at least recognise that the housing benefit proposals are punishing the poor, tenants and those in housing need for a problem that they never created. I am not sure what the proposals will achieve. Unless they are linked to a huge building programme of places for affordable rent, all we will be doing is making a bad situation much worse and punishing a whole generation of young people and children across London. I want to hear about the building programme, so I hope that the Minster will be able to address that point.
I shall make my two further points quickly because many colleagues wish to speak. Has the Minister any plans to improve the situation of leaseholders who have bought places, usually under shared ownership schemes, from housing associations? There seem to be enormous problems about representation in housing associations, and many of them seem to have a generally unresponsive attitude to high leasehold and service charges.
My final point relates to planning issues. Most local authorities in London have now adopted a proposal that a proportion of all new build schemes should be for social housing. The former Mayor of London, Mayor Livingstone, wanted a proportion of 50% for those in housing need, although I would rather it was 50% for social housing. Is the Minister prepared to underline what the previous Government tried to do by providing sufficient resources so that new build can take place or providing borrowing allowances for local authorities?
My local authority has a new cabinet member for housing: James Murray, who is part of the new Labour team—not new Labour with a capital “N”; I do not ever want someone to misquote me on that. I shall end by quoting from his message to me:
“In Islington we have thousands of families on the waiting list for housing, many living in desperate overcrowding. It is not rare to see 7 or 8 people in a 2-bed flat—with the children often unable to do their homework, unable to have any privacy, and with the whole family suffering under the stress…The announcement last week of a cap on housing benefit could put a third of Islington’s private sector tenants who are on housing benefit at risk of eviction. This will only increase the pressure on social housing—and so more than ever we desperately need more investment in social rented homes. You will hear the same message from many Labour politicians in inner London—and that is because this investment is the only answer.”
Mr Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)
Many of us present are old hands at speaking in Westminster Hall on the continued complexities and persistent demands of providing affordable, decent and plentiful homes in the capital. I fear that I have joined the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) as one of the usual suspects in that regard, and perhaps in many other ways as well. The frequency of our presence in this Chamber testifies to the difficulty of striking the right balance when dealing with housing need in London.
As those who have heard me speak on this subject before will know, an ostensibly wealthy inner-city constituency such as mine is not in any way immune to these problems—quite the opposite. Housing has been, and continues to be, the single most important issue in my postbag, along with immigration. No doubt, the two things go hand in hand for Westminster, and for any of us with London seats, because this global capital city is a magnet for those seeking to make their fortunes—not only from across the world but from all corners of the British isles.
The pressure that the vast flow of people into and out of my constituency places on our housing stock is enormous. Rental values have shot up in recent years, and so too has the huge cost of providing for those in need, although the amount of money that landlords get from tenants on housing benefit has similarly driven up prices. It is, I fear, for that reason that some of the most shocking and high profile stories about housing benefit have come from my constituency; the £104,000 a year home was in Mayfair in the west end. There are individual families whose accommodation costs the taxpayer thousands of pounds each and every month.
I have a lot of sympathy with what the hon. Member for Islington North said on this subject. There is a risk that some of the proposed changes will drive some of the most vulnerable people out of London, and that will need to happen to a large extent.
Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)
I heard the hon. Gentleman say that some of the most vulnerable families will be driven out of central London, and I believe that he said that was necessarily so. Where does he think they should go?
Mr Field
I hope that the hon. Lady will allow me to continue with what I have to say; these issues affect all of us in the capital. In his Budget statement, the Chancellor said that we could no longer have a state of affairs where people who do not work are living in homes that ordinary working people simply could not afford for themselves. Putting aside that principle, housing benefit has also become an enormous trap, as the hon. Member for Islington North rightly said, for its recipients in London, and I agree. In the past few weeks, I have canvassed people in the Churchill Gardens estate, where the precise situation that the hon. Gentleman described is prevalent. In other words, people are living next door to one another, one in a council property paying rent that is very low by the standards of the vicinity, and another in a property that has been sold two or three times and is now in the hands of a housing association, effectively being passed on to nominations from the local authority at three or four times the rent of the property next door.
Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)
Has the hon. Gentleman spotted a potential inconsistency in the argument of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who says that the unemployed in the north of England, for example, should give up their homes and move to London, while those on benefits in London should give up their homes and move to the north of England?
Mr Field
I fear that there are many inconsistencies going back not only over the past six or seven weeks but, I suspect, over the past six or seven decades. One inconsistency is that we had a Labour Mayor of London for eight of the past 10 years, and housing development was almost at its lowest. In many ways, having overly stringent rules prevented many developers from deciding to develop; they sat on their hands and waited for property prices to increase. The situation has made unemployment a logical option for many people living in London, because it has been forced on them, due to the huge poverty trap. That has meant that unemployment in the capital, even in the boom years, was the highest of any region in the UK.
The announcement in the emergency Budget of a cap to limit the cost of a four-bedroom property to £400 per week has caused incredible concern among my constituents. I suspect much of that concern is caused by the uncertainty of how such a cap will be applied in individual cases, and I want to highlight a couple of typical cases that have come to light in the past week or so. Most of the concerns raised with me so far have come from elderly or disabled constituents, many of whom have been unable to get on to Westminster city council’s list for a council property, so instead they live in the private rented sector and have their rent paid by housing benefit. One such constituent is Mr Roger Aves, a disabled resident who requires a live-in carer. He wrote to me:
“You cannot get a broom cupboard in central London for the amount being proposed yet central London is my home and has been since 2001. My medical input is large and being close to my health providers and social care was paramount to my choice of living here.”
Another constituent, William Richards, is an 80-year-old pensioner from Pimlico. He said:
“'I agree with a cap on total amounts although it may well affect me in the future. What is a bit mystifying is reference to ‘percentile’—
referred to earlier—
“which appears to be another way of reducing the benefit but is not made clear at the moment. I have lived in the same private rented accommodation for 25 years. My rent is increased by 10% per annum. How will my flat be evaluated compared to the rent of a social housing flat? Will it be based on the market rent of a privately rented flat in Pimlico or on a council flat?”
As many of us know, some of the most illustrious and sought-after areas in central and outer London are often cheek by jowl with council estates. Mr Richards says:
“The two do not bear comparison. Even now my pension does not cover my rent and I have been living on my savings for many years now in order to pay for the basic necessities. I may well be forced to leave my home.”
It is vital that the likely impact of any changes is made clear to people such as Mr Aves and Mr Richards, and we need certainty at the earliest opportunity.
My local authority, Westminster city council, supports the cap and lobbied for some time on reform of housing benefit, as it is essential to reducing the welfare bill, particularly with rates of £2,000 per week claimed for larger properties in Westminster—rare, but none the less real cases.
Ms Buck
Does the hon. Gentleman share my sense of irony that Westminster is supporting the cap now after making almost £6 million for the council tax payer in recent years through housing benefit being above the rents paid for temporary accommodation? Is he not aware that to be politically in line with the Government, Westminster is cutting its throat and the throat of its council tax payers to the tune of nearly £6 million?
Mr Field
The hon. Lady makes a very valid point; one of the main absurdities of the housing benefit system is that there is so little incentive for local authorities, whether in London or across the country, because they can get the money back from central Government. That situation has to change.
Westminster council estimated the worst-case costs at £8.1 million, reflecting the expense of the long-term temporary accommodation contracts that the council was encouraged to enter into under the previous cap regime. Many would welcome the Government’s implementing the new caps and mitigating the associated risks. In particular, places such as Westminster need the guidelines around local connection to be changed. Under the existing guidelines, local authorities affected by the caps are required to try to house people in their vicinity. I think that Westminster city council is particularly concerned that the courts will find against it if it tries to house families out of the borough, leading to additional costs and more uncertainty and family disruption.
The guidelines need greater flexibility, and the Minister must recognise that there are specific issues in London, for boroughs of all political complexions, that need to be thought through. We need to ensure that local authorities can, to an extent, house out of borough when it has not proven possible to find temporary accommodation in the area at the new capped rates.
There is much more that I would like to say, but I appreciate that other Members wish to contribute so I shall end my comments with these thoughts. Given that the proposals are due to come in over the next few months, in the run-up to the next financial year, I wish to say only that many Members on the Government Benches welcome the review of the housing benefit system, the flaws of which have been glaringly obvious to all of us who deal frequently with housing cases. I accept that there will be differences across the House as to how the changes should take place. If the case for change is successfully made, we will require a much closer working relationship with the boroughs, and clear and frequent communication with London Members, who will be receiving ever more letters from anxious constituents in the months ahead, so I hope the Minister will pledge to ensure that there is proper communication, which will be essential.
It is also vital that the most vulnerable in our communities are properly reassured. If they are not, we risk undermining the most compelling aspect of the case for reform, which is that the measures should primarily be about fairness, with the hard-working being rewarded and the truly vulnerable being properly and fully protected.
Glenda Jackson (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Howarth. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) on securing this debate.
I shall not rerun all the figures that have been heard already. I agree absolutely with what my hon. Friend said, and I also agree, up to a point, with the contribution of the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr Field). The central issue is the implicit threat to so many of the most vulnerable people in my constituency from what the Government propose on housing benefit. I freely and openly admit that I am a cynic when it comes to their policies on what I still regard as social housing—I prefer to call it council housing, but let us make it broader than that.
It seems that we will have, yet again, a rerun of the attacks that were made on social or council housing under the first Thatcher Administration—the coalition Government are actually Thatcherism mark 2—and we can remember what happened during that time. We saw a massive explosion in homelessness. I do not think that there was a single street in London during that time that did not have its community of homeless people sleeping in doorways, many of whom had serious mental health as well as physical health problems. The waiting lists grew ever longer, and families were placed in bed and breakfast accommodation where they were allowed into what were, in the main, utterly appalling conditions. I visited many of them, and I speak about what I actually saw. If those images had been presented to members of the Kennel Club as fit places for dogs to live, there would have been riots in our streets. Families in such accommodation had to leave it at 9 o’clock in the morning and were not allowed back until 5 o’clock at night, in many instances.
Out of the desperate need of those families—every black cloud has a silver lining—came a growing number of charitable and voluntary organisations that attempted to get certainly the children off the streets of London, where the then Government had deemed it was entirely right and proper for them to be. Many of the children were of pre-school age, and, of course, there was nothing like Sure Start and no free nursery provision in those days.
What is being proposed by the present Government for housing benefit will recreate precisely those conditions all over again. No one in this Chamber would argue that the housing benefit system should not be examined closely—many of us have been arguing that for a considerable time—but to believe that we can improve it by punishing those who have no homes without the support of housing benefit seems utterly absurd.
For example, rents in my constituency and in that of every London MP who is sitting here this morning are way above the national average and, in many instances, way above the London average, yet the Government propose that a cap should be placed on housing benefit. I cannot in all honesty see the landlords who are presently benefiting from the system saying, “Oh dear, are we charging too much? Perhaps we should bring the rent down.” They will simply not accept the same number of tenants whose rent payments are dependent on housing benefit. That is also something that has been growing over the past few years.
Then we look at the north, where people who cannot get work in London are apparently supposed to go to look for jobs. Rents undoubtedly are much lower there than they are in London, but one knows precisely what will happen. The landlords will say, “Oh, goody.” If the Government are prepared to pay a certain amount for a house, flat or whatever, up the rents will go. There will be absolutely no saving of any kind for the national purse, but there will be real, serious human tragedies played out on our streets yet again.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North said, the proposal will impact horrendously on children. He did not say that—I am paraphrasing—but that is what he meant. It will impact horrendously on children who cannot do their homework or make friends because they have nowhere to bring friends after school to play or have a cup of tea. It will impact terribly on parents who are constantly left feeling guilty, because they see the damage that is being inflicted on their children.
The proposal will also have appalling repercussions on the wider community. All hon. Members receive letters and complaints from constituents about noise—in many instances, it is perfectly natural, normal noise. Children make noise, and if three or four of them are in an extremely small flat with nowhere to play—more than likely up a tower block—they will make noise, and that will create the usual neighbourhood dramas that we all have to deal with day in, day out.
I go back to my original hypothesis, which arises from my cynicism and hard-won experience of many years ago, that this is just another brick in the wall of the attempt by the present Government to destroy social housing as we all understand it. They want all properties that at present could be deemed to be social—whether council, housing association or some other form of social housing—to be taken out of that sector and placed in the private sector. It seems that they want to put all housing in the private sector and to remove all kinds of support for people who will never be able to buy a house of their own or meet what will be the soaring costs of renting in the private sector, certainly in London, because they want London to be a place where rich people live. They do not want it to be a place where poor people live.
This is a step up from the gerrymandering—I exclude the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster—that we saw in Westminster. My hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), who is sitting one seat away from me, knows precisely where I am going with that. That kind of gerrymandering involved decanting people from areas of Westminster and bringing in those who were deemed to be Tory voters. I have to tell the Government that the fallacy that only rich people vote Tory is absurd. I know many people whom they would not regard as being even vaguely well off who are solid, absolutely committed Tories and will be all their life.
The idea that the way forward is to create virtual ghettos of a different kind is absolutely and utterly unacceptable in a country such as ours, certainly in this century. We cannot go down the road of arbitrarily deciding which properties can be charged for at a certain level in this way. The proposals for housing benefit are monstrous, and they will, as they inevitably do in such areas, impact most on the most vulnerable.
I sincerely hope that the Minister, who I am surprised to find sitting here supporting such policies, will rethink them. If he will not do that, I hope that he will report on what he hears this morning in the hope that those above his pay grade will think again about something that could be so destructive for this city.
Mr George Howarth (in the Chair)
It might be helpful if I announce at this point that I intend to call the first of the two Front-Bench spokesmen at 12.10. If hon. Members who are trying to get in do the maths, they will realise that it will be difficult to get everyone in. However, the more disciplined hon. Members are about the time that they take, the more likely it is that we will get more of them in.
Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
Thank you, Mr Howarth. I shall follow your stricture and keep my remarks to 10 minutes or thereabouts.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) on securing this debate. He is right: many of the usual suspects are present for it. They include some ex-Ministers who share responsibility for the housing situation that we have in London.
It is fair to say that housing has been neglected by successive Governments and that the problem in London has not emerged in the past couple of months. There are different figures for how many households in London are looking for or waiting for social housing, but 350,000 has been quoted to me. Whichever figure one takes, a substantial number of people need social housing.
Clearly, as a result of demographic changes in London, pressure on housing will increase as the population increases. Demand might rise further if the coalition proposal to safeguard housing rights for people who are looking for work and perhaps coming to London has an impact, which it could. The proposal has some merit, but for it to work, we need some spare capacity in housing in London. I would not want such a proposal to displace people who are waiting for housing in London and who, in many cases, are being advised that they could wait for seven, eight, nine or 10 years. Such waiting times are being quoted to some people in my borough.
Clearly, too, the housing benefit changes, to which many hon. Members have already referred, will have an impact. There is some evidence, certainly in the commercial sector, that some landlords are responding to the present financial situation and, if not knocking down prices, holding prices for leases that run for four or five years.
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
The situation may or may not have changed but the policy certainly has, so does the hon. Gentleman support what the Housing Minister said about looking at having no secure tenancies for new lettings in the future? Does he support the £250 to £400 cap on housing benefit, which must affect his constituents as well as mine?
Tom Brake
Some valid points have already been made in the debate and, perhaps surprisingly, one of the reasons for my being here today is to listen to the Minister, who is a sound and honourable man, explaining—hopefully, explaining away—some of the apparent contradictions in a number of the proposals. I know from his background in local authorities that he believes, contrary to what the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Glenda Jackson) said, that council and social housing in this country has a strong and sound future. I am sure that he will defend that principle.
Glenda Jackson
Going back to my theme, we have heard such a proposal before but presented in different words: essentially, it amounts to a property-owning country. That is good old-fashioned Thatcher dogma, simply re-dressed in another way. We saw what happened when that dogma ran the first time: a massive loss of homes, businesses and families. The Government will create that all over again.
Tom Brake
That is the hon. Lady’s interpretation of the coalition Government’s proposals across a number of policy areas, but it is not one with which I can agree. I agree that we need to guard against the potential impact of the proposed housing benefit changes on migration from central London to outer London boroughs or beyond, but I hope that Opposition Members accept that we are in rather a difficult financial position at the moment. I am keeping a tally of their proposals on how to address that position. They have accepted the need to cut 20% from a number of departmental budgets, including those of the Departments for Work and Pensions and for Communities and Local Government, so we need to hear some sort of explanation. Indeed, the hon. Lady said that housing benefit should be looked at, but presumably not with a view to increasing the funding available. I hope to hear at least an outline of some possible Opposition solutions or improvements to the coalition Government’s proposals. I shall wait and see.
Jeremy Corbyn
Does the hon. Gentleman not understand that if we invested in housing with affordable rents, through housing associations and councils, we would immediately cut the housing benefit bill enormously: instead of paying £400 a week, we would pay £120 a week?
Tom Brake
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I assure him that I understand his point perfectly, but he must be aware, having spoken in many such debates in the past 13 years, that housing in London is in short supply. The previous Government did not manage to resolve the problem, but I hope that the coalition Government will do so.
I want to refer to some of proposals in the coalition programme that will address the issue.
Mr Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)
As someone who also represents an outer-London borough, I share the hon. Gentleman’s concern about the migration of people from central to outer London—a number of my constituents, who are struggling to find housing in the private sector because of the changes, are already concerned. He hopes that the Government will make some changes to prevent such migration from happening, but what sort of changes would he like the Government to make?
Tom Brake
I am afraid that I shall again have to defer to my hon. Friend the Minister, who I am sure will pick up that point when he responds to the debate. I want to put on record some of the proposals that the coalition Government have listed in their programme—measures, or sentiments, that can address the situation. When the Minister responds, I hope that he can put some flesh on the bones of such sentiments, as well as give an indication of where the Government are going with housing, so that we have greater clarity about how housing provision and needs will be addressed.
We will promote a radical devolution of power and greater financial autonomy to local government and community groups. We will abolish local spatial strategies and return decision making on housing and planning to local councils. We will radically reform the planning system, to give neighbourhoods far greater ability to determine the shape of places in which their inhabitants live. We are exploring a range of measures to bring empty homes back into use, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) made clear in an intervention earlier. We are also looking at new trusts and perhaps ways of providing cheaper homes that people can buy—cheaper because community trusts hold the land separately.
Emily Thornberry
Is the hon. Gentleman aware that David Orr from the National Housing Federation has said that changes to the planning system, such as the end of regional targets and the cut in investment, mean that the amount of affordable housing built in England this year could fall by 65%?
Tom Brake
I am aware of those concerns. However, a bottom-up approach to housing is required. Again, when the Minister responds to the debate, I hope that he will explain how the proposals in the coalition programme will help to increase the supply.
I want to mention the promotion of shared-ownership schemes. Registered social landlords, such as London and Quadrant led by David Montague, are proposing imaginative schemes, such as the “up to you” programme, to make homes available for people who might not be able to pay a deposit for a property.
The situation is challenging, but we have some solutions or partial solutions to the problem of housing need in London and beyond. I should like to ask the Minister a specific question—just to get some clarity—on the decent homes programme. Although the issue is a local one, it might affect other hon. Members. The London borough of Sutton was awarded partial funding for its decent homes programme shortly before the general election. I seek confirmation that that funding remains available, and I ask about the future of the programme, which was due to last for a number of years. Tenants and the Sutton Housing Partnership are interested in what will happen to the decent homes funding.
To conclude, we are clearly in a challenging situation as far as housing need in London is concerned. It is not something that has emerged in the past couple of months but has been a long-standing problem in London, with a shortage of supply of affordable homes and, indeed, homes for sale. I hope that the coalition Government can take on that situation and can address it in the next five years.
Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), who has a long history of bringing to this place for discussion matters on which Opposition Members work as a team. My hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck)—I hope that she catches your eye, Mr Howarth—also has a long history of bringing such matters to this place.
As London MPs, we are not here to suggest that we have cracked housing issues in London. We all have a long track record of campaigning on them, and understanding them, largely because we know from our constituency surgeries that London is a tale of two cities—the two cities that my father found when he arrived here in 1956. He shared a one-bedroom flat with a small paraffin heater in Finsbury Park with five others. He is not with us today, but I know he is pleased that I now have a big house in Finsbury Park. That is the progress of immigration.
All of us in the Chamber have large homes, and all of us have employment, but we are here because either we are moving incrementally forward on housing or moving backwards. The Budget and its housing benefit issues will move us backwards. I predict that the result of the exodus from inner London to outer London will be equivalent to what happened in the Parisian suburbs and there will be social unrest in three or four years. It is right to put that on the record. That will be the consequence of the social cleansing of inner London. It is patently clear to all Members of Parliament who represent London constituencies that the face of homelessness, particularly in London, is a black and ethnic minority one. Those are the people who will be cast out of Westminster, Islington, Camden and Hackney to find their way and their homes as they will, against a backdrop of existing acute housing need in London.
We have a Mayor who is not committed to building the necessary affordable homes in the city. Looking at the list of Conservative local authorities, I find it pathetic that only 200 affordable homes were built in Westminster in the last year for which we have figures; just 100 were built in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea and, even worse, in Richmond only 127 were built. Those authorities have the space and the opportunity, but over that period their attitude to building affordable homes was poor. That is the backdrop against which people will suffer.
Last Friday, an event was organised by the charity, TreeHouse, which supports families with young children on the autistic spectrum. I spent the afternoon on the Broadwater Farm estate with the Uddin family. I collected their son, Adil, from Broadwater Farm primary school, to be close to the family as they deal with their five-year-old’s serious autistic needs. There are eight of them and they live in a two-bedroom flat, which is typical of housing need in my constituency. My message to that poor family with six children is that their disability living allowance will probably be cut by the present Administration, so despite having a three-week-old child, they can forget any possibility of receiving the baby or toddler element of the child tax credit, because that will go too. Mr Uddin makes representations to me about housing need, but against a backdrop of 3,471 people on the temporary accommodation list in the London borough of Haringey and, as we speak, 818 in emergency accommodation, it is very unlikely that the family will be able to move from their two-bedroom flat, despite the fact that eight of them live there. Even worse, the new Government, because of their attitude to economic matters, has deemed that the housing pressure in our London borough is set to become even worse.
Opposition Members believe passionately that despite the tough economic times, the way through is to invest and to determine growth. This is an opportunity for a new deal arrangement for our country, and Liberal Democrat Members should remember the opportunities that Lloyd George put in place with his people’s Budget. It is a disgrace that hon. Members who represent areas such as Hornsey and Wood Green, and Bermondsey, where there are poor and needy constituents, support a Budget that will result in an exodus and social unrest. It is a disgrace.
Mr Lammy
No, I will not give way. We have heard enough from the hon. Gentleman and, frankly, it was pretty poor.
One in eight people on housing benefit is unemployed, but many are workers—cleaners, shop workers, hospital porters and so on. The pressure that the Budget will put on them is unacceptable. It is a disgrace, and will lead to the sort of social unrest that I and my constituents saw in 1985 when unemployment was 20% in the constituency, and probably 40% among black people. We will see that again with the cutting of the future jobs fund alongside the ridiculous, nasty policy that underpins the Government.
[Mr Mike Hancock in the Chair]
Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)
We have heard some excellent speeches from Opposition Members this morning, and I hope that we will hear more. I will try to be brief. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) on giving us that opportunity.
London has always been a city of mixed communities. In constituencies such as that of the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr Field), mine and those of other hon. Members, we see the historical product of that mixture. Properties were built by Peabody and Octavia Hill, and the 19th century housing associations. They recognised that there were slum conditions in London and that the poor have always lived in different parts of London. We are in danger of engineering a set of solutions that fly in the face of the centuries-old history of London by making London, particularly central London, safe for millionaires to live in.
We had a mixed stock of housing in our cities, and that stock has changed, but the supply of properties has not changed. The buildings are still there, but the people who live in them are different. For example, Westminster has 14% less social housing than in the 1980s. In Sutton, there has been a 7% fall in the number of social housing properties, and in Wandsworth, remarkably, there has been a 22% fall in the proportion of social housing properties. Some of the people living in ex-social housing properties bought their properties, and rightly so. Good luck to them. Understandably, they took the opportunity, and then sold and moved, so those properties are now in the private rented sector. My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound), who has left the Chamber, said that some people living in ex-local authority homes are paying rent of £400, £500 or £600 a week when their neighbours are paying only £100 a week.
We have heard about the employment trap being almost a justification for such policies, but let us not forget that rents cause the employment trap. Those who are living in private rented accommodation and facing a rent of £400, £500 or £600 a week obviously find it difficult to work, although despite that many do. If they had the benefit of a social rented unit, as many of them used to have, they would not face the employment trap and the disincentive to work. Indeed, all the records show that unemployment and worklessness in social housing was far lower 30 years ago than nowadays because all sorts of social housing—housing association and local authority property—is residualised due to the reduction in stock.
We now blame tenants and those who live in those homes but, in many cases, they would have been social tenants if the available capacity were the same as 20 or 30 years ago. We retreat to the policy that was actively encouraged during the 1980s of shifting large numbers of people not just to outer London, but in some cases to bed and breakfasts in Margate or to social housing in Birmingham, regardless of all the local and community connections people might have had. What a desperate legacy we are still dealing with for families who were, by definition, going through the homelessness gateway and therefore vulnerable. They had children, disabilities or caring responsibilities, and we are still dealing with some of the consequences of cramming people into bed-and-breakfast accommodation and shattering their local connections in order to implement a harsh homelessness policy.
This policy is absolutely insane. Although I have been critical in the Chamber about the Labour Government’s failure to build enough social houses, they did—rightly— look at ways of reducing homelessness. The number of households accepted as homeless has fallen steadily over the past 15 years. Over the past year, a duty of homelessness was accepted for 36,000 households—9,000 over the last quarter. That number is down.
Looking at homelessness prevention we see that last year, 123,000 households were diverted from making a homelessness application. Fine. We all agree that keeping people in their homes and providing them with an alternative would be a sensible thing to do. However, where were those 123,000 households diverted? More than 60% were diverted to the private rented sector. We have achieved a reduction in homelessness by placing people in the private rented sector. Now we are saying to those people that we can no longer put them in the private rented sector in most places, so what will happen? They will be homeless. They will make an application and, under present law, there is a duty to accept them as homeless, so what is the answer?
Earlier, the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster came up with an answer: the coalition Government will change the law. I predict that they will change the law so that local authorities no longer have a duty to house homeless applicants; Westminster council has made it clear that it supports that position, as has Hammersmith council. Local authorities could not house those people because if they did, the entire policy on housing benefit reduction would be shattered. Therefore, the Government will change the law to allow all homeless households to be housed only in the private rented sector. They will remove all forms of local connection. But what will be required? How will the Minister answer that? Will households be required to find alternative accommodation anywhere in England, or will it just be anywhere in London? That question goes to the heart of the implications of the policy.
The Government propose to cleanse lower-income people, many of whom work, from large parts of London. That is the core purpose of the policy; it has no other purpose. Those households will have to live somewhere—unless they do not have somewhere to live. In 1997, one of my first cases as an MP was helping a family whose children were living in a bus. I predict that one consequence of this policy will be that families will sleep in their cars, on waste ground or on the streets. We probably will have disorder; there will be catastrophic overcrowding and we will see people living in the streets. Of course, we will also see people shipped away to the north of England.
What is the sense in a policy in which, on the one hand, the Secretary of State for the Department of Work and Pensions says, “Let the workless come to London to find jobs,” but on the other hand, the workless are driven out of London to where the housing is? Such a policy is intellectually incoherent and, above all, morally indefensible.
Mr Mike Hancock (in the Chair)
If the last two speakers want to speak they will have to be generous to each other as we have less than 10 minutes.
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), who has an outstanding record on this issue. As he says, “Here we go again.” The fact that 11 Labour Back Benchers are present shows the strength of feeling and the importance of this issue. The hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr Field) also regularly attends debates on this subject, although I note that he and his new Liberal Democrat friends have not so far been in a position to defend the changes to housing benefit. We wait with interest to hear what the Minister says.
I sponsored a debate on the issue about two months ago in which I kept to my usual two themes: first, to urge the then Government to build more social housing in London, which they were beginning to do, and secondly to draw attention to the social cleansing that has been going on for some years in my borough of Hammersmith. I will not talk about that today, but it is a template for what could happen elsewhere. There are many clubs in the armoury, from demolition to sales or the refusal to build any new social housing, and in many ways that has set the agenda.
Even that picture, however, looks rosy compared with what we see now. Not only have there been changes in the Budget, which I will come to in a moment, but we have had clear statements of intention from the Minister responsible for housing. I referred to them earlier, although the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) declined to comment, as he declined to comment on anything else. I know that he is a decent individual, so perhaps it was from embarrassment at what his Government are doing.
When my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) asked the housing Minister on 10 June whether he would confirm that
“new tenants—people in housing need coming off the housing waiting list, as he described—will enjoy the security enjoyed by existing tenants”,
the reply was that Government policy
“may include looking at tenure for the future.”—[Official Report, 10 June 2010; Vol. 511, c. 451.]
As we know from the figures given by my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North, there are about 45,000 new tenancies in London a year, which represents 6% or 7% of tenancies over the term of a Parliament. The policy could mean that a quarter of social tenancies in London disappear. It effectively means that social housing, whether assured or secure tenancies, will become a bin-end, a type of housing that is being phased out. As my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North said—she has an exemplary record in raising these issues—the product of the past 20 or 30 years has been increasingly to use the private sector for housing.
Emily Thornberry
I wonder if my hon. Friend has had the same experience as me—I expect he has. A woman with three children came to see me in my surgery. They had nowhere to live, and I told her that there was no social housing and that she had to go into the private sector. She replied, “But it’s so expensive, Emily, what can I do?” I said, “Don’t worry. You can get housing benefit.” She said, “What about when I go to work?”, and I said, “Don’t worry; you’ll still get housing benefit to top up your salary when your children go to school.” I now feel as if I have betrayed her by pushing her into the private sector when housing benefit is about to be taken away.
Mr Slaughter
I suspect that my hon. Friend is more compassionate than I am. Tenants come to me who have three or four kids and they are living in a one-bedroom flat. They say that the council is blackmailing them and telling them that they will never be rehoused unless they give up their secure tenancy and take an assured shorthold tenancy in the private sector with what are, as has been pointed out, inflated rents. I say, “Stick it out because once you’re there, they can do whatever they like with you. At least you have a permanent tenancy at the moment.” That is a hard thing to tell people who are living in extreme housing need.
The system of direct lettings gets people off the housing waiting list by placing them in highly insalubrious private accommodation, and getting them into undesirable relationships with the private landlords who are found in local authorities such as Hammersmith. Schemes to avoid homelessness by keeping people in private sector tenancies, the use of private sector letting—a relief after the old bed-and-breakfast system—and, as my hon. Friend has just said, the removal of rights to permanent housing, have forced people into insecure housing in the private sector and meant that a time bomb has built up.
The response of the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives has been to reduce the sum of money available. Let us forget figures of £100,000; no one is in favour of that or of £2,000 a week. We are talking about £400 or £250 a week. I have been told that so far my borough has identified 750 families who will have to move, I think, out of the borough. There are very few suitable properties, although I think that yesterday we heard the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions say—I shall check Hansard for the exact quote—that he wanted people to find the right level of housing, the right level of housing for people who live in London. So people move outside the M25 or live in a slum. Many of my constituents already live in a slum, because of the pressure on housing in the private sector, and that will increase. To pillory people and to say that they are unemployed, feckless and so on is, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) said, absolutely wrong.
Shelter has said:
“The vast majority of housing benefit claimants are…pensioners, those with disabilities, people caring for a relative or hardworking people on low incomes, and only 1 in 8 people who receive housing benefit is unemployed.”
Those are the people the Conservative party and the Liberal party are seeking to victimise—they cannot escape that. I look forward to what the Minister will say, but he has a very difficult task today.
Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)
It is fair to say that housing is one of the biggest issues in my constituency, if not the biggest, and I am very pleased to be able to take part in the debate. Having a decent place to call home is something that many of us take for granted, but for thousands upon thousands of Londoners, the housing crisis in London can be described only as a living nightmare.
In my constituency, the biggest problem is that there simply are not enough reasonably priced homes to go around. In parts of Lewisham East, average house prices are 10 times average salaries. For many young people and public sector workers, home ownership is a distant pipe dream. Even the council’s housing list offers little hope. The list stands at 17,000 households but, in contrast, about 1,400 properties become available to rent each year, so for each family that moves into a suitable property, another nine will be disappointed. For larger families, the wait for a suitable property can seem to take for ever.
In some parts of the country, overcrowding could be sorted out by using homes better, such as by matching the size of a household more closely to the size of the property, but even if under-occupation was completely eradicated in London, we would still be left with a huge problem. Private sector cross-subsidy for new affordable housing has not delivered the number or type of the new homes that are so urgently needed.
This issue is not about giving people a cushy place to live, but about giving kids the chance to do well at school and giving mums and dads the type of home life that prevents them from going nuts and enables them to go out and get a decent job. I could not quite believe it when the Chancellor of the Exchequer suggested in last week’s Budget that one of the ways he plans to limit spending on housing benefit is by restricting tenants’ access to appropriately sized homes. Will the Minister recognise the devastating impact that overcrowding has on the lives of my constituents and will he assure me that the Chancellor’s zeal for reducing spending on housing benefit will not result in even more misery than there is at present? I cannot help but think that the coalition’s proposals to do away with housing targets and its weird obsession with so-called garden grabbing will just result in fewer homes being built in the capital. What assurance can the Minister give that that will not be the case?
The issue is not just building more homes, however, but investing in the homes that we do have. As the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) said, a number of arm’s length management organisations in the capital are crying out for investment. In my local authority area, Lewisham Homes is being inspected to determine whether it has reached the required standard to unlock £154 million of capital funding over the next five years. Other round 6 ALMOs in Lambeth and Tower Hamlets will undergo similar inspections in due course. Given the Chancellor’s remarks about the importance of capital expenditure in the next few years, will the Minister reassure me and residents of properties provided by Lewisham Homes that the Government will look favourably on the investment needs of homes in London, and will he honour the commitment made to Lewisham by the previous Government?
Will the Minister also commit to looking beyond the decent homes standard and finding a flexible way for tenants to have the ability to set local priorities for investment? I have lost count of the number of times that people have said to me, “I have a perfectly decent kitchen, thank you. What I want is a lift that works.” The scale of the investment required in London’s social housing must not be underestimated, and nor must the long-term implications of not investing.
Housing is an issue that does not get enough airtime. It is also something that the new coalition Government seem not to understand. Last week, various news outlets were reporting the impact that housing expenditure can have on the nation’s public health, but for those of us who are familiar with the state of London’s housing needs, that was not news. I sincerely hope that the new coalition Government will do all that they can to improve London’s housing conditions and to ensure that the type of homes that Londoners need are built. I for one will do all that I can to make sure that they do.
Mr Mike Hancock (in the Chair)
Thank you very much; good timing there. I call Ian Austin, and thank him for giving up some of his time to allow colleagues to speak.
Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)
Not at all, Mr Hancock.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) on securing this fascinating debate, which has been marked by passionate, knowledgeable and expert contributions from my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) and my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck). We heard a brilliant speech by my hon. Friend the new Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), as well as expert contributions from other hon. Members.
I want to pick up on a point made by the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake). Of course savings must be made. We understood that, which was why we set out plans to halve the deficit in four years. The question, however, is when we make the savings, how quickly we make them and whether we make them in areas of expenditure that drive growth and get the economy moving again. Labour Members believe that we need more investment in social rented housing, not less, and that was why housing in London was such a priority in the £1.5 billion housing pledge that we announced last year to get the economy moving.
Will the Minister tell us when we shall know what is happening to the homes that we planned to build in London before the election? The Treasury announcement on 24 May about spending cuts required the Homes and Communities Agency to make savings of £230 million as part of a wider package of savings in the Department for Communities and Local Government totalling £780 million for this financial year—a financial year in which, if we had been in power, cuts would not have been made. Will he tell us what proportion of the £100 million to be saved from the affordable housing programme will be taken from the HCA in London? Will he also tell us what proportion of those savings will be met by the cancellation of homes planned for London under the kick-start programme? In total, 17 schemes were planned for the capital, and this is a very important issue, not just for families stuck on waiting lists who are desperate to get a home of their own, but for developers and people working in the construction trade.
We had planned the biggest council house building programme in two decades, but the new Government’s announcements have put at risk 194 of those homes on a dozen sites across London for which we had earmarked £15.5 million. Will the Minister tell us which of those developments will be going ahead? Given that the Mayor has gone back on his pledge to build 50,000 affordable homes for London over three years and that he is abolishing the policy that half of new homes should be affordable, given that Shelter’s former chief executive, Adam Sampson, has said that the Mayor’s policies
“perpetuate the wealth and class divisions in the nation’s capital”,
and given that London borough waiting lists have risen by 20,000 in the two years to April 2009, will the new Minister say what stance the Government will now be taking on the Mayor’s London housing strategy?
Every home lost in the recession has been a tragedy for the family involved, but repossession levels have run at a fraction of those in previous recessions because we took action to help Londoners who were struggling to meet mortgage payments. We helped 25,000 families and provided £2.8 million for local authorities to establish loan funds. Will the Minister give an assurance that that area of expenditure will be saved from the cuts that the new Government make?
When we came to power in 1997, estimates suggested that almost 2,000 people were sleeping rough in London. By this year, we were within touching distance of ending rough sleeping once and for all. The only announcement that the new Government have made in this area has been an utterly trivial point about the way in which figures are counted, but today, however the calculation is done—whatever measure is used—it is clear that the number that we inherited has been cut dramatically. Most figures suggest that it has been cut by three quarters.
Mr Mark Field
It would be wrong not to give considerable credit for the improvements made in relation to rough sleeping since 1997. However—and this is not just the anecdotal evidence of a central London MP—things have been getting markedly worse in the past couple of years. I accept that there is a big duty on the present Government to ensure that we bring back some of the significant improvements made in the aftermath of 1997, but it would be wrong not to put on record the fact that there have been and there are increasing problems with rough sleeping. We need a new initiative to build on some of the successes, but things have been getting worse.
Ian Austin
What we need is a commitment by the new Government that they will continue the investment and initiatives that the previous Government were putting in place.
There are certainly major challenges ahead, not least in connection with rough sleeping among people who have come to Britain from eastern Europe. First, the Labour Government set out an ambitious plan to cut rough sleeping by two thirds, so I want to know whether the goals and targets that we established will survive the election of the new Government. Secondly, many vulnerable people with multiple needs are struggling to get the support and services that they need. Although Homeless Link requested that all party manifestos included a commitment to tackle multiple needs, the Labour party’s was the only one to do so. What action do the new Government propose to take to help people with multiple needs?
Thirdly, we need to increase homeless people’s access to the NHS, because homelessness is often about not only housing, but health. Fourthly, we need to renew our efforts to tackle rough sleeping by people with no recourse to public funds. We need to ensure that those with the right to work can do so and that those who cannot are able to return home. Finally, and most importantly, we need to increase homeless people’s opportunities to get skills and work so that we change not only where they live, but their whole lives.
The Labour Government got Ministers in the Department for Work and Pensions, the Home Office and the Department of Health to work together more closely than ever to co-ordinate efforts right across the Government to tackle homelessness and end rough sleeping. Will the Minister tell us whether it will continue under the new Government and how his Department will develop it? Will there be ministerial leadership and cross-government co-operation so that we can end the scandal of rough sleeping for good?
Mr Mike Hancock (in the Chair)
You do not have long, Mr Stunell, but here goes it.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Andrew Stunell)
Okay, I will do my best. Hon. Members will appreciate that it will be difficult to answer in detail the many points that have been raised.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), who has been a tireless campaigner for improved housing in London. He does himself an injustice when he describes himself and other hon. Members present as the usual suspects. Housing need is a matter that people rightly feel real passion about, and hon. Members from all political parties have invested a lot of personal commitment in tackling it over the years. I do not, therefore, want to downplay or minimise the importance of the debate in any way, and I thank those Members who have contributed. I see from the record that many of them also made speeches on 2 March, and although their language was perhaps slightly less hostile, they were equally firm in challenging the then Government about Ministers’ performance.
The hon. Member for Islington North rehearsed very well the issue of housing stress, which we see in London and in other inner cities, although it is particularly evident in London. I will not review the figures and statistics that he gave, but Members can perhaps take them as having been read and accepted by this Government. The hon. Gentleman and, indeed, all Members posed a number of difficult questions, and I do not deny that they are difficult. If they had been easy, I have a feeling that the Labour Government and the Labour Mayor would have solved them in the boom time, rather than leaving them for the coalition Government to try to solve in the bust time. However, we will do our best. Let me make it clear that increasing the supply of housing, including affordable housing, is a priority for the Government.
Mr Nick Raynsford (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
Will the Minister give way?
Andrew Stunell
I will, but doing so obviously reduces the number of questions that I can answer.
Mr Raynsford
I am grateful to the Minister, and I recognise that his time is limited. Given the commitment that he has given to increase the supply of housing, including social housing, will he tell us what advice he has received about the impact that decisions taken by the Government to date—notably, the freezing of the Homes and Communities Agency investment budget and changes to the planning system—will have on housing supply?
Andrew Stunell
Certainly, if I get to that part of my speech, I will answer the point. The right hon. Gentleman has a superb, lifelong record on this issue, and I welcome his contribution.
The fact is that there has been a significant gap between the supply of, and demand for, new homes for decades, and housing supply has failed to keep up with the growing population. Of course, that is particularly the case in London. The Government will create a framework of incentives for local authorities to deliver sustainable development, and that will commence at the earliest opportunity. Local communities will really benefit from delivering the housing that they want and need. Our incentive scheme is designed to encourage local authorities and communities to increase their aspirations for housing and economic growth and to take more control over the way in which the local community is developed.
In a short time, the Government have moved to free up the housing market, with the suspension of home information packs. We have also protected spending on social housing as well as we can, and that remains a Government commitment. That is why we are using £170 million from the £6 billion of savings to reinvest in social rented housing—I emphasise that it is social rented housing—which was, unfortunately, not properly funded under the outgoing Government. Although decisions about the allocation of that £170 million have still to be made, it seems likely that something in the order of 40% will be invested in social rented housing in London. That will require a partnership between councils, the Mayor of London and the Government.
Many such matters are now devolved to the Mayor of London, and some decisions about allocations are very much matters for him. Members will be well aware that his London plan is facing examination in public, and I have a feeling that those who are sitting around this table will want to make sure that their views are clearly expressed to the inspector during that examination. The Government intend to the give the Mayor responsibility for the Homes and Communities Agency in London to help provide the flexibility to meet the housing needs of local communities in the city.
Andrew Stunell
The hon. Lady is obviously some sort of psychic, because I was about to say that homelessness remains a significant problem in London. As has been said, three quarters of homeless households in temporary accommodation in the country are in the capital, and the Government are committed to addressing homelessness head-on. That is exactly why my right hon. Friend the Minister for Housing announced last week that the Prime Minister had agreed to a cross-departmental approach to tackle the problem of homelessness and rough sleeping. Many people around this table will know that my right hon. Friend has a strong personal commitment to tackling homelessness. The new ministerial taskforce met for the first time on 16 June, and its members will work together to determine how the policies for which they have responsibility can help to address the complex problems that cause people to lose their homes. [Interruption.]
Mr Mike Hancock (in the Chair)
Order. It is clear that the Minister has declined to take any more interventions because of the shortness of time.
Andrew Stunell
Thank you, Mr Hancock. I am trying to give Members the information that they asked for, and I have two and a half minutes to do it in.
I was asked about bringing empty homes back into use. That is clearly one possible way of tackling the housing shortage in London, and I am leading active work in the Department to make progress on the issue.
My hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) asked about progress on decent homes. The money for local authority social housing and decent home programmes for the current year has already been released and is not in doubt. Money for future years will be considered in the comprehensive spending review. I will write to him specifically about the Sutton arm’s length management organisation, as I think that he asked me to.
I want to challenge some of the gospel of pure hypothesis, which I heard from two Opposition Members. Let me tell the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Glenda Jackson), whom I admire a lot, that other parts of the country—some of us come from outside London—already have local caps, alongside local reference rents, on housing benefit. I can tell her—[Interruption.]
Mr Mike Hancock (in the Chair)
Order. The Minister is trying to answer the points in the debate. I cannot hear him, so Members will not be able to hear them either.
Andrew Stunell
Several Members strongly made the point that they wanted their concerns about the detailed application of last week’s announcements conveyed to the Department for Work and Pensions. I give an assurance that those concerns will be relayed, exactly as Members have asked.
To pick up the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr Field), let me say that the consultation should take full account of the views of London boroughs and London Members. I am quite willing and ready to give that assurance.
Low Educational Attainment
(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)
I do not intend today to give the Minister a big work load today, but I want to lay down a marker. I thank Catch22, Save the Children, the Child Poverty Action Group and Michele Sutton, the principal at Bradford college, for contacting me and providing me with useful information, as well as useful questions that I shall no doubt put in written form later.
A few years ago, I was on the second largest council estate in Bradford in the youth centre, where I have been on the committee for probably nearly 30 years now. I came out of the door and a mobile library was outside. I decided to go and chat to the driver. A young woman got on the mobile library bus with a toddler. The buses are set up with a play area with Lego bricks and so on at one end. I remember clearly that the toddler got on and started to move towards the books, but the mother said, “You don’t want those; they are only books.” It is funny how things stick in one’s mind, but that said so much about the possibilities and life chances that that child probably had.
The research on early years, and indeed pre-early years, is pretty compelling. I know that today I am speaking to people who know about the subject and are concerned about it, and I am not here to teach anyone to suck eggs, but I want to mention the “Meaningful Differences” research by Betty Hart and Todd Risley at the university of Kansas some years ago. It showed that parents from what they called the professional class had interactions—words that were spoken—with their children at a rate of, on average, 2,150 per hour. Among those from what they called working class backgrounds the rate was 1,250 per hour, and for those from what they called welfare families it was 620 words per hour. That is happening hour after hour, day in, day out. The cumulative effect of that in the first three years, if extrapolated, was a difference of 20 million words between the professional class and the welfare class, and that is before we consider the quality of the language, or the social interactions happening alongside language development.
Clearly, many of the measures that we have put in place start far too late in a child’s life. We can start at any point, but, to take the example of universities, I am very aware of what happens there in the way of pastoral care and financial support for young people from deprived backgrounds. In addition, there is the Aimhigher campaign to encourage more people from disadvantaged backgrounds to go to university. Work is done in sixth forms to encourage applications, and in schools at key stages 3 and 4 to encourage staying on into the sixth form. In year 6 there is help with the difficult transition from primary to secondary school, and other work is done in schools and off site with those who struggle academically. Primary schools give additional support, including mentoring and one-to-one support. Nurture rooms have been created, and there has been a development of parental involvement and learning enrichment programmes in those environments. At the pre-school stage there is early years work, with Sure Start children’s centres to provide help to children.
The sad fact, however, is how little of that works. Despite all the things I have mentioned, the gap between a child from a deprived background and one from a more affluent background increases as they go through the education system—the disadvantage widens. That is incredible but true. I have secured today’s debate not because I have answers, but because it is clear from all the good work done by many organisations that none of us seems to have them.
Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on raising this important issue. Perhaps I may add a slight complication into the mix regarding the problem that he has elegantly identified: an urban-rural divide. He was careful not to characterise the problem as an urban phenomenon, and I am sure that he will agree that there is also a challenge for rural areas, where often it is difficult to measure at the base the problems of social exclusion because of the dispersal of rural households and the frequent proximity of deprived families to apparent affluence. That has an effect on educational achievement and the capacity of authorities to deliver responsive measures to the children in question.
The problem is not just urban but rural, so there are particular challenges for hon. Members who represent rural areas. However, I appreciate that as the debate covers England, the Minister cannot respond specifically to my Cardiganshire concerns.
Mr Mike Hancock (in the Chair)
Order. That intervention was very close to being a speech.
Mr Ward
Deprivation, of course, knows no geographic boundaries, and is everywhere we look. It needs to be dealt with wherever it is located.
A great deal is being done in many settings, but it is all really amelioration and compensation or, in more prosaic terms, catching up. We clearly need to focus more on the pre-school and pre-early years settings. As we know, many children are already at a disadvantage in the womb. This debate is intended to identify a problem of which many people are already aware, to show that I know a little about it and feel strongly about it, and most of all to send out a clear message that I am extremely keen to work with other organisations and politicians to address the problem.
The Minister of State, Department for Education (Sarah Teather)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward) on securing the debate. This is my first outing in Westminster Hall as a Minister, and it is pleasing that the debate was initiated by a Liberal Democrat, with a response from a Liberal Democrat and a Liberal Democrat in the Chair. I know that the hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass) wants to intervene later, but she will forgive me for momentarily making a smug Liberal Democrat point.
I thank my hon. Friend for securing the debate. He is an active campaigner on the issue, and he shares my passion for matters of social justice. I hope that his securing the debate so early is an indication of the issues that he will champion in the five years of the Parliament. He shares the ambition of the coalition Government and, indeed, that of hon. Members across the House to secure better futures for children who live in poverty. What he said about the importance of early years education was music to my ears. I am grateful to him for making those points today.
My hon. Friend argued persuasively that deprivation and fairness really matter. They matter to individuals and communities, and they matter to the success of our country. Sadly, as he said, where children live and the families who they live with are still uniquely strong predictors of how their lives will turn out. For example, statistics show that a baby born in Harlesden in my constituency of Brent Central is likely to die more than 10 years before a child born in neighbouring Kensington, which is but a short drive away. That is unacceptable. It is an outrage that those statistics should still be so relevant. That is what why I am so passionate about fighting on this matter.
Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)
I thank the Minister for giving way. In the past 10 or 15 years, organisations and national strategies have resulted in our becoming the most data-rich nation in Europe and possibly the world. Those data tell us that the attainment of our highest-achieving pupils is as good as, if not better than, that of those in Europe or the USA; we are pipped only by a specific group of countries. However, the attainment of our lowest-achieving pupils is almost an international disgrace. Over the past three or four years, Government policy has shifted towards narrowing the gap between the highest and lowest attaining pupils—between pupils living in poverty and the rest, looked-after children and their peers, and pupils with special educational needs and others.
People who, like me, have spent 25 years working at all levels with the worst-attaining pupils, disadvantaged children and children living in poverty were mentally running around the country punching the air because such children were suddenly at the forefront of Government policy. I seek a reassurance from the Minister that the spotlight of the inspection framework and considering not only raw attainment—
Mr Mike Hancock (in the Chair)
Order. We will have to shorten that intervention a bit. It is more like a speech.
Sarah Teather
I understand the point that the hon. Lady was trying to make, even if it was cut short. I reassure her that I am absolutely committed to gap-narrowing. For me, that is the point of early years education and early years provision. We may disagree about some of the ways to measure whether the gap has narrowed. We may debate the matter in more detail over the next few years, but I suspect that we share the same commitment to ensuring that the investment in early years provision narrows the gap—the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford East. I shall say a little more about that later.
My hon. Friend the Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams) makes a good point. I represent an inner-city seat, and I see the consequences of poverty writ large in my advice surgeries and in my constituency office every day. However, the problem is not confined to the cities; it is very evident also in rural areas. What he said about the dispersal of families, which makes it more challenging for local authorities and other service providers to tackle the problem, was a point well made, and I am well aware of the issue. The policies that the coalition Government have put in place will include specific mechanisms to deal with child poverty.
The uncomfortable truth is that the link between deprivation and low attainment exists across the country—not only in my constituency but everywhere. My hon. Friend the Member for Bradford East gave some statistics, but those given to me by my officials are even more stark. They suggest that children from poorer backgrounds have a smaller vocabulary at the age of three than their peers and that, by the age of four, they have heard 30 million fewer words. Whether the figure is 20 million or 30 million, the statistics are stark. Again, that is a challenge for early years provision. Low-ability children from rich families overtake high-ability children from poorer families at primary school. As my hon. Friend pointed out, the gap widens as the children grow older; children eligible for free school meals are half as likely to achieve five or more GCSEs at grade A to C, including English and maths, as those from wealthier backgrounds.
I welcome the opportunity to debate the subject and to consider some of the reforms needed to break the link between deprivation and low attainment. It goes to the heart of the coalition’s plans to build a fairer, more responsible and freer society that we should have policies to tackle the problem on all fronts. That could be done through better-focused early years provision, which I mentioned a moment ago, or through giving families more practical support or ensuring that children from poorer backgrounds get the same chance at school as their peers.
The question, therefore, is whether we consider deprivation to be an automatic barrier to success, or whether good teaching, good early years provision and good government can all play a part in helping to reduce inequality and unfairness. I passionately believe that that is a role for the Government, and we believe that those factors can bring that about. That is why we have already set about tackling deprivation, not only as an end in itself; we are also tackling the systemic weaknesses that highlight and deepen those divisions as children go through life.
For example, we are committed to hitting the 2020 child poverty target already laid out in legislation. We also plan a review of poverty and life chances, which will be chaired by Frank Field. We have set out a school reform programme. Most critically, we have announced the pupil premium. Finally, of course, we have decided to recruit more health visitors for Sure Start children’s centres to help the most disadvantaged families.
Mr Mark Williams
I applaud that list of measures. I was in the teaching profession in a previous life. What greatly impressed me was the need in areas of deprivation for real measures to encourage parental participation in the education system. I was involved in a pilot scheme to improve numeracy among parents. We need to get that partnership right. I hope that the measures that the Minister listed will include a strong role for parents. The old adage was that teachers have children for six hours a day but that they are at home for the remaining 18. It is most important that we get official recognition of that and encourage parents as well as the children.
Sarah Teather
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. The Secretary of State for Education will consider that as part of schools’ wider role, but it is not only for schools. Sure Start centres also have a role in encouraging parents to be involved with their children. There are also the informal and more formal literacy schemes that have been mentioned.
The list that I gave is a broad package of reform designed to break the link between deprivation and low attainment on all fronts. The danger is that we could be fatalistic about it, but I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford East that the first few months and years of a child’s life are critical. However, we must remember that deprivation is not all that matters. We can improve the lives of children and young people at every point in their development. For me, it goes to the heart of our liberal philosophy that we must always give people second chances—there must be no closed doors—throughout the education system.
My hon. Friend raised various issues when opening the debate. In particular, I wish to speak about the Government’s strategy on child poverty. Reducing poverty must be a fundamental part of our strategy to increase social mobility. The coalition Government are clear about the need to create that fairer society. To that end, I am delighted that we have committed ourselves to eradicating child poverty by 2020. I look forward for working with Ministers across the Government on how to achieve that goal. My hon. Friend will be aware that Liberal Democrat plans for a pupil premium have been adopted by the coalition. It is a critical element of our reform plans. I believe that schools have a pivotal role in breaking the link between deprivation and low attainment.
My hon. Friend will know that we are keen to ensure that Sure Start children centres focus more on working with families from deprived backgrounds—those from the neediest families. Children’s centres have much to offer all families from all backgrounds, but we must ensure that they are better at reaching out to those families who are most in need. For example, more than 95% of families currently take up their free entitlement offer for child care, but a disproportionate number of more disadvantaged families still do not. Sure Start has an important role to play in encouraging families to take up that offer and in promoting fairness. To a certain extent, that is already happening in many of the good Sure Start centres. We have some tremendously talented, dedicated early years professionals, both in the work force and in outreach teams, who are committed to reducing social injustice, and we have many good examples to show how we can achieve that. However, the Government can do much more to ensure that best practice is spread across the country.
Health visitors have a crucial role to play in reaching out to vulnerable families. They are there from pregnancy right through to the first few years of a child’s life, so, as my hon. Friend said, they cover the earliest days of a child’s life. That is why we are committed to increase dramatically the number of Sure Start health visitors and to ensure that more vulnerable families access such services. As a Government, it is our responsibility to help every child, whatever their background or circumstances, to achieve their full potential. If we trust professionals to do their jobs and free them from the top-down bureaucracy of recent years, we can achieve that. Most importantly, we believe that the coalition should take action to support the disadvantaged and that such support—whether through free child care, the pupil premium or early intervention—is crucial to unlocking social mobility and overcoming low attainment.
Strong learning and development in the early years can have a huge impact on reducing the causal link between deprivation and low attainment. It lays the foundation for achievement at and after school, with 94% of children who achieve a good level of development at age five going on to achieve the expected levels for reading at key stage 1. Those children are then five times more likely to achieve the highest level.
The most recent evidence from neuroscience also highlights the importance of the first three years of a child’s life. At birth, a baby’s brain is only 25% formed, developing to 80% by the age three, with most growth taking place in the first year of life. A strong start in the early years has been found to increase the probability of positive outcomes across the child’s life; a weak foundation has been found to significantly increase the risk of later difficulties. In short, the first 36 months of a child’s life are as important, if not more so, than the next 36 years, so good, properly targeted early years provision can do a huge amount to mitigate the impacts of deprivation.
It is also worth mentioning that we are looking at the wider impact of deprivation and not just at the income measures themselves. Frank Field has been tasked by the Prime Minister to lead a review of poverty. We also have a new ministerial taskforce on childhood and families, which is being chaired by the Prime Minister and includes the Deputy Prime Minister. Its role will be to tackle what the Deputy Prime Minister has described as
“the everyday bottlenecks that frustrate family life”.
There will be further announcements on the programme of the new ministerial taskforce and how it will operate. It will certainly consider some broad areas that are very relevant to a child’s life chances: parental leave and flexible working; how we can protect children in the event of family breakdown; increasing access to safe and secure play space; and helping children to avoid pressures that force them to grow up too quickly. We expect that work to conclude in the autumn and follow a timetable similar to that of the spending review. I certainly expect it to address some of the points about poverty and attainment that my hon. Friend raised at the start of his remarks.
I should like to return to the role of schools. My hon. Friend spoke specifically about early years, rather than schools. He argued very passionately that it is early years intervention that makes such a difference. However, that is not enough; we have to ensure that we give children, at whatever stage, the best possible chance to succeed. Schools are part of that critical mix in breaking the link between poverty and low attainment.
The ethical imperative of our education policy is quite simple: we have to make opportunity more equal. We must overcome deep, historically entrenched factors that keep so many people in poverty and that deprive so many people of the chance to shape their own destiny. By 18, the gap is vast. In the most recent year for which we have data, out of 80,000 young people eligible for free school meals, just 45 made it to Oxbridge. As a nation, we are clearly still wasting talent on a scandalous scale, and that is why I am so glad that at the heart of our coalition’s programme for government is a commitment to spending more on the education of the poorest. That specifically picks up on one of the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Ceredigion raised about the difficulties that rural communities face. A rural area may not be classed as deprived, so families from the poorest backgrounds do not get the extra help that they need. One of the advantages of the pupil premium policy is that the money follows the child, so the child’s school will get money to ensure that extra help is focused on raising attainment at every level.
Mr Ward
I thank the hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass) for her interventions. I have already googled you and seen that you have made solid contributions to the subject over many years. Indeed, you have contributed to education, which I was not aware of before. I am not criticising anybody in this debate, because I am aware of the tremendous efforts that are being made by professionals and volunteers to raise the life chances of young people. As the chair of governors of a school in a deprived community, I am really frustrated by the fact that although we have an extremely impressive value added score—our achievement is high—our attainment is very low because of the level at which the children come into the school. However much we do, and we try to do more and more, we continually face the problem of children coming into the school with low attainment.
Mr Mike Hancock (in the Chair)
Order. That was very close to another speech. Let me remind Members that when addressing other colleagues in the Chamber, we do not use the word “you”; we use their constituency title. I am not being pernickety; that is the custom of the House. Moreover, when a Member refers to someone who is still a Member, they should do so not by their name, but by their constituency.
Sarah Teather
Thank you, Mr Hancock. You are absolutely correct, and I am sorry for forgetting to refer to the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) by his constituency title.
I understand my hon. Friend’s point, but it is the Government’s responsibility to narrow the gap. We must focus our efforts on that to ensure that young people from a poorer background have a better chance of fulfilling their potential as they come into school. That is the point, I think, that the hon. Member for North West Durham was making in her intervention a few minutes ago. However, it is not adequate to say that because a child comes from a poorer background and has had a difficult start in life, a school should not put in that extra effort. That is the point about pupil premium and about ensuring that schools are clear about raising aspiration. That is why my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is clear about why he wants to give schools more autonomy. He wants them to have more flexibility on the curriculum, so that they can focus on the particular needs of children. We must ensure that we have high-quality teachers, and that teachers are absolutely clear that we have high aspirations for all children going through school regardless of their background. I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford East will be reassured by the Secretary of State’s proposals for the next six months, as we look towards a second Bill later in the year.
In conclusion, a mix of reform is needed to break the link between deprivation and low attainment. The reforms that we have instituted go far deeper than ever before and are uniquely ambitious. There is no point being in politics, fighting elections or seeking office unless one is ambitious to make a difference. It is only through a new approach to breaking the link between deprivation and low attainment that we can build a fairer society and ensure that all children have the opportunities and capabilities to flourish.
North Wales Economy
(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)
This afternoon, I hope to illustrate the progress that has been made under 13 years of a Labour Government in the economy of north Wales, how fragile that economy is, and how threatened it is by current proposals and possible future proposals from the Con-Dem coalition. I hope to look at the reasons for the success of our local economy and examine the threats from the coalition. I will be seeking specific assurances from the Minister on a number of specific points of the current Con-Dem policy.
The history of north Wales shows that in the last 40 or 50 years we have relied on tourism, heavy industry and agriculture, all three of which have taken a pounding. At Courtaulds in Flint, in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), there were 3,000 job losses and at Shotton in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami), there were 7,000 job losses in 1981 under the Conservative Government. That Conservative Government decimated—dare I say annihilated?—heavy industry in north Wales. Shotton steelworks had the biggest industrial lay-off in a single day: 7,000 workers were laid off in one day. That was the Tory legacy.
Labour believes in timely and positive Government intervention in key industries. When we look at the success of north-east Wales, we see that the last Labour Government gave launch aid back in 1998 to Airbus— £500 million of launch aid. From the ashes of Shotton steelworks rose the Airbus factory, the most expansive factory in western Europe, which has 7,000 workers and 700 apprentices.
Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the key issues that we must address is ensuring that future work comes to the Airbus factory and that one of the key elements in that regard was the signing by my right hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North East (Mr Ainsworth), when he was Secretary of State for Defence, of the contract for 22 aeroplanes under the A400M project, which the current Government have not yet confirmed? Will my hon. Friend seek today an assurance from the current Government that they will confirm that order for 22 planes?
Chris Ruane
I back my right hon. Friend on that issue. I give credit to the Government—I do not want to be too negative, lest anyone think that I am—for the decision that has been made about the AirTanker. People in north Wales are grateful for that decision. However, the A400M project needs to be looked at very carefully for the good of Britain’s defence and of workers in north Wales.
The Con-Dem Government have said that they do not believe in big Government intervention in industry, as they have shown by withdrawing the loan to Sheffield Forgemasters steelworks. We do not want that situation repeated in Wales.
Albert Owen (Ynys Môn) (Lab)
The decision on Sheffield Forgemasters may have an impact on nuclear development and indeed on wind development in north Wales, because the casting for those projects would be done in the UK. It is essential for the supply chain of the whole of the United Kingdom, and in particular of north Wales, that those projects go ahead.
Mr Mike Hancock (in the Chair)
Order. That intervention is stretching a debate on Wales quite considerably.
Chris Ruane
Nevertheless, I back my hon. Friend on that issue. The vision of an “energy island”—the term he created—that he wants for his constituency depends on Sheffield Forgemasters making those critical engineering components for the nuclear plant.
Under Labour, we have seen a massive investment in higher and further education. North Wales has a new university in Wrexham, Glyndwr university, which is acquiring top-class research facilities, such as the OpTIC—Opto-electronics Technology and Incubation Centre—research facility in my constituency. It is forging links with the private sector; it is doing everything that a 21st century university should do.
It is not only the HE sector that is important; FE in north Wales has made great gains. In my constituency, we have colleges in Denbigh and Rhyl and for the first time in their history there are colleges in Abergele and Llanrwst. They are community colleges, rooted in their local communities and responding to the needs of those communities for skills. Those colleges are delivering. Rhyl college is an award-winning institution. Llandrillo college has 25,000 students and is one of the best run colleges in the whole country.
However, the first act of the Con-Dem Government when they came in was to reduce the number of university places by 10,000, with more reductions likely in the autumn. How will the FE and HE sectors in north Wales, indeed in the whole of the UK, cope with cuts in funding of between 25% and 30%? How will we maintain the momentum in north Wales that I have described if those cuts are made? Will the Minister guarantee that the Government will make an analysis of the economic impact on local and national economies of those cuts before they are made? A cut of £1 in the FE or HE sectors may seem sensible, but it could lead to further cuts of £2, £3 or £4 if it means a reduction in training and research.
North Wales has a big agricultural industry. The Tories have promised an attack on red tape and bureaucracy. Before they make that attack, may I ask them to learn the lessons of history for the agricultural sector—the lessons of their last period in government? During that period, there was Alar in the apple industry, anthrax in the pig industry, botulism in the food processing industry, listeria in the dairy industry, salmonella in the poultry industry and E. coli in the meat industry, and who can forget that there was BSE in the beef industry? Many of those diseases came about because of a reduction in food and safety standards in specific industries. Will the Minister guarantee that there will be no assault on standards in the agricultural and food processing industries, which would damage the economy of north Wales?
I turn now to an issue that I hope is dear to the Minister’s heart—seaside towns. The second and third biggest towns in north Wales are Rhyl and Colwyn Bay, traditional seaside towns that have suffered the same plight as many British seaside towns during a long, 40-year, period. The cause of the poverty in towns such as Rhyl and Colwyn Bay is the conversion of hundreds of former hotels and guest houses into houses in multiple occupation. Slum landlords have become millionaires by making money out of misery. The Tories refused to introduce mandatory licensing of those premises. Labour introduced it in 2004 and north Wales councils are only now fully implementing it. I believe that the Con-Dems are reviewing the HMO licensing scheme. Will the Minister guarantee that HMO licensing legislation will not be watered down?
Colwyn Bay and Rhyl, along with Prestatyn and other north Wales coastal towns, have benefited from co-operation between the national central Government and the Labour-led Welsh Assembly Government. In the whole UK, the WAG are leading the way on seaside regeneration by adopting a strategic and thematic approach, not in just one seaside town but in five or six seaside towns along the north Wales coast, stretching from Prestatyn to Colwyn Bay. Welsh colleges, the local authorities, the Department for Work and Pensions, voluntary organisations, the private sector and the public sector are all playing their part in that regeneration. Will the Minister guarantee that he will positively engage with the WAG on seaside town and town centre regeneration?
It is not only seaside towns that need regenerating. When the Labour Government came to power in 1997, they told the national lottery to stop giving money to the Churchill family—£12 million for the Churchill diaries—and to the playing fields of Eton, which had received £5 million. They told the national lottery to vire such heritage money to towns that had architectural merit and deprivation, so towns in north Wales, such as Holywell, Rhyl, Denbigh, Llanrwst and, I think, Holyhead, have benefited because of those instructions.
Chris Ruane
Dolgellau is another one; I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention.
So we have done well. In my constituency, Denbigh received £10 million of funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund under Labour. Will the Minister guarantee that limited lottery funding will be vired towards the areas with most need?
The key to the success of seaside towns and other towns is the back to work initiative, including programmes such as the city strategy, the future jobs fund and fit for work. We have only two city strategies in Wales. One is for Rhyl—Gareth Matthews from what was then Working Links and I got it for the town in 2007—and the other is for the heads of the valleys area. I think the town of Rhyl has the best practice in the whole UK. Rhyl is leading the way. Its town-based, small area, co-operative, collegiate approach across the private, public and voluntary sectors resulted in an almost 20% drop in the number of people claiming jobseeker’s allowance in the Vale of Clwyd between January and May 2010. The number fell from 2,242 to 1,836. That is 406 people back to work in my constituency in the past five months, the best result in north Wales.
The future jobs fund played an important part in those results. The Rhyl city strategy hopes to put 340 young people back in work by September this year; 190 are already back in work. The strategy has achieved 100% of its targets to date. Young people have been given a wage, training and a reason to get up in the morning. Their confidence has been restored, their CVs enhanced and their job prospects maximised, but all that is under threat. One of the first acts of the Con-Dem coalition was to axe the future jobs fund.
Mr Llwyd
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this important debate. I appreciate fully what he is saying about the back to work initiative. Is it not strange that the Government want to cut back on social welfare payments and, at the same time, on back to work initiatives? Where are we going in terms of social justice?
Chris Ruane
It is déjà vu all over again. It is back to the future—back to the 1980s, when whole communities were parked by the Conservative Government, who said, “Stay on the dole. Bring your kids up on the dole, and your grandkids as well.” We are only just beginning to unwind 18 years of misrule under the last Tory Government.
We have the facts and figures to prove that the policies we have pursued are working in north Wales. More than 2,000 people went back to work between January and May this year. Our policies are working. We want a continuation of the future jobs fund. The cuts were implemented without even an assessment of whether the programme was successful. Will the Minister guarantee that he will monitor youth employment in north Wales over the next 18 months and that if it starts to rise, he will press for the reintroduction of the future jobs fund? What assessment has he personally made of the effectiveness of the future jobs fund, which has put young people in his constituency back to work?
The previous Tory Administration were riven with factionalism over Europe. We all know what the Tory Prime Minister, John Major, called certain troublesome MPs, so I will not repeat it. Was internal conflict in the Tory party the reason why the Tories failed to engage positively with Europe during the 1980s and 1990s? When they were closing the pits and the steelworks and letting seaside towns rot, they did not even bid for objective 1 funding for Wales. In 1997, when the Labour Government came in, they applied for objective 1 funding, provided match funding and implemented the scheme. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Neath (Mr Hain). At the behest of the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd), Betty Williams, Gareth Thomas and me, he included Denbighshire and Conwy in the scheme. As a result of that brave decision, which was taken against civil servants’ advice, Denbighshire county council received £124 million in public and private objective 1 funding over a seven-year period. I presume that Conwy received the same.
We have made being in Europe a success for Wales. Labour provided the match funding. Will the Minister assure me and the people of north Wales that during the Con-Dem cutbacks, match funding and convergence funding—the follow-on funding for objective 1—will not be cut back and will be included in the Welsh block? It makes economic sense. For every £1 given by the UK Government, we can draw down £2 or £3 from Europe. North Wales cannot afford cutbacks on that scale.
Will the Minister inform the House why the Tories did not bid for objective 1 funding for parts of Wales earlier, when they closed Shotton steelworks and the pits? Ireland did so and turned its economy into the Celtic tiger. Could Wales have done so in the early ’90s? Will he guarantee that blind prejudice towards Europe will not interfere with negotiations on the next phase of EU funding—tail-off funding, which should come at the end of convergence funding?
Energy, particularly renewable energy, has been a success for Labour in north Wales. Sharp has located its biggest solar panel factory in Europe in Wrexham. The biggest solar panel in the UK is at the Technium OpTIC in my constituency. The Technium OpTIC has just pioneered photovoltaic paint and is working on fission power. We will have the largest array of offshore wind turbines in the world when the Gwynt y Môr wind farm is completed, despite the fact that the leader of the Conservative party has referred to north Wales turbines as “giant bird blenders”. Will the Minister guarantee to give up his personal opposition to the Gwynt y Môr wind farm and promote wind energy in Wales?
Non-renewable as well as renewable energy companies operate in Wales, including BHP Billiton, which is based in Northop, in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn. We also have E.ON, which has a gas-powered power station in Connah’s Quay. North Wales has so much energy that we shall be exporting it.
Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)
My hon. Friend mentioned that the previous Conservative Government did not claim objective 1 funding. Does he not find it surprising that a former Conservative Secretary of State for Wales, the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood), returned to Whitehall money that was due to the people of Wales? Many businesses in north Wales, especially in our villages and small towns, are small businesses. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government’s changes to VAT will have a devastating effect on such businesses?
Chris Ruane
I concur on both points. The right hon. Member for Wokingham returned £120 million to Whitehall while Welsh schools were closing and services were being cut, and the impact of the VAT rise on spending power in the high street will have a devastating effect.
North Wales will be exporting power through the Irish interconnector, from Connah’s Quay power station through Prestatyn in my constituency and over to Ireland. The project is being paid for by Eirgrid.
I highlight the good work of my hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen), who coined the phrase “energy island”. It is not just a phrase; it could become a reality, if the Con-Dem Government do not renege on Labour’s decision to let the replacement of Wylfa proceed. Will the Minister guarantee that his party and his Government will not do a U-turn on the new nuclear plant for Anglesey?
Albert Owen
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for mentioning the energy island concept. North Wales can be a centre of excellence for both aviation and low-carbon energy for the future, building a skills base of transferable, high-level skills, which is what the Government aim to do. With respect to the Minister—I know that he has been supportive of nuclear power in north-west Wales, and I hope that will continue—a centre of excellence for highly skilled jobs is what we are all aiming for.
Mr Mike Hancock (in the Chair)
Order. Mr Ruane, I point out that a number of issues have been raised. If you are to give the Minister sufficient time to answer them, you will have to start looking at the clock.
Chris Ruane
Thank you, Mr Hancock. In conclusion, north Wales has an excellent story to tell. The fastest growing local economy in the country is the Deeside hub between Deeside, Wrexham and Chester. We have some of the biggest increases in employment; five of the top six constituencies in Wales for increasing employment are in north Wales. We have a proud tale to tell. I do not want the progress that we have made in the past 13 years to be undone by a Con-Dem coalition demolition job on the Welsh economy.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Wales (Mr David Jones)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) on securing the debate, which is, of course, dear to my heart because I am the Member of Parliament for the constituency immediately adjacent to his. There can be no doubt that the recession has hit north Wales as hard as many other parts of the country, if not harder. In fact, over recent months, there have been significant job losses right across the region—134 jobs lost at David McLean, more than 50 jobs lost at JCB, 130 jobs lost at PT Construction on Deeside and, most significantly, major job losses at Air Products in Wrexham, Anglesey Aluminium and the Indesit factory in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency. The Indesit factory was, in fact, a major employer for my constituency, where more than 300 jobs were lost.
Although the hon. Gentleman paints a rosy picture of employment and industry in north Wales under the Labour Government, it is not quite so rosy. Indeed, without wanting to put too fine a point on it, over the past 10 years, the claimant count in his constituency has increased by 40%, long-term unemployment has increased by 16%, the youth claimant count has increased by 63% and long-term youth unemployment has increased by 71%. Although one does not want simply to trade statistics, as I say, the rosy picture that he painted in his opening remarks is, unfortunately, not borne out by recent developments in north Wales.
Mr Jones
Given that the hon. Gentleman has already taken 19 minutes for his opening comments, I feel that I have to make some progress. He mentioned a number of important points that will be of concern to all hon. Members who represent constituencies in north Wales and, because he raised those specific points, I would like to comment on as many of them as I can in the time remaining.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned the A400M project, which is of significant importance to north Wales. Indeed, the Airbus factory should be regarded as the jewel in the crown of industry in not only north Wales, but the whole of the United Kingdom, because it provides high-quality, high-tech jobs that must be the way for the future. The A400M is, of course, actually developed in Filton, as the hon. Gentleman will know. However, the wing technology that is being developed at Filton is shared at Broughton. The Wales Office is certainly very supportive of the A400M project, but having said that, as the hon. Gentleman knows, a strategic defence review is under way and, of course, all announcements must wait on its outcome. I gently inform him that the Labour Government did not progress the A400M project or commit themselves to it.
Mr Jones
Yes, but as the right hon. Gentleman knows, a number of projects were signed up to—including the Sheffield Forgemasters project—very late in the day during the election period for a reason that is patently obvious to even the most charitable observer.
The hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd mentioned Glyndwr university and Technium OpTIC. I endorse his commendation for OpTIC. In fact, the first official visit that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I paid to north Wales after our respective appointments was to Technium OpTIC. I particularly commend Professor Mike Scott, the vice-chancellor of Glyndwr, for forging ahead with OpTIC and, as the hon. Gentleman has pointed out, ensuring that the university forges strong links with the private sector. Such an approach is certainly the way forward.
We also heard about Landrillo college. Again, I can do nothing but commend Landrillo, which is, in fact, headquartered in my constituency. I pay tribute to Huw Evans, the principal of Landrillo college, for forging links with the private sector.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned agriculture. I think it is fair to say that over the years, the Conservative party has shown nothing but support for the agricultural sector and it will continue to do so.
The hon. Gentleman also mentioned seaside towns—an issue of personal interest to me. Colwyn Bay is an important town that has declined over recent years. It is, in fact, currently in receipt of strategic regional assistance moneys from Europe via the Welsh Assembly Government. I echo what he said about houses in multiple occupation, which have been a scourge of seaside towns—Rhyl in his constituency and Colwyn Bay in mine alone. However, I must gently criticise the Welsh Assembly Government’s policy of attracting people into north Wales who have no connection with the area because doing so has ensured that incomers can leapfrog indigenous north Waleseans. That has caused a great deal of concern to councillors in my constituency and, I am sure, in the constituency of the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd).
The hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd mentioned the Heritage Lottery Fund. I remind him that the lottery was a Conservative innovation. He has already mentioned John Major. If I remember rightly, the lottery was John Major’s pet project. I am glad to say that the coalition Government intend to review the operation of the lottery to ensure that it reverts to its original aims of supporting good causes. We want to ensure that it is not rifled by Government as a support to taxation.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned the Rhyl city strategy and the future jobs fund, which he regards as important. We have to make a decision in this country: whether we create real jobs, with some prospects of creating real wealth, or whether we subsidise jobs that are guaranteed only for six months. Doing the latter does not create real wealth and runs the risk of returning the young people on those programmes to the dole. The focus of the Government should be on creating real wealth. That is the nub of the difference between the Labour Government and the coalition Government. The previous Government were happy to fritter away this country’s resources through borrowing to mortgage our children’s and our grandchildren’s future, without tackling the root causes of the problem that the economy faces, which is essentially the enormous deficit that this country is running. The enormous structural deficit and debt run the risk of strangling each and every one of those young people before they get a job at all.
This Government intend to focus on reducing the deficit, on restoring real jobs to the economy, and on ensuring as far as possible that those who are able to work can do so. That is why I commend the work programme that was announced today by the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, my right hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), which was criticised by the hon. Gentleman. This Government are not afraid to face the real decisions that we need to take to put the country back on the right track. We may receive criticism from the hon. Gentleman, but we have received the support of the OECD, the G8, the Governor of the Bank of England and any number of chief executives he may care to mention. The future of this country is real, genuine, honest employment.
Mr Jones
If the hon. Gentleman would like to listen, he might actually be pleased with what I am about to say. I commend him for his advancement of the energy island concept. He understands that only real jobs will rescue Anglesey, and I commend him for it. I repeat my previous support for Wylfa nuclear power station. I hope that it gets built, and but for the fact that the Labour Government effectively had no energy policy for 10 years, Wylfa would now be well on the way to being built. We have had 13 wasted years of Labour, during which time we ate the seed corn for future generations. It is time to get Britain back to work; it is time to get Britain moving again. I believe that the coalition Government will do just that.
Western Balkans
(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Sir John Stanley (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)
I spent most of last week in Kosovo and in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a member of the Defence and Security Committee of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, alongside members of the Assembly’s Committee on the Civil Dimension of Security. I am pleased that, through whatever mysterious processes apply in this place, I have been given an early opportunity to share my thoughts and concerns with hon. Members.
There is perhaps a widespread temptation to believe that just because no significant violence is taking place in the western Balkans, the problems in the region have been solved, but that would be a serious illusion, particularly in relation to Kosovo and to Bosnia and Herzegovina, on which I will focus my remarks. With regard to the most difficult problems in those two countries, I say straight away to the Minister that the hardest nuts definitely still have to be cracked.
I will start with Kosovo. I want to refer to one or two security matters and then move on to the main unresolved political problems facing that country. As we know, the entire justification for NATO’s original involvement was, of course, based on security. We remember vividly the appalling violence that took place, which was mainly committed by Kosovo Serbs, and the spectacle of hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians trapped in the mud on the Macedonian border. Since the conflict was finally brought to a close, NATO’s role there has been based on the security contribution that it can make. There are three questions that I want to ask the Minster against that background. They all relate to my basic proposition that having expended so much effort, time and money, and the lives of NATO service personnel, it would be a serious dereliction of duty if we underestimated or wound down prematurely our security presence through KFOR—the Kosovo peace implementation force—in Kosovo.
The plan is to reduce the KFOR presence from the present 9,500 service personnel to 2,000, or perhaps fewer, so my first question is this: will that be too severe a reduction in too short a time scale? We have reinforcements in the shape of three over-the-horizon battalions, but those are available on seven to 14 days’ notice, so my second question is this: is that period appropriate to ensure that if the worst starts to happen in Kosovo, reinforcements will arrive in time? My third question relates to information that I obtained in what was, I stress, an unclassified briefing. KFOR has been denied a particular intelligence capability as a result of NATO budget cuts. I shall refer to that in more detail when I speak to the Minister in private after the debate, but the question that I want to put on record is this: will that cut, which is motivated by financial concerns, expose KFOR to an unacceptable level of operational risk?
I will now address the critical political problems in Kosovo that remain unresolved. In my view, the foremost concern is Serbia’s policy towards Kosovo. I have been visiting the former Republic of Yugoslavia, now Serbia, for more than 30 years—since President Tito was in power. I am under no illusion whatsoever about the importance of Kosovo in historical, cultural and religious terms to the Serb people, but I must state clearly that, notwithstanding that background, it cannot be right for the Government in Belgrade to continue to support, establish and finance parallel political structures inside Kosovo, including the funding of local elections, which is creating an extraordinary position in which there are two mayors in some of the Serb enclaves, with one elected under the aegis of Belgrade and the other elected under the aegis of Pristina. The international community must make it clear to the Government in Belgrade that a continuing policy that subverts the elected Government in Kosovo is incompatible with progress towards EU and NATO membership, which Serbia wishes to achieve.
The second major concern relates to the process of international recognition that Kosovo has achieved and hopes to achieve in future. The progress thus far has been somewhat disappointing. Only 69 countries recognise Kosovo as an independent nation state, and that does not even include all 27 EU member states, as five do not recognise its independence. Those 69 countries represent just over one third of the members of the United Nations General Assembly. The hope is that, following the International Court of Justice’s judgment on Kosovo’s independence, which is expected shortly, there will be a breakthrough beyond the 69 figure. The key figure that needs to be broken is 100, because anything above that would mean that more than 50% of members of the General Assembly recognise Kosovo as an independent sovereign state. I hope that the Minister will be able to assure us that the British Government will do all that they can following the Court’s judgment, with many other countries, to ensure that the recognition of Kosovo passes beyond the figure of 100 so that majority support in the General Assembly is achieved.
My final key point, which is ultimately the most important one, is that the unhappy and unacceptable reality is still that north of the Ibar river, particularly in north Mitrovica, we effectively have a state within a state. It is an area under Kosovo Serb control where the writ of the Pristina Government does not run and where there is a wholly unacceptable degree of lawlessness—indeed, there is no effective rule of law to speak of. The European rule of law mission in Kosovo, EULEX, has thus far been a serious disappointment. It has an incredible number of personnel in the country—around 3,000—but has signally failed to establish an effective criminal justice system in north Mitrovica and the northern Serbian enclaves.
The situation in the court in Mitrovica is disgraceful and truly shameful as far as the international community is concerned. There is a backlog of 30,000 cases, and sadly EULEX has caved in to Serbian demands, including from Belgrade, that no local judges or prosecutors should perform in the court house in Mitrovica. As long as that situation continues, we are effectively dealing with a fragmented state, so I urge the British Government, with their international partners, to do much more to ensure that the rule of law is re-established north of the Ibar river. Only then will we end the current situation which, in my view, is almost akin to that in Cyprus. In theory there is a single integrated state, but a significant territory is outside the jurisdiction and rule of law of the elected Government.
The situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina is perhaps even more fragile and potentially more dangerous than that in Kosovo. The Dayton constitution was a huge success in so far as it enabled the appalling internecine fighting and bloodshed to stop. The fundamental problem, however, is that while the constitution, which is built on layer upon layer of blocking mechanisms protecting the sectional interests of the three major ethnic groups, was successful in bringing about an end to conflict, it is effectively unusable as a serious decision-making mechanism to deal with either NATO or EU membership.
Nothing illustrates that more than the issue of property, especially defence properties. NATO Foreign Ministers took an excellent decision at their meeting in Tallinn in April to offer Bosnia and Herzegovina the entry point for eventual NATO membership. They offered it membership action plan status subject to conditions, one of which is that it resolves the issue of ownership of defence properties. There are just 69 properties held by the entities—in other words, by the federation and Republika Srpska—the ownership of which should be transferred to the state. So far, it is wholly unagreed and there is total logjam, which poses the question: if the ethnic groups inside Bosnia and Herzegovina cannot agree the relatively simple and straightforward issue of the transfer of 69 defence properties from the entities to the state, what can they agree on in terms of imperative constitutional reform?
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, we have a stalemate, but it is worse than that—it is a stalemate over which is suspended a sword of Damocles. The sword is the powers that Republika Srpska has taken to hold referendums, and the threat is that those powers will trigger a referendum on secession. If that happens, and the referendum is carried and Republika Srpska secedes from the rest of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnia and Herzegovina in its present form will collapse with unknown and unquantifiable consequences, not only in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but elsewhere in the western Balkans. What can be done in this situation?
I do not believe that a new vista will open up after the forthcoming local elections in the autumn. That idea was put to us, but it is a complete illusion. Nor do I believe that it is realistic or reasonable to expect the current High Representative to use the Bonn powers as Lord Ashdown did when he was High Representative—that era is over. Two critically important policy steps need to be taken that would resolve the crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina. As in Kosovo, the Government in Belgrade need to change their policy fundamentally. As long as Republika Srpska believes that, at the end of the day, Belgrade will finance, back and support it, it can go on being wholly negative towards constitutional change.
Most important of all is this: ultimately, the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina must own their constitution and vote for the constitutional changes necessary to give them an effective decision-taking Government. We need to bring about a seismic change of attitude among the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Some might say that that is impossible; I most certainly do not. It is not impossible because the Serbs in Serbia, as shown in the previous major elections, have already achieved that seismic change in attitude. They voted largely to put the past behind them and look forward to EU and NATO membership. If Serbia can achieve that seismic change of attitude, surely it is possible for Republika Srpska as well. It will also require a major change by the international community, which will need to adopt a quite different policy from that adopted so far. It will need to offer much more carrot than stick, to offer incentives to get support for NATO and EU membership, and to bring more imagination, determination, skill and sensitivity to the negotiating process. I believe that that is the way forward, and it is the only way forward if Bosnia and Herzegovina is going to remain integrated, stable and, above all, at peace.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr Henry Bellingham)
I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir John Stanley) on securing the debate and commend him on his persuasiveness for the case that he put to the Speaker’s Office to secure the allocation of the debate so soon after his visit to the region.
I assure my right hon. Friend that the new Government attach great importance to developments in the western Balkans and to the promotion of stability in the region. My colleagues in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office have already taken a great interest in the region. The Foreign Secretary visited Sarajevo for a western Balkans high-level meeting on 2 June—one of his first overseas engagements—and the Minister for Europe visited Macedonia and Kosovo last week.
My right hon. Friend raised important questions, particularly about Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina. He talked about some of the problems that those countries face as being the hardest nuts to crack. I am grateful to him for the examples that he gave and for his advice. I shall address those points in a moment, but I should like to make some more general points first.
The Government have made it clear that we see the enlargement of the EU as a vital strategic goal. It will create stability, security and prosperity across Europe based on the firm foundation of democracy, the rule of law and shared values. We see EU membership as an unparalleled opportunity for the countries of the western Balkans to move on from the conflicts of the past, many of which my right hon. Friend vividly touched upon. The new coalition Government fully and strongly support EU and Euro-Atlantic integration for all the countries of that vital region.
This is a two-way process. Of course the international community needs to play its part by sharpening its focus on the western Balkans, and I agree entirely with my right hon. Friend when he says that the west must raise its level of involvement and pursue a clear, determined, firm and active approach that is focused on delivering results. We need carefully to uphold the rigorous conditionality inherent in the EU accession process to drive many of the important reforms on which he touched. However, the countries must also play their part. They need to demonstrate serious political leadership in meeting the criteria set by the EU. Obviously, that will not always be easy: compromise and flexibility will be required. They will have to take steps that may prove unpopular at home, and they must also resolve outstanding bilateral differences that, if not tackled, risk becoming serious obstacles to one another’s progress.
Turning to the two countries that my right hon. Friend touched on, I shall first deal with Kosovo. He mentioned the fact that the size of KFOR will be reduced from 9,500 personnel to 2,000 or fewer. He rightly raised the point that the over-the-horizon battalions are on 17 to 14 days’ notice, I believe he said, and he asked whether reinforcements would arrive in time. I shall refer that important question to my colleague at the Ministry of Defence, the Minister for the Armed Forces, to try to get a firm answer for him.
My right hon. Friend also asked about the withdrawal of important intelligence capability, which I understand was done, as he said, on financial grounds. He suggested that it may well put the whole operation at risk, and I share his concerns. It is obviously something that we ought to look at as a matter of urgency. Again, I shall come back to him on that point, and I should like to accept his invitation to have a private chat about it after the debate.
My right hon. Friend mentioned the process of the international recognition of Kosovo. He put very well his vivid recollections of some of the wretched and sad events that afflicted this troubled area and also mentioned NATO sacrifices. I agree that that in itself is a good reason to ensure that movement is made to resolve the problems and, above all, to ensure that Kosovo receives international recognition.
My right hon. Friend said that only 69 countries currently recognise Kosovo, and that five EU countries are non-recognisers. I saw those figures when I was being briefed for this debate and found them surprising. That is certainly one of the things that the coalition will look at. The Foreign Secretary spoke about intensifying bilateral relations with several key European partners and other countries, and we need to look at exactly that kind of issue. We need to ask those countries to explain why they do not recognise Kosovo, in line with the vast majority of other European countries.
My right hon. Friend mentioned the activities and machinations that are being controlled from Serbia, particularly the initiatives that have resulted in two mayors currently being in place, undermining each other. That was a good point. I agree entirely with what he said about the area north of the Ibar river, where there is a state within a state and all the resulting lawlessness.
We shall watch the outcome of the extremely important International Court of Justice decision and advisory opinion on Kosovo’s declaration of independence, which are coming up. Obviously, we must await what the court says, but we will look at its decision carefully and, above all, use it as a spur to reinvigorate the international campaign that is being promoted by several European countries to ensure that other countries row in behind the Kosovo independence movement and to ensure that the figure of 69 increases substantially to 100, which is very much in line with the objectives of Her Majesty’s Government. Indeed, when my hon. Friend the Minister for Europe visited Kosovo last week, he made those very points. He made it absolutely clear that Kosovo’s independence and territorial integrity are a matter of fact and irreversible, and he warned specifically against any attempt to use the occasion of the ICJ advisory opinion as a pretext for returning to a discussion of status. He underlined the Government’s full support for Kosovo’s EU perspective as part of the western Balkans region moving towards EU membership. He is very much on the case and working extremely hard.
On Bosnia and Herzegovina, I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for stressing the point about defence reform. Bosnia and Herzegovina has been invited to join NATO’s membership action plan, and NATO has made it clear that it will do so when the defence property that he referred to has been properly apportioned. That is why we urge the country’s leaders to meet the clear criteria set out by NATO in that regard.
I agree with my right hon. Friend and find it staggering that, following the Tallinn conference when Bosnia and Herzegovina made it clear that it wants to push ahead with its NATO membership, it has since dragged its feet and there has been a logjam. I share his frustration and, indeed, amazement that progress has not been made. One would have thought that the goal and what is at stake for Bosnia and Herzegovina in joining NATO would be incentive enough to ensure that the problem is sorted out. I would not have thought it beyond the wit of officials and bureaucrats to get a grip on the matter, but it does require renewed political leadership. I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend that that is exactly what that country must do.
My right hon. Friend mentioned the sword of Damocles, as he put it, and the fact that there may well be several referendums. I agree entirely that a fundamental change in policy is needed on the part of Belgrade. There needs to be a change in attitude and culture. Likewise, he mentioned that there needs to be a change in attitude in the international community—a change of approach, a revitalised approach—but I think that, above all else, what needs to be made crystal clear is that both Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina want to join the EU and that the criteria for doing so are simple. They will have to resolve their problems in a statesmanlike, constructive and coherent manner. If they do not do that, the chances of their coming into the EU will diminish substantially.
I agree, as my right hon. Friend spelt out so clearly, that in both Kosovo—he mentioned the area north of the Ibar river, where there is almost a state within a state and lawlessness prevails—and in Republika Srpska, where exactly the same thing is happening, Serbia is intervening behind the scenes. In the case of Republika Srpska, it is trying to encourage a secessionist movement that would have the effect of completely destroying Bosnia and Herzegovina. We must be absolutely aware of that and make it crystal clear to Serbia that what it is doing is not in its own interests. It is incredibly destructive, and it will simply delay the date when it will be eligible to come into the EU.
Once again, I thank my right hon. Friend for securing this debate. There may well be some points that I have not had a chance to touch on. If so, I shall write to him, and I shall certainly refer certain points to the MOD. The point about the battalions is important.
I should like to underline the importance that the Government attach to countries in the region intensifying efforts towards reconciliation and improved regional co-operation. Some positive steps have been taken in recent months: Serbia, Turkey and Bosnia and Herzegovina have sought to improve their relations through the Istanbul declaration, and the Serbian parliamentary resolution condemning the Srebrenica massacre was a welcome step towards greater reconciliation in the region. Slovenia’s and Croatia’s Brdo process is a welcome initiative to promote active co-operation across the region, and the coalition Government strongly encourage further such effort.
To conclude, the Government will continue to be actively engaged in the western Balkans. We will seek, encourage and promote effort and positive momentum to ensure that all countries in the region are put fully and irreversibly on the path to joining the EU and NATO. If they look at those goals positively and show statesmanship, that in itself will be the biggest driver of all in solving some of the problems that my right hon. Friend so eloquently touched on, and if that happens, for the first time in our lives the region will be incredibly stable and have a bright future.
Question put and agreed to.
Written Ministerial Statements
(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Child Trust Fund Regulations
(14 years, 5 months ago)
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The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Mr Mark Hoban)
The Government have today laid draft regulations before both Houses, which would reduce Government contributions into child trust funds from August 2010.
The Government announced on 24 May 2010 that they intended to reduce and then stop Government contributions to child trust funds, as part of achieving £6.2 billion of savings from Government spending in 2010-11.
These regulations would reduce Government contributions into child trust funds at birth, and stop Government contributions at age seven, due from August 2010. They would also stop disability payments into child trust funds due from 6 April 2011, but the funding allocated to make disability payments in future years will be redirected to provide additional respite breaks.
The Government will separately introduce a Bill to stop all Government contributions to child trust funds at birth due from January 2011.
Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme (EU-US Agreement)
(14 years, 5 months ago)
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The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Mr Mark Hoban)
Following the conclusion of negotiations between the EU and the US, the Council yesterday signed an agreement with the United States that will allow financial messaging data stored in EU territory to be shared with the United States Treasury Department for its terrorist finance tracking programme (TFTP). The Government have opted in to the signing of this agreement.
The TFTP has brought significant security benefits to the EU and to the UK. Leads it has generated have provided valuable contributions to a number of investigations, including: the Bali bombing in 2002, the Van Gogh terrorist-related murder in the Netherlands in 2004, the plan to attack New York’s John F. Kennedy airport in 2007, an Islamic Jihad Union plot to attack Germany, the attacks in Mumbai in 2008 and the Jakarta hotel attacks in 2009. This agreement will further increase its effectiveness by imposing a binding requirement on the US Treasury to search the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) data on request from EU member states that comply with the terms of the agreement. It also contains strict yet proportionate data protection provisions.
The Government believe that parliamentary scrutiny of European business is extremely important and regret that, on this occasion, it has not been possible to complete parliamentary scrutiny of this important decision through the appropriate mechanism, as the timetable for the adoption of the agreement was rapid and the parliamentary scrutiny committees in the House of Commons have not yet formed. However, if the UK had not opted in, it could have put the success of the whole agreement in jeopardy.
Treasury Ministers have, of course, provided a full explanatory memorandum on the document to both Houses, and will be taking this issue forward with the scrutiny committees as soon as possible.
Finance Bill 2010
(14 years, 5 months ago)
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The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (Mr David Gauke)
The Finance Bill will be published on 1 July.
Explanatory notes on the Bill will be available in the Vote Office and the Printed Paper Office and placed in the Libraries of both Houses on that day. Copies of the explanatory notes will be available on the Treasury’s website.
Local Enterprise Partnerships
(14 years, 5 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (Vince Cable)
I, together with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, would like to inform the House that today we have jointly written to local authorities and business seeking outline proposals for local enterprise partnerships.
In the coalition’s programme for government we set out that we will support the creation of local enterprise partnerships—joint local authority-business bodies brought forward by local authorities themselves to promote local economic development—to replace regional development agencies (RDAs). This letter is the first step in realising this commitment.
The rationale behind these proposals is to create a more effective economic development structure to drive growth and maintain recovery. The structures we put in place should ensure that the right conditions for growth exist throughout the country.
A copy of the letter has been placed in the House Library.
Planning Reform
(14 years, 5 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Greg Clark)
Infrastructure is vital to the health and well-being of our nation. It is the backbone of our economy and its proper maintenance and renewal is critical for growth. We need to generate power and deliver it to our homes and businesses. We need ports to import and export goods and modern transport infrastructure to sustain a dynamic and entrepreneurial economy and to improve our quality of life. Without new infrastructure networks we risk the economic recovery of the nation.
Because decisions on new major infrastructure are so important and affect so many people we will be making a number of changes to the way in which policy is established, applications are handled and decisions taken. We will include the necessary measures within primary legislation to be brought forward in the current session of Parliament.
Abolition of the Infrastructure Planning Commission
The Government want a planning system for major infrastructure which is rapid, predictable and accountable. But we do not believe it is right that decisions on major infrastructure applications be taken by an unelected quango. They should be made by Ministers. We will therefore be abolishing the unelected Infrastructure Planning Commission and reintroducing democratic accountability in line with the coalition agreement:
“We will abolish the unelected Infrastructure Planning Commission and replace it with an efficient and democratically accountable system that provides a fast-track process for major infrastructure projects.”
Our intention is therefore to establish a Major Infrastructure Planning Unit as part of the Planning Inspectorate—an existing agency of Communities and Local Government—which will retain the strengths of the streamlined processes and the experience of the Planning Inspectorate. The Government will put these changes into effect as soon as possible. In the interim, we have asked the Infrastructure Planning Commission and the Planning Inspectorate to consider now how they can work together and identify efficiency savings. Further transitional arrangements are set out below.
National Policy Statements
We are committed to openness and transparency and it follows that planning decisions should be taken within a clear policy framework, and within clear time limits, making these decisions as predictable as possible. The Government will therefore be pressing ahead with the development of national policy statements and will issue a more detailed statement on them later in the summer.
The Government also want to ensure that national policy statements, and the decisions that will be based upon them, are as robust as possible, thus minimising the risk of successful judicial review, particularly by those wishing to abuse the system. We believe therefore that the decision-making framework for major infrastructure should have the strongest possible democratic legitimacy. That is why we will be ensuring that national policy statements are ratified by Parliament. National policy statements are critically important documents and they should be subject to public consultation with appropriate local and community engagement, and both scrutinised and ratified by Parliament before designation.
Transitional arrangements
Until new legislation is in place the Infrastructure Planning Commission will continue in its present role until it is abolished. During this interim period, should an application reach decision-stage and where the relevant national policy statement has been designated, the Infrastructure Planning Commission will decide the application. If an application reaches decision stage and the relevant national policy statement has not been designated, the Infrastructure Planning Commission will make a recommendation to the Secretary of State, who will take the decision.
For those applications under active consideration by the Infrastructure Planning Commission when it is abolished, transitional provisions will enable the examination of such applications to continue without interruption, through a seamless transfer to the new Major Infrastructure Planning Unit. There is no question of applications having to restart the process and we intend that the statutory timetable for decision taking will be no longer than the current regime.
The Government want to have national policy statements in place as rapidly as possible. In particular, we intend to complete the process for making the energy (including nuclear) national policy statements, which are part-way through the scrutiny process, and will bring forward revised final texts and ask Parliament to ratify them. We are still considering how best to take forward the remaining national policy statements under development, and will be publishing a more detailed implementation plan —including transitional arrangements and a revised timetable—later in the summer.
Arm's-length Bodies
(14 years, 5 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mrs Caroline Spelman)
The delivery of public services is at the heart of DEFRA’S role. From flood defences to animal health, from making payments to farmers to conserving biodiversity, DEFRA protects our natural environment, supports British food and farming industries and promotes the green economy.
But DEFRA has a very big network, with over 80 arm’s-length bodies. In my first month, I have made it my priority to examine the network critically. In line with the coalition Government’s commitments, I am applying the “three Government tests” to each of our bodies: Does it perform a technical function? Does it need to be politically impartial? Does it act independently to establish facts?
I am announcing today the first results of this work.
The Government are committed to improving the quality of life for those living and working in rural areas and intend to put the fair treatment of rural communities at the centre of Government. Ministers will lead rural policy from within my Department; I have decided accordingly to abolish the Commission for Rural Communities as an independent body.
The Commission for Rural Communities (CRC) is a DEFRA-funded non-departmental public body that was established under the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act on 1 October 2006.
The Government believe policy advice should be carried out by Departments, not arm’s-length bodies. DEFRA will, therefore, reinforce its capacity to undertake rural work within the Department: a strengthened Rural Communities Policy Unit will work across Government to ensure that the interests of rural communities are fully reflected in policies and programmes.
In taking this action, I pay tribute to the commitment and quality of work undertaken by the Commission for Rural Communities, its staff, commissioners and its chairman, the Rev. Dr Stuart Burgess CBE, over the past four years. My Department will continue to work closely with the CRC during the transition to the new arrangements so that we build on its achievements.
The Animal Health Agency and the Veterinary Laboratories Agency, are the two principal DEFRA executive agencies which work to combat animal diseases. I intend to merge these two agencies. This will allow us to bring together services, expertise and scientific capability on animal health. It will improve our resilience in delivering important services, including our animal disease emergency response capability and science requirements for animal health. In resource-constrained times, the merger will enable the agencies to create more efficient ways of working, reduce the cost and bureaucracy needed to manage the interfaces between these agencies, DEFRA and the devolved Administrations, and their customers.
The merger of the executive agencies will go ahead shortly, with as little disruption to staff and customers as possible.
A single chief executive will be appointed for the new agency this summer, and will be tasked with working out how to achieve the full integration of the agencies, including structures and ways of working, by the autumn.
In the meantime, both agencies will continue to be led by their chief executives and senior teams. In implementing this change to our arm’s-length bodies, the Department will work closely with the Responsibility and Cost Sharing Advisory Group, as well as devolved Administrations and other stakeholders.
Following the principle that Government should do only those things which only Government can do, we are examining how parts of the DEFRA network’s assets could be marketed or be run better through the voluntary sector, while protecting key DEFRA outcomes. Further announcements will follow, against the principles outlined above.
Foreign and Commonwealth Office: Programmes
(14 years, 5 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr William Hague)
The House is aware that I have been conducting a full review of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s spending on programmes. I refer to the reply given by the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) to the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) on 7 June 2010, Official Report, Column 24W.
My aim was threefold: to ensure that FCO programmes deliver the priorities of the new Government; to ensure that they focus on those areas where the FCO itself can make the biggest difference and offer the best possible value for money; and to establish where the FCO can make cuts as part of its contribution to the reduction in public expenditure to which this Government are committed.
I have decided that we will:
Sustain planned spending this financial year on our counter-terrorism and Afghan counter-narcotics programmes, which contribute to some of the UK’s most important priorities, and will seek (resources permitting) to maintain FCO programme funding on these issues in future years.
Sustain planned spending this financial year on our bilateral programme funds, which enhance our relationships and influence with key countries around the world, and will seek (resources permitting) to increase this funding in future years.
Maintain a substantial programme of scholarships to bring future decision-takers and opinion-formers to the UK, while professionalising our current arrangements and targeting them on a smaller group of people. We will cut this year’s programme by £10 million and seek (resources permitting) to sustain a smaller and more strategic programme in future years. I believe this programme should also attract some further external funding, which will now be explored.
Sustain in future years (resources permitting) the FCO’s programme spending in support of the overseas territories, while making a cut of 10% (£630,000) in spending this financial year.
Sustain in future years (resources permitting) the FCO’s programme spending in support of counter-proliferation, while making a cut of 10% (£300,000) in spending this financial year.
Sustain in future years (resources permitting) the FCO’s programmes on human rights and democracy, reuniting Europe, and in support of the Westminster Foundation For Democracy, while making cuts to these programmes this financial year of 10% each (cuts of £560,000; £380,000; and £380,000 respectively).
Cut the FCO’s spending on its low-carbon high-growth programme by around £3 million this financial year and explore alternative sources of funding for the programme for future years. This does not mean the FCO is ending work on these issues: our diplomats will remain fully engaged in the UK’s international efforts to promote a low-carbon high-growth economy.
Cut the FCO’s programme spending on drugs and crime by £l million this financial year, end FCO funding in future years, and explore alternative sources of funding for this programme. This does not mean the FCO is ending work on these issues: our diplomats will remain fully engaged in the UK’s international efforts to fight drugs and crime which threaten our shores.
Cut our public diplomacy programmes by £1.6 million this financial year, focusing on strategic communications to key overseas audiences, while seeking (resources permitting) to sustain this programme in future years.
Make some adjustments to FCO programme spending on international institutions, cutting £250,000 this financial year, while seeking (resources permitting) to sustain essential support to those institutions in future years.
These decisions will deliver over £18 million of savings this financial year out of total FCO programme spend of some £140 million. The money saved will help sustain the UK’s front-line diplomatic work and our global network of posts, and contribute to the FCO’s £55 million in-year cuts.
This is only a small part of the work I am leading to ensure that the FCO delivers the best possible service to the UK taxpayer at the lowest possible cost, and contributes to the Government’s goal of reducing the budget deficit. Where there is scope for further cuts, efficiencies and reforms to deliver better for Britain, we will make them.
Police Reform
(14 years, 5 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mrs Theresa May)
I am today setting out some further details of the Government’s approach to police reform. Policing governance has become distorted and over- centralised in recent years and the Government are committed to ensuring that accountability and transparency are firmly at the heart of policing.
The first step for reform must be the return of proper operational responsibility to chief constables and their teams and that for this to work effectively there needs to be a redesign of the current performance landscape. The police service needs more freedom from central control—fewer centrally driven targets and less intervention and interference from Government. That is why I am announcing that we are abolishing the centrally imposed target on police forces to improve public confidence and we will scrap the policing pledge. Police forces need to be accountable instead to their communities.
To achieve greater accountability, the public need better information about their police and about local crime. This is why we will make sure that crime data are published at a level that allows the public to see what is happening on their streets, enabling the public to hold the police and other local agencies to account for how they are dealing with problems in their area. We will also require police forces to hold regular “beat meetings” to provide residents with the opportunity to put forward their concerns and hold the police to account.
In the future, the establishment of a directly elected individual at force level, setting the force budget, agreeing the local strategic plan, playing a role in wider questions of community safety and appointing—and if necessary removing—the local chief constable, will strengthen local accountability for policing. We will publish further details on our reform of policing later in the summer, which will assist our discussions with the public and our partners, and inform the Government’s preparations for the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill in the autumn.
Vehicle and Operator Services Agency
(14 years, 5 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Mike Penning)
The Department for Transport has today issued a consultation document on proposals to empower examiners from VOSA with powers to stop commercial vehicles for inspection throughout Great Britain. At present their powers are restricted to England and Wales.
The new powers will help them to ensure that commercial vehicles and their drivers comply with road traffic law. Similar minor additions will be made to Northern Ireland legislation where no comparable powers already exist in relation to the stopping powers for the Driver and Vehicle Agency (DVA) staff.
I have placed copies of the document in the Libraries of both Houses.
The Work Programme
(14 years, 5 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Chris Grayling)
Today the Government begin the first stage of their reform to deliver a 21st century welfare system.
The coalition Government are committed to fighting poverty, supporting the most vulnerable and helping people break the cycle of benefit dependency that has blighted some communities.
We want to establish a system of employment support that treats people with the dignity they deserve.
As announced in the coalition agreement we will radically simplify the back-to- work system by ending the complexity of the previous decade and replacing current schemes with a new Work programme.
The Work programme will provide a coherent package of support for people out of work, regardless of the barriers they face or the benefits they claim.
The Government will look to investors from the private, public and voluntary sectors to provide this support.
This week we will be releasing an advert setting out the parameters of a commercial framework and encouraging private, public and voluntary sector organisations to bid to be part of it.
Once in the framework organisations will compete to supply employment support.
The framework arrangement means we will be able to contract for employment support in a faster, flexible and more efficient way than the current system allows.
It also means Government can be more responsive to economic conditions and local need, which will enable us to let larger, longer contracts, encouraging greater investment and creating the circumstances for a proper rate of return for investors and meaningful social return for the taxpayer.
The Work programme will also provide help for the thousands on incapacity benefits who are able to work.
There are 2.6 million people claiming incapacity benefits.
The Government are committed to providing unconditional support for very sick and disabled people within that group.
But there are people claiming incapacity benefits that can work, and want to work, with our help they will be able to.
In the autumn, starting in Burnley and Aberdeen, we will ask incapacity benefit claimants to attend a work capability assessment. The rest of the country will follow, with reviews taking place when the normal benefit review is due.
The work capability assessment is designed to measure whether someone is able to work. It also allows us to recognise those who need additional support and ensure they get unconditional help.
To this end, we will take forward recommendations to treat people waiting for or between courses of chemotherapy in the same way as those already receiving it.
We will also extend the criteria for people with severe disability due to mental health conditions, meaning fewer very sick people will be asked to attend an assessment.
We will also establish an independent review as required by the Welfare Reform Act 2007, a concession forced on the previous Government jointly by the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives.
The coalition amendment established an independent review, which Professor Malcolm Harrington has agreed to lead, to scrutinise the assessment process. This will ensure people are treated fairly and assessments are transparent. The report will be completed by the end of the year.
These reforms are not just about getting people who are able to work into a job.
These reforms are the first steps towards tackling one of the key drivers of poverty and breaking the intergenerational cycle of worklessness and disadvantage.
Today the coalition Government take a firm but fair hold of the welfare system. This approach will bring about transformational change in the benefits system, helping people leave benefits and work towards a better quality of life for themselves and their families.
We have produced a guide to the framework and copies are available in the Vote Office and the Printed Paper Office.
House of Lords
Introduction: Lord German
Introduction: Baroness Hussein-Ece
Introduction: Baroness Ritchie of Brompton
Chagos Archipelago
(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Viscount Montgomery of Alamein
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what measures they propose to increase awareness of the environmental and scientific importance of the Chagos archipelago.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Lord Howell of Guildford)
My Lords, high levels of conservation have already been achieved with a legislative framework protecting sites and species of particular importance. The territory’s quarter of a million square miles is Britain’s greatest area of marine biodiversity. The territory’s Administration will work with interested organisations and regional governments to increase awareness of the environmental and scientific importance of the territory.
Viscount Montgomery of Alamein
My Lords, that sounds very encouraging, but can the noble Lord confirm that sufficient funding is in place to ensure that illegal fishing in that vast marine archipelago will not take place in forthcoming years?
Lord Howell of Guildford
My Lords, the declaration of the marine protected area did not cost anything, but by implementing a no-take fishing zone, the British Indian Ocean Territory's Administration loses between £800,000 and £1 million of revenue which they would have got from the sale of fishing licences. That revenue used to go towards the cost of maintaining a British Indian Ocean Territory patrol vessel for surveillance duties, and so on. The annual cost of running that vessel is about £1.7 million, including fuel costs, so the costs not offset by the fishing licence loss were met by subsidy from the overseas territories programme fund. The short answer to the noble Lord is that we need to find an additional £800,000 to £1 million, and the overseas territories division is in discussion with a number of foundations and charities which have offered to meet that requirement for a five-year period.
Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead
My Lords, I acknowledge the merits of marine conservation, but does the Minister agree that the MPA has caused considerable tensions, not least with our close allies, the Government of Mauritius? Will he respond positively to the expressed desire of the Mauritius Government for the dialogue initiated by their Prime Minister and Gordon Brown to be continued as soon as possible by the current Government? Would he be prepared to meet representatives of the Chagossian community in the UK?
Lord Howell of Guildford
My Lords, under the previous Government, of which the noble Baroness was a distinguished member, there were some difficulties about the consultation continuing. It began, but then problems arose on the Mauritian side. We remain happy to talk to the Mauritian Government at any time about the marine protected area, but if it takes us into the broader issue, on which the noble Baroness touched in the second part of her question, of the Chagossians’ right of return, all I can tell her at this stage is that the new Government are looking at the whole pattern of issues raised by the British Indian Ocean Territory's situation. I will certainly communicate with her and your Lordships as soon as possible on that issue, but I cannot say more today.
Lord Avebury
My Lords, bearing in mind that a total ban on fishing under the MPA would end the careers of Mauritian and Chagossian fishermen, and the amount of money that the Minister mentioned, which would contribute to the use of the BIOT fisheries range protection vessel, will the Government refrain from taking any decision on the MPA until Parliament has had the opportunity to debate the situation after the European Court’s decision on Chagossian rights of return, expected before the Summer Recess? Secondly, can we invite the US to undertake a joint review of the pollution created by the US nuclear base on Diego Garcia, including the deployment of the nuclear submarine tender USS “Emory S Land”, which is alleged to have contaminated the sea around its former base in Sardinia?
Lord Howell of Guildford
Parliament is free to debate the MPA, which is a very important proposal, development and plan, at any time it wishes. The intention to go ahead with the MPA is in place. However, on the broader issues of the hearing in the European Court of Human Rights and the nature of operations in the Diego Garcia base, the Government are, as I said, looking at all aspects raised by the British Indian Ocean Territory’s problems, and I will communicate with the House when views have been reached. I cannot go further than that today.
Lord Luce
My Lords, I accept the concept of a marine protected zone, but does the Minister agree that it would be wholly wrong to implement this zone without doing justice to the Chagossian islanders who were gratuitously expelled from Diego Garcia and the surrounding area after 1965, whose rights of abode and access need to be restored first?
Lord Howell of Guildford
The noble Lord is raising two separate issues. The proposal for a marine protected area is widely supported by many people and there are very few objections to the general concept from the Mauritians or anyone else. The Chagossians’ right of abode is a broader issue. I would like to say that certain views have been reached which may or may not be different from those of the previous Government, but today I cannot because the matter is under review. I will communicate with the noble Lord and other noble Lords when we have a view on this situation, with which many Members opposite are very familiar.
Lord Shutt of Greetland
I think we will hear from a Conservative Member first.
Baroness Gardner of Parkes
Is there any threat of rising sea levels endangering the possibility of people living on these islands, as there is in some Pacific islands where it may be disastrously affected?
Lord Howell of Guildford
I know of no specific threat in relation to resettlement. All sorts of other problems were studied in a feasibility study some years ago and the whole prospect of resettlement was found to be precarious. However, the particular issue of rising sea level is not one on which we have any detailed evidence.
Baroness Whitaker
The Minister mentioned the general concept of an MPA. Does he acknowledge that in the general run of MPAs, the people who normally live there actually live there, by which I mean the Galapagos and the most recent MPA, made by President Bush, around western Hawaii? Would it not be quite normal for the Chagossians to be living in the MPA?
Lord Howell of Guildford
As I have explained, the Chagossians are not living there because they have not resettled. That is a separate issue which needs to be looked at and we are studying. The issue of the MPA, which is a vast area, immediately affects only the licensed fishermen whose problems have been very carefully addressed. That is the position, and these are two separate issues. I am sorry that I cannot help the noble Baroness in bringing them together today.
Quangos
Baroness Seccombe
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what the process will be for reviewing quangos across government.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, the coalition Government are committed to increasing the accountability of public bodies and to bringing forward a Bill in the autumn.
Baroness Seccombe
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for his reply. Does he agree that 111,000 people are employed by quangos at a cost to the British taxpayer of more than £38 billion? Some of those quangos perform important and essential work, while others, in my view, are rather expensive talking shops, which, surely, are an undesirable luxury that cannot be afforded in today’s world. How are we to distinguish between them?
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
Virtue is always easy to recognise, but my right honourable friend the Prime Minister has asked for all quangos to be assessed against three main tests. First, is the function technical? Secondly, does it need to be politically impartial? Finally, do facts need to be determined transparently? My right honourable friend the Minister for the Cabinet Office will discuss the outcome of this assessment with Ministers in July and, following Cabinet agreement, publish the outcome in the autumn. He has confirmed in a Parliamentary Question in another place that cost-effectiveness and suitability will also be factors. His assessment will also ask whether the Government really need to do this and whether the function should be performed at a local level or through non-state means by either a voluntary or a private body. Furthermore, his assessment will also bear in mind costs, efficiency and the requirement for savings, including alignment with Budget and spending review requirements, and, finally, the impact of the changes on the Government’s policy objectives.
Lord Palmer
My Lords, maintaining the monarchy for the taxpayer costs 69p for every person in the United Kingdom, whereas maintaining all these quangos costs £2,500 per household. Is the cost of maintaining the quangos not an utter disgrace?
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
The noble Lord expresses himself powerfully. As my noble friend mentioned in her supplementary question, the cost of maintaining quangos amounts to £38.4 billion per year, which contrasts with £15.4 billion in 2002. There is a considerable problem to tackle. By dealing with it rigorously, I hope that the Government will show that they are in earnest and have purpose.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I welcome the noble Lord to his new role. I am sure he will agree that new Governments always talk about getting rid of quangos and not creating them. Much has been made of the importance of the Office for Budget Responsibility, which I believe is a quango. Therefore, how many quangos have the coalition Government announced or set up since they took office?
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
The Government are determined to ensure that any new bodies set up will satisfy the new tests. I remind the House that those tests are: is the function technical; does it need to be politically impartial; and do the facts need to be analysed transparently?
Lord Maclennan of Rogart
I thank the Minister for his full reply. Is it the Government’s intention to seek to consolidate quangos in order to save overheads where that can be done without necessarily winding up useful bodies? Will he undertake to consult the public before introducing legislation? This is such a vast field that there will be particular consequences of the application of the Government’s criteria which cannot be suitably dealt with during the legislative process.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, the whole point of the exercise is to make sure that the agencies of government as represented by quangos perform in the interests of the body politic. To that extent the body politic will be involved in the legislation. The country is well aware of the economic background against which these decisions will be taken and of the costs, as I explained to the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, of the existing quango structure. The Government are right to tackle that task, which they will do with determination. I hope that the Bill will be before the House in the autumn.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe
My Lords, many of us recognise that there are quangos and bodies that need to be reviewed and some of them may need to disappear. But can we not set up a small committee here, which will cost nothing, to try to ensure that when Questions are asked, they are answered? Can we have an answer to the question of how many commissions and quangos have been set up since the Government came to power, and can we please have the cost of them as well?
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I am afraid that I cannot give the answer to that. What I am trying to do is give the House an indication of the standards by which this Government will address the whole business of public agencies and bodies. I will write to the noble Lord and, indeed, to the Leader of the Opposition who asked the question in the first place so that they are aware of the facts, but I am afraid I am not briefed on how many have been set up since the Government took office. It cannot be very many, and certainly cannot be as many as we found—966 in total—when we took office.
Student Loans Company
Lord Addington
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what proposals they have concerning the performance of the Student Loans Company as regards its general duties and its support for disabled students.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Baroness Wilcox)
My Lords, last year, the service delivered by the Student Loans Company was unacceptable. The Student Loans Company now has a strengthened leadership team and is engaging more effectively with its stakeholders, including those representing disabled students. My department has provided increased resources to help the Student Loans Company put the service back on track, and has set tighter turnaround targets for applications for the disabled students’ allowance.
Lord Addington
I thank my noble friend for that Answer. As something like 10,000 students did not receive their disabled students’ allowance last year, can the noble Baroness give an indication of what is being done to make sure that any future reorganisation of the service does not result in a disaster like this one, where a locally run service was replaced with a central one and ended up failing totally?
Baroness Wilcox
My Lords, the Student Loans Company has made a number of improvements in the way it processes applications, which I hope will improve customers’ experience. The scanning technology that was at the heart of the processing problems last year has been moved from Glasgow to Darlington where the processing teams are based so that all paper documentation is sent to one location, allowing the Student Loans Company to react quickly to any problems. A more user-friendly online application process has been introduced for new and returning students. Applications for disabled students’ allowances are now being turned around faster, and in consultation with stakeholders—who have proved to be an invaluable support to us—the Student Loans Company has streamlined its processes for dealing with these applications. That includes a fourfold increase in the number of staff allocated to the work, with better training and quality assurance to ensure consistency in the service provided to its customers.
Lord Young of Norwood Green
My Lords, I welcome the assurances given by the Minister. Can she confirm that arrangements have been put in place to enable contacts between disability groups and the Student Loans Company? My experience of going around universities suggests that they bend over backwards to assist potential students with disabilities.
Baroness Wilcox
I am sorry, I rather thought I had answered that. We have set up a special group for all the outside groups that need to consult, and we have made sure that we have a chairman who is from their number rather than from our own.
Baroness Afshar
My Lords, I declare an interest as a contact person for disability at the University of York. It is my experience that, essentially, help does not arrive on time. The problem is that there is no system whereby an advance can be offered to students whose cases have not been processed, but disabled students need help from the moment they arrive. Unfortunately, even a little delay can cost them a great deal in their studies. Is there a way of advancing an initial sum to these students so that they are given assistance on arrival?
Baroness Wilcox
As noble Lords can imagine, we have studied this question very carefully to see what can be done. Special financial arrangements have been made to get people over the difficulties that they are experiencing immediately, and money has been set aside for that. The applications that we have received are receiving good attention now. However, we are mindful of the fact that people do not seem to realise that for this year, for example, starting in September, students—whether able or disabled—should apply now; they do not have to wait. If they or their representatives were to start applying now, we could get to the core of their difficulties, so that by the time they start their year arrangements will be in place. We have found particularly that disabled students wait until they are on the course before they start applying, by which time the lag that they experience causes them difficulties. However, even in such cases we will make sure that, because of last year’s awful experiences, people will not be put off starting their studies for fear of not having their money.
Lord Ashley of Stoke
Does the Minister agree that the setting up of this disability stakeholder group is a major step forward, as it provides a proper assistance set-up? A great deal of credit for this forward movement should go to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for his pressure and assistance.
Baroness Wilcox
My noble friend Lord Addington has been an absolute champion of the disabled. He very kindly gave us of some of his questions in advance so that we could start to process them already. If the noble Lord has other questions that he would like answered, I very much hope it will be okay for us to write to him. This is a big and complicated subject and we really do not want to see it get into the trouble that it did last year.
Lord Dholakia
My Lords, what are the Government doing to prevent a repeat of the knock-on effect that the SLC crisis had not only on students but also on service providers?
Baroness Wilcox
I rather thought I had covered that. We have strengthened the leadership team; we are engaging more effectively with stakeholders, including those representing disabled students, which is very important and went wrong last time; and we have provided increased resources to help put the service back on track. I really do hope that this year, for the sake of us all and all our students, we will see a much clearer run at things—if they get their applications in early enough, please.
Energy: Belarus-Russia Gas Dispute
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of the Belarus-Russia gas dispute on gas supplies to Europe.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Lord Marland)
My Lords, the Russia-Belarus gas dispute had minimal impact on European gas supplies, though flows to Lithuania reduced, as did pipeline pressure to Poland on 23 June. However, no customers were affected. The EU-Russia early warning mechanism, strengthened after the January 2009 Russia-Ukraine gas dispute, was activated and the Commission led EU engagement with both parties to urge a swift resolution. Any such dispute is regrettable but we welcome its swift resolution before EU customers were affected.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord and for the speedy resolution of the dispute. Does he accept that this dispute and the Russia-Ukraine difficulties show that Europe needs co-ordinated action on gas security? Can he say what progress has been made in the development of the southern corridor, which brings gas to Europe from the Caspian but is not dependent on Russia?
Lord Marland
My Lords, this gives me a great opportunity to praise the former Minister who, through his work on the EU security of gas supply regulation, helped to enhance the resilience of the emergency plans and provided cross-border support of supply. We look forward to his plans being adopted in the autumn. I am grateful for the work that he has done—as, I am sure, is the rest of the House. The general point is that the UK is not dependent upon the Caspian Sea or Russia for its gas supply: 65 per cent of our gas comes from our own domestic fields, 20 per cent from Norway and the remainder from other international sources. We have reviewed this situation in the light of what we have just seen and I am confident that we can support our customers to the full.
Lord Teverson
My Lords, given the continued dependence of Europe as a whole on Russian gas, what pressure are the UK Government putting on the European Commission to look at the potential for shale gas in Europe, which over just a couple of years has in many ways revolutionised the security of energy within the United States?
Lord Marland
My noble friend and coalition colleague raises a very good question to which not many know the answer, but I will do my best under the circumstances. The issue of shale energy, for those who are interested, is well advanced in the US. It is generating a great deal of supply, but it does not have the same planning restrictions that we do here in Europe, so only limited exploration has been carried out. As yet there has been no establishment of financial viability, but this is happening apace. The benefit from this for the UK is that as a result the US is importing far less LNG, which makes it cheaper and more available for this country.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
Does the Minister not feel that he is being a little overconfident about Britain’s position in all this, given that our capacity for gas storage is very low compared with a lot of other member states in the European Union? What are the Government doing to encourage more gas storage in the UK, which is surely one of the key elements in dealing with any interruption of supply?
Lord Marland
The noble Lord asks a good question. The reality is that we currently have eight days’ gas storage—more than we have had for a very long time, and after depletion from a cold winter. We have to establish security of supply. As I said earlier, 65 per cent of the gas we need comes from our own shores; 20 per cent from Norway, which we believe is a friendly source; and 15 per cent from other countries throughout the world. Having reviewed this, we feel confident that we can sustain the supply required.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, is not foreign control or ownership over the supply and distribution of energy resources in fact a national security issue for this country? Do the Government have a position on the foreign ownership of energy supply companies, such as the fact that most of London’s electricity is supplied by Électricité de France?
Lord Marland
I think the noble Lord is being a bit unreasonable. I have explained where our gas supply comes from, which I think most people would say was adequate, and I really do not want to engage in whether France is a secure supplier of our electricity or not.
Lord Howarth of Newport
When the Minister answered the question from the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, I do not think he indicated whether it is the Government’s intention to increase gas storage capacity in this country. If they wish to do so and if they are going to abolish the Infrastructure Planning Commission, how will they be able to do so on a reasonable timescale and on terms that are acceptable to public opinion in this country?
Lord Marland
I think I have made this clear. The truth is that we have enough supply, 65 per cent, coming in from our own shores, and we have to work out whether we can supply our customers. We have 135 per cent capacity, which is increasing to support the import of gas into the country. Quite frankly, I have answered this question quite bluntly and blatantly.
Lord Marland
My Lords, it will decline during the coming years, as we know. The fact is, though, that we have a broad spread of import, a secure supply from Norway and Holland and adequate capacity to store and provide for our customers. I referred earlier to our gas import capacity of 135 per cent, and that is increasing over the next few years to 165 per cent, which is more than adequate.
Rehabilitation of Offenders (Amendment) Bill [HL]
London Local Authorities Bill [HL]
The Chairman of Committees
That the Commons message of 23 June be now considered; and that the promoters of the London Local Authorities Bill [HL], which was originally introduced in this House in Session 2007–08 on 22 January 2008, should have leave to proceed with the Bill in the current Session according to the provisions of Standing Order 150B (Revival of Bills).
Business of the House
(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Strathclyde
That Standing Order 40 (Arrangement of the Order Paper) be dispensed with on 5 July to allow the Motion to approve the draft State Pension Credit Pilot Scheme Regulations 2010 to be taken after the Motion standing in the name of Earl Attlee.
Arrangement of Business
Lord Shutt of Greetland
My Lords, there are 67 speakers signed up for today’s debate. If Back-Bench contributions are kept to seven minutes, the House should be able to rise at around midnight.
The Earl of Onslow
My Lords, is it really satisfactory to ask people whose average age is about 1,006 to stay up till 12 o’clock, and to have 67 speakers all on one day on one Motion? I would hope that the usual channels could look into this and come up with something which was slightly more satisfactory.
Lord Shutt of Greetland
My Lords, when the Motion was set down, no one had any idea how many speakers there would be. It so happens that 10 per cent of your Lordships are desirous of speaking. In those circumstances, seven minutes is about right for a midnight rising time. Of course, if noble Lords spoke for five minutes, they could be ready to go at 10 pm.
Lord Corbett of Castle Vale
Given that we now know the number of noble Lords who wish to take part in this debate, what on earth is the problem about finishing it at the more reasonable time of 10 o’clock and going into a second day? If the Government do not want to hear the views of noble Lords all around the Chamber, they should say so. This is nonsense; it is just waffling.
House of Lords Reform
(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Strathclyde
That this House takes note of the case for reform of the House of Lords.
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Lord Strathclyde)
My Lords, I for one am delighted to have been able to find this very early opportunity in the lifetime of this Parliament to discuss your Lordships’ House. I can say to noble Lords who have an interest—and many do—that this is the first of such opportunities that we will have to discuss the future of this House.
Lord Strathclyde
The noble Lord who asked a question a moment ago is now leaving the Chamber.
Lord Strathclyde
So I shall not bother telling him the good news about how often we hope to hear him speak in these quality debates over the next year.
Before the election, we knew that if Labour had won we would now be faced with a Bill based on Jack Straw’s committee paper, seeking to legislate on an elected senate in Labour’s historic fourth term—but that was not to be. Equally, we believed that, with a Conservative victory, reform would not be such an urgent priority and we could continue to seek a consensus for a long-term reform. Under the coalition Government, the three main parties all share similar objectives and the issue has now been given greater priority. Today’s debate is an opportunity for the Government to lay out the structure of their plan and an opportunity to listen to the views from your Lordships’ House.
There were more speakers who had put their names down on the speakers list but decided not to go ahead. Some have written to me with their views, but, as I said a moment ago, this, I think, will be the first of such opportunities to discuss the future of this House.
We seem to have been living with propositions for reform of your Lordships’ House for years, indeed decades. It is neither the most important question facing the country nor the least important; this is one House in a sovereign Parliament. It is a House that has often been proved right in recent years, but its voice needs to be better heard. Your Lordships’ House does an outstanding job, but it has not been able to avoid this country having a near disastrous experience from a surfeit of spending, legislation and regulation. We have done what we can well, but it has not always been enough to achieve all that we wanted, whether that was in the fields of ancient liberties, choice or plain old common sense. If the first job of your Lordships is to call the Executive to account and to challenge the other place to do its job, we have not lately excelled. It is at least legitimate to ask if one of the constraints on our ability to act lies in how we are constituted.
There have been years of debate since the 1999 Act changed this House for ever by ending the right to sit by virtue of hereditary peerage alone. We have seen umpteen schemes and watched them drift down umpteen backwaters, often with many here cheering loudly as they ran aground in the mud. We have seen umpteen propositions for change within the House, with my noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood perhaps the most persistent in his bid to create the wholly appointed House that both Houses rejected in 1999. Many have hoped that it would all go away, but it has not. Indeed, all three major national parties promised a largely elected House in their manifestos only a few weeks ago, while the SNP pledged our abolition outright. A reformed House could play a great part in pulling together the voices of the devolved nations. No wonder those who would divide our kingdom see no place for any upper House, representative or not. That is a view that I totally reject. I have no doubt that this country needs a second Chamber with authority in all parts of the kingdom—one with confidence, powers and the willingness to use them in the public interest, even as the House that we now have acted to protect jury trial, defend habeas corpus and rejected the tyranny of electronic surveillance by compulsory ID cards. Can we create a Chamber better able to do all those things? That is the question before us. I believe that we can. Others believe that nothing under the sun could be better than this. As Leader of the House, I want to ensure that the voice of this House is heard from the outset in this debate, as sadly it was not always—indeed, some argue ever—heard in the past decade.
The coalition Government’s declared intention is to bring forward a draft Bill on reform of the House, which will provide a proper focus for debate and decision. It is something that I and many other noble Lords called for many times over recent years. My noble friend Lord McNally and I will set out the government agenda, but we are also, just as importantly, here to listen to your Lordships’ views. I can promise you this will not be the last opportunity. I know that many of your Lordships will have greeted this element of the coalition’s programme for government with a degree of apprehension, although the work of the cross-party group led by the former Lord Chancellor, Mr Straw, set it at the heart of the programme of the party opposite, too.
I hope that we will be able to reassure the House today that your Lordships, indeed both Houses, will have a full opportunity to take part before ever any legislation is introduced. In our programme for government, we said we would establish a committee to bring forward proposals for a wholly or mainly elected upper Chamber on the basis of proportional representation. We have done that. My right honourable friend the Deputy Prime Minister is chairing that committee, which is composed of members from all three major political parties as well as from both Houses. My noble friend Lord McNally, the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, and I all serve on it. The committee is charged with producing a draft Bill by the end of the year.
Lord Barnett
Whatever is in manifestos, the plain fact is that at the moment the Front Benches of this House are on this committee and, as the noble Lord and all sides of this House know very well, in advance of a debate the Back Benches do not agree with the Front Benches. Why is there not a single Back-Bencher on that committee?
Lord Strathclyde
Because, my Lords, this committee is charged to create a Bill in draft. There will be a full role for Back-Benchers in both Houses, on all sides and with different views, when we set up a Joint Committee of both Houses which will then give it the scrutiny it deserves before it is introduced to each House.
Lord Grocott
Could the Leader of the House, in the spirit of the coalition document, referring as it does to the importance of transparency, ensure that the agenda and minutes of this committee which is meeting at present are made available to the House and to the public?
Lord Strathclyde
I am very happy for the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, to discuss that with the Leader of the Opposition, who sits on the committee, but the Government will not be publishing either the agenda or any minutes because our objective is to come forward with a Bill in draft. That will be the result of the committee and we hope to do that before the end of the year. This will be the first time that legislation setting out how an elected second Chamber might be constituted will ever have been published by any Government.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
Before we leave the matter of the composition of the committee, perhaps the noble Lord could explain why representatives of three of the main groups in this House are on that committee while the fourth group—the Cross-Benchers—is not represented? In order to save him from doing something which will irritate those around me quite a lot, will he please not say that it is because we have already made up our minds as to the shape of a future House?
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, I have no desire to irritate the noble Lord or, indeed, his noble friends, but the point is that the three main political parties each had a manifesto at the last general election which was broadly in agreement. The Deputy Prime Minister took the view that it was important to bring those political parties together in drafting the Bill. When we get to the creation of the Joint Committee of both Houses, the noble Lord and others of his views—not just on the Cross Benches, but elsewhere—will quite rightly be fully consulted and represented on that committee.
Lord Hughes of Woodside
Does the noble Lord agree that the path that he has now undertaken means that the House will be presented with the choice of the three political parties? It is a bit like Henry Ford: “You can have any choice you like, so long as it’s mine”.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, in a way that is how it works in Parliament. Governments propose legislation and then Parliament disposes of it in whichever way it wants—and that will happen. I am sure that what the Government publish and what comes out of this committee at the end of the year is not where we will be at the end of the day. This is the start of the process. It will be up to the two Houses to set up the Joint Committee; it is not the job of government. My noble friend Lord McNally, the Deputy Leader, and I will make the case for the inclusion of all strands in this matter.
The Earl of Onslow
I am normally an enormous fan of my noble friend on the Front Bench, but surely his argument about not including Back-Benchers is slightly destroyed when it becomes a cartel of the three Front Benches. If it was solely my noble friends on the Liberal Front Bench and my noble friends on the Tory Front Bench, his argument would be absolutely solid. However, as it has included the Labour Front Bench, which as far as I have gathered is not part of the coalition—even though 1931 might come again—surely to exclude Back-Benchers is not a sensible idea.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, the point I was trying to make is that Back-Benchers will play their full part in the process when we get to the creation of the Joint Committee of both Houses. The committee that the Deputy Prime Minister chairs, with all his might and authority, is designed to create the Bill that your Lordships and others can then comment on. I suggest that we are not going to agree on this issue this afternoon, but I hope that we can move on.
Lord Campbell of Alloway
Is my noble friend the Leader of the House aware that there is another point of view? On 5 July, the question of due process concerning the setting up of this committee and its functions is due for consideration. There are two views. One is that of my noble friend the Leader of the House and the other is certainly my own.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, I am well aware that there is more than one view on this issue. Today we will hear from 68 speakers and we may well end up with more views than there are speakers. The point of the Deputy Prime Minister’s committee is to produce a Bill. Then a Joint Committee will examine it and that will have representatives from the Cross Benches and the Bishops’ Bench. I look forward to them playing their full part in it. We would not wish to exclude anybody from this process. That is likely to mean that it will be a substantial committee. It will have a substantial job to do, but that will be next year’s job, not this year’s.
Lord Richard
The noble Lord has been very good in giving way. Perhaps he could help me a little. I understand that this committee will produce a Bill. Will it produce a Bill in a legal form, properly drafted by parliamentary draftsmen? Will parliamentary draftsmen be attached to a committee of the three Front Benches to draft a Bill? Is that really the position, so that when the committee reports we get a Bill in draft—which can be introduced in the House—and carry on from there?
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, yes. I would hope that the noble Lord would not be so incredulous. One thing that has been missing from this great debate is precisely that—a Bill in properly drafted form. It will not be introduced to Parliament as part of a legislative process, but as part of a pre-legislative process for proper discussion. I am not going to give way too often.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton
My Lords, I hope I can save the noble Lord the Leader of the House a little time. Will the draft Bill that is being produced by the committee deal with transition? I think it might shorten the number of speeches today if the noble Lord could be more forthcoming on that.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, yes, it will deal with transition, which is one of the most important issues. I do not suggest for one moment that the noble Baroness will agree with whatever we propose, although she might. I cannot tell her what it will be because we do not know either at this stage. It is still very early days. However, the Bill will cover that subject, as it must. Once the Joint Committee has completed its work, at the end of the process, it will be for the Government to decide whether to bring forward legislation. I hope that by the time we reach that point, this House will have had the opportunity for input—first into the work of the committee, and then that of the Joint Committee—before we get to a final decision.
Lord Rooker
I seek clarification on this point. Like other Members, I have read all three manifestos, which all talked about the House being mainly or wholly elected. Not one of them raised the issue of what this place is for. At what point will the House get the chance to debate what a Second Chamber is for, what it is to do and what its powers are? Surely, all we are talking about at the moment is its composition, which seems to be the wrong way round.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, was a senior Minister in the former Government. They must have debated these issues many times in the build-up to the 2008 White Paper. Of course we have to decide what this House is for and what it will do. The view at the moment is that the House should continue to have the powers that it holds and do the work that it does. We are looking at its composition and how people get here, rather than what they do once they get here. I have hardly started in my speech. I will give way to the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, and then I will get on.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
I am most grateful but, in the light of all the peculiar circumstances, it is important to know that, when the Bill is brought to the House, it will not be whipped so that there can be a genuinely free debate.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, I have consistently taken the view over a long period—I am not saying that I will retain that consistency—that whipping a Bill on reform of the House of Lords is a particularly fatuous exercise as I suspect that Peers will make up their own minds, almost whatever the Whips tell them. However, we are a long way from having legislation on which we need to take a view on whether it will need to be whipped.
The coalition agreement, which noble Lords will have seen, envisaged a wholly or mainly elected House with elections on the basis of proportional representation. As the noble Baroness pointed out a moment ago, it also anticipated the transitional arrangement that a “grandfathering” system would be put in place for current Members of the House. I know that noble Lords will be anxious to know what both these things mean. They mean that we as a Government have yet to take a view—
Lord Strathclyde
We have yet to take a view on whether a reformed House should be fully or partly elected. Those words mean that we recognise the case for an orderly process of transition if the composition of the House is to change, just as in 1999 both Houses saw the wisdom of retaining a transitional element from the old House.
As I said at the outset, this House can be proud of so much that it does, but it lacks democratic authority. As a result, I believe that it does not carry the weight that the quality of its work merits. While we remain an overwhelmingly directly appointed House—something like 85 per cent appointed as against 50 per cent before 1999—our membership continues to grow. It is now fast approaching 800, with daily average attendance rising over 400. More new Members are due to be introduced over the coming weeks and months. I believe that it is time to examine what avenues could be created to make it possible for Members to leave the House permanently. To this end, I can announce that I will be setting up a Leaders’ Group, chaired by my noble friend Lord Hunt of Wirral, to investigate the options available. The group will include representation from all sides of the House and will be tasked with identifying the options that could be considered to allow Members to leave or to retire from the House.
Over the past 18 months, public confidence in politics, but more especially in Parliament, has been dramatically eroded. While many may reject the case for change, both Houses must surely consider it. Some in this House did not want change in Parliament in 1832, 1911, or, indeed, that much in 1999. Incredible though it may seem, the party opposite even voted against the creation of the life peerage in 1958. However, we came to accept all these great changes, just as in 1958 the then hereditary House accepted the case for change.
We cannot know precisely how this debate will unfold, but we know that it cannot be avoided. A great debate is beginning, or perhaps for some of us it is restarting. This House of all places cannot sit this one out. There is not a single Peer, whatever his or her views, who does not love this place, understand the need for a stronger Parliament and want the best for our House. This House, and its Members, must be at the heart of the debate ahead. I want to ensure this House a place in that process. That is the reason today’s debate was arranged. I look forward to all the contributions that will follow today and in the months ahead. I beg to move.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I am grateful to the Leader of the House for opening today’s debate with his characteristic élan and his evident relish for reform. We all marvel at the newfound determination of the Conservative element of the coalition Government to ensure that, very suddenly, a third-term issue should become an imperative. But whatever their reasons—and I for one am utterly convinced that the Conservative Benches opposite are as natural supporters of reform of your Lordships' House as they are the natural party of government—we can all heartily welcome the Conservative Party to the ranks of reformers.
The noble Lord the Leader of the House is the very model of the radical revolutionary, and from his speech on this subject to the House today, no one can see him in anything other than that role in the future. While the judgment of these Benches is that the constitutional change on which the coalition is so focused means rather less to people’s lives than the measures put forward in the coalition’s Conservative Budget, I look forward to today’s debate, and I thank the Government for providing the House with the opportunity of debating these issues once again.
This House is familiar with almost every aspect of the issues around the question of Lords reform. The department store John Lewis makes the claim that it is never knowingly undersold. On the question of reform of the House of Lords, I think that we in this House can claim that it is never knowingly underdebated.
However, we have seen in this long-running debate a new move, as mentioned by the Leader of the House: the decision by the coalition Government to form a cross-party committee, chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister, on further reform of the House, with the explicit aim of bringing forward a Bill on reform for consideration by both Houses. I am grateful to the Leader of the House for the information that he has provided about the committee’s work so far. I would have liked a more open and transparent way of working, but I am told that because the committee is a Cabinet committee, this is not possible. However, I would ask the Leader of the House for an undertaking that he will, as Leader not only of the whole House but of the Government in this House, continue to keep Members of the House informed about the work of the committee as it progresses.
We may not always have to hand a debate on the future of your Lordships' House to provide the means for him to do so, but I would urge the Leader to consider the best means by which all Members of this House can be kept up to date about the committee’s work. It is directly relevant to the future of this House and of the Members of this House. While many beyond this Chamber have a legitimate interest in this House and what will happen to it, I would argue that the Members of this House unquestionably have such an interest and it is right and proper for the Government to keep the Members informed.
Some—including, I acknowledge, some in my party—have questioned whether it is appropriate for Labour spokespeople, including me, to be members of this committee, taking part in its deliberations. I understand those concerns. However, I think that in this case it is right for me, as Leader of the Opposition in this House, and for two other members of the current shadow Cabinet to take part. As we showed in government when, at the instigation of my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer of Thoroton, we established the cross-party talks which led directly to our last White Paper on these matters, there is a genuine cross-party interest in such a major constitutional change as further reform of your Lordships' House. We also as a political party should be involved in these discussions inside the tent, if I may put it like that. Reform of your Lordships' House is of course a matter of party politics, but reform of your Lordships' House is also such an important matter for the constitution of our country that it is above party politics too.
I would have preferred—as clearly would have others—the Cross Benches to be represented on the committee. I think it is wrong that they are not. However, our being members of this committee does not bind us to it. We are the Opposition, not the Government. We have joined a committee, we have not joined the coalition. We will see what conclusions the committee comes up with. We have agreed nothing in advance. As the Deputy Prime Minister told us about the approach to these discussions, nothing is agreed until it is all agreed. There will be no accretion of agreement as we move through the process. In particular, we on this side of the House were committed in our manifesto to put the issue of further reform of your Lordships House to the people of this country. To us, that commitment is real and it is important.
This House plays a vital part in the politics and constitution of our country. Whatever the temporary impact on the balance of this House caused by the forming of the coalition Government, this House plays a vital role as a revising Chamber as well as having a central function as a unique means of national debate. It is the principal mechanism within the legislative process by which the Government of the day are held to account and can be asked to reflect and reconsider. That role is necessary whatever political party is in power. It is no less necessary with a coalition Government in power. Indeed, we on this side of the House would argue that it is even more necessary in such circumstances. I take this opportunity entirely to refute the suggestion that the views of this House were not heard by the Government over the past 13 years. They were constantly heard around the Cabinet table.
This House plays a key part in our constitutional arrangements. It is one of the main checks and balances in our constitution and it is right that it should remain so. Our manifesto commitment to a referendum reflects that. It shows that we believe that, because of the importance of the role of your Lordships’ House in both our politics and our constitution, it is right that any fundamental change to this House should be put to the people of this country for their decision.
According to the agreement of the coalition Government, the parties opposite are committed to a referendum on voting reform, specifically on the introduction of the alternative vote system for the election of Members of the House of Commons. However, because of the fundamental instability at the heart of the coalition Government, the two parties opposite are not committed to campaigning for the same goal in any such referendum. That and other deep fissures in the coalition, although significant, are matters for another day. What is important today is that, if the issue of voting reform is significant enough to merit the country’s consideration in a referendum, so, too, is further fundamental reform of your Lordships’ House. I made that point at the first meeting of the Cabinet committee chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister and I shall continue to hold to it as the process of the committee moves on.
Lord Maclennan of Rogart
I remind the noble Baroness that the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, which reformed the composition of this House by removing from its Benches the Law Lords, was not put to a referendum. Has she any precedent for what she suggests?
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I acknowledge that there was no referendum on that occasion, but I respectfully suggest to the noble Lord that making this House an elected House would be a fundamental change in our constitution.
Lord Goodlad
If, as we consider legislation, the party opposite presses for a referendum on the future of the House, will the noble Baroness take into account the recommendations of the Electoral Commission on compulsory voting, which applies in many other countries, so that that is one of the considerations that come before us?
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I could not at this juncture speak for my party on that issue, but personally I am a firm supporter of compulsory voting. However, that is my personal view.
On other occasions, my noble friend Lady Jay of Paddington, a distinguished former Leader of the House, has asked what the point is of the committee of which I am now a member. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, will raise a pertinent issue in his Question on 5 July and, with typical shrewdness and incisiveness, my noble friend Lord Richard has made the point that, if the committee is to consider fully the outstanding issues of Lords reform, it is unlikely to be able to produce a Bill by the end of the year.
Lord Higgins
Will the noble Baroness clarify whether, in her understanding, this will be a government draft Bill, or will it be agreed to by the Opposition as well? More particularly, is it not rather strange to say that we will have a draft Bill before we have taken the decision on whether we want a partially or wholly elected House? Surely that would be a complete waste of time. The vote on the main point of principle ought to take place first, not during consideration of a draft Bill that has been stitched up by the Front Benches.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, as I mentioned, this is a government committee on which the Government have invited members of the Opposition to sit. That does not mean to say that, at the conclusion of the committee’s work, the opposition party will fully sign up to it. The noble Lord makes a powerful case in relation to a referendum, but whenever the referendum takes place—
Lord Higgins
My point was not about a referendum; I was asking whether the cart is now being put before the horse—that is, should we not vote first on whether to have a wholly or partially elected House before debating the establishment of a committee which assumes that that is going to be the case?
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, with respect, the setting up of the committee and the process that is being followed on when or whether or not there should be various votes are matters for the Government. I am the Leader of the Opposition.
Lord Haskel
Would it be open to members of the committee to put in a minority report?
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
Indeed it would, should that be necessary. Obviously, these are still very early days. This committee has met once, and we just have to wait to see what happens within the process. However, I assure my noble friend and other noble friends that I will keep them as fully informed as possible.
I return to the question of what the committee is for. Many noble Lords around the House have suggested that it will not be possible for such a committee to produce a Bill by the end of the year. However, I believe that there is a huge impetus on the part of the coalition Government and that, for three reasons, it will be possible for the committee to produce a Bill by the end of the year. The first reason is political impetus. On behalf of the coalition, the Deputy Prime Minister is making it clear that he wants and intends to maintain the political momentum implied by the formation of the coalition, including on Lords reform, and of course he has every right to do so.
The second reason is political preparation. Perhaps against all the odds, the cross-party group steered through to conclusion by my right honourable friend the Member for Blackburn got further and made more progress than might have been imagined. Therefore, the new committee is meeting against a background of a high degree of political consensus and of a considerable amount of work done.
The third reason is Bill preparation. The length of the history of further reform of your Lordships’ House means that a number of pieces of draft legislation have, from time to time, been prepared by the Government of the day. I suggest that there is much stuff in the Cabinet Office’s cupboards, so taking a Bill off the shelf, as it were, and adjusting it is far from impossible.
Therefore, to answer the question posed by various noble Lords, I think that it is possible to produce a Bill by the end of this year, but the crucial issue is the pre-legislative scrutiny which the Bill must then receive.
It is clear from what the Leader of the House has said that Lords reform will not be part of what the Deputy Prime Minister has talked about in quite grandiose terms—a new great reforming Act to rival the Great Reform Act of 1832.
Lord Campbell of Alloway
I apologise for interrupting but exactly the same problem is raised by the intervention of my noble friend and the noble Baroness’s reply. We come again to the question of due process, which must be dealt with long before a Joint Committee is in place to scrutinise the Bill. At a very early stage, the due process of this committee is being challenged.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I well understand the concern being expressed around the Chamber about due process, but quite frankly, as Leader of the Opposition, I am not responsible for that due process. This is a matter for the Government and noble Lords should continue to put their questions to them.
Lord Anderson of Swansea
My noble friend appears to agree that the Government have made a crashing error of judgment in excluding the Cross-Bench Peers, who clearly have a legitimate interest in the outcome of the draft Bill. Will my noble friend therefore not adopt a grandmotherly attitude, listen to the Cross-Benchers herself and be prepared to put forward their view, as they are excluded from the committee?
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, it would give me great pleasure to listen to the Cross-Benchers and to put forward their views in the committee. I must rapidly move on and come to a conclusion.
From everything that has been said, it is clear that this is going to be a separate Bill and not part of a great reforming Bill. However, can the Leader of the House confirm that its separation will not mean that it will be considered in isolation from issues such as voting systems? Would it really be sensible for the people of Scotland, for example, to be subjected to as many as four different voting systems, perhaps on one day?
In relation to pre-legislative scrutiny, can the Leader of the House state that a Joint Committee, which I welcome, will be given enough time to consider, in depth and in detail, all the complex issues involved in further substantial reform of the House? For example, can the Leader confirm that such a Joint Committee will fully take into account the stipulation of the last cross-party Joint Committee of both Houses, chaired by my noble friend Lord Cunningham of Felling, on the conventions of this House, that if substantial proposals on the reform of your Lordships' House are brought forward, then the issues considered by the Joint Committee will need to be examined again?
The powers and functions of this House are significant and merit careful consideration, which I hope they will be given. Can the Leader of the House also set out the coalition Government's attitude to the Bill covering a range of reforms of this House brought forward again by the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood? I welcome the Leader’s announcement about a small group to look at people leaving the House.
I shall detain the House no longer, other than to say that, in this next period, we on these Benches will be holding the Government to account, both inside the Cabinet committee and outside it, on four key points—that the major issues of further reform of your Lordships' House, including the conventions of its relationship with the other place, are properly considered; that the process of pre-legislative scrutiny is full, thorough and sufficient for the nature of the issues involved; that due regard is given to and provided for any necessary transitional arrangements—I am glad that the grandfathering idea is mentioned in the coalition agreement; and that the issue of further substantial Lords reform is a matter for a referendum of the whole country.
We on this side of your Lordships' House, together with the Liberal Democrats on the Benches opposite, have long been in favour of reform. If, in becoming a member of the coalition, the Conservative Party, and not just its leadership, is now also in favour of reform, we in the reform group genuinely welcome that. History and experience might suggest otherwise, but we shall see. As the noble Lord himself suggested, we know that change is inevitable. As ever, however, the questions are: what kind of change is intended? What will be the rate of change? How will the change be managed? And, crucially, what is the change for? As my noble friend Lord Rooker said, “What will it achieve?”. Will it make our Parliament, our politics, our constitution and our country better? Those are real and important issues, and throughout this process we shall seek answers to these extremely important questions.
Baroness D'Souza
My Lords, as has been said, constitutional Acts affecting this House include the Life Peerages Act 1958, the House of Lords Act 1999 and the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. That legislation has had a profound effect on the work and composition of the House of Lords—very much for the better, as almost all would agree.
More recently, a stringent Code of Conduct has been agreed and implemented, a commissioner for standards has been appointed and we are about to have a new and transparent financial support scheme. We have on the table a raft of small but important further reforms, such as those in the so-called Steel Bill which, if enacted, would address retirement, sanctions, the House of Lords Appointments Commission and hereditary by-elections.
The Leader of the House has referred to a group on retirement and is setting up a group to consider further the recommendations put forward by the noble Lords, Lord Filkin and Lord Butler, and by the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, on strengthening Parliament. These would encompass greater pre- and post-legislative scrutiny of primary legislation; better legislative standards; public evidence hearings for government Bills; improving lines of accountability and transparency in all our work; and measures to make the planning and execution of business more efficient.
So reform is clearly taking place. The above measures are aimed at enabling this House to do better what it already does well. Why do we need an elected House to do what this House does well and for which it is widely respected? In other words, why fix what ain't broke? What would elections add to the process? How would elections strengthen the functions that this House undertakes? Those are genuine questions, and it is difficult to find answers.
Let us take the important question of democracy. This House, it is said, lacks legitimacy because it is undemocratic, and will continue to do so until it is fully elected. Let us consider how far elected representatives will be able to deliver the relatively impartial and independent scrutiny that this House specialises in. One of your Lordships said at a recent meeting that in order to do our job, Members must somehow manage to stay out of the pockets of Whips, but the proposed reforms would be precisely to deliver us into the hands of the Whips. Democracy, which I shall define for the moment as freedom to say no to the Government of the day, would surely be eroded—possibly in a short period.
Once again, the role and functions of this House are quite different from those in the other place. Certainly a fully elected House would in one sense be a strengthened House, in that it would have the same legitimacy as the other place. If this House is elected, it will inevitably behave like an elected Chamber. Is that what the Government want? Do they want to legislate for tension and possible stalemate between the two Chambers? What would then be the point of such a second Chamber?
Let me briefly say something about the proposed mechanisms for achieving reform, which have already been addressed in some detail. The Deputy Prime Minister courteously called me to tell me in advance about the announcement that he was about to make in the other place two weeks ago about the Cabinet drafting committee to be set up, for which I am extremely appreciative. However, I asked him why I, as representative of almost one-third of this House, was to be excluded. The answer, which I think is worth repeating verbatim, was “I want a clear and explicit political consensus which I would not get if you were on the committee”. I appreciate the frankness, but I wonder what consensus means or what kind of consensus is concerned with talking only to those who already agree with your plan. That is no way to rewrite fundamental parts of the constitution of this country.
There is an area of further contradiction and confusion. It concerns the seemingly endless march of new Peers into this House—all of them extremely worthy and welcome—when on all Benches we agree that a smaller House is not only desirable but imperative. That is coterminous with an almost deafening call for a fully elected House. Do the Government believe that such actions command public respect?
Your Lordships would expect me to express those views—being, for the moment, Convenor of the Cross-Bench Peers. It is, after all, an aspect of my task to extol the virtues of an independent element in this House, and I do so willingly, but the issue is so much wider. We are heading at dangerous speed towards a major constitutional change by relatively undemocratic procedures. Once done, it cannot be undone. We have before us a much needed programme of rolling, incremental reform. This House would be the better for many of those reforms but, as they show, we do not need an elected House to achieve them.
The Archbishop of York
My Lords, in my speech on House of Lords reform in 2007, I said that the key issue in reform of your Lordships' House as a legislative revising Chamber has to do with revising the law that will maintain freedom and justice for the nation and for every individual within it. This is the basis of our concept of democracy, which is central to our nation's understanding of itself. Throughout this country's history, it has been a symbol of British freedom. As John Betjeman said:
“Think of what our Nation stands for,
Books from Boots' and country lanes,
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
Democracy and proper drains”.
Winston Churchill said:
“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/11/1947; cols. 206-07.]
It is now claimed by some that your Lordships' House, not being elected, is undemocratic. I believe that a wholly elected House may not serve the interests of freedom. Our 21st-century fashion for a particular form of democracy may, in the end, not give us freedom. Elections, freedom and justice are not necessarily coterminous. We all know of countries where elections were conducted but their Governments ended up being elected dictatorships.
How should we therefore, in our 21st century, understand democracy? The principal elements of democracy are power, accountability, transparency and representation. However, representation must not be the only important element. There are those who always overplay this element. The concept of democracy goes back to Greek classical thought. Democracy—demokratia—means government by the people, but Governments do not have a right to the unrestricted use of power. They exercise it only as trustees of the people. The role of your Lordships' House, I submit, is to ensure that this temptation to the abuse of power, by the use of statutes from the other place as a promissory note or a form of assurance, is kept in check, and to maintain a very clear commitment to the social values of justice and equity.
Secondly, democracy has to do with accountability; that is, people's ability to call to account those who exercise power. In these present days, accountability is key to the confidence people have in Her Majesty's Government. The question for us is: how best will your Lordships' House exercise the task of calling Her Majesty's Government to account to the people for their stewardship of the trust people have placed in them? I believe that a wholly elected House of Lords will not encourage the distance and independence needed to ensure proper accountability. They are far too close. The elections are coming next time round. Proper transparency is necessary.
Thirdly, there is representation. While there is a strong and historic imperative towards representation, we must remember that your Lordships’ House is not Her Majesty's Government, but a second Chamber that revises legislation in order to keep the statute common to all, especially to the gentleman on the Clapham omnibus. The issue of representation becomes skewed if we are trying to create a Chamber in which everything is like the House of Commons, but in name only. I believe your Lordships' House is at its best when it is not being whipped, but allows freedom of expression and revision of the legislation for the common good of the country, and not for any political advantage.
A truly democratic society will affirm and uphold the equality of all, both before the law and in the responsibility for the exercise of power. The key issue for us is: does your Lordships' House keep to this task? Would it perform the task better as an elected Chamber? The present operation of the House of Commons, with its Whips and guillotines, should give us no great confidence in this. Regulations are often placed with a bare minimum of revision. The Equality Bill was a good example. This House revised that legislation and tidied it up into a good Bill, and therefore a good Act, which I do not think they could have done down there.
The fundamental issue before us is to determine the true purpose of this Chamber and the best way of achieving it. If we set out the purpose, goals and objectives clearly, it will be possible to work out how people should get here. If we do it the other way round, we are simply in a game where the football is already flat. I maintain that in order to ensure the just use of the power entrusted to Her Majesty's Government, in order to ensure true and impartial accountability, and in order truly to represent the breadth and diversity of our fellow citizens, we need a House that has the potential to draw on the diversity of persons, with all their different backgrounds and experience, who we see before us in your Lordships' House. The noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, played a major role during the passage of the Equality Bill, as did the Leader of the Opposition and many other noble Lords. I am not sure whether they would like to stand, but I have not asked them.
It may be that the time has come to say to the other place: “Thus far, and no farther. You concentrate on your first task of ensuring that Her Majesty's Government are called to account, are transparent, truly represent the whole nation and do not abuse the power entrusted to them by the Crown and the people of this country”. The other place must make the main thing the main thing—calling the Government to account—and we revise the legislation. This House, your Lordships' House, will diligently revise the legislation and seek answers to questions. That will make Her Majesty's Government more accountable and transparent. That is our job, and I am uncertain whether a wholly elected House that looks very much like the House of Commons will do its job.
Lord Howe of Aberavon
My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the most reverend Primate in a debate of this importance, particularly because each of the three noble Lords who have spoken before me have taken us one step further towards clarifying the issues. The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, gave a clear insight into the fundamental importance of the central issue, which, put simply, is: is this House likely to improve if a substantial elected element is introduced to it? That is the great fundamental question and I have some sympathy with her proposal of a referendum on the consideration of that. The noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, reminded us that a number of transitional changes are featured in the Steel Bill, which, whatever happens, will need to be considered. As we have argued many times, they have and could have been considered already. That is the quality of the questions we are considering.
The first and fundamental question is whether there should be elected Members here. One of the problems is that we will not gain much from arguing about the procedure for resolving that; from arguing about the appropriateness of a draft Bill now, next week or next year; or from arguing about what committee should be designed to consider the problem and disentangle the difficulties so as to make it easy to go on with the next step. The difficulty is that every political organisation addressing this question is divided within itself. All the parties are divided. Both Houses of Parliament are divided, which causes gaps between the leadership, as well as between the sometimes slightly misleading term of the organisation. For example, we understood that this would be something for a third term of a Conservative Government, but somehow impatience has carried it in a different direction.
We want this caucus of Front-Bench representatives from the three parties to seek a way forward, and I can understand why. It then has to be commended to both Houses of Parliament. Both Houses have to address this fundamental question of elected Members and be persuaded in their judgment that it is a positive improvement for this legislative structure. Because that question concerns this House alone in the direct sense, it is very disagreeable to find any suggestion to the effect that the views of this House can be pushed to one side and that, above all, we do not require a clear majority persuaded in favour of this change in this House.
Therefore, where the evidence is on which the case for change is to be based becomes the important question.
Lord Howe of Aberavon
Before the noble Lord speaks, I should say that it is not customary to give way in a speech of this kind. I fell into the habit on the Front Bench in the other House of yielding too often to interrogative bodies. I would like to have freedom from that on this occasion in this House.
I draw attention to the total lack of evidence that can justify a change of this kind on this scale. It is interesting to look at the speech made by the Deputy Prime Minister on 19 May in which he said that his second objective was to,
“reform to reduce the power of political elites and to drag Westminster into the 21st century, starting with the House of Lords”.
That is the proposition he advanced and it is the proposition which it is necessary to establish if this case is to get anywhere at all.
What will be the effect on the composition, style, quality and expertise of this House? It is that which is of crucial value and we need considered debate about it, as we have had frequently. The first quality is one that we hardly need to be reminded of: it is the sheer expertise of this House. Its difference and its quality are wholly distinct from that of the other place, and therefore it makes a very distinct contribution. Only in the past few weeks we witnessed a debate led by the noble Lord, Lord Patel, on genomic medicine. That is not a topic I even begin to understand anything about, but the House was privileged to have taking part in that debate not just the noble Lord himself, a profoundly authoritative expert on the subject, but four members of two royal societies, including the president the Royal Society of Edinburgh and two Fellows of the Royal Society, the president of the British Academy and chairman of the Nuffield Foundation, two Ministers, one a Minister of Health, and several other well qualified medical people, including the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, and above all, the noble Lord, Lord Winston. That is the kind of quality that to a large extent would be impaired and destroyed if we were to accept the concept of a wholly elected House.
I take your Lordships’ minds back to the debate four days after 9/11, on the Friday when we debated what would happen in Iraq and when, sadly enough, our views did not prevail so as to prevent that disaster. The people who took part in that debate included three former Chiefs of the Defence Staff, three former Foreign Secretaries who had played a role in that part of the world, two former Home Secretaries, two former ambassadors, two former Defence Secretaries and many others with service experience. The House has its character because of the accepted presence of a substantial number which makes up the quality that it is necessary to preserve. That is only one thing which would be damaged if we were to accept a substantial elected element here. Grave damage would be done to the quality, diversity and expertise of this place.
Secondly, I turn to the argument about legitimacy, about which we have heard mention already. It is a strange argument that is inconclusive in its impact because an apparent consequence of legitimising us by making us elected would be to provoke much more savage and regular conflicts between the two Houses. There is no doubt that if we were to feel as extravagantly self-important on the issues of this kind as the other place sometimes does, conflict would be repetitive. Nothing would be gained by sharing legitimacy in that way.
Another consequence would be the change in cost if this House were to represent people who had been elected with access to the same level of privileges, facilities and services as exist in the other place. I make no complaint about that, but where is there any evidence to suggest that elected Members here would effect an improvement in the quality of our performance? It is a question that I have asked many times. Curiously, we find that Parliament’s shortcoming is most frequently attributed to shortcomings in the other place. I have quoted previously the fifth report, HC 494-I, of the so-called Wright committee, published in 2002, much to the credit of that Member of the other place. The committee addressed the question of what effect legitimacy would have and said,
“the principal cause of today’s ‘widespread public disillusionment with our political system’ is the ‘virtually untrammelled control … by the Executive’ of the elected House”.
It is the fact that the other place is effectively dominated, commanded and controlled by the Executive, which now even chooses candidates for selection at constituency level and so on. That is the cause of the disillusionment with our political system. The Wright committee went on to reach two conclusions. It emphasised,
“the need ‘to ensure that the dominance of Parliament by the Executive, including the political Party machines, is reduced and not increased’”.
How would that dominance be reduced and not increased if we were to have elected Members here? Who would select those Members but the parliamentary Executive? Who would finance their campaigns? The parliamentary Executive.
For those reasons, the Wright committee reached the other conclusion that the Second Chamber—that is us—must be,
“neither rival nor replica, but genuinely complementary to the Commons”,
and, therefore, “as different as possible”. That would hardly be fulfilled if we were to now set about introducing elected Members to this House. That is the central question.
Interestingly, I started by quoting the Deputy Prime Minister as wanting to start the reform by making fundamental change here, bringing us into the 21st century. This week I came across an article in the Parliamentary Brief paper for June/July—the latest one—in which there is an article by the new Leader of the House of Commons, Sir George Young, someone for whom I have great respect. I have half a minute left and I dedicate it to Sir George Young. Under the heading, “The House rules, OK”, he starts with this paragraph:
“For years, the real scandal in British politics has been the impotence of the House of Commons. The terms of the trade between government and parliament have shifted too far in the executive’s favour. Over recent decades, it has simply become too easy for the government to sideline parliament; to push Bills through without adequate scrutiny; and to see the House more as a rubber-stamp than a proper check on executive authority”.
If that is the real scandal in British politics today, where, in heaven’s name, is there any sense in introducing and extending the role of the political Executive into this House with disastrous consequences?
Lord Richard
My Lords, there is a strong sense of déjà vu about this debate. We go round and round and round again; it is not a magic roundabout, it is an eternal roundabout. I have heard nothing today which I have not heard in the past 10 years and I do not expect during the whole course of this debate to hear anything new said about this issue.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, has been persistent and consistent in his views: he does not like the thought of an elected Chamber and has passionately advocated the status quo. For my part—I do not think anyone in this House would doubt it—I have persistently advocated precisely the opposite. As he has asked the question, I shall try to answer it. It is a fair question. The debates in this House are of extreme quality—no doubt about it. The people who take part in those debates are of extreme quality—no doubt about it. We deliberate, come to a conclusion—and nothing happens. The fact of the matter is that no one is listening to us. Why are they not listening to the House of Lords? They are not listening to the House of Lords for one very simple reason—we are capable of being ignored.
When I was in the House of Commons, as any other Member here who was in the House of Commons will know, the last thing we ever did was consider what was going on in the second Chamber. Why did we not consider what was going on in the second Chamber important? Because it did not represent anything. It was a group of people, some of whom are extraordinarily distinguished, I do not deny that, but—
Lord Richard
Perhaps I may finish the sentence. But we are not a debating Chamber. This is a legislative Chamber; a part of Parliament. It is not here for us to have good debates and to produce good reports, which people do not thereafter read. The noble Lord wants to enjoin me.
Lord King of Bridgwater
I wondered if the noble Lord recalled the fact that if it had not been for the intervention of this House, we would probably now have 90 days’ detention without trial.
Lord Richard
If he wishes, the noble Lord can take the view that that is a massive justification for a non-elected legislative Chamber; I am bound to say that I do not. I have a simple view on this, and I have persisted in it for many years now: if you are a legislator, you should be elected by the people who are going to be affected by your legislation. It is a simple proposition.
I am pleased that the Government, with the extraordinary coalition that they now have, seem to have come to the conclusion that a mainly elected second Chamber is desirable. I share that. What we need in our constitution is a predominantly but not exclusively elected second Chamber. I am fortified in that, because that is almost the wording that John Smith used to describe what Labour Party policy was supposed to be when he was leader of the party, and that is going back a very long time. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, is now in exactly the same position on this issue as he was in 1997 and 1998. His position has not moved on, but it has to.
I support the idea that there needs to be legislation, but I have one or two reservations. The first concerns the powers of this Joint Committee. For the life of me, I do not see how it is going to produce a Bill. I do not see how you could conceivably instruct parliamentary draftsmen when there may be opposition on that committee. If we get a piece of paper in our hands that says, “This is the Bill”, I shall be extraordinarily surprised.
I shall make just two further points, because I am anxious to sit down within my seven minutes. It is easy to see the ends that one wants. Very often we get to this stage of the negotiations: you agree what you want to achieve, but how on earth do you get there? We had this the other day on the Barnett formula—everyone on the committee agreed that it ought to be reformed and what we ought to see, but how on earth did we move from were we were now to where we wanted to be?
I emphasise that the transition provisions will be crucial to this enterprise. I follow the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, on that. Many of the people in this House are life Peers who came here on the basis that they were here for life. Maybe they will not be—I do not know—but it was a legitimate aspiration on their part, given the way that they were approached and introduced. Personally, I had a fond notion that I would be staggering into the House on my Zimmer frame at the age of 85, and I sincerely hope that that will still be the position. I do not know how the grandfather concept is going to work, but I look forward with great interest to hearing about it. The transition is very important.
The second thing that is important is the system by which Members will be elected to the House. I am sure that this will shock the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, and many other Members of this House, but I am totally heretical about this: it should be an election on the basis of constituencies, rather like the present European constituencies, and it should be done by PR. Elections to this House should be fixed and they should not be coterminous with elections down the other end.
In terms of the health of British democracy, the situation in which this House can provide a better check upon the Executive because of the way in which it has been elected, and because of the composition of this House compared with the composition of the other House, is a greater check on the power of the Executive than the glorious speeches that we make in this Chamber and the glorious debates that we have. If you want to check the Executive you have to have power, and in order to have power you have to earn it—it has to come from an election. It has to have a legitimacy that arises from the people.
I hope that this venture moves, although perhaps not too quickly, towards fruition. I will give it my support. I hope that at the end of the day this House will be more efficient and effective, it will be heard more and it will be more democratic and more justified.
Lord Maclennan of Rogart
My Lords, I have been involved in several attempts to move the House of Lords towards a 21st-century institution of our democracy. I do not agree with those who say that nothing has happened. The outcome of the discussions between the Labour Party and Liberal Democrats that were led by Robin Cook and me was that measures for the reform of this House were introduced. That there was a compromise as a result of the clever negotiation between Lord Cranborne—now the noble Marquis, Lord Salisbury—and Tony Blair about the hereditary Peers certainly stalled the process of reform. However, that was not the end of the story, because in 2005 we had a significant Bill, which, as I mentioned in an earlier intervention, removed the Law Lords from this place. That followed the wise advice of the then senior Law Lord, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bingham, who took the view that those who made the law should not sit in judgment on their own laws. We were moving. The previous Government produced a White Paper that indicated further moves.
The noble Lord, Lord Richard, exaggerates when he says that no one listens to the work that is done by this House. The actuality is that, during the past five years, some 40 per cent of the amendments passed by it, against the advice of the Government at the time, have been accepted without cavil. That may not have captured the headlines in the broadsheets; it may not have been reported more widely than in “Yesterday in Parliament” en route; but we have made a big impact on legislation and have stepped in very often when the Commons was not ready to make a move because it was very largely in the hands of the Executive.
In considering today the case for the reform of the House of Lords, what should be up front is not the process, which seems to have dominated the debate to some extent, but what the objective is and where we will see an improvement in our system of governance. For that, I agree that it would be sensible to look at this House’s transition to a modern elected House, because most of us have some direct interest in the House as it is structured. However, let us also consider where we should end up.
The weakness of our parliamentary democracy is not its bicameralism; it is the fact that its principal House—there have been references to retaining its primacy in every debate that we have had—is very largely the creature of the Executive if they enjoy a substantial majority. That does not help to improve the quality of governance, which is why this House, reformed, should have a major role. There is certainly a case for considering how that could be more effectively discharged; for example, I cannot really see that we need to circumscribe the Prime Minister’s choice of Ministers by saying that they have to be either drawn from the Commons or appointed to the Lords. That gives the second Chamber a heavier bent towards the Executive than it would have if it were empowered to draw in to answer its questions all those who were responsible for Acts of government. I hope that the second Chamber, as reformed, will not contain Ministers of the Crown, but that Ministers of the Crown will be required to attend when it has a Bill for which they are responsible or to answer questions when they are departmentally responsible.
I am glad that nobody in this debate or in any other debate that I can recall has seriously suggested that we could do without a second Chamber. Reform, not abolition, is under discussion. However, the discussion also ought to take into account as a goal, and as part of the case for reform, the fact that the Commons is grossly overloaded. It has to be said, taking that consideration into account, that it is somewhat odd to be looking for a substantial reduction in the number of Members. Does this not point to a sensible delimitation of functions between the two reformed Houses? Would it not make sense to have some second-guessing, which allows opportunities for reconsideration?
Also, as we give the other place priority over money Bills and exclude this House from their consideration, should we not give the reformed upper House priority over considering the country’s international obligations such as the treaty-making process and perhaps European Union oversight? That is a growing weight of responsibility for Parliament as a whole, and if we are all second-guessing each other all the time we are diminishing the amount of time available for the vast global responsibilities in which we wish to play some part.
This House has 137 Members at the last count engaged in its subject committees, which one might regard as a very active part of its membership. That sort of number might be a target for the size of the reformed second House. It is certainly clear that we need to have a committed House in which Members are prepared to work their socks off. Many do, and that is what has allowed this House to survive as long as it has in its present form.
I put it to the House, not as a postscript but as a central proposition, that we have such expertise, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, said, that we do not wish to see it lost entirely to the governance of this country. That should not be included in a reformed, elected House—
Lord Maclennan of Rogart
My time is almost up. That should not be included in this House directly, but it might be incorporated in a separate institution such as a council of state, which would not have the power to block the Government or reform legislation but would have the power to make amendments and draw in evidence from outside as well as informing the proceedings of both Houses of Parliament. With the complexity of government that we have today, that expertise should not be abandoned to our processes.
Lord Wright of Richmond
My Lords, I shall make four very brief points. First, in response to the Prime Minister’s invitation to everyone, including parliamentarians, to suggest ways in which to cut the deficit, I have pointed out that in my opinion it is sheer folly, in what the Leader of the House referred to only yesterday as the present economic climate, to aim to legislate for an all or substantially elected House of Lords, which on any calculation is bound to cost the nation at least three times as much as the existing appointed House.
Secondly, I find it extraordinary, given the strength of feeling expressed in today’s debate and on many previous occasions, that there is no representation of Cross Benchers, let alone Back Benchers, on the Deputy Prime Minister’s committee. Unless the Government are prepared to change their mind on this, I hope that the Leader of the House, or the noble Lord, Lord McNally, when he comes to close the debate—and the Leader has already told us that he is here to listen—will assure us that he will personally accept the responsibility of conveying our views to his noble and right honourable colleagues and, in particular, to the Deputy Prime Minister.
Thirdly, I strongly support the Motion proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood, which seems in no way to pre-empt whatever wider legislation the Government decide to propose at a later date for an all-elected House. Finally, a lot has been made today of our lack of democratic authority or legitimacy because we are not elected. Perhaps the Government could tell us what they propose to do about the Supreme Court.
Lord Denham
My Lords, having been a Member of your Lordships’ House for an inordinate length of time, I have often had it said to me that I must have seen a lot of changes in the House over the years. I always give the same reply, that what amazes me is not how much the House has changed, but how much it has remained the same.
It has survived the advent of the life Peers. It has survived eight Labour Governments, each bent on its destruction. It has survived Select Committees, Joint Select Committees and Royal Commissions, all hoping to improve it. It has even survived the culling of 90 per cent of the hereditary Peers, carried out though it was by the Administration of that time in an unnecessarily callous way. And the House still retains the quiet and unassuming sense of purpose with which it carries out its duties that I first found here 60 years ago. But I must tell your Lordships that I have the gravest of doubts if it will survive being turned into a wholly, or even a predominantly elected House.
One of the principal virtues that your Lordships’ House has retained is the fact that if you win the argument, more often than not, you will win the vote—which is invaluable in a reforming Chamber, frowned on though it would undoubtedly be in another place.
When the animal lobby and the whole Green movement first came to the fore in the 1980s, I discovered that there had not been a vet—veterinary surgeon—sitting in either House of Parliament in the whole of that or the previous century. And I was able to send an urgent message down the Corridor to my right honourable friend the patronage secretary, seeking to remedy this omission. That is how and why we have had the advantage of advice on such matters as these from my noble friend Lord Soulsby of Swaffham Prior to this day.
There is a small but select number of what I would call key Peers who are generally acknowledged, irrespective of party, to be experts in their own particular subjects and who, when that subject comes up, are immensely useful, to their own side, certainly, but beyond that to the House as a whole. Each of your Lordships would be able to draw up your own such list. I do not want to embarrass them, but my list would certainly include my noble friend Lord Plumb on agriculture, the noble Lords, Lord Bragg and Lord Puttnam, on the arts, and, more recently, the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, on business know-how.
Beyond that again, each of the parties has provided themselves on their Back Benches with their own experts on such diverse subjects as the law, defence, economics, employment, foreign affairs, the Commonwealth, crime, health, sport and the machinery of politics itself. The right reverend Prelates bring with them an extraordinary knowledge of the individual characteristics and needs of every parish in England. And the contribution of Cross-Bench Peers to all of this speaks for itself.
We would indeed be lucky if any conceivable form of election were able to throw up a tenth of the combined skills and experience that are present in your Lordships’ House today.
I would like to end with a story that I have told your Lordships on two similar occasions, both of them a long time ago. It is the story of Sir Isaac Newton’s mathematical bridge at Cambridge. The story is probably apocryphal but, as Sir Winston Churchill once wrote about another legend, “If it isn’t true it ought to be”. Newton, so the fable goes, designed a wooden bridge over the River Cam with such ingenuity and mathematical precision that its component pieces of wood, once they had been laid in place, held together without the aid of nails, bolts or any other form of fastening. This confounded all the greatest brains in the Cambridge of the day. They could think of no good reason why a bridge constructed in this way should work. They could think of a number of very good reasons why a bridge constructed in this way should not work. But the one thing that was abundantly clear for everyone to see was that the bridge did work and carried out admirably the purpose for which it was intended.
Such was Newton’s prestige in the Cambridge of the day that, while he lived, no one dared to tamper with his bridge; but as soon as the old man died, their curiosity got the better of them and his contemporaries could resist it no longer. They took the bridge to pieces to find out how it worked. From this piece of vandalism they learnt only two things. The first was that by taking the bridge to pieces, they could get no further forward in discovering how and why it had worked; and the second was that, having taken the bridge to pieces, they could not put it together again.
Lord Filkin
My Lords, follow that. When the Leader of the House spoke to us before multiple interruptions, he set out several points. He said that public confidence in Parliament had been damaged over recent years, and that the task of holding the Executive to account by this Chamber, while often done well, could have been done better. I agree with him. The point I wish to make in this short intervention is that addressing the composition of the House may make some contribution to those points but, by itself, will not rectify them. We need, within the terms of reference of the reform of the House of Lords, to consider how well we do our role, as well as who is doing that role. Over the past 15 years, we have given excessive attention to composition and insufficient attention to how we fulfil a role around which there is a broad consensus.
The noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, acknowledged that there had been many ideas for improvement of how the House functions. She had the kindness to refer to three recent contributions to that debate from the reports of the cross-party working groups led by the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, the noble Lord, Lord Butler, and me. We would say no more than that these are stimuli to a wider debate, rather than seeking to set out a rigid template for change. Nevertheless, some of those ideas—and others on the same theme of how we improve how this House works—require debate. The process of changing the composition could well take 10 or 15 years. We must not neglect the importance of addressing our processes, procedures, systems and standards.
I will briefly touch on three or four points in those reports, which are no more than a taster. On legislation, perhaps the central recommendation was that there should be a process whereby this House tests whether legislation is fit and ready for introduction to Parliament. That is basically a technical function; it would do for primary legislation on a slightly bigger scale what is already done for secondary legislation by the Merits Committee. It would ensure that legislation had been thought through; it was clear what it sought to do; it had been properly consulted on; and there was a clear explanation of what it was for and how it would achieve its policy objectives.
Next, we recommended that there should be a public evidence process as part of any Lords starter. I am delighted that we need to say no more on that; it is already the coalition Government’s policy, as set out in their manifesto. Amen to that. Finally, because we thought it made sense, we said that the use of Grand Committee should become the default rather than the exception. I am sure that ought also to cheer the heart of the government Chief Whip. We also said that there ought to be more post-legislative scrutiny and we should get on with doing it. There is no threat to the Government of the day in any of those proposals. They ought to ensure that government legislation is better prepared by officials and goes through with more understanding of what it is for, rather than wasting time trying to unpack what it is for, which is often what we do.
On procedures, I will say nothing more because the noble Lord, Lord Butler, may wish to speak on those. However, we made a range of recommendations about Statements, Oral Questions, the topicality of debates and sitting times—the micro-issues, which are very important in making sure that the House operates efficiently.
In the report on governance, we argued that there is a need for a debate about the governance of this House. Some believe that governance is self-evidently good and sound. Others find it opaque and do not understand it. Irrespective of who is right on that, it is important that any self-governing institution is particularly careful to review periodically its governance and standards so that it can command public confidence that it has good governance, and that how it has good governance is transparent. We ought to be particularly mindful of that. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, when we discussed these issues with him, had the grace—as one would expect—to recognise that perhaps every 10 years or so, a body such as ours ought to review how we work in these respects.
We were pleased to have the opportunity to discuss these issues with the noble Lords, Lord Strathclyde and Lord McNally, as Leader and Deputy Leader. We were cordially received—I would expect no less from the Leader of the House—and had a good discussion. He agreed—I hope that he will correct me if I am wrong—that it would be desirable to have a debate on these and other issues before too long. I got the sense—I hope that I am not taking it too far—that he was minded to establish a Leaders’ Group after proper consultations. He has made a similar remark in other places. We told him that we see the benefit in such a process having wide terms of reference, being set up early rather than later—before the Summer Recess—getting on with it, and therefore reporting before the Christmas Recess, all of which we thought was perfectly possible without going at it too pell-mell. Therefore, when he responds, will the Deputy Leader say whether he agrees that we should make progress in these ways and when such a debate and such a process might start? I will say no more. I thank both the Leader and the Deputy Leader for the way they received our comments. I think that the House would generally welcome a process to look at these other issues in parallel with the debate on composition. There is more to life than composition.
Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, I would certainly support the Motion standing in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood. A final solution to the question of Lords reform has been dangled tantalisingly before us, arguably, for the past 100 years. The pace may have quickened in recent years but the outlook is still quite uncertain. In the mean time, certain specific reforms are needed to remedy some obvious weaknesses in the constitution of your Lordships' House. These could be introduced without in any way prejudicing the case for more radical reform, if that was thought desirable. The noble Lord has given us the opportunity to make these changes on a number of occasions over the past three years, but we have consistently allowed the uncertain prospect of more fundamental reform to stand in the way of necessary but more limited reform. I do not think that we should do this any longer.
To take just the most obvious case, everybody agrees that the need to reduce the size of the House is now pressing. The adoption of a scheme to enable Members of the House to retire would potentially open the way to a reduction in the size of the House. We fluffed the opportunity to salvage even this most uncontentious provision from the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill in the wash-up at the end of the previous Parliament. In the mean time, the House just gets larger and larger. I do not think that we should fluff this any longer.
On the question of more fundamental reform, I was not long in this place before it was obvious to me that it is rather well constituted for carrying out its principal role as a revising Chamber. The qualification for this is expertise and experience rather than the more nebulous quality of representativeness. These are things that can probably be better secured by appointment than election; it is more like choosing someone for a job than electing them to represent you. The bases of legitimacy are not better or worse, just different. In any case, if it is democratic legitimacy you are after, it is not clear that this place is conspicuously inferior to the other. Again, it is just different. The Members of this House may not be democratically elected, but in the way that we operate, with the writ of the Whips being much less irresistible and predictable here than it is at the other end of the building, I would argue that the point of view of civil society gets a much fuller airing and receives a much better hearing here than it does in the other place. Subject to the changes about which the noble Lord, Lord Steel, is talking, I would be relatively content for the method of recruitment to this House to remain broadly as it is. By common consent the House has never worked better. The case for election may be superficially attractive, but it remains essentially superficial. Where is the added value in a pale imitation of the House of Commons composed of people who could not get into the House of Commons?
The arguments for election versus appointment will no doubt be canvassed back and forth as the day goes on—indeed, that process has already begun. We will hear about election changing the balance of power between the two Houses and the need to tear up the conventions, or the confusion caused by two sets of elected representatives roaming around each others’ constituencies. However, like the noble Lord, Lord Richard, who spoke earlier, I do not suppose that anyone’s mind will be changed. We will just argue ourselves to a standstill.
Instead, I might suggest that we try to find a way through which gives something to each of the rival points of view. If we are to have an elected House—as I said, I am by no means persuaded that this is the right way to go—I would submit that we need a better system, and one better calculated to preserve the House’s USP of expertise than one based on geographical constituencies such as is used for electing the other House. A system could be developed based on constituencies of expertise, mirroring the different walks of civil society—the law, medicine, the arts, sport, education, the Armed Forces, business, trade unions, the voluntary sector and so on. By departing from the geographical constituencies used for elections to the other place, this would bring something distinctive and provide the necessary added value. It would retain the necessary basis in expertise which those who favour appointment seek to preserve, and which is the essential hallmark of this place, but would at the same time concede something to those who favour election.
It may not be easy to devise a system which achieves universal suffrage. I would favour a system based on electoral colleges representing the different branches of civil society. It is not possible to get into the detail today, but I hope that it will be possible to submit more detailed proposals to the committee we have heard about this afternoon which is going to come up with a draft Bill by Christmas. I and others have made proposals along these lines before, but they have typically been given rather short shrift. The Wakeham commission was initially attracted, but—if I may be forgiven for saying so—its approach ended up by being one that seemed more inclined to find a difficulty for every solution. It cannot be beyond the wit of man to find a solution for at least some of the difficulties.
For instance, the House of Lords Library has a classification of existing Peers in 19 categories. We could do worse than take that as a starting point for determining the constituencies of expertise. At all events, I hope that the coalition may be willing to give these ideas more of a hearing than its predecessors, and see them as a potential solution for many of the difficulties. For it seems to me that only by means such as these will it be possible to break the deadlock in a way which stands any chance of building anything like a consensus.
The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, I know that brevity and clarity are at a premium in a debate of this length. I therefore ask your Lordships’ indulgence if I take this opportunity to remind you of the consistent position of this Bench and of the Church of England in the matter of Lords reform and to reiterate the principal points made both to the Wakeham commission in 1999 and more recently in response to the 2008 White Paper.
We have, along with others, consistently raised the question about the purpose of a second Chamber. In the Church of England’s submission to the Wakeham commission we expressed the point in this way:
“In a number of senses”,
the second Chamber’s role,
“is to provide a different yet complementary system of representation to that provided by the House of Commons. It should not seek to challenge that House's democratic primacy but it must not be a mere cipher. It should have powers to amend legislation, to require reconsideration and should play its part in the duty of Parliament to hold the executive effectively to account”.
The distinction of roles implied by the historic functions of your Lordships' House suggests that a second Chamber requires a different mix of skills in comparison to the other place and, crucially, a source of legitimacy which does not pit the second Chamber against the first in a potential stalemate. It is clear that our focus must therefore be on the role of a second Chamber in holding the Executive to account.
The party-political system has contributed a great deal to the functioning of our democracy, but where it needs augmentation from a non-partisan element is in enabling Parliament to maintain the necessary checks and balances that good governance requires. Elected Members in the other place sit on behalf of all their constituents, not just those who voted for their party, and the Executive legislate on behalf of all. A politician will, no doubt, believe with a passion that his or her party’s programme is the best hope for the common good, but understandable single-mindedness must always be moderated by the perspective of others, especially those who, because of expertise or experience, have reason to know the detail of how legislation impacts on people’s lives. Furthermore, a move to a fully elected House would come at a time when the greatest issues that we face, such as climate change, competition for scarce resources and reform of our financial systems, cannot all be fixed within the short-term time horizons of the electoral cycle.
My colleagues on this Bench and I question, as others have, the composition of the committee set up by the Deputy Prime Minister to take a first look at reforming the constitution. We would have expected such a committee to include representatives of all the stakeholders in the present arrangements. In replying to this debate, will the noble Lord, Lord McNally, at least acknowledge that, by setting up a committee entirely composed of members of the three main political parties, the Deputy Prime Minister runs the risk of appearing to foreclose the question about the role of non-party members in any future second Chamber?
At a time like this, your Lordships would expect me to raise the wider question of the place of religion and bishops in our national life and hence in our constitutional structures. The experience of the last decade or so has made one thing very clear. The theories of secularisation, with which most of us have been familiar for a long time, are no longer an accurate picture of how the world works. Contrary to expectations, increasing material prosperity, scientific advance and global mobility have not led to the death of religion or even to its relative eclipse. That may be a matter of celebration or dismay to some of your Lordships, but it remains true that the persistence of religion has to be accounted for and, since it will not go away, its ongoing place in society must be taken into account. It would be at the very least a shame if major constitutional reform, potentially the most significant for nearly 200 years and designed to last for perhaps several hundreds more, were grounded on a 20th-century theory of secularisation that has been fairly comprehensively discredited and no longer describes the world as it has turned out to be.
Of course I do not believe that Christians, let alone Anglicans, should be the only Members of a second Chamber who stand for and speak for their religious principles. Nevertheless, the established place of the Church of England is deeply woven into the constitution and unpicking it at any one point will have numerous consequences in other areas of our national life. Successive Governments, including the last, have asserted that they intend to do nothing to diminish the church’s established role and I hope that we can look to the new coalition publicly to continue that commitment. Embeddedness in the nation’s life and history should surely count for something. Of course, bishops of the Church of England claim absolutely no monopoly of those qualities among the religious communities of the land.
My case is this. I ask what a second Chamber is for and I remain convinced by the answer that it must be primarily a revising Chamber that does not seek to usurp the prerogatives of the other place. That in turn requires some distance from, or leavening of, the party system by independent Members chosen for a different set of virtues. Those virtues should include experience, expertise and wisdom gained in vocations to service outside these walls, and should be brought to the service of Parliament to serve the good of all. Some of these Members should represent the religious character of our country and the religious motivation that enhances citizenship for so many of our people.
Lord Waddington
My Lords, it is both a pleasure and a privilege to follow the right reverend Prelate. I am sure that he knows that I do not underestimate the important role played by the Bishops’ Bench in this House. However, this afternoon I will raise another matter of great importance that we are in danger of overlooking. It shows clearly that we cannot duck the question of what should be the powers of a reformed House by saying that it can be left as a marginal matter.
I remind your Lordships that our constitution has been rickety since 1949, when the Government of the day, rightly or wrongly, upset the quasi-settlement of 1911 and used the Parliament Act to drive through a reduction in the delaying powers of the Lords without the consent of this House. It is arguable that with that precedent a Government could further reduce our delaying power; indeed, could so reduce it as to make it virtually valueless and render this Chamber incapable of fulfilling its most important role as the ultimate guarantor of the rights and liberties of the subject. Therefore, what is required is not a second Chamber that is an ever more efficient part of the legislative sausage machine, and not a second Chamber that does no more than—to use the jargon—add value to the legislative process by amending bills that have not been properly considered in the Commons, and by scrutinising EU legislation. We need a second Chamber that can block legislation for a meaningful period and stop a Government using their temporary majority to drive through irreversible change before the country has had time to grasp and digest its true consequences. That was precisely what the settlement in 1911 was about. We need a second Chamber that can stop a Government using their temporary majority to extend their own life, which is another thing that the 1911 settlement was all about.
That is what the country needs but, the way we are going, it is very unlikely to get it. This House with its present powers is, as I have shown, a very frail barrier against arbitrary government, and it is absolutely clear that, because it lacks democratic legitimacy, it will never get additional powers. However, if we do not look out, an elected House will also be denied meaningful powers in the name of preserving the primacy of the Commons. My noble friend the Leader of the House said as much when he hinted that there was no chance of any increase in the powers of the second Chamber.
After all the inglorious constitutional meddling of recent years, it would be surprising if many people did not feel now that the best course is to leave well alone. If an elected House comes into existence, we do not know how the relationship between the two Houses would work, and how the inevitable tension between them would be resolved. So why, many say, take a leap into the unknown?
I am afraid that the answer to that is very plain: the transition to an elected House is, in my view, well nigh inevitable. Lords reform is not, just now, a burning issue in the Dog and Duck, but when measures are taken to cut the number of MPs, surely it will be almost impossible to argue that people should be required to support an unelected House growing ever bigger and costing ever more, for I have seen no evidence to suggest that if a proposal were brought forward to encourage noble Lords to retire, there would be a great rush of people to the door. I do not believe for one moment that that would happen.
Therefore, I think that our job is to see that by the method of election to the new House, by a limit on the period for which anyone can serve and by other devices we create a House far more independent of the Executive and therefore a better check on the Executive than the Commons has proved to be in recent years. Of course, we must see that the new House has meaningful powers and at the very least—this has not been mentioned yet today—the power to veto a Bill that seeks to further amend the Parliament Act.
I have not much doubt that a change to an elected House will cause much trouble and strife, with the new House using its democratic legitimacy to challenge the primacy of the Commons. However, there is perhaps some reason to hope that out of it all will come in time what is really needed: a new constitutional settlement with a written constitution granting the second Chamber specific powers different from those of the Commons—powers such as were mentioned very briefly by the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, a few moments ago—and with it becoming something akin to the American Senate. That, indeed, would be a happy outcome.
Lord Grenfell
My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord the Leader of the House for introducing this debate. I have to confess that I am somewhat irritated by the fact that we are invited to take note of the case for reform of the House of Lords, as though that were on the coalition’s agenda. It is not. What is on the agenda is the abolition of the House and its replacement with something entirely different. That is quite an innovation but, as Edmund Burke taught us, innovation is not reform.
Of course there is a case for introducing reforms, particularly those that would reduce the size of the House, improve its structures and procedures, and set in place a statutory appointments commission. We have been discussing such reforms for some time now, many of them in the context of the House of Lords Reform Bill, for which there was wide support, and it is on those that the Government should now be focusing.
However, we have got nowhere because the posture of the previous Government, and now, alas, of this Government, has been founded on what I would call a grand illusion. That illusion is that you can invest this House with the legitimacy that we are told it lacks with reforms that do not upset the balance of power between the two Houses. My Lords, you cannot. This Government and the previous Government are and were hell-bent on creating a wholly or predominantly elected Senate whose powers would be neither more nor less than those enjoyed by the House of Lords today. They may succeed in drafting a Bill with that as their objective but they know that in practice it will be shown to fly in the face of all logic. Alas, they seem to be ideologically blinded to reality.
The abolitionists speak airily of “transition” to an elected Chamber, as though it will involve little of more consequence than a rechoreographing of the State Opening and a rewriting of the Companion to the Standing Orders. However, in effect, they will be provoking a constitutional upheaval of colossal import. To paint it as otherwise is, to put it politely, disingenuous and, less politely, pitifully naïve.
What would this hugely costly new creation be asked to do? If it is asked to do what the existing House does, but better and more democratically— whatever that means—I cannot believe that it will succeed. It will fail because it will become, in the splendid description offered by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian,
“a wrinkled second division replica of the Commons”.
What room will that give for the application of expertise and independence of thought, which are the hallmarks of the work of this House? One has to ask: in exchange for giving up most, if not all, of our capacity to scrutinise, advise and propose revisions to legislation to the high standards that we attain here, what on earth will we get in return, all in the name of greater legitimacy?
Those who claim that only a fully elected or predominantly elected upper Chamber will have the legitimacy to do what we do, fail to appreciate, or wilfully ignore the fact, that our true legitimacy lies in what this House achieves. I voted happily for the 1999 Lords reform Bill and I remain convinced that the House has since demonstrated that it can and does play a fundamentally important constitutional role. How? In simplest terms, the House of Lords seeks to meet the electorate’s requirement that the legislation promised by the party that wins office is fashioned to the highest possible standard, consistent with the will of the elected House, whose primacy we unquestionably acknowledge. With few powers to exercise, and rightly so, we Members of the Lords participate in the legislative process by drawing on our experience and applying our expertise to help to ensure that Parliament delivers to the people what it has the right to expect: high quality, implementable Acts of Parliament.
It has yet to be proven to me that the fact that we are an appointed House disqualifies us from performing that crucial democratic function. I am yet to be persuaded—I am confident I never will be—that an elected Senate, riven by party political interests and divisions and locked in a permanent power struggle with the other House, will perform that service to the people better, if at all.
My final point is that we all know the broad outlines of what will emerge from this exclusive, closed drafting committee. That is pre-ordained. In the mean time, Cross-Benchers and Back-Benchers must satisfy themselves by writing letters to it, presumably enclosing a stamped addressed envelope. After today, we shall have to wait for the pre-legislative scrutiny stage before we outsiders can make any real impact. Believe me, those of us who do not share the abolitionist ambitions of the coalition Government and of those likeminded on other Benches, including my own, will, I trust, continue to make their case forcefully, but not just within the confines of Parliament. The people must be made fully aware of what is being proposed in their name.
Properly informed, I believe that they would recognise that their right to high-standard law-making would be put at risk by an ideology-driven move to create an elected Senate, no matter what the unintended consequences. Is this what the people want? The Government may claim that they already have the mandate to reform this House because it was in each party's manifesto, but do the people know what the full constitutional consequence of that is for the structure of Parliament and the balance of power between the two Houses? Of course they do not. It has not been explained to them, and it should be. Then let them tell us what they think about that in a referendum, but, of course, they are not likely to get one. One referendum on AV will, doubtless, be considered enough. Besides, the coalition Government could well lose a referendum on a proposal to restructure Parliament in a way that alters the balance of power between the two Houses and puts at risk the quality of legislation, and they would richly deserve to lose it.
Lord Steel of Aikwood
My Lords, I wish to express the hope that our colleagues on the Front Bench will convey copies of this debate in Hansard to members of the committee who are not present in this House so that they may read speeches such as the one we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell. I begin with a note of surprising agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Richard. I have some doubts about the timetable. In my Resolution, I very politely talked about the legislative timetable being unclear. That is not an insult, it is a statement of fact. So many things have to be decided before we get to a Bill that I think that the noble Lord, Lord Richard, is right.
Let me mention just three circles that have to be squared before we get to that point. The first is the question of the electoral system to be used. The noble Lord, Lord Richard, said that he is a heretic and believes in proportional representation. I join him in that heresy, but we must be aware that, at the moment, both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party are not so persuaded—or, if they are, they are minded to have the horrors of the party list system, which is a form of proportional representation that most of us would not want in an elected House.
That is the first circle that must be squared. The second is to decide on the phrase used so blithely, “wholly or mainly elected”, as though that is just some minor matter. It is not a minor matter. If the argument is that we have no legitimacy unless we are elected, what on earth is the point of having a percentage of illegitimate Peers in a future House? That does not make sense. In my view, only a wholly elected House stands up to any rational scrutiny. That issue is glossed over all the time in every document from both the previous Government and the present one. They say, “wholly or mainly”, as though that is a minor matter that can be decided in five minutes. It is not; it is a major issue.
The third circle has been referred to by several colleagues already. That is the question of the conventions between the two Houses, which, as the Cunningham committee reminded us, if we move to an elected upper House, will have to be completely rewritten. I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Richard, when he ended his interesting speech by talking about needing to have power and saying that we would have power only if we were elected. I do not think that this House is about having power. That is a mistake that some people make; it has a very different function.
I suggest that two other circles have to be squared before we have even a draft Bill. Our coalition is committed to reducing the size of the House of Commons. It therefore cannot make any sense at the same time to be increasing the size of the upper House, but the previous Government’s White Paper and everything we have heard so far from the coalition suggests that existing Peers will sit in an interim House alongside newly elected ones. Our size will increase, when we are already bigger than the House of Commons. That circle will have to be squared.
The fifth circle that will have to be squared is this. I read the speech by my right honourable friend the Deputy Prime Minister in the Commons in introducing these proposals. I admire his reforming zeal. He said that one of his objectives was to reduce the cost of Parliament. How can you reduce the cost of Parliament when, as we heard only yesterday from the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, we, existing on minor expenses, would be replaced by an upper Chamber which is salaried and which will need offices and secretaries? That will not reduce the cost of Parliament.
All of those issues lead me to agree with the noble Lord, Lord Richard, that this will take some time. I very much doubt if we will see an elected Chamber—or even proposals for an elected Chamber—passed through this Parliament before we reach the end of this five-year coalition. What are we going to do in the mean time? That is why I tabled my Resolution, as one cannot amend a take note Motion.
Members will have noticed that the four items I mentioned in the Resolution are the four items that have been twice discussed in the Private Member’s Bill which I introduced to the House. I have said repeatedly in previous debates that my objective was not to pass a Private Member’s Bill—it is not a suitable subject for that—but to bring pressure to bear on the Government to act on the issues. To some extent, I was successful, because, as Members will remember, Jack Straw had a deathbed conversion and, at the last minute, produced three of the four items in the Constitutional Renewal Bill, which was washed out in the wash-up. I am not surprised, because we could hardly be expected to do in 24 hours what we had failed to do for several years, but that is what happened.
In a sense, we have gone backwards, because whereas the previous Government had grasped three of the four items in my Bill, today the new coalition has taken only one. Let me say right away that I welcome the announcement of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that he agrees that we ought to have a system to enable Peers to retire and that he will set up a committee to deal with that. I welcome that very much; I just wonder why he does not go the whole hog and take the other three items which were in my Bill. Why is he so wedded to continuing the hereditary by-elections? Why do we not, as in the House of Commons, remove those who are convicted and receive a jail sentence of more than one year? That happens automatically in the other place and should happen here.
The one item that neither Government have accepted is the appointment of a statutory commission, even though the noble Lord, Lord Jay, as chairman of the present commission, has argued for a statutory commission. The argument was that we do not need one because we are going to have an elected House. Since then, we have had 57 new appointments, we are told that there are more coming and there are bound to be more in the next five years. If we end up with a mainly elected House, 20 per cent or so of Peers will be appointed, so there will be a need for an appointments commission. I cannot see why we cannot have that properly on a statutory basis.
We have before us the scandalous case of Lord Laidlaw, who said to the Appointments Commission that he would give up his tax exile status. It had no powers to make him do that and, in fact, he has done precisely the opposite. In the best Lloyd George tradition, he has effectively bought a title with no responsibilities whatever. It is publicly unacceptable that that goes on. That is the case for having the Appointments Commission on a statutory basis.
These four reforms that I keep pressing on successive Governments were approved by the Commons Administration Committee, so they have a lot of support at the other end of the building. The question is: what is going to be done about them? When the Straw Bill failed to carry, I sent an e-mail to my noble friend Lord McNally, the leader of my party. I said that it was a great tragedy and we must do something about it. He replied and encouraged me to retable my Bill in the new Session of Parliament, which I have done. [Laughter.] Wait for it! I then wrote to him in his new position and said, “Dear Minister, my leader recommended that I table the Bill. I have done so. What about government time?”, to which I got a reply saying, “Dear David, your leader is a very wise man”, which did not really address the question.
Frankly, my Bill is not going to go anywhere. I recognise that. Let us be realistic. That is why I tabled the Motion in the hope that the Government would enable Peers to vote separately on the merits of these issues and would introduce their own wording so that it would be government wording, not a private Member’s wording. I think that is a sensible suggestion. Whether I move the Motion later tonight—I certainly do not want to start a second debate after we finish this one—depends on the reaction of Members in the rest of this debate.
Lord Bilimoria
My Lords, at a time like this we need to be extremely careful as we move forward, because a step in the wrong direction will have far-reaching consequences not just for us but for future generations. As Winston Churchill once said,
“It would be a great reform in politics if wisdom could be made to spread as easily and rapidly as folly”.
What the coalition Government propose—to rush through wholesale reform of the House of Lords—is sheer folly. The upper House is the principal check and balance on the Government. This House is, in many ways, the guardian of the nation. Nothing should be done to modify this role of the House. An appointed House brings together, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, said so well, diversity, objectivity, experience and, as the noble Lord, Lord Denham, illustrated, world-class expertise and, perhaps most importantly, thinking that is independent of party politics.
Should we appoint our Members or should we elect them? That is what we are all talking about. I believe that this is where instead of being right, a lot of people unfortunately try to sound right. To be clear, I believe with every fibre that if we stand for anything, we stand for democracy. As the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York so clearly spelt out about democracy, the voice of the people is the moon and tides, the push and pull, of our great nation. However, I have no hesitation in saying that if its membership comes through elections alone, this House will miss out on the services of many of its best Members.
We have a House today that is functioning well, be it in attendance, the quality of the debates, the exceptional value for money—as the noble Lord, Lord Steel, mentioned, it costs one-fifth of the cost of the House of Commons—or the independent nature of the House, which ironically makes our unelected House the cornerstone of our democracy. What is needed is further evolution, not revolution. For example, the Appointments Commission, which is doing such a sterling job, could be made into a statutory appointments commission, as suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Steel.
We are not very good at communicating our strengths to the public. The general impression is that the public feel that for the House of Lords to be legitimate it needs to be elected. I believe that if there was wider understanding of the role and functioning of this House, the public would agree that to have an elected second Chamber would dilute the quality and qualifications of this House. Would we risk diluting the credentials and qualifications of any other cornerstone of our society via an elected system? Would we elect our Army chiefs, our top civil servants, our judges, our surgeons or our university vice-chancellors? Do we question their legitimacy on whether they are elected or not? No, we judge these professionals on the quality of their work, their service to the people and the content of their character.
When we talk about the general public not feeling a connection to this House, I find it astounding that there are those who suggest electing Peers through a system of proportional representation in the mould of the European Parliament elections. MEPs in this country have no connection whatever with their constituencies or their constituents. The vast majority of people cannot even name their MEPs. Do we really want to go down that route? But whatever happens we must maintain an appointed, independent Cross-Bench Peers section of this House, as electing this valuable subsection of the upper House would never work. However, if we are living under a coalition Government who promise freedom, fairness and responsibility, as the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, and so many others have stated, where is the fairness in having a committee on House of Lords reform with no Cross-Bench representation? This is absolutely appalling and completely unfair.
Let us for one moment imagine what it would look like to have an elected second Chamber. As the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, said, we could kiss goodbye to the balance of power between the two Houses as we know it. An elected House of Lords would ultimately challenge the primacy of the House of Commons, leading to conflicts, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, said, between the two Houses over rights, laws and constituencies. We would begin to resemble our American cousins, with an elected Senate and a congress vying for power, and an appointed Supreme Court with the power to strike down laws that it deems to be unconstitutional.
If we want to go all the way, let us just do it. Let us have a wholly elected membership and increase the level, power and authority of this House, like the American Senate. I do not believe that this country needs that or that the people of this country want that. This is not a case of turkeys not wanting to vote for Christmas. This House is very much at the beating heart of democracy in Britain. It has been for centuries and long may that continue.
In conclusion, as I have said before, let us not shake these great foundations. We need always to remember that when you try making changes to a house, you can change the layout, you can even move a few walls, but if you try to change the foundations, there is always the risk of bringing it down.
Baroness O'Cathain
My Lords, I must apologise for being absent for most of this debate. Unfortunately, I had to go to a meeting of the EU Select Committee, but at least I have truncated my speech. I hope that what I will say will not be too repetitious. The Motion on the Order Paper is:
“Lord Strathclyde to move that this House takes note of the case for reform of the House of Lords”,
and we seem to be going through all sorts of options of how we will reform. But we ought to decide whether this House needs to be reformed.
I believe that there are three options. The first is to leave this House as it is. The second is to make some changes to structural procedures, such as reform of an evolutionary nature. The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, is right that we should go for an evolutionary process. Reform implies evolution in terms of reforming something which exists and making it better, and we hope not to make it worse. When you chuck out everything and change the whole basis of the constitution—what it does and its relationship with other things—that is revolution. It is not reform.
Looking at the three options, I refer first to the option for leaving the House as it is: that the tasks undertaken add value, not least because of the body of experience and expertise. Moreover, as others have probably said, we have more time to consider issues because Members of the other place have serious constituency duties which do not permit them to undertake the same level of scrutiny as we can. In the last Parliament, there was an appalling situation of a House of Commons Bill where in only three of its seven stages had it been scrutinised even marginally before it came to us. That is one of the things we do, but I am not about to back this option.
We are in danger of being seen to be wasting time considering all sorts of options when people in the world outside this place are horribly burdened with managing their finances and wondering if their jobs are going to disappear. The amount of time we have already spent on this issue and the amount we are going to spend on it will, I suspect, be far greater than the 700 hours we wasted on the Hunting Bill. Is that what the people out there really want, and is that what they are going to be told it is all about?
I turn to the second point, that of evolutionary reform. The burgeoning size of this House is clearly a cause for concern. Although we have recently lost some very distinguished Members, their number has been more than offset by the creation of more than 50 Peers, with talk of more and more coming through. There are practical resource implications, not least in terms of accommodation, and political implications in terms of how we are seen by those outside the Westminster village. We are caught between a rock and a hard place. If Peers do not attend, they cannot claim allowances, so there is no burden on the public purse, but none the less it conveys a poor impression if we operate on the basis of a certain proportion of our membership being able to come here or stay away willy-nilly whenever they want.
We now have a dedicated and transparent House of Lords Appointments Commission. I support my noble friend Lord Steel and I firmly believe that it should be put on a statutory basis. That would bring us into line with what electors expect in terms of the appointments process, and in effect would guarantee independence for the process. Perception is all, and as a matter of principle we need to enhance our powers to deal with Members who break the law, or indeed who break the spirit of the law. Our powers are far too limited. I also favour changes to some of our existing practices and procedures for the purpose of strengthening what it is that we do. We should make greater use of evidence-taking committees when a Bill originates in this House, we should play to our strengths in establishing a committee for post-legislative scrutiny, and we should press further for the greater use of pre-legislative scrutiny. In short, we could, should and must build on strength as an evolutionary process.
What I am totally opposed to is the third option, which constitutes the exact opposite of building on strength. The Government’s proposals for an elected House are a recipe for wiping out the strengths of this House. Why would elected Members of a second Chamber devote their time to detailed scrutiny that has little potential to attract the attention of the media and their constituents? I do not think that I have ever heard of a Member of this House issuing a press notice when he or she is about to make a particular point in a speech, or has done so. That is a feature of what happens in the other place.
Moreover, what would elected Members in this House bring to bear to enable them to engage in these tasks? They would be here primarily because of their political skills and not because they have a particular expertise that is likely to be of value to the House. Despite some of the claims of the previous Government, an elected House would not be a House of Lords in a different guise. The reality of who would stand for election to a second Chamber was conceded in the last Government’s White Paper. After serving a single fixed term, Members of the second Chamber would, for a period of five years, be debarred from seeking election to the House of Commons. In other words, the group established by Jack Straw conceded that people coming to the second Chamber would be those who would rather be in the other place. We would be their number two choice.
Who would vote for the Members of a Second Chamber? The Government appear to believe that an elected Chamber would not have any more powers than the current House. However, turnout in elections is likely to be low—one suspects it might be lower than that for elections to the European Parliament, which now has considerably more powers than this House. Again, the Government appear to concede this by wanting to hold such elections on the same day as those for the House of Commons. In short, the Government’s proposals effectively concede that the new House would lack popular legitimacy.
I fail to see that the case has been made for the third option. They need to go away and think about it, not rush ahead with ill considered legislation. In fact, they should not even consider it. If they really want to see reform, they should take what we have got and go part of the way I have suggested in an evolutionary process.
Viscount Eccles
My Lords, I suppose we are hoping that, whatever the outcome may be, we are going to be better governed. Perhaps to some extent we should go back to first principles because there is always a danger, when something has been going on for a long time, that we stop thinking strategically. There becomes a certain inevitability of outcome that may disregard the circumstances. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Richard, put very powerfully in his speech the argument for stopping the dialogue and just doing what to him and many others has seemed obvious for a long time. My noble friend the Leader of the House referred to “public confidence” and the matter of whether people’s expectations are fulfilled, whether they are good or not so good.
There is a deep lack of confidence among the public because people believe increasingly that Parliament is not in a good position to deliver, and worse than that, that it is unreasonable to expect it to do so. Why are the public coming to this conclusion, which certainly requires that we should go back to first principles? If you say that you have ways of ending boom and bust and it turns out that you do not, that is not a good start. The story, which started in 1911, has a much longer history and began with the erosion of confidence in politicians and in politics itself. The public know that much of what has happened—and much of it is extremely good—has been driven by science and technology. People know that such improvements are not driven by the political system and that developments in the global economy are not driven by the political system of a single nation state, so they are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that Parliament is not easily able to design or even to describe end results. It is increasingly less able to keep up with the unfolding details of events such as the BP experience or the challenge of climate change.
Political leadership now lies much more in establishing directions of travel than in a commitment to detailed end results through legislation, but if we are to pursue successful directions of travel, we need to deepen the dialogue both within the Houses of Parliament and with civil society: a theme developed by the noble Lord, Lord Low, in his speech. We need to know where to acquire the necessary knowledge and advice on which the best decisions can be made, and we need to improve our ability to decide what to legislate on and what not to legislate on, and how to legislate. These decisions are becoming more, not less, difficult year on year, but the one thing we should not do is try to simplify these complicated issues by going back to a tactical solution that started in what was indeed a very tactical way in 1911, because simply to continue the long history of attempts to complete the process that started in 1911 will not lead to better government. We need first principles in order to think through the challenges of our democracy as they are today and not as they used to be.
Lord Lea of Crondall
My Lords, the fundamental flaw in the approach in the Statement made by the Leader of the House yesterday is that we are playing at demotic politics without the demos. For years we have been carrying on as though there is an issue in the country but, wherever else there is an issue, it is not in the country. We have therefore had to invent a demos who want something, which we then have to give them. A moment’s thought suggests that that is an erroneous starting point. There can be many other starting points, but I wish to clear that one out of our subconscious first.
This leads directly to the second fallacy in the line of proceeding. Someone has said that we must have a committee with a limited remit—build a Trojan horse. If you want to build a Trojan horse there is not much more you can do other than build it. I cannot think of someone saying you should put down an amendment if you want to build a Trojan horse—you have got to get on and build it. My metaphors are often hard to keep running, but this one would result in a process whereby it would be hard to look at anything other than building the Trojan horse.
Can all the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, and many of the points made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester—who made an interesting contribution, as did the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston—be brought within the building of, or even inside, the Trojan horse? That will produce a difficulty for many of us; it is an impenetrable remit that will prevent us getting to the practical and philosophical points that lie behind it.
Therefore, to use the vernacular that has been used more than once, it would be nice if we could take literally, objectively and honestly the famous aphorism, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. However, what is it that is broke? Let us say, “Okay. This is not a perfect place. Something is perhaps a little bit broke. Let us look at it”. There is a gap in the range of people who come here. The noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme, who is not in his place, said in his evidence to the Constitution Select Committee—this was drawn to my attention by the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth—that there is a danger that we are appointing too many people in our own image. There is something in that. It raises the practical question of what you do to avoid appointing too many people in your own image.
In the Labour Party there is certainly scope for getting the National Executive Committee and the conference to look at the appointments system. This is a reform measure and, as the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, said in an excellent speech, the Labour Peers’ Group is a practical reforming group. A majority of the group—indeed, it was a consensus—wrote to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in answer to his suggestion that we should put forward any ideas, and said that we wanted these four points considered. I am not saying that the noble Lord, Lord Steel, did not have an idea in his head until that moment in history, but he picked up on that principle and no one at any stage has ever said that there was anything other than genuine reform in it.
The only request I would make of my very good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, is that he does not repeat the canard that we are only putting forward the Steel Bill in order to put off the revolution of election: that in the Steel Bill we want a body of six or seven people to make all political appointments and so on. Perhaps I may put on record for the nth time that that is specifically not what we want. In the last version of the Steel Bill before the election, it was spelt out specifically that that is not what we are proposing. We are proposing virtually the opposite: that the parties should put up criteria to be registered with the Appointments Commission.
Two aspects of democracy would then be met and the balance between the parties would not be too far out. The Liberal Democrats would say that there are not enough Liberal Democrats, but the balance between Labour and Conservative over the years has met the three elections’ average. This is not like the nonsense in the coalition document. The worst drafted sentence in the whole document is that they want a House of Lords that reflects the last general election. I do not know which innumerate person in the coalition talks late at night wrote that sentence, but it would be totally impossible unless there were 1,000 Members within a few years—we leapfrog you, you leapfrog us.
The way in which these ideas can be looked at side by side with building the Trojan horse may cause a difficulty. One way through may be to look at the way in which we relate to Members of Parliament. There is no feeling among most MPs that this demotic politics needs to find the demos, but there has been a bit of a reaction. As Jack Straw said late at night here in the wash-up—this was reported in the newspapers so it can only be accurate—coming up to the House of Lords is like going to another planet. If these two planets are to have Members who know each other, and there are no pointed heads on one side or the other, we ought to get to know our colleagues at the other end a lot more than we do. There are some very notable colleagues—my noble friend Lord Grocott springs to mind on our side—who have spent many distinguished years in the Commons. We know many people in the House of Commons who, as soon as you have the second pint with them—but not only because you buy them a second pint—start to see the sense of what you are saying.
We should find a way in which we can continue to look at the merits of the proposal by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, and parallel proposals, side by side with this mad idea of building a Trojan horse. George Woodcock, who was the very distinguished general secretary of the TUC when I joined, used to quote something that I never understood. He said, “Structure is a function of purpose”. After 50 years, I begin to see what he was talking about, and that is where we should begin the conversation.
Lord Cope of Berkeley
My Lords, I wish to express my views on the main issue of whether or not we should have an elected, largely elected or partly elected House. The House of Lords has evolved under Governments of all three parties during the past century and I support some further evolution such as that suggested in the Bill of my noble friend Lord Steel. However, as I said, I want to discuss the main question.
The basic argument in principle against the present set-up, which has already been set out, is that we are not elected. The argument is that it is wrong that unelected people should be involved in legislating in a democracy. I do not accept that. After all, even if we had a fully elected senate, many non-elected people would still be involved in legislating—the Civil Service to begin with. Given that almost all legislation of importance is government legislation, government collectively have a much larger and more detailed input than either House into what goes into legislation. That will not change.
In addition, Governments these days also consult widely from outside when preparing legislation, draft Bills and so on. That involves experts, interest groups and the public generally—and quite right, too. So the idea that only elected people should be involved in decisions on legislation is not sustainable.
However, this is also related to the question of power. As others have said, this House is high in expertise but low in power—and, for that matter, in cost. An elected House would dramatically lower the expertise involved in legislating, and it would inevitably increase the cost immediately. It would increase the power of the second House, at least over time, and it is the question of power that is the least understood. The House of Lords lacks power exactly because it is not elected. That does not mean that it does not have any power; it does, but in the end the elected House prevails.
Having been a Whip in both Houses, for some years in both cases, I have seen the ping-pong process from the inside. The process when the two Houses disagree is more subtle than is often realised. If each House insists on its version of the Bill—what is called “double insistence”—then the Bill falls altogether. By that time that is rarely wanted by either side, so the amendments exchanged between the Houses in the course of ping-pong in order to avoid double insistence progressively move nearer to one another until agreement is reached. I can tell your Lordships from experience that when ping-pong is in process or, for that matter, merely threatened, the time comes when noble Lords increasingly say, “Well, the elected House should have its way. We have expressed our opinion and they have expressed theirs”. When enough Peers say that to the opposition Chief Whip, the Lords give way. This is not a secret. After all, at both ends of the building, and, for that matter, in private, Ministers use the argument vigorously in such situations.
If there were an elected senate, however, then that argument would not apply. The senate would be elected by a different method or on a different timescale, or some combination of those. At times it would say, “We are more legitimate than you, the House of Commons. We were elected more recently”, or, “We were elected by what we think is a better method”—more proportional representation, or whatever the method was. I hope that Members of the House of Commons realise that if we were to go down this route, the Commons would lose their vital power ultimately to decide legislation. To ignore that entirely foreseeable consequence of an elected House of Parliament is to be as short-sighted as a Uruguayan referee. Better to have an appointed second House with world-level experience and expertise and the influence that that gives to this House, but with the low powers that follow from not being elected.
Fundamentally, I believe that whatever can be done to improve our system of governance will not be achieved by electing more legislators. We are not suffering from a shortage of politicians.
Baroness O'Loan
My Lords, the debate on reform of the House of Lords has been, as Members have stated, a very lengthy one. However, reform has been ongoing, most importantly since the Life Peerages Act 1958 when women were allowed for the first time to take seats in the House of Lords.
Now the coalition Government have stated in the programme for government that this committee will bring forward proposals for a wholly or mainly elected Chamber and that there will be a grandfathering system for the present Peers, which I understand means that we will be permitted to serve out our term. Why it is called a “grandfathering” system for those of us of my sex, I am not quite sure.
The proposal appears to deal only with the methods of appointment to this House. I accept that there are consequences with any model of appointment, but nevertheless I question why there is a focus on the method of appointment only.
I emphasise that, as has been said previously, the cross-party Joint Committee on House of Lords Reform does not include the Convenor of the Cross-Bench Peers. Given that Cross-Benchers represent some 25 per cent of the membership of the House and given that they make a significant contribution, it cannot be right for them to be totally excluded from this process. The holding of a debate such as this does not address the lacuna created by this deficit in proper process. Even now, it would be much more acceptable were the Convenor to be appointed to the committee. In an era in which the Government legislate and call repeatedly for equality, and in which statutory obligations are placed on so many organisations, it is important that there be equality of access in the way in which any process of reform in this House is conducted.
The possible outcome of the coalition Government proposals for a House elected using proportional representation cannot be definitively forecast. We know from the operation of PR in Northern Ireland that on occasion the results can be somewhat unexpected, and that people can use their vote tactically to achieve the end of keeping an individual out rather than electing anyone. Be that as it may, it is eminently possible that a PR vote for an elected House of Lords would result in a House that, rather than being reflective of the share of the political parties in the previous election, would be very different.
There are of course a variety of systems of PR. The outcome of the most recent election, had it been conducted under alternative voting, would not have produced the result that the coalition Government seek to achieve for the House of Lords because the result of that election was the result of the first-past-the-post system, not an alternative vote system.
It has been said publicly that the turnout for elections, particularly in European elections and elections for the Mayor of London, is very low. In the past three Mayor of London elections, the proportion electing was 34 per cent, 34 per cent and 45 per cent respectively, and that was a situation in which the mayoral elections attracted candidates, it has been said, with a high public profile and the functions of local authorities are clearer than the functions of the new House would be—we do not quite know what those functions are anticipated to be. It has also been suggested, and I think noble Lords have said this, that elections to the upper House would be likely to attract candidates who would really be seeking to go into the Commons, and therefore it would become a second Chamber in more ways than one.
Can it be appropriate to develop a new system for selecting individuals for membership of the House of Lords by simply seeking to replicate the outcome of a previous election using an uncertain voting system? There is, of course, an alternative.
It is necessary to consider the possible outcome in terms of the election of an alternative Government to this House, one that did not reflect the party results in the House of Commons but that would effectively create a powerful Opposition to that Government in this House. One also has to contemplate the fact that elected Peers would look to their electorate to ensure that they remained in the House. This would introduce another dynamic into this House’s deliberations that may not be conducive to proper scrutiny and the reform of proposed legislation.
In addition, one has to factor in the fact that the other place has become rather dysfunctional. On a number of occasions, Bills have come to this House that have not been properly scrutinised and debated there. The tenor of debate in this House is generally more reflective, considered and purposeful. Were we to move to a fully elected Chamber, the dynamics of the context of our debate would change. Is it possible that that would result in the kind of dysfunction to be seen on occasion in the other place?
It is right that Governments should not be motivated solely by cost or by cost savings. Nevertheless, it is the case that this House, with its 753 Members—many of whom never appear in the Chamber and 155 of whom are women—cost about £104 million in 2008-09. Were Parliament to legislate for an elected House, costs would increase dramatically. We currently do not receive the kind of salary and office costs attendant on membership of the other place. Elected Members would have to be paid just as elected Members of the other place are. Inevitably, this would be a substantial salary.
A reduction in the size of the House is clearly necessary. Without wishing to be indelicate, that may, in part, happen naturally, and if the appointment of new Peers were handled differently, the size of the House would diminish anyway.
I shall briefly address the issue of how we work. As a newcomer, I think it works well. There is recognition of the role of the other place and of the place of government in that House, but Bills often leave this House to return to the other place in a significantly different form from that in which they came here. I think we could fine-tune our working practices, but I do not understand that to be the purpose of this new committee on the reform of the House of Lords.
Is reform necessary? I think it is. The route that we should take is the one that I am proud to have been appointed through: the House of Lords Appointments Commission. The noble Lord, Lord Jay, gave us its figures for appointment. It has appointed 51 people since 2001. Forty-nine of them are active, two having died. It has appointed about 20 per cent of the total of 183 independent Cross-Benchers, which means that 70 per cent of even the Cross-Bench Peers have not gone via this route. Of the 51 appointments, 37 per cent are women, 22 per cent are from ethnic minorities and 8 per cent are disabled. This composition represents greater diversity than does the current composition of the House of Lords and reflects the remit of the commission, which is to ensure that the House is more broadly representative of Britain’s diversity—a remit which it takes seriously. I am therefore moved to support the conversion of the House of Lords Appointments Commission into a statutory appointments commission. I do not see why those who have given distinguished service in the field of politics should not apply, as I did, to that commission for appointment to this House. There is nothing which diminishes one when one applies. The process of open competition is something which the people whom we serve understand and are familiar with, and it would add credibility to the appointments process.
There are clear arguments for non-active Members to be able to retire, attractive as it may seem to some parties to be able to call on the votes of those who have ceased to play an active role here. It would be better for this place if there were to be a process whereby a person could honourably retire if they chose so to do. I am well aware, however, of the extreme clarity of the minds of some of my noble colleagues who are a little further advanced in years than I am and of the wisdom which they bring to debates. Age should not be a determining factor. I agree that we need to be able to remove from this House Peers convicted of serious offences.
In all this, then, I am minded to support the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Steel. There is much for this House to consider in the context of reform of the House of Lords, but the consideration must be worthy of this place. It must be conducted in a proper manner by all the representatives of this House. The Houses of Parliament have a great history. Any change will have great significance for the future of our country.
Lord Higgins
My Lords, we are asked to take note of the case for reform of the House of Lords. In fact, we have had two related debates: on the one hand, the arguments about whether the present House of Lords should effectively be abolished and substituted by a wholly or mainly elected House and, on the other, the arguments for reforming the House of Lords by improving the present structure of the appointed House. To some extent, those in favour of moving to an elected House feel that progress on the second issue would undermine their case, because it would then be working even better than it does now. That is a mistake. It is becoming increasingly urgent that we should reform our proceedings, and I wholeheartedly support the proposal put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, which, after all, was carried without any dissent in the last Parliament. We have had in addition the proposals of the three committees set up in the last Parliament—under the chairmanship of the noble Lords, Lord Filkin and Lord Butler, and the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy respectively—putting forward a number of important ways in which we could improve our procedures. Since it is unlikely that rapid progress will be made on the first issue, it would be a mistake not to treat as a matter of great urgency progress on the second; namely, the reform of our procedures within the context of the present House.
The Leader of the House said that the reform of the House of Lords is not the most important issue which we face at present. That is true if one takes into account the state of the economy or Afghanistan—there are many issues which might well be regarded as more important. However, while the question of reforming the House of Lords may be more or less important, it is fundamentally different, because it alters the way in which we deal with all the other issues. In addition, any change is likely to be irreversible. While fundamental reform may not be the most urgent or important issue, we must recognise none the less that it is different in kind from the other issues. Budgets come and Budgets go, and even wars come and wars go, but the way in which we reach decisions on these matters is quite different.
I turn to the Government’s pressing ahead with a so-called Bill and there being considerable objections rightly raised by the Cross-Benchers as to how they are going about it. It is very curious indeed that the Opposition have apparently agreed to be involved in what the Government are proposing. We are not then clear whether it is a government Bill and, inevitably to some extent, the Opposition will be committed to whatever eventually emerges. The difficulty as I see it is pressing ahead with that Bill—the Government are saying, “We must have a Bill; we haven’t had a Bill before”—before we have reached a decision on whether we want a Bill which introduces elected Members to this House. That was the point of my earlier intervention on the Leader of the Opposition. If we are to proceed in this way, we should have a debate on whether we should have a partly or wholly elected element before we decide to draft the Bill. It is of course rather a cunning approach to it: we will find the Opposition to some extent committed and we will find anyone who serves on any pre-legislative committee also implicitly agreeing with the basic proposition. So we should agree the principle first then come to drafting a Bill. We do not know how the House will decide.
It was absolutely clear in the last Parliament that the leaderships of both the main parties were totally at odds with their membership. In the other place, the official Labour Party policy was not supported by a majority of Labour Members, and the same went for that of the Conservative Party. In this House, both were vigorously rejected. There is therefore a gulf between the leadership and the Back Benches. Therefore, to set up a committee made up solely of the leadership of the three parties with no regard for the Cross-Benchers or the Back-Benchers is unlikely to be a fruitful or helpful way of proceeding.
We must confront the fundamental issue: we are told that if we have elected Members, the House will be more democratic. I simply do not believe that to be the case. Mr Clegg said the other day that the House of Lords was an affront to democracy. How does having an elected House make the country more democratic? We are already 100 per cent democratic in this country, and that democracy is vested in the House of Commons. Having this House elected will in no way increase the extent to which this country is democratic. It will undoubtedly result in a division of powers between the two Houses, with no ready means of resolving it. We are going along this road. Unless we hear a more convincing argument than that it will increase democracy, it is the wrong way to go. But there is no other argument. For some reason, the leaderships of the parties have decided that there is a huge public demand for election to the House of Lords. Anyone who went around on the doorstep during the last election will not have been overwhelmed by a view that “we must have an elected House of Lords”—certainly not in some of the south London constituencies where I was canvassing. That is one of the main arguments against a referendum.
We have a problem both in the House of Commons and among the public at large. There is the most appalling ignorance of how this House operates, certainly at the other end. We do not know, if we have a vote similar to the last one, how the House of Commons will vote. It is always a danger with a new House of Commons that the new Members will not want to revolt too readily against their leadership, whichever party they may be in. That is clearly a danger. However, we need to take stock. The proposals put forward by the Government with regard to the committee and so on are totally out of sync. We have to reach a decision on the principle first, and then we know where we are. But there is also the most appalling ignorance about this House of Lords in the public at large. That is why a referendum is certainly not the right way in which to go. People do not have the remotest idea about what they are really voting about or about the value of this place, which is the most cost-effective legislative Chamber in the world. To ask them to express a view on it would be completely wrong. However, we need to press ahead with the second group of reforms, as I have suggested, in which the noble Lord, Lord Steel, and the various committees have put forward constructive approaches that will enable us to get this House right, not least with regard to numbers, before we go to anything more fundamental.
Lord Rooker
My theme is very much along the lines of my intervention on the Leader of the House earlier. I agreed very much with the speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Cope and Lord Higgins. The Tory, Lib Dem and Labour manifestos and the coalition programme exclusively refer to the words “second Chamber” and deal only with the issue of composition. I do not seek to support the status quo. Giving my maiden speech at that Box some nine years ago, I reminded this House that in 1980 I moved a 10-minute rule Bill in the other place to abolish your Lordships' House. That enabled me to get away with a lot at that Dispatch Box over the years.
The manifesto lines of the parties are obsessed with composition. Not one asked what we are for, what we do and how we do it. The functions and powers of the second Chamber should be known before starting on the composition, if only on the basis that if we are expecting good, honest, professional citizens outside to want to get elected here, they will want to know what their powers and functions are beforehand, not afterwards. There is a real problem, as the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, has just said. After 27 years in the Commons, the last four as a Minister, I will admit that I was very ignorant about your Lordships' House. Not any more—but as a transferring Minister from one House to the other, fresh from the Commons, in my first seven years in this place, in my four departmental roles as a Minister, I genuinely felt under greater scrutiny than I ever was in the Commons. There is no question about that in my mind and I have thought about that a lot. The scrutiny level here is much greater—and my experience ranges across six departments.
On more than one occasion as a Minister, I found myself in Cabinet committees explaining, not defending, the way in which the Lords works, to be met by the accusation from the senior Cabinet Minister in the chair, “You’ve gone native!”. That was the level of debate. My noble friend Lord Grocott was with me on one occasion when that was said. I am entitled to ask whether the present Deputy Prime Minister is any less ignorant than his shadows in that position beforehand, because so far I have not seen any evidence that he is. Many of your Lordships have served in the other place, but there is only one Member of the other place who has served in this place. So the level of knowledge of this place is incredibly shallow in the other place. You can make a damn good cheap conference platform speech, however, at the expense of your Lordships' House. It will always get a cheer. So there is that shallowness in the debate.
My other point is this—I do not see how we can escape a review of the conventions. If I came in here elected, I would not be interested in conventions, because I would have been elected. Where is the book of powers for the Lords? People have talked about our having fewer powers, but we do not; we have very substantial powers, but we choose not to use them because we are not elected. That is what the conventions report was all about. The refusal to give a Second Reading, the time delay, how we treat secondary legislation and the challenge on financial privilege will all go by the board by elected Members of this House. Why should they obey the conventions? Therefore, if we do not legislate on the conventions on a statutory basis, which means by definition legislating to reduce the powers of the Lords by law, we will suffer the consequences of massive conflict between the two Houses as elected Members here test the powers. If the second Chamber is to get more power, that can come from the Commons alone. We have to appreciate that—there is only one central, finite power, and any more coming here means that some has come from there. So it is make your mind up time. We have to fix the role of the second Chamber, fix the powers and the numbers before we do that—and only then do we start to make a sensible arrangement that will stand the test of time about the composition of your Lordships' House. I do not believe that these aspects will go away when we get to the detail of Bills. It will be an absolute disgrace if the Long Title of any Bill rules out discussion of the powers and functions, if the Bill does not deal with them itself, and we will insist on them being dealt with.
To finish, I want to be a little bit more positive. I have some personal views about how a second Chamber should work, although I cannot go through them in detail here. We should concentrate on revision and scrutiny rather than repetition, which we do so much of. There is far too much repetition in this place and not enough revision and scrutiny. I do not think that Bills should start here and we should be half the size of a much smaller Commons than is planned, with no more than 500. I do not think that Ministers should be here, but we should be able to send for them to come and explain and then scrutinise what they are doing and revise the legislation in the light of what they say. That would be a much better role. We must not be a mirror of the Commons—and we do not want people queuing up to get in here because they could not get into the Commons. I guarantee that that is what will happen.
The upshot of all this—and it has been a theme of many speeches—is that to function on behalf of our fellow citizens, as a second Chamber of Parliament, the powers that we have are not dependent on how people arrive here. I could make a case for an all-elected House or an all-appointed House, but one case that I will never make is for a hybrid House of some elected and some appointed. That is completely and utterly unsustainable and, if any Bill comes forward with that, we will end up wasting months of time, because it will not get anywhere. It is better that those points are taken on board and we have a much wider debate before we are faced with a fait accompli.
Lord Wright of Richmond
I intervene very briefly to remind the House that I am the only surviving Cross-Bench member of the conventions committee. We came under strong pressure from the then Government to make it clear that the conventions as they existed at that time would continue. In response, we made it very clear that under an elected House—
Lord Wright of Richmond
But not another Cross-Bench Member. We made it very clear that an elected House would totally change the conventions.
Lord Mayhew of Twysden
My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, and rather a surprise to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wright. I admire both of them. I admired the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, in the House of Commons for many years and admire him in this House. The difference is that I generally agree with him in this House, and I have agreed with him to a very great extent today.
The noble Lord, Lord Filkin, said that there was more to reform than composition—and, of course, there is. But the debate about composition is the cornerstone of reform. I hope that I shall not be thought to be obsessive if I devote my seven minutes to trying to demolish that cornerstone.
In his book, The New British Constitution, Professor Vernon Bogdanor, Professor of Government at Oxford University, has a particular footnote which I shall read. It says,
“In 2007 I heard a Liberal Democrat MP at a meeting in the House of Commons on House of Lords reform solemnly apologise for the fact that the Liberals had not fulfilled their pledge to democratize the composition of the Lords. Perhaps his apology was unnecessary. For the pledge was never intended to have been taken seriously”.
In support of this, Bogdanor reminds us of the then Liberal Government’s heavy and radical reform of legislation. He said that they and their Back-Bench supporters,
“wanted simply a measure which, by removing the obstacle of the House of Lords, would allow”
their programme to be implemented. He continues,
“They saw the Parliament Act as a final solution to the problem”.
They did not see it as “an interim measure”, and, as he says, for the reason that,
“the Liberals were hardly likely to construct a second Chamber more legitimate”
than the then current hereditary system, because being more democratically based it,
“would be in a stronger position to wreck their legislation”.
He concludes:
“It is doubtful ... whether current attempts to reform the composition of the House of Lords designed to make it more legitimate, can fairly be characterised … as ‘Mr Asquith’s unfinished business’”.
These are not fanciful considerations; they were not even fanciful in those days, or considerations peculiar to the differing circumstances of 100 years ago. Neglected though they have been, they remain good today. In modern times, I guess that there was no shrewder judge of these matters than the late Viscount Whitelaw of such fond memory—a highly successful leader of your Lordships’ House and, before that, an MP for some 28 years. In his memoirs, published in 1989, he wrote declaring his opposition to any elected House of Lords, partial or otherwise, as follows:
“Surely, experience with all assemblies, of which the most recent is the European Parliament, shows that the moment the members are elected they demand more powers”.
We can add that subsequent devolution surely adds further examples of that phenomenon.
Let us look into the future. If further powers are demanded, probably—and I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, about this—through a rejection of some of the conventions that govern our relations with the other place, what will happen? It is highly unlikely that the Commons will concede them, so there will be ongoing conflict and instability, with the probability that the delaying powers of this House would be further curtailed in the end, and that the stability of the 1911 settlement—substantially amended as it has been, as we have been reminded—which has served us so well will be disrupted.
Even if the powers of the Lords remained the same, membership of this place would be unlikely to attract what one might perhaps describe as first XI or even second XI players. To quote once again from Bogdanor’s book:
“The more the powers of the Lords are restricted, the more difficult it would be”,
for,
“people of ability to stand for election. What person of merit would wish to stand for election to a toothless chamber”,
and attract to himself all the joys of serving a constituency?
Almost at a stroke, then, there will be undermined and diminished those House of Lords functions which attract the strongest approval from the public; first, our wide expertise, so graphically illustrated by my noble and learned friend Lord Howe this afternoon, brought to bear when scrutinising legislation and in holding Ministers to account; and, secondly, our independence—the latter, because, as Professor Bogdanor points out,
“in every modern elected upper house, elections are organised by political parties and run by professional politicians”.
Not much scope for independence there.
I contend that the right solution, although there is no time to develop it, is a House appointed by an independent statutory commission. That would give it legitimacy from having been imposed, set up and established by Parliament. I concede, of course, that the high-water mark of the case for an elected House of Lords is the fact that all three major political parties supported it in their manifestoes. That undoubtedly advances the case, but does not secure it. Objectively, it can be seen to constitute a shared mistake. The electorate may well forgive a mistake that is confessed, explained and corrected. It will not forgive a mistake that it is left to it, by bitter experience, to discover for itself.
Lord Howarth of Newport
My Lords, an elected second Chamber is the wrong answer to the wrong question. Even those who accept the Prime Minister’s melodramatic characterisation of our politics as broken cannot claim that dissatisfaction with the House of Lords so much as registers among the public’s concerns—notwithstanding the grubby efforts of the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Times. Public dissatisfaction with our political culture arises mainly, I believe, from two other sources.
First, people think that power is excessively centralised in London. Too few decisions are taken locally. Too much political power resides in Downing Street. Associated with that is a widely held view that the House of Commons is excessively dominated by the Executive. There is good will towards the coalition, a hope that it may portend a fresh politics, but that sentiment has not dissipated the folklore that Members of Parliament are too biddable by their leaders and Whips and, as exposed by the expenses crisis, venal. Unfair though this is, the House of Commons has a lot more to do to vindicate itself to the people. We are entitled to retort to the eager proponents of Lords reform in the other place, “Physicians, heal thyselves”.
We can applaud the new localism professed by the coalition, but if and only if it means a revitalisation of democratic local government and not a marginalisation of it. Reform of the House of Commons and renewal of local government are the right priorities for constitutional reform. Reform of the House of Lords will, at best, do nothing to mitigate public disaffection from politics and, if it is to mean a second elected Chamber—costly, docile, weak and otiose—it will actually make it worse.
The second principal source of malaise is the malfunctioning of the media. Our politics suffers profoundly from the relentless cynicism, triviality and sloppiness of so much political journalism. There is no solution to this at the disposal of constitutional reformers. The best we can hope for is that we might, over time, have better educated citizens who will insist on better political journalism.
Why would people want to create an elected second Chamber? For some MPs, it is good enough that it looks progressive and deflects public indignation from the House of Commons. For Mr Cameron, embarking on it at this stage is a price worth paying to have Mr Clegg on board. For some Ministers, it will be attractive no longer to suffer the inconvenience of a second Chamber that does revise their legislation and from time to time blows the whistle on seriously misguided policy. Rather than those independent Cross-Benchers and former senior parliamentarians, how much easier to have a second Chamber of elected placemen, placed by patronage on the party list under PR, people more like Prufrock,
“an attendant Lord, one that will do
To swell a progress ...
an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous”.
If those explanations are too harsh or fanciful, it is difficult not to take the view that, in the present circumstances of our country and the world, for senior members of the Government to be channelling their energies into abolition of the House of Lords is displacement activity, a frivolity. In the scale of things, reform of the House of Lords is neither here nor there; that, I am quite sure, is the view of the public. People will stop worrying about political institutions if they become confident that the politicians they have elected are making wise judgments about the big issues, tackling them with determination, courage and effectiveness and offering inspiring political leadership; that is the proper path to democratic renewal.
None of this is to say that reforms of the House of Lords are not still needed, following the major reforms since 1999: the removal of most of the hereditary Peers and the establishment of a Supreme Court, separate from this House. We are proud of this institution, but we are not complacent.
My own agenda is fourfold, aligned with that set out in the latest Bill and the Motion tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood. We need to open the way to abolition of the hereditary principle for membership of the legislature. We need to place the Appointments Commission on a statutory basis and task it to improve further the representativeness—representativeness of civil society—of your Lordships’ House, a House which is already more diverse in terms of experience, gender, ethnicity and disability than the House of Commons. We need to disqualify from membership Peers guilty of serious criminal offences. And we should introduce a term for membership. I would go further than the noble Lord, Lord Steel, in not only making provision for retirement, but abolishing the right to sit in the legislature for life.
The reforms proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, and backed by so many of us on both sides of the House, are reforms that the previous Government would not countenance and nor would the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. He showed no sign today of becoming any more pragmatic in office than he was in Opposition. If he would only abandon his dogmatic attachment to an elected second Chamber, he could carry the House in support of a substantial set of reforms.
What most noble Lords seek is not abolition of the House of Lords, as advocated by the Leader of the House of Lords, but reform to consolidate and enhance the existing capacity of this House to do the job that the public want it to continue to do: to scrutinise legislation thoroughly and rigorously and offer amendments; to debate the issues before the country with expertise and relative impartiality; to advise; sometimes to propose restraint to overweening central government and a House of Commons that finds it hard to shake free of party conformism; to prompt second thoughts and a pause to get things right. This is the contribution that we make as a House of Parliament. The problem is not a lack of democracy at Westminster. So long as this is an unelected House, we will not defy or block the democratic House of Commons. Would it not be sensible to settle for this kind of complementarity?
What motivates so many of us, who value this House, to oppose its replacement by an elected Chamber is not self-interest but a deeply held belief that such a change would be damaging to Parliament and the quality of government. As I have said again and again, the onus should be on those who propose an elected House to explain how it would improve the performance of Parliament. None of them has yet been able to do so.
Lord Butler of Brockwell
My Lords, I take it that, notwithstanding the title of this debate, it provides an opportunity for your Lordships to put points to the cross-party committee which is preparing a draft Bill for a partly or wholly elected House. Like other noble Lords who have spoken, that is profoundly not what I want and I think it is a fundamental mistake. Nevertheless, although I do not agree with it, I accept it for the purpose of the remarks I am going to make. I want to put a case rather different from that which other Members of your Lordships’ House have made. I suggest—I hope not entirely frivolously—that the House could find itself going down this route, through the process of so-called reform, having an elected House, and finishing with something not very different from what your Lordships’ House is today. I will explain why.
As the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, said, the starting point is: what are the functions of the House? The Leader of the House answered that question this afternoon. He said that he envisaged that the functions of the House would continue to be as they are now, and its powers very much the same. What are those functions? I suggest that they fall under three headings. One is to provide an alternative forum of accountability for the Executive. The second is to provide the sort of detailed scrutiny of legislation which the other House fails to provide. I was struck by the statistics given by the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, about the times when this House acts against the Government’s advice but its advice is accepted in the amendment of legislation; and by what the noble Lord, Lord Cope, said about that. The third—to which I think the public attach enormous importance—is to act as a partial counterweight to the dominance which the Executive have established in the other place and which, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, quoting from Tony Wright’s report, said, is the fundamental reason why the public have lost so much of their confidence in their Government.
I think your Lordships would agree that that power of the House of Lords—to act as a counterweight to the Executive—cannot be achieved if the Executive have an overall majority in this House. Since voting patterns for your Lordships’ House would be likely to follow closely those for the House of Commons, that can only be achieved if there is a significant independent membership of the House of Lords. I follow the noble Lords, Lord Steel and Lord Rooker, in feeling uncomfortable about having a hybrid House which is partly appointed and mostly elected. However, I do not see any other way of achieving an independent element. If there was a section of the House that was reserved for independent Peers, if I were not to be a grandfather I would stand for it, but I do not see any basis on which the electorate would be likely to know whether to vote for me. I find it difficult to see how an independent element can be produced without the method of appointment.
Then we come to the elected Members of the House. Of course the political parties will continue to exercise great influence. They will determine who will stand in their name. To say that this is people being elected at random is absurd. It will be a method of appointment which goes under the guise of election but will, in effect, be appointment by the political parties. Since the coalition manifesto makes clear that the people who will be appointed will be appointed for a long, single term, with a period of quarantine before they could stand for another place, it is unlikely that there would be people standing for election who have future political ambitions. Contrary to what the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, said, I give the political parties the credit of supposing that they will want to have sitting in their names in this Chamber people of experience, wisdom and weight, and people without further political ambition. That seems a very close specification for the type of Members that we have sitting for the political parties in this House now. I think the best outcome would be if those people were on the list and were elected.
So, what would we have after this period of reform? We would have a significant element—let us call it 20 per cent—of independent Members, who I think would have to be appointed. Eighty per cent would be elected on a party-political ticket and it is likely that they would be senior and experienced members of their parties, who have no further ambitions for the other place. If so, that would be a House very much like we have now. We would have gone through all the agony of reform. Certainly, the people sitting for the parties would have been nominally elected but in fact they would have been appointed. We would have gone through it all and we would wonder what the point of the agony had been.
Baroness Miller of Hendon
My Lords, let us face it—the subject of reform of the House of Lords is but a euphemism for introducing an elected second Chamber, where the protagonists of election in the last two Parliaments have conducted a bizarre Dutch auction between themselves as to the precise number of elected Members that there ought to be. The figures have ranged from 20 per cent to 80 per cent and 100 per cent, with those of us who dare to say 0 per cent being marginalised as undemocratic reactionaries.
Let us admit at the outset that the composition of your Lordships' Chamber is anything but democratic and that if we were creating a new Parliament today there would be no possibility of having a second Chamber such as the one we have now. Let us admit that, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, this House may be the worst form of a second Chamber, except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time. However, we are where we are with a revising Chamber that, without exception, is described by commentators as the finest anywhere. We have a revising Chamber which, far from being undemocratic, invariably bows to the will of the elected Chamber, prodded without doubt by the Parliament Act 1911, but also by the outstanding act of self-denial, the Salisbury convention. We have a revising Chamber which, far from being undemocratic, exists to remedy the errors and omissions of the other place, where the legislative sausage machine operated by the Whips allows whole swathes of legislation to reach us without having had a single minute of debate or discussion, it being left to your Lordships to put these matters right.
On the subject of democracy, I say as forcefully as I can that our constitution does not belong to one Parliament, one party, or to one group of politicians who happen to have no more than a leasehold five-year term of office. How much less does it belong to a Parliament whose Members were held in such low esteem, given their unacceptable behaviour, that no party was able to secure the unequivocal mandate of a majority in the other place? Whatever the issues were in the recent election, I can tell your Lordships that, apart from the fine print buried in the massive verbiage of the three party manifestos, the so-called reform of your Lordships' House featured nowhere on the doorstep, as my noble friend Lord Higgins said. He may have been talking about south London, but the same applied in north-west London. Voters were interested in jobs, housing, immigration and above all the effect of the economy on their own lives.
Members of your Lordships' House who have been Members of the other place, party activists or have served their trade unions have already done more than their fair share of electioneering. I cannot see the leaders of industry, academics, Nobel laureates, distinguished commanders of our forces and others who are here honoris causa submitting themselves to door-to-door canvassing or to toadying up to the Whips in the hope of securing a higher place on the list if, as has been suggested, an election is held on the PR system.
The House of Lords has existed for more than 800 years. It is not open to a transient group of politicians to change it without the full knowledge and consent of the public and after a comprehensive, detailed debate. If this sounds like a call for referendum—I have never really approved of that—it is, but it is very low key. As we know, the outcome of a referendum can be manipulated in advance by the phrasing of the question. My choice would be exactly the same as that of the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, and of the noble Lord, Lord Lea, “Do you subscribe to the view that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it?”.
I assure your Lordships that I wish to discuss briefly the basic question posed by this debate. If the “reform” is not simply to alter the composition of your Lordships' House, what is to be reformed? The current President of the United States of America got himself elected by constantly repeating the mantra calling for change. Change from what to what was never specified. What reform do we need to enable us to perform our functions better without the other place ceding us additional powers, which, of course, it will not? In fact, the package of reforms proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, in the Motion in his name on the Order Paper is indeed worthy of our support as it deals with difficulties that we have. The beauty of Britain's unwritten constitution is its flexibility and adaptability. Before we give a single day's consideration to the reform of the membership of your Lordships' House, it is essential to define what its functions should be. What is it supposed to do? What powers shall it have? What powers will be ceded by the other place? In short, what inducement will there be to persons of the same quality as those here now to put themselves up for the rigours of election?
Reform of the House is a distraction when compared with the vital and pressing subjects with which the country and the new Government should be concerning themselves first and foremost. The cosmetic issue of reform of the House, accompanied by the sound of the hoof-beats of hobby horses thundering through the corridors of the Palace of Westminster, is an irrelevant act of self-indulgence which the country is neither interested in nor has the time for at present. I only hope, but with not much optimism, that after today's debate the Government will accept that they have far more important issues on which to expend further valuable parliamentary time.
Lord Elder
My Lords, I intend to make just a few points. I have supported and opposed referendums in the past, and I look forward with interest to hearing what a low-key referendum might look like. I suspect that I may well support one of those as well. I am, and remain, a unicameralist, but I would like to put that in context, for I would not like to see a unicameral settlement in the UK with nothing else changed.
Under the previous Government, there were major constitutional changes: reform here, with most of the hereditaries going; devolution to Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London; and a great deal more. It was hoped that the English regions would be part of that as well. It was a coherent package of constitutional reform. That has not normally been the case in the UK. The tradition—and it is an unhappy one—is much more piecemeal. I fear that the present proposals for the Lords are very much in that piecemeal tradition.
The issue of the cost of a reformed House has been raised. The noble Lord, Lord Wright of Richmond, made the point that any proposed reformed, elected Chamber would cost at least three times what the present House costs, and questioned wisely whether this was the right time for such a proposal. I would add a further point. We are in the middle of discussions about changes to the allowance system in this House. At a time when we are under more scrutiny than ever before, it appears that we are seriously considering a system whereby if you live close to the House and have fewer additional costs arising from attendance, it will be possible to claim higher allowances than before, whereas if you live away from London, as I do, and have genuinely additional costs, you will be able to claim less than before. I wonder whether this bright scheme will survive real scrutiny. It sends a terrible message to the rest of the country and will tend to mean that the representation of the country away from London will be diminished. I will not be alone in looking very closely at the costs involved in attending the House. The proposal for a sort of half-day payment, which has all the hallmarks of being put forward in a blind panic rather than with serious prior thought, is as unworkable as it appears ridiculous.
One of the great strengths of this House is that it has always given Governments time and space to get legislation right. Not just the Government but the Opposition, outside interest groups, lawyers, Cross-Benchers and other experts all have time to consider what legislation will achieve, and are able to make changes and discuss things. For a whole plethora of interest groups, that time and space gives them the opportunity to lobby Parliament and argue their case. An elected House will not, I fear, be as willing to fulfil that function and is more likely to be involved in a battle for power with the other place.
The question of electoral systems has been raised—a matter on which the coalition partners have strong albeit opposing views. Having a different system here will mean endless dispute about the relative legitimacy of the two Houses. That point was made forcefully by my noble friend Lord Rooker. Politics is a dynamic process. I wonder where we might be in a couple of years’ time. How will the future of regional government look then? I imagine that there will be increasing demands. In areas such as the north-east there will be a realisation that people need their own voice in their own area, to offer them protection and leadership. That is also true of areas such as the south-west. I know that they are very well—uniquely well—represented by the parties in the coalition. Does that mean that people in such areas will have no differences with Westminster? Or does it just mean that they will have no way of dealing with the differences that they certainly will have?
We have a very mixed system of government across the United Kingdom. We have a chance to make it better with a coherent package. I fear that what is being proposed will only make matters worse.
Lady Saltoun of Abernethy
My Lords, before you can decide on how to reform this House, you have to decide what you want it to do, and I do not think that we have done that yet.
But whatever the functions of the House are to be, I have grave doubts about the wisdom of making it an all or part-elected House. I just do not think that the Prime Minister and his advisers have thought this through. I do not know who his advisers are, although I read names in the newspapers from time to time. I believe he would be wise, if he has not done so, to consult the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, who has studied the subject with some care. Election for every conceivable post is now the politically correct procedure, regardless of whether it is sensible or not. It is supposed to be “democratic” and “modern” and to make the body to which people are elected more “legitimate”. These buzzwords are bandied about without any thought for what they really mean.
I am asking Her Majesty’s Government to give a little thought to what they are about to destroy, before wading in with the bulldozers—for bulldozers it will be. There is no way that the existing House can evolve into an elected Chamber as it has always evolved in the past. It means starting again from scratch.
There is in this House at present a large body of ability and expertise in a wide variety of subjects. Much of it is on the Cross Benches, but there is a lot on all sides of the House. Is it wise to disband that expertise? For no system of election will give us the quality we now enjoy in many Members of the House, which is a mainly appointed House. I am sorry, but I do not think that the kind of people who are in this House now will want to stand for election and go through all the hustings and the hassle of doing so, whatever anybody may suggest. What is less than satisfactory here is the method of appointment—party leaders filling the House with their cronies whom they want to pay off for past favours; or those cronies from whom they have hopes and expectations. Only the Cross-Benchers have an appointments commission.
The noble Lord, Lord Steel, has trotted out his House of Lords Bill for another outing. I entirely agree with him—I am sorry that he is not in his place at the moment, to hear me agree with him for once—in his wish to have an appointments commission for the whole House. What I do not agree with is his recipe for the commission. In the first place, I do not see why the Speaker of another place should have any input into the membership of the commission. Come to that, I do not see why the Lord Speaker of this House should have one either, although I mean no disrespect to the Lord Speaker in saying this.
At the same time, I think that the leaders of the parties should have an input, the Convenor of the Cross Benches especially. I think that they should each be able to nominate members of the commission. However, they should have to nominate them from those members of the Privy Council who are also Members of this House, because that way you might get people who understood what was needed. The leaders of the Government and the Opposition and the Convenor of the Cross-Bench Peers could each nominate three members and the leader of the Liberal Democrats could nominate two members. That would make a commission of 11 members. The chairman of the commission should be an independent Cross-Bencher.
I could go into a lot of detail as to how the commission would work—it would work in much the same way as the commission of the noble Lord, Lord Steel—but we have very little time, and I will not bore your Lordships with the details in this debate. Anyone who is interested, which is very unlikely, can ask me.
As for the rest of the noble Lord’s Bill, any of us can retire at any time by simply ceasing to attend. Or is he proposing that we should be paid to cease to attend? I doubt if that would go down very well in the present fiscal state of the country. I find the noble Lord’s proposed embargo on ex-convicts a little sad. They have paid their penalty and some may have much to contribute.
The hereditary Peers were—as the then Lord Chancellor, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, said at the Dispatch Box—to remain until the second stage of the reform had taken place, as hostages to annoy the Government and prod them into producing the second stage. The appointment of an appointments commission for the whole House would constitute that second stage of reform, and the hereditary Peers would have fulfilled their remit and should then go.
I do not think that the people of this country want the House of Lords destroyed. It is the Government who want this House destroyed, when it does its duty in preventing them getting their own way without a second thought. That is why the Government are determined to do what they propose. They do not wish to destroy—for destroy it would be—this House because it does not work. They wish to destroy it because it does work—too well for their comfort.
Lord Campbell of Alloway
My Lords, I do not have a prepared speech, but I made a few jottings and shall try to deal with them in relation to what has been said. At this stage of the debate, it is just as well that I did not try to make a speech, because I could never have matched the quality of the speeches that were against setting up an elected second Chamber.
Perhaps I may say a word or two on due process. I am extremely grateful not only to my noble friend Lord Higgins but to the noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon, who immediately got hold of the importance of the point. This is crucial, because if you are to start a process, you really ought to start at the beginning. No one yet has taken that point, which is crucial. We should debate whether we want a second Chamber. Once we have said yes—we probably will, or perhaps we will not; I do not know—the committee that has been appointed can get to work. If we say no, it cannot.
What is the committee doing now? I do not know of course, but I suspect that it is very little. I think that it has had one meeting, but it may be meeting in vain. At the moment the committee should not be doing anything. One has to consider not only its remit but its composition. Why is there no Back-Bencher from any of the three main parties of our House on the committee? I do not know. If I asked the Leader of the House, I would not get a direct answer, because even if he knew he could not tell me. This is a very important question because the whole process could collapse if a court were to hold that there had been no due process.
It is not only Back-Benchers from the three main parties. It is crucial to include the party in opposition, whatever it thinks, because we are supposed to be a sort of democracy. As the noble Lady, Lady Saltoun, said, we should also have someone who knows something about the House. Most of the people in the other place know nothing about the House. They do not want to know anything about the House. They do not like the House very much. They think that we are an awful nuisance. I do not blame them, but they are not ideal candidates for a committee to improve our work.
Those two aspects have to be dealt with. There is no prospect of a compromise. I hoped that there might be, but I made some inquiries and was informed by people who are more knowledgeable than I am that there is no prospect. Well, these questions will be dealt with at Question Time next Tuesday.
The noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, dealt with this next point in a remarkable fashion. What about the people? What do they think? Do they want a change in the House? Has anybody asked them? Does anybody know? The feeling is that the people are really rather satisfied with the way in which we deal with things in a moment of difficulty. I argued this point from the other side of the Chamber some time ago, when we debated the Eames report. The day after that debate, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, said to me outside, “You were right. What we wrote in the report could not have been the right reason”. However, there were other reasons. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, who was not the Leader of the House then, said, “Well, times have changed and that is the reason”. However, there is no evidence that the people are dissatisfied.
Let us not forget that, as the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury said on 8 June, the “historic role” of our House is to represent “non-partisan civil society”. This is not only about elections; it is about the nation. Before we debate, we want to know what the people think. Some time ago, polls showed that the people supported our House. Perhaps the papers or someone else could arrange for us to have some evidence, of whatever quality, of what the people think before we have this essential debate.
Lord Morris of Aberavon
My Lords, since I first came to Parliament, I have listened to many debates on the reform of this House but I have never spoken in one. My fondest memory is of the debates on House of Lords reform in the other place in the late 1960s, when a coalition of Michael Foot and Enoch Powell, both eminent parliamentarians, held the Labour Government to ransom. As we did not have a sufficient majority to impose a closure, that Lords reform Bill was obviously dying on its feet. Its unenthusiastic author, Jim Callaghan, departed to the warmer climes of a Commonwealth conference, leaving the management of the Bill in the interminable, long nights to his young Parliamentary Secretaries, Lord Merlyn-Rees and the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan. In one of his late night interventions, Mr Foot reminded the House of a naval battle in the Mediterranean, when the admiral had been shot on the deck of his ship, leaving his young son standing alone on deck, whence all had fled. Michael said of the two young Parliamentary Secretaries that never had such responsibility rested on such young shoulders,
“since the boy stood on the burning deck”.—[Official Report, Commons, 14/4/69; col. 885.]
Soon afterwards, that attempt at reform was abandoned. I forecast a lot of trench warfare on this occasion, too.
There may be greater success if we keep at the forefront of our minds what I regard as some important facts. First, in our time, there have been massive changes in the entitlement to membership of this House. Secondly, it would be counterproductive to have piecemeal, individual reform of the two branches of the legislature. The Commons must be the primary House. Supply must be its concern and its concern alone. That is why I have looked with great disfavour when the head of a major spending department is in this House. Traditionally, my view used to be the attitude of the Labour Party, too. To achieve any worthwhile reform of this House and to ensure the stability of that reform, the powers of both Houses and the relationship of Westminster to the devolved legislatures should be considered first. We have had that reiterated time after time in this debate.
It is said from time to time that there is no intention of giving this House more powers. Powers are the key to the future. It is said that the powers of this House and of the other place would remain the same. That is nonsense. No self-respecting reformed House of Lords would be content with that. Elected Members of this House, with their staff and offices and with the enhanced credibility of having been elected, would demand their place in the sun. Unless a provision is built in to limit in some way their re-election—and there could be human rights problems with such a proposal—they will strive for more powers and the publicity from the exercise of those powers. Within our shores, we have seen in the last few years the demand from the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly for more powers. The same would happen with an elected House here.
Michael Foot also said, “Don’t ever think that you can make the House of Lords an India paper edition of the House of Commons without creating eternal conflict”. We are approaching a situation in which we have too many elections—to the Commons, Europe, the devolved legislatures and councils, as well as referenda, with more to come. Over the years, the percentage of those voting has gone down. It would be a brave person who would claim that, with different kinds of voting for different kinds of bodies, the percentage of those voting would go up. What sort of poll could we expect from another tier of elections for this House, unless we piggyback that election on another one?
Dare I say that there is a problem of identifying people who are prepared to stand the rigours of election to office? I surmise, with respect, that many if not most of our present membership would not dream of doing so. Given the resources that MPs now have to carry out their duties, can the totality of their number, which has been increasing over decades, be justified? When the Welsh Assembly was created, my postbag and my surgery workload as an MP were halved overnight. For all these reasons, I suggest a different approach. We now need an impartial study, probably by a royal commission—as we used to have, particularly on matters pertaining to the constitution. The most recent one in my time was the Kilbrandon Commission on devolution. The remit of the royal commission would be to examine the powers and constitution of both Houses; the number of Members; and Westminster's relationship with the devolved assemblies. Before we proceed any further, we should do that.
Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank
My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Morris, we are all allowed a personal reminiscence—perhaps an indulgence—on this occasion. My text for today arises from 20 October 1994, when I said in the House:
“I believe that it would be a mistake for any government to make the reform of the House of Lords the centrepiece of the first parliamentary Session”.—[Official Report, 20/10/94; col. 368.]
I suggested that there were more urgent problems, such as poverty, unemployment, health, education and homelessness. I went on to say that if, however, legislation were to be proposed, it should examine how life Peers were chosen, and by implication the ending of the hereditary principle. I also said that an appointed House should reflect the composition of the electorate as indicated at general elections.
That was my view 16 years ago. Consistency is not necessarily a virtue, but my views since have remained broadly the same. As for priorities, although my noble friends on the Front Bench may wince, I will remind them that there were only two and a half lines about reform of the Lords in the 108 pages of my party's manifesto—and one paragraph out of 300 in the document, The Coalition: Our Programme for Government. In the election campaign, I did not hear much about this in Glenrothes, Wigan or Llanelli. However, I recognise and fully accept the Government's wish to publish a Bill with a large measure of cross-party agreement. If the Bill is a big, bold proposal, it will absorb a great deal of parliamentary time. The alternative is an important, significant but relatively modest Bill, which may succeed.
One objection to the character of the House 16 years ago was the unfair and damaging political dominance of the Conservative Party. In the interim, without statutory change and owing to my noble friend Lord Wakeham's royal commission, there is now a convention by which there are at present more Labour Peers in the House than Tories, even if there are not enough Liberal Democrats. Another objection at the time was, as I said, to the hereditary principle. Although I thought that it should be abandoned completely and did not agree with the Weatherill amendment, at least under the 1999 Act the hereditaries have been reduced to fewer than 100. There has also been an Appointments Commission since 2000. This is better than nothing, although it is not statutory, it has arbitrary numbers and it does not cover all noble Lords who sit on the Cross Benches.
There have been other major constitutional developments, including the election of the Lord Speaker and the departure of the Law Lords to the new Supreme Court. The House has changed a great deal for the better over these years without becoming elected or partially elected. By common consent, the House is very effective in the scrutiny of legislation because it now has a greater range of experience and talent. At the same time, there has been no challenge to the primacy of the Commons. In the end, the existing elected House wins—and quite right, too.
In a debate almost three years ago, I said that my preference among the options for reform of the Lords was for no more White Papers, no more parliamentary Statements and no more working groups. I called for a moratorium of at least five years. It was, I think, the informal view of my noble friend Lord Strathclyde that he would perhaps prefer 10 to five. However, when I came to examine the first draft of my noble friend Lord Steel's Bill, I softened. There was a strong case for supporting it.
Almost every Member of your Lordships' House has a personal agenda. My own is for all Bills to go first to the Commons for Second Reading—to agree on the principle of the Bill and vote if necessary—and then to the Lords for all its stages, from Second Reading to Third and Do Now Pass. After that, it would return to the Commons, which would take the remaining usual proceedings up to Royal Assent. One advantage would be to end the tiresome exchange of ping-pong, another to emphasise that the House of Commons would have the last word. I am tempted to examine this further, but on this occasion I am content to back my noble friend Lord Steel's Bill as the core for new legislation to be promoted by my Government.
Lord Norton of Louth
My Lords, like others, I have no problem with taking note of the case for reform of the House of Lords. Indeed, I am happy to support reform. There are various changes that we could and should make in order to render the House more effective and efficient in fulfilling its tasks, not least those changes so clearly adumbrated by my noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood. However, like others, I distinguish between reform and what the Government propose for this House, which is not reform but destruction. The Government's case for a largely or wholly elected House is built on stilts. In the time available, I wish to address each of these and demonstrate why they cannot bear the weight given to them.
First, we are told that having an elected second Chamber is the “settled view” of the House of Commons. This derives from the outcome of two Divisions in 2007. It is not clear why the votes of MPs in 2007 constitute a settled view but their votes in 2003 do not. How can something decided on only one occasion constitute a settled view? If there is a settled view, it is the consistently expressed view of this House, which apparently is to be dismissed.
Secondly, we have heard the argument a number of times that an elected second Chamber is the “democratic” option. This is usually advanced as if it is self-evidently true. We have a representative democracy, at the heart of which is the concept of accountability. Our system of asymmetrical bicameralism ensures that we maintain what has been termed “core accountability”: that is, there is one body—the party or parties in government—responsible for public policy and accountable through elections to the House of Commons for that policy. There is no divided accountability, as exists in presidential systems and/or where both Chambers are elected. The role of this House, by virtue of not being elected, is to complement the elected Chamber and not to conflict with it. Once one elects a second Chamber, the relationship will change and undermine the core accountability that I consider a particular strength of our current system.
Thirdly—this is related—we are told that an appointed Chamber lacks legitimacy. Legitimacy derives from a popular acceptance that certain people are the most appropriate for fulfilling particular tasks. The means by which they are selected to fulfil their task will vary according to the nature of the task. There is survey evidence that people want this House to fulfil its current tasks, not least that of detailed scrutiny of legislation. The legitimacy of the Commons derives from election. Our legitimacy derives from having a membership that is especially qualified, through experience and expertise, to engage in informed scrutiny. They are different forms of legitimacy but they constitute legitimacy none the less.
Fourthly, we are told that moving to an elected Chamber will not affect the relationship between the two Houses. My noble friend Lord McNally has said in answer to a Written Question from the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart of Swindon:
“The Government believe that the basic relationship between the two Houses, as set out in the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949, should continue when the House of Lords is reformed”.—[Official Report, 24/6/10; col. WA 206.]
Perhaps, in replying to the debate, my noble friend can tell us why he thinks that the Parliament Act was put on the statute book. Election will change the relationship between the two Houses and indeed the relationship in the second Chamber between the parties. The partisanship that is a feature of the other place—a consequence of competitive election—will translate to this place. It will be difficult to see how demands for greater powers than those presently held by this Chamber can be resisted.
My noble friend’s Answer demonstrates the key failure of the Government’s approach. Our constitution comprises a number of bodies that have evolved over time, each interlocking with other parts of the system. No one institution is a wholly autonomous body capable of being removed or replaced without having implications—sometimes fundamental implications—for the other parts. We have to understand the complex nature of our constitution before we make substantial change to any one part. We have to have a clear understanding of what Parliament does—and what we expect of it—in relation to the body politic before we embark on replacing one of its Chambers.
Some claim that the subject of Lords reform has been debated ad nauseam. It has been debated at length, but most of the debate, like the White Papers on Lords reform, has focused on process. The Government appear to have achieved the remarkable feat of not having engaged with the principles and not having thought through the consequences. We need to engage in a proper, thorough debate. I look forward to my noble friend agreeing that any legislation must be a consequence of such debate and not a substitute for it.
Lord Desai
My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the noble Lord, with whom I totally disagree, although I shall not explain why as I do not have the time.
I have been in this House for 19 years but I still fail to admire myself so much that I think of myself as indispensible to the British constitution. It is difficult not to be in love with oneself but I try. I am for a wholly elected House of Lords and always have been. I belong to a party which, I remind my noble friends on this side of the House, had to be dragged from being abolitionist to being in favour of a reformed House of Lords. If some of us have now moved to a no-change position, I shall not join them.
This, I believe, is the first time that we are in serious danger of being reformed. We at last have a Government who have the commitment to do that and, given what they are doing—I believe, rightly—to the economy, they need a political programme that will prove their radicalism. This Government have the majority in the House of Commons—and perhaps even in the House of Lords, although whipping is difficult—that will make it possible for them to pass a Bill on reforming the Lords to a wholly or partially elected House. That is quite a serious possibility. This is now the time to stop thinking that this issue will go away or that people will get into a discussion about powers and conventions and that somehow reform will never happen.
I take this matter very seriously. I believe that this Government should not only draft a Bill for whichever option they choose—as I said, I prefer the wholly elected option—but should also be prepared to use the 1949 Act. When Tony Blair came to visit the Labour Peers’ Group about five years ago just after he had made a hospital pass to Jack Straw about House of Lords reform, I remember asking him whether he was going to use the 1949 Act. He looked as though I had assaulted him. He said, “No, of course not. I am going to rely on consensus”. At that moment, I knew that reform would not happen.
Constitutional change does not happen by consensus; it happens by conflict, as British history shows, although I shall not go into that. If we are serious—and I am very serious about this—then we have to get this Bill through. We have already waited 100 years. The right honourable gentleman the Deputy Prime Minister may not quite get what he wants in 2011 but he may get it in 2012. I want reform because of the inadequacy of the House of Commons to be a check on the Executive and because our appointed position does not make us powerful enough to check the Executive, despite the evidence that the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, gave of our amendments being accepted. When push comes to shove, we always have to say that the other place is right and that we are wrong.
I consider the primacy of the Commons to be an historical accident of the past 1,000 years or so. It is an historical accident because your Lordships’ House is unelected. No Commonwealth countries adopted this bicameral model when they left the Empire. They all took a bicameral model but none had an appointed or hereditary House.
Lord Pilkington of Oxenford
Can I correct the noble Lord? What about Canada?
Lord Desai
I stand corrected. I always think of larger countries such as India and Pakistan. I apologise for that. However, Canada did not make its second Chamber hereditary, because at that time it did not have that option. There was not even an appointed element in your Lordships’ House when Canada made that choice.
The point is that other countries manage to have bicameral legislations with elected representatives and they get into conflict. Conflict is the essence of politics and conflicts get resolved. There are established ways of reconciling conflicts between two Chambers of a Parliament wherever there are two Chambers. Why are we afraid of conflict? Solidly belonging to my party, I believe that good things, including progress, come out of conflict; progress does not come out of reconciliation.
If we want a really effective Parliament—one that will be a check on the Executive—perhaps we will have to abandon the wisdom and sagacity of your Lordships’ House and have a Chamber which is elected and legitimate and which will be able effectively to check the Executive. We will then have to consider on what grounds we elect that Chamber, and a number of suggestions have already been made. The noble Lord, Lord Low, in particular, made a very interesting suggestion about appealing to various constituencies such as the royal societies and so on. However, we have to move to an elected principle—perhaps not on territorial grounds like the House of Commons—with Members who cannot be re-elected so that they are independent. Fear not, my Lords. There are other people who are very capable; the fact that they are not here does not prove that they are not.
Viscount Tenby
My Lords, I confess it is something of a shock to learn that there is a Back Bencher in favour of an elected House. With the new stricter regulatory regime, I feel I ought to declare a family interest in these matters. I can assure noble Lords that my contribution will be brief in view of the hour and a long speakers’ list.
The arguments in favour of an all-appointed, or largely appointed, House, against an elected one, have been well aired in a series of remarkable and compelling speeches. I would say that they enjoy the support of the majority of noble Lords on all sides of this Chamber. One of the more entertaining features of life in this place in recent months has been to watch the faces of those noble Lords seated behind their Front Benches when official policy on the subject of so-called reform is being discussed. To describe such faces as being supportive would be to stand the English dictionary on its head. Practical considerations and common sense are, of course, nearly always overlooked at such times.
However, to put in hand, at a time of dire economic stress, reforms which will add very considerably to the cost of the Lords, while at the same time driving a coach and horses through its ability to make a meaningful contribution, as it undoubtedly does at present, to this country's legislative process, beggars belief. I am reminded of the question, repeatedly and cogently asked—and asked again today—by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, who is not in his place: in what way will any reform improve the quality of the work that the Lords is expected to carry out, and how will it improve its performance? Each time, until today, that question has been met with a deathly hush, but I am much obliged to the noble Lord, Lord Richard, who also is not in his place—this is a problem of speaking down the batting list, as they say—for supplying an answer during this debate. I cannot say that I am persuaded by it, but at least he has provided, as one would expect from the noble Lord, a lucid and passionate case for the forces of darkness.
Proponents of reform, as they like to call it—although in this specific context “destruction” rather than “reform” might be a more accurate word—take pleasure in using words like “anachronistic”, “indefensible” and “undemocratic” to describe this place, but, like many other noble Lords I suspect, I have rarely heard them used by ordinary people outside the hothouse atmosphere of Westminster and certain sections of the media. Rather, there would appear to be a modest appreciation of the work we do, although we must never ever be guilty of self-satisfaction.
I would like to make two observations, one general and one particular, about the spin-offs from this reform crusade. On the generality, there is much talk of the need for democratic accountability and that, of course, entails elections. Interestingly enough, however, figures show that the increased demand for elections—for Europe, for mayors, for the police, for Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all—runs in direct parallel with the drop in numbers of those taking part in the democratic process itself. In 1950, for example, the percentage turnout for the general election was 83.9 per cent and in May, it was 65.1 per cent. As a democrat, I have a strong feeling that we should be doing more, far more, to get the electorate to vote at the only election which really counts—the election of Members of the other place.
Let us fine tune the mechanism for general elections by making it possible for everyone to vote who wants to vote, without being turned away at the polling stations and without multiple voting fraud, by having sensible constituencies, and so on, before we start fiddling about with additional electoral creations where a 40 per cent turnout will be regarded as a triumph. That sort of thing brings democracy into disrepute. As to the particular, we learn, just as with certain aspects of the human rights legislation, that democracy can be selective. Let me remind the House, for the umpteenth time today—good tunes always bear repetition—about the committee established to produce a draft reform Bill by the end of the year. It contains no Member of the Cross Benches, and Cross-Benchers account for a quarter of the membership of this place, and it has no Back-Bencher on it. Presumably, one cannot risk the chance of dissenting voices. It might be too much to talk of the tyranny of democracy, but to describe it as the selectivity of democracy would seem an apt description.
Of course, I welcome sensible reform of the House, but reform and not destruction. There are more urgent issues than the debate between election and appointment. Let me refer to just two. At present, the House is far too large; its size should be reduced through the sympathetic and sensitive encouragement of retirement. Secondly, the Appointments Commission should be put on a statuary basis. I cannot understand why the excellent Bill proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, should not be given a fair wind without delay. I look forward, with interest and sympathy, to the Motion of the noble Lord at the end of these proceedings today.
Recent experience has shown us the constitutional folly of piecemeal, or rushed, reform. Ill-thought-out changes, which after experience and evaluation can be seen not to have worked, can take a long and damaging time to put right. Any reform to this House must enhance its capabilities and be in harmony with the other place. Nothing else will do for the good governance of future generations.
The Earl of Onslow
My Lords, I am probably one of those people who will support an elected House, although, having listened to the noble Lord, Lord Cope, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, I thought that their cases were very strong indeed. When the noble and learned Lord was speaking, I looked at the three Cross Benches there and saw a collection of talent which was mind-blowing. Will we, because of election, lose those people? I was wavering. What made me stick to my guns is what the noble Lord, Lord Desai, said: I, too, want this House to be more powerful. Let us remember how the King’s Government goes on: the King’s Government can only continue because the Commons gives it money so to do. We have never had tax-raising powers; we only had “don’t raise tax” powers and when more people voted to tax other people and it was popular and necessary as a result of universal suffrage, it was natural for this House to say to the Commons, “No, you cannot take powers”. It lost all credibility and the consequence was 1911.
The powers that rest in this House are still, as the noble Lord, Lord Desai, and others have said, very considerable. I can think of several statutory instruments in the past year which we should have voted down. We should have voted down the one about all those northern boroughs and then the Government would not have got into a pickle. The fact that the first Division in this House this Session was lost by a Conservative Government in the House of Lords is one of those totally joyous facts which one will cherish, giggling, all the way to one’s grave. I am not sure the Whips feel like that.
The system of election is very difficult and it is important that the election should not be at the same time as that for the House of Commons. It is equally important that people should be elected for, say, a fixed term of 15 years with no re-election. When elected to this House, the Whip should lie like gossamer upon your shoulders. Admittedly, I am here because Pitt got drunk with my great-great-grandfather, but we have been paid our bribe and all that sort of stuff. For however long I have been here, the Whip has rested lightly upon my shoulders. I hope it has not stopped me being a great supporter of the Conservative Government when in office and someone who has tried on occasions to make the Labour Government’s life impossible. However, Governments are never perfect; they make mistakes; and, therefore, something has to be done about it.
If you have elections, you go back to what our Whig forebears found, which is a balance of power between the two. There was an amazing example of 18th century government which took place in Australia. Because the Australians had had dominion status, as it was then called, before 1911, their Senate had the power to throw out Budgets, exactly as the old House of Lords did. When the Senate under Gough Whitlam threw out the Budget, Sir John Kerr dissolved Parliament and said to the people, “The King’s Government have stopped. Now please, oh people, choose another King's Government”.
The Whig constitution of 1688 works perfectly. Before 1911, that is how this House functioned. It said that we will very rarely sling out Bills, but when we do, either you accept it or you call an election and let the people decide. If you rebalance the powers between the two Houses, you have a more balanced and, in my view, a more efficient Government.
The House of Commons now has a system of timetabling and guillotining. The Bills come from the House of Commons undigested and undiscussed. We seem to be able to go through most of them on the Floor of the House quite sensibly. I am not asking for a change of culture. I am just suggesting that we should use the powers that we have and have the legitimacy to use those powers more than we do.
The Archbishop of York
I am confused; perhaps the noble Earl can explain. He says that by electing this Chamber, those powers can be properly used. The House of Commons is all-elected. Does it do better in making the Government accountable? Does it use its time to revise the law properly? They are elected. What difference would that make to this House that does not happen in the House of Commons, which is fully elected? Can he enlighten me?
The Earl of Onslow
I am extremely sorry that the most reverend Primate is confused, and I will do my level best to try to deconfuse him. It is a question of legitimacy of power, is it not? In today’s world, it is difficult to say that power can arise other than through some element of popular choice. If we had an elected House, there would be no reason why the Prime Minister should not sit on that Front Bench, because if the party chose him as leader, he would have power. We would get a rebalance of the Whig constitution. That is very important.
Finally, if and when we have a change, please, please, please do not let us call this House a senate. I would love to be elected—it would be great fun to come in because of birth, because of an odd election and then because of a popular election, but I am much too old—but if I were I would not like to address my fellow Members in an upper Chamber as conscript fathers. Let us keep calling it the House of Lords. Let us not change it to a senate. Those are my views. I know that I am in a minority but there we are, that is what politics is all about.
Lord Hoyle
My Lords, we always get surprises in this House, and I did not imagine that I would agree so much with the noble Earl. Nor did I imagine for one moment that he was going to be in favour of an elected House. Indeed, when agreeing with the Leader of the House in the past, I said that there were only two of us in favour. Now it appears that there are one or two more than that.
On the other side, we have heard again—I agree with my noble friend Lord Richard when he says that the arguments are all the same—the reason for delay and why we cannot do it now. We have referred in passing to the fact that there have been party manifestos on this. The Conservative Party manifesto stated:
“We will work to build a consensus for a mainly-elected second chamber to replace the current House of Lords, recognising that an efficient and effective second chamber should play an important role in our democracy and requires both legitimacy and public confidence”.
In their manifesto, the Liberals were quite short on the subject. They simply said:
“Replace the House of Lords with a fully-elected second chamber with considerably fewer members than the current House”.
That is quite straightforward as well. The Labour Party manifesto stated:
“Further democratic reform to create a fully elected Second Chamber will then be achieved in stages. At the end of the next Parliament one third of the House of Lords will be elected; a further one third of members will be elected at the general election after that. Until the final stage, the representation of all groups should be maintained in equal proportions to now. We will consult widely on these proposals, and on an open-list proportional representation”—
I emphasise, an open-list proportional representation—
“electoral system for the Second Chamber, before putting them to the people in a referendum”,
with which I agree. It is no use this House continuing to resist change.
My noble friend Lord Desai is right; it is possible that that could go through, and it is time that the House recognised that that is legitimate and could happen. We have seen that the new Government are prepared to bring that about. There has been a lot of talk about the clash between the two Houses if it happened. On 24 June, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, stated:
“The Government believe that the basic relationship between the two Houses, as set out in the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949, should continue when the House of Lords is reformed”.—(Official Report, 24/6/10; col. WA 206.)
That is right as well. There is no reason why there should always be a clash between the Commons and the Lords. What about the Lords and the Commons coming together to bring the Executive to account? I do not see why that could not be achieved. We have been looking at the negative; let us look at the positive for a moment.
We have been talking about the size of a new House. We ought to recognise that this House is run by about 400 people. There may be nearly 800 Members, but attending week by week or day by day there are about 400, give or take—sometimes there are less, sometimes more—so there is no reason why we should not look at a composition of a House of about 400. I welcome what the Leader of the House said: that he would look at proposals for what might happen to existing Peers—retirement, or how else they could go? There is no reason why we cannot change that.
I also agree with the noble Earl that anyone who is elected should be elected for one term—that term being, I suggest, about 15 years. It could be for three Parliaments; it could be for 15 years. Where I disagree is that if we are to get a real turnout and make a representative House, the election must be on the same day as the general election, when the Commons is elected, but in a different way. I believe that it should be elected by region; I believe that it should be by proportional representation; but I believe that it should be by an open list, so that Members are not responsible to the parties in the same way. We know what parties do with lists; they put those who they want at the top and those they do not want nearer the bottom. Why should not the electorate select for themselves who they want to sit in Parliament?
If you pass legislation, you should be democratically elected. I think it is possible—I go no further than that—to say that after 100 years, we may be nearing the time when there could be an elected House. I respect everyone in this Chamber. I really enjoy my time here and any debate I partake in, but instead of trying to delay and procrastinate, we have to recognise that this might happen and must play a role in bringing it about. We must be positive and look towards the future: a democratic House. We will end 100 years of procrastination when we achieve that aim.
Lord Pilkington of Oxenford
My Lords, as an old history master, I must give a little correction; Peers assessed themselves until, I think, 1663. That said, the noble Lord, Lord Desai, was right to say that you must consider the history of every country when you consider their constitutions. As the 38th speaker on the speakers list, I can only underline what other noble Lords have said. The fact is that the British Executive are one of the strongest in the world. As noble Lords know, in recent times Lord Hailsham described it as an elective dictatorship. Paradoxically—and we have got to face this fact—this House is the most independent element in the English constitution. The late Lord Peyton was a great friend of mine. Those of you who knew him here know that he was an awkward and independent man. The Whips once got hold of him and said that he ought to knuckle under and be more supportive of the Government. He replied, in a very pretty phase, “Look, you’ve got nothing to give me that I want, and there is nothing that I have that you can take away from me”. That is, in a way, the essence of this House. We are all independent. I am possibly more independent than many, which is why I am 38th on the list.
The basis for this executive power is the political party. There is a book to be written on the English political party. It is one of the strongest in western Europe and was created from Gladstone, Disraeli and Salisbury onwards. It is the basis of the power of the Executive. Many Members know more intimately that I do what happens when you rebel against a political party. Very few rebels last after one election. The party holds the power. Harold Wilson descried it by saying, “If you don’t wear my dog collar, you won’t get anywhere”. That is the historical background we are operating against. The political party will not alter its power and will remain, and that is why I oppose elections. You would not have men like the late Lord Peyton. The noble Lord, Lord Hoyle, who spoke eloquently in favour of democracy, is also an independent man, but would he be in an elected House with a career to prove?
A long tenure has been suggested. The English political party has refined and developed its methods and would deal with that tenure in no time at all. When the poor fellow passed his tenure, he would be told that he had no hope unless he committed himself to the party.
I am opposed to election. I think we are walking blindfold into an abyss. I agree with all that my noble friend Lord Norton said, but that does not mean that I am happy with the present method of appointment, although I was a beneficiary of it. It is not beyond the wit of man to devise a system of appointment that is fairer and more independent and that would produce a House that is better, possibly, than the one we have now. It is crucial that, with a strong Executive and iron political parties, there is an independent element somewhere within our legislature. The fact is that we are it. If we abandon this, we get over the abyss and hand total control of the legislature to the English political parties. I suggest that we would do that at our peril. History would not reward us for what we did. I ask noble Lords to think. The noble Lord, Lord Richard, spoke about democracy. It is a sort of magic word. We have forgotten who invented the referendum; it was Napoleon, and he never lost one. We also forget that the greatest beneficiary of the democratic system was the late Adolf. We should not plunge ourselves into that abyss.
Lord Cobbold
My Lords, I am one of those who strongly support the House remaining a fully appointed Chamber. I support the reforms proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, and agree to the proposed ending of the election procedure for replacing the 92 hereditary Peers. Although I am a beneficiary, I do not think that heredity can any more be justified as an automatic qualification for membership of your Lordships' House. That does not, of course, mean that a hereditary Peer cannot be appointed to the House on the basis of personal merit.
My main concern is about the growing size of the Chamber. Noble Lords are living longer and the numbers of new entrants are large. The idea proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Steel—that there should be a voluntary retirement option—is a step in the right direction, but I do not believe that it would solve the problem. I believe that there should be a fixed retirement rule. It should be based on either a retirement age or a fixed period of service. I feel strongly that a fixed period of service is preferable. An age limit takes no account of the fact that individuals become Members at different ages and therefore would have different periods of service. A fixed period of service, on the other hand, is the same for everyone.
How long should the fixed period of service be? It could be 20 or 25 years; I would suggest 20. There should be a mechanism to grant an extension of, say, up to five years to a Peer who is making a significant contribution at the time of retirement. This step could be approved by the Lord Speaker after consultation, as appropriate. Given that a large proportion of the current membership of the House has considerably more than 20 years of service, it would be necessary to have an extended transition period of at least five years. I proposed such a system in an amendment to the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill in the previous Parliament, but it was lost in the wash-up and not debated. Basically, it would involve listing the present membership by length of service and dividing it into, say, five groups, with the longest serving group retiring in the first year and the others spread over the next four years. In summary, I believe that a fixed period of service will be necessary if this House is to survive as a fully appointed House, and I believe that it is of paramount importance for the future of this country that it should.
Lord Skelmersdale
My Lords, in discussing this subject, I believe that we should take a firm and objective view of ourselves and what we do or, rather, the results of what we do. When all is said and done, we are a House of Parliament with very few powers, fewer even than when WS Gilbert wrote that we,
“Did nothing in particular,
And did it very well”.
As my noble friend Lord Cope pointed out, we often do not use the powers that we have. We credit ourselves—and, to be fair, outsiders do too—on being an efficient and cheap revising Chamber, not only in discussing potential Acts of Parliament, but in general debates, Starred Questions and in looking at government policies or, sometimes, the lack of them. I must ask noble Lords to look beyond this and consider what happens then.
The noble Lord, Lord Richard, is right. The answer is precisely nothing, except in very rare cases until or unless the Government of the day accept our findings. That is why I believe that a better description of our activities is “advisory”. It follows then that we are not so very different from any other quango anywhere in the world, but with one notable exception. We are the biggest by far. I am sure that it is principally this that has, over the past few years, put the wind up the leaders of all the political parties. I am therefore delighted by the formation of the Leader’s Group to be chaired by my noble friend Lord Hunt of Wirral.
We are, of course, smaller than we were before the great emasculation, a phrase that does not gain universal approval. On 13 October 1999, we mustered 1,213— technically anyway, as 117 noble Lords had either no writs of summons or had taken leave of absence. That is around the size of the roll of Eton. At the beginning of the next Parliament, we had reduced to 674, with only four Peers on leave of absence. Today, including the three noble Lords we have just welcomed, we have 745. As my noble friend Lord Strathclyde said at the beginning of this debate, it would not surprise any of us if we did not number 800 by this time next year.
How can we possibly justify this? The answer is that we cannot. Indeed, could we do the same job so well and so inoffensively with less than the average daily attendance of 400? Do we even need 800 Peers to achieve attendance of 400? I doubt it very much. We must correct it. My solution is rather different from the announced policies of the main political parties, which got approval for them from a series of votes in another place in the last Parliament. This has resulted in a quick and dirty solution; that is, to have a substantially elected chamber. It is beyond peradventure that this will be the guts of the draft Bill that will be the product of the committee comprising the great and the good of the main political parties, all of whom are members of one or other Front Bench. My noble friend on the Front Bench will have noticed more than a little resentment here.
Before they do further work, I strongly suggest that the Government organise a free vote in another place to ascertain the views of a substantially different House. More than that, I would like to see a self-denying ordinance by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister of not recommending the creation of any more new Peers to Her Majesty once the parliamentary parties in this House are balanced. There should be no more mid-term lists except to correct the natural wastage of those that go to the great debating chamber in the sky, and there should certainly be no resignation honours unless we invent non-parliamentary life Peers. There should also be a statutory limit on the suggestions of the Appointments Commission.
Last, but not least, there should be no question of an elected House for all the reasons that have and will be given by other noble Lords. Another place will live to regret it if there is, unless we are to have what the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, might have called an elected poodle. That is what it seems the Government want.
Lord Anderson of Swansea
My Lords, we are invited to note,
“the case for reform of the House of Lords”.
In fact, the debate has noted the case for only limited reform or no reform at all. Clearly, House of Lords reform is very much a minority interest. As my noble and learned friend Lord Morris of Aberavon said, if there were to be a referendum just on this, one would anticipate a very small participation. The Conservative component of the Liberal-Conservative Government read public opinion better than its Liberal Democrat junior partners. For the Conservatives, at best before the election this was a third-term issue, which means that there would have been no conclusion during the lifetime of the first Parliament. They recognised that there are many issues much higher up the political agenda.
Thus, the question is: why now in government has this issue been accelerated against the political instincts of the Conservative Party? The answer is clear. For the Liberal Democrats, strictures on constitutional structures are very much part of their raison d’etre. There is a certain wide-eyed zeal, believing this to be, after 100 years or so, the unfinished business of Lloyd George. Just as Mr Clegg misread the significance of the Reform Act 1832, so I believe he has misread that of Lloyd George.
Lloyd George in my judgment would have shown himself to be a pragmatist at this time. One recalls the Limehouse speech:
“They toil not, neither do they spin”.
That is a world away from your Lordships’ House. Today’s House has a very different role and composition from his time. The truth is that the Liberal Democrats are so zealous that they were willing to pay a high price to obtain reform—not just voting reform, but including the reform of the second Chamber. But, the Minister, Miss Featherstone, as quoted in today’s Daily Telegraph, has said that she now recognises the sort of price that is being paid. It is the price of a free rein on constitutional reform for the Liberal Democrats so that the Conservative Party can have a free rein for a Tory Budget and massive welfare cuts, which will harm the poor particularly. It is sad to see the willingness to sacrifice the poor and the deprived in the country on the altar of constitutional reform. We have been here before. At an international parliamentary conference I recall a Florida Congressman saying that everything that can be said has been said, but not everyone has said it. So he proposed to make his own speech.
Let me try to expose some illusions. One illusion is that an 80 per cent or 100 per cent elected Chamber,
“answers the claims of democracy and accountability”.
That is absolute nonsense on stilts. If there were to be one election every 12 years with no possibility of facing the electorate again, how can such an individual be deemed to be accountable because they happened to pass an electoral test at one stage in the distant past? How can they in any way be accountable to an electorate?
The second illusion is that such a changed House would not rival the House of Commons. I think that it was Berkeley who said that no institution is static; all institutions are dynamic. Certainly, a House of Lords with democratic legitimacy would inevitably challenge the House of Commons more regularly and with greater ease.
Another illusion is that in a reformed House of Lords one can still expect the same expertise as we have now in this House. For me the argument is less strong, having seen some of the arguments in favour of a Welsh Assembly. We were in favour of an Assembly, but one of the arguments was that we would have a new sort of person coming from all corners of Wales and not from the traditional political structures. Alas and alack, although there are many very good people, the normal pathway to the Welsh Assembly is through being in the office of an existing Assembly person. One has to pass through the normal political structures if one values the expertise which one has from senior lawyers, senior medics and senior military people. Does one expect those lawyers, medics and generals to find a place on a party list? Of course they would not. If they were to expect to find a place on the list, the argument put to them would be: “What have you done? Have you laboured in the vineyard? What have you done for the party?”. It would be a different sort of House, which would be a pale reflection of the House of Commons and of those who, for various reasons, were not able to find their way here. They will not be the new people. Indeed, the old will prevail:
“New presbyter is but old priest writ large”.
Finally, the reality for all of us is that, ultimately, reform will come, as my noble friend Lord Hoyle has said. There will be a House wholly or mainly elected even if there is a Passchendaele of trench warfare in this House on the way. The other place seems not to understand that there is a real danger that much of value will be lost. Surely there is a case for analysing the strengths of the current House of Lords and for asking how one could mitigate the negative aspects of change.
That means not just altering the composition, but at present this House is less partisan than the other place, is more expert, has a stronger representation of women and minorities, is much stronger on human rights and is willing to be a curb on Government in this and other respects. So any change should ensure that no one party has a majority. At least 20 per cent of its composition should be appointed for their expertise and should be based on diversity. In the past, we have altered our constitution gradually, smoothly, moving from precedent to precedent. The Steel Bill, in my judgment, offered such a way out for the Government, but the zealots have rejected it, as the noble Lord, Lord Cobbold, said. I fear that much of value will be lost, and that we will indeed be a weaker reflection of the other place unless there is a clear analysis of the virtues of this place now and a serious attempt to preserve these so far as is possible.
Lord Goodhart
My Lords, it is now 99 years since the passing of the Parliament Act 1911. I think it would have considerably surprised the supporters of that Act that, a century on, the question of how people should become Members of your Lordships’ House is still undecided. To use for a moment the story that the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, raised about the man who said that everything that could be said once on a subject has been said but not everybody had said it, the situation here is more than that. Everything that could be said on this subject has been said and, what is more, everybody has said it. The trouble is that not everybody has said it more than 20 times. I shall therefore concentrate, perhaps slightly as a form of light relief, on other aspects of reform, just pausing to say that I support strongly the 80:20 per cent formula.
There have been many important changes since 1911 in the way in which your Lordships’ House operates. Notably, we have had the Life Peerages Act 1958 and the House of Lords Act 1999 which between them have fundamentally altered the nature and membership of the House. In 1911, Members of your Lordships’ House were mainly grandees, the hereditary aristocracy, the great landowners and the descendants of great landowners. That had been so ever since Parliament had first come into being 600 years earlier. But that is very far from the present membership. No new hereditary peerage, I believe, has been created since Harold Macmillan was created Earl of Stockton in 1984. It is several years now since any peerages have been included in the New Year’s or Birthday Honours.
Lord Goodhart
My Lords, I think Lord Tonypandy and Viscount Whitelaw were given peerages in 1983, a year earlier.
It is increasingly clear that new peerages created now are not awards of honours but are awarded as a method of appointment to a job. But there are many features of your Lordships’ House which are unsuitable to the House as it now exists and should be removed or altered. Let me start with a trivial matter. Why do we have to hire fancy dress from Ede and Ravenscroft if we want to attend the State Opening of Parliament? Scarlet robes are taken as a sign that we are still a group of hereditary aristos. Robes make us look out of date because the media always use photographs of us at the State Opening. I remember a photograph appeared in the newspapers of noble Lords dressed in robes and awaiting the gracious Speech in which I was the only identifiable face in the picture because I had turned around to talk to a Peer sitting behind me. Unfortunately the headline over the photograph was “Cash for peerages”. I must say that I thought I had good grounds for huge libel damages, but I avoided taking it any further.
More seriously, why do we have to have titles? Why do we have to be Lord X or Baroness Y? Why do many of us have to add place names on to our surnames? Titles, even if they are for life peerages only, seem to be another remnant of the hereditary aristocracy. Why not call ourselves—and here I disagree entirely with my noble friend Lord Onslow—senators in the same way as professors call themselves Professor or doctors call themselves Doctor without altering their names?
Let me move on to a more important matter. Why are we appointed for life? Again, that is a leftover from the time of hereditary peerages. I believe that all appointments to your Lordships’ House should have a time limit, and I agree, as most people have said, with 15 years. The Cross Benches add valuable expertise to your Lordships’ House which is particularly important when fewer and fewer Members of the House of Commons have experience of any work outside of politics. But most Cross-Benchers are only appointed on or close to retirement, and expertise has a sell-by date. After 15 years, expertise is usually not worth very much, and I believe that political appointments or elections should also be time-limited. In the case of elections that is inevitable, of course, because they will run only until the next appropriate election, but it should apply to those who in the future are appointed to sit in your Lordships’ House as party Members. I would extend this to those who have already been appointed, except that I do not want to be lynched by Members of the House, and indeed it would cause serious problems for my noble friends Lord Strathclyde and Lord McNally.
Quite plainly, our numbers are too large. Since your Lordships’ House is the best geriatric daycare centre in the country, we live for too long. I have been a Member for more than 13 years and I am conscious that my ability to contribute to the House is beginning to decline. When I will have completed my 15 years, my membership should come to an end.
The need to recognise and explain to other people that appointments to your Lordships’ House are for work and not for honour is completely different from the functions of Members of the House in 1911, and it is significantly different from the situation before the House of Lords Act 1999 came into force. But our retention of titles or life membership and other habits are out of date and mislead the public about the character of this place. It is time that we made it clear what we really are and stop pretending to be what our predecessors used to be.
Lord Jopling
My Lords, much has been said with which I strongly agree but, as Lord Peyton, whose name was mentioned a few moments ago, once said, “Nothing is spoilt by repetition”.
The House of Lords clearly needs reform, but the way not to reform it is to introduce the elected element. What will happen is that the bulk of the candidates—and here I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell—will see standing for election to come here as a second best choice to the House of Commons, as they do, to be frank, with the European Parliament now. The elections will be taken over by the parties whether we like it or not, and the elected Members will be taken over by the Whips. I say that with the authority of a former Government Chief Whip. The widespread expertise— which is the glory of this House—will be confined to the appointed Cross-Benchers, and that would be a tragedy.
However, the House needs reform and we have a good start with the Steel Bill. I like the phrase of the noble Viscount, Lord Tenby, who said, “Let us have sensible reform, not destruction”. Much has been said about the growing numbers. If we go on like this, it will be within the lifetimes of some of the younger Members of the House that we shall get to 1,000. We are already seeing the possibility of the Conservative shortfall in membership compared with the Labour Party likely to be corrected by the treadmill of top-up, as I call it. We need to move to a much smaller House—400, 500, it is arguable—which should be subject to a cap where the membership cannot go above that figure.
Over the weekend I was with American friends who have strong connections with the United States Senate. When I told them that I thought the membership of the House of Lords should be reduced from getting on for 800 down to 400, they were astonished and said that if the United States can manage with just over 100 in its upper House, why do we need 400?
However, the membership of the House should be flexible after each general election. I wish to ask a question of my noble friends on the Front Bench. I hope my noble friend Lord McNally might refer to this when he winds up because I have said it all before here and have never yet got any kind of an answer—partly because I do not think there is one. What would happen in this House if a party came from nowhere at a general election and became the Government, or a significant part of a coalition, with virtually no presence in this House? It happened not long ago in Turkey and Italy. I remember, and other Members, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers, will remember the surge of the SDP in the 1980s when it got to almost 30 per cent or maybe more—I forget, but around that figure—in the opinion polls. It was not sustained but it is not impossible that a surge of that kind could happen. It would be impossible here if there were a surge of that kind and a party came from nowhere and had no representation here. If we are to reform the House, let us take into account the chaos that would arise in that kind of eventuality. It is vital to deal with it now.
It would be important in the formula I suggest to adjust the House of Lords membership in the short time after a general election. The problem then is how you adjust the membership to reflect a change in government. I do not support an age limit; I do not support a set term of service. There are many around the House who will remember those who served for decades in this House; they lived to an old age in their 80s and 90s but contributed magnificently to the House. I would hate noble Lords to be thrown out just because of that.
The best way to adjust membership after each election is to leave it to the membership of the particular political party to decide which of the party members in the House will leave and which will stay. That was done very satisfactorily with the election of the 92 Peers who stayed on. Colleagues know their colleagues well, and they can be relied on to elect the most active and the most wise.
We need a formula that comes into effect after each election, so that within the cap of 400 or 500, as I say, you can allocate the membership totals to parties following the general election to reflect broadly the results in the House of Commons. Of course we would still need 20 per cent to 25 per cent of appointed Members on the Cross Benches, with all of their expertise, but whether you have an appointed or an elected House, in my view the two main parties should have more or less the same percentage. That percentage is currently around 30 per cent, and maybe each of the two parties would need rather more than that. You would leave the balance of the membership to the other parties.
I have made this speech before. I believe that it has become rather more relevant than it has been in the past, with our numbers approaching the absurd figure of 800.
Lord Inglewood
My Lords, having heard the noble Lord, Lord Jopling, I am sure that he will agree that it is better to hear a good speech twice than a bad speech once.
This is a good time to consider House of Lords reform, for two reasons. The first is that we have a coalition Government. Any party in government thinking about reform of this kind is almost inevitably going to see how it can obtain party advantage. The great thing about having a coalition of two parties is that, with a bit of luck, they may be able to keep each other reasonably honest.
The second reason is that this is part of a wider debate about parliamentary reform. As has already been said on a number of occasions, we cannot deal with the way that a second Chamber is composed or operated without reference to Parliament as a whole, because of the independent nature of its components. In that context, it is important to appreciate that we cannot prescribe by statute how a chamber of a parliament actually works. Since 1999, we have seen how this Chamber has gained considerable political self-confidence, and it has a kind of political impetus behind it that it did not have a decade ago.
I spent 10 years of my life in the European Parliament; indeed, I think I represented my noble friend Lord Jopling, who obviously felt that he might have had a better representative; I do not know. I remember the way that, regardless of what the precise constitutional position was, because we had been directly elected we slowly clawed more powers towards ourselves. This is the point that my noble and learned friend Lord Mayhew made when referring to my old friend, neighbour and mentor Viscount Whitelaw. In this context, I suspect that the more inferior any designation that is put to, and ascribed to, a Chamber of Parliament, the more uppity it will become as a result.
We cannot shackle the future, just as Parliament cannot bind its successors. If you look at the way that the European Union has evolved, you see that it was in a series of steps, each one of which was a settlement, but each settlement contained within it the mechanisms for change. If change takes place in accordance with the appropriate procedures, there is nothing that we can do about it. We can start by spelling out how the powers of a second Chamber may be exercised, but if a reformed second Chamber generates its own political impetus, there is nothing we will be able to do to stop it trying to acquire more. We should not be remotely concerned about that; we should cross those bridges if and when we reach them.
I turn to what I might call “soft points”. I will not necessarily offer any answers to the questions that I pose but they are important, albeit that they may not have been widely canvassed. First, I believe that Parliament as a whole is excessively metropolitan. Inevitably it is going to be London-focused because of where it is, but I happen to live and work outside London, and that makes it a great deal more difficult organisationally to play a part. I am particularly on my guard when I hear reference to “family-friendly policies” in Parliament. That normally means that you are going to have to spend all evening by yourself, and the temptations of the stews of Soho will no doubt be ever more in one’s mind as the evening goes on. They are not family-friendly at all; they may be attractive to those who live in London, but for those of us who do not come from London they are diametrically the opposite.
Secondly, the basis of the allowances that we receive appears to be that Members of this House are financially self-sufficient, through outside earnings, inheritance or pensions—I do not for a minute suggest that I am not. However, many people in this country are not in that fortunate position. While I would not go so far as to say that membership of your Lordships' House is means-tested, that proposition has an echo of truth in the background.
Perhaps I may use the “A” word: age. The truth of the matter, whether we like it or not, is that this is a pensioners Parliament. The average age here is just under 70. I think that I have been in the youngest decile here for the 20-odd years that I have been a Member. I have nothing against people being old—indeed, I very much want to be old myself one day, albeit subject to St Augustine’s strictures about chastity—but the second Chamber should no more be a gerontocracy than be a shrine to youth.
As someone who has to go out to work—I have not yet reached retirement age, which seems to be disappearing over the far horizon—I come here as a Back-Bencher and I play a part-time role. I suppose that, in a life where portfolio activities are becoming increasingly prevalent, that is not necessarily perceived as being dilettante or amateur, but we need to decide how Back-Bench Members of this House should organise their time and what commitments are expected of people.
We live in a country where evolutionary change is the technique as we go through time. We have a flexible constitution and we do not wait for the pressure cooker to build up so it explodes. We adjust to forces of change before that happens. Whatever the rationale for the processes under way for reform of the second Chamber, we must not forget that the composition of the House of Lords is not only a matter for us who are Members here or for Members of Parliament as a whole but is also a part of the constitution and belongs to every British citizen, who has a legitimate interest in what is going on. What matters most about the work which the committee that will look into these matters will conclude is not whether there is consensus in committee, not whether there is consensus in Parliament, but whether what is proposed is acceptable to the country as a whole. We can see from reading the newspapers that there is a wide range of disagreement about what should happen in the second Chamber—it seems to draw almost every crank in Britain into the letters pages, and you see some extraordinary as well as some extremely wise contributions.
Political legitimacy does not depend on systems of appointment or Acts of Parliament. It depends on acceptance by the wider body politic, which may or may not in turn form its view based on it. The ultimate test of legitimacy is whether, when a decision is taken with which you disagree or which personally hurts you, you accept it as being fair and reasonable. If you do, it is legitimate. To achieve this, hearts and minds have got to be engaged; you cannot simply do it as a top-down administrative process. Acts of Parliament do not engender hearts and minds. You have only to look at, for example, the Act of Union with Ireland, which collapsed because the Irish simply were not prepared to put up with it; the same, I fear, could happen again with Scotland. The European Union’s biggest problem is that it has not won the hearts and minds of the citizens of this country and a number of others.
If proposals for a reform of this Chamber come forward, it is important that they have general acceptance across the country. I have no objection to radical change, but my own preference should not necessarily determine the way in which I vote. There is not a right and a wrong answer—there is a whole series of ways of skinning this particular dead cat—but it is important that we know what the country wants for the second Chamber. For the time being, I am in the dark about that.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester
My Lords, I am sorry that the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the Leader of the House, has temporarily left his place, because I was going to start by congratulating him on the way in which he opened the debate. It was, typically for him, a smooth and polished performance. I felt that if he were to visit a turkey farm in November he would have no difficulty in convincing the residents that Christmas was really a time for rejoicing and that all of them should be grateful for the humane way in which they were going to be dispatched. However, he is not here, so perhaps his Chief Whip will pass that comment on to him.
I had hoped that the new Government would have tried harder to achieve a consensus on Lords reform. When my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer of Thoroton was Lord Chancellor, he made it clear that Members of your Lordships' House were to be part of the consensus which would deliver change. That made particular sense in the aftermath of the votes in the other place in 2003, when no majority could be assembled for any of the options on offer.
That approach was shattered, which made me sad, following the votes in the House of Commons on 8 March 2007, and from then on the views of Back-Bench Peers were largely ignored in the discussions about our future. Quite why the 2007 votes mattered so much, and why the failure to agree on any option in 2003 was of so little consequence, has never been satisfactorily explained to me. The noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, referred to this matter in his speech. I have a strong suspicion that, had a Bill been published before the recent election, it would have contained provision for the eventual expulsion of all existing Members as we moved to an all-elected House. I do not know how many of your Lordships are familiar with the TV game show “The Weakest Link”. I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Jopling, may be, because he seemed to suggest that noble Lords should vote other noble Lords out because they were not contributing enough—very much the theme of that programme, as noble Lords will know if they are familiar with it.
Let us be quite clear about one thing. Those of us who are opposed to an elected House are not against reform. This House has already demonstrated that there is very considerable support for the measures contained in the Private Member’s Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood. It is very regrettable that its merits were not recognised until it was too late in the last Parliament to do anything about it. If the noble Lord, Lord Steel, wishes to press his Motion to a vote later, I shall certainly support him. His Bill goes a very long way towards modernising this House, as the previous Government recognised in their Constitutional Reform Bill. One of its immediate benefits would have been to reduce the total number of Members, to which a number of noble Lords have referred, as they took advantage of the provisions for retirement. Until now we have had to rely only on the Grim Reaper as a means of reducing our number. Unless something like the bubonic plague were to make a reappearance, the Grim Reaper would not be able to keep up with the lists of new appointments that seem to come through week after week at the moment. So I wish the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, well with his group, but I think that the provisions in the Private Member’s Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Steel, will be an essential part of any new arrangement for retirement.
I have a great deal of respect for the point of view that elections confer legitimacy, but I argue too that elections are not the only way in which legitimacy can be achieved. The role of this Chamber, which is primarily to scrutinise legislation and hold the Government to account, derives its legitimacy from the way in which we do that job and from the people who carry it out. It would not be enhanced if every Member, or nearly every Member of this House, were elected. It is necessary in doing the job that we involve substantial numbers of people who are not part of the normal party-political establishment. At present we can credibly say, during the passage of legislation and the final stages of ping-pong, “We know our place”. That is a point that the noble Lord, Lord Cope, made. When inadequately scrutinised legislation is presented to us, we are able to suggest improvements and revisions to it, but we know and accept that the final word lies with the elected Chamber. The moment when authority is conferred on an assembly through election, it would be necessary to rewrite the conventions between the two Houses. Where would you stop? On what basis would you deny an elected House the right to debate supply and agree the Budget, for example? That point was made with great force by my noble friend Lord Rooker.
I hope that honourable Members in the other place will read very carefully the words of the noble Earl, Lord Onslow. As we heard this afternoon, the noble Earl is a great enthusiast for elections. But the reason why he is such a great supporter of them is that he wants this House to be really powerful and to challenge the will of the Commons. I hope that the House of Commons will come to terms with the fact that many more Members will take the same view as the noble Earl. It seems to me that there is barely a glimmer of understanding of that in the other place. They seem to believe that opposition at this end of the building to an elected House is motivated purely by self-interest and will somehow melt away if we can be bought off by some vague offer of grandfather rights for existing Members, which I have to say I find pretty insulting. The great majority of us are opposed to a predominantly or entirely elected House because we believe that the effectiveness of the second Chamber will be irretrievably weakened if it is replaced by an elected body from which Cross-Bench Peers are absent and whose Members are chosen by the party machines.
It would be invidious to name individual members—mostly, but not entirely, they are on the Cross Benches—whom we would lose if they had to stand for election. Yet who can imagine how groups such as former university vice-chancellors, eminent scientists, distinguished medical practitioners, retired police chiefs and permanent secretaries, generals, air vice-marshals and admirals—with the possible exception of my noble friend Lord West of Spithead, who I can see on the hustings—would offer themselves as political party candidates in elections to this place? They would disappear and the character and effectiveness of the House would change totally.
I wish that when we discuss these matters we would use the English language accurately and truthfully. What is being proposed is not reform, it is abolition. It is the replacement of what we have now with something totally different. Anyone who questions that has only to read Mr Clegg’s rhetoric. I cannot believe that the overwhelming majority of noble Lords on the Conservative Benches, who voted by margins of almost 6 to 1 in favour of an appointed House in 2007, are going to allow their temporary coalition partner to destroy an institution in which they so strongly believe and to which they make such a powerful contribution.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, for whom I have considerable respect. I also think that I agree with every single word that he has uttered. As someone who has lived through some 50 years of continuous, evolving reform of Parliament—admittedly, a great deal of it somewhat vicariously as the spouse of my noble kinsman when in the other place—I am certainly not opposed to necessary, continuing reform of your Lordships’ Chamber. Indeed, probably my only claim to speak on this subject is that I am a product of one of the more recent reforms of your Lordships’ House: Parliament’s decision to set up a House of Lords Appointments Commission to encourage a more widely drawn composition of the Cross-Benches, within what had already become a more representative and politically balanced House with the removal of most hereditary Peers.
As one of the first 15 so-called, rather arrogantly, people’s Peers selected, my baptism was immediate. Like all my colleagues in that first batch of appointees, we quickly became aware of the vast range of experience, expertise and, above all, independent-mindedness among those we had just joined. I do not need to go through all the characteristics because the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, has already kindly done it for me. That description certainly includes the remaining hereditaries, whose presence has also ensured the maintenance and quality of well-behaved self-regulation. Indeed, in our current Parliament we have what I would call a typical British accident—above all, an accident that works.
Necessary reform of your Lordships’ House probably has the backing of most of us, but that is not what our coalition Government have in mind. Again, I could not agree more with what so many of your Lordships have said: rather, it is the abolition of the Lords as we know it and its replacement by a completely—or almost completely—elected rather than appointed second Chamber. How much more sensible to proceed with something such as the Steel Bill, which would continue the evolving reform process by making the Appointments Commission statutory; ending the process of replacing hereditary Peers; enabling Members to retire; and taking whatever other sensible measures make sense at the time. When you consider the alternative—the upheaval and sheer cost at an economic time such as this—that a completely elected House would involve, it really does not begin to make sense.
There is no likelihood that elected Members will settle for the kind of minimal expenses and working conditions that today’s Lords receive. It is not just parity with the pay and expenses that the Commons receive that would be required, but the additional expenses and accommodation for their staff. Voting powers of equal strength, too, would certainly be demanded, unlike the benefits of the current system where the Lords can secure only strictly limited delay. What happens then when a clash between the two Houses occurs? How will that situation be resolved? Again, nobody has addressed these questions in the practical way that would be required. I return to the Lords’ proven track record of business experience and expertise in every field under the sun, particularly, as has been said, on the Cross Benches. This will become even more valuable in a Parliament where, to the great disadvantage of us all, the Prime Minister has made it clear that MPs will no longer be able to hold any kind of outside job.
However, there are certainly areas in your Lordships’ House where democratic reform could well and truly be introduced right now. I give one example. The usual channels may have their uses but they are hardly a democratic institution. In this respect, the other place has already begun to set us an example, with its change of rules to enable Members to vote for the chairmen of their committees, rather than Ministers being able to make these influential appointments. A similar change in your Lordships’ House would certainly inspire far more confidence.
We may be at the beginning of a real debate on this whole issue. I was particularly inspired to see that our marvellous House of Lords Library has today produced two wonderful examples of what it does to keep us all up to date. These draw the wider public’s attention to just how important the present role of the Lords is to the effective working of our basically democratic parliamentary processes. With that in the background, there is much more to look forward to in the debate, including the involvement of the wider public in the future. I hope the Government will find a less contemptuous and more democratic way of processing their plans, which involves membership of both sides of your Lordships’ House and not just a convenient section of it.
Lord Naseby
My Lords, I have a pretty cynical view of this debate, not least the word “reform”, which we all know is not what it is about. It is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, has said, about abolition or—to put it in fairly crude parlance—butchery. It is not about democracy; it is, frankly, about expediency, power, short-termism and control. I am sorry to say this, but I have been in politics, in marginal seats, for long enough to know a stitch-up when I see one. This is a blatant piece of gerrymandering. Let the Back-Benchers talk among themselves for hours, probably beyond midnight. In the mean time, the Government have their own committee that will exclude the Cross-Benchers and Back-Benchers, and in the end they will force through a Bill.
I have news for the Government; first, they should listen to, and I hope study, the short, poignant speech of the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza. If they do not, that is a large block vote to put on the other side. They should listen to their own Back-Benchers who do not like gerrymandering. Many of us are very devoted democrats. I draw the attention of my noble friend on the Front Bench particularly to the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, which for many of us summarised what this is all about.
We do not believe that the voice of the House needs to be better heard. I had a look at the coverage of the Terrorism Bill. Your Lordships' House, or any parliament anywhere, could not have had better coverage than we received for what we did on that Bill. Therefore, I do not think there is any deficiency there or in the debates we had on trial by jury. There are other examples.
Those of us who have come from another place frankly do not want to see Members of Parliament challenged by senators, Members of the new House of Lords, or whatever they may be called. In addition, elected Members of Parliament do not like the list system one little bit. I think all of us recognise that some reforms are needed, but how cynical it is that the relevant figure has already increased by 56. The figures quoted in the press—I am not sure whether it can be believed or not—vary from another 100 on top of the 56 to as many as 150. Then our leaders say that there are now too many people coming to your Lordships' House. I view that as a rather cynical approach.
I have two major historical interests in democracy and your Lordships’ House. First, on your Lordships' House, I have a great interest in Cromwell. Even he had the sense to bring back the House of Lords. We should learn from history and not make the mistake that he made. Secondly, I had the privilege of working in India and know what it stands for. I looked up Mahatma Gandhi’s views on democracy. He said:
“Democracy, disciplined and enlightened, is the finest thing in the world”.
But, he added:
“The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without”.
This House, and particularly those who lead it, could well reflect on those words.
I am all for reform of this wonderful, passionate, unelected House, which respects its role and its relationship with the other place. However, I do not accept the need for an elected Chamber. If there is an attempt to impose it, I fervently believe that there should be a referendum of the people of the United Kingdom. No Government should try to change our precious constitution without the explicit will of the people in a referendum, for that is true modernisation.
Lord Birt
This is a powerful debate with more consensus than I anticipated. It is a privilege to follow so many distinguished contributions.
The steady, incremental and non-revolutionary development of the UK’s constitutional framework sets us apart from other countries. Unsurprisingly, therefore, our system lacks a neat and elegant design rooted in a clear set of principles. The US example offers a contrast, although not one I envy. Our system, for all its untidiness, has great strengths. For me, its critical virtue—although some of your Lordships plainly do not agree—is the ferocious intensity of a near-sovereign House of Commons. Governments will always make mistakes, but in our system they are cruelly exposed. National problems may receive insufficient attention, but eventually in our system they will surface and be addressed.
When, as now, and as in 1945 and 1979, we have to be bold and we can be decisive. I place great value on that. Inevitably, however, our system has had, and still has, many anomalies. We have only just separated our Supreme Court from our legislature. Uniquely among modern democracies, a religion nationalised by a tyrannical king nearly 500 years ago remains firmly embedded in our Parliament. While today’s hereditary Peers would justify a place on merit in any system, the birthright principle should have no place in a modern political system, as others have said.
There are constitution issues on which others have not touched thus far. As more and more power and responsibility are devolved to Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, it is increasingly anomalous that Members of the Westminster Parliament elected from those countries can have a decisive impact on policies that affect England alone, when the converse no longer holds. Moreover, while there continues to be a massive transfer of wealth from England to those nations—in effect, now taxation without representation—there will eventually be a clamour for a Parliament for England.
If the coalition Government are to redirect some of the awesome energy and political capital that they will need to reduce the deficit towards further constitutional reform, I hope that they will either take a truly fundamental look at the arrangements for the United Kingdom as a whole or confine themselves to more traditional incremental reform of the existing system, as most noble Lords have urged. Like others, I support the proposals of the noble Lord, Lord Steel. Whichever direction the Government take, they must address the simple question: what is the optimal role for a second Chamber? Then, and only in the light of that, should they ask what its composition should be.
At the moment, we sit in an essentially advisory Chamber with no significant powers. Provided that the process of appointment is democratically rooted, and provided that it is considered and sound, appointment is a perfectly reasonable means of ensuring that an advisory Chamber has an independent cast of mind and contains appropriate expertise and insight. Maintaining the advisory role but changing the composition whereby the upper House is wholly or largely elected is likely, as others have said, to have unintended consequences. An elected Chamber could never be happy for more than a moment with our limited role and powers, and would soon simply demand an increased role and greater power.
Moreover, a Chamber elected on a more proportional system may forever subvert the power of the Commons and of the Government of the day to act decisively. Such an outcome would be a momentous break with our history and would not be in our long-term national interest. We all appreciate and understand the immediate urge for a more raw form of democracy—just talk to the bright young political activists in all three major political parties—but let us please consider all the consequences with due wisdom before we risk fatally unbalancing our constitution.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
My Lords, I rise as number 50 on the list and I am conscious of the fact that there are still another 15 or 16 speakers to go before the wind-ups, so I shall be brief. I am sorry that my noble friend Lord Strathclyde is not in his place, as I would want him to hear this. He has listened to many hours of this debate and I cannot help but feel some sympathy for him as the Minister who will no doubt have to take through this House whatever emerges from the committee of which we have heard or from the Joint Committee that is to follow it.
It is perfectly clear from the speeches that we have heard that the position has not changed since the previous occasions when we have debated this issue. An overwhelming majority of this House is against the idea of an elected House and believes, as the noble Lord, Lord Birt, so cogently put it in the speech to which we have just listened, that an appointed House is a perfectly good way of finding the expertise that is necessary for us to perform our totally different function from that of the House of Commons. I listened to my noble friend Lord Onslow saying that the House of Lords needs more powers, including the power to tax. All I can say is, “Heaven forfend”. I hope that, as someone else said, the Members of another place may be persuaded to read his speech.
Earlier this afternoon, I listened to the speech of my noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon. We are very old friends; indeed, when we came down from Cambridge, we shared two rather grotty rooms while we started our practices at the Bar. Therefore, it is not altogether surprising that I should have intended to talk about two of the points that he made so cogently and to use the quotation that he gave from the Leader of another place, Sir George Young. However, as my noble and learned friend said it all perfectly well, I will not. To my mind, he made an extremely cogent argument as to why the Government’s position on this is wrong.
Like my noble and learned friend and others, I believe that the major problem in our constitution has been the Executive’s increasing dominance over the House of Commons and to some extent this House. It seems to me that that is what lies behind the public disquiet about politics and politicians. The Administration —one has to say this of whatever party or coalition of parties—seem to require the control of Parliament, which should be their watchdog. Parliament is there to scrutinise the Government as the first check and balance in the constitution.
One of the people who have been writing about our affairs over the years has been the admirable academic Meg Russell of the Constitution Unit at UCL, who has had many wise things to say about this House and its reform. The noble Baroness, Lady Howe, referred to the House of Lords Library’s excellent report—in fact, the other report was produced in March, not yesterday—from which I quote. Meg Russell wrote in her latest book:
“Although ministers try to present arguments as Lords versus Commons, the far more interesting dynamic is that of Parliament versus executive. The existence of the Lords as a serious longstop has given a greater confidence to MPs to extract concessions from ministers, and the greater rebelliousness of the Commons also acts to boost the power of peers. This … could represent a real shift of power within the British Westminster system”.
Yet what do we see? The Government propose an all or mainly elected House, which, as others have said, will come under the control of the political parties and in which we will lose most, if not all, the value of the Cross Benches and the independence of mind that they bring. It was certainly said that one of the motives of the last Government was to increase the Executive’s power over the House of Lords, which was the one organ of government over which they did not have control. So I align myself wholly with the majority of your Lordships in opposing what this Government are trying to put forward.
I am sorry that I did not hear the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, who expressed some doubt as to whether this reform could happen. I share that view. Given the great weight of opinion in this House, the Government will have a very severe task if they try to force their legislation through Parliament.
The noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood, has a Motion on the Order Paper, and invited all of us in the House—a number of noble Lords have taken advantage of this—to express our views. I wholly support the four points that he has made in his Motion, and I particularly support the view that the commission should be statutory. I read the excellent evidence given by the noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme, to the Constitution Committee of this House. It was a marvellous example of transparency that showed how the Appointments Commission works. If noble Lords have not read it, I strongly recommend that they do.
I will make one final point. The noble Lord, Lord Richard, said that nobody is listening to us. That simply is not true. I will cite my own experience: I chaired the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology’s inquiry into science and society 10 years ago. Ten years later, there is not a single professional scientific or engineering body in the country that does not have its science and society activities—and the Government have, too. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Richard, is not in his place, but his idea that nobody is listening to us is complete rubbish. We work in a different way from the Commons, we can be equally influential and we should be allowed to go on doing this.
Lord Gilbert
My Lords, I start by declaring an interest as probably the most prehistoric of your Lordships to address the House tonight. I have no intention of standing for a seat in your Lordships' House for the simple reason that I know perfectly well that I would not get elected, and I am not interested in elections in which I do not intend to be successful. I think that I am the only person this evening to have made that declaration of interest.
Why do we find ourselves in this ridiculous situation? I am afraid that the engine driving it has been within my own party, very much led by a certain Mr Jack Straw. Within my recollection, not many months ago Mr Straw and Mr Blair were united in total opposition to anything other than a 100 per cent appointed membership of this House. Why did they change their minds? I am afraid that I have a nasty, cynical explanation: some grubby work at the crossroads, and peerages from the north-west of the country at the time causing them to change their minds and to decide that the situation could not be tolerated and that they had to find some way out in order to divert public attention from what was going on in the Labour Party.
I will make it clear that it is not only within the Labour Party that grubby things happen when it comes to appointments to this House. Many of the motives behind the movement at the other end of the corridor come from a combination of envy and incomprehension. The incomprehension reposes in the fact that Members in the other place have not the faintest idea what would happen to them if this House were to be elected. The first thing that would happen is that people would say, “Well, I’ve got just as good a mandate as you have”, because, however this House is elected, whether directly or indirectly, the elections must cover the entire territory of the United Kingdom. If we are to cover the entire territory of the United Kingdom in this House with only 300 or so Members and there are 650 at the other end, it does not take a mathematical genius to see that anyone elected to this House will be able to say to someone in the other House, “I’ve got twice the mandate that you have. What are you going to do about it?”. Unless the elections are always on the same day, as in other idiotic ideas put forward from time to time, the elected Members of this House will be able to say to the idiots at the other end, “What’s more, my mandate is more recent than yours. What have you got to say about that?”. Of course, there is no answer.
Leaving aside some other unpleasant consequences, if people were elected to this House without any cojones whatever, they would start to demand three things: a say in supply, a repeal of the Parliament Act and more Ministers. The noble Earl, Lord Onslow, will speak for himself but that lovely dream that he had of a Prime Minister addressing this House from that Dispatch Box is something of which I simply cannot conceive as plausible. Why on earth would the House of Commons voluntarily submit to an aggregation of extra powers to this House? Therefore, the stage would be set for permanent conflict between the two Houses as soon as this Chamber was elected.
Then we come to the question of who will be elected to come here. You would get the sort of oik—for Hansard’s benefit, oik is spelt OIK—that could not get into the Commons, Europe, the Scottish Parliament or the Welsh Assembly and probably not into a half-decent county council. That is the sort of oik you would have here, particularly when you told them that they would be here only for one election and for 15 years at the most. That is absolutely barmy. I do not see anything funny about it—at least, I was not intending to be funny but I am often misconstrued; that is one of the prices of old age.
I think that there will be some candidates from within your Lordships’ House. Looking around at my Benches and with great respect to everyone whom I can see, only my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath could get himself elected effortlessly to any Chamber to which he put himself forward. I have no idea whether it would be in his mind to stand and I hope he does not think that I am giving him ideas. On the other side, I can see only one half of “the two TomToms”. The TomToms have great charm, good looks, energy, youth and devotion to this place on their side, and unfortunately a very similar level of intelligence, but I shall not go into that. That was not supposed to be funny either. In fact, it is a moment of great tragedy when you think about it.
I have probably spoken for long enough. I simply add that I totally support what the noble Lord, Lord Steel, seeks to do. It is nonsense to say that people in this House do not want reform, as distinct from abolition. I think that these days it would be very hard to find anyone in this House who did not, like me, support in principle what the noble Lord, Lord Steel, wants to do.
Baroness Hooper
My Lords, it has always been my view that we should be looking at the whole of Parliament in determining the future of the House of Lords. In the light of the devolved Parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland—and, indeed the existence of the European Parliament—the size and functions of the House of Commons also need to be looked at and changed if necessary, and I should prefer that to a piecemeal approach.
I opposed the 1999 reform Act partly because the mixed hereditary and appointed House worked very well, regularly defeated the then Conservative Government and asked the other place to think again, but mainly on the grounds that the final shape and role of the House of Lords had not been thought through. Here we are, still thinking about it 11 years on. Subsequently, we had two opportunities to vote on the best way forward in terms of a partially or fully elected House. In each case, I voted in favour of a fully elected second Chamber. Interestingly, my companions in the Lobby were mostly hereditary Peers and the Labour Party. Please note that I say “fully elected” and not “directly elected” and I shall return to that point. I voted that way because I recognised, with regret, that it was not possible to turn the clock back and that reforms justified on the grounds of making the House of Lords a more democratic and legitimate institution were hardly fulfilled by a fully appointed House.
Therefore, this debate gives us the opportunity for a completely fresh approach, so that we can design an appropriate system which promotes participation throughout the country in the selection of experts to assist and to complement the House of Commons, rather than to challenge its primacy. I favour the idea of indirect elections. It seems to me that a system based on electoral colleges, which would represent this country’s rich tapestry of interests—churches, lawyers, doctors, academics, trade unions, the voluntary sector, indeed hereditary Peers themselves—would give the House of Lords an element of continuity and recognise our history and tradition. The noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, made a similar suggestion, but from a rather different direction.
Indirect elections would offer flexibility and adaptability. Electoral colleges could be merged or altered as required, just as constituency boundaries are changed. Members would be elected for a term of years and would be accountable to their electors. Rather than a huge statutory appointments commission, as advocated by my noble friend Lord Waddington along the lines suggested in the Steel Bill, the responsibility for finding suitable candidates would be shared out and the interest and involvement would be spread across the country to all sectors of the community. I believe that would also fit in with the importance of the evolutionary nature of change, advocated by my noble friend Lady O’Cathain; would remove any feeling of direct competition with the House of Commons; and would avoid the danger, pointed out so brilliantly by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, that people who fail to get elected to the other place would be queuing up to come here. I know others have also referred to that. Other countries have used that system for their second Chamber, notably the Republic of Ireland, so there would also be an opportunity to learn from other people’s experience. I believe that that would be a compromise and the best way of safeguarding the reputation of the House of Lords for wealth of expertise, independence, high ethical standards and hard work.
One final point is the name of our second Chamber. The creation of large batches of new Peers and asking the Queen to create more and more life Peers is a bit of a nonsense when the majority of hereditary Peers are not allowed to sit here any more. Whatever happens, therefore, I think that new Members, whether appointed, indirectly elected or directly elected, should simply become Members of the House of Lords without being given titles. I do not favour the idea of a senate. In any event, it would seem very odd to have a House of Commons without a House of Lords. I think this place should continue to be known as the House of Lords to preserve a lasting link with the history and tradition of our parliamentary heritage.
The Earl of Sandwich
My Lords, this debate goes on so long that I almost feel that I have been here for 350 years—in some senses, some of us have. I will focus today, however, on the present size of the House. There cannot be anyone here who does not want to reduce the number, which is growing every day. Our indulgent public would be quite hostile to us if they knew that we were funding a second Chamber of almost 800 Peers, half of whom do not attend regularly, so I hope that no one will tell them. Our numbers are absurdly high compared to other second Chambers.
That must be changed. There is only one way to change it quickly and soon: political parties will have to restrain themselves. They are the principal source of appointments, and hence the primary means of reducing our numbers over a reasonable time. There are dissolution honours, resignation honours and political lists of working Peers. The scene here nearly every day is still reminiscent of Trollope and WS Gilbert. Our website states that all Peers are vetted by an independent appointments commission. That is misleading. Rewards for favours and political patronage remain, only just out of sight of the public. The noble Lord, Lord Steel, has given a strong example. The do-nothing excuse on Lords reform—that in time we will have a partly or wholly elected Chamber—will not do. We heard that from the previous Government, but nothing happened, even at the last minute, when the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and his colleagues began to see the wisdom of the Steel proposals. The case for elections has been effectively demolished today and will be demolished again.
We are moving too slowly, and I propose that something is done about it now. One sensible way would be to bring the party and independent appointments together under a single committee of respected and still active retired civil servants. I rather like the phrase of the noble Lord, Lord Birt, “democratically rooted”. I have been at a loss to understand why both Front Benches have been against a statutory appointments commission. Perhaps the noble Lords who will be winding-up the debate can explain that. I am sure that it is not Downing Street or the Civil Service who are against that but the parties themselves, who wish to retain control over their appointments. Again, if the public knew all that, they would be horrified that the parties are still promising appointments as a reward for service.
There is now consideration for the balance of numbers and diversity of professions in the House, but not of the overall numbers. The noble Lord, Lord Lea, had a good phrase: leapfrogging is going on all the time. I very much hope to see the present Appointments Commission strengthened and, ultimately, made statutory. That is simply common sense, as many noble Lords have said.
What are the alternatives? The Leader of the House mentioned a Leader’s Group on retirement. I am glad that that subject is now being given fuller consideration. I supported an amendment to the constitutional reform Bill on that. One virtue of this House is old age; I increasingly recognise that. No other Assembly or organisation in this country reveres wise old heads as much as a loya jurga or a village shura in Afghanistan as does this House. The wise women and men here are precious to the nation, and long may they remain.
However, the proposed new national retirement age is lower than our average age in this House. We are not and should not be exempt from public discussion about the right age to retire. People grow old at a different pace, and there should be at least an opportunity for party leaders and our Convenor to speak to people from time to time to listen to their intentions. Length of service should be important but not a determining factor. Lord Russell and Lord Longford were examples of those who could never be allowed to retire—and they would not have agreed to it anyway. Fortunately, we are not all like that. In my view, it is time that we introduced that aspect of human resources, with a reasonable budget to help Peers in difficulty during their first year or two of retirement.
I repeat what I said at the outset. Those changes must be made now. They do not all need legislation or months of consultation. The virtue of the Steel Bill is that the House need not always be waiting for Godot or the Government. It can resolve to move now towards practical reforms, which most of us will see in our lifetime. Proposals that we have seen before are so far reaching and have so many constitutional implications—especially those regarding elections—that they would take many years to discuss and implement, and none of us would be left here to see them through.
Lord Selsdon
My Lords, for most of the day, I sat on the Steps of the Throne because I like to see my enemy and my friends face to face and also feel that I should be in an inferior position. Now, I feel like throwing a few spanners into the works, if I can, and I begin by pointing out that 20 per cent of the people who have spoken today are elected Peers. They may have been defined as those excepted under the 1990 Act and then elected, but according to my officials in Government, we are elected Peers, whatever the sense of the election. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, acknowledged that last time I spoke from the other side. I rather wanted to go and speak from behind him today because I have never liked this side of the House as you always have the sun in your eyes.
If you are elected, as my colleagues and I are, you should have a role to perform. I spent last summer sitting down writing papers for various government bodies, because if you have been brought up in a bureaucratic bank like Midland Bank, you write papers and you know that nobody will look at them. The noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, did me a great favour. He pointed out that the biggest single submission, which was bigger than almost all the submissions to him put together, was mine. I never thought that the Civil Service would take this up. Some of my questions were: Do I have a role? Do I have a role to perform? Do I have a job? Do I have a job to do? What do I have? I am happy to announce that the Civil Service at a very high level has confidentially advised me that the only people in your Lordships' House who have a job, a role or employment are certain Ministers and certain chairmen of committees who are remunerated. All others have no role and no job. They have nothing to perform. All they have is a dignity. Unfortunately, the definition of a dignity is beyond the Civil Service. It cannot define it. Therefore, it cannot define those of us who have it. We could define that all those who do not have a dignity and have employment are undignified. Today, I tried to find out who are remunerated and undignified. It was rather difficult. Even the Library could not find out.
I take my lead from the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. If you cannot define the role of a Member of the House of Lords, what is it that he or she can do? I am told that the dignity means that you are responsible to the Writ of Summons, which goes back to 1340. That Writ of Summons places certain obligations upon you, but it does not imply a duty. So one of my thoughts, very simply, was that if we are to try and define the future of the House of Lords, the first thing, following on from the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, is to define the role of the House of Lords and the role, responsibilities and duties of a Peer. That is not as simple as it seems. I promised my friends in the Civil Service who advised me that I would not sneak on them, but they find that when you look at Halsbury and some of the regulations, that is not true. You cannot have a place where the person concerned does not have a role.
Therefore, what are we? I thought I would go back into the mists of time and summon my classical Greek, which I was never good at. I came across aristokratia. It is effectively government by the best people. Aristocracy is not a class; it is a government. I have an enormous database on everybody. I use the frame “KEW”—knowledge, experience and wisdom—but after the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, I think I will change “wisdom” to “wit” as there is a sense of humour at the moment because nobody knows what we should do or who is going to do it. I am in favour of elections, and the first thing I would like to suggest is that all the members of the committee that will look at the future of the House should be elected, and I think that every Member who leads a political party should in this House be elected by his political colleagues and not be appointed by the Prime Minister. The previous two Prime Ministers appointed 428 people to your Lordships' House.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, I need to tell the noble Earl that on this side of the House, we have been elected.
Lord Selsdon
And I need to tell the noble Lord that I am not an Earl, but I much appreciate the compliment.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, in view of his tremendous work, he jolly well ought to be.
Lord Selsdon
I really believe that one of the things that we can do is provide more information on this House. If we do not have a role as an individual and we cannot define the role of the House, and if we believe in representative government—we are part of government—who do we represent? Last time around, I declared that I had agreed to represent everyone who did not vote at the last election and every person who was elected by another body, which was something like 106,000. It is fairly simple. Before we go any further, we need to define what people think the current and future role is of the House of Lords and of its Members.
Lord Graham of Edmonton
My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate. I rise as the 55th speaker in a list of 65. In 1998, which was the last time we had a great debate of this kind, I was 182nd in a speakers list of 193. I rose at 2.30 am on the second night. So, if you think that we are being badly done by in this debate, you ain’t heard nothing yet. The interest in this debate is brought from a range of experiences. I do not envy for a moment the Leader and Deputy Leader of this House in having to attempt to make something out of the worth of this debate. One of the great things in sitting for a long time through a debate is to recognise, as I do, just how much one does not know about various aspects of the issue.
I have my prejudices and my roots. My mind will not be changed, but I always find great comfort and solace when I listen to people on both sides of the argument bringing their point of view to the debate. Invariably they bring it with passion and belief. It is not my job tonight or at any time on an issue of this kind to pontificate on what is right or wrong. All my political life I have been guided not by the destruction of the House of Lords but by the abolition of the House of Lords as it was painted during the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and into this century.
I will illustrate my point by giving my experience. While I was the opposition Chief Whip in the 1990s, I was convinced that election was much better than appointment. When Labour took office in 1997, there were 116 Labour Peers and 425 Conservative Peers, many of whom have spoken tonight. At that time, they saw nothing wrong with that disparity. There was no question of moving for change. They enjoyed the power that numbers brought and they did nothing about it. They might tell me now that they felt uncomfortable at the dominant numbers, but as I did my job I realised that the dominance of the hereditary principle was there.
The noble Lord, Lord Jopling, talks about the fear that some day we will reach 1,000 Members. In the 1990s, there were 1,200 Members of the House of Lords. Not a word was said about how the number could be reduced, but all of a sudden arguments about the composition and the powers are raised, and people forget what had been tolerated. I would say to the Deputy Leader, my good friend the noble Lord, Lord McNally—and, in his absence, the Leader—that I can recall at least two occasions when the Leader of the House, as Leader of the Opposition, came before us with a done deal between the two Houses and the two parties, which recommended that there should be a move towards an elected House. He was dignified and delivered what he had promised to do, but those on his Benches behind him did not follow him. People have told me that someone sitting behind Mr Churchill said to him, “Mr Churchill, I am in a very privileged position. Together we can look across the Chamber and see our enemies”. Mr Churchill is alleged to have said, “My boy, the people opposite us are the Official Opposition. Your enemies are behind you”.
Do not let the Deputy Leader of the House be under any illusion. If the committee that has the job of making progress is fed the feelings of the House, not just on that side of the Chamber but on this side too—I am in a minority on my side—when it comes to the real issue of abolition or change of a large nature, he knows before he sits down to put pen to paper that if the proposition as we know it now is brought before the House at the end of this year or next year, he will be soundly beaten.
Lord Graham of Edmonton
I almost forgot what I was going to say. The point is that in a few months’ time we will have a proposition along those lines, and I would simply say to the Deputy Leader that it will be a mess that they got themselves into because the imperative that is here tonight rides on the back of the Deputy Prime Minister. He spoke cogently but positively about a great reform that cannot wait; it has to be started now. Having started it now, they will then scratch their heads and ask, “What shall we do?”. If the committee examines all the propositions, it is going to be radically different.
I wish the coalition Government well in their attempt to change the composition and functions of this House, but I do not believe that they have got the House behind them. My best wishes go to my dear friend the Leader of the Opposition with these words: be very careful of being drawn into some kind of agreement that might appear to be generally well accepted, because in my view there has been no change on either side of the House on this issue since the last time we debated it.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
My Lords, I am strongly in favour of reform of this House and I am strongly in favour of the Bill of my noble friend Lord Steel. I hope that, at the end of the proceedings, he will press his Motion because I think it deserves support. It will give an instant impetus to what I would call sensible and organic reform and will stand to the credit of this place. Having said that, I also agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, said at the beginning of the debate when she observed that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I do not think that this House is broke. It needs reform, certainly, but it is not broke. Sometimes I scratch my head and wonder how the other place manages constantly to point at us because if there is a broken House in our Parliament, it is, I fear, the other place.
Before I go on to say why, contrary to my instincts, I am against elections, I would say briefly that I am strongly in support of what the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, said in opening for the Opposition—that at some point we must have a referendum on the issue of election if it is pressed forward. I spoke to that effect in the debate on the Queen’s Speech and I do not propose to add to it more than to support what she said; she covered most of the key points.
To come back to elections, I was interested to hear the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, say that he thought that if 20 per cent of the House was retained on an appointed basis, he did not really see how the outcome would be very different from what we have now. I disagree with him radically for these reasons. The 80 per cent elected would, I fear, be beholden to the party members who put them on the list. Those high on the list would be particularly beholden and once in this House they would have, if you like, a powerful partisan obligation to be a great deal more observant of the Whips than Members currently feel they must be. Secondly, those personal party loyalties which are a natural—
Lord Goodhart
What does my noble friend think is the difference between that situation and the present situation in which appointments are made by the party leaders? Are they not equally under an obligation?
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
They are under an obligation, but a much more fuzzy and weaker one, and they are not constantly having to go back to their constituencies —as an elected Member would have to do—to justify themselves to their members. I have no doubt about that. As I was saying, the personal party loyalties, which are perfectly normal and good in our system, would not—contrary the hopes of the noble Lord, Lord Butler—allow many outsiders to appear high on the party list at elections.
In any event, the number of party members in this country is very low and still declining.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
Labour Party membership is growing considerably since the election.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
The noble Lord’s party membership is going up—I am happy to hear it—by three in a month, probably. There are fewer members of all political parties than members of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
I do not believe that the kind of people who inhabit this House now would want the rigours of an election. Certainly they would not want the constituency work that would follow from being elected for a regional constituency. The notion that Members could come to this place and devote all their energies to legislation and so on is cloud-cuckoo-land. They would have a massive constituency load and would be prevented from spending the overwhelming part of their energies and imagination on the legislative work for which this House is rightly renowned.
As to the 20 per cent appointed in the mixed, hybrid system—full-time, fully-paid appointed Members—I do not think that many sitting in this House now would contemplate that position. I do not think either that the tenor of this House, which is so important to the enjoyment of Members here, would be retained in a partisan House that was 80 per cent elected and which would swiftly become a shadow of the other place. The appointed Members would be second-class Members; they would not have elective legitimacy and they would be a much older cadre. The Commons might use the fact that 20 per cent of the House was appointed as an excuse for refusing to cede any further powers to this place.
The statement of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that the powers in an elected House would be unchanged from what they are now is surely a certain recipe for not only the constitutional inferiority that we now have, and readily accept, but for a qualitative inferiority. Let us be blunt: who but second-rate Members would want to be elected to this House, with its inferior powers, when they might seek to be elected to the other place?
I refute the assumption of the noble Lord, Lord Richard, and others that election would increase the power and influence of the House for the reasons I have attempted to summarise. The present wonderful complementarity of this House would be shattered in one fell swoop. It would lose both its storehouse of remarkable experience and expertise and its independent spirit by the act of election. In the last four Sessions of this House in the three and a half years up until last November, there were 349 whipped votes; the Government were defeated in 113 of them, or 32 per cent. Over the same period in the Commons, fewer than 1 per cent of the votes led to government defeats; indeed, in the first 10 years of the Blair Government, they lost a single vote.
I feel that we cannot abandon the historic, organic evolution of the powers of this place, and I hope very much that we will support my noble friend Lord Steel in his sensible reforms today.
The Earl of Caithness
My Lords, when I saw that I was going to follow the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, I was reminded of that lovely quotation in the book The Leopard:
“Things have to change in order to remain the same”.
It is a delight to see the noble Lord back in his place, and it is a great benefit to this House.
The noble Lord, Lord Richard, reminded us that we are on an eternal roundabout and not making much progress. Although we are not making much progress with reform, the House continually evolves as we adjust our procedures and conventions. To me, one of the conventions that has changed markedly and, I think, for the worse is the number of interruptions in our opening speeches. We are a great debating chamber, one of the finest in the world, but the number of interruptions in opening speeches, particularly today, reduces the value of those speeches, and that is to our detriment.
I was sad when I read the document that my Government put out on 20 May. It says:
“Lords appointments will be made with the objective of creating a second chamber that is reflective of the share of the vote secured by the political parties in the last general election”.
Why was I upset by that? Because the House is large enough as it is. It is increasingly difficult for us to do our job, given the space that we have. The noble Lord, Lord Graham, rightly reminded us that the House was much bigger when there were a number of hereditary Peers, but they did not attend. The average attendance in those days was under 300, if I remember rightly; now it is more like 400, and growing. If we are going to get a whole lot of new Peers, that will mean that attendance increases because they will be the regulars.
It is interesting that the Liberal manifesto said that they wanted to have a fully elected second Chamber with considerably fewer Members than the current House. How small a Chamber should we be? Going by the recent edition of Dod’s, if we wanted a House of 400 people, there would be no one here over the age of 70. That would move me suddenly from the lowest quartile in this House, where I have been for 40 years, into a much higher one. If we wanted a House of 350, the retirement age would have to be 67, so a number of us who have spoken today would be leaving and not returning. There is no doubt in my mind that the key driving force now for reform is the number of people in the House.
I join the many noble Lords who have asked in this debate, “What is our role? What is the point of a second Chamber? What role do the Government really want us to undertake?”. At the moment we consider in great detail, and spend hours debating, legislation that has not even been discussed in another place. We have long debates; we then have a vote, as the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, just said; the Government are defeated; and what happens? It goes down to the other end and most of it is not even discussed there. At the moment we are not asking the other place to think again—we are not even asking it to think. We are an advisory Chamber, not a revising one.
The second Chamber should be a revising Chamber, and that is why I firmly believe that we should be a wholly elected House. That is the only way that we can have some brake on the Executive. The other place is not holding the Executive to account at all, while we are doing a little bit. But we ought to have a much stronger voice and we ought to be much more challenging. We should be a totally elected Chamber, not a partially elected Chamber. I see huge complications in having some Peers appointed and some elected. It would be much cleaner, much better, to have a totally elected House. I have been of that opinion for some years.
The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, said that she felt that the Conservatives were naturally anti-reform. I would have to remind her of the 1958 Act. I would have to remind her also of the 1968 Bill, which was passed in the House of Lords by the hereditary Peers, who were ready to abolish themselves. It was Michael Foot and Enoch Powell in another place who destroyed that Bill. So I take issue with the noble Baroness on her view that we are the party against reform.
The noble Baroness also mentioned a referendum. I found that interesting. I found it hard to believe, too, considering how the Labour Party behaved with regard to a referendum on the Lisbon treaty. Could it be trusted on a referendum on this House? However, the point of a referendum is important. Having listened to a number of noble Lords who have spoken on it today, I believe that what we agree—if we manage to agree anything—should be put to a referendum.
The noble Lord, Lord Steel, has put down his Motion. He knows that I have fought him on his Private Member’s Bills in the past, but, since then, things have changed—we are both very lucky, we are both noble friends. Nevertheless, I shall still fight him on his Private Member’s Bill, most particularly because of its proposals in respect of by-elections for hereditary Peers. Those were an integral part of the 1999 agreement which secured that Bill into legislation and without them it would have been a very different story. It is a major principle for all of us hereditaries and it needs to be retained until there is a major reform of the House of Lords. When there is a major reform it will be a different story, but to do this incrementally and to remove the one plank that saw so many noble friends all around the House leave this Chamber after making such a huge contribution for most of their lives, would be a great mistake. I shall therefore fight my noble friend on his Motion and on his Bill.
Lord Walton of Detchant
My Lords, when I was a boy in a mining village in Durham County, and even when I entered the Newcastle medical school, it never crossed my mind that one day I might become a Member of your Lordships' House. I suppose that it was my multiple medical presidencies, to two of which I was elected by a single transferable vote, which led to my being ennobled 21 years ago. The moment I entered this House I was immensely impressed by the all-pervading sense of authority, experience and expertise which so frequently enlightened and enhanced the debates in your Lordships' House. I say in contradistinction to what the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, has just said, that this is a revising Chamber. We are most effective and at our very best in revising ill-digested legislation coming up from the Commons, to such an extent that more than 75 per cent of the amendments to poorly digested Bills from the Commons which the Lords have passed are subsequently accepted in another place. That is one of the major roles that this House plays.
I do not believe that you could find in any other second Chamber in any other developed country as many distinguished former Cabinet Ministers, noted MPs, diplomats, heads of the Civil Service, defence staff and police, and leaders of academia, science, law, business, trade unions, political parties and religious life as you will find in this House. That is one of its greatest strengths.
One of the other strengths of this House rests in the Select Committee mechanisms. I served at different times, for a total of 14 years, on your Lordships’ Select Committee on Science and Technology. I agree entirely with what the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, said a few moments ago in totally refuting the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Richard, who said that no one listens to what happens in this House. My baptism of fire in 1989 was with the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. I was reliably informed that our lengthy debates, often going on until three in the morning, greatly influenced the subsequent votes in the Commons that led to that legislation being passed. We also had an inquiry into forensic medicine, which led to the establishment of a national Forensic Science Service. I was happy to chair an inquiry into research in the National Health Service, which persuaded the Government of that day to create a research and development branch within the National Health Service, which has led to the establishment of the National Institute for Health Research.
I could quote many more examples in which the work of that Science and Technology Committee has subsequently had a major effect on government policy. That is important—and even more so now, because in the Commons we have lost no fewer than 10 able scientists, two of whom in the last Parliament lost their seats and several others of whom stood down. There are some scientists in the new Commons, but not as many as there were in the last Commons, and the role of this House in assessing complex scientific matters is going to be of increasing importance. I add that I had the privilege of chairing your Lordships’ Select Committee inquiry into medical ethics which led to the government policy, which still holds, although it has been increasingly questioned in many parts of the House, on issues such as voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide. These things have been among the strengths of this House.
It has been regularly said that the Cross-Benchers, of whom I am proud to be one, have played an important role. I believe that they have often diluted the worst excesses of rampant political parties in this House. How can the electorate of an elected House be so constructed as to retain a powerful Cross-Bench independent view, which many if not most Members of this House believe to be crucial for the future? Of course, I have heard that there will be, if the House does have an elected component, a grandfather clause—in my case it would have to be a great-grandfather clause. That is important. I am glad that the Steel Bill, which I warmly support, has included the possibility that Peers may have the opportunity of taking honourable retirement. If that Bill passes into law, that is something I would be glad to consider, although it would be nice to feel that one might be given some kind of modest incentive to accept that choice. I also hope that, if that does come about, there might be the possibility of retaining what one might call simple club rights, even after retiring from the Chamber.
I make one other point of importance on the geographical representation in this House. That does require some reform. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, rightly referred to the excellent work being done by Meg Russell of the Constitution Unit at University College, London. In a major analysis of the present strength of the House, she has discovered that I am the only Cross-Bench life Peer in the entire north of England between north Yorkshire and the Scottish border. I think that she overlooked my noble friend Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington but, nevertheless, we are not well represented in that particular part of the country.
I have a great admiration for the Leader of the House and the Deputy Leader as well as for the Leader of the Opposition, so I hope that they can find some clever Machiavellian means of manipulating their proposals relating to an election to this House in future which would, on the one hand, retain a major Cross-Bench component and, on the other, retain something like the massive expertise that exists and so strengthens the work of this House. I cannot feel that that is likely to be achieved. Hence, I feel a little like the ageing wife of the taxidermist who looked on the future with increasing apprehension.
Viscount Astor
My Lords, one of the strengths of this House is that political parties in opposition love the place. It is the only Chamber where they can defeat the Government. Of course, once they get into power the love affair wanes as, often, the Government’s carefully planned Bills, which have inched their way through another place, are revised in this House. Then Ministers in another place get frightfully cross and start talking about the undemocratic nature of this House, or the cost to the Treasury of undoing their carefully thought-out plans. I hope that we never lose our reputation for awkwardness to Governments.
When one looks at our composition, we are a varied bunch and there are varied ways of getting here. One can be an elected hereditary Peer, like me. You can come from another place for services rendered or services to be rendered. Some noble Lords are active in retirement, but the sightings of some freshly made Peers from another place are as rare as those of a white rhino. You can also stay long enough in another place so that you get a peerage to encourage you to vacate the seat for some up-and-coming young politician. Finally, there is the more traditional Labour route; you deny vigorously that you ever want to come here; you rubbish the place vehemently; then, suddenly, a couple of months later you are here. I think that is the Healey, Hattersley and now the Prescott route.
In this House, you can be gallant, learned, right reverend, or even a people’s Peer; we are a mixed bunch. The question is how we can change this House, following the votes in another place and the recent general election result, and reflect the wishes of the electorate. One must start by saying that this House has become too large, as many noble Lords have said. As a parliamentary Chamber, this House is second in size only to the National People’s Congress of China. It is the only Parliament in the Commonwealth that I can find where the second Chamber is larger than the first. We are told that we will have more noble Lords arriving here. We have to do something, because we will soon have more than 800 Members. I am sure that there should be a way of encouraging some form of retirement, but if that does not work we may have to consider a mandatory retirement age, as for example happens for High Court judges. I also believe that the Cross Benches—this may be unpopular there—have become too large in relation to the political parties in this House. They are, in effect, almost the largest party.
We must remember that we are fundamentally a political chamber, not a debating society and however good our speeches, we are often self-congratulatory and too smug about what we do in this House. Too often, we have general debates; they are always informed and often fascinating, learned and entertaining, but the problem is that very few people listen—least of all Governments. That includes the noble Lords opposite and, indeed, my own noble friends. How often do we have brilliant foreign affairs debates, yet can anybody—from their time in government or the Civil Service—remember when, after a debate in this House, a Private Secretary has rushed in to see his Minister, saying, “Minister, you must read the Lords Hansard before you go to Brussels”—or to some important meeting—“because there has been a very interesting debate”? It just does not happen; we kid ourselves. Hansard is, I hope, read by those who have made the speeches. I have always thought that everybody should be forced to read their own speeches the following morning, as a sort of hangover cure. Perhaps there are a few insomniacs too.
Anyway, this House is at its best when it scrutinises and revises legislation. As we have heard, most amendments that are agreed in this House are accepted by another place and, as my noble friend Lord Jenkin of Roding pointed out, the Select Committees are very influential, so this House functions surprisingly well both because of recent reforms and, indeed, in spite of them. Yet any new reform must look at function as well as composition and everybody has their view to the future; sadly, so have I. We must move towards an elected second Chamber but, as we have seen in the past, rushed reforms do not always work well. We cannot bury our heads in the sand and hope that reforms will be sidelined or somehow go away. They are promoted by all three political parties.
A possible route would be to have elections based on Euro-constituencies for one Parliament. This would amount to 78 seats. If we were, over time, able to cut our number to around 400, that would amount to around 20 per cent. It would ensure that the grandfathering proposals put forward by my noble friend would work and we would need to consider how to move on from that change. The one advantage would be that if the consensus was that it was working, we could extend it. If it was not working, as might easily be the case, we could return to a fully appointed second Chamber. We have to find a way of getting all three major parties and their Front Benches off the hook of a fully elected Chamber. It will not go away. We have to help them.
We must improve what we do in this House. I am afraid we did not always hold the previous Government to account in the previous Parliament as we should have. We are too nice sometimes—too gentlemanly and perhaps too afraid of reform. We allowed a Minister to come here after having twice resigned his post in another place. We failed to hold the Government to account on the vast increase in national debt, the rise of unemployment, increased taxes and, most importantly, the breaking of our covenant to the Armed Forces.
I make one further plea. Reform of this House is too important just to be left to the political parties—even one as well led as my own. I suppose I must declare an interest as the stepfather-in-law of the Prime Minister—or, to put it more easily, I am married to his mother-in-law. I am very grateful to the Leader of the House for initiating this debate so early in the process of reform. I know he will take a close interest in everything that has been said this evening, and inform his colleagues in another place.
Lord Neill of Bladen
My Lords, it is past 10 pm and I am the 60th person to speak. I will try to be brief and depart from what I was going to say. If anyone is interested in what I think on the general subject, they will find it in previous copies of Hansard and I will be happy to supply references.
I was very struck by the debate that took place in the first half-hour of our proceedings, when people began to ask questions about the nature and size of the committee that was looking at this proposal, and its plan to bring forward a draft Bill in December. I listened to the voices raised by your Lordships, the overall tendency of which—although not unanimous—was to be, I suggest, very much opposed to the thinking of the Deputy Prime Minister and the notion that we would proceed to a House that is elected or partly elected. The realpolitik as we face it is that the chairman of this small committee is, I understand, the Deputy Prime Minister. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, and the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, are members. There is no Cross-Bench member. I pause for a moment on that. Why not? The reason I heard some time after 3 pm was that they did not want Cross-Benchers or Back-Benchers on the committee because they want a political consensus. I have attributed this—I hope not unfairly—to the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. He can contradict me if I am wrong. In my respectful submission, that is the wrong approach. What is wanted is something that will unite everybody.
The first thing to do is to address the topics that have been raised here. What is the purpose of having a second House? What sort of people do we want to form its membership if we are going to achieve the best result? You want to start with that before you take out the drafting pen or call in a parliamentary draftsman and say, “Can we have a draft?”.
I respectfully suggest to the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that the conclusion of what we have heard today is that there is no will to look at a draft Bill in December. That document is not wanted. Many Members of this House think that the committee has been wrongly set up with no Cross-Benchers, which means that a quarter of the House is not represented, and no Back-Benchers from the other place.
We should apply common sense to the present position. We are not dealing with the statutory position. As I understand it, the committee is set up by agreement between the leaders. There is nothing to stop them for the time being dropping the proposal that they will come up with a draft Bill in December. It is not impossible for them to alter the nature of the committee to include Cross-Benchers from this House and Back-Benchers from another place. Serious consideration should be given to both these ideas before we have a long period of six or seven months while the committee toils away producing that which is not wanted and making proposals which are not acceptable. It would be much better for it to produce a report or a White Paper—call it what you will—which faces up to the various points on which we know there is dissension and disagreement, produce a report by December which we can assess and reorganise the committee’s membership. Those are my suggestions to the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde.
Lord Elton
My Lords, I hope that the House will forgive me if I go back briefly to first principles and stand back from the question we are looking at to consider the whole population of the United Kingdom. The first question we then need to ask ourselves is, “What is Parliament for?”, not “What is this House for?”. The short answer is: to enable the British people to choose a Government, to finance them and, essentially, to see that they remain their public’s servant, not their master. The very cornerstone of keeping a Government under democratic control is protecting the individual liberty of the citizens of this country. That is what Parliament is for.
We live in a democracy. Has the democratically elected House of Parliament sufficient power to ensure that Governments remain ultimately under its control? You might think so. It has the power to refuse to supply them with money. That is a nuclear deterrent and is rightly for the Commons alone, but the erosion of liberty is little by little. More appropriate to protect liberty is its power to refuse to give a Government the laws they want or, more commonly, to insist on substantial changes before it will agree to them. With such massive powers available to it, the Commons surely ought to be counted on to protect those liberties—but, my Lords, it cannot be. In 2005, it utterly failed to do so. If the House of Lords had not then acted in their defence, everyone in the United Kingdom would now be liable to summary arrest and detention without either trial or appeal. This and all future Governments would have been able to issue a derogated control order against any individual they decided to label a terrorist threat. With this order they would have been able to detain our citizens without trial, not just for a week or month but for 90 days. Such a weapon belongs in the armoury of a fascist state, not Whitehall, yet the democratically elected House of Commons let it through. It made clear what it thought of it; Mr Blair's majority was cut from 161 to a handful of votes—I think it was 14. I remind your Lordships that this unelected House stopped that happening. We stopped it by constantly refusing inadequate changes to this monstrous proposal. We did so in a sitting that lasted unbroken from 11 am on 10 March 2005 till 7.31 pm on 11 March. We rose only when we had secured just enough judicial involvement to prevent this thing being used unfairly, unnecessarily, or for undemocratic purposes.
Why did the two Houses behave so differently when faced with this same, very simple issue? I have never sat in the Commons and I intend no disrespect, but what I am about to say seems to have been borne out by inference from a lot that I have heard from Members who were there previously. The Commons voting figures seem not just to reveal the strength of some Members’ feelings but to draw our attention to the influence, even the power, of the party Whips on what for many MPs was a matter of conscience. Consider that MPs are elected but cannot be elected without their party's support. They therefore arrive, as the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, said, indebted to their party. If they belong to the majority party, they find up to 150 of their fellow Members sitting with them as members of the Government in the same Chamber. Therefore they do not, without effort, think of the Government and party as separate bodies. They also receive substantial salaries. To lose their seat is to lose their livelihood, and party Whips can arrange the deselection of a Member as well as his selection. That means not just that he will not win the next election but that he will not be able even to fight it.
Therefore, in the House of Commons as now constituted, three elements together necessarily diminish its power to keep the Government under the control of the electorate. Its Members are in an elected Chamber, they are paid a substantial salary, and they can become and remain Members only with the consent of their party apparatus. Even if they were all saints, these arrangements must have some effect on how they vote. Their effect is greatest when the number of Members is greatest—in the party of government. I regret to tell my noble friend Lord Caithness—or I would if he were here—that he is entirely wrong in his belief that election to this House would give it greater power.
How strange, how sad and how sinister that our colleagues down the Corridor are now clamouring to introduce precisely these three elements into the Lords—the only Chamber still strong enough to stand up to Governments who have prevented Members of the House of Commons from doing so. Your Lordships should also note that an appointed House does not automatically become the poodle of the appointing body. By March 2005, 45 per cent of the Members of this House had been sent here at the request of the very Prime Minister whose proposal they threw out; 147 among that new entry had taken his party’s Whip. The smallest margin of votes by which his proposals were rejected was 48. The largest margin—to the great credit of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, who is now our Lord Speaker—was on her Motion, which was carried by 150 votes. That is no poodle, but a guard dog with teeth. I ask my noble friends on the Front Bench to think about the need for this country to keep Governments under control, even when they are staffed by such benign and intelligent people as my noble friends. I listened to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, with some reservation on that point.
Every Government, when they have been in power for quite a short time, want more power because Parliament is such a damn nuisance. If you are trying to run the country you do not want a lot of other people telling you how to do it better. You want to shut Parliament up. The pressure is from not only the Government and their colleagues, but the huge Civil Service machinery behind them, which wants to go this way, finds that a few people are squeaking in this House, and suddenly has to go that way. This is a matter of the greatest importance and I hope that in the years to come your Lordships will not let it go.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe
My Lords, I thank noble Lords on the Front Bench for providing us with the opportunity for this debate. I thank them also for the firm leadership which they are giving the House. They have recognised that the electorate this year have spoken with quite a different voice from what we have normally heard, and have been endeavouring to respond as best they could to the will of the people and to try to win back support and trust in the ways that they are exploring these issues.
When reflecting on the debate, I share the view of the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, who is no longer in his place—there has been an element of disconnect from what is happening out there in political terms and in real life. It is important that we endeavour, as we work through this issue, to ensure that we are connected. It is worth reminding ourselves that all three parties went to the electorate with manifestos seeking either an elected or a partially elected Chamber. For the first time, the issue came up regularly before 8 million to 10 million people in the leaders’ debates, which we had never had before. I suspect that for the first time people knew more about the House of Lords and the attempt to reform it.
I ask myself what right I have as an appointed Member of this Chamber to override and ignore those facts. If we are about rebuilding trust, we have to look for the areas in which we can do it. We should listen to what people have said. It does not do us a great deal of justice or help us if we start ignoring manifesto promises. I say that as much to my own side as to colleagues on the other side.
In my opinion—I am sure that this view is not commonly held—where the Government may have gone wrong is that they lost their radical credentials marginally by not immediately moving to hold a referendum on the coalition’s programme for action. Had they done that, we would not have been having this debate today; without such a referendum, many of the debates that they will run into will also be problematic for them. I have raised this issue with my party, arguing that, if we go into a coalition, we should seek the electorate’s support in a referendum. Indeed, I shall be asking the prospective leaders of my party where they stand on this issue. We have to tackle some of the fundamental changes that have taken place in society. One of them relates to involving the wider public through referenda to a degree.
I come back to the question that the Leader raised at the beginning of the debate. The Government have an opportunity to redeem themselves. They could commit themselves to taking the Bill, after we have finished with it, back to the public, just as they said in their document that they want a referendum on other changes. I ask the noble Lord to reflect on that, as I believe that that would be the right thing to do and I suspect that he would get the right answer if he did it.
My next point is on an entirely different issue. Will the noble Lord say whether the Government will consider breaking the linkage between the honours system and appointment to this Chamber? That is a fundamental issue, which I do not think has been raised today, and it needs to be looked at. I shall come back to that point later.
I come to the general approach. If the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, had been bolder at the beginning and had stated where the Government stand on the use of the Parliament Act, we might have had a rather different debate today. I understand that we are starting gently down the route, but I believe that we need to focus minds. I believe that the Government would have taken away a lot more useful information from this debate if we had known whether they intend to use the Parliament Act. I ask the noble Lord to clarify the Government’s position on that.
Where do I stand on this issue? I broadly fall in line with my noble friend Lord Butler. We have to deal with reality and I suspect that we will not be far off the mark of what he said might happen. I support an 80:20 per cent hybrid House. We can make that work if we want it to. I would go for 500 Members initially, possibly changing that further down the line, with the constituencies the same as for the European elections, with open lists and preferably with primaries—the Conservative Party was exploring that idea, which I hope has not been forgotten. We need new systems for selecting people to be elected to this Chamber. I hope that the views expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, will be taken into account by my friends on the other side, as what he said was very useful. There are ways in which we can identify people of the right calibre from around the country who are prepared to stand and who could come here and give the kind of performance whose possible loss concerns so many people.
I come now to the unanswered question of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, who asked what difference and improvement elections would make. First, we would have an element of accountability. I would go for eight-year terms, subject to re-election for a further eight years, making 16 in total. Here I differ from what was suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Butler: I would go for re-election after eight years. What would also be different—this has hardly been mentioned, which is fascinating—is that tonight we have 12 women out of about 64 speakers in the Chamber. The problems that we have with the underrepresentation of women in Parliament have not been mentioned. We should have quotas and we should go for substantial increases in the number of women who would be eligible for election to the House of Lords. Similarly with ethnic minorities, we should look for substantial changes so that we end up with a different-looking Parliament entirely.
The issue of the absence of geographical spread has already been mentioned, so I will not pursue it, but perhaps we should look for a few Roman Catholics from Northern Ireland. Would they not make this Chamber better than it is at the moment? The noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, clearly demonstrated how the quality of the House has changed over recent years. There is a case for it to continue to change—and for the better—in order to become more accountable and more democratic.
My noble friend Lord Rooker raised the issue of the relationship with the Commons. This is not beyond solution. I suggest to noble Lords on the Front Bench opposite that they dust down the work that was done by the 2003 Joint Committee and look at the ideas on the codification of our conventions. They should move quickly on that to kill all the counterarguments that have come from many quarters. Our work and procedures would stay broadly in line with what we do at the moment, although my preference would be to look at the way in which, at the other end, they deal so inadequately with European legislation. That is something that could come to the House of Lords.
There are answers to many issues that have been raised today about quality; and there is an answer to the potential conflict between us and the Commons. Finally, I refer to the committee that will be established under the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and suggest, not without jocularity, that perhaps he should consider whether we could offer a conversion from life peerages to hereditary peerages—maybe for one or two generations and then they would disappear. In that way, either we would give substance to, increase and improve the aristocracy, or possibly provide the final nail in the coffin that will undermine it.
Lord Tyler
My Lords, at this hour of the evening the time for opinions—particularly mine—has passed, so I will stick to simple facts. The first concerns manifesto mandates. Whatever the status of previous manifesto commitments from a succession of Governments, this one is different. All three major parties committed themselves to reform, and that has been reinforced since by the coalition agreement. I have heard the sanctity of the popular mandate quoted so often in your Lordships' House. There is no escaping this one, as the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, said. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, that it would be preferable if the Government had also spelt out what exactly would be the role of the revised Chamber. That is not a point that can be put to one side, and they should return to it as the proposals develop.
The second fact concerns the primacy of the Commons, which has been referred to on all sides of your Lordships' House today. I remind noble Lords that on 7 March 2007, MPs voted by 375 to 196 against a fully appointed House; by 305 to 267 for an 80 per cent elected House: and by 337 to 224 for a 100 per cent elected House. Incidentally, my honourable and noble friends on Liberal Democrat Benches in both Houses voted for reform by large majorities. It has been suggested this evening that somehow that is out of date as there is a new Parliament. I challenge any Member of your Lordships’ House to tell me that any MP elected on 6 May refused to endorse the manifesto commitment of his or her party on this point. How can we respect the primacy of the Commons if we do so only when it suits our personal prejudices, which would seem to be the position of some Members? I trust that new arrivals here from the other place will be especially protective of their party manifesto commitments and the primacy of the Commons.
Lord Tyler
Unless my noble friend is going to give me some injury time for his intervention—and I do not believe he can guarantee that—I am not going to give way.
I now turn to facts about the timetable and transition. I am delighted that my noble friends on the Front Bench have already announced that there will be a draft Bill by the end of the calendar year. Continuously throughout these discussions, noble Lords have rightly demanded that we get some proposals for discussion in your Lordships’ House. That will now happen. However, better than that, pre-legislative scrutiny by a Joint Select Committee will ensure not only that there will be a full parliamentary inquiry but also that there will be evidence from outside the Westminster Parliament. We keep being told that the public have this or that view, and in polls they have continuously said that they want reform of the Lords. This will be a full opportunity for consistent public support to be given meaningful input.
On transition, again, the Government have announced that there will be progress on important developments. I was delighted to hear the Leader of the House say today that there will be a committee of your Lordships’ House—that is appropriate—to examine a dignified and legitimate retirement route. I wish the committee well. I also believe that we now have to look very seriously at the four issues raised by my noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood. Even if we make good progress on the big Bill, these issues are immediate, particularly with regard to the numbers coming into the House and the possibility that we will be completely swamped by a huge number and that this place will become unmanageable.
I turn also to the way in which your Lordships’ House operates internally, which is just as important in terms of reform. The work done under the auspices of the noble Lords, Lord Butler and Lord Filkin, and the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, stimulated by the Lord Speaker with the Strengthening Parliament process, is extremely important—we have to raise our game. This is a parallel exercise to one that is already taking place under the auspices of the new Government in fully implementing the work of the Wright committee in the other place, and not before time. Again, I was pleased that the Leader of our House expressed a positive response to that work—in contrast to the half-hearted reaction from the previous Administration.
Finally, it is absolutely critical that we make it clear to Members of both Houses that improving the way in which we operate and improving the influence that we have is not part of a zero-sum game. I quote the late Robin Cook on this point. Both Houses can improve their game together in holding the Executive to account for both their executive actions and their legislation. It is definitely not a question of one House doing better at the expense of the other. That, too, is explicit in the coalition agreement and it is very welcome.
I appeal to Members of your Lordships’ House to read again the White Paper produced under the auspices of Mr Jack Straw, with representatives of all three major parties, the Bishops and the Cross Benches. A lot of the issues that have been raised tonight were addressed in that White Paper, and even more so, if I may say so with due modesty, in the Bill produced in 2005 in the other place by me, together with Robin Cook, Kenneth Clarke, Tony Wright and George Young, and supported by many Members of your Lordships’ House, as well as many Members of the other place, including five senior members of the present Government.
The facts are that issues such as the excessive numbers during the transition period, the competitive mandates possible between the two Houses and the risk of challenge and deadlock are addressed in the report produced by the Constitution Unit with the five of us for that Bill and, to a large extent, followed through in the 2008 White Paper. We called our report, outlining that Bill, Breaking the Deadlock. At long last, after 99 years, we have a Government who seem to be determined to break that deadlock and we should face the political fact that those with a personal interest in procrastination must not be allowed to derail this process.
Today I have heard so many Members say that they are in favour of reform as long as it does not reform the rationale for their own presence in this Chamber. Frankly, I do not think that is enough to satisfy the public. It was claimed earlier that this House represents the beating heart of democracy in Britain. That level of self-satisfied complacency, to which the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, referred, does not enhance trust in our House or respect for parliamentary democracy.
Lord Kakkar
My Lords, I address your Lordships as one of the most recently appointed Members to your Lordships’ House. Therefore, I come to this issue for the very first time. I thank the Leader of the House for having provided this opportunity because reform of the House of Lords is clearly no trivial matter. It is a serious issue which I think will resonate with the public although, clearly, at the moment it does not. We know that there are greater concerns for the citizens of our country. When this issue is discussed in more detail early next year, the nation will be facing considerable hardship and the people of this country will want to understand that we are discussing it for the right reasons.
What is the purpose of considering reform of your Lordships' House? Is it because this House is ineffective? Is it because this House has failed to serve the people of our country for many generations? Is it because this House does not provide value for money? The purpose needs to be clear. We need to understand the current function of your Lordships’ House. I have always understood it to be a revising and scrutinising Chamber. My own impression and experience, admittedly gathered over a short time while sitting among your Lordships, is that this House delivers that function exceedingly well. Therefore, any process of reform needs to ensure that we make the current purpose of your Lordships’ House more effective. In that regard, the Bill proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood, is very powerful and should enjoy broad support. It deals with some of the issues which potentially make the working of your Lordships’ House less than effective.
If the purpose of reform is to change the very nature of your Lordships’ House, a considerable constitutional change is envisaged. During the debate we have heard of the potential to create a House which could challenge the other place more effectively. That has not been the purpose of your Lordships’ House to date. What might an elected Chamber look like? How might it function? Those are very important questions. Will it be subservient to the party machine in another place? Will it be a House where those who are successful in an election, through a method of proportional representation, owe allegiance to the other place and to those who control the other place? What would be the consequences of that?
One of our important functions is to ensure that the life of a Parliament does not extend beyond five years. If this House were to be controlled by another place, how would that safeguard be maintained? That is hugely important and a vital constitutional question that must be dealt with in any proposal for reform of your Lordships’ House. On the other hand, if this House were to be elected and were to become truly independent of another place and the party machines, there would be potential for conflict.
Of course, there has been much discussion about the conventions which dictate the relationship between the two Houses in this great Parliament. Would those conventions stand? My understanding is that when the Joint Committee on Conventions last looked at this some years ago, it concluded that they would not. The conventions stand because one House is elected and the other, which was hereditary, is now an appointed Chamber. Some constitutional settlement needs to be achieved to ensure that there is a clear understanding about the relationship between those two Houses, if there is to be an elected House.
It is wrong for a Motion to come in isolation for debate in this House and in another place that does not deal with those important issues. This is major constitutional reform, and the people of this country will expect us to consider all the implications and provide solutions to ensure that there is not gridlock in our legislative system, that Parliament continues to work well and, ultimately, that they enjoy the very best laws. Those laws come from appropriate, thorough scrutiny and discussion with Government. The greatest strength of this House has been to help the Government of the day achieve the very best laws for all the people of our country.
Perception is another important issue. There should not be a misapprehension in future about the purpose of reform. It should never be suggested that reform was proposed as a matter of political expediency because there was a need to satisfy tensions within a coalition Government. This is important constitutional reform, and must be done for the right reasons. Because it is such important reform, the people of this country deserve the right to consider it by way of a post-legislative referendum, so that they know exactly what they are voting about and have explained to them all the implications and how we and those in another place propose to deal with them.
Process is also important. It is regrettable that Cross-Benchers have been excluded from the beginning of this process. I know that, down the line, there will be an opportunity for scrutiny of legislation. That is welcome, but it is important that perception is correct from the very beginning. I have felt privileged to listen to all the extremely high-quality contributions this evening.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I shall come in as Pollyanna, even if I leave as Cassandra. I support an elected House of Lords; I am with the noble Lord, Lord Richard, on that. I am happy with the composition and purpose of the committee; I am with my Front Bench on that. We have to have a focused committee if we are to get through the difficult business of producing a Bill. The structure that my noble friends have proposed is exactly right. I am happy that it should be followed by a pre-legislative stage, as long as it is given enough time. I am happy with what my noble friend Lord Strathclyde said about the elected House having the same powers and duties as the current House.
I do not see that there is necessarily a vast difference between those who want an elected House and those who support the Bill of my noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood. At its closest, the only difference is that my noble friend’s Bill involves Peers being chosen from a secret list, whereas election involves them being chosen from an open list. The two are very close together, especially as my noble friend Lord Strathclyde says that the House is to have the same powers and duties, and therefore that we are presumably to try to keep close to the current model of this House—to have, as far as possible, an evolution rather than a revolution.
Perhaps we shall end up with a House which one can reasonably hope will behave in much the same way as does this one, or at least that it will change slowly and predictably. If we go for some of the more revolutionary styles of an elected House and move further from where we are now, we will get something that is much less predictable. It does not take long before we are in the territory described by my noble friend Lord Norton, where we have much more conflict with the other place, much less quality in this place and much less value for the public in the House as a whole
As I said, I am fundamentally optimistic, but I think that my noble friends are making a grave mistake in making the committee so closed to us. So many of the matters which the committee will have to ponder are entirely common between an elected House and proposals under the Steel Bill. What size should this House be? Should it incorporate or tend to major on expertise? What should be the political balance of the House? What should be the social balance of the House between gender and ethnic minorities? What should be the geographical balance of the House? How should we attempt to incorporate small parties? What should the thresholds be? What is the size and role of the Cross Benches? Are we to be a part-time House or a full-time House? What is the length of our term to be and is it renewable? What is the cost of this House to be? What are salaries to be? What support is to be provided to Members? Are we to have members of the Government in this House or are they merely to be visitors? How will we handle the transition? Should there be a continued link with the honours system?
Almost all the questions that this committee has to decide are matters on which this House has great expertise and interest and can apply itself regardless of whether we will end up with an elected or an appointed House. They all have to be sorted out whichever direction we are going in. There is no reason why we should not do that with good spirit and co-operation. The Government might even find—and I think they ought to know us well enough to trust us on this sort of thing—that we would give them a decent hearing on which electoral system should be used if we go for an elected House. What we have to do is be involved.
If we are left at the point where we do not really have any say until we get to the pre-legislative stage, we will be, in effect, supplicants to a committee half of which is made up of another place. I envisage us ending up in a train wreck. It is quite clear from the speeches today that the majority of this House is extremely cautious about the idea of election. If we think that all their ideas and contributions have been shut out of the process of getting to the Bill, if we are left with all the decisions seemingly taken, how do the Government expect that they will get their ordinary legislation through, let alone the Bill that will follow this? What are the consequences for the coalition if this policy falls apart because of the mishandling of this House?
It seems to me that there is a great deal to be said not for changing the composition of the committee, but for giving this House a great deal of time with that committee. I note that the Commons are coming back in September and we are not. I note that we have not been told when we are coming back in October, and not many of us really spend much time attending party conferences. There is plenty of opportunity for us to be given some quality time with this committee to get to the point where we feel that we have made our arguments, have helped to resolve some of the difficult questions in the Bill and that we have, at least in part, ownership of it.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, this has been a long, substantive and highly enjoyable debate. I say to my noble friend Lord Richard that if perhaps we have heard little new, it has at least served notice on the Government of the scale of the challenge that lies before them. I am glad that they are taking on the challenge and that they do it on the basis of manifesto commitments by all three main parties.
The Opposition are committed to democratic reform, and we joined the committee on that basis. I am only sorry that our Cross-Bench colleagues will not also be represented. We will not be giving the Government a blank cheque. We will judge the committee’s conclusions on their merits. I welcome the commitment by the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, to listen to this House. I am sure that he will reflect on the points raised by his noble friend Lord Lucas and, no doubt, if the usual channels decide that we could take up some part of September discussing this matter in greater detail, we on this side of the House would be only too eager to co-operate and allow that to happen.
When the noble Lord, Lord McNally, winds up, will he give a clear assurance that the Joint Select Committee will be given sufficient time to undertake pre-legislative scrutiny? Nothing is more certain than that, unless this is done with thoroughness, it will come unstuck the moment a substantive Bill comes into Parliament. Surely, that is the lesson of the many failed attempts in the past 100 years, one of which was so graphically described by my noble and learned friend Lord Morris of Aberavon.
At the last election, my party committed itself not just to a fully elected House of Lords but also said that it would be subject to a referendum of the British people. I have to say that I find it quite extraordinary that the Conservative-Liberal Government have not promised a similar referendum. Yet it is prepared to offer a referendum on the AV voting system. Surely, in constitutional terms, the emergence of an elected Second Chamber is of much greater lasting consequence. My noble friend Lord Grenfell is surely right.
The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, says “Lisbon”. We promised a referendum on Europe on the basis of a new constitution, but Lisbon was not a new constitution.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, this is from the party which did not offer a referendum on Maastricht. In UK terms, an elected Second Chamber is of much more constitutional importance than what happened in Lisbon. I also hope that the noble Lord, Lord McNally, will explain clearly how he sees the place of an elected Second Chamber in our democratic process. That point was powerfully put early on in our debate by my noble friend Lord Rooker. Lords reform cannot be considered in isolation.
There are those who assume that an elected House will simply carry on in the same way as we do now. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, said as much. But we know that that cannot be so. An elected Chamber will by its very nature behave differently. It will be dominated by full-time politicians. Inevitably, there will be more challenging of both the Government and the other place. I have no problem with that. Like the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, I want a more powerful Second Chamber. But the Government need to be open about this. They should spell out the consequences of what will be proposed. On that I am very sympathetic to the noble Lord, Lord Waddington.
What will be the relationship of an elected Second Chamber to the Commons? There is general agreement here of the need to maintain the primacy of the Commons. The 2008 White Paper maintains that primacy does not rest solely or mainly on the fact that the Commons is an elected Chamber while the House of Lords is not. I agree that the subordinate relationship of the Second Chamber is underpinned by the Parliament Acts, including supply, and the fact that it is the Commons on which a Government rely for confidence and from whom the Prime Minister and most of the Cabinet are drawn.
The White Paper states:
“A second chamber that is more assertive than the current House of Lords, operating against the background of the current arrangements for its powers, would not threaten primacy”.
I agree. But let us have no doubt that an elected Second Chamber will act to the limit of its powers. Currently, we do not do so because we operate a system of self restraint through the conventions. My noble friend Lord Rooker spelt it out. Conventions are just that. They have no statutory basis. They change over time. What self restraint would be exercised by a largely or wholly elected House? It could be very little, if any. Why on earth should it?
In previous discussions it has been argued that a clause could be inserted in a Lords reform Bill, which simply states that nothing in such a Bill affects the status of the conventions and it just leaves it at that. But how can you leave it at that when it is clear that the current conventions are voluntary and can change over time? That was the point made by the committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Cunningham. I agree with the conclusion of the committee, not because I want to obstruct change—I favour change—but I do not think that we can avoid tackling the convention question. My noble friend Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe suggested how we should do it.
To those Members who are concerned about the constitutional implications of, for instance, the option of the statutory coding of the conventions, I do not think that that is inconsistent with proposals from a Government for legislation that seeks to be very specific about Parliament in areas such as fixed-term Parliaments, the rules for dissolution and the use of super-majorities. The noble Lord, Lord Waddington, thought that a written constitution was inevitable, and I must say that I am becoming more sympathetic to that view. So I say to the noble Lord, Lord McNally, that this is the most important issue that has been raised tonight. I greatly respect him and we share his view on Lords reform, but we will have to deal with the issue of powers. We cannot sweep it under the carpet.
I would also remind him of the question put to him by my noble friend Lord Brooke that in the event of this House’s opposition to reform, will the Government be prepared to use the Parliament Acts? I am hopeful, indeed optimistic, about reform, but I am convinced that we need a transition. First, we need it because of the practicalities of building up a new second Chamber, particularly if we elect that Chamber by thirds, which I favour. Secondly, we need to ensure continuity between the work of this House and the new one.
The 2008 White Paper set out a number of options for transition. We now have a further option, that of grandfathering, as described in the coalition agreement—except that no definition has been given. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, seemed to suggest earlier that it is anything that the noble Lord or his friend Mr Clegg wants it to mean. Perhaps I can help the Government on this. I should like to ask the noble Lord, Lord McNally, to confirm that Article 13 of the Health Professions Order 2001 contains the most recent statutory definition of grandfathering. My understanding—and I had ministerial responsibility for this well known and perfectly formed order—is that if you have been a member of an unregulated health profession that was to become regulated, experienced practitioners did not have to sit a professional examination if they had previously been practising in a safe and effective way. That describes the position of the Members of your Lordships’ House. I sympathise with the view of my noble friend Lord Richard on this point.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, that I believe in reform. I say also to my noble friend Lord Filkin that I want to make the current House as effective as possible, and I welcome the proposals of the Leader of the House for a group to look at working practices. Indeed, I ask him to reflect on the words of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, who suggested a number of points that could be encompassed within that review which, as he said, would make the House feel more involved in the important matters we are debating tonight.
On the question of retirement from this House, I noted what the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, had to say about the establishment of a Leaders’ group, and I welcome that. However, I put the point to him and to his noble friend that if they are so concerned about the number of Members in this House, why on earth did the Conservatives veto in the wash-up sensible provisions in the Constitutional Renewal Bill that dealt with this point? If the noble Lord is so concerned about the numbers coming to this House, why are we faced with the intention of the coalition to appoint dozens more new Peers? Why is that being done given that the coalition already heavily outnumbers the Opposition? We have long had an understanding that there should be rough parity between the Government and the main Opposition parties.
The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, has long and honourably argued for a strong, independent House of Lords, but unless this House is in a position to ensure that the Government are asked to think again, what is its purpose? Earlier the noble Lord, Lord Denham, said that if you win the argument, you usually win the vote. The noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, argued that the House has proved itself time and time again by its effectiveness in the number of changes that have been made to legislation as a result of what this House has done. This is not going to happen if the coalition insists on winning every vote.
We have heard today a great deal of the virtues of this House. The noble Viscount, Lord Astor, and the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, thought the House was being a little self-congratulatory. However, we, too, should acknowledge its virtues—the quality of debate, the scrutiny of legislation, the holding to account of the Executive. Next week the House will have an early test of this under the new coalition agreement with the Report stage of the Academies Bill. It is defective, ill-digested, as the noble Lord, Lord Walton, might say, and is being rushed through your Lordships’ House at an unseemly pace, which has attracted attention from around the House. I look forward to the House asserting its independence when it comes to voting next week.
It was said of Abbé Sieyés, the drafter of constitutions for revolutionary France, that on the second Chamber question he instructed:
“If a second Chamber dissents from the first Chamber, it is mischievous; if it agrees, it is superfluous”.
I know—elected or not—what kind of second Chamber I would like to have.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)
My Lords, I was interested to hear the quotation of Abbé Sieyés. The only one I know is that he was asked at the end what he did during the French Revolution and he said, “I survived”. That is a good lesson for everyone in politics.
I was looking at the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and I thought that he looked fit and happy and 10 years younger, and then I suddenly realised why. For many a day in the previous Parliament, when we sat over there on the Liberal Democrat Benches, we used to initiate debates on reforms of this Chamber, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, used to sit here, tense and flipping through his notes, waiting to reply. It is a lot more difficult on this side than it is on the other and I wish him good health.
I immediately take up the noble Lord’s point on grandfathering rights. If this excellent legislation will have his imprimatur on it, I shall certainly bring it to the attention of the Deputy Prime Minister. On the matter of the voting record, as he knows well, the record for this Government so far is that we have lost every vote in this House.
This is going to be difficult. I know that if I am too firm, clear and decisive then noble Lords will be up on their feet and saying that I am bouncing the House, not consulting it, and they will ask where all this came from. If I say we are listening and will consult, noble Lords will say that it is all wishy-washy. I can assure the House that the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, I and indeed the Deputy Prime Minister are in listening mode. We are simply trying, with the best of intentions, to set out a road map for this House and for Parliament so that they can deal with an issue that some would say has bedevilled it for 100 years. Certainly those who have been around for the past 10 years have seen it being dealt with without much progress.
In 1909 the then Prime Minister, Mr Asquith, received the following assessment of prospects of reform of the House of Lords from his Parliamentary Private Secretary, Edwin Montagu. He wrote:
“The history of all former attempts at coming to close quarters with the House of Lords Question shows a record of disorder, dissipation of energy, of words and solemn exhortation, of individual rhetoric … without any definite scheme of action”.
In some ways, try as they did, that could be the description of the previous Government between the reforms of 1999 and the cascade of deathbed repentances which ended up in the CRAG Bill. We are desperately trying, perhaps in time for the 100th anniversary of the first passing of the Reform Act, to make some progress.
I want to make a correction. Noble Lords will know that the 1911 Act was passed on 10 August, and I said in an earlier debate that we all know why they managed to pass it then—their Lordships wanted to go off and slaughter grouse. Not at all, it turns out. The noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, immediately brought me his grandfather’s memoirs. His grandfather was the leader of the last-ditchers, and he explains in graphic terms that the reason why they failed to derail the 1911 Bill was that the bishops ratted. When the last-ditchers needed their votes, they were inexplicably absent. Those noble Lords who are relying on the bishops this time around, remember that precedent.
Quite seriously, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. I know how much work he and Jack Straw put into attempts to make progress on this. That is one of the reasons why the Clegg committee is able to get off to a flying start; as the members will know, we are using quite a lot of that work. Some of the officials and experts have been on this topic for 10 years so they are not new to the issue, and the work that has been done, I should say to the noble Lord, Lord Richard, includes some drafting of parts of a Bill that was commissioned by Jack Straw. As I have said before, some of the building blocks are there.
Yesterday, when we were talking about the expenses regime, the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, pointed out that this House has not been slow in bringing reforms forward. She said:
“In the space of less than a year we now have a stringent code of conduct, an active sub-committee on privileges and standards and greater financial transparency”.—[Official Report, 28/6/10; col. 1515.]
That is backed up by an officer of the House who is going to police those reforms. So we have carried reforms forward and we continue to do so.
I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham. As I have said before, I sometimes think that we missed an enormous chance by not taking up the Wakeham recommendations; we would have been almost halfway through his transition period by now. That is a lesson sometimes in politics. I have said to the Deputy Prime Minister that he could well with profit read the Wakeham report as part of his reading on this subject.
I pay tribute to the noble Lords, Lord Butler and Lord Filkin, and the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, for their initiative on the other matter of trying to parallel the Wright committee’s report. There are things that we could and should be doing as we approach the issue of major reform.
Let me take head-on the structure of the committee. Lots of people have asked, “Why are the Cross-Benchers not on it?”. I put it quite bluntly to the Cross-Benchers: they can be one of two things. They can be the fourth political party in this House or they can be what they all take pride in—individuals who come as independents to put an independent view to this House. Their strength is their individuality, which makes them separate from the political parties but does not make it easy for them then to be on a committee made up of three political parties which, in their manifestos, have just taken a case to the country.
Having had the experience of the past 10 years—this is something that always happens with these debates in the House—I know that there are colleagues who couch their speeches in notes of surprise as though some of the issues that have been raised have never been put to them before; this is all a matter of shock, goodness gracious, we must start from first principles and it will take at least five years. But if you start in the first few weeks of the Parliament, you are then accused of rushing them. Then, if you leave it, as the previous Government did, to the last few weeks of the Parliament, you are told, “This can’t be done in the last few weeks of a Parliament”. I know Catch-22 when I see it.
We are trying to produce what we have not had in the last century—a Bill which we can focus on. All the issues can be considered. It was said that Cross-Benchers were not being consulted. I assure your Lordships that not only will the Hansard of this debate be put before the Deputy Prime Minister, the Prime Minister and the other members of the Clegg committee, but so will a paper analysing the major themes that have come out of it. This is part of a consultation that we want. It is not matter of just going through the motions; it is a matter, at this stage, of having a committee of the willing to try to draw up a Bill to make progress. I have in my notes a line—it is all mine—that says that if the Member for Old Sarum had been on the committee for the 1832 Reform Bill, he might still be in the House of Commons. I was going to leave that out of my speech so as not to be provocative, because my noble friend Lord Strathclyde said, “Don’t provoke them. Be conciliatory”. I really resent the attack of the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, on my noble friend, whom he implied was trying to lure the House in directions that it would not otherwise wish to go, which is again far from the truth.
We are trying to set out the Government’s strategy, listen to the views of the House and then try to resolve the differences such as we can. However, if I believe in a directly elected House and my noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon believes in a wholly nominated House, I have with all respect to ask him what alchemy will provide a solution. The late Liberal MP David Penhaligon used to say, “If you believe in something, write it on a piece of paper, stick it through a letterbox and persuade people to vote for it”. That is how democracy works—I assure my noble and learned friend that I am not telling him how to suck eggs. I cannot see a way of resolving a dilemma such as this other than by the political parties taking their case to the country and then bringing it back to Parliament. That is the process that we are undertaking at the moment. We have taken our case to the country; we are bringing it back to Parliament for a full debate, for full scrutiny, on the basis of a draft Bill. I cannot for the life of me see any other way forward.
The noble Lord, Lord Norton, asked why the Parliament Acts exist. I have always understood that the Parliament Acts are there to underpin the supremacy of the Commons. It was asked what the new reformed House would do and how it would challenge Parliament. There are many bicameral regimes around the world that manage to work out the relationship between Houses and do not end up with gridlock. I say in response to the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, that I see this as an advisory and a revisory House. I was on the Cunningham committee. I remember the debates, and I remember why the refuseniks were so determined to write in to the Cunningham committee to say that its proposals should apply only to an unreformed House. They want to do exactly what they are doing now, which is to raise the spectre of some great constitutional battle between the two Houses.
I signed the Cunningham committee in the end, not, as the noble Lord, Lord Wright, implied, on the basis that at the point of reform there would be a great constitutional crisis; I signed it on the basis that it would apply to a new House, but that at the point of reform it would have to be looked at again. Noble Lords can read the Cunningham committee report, and that is what it says. That is absolute common sense. My belief, which was confirmed in many discussions in the Cunningham committee, was that the Cunningham committee conventions would still work and operate in a reformed House. If there was a transitional period, there is no doubt that it would give the opportunity for a proper look at where and what part of the Cunningham conventions would need to be looked at again. I do not see them as the great crisis point implied in the debate.
A number of noble Lords said that we should not be looking at this because there was a great economic crisis. As I said during the Queen’s Speech, the Churchill coalition brought in the Beveridge report and the Butler Act and won a war. I do not believe that Governments are one-trick ponies; they should be able to bring forward other reforms at the same time as dealing with the economy.
I have no doubt that if a pre-legislative scrutiny committee of both Houses was set up to look at a subject as important as this one, whatever I say from this Dispatch Box, those Members will not be bullied or railroaded. They will do a proper, thorough job. Every one of them will know that it will be one of the most important pieces of pre-legislative scrutiny that anyone has ever considered, and I do not believe that it would be a problem. I am sure that I have missed some other questions.
On the attitude towards the Steel reforms, I am a little worried, as the Minister responsible for freedom of information, that the noble Lord, Lord Steel, breached the Act by revealing our e-mails. I have always said that we should let the Steel reforms be part of the mix, and the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, has already indicated that one particular reform will be taken forward in a study group. The other elements will certainly be reported to the Clegg committee.
On the question put by the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, on working practices, I am assured that the usual channels are looking to make an announcement very, very shortly—and that means very, very, very shortly, within the next few days—about how to go forward with a full debate on that issue.
The noble Lord, Lord Jopling, asked what would happen if a party came from nowhere to amass an overall majority. There is ample precedent for that. Labour was the junior partner in the war coalition but won a landslide at the 1945 election. I like to tell the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that on a regular basis. Again, that shows you how the House deals with such things. That is where the Salisbury convention came from. One of the great things about our Parliament is its ability to adjust to new circumstances, and that is a good example of it. We all want now to go to our beds—
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
Forgive me, my Lords. The noble Lord answered the question from the noble Lord, Lord Norton, about future use of the Parliament Act, but my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and others asked whether that Act would be used in the case of a forthcoming Bill on House of Lords reform. I wonder whether the noble Lord could clarify that.
Lord McNally
That is why I was going to sit down before the noble Baroness asked her question. She has been in Government. If I said at this Dispatch Box now, “We are going to use the Parliament Act”, those on half the Benches would stand up, and quite rightly so. We are going to produce a Bill that we are going to ask you to look at in the most constructive form possible. Let me end—
Lord Desai
The noble Lord mentioned the Salisbury convention. That convention had to do with a party’s manifesto before the election. If there is a coalition, there is not one manifesto; there are two. How does the Salisbury convention apply if there is a coalition Government?
Lord McNally
I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, is already preparing a book on the whole subject. I remember the noble Lord, Lord Desai, when he was a troublemaker at the LSE. He has not changed.
Lord Rooker
With respect, he deserves an answer. The political parties all took legal advice before they drafted their three manifestos as to whether their words would cover them in the event of the Parliament Act being used. That was the case and it is why they are so similarly drafted. The noble Lord, Lord Desai, deserves an answer to his question tonight.
Lord McNally
I am not aware of that. My noble friend Lord Strathclyde said that the Labour Party must have had more money than sense if it was taking legal advice. Look; the fact is that the commitments made in our manifestos have been merged into the coalition agreement. If the Labour Party is saying that it is planning some kind of guerrilla warfare on that basis, while as far as I am concerned the Salisbury convention and the Cunningham conventions will still be operated in this House, we will have to wait and see.
The Earl of Onslow
What is slightly odd in this thing is that those on the two Front Benches and I, and the noble Lord, Lord Desai, agree. There is a sea of people from all over the place who do not agree, so those who are causing trouble will be led by the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, who is a Labour Peer, and by my noble friend Lord Cope, and my noble and learned friend Lord Howe, who are Conservative Peers. I am sure that I can think of one here as well. It is not a party political issue of where the Parliament Act arises. It seems to me totally wrong for this House to throw out a Bill like that, which had been agreed by the Commons. That is why I could never, ever agree to that myself.
Lord McNally
It slightly chills the soul to think that my sole supporters are the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, and the noble Lord, Lord Desai, but I will take any help I can on this. However, the noble Earl makes a valid point. This is something else that this House has to think about, and it is why we want to take it gently through this. If the other place, on the basis of a substantial majority, brings a Bill to this House, this House will have to think very hard about what it does next. I think that has been understood over a long period.
I will give your Lordships two quotes to finish, and shall then sit down. The historian Janet Morgan, writing over a quarter of a century ago, wrote:
“On summer evenings and winter afternoons, when they have nothing else to do, people discuss how to reform the House of Lords. Schemes are taken out of cupboards and drawers and dusted off. Speeches are composed, pamphlets written, letters sent to the newspapers. From time to time the whole country becomes excited. Occasionally legislation is introduced; it generally fails”.
That is a very pessimistic view, so I finish with this. As something of an historian manqué, I subscribe to History Today. The latest edition has an article on the 1832 Act. We might find its opening useful as we go to the next stage of Lords reform. It says:
“There is a curious but almost entirely consistent feature of the history of constitutional change in Britain, a feature which could be said to typify the twin national characteristics of boldness and caution. It is that significant political alterations … are generally resisted for decades, but once adopted are almost immediately absorbed into the general pattern of stable political continuity”.
I believe that would happen if we faced up to the fact and reformed this House.
House of Lords Reform
(14 years, 5 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
23:35 - Division on Lord Steel's Motion. - Ayes: 44 / Noes: 29 - Motion agreed.
Lord Steel of Aikwood
That this House calls on Her Majesty’s Government, notwithstanding their proposals for Lords reform whose legislative timetable is unclear, to table Motions before the Summer Recess enabling the House to approve or disapprove-
(a) a scheme to enable Members of the House to retire,
(b) the abolition of by-elections for hereditary Peers,
(c) the removal of Members convicted of serious criminal offices,
(d) the creation of a statutory appointments commission.
Lord Steel of Aikwood
My Lords, I said at the beginning that I would listen to the debate. I have been encouraged by the strong support for my Motion. Therefore, I propose to move it without making another speech but I will simply clarify two things. Contrary to what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said, the Motion is not an alternative to the resolution of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde; it is a precursor to it. It is clear that the course on which the Government are embarked will take at least the five years of this Parliament. We need running repairs now. If the four separate resolutions are passed—I stress to my noble friend Lord Caithness that they are separate and might not all be passed—there is no reason why draft or full legislation could not be introduced in the autumn. Three of the points are already in legislative form from the previous Government. Therefore, the legislation could go through during this Session and we could achieve the running repairs which this House so badly needs. I beg to move.
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Lord Strathclyde)
My Lords, I am surprised that this Motion has been moved. I was rather hoping that the debate we have had over the last few hours would have been enough for your Lordships, so I have not prepared many words. However, the Order Paper is a serious document, and if Motions are tabled and moved they need to be taken seriously, so I should formally respond to the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood.
This is an unusual Motion. I have never seen one quite like it before and we are taking it at an unusual time of night. It is unusual because it is unclear what its intended effect is. On the advice that I have received, it does not bind the Government to do anything. It simply asks the House—or gives it the opportunity, which it can take at any stage it wants—to give an opinion on various matters. It does not inexorably lead then to any legislation. From that point of view the Motion is rather pointless, though I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Steel, when he replies, will explain why it has a point and what that point is.
The Motion asks the Government to table Motions which could approve or disapprove certain requirements. In my speech this afternoon, some hours ago, I explained that I had had cause to set up a Leader’s Group that will look at the position of retirement of Members from this House permanently, and that the group would be chaired by my noble friend Lord Hunt of Wirral. I would hope that that would have dealt with that. There is certainly no scheme. The noble Lord, Lord Steel, does not have a scheme; I do not have a scheme. We are all rather hoping that my noble friend will be able to come up not necessarily with one scheme but many different schemes. There are several options. The whole point of my noble friend’s job is to try to find out what these options, and their pros and cons, are. Therefore, I do not see that there is any particular point on that because I think there is a substantial desire in this House to have a scheme for retirement. I was rather hoping that there would be a murmur of approval for that.
Lord Strathclyde
Since we are on a roll, how many noble Lords would like to take up that scheme for permanent retirement? I am very happy to take an interruption at this stage.
Lord Strathclyde
The noble Lord, Lord Richard, proves my point and I am immensely grateful to him. We are going to investigate whether there should be a scheme.
The noble Lord, Lord Steel, wants to have a vote on the abolition of by-elections for hereditary Peers. I can confirm to the House that when we publish a Bill at the end of this year, which is only a few months away, there will be not only a proposal for the abolition of by-elections for hereditary Peers but one for a very substantial cut in the number of life Peers under the Life Peerages Act 1958. That is the by-product of going down this road.
The noble Lord has put down only four suggestions. He could have had a fifth: whether or not there should be an elected or an unelected House—as if there were any doubt about that, incidentally. His next proposal concerns the removal of Members convicted of serious criminal offences. Frankly, I was surprised to see this because I cannot imagine that anybody would not be in favour of having a statutory scheme similar to that of the House of Commons. It is certainly our intention that this should be covered in the legislation when it comes forward, once we have had a suitable debate on that subject. The provision already applies in another place; there is no good reason why it should not apply here.
The creation of a statutory appointments commission is infinitely more complicated and is the most difficult and controversial aspect of the noble Lord’s proposals. It is difficult and controversial at least in part because the appointments system that we have already seems to work pretty well. Many of the Peers on the Cross Benches came out of the Appointments Commission and they show up that commission rather better than many of us had imagined would be the case. However, if we still had an appointed element in this House, there would have to be some kind of system, and it would be very surprising if that was not a statutorily-based system.
Lord Lea of Crondall
Is the noble Lord not aware that, in introducing his Motion, the noble Lord, Lord Steel, said that it applies to the period between now and the never-never land when the Bill will come into operation? To say that this will all be covered by the Bill and that the hereditary by-elections will automatically ipso facto go at that time does not address the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Steel.
Lord Strathclyde
But of course it does. The Government have pledged to produce a Bill by the end of the year. I could ring up the parliamentary draftsman tomorrow morning and say, “We have a cracking good idea. We have four marvellous suggestions that none of us has thought of before. Please draft a Bill”. These measures require legislation. They cannot just be willed. They cannot just happen.
Lord Strathclyde
But it is not a government Bill. It has been introduced several times and found to have enormous flaws. A responsible Government would have to ask a parliamentary draftsman to draft a measure. The noble Lord with his government experience knows this. We would need to do that at the earliest opportunity. We are going to fast track this. It could not be published before October or November. That is just a few weeks before we will publish our own Bill. I do not think that I could go to the committee of parliamentary business managers and say that the House of Lords wants an advantage of just a few weeks to discuss in government time the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Steel. With the best will in the world, that is not going to happen.
All that I will say is that it has been a tremendous debate. I am glad that I have been able to answer the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood. He has been very patient for a number of years. Now we are asking him to be patient for a few more months and he will get everything that he wants and probably deserves.
Lord Steel of Aikwood
All that I would say to that is that I do not want to wait for another five years. We need these matters to be resolved now. I beg to move.