House of Lords
His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh
(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Strathclyde
That an Humble Address be presented to Her Majesty The Queen as follows:
“Most Gracious Sovereign,
We, Your Majesty’s most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament assembled, beg leave
To assure Your Majesty that this House looks forward to the ninetieth birthday of His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh;
To convey to Your Majesty the admiration that is felt by this House for His Royal Highness; and
To express the hope that His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh may long continue to enjoy good health and happiness.”
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Lord Strathclyde)
My Lords, it is with the greatest pleasure that I invite the House to agree this Motion today and thereby to place on record, on behalf of this House and the nation, our sincere admiration for His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh and our gratitude for his unswerving contribution to our national life ahead of his 90th birthday this Friday. The longest serving consort in British history, for over half a century the Duke has both steadfastly supported Her Majesty the Queen in her important work and at the same time created a distinctive and much valued role for himself in our national story. Like his predecessor a century before, Prince Philip has served our institutions with great dignity and honour. His role at the heart of a partnership that has helped to bequeath a glorious reign has been something both fundamental and very special.
Few of us can fail to admire Prince Philip when he comes to the State Opening of Parliament and sits quietly but resolutely next to Her Majesty on the Throne, with a twinkle in the eye and a profound understanding of the values of duty and service; and with an intrinsic grasp of our national character and spirit. Prince Philip has remained constant to this country and its people, and today we are going to recognise and thank him for that.
Born on 10 June 1921, a prince of Greece and Denmark, Prince Philip and his family were evacuated from Greece in 1922 by a Royal Navy ship, subsequently settling in France. Educated in Germany and the United Kingdom, he joined the Royal Navy as a cadet in 1939 at the onset of the Second World War. His appointments included that of first lieutenant of HMS “Wallace”, which took part in the Allied landings in Sicily in July 1943, and first lieutenant of HMS “Whelp”, which partook in the surrender of Japan. He then went on to attain the rank of lieutenant commander in 1950 and of commander in 1952, by which time his active naval career had come to an end following the untimely and premature death of his father-in-law King George VI.
Following his marriage to the then Princess Elizabeth in November 1947 and her accession to the throne in February 1952, Prince Philip, who had by then become the Duke of Edinburgh, began his new role in public life in support of the many duties, engagements and responsibilities carried out by Her Majesty the Queen. He is patron or president of some 800 organisations, foremost among them the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, a charity which has touched the lives of more than 4 million young people in more than 60 countries since its inception. He maintains an active interest in industry, conservation and the environment, most prominently as the first president of the UK arm of the World Wildlife Fund. He is also a proud father, a grandfather and most recently a great-grandfather, achievements and accolades sometimes too obvious to mention, but nevertheless sources of immense pride. He is a keen sportsman, a tireless collector, a passionate supporter of the arts, of education, of our Armed Forces and of the Commonwealth—to do full justice to Prince Philip’s achievements and interests would require a litany.
He is a man of extraordinary range, commitment, involvement and passion. The Duke has been at the heart of what this country is about for almost his entire adult life. We owe to him a significant debt of gratitude for all that he has done and continues to do and I know that the whole House will wish to join me in conveying our warmest congratulations to His Royal Highness on the occasion of his forthcoming 90th birthday. I beg to move.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, it is a very great privilege for me to have the honour to associate the Opposition Benches and myself with the tribute that the Leader of the House has paid to His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh on the occasion of his forthcoming 90th birthday. The country holds Her Majesty the Queen in very high esteem and regard, all the more so since the royal wedding in April and the success of the extraordinary visit by the Queen to Ireland last month. A fundamental part of that esteem is the role played by His Royal Highness as the Queen’s consort—indeed, the longest serving royal consort in British history. In doing so he has virtually defined the role, at least since it was carried out for Queen Victoria by Prince Albert.
In a BBC documentary for his 90th birthday, to be broadcast tomorrow night, I understand that the Duke says of his role:
“It has all been trial and error”,
but as his son, the Duke of Wessex, says in the programme:
“That kind of view is typical of him. He is very modest about himself”.
While the Duke of Edinburgh may indeed be modest, his achievements are not. For many people all over the world, the words “Duke of Edinburgh” are inextricably linked with the award scheme which carries his name. Since 1956 when the scheme to help the development of young people began, a staggering 7 million young people have taken part in it across 132 countries—an astonishing achievement.
As he approaches his 90th birthday on Friday, we give heartfelt thanks for all that His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh has done for Her Majesty the Queen, for his service to this country, including his own fine naval record of service, for all the causes which have benefited from being associated with him and especially for the many millions of people who have participated in the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award programme and whose lives have, as a result, been immeasurably altered and improved and whose volunteering has, in turn, altered and improved the lives of so many others.
The Motion before the House today speaks rightly of the outstanding service to the nation given by His Royal Highness in supporting the Queen, and his own deep contribution to our national life. Those are exactly the right sentiments and exactly what we on these Benches wish to support.
Lord Dholakia
My Lords, I am delighted to associate the Liberal Democrat Benches with the humble Address to be presented to Her Majesty the Queen, and the message to be conveyed to His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh on his 90th birthday. The essential feature of our democracy is the strength and stability of our monarchy. Whereas in other parts of the world presidents and prime ministers come and go, we can take great pride that next year we will celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Her Majesty the Queen.
The Duke of Edinburgh has been the longest serving consort and the oldest serving spouse of a reigning British monarch. During all this time he has accompanied the Queen to various countries abroad. The Commonwealth, particularly the new Commonwealth, takes great pride in its loyalty to and respect for the Queen and the Duke. It is because of our Royal Family that the Commonwealth has continued to be an important political voice on the world stage.
As a person born in east Africa, I take great pride in one other matter. Prior to the Queen’s accession in 1952, the royal couple visited Kenya. She came to us as a princess and we sent her back as a Queen. We wish His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh many happy returns and thank him for his services to the United Kingdom.
Baroness D'Souza
My Lords, nine decades is a long time and covers a great deal of ground and change. It is my happy task, on behalf of the Cross-Bench Peers, to wish His Royal Highness a very happy birthday and many congratulations on reaching such a venerable age, while at the same time confounding all the stereotypical views we hold of someone facing his 10th decade. Far from being a gnarled old man, the Duke has retained his bounce and his interest in life. His robust sense of humour has added a welcome informality to official occasions. A reported conversation at a press reception to mark the Golden Jubilee in 2002 went something like this. The Duke said to a journalist, “Who are you?”. “I’m the editor in chief of the Independent, sir”, replied one Peter Kellner. “What are you doing here?”. “You invited me, sir”. “Well, you didn’t have to come”. How can exchanges of this kind not but add to the gaiety of nations?
More seriously, the Duke of Edinburgh, with his originality of thought and readiness to challenge accepted truths, has played a key role in modernising the monarchy, encouraging, as we have heard, millions of the young to undertake challenges. He has made significant contributions to conservation and undertaken the patronage of more than 800 organisations, as we have also already heard. Above all, he has been a steady and ever present consort to Her Majesty the Queen. Long may he continue in this and his many other roles.
Once again, on behalf of the Cross-Bench Peers, I am privileged to join all sides of your Lordships’ House in offering our congratulations to His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, and to support wholeheartedly the humble Address and the Motion standing in the name of the noble Lord the Leader of the House.
The Archbishop of York
My Lords, on behalf of these Benches, I express the warmest congratulations to His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh on the occasion of his 90th birthday. As the embodiment of devotion, duty and loyalty in service to our country, the Duke has been a model example to us all.
As someone who shares a birthday with the Duke, I look with admiration and—if it is allowed in someone from these Benches—envy on his stamina and resilience. Until 2006, he was still pursuing his passion for carriage driving and competing with fell ponies. We have witnessed his tireless energy again in recent days with the royal wedding, the historic visit to the Republic of Ireland and the welcome to the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, on his state visit. I have had particular cause to reflect on these qualities over the past couple of weeks during a stay in St Thomas’s Hospital, where, in the words of the consultant surgeon, Mr Simon Atkinson, I had to have “a nasty appendix” removed. I was discharged from hospital only this morning. In my somewhat fragile state, the question in my mind has been a very simple one: how does the Duke do it?
His Royal Highness’s long record of service to our nation began before his marriage to Her Majesty the Queen. As for many who risked their lives in the cause of freedom during action in the Second World War, the Duke’s record of military service was a distinguished one. As an officer in the Royal Navy, his quick thinking in distracting a Luftwaffe bomber saved the lives of many on board HMS “Wallace”. After the war, his marriage to the then Princess Elizabeth brought much happiness and hope to a nation during what were still uncertain and straitened times. The recent wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge has been a reminder of how much the spirits of our nation can be lifted during difficult days by events that capture the imagination and draw on the symbols and heritage that underpin our history and identity.
Since giving up his 14-year naval career, His Royal Highness has acted, as we have heard, as patron to some 800 organisations, as well as being chancellor of the University of Cambridge. In particular, I pay tribute to his passionate commitment to the welfare of our nation’s young people, notably through the award scheme which bears his name and which has been an inspiration to so many similar schemes overseas. The award scheme’s emphasis on physical achievement and service as ways of building confidence and character reflects the Duke’s own experience and values. Underpinning those values has been his rootedness within the Christian religion, first within the Greek Orthodox Church and now for many decades within the Anglican branch of,
“the one Catholick and Apostolick Church”,
giving steadfast and tireless support to Her Majesty in her role as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England.
Not everyone is aware that His Royal Highness has a keen interest in theological questions. Bishops who are invited to stay and preach at Sandringham face a barrage of serious theological questions over lunch—and there is nowhere to hide. He listens appreciatively but never uncritically. In my case, the sermon was based on Jesus turning water into wine at Cana in Galilee. In conversation, the Duke suggested many possible explanations for the miracle as opposed to the one that I was giving. He even included a Uri Geller-type explanation. He produced a spoon that Uri Geller had bent for him. “You see this?” he said, “That could have been it”. To my rescue came that still, small voice of calm from Her Majesty the Queen, saying, “Philip and his theories!”. Secondly, among the Duke’s theological interests are several publications that he co-authored, including “Survival or Extinction: A Christian Attitude to the Environment”, a work that incorporated another of his enduring concerns—wildlife preservation and care for the environment.
In ecclesiastical affairs, as on other issues, the Duke of Edinburgh likes to cut to the heart of the matter. My right reverend friend the current Bishop of Norwich recalls that, on first arriving at Sandringham, the Duke asked him, “Are you happy clappy?”. To that, he responded, “No, I’m smells and bells”. I am pleased to say that, following this robust exchange, they got on fine.
Humour is ever one of the Duke’s characteristics. The Duke is in fact a tease par excellence. For example, when showing me around the restored chapel in Windsor Castle after the devastating fire, he said, “Come and see my new piece of modern art”. I looked at it but could not work it out and had to ask, “Who is the artist?”. With a big laugh, he said, “That’s a piece of wood saved from the fire”. Later on, in writing to him, I suggested that he send that piece of modern art to the Yaohnanen tribe, in Tanna, who regard him as a god. I will leave noble Lords to imagine his response.
We, the Lords spiritual, wish His Royal Highness the Duke many happy returns and associate our sentiments with all sides of the House.
His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh
(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Strathclyde
That a Message be conveyed to His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh as follows:
“Your Royal Highness,
We, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament assembled, warmly congratulate Your Royal Highness on Your Royal Highness’s forthcoming ninetieth birthday;
We express our gratitude for Your Royal Highness’s outstanding service to the nation, not only in supporting Her Majesty The Queen throughout Her Majesty’s reign but also in making Your Royal Highness’s own deep contribution to national life, in particular in Your Royal Highness’s distinguished naval service in the second world war and in Your Royal Highness’s creation of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award which has done so much to encourage the development of young people;
We wish Your Royal Highness many happy returns.”
Oil Prices
(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Barnett
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans HM Treasury has to ensure that inflation is reduced and consumers derive benefit when there is a reduction in oil prices.
The Commercial Secretary to the Treasury (Lord Sassoon)
My Lords, the independent Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, the MPC, is responsible for maintaining price stability. It sets policy to meet the inflation target in the medium term. The MPC continues to judge that inflation is likely to fall back through 2012 and 2013. Petrol retailing is a competitive market. It is that competition which should see reductions in oil prices passed on to consumers.
Lord Barnett
I thank the noble Lord for his Answer. I am conscious of the fact that he has a propensity to quote what I said some 40 years ago. I thought of checking this time, but on reflection I realised that the Government have inherited a different policy from that of my time. In 1997, the then Chancellor Gordon Brown, as the noble Lord has pointed out, introduced a new policy involving the transfer of power from the Chancellor to the Governor of the Bank of England and the Monetary Policy Committee. The Government do not particularly like the then Chancellor but I assume that they are happy with the inheritance. Perhaps the noble Lord will confirm that. I know that he does not like talking about interest rates but will he also confirm the extreme national and international importance of interest rates and that the Chancellor still has absolute confidence in the governor and his policy for dealing with inflation?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, I am very happy to confirm that this Government are entirely comfortable with the structure around the MPC and have complete confidence in the governor. I could go on. I have quotes from 40 years ago. I was going to use quotes from 30 years ago but if the noble Lord would prefer me not to use them on this occasion I will not do so. However, his words of wisdom are always my guide.
Lord Bilimoria
My Lords, I agree with the Bank of England in keeping interest rates low to support the economy but on the other hand we have rampant inflation: food inflation is 5 per cent; wheat has gone to 70 per cent; corn is 100 per cent. The consumer is being squeezed because we have wage deflation. Does the Minister agree that the Government are between a rock and a hard place? In that situation, should not the Government consider reducing taxes to help the consumer and encourage growth?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, I completely agree with the figures given by the noble Lord for the very considerable increases in commodity prices over the past year. Those are, of course, driven by global factors, but they impact very severely on consumers and businesses in this country. That much I agree with. He referred to low interest rates. This is absolutely critical. We have almost record low interest rates on our 10-year gilts at the moment—3.33 per cent, I think, last night. That is a recognition of the confidence that the Government have in the underlying fiscal policy but it also reinforces that the Government’s contribution is to make sure that we continue to have a prudent view on public finances and do not deviate from the course that we set for reducing the fiscal deficit that we inherited.
Lord Higgins
My Lords, is it not clear that the mechanism set up by Mr Gordon Brown for controlling inflation is not working and that the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England is taking a number of other factors into account in addition to inflation? That being so, would it not be appropriate to revise and improve the remit given to the MPC rather than the Governor of the Bank of England having to write letter after letter after letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer explaining why inflation is above target?
Lord Sassoon
Well, I am always reluctant to disagree with the analysis of my noble friend who has considered these matters for many years, but I do disagree because I think that the medium-term target that the Bank of England has been given and the framework within which the MPC operates continue to be entirely appropriate. Of course, it is a medium-term target, and the latest Office for Budget Responsibility forecast from March shows inflation coming down to 2.5 per cent in 2012 and 2 per cent in 2013.The comparison of independent forecasters shows a very similar picture—2.3 per cent next year and 2.1 per cent in 2013. This shows that the Bank of England has the confidence of the commentators and the forecasters to continue to work to its mandate successfully.
Lord Hughes of Woodside
Is it not the case that inflation is never going to reach the benign figures that the Minister says? Yesterday we were warned of a gas price increase of 19 per cent, an electricity price increase of 10 per cent, and all the other companies will do the same. How can the noble Lord possibly think that inflation is under control? Is he simply going to let the spiral continue until we land in bankruptcy?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, of course we would not wish to see inflation at the 4.5 per cent it is now. As has been explained, this is very largely driven by global factors with regard to commodity prices. We are not only keeping to our tight fiscal policy, which underpins the ability of the Bank of England to stick to its mandate, but giving help to the most vulnerable—whether that is the Budget announcement that gave a £630 increase in cash in personal allowances for the under-65s, whether it is in the arrangements that we made to cut fuel duty effectively by 6p per litre from what the plans of the previous Government had been, or whether it is increasing the state pension by 4.6 per cent. What the Government must do, and are doing, is to protect the most vulnerable in our society.
Lord Newby
My Lords, with the Chinese economy, the Indian economy and many other economies still growing strongly, is it not likely that the price of oil and other fossil fuels will remain high for the foreseeable future? In those circumstances, does the Minister agree that the Government’s carbon reduction strategy assumes an even greater importance? In that context, can he tell us when the Government plan to bring forward the Bill formally establishing the green investment bank?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, we will bring forward the Bill in due course when it is in good shape. I take my noble friend's point about commodity prices. It reinforces the fact that we need to ensure that all energy users get advice to use energy efficiently in order to reduce their household bills. That is part of where we are targeting government help.
Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, when energy prices and oil prices rise, the price to the consumer rises very quickly. When world prices fall, the price to the consumer falls very slowly. What are the Government going to do about that?
Lord Sassoon
I have no idea what the noble Lord’s evidence for that is. The most recent intervention taken by the Government was to cut fuel duty, as I explained, by 1p per litre on Budget day. The price at the pump over the following few days fell by 0.8p per litre, despite rising oil prices over those same days. The market was investigated by Ofgem or the OFT. The competition authorities looked at the market for oil prices in 1998 and have not sought to look at it again. If the noble Lord or anyone else has evidence about prices, Ofgem, which looks at the market, has dealt with them recently and I am sure that the OFT will as well.
Businesses: Regional Growth Fund
Lord Harrison
To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many small and medium-sized enterprises have been helped by the Regional Growth Fund, and what other plans they have to help such businesses.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Baroness Wilcox)
My Lords, about one-third of the £450 million conditionally allocated for successful bids in round 1 will benefit small and medium-sized enterprises. Our expectation is that at least 1,000 SMEs, located in areas where there is not already a vibrant private sector and culture of enterprise, will benefit directly from round 1. The second round of the fund is bigger, and we expect further bids that will benefit SMEs.
Lord Harrison
Given that only one-third of the successful submissions are from small businesses, whereas the regional growth fund was designed to help small businesses, does the Minister accept that a flaw in the design of that fund is that you had to submit a minimum bid of £1 million, which is out of reach for many small businesses? Does she accept that the advice on the BIS help site is absurd, given that the proposal that you should spatchcock together lots of different projects from small businesses not only increases bureaucracy but means that projects are brought together which are unnatural neighbours? Is it not time that the Government thought big about small businesses?
Baroness Wilcox
I know exactly what the noble Lord is talking about: the threshold value of £1 million seems very high for very small businesses. We recognise that £1 million is too high a threshold for the smallest businesses. Sadly, it would take much time and resource to deal with a very high number of very small bids. We have addressed that point by conditionally allocating funding to organisations with experience of the SME sector, so that they can work with it to deliver the grants. Projects below £1 million can join up with other projects to form a coherent package and can bid together to meet the threshold. I come from a business background and know that if you cannot get a grant or a loan for the business the first time round, you go out there to find another business that will join you so that you can get it. This is a competitive process, which is what we want it to be, and I think it will succeed.
Lord Bilimoria
My Lords, the credit crunch which started four years ago was as a result of the sub-prime crisis. After the credit crunch came the financial crisis then the recession and then the sovereign debt crisis, but the biggest domino effect was that lending to small businesses all but froze. Are the Government really doing enough to compel or encourage the banks to lend to small businesses, given the support that we have given to the banks over those years?
Baroness Wilcox
My Lords, the noble Lord will know that my right honourable friend in another place, the Secretary of State, is for ever speaking to and with businesses. Yes, of course we know that we need a predictable tax system to reward endeavour; we know that we need better access to both debt and equity finance; and we know that we need to reduce red tape. We are working hard on all of that.
Lord Cotter
My Lords, other support for small businesses is intended to come through local enterprise partnerships. Will the Minister take on board concerns that not enough small businesses—not in sufficient force—are being involved in local enterprise partnerships throughout the country? This is of great concern. Surely this should be part of the approval process that the Minister has to go through when he sets up the local enterprise partnerships in the first place.
Baroness Wilcox
The evidence is that we have been overwhelmed by the number of bids that have come in. For the second round that we are in now, there is an enormous number of bids, which is very heartening. It is competitive, and people are doing awfully well with it. I hope that I can speak later to the noble Lord and reassure him on this with the evidence that we have.
Lord Young of Norwood Green
My Lords, given the record levels of youth unemployment, is the Minister aware of the newly released data from the Federation of Small Businesses showing that only 8 per cent of small businesses have taken on an apprentice in the past year? This is concerning, given that in 2009 more than half of the apprenticeships took place in businesses with fewer than 50 employees. Furthermore, the federation believes that allocated funding to apprenticeships must be used to benefit micro-businesses—that is, businesses that are likely to take on their first apprentice with the potential to grow. It believes that the Government should better promote group training agencies or apprentice training agencies.
Baroness Wilcox
My Lords, I expected this question to come from the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, whom I see is in the House today. My answer to this question is that this is a challenge fund and projects can cover whatever the bidders want. The aim of the fund is to create jobs and these could include apprenticeships—a key part of this Government’s growth agenda. We look forward to bids coming forward for apprenticeship growth.
Lord Sugar
My Lords, my question for the Minister is not the one that she was anticipating. She will recall that in my short stint at BIS as an adviser to the Government, I concentrated on the business link centres. At the end of that period, I concluded that they were, frankly, a waste of money. I was told that they cost £250 million per year. Will the Minister give us an update on the status of the business link centres and indicate whether she has come to the same conclusion? Will the money that was given to the business link centres be deployed somewhere else?
Baroness Wilcox
I was not prepared to answer a question on that, but I will of course send an answer to the noble Lord. I would like to reassure him that I think that he would approve of the system that we are using here. It is working. The bids have already levered in £2.5 billion of private sector funding. Maybe he would like to follow carefully how we are proceeding with this sum—and maybe even support us in some ways.
Allotments
Baroness Sharples
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have for the future of allotments.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Baroness Hanham)
My Lord, it is local authorities that have a duty to provide statutory allotments. The Government are keen to support local communities that want to use local spaces for community food growing, and to protect existing land for this purpose. New neighbourhood planning provisions in the Localism Bill will provide a new right for communities to shape their local areas, including the means to boost allotment provision.
Baroness Sharples
I thank my noble friend for that reply. I realise that the Localism Bill will help, but are local councils playing by the rules in providing alternative sites when those present sites are needed for development or whatever? An enormous number of people who write to one now are looking for allotments and cannot get them. They have to wait years.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, we already know that there is a 50 per cent extra requirement for allotments. Local authorities can, of course, make land available if they have it for allotments. The neighbourhood planning provisions in the Localism Bill, to which my noble friend refers, will enable neighbourhoods to identify land where they think allotments could be provided within their neighbourhood plan and have that agreed by the local authority. There are, therefore, methods by which new allotments can be provided, but I recognise immediately that there are far too few for those who want them.
The Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells
My Lords, I wonder whether the Minister is aware that, in the 19th century, the Bishop of Bath and Wells was one of the founders of the allotment movement. I have to say that there are questions about why he founded the allotment movement, but he did. The Minister may also be aware that under the present development of the Bishop’s Palace in Wells—in opening it more effectively to the public—the palace hosts not only the city allotments but a new community garden. I note that the National Trust has pledged some 1,000 allotments on its premises by 2012, and ask the Minister to encourage the development of land on all suitable estates open to the public as allotments or community gardens.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, that is a fascinating bit of history from the right reverend Prelate, which I did not know but I enjoyed hearing about. Of course, he is right that the National Trust has already started developing allotments and, yes, wherever allotments can be provided and wherever authorities or bodies are able to provide them, we could encourage that, because too many people who would like to grow their own food are waiting for allotments. The more provision, the better.
Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall
Does the noble Baroness agree with me that allotments have many virtues, among them the fact that they provide an important habitat for honey-bees and other kinds of bees? Indeed, some allotment users keep bees on their allotments. Are the Government ensuring that research funding is being sustained in order to monitor and, if possible, to reverse the decline in the honey-bee population in this country? If she cannot tell the House now perhaps she would be kind enough to write to me.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, bees are a little beyond my brief and a little beyond my department’s brief. I am extremely happy to refer the question, probably to Defra, and to ensure the noble Baroness has a reply.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I remind the House that I am a local councillor; I am pleased to say that we have just provided some new allotments in my ward. In areas with town and parish councils, the town and parish councils are the statutory allotment authorities and very often run all the local allotments. They are often very good at managing the allotments and running them in an economic and financially viable way. The problem of producing new allotments is providing the capital funding in the beginning to set up the allotments before they can be managed. That is a real problem for town and parish councils. Will the Government look again at it?
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, it is right that local authorities have the statutory responsibility for allotments, and it would be up to them if they wished to put aside a capital sum to provide more in their area. I do not think that the Government can direct them to do that, although we recognise that many people want allotments. I certainly do not think that my department would tell local authorities that they had to provide them.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
Does the noble Baroness think that we would have such erudite questions about allotments and bees if we had an elected second Chamber?
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, I admire the noble Lord’s ingenuity in getting such a question into Question Time. I shall not spend any more time trying to answer it.
Lord Harrison
As with the regional growth fund and inflation, on allotments have the Government lost the plot?
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, I am not sure who has lost the plot and it is not an issue I want to address this afternoon.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
My Lords, my family have some allotments in Surrey—I live in Devon. They are run by the allotment holders, who provide everything that is needed to keep them running; they do not need the local authority. Is this not an example of the big society?
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, self-help and people working for themselves, producing their own answers and working without government intervention of course is the big society at its best. After all, the big society is just about that; it is about local people working for themselves and for others and looking after their neighbours. In that regard, what could be better than working on an allotment?
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, the noble Baroness has referred to the neighbourhood planning regimes of the Localism Bill and how they may be beneficial to allotment development. What protections are in the system to prevent aggressive development of allotments by narrowly focused neighbourhood forums?
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, allotments are protected: one cannot just come in and take them over. Land is made available for allotments and it is a statutory right for them to be there. It would only be if allotment owners did not want those allotments that they could be addressed within a neighbourhood plan and with the wish of the neighbourhood that they should change hands. I do not believe that anybody can aggressively take over allotments.
Travellers: Dale Farm
(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Avebury
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what amounts have been promised, by which government departments, as contributions towards the costs of policing proposed evictions at Dale Farm.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, the Home Office has agreed to set aside contingency funding, up to a maximum of £4.65 million, to assist with the costs of policing the proposed evictions at Dale Farm. The final grant awarded will be agreed after the operation and will only cover the costs incurred. In addition, the Department for Communities and Local Government has committed to provide up to £1.2 million to Basildon Borough Council to support the evictions at Dale Farm.
Lord Avebury
My Lords, will my noble friend comment on the decision to spend £117,000 per family on eviction of these people from the Dale Farm site considering that there are no other sites in the county to which they could be directed? Does this policy not simply mean that another £18 million will have to be spent by local authorities down the line on evicting the same families from even less suitable locations, to say nothing of the downstream costs on health, education and the social costs arising from these evictions?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, this is an extremely difficult and sensitive issue which my noble friend has worked on to good effect for decades. He suggests that this is an inappropriate use of potentially several million pounds of public money. However, there will be no need for any expensive police operation if those served with eviction notices leave within 28 days having exhausted all their appeal rights under our well developed system of justice and the rule of law. Why should one community group be allowed to flout our planning laws by suggesting disorder and thus an unaffordable police operation while a lone family or individual is easily required to comply?
Baroness Turner of Camden
My Lords, does the local authority not have a responsibility to have concern for these families? I believe there are 100 children involved. Surely there is an obligation on the council to look after their welfare: indeed, I believe there is an EU resolution on the stocks which would commit the local authority to doing precisely that. Why are these people being deprived of their homes after all the years that they have lived on this site?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, the noble Baroness is absolutely right. Basildon Borough Council had to make an undertaking to the High Court that the matters which the noble Baroness referred to would be dealt with properly.
Baroness Harris of Richmond
My Lords, could my noble friend tell me whether Basildon Borough Council has undertaken an equality assessment of its decision to evict the Gypsies and Travellers from this site?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, if Basildon Borough Council had not carried out a proper impact assessment of all the consequences of its action, it would probably fail in the courts.
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, is the Minister aware of the deep concern that many Traveller children are not being well engaged in the education system, that they are being failed and that the generational impact of continued failure is being perpetuated? Is consideration being given to the education of these children and what steps can be taken to ensure that they have continuity of education and, if possible, stay in the same school?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, the noble Earl makes an extremely important point. If we carry on not properly educating Traveller children we will never break the cycle, because it is very difficult for Traveller families to engage in fully legitimate economic activity if they have not been properly educated. I referred to undertakings in my answer to the noble Baroness: the local authority has to deal with these issues.
Lord Avebury
My Lords, can my noble friend explain where these people are supposed to go, considering that there are no other sites in Essex, and no sites in the county plan?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, the local authority has obligations under the law of homelessness, as the noble Lord fully appreciates. I go back to my original point: we cannot allow people to flout our planning laws.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, the original Question was about cost. The noble Earl will know that currently we are debating the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill, which proposes to party-politicise our police force through the election of police commissioners. Would it not be true to say that the money being spent on those elected commissioners would be better spent on ensuring that our police forces are properly staffed?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I thought that the noble Lord would raise the issue of police and crime commissioners; I would have been very disappointed if he had not. We do not intend to limit the influence of central government on policing decisions only to see the same restrictions imposed by PCCs. They will provide the community with a voice and local accountability that is currently non-existent.
Lord Stoddart of Swindon
My Lords, it is clear that this is a very complex issue. I hope that the House and noble Lords will appreciate that if this site is occupied illegally, action has to be taken to remove the occupiers. If the law is not upheld in this instance, how on earth can it be upheld in other instances which may be just as important?
Earl Attlee
I am sure that all noble Lords agree that the noble Lord has made a very good point.
Winterbourne View
(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Hollins
To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to yesterday’s Written Ministerial Statement, whether they will ensure that the terms of reference of the serious case review into the abuse at Winterbourne View encompass the question of the appropriateness of placing people with learning disabilities in private hospitals.
Baroness Hollins
My Lords, I declare an interest as a psychiatrist who has spent much of the last 30 years working with people with learning disabilities who have similar needs to those of the subjects of the shocking “Panorama” programme. I am also the carer of an adult man who has a learning disability and whose behaviour at times challenges those who support him. I have also been a policy adviser on learning disability to the Department of Health on two occasions.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Earl Howe)
My Lords, the safety and quality of care of those with learning disabilities are of the highest importance. We will discuss the terms of reference for the serious case review with South Gloucestershire Council. We want to ensure that the terms of reference for all of the reviews by the local authority, the strategic health authorities and the Care Quality Commission will give us the evidence that we need to answer the serious questions raised by the events at Winterbourne View. We have asked Mark Goldring, the chief executive of Mencap, to work closely with us in reviewing the evidence.
Baroness Hollins
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his response. The national picture needs to be thought about. This matter is not happening just in south Gloucestershire. I understand that there may be as many as 150 private hospitals. I consider that to be unacceptable given the three decades of work to close NHS long-stay hospitals, which was finally achieved just two years ago. Will the Minister consider reversing the decision to end the employment of the national director for learning disabilities, who, as a policy adviser to the department, could have responsibility for overseeing the implementation of government guidance? The Mansell report gives guidance on how to manage and support people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour in the community, rather than exporting them a long way from home to private hospitals.
Earl Howe
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness. She raises some important issues. I am aware that the chief executive designate of the National Health Service commissioning board and the current chief executive of the National Health Service, David Nicholson, will be looking at the whole question of national clinical directors and leadership in clinical care in the coming months.
The noble Baroness is right about care in the community. That has been the direction of travel under the previous Government, as it is now. She will know that many Winterbourne View residents were sectioned under the Mental Health Act and had challenging behaviour, an area I know she has experience of. I believe that privately provided care can be trusted; if the commissioning is right, if regulation is right and if the arrangements for oversight are right, it is not intrinsically less likely that privately provided care will be delivered at the right levels of quality.
Baroness Thornton
I am seeking assurance from the Minister that there will be a wide-ranging and independent review of this matter, held in public, that will shine a light on what happened at Winterbourne View and allow the wider lessons to be learnt. We need to know whether the CQC’s failure to monitor the treatment of residents was due to the fact that there was a shortage of CQC staff. Does the CQC have sufficient powers to act in this case and, if so, is it using its powers adequately? Could the Minister also comment on the wisdom of placing more regulatory tasks with the CQC, as the Government are proposing in the process of reorganisation? Surely we need to see that the CQC is carrying out its current functions adequately.
Earl Howe
My Lords, first, there is a criminal investigation under way and it would not be appropriate to launch an inquiry, even if we were minded to do so. As the noble Baroness knows, the CQC has launched its own internal investigation. It has admitted that there were failings in its processes. South Gloucestershire Council will lead an independently chaired serious case review, as has been mentioned, involving all agencies, which will look at the lessons to be learnt. The strategic health authorities involved have instigated a serious untoward incident investigation. The department will, after these reviews have been concluded, examine all the evidence and report to Parliament.
We want to understand not only the immediate facts and why things went wrong at Winterbourne View but also whether there are more systemic weaknesses in the arrangements for looking after people with learning disabilities and who exhibit seriously challenging behaviour. It is very easy to make the CQC into a scapegoat. It is difficult to ask of the CQC that it polices every room in every hospital at every hour of the day. We rely on the CQC and have been supportive of it. It does much good work and clearly it will want to review its own processes as part of this.
Baroness Barker
Does the Minister agree that when this abuse was taking place, a number of professionals, including nurses and doctors, must have gone into that establishment and that these professional bodies should start to conduct their own inquiries into what their staff were doing in there at the time? Secondly, a bad provider of care has everything to fear from an unannounced visit, while a good provider of care has nothing to fear. Does the Minister agree that as a temporary measure the CQC could consider conducting only unannounced visits in the foreseeable future?
Earl Howe
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend. My understanding is that all patients at Winterbourne View have been regularly reviewed by a multidisciplinary clinical team in the past six months on behalf of the primary care trust that commissioned their care, and most of them in the past three months. I am sure she is right to say that those who have conducted such reviews should examine their processes and my understanding is that that is exactly what will happen.
We have endorsed the CQC’s proposal to launch a programme of risk-based and random unannounced inspections of a sample of the 150 hospitals providing care for people with learning disabilities. They will work in conjunction with local government improvement and development, ADAS, Mencap and with experts with experience of this programme. The spirit of my noble friend’s question is amply addressed in the programme.
Lord Laming
Will the Minister encourage the Government to reinforce messages about managerial accountability wherever vulnerable people are being cared for and about the fact that the greater the degree of vulnerability, the greater that accountability must be held by the managers of the service?
Earl Howe
The noble Lord is quite right. There has clearly been a serious failing in management here. We are looking at that urgently and, no doubt, important lessons will be learnt. All agencies have acted immediately on being alerted to the situation by the “Panorama” team and, as I have mentioned, appropriate inquiries are under way.
Baroness Wall of New Barnet
I agree with the Minister about the response around the Care Quality Commission. When such a result as this comes out, the undermining is quite damaging right across the whole spectrum of its work. In hospital trusts and everywhere else, the CQC’s inspection and report are held in great esteem if they are good and are very worrying if they are not. I wonder whether that is denigrated by this unfortunate incident and this awful opportunity that it has had and missed.
Earl Howe
My Lords, I take the noble Baroness’s point. It is very easy to blame the CQC whereas we should in fact first point the finger at those who perpetrated these awful acts and at the management of the hospital. There are a number of other agents involved besides the regulator. We are committed to developing the role of the Care Quality Commission to make it a more effective regulator of health services in England. Those efforts can be supplemented by the role of HealthWatch, which she will know we proposed in the Bill before the other place to strengthen the arrangements for the patient and public voice. I am sure that there is more that we are able to do, but it is important that we learn the facts first before pointing the finger at the regulator or anybody else.
Baroness Anelay of St Johns
My Lords, we have reached 10 minutes and should progress to the next item of business.
Syria
(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what measures they are proposing the United Nations Security Council should take against the Government of Syria in the draft resolution they are putting before the Security Council later today.
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean
My Lords, I beg leave to ask a Question of which I have given private notice.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Lord Howell of Guildford)
My Lords, today in New York, Britain and France, along with Germany, are asking for Security Council support for a resolution condemning the repression in Syria and calling for the Syrian Government to meet their people’s legitimate demands, release all prisoners of conscience, lift restrictions on the media and the internet and co-operate with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The violence being meted out against peaceful demonstrators in Syria is an appalling response to the people demanding their basic rights and freedom. It is time for the Assad regime to stop the violence and reform or step aside.
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that very full response—but is it really enough? There are hundreds of Syrian civilians who have died in terrible circumstances; worst of all is the report of a 13 year-old boy who was tortured, emasculated and murdered. There are thousands pouring over the Turkish border and reports of police officers being executed for refusing to fire on crowds of civilians. Does not the Minister believe that the situation in the town of Jisr al-Shughour is so like that in Benghazi that similar measures should be taken to protect the civilians there? Does he agree with the French Foreign Minister, Alain Juppé, with whom the British Government are sharing the platform today, who said that the process of reform in Syria is dead and that Syria’s president has lost his legitimacy to govern?
Lord Howell of Guildford
The noble Baroness is absolutely right that the situation is far from getting better: it is getting worse. The reports of atrocities are disgusting. We have all been shocked by the news of the apparent treatment of a young child—indeed of many young children—in the mayhem of violence. All these questions are being debated today at the United Nations. We and the French—the noble Baroness mentioned Monsieur Juppé—are putting forward sentiments very similar to those that she suggested. It is a question of carrying all opinion in this direction in order to get effective co-operative and co-ordinated action. Not everyone, particularly in the Arab world, has yet reached the point where they have united in seeing that further measures are required beyond those that we are already proposing. I myself was able to consult with a number of Arab and Gulf leaders last week in that region and had some mixed opinions on whether this was the time for more forceful action. The noble Baroness can be assured that Her Majesty’s Government hold this matter in the strongest-possible and deepest concern. We believe, and fear, that stronger measures will indeed be needed.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine
I congratulate my noble friend on the new tougher resolution that the Government are trying to secure through the United Nations Security Council. Let us, however, speak plainly. We know that China is one of the countries that is likely to veto this resolution. My noble friend will of course be aware that Chinese workers in Libya had to be taken out on a Chinese frigate, and that China now has interests around the world. Will he urge the Chinese Government, as they engage around the world, also to build alliances around the world to promote the interests of their own citizens if not for nobler purposes such as democracy and human rights—which, alas, they do not respect?
Lord Howell of Guildford
My noble friend makes an extremely good point which has certainly occurred to me in discussions with senior Chinese diplomats. The traditional or conventional stance of the Chinese authorities and Chinese Government is that they do not interfere in foreign countries. The reality is that because of extended Chinese influence and involvement throughout the world, whether the Chinese authorities like it or not, they are involved and do have to move towards taking a responsible position as they become a world force and a world power, an active member of the World Trade Organisation and a responsible authority and influence in the world. If this is the role that they want to play, they will have to be involved in a much more positive way, as my noble friend says.
Lord Wright of Richmond
My Lords, it is now 30 years since I left Damascus as British ambassador to Syria. Of course I accept that we are absolutely right to condemn these appalling reports on what is happening in Syria, just as I hope that we condemned in 1982 similar reports of terrible massacres of people in Hama under the present president’s father’s rule. However, does the Minister accept that whatever its other faults, Ba’athism as a system of government is a secular system of government? I believe, and I hope that the Minister agrees, that we should be extremely careful to do nothing that could desecularise that wonderful country.
Lord Howell of Guildford
Those are clearly very wise remarks. I suspect that the noble Lord has more experience than I do of exactly how we reacted to the atrocious murders in Hama in 1982, which were conducted by the brother of the then president, Hafiz al-Assad. The noble Lord is right that Syria is a secular pattern. It is also a tribal pattern, and the tribal and family groups who have ruled Syria are of course not a majority; they are a minority, among many others. They have ruled by methods that we regard as reprehensible, and that are becoming even more so. I accept the noble Lord’s analysis that one could see a very serious disintegration of a country of many tribes and various religious groups and, indeed, a pattern that could develop a far greater infection of jihadism and extreme religious activity. For the moment we will have to see how events unfold. We hope that they will take a better course, but at present there is not much room for optimism.
Lord Triesman
My Lords, I also welcome the steps that are being taken today at the United Nations and I understand the limitations that this Government and the French and German Governments must feel about how far they can go. This is, as the Minister has said, a savage regime, conducting brutal behaviour towards its own people. Can the noble Lord tell us what steps are being taken to engage Arab support in the region and whether consideration is being given to the International Criminal Court, which must certainly be looking at these as crimes of concern to humanity?
Lord Howell of Guildford
As Syria is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court it would need a UN resolution to direct such a course. I have no doubt that the idea has been circulated but no action has been taken on it. As for gaining the support of the surrounding region and the leading Arab powers, my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary and other Ministers are in direct contact with a range of leaders in the area. Our posts are in constant contact with the area. I myself had contact last week with a number of leaders, including, although not directly an Arab leader, Mr Najib Mikati in Lebanon, which is directly affected by what is happening in Syria. We keep lines as open as we can with all the major influences and parties, not least the Turkish Government and Mr Erdogan who have some direct line of influence over Bashar al-Assad, but so far their efforts have been to no avail.
Lord Anderson of Swansea
UN Security Council Resolutions 1970 and 1973 were built on the platform of the Arab League agreement, and that provided a degree of cover, preventing Russia from vetoing the resolutions. What is the working assumption of the Government in respect both of the Arab League generally, which presumably is fairly pessimistic about support, and the way in which Russia will now react?
Lord Howell of Guildford
The noble Lord, with his experience, is describing precisely the modalities and parameters that my colleagues in the British Government and other diplomats are having to cope with in New York at this moment. There is some hope that a resolution can come forward. There are varying views within the Arab League and among Arab leaders about which way to go and how much pressure to apply. There have been in the past first the traditional Chinese attitude of non-interference, which I have already described, and secondly some reluctance from Moscow to be involved. But this could be changing and there comes a point in this transparent interconnected world where the sheer volume of the atrocities means that there is a unity of intolerance to the continual misbehaviour. We may get to that point soon.
Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Bill [HL]
Baroness Anelay of St Johns
That the bill be referred to a Second Reading Committee.
European Union Bill
(13 years, 5 months ago)
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18:25 - Division on Amendment 5 - Ayes: 221 / Noes: 216 - Amendment 5 agreed.
19:35 - Division on Amendment 5A - Ayes: 158 / Noes: 208 - Amendment 5A disagreed.
Lord Liddle
Lord Liddle
My Lords, I rise to move this amendment in a purely formal way. I anticipate that, in speaking to Amendment 2, the noble Lord, Lord Howell, will give us assurances that will enable us to withdraw this amendment, but without further ado I would like to hear what he has to say.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Lord Howell of Guildford)
My Lords, I am grateful to those noble Lords who have sought, through the tabling of these amendments and in Committee, to clarify the spirit of the provisions in the relevant clauses of the Bill by tabling all but one of the amendments before us in this group. I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, who has just indicated that he is moving his amendment formally in order, quite rightly, to elicit from the Government our case for the amendment that we have tabled within the group.
As my noble friend Lord Wallace made clear in Committee, it has not been and nor should it be the Government’s intention to tie the hands of Ministers and their officials who negotiate assiduously in the development of European Union legislation in order to protect and maximise the UK’s interests and priorities. The fact is that Ministers and officials have participated constructively for many years in the earlier stages of the development and negotiation of various EU measures, and nothing in this Bill will prevent that from continuing in the same way. When it comes to the point at which the final decision is taken in the European Council or the Council, what the provisions of the Bill are designed to do is to prevent a Minister from voting in favour of a treaty or other measure specified in Part 1 at this final stage, or otherwise allow the adoption of a treaty or measure to happen, unless and until he or she has the approval specified in the relevant clause of the Bill. As we know, this may be an Act of Parliament or it may be an Act and a referendum where there is a transfer of competence or power. The Bill does not prevent the Government from signing up finally to and participating in anything at the EU level, but Ministers would first have to have the support of Parliament and, where necessary, of the British people before doing so.
The amendment tabled in my name in the Marshalled List makes the position crystal clear, and I hope to the satisfaction of noble Lords. The effect of the amendment will of course govern the use of the phraseology we are concerned with throughout the whole Bill, and therefore not oblige us to table a series of consequential amendments because this change to Clause 1, which is interpretive, will govern the whole Bill.
As my noble friend Lord Wallace explained in Committee, the words we are concerned with, “or otherwise supporting”, are included to make clear that, at the point of the final and formal decision in Council or the European Council, a Minister would be unable to allow a measure to be adopted in Council or the European Council through means other than a positive vote, which under this Bill would have to be preceded by the necessary national procedures—namely, an Act and a referendum, if required. Articles 235(1) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and Article 238(4) make clear that abstentions at the point of final and formal decision in Council do not serve to block, but rather are treated as support for the adoption of a proposal requiring unanimity. Therefore, letting a measure through by abstention in the Council and then claiming by way of excuse or explanation, as it were, that although it transferred competences or powers and should have had national approval somehow it slipped through and Ministers could not help it, would not be allowed.
In addition, as many of your Lordships know, in Brussels matters often do not proceed to a formal vote. The chairman may just seek the sense of the room, and if no one dissents, take it that the proposal has been finally agreed unanimously. It is then ticked and it goes through. That could happen only after national procedures, which would require parliamentary approval, while if competences and powers are being transferred, it would of course require a referendum. So the phrase “or otherwise supporting” seeks to ensure that Parliament and the British people can be confident that there is no possibility that any inaction on the part of the Government of the day could allow a measure to be finally decided and agreed without the proper approval of Parliament or the people or, indeed, both. To allow a measure to be adopted in such a way would represent a sleight of hand that would cheat both this Parliament and the public out of their rightful say.
My noble friend also made the point that, in this way, the Government were replicating the phrase used by the 2008 Act, which was introduced by the previous Government when Parliament was approving the ratification of the Lisbon treaty. However, we accept the point—made, I think, by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford—that, although that was the position before, there is no reason why we cannot improve the drafting of provisions from the past, as indeed we can improve on much else that went on during the past Government and seek to do so.
We have reflected further on this point, as we have on all the amendments tabled in Committee, as we should. For the reasons I have given, we have tabled a government amendment to spell out, in the interpretation in Clause 1, exactly what is meant by “or otherwise supporting” and to explain when and where it applies: to wit, that it is only at the final and formal stage in the Council, or the European Council, that the bar on voting for or abstaining on—in other words, otherwise supporting—measures applies, unless or until there is parliamentary and, where necessary, public approval, in which case of course the support could go forward.
We feel that providing this amendment to the definition provides the clarity that noble Lords were seeking in their amendments. It spells out unambiguously the limitations on Ministers and in doing so makes clear—and I make clear now—that this and future Governments may negotiate proposals in future in the same way as they do now and they should seek the views of the scrutiny committees of both Houses in the same way as they do now and undertake any other existing national approval procedures that are required before finally agreeing to a proposal in the European Council or the Council.
That is the position. I hope noble Lords will accept that clarifies the concerns we all had in Committee on this matter and therefore I will beg to move the Government’s amendment. This will confirm to noble Lords that we have heard and addressed their concerns. I ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment, which seeks an exactly similar effect.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
Before the noble Lord sits down, perhaps we could be just a little clearer. I thank him very much for the letter he sent me and other noble Lords about what I described as the chicken-and-egg situation, which is part of this nexus that he has been dealing with. That was a very helpful letter and I would be most grateful if he could agree that that letter should not only go to noble Lords who participated in this debate but could also go in the Library of both Houses, because I fear that sometimes the other place does not take very much cognisance of what is said by Ministers in this House. On this occasion, what is said in that letter, in particular about nothing in this Bill inhibiting Ministers from participating in negotiations other than on the final decision, is very important. I hope he can agree that the letter should go in the Library of both Houses.
On another point arising from what the noble Lord himself said, I have to confess to some slight confusion about how many of the instances of “or otherwise support” get taken out and how many get left in and whether there is not a degree of potential ambiguity from leaving any of them in at all. Perhaps he could just clarify that point. I had at first thought, and from what he initially said this afternoon, that he was actually saying that all the references to “or otherwise support” were going and that the statement would simply be that we would not allow any decision to be taken. That is, I think, the sense of what the Government have been trying to do and what those of us who have been trying to amend this provision are trying to do. However, I am still not quite clear where we are on that point.
Lord Howell of Guildford
On the first point, I will certainly endeavour to see that the words and wisdom of your Lordships’ House are spread as widely as possible and that the correctness of our view is recognised, in the way that we are changing the phraseology of the past in an improving way.
As to the question of what is amended by our proposed amendment, I think that I said that by changing the definition in the interpretative Clause 1, that change governs all references to the particular words we are concerned with throughout the Bill. It simply overrides and governs all those references, so that there is no need for your Lordships to be bothered with the task of going through each clause amending or adding the amendment at every stage of the Bill. By putting it in Clause 1, in the interpretative section, we are governing and rendering effective in the light of the amendment everything that is said throughout the entire Bill. That is the position as I would like to put it to your Lordships and I believe that that is the correct one.
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne
I pay tribute to the Minister and to the Government for listening with such deep concern to what seemed to me to be perfectly acceptable phraseology, but which gave noble Lords opposite considerable difficulty. It seems to me odd that something that is comfortable, which we already passed in the UK 2008 Act, should somehow become a discomforting phrase here, but I am none the less absolutely delighted to see that the Minister is able to come forward with what is clearly to other noble Lords a major concession and clarify a phrase which to some of us seemed perfectly adequate. It is always good that we should have a consensus in this House—your Lordships are known for a consensual approach—and I congratulate and thank the Minister.
Lord Liddle
My Lords, I would not go as far as the noble Baroness in describing this as a major concession in the Bill. However, in the spirit of good will in the consideration of the Bill on Report, we are prepared to withdraw the amendments in my name in the light of what the noble Lord, Lord Howell, has said, subject only to two points of clarification: first, that his letter to the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, will be deposited in the Library; and, secondly, that we are absolutely clear that the amendment to the interpretative clause, Clause 1(7), does therefore govern all the other references to “otherwise support” in the rest of the Bill, and that no one is going to turn around at a later stage and say that a Minister cannot publicly advocate a position, either in the Council or in a wider forum, until the point at which a formal decision has to be taken, so it is possible for Ministers publicly to advocate their support for a position, subject to the final decision having passed all the requirements of this eventual Act.
Lord Howell of Guildford
My Lords, as a final word I repeat that the definition will apply to any use of this wording elsewhere in the Bill. That is the definitive statement I am making, and that applies.
The Chairman of Committees (Lord Brabazon of Tara)
If Amendment 2 is agreed to, I cannot call Amendment 3.
Amendment 2
Lord Howell of Guildford
“(a) voting in favour of the decision in the European Council or the Council, or(b) allowing the decision to be adopted by consensus or unanimity by the European Council or the Council.”
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 7. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, will regard this too as a major concession by the Government. These two amendments are intended to address a point raised by a number of Peers during our debate on the first day in Committee some weeks ago on what the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, described as a probing amendment. The noble Baroness, along with the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, raised the question of the correct interpretation of Clauses 2 and 3 with respect to the application of the referendum provision to Gibraltar. They raised the concern that the provisions as drafted could result in the need to hold a referendum in the UK even if the proposed treaty change happened to apply solely to Gibraltar and not to the United Kingdom. They said that this would be nonsensical. I agree that in such unlikely circumstances it would be nonsensical.
As your Lordships’ House is aware, the Bill concerns only the future transfer of competence or power from the UK to the EU. As I promised at the end of that debate, we have reflected further on this issue. Our view remains that the requirement for a referendum to be held in Gibraltar under the provisions of the EU Bill is not self-standing but is dependent on three things: first, that there is a treaty change which applies both to the UK and Gibraltar and, secondly, that the treaty change would result in a transfer of competence or power from the UK to the EU. Then and only then does the third condition arise; namely, whether the treaty change would also represent a transfer of competence or power from Gibraltar to the EU.
That said, we recognise that it is important to be as transparent and clear as possible. That is the Government’s intention. Consequently, we have tabled these two simple amendments to Clauses 2 and 3 to make sure that the meaning is clear beyond doubt. The amendment makes explicit that only if a treaty change were to apply to both the UK and Gibraltar, and the referendum is to be held in the UK, would that referendum also be held in Gibraltar. I beg to move.
Lord Davies of Stamford
I hoped to intervene before the Minister sat down but I missed my cue. I shall be very brief. As the noble Lord and his colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Howell, have been courteous enough to mention me in the context of our debates on these matters in Committee, it would be wrong of me not to say that we on this side appreciate that the Government have genuinely reflected on the Committee stage debate on these two matters, relatively minor though they may be. That is encouraging for us and the hope that we can all take part in improving this legislation and that the result of our labours will not be entirely nil. Does the noble Lord have in mind any specific contingency in which there might be a proposal involving the transfer of powers from Gibraltar to the EU, or is this whole subject merely theoretical? Have the Government provided for it as a purely theoretical possibility, or do they have any issue in mind that might be triggered by this clause?
Lord Triesman
My Lords, I appreciate the tabling of these two amendments by the Government. I share the view of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, that they will probably not be thought of as huge concessions almost anywhere. He put that rather generously and he is quite right—they will not. More to the point, they are wise amendments. It may well be that on some future occasion he will wish to land in Gibraltar. He would not want to receive the sort of frosty reception that he would receive if he had done anything to the people of Gibraltar other than what appears as a result of these two amendments. It is a helpful clarification. We are satisfied with it and thank him.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
If no one else wishes to intervene, I ought to answer the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford. I find it difficult to imagine circumstances in which there would be proposals that would represent a transfer of powers or competences from Gibraltar to the EU. However, I have not looked back at Protocol 3 of the 1972 Act which ratified the treaty of accession and the extremely complicated circumstances in which Gibraltar is treated as a member of the EU but does not take part in all aspects of EU policy. For example, it does not take part in the common agricultural policy, but it takes part in the freedom of movement.
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne
Would the Minister recommend to other European Union member states that have territories that are not specifically part of their geographical parameters—such as Spain and the Canary Islands, and France and her piece of territory in north Africa—that they follow the lead of the United Kingdom in drawing more fully into their embrace the territories that belong to them?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I shall not detain the House very long. The question of the different relationships between the Crown dependencies and the EU, and Gibraltar and the EU, is a deeply arcane subject. I read an extremely long report from the Government of Jersey some 18 months ago about the relationship between Jersey and the EU. It is very good bedtime reading for anyone who does not wish to go to sleep. These are very complicated areas. However, I and our advisers cannot at the moment envisage the likelihood of a referendum. We nevertheless hope that this amendment clarifies the situation.
Lord Williamson of Horton
(d) the Electoral Commission have issued a certificate stating whether or not it appears to them that more than 40 per cent of the persons entitled to vote in the referendum have voted in it. ( ) If the certificate issued under subsection (2)(d) states that more than 40 per cent of the persons entitled to vote in the referendum have voted in it, the treaty may be ratified.
( ) If the certificate issued under subsection (2)(d) states that fewer than 40 per cent of the persons entitled to vote in the referendum have voted in it, the treaty may not be ratified unless—
(a) in each House of Parliament a Minister of the Crown has moved a motion that the House approves Her Majesty’s Government’s intention to ratify the treaty, and(b) each House has agreed to the motion without amendment.”
Lord Williamson of Horton
My Lords, Amendment 5, and the similar Amendment 8 that is grouped with it, are both in my name. Although these amendments are relevant to the European Union Bill, they are not about European Union policy. They are about the way in which we deal with referendums in this country and the role of Parliament, if any, in relation to referendums. Perhaps this might have the unique result that, when we continue the discussion on this amendment, we might find that Europhiles, Europhobes and Eurosceptics are all on the same side, which would be rather unusual. The amendments have a good—indeed, a noble—parentage, since they are in substance the same as the much discussed amendment by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, to the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill.
The effect of Amendment 5 is quite simple. The Government have proposed that, if, as a consequence of the referendum lock set up in the Bill, a national referendum were to be held on any of the about 50 cases covered by the Bill, that referendum result would be mandatory and Parliament would have no role. This amendment would not change that situation if at least 40 per cent of the persons entitled to vote had voted in the referendum. However, if there were a poor turnout and a smaller percentage of the electorate voted, the result would remain valid but would have to be confirmed by a Motion in each House of Parliament. This will give Parliament its proper representative role if there were, for example, a derisory turnout.
This amendment is particularly relevant to the Bill because all the potential decisions or transfers of power or competence to the European Union covered by the Bill are already subject to our veto and the Government have stated that they do not intend to make any of these decisions or transfers in the current Parliament. Unless, therefore, a sunset clause is inserted—the subject of later amendments—or, if it becomes an Act, a future Parliament repeals the Bill, the legislation has the potential to require national referendums for many years ahead.
What would be the circumstances of these potential referendums? First, they would be about issues where the UK Government had concluded that it would be in the national interest to act. If not, the Government would simply veto the proposal under existing powers. Secondly, a referendum might be about a change to qualified majority voting. There are 40 different cases listed in Schedule 1 on subjects which voters might find of little interest or importance. An example might be a change in the method of voting for the appointment of advocates-general of the European Court of Justice. Such a bizarre national referendum would probably attract a miserable turnout. This amendment would give Parliament an opportunity to take stock. Alternatively, a future referendum might be about a serious treaty change or a group of changes. In Committee, the Minister speculated that in the future this might be the case, although I personally consider it improbable, but in any event there would clearly be a significant turnout in such circumstances. This amendment does not affect the mandatory nature of such a referendum decision.
To conclude, this amendment would bring back a role for Parliament in those cases, and only in those cases, where the British public had demonstrated their lack of interest by a very low turnout in a referendum. I beg to move Amendment 5.
Lord Howe of Aberavon
My Lords, I can add very little to the lucid presentation made by my noble friend Lord Williamson. I start from premises which I have described to the House before. My first premise is to regard referenda as unreliable things. The more complex the subject, the less reliable they become. I have said many times that the referenda which I have always been enthusiastic about were those which I was able to introduce at a meeting of the Welsh area council of the Conservative Party in the 1960s—namely, to determine, on a county basis and at seven-year intervals, whether public houses should be open on Sunday. That was put into law within a short time by Henry Brooke and remained there for 35 years, because after five seven-year lapses every county in Wales had finally been liberated, Caernarvon being the last. My noble and learned friend Lord Morris was then able to repeal the legislation. Nobody can argue with that.
Between 1974 and 1979, when I was on the opposition Benches in the other place and was able to do other things, I was on the board of a company called AGB Research, which was one of the largest and most effective market research companies in Europe, specialising largely in the measurement of television and broadcasting audiences. The whole process depended on trying to determine what people thought. In so far as we were dealing with quite simple things about broadcasting, it was easy enough to decide. In so far as we were measuring relative enthusiasm as between butter and margarine, we felt that we could rely on a referendum-style questioning and answering analysis. But unlike many of our competitors, we were always clear that we would never touch political opinion polls with a bargepole because we felt that in that area, however well one tried to do it, the outcome was likely to be less than lucid and less than decisive. For that reason, throughout this legislation I have been wholly lacking in enthusiasm for the introduction of referenda in substitute for decisions taken by Parliament.
We have reached the point when referenda seem likely to remain in legislation, but the least we can do is to try to make those referenda less ill founded than they might otherwise be. If we do not prescribe a minimum along the lines suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, then we are at the mercy of decisions being taken by almost invisible percentage votes. I do not regard there being much wisdom in a 40 per cent referendum, but I am delighted to be able to follow an example set by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who was a colleague in the other place for many years and who, the House may remember, was also the author of the Rooker-Wise amendment on income tax legislation. So for the second time, although it is not like that Rooker-Wise legislation and his name does not even appear on this amendment, I am glad to endorse his wisdom, particularly when it is reinforced by the lucid, compact argument advanced by the noble Lord, Lord Williamson. It is the minimum we can do to exclude the unreliability of this unattractive device. It should be in the hands of Parliament. This amendment enables it to come back into the hands of Parliament if certain conditions are not fulfilled. I speak in support of the amendment.
Lord Richard
My Lords, I speak in partial support of this amendment. I cannot say I am very enthusiastic about part of it, but nevertheless I agree with the general thrust. Before I turn to the amendment, I would like to say how much I admire the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, particularly his actions in the 1950s in persuading the Conservative party in Wales to agree to a set of referendums on whether pubs should be open on Sundays. I say that because in the valley where I was brought up there was a Labour majority of 35,000, but the club with the biggest membership of all was the local Conservative club. Why? Because it was open on Sundays. He deserves to be commended for his altruism, which deprived the Amman Valley’s Conservative party of a considerable amount of beer money.
My Lords, I am not too keen on this amendment for one reason. We have a figure which, if it is not reached, then prima facie at any rate the referendum should not be valid. However, in those circumstances where the turnout does not reach 40 per cent, the result is deemed to be valid because the matter will come back to Parliament and, if each House passes a resolution saying that, despite the turnout being under 40 per cent, the measure should go through, then it will go through. I question the value of that. If you have that in the Bill, it seems to me it is slightly pointless having a 40 per cent plateau. If one is going to have a figure that the turnout must reach for the referendum to be effective, why should Parliament give the Government a second chance of getting their policy through? If there is a condition that you must have 40 per cent, surely if you get that 40 per cent the referendum is valid; if you do not, the logical conclusion is that the referendum is not valid. If it were as simple as that, I would support the amendment entirely. On the other hand, I must say that if the amendment is one the House is prepared to accept, I would certainly go along with it rather than not have anything like it.
Lord Waddington
My Lords, I find the amendment rather strange. I certainly agree that a poor turnout may be taken as complete lack of interest in having a referendum on the issue, but a poor turnout certainly could not be taken as support for the measure in question. One must remember what sort of measures we are talking about: these are measures that cede more power to the European Union. So if there is a low turnout, the one thing that is absolutely certain—along with the fact that there may be lack of enthusiasm in voting at all—is that there is minimum support for ceding more power to the EU. That seems to me to be an absolutely rotten reason for handing the whole matter back to Parliament. Half the trouble at present, and the reason there is so much distrust over this whole area, is that people feel that, over the years, Parliament has been far too fast to cede more powers to the EU.
As I have said before, it seems extraordinary that when the people give to our parliamentarians the opportunity to use certain specific powers they then spend the whole of a Parliament handing over those powers to other people. No wonder there is a lack of understanding of what is being done in the people’s name. It is pretty nonsensical to say that if there is a low turnout in the referendum, we should hand the whole matter to Parliament, which is half the cause of the trouble in the first place. After all, it is Parliament which the public feel, with fairly good evidence, cheated them of the opportunity of a referendum when Lisbon turned up as a rehash of the European constitution. That is one of the causes for the Bill. We are having a Bill now to try to rebuild some of the lost confidence in the EU, and we should judge the amendment by that problem. As far as I can see, the amendment would add to the problem rather than reduce it.
Lord Tomlinson
When I heard the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, speak about nonsenses, that seemed to be a cue inviting me to participate in this debate. The noble Lord talked extensively about ceding powers to Europe, but the very essence of the Bill is that the issues subject to referenda are issues that require unanimity in the Council of Ministers. The Government have every power that they need; they have only to say no and by that process they can stop any ceding of powers to Europe or anywhere else. They can deny unanimity. That is not what it is about. The idea that the Bill is the last bastion defending the rights of Englishmen, to stop his rights being transferred to Brussels, is really the argument of the knave who knows better, because it does not do that at all.
If we are to have what I believe to be nonsensical referenda inflicted on us, there has to be at least some measure to give a minimum standard of credibility to the referenda. Like the noble Lord, Lord Richard, I am not particularly happy about the amendment, although I will support it. The idea of putting to a referendum an issue where people can vote for or against does not really transfer sovereignty to the British people. I would far rather see a question with four options: “For”, “Against”, “Don't know” and “Don't care”. If we had that, considering some of the issues which will be subject to referenda, I suspect that it would be a combination of “Don't know” and “Don't care” that would win in every case. The amendment would not give us a great deal of protection, particularly as, as I said, power already rests in the hands of Ministers. If there is such a reluctance of Ministers to use the power that they already have, an honourable retreat is available from Government to the Back Benches, so that they can continue their impotence from there. When the Government have every power that they need, they also need the political will to use it, not to use a fig-leaf argument trying to bind a successor, in circumstances where they seem to be predicting their imminent defeat at the next election.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard
My Lords, I rise to support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, which is a Tory amendment. I am surprised to find myself sounding more Tory than the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, which is a feat I had not expected to attempt. The noble Lord, Lord Williamson, comes from the West Country, and I suspect him of being a Burkean. At Second Reading, the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, took us through John Locke. The Taverne view against referenda was derived from Locke, and he contrasted that with the evil Rousseau, who led the French in the direction of referenda. I would have preferred to have dinner with Fox, but Burke impresses me on the role of Parliament. The reasons I support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, have nothing to do with the European Union; they have to do with the position of Parliament.
Burke’s speech in 1774 was to the Bristol electors who had just elected him. He had the guts to say:
“The wishes of the people should have great weight with their Representative, their opinion his high respect, their business his unremitted attention. It is his duty…to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to them…Your representative [in Parliament] owes you, not only his industry, but also his judgment; and he betrays you, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion”.
That seems to me to be the core of Tory philosophy on parliamentary democracy. I agree with all that; it seems to me to be 100 per cent correct.
This Bill is a constitutional innovation. It says that once an Act of Parliament has been passed, it will be struck down by the people if they say no in a referendum. This is not the alternative vote referendum scenario. As Conservative noble Lords may remember, we did not vote for the alternative vote; we voted for a referendum on the alternative vote. In the case of this Bill, the treaty amendments that would have been considered by Parliament, and the 57 varieties of decisions—the baked beans can of decisions—that would have been considered by Parliament would have been subject to Acts of Parliament. They would have received parliamentary approval and then they would go to referenda. That is the first time, I think, that has happened in our constitutional history.
Lord Tebbit
I am grateful to the noble Lord for lecturing me on conservative principles. Does he think that when Locke was making that speech—
Lord Tebbit
Does the noble Lord think that he envisaged a day when Parliament would be transferring sovereign powers from the people of this country to those of another country, to people who they could not elect and could not dismiss?
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard
I am sure that Burke was not thinking of the situation of the EU Bill which is before us. The noble Lord is absolutely right. He may have been thinking of a situation in Ireland which developed in ways that bore some resemblance to that during his lifetime, but I am sure that when he was addressing the Bristol electorate his concern was simply with explaining to them how he saw the role of Parliament and the sovereignty of Parliament. It is because I think that he was right about that that I think that we should vote for the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, which I hope he will press to a vote. It does not restore full parliamentary sovereignty, but in a situation where—in his words—a derisory turnout had voted, the question of whether Parliament’s will should be overruled would be raised. That is a little bit of Burke that would be rescued from the mess of Rousseau that we are in.
Lord Dykes
I rise briefly to speak enthusiastically in support of this amendment and to thank the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, for his remarks—I agree with them all. I was, like others may be, a little startled when the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, began to say that he rather agreed with the first part of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Waddington. But I understand what he was getting at. The beauty of the amendment is that it can appeal to a whole range of Members of this House in deciding, irrespective of their own particular views on the virtue of referendums, or referendumitis, or the danger of referendums, or whatever, that this would be a good way of making more respectable a given referendum result with a turnout requirement—following the wisdom of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, in a totally different context—and would make sure that we were not trivialising the exercise in a way that would disconcert the public in a big way. The beauty then is that, if the threshold is not reached, the power goes back to Parliament and the Government as the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, would always wish.
On 5 April, in the early stages of the Committee of the whole House, the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, in referring to Schedule 1, said:
“if we present to the electorate the sort of issues in Schedule 1 and ask them … to turn out at the polls”—
in referendums—
“we are being not only completely unrealistic but deeply insulting to them”.—[Official Report, 5/4/11; col. 1694.]
I have left out a few of the smaller words, but essentially that is what he said.
The electorate would say that that is what they elect parliamentarians to decide. We could easily have participation rates of less than 20 per cent, and we would return, therefore, to the Vernon Bogdanor example. I believe that this matter is important for parliamentarians in both Houses, but particularly here, as this House has an opportunity to improve the Bill in a way that government Ministers have already started to do with their generous amendment. We must work hard to restore public faith in the public’s ownership of first-rate parliamentary standards of tradition, work and devotion to the public good. My personal view is that I am very fearful of referendumitis and this Bill would deliver a lot of it in the future if the situation were allowed to get out of hand.
Most sensible citizens are highly intelligent and quite rightly regard subjects other than mere politics as far more important and crucial. I often do. I would cite family and children, the local community, jobs and job prospects, football and—even better—rugby, holidays, the kids’ results at school and music. Very many of those things are more important than politics. The public want to enhance political quality by leaving the political decisions to their elected representatives, even if some of them in the other place are sometimes rather nerdy people, like Bill Cash or John Redwood. We have to remember the warning words of my noble friend Lady Williams when she spoke of the disastrous example of California, which had become a bankrupt state as a result of excessive referendumitis and foolish populism. This amendment provides a pragmatic way of making the results of referendum—if there has to be one—more respectable. I hope that this House will support it.
Lord Stoddart of Swindon
My Lords, I wish that the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, would not describe people who oppose his points of view in such terms as “nerds”. It does not enhance debate and it is quite unnecessary to lampoon one’s opponents.
The amendment has a certain superficial attraction, but we need to be extremely careful what we do. If you say that a decision on an item on which a referendum is to be held can take effect only if 40 per cent of the electorate vote, you could say that about almost every election we have. People are elected to the House of Commons—certainly in by-elections—on a turnout of less than 40 per cent of those entitled to vote. Why on earth should that be legitimate and a referendum on a matter which is to be transferred to European governance not be accepted? We have to be very careful not to create a precedent here which might be used in other circumstances that may be inconvenient to Parliament and certainly to local authorities, where the turnout is very often far below the 40 per cent of those entitled to vote.
The noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, talked about the various alternatives that might be put on the ballot paper. If you pass this amendment, there is another alternative which is that you can campaign for people not to vote. That is good democracy, is it not? Or is it? If you encourage people not to vote to get the decision you want, that is extremely bad democracy. I do not want to delay the House any further, but I believe that before we vote we should be very careful about what we are doing.
Lord Lamont of Lerwick
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, as always, made a very careful and thoughtful speech which places me in a slightly awkward position. I find it surprising that there is so much enthusiasm for this amendment from those who accuse the Government of obstructing the process towards greater European integration. They have said that the Government have been putting locks on moves towards further European integration. Here they are putting a padlock on the lock; they are putting another obstacle in the way of European integration. Let us not forget that one will get a referendum only when the Government are proposing to acquiesce in a step towards European integration. Therefore, I find it a little strange that those who are enthusiastic about more integration and think that the Government are being obstructionist about this want to put up another obstacle.
I do not accept the argument of the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, that there is a danger that we will have lots of referendums on trivial subjects such as the number of advocates-general or the voting system for having advocates-general. There are several reasons, which we went through in Committee, why we will not get a whole series of trivial referendums. First, these sorts of changes tend to come along in packages after major treaty revisions and we have been assured there will not be major treaty revisions. It seems unlikely that any one country is going to invest a huge amount of political capital pressing for a change in the voting system for choosing advocates-general. If some power has not been given to Brussels even after the Lisbon treaty and the Maastricht treaty—the series of constitutional treaties we have had—if powers are left to individual countries, there is a very good reason for that. Obviously in previous negotiations countries have not wanted to cede those powers. The idea that we are going to get a lot of referendums on trivial matters is unrealistic and is a chimera. If that was the basis of the noble Lord’s argument I would not accept it. There are many subjects that are by no means trivial, such as our borders and our criminal justice system, where it would be wholly appropriate to have a referendum. That is why I am broadly a supporter of the Bill.
I said at the beginning that the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, places me in a slightly awkward position because I was, as some of my noble friends will remember, a very strong supporter of the 40 per cent threshold for the referendum on AV. Indeed, I voted twice against my party on it. I do not like to make personal comments but I got to my feet largely because of my noble friend Lord Dykes, who I have known for many years. On the AV question, my noble friend was a very firm opponent of the 40 per cent threshold to which he has put his name on this occasion. As I am placed in an awkward position and he is also exposed in an awkward position, I am prepared to do him a deal. If he will not support this amendment, I will vote for it.
Lord Risby
My Lords, it is worth pointing out that the referendum is now part of our political culture. Indeed, it is not only part of our political culture, but right across the European Union referendums are deployed to get people’s views. It is now a fundamental part of the whole democratic process. However, the potential effect of this amendment is to make the referendum advisory. That is the point because if it is below 40 per cent the decision is referred back to Parliament. The essence of that argument is that the result ceases to be mandatory and effectively becomes advisory. That destroys the whole point of the reconnection process.
We are trying through the Bill to reconnect the people of this country with the European Union. It is a big challenge. If we are going to re-engage people in that process we must recognise that, if there is going to be constitutional change, the vast majority of people will want to feel that their voice is represented in the process. We owe that to them. I very much agree with the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, that the 40 per cent figure is arbitrary. It would be absurd in a local or European election, when sometimes the figure drops below 40 per cent, to reject the result. That is not the way we do things. We must remind ourselves that the vast majority of people will want a referendum if there is going to be an important transfer of powers to the European Union.
The AV referendum showed us that on an important constitutional issue, the people of this country will be fully engaged. They took it seriously and voted in great numbers. I have the greatest confidence that in a matter such as the one before us, the potential transfer of additional powers to the European Union, they will of course be very interested. Therefore, I feel that turnout would be quite high.
We must make sure that people feel that when they vote, their vote counts and is decisive. Otherwise, it will destroy the point of the referendum. The referendum lock should be given without qualification; it is in the spirit of what the Bill is about. The fullest acceptance of the referendum result voted by the people is something that we should recognise. It is our duty as parliamentarians to do so.
Lord Flight
My Lords, I voted on two occasions for the Rooker amendment on AV. It is tempting to join the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, in taking the position that there may be a similar argument for supporting here an amendment that requires a 40 per cent turnout. However, the position is not at all analogous. In this situation, the aim is to protect the people of this country from having the powers of their Parliament and Government further diluted and given away, as has sadly happened in the recent past, with Parliaments breaking their word to citizens and acting in a way contrary to that which they promised—I refer, for example, to the recent Lisbon treaty.
It is very clear that the Bill is there as a protection for the British people, and it would be made meaningless if we said to them, “We are going to give you this lock and protection, but if less than 40 per cent of people vote, we will give power back to the Government of the day who command a majority in the House of Commons”. It is not an analogous situation to changing the voting system, where there were powerful arguments requiring an adequate turnout. It is not a situation that Burke would have supported in the slightest; he would have been absolutely against giving away the powers of the British Government and Parliament to another organisation. Either we give citizens a meaningful lock or we do not. Therefore, I feel no discomfort in opposing these amendments, having supported the Rooker amendment on AV; it is the whole point of the Bill.
Lord Deben
My Lords, I find myself in disagreement with both my noble friend Lord Lamont and the noble Lord behind him. I am opposed to referenda in any case and do not think that we should judge referenda, even if we are in favour of them, by the particular amendment that is before us. We should judge referenda as referenda. Therefore, to vote for a 40 per cent division between compulsory and advisory on one subject and not to vote for it on another seems not to hang together. The issue is not about the European Union. Everyone knows where I stand on that. It is about an issue which comes from before that. Long before there were these debates on the European Union, there were debates about referenda. I enjoyed debating them and I have not changed my view on them.
The parliamentary democracy which we have is the greatest gift which we have been able to give to the world as a whole. Irrespective of the comments of my noble friend Lord Risby, parliamentary democracy and referenda do not go together, as a matter of fact. The one comes from a different tradition and I am not going to be one of those who besmirches the tradition by referring to the use of referenda by such people as Louis-Napoleon. That would be wrong. But referenda do come from that tradition and not from our parliamentary tradition.
Therefore, I was much enlightened by the reminder which the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, gave us of the great conservative thinker, Edmund Burke. He said that the embarrassing fact of being a parliamentarian is that you do have, in the end, to make up your own mind, even though the popular press, the women’s advisory committee of your association, the local doctors’ alliance and a whole range of other people tell you that you have got it wrong. I remind noble Lords of what happens if you take that away. It means that nobody with a strong view on abortion, for example, would be able to uphold his or her view in those circumstances. If he or she were to follow the views of the electorate, he or she would not be able to uphold what he or she thought was a moral position. The same would be true about capital punishment. No one would have voted against capital punishment if they had listened to the average elector over the past 30 or 40 years.
Let us not be too easily lulled into that simple concept of the referendum now being part of our democratic heritage. Referenda have always been used—I say this as a committed Conservative—in a way which has tended to favour those who take a very conservative attitude. My noble friend takes a very conservative attitude, so I am happy to give way to him.
Lord Tebbit
May I assume, therefore, that in defence of parliamentary sovereignty and all that of which he has been speaking, my noble friend will assert the right of Parliament, and none other, to decide whether prisoners should have any voting rights at all? Will he be on side in this matter or will he defer to some agency outside Parliament?
Lord Deben
I am always worried when my noble friend intervenes upon me but I am very pleased on this occasion to say that I agree with him entirely. This is an issue for Parliament and Parliament should make up its own mind—I have no doubt about that at all. He need not worry. I am a great defender of Parliament. But I ask this House not to allow itself to get into the situation which the Swiss got into. After all, Switzerland was the last country in Europe to allow women to vote. Why was that? Every time they passed it in Parliament, it was the referenda which defeated it. I ask noble Lords to be very careful about this.
Let us look at this amendment. I have great sympathy for the view which the noble Lord, Lord Richard, expressed. It seems to me that this is a very simple concept. We who are arguing for it have accepted that in our view, for bad reasons, we are going to have referenda. We are unlikely to have a referendum on something trivial—I do not really agree with the noble Lord, Lord Williamson; I think it will be likely to be on something of note. It will be on something which the Government have decided not to veto. It is going to be quite a rare occasion. It is going to be something which the Government have presented to Parliament, Parliament is going to vote for it, and it will then be placed before the public. All we are saying is that if less than 40 per cent of the public think it worth while voting, Parliament can reconsider the matter. It can take into account what the public have said and then ask itself what should it do.
I finish by saying that I would say this about a proposal for a referendum on something that I believed my side would win in all circumstances. This is not a matter about the subject; it is about the mechanism. It is that which we should face. May I suggest to noble Lords that this House has got to do its duty in ensuring that when there is a major change, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said, we ensure that it is not one with unforeseen circumstances? All we are saying is that if enough people vote, then it is mandatory; if not enough people vote, it is advisory. That seems to me to be a sensible compromise, so I ask the Minister to help those of us who find this Bill very difficult indeed and at least allow us to have this compromise, which is in the best tradition of British parliamentary democracy.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch
My Lords, seldom have I been made glummer than I have been made by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Deben, and indeed, by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, and those who tabled this amendment. They have encapsulated perfectly the disdain of the political class for the people of this country.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch
I am indeed a member of the political class, but I think I see it perhaps with more objectivity than those who tabled this amendment. If your Lordships' House has a vote and less than 40 per cent turn out for it, the result is still valid. If 10 per cent of your Lordships' House votes, perhaps rather late at night, the result is still valid.
I say that those who tabled this amendment really do not understand the disdain of the people of this country for the political class, and that disdain is justified. Look at the position into which our political class has led this country over the past 50 years—since Suez, perhaps, and we got that wrong. Our children cannot learn to read; our prisons are overflowing with the illiterate; our hospitals are dirty; we are failing the old, most of whom end their lives in misery and loneliness; our streets are dangerous; our transport is creaky; our police are overburdened and overbureaucratised; even our Armed Forces are being asked to do too much with too little, and their morale is beginning to crack; immigration is out of control; Islamism is on the march; and our economy is in terrible trouble, the pain of which will, of course, be visited upon the people. I think the British people are justified in thinking very ill of their political class.
Noble Lords may remember that for about two minutes last year I was the leader of the UK Independence Party and, rather against my will, we consulted focus groups, which I always think should be completely unnecessary. Even I was surprised by the answer to the question about what people thought about the political class. Every class of the British people in every area of this country said that they regarded the political class not with dislike, not with disdain, not with distrust, not even with anger, but with hatred. I believe that our system of representative parliamentary democracy, which those who tabled this amendment and the leaders of our political class like so much, is no longer supported by the people, and therefore has broken down.
Do not let us forget that up to the 19th century and the early 20th century most people in this country could not read, so it was reasonable to send representatives to Westminster to take decisions for them. But now people can read. On the whole, they are very much more sensible than the people who represent them and they want referendums. They want referendums not only on the European Union but perhaps across the board, which might be the only way to reconnect the people with their democracy. I believe that their decisions—even if only 15 per cent of them turn out to vote—will be very much wiser than those of our failed political class. Therefore, I oppose these amendments.
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, I shall speak specifically on the 40 per cent threshold and will start by reaffirming the point made by other noble Lords on these amendments going against the Government’s objective of re-engaging with the British people, particularly on major EU issues about transfer of power and competency. I want to reassert the coalition’s intentions on referendums in other parts of our life. The Localism Bill, which we discussed yesterday, has many arrangements in place for referendums.
It might be helpful to remind the House of the other referendum that took place a couple of months ago. I am not referring to the AV referendum but the one in King’s Lynn about an incinerator. After a strong campaign against a local incinerator, the turnout was 61 per cent. It was interesting that there was a division between a county council view and a district council view about whether there should be such an incinerator. The county council view ignored the will of the people. I am afraid that my Conservative colleagues and my noble friends on these Benches suffered some significant defeats in the local elections. Nine councillors were rejected because the people felt that their voice had not been heard after they had been allowed to give it. We miss that opportunity at our peril. I have given that specific example because, in Committee, I raised the issue of the Scottish referendum in 1979 after which there was a significant disconnect. It has taken many years to address it. Some would argue that there is still a legacy of distrust between Westminster and Scotland.
I would prefer the political parties and other groups involved in campaigning for referendums to engage with the public, rather than there being a threshold which, as others have mentioned, could skew the result. You may get not just the “don’t knows” and the “don’t cares” referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, but those who do not support the motion actively being asked not to vote in order to skew the result. Then the public debate becomes about voting and not about the issue. That would be wrong.
The contrast between these two types of referendum is striking. In the first, a real referendum resulting in engagement with the public undoubtedly has helped the public’s perception. The 1975 EU referendum benefited the perception and understanding of the EU for many years. But in Scotland there was a real contrast and, as I have mentioned, serious damage is still there.
Finally, last year, the Lords Constitution Committee stated that there should be,
“a general presumption against the use of voter turnout thresholds and super-majorities”.
Let us heed that sage advice and not support the amendment.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
My Lords, I find that I am afflicted by the quite well known advice once given to me by the Whips. It was, “Never listen to the debate on any issue”. When I saw this amendment I was rather dismayed because, as my noble friend Lord Lamont pointed out, it replicates exactly the proposal which he, I and others put forward on the AV referendum. I found myself thinking, “Now I have got to be against this because I am against Europe taking more powers from Britain. How am I going to reconcile this in my mind?”. My noble friend Lord Deben has been very helpful in this regard because it is not about the issue of European powers or the role of the European Community. It is about the relationship between Parliament and referendum.
I am going to upset a number of my noble friends by being on an unpredictable side in this argument. My noble friend Lord Risby said that it is now part of the culture in Europe to have referenda. I am rather alarmed by that, because we have a parliamentary democracy. I support this Bill in its intention, which is to give the people a say before a power is transferred, if that should happen. It seems very dangerous to get into a position where we have what is a constitutional innovation—the concept of drop-dead referenda. The moment the vote is cast, that is it. It has become enshrined in law and Parliament no longer has a say. That is a new concept which has crept into our constitution. When we joined the European Union, we did not have a referendum of that form. The Scottish referendum, with all due respect to my noble friend, was not of that form, either. Parliament was still in control and had the final say. My noble friend Lord Deben has been consistent throughout all the time I have known him in his opposition to referenda. I am not against referenda but they must be supported by a substantial group. We could argue about whether 35 per cent or 40 per cent or 50 per cent is the right number, but there ought to be a clear view expressed by the people.
Perhaps I may take up an earlier point. I know nothing about the incinerator but I have been involved in public life long enough to know that if you want to put an incinerator anywhere, you are going to get a majority in a referendum against it. That is why we have elections and that is why we have Parliament. It is in order to take difficult decisions, which, as my noble friend has said, may very well be unpopular. So I am rather inclined to support this amendment for that reason. It seems to be consistent in supporting the constitutional principles which this House should be concerned about. Tempted as I am by the expediency of the case, I think that argument ought to prevail.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
In supporting this amendment, is my noble friend comfortable with the concept of a turnout of less than 40 per cent, which is therefore null, and a no vote by a narrow majority? Bearing in mind that the Government will have instigated this referendum because they want a yes vote, if they get a no vote by a narrow majority and the House of Commons reverses it to a yes vote, is my noble friend comfortable with that idea, because that is what he is advocating?
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I am not advocating that at all. It would be a matter for the House of Commons to decide. The House of Commons and this House would have to take account of the nature of the campaign and the strength of the vote and the arguments that are put forward. The pressure of a referendum in itself, however big the turnout, will be a major factor in the considerations which are taken by the elected Members. I am not comfortable with the idea of cutting Parliament out when there may have been a low turnout. By the way, I was also not comfortable with accepting these arguments when I rejected them not many weeks ago in the context of having a threshold on the AV referendum.
Lord Taverne
My Lords, I want to make three short points. First, I refer to the argument of the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, who always argues his case with great force and effectiveness. However, on this occasion, it seemed rather strange. He said that if there is a low vote, it simply proves the lack of enthusiasm for the European Community, and the fact that people will not vote is equivalent to a no vote. The circumstances, as has just been pointed out, will be whether the Government support a change in the law. Suppose the next Government are a Conservative Government. They are not likely to make a major transfer of powers to Brussels. On some of these minor matters in Schedule 1, they might see the advantage in not having a veto and make that part of their case. If there is a very low vote, it is a toss-up as to which way it will go, but a 10 per cent vote in favour of a transfer of power and 9 per cent against is a quite a likely result. In effect, the argument put by the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, is that it makes a transfer of power more likely.
The noble Lord, Lord Lamont, says that it is not likely that there would be an individual vote on some of the minor matters set out in Schedule 1 because they would be packaged, which is also what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, has told us on a number of occasions. But a package is particularly unsuitable to the referendum process. Let us suppose that some people in the country are passionately concerned about joining the European public prosecutor’s office, while others are passionately concerned not to have an extra judge in the European Court of Justice. Yet others may be very concerned about not having a new protocol for the deficit procedure. All those issues may be part of a package. Which way should people vote if they are in favour of one and against another? What should they do? It makes a nonsense of any sort of referendum.
The second point I want to make is that if this amendment is not passed, we are likely to be left with referendums on some of these minor matters. Are they really going to bind this country closer to Europe and reconnect the public with Brussels? Are they going to make Brussels more popular? Of course it is a result that I do not necessarily approve of, but would it not make referenda less and less popular with the public?
That brings me to my last point. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, referred to Burke. I should like to comment on that since I was the first person to bring Burke into the argument. In his doctrine, Burke says that the will of the people should always prevail; it is the anti-Rousseau argument. What is interesting is that while there have been some tests of it, although only a very few, they suggest that Burke is actually quite popular. I shall give two examples. In my speech at Second Reading, I referred to a by-election in which I resigned on an issue over which I was unpopular in the sense that a local poll showed a majority of three to two against our joining the European Community. But I argued for the principle of Burke that I was entitled to exercise my judgment, and Burke prevailed by a substantial majority. I can give another example. One of my neighbours where I lived until recently was a Conservative MP I greatly respected. He was the late Norman Miscampbell, who was a Member for Blackpool. Many people will remember that a police superintendent was murdered in that town, and a campaign was launched by his widow to restore the death penalty for the murder of a policeman. It had overwhelming support in Blackpool, but Norman Miscampbell, on principle and very bravely taking the Burke view, voted against the restoration of the death penalty. His fellow Conservative MP in Blackpool, the late Peter Blaker, supported the petition and voted in favour of it. At the next election, Norman Miscampbell’s vote increased by somewhat more than that of Peter Blaker. Burke is not unpopular. When they reflect on it, people think it very reasonable that Members of Parliament should exercise their own judgment and not act as puppets.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
My Lords, perhaps I may make a few remarks in support of this amendment. I find some of the arguments that have been used against it quite bizarre. The noble Lord, Lord Risby, said that the vast majority of people in this country want these referendums. If so, he has nothing to fear from the amendment. If the vast majority of people in this country want referendums, more than 40 per cent of them will vote when a referendum question is put, and this Bill, as amended, will then provide mandatory outcomes. It has been suggested that this is all about engaging with the British people, but if we cannot get 40 per cent of the people to vote, is that not a failure to engage with the British people? Surely that is precisely what it is, which is why having a threshold makes sense.
I argue that we should not go down the primrose path of thinking that the referendum fashion is sweeping across Europe. First, we are not talking about Europe; we are talking about Britain. I do not see why we should accept that argument as valid in our case. In any case, I have a strong feeling that most people who have supported referendums around Europe now bitterly regret it. In the most recent one, last weekend, the Slovenians voted against raising the pensionable age to something quite a long way below the pensionable age in this country; not, I would have thought, a very sensible thing to have happened—something rather like the incinerator case, I suspect. I am very much in the same group as the noble Lords, Lord Deben and Lord Forsyth. It is not a very good idea to have these referendums. The Government could quite easily have avoided most of the petty referendums by drawing up a much simpler Bill, but they chose to throw in the kitchen sink. Given that, the case for a threshold is really rather compelling and I therefore support the amendment.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
Before the noble Lord sits down, does he accept that the power of the Executive has got much stronger in the House of Commons? We all talk here about parliamentary democracy in terms of the other place, but how many times have the Government actually been defeated over the past 20 years?
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
It is not the time of night to go into a lengthy disquisition on British constitutional history, but we still live in a representative parliamentary democracy and we still accept that a Government who have a majority in the House of Commons can make laws. However, we are seeking to contradict that with this provision. The amendment that is being moved is a small, modest palliation of that.
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne
This amendment is not in fact about the absolute underpinnings of this Bill, although it is a very tempting set of red herrings that have been laid in front of your Lordships’ House. This set of amendments is about whether or not there should be a 40 per cent threshold and, with your Lordships’ permission, I would like to comment purely on that point.
The 40 per cent threshold seems to me, as a former Member of Parliament and of the European Parliament, to be a rather odd thing for noble Lords to be considering today. We do not have a 40 per cent threshold in the general election or in the European election, for example. We are perfectly comfortable with assuming that 50 per cent of those who come out to vote is the threshold on which the electorate are exercising their wisdom. I find it extremely difficult to see why, just for this Bill, some noble Lords are so adamantine in their perception that a 40 per cent threshold—and no less—is the absolute minimum they will accept if a referendum is to give a valid answer from the British people.
All noble Lords who have commented on the imperative of parliamentary democracy and Parliament’s primacy are, of course, absolutely right. I think that it is Clause 18 of the Bill that, for the first time ever in many generations in Parliament, absolutely clearly defines that it is only through the primacy of Parliament that EU legislation can be accepted at all. It is our responsibility. The noble Lord, Lord Waddington, made the point in his very thoughtful intervention—and I fully support this—that we have been far too fast in ceding power from this Parliament to the European Union. However, I would perhaps remind him that that is our responsibility, certainly in the House of Commons and Government but also, to a much lesser extent, here. The noble Lord, Lord Roper, is in his place, representing the several generations of outstanding work by EU sub-committees in your Lordships’ House. That has not been the case in the House of Commons, which has let slip piece after piece of legislation pouring in from Brussels. Indeed, it is the Ministers of the day, from every single Government—from the previous Government and the ones before that—that have fed the House of Commons so little material that somehow it has unwittingly, or in some other mode, let through all of this legislation and the growing burden of all these regulations which are, I believe, oppressing the peoples of the European Union and particularly the peoples of the United Kingdom.
This modest Bill, although it is relatively lightweight, does contain two or three very important points, the first of which I believe is the primacy of Parliament over EU legislation and therefore surely over the outcome of any referendum. It also gives the wonderful possibility of a downhill-driven knowledge base to the British people and some small modicum of authority over what will happen. I very much support the Bill because of those two points.
Coming back to Burke, to the point that was raised in the context of representative parliament, I cannot help but comment, because the flavour comes through so strongly, that some of the arguments that noble Lords are putting forward tend to resonate with those of us whose female forebears fought for the vote for women. In other words, somehow some elements of the population are not fit to bring their judgment to bear on important matters affecting the United Kingdom. It is difficult. Burke, of course, was wonderful, but before him and at his day women did not have the vote. Academics had more than their current bundle of votes per person, so did the landed gentry, so did the aristocracy; well, wonderful, but today is different.
One of the key differences is that today we have modern technology. Only the day before yesterday I had five e-mails, no less, from the great Steve Jobs himself urging me to discard my newly purchased iPhone and my iPad of the week before last in favour of iCloud, where all my data are going to be parked for ever and a day. Modern people, men, women and children of all backgrounds, all income brackets, all of us—I leave aside prisoners because I do not want to interfere with the debate between two prominent powerful members of the Conservative Party on that one—all those people have knowledge now, absolute knowledge, just as much as we do, and they have time, they have energy, they get involved.
My noble friend Lord Dykes commented that—despite the absence of cricket in his tremendous tour de force of commenting on what the British public are interested in—the British people trust their political representatives to make political judgments on their behalf. Noble Lords know full well that the British public have no trust in any politician at all at the moment, although I believe that they have greater trust in your Lordships’ House than in the other place. What they do have confidence in is the knowledge that they take, albeit false knowledge, from Wikipedia, from iCloud and from other data that are now so readily available 24 hours a day and which people take, commandeer and use. Therefore, they want to be involved; they are able to be involved; they are knowledgeable about being involved and that is why the heart of the Bill is a good idea.
The 40 per cent threshold is a very odd idea, unless we are going to carry it right forward into the European Parliament, into the general election, into local elections, presumably—we can have a dismal turnout, yet we respect the council that is elected none the less and the mayors that are elected, if they are. I expect that there will be a pretty low turnout if we have elected police, for example. So we do accept that low turnout and we take just over a 50 per cent threshold as a majority. That is the way in which our parliamentary system works, that is the way in which our electoral system works. I can see no rationale, no reasonable argument that has been laid in front of your Lordships’ House so far this afternoon, which tells me that I should support this set of amendments. These referenda will be few and far between—probably once every 10 years if the European Union actually proposes a further transfer of sovereign power, which at the moment is highly unlikely. It is busy with the euro, it is busy with the superabundance of enlargement; it is not going to propose anything very important for the moment on these grounds. Maybe once every 10 or 15 years there will be a referendum. Is this of such profound significance that it outweighs the normal way in which we vote in general elections? I think not. The logic is against it because the Bill says that the primacy of the British Parliament overrides everything coming from Brussels in any case. I oppose the amendments.
Lord Triesman
It has been a long debate and I suspect that there has been a very full review of most of the issues. I am very pleased to be associated with the noble Lords, Lord Williamson and Lord Dykes, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, in this amendment. I also find myself in very strong agreement with the noble Lords, Lord Deben and Lord Forsyth. I too have been thinking about Burke. It may completely destroy any prospect of my ever sitting successfully on these Benches again, but the reality is that those are the key arguments.
There was such strong support for my noble friend Lord Rooker’s original concept of thresholds and the feed-through to the parliamentary system—there are some differences here that I shall explore in a moment—because it was felt strongly that when there were to be significant changes to our constitution or the arrangements under which we are governed, there ought to be a demonstrable degree of legitimacy. Goodness knows, 40 per cent is a pretty modest figure when looking at a level of legitimacy for changes that profound. None the less, it was an attempt to say that there should be some authority for the decision, and that the figure gave at least that degree of authority. One of the arguments adduced at the time was that in the commentary on the turnout in local elections, in particular, dipping below 40 per cent, as it often did, people made very severe criticisms of the quality of our democratic life. When it was higher than that, people tended to think it was healthy. I do not want to say that that seems to be the key reason. I just make the point that on turnouts of less than 40 per cent, results were routinely disparaged. Anybody looking back over the press and other commentary at the time would come to same conclusion.
The constitutional debates in this House were interesting. Many of your Lordships said that once the decision is taken in a referendum we should not try to second-guess the electorate. They will have spoken, however small the turnout and however profound the issue. None the less, they will have spoken. That was never a convincing reason not to look at the prospect of some threshold. That is why I agree so strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Deben. Unfortunately, we look at it from where we are now, with this legislation in front of us.
The reason why I assert that we may be in a slightly different position now is that most of the arguments that my noble friend Lord Rooker produced are still very good. However, the argument today has a slightly different salience. It has been argued that, in relation to Europe, the people of this country have felt disenfranchised. That may well be true; I do not particularly choose to argue that it is not the case. They may well resent having had less say than they believed they should. What is needed in these circumstances may be the indelible mark of people’s approval for changes that might have a significant effect on their lives. I can see that. If it is true that we need that new kind of indelible mark, let us make sure that it is a credible mark, which has some authority and dignity and has not gone through on very small figures.
The reason why I believe that this is significantly different from the arguments about, for example, local elections, and different—with the greatest respect to former Members of the European Parliament—from European parliamentary elections, is this.
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne
I was merely making the general point that 50 per cent-plus is our normal modus operandi. It is impossible to see why it should be any different for this referendum.
Lord Triesman
My Lords, the argument for 50 per cent plus has been widely canvassed recently among the people of the United Kingdom, who formed a very clear view of it, which I agree with. I make this point because it goes to the heart of the difference that we are discussing. The difference seems to be that Parliament will have taken a decision to put the matter to the electorate. The question is: what size or degree of opposition should there be before Parliament is overridden and its decision—the decision that has been advocated by the Government of the day—set aside? The decision that forms the fundamental proposition being put to the people will have been argued for from government Benches, and may well have been argued for from opposition Benches as well, before it ever gets to the point where it is put to the people. The constitutional innovation is that people are being asked to set aside whatever Parliament, and indeed whatever the Government that they have elected, have said. This is a very profound difference from any arrangement that we have seen at any time in the United Kingdom.
Lord Stoddart of Swindon
My Lords, before the Minister gets up, I have a point of order.
Lord Stoddart of Swindon
I will make the point of order whether there are interruptions from other parts of the House or not. The noble Lord, Lord Triesman, said that we had had enough of this debate and that, when he got up, no other noble Lord would be able to speak. This is not in accordance with the Companion to the Standing Orders and Guide to the Proceedings of the House of Lords. If noble Lords turn to paragraph 8.139, on page 152, they will see that, as long as the House accepts that they should do so, noble Lords may speak until the Minister gets up. After this, there shall be no speeches. However, before the Minister or spokesman gets to his or her feet, with the permission of the House, any Member of the House may speak
Lord Howell of Guildford
My Lords, if the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, is correct, as I have got up, this debate now comes to a close.
As always, it has been a fascinating debate with many profound remarks. It has predominantly been a debate about referenda, but I do not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, that the debate has been entirely separate from the Bill. Speaking as one of the, I suspect, rather few ex-Ministers who have taken a referendum Act through the other place in the distant past—the Northern Ireland referendum Bill—I suppose that, in the eyes of my noble friends Lord Deben and my noble and learned friend Lord Howe, I am damned before I start.
Nevertheless, let me set out one or two of the arguments that have perhaps not been exposed as clearly as they should. We know that the purpose of these amendments is to include a minimum turnout threshold for any referendums arising as a result of the Bill. If the threshold is not met, regardless of the result, hey presto, the referendum would become advisory and not mandatory. This proposition has a whole string of disadvantages, which are not all obvious but become clear if you think about them. First, as many of your noble Lords have pointed out, instead of it being mandatory on the Government, it leaves the British people in real doubt about what the effect of their vote will be. The noble Lord, Lord Triesman, is incidentally entirely wrong that it will be mandatory on Parliaments; it will be mandatory on Governments, though it is true that Governments often, but not always, control Parliaments. However, this goes by the board if we pass the amendment. It will be the end of the British people’s mandatory certainty and they will be back where they started, passing the ball back to Parliament and the party and Government controlling Parliament. This is where the record has, frankly, not been brilliant or reassuring. This is one of the reasons why we are facing these problems.
We have the glorious assertions of excellent and eloquent spokesmen like the noble Lords, Lord Tomlinson and Lord Triesman, that the only need is for the Government to say no. However, they have not said no. They have said yes, when many people have felt that this yes was the wrong and inappropriate proposition. The fear is that, now that we have said yes to Lisbon, we have said yes about handing many important powers to the European Union. We work with the European Union and believe that they should have powers. However, will it be a no or yes in future? The doubt remains. The doubt must be removed. The reassurance is not there. For the vast majority of the people, the call is for the reassurance to be there. Though the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, will not agree with me, I suspect that the vast majority in this country want us to be good Europeans and to be effective in Europe and effective in allowing Europe to use—and not have us unravel—its vast range of existing competences. They are, however, worried as to whether it will be a yes or a no in future. The noble Lords do not seem to have grasped this central point. It is simply not right to lead people in doubt about what their role will be. It leaves them with a doubt—a dangerous doubt—about whether they will be listened to, about the lack of clarity and about whether their views will count.
The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, brought us back to Edmund Burke. I love Burke. He is one of my favourites. However, he is not particularly my favourite when he warned that democracy only works if, as he put it, there is a policeman within each one of us. It is slightly different from the proposition about parliamentary democracy. We all know perfectly well that Burke was not operating in today’s situation. He perhaps did not foresee the iron discipline of party politics, where some parties get a complete grip on Parliament. Has the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, recently read—or ever read—Lord Hailsham on elected dictatorship? In it he would find a heavy antidote to the glorious idealism of the Burkean age, in which the noble Lord, Lord Deben, and Mr Burke could speak out to their conscience freely unaware of any party restraints. I have spent 31 years in the other place and I am afraid that every day I was aware of party restraints.
I cannot see that this 40 per cent threshold would reconnect the British people with the decisions being taken in their name at the EU level; it certainly would not do so. These devices do not serve to solve the problem, as astutely identified by a great many commentators day after day on the radio or in the newspapers. I see that my brief refers to the BBC’s Europe editor, who said the other day that,
“Across Europe voters feel insecure, suspicious of an elite with its own vision of an ever closer union but which doesn't necessarily address their hopes or fears”.
I would hope that this wise House of Lords, where we wear our party allegiances somewhat more lightly, would support efforts to resolve this concern and to see the European Union on a more solid basis than, frankly, it is today, not only for lack of popular support but because it is facing very serious policy issues as well. For those of us who want to build a better relationship between the British people and the EU and, indeed, people generally and the EU right across the 27 countries—soon to be 28 or more—I would have thought that this is the way to go.
By the same token, the amendment before us undermines that whole aim of the Bill. That is the first point which must be taken into account and cannot be dismissed, unless those who do so think that popular support and consensus are irrelevant, do not arise and that parliamentary wisdom is so entrenched and admired that anything decreed by Governments in Parliament will be immediately accepted—it will not. Secondly, the point has rightly been made that thresholds of this type encourage game playing during a referendum campaign rather than a proper presentation of the arguments to achieve a desired result. For example, if supporters of the yes campaign know that Parliament supports the treaty change in question, they have a huge incentive to keep the vote down below 40 per cent rather than going out and making the case for change.
Thirdly, the Government believe that we should encourage public participation rather than providing reasons for keeping that down. We could wish that the internet age had never occurred and that the days of massive and wide public consultation had not developed, but they have. As my noble friend Lady Nicholson rightly pointed out, are we saying that local elections are not legitimate? We can wave a hand and say that they are different but that is just an assertion. I do not think that they are all that different. Are we saying that the European parliamentary elections are not legitimate? What does it do to the trust in the body politic if a majority have voted no in the referendum but Parliament decided, because it has the power to do so, to go ahead anyway? That would be extremely damaging.
Fourthly, the Lords Constitution Committee, to which some of my noble friends referred, in its wisdom—it is a very wise committee—shares opposition to thresholds. Its report on referendums in the UK concluded that,
“there should be a general presumption against the use of voter turnout thresholds and supermajorities”.
Thresholds are bound to distance voters from the issues on which the British people want to have their say. Incentives to campaign to abstain would be vastly increased.
There is a further question. During our first days in Committee on the Bill, the wise noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said that during the debates on the EEC Referendum Act 1975, the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher—then Margaret Thatcher—had objected to the possibility of the referendum being mandatory. She also said:
“The Government might regard themselves as bound, but the result could not fetter the decision of Parliament”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/3/1975; col. 315.]
That, of course, is exactly our point. That is why I fear that the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, is wrong. These referenda, or the referendum that might occur—I think that it will occur only once every few years, but I will come to that in a moment—are mandatory on government. That is the whole point of the Bill. However, they are not mandatory on Parliament. They cannot be. Parliament’s view of the treaty will be taken during the passage of legislation for the referendum. If Parliament did not support the treaty, it would not pass the legislation, so Parliament has its say and remains supreme in every sense.
Lord Williamson of Horton
My Lords, it is traditional to say we have had a wide-ranging debate. On this occasion it is true. When I put the amendment forward, I hoped I would get a measure of support from different parts of the House. I have done that, but of course there has been a good measure of disagreement as well. I have also succeeded in doing something I did not set out to do: I have clearly split the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats. That will, perhaps, give me a reward in heaven, although I will go on a little longer to say that I will be first to have a reward here in the Chamber.
I would like to make one or two very brief points. The first is that this amendment comes forward because of circumstances that have been dictated by the Government’s Bill. They are nothing whatever to do with a blank space about how we are going to deal with Europe. We have a Bill on the table that potentially introduces more than 50 referenda. I do not think we will get those, but in any event what is happening in the near future, to which the Minister referred, is not relevant because the Government is not going to take this action during the current Parliament.
What we are discussing is what sort of referendum regime we want to build into our constitution for the medium term and what role we think Parliament should play in that. I think Parliament should play some part, particularly in those cases where the British public has shown a complete lack of interest in—or even their disagreement or contempt for—the Government’s attempt to hold a referendum by voting in negligible numbers. I think it is perfectly reasonable, in those circumstances, for Parliament to take responsibility. That is the basic approach and I stand by it.
I do not want to go into all the other details because I know nothing about the incinerator in King’s Lynn. I do not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, that we have reached the death of the political class. I know they are a bit threatened, but I do not think they are dead. All those issues are beyond me.
One final point is that there have been a good number of comparisons with elections, local elections and so on, which have no 40 per cent bar. I think all those arguments are totally irrelevant. In particular, we had a Second Reading of a Bill yesterday that made possible a large number of referendums on local government. Every one of those referendums was going to be advisory, not mandatory. The position of the Government, particularly the Liberal Democrats, is in favour of advisory referenda and I cannot see why they wish to act differently in this case. I think I have said enough, and I wish to get my reward here and not in heaven. Therefore, I wish to test the opinion of the House.
Lord Liddle
“(a) a referendum does not need to be held in accordance with section (Process for determining the necessity of referendums); or(b) ”
Lord Liddle
My Lords, after that great victory for Parliament—let us thank the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, for moving the amendment and being the moving spirit behind it, with other Cross-Benchers—I now speak to the amendments in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Triesman, which are also about the role of Parliament, about strengthening Parliament and substituting the discretion of Parliament for the automaticity of the referendum locks that the Bill contains.
The amendments do not drive a coach and horses through the basic principle of the Bill, which is a requirement for referendums on the big issues affecting Europe's future, but they set up a special Joint Committee of Parliament: the European Referendum Scrutiny Committee. In cases where Parliament had passed an Act under this legislation, that committee would be there to consider whether it was necessary to have a referendum on that Act. In making those judgments it would take account of the criteria in subsection (4) of Amendment 5B. Those criteria include whether the matter was significant, whether it was urgent and where the national interest would lie. It would come to a judgment on whether it felt that a referendum was justified. If a referendum was justified, it would be up to each House, in a Motion, to approve that recommendation. It is important to emphasise—because this is a change in the amendment that we moved in Committee, perhaps to make it more acceptable to sceptics in the House—that if there was not to be a referendum, it would require both Houses to say no to the recommendation of the Joint Committee that there should not be a referendum. In other words, it would meet the point that the noble Lord, Lord Howell, makes that with executive control over the Commons, it would be possible for a whipped vote to defeat the idea of a referendum, because they would have to go against the recommendation of the committee and win that position in our Chamber as well.
What is the point of putting in place this proposal? It is to inject proportionality into the Bill. The Bill contains no proportionality whatever. It is a “thus far and no further” Bill as far as the European Union is concerned. It assumes—and it is an extraordinary assumption—that a Government can today foresee all the circumstances in which change in the European Union might be necessary over the coming years. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, keeps telling us that he sees very little prospect of a referendum occurring in the near future. However, within two years of the approval of the Lisbon treaty we have already had a proposal for a revision of that treaty, under the simplified revision procedure, to create a European stability mechanism, which is necessary to deal with the crisis in the euro area. That is not the result of an attempt to deceive people after it was thought that there would be no treaty changes immediately after Lisbon. That is not the reason. The reason is that, due to the crisis in the euro, circumstances have occurred which no one foresaw and it is necessary to make this minor amendment to the treaty.
As it happens, that does not affect us. However, if there was a change which in a similar set of circumstances did affect us, it would require a referendum. Yet it is hardly the kind of major issue about the nation’s destiny that would justify having a referendum. It would therefore be up to the Joint Committee that we would establish to decide on the proportionality of these questions as to whether a referendum was necessary. It is a strengthening—an affirmation—of the rights of Parliament, just as we have voted for a few moments ago, and an important one to make.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
My Lords, I support the amendment. It seems to me that it addresses an issue which desperately needs addressing in the Bill, and that is flexibility. The structure of the Bill, particularly in its elaborate nature, with the 56 possible incidences of referenda, is, frankly, a couch of Procrustes, on which we are busy stretching ourselves and on which, no doubt, our feet or our heads will one day be lopped off. It is very rigid indeed. It leaves very little appreciation to the Government of the day, although of course the Government of the day will have had to agree in Brussels that, in principle, subject to the proceedings in this Bill, they will go along with it. However, then the rigidity comes back in. It is not surprising in a way. The Government proudly call this Bill a referendum lock, the key of which they have taken out and are now throwing out of the window.
I think this amendment is one way to deal with the issue and earlier today we discussed others. I very much welcome the fact that the Government recognise that, in the handling of this “or otherwise support” issue, they needed a bit more flexibility and they have now moved an amendment, which I was delighted to see went through unopposed, which gives a little more flexibility. It enables a Minister in Brussels to say that he would take something back to London and subject it to the procedures under the Bill, but that he would support it. It enables him to say that but, of course, it does not allow it to go through in any legal sense. That is an increase in flexibility. We have just voted for an increase in flexibility for Parliament because, if less than 40 per cent of the British people are prepared to get off their backsides and vote, then Parliament will be able to take a decision itself and the result of the referendum will be only advisory.
It would be splendid if the Government would think a little more about how to introduce more flexibility into the Bill, while not removing the essence of it. I accept that it is supported by a majority in the House of Commons and that it is in the coalition agreement, which says that, if there are major constitutional changes, there will be a referendum. As the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said, the recommendations of our own Constitution Committee are rather clear on this point but were ignored by the Government. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, quoted the bit he liked, but did not quote the bit he did not like in the Constitution Committee’s report. That was a much longer bit, which said that referendums should be used only for major constitutional innovations. If you look at the various clauses of the Bill, you will see that there are stacks of things there which are not major constitutional innovations. This provision will give a little more flexibility there, and I hope that the Government will seriously consider that because flexibility will be needed somewhere down the line. The more care taken with the legislation, the better that legislation will be for the interests of this country.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine
I say to noble Lords opposite that we on the Liberal Democrat Benches recognise that this amendment is intended to enhance scrutiny and to improve propositions that might be put forward by the Executive. We also accept the spirit of what noble Lords opposite are trying to do. For the record, I do not find, in the copy that I have just looked up, the elements of the coalition agreement to which the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, referred as endorsing this amendment. I would not want to tempt him to read out the entire section on Europe in the coalition agreement, as the hour is late.
I shall speak to the substantive elements of the amendment. We do not believe that it would be right to take such a dramatic step to remove from the Executive, the Government of the day, the decisions about what they will support or not and to give them to a committee of both Houses. We have had a long debate about Parliament and the importance of parliamentary scrutiny and so on. In Committee, we heard a lot of argumentation across the House regarding urgent situations and what would happen because decision-making was so late and would be so stymied. I find that the methodology proposed here would certainly add to the amount of time that would be taken to deal with measures if a Joint Committee had to rule on them. There would also be the issue of reintroducing some rather subjective concepts: urgency and national interest. We have had debates on those subjects; both are highly subjective. We are also conscious of the judicial review implications contained in the Bill.
Finally, the amendment seems to miss the underlying theme of the Bill, which is that the Executive make a call on a proposal, bring it to Parliament, Parliament agrees it and then the public are to ratify that decision through a referendum. As we have repeatedly heard from the ministerial Bench, the Bill is designed to reconnect the British public with these policy issues that emanate from the European Union. The public will be empowered, through the processes proposed here. To take that away and to give it to a Joint Committee of both Houses seems to me to entirely miss the point of the Bill. On that basis I suggest that it goes contra to where we had got. Before I conclude I give way to the noble Lord,
Lord Davies of Stamford
The noble Baroness has said that one of the reasons why she did not want to support the amendment was that she was worried that it would raise the possibility of judicial review on the decision about whether a referendum was necessary. According to this amendment, that decision will be taken by a parliamentary committee—in this case a joint parliamentary committee—so how could there possibly be a judicial review? That would be contrary to the Bill of Rights.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine
I think I can see the point that the noble Lord is making. I wonder whether he is interested in hearing my reply, as he is now engaged in another conversation. As I understand the amendment, the committee would make a recommendation to the Government on the basis of urgency, significance and national interest. I think the decision of the Minister, in accepting or not accepting the recommendation, would be subject to judicial review.
For the reasons I have enunciated, I can see that the amendment is well meaning but I urge my noble friends to oppose it.
Lord Davies of Stamford
My Lords, the clause makes no reference to the Joint Committee advising the Government. The Joint Committee would have the responsibility for making a decision. By definition, if the decision is made by a parliamentary committee—a Joint Committee or other parliamentary committee—it could not be subject to judicial review.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine
Since the noble Lord continues with the matter, I will detain the House for a moment. What is the point of a recommendation coming out of a Joint Committee if the Government ignore it?
Lord Empey
My Lords, I have listened carefully to this debate and there is one thing that we can say about ourselves: we are at least consistent in our inconsistency. We were talking earlier about 40 per cent thresholds and yesterday we were talking about 5 per cent thresholds, and some of us have been subjected to referendums over the years whether we like them or not. Therefore, the important argument about parliamentary democracy which was put forward eloquently by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, and others does not quite register. I fear that this amendment suffers from the same weakness that it is the purpose of the Bill to try and resolve—that, effectively, Parliament is making these decisions. We hide behind the words “major constitutional significance”—some people may say they are weasel words—because what is major to me might not be major to the noble Baroness. We then take away from the Government of the day any significant role unless they rely on their party positions to whip people into particular positions.
The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, referred to the fact that the Government had to be able to respond and be a good partner to our European colleagues. I believe that the United Kingdom has been an exceptionally good partner over the years. However, simply because we have particular constitutional architecture concerning how we take decisions that affect us in no way invalidates us as a good partner nor does it invalidate a Government’s ability to respond. There are many decisions that require an urgent response. I see no reason why that cannot continue.
It is only when there is actually a change of substance that time will be taken to ratify that. Even when we have been talking about the current economic position in Europe we have been looking at the stability arrangements and others, and we know that these are going to take 18 months to 24 months to get through on existing arrangements. Therefore, I do not believe that this country would be unable to respond and act as a good partner. Nor am I frightened by the prospect that if we enhance our constitutional arrangements our European partners will take the huff and stop dealing with us. I do not believe that for one moment. It is our business. I believe that the Commission accepts that it is our business to decide whatever structures should be put in place. That is the way of the world. Other countries do it. Other countries have referenda; other countries have a variety of constitutional locks. As the European Union grows, I suspect we will enhance the variety of different decision-making processes that come in. Why should we be worried about that?
I do not think that people on the street are running around saying, “I wonder if we are a good partner with our colleagues in Paris or Bonn”. I do not think this is something that registers with the people. What does register is if they are told one thing and then something happens that is the opposite of what they were told or promised. That comes back to why there is a need for such a Bill. Whatever its inelegancies—and I can see that there are many—it is there because we have broken a trust. There is a huge gap between what we as politicians think and what the public think of us. It has only been the recent financial crisis and the situation with bankers that we now have somebody we can look down upon. Until then, we were really at the bottom of the pile.
The truth is that we are, and have been, inconsistent. We have chopped and changed on referenda. Burke was quoted extensively—I am no scholar on Burke—but he was operating in the 18th century.
Lord Empey
Yes, and all the better for it. However, time has moved on and things have evolved from what we did when kings were able to come into this building and chop people’s heads off. Our constitution continuously evolves. Just because we are attracted to the idea that a representative should be free to come into Parliament and express his or her opinion on behalf of those they represent—and people believe that to be a sacrosanct position—in the way the modern world has developed, the referendum genie is out of the bottle whether people like it or not. You are not going to be able to push it back in so the question is, what triggers it? Do we leave the trigger with the institution which has led us to the position where this Bill is on the table or do we put in some safeguards so that people know they will get their say?
I think that there is little alternative but to give this a try. It is not something that will last for ever—it might change. After 10 or 20 years it might no longer be sustainable and we need to improve it. We have moved on, people have moved on, communication has moved on and, thank God, people are educated to a much greater extent. Years ago, when people came into these buildings they represented the masses outside who could not read or write. Perhaps very few people had any grasp of what was going on around them. Their world was confined to their farm or, in more recent years, to a factory. Today, the people out there are much more sophisticated and probably know more than many of us in here. We have to respect that and trust the people.
We all make mistakes and sometimes referendums produce results that we do not like. The same happens in elections: it is the peril of the democratic world. However, we should look at the alternatives around the world. Whatever faults we may have, ours is a better system, but it has to evolve. I fear that this amendment, if passed, short-circuits and defeats the whole purpose of the legislation. Therefore, I am unable to support it.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Empey, because the purpose of the Bill is to give the people of this country the final say on what happens in terms of our relationship with Europe. If we allow this amendment to go through—and I totally oppose it—the effect will be to open it all up again so the discretion is left with Parliament. That is where the whole problem started. Successive Governments have misled this country about the implications of the treaties that we have signed. They have always been understated.
I spent much time as a Government Whip in another place saying to my colleagues, “Don’t worry about this, it is just tidying things up and putting things in order. It does not really have any impact on the way we do business here.” Every single time I said that I was lying through my teeth. Government have been lying though their teeth from the very start when we entered the economic community. We said to everybody, “Don’t worry, there are no issues of sovereignty here. We are joining a free trading area. A free trading area is a wonderful idea and we want to get into this as quickly as possible”.
Baroness Quin
When we joined the European Economic Community, we were already in the European free trade area. I am old enough to remember that the debates focused on the difference between a free trade area and the treaties that established the European Economic Community.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
That was not the story that I was told. If I had realised the massive implications for the transfer of sovereignty as a result of signing, I would not have supported the referendum on the question of our membership of the European Union.
There has been a tremendous amount of deception. Not only is it an understatement of what we have signed up to, but it is a process of grandmother’s footsteps—a little bit at a time, always understating the implications. Therefore, with reference to the amendment, if we leave it with Parliament to make the decisions about whether the implications of the business are worthy of a referendum, we are right back in the position of deceiving the people of this country and will merely sow more mistrust and undermine the whole purpose of the Bill, which is to reassure the British people that if there is any question of us being drawn further into the European Union we will put it to them to decide whether it should happen.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch
My Lords, there is another reason to disagree with the amendment. Any Joint Committee composed of Members of your Lordships' House and the other place is bound to be stacked in favour of the Europhiles. In your Lordships' House, we now number some 800 Members, of whom I think only eight are prepared to say, more or less in public, that we should leave the European Union. That compares with some 84 per cent of the British public who want a referendum on whether we stay in the European Union at all—which has nothing to do with the Bill—and more than 50 per cent who believe that we should leave outright. In recent years, I have often pointed out that the composition of your Lordships' Select Committees is skewed in favour of Europhilia, even by the standards of your Lordships' House. I have not made a recent examination of the members of the main European Select Committee or its sub-committees, but I am prepared to bet that not a single member of those committees agrees with at least half the British people, and perhaps only two or three of them could be regarded as vaguely Eurosceptic.
In the House of Commons, some 26 Members have joined the joint Better Off Out group and have voted in a refreshingly Eurosceptic direction on the Bill and other matters. The Joint Committee of both Houses of Parliament of course will be stacked by the Whips and will, in the recent tradition of both Houses of Parliament, get wildly out of tune with the British people—something that the Bill is supposed to do something to correct. The amendment goes in entirely the opposite direction and I hope that it will be resisted.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard
My Lords, I need to recant. In Committee, I was against the amendment on the grounds that it complicated things. However, now it seems that it may be the only hope for dealing with a problem that I had hoped would be dealt with by another route. I was young, innocent and idealistic; I did not realise that we would end up cheering a government concession that means that, in the Bill, “support” is a term of art defined at the beginning, and the various prohibitions on Ministers of the Crown in any way supporting X, Y and Z does not mean that they cannot propose, advocate or support them in Brussels—just that they cannot vote for them. This is a huge advance and I am beginning to understand how difficult the legislative process is.
Clauses 2 and 3 have two different procedures, depending on whether the treaty amendment emerges by the classical method plus a convention, or by the accelerated method that is meant to deal with emergencies. We have two different procedures, and one of the paradoxes is that we have a significance test in the second but not in the first. Therefore, we envisage that any treaty amendment by the first, traditional method plus the convention must be significant. The second curiosity is that I thought that a treaty amendment was a treaty amendment, whichever route it came by. The third curiosity is that the accelerator method, covered in Clause 3, is meant to be used in an emergency, but we do not have any emergency or urgency test built in.
The charm of the amendment, as I now see, is that it brings in these tests. It would get significance into the traditional method, where it is not at the moment. It would also bring in urgency and the national interest, which perhaps is not a bad idea. It is a complication and it is a great pity that we have not had any clear rationale for the separate methods that depend on the origin in Brussels of the treaty amendment. However, we are where we are and clearly the Government are not going to give us any concessions on that. Therefore, faute de mieux, I support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Liddle.
Lord Howell of Guildford
My Lords, I begin by dissociating myself entirely from the statement of the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, that somehow the Bill gives encouragement to referenda and public votes “on anything and everything”. That was his phrase, but it could not be further from the truth. It would be impossible to think of a proposition that is more remote from what the Bill is intended to do. The Bill is about transfers of power and sovereignty—over a wide range of issues, I concede—from the United Kingdom and this Parliament to the European Union. I am left almost speechless; what is unimportant or trivial about that? These are issues that we have dealt with again and again—the famous red lines that successive Governments have found to be of extreme importance to Britain. The argument is not that we should not be involved with the European Union in all these areas, but that we should retain a veto power if we are pressed too far; that all the powers that are needed have been conceded under the Lisbon treaty; and that those that were left out—the remaining issues where unanimity must prevail, where the veto must be kept in place and where no further treaty competences should be transferred—are all the important remaining ones, which many of the 27 countries insisted on preserving.
These are the important issues: defence and security, national security, military issues, national tax, fiscal and energy policy, provisions under the EU budget, financial management of the EU, citizenship and elections, foreign policy and social security. These are not trivial issues that can be dismissed. What prevails in these comments is a devastating lack of understanding of the importance of the remaining issues that are not within the competence and power of the EU because the nation states do not feel that it is necessary for them to be there—and, on the contrary, think that they should remain under national and sovereign control. Therefore, the starting point of many of these comments is so far removed from what is in the Bill and what the Bill is concerned with that I find it very hard to find a bridge of words to link the two, but I will try my best.
Under these amendments, decisions on whether a referendum on treaty change or a decision—these are big issues—should be held would be made by a special committee of both Houses. This is similar, though not identical, to the debate we had on amendments in Committee. They were limited to Clause 6 decisions, and seem to have widened the scope of the so-called European referendum scrutiny committee to cover treaties and Article 48(6) decisions. This is a big assignment of discretion to this parliamentary committee. How this committee would come about, I am not too sure. I have to say in the best of spirits to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, that if he thinks that this committee would be free of interference from the Government or party-political pressures of various sorts, then his innocence is not entirely lost.
I am at least pleased that this amendment recognises that consideration should be given to the need for a referendum when treaties or Article 48 decisions are to be made. This is a clear step forward from the status quo, where it was entirely down to Ministers to decide whether a referendum was to be held and where, as we have sadly seen, Ministers and Governments can and do change their minds—hence many of our problems. The amendment appears to have retained the provisions in the Bill—which is good—that all treaties and Article 48 decisions must in future be ratified through an Act of Parliament. At least it retains a greatly increased role for Parliament, which this Bill stretches for and seeks to provide. This is a definite advance.
Moving from ministerial discretion over whether a referendum should be held, to parliamentary discretion over whether a referendum should be held, really is not sufficient. What we would have is an extra step in the process of deciding whether to have a referendum, which I suspect would merely diminish further rather than increase the confidence and trust of the British people when compared to the current provisions in the Bill and to what the Bill is trying to do. It would cut right across, and therefore potentially diminish, the work done by the European scrutiny committees of both Houses, which—despite the overrides, which one must concede have been too frequent—has been valuable in giving some impression to the general public and to the electorate of this country that there are some brakes on the system.
Why would the arrangements for the proposed European referendum scrutiny committee diminish public trust? The answer is that because whereas the Bill is, with the exception of the narrowly defined significance test, very specific about which transfers of power and competence would lead to a referendum—that is what this whole Bill is about—these amendments would do away with the certainty. In agreeing the Bill as drafted, Parliament would be giving a clear signal to the public as to when a referendum would be held. If the amendment were agreed, the whole process would be lost in a whirlpool of subjective political judgments and, I have no doubt, of manoeuvres as well, and of all the pressures that operate through our political system—perfectly properly, because that is the way that a democratic system works. The idea that they would be absent and that an isolated, divinely independent judgment could be reached by this committee is absurd and naive.
These amendments require the committee to assess all treaties and Article 48 decisions against significance, urgency and the national interest. These are highly subjective terms which are capable of a far wider range of interpretation than the criteria in Clause 4, which have been carefully analysed and crafted. This amendment moves the whole debate away from an objective consideration of whether power or competence has been transferred from the UK to the EU. It moves it away from objectivity to subjectivity of precisely the kind which works against trust and against confidence, and against support for the whole European Union project which I thought so many noble Lords wanted to see reinforced.
Government and Parliament will of course take into consideration issues of urgency, importance and certainly the national interest when negotiating a treaty change, and in passing Acts to ratify treaty change. These are centrally important issues, but they are not the right criteria on which to decide whether a referendum is needed before a treaty change or an Article 48 decision is ratified.
The other problem with these amendments is that the decisions on these highly subjective issues will be made, frankly, by a small number of parliamentarians. I have said that we are not quite sure how they would come to be on this committee. The way this committee is set up means that it could only ever deny the public a referendum, which is what is promised under this Bill. I do not like to say it, but when my noble friend Lord Hamilton points it out, it is a fact that the British people’s trust in the institution of Parliament and the political parties within it has, in this area, been eroded over the years, particularly on issues of Europe; I sometimes think that on other issues it is grossly exaggerated. One always marvels at how many people are generally critical of the political class, but when they start talking about individuals—the hard-working Members of Parliament—they say, “Oh no, our person is splendid. It is just the general lot we do not like”. It can be overdone. However, on the issue of Europe, it is quite clear, by every measure that we have seen of the public’s support and the general tenor of the public debate, that a lack of trust is noticeable. People have been promised a referendum on a treaty change, only to see it taken away again. This is reflected in the number of people who do not value the EU, who do not trust it or who simply do not seem to grasp its work, aims or purposes. There is a sense of apathy, because people feel powerless to influence decisions which affect their daily lives. To deny this really is to shut our minds to the good and valuable side of the EU’s work, which I believe is enormous and often underestimated.
The coalition Government intend to address this cynicism, apathy and lack of trust. The aim is to reconnect the British people directly to the key decisions on the EU and assure them that, while there are now vast powers and competences in the EU’s hands, any further expansion of these would have to be very carefully argued and in many cases put to the British people for their approval. It remains a mystery to me why the Opposition still somehow argue that there should be these extra powers—that we are going to need these future treaty changes—but what for? One is left groping the air, trying to understand the mystery of it all. It is a sort of apophatic doctrine, that somehow there are issues ahead so complicated that the people cannot put them into words or understand them, and that these require the flexibility which the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, keeps returning to.
We know that the British people want a say. The June 2009 survey by the European Parliament found that eight out of 10 people in this country agreed that future EU treaty changes should be decided by referendums. Fewer than one in 10 disagreed. These amendments do not represent the modern reality about transparency and openness that we in the coalition Government want, and which reflects a modern attitude to participatory democracy. They are a step back in time which may be nostalgic and romantic, but they take us away from reality and away from the future.
I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Waddington, who is not in his place at the moment, for what he said about these proposals in Committee. He said that,
“you are moving even further away from a situation where the general public has any confidence at all that its views are considered when vital decisions are made”.—[Official Report, 16/5/11; col. 1230.]
However well intentioned these amendments, they cannot serve to enhance this Bill or its underlying virtues and purpose. The Bill is deliberately designed to set out as clearly as possible which treaty changes would require a referendum, while avoiding the need for trivial referendums. That seems to me to be a scare story which I hope we are not going to hear repeated because it is not connected with the reality, the intention or the possibilities which arise from this Bill. Leaving it to the discretion of a committee of parliamentarians to decide whether a referendum is needed will do nothing whatever to reconnect, re-engage and regain the trust of the British people. I believe this is an amendment that we could do without and that does not help the Bill or the underlying purposes, which I believe most noble Lords in all political parties and in none basically want reinforced. I think these amendments go the other way and take away from us the purposes and goals that we should be pursuing, so I ask the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Liddle
My Lords, I have to confess that I am staggered by the Minister’s reply. He misrepresents the position of the Opposition, and I do not think he understands the content of the Bill that he is putting before this House. Let me briefly say why. He goes on at length about allowing people to vote on decisions that affect their daily lives. Is he putting this forward as a general principle? Do the Government think that there should be a vote on the merits of their health reforms and the changes to their health reforms? How many people in the country do they think would vote for that? The idea that this Government stand for a general principle of giving people the right to have a say over decisions that affect their own lives is a nonsense.
Why is it that this principle should simply be applied to the European Union and be applied in a way in which the Government do not appear to understand what they are doing? The Minister says that we are saying that this Bill will require referenda on anything or everything. In the case of the European Union, there are 56 instances where this Bill requires a referendum. Is it seriously being suggested that there are 56 issues of profound importance affecting Britain’s future in Europe which would require a referendum? I suggest not. We know what those major issues are. We will have amendments later to confine the referenda to those major issues. It is a nonsense to suggest that we should have referenda on 56 issues. As far as Europe is concerned, that is anything or everything.
There is a point-blank refusal on the part of Ministers to understand the need for some flexibility when we are dealing with the future. I do not think that the government Benches understand the point of an Article 48(6) simplified revision procedure, which is under Clause 3. It is to deal with circumstances which we cannot foretell, yet in every circumstance, apart from very limited exceptions, this legislation says that such an amendment would require a referendum. It is the view of every expert on the European Union that that is going to inhibit greatly Britain’s ability in future years to play a leading role in the European Union.
As for the Minister’s remarks about how parliamentary committees are all fixes and you cannot trust what they say, I thought that he had respect for the workings of Parliament and for the workings of the Constitution Committee of this House, for instance, which puts forward very objective reports, despite the party composition of its membership. I would have thought that if we agreed, as this amendment proposes, to a parliamentary process for deciding what was proportional, such a parliamentary committee would do its job independent of the Executive in such a way that we could all respect its judgment.
I am afraid I am unconvinced by the Government. I am not prepared to withdraw the amendment, and I wish to test the opinion of the House.
Research: Science and Technology Committee Report
Lord Sutherland of Houndwood
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their response to the Report of the Science and Technology Committee on Setting priorities for publicly funded research (3rd Report, Session 2009–10, HL Paper 104).
Lord Sutherland of Houndwood
My Lords, it is often said that the future success of this country depends on our continuing success in science and technology. Although I am not a scientist, I fully agree with that comment. There are clearly a number of other determinants of national well-being, not all of which are in our control. However, success in science and technology is significantly within our control. It is with that element of the nation’s future that we are concerned today.
We start from a strong platform. We have talent and, equally importantly—I shall come back to this—we attract talent to this country. This is a good place to be a research scientist. We have institutions which give civil support to this, most notably the Royal Society, as well as the various academies and institutions, including the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of which I confess an interest as a past president.
We have talented and able scientists who continue to build on the legacy of Newton, Boyle, Harvey, Darwin, Clerk Maxwell, Rutherford and so on. I could go on for half the evening but I shall not. I mention those names and the talent of our scientists to point out that, in forthcoming debates about the membership of this House, I fervently hope we will continue to have the immensely able and informed scientific opinion which, as noble Lords will hear in this debate, we have with us. As the boxing metaphor puts it, the nation has a capacity to punch above its weight in science, technology and engineering. This is not simply an additional national boast and an intellectual luxury in which we enjoy indulging but one of the key conditions of our economic vibrancy as a nation.
This report was prepared as a matter of some urgency in the autumn of 2009 and the spring of 2010, before the impending election, to help the debate about the place of science and technology in our community at a time which evidently was going to be one of financial austerity. For a variety of reasons the report comes fairly late to this House, but there have been significant movements since it was submitted both in the Government’s response and in the development of some of the recommendations that we have made. As a consequence, my remarks will focus partly on the report—some of its highlights and one or two of its key recommendations—and partly on policy developments of the new coalition Government which have real significance for our capacity in science and technology.
Initially, what were our main recommendations? The first is just motherhood and apple pie; that is, spend money wisely. I have to say that usually—I speak here as a chastened former vice-chancellor—scientists come along with their hand out doing a good impression of Oliver Twist asking for more. That is not the point of this report. The point is to use what we have to best effect and to ensure that in policy formulation and implementation the systems that we have are at least fit for purpose. Although we are not asking for more money, I should point out—I think that this will come up later—that we need to keep in mind who our competitors are internationally. Both France and the USA have declared their intention of enhancing the spend on science and technology.
As to the report and spending money wisely, I want to make two points, which I think will be expanded on by some of my colleagues. Evidence given to us suggested at that time a certain flabbiness in co-ordination within government, in policy formulation and in drawing on the best possible advice in this area. I believe, and I think that my colleagues agree, that this led to a limitation in overall vision. Science and technology and its importance for our community is so critical that there has to be a vision that is clear and understood widely by the community at large so that when we are supporting significant spend in science, as we are and which is a good thing, the arguments will be understood by the wider community.
One condition of informed vision, planning and policy is knowing where we are. We asked a key question of our witnesses: what is the total spend, department by department, across the whole of government on research in science and technology? Our witnesses, who came from well-informed sources, could not answer that question. One of them significantly pointed to the difficulties in this country as compared with other countries in putting a total figure on research and expenditure in science and technology across all departments. You can do it for the research councils—that is pretty straightforward—but a significant part of our research activity is funded through departments. “We don’t know” was the answer, and no one at that stage could tell us. I believe that there has been progress since then. I will come back to that in a moment. We need to know what steps can be put in place to ensure that there is such a total picture of the platform from which we start in planning expenditure in this area.
The second point I want to make from the report is that we attach very great importance to the role of the Chief Scientific Adviser. I believe we have an excellent Chief Scientific Adviser at the moment. There are scientific advisers in most departments but not all. I point the finger at the Treasury here. I would like to know when that is going to happen. There was talk of a scientific adviser there. The Chief Scientific Adviser and his colleagues in departments have a critical role to play in policy development and implementation. We believe that the Chief Scientific Adviser should have more access to specific departmental and interdepartmental debates about funding. The condition of this is that they are present in key meetings with the Treasury as these are identified over the months and years to come. The scientific adviser should have input into departmental expenditure, budget creation and discussions with the Treasury. The advice that the scientific adviser gives in the formulation of policy is critical. We also put stress on encouraging scientific advisers to find the best advice they possibly can. This may not seem an obvious point but it was obvious to us on the committee. The recommendations I point to have to do with the chief scientific advisers, their presence departmentally and also, in Sir John Beddington’s case, at key Treasury meetings and departmental management boards.
In the few minutes remaining to me I want to point to two or three policy developments that will have, and are having, an impact on our capacity in science. This has been a constant refrain from the committee over the years. The Government’s left hand must know what their right hand is doing. Understandably, co-ordination sometimes fails. It is a big complex business. However, I will give three examples where I have concerns to ensure that the unintended consequences which could be bad for science are not a reality. I start with the question of science in schools. I thoroughly supported the clear statement by the noble Lord, Lord Browne, about the importance of funding STEM subjects in universities, both in civil terms and also in terms of the economy. I am concerned that that has not gone along with equally clear statements about whether we will have enough well-qualified and able students coming through to fill the places in universities that are going to be so funded. Put bluntly, I am concerned that that will not be the case. I simply ask the Minister to ask her colleagues in the relevant department what they are going to do about the critical point of the curriculum for science and the attractiveness of science to senior pupils in schools. Good things have happened and I support the Browne proposals and the department’s interest in the Baker-Dearing trust’s initiative on technical education. I think that that is very good and very important.
The second example is the Department of Health. I do not want to intrude on private grief but there are real discussions going on about the state of the current Bill. The Bill contains a clear permissive statement that research can be commissioned. I would like reassurances that the resources will not simply slide away from those who do the commissioning. If the resources move significantly towards a different form of commissioning within the health service, will there be a danger that the major input of the NHS into research might slip backwards—for example, for drug trials which are very important in this country, but also basic research in medical science? It would be good, even if not today in writing, to have some reassurances that this can be done.
The last point is a matter of government policy. When I was a vice-chancellor I was well aware of the importance of looking internationally to recruit the best scientists. Universities have raised concerns about visas and we would like to be reassured again that there is no coyness or truculence in issuing visas to those who have been identified as capable of making major contributions to scientific research in this country. It is easy to turn off the enthusiasm of those who want to come, and plenty of other countries are developing policies and procedures to make it easy for these individuals to go there. So I ask three questions about contemporary policy and how it is developing. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough
My Lords, I did not have the pleasure of serving on the committee under the noble Lord’s chairmanship. Interestingly, I was conducting a similar inquiry in another place at exactly the same time on the same subject and coming to the same conclusions. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, for analysing so admirably the Government’s response to the Select Committee report. The fact that the Government’s response bore precious little relevance to the actual recommendations of the report makes his contribution today even more noteworthy. That said, he is right to say that the Government’s actual record on research is far more positive. Ministers have chosen very wisely to build on the sound foundations laid by the previous Government, particularly the noble Lords, Lord Sainsbury and Lord Drayson, even agreeing to include in the Ministerial Code a requirement to take notice of independent scientific advice, which was a recommendation from both our committees. Despite draconian cuts in public expenditure, a flat cash settlement of £4.5 billion is to be welcomed; and the major capital investment at Harwell, at the new Institute for Animal Health at Pirbright, for molecular biology at Cambridge and, of course, the fact that the St Pancras development is going ahead, are clear indications of the Government’s commitment to science.
The Treasury is almost on message. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, that this afternoon a scientific adviser to the Treasury, James Richardson, was appointed. However, we should not get too excited because his press officer in the Treasury quickly sent a message saying:
“I would like to stress that the post of Chief Scientific Advisor will be taken on alongside James’ current responsibilities as the Director of Public Spending and the chief Micro economist at the Treasury”.
How much time he will have for the job, I do not know.
However, lest we get carried away by the Government’s record, the reality is that despite a decade during which we have seen research funding double, the amount we have spent as a proportion of GDP has actually fallen from 0.69 per cent in 2004 to 0.6 per cent in 2009, and this at a time when the UK was enjoying the most prolonged period of economic prosperity that the nation had ever seen. More worrying is that, while we were spending arguably more in cash terms but less as a proportion of our GDP, all our competitors were outstripping us in terms of their investment. Even more important is that over the coming decade, they are all planning to increase their spend rather than simply hold it where it is.
The Science and Technology Committee report recommended urgent prioritisation of our research effort, a call that has been echoed by most scientific bodies. Since 2004, we have had a 10-year science and innovation framework which has served us well, and we should be honest enough to admit that. But we need another one, and it has to be in place before the next CSR, and we have to do the lobbying for it. A key priority of any plan must be the re-engineering of our research infrastructure, in particular in our universities and institutes, by asking what we expect them to deliver and giving them the resources to do so. By default this is happening, with 90 per cent of our research funding now being spent in around 30 of our universities. But if we are to remain globally competitive, further concentration, probably involving amalgamations of universities or departments, will be absolutely necessary if we are going to remain world class, which is where we have to be.
I shall say to noble Lords what I have said before. We cannot sustain 165 higher education institutions offering master’s and PhD courses. In the United States, only 28 per cent of universities offer PhD programmes, while in the UK the figure is 90 per cent, often with few faculty. Surely the time has come to look at US-style graduate schools in the UK. Further, many say that the new fee regime will make students more demanding customers. Quite frankly, that is no good for science. What we want is our universities to become more demanding providers. They should ask more from their students in order to raise the academic bar. We constantly forget that that is the best way to give value to our students.
Finally, and here I have to declare an interest as chair of the Association of Medical Research Charities, it is crucially important that we retain links with our charitable research funders. Some 15 per cent of the money going into our universities comes from charities, with the 126 member charities in AMRC spending roughly £1 billion last year. Without the Charity Research Support Fund introduced by the previous Government, it would not be possible to deliver the front-line support that charities provide. I want to ask the Minister about this because the replies I have had so far suggest that the Charity Research Support Fund will last only until 2011-12, with £198 million. I hope that my noble friend will be able to get a message from the Box saying that at least throughout the whole of this comprehensive spending review period, it will remain in place. Without it, we will seriously affect the amount of money going into research from our charities.
Lord Oxburgh
My Lords, in the spirit of doing the best with what we have, I intend to follow the lead made by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, in discussing the role of departmental chief scientific advisers. Until a couple of decades ago, the departments for which research was important tended to fund and manage their own research institutes. It was not a perfect world, but Ministers and officials had direct access to scientific advice and technical expertise that was closely tailored to their needs. This situation changed dramatically when a majority of government research institutes were privatised, turned into executive agencies or, in some cases, closed. The consequences for government science have been profound. Perhaps the main one is that today, there is virtually no opportunity to pursue a scientific career within the Civil Service.
New science and engineering graduates are recruited and indeed welcomed, but they bring very little experience of the world of science and engineering with them. The consequence is that when it comes to advice on matters of policy and procurement in these areas, departments may have virtually no relevant expertise or experience. In essence, departments lost at this time much of their ability to be intelligent customers. It was this situation that led successive Chief Scientific Advisers to place great emphasis on the roles of their departmental counterparts. Necessarily, the majority of departmental CSAs come from outside government. They have brought in high levels of recent experience of research and business. However, appointing a CSA is one thing, and using them properly is another.
For a newcomer to be effective in Whitehall, there are several requirements. The most important of these is for the CSA to win the confidence of colleagues and to convince them that he or she can help the department do its job better. This means that the CSA must be seen to bring real expertise and experience to the job, and early on must take the time to get to know their Ministers and colleagues properly, as well as understand departmental priorities and problems. This is very hard for someone who can devote only a day or a couple of days a week to the job. Secondly, the CSA needs sufficient rank to be taken seriously within the department. They must attend senior staff meetings so that problems can be spotted before they arise. Without that, the job becomes simply reactive, so that advice is often given too late and may not be taken seriously. Thirdly, the CSA has to have sufficient resources to do the job. These may be resources of people or of money to bring in external help. I make these points because there may be a tendency, at a time of financial stringency, to think that a departmental CSA is an unaffordable luxury or that savings can be made by downgrading the post. This is far from the truth if the CSA is being used properly.
Against that background, it was a real concern to learn from evidence given at a recent meeting of the Science and Technology Select Committee that the Ministry of Defence plans to reduce the grading of its CSA when the present incumbent shortly retires. I must confess to a particular interest in this post as it was one that I held some 20 years ago. For the moment disregarding the fact that, as our report shows, the MoD has a massive R&D spend that is comparable to that of all other government departments put together and that the department does not have an entirely unblemished procurement record, technology is probably more important to the MoD than to any other department in Whitehall. It depends on maintaining a technological edge to which the CSA should make a vital contribution. This is particularly the case at a time, such as the present, of rapid technological change. At a time when challenges to our armed services appear to widen daily, does it really make sense to risk the quality and level of their technical support? In military matters there are no prizes for coming second. Lowering the grade of the MoD CSA sends a very clear message to the outside world: namely, that lower-calibre and less experienced applicants would be acceptable.
In the present climate, the need for effective departmental CSAs to help ensure good value for money is stronger than ever. I ask the Minister to use the influence of her department to ensure that the role of CSAs in Whitehall departments is not diluted and in particular to ask the Ministry of Defence to reconsider its plan to downgrade its CSA.
Lord Krebs
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland of Houndwood, for introducing this important debate and for chairing the inquiry of the Select Committee of which I was a member. I should also add that I am the noble Lord’s successor as chairman of the Select Committee, although he is, as they say, a very hard act to follow.
As the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, has said, nobody seriously questions the importance of science and technology for the future well-being of this country. I want to add two points to that. One is the inherent unpredictability of identifying where those future significant discoveries will arise. It is famously said—perhaps apocryphally—that when Faraday was asked about the importance of his discoveries, he said “What use is a baby?”. The other point I wanted to make is that our own science and technology base not only enables us to benefit from knowledge generated here but to tap into the global source of knowledge—it enhances our absorptive capacity.
Science is one of the things at which the UK excels. If the Wimbledon tournament that starts in a couple of weeks’ time were a tournament for science, we would certainly not be waiting 75 years for our first male champion and 34 for our first female champion. The figures are very familiar but are worth repeating: we have 1 per cent of the world’s population, invest 3 per cent of the world’s science funding but produce 9 per cent of the scientific papers and 14 per cent of the most highly cited papers. In terms of bangs per buck we are top of the G8 league and, as the noble Lord, Lord Willis, has already said, this is in spite of the fact that our public investment in science as a percentage of GDP is low—about half that of many of our major competitors.
However, we should not rest on our laurels. The global landscape of science is changing very rapidly and the recent Royal Society report Knowledge, networks and nations highlights the rapidly changing global landscape. China, with its R&D spend growing by 20 per cent per year, is predicted to overtake the USA as the leading nation for publishing scientific papers by 2013. The Royal Society also highlights many other developing countries—for example Iran and Turkey—as dynamic rising stars.
In short, unless we not only sustain but increase our investment in science, we will very soon lose our pre-eminent position. The comprehensive spending review, as the noble Lord, Lord Willis, has mentioned, did secure level cash funding for science programmes over the next four years. This was, in relative terms, good news, but we should not forget that our competitors are increasing their investment. We should also not forget that the settlement included a swingeing 54 per cent cut in the capital budget of the research councils.
I ask the Minister whether she agrees that the funding levels for science in this country do indeed pose a serious threat to our ability to attract and retain the best talent in a global market in the coming years. We should also note that some government departments cut their R&D budgets dramatically: 45 per cent for DCMS and 20 per cent for Defra. We heard from the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir John Beddington, last week in evidence that some departments have not yet determined their budgets for the coming years. Can the Minister confirm that she has the figures for all the departments and can she tell us what those figures are?
I turn briefly in the last few minutes to the question of scientific advice, to which others have already alluded. As we have heard, over the past few years, an increasing number of government departments have appointed chief scientific advisers who are leading experts from academia or other sources outside the civil service. This has been a most welcome development. However, I seek reassurance from the Minister that the commitment to this ideal is not faltering.
Therefore, I want to ask the following questions. First, given the importance of social sciences for many policy matters, will the Government appoint an independent—an independent—chief social scientist to replace Professor Paul Wiles, who has retired? When are the Departments for Transport and for Business, Innovation and Skills going to replace Professor Brian Collins, who was their independent chief scientific adviser? This latter point is particularly important in light of the recent critical reviews of these two departments by the Government Office for Science. The review for the Minister’s own department says,
“the resourcing and organisation of SE evidence and advice has not always been given the priority that is needed in BIS, and is not yet to the standard that we (the Panel) would expect”.
In light of that, I want to hear from the Minister what steps are being taken to improve scientific advice in her own department.
Finally, in an editorial in the leading scientific journal Nature last year, which gave an early assessment of how the new Government were handling scientific advice, the conclusion was:
“It should leave those who promote evidence-based policy feeling anxious”.
Will the Minister assure us that the anxiety expressed by Nature is not justified?
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer
My Lords, as one of the few non-scientists speaking in this debate, I should say that I was prompted to speak because the grand challenges that the report refers to and the issues that it raises so powerfully—food security, water security and climate change—concern us all. I was very concerned by the issues which were so well expounded between the chairman and the Chief Scientific Adviser when, on page 43 of the report, they talked about orphan issues. They both agreed that such important issues often fall through the cracks in the system. That is really what prompted me to speak today. It is very worrying to think that such important issues—in critical areas such as biodiversity or climate change, which are the ones that the report quotes—are not being covered.
That perhaps is also why questions that require a cross-departmental response are so essential. There is a non-answer to the key question on page 68 of the evidence, which is really worrying. I want to ask the Minister today the same question:
“Please could you send the Committee copies of papers … on how departments and research councils will work together on cross-departmental issues?”.
The answer was:
“The papers … are internal documents at this stage and we are unable to share them with the Committee”.
So my question for the Minister is: have they now been shared, or can they be? And is the Minister satisfied that cross-departmental sponsorship works well? That question is prompted by my visit to the Natural History Museum earlier this year to see its work in some depth. Its primary sponsorship body is, of course, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, because it is a museum. However, much of its work would be sponsored by almost any other department, whether it was Defra or DECC. Its work on a national, European and international level concerned with ecosystems, for example, is absolutely critical. I am sorry that the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, is not speaking tonight. He made some incredibly important points in this report with regard to systematics and taxonomy. Indeed, the Committee has previously done some very interesting reports on these issues. He said that it is a discipline that is quite critical in delivering biodiversity and conservation commitments.
It is critical also in understanding a swathe of issues around, for example, food security—one of those grand challenges—biological pest control and plant adaptation to climate change, to mention but a few. Last week the Government published the first national ecosystem assessment which underlined how valuable a healthy environment is to our economy. If there are gaps in our knowledge of that ecosystem, it will be very hard to build on the aspirations of the environment White Paper.
It was also interesting to learn from the Natural History Museum’s recent assessment that for each pound of government money invested, £4 in wider economic benefits are delivered. Too often grants for research are seen as a cost to the Government rather than as an investment giving, in this case, a pretty fair return.
I may be a lone voice in today’s debate, but when I look at appendix 5 and see the public funding for R&D, the challenges mentioned—climate change, food security and water security, in one category—and then I look at the spend, I come away with the feeling that our priority is still literally to be able to fight our way out of adversity. The MoD research budget, as has already been mentioned, is nearly twice that of all other government departments added together. We are still at the point of paying lip service to solving problems through the acquisition and application of knowledge, while actually spending too much resource in researching which weapons would be best to use if that approach fails and we literally have to fight for our share in a hungry, water-short, energy-poor world.
I do not think that that is a battle we can win anyway in the long term with weapons. I do think that we could win it with enough investment and effort in understanding the problems and developing the solutions. I understand that this report is not asking for more money, it is asking for it to be spent in a more rational and wise way and in closing those cracks. I hope that, over time, we can look at shifting that investment.
Lord Rees of Ludlow
As noble Lords have emphasised, science is indeed a UK success story, but the UK could pay a heavy price if we lose this competitive advantage. We are up against strengthening global competition for the most talented individuals, the most innovative firms and leadership in high-tech sectors. The CSR indeed cut the science budget less than we had feared, but those who read in the foreign press about trends here do not get a positive impression. We still lag behind our OECD comparators. Our universities are perceived to be engulfed in turbulent restructuring. Mobile talent from eastern Europe or Asia is in consequence less likely to perceive the UK as a favoured destination than was the case a few years ago. Our brightest young people, savvy about trends and anxiously choosing a career, are not getting a signal that the UK offers enticing opportunities in cutting-edge science.
A dangerous feedback operates here: a downward trend of just a few per cent in the UK when other countries are on the rise sends a signal that disproportionately reduces our chances of attracting, retaining and incentivising top talent. To attract academics, access to responsive mode funding is crucial. We must continue to support the best research across all subject areas; otherwise we could lose out on the greatest innovations, which often occur at the interfaces of traditional disciplines. We also need breadth, to provide absorptive capacity so that the UK can seize on ideas from the rest of the world and sustain top-rate university education.
Last year’s Nobel Prize in Physics went to two Russians on the faculty of Manchester University. They created a substance called graphene; a new form of carbon, a lattice one atom thick with extraordinary tensile strength and electrical properties which could lead to transformative technologies. If the UK is to sustain its scientific excellence, our universities must provide a supportive environment for serendipitous breakthroughs such as this. We must continue to be a preferred destination for people like Novoselov and Geim and, of course, our border agencies must welcome them in, wherever in the world they are from.
I want to say just a word about impact as measured in the report. The impacts of science are often felt far away from the time and place where the original research is done. Even in medicine, where research is often highly targeted, the lag between scientific research and health benefits can be anywhere from 10 to 25 years. In other areas of science it can be decades before direct benefits are felt. The lineage of any spin-off can be traced back to a surprisingly diverse range of influences. What is controversial is not whether the impact is important—all scientists realise that and all aspire to make an impact—the issue is whether impact can be appropriately quantified as a measure for allocating specific grant support. Most of us are concerned that it is too long-term and diffuse to serve that role.
The across-the-board public support for academic research comes, of course, from within the ring-fenced science budget, but, of course, when it comes to the development phase, we cannot do everything and prioritisation is essential. The Government have a role here, as emphasised in the Hauser report, in bridging the gap between what is done in universities and what is needed to develop ideas into marketable projects. This is a gap where bodies like the TSB may not be adequate in scale and where something else may be needed. Chief scientific advisers within government departments have a role here, as they have many other roles. This system has proved its worth; excellent incumbents coming from outside the Civil Service, when given access to Ministers and top officials, can really make a difference.
From outside government, it is also the role of bodies such as the Royal Society—where I declare an interest, as a recent president—to provide scientific guidance to government and to the public. Indeed, at a time when, through the Public Bodies Bill, some statutory advisory bodies are under threat, the role of academies has never been more essential in providing independent, authoritative advice. The global developments of the 21st century will be driven by waves of new technologies. We must be equipped to ride these waves and to ensure that scientific advances optimally enhance our quality of life and the environment.
I end with a quotation from a distinguished Member of this House, the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, of Wigton, who lectured in the Sheldonian Theatre last year:
“We are supposed to be the clever country. We used to be the commonsense country. Not for much longer if the politicians continue to undervalue the potency of those Francis Bacon called the ‘merchants of light’, of new knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, which is unarguably the only sure wealth of the future”.
Lord Young of Norwood Green
My Lords, I join the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, as the other non-scientist and I enter the debate with some trepidation after hearing the contributions. First, I welcome the report and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, for his introduction. He said that the UK was a good place for science and technology and our aim should be to keep it that way, but we are in danger of losing our world-leading position in science. The Government only have a three-year spending review period plan for science. We have called for the Government to reinstate a 10-year funding plan for science. This allowed researchers and investors more confidence in the long-term funding landscape and was welcomed by British scientists and campaign groups.
The report states:
“Our first recommendation is fundamental: that the Government should make a clear and unambiguous statement setting out their current research funding commitments”.
In their response to the report’s fundamental recommendation, the Government said that,
“funding of science and research will be addressed in the forthcoming Spending Review”.
The Government have repeatedly claimed that the spending review science settlement is a long-term plan for science and refused to reinstate Labour’s 10-year plan for science. However, scientists know that three years is not long-term; it is not even one PhD funding cycle. In a speech to the Campaign for Science and Engineering before the Budget, John Denham called for the Government to put in place a long-term funding plan. He said:
“It’s essential that the forthcoming Budget sets out a clear framework for science funding well beyond the current spending period and ideally for a 10-year period”.
We would argue that the previous Labour Government rescued British science. We introduced the science research investment fund in 2002 to address a historic backlog of upgrading and updating required by the physical university research infrastructure across the UK, left by the previous Tory Government. We also set up the higher education innovation fund. We set up the UKRC, funding for which was withdrawn by BIS this year, to promote the position of women scientists and engineers. We set up the Technology Strategy Board and the RDAs that have successfully invested in British science and innovation. We introduced the 10-year commitment to invest in science and innovation. This gave the research community long-term confidence, as I said. This long-term increase has now been reversed, with a real-terms cut over the next three years, while, as several contributors have said, our international competitors—even those with deficit reduction programmes—increase their investment.
As I think the noble Lord, Lord Willis, pointed out, China is increasing investment in R&D by 8 per cent, Germany is increasing investment by 7 per cent, France by 1 per cent, Australia by 25 per cent and the USA by 5.7 per cent. There are major new players in world science, from Brazil to Singapore and from the Gulf states to India. As the Royal Society said in a recent report, we need to keep running just to stand still. The coalition does not seem to understand how tough the global competitive environment is.
Several contributors have said that the cuts under the comprehensive spending review could have been worse. The reality is that the science budget stays the same in cash terms, but has a 10 per cent real-terms resource cut of £450 million over that period. Capital research and development spend takes an enormous 40 per cent cut, which will recreate the huge backlog of building works that built up under the previous Tory Government. Other areas of the science budget, such as funding for engagement and diversity in science, also face large cuts. There is an increasing focus on centralised excellence to the detriment of regional research centres and universities. RDA science funding, which was £440 million per annum, has also been lost. Therefore, I have the following questions for the Minister. Why is the UK reducing its overall spending on research and development when our competitors are increasing their investment? When will the Government set out their plans for investment in British science and innovation beyond 2014-15?
The noble Lord, Lord Rees, made some interesting points when he talked about worrying signs and downward trends. If we want to maintain the UK as a place where people want to continue undertaking research, and to attract such people as the recent Nobel Prize winners he referred to, we have to make sure that we create the right environment.
I must admit that when I looked at the report from a lay person’s perspective, I found a lot of complexity, even in dealing with the terms. I would not have known until I read more carefully what “responsive-mode” research was—I would have referred to it as blue-skies research—as opposed to “targeted” research. What interests me in all this important talk of research and development is something that the noble Lord, Lord Rees, said in the conclusion of his contribution. He talked about turning research into applications that become marketable products. We may excel, as one contributor said, in producing the largest number of papers in the world, but if we cannot turn them into marketable products, there is a failure that needs to be addressed. It reminds me of that old advert about what we might call “the appliance of science”.
I, too, look forward to the Minister’s response and thank the committee for producing a very interesting report.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Baroness Wilcox)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland of Houndwood, for introducing this debate on the report Setting priorities for publicly funded research produced by the Science and Technology Committee, which he chaired. The Government’s response was published in July 2010 and a copy is still available on the committee’s website. I will try to answer as many questions as I can in the limited time that we have for such an important subject, but I will write to any noble Lords whose questions I do not manage to pick up. It has been a pleasure to hear views, advice and questions from some of the finest minds in the country, possibly the world. It is one of the great advantages of this House that we are able to do so. I thank all noble Lords who have spoken.
There have been many developments since the Government published their response to the report Setting priorities for publicly funded research. In October 2010 the Chancellor announced that science and research programme funding would be protected with a flat cash, ring-fenced settlement for 2011-15. This was a major commitment to science at a time of great pressure on public spending.
I will try to answer questions as I go through. I hope this does not make it too disjointed. To respond to the noble Lord, Lord Willis, who talked of a charity support fund, the charity support fund is part of HEFCE’s block grant for research and will continue throughout the spending review period, as was announced last December. I hope that is helpful.
In December, the science budget was allocated to the individual research councils, HEFCE and other programmes. In line with views from leaders of the academic and business communities, the balance of funding between research councils and HEFCE was kept broadly the same—here I acknowledge the noble Lord, Lord Young. The coalition Government’s long-term vision for science and research was published alongside their plans for science funding to 2011-15.
In the Budget in March, an additional £100 million was announced for science capital projects. This investment will develop infrastructure at national research campuses in Daresbury, Norwich and Cambridge, and the International Space Innovation Centre at Harwell. This is a vital investment in our research base, particularly life sciences and space industries, which are critical for delivering economic growth. This investment is not intended to reverse the announcements in the spending review, but it demonstrates the Government’s commitment to research and their willingness to invest prudently as and when additional funds become available.
The spending review announced that key scientific infrastructure projects would go ahead. There will be a £69 million investment in the Diamond synchrotron at Harwell in Oxfordshire, and £220 million capital funding for the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation in London. Since the spending review, the Government have announced funding for three further projects, including £33 million for the birth cohort study.
The noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, raised the matter of the government Chief Scientific Adviser’s input into Treasury meetings. Sir John Beddington cannot, of course, attend all Treasury meetings, but he meets regularly with the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury and is working closely with the Treasury on the implications of the spending review for departmental research budgets. I understand from this work that the overall outcome for research spending by government departments also looks good in the circumstances. Sir John Beddington explained this in detail to the Lords Science and Technology Committee two weeks ago.
The Government have emphasised their commitment to health research in the National Health Service White Paper and the spending review. The Department of Health will be increasing its investment in health research in real terms over the next four years. A crucial part of this will be £775 million to promote translational R&D. The department has been very clear on this.
Peter Luff reported recently that the Ministry of Defence’s science and technology budget is, in cash terms, expected to rise over the spending review period. The nature of departmental research budgets and ongoing planning means that we cannot give the noble Lords, Lord Sutherland and Lord Krebs, the final figures for every department for the next four years. I understand that Sir John will be sending the Science and Technology Select Committee information for departments that are in a position to provide details of their expected expenditure over the spending review period. Each year the Government publish outturn figures on departmental expenditure on R&D in the science, engineering and technology statistics. This autumn the Government will be publishing outturn figures for all departments for 2009-10.
The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, mentioned that some departments have had significant cuts in budget. In general, research spending plans for other government departments are in line with the settlement that they have received from the Treasury in the spending review. Departments are now looking very carefully at their priorities and the resources needed to deliver their science, research and evidence needs. They will not have all the answers overnight and should probably not try to set too much in stone. Going forward, departments will be reviewing and updating their science and innovation strategies to ensure that they reflect current departmental priorities and cross-cutting issues and that policy-making delivery and evaluation is evidence based.
The noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, was concerned about science in schools. The Department for Education’s The Importance of Teaching—The Schools White Paper 2010 showed the Government’s commitment to continue to provide additional support to promote the uptake of science. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, that Research Councils UK’s cross-council programmes bring together partners across government and business to address global challenges and create growth opportunities for the United Kingdom. As well as the government Chief Scientific Adviser, there is a strong network of departmental chief scientific advisers and departmental directors of analysis across Government that ensure that Government have access to, and use, the best science, engineering and analytical advice, including to address research challenges that cut across departments. These networks work closely with the research councils. The noble Lord, Lord Willis, brought the news that the Treasury has appointed a chief scientific adviser today. I am delighted to support this very welcome news. The fact that the new Treasury chief scientific adviser, James Richardson, has other duties means that he is at the heart of the decision-making process in the Treasury, which should be a very good thing.
The noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, worried about the MoD CSA being downgraded. The MoD recognises the importance of science and engineering to its business. This was considered carefully in planning following the spending review. It has been decided that the MoD’s chief scientific adviser will be at director-general level, rather than permanent secretary. I understand that Sir John Beddington has been closely involved in this decision. He will be a member of the selection panel, which I hope is of some reassurance to the noble Lord.
The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, asked about the Government’s chief social scientist. Jenny Dibden and Richard Bartholomew are joint heads of the Government’s social research service. These arrangements work very well—it says here. In response to the noble Lord’s question, “When will the CSA, DfT and BIS be replaced?”—sorry, that cannot be right—I can say that DfT and BIS are currently looking at how the CSA function will best be delivered. This includes exploring the possibility of a shared role with another government department to take advantage of the synergies and overlaps between their science, technology and research interests. The government Chief Scientific Adviser has been involved in these departments’ deliberations about the role of their respective CSAs and will be involved in the appointment process.
Departments also draw upon independent advice from science advisory councils and around 70 scientific advisory committees. In line with the Government’s priorities, it is essential that advice takes place in an open and transparent way. This is why the coalition Government have now included a specific reference to the principles of scientific advice to Government in the ministerial code. Continuing with the theme of independence, the Government restated their commitment to the Haldane principle in December. The long-established Haldane principle continues to work well. It protects scientific independence and excellence and is one of the key factors that makes the UK research base a world leader.
In response to the third point made by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, despite commitments to reduce net migration, the Government recognise the value that academics and scientists bring to our economy. Recent changes to the points-based system have made provision for this. The truly world class will come through the exceptional talent route in tier 1 where entry is not contingent upon a job offer. Otherwise, others will be prioritised through tier 2 where points are awarded for high-level qualifications.
The coalition Government have continued to demonstrate our clear commitment to evidence-based policy making and to science and research by giving a real boost to our world-class research base. This puts science and research in a privileged position. We will work hard to ensure that investment delivers economic benefit, creating new businesses and improving existing ones, attracting highly skilled scientists and technicians and international business investment and improving public policy and services.
European Union Bill
(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Triesman
Lord Triesman
My Lords, given the debates that we had in Committee and the debate which we had shortly before the dinner break, it is possible to speak to this amendment fairly briefly. Its aim is to take account of circumstances where the Government conclude that it is in the interests of the people of the United Kingdom to act with greater dispatch than would occur if the whole of the processes set out in other parts of this Bill were gone through.
Earlier this afternoon the noble Lord, Lord Howell, asked—I understand the point—“What are the circumstances in which events might take place that are difficult to put into words?”. I shall try to put at least one such circumstance into words, but I recognise immediately that it may be difficult to do so in the context of the judgments that Governments have to make about the interests of the country when events precipitate at a rate which is not anticipated in the normal course of events. However, my ministerial experience, and that of many others in your Lordships’ House, tells us that events happen. I think that I am quoting a former Conservative Prime Minister, and he was entirely right—they do. Events happen and Governments have to respond to them. We will be able to deal with many of them using the sovereign processes of our own political system. Some will occur in a wider context and we will deal with them through international organisations, including the European Union and its existing competences—that is not the subject of this Bill—the United Nations, the World Bank and others. Those are not the issues to which I refer. However, it seems to me at least conceptually possible that some things will happen which require an urgent response and where it will be clear to the Government of the day that they need to act in concert with others in ways which are not covered by current arrangements. Before any noble Lord says that he cannot conceive of such circumstances arising, I assure the House that they will do so. They will arise, for example, around an environmental disaster or a financial disaster. The purpose of this amendment is to make provision for the circumstances in which they will arise.
When we talked about the meltdown of the world banking system, noble Lords rightly pointed out that the emergency arrangements that were made took a considerable time to design and to begin to be put in place. Indeed, they are not in place to this day and we have not reached the end of that process. That is rather regrettable because it seems to me that in international terms we are without a number of the levers which we would probably desire to have, in order to have a real impact on some of those events in concert with others. The G20 made a very good effort at least at one meeting, and arguably at two meetings, to try to work out some sort of architecture to deal with those circumstances. Others may disagree but I believe that if Europe had been able to speak with a more coherent voice in the G20 meetings, it would have been much more likely to have arrived at an authoritative consensus with the United States and with China in particular.
It seems to be within the realms of possibility, and perhaps not so fanciful either, that there could be circumstances—particularly in acute financial crises—where the Government might conclude that emergency conditions applied, they needed to be able to act under those conditions, it was desirable for the interests of the country and the people of the country that they did act under those conditions, and that slight variations in the current arrangements would make that more possible. These are inevitably difficult conditions to envisage largely because every time you try to do so you can usually point to a set of arrangements which have already been designed to take account of them. However, we have surely learnt, certainly since late 2007—we have learnt this rather harsh lesson through 2008 and up to the present—that it is not possible to predict all those circumstances, manage them, say that we have the levers for managing them or say that the other institutions, particularly the G20 in which we put such faith, are capable of doing so, partly because Europe is incapable of acting or speaking in a single and coherent way. I beg to move.
Viscount Trenchard
My Lords, I am afraid the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, has not persuaded me of the need to include an urgency condition. It seems to me there is absolutely nothing that prevents the UK from co-ordinating with other EU member states in response to any natural disaster. Furthermore, if the amendment were adopted, the ability of the UK to react speedily might even be circumscribed. The amendment does nothing to improve clarity; rather, it confuses the situation, compromises legal certainty and is very subjective. Amendment 10 states:
“The urgency condition is where an amendment under the simplified revision procedure is considered to be urgent”.
“Considered” by whom and in what forum? It is very unclear. I venture to submit that this amendment does nothing to improve the clarity and certainty of the Bill.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine
I too oppose the amendment, although I recognise that in tabling it the opposition Benches are very conscious of the leap in the dark that we are making to some extent with this Bill. It is about future eventualities at a time of significant flux in the world, and indeed in the European Union. One would need to be a clairvoyant to imagine what might be coming down the road in terms of emergencies and urgencies that would need rather speedier action than the normal pace of change in the European Union. In fact I think one of the reasons why there is a disconnect between the British electorate and the Union is partly because of the very slow and cumbersome methodology and pace of reacting to events. When there is a deep economic recession or a great financial or banking crisis, people out in the country want their leaders and politicians to act speedily to deal with the issues that led to those events, and perhaps would wish us to move faster than we have been capable of doing in international fora and multilateral institutions.
Despite recognising these things, I nevertheless oppose this amendment because I think what defines urgency is so subjective and so much predicated on what the Government of the day, and the policy-makers on either side of the debate, would imagine to be urgent or not. While I think we all know what is urgent when it hits us in the face, and it is quite right that we should and should then act speedily, enshrining it in law seems to raise a host of problems, not least again with judicial review. It also creates a basis of very subjective analysis as to whether something is urgent or not, and the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, in his very helpful moving of the amendment, accepted that we do take quite a long time—that even the European financial stability mechanism is going to take a leisurely pace. This really goes to the heart of the argument; that it is better for us to look for ways to facilitate speed and urgency when the urgent situation arises, rather than to seek to enshrine it in law at this stage.
Lord Stoddart of Swindon
My Lords, I have read the amendment, which would restrict the operation of the Bill to matters of urgency. That is what it is about. I thought that the Bill was about major transfers of power, not just little changes to ongoing, day-to-day matters in the EU; it is about major transfers of competence or powers. Whenever you are transferring powers from this country to another institution, it ought not to be done in haste. There should not be urgency about it.
Those sort of matters, those great matters, should be decided only once all the issues concerned have been examined by the Government and by Parliament; and then by referendum. Why do we want an urgency clause? We cannot afford to have an urgency clause when we are transferring powers from our country to another organisation. I cannot support the amendment, although I understand why the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, feels that it would be helpful to the Bill. I do not think that it would be helpful to the Bill, because it would undermine its whole purpose, which is to ensure that when this country transfers major powers elsewhere, there has been proper consideration over a proper period by the proper authorities, including the Government, Parliament and the people.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard
The noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, will be very upset. I accuse myself of being nerdish, and I hope that the noble Lord will agree that I can be considered in the same class as Mr William Cash.
We are talking about an amendment to Clause 3. Clause 3 is about the accelerated, simplified procedure. I do not know why we have Clause 3 separate from Clause 2, but we do, and we are debating it. The simplified procedure cannot be used for the transfer of competences. That is what the treaty states. Article 48(6) states that the decisions referred to in the second paragraph,
“shall not increase the competences conferred on the Union in the Treaties”.
We are talking about urgency and the use of the competences that the treaties have conferred. We are talking about urgency because that is the nature of the simplified procedure. It was invented to move fast in situations where we might want to. It avoids the convention, it avoids the full paraphernalia after Parliament—you still have to consult Parliament under Article 48(6), but that can be quite quick.
This is a modest amendment, unlike the previous amendment on which we voted, which was bigger. This is a modest amendment because it simply suggests that the urgency condition might be written into Clause 3, on the simplified treaty revision procedure, which is about urgent treaty revision and not about competence. It cannot be used to confer competences on the Union from the member states.
It seems to me appropriate and modest to say that, when we are dealing with treaty revisions or decisions taken under Article 48(6)—which, by definition, will happen only in a hurry—we should be able to have an accelerated procedure here in this country. We might accept that the general view was correct: this was an emergency and we needed to move fast. Of course, if you did not accept that, you would have said “No” in Brussels and the accelerated procedure would have stopped, because it still requires unanimity. By definition, you are in a situation where people have thought, “We haven’t got the time to do the whole shooting match”. This is important. The Government think it is in the UK interest—they voted for it. Who would decide whether the urgency consideration applied? It is a question asked in this debate. The House would decide. Parliament would decide. If this provision was in the Bill, the Government would have to explain whether the urgency procedure, in their view, applied. Parliament would vote on that. This is a parliamentary democracy—that is where the decision should be made.
I do not see anything wrong with this amendment. It seems to me that it is appropriate—particularly appropriate—to this clause. I supported the previous amendment—the bigger amendment—which would have written it also into Clause 2, alongside the significance condition, which sadly is still missing in Clause 2, for reasons that I do not understand. Putting it in Clause 3, which the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, proposes, is absolutely appropriate and I support the amendment.
The Minister commented with approval, as would I, on the evidence that Sir John Grant gave to the Commons committee. Sir John Grant made two points that the Minister quoted with approval. I approve of them too—although, as the Minister delicately pointed out, Sir John is a more recent permanent representative in Brussels than me. There may have been a faint connotation in the Minister’s remark that I might be a bit fuddy-duddy or out of date. I accept that; it is perfectly possible, and Sir John Grant is a very brilliant man.
Sir John said that he saw no chance of serious treaty amendment in the next few years. I agree with him for a whole lot of reasons. Nobody in Brussels wants it; the UK Government have said that they are not going to have it; and it is in a coalition agreement. That seems to me to be fairly conclusive, so I think Sir John Grant was on pretty safe ground with that prediction. He also spoke of the unlikelihood—and the Minister quoted him—of the passerelles being used in the near future. I agree. That seems to me to be implausible too.
What the Minister did not mention—I cannot remember whether Sir John Grant did—is the much more likely scenario in which, some time in the next decade, something will cause people to say, “Jeepers, we are going to have to change something. This is clearly a case for the accelerated procedure”. Things do happen in the world, things change, and the chances are—I do not think this is very likely in the near future, though the monetary example is fresh in our minds—that some time in the next decade there will be a need seen by most people, possibly by us as well, for a change, and if it is to be done quickly then the chances are that people will use Article 48(6) procedure.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
May I, with apologies, ask a nerdish question of the noble Lord? If I understand Article 48(7) correctly, it suggests that urgency can be carried through at the fastest in six months. Is that correct?
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard
I do not think that is what the treaty says, but yes, it is likely that that is the case. Of course, any treaty amendment requires ratification by whatever the national procedures are. I am talking about an emergency situation in which most people think, “We have to do this pretty fast”.
We could still have our referendum. If the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, were accepted, there is nothing to stop the Government of the day saying to Parliament, “Despite all the risks of delay, we actually think this is a sufficiently serious matter to justify having a referendum”. That is entirely open to them, if the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, is accepted. However, that amendment would remove the present danger in the text, which is that there would be an absolute requirement to have a referendum because there is no potential let-out for an emergency, even though that is the most plausible scenario for a treaty amendment and everyone, including us, would have agreed that it was an emergency and therefore justified the accelerated procedure. That is why I support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Triesman.
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne
The noble Lords opposite will not be surprised to hear that I find it very difficult to accept this amendment. Coming from the Brussels angle, I remind noble Lords that in Brussels the word “urgency” relates to the French word “urgence”, which means of powerful importance. I recall that week after week, month after month in Strasbourg and Brussels, we had urgency debates which took place many days, weeks and sometimes months after the activity in question, such as a revolution somewhere or the Arab spring. It took me a while to realise that the English meaning of the word “urgency” is quick or hurry up whereas in French it means something that counts, something that is valued and something to which we should pay special attention. It is rather like high representative which does not mean high at all, but important.
I suggest that the transfer of sovereignty falls into the French “urgence” category—it is something of powerful importance—but inevitably Brussels life advances at the pace of a snail; it is very slow. Rather like the mills of God, Brussels grinds exceeding small and it takes a very long time. I have never known anything of importance, high-value, “urgence”, to happen at any speed in Brussels. Nor do I think that the transfer of sovereignty, important as it is, should be done in haste. I honestly cannot anticipate Brussels not taking maybe a decade over something of real value, such as the transfer of sovereignty.
When I joined the other place in 1980, I found myself dealing with a very important piece of legislation on intellectual property. It was data protection and intellectual property in computer software. When I arrived in the House of Lords, a decade later, I found that the Bill had been to Brussels and come back to the Lords and it was still in an active, first-step, consultation process. Two years later, when I arrived in the European Parliament, being lucky enough to be elected there in 1999, I found the Bill was in the European Parliament. It was just about to leave the European Parliament when I left a decade later. Powerfully important things such as that take a considerable length of time. How much longer do we imagine that the transfer of sovereignty would take?
During the past decade, we in the United Kingdom have very actively supported the enlargement of the European Union. It now has 27 states and more are coming in: Croatia tomorrow and the Balkans the day after. As a result, quite properly, the slowness has increased tremendously. It is no longer possible to put things through even at a reasonable speed; now things are slower than slow. That is why I do not see a referendum coming our way even if this Bill goes through in its entirety, which I hope and pray it will, for maybe at least a decade. Brussels is simply not able to think that way. The confusion of the euro, combined with the continuing enlargement, has made the whole system so slow, and I do not think that we will see a referendum in the next 15 years or so. Urgency, in English terminology, is simply not available.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
My Lords, if you do not mind me saying very briefly, I find the debate that we have been having since dinner of singular unreality. It reached its apotheosis in the last speech, which told us, “Keep calm dear, nothing is going to happen for 16 years. Everything is going so slowly, as they will be translating urgency from ‘urgence’ and back again and making something of it”. I am sorry, but you have to look back only one year to see a circumstance where there was a major crisis, when the Greek economy was on the point of collapse and the European Union, including Britain, decided that something needed to be done about it because otherwise there was a very real risk for the solidarity of the whole European financial structure. It is no good saying it will not happen. It has happened. Please do not tell me that it could not happen again.
So what happens then if you lock all the doors and throw all the keys out of the window, as the Government are absolutely determined to do? Their supporters have explained with enormous eloquence this evening how jolly happy we will all be when we throw all the keys away and we cannot unlock the door—we cannot do anything in less than two or three years or something like that—and we shall all be happy. What happens? They find some other way of doing it. That is what will happen now. And the British Government will help to find another way too, because it will be in our interests to do so.
This debate is a matter of total unreality. It has no meaning whatsoever. If the Government had a bit of common sense, they would see that the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, does have quite a lot of sense in it.
Lord Flight
My Lords, I suggest that what the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, has just said illustrates the very reason why this amendment is undesirable. It is not in the interests of this country to get sucked into bailing out economies that have gone off the rails as a result of the problems of sharing a currency. Had there been a requirement for a referendum, the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the previous Government would not have been in a position to have committed this country to things to which he should not have committed us.
Charming and likeable though the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, may have been, this amendment is just another excuse for watering down the basic principle of this Bill. It is of less magnitude than the last amendment. Urgency is a subjective matter—it could arise; it could not arise—but the basic principle of the Bill is that the elite of British Governments will no longer be able to commit this country to loss of sovereignty and other such matters without the consent of the people.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, we all understand that events happen—although I believe that what Harold Macmillan said was, “Events, dear boy, events.” We also understand that in a crisis Governments get together and take the necessary decisions to deal with that crisis. The noble Lord, Lord Triesman, rightly said that we cannot envisage what sort of crisis we might be facing in five to 10 years’ time or even in two years’ time. The G20 is a very good example of the sort of body which has come to operate relatively effectively, as a form of consultation about a number of global problems. However, the G20 is of an entirely different quality from the European Union. If there were a crisis, the relevant Governments would necessarily get together and have to act, but they would undoubtedly act by consensus. That would be different from agreeing to change the structures and competences of a European Union, which is not simply an international organisation but a structure of law, a semi-confederal institution of which we have become a co-operative member.
Having had some informal conversations across the table with the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, I note that Article 48(6) states—
Lord Davies of Stamford
I thank the Minister for giving way. Is not the argument that he is adducing one that entirely excludes even the theoretical possibility that the European Union might turn out to be the best instrument for addressing the crisis that we are talking about? If the crisis can be dealt with by consensus with other Governments—the G20 or whatever—that is well and good, but what the Government are doing in the Bill is excluding the possibility that the European Union may be the most effective instrument for solving the problem and might need additional powers for that emergency.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, the Bill in no way excludes the European Union from being the appropriate body to respond. It is entirely appropriate that bodies such as the European Council and the Council of Ministers in its various forms should take decisions. How those decisions are taken, and what their legal implications will be, are matters probably best not dealt with in an emergency. Where there might be a transfer of competences, one should consider it not under emergency conditions but rather more coolly.
I was about to quote Article 48(6), which states that the decision under the simplified procedure,
“shall not enter into force until it is approved by the Member States in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements”.
That is why urgent decisions will take 18 to 24 months to get through the various constitutional requirements, and why the question of what we mean by urgency does not limit the British Government.
It is of course very difficult to foresee what sort of crises we might face, or how and in what framework we and others would respond. The European Union exists as a framework and therefore may very often be used as such, and we and others would work through it. It has plenty of competences and the ability to take decisions by consensus in response to a crisis. However, that does not transfer powers and competences. That is the difference between taking urgent decisions and changing the nature of procedures, structures, powers and competences. With respect, I say that the urgency question is not an important part of the Bill. There would be sufficient time to complete the processes set out by the Bill, by an Act of Parliament and, where required, a referendum of the British people.
The second part of the condition is that the treaty change should be in the national interest. My noble friend Lord Howell said, when debating a previous amendment, that the national interest is not an entirely objective concept. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, agrees that the coalition has come together in the national interest and is acting in what we think is the national interest—although he may have a different view of the national interest from members of the coalition. Politics revolves around our contesting views of Britain's best national interests. Therefore, the concept is not an entirely objective one that we can usefully write into the Bill. No Government would agree to any treaty change at EU level if they were not of the firm belief that such a move was consistent with the national interest. No Administration would ever agree to a treaty change if they considered that it would be against the interests of the United Kingdom. Therefore, I assure noble Lords that the national interest, as we see it, is at the heart of every major decision that this Government take on EU matters—as I assume was the case with the previous Government and will be for any subsequent Government.
Having answered those questions, I urge noble Lords to withdraw the amendment. We have had a useful but general debate about what might happen in a hypothetical crisis that none of us can yet quite envisage, let alone consider what immediate changes in powers or competences it would require.
Lord Triesman
My Lords, just to take any possible lingering tension out of the highly charged environment of this Chamber—I would hate to wind up everybody inappropriately—I will tell you now that, in a few minutes, I will withdraw the amendment. Before I do so, I have to say that, from an intellectual point of view, these have been some of the more depressing arguments that I have heard. I do not mean to say that in order to be rude. I just think that we must allow ourselves the courtesy of being a great deal more rigorous.
As the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, pointed out, it is plainly the intention of the amendment to provide a means whereby, in circumstances which are very pressing and where we need potentially to adjust our capacity to act—this is about our capacity to act and the mechanisms that we can use to act—we do not deny ourselves the opportunity to do something if it is in the national interest.
I cannot imagine that it really needed any presentation to us, but I readily accept that what constitutes the national interest will not be determined by some objective basis, as would a demonstration of Boyle’s law of gaseous volumes. This is not a point that I have ever attempted to make. The national interest will be defined by the Government of the day, whether a single party or a coalition. We may or may not all agree with one another, but it is in the nature of our parliamentary democracy that the power to arrive at a conclusion about what the national interest is is vested in a Government that enjoy the confidence of the House of Commons and can proceed on that basis. In that sense, from a political point of view, it is a completely objective test. I know whether the Government of the day enjoy the confidence of the House of Commons precisely because I know what would happen if they did not. It is a very simple matter.
Let us not deal with this kind of discussion as though it were incumbent upon us to do something like Boyle did, in showing the way in which the volumes of gases under pressure react to it, which can then be set out in a textbook to be tested to kingdom come in any laboratory in the land. Let us deal with it as political people—I was going to say, if the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, was in his place, as humble members of the political class. Let us deal with it as political people—with a small p—who understand perfectly well the convention which decides what the national interest is at any time. I am sorry, but I cannot buy that kind of argument. I do not think it treats us credibly.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Flight, that it was never my intention in moving this amendment that the Bill should be watered down. I do not like that interpretation being ascribed to what I have said. I have always tried in the House, whether on the government Benches or on these Benches, to be very candid and very frank—it does not always win you friends—about what I am doing and why I am doing it, because it seems to me that life is a lot easier if you try to do it that way. The reason is not to water it down but to make certain that Ministers in any Government have the kind of authority and ability to act in circumstances which come along that we cannot predict.
I am not omniscient, and I cannot say any more than anybody else in the House what I know will happen or what kinds of competence we may require at a particular time to deal with those issues. I will be candid with the House: I did not expect the collapse of Lehman Brothers; I was astonished to know that we were within two hours of the Royal Bank of Scotland collapsing; and I notice that sovereign debt crises are occurring more rapidly and are likely to occur more rapidly. I just say to the House no more than that it is extremely likely that we will face more such circumstances. I do not want to feel that we do not have all the levers at our disposal in order to deal with them.
Lord Stoddart of Swindon
What I was talking about was the transfer of great powers, which would be permanent; what the noble Lord has been discussing is matters of emergency. Those are quite different because, for example, on the financial crisis that has blown up in the European Union, it is perfectly possible for the Government—indeed, the Government alone, backed later by Parliament—to make decisions that might last for five years, but would nevertheless not be permanent transfers of power. That was what I was trying to get at.
Lord Triesman
My Lords, if I misunderstood the point, I of course apologise.
I conclude my remarks by saying that this does not involve the same sort of transfer of powers as under Article 48(6). It is not intended to do so. We have all acknowledged that it has a different standing.
My key point is this, and I address it to the government Front Bench to think about—even though they obviously cannot respond to it this evening in this particular debate. The G20 was as good an attempt as anybody could make in the circumstances to try to find some way of codifying the responses to the financial crisis across the world. Thinking of it professionally almost—as an economist—I think that it was a pretty poor outcome and the G20 did not do what it was supposed to do. The key players did not play the roles. It may be that a number of people, including eminent politicians from this country, talked up what the G20 was capable of doing and what its successes might be, but when we look at it in the cold light of day, we do not have in the international financial system the protections that some pretended there would be as a consequence of that meeting. There is no doubt in my mind that one of the reasons for that is that a number of coherent economies in Europe that were used to mature financial operation found themselves without the tools to respond together, and that had a profound effect. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Howell of Guildford
Lord Williamson of Horton
(d) the Electoral Commission have issued a certificate stating whether or not it appears to them that more than 40 per cent of the persons entitled to vote in the referendum have voted in it. ( ) If the certificate issued under subsection (2)(d) states that more than 40 per cent of the persons entitled to vote in the referendum have voted in it, the decision may be approved.
( ) If the certificate issued under subsection (2)(d) states that fewer than 40 per cent of the persons entitled to vote in the referendum have voted in it, the decision may not be approved unless—
(a) in each House of Parliament a Minister of the Crown has moved a motion that the House approves Her Majesty’s Government’s intention to approve the decision, and(b) each House has agreed to the motion without amendment.”
Lord Liddle
Lord Liddle
My Lords, I hope not to detain the House long on this. In a sense, with this amendment we are trying to skin the same cat in a different way. It is designed to extend the scope of the significance clause in order precisely to give our Government, because we want to support them and make them effective in the European Union, the flexibility to cope with the unforeseen. We have made this point many times in these debates. Basically, the Government point-blank refuse to accept its validity. They argue, first, that all the red lines and every issue in the Bill is of constitutional significance, including the full list of issues in Schedule 1, and that therefore any move on these issues should require a referendum. That is the Government’s position on my first point.
Secondly, they would argue that the EU has plenty of competences to act already in most situations, which is true, but that does not cover any potential new situations which we cannot foresee, to which my noble friend Lord Triesman referred. Thirdly, they argue that when we talk about circumstances that might occur which would require action, we cannot name any of these circumstances and that it is all hypothetical and nonsensical.
This amendment is on the assumption that it is not hypothetical and nonsensical. We can already see brewing in the European Union the makings of another big step forward towards fiscal federalism being considered at a senior level within the Union. One just has to read the—in many ways wonderful—parting speech made by Jean-Claude Trichet last week when he received the Karlspreis in Aachen. It was about the achievements of the European Union and all Members of the House should read it. He said that as a result of the present crisis, not today but the day after tomorrow, there would be a need for the creation of a European finance ministry and for member states to concede sovereignty over economic questions, particularly when they were in difficulties and failing to conform to European rules. I can understand his frustration in dealing with the situations in Greece, Portugal and Ireland.
If I was still an adviser in No. 10 Downing Street, my reaction would be to say, “Gosh, there’s something potentially quite big here coming down the track. We may well have changes of Government in France and Germany in the next couple of years. We have got to do some hard thinking ourselves about how we anticipate the situation”. I would say to the British Prime Minister that if he wants to avoid another big treaty, he has to think about how, on all the relevant issues—economic governance, supervision of the banks, the structural reforms necessary to make the European economy competitive and the advance of the single market—we can make Europe more effective. If necessary we have to be prepared to look at small changes in the treaties which we could make under the simplified revision procedure that would convince our partners that serious action could be taken that would not require another big leap forward. Therefore, that is what I would be doing.
These issues are likely to be right at the top of the agenda in the next two or three years. On page 14 of this wretched Bill, in Schedule 1, we see how it would inhibit any British Government from considering even the slightest change in decision-making processes in these crucial areas. In Schedule 1(2) we see that referenda would be required on any changes in the approximation of national laws affecting the internal market, any changes in the broad guidelines of economic policies, any changes in the adoption of provisions replacing the protocol on the excessive deficit procedure and any changes in the role of the European Central Bank on prudential supervision. These are precisely the issues that are going to be at the top of the agenda in European Union policy-making in the next few years, yet we are putting a ball and chain around the feet of our Ministers, because we know that Ministers are not going to put forward anything that would require a referendum, and we are preventing Britain from playing the role it should be playing in the next few years on these issues.
Some noble Lords may argue that these issues are nothing to do with Britain because we are not in the euro. I think that that is completely wrong. Although we are not in the euro, the success of the Government’s economic and political strategy very largely depends on the success of the euro area to which a huge proportion of our exports goes. If we are going to get a rebalancing of the British economy into exports and investment, we have to put forward policies for the success of the euro area, because we will not succeed in those ambitions unless we engage constructively in that debate. Yet we are hampered completely from engaging constructively in it because of the conditions of this Bill. So let us be pragmatic. Let us give ourselves the ability to act in our national interests.
Lord Dykes
I am most grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. Is not that point even more relevant when one thinks of the very helpful and positive Answer of the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, answering Questions on Monday, when he said how important it was to maintain the solidarity of the UK with the eurozone through all the common work that we are doing together? Is that not even more important now that we are going to have the pan-European financial supervisory agency based in London? What if a crisis emerges that needs to be dealt with precipitately by all national Governments together?
Lord Liddle
The noble Lord, Lord Dykes, is so right. I actually congratulate the Government in many respects on their attitude. The Chancellor of the Exchequer made a speech in Paris earlier this year in which he said, “We are not in the euro but by gosh we want the euro to succeed. It is absolutely essential to our interests”. This was what Mr Osborne said. Some Members on the Conservative Benches may not recognise that point but that is where Britain’s national interests lie and we have to have the flexibility to deal with these situations. I do not know what precise flexibilities would be required but we have to have that.
In terms of historical parallels, I am reminded of Harold Macmillan’s wonderful quote, “Events, dear boy, events”. Of course it was Harold Macmillan as Chancellor of the Exchequer who had failed to realise the significance of what was happening at Messina and then woke up later to the reality of the treaty of Rome and the threat that this presented to Britain’s position in the European Union.
Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary—using the language of a man who had fought in the First World War and lived through those experiences in a different age from that in which, thankfully, we are living in—that, “If we were to allow the French and the Germans together to create a united Europe with Britain not being a part of it, we would be sacrificing everything that our men had fought for in two world wars”. That was his view in the 1950s. Our view today should be decided on the basis of a proper calculation of our national interest. We need to be fully engaged in all the questions affecting the European Union. We ought not to have this ball and chain, and we should have some flexibility. That is why I urge the Government, even at this late stage in the consideration of the Bill, to think about how it could be amended to give Ministers the pragmatic flexibility they need in order to represent our national interests effectively in Brussels and in order that Britain can live up to its role as one of the leading partners in the European Union. I beg to move.
Lord Lamont of Lerwick
My Lords, I think that this is what might be called the Rumsfeld amendment, because it has been moved to deal with the unknown unknowns. That is what it is all about. I had not remotely intended to speak in this debate, but the noble Lord’s enthusiasm is so infectious. He looks at the European Union and sees that nothing has ever gone wrong with it. We ought always to be in there and engaging with it. We must be careful not to miss the train. We must always be positive regardless of what is happening. He tells us about the wonderful speech that Monsieur Trichet has made, saying that we ought to have fiscal union in order to save the euro. No mention is made that that comes out of the ashes of the disastrous ruin of monetary union.
I think it was the noble Lord who used the same arguments to try to persuade us to join the euro. He said that we are losing influence. Even though the euro has now itself faced enormous problems and even though some of my noble friends on the Back Benches have said that we shall never be able to have a single currency area without a fiscal union, we are told, “That is ridiculous. Now fiscal union is just another great step forward. We have got to be positive about it”.
The noble Lord also says that the European stability mechanism is another thing that we are missing out on, and that we ought to be involved in it. Of course, the ESM is in complete contradiction to the whole basis on which the euro was set up. It is not because it was an unexpected disaster—it was a predicted disaster. The reason the ESM had to be created was because the treaties totally forbade it. Yes, we do face some unknown unknowns.
I apologise to the House because we should not all give our own views on Europe, but I was completely provoked by the noble Lord, who seems to be like Alice through the looking-glass: every disaster is seen as a step forward. We just ought to take a step back, hold our breath, and think about it a little.
Lord Davies of Stamford
My Lords, I am going to resist the great temptation to respond to the noble Lord, Lord Lamont. I do so not because I do not think that he is completely wrong, which I think he is. He is quite wrong to write off the euro in this way, and he is wrong to suppose that we would not have had to face a systemic crisis caused by fiscal collapse in Ireland, Portugal and Greece. Whether or not the euro had ever existed, we would have needed to take intelligent and concerted action. The noble Lord, with whom I have debated these matters with great pleasure on many occasions over the years, is as wrong as he has always been. I am happy to give him good money in a private conversation afterwards that the euro is far from being in a state of crisis and that it will survive.
I hope noble Lords understand the very important distinction between a fiscal crisis, which has hit a number of countries that are members of the eurozone and have the euro currency, and a crisis for the euro itself. You can have a fiscal crisis caused by Governments overborrowing irrespective of the currency in which they are borrowing. Even if those countries had been members of the dollar area and had borrowed so much that the financial markets were in danger of ceasing to refinance them, there would have been a crisis affecting them; and because of the number of assets that we inevitably hold in those countries, which are major trading partners of ours here, we could not have been immune to a fiscal crisis irrespective of the currencies involved.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
Does the noble Lord accept that the ECB is technically bankrupt?
Lord Davies of Stamford
I accept nothing of the kind—the ECB has a triple-A credit rating, as I am sure the noble Lord knows.
Lord Flight
Would the noble Lord give even just a little bit of credibility to the argument that the problem of different economies sharing the same currency is that the costs of some in the southern part of Europe have gone up 35 per cent while Germany’s costs have only gone up 10 per cent, so they have a big competitiveness problem, which is part of their fiscal problem? In the case of Spain and Ireland, the problem is that they have had a low rate of interest that is unsuitable for their own domestic rate of inflation, causing real interest rates to be negative. That caused everyone to borrow too much and the banks to lend too much, so they have had an overlending problem, in part caused by the fact that they are sharing an inappropriate currency. If they had their own currency, they could devalue when they had such a crisis.
Lord Davies of Stamford
I am getting signals, quite rightly so, from my Front Bench so I really must not respond to the substance of that because I shall be turning this into a debate—which we ought to have in this House on these important matters—on fiscal and monetary issues in the European Union at present. I hope that the Government take note of the obvious interest on their own Benches in having the opportunity to discuss this matter and exchange our various perspectives on it. I wanted to intervene really just to support my noble friend’s excellent amendment. If it is accepted by the House, it will get rid of a large amount—80 or possibly 90 per cent of the damage—that could be done by this Bill. If this amendment goes through, Clause 3(4) would then read:
“The significance condition is that the Act providing for the approval of the decision states that … the decision falls within section 4 only because of provision of the kind mentioned in subsection (1) of that section, and … the effect of that provision in relation to the United Kingdom is not significant”.
In other words, the only exemption from the need to have a referendum would be in relation to matters that were not significant for the United Kingdom. Surely, to accept this particular amendment is a cost-free concession on the part of the Government. I cannot believe that the Government actually want to provide for having a referendum on something that is not significant for the United Kingdom. Am I perhaps wrong about this?
We need to probe the Government’s logic a little here, because what an extraordinary thing it would be if the Government want to take through Parliament a Bill providing for the possibility of having referenda on issues that are not significant for the United Kingdom. The Government cannot turn around and use the argument that what is significant or not might be a subjective and difficult matter to determine at any one point, because they have already accepted in this Bill, as it stands, the need to make a distinction between significant and non-significant. That argument cannot be made. The only argument that can be made is that we need to provide for having referenda on something that is not significant, which does not make the slightest sense. I ask noble Lords to envisage a scenario in which we have a referendum in this country on something that everybody accepts is not significant for the United Kingdom. We ask the electorate to focus their mind on a difficult, technical and perhaps rather abstruse matter—maybe a whole package of such matters, which is what the Government have been suggesting recently; to take the time to master the relevant briefs or at least make up their minds on this matter; and to take time off from their work or from their leisure activities and go to the polls on something that they are told in advance is not significant for the United Kingdom.
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne
Since the noble Lord has such confidence in the judgment of Ministers that he wishes to recentralise the possible decision-making that would come through referenda, why does he not have confidence that the judgment of Ministers would be that something inessential would not come to Parliament in the first place? There is an illogicality in his circular argument.
Lord Davies of Stamford
There is no illogicality at all. There is no need to provide for a referendum on something which is not significant for the United Kingdom unless the Government believe that they might, at some point, wish to have such a referendum, which I regard as an utter absurdity. It would be an insult to the electorate; it would be treating the whole electoral system of this country in a thoroughly frivolous way. I have to ask the Government: what is the purpose—what is the logic, because it is not clear to me at all—in providing for the possibility of referenda on non-significant subjects? It would be an utter contradiction in terms.
I have to mention to the House a matter which I must not go into in any detail for fear of breaking the relevance rule. I shall not do that, but I need to refer to the fact that a week or two ago the Government published a Bill on reform of the House of Lords which provides for fundamental changes to this House, and therefore to the legislature of this country, without providing for a referendum at all. So we have a situation in which the same Government are saying, on one hand, “We have to change the House of Lords in a fundamental way and we cannot have a referendum on it”, and at the same time saying, “We have to have referenda on changing the rules on qualified majority voting on taking decisions about the future of the public prosecutor’s office in the European Union”—something idiotic like that. Now they come forward and say, “No, actually we need to provide for referenda on explicitly non-significant matters”. What an extraordinary contradiction.
I see that, for once, I have the agreement of the noble Lords, Lord Flight and Lord Hamilton, as well as other distinguished Members opposite. Maybe the Government, in responding, should not just turn to me; they should turn to their supporters on their own Back Benches. They certainly need to turn to the country to explain the logic of the Bill, because, whatever it is, it does not appear to be coherent or something that has been properly thought through. I am sure that it is not deliberate hypocrisy—I would not dream of accusing noble Lords of that. Maybe it is some kind of confusion, but we need to know what it is, because what they are bringing forward seems to have no sense at all either from the rational or the pragmatic point of view, or to be credible in any way.
Lord Howell of Guildford
My Lords, perhaps it is for me to try to put this amendment back in its box, from which it seems to be rapidly escaping into fascinating issues such as reform of the House of Lords. I am not sure whether that is immediately germane to this amendment, which does not involve any transfer of powers or competencies to the European Union as far as I can see from the debate. I shall, if I may, abandon that and return to the amendment which the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, moved with fiery eloquence. He was frank enough to admit that the purpose of the amendment was an attempt to say, I think his phrase was, the same thing in a different way. I shall try to avoid giving the same answer in a different way, but I am afraid that the answer I am going to give will not please him very much. Anyway, I will do my best.
The amendment seeks to extend the scope of the significance condition beyond the two types of transfer of power identified by Clause 4(1)(i) and Clause 4(1)(j). We had a similar amendment, did we not, in Committee? I explained at that stage that the significance condition as drafted applies only where there may be a proposal for treaty change under the simplified revision procedure which would result in a transfer of power—I shall come to the competence issue in a moment—from the UK to the EU, as defined by the criteria in Clause 4(1)(i) and Clause 4(1)(j), namely treaty changes which seek to impose or extend a requirement obligation or sanction on the UK. It is only then that an assessment by the Minister is required as to its significance. As I said at the time, the significance condition is applied deliberately to such a limited range of proposals in order to establish a transparent and un-fuzzy, un-grey, unequivocal set of criteria, for Parliament as well as for the people, for which a referendum will be required under the Bill.
Lord Davies of Stamford
I am most grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. With the greatest respect, this amendment is about having a referendum, or not having a referendum, on matters the effect of which—to quote the Bill—
“in relation to the United Kingdom is not significant”.
Nobody in the world would argue that setting up a finance ministry for the European Union was not significant for the United Kingdom; the question is why we should have referenda on matters which are not significant. The noble Lord has cited a lot of possible scenarios, all of which involve dramatically significant events which would obviously be significant events for us, but the big issue concerns why we should have a referendum on matters which are known not to be significant for the United Kingdom.
Lord Howell of Guildford
I think that we are arguing in a circle because the Bill provides the significance test and matters in paragraphs (i) and (j) of Clause 4(1), which I have described, might well be ruled by Ministers not to be significant, and therefore there would be no referendum. Furthermore, in Clause 4(1) there is a whole string of exempt conditions where no referendum will occur. Therefore, I do not see what the noble Lord is worried about. As regards issues that are deemed to be insignificant, or issues that are deemed to fall under Clause 4(4)—sorry, I said Clause 4(1), whereas I meant Clause 4(4)—Clause 4(4) states that:
“A treaty or Article 48(6) decision does not fall within this section merely because it involves one or more of the following”.
There is your list. There are the things that are not significant which will not attract a referendum. The noble Lord was speaking with great feeling and fervour but I cannot see that his worry is well founded. I am clear that this amendment would not assist the purposes of the Bill and would undermine certain values and aims of the coalition’s European policy. On that basis, I strongly urge the noble Lord to withdraw it.
Lord Liddle
My Lords, I will withdraw the amendment, but the Government are making a major mistake in not listening to the points made not just from the opposition Benches but from the Cross Benches as well about the necessity to keep open some flexibility to deal with the unforeseen. If the United Kingdom wants to resist major treaty change, we will almost certainly have to propose minor changes which would demonstrate a willingness to deal with the practical realities of the situation that the EU would be facing. It is the Government who are not living in the real world and not facing up to what it is necessary to do if we are to be an effective member of the European Union in the years ahead. I regret very much having to say that, but with that I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.