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Oral Answers to Questions
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Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)
1. What steps she is taking to improve road infrastructure.
Gavin Barwell (Croydon Central) (Con)
4. What steps she is taking to improve road infrastructure.
Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)
10. What steps she is taking to improve road infrastructure.
Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)
13. What steps she is taking to improve road infrastructure.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Mike Penning)
The Government announced in 2010 that we were investing £2.1 billion to start 14 new road schemes over this spending review period and to complete eight existing schemes. A further £1 billion of new investment was also allocated in the autumn statement to tackle areas of congestion on the strategic road network.
Mark Garnier
As the Minister will be aware, a number of other projects can have specific local economic impacts. Two such projects are the Stourport relief road and Hoo Brook link road in Wyre Forest. Will the Minister meet me and the leaders of Wyre Forest district council and Worcestershire county council to discuss how his Department might assist in the progress of those two projects?
Mike Penning
I will be more than happy to meet my hon. Friend and those council leaders, but I think this is probably a matter for my colleague the Minister for local roads, the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Norman Baker). If he can meet them, that will be fine, although, ultimately, these matters are for the local authorities.
Gavin Barwell
Congestion on the A23 is a major problem. Will the Minister or one of his colleagues meet me to discuss what the Department, along with the Mayor of London, can do to improve conditions on that road?
Mike Penning
I am always more than happy to meet colleagues, especially to discuss the A23, which is a much-improved road since the Hindhead link tunnel was opened. The stretch of the A23 about which my hon. Friend is concerned is mainly a matter for the Mayor, but I am more than happy to help in any way I can.
Stephen Metcalfe
The Minister is aware of the importance to the national economy of the Dartford crossing, and he is introducing plans to increase capacity. However, to get the maximum benefit from those improvements work must be done on junctions 30 and 31 of the M25. When will the Minister publish detailed, costed plans for those improvements, which are especially important given the developments that have taken place in the Thames Gateway?
Mike Penning
I can tell my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock—[Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (Stephen Metcalfe); I apologise for having got the constituency name wrong, but it is a long time since I stood for election in that part of the world. We are currently working on the costings for junctions 30 and 31. As my hon. Friend will be aware, the fantastic investment by DP World at the Gateway port means there will be work at junction 30, and we will publish proposals as soon as we can.
Julian Sturdy
As my hon. Friend the Minister will know, I am deeply concerned about the A64 and the A237 in York. Those vital road corridors are increasingly congested and accident prone and are a major drain on our local economy. Can the Minister give me any information about any future funding for projects, and will he again meet me and a group of local MPs who share my concerns?
Mike Penning
It looks like I shall be very busy with meetings, but I am more than happy to meet my hon. Friend and his colleagues as we look for new road programmes for the future. He may not know that I was on the A64 to Scarborough on new year’s day and experienced some of the traffic problems on that day.
Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)
As the Minister’s constituency is near mine, he will know that we in the eastern region have terrible east-west road links. Is he carefully considering any serious schemes for improving those links?
Mike Penning
Yes, and we are looking very closely at one of the most significant road problems we have: the A14 link across the eastern corridor. We have limited available funds, but I am very pleased that the Chancellor announced an extra £1 billion in the autumn statement. I will be happy to work with the hon. Gentleman at any time to improve the transport links in our part of the world.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Although we always like to hear of the big schemes, is the Minister aware that low-cost engineering schemes save the most lives? They are the best investment and offer the best bang for the buck. In this the United Nations decade of accident reduction, the most likely cause of death for any young man anywhere in the world is a road accident, so will we consider any innovations we might introduce on the roads through low-cost schemes?
Mike Penning
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right and the fact that he mentions is a sad indictment. Boys aged between 17 and 25 are 10 times more likely to be involved in an accident than a lady of that age. Low-cost schemes are vital, and some of the very low-cost schemes, such as retro-reflective paint on roads, have moved things on a huge amount in the last 10 years. I assure the hon. Gentleman that I am considering such schemes.
Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)
The Government have approved construction of the Switch island to Thornton relief road. The land is owned by a number of Government agencies, including the Forestry Commission, the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency and the Highways Agency. Will the Minister encourage his ministerial colleagues to speed up negotiations with Sefton council, so that work can start on the road?
Mike Penning
I am working with other Departments and Ministers. This is a vitally important scheme and we will push it forward as fast as we possibly can.
Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)
Cycle infrastructure is sadly lacking across the country and that causes a number of safety problems, such as a recent tragedy at King’s Cross and many others around the country. What steps is the Minister taking to improve the quality and amount of cycle infrastructure on our roads?
Mike Penning
Most of the roads I am responsible for are part of the national road infrastructure, and I hope there are no cyclists on that part of the infrastructure. However, the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: cycling is vital not only to local commuting and enjoyment but to the health of the nation. I am sure that the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Norman Baker) was listening closely to what the hon. Gentleman said.
Teresa Pearce (Erith and Thamesmead) (Lab)
2. Whether her Department has conducted an impact assessment of the proposal in the McNulty report on closure of ticket offices.
The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Mrs Theresa Villiers)
No impact assessment has been conducted of this proposal in the independent report undertaken by Sir Roy McNulty.
Teresa Pearce
Disabled people in my constituency already have trouble accessing work and leisure opportunities in London because Erith station’s London-bound platform has no disabled lift or step-free access. They are advised by the train operating company to travel in the opposite direction for 15 minutes and then change trains. The closure of the ticket office at Erith will further disadvantage this group of people. Will the Minister consider an equality impact assessment on the proposal and reject McNulty’s plans to close ticket offices, particularly at places such as Erith, where disabled people already face a difficult journey?
Mrs Villiers
In considering the recommendations of the independent McNulty report and before any decision was made on changes to future ticket office rules, it would of course be vital carefully to assess the needs of disabled communities and pensioners. That would be a very important part of any decisions made on future reform of ticket offices.
Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)
The McNulty report identified some 30% savings in real costs across the piece. If that is to be achieved by the closure of ticket offices or in other ways, what will the Minister do to ensure that that money will be passed on not to the rail companies but to the users? The line from Chippenham—the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham (Duncan Hames)—to London is among the most expensive in the world: more, mile for mile, than the cost of Concorde. We need to cut those rates, and we can do that by saving money on the infrastructure.
Mrs Villiers
We have made it clear that it is vital to get the costs of running the railways down, and it is also vital that the benefits of those cost reductions be shared by both taxpayers and fare payers so that we can give both better value for money. If we can achieve savings on the scale contemplated by McNulty, we could, we hope, see the end of the era of above-inflation fare increases.
Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)
Costs impact on fares, as the Minister has just said. In London, Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson—[Hon. Members: “Hooray!”] I expected a more Pavlovian response, Mr Speaker. Mayor Johnson has approved rises on average of nearly 6%, yet Labour mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone—[Hon. Members: “Hooray!”] Much better, Mr Speaker. Both sides of the House appreciate the Labour candidate; I am sure he would be very reassured. Ken Livingstone says he can cut fares by between 7% and 11% because of Transport for London surpluses. Has the Minister had any discussions with Mayor Johnson about the rises?
Mrs Villiers
The hon. Gentleman is completely naive in his approach to Ken Livingstone’s proposals on fares. Livingstone’s numbers simply do not add up, and his track record shows that he promises fare reductions and ends up delivering fare hikes.
Mr John Leech (Manchester, Withington) (LD)
Does the Minister agree that no station operator should be allowed to close ticket offices where there are any real concerns about security and safety as a result of creating an unmanned station?
Mrs Villiers
Certainly, if we were to change the way ticket offices operate, we would need to look carefully at all safety and security consequences, as well as taking into account the concerns of the disabled community and pensioners. However, we do need to look at ticket offices as part of the process of reducing costs on the railways, in order to deliver the better value for money that passengers want. We need to do that because the way passengers are buying tickets is changing. Oyster in London demonstrates that there are some high-quality alternatives to the ticket queue. If we can roll those out more widely, which we plan to do with ITSO smart ticketing, that will make a difference to our approach to future decisions on ticket offices.
Tom Greatrex (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Lab/Co-op)
3. Whether she has made an assessment of the benefits of extending High Speed 2 to Scotland.
The Secretary of State for Transport (Justine Greening)
High Speed 2 would serve Scotland from phase 1, through current classic-compatible high-speed trains running on the existing network, with half an hour being taken off journey times to Scotland. Although the Department has made no specific detailed assessment of the benefits of extending high-speed lines to Scotland, I am committed to delivering a truly national high-speed rail network. Of course, the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning), was up there yesterday having those very discussions.
Tom Greatrex
I thank the Secretary of State for her response and trust that her ministerial colleague enjoyed his time in Scotland yesterday and will be back there very soon.
I am sure that the Secretary of State is aware of the business case made by CBI Scotland and others about the benefits, including those for business across the UK, of HS2 eventually coming all the way to Scotland. Is she also aware of the concern that has been expressed in the past couple of days that the constitutional uncertainty in Scotland may make that less likely? Does she therefore agree that it is important that that issue is dealt with so that HS2 and all the economic benefits can come to Scotland, and are then followed through?
Justine Greening
The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point and I completely agree with it. Like many Members in this House, I want to see a United Kingdom and one of the ways we can unite our kingdom is through high-speed rail.
Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)
Is the shadow Minister aware that on this issue we need to consider not only what the British Government can do, but what the Scottish Government can do? Is she prepared to consider allowing the Scottish Government to ensure that they can start to build the high-speed line themselves, using their own money and at no cost to English taxpayers?
Mr Speaker
I am sure that the hon. Gentleman did not intend to relegate or demote the Secretary of State.
Justine Greening
Thank you, Mr Speaker.
I do not need to allow the Scottish Government to do that; they already have the ability to get on with starting the preparatory work for a Scottish high-speed line if they want to do so.
Mrs Louise Ellman (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab/Co-op)
The real benefits of high-speed rail will come from taking the line beyond Birmingham. What commitment can the Secretary of State give to extending the line to Leeds, to Manchester and then, possibly, to Scotland?
Justine Greening
I hope that I can give the hon. Lady a firm commitment, and it is one that she will doubtless have seen in the Command Paper itself.
Mr Gary Streeter (South West Devon) (Con)
May I encourage the Secretary of State not to consider extending HS2 to Scotland and instead to place that investment in improving rail capacity to Plymouth and the far south-west? We are now without an airport and, as the motorway stops at Exeter, we desperately need to increase our rail connectivity to the rest of the country.
Justine Greening
My hon. Friend raises the very important question of value for money. The Scottish Government have already said that they are willing to fund a high-speed rail link within Scotland, and of course I will make sure that I strike the right balance between developing any high-speed network further and maintaining our investment in the existing railway network.
John Robertson (Glasgow North West) (Lab)
5. What discussions she has had with the Scottish Government on the renewal of rail franchises for services from and to Scotland.
The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Mrs Theresa Villiers)
The Secretary of State has not yet had the opportunity to discuss rail franchising with the Scottish Government, although I have had a number of such meetings. There are also regular contacts on rail franchising between the Department for Transport and Transport Scotland at official level.
John Robertson
I thank the Minister for her reply. She will be aware not only of the possibility of a referendum in Scotland, but that the ScotRail franchise comes to an end in 2014. Does she agree that when deciding on a new contract the Scottish Government should consider the fact that ScotRail has had the highest level of customer complaints and a fourfold increase in overcrowding at a time when prices are rising by 6%? Will she note that the company’s boss is a leading Scottish National party supporter and contributor?
Mrs Villiers
I certainly noted the hon. Gentleman’s concerns about ScotRail. I will take them on board and officials will be happy to raise them with Transport Scotland.
Stephen Mosley (City of Chester) (Con)
The west coast main line franchise, which serves the west of Scotland, is up for renewal next year. What consideration have bidders for the franchise been asked to put in place to ensure that no disturbance is caused by the construction of HS2, either at Euston or in the London area during the period of that franchise?
Mrs Villiers
It will be a very important part of the planning process for the construction of HS2 that every effort is made to minimise the disruption on existing rail networks. Indeed, that is one of the reasons why building a new high-speed rail network is a better option than seeking to eke more capacity out of the existing west coast main line, given the decade of disruption that passengers suffered on that. There will be an impact on Euston, but a huge amount of effort is going to be put into ensuring that that is minimised.
Graeme Morrice (Livingston) (Lab)
6. What discussions she has had on the route for High Speed 2 and its possible extension to Edinburgh and Glasgow.
The Secretary of State for Transport (Justine Greening)
The former Secretary of State held discussions with Scottish Ministers regarding a potential extension of High Speed 2 to Scotland last year. As I said, the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning), was up there yesterday and we expect to have further discussions with the Scottish Government to identify and evaluate options for developing high-speed rail further in the future.
Graeme Morrice
I hope that the Under-Secretary, who was in Scotland yesterday discussing rail issues, took the train to Scotland. The Scottish Council for Development and Industry’s recent survey of leading Scottish businesses demonstrated overwhelming support for extending high-speed rail to Scotland because of the significant economic benefits that it will bring. Will the Secretary of State now give a clear commitment that Scotland will be included in the development of the project from the earliest stage possible?
Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that taking the route of High Speed 2 through Heathrow will be important in achieving a modal shift for domestic passengers travelling from Glasgow and Edinburgh to London?
Justine Greening
My hon. Friend is right and that is why the second phase of High Speed 2 will see a spur to Heathrow. It is also wise to point out that the first phase will see Birmingham airport effectively connected to High Speed 2, too.
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
I hope that we will see direct trains from Scotland to Paris and Brussels. Will the Secretary of State confirm that the current proposal is for only a single-track interconnection between High Speed 1 and High Speed 2 and is she open to imaginative ideas to make better use of existing capacity to allow a proper two-track link between the two future high-speed links?
Justine Greening
The right hon. Gentleman is right to point out that we have plans to connect those two high-speed tracks in part of the first phase and his question demonstrates the opportunities for growing that capacity in future years. I think it shows why high-speed rail is so vital to the future of not just the capacity of our rail network but our economy.
Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)
There is great interest in the east midlands about where the route of HS2 and the east midlands station will be located. Will she bring forward the timing of the first announcement of the plans so that we can all understand the potential benefits and downsides of the route?
Justine Greening
The timelines are that we will get some initial advice on potential routes later this year, which will enable us to start having those discussions with local stakeholders and that, by 2014, we will have a preferred route on which we can formally consult. I hope that over the course of this year the sorts of discussions my hon. Friend mentions will be able to take place.
Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)
Have the discussions about extending the route to Scotland included considering bringing the fast trains through Birmingham and into the black country, an area that has the largest concentration of manufacturing companies anywhere in Europe? That measure would enable the Government to deliver on their commitment to rebalancing the economy in favour of manufacturing and would cost much less than the alterations she has made to the route to allay the concerns about farms and fields in the home counties.
Justine Greening
The decision I announced earlier this week was my final decision on the route of phase 1, but I was in Birmingham yesterday and one thing that came across very clearly to me was the broader benefits of High Speed 2 for the whole region, including the black country. Of course, by providing more capacity, it will free up capacity on the existing rail network, which will particularly help that part of the country.
Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) (LD)
7. What plans she has to encourage the use of 20 mph speed limits.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Norman Baker)
I recognise the value that 20 mph speed limits can bring in some locations, particularly outside schools, but it is for local authorities to decide whether and where to implement them. Last October, I took steps to make it easier for every English local authority to introduce 20 mph zones and limits more efficiently and with less bureaucracy.
Jo Swinson
I thank the Minister for that reply. Bishopbriggs in my constituency is trying to become Scotland’s first 20 mph town and, as research shows that the risk of children being involved in an accident is reduced by two thirds in 20 mph zones, that is understandable. I congratulate the Minister on the changes he has made. Of course, that improvement does not apply in Scotland, so may I ask what discussions he has had with his Scottish counterparts about the success of the scheme? It would be excellent if the Scottish National party Government followed suit, to the benefit of towns such as Bishopbriggs and others.
Norman Baker
As my hon. Friend will appreciate, this is a devolved matter so I have had no such discussions with Scottish colleagues. There are 2,000 20 mph schemes in England and evidence from the British Medical Journal shows a significant reduction in casualties and collisions of about 40%, a reduction in the number of children being killed or seriously injured of 50% and a reduction in casualties among cyclists of 17% where there are 20 mph limits in London. Perhaps my hon. Friend would like to pass that information back to the Scottish Government.
Mr Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)
Many residents in my constituency, like me, support the increased use of 20 mph speed limits, but we are finding that the time over which designation takes place is still inordinately long. I know that the Government have made welcome proposals, but are there any specific observations that my hon. Friend would like to make to assist my local authority in making speedier decisions?
Norman Baker
As I said in response to the initial question, we have made changes as part of the road signs review, “Signing the Way”, to make the introduction of such limits and zones more efficient and less bureaucratic. It is now possible to use roundels on the road rather than repeater signs, which saves money and is quicker to introduce. We are also looking at the requirements on local authorities to advertise road changes in traffic management terms.
Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)
8. What assessment she has made of whether stockpiles of salt for winter resilience have increased since 2009.
Mrs Helen Grant (Maidstone and The Weald) (Con)
14. What assessment she has made of whether stockpiles of salt for winter resilience have increased since 2009.
The Secretary of State for Transport (Justine Greening)
Total salt stock holdings in Great Britain at the start of December last year were just over 2.7 million tonnes, including strategic stockpiles of 539,000 tonnes. This is a significant improvement on the stock levels held in 2009 and is due to the actions that this Government have taken on winter resilience.
Mr Walker
I am grateful to the Secretary of State for that very reassuring answer. Will she join me in commending local authorities such as Worcestershire that have not only increased their stocks but have also adopted new technologies such as the use of brine and GPS monitoring to make sure their reserves go much further? Is it not right that in these difficult times in preparing for cold weather councils should be innovative and creative in doing more with less?
Justine Greening
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend and I very much welcome the preparations that Worcestershire county council and other local highway authorities have taken to be prepared for severe winter weather. I also commend Worcestershire for taking on board the guidance that was published through the UK Roads Liaison Group in December 2010, which related to the sorts of things he has talked about.
Justine Greening
In addition to the measures I just outlined in relation to increasing not only the level of salt we have but our ability to get the most effective winter resilience out of that salt stock, we are investing to make sure that our rail companies are far better able to cope with bad weather. That includes making sure that we have more de-icing trains as well as better technology for existing trains to de-ice as they run. That will be particularly beneficial to my hon. Friend’s constituents.
Karen Lumley (Redditch) (Con)
9. What discussions she has had with ministerial colleagues on metal theft from railways and motorways.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Norman Baker)
I am in close discussions with ministerial colleagues from the Home Office and other Departments about the severe impact of metal theft on transport and more generally. We are actively discussing measures to tackle this, including amendments to legislation. We are also working with the police to establish a dedicated metal theft taskforce.
Karen Lumley
I thank the Minister for that answer. Network Rail estimates that by the end of 2011, railway passengers will have suffered half a million minutes-worth of delay as a result of metal thefts. Those delays are discouraging people from using railways and Redditch is looking to improve business links. What assurances can the Minister give to businesses in Redditch that this House will legislate to protect the UK economy from this crime?
Norman Baker
The Home Office is the lead Department for legislation, but all Government Departments are fully seized of the need to deal with this issue as a matter of urgency. Discussions are taking place about options. This issue affects not only railways but the highway network and the coastguard service, for example. Most despicably, the theft of cable in the Vale of Glamorgan recently forced the cancellation of 80 operations.
Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)
As passengers up and down the country could tell the hon. Gentleman, performance on Britain’s rail network is getting worse and metal theft is a major factor. On the basis of the Department’s own figures, metal theft is set to cause up to 7,000 hours of delay this year. When are the Government going to act?
Norman Baker
The Government have already acted with the measures announced by the Chancellor in his recent statement to appoint the special taskforce to which I referred. As I have mentioned, there are also ministerial discussions taking place across Departments. I assure the hon. Lady that discussions are taking place. Particular proposals are being considered and evaluated and there will be an announcement quite shortly, I hope.
Maria Eagle
The hon. Gentleman is right to recognise the importance of this issue, but passengers want to see action, not just discussion and a taskforce. With passengers facing rail fare rises of up to 11% and given that the Department calculates that this issue is costing Network Rail more than £16 million every year and a further loss of £10 million in economic cost to passengers and the economy, when will the Government listen to Network Rail, agree to legislate to tackle the illegal market in scrap, and ban cashless transactions?
Norman Baker
Under the 13 years of the hon. Lady’s Government nothing much was done to amend the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 1964 and we are now taking action on that front. The issue of cashless payment was referred to by my ministerial colleague the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire), at Home Office questions on 12 December. He said that he was looking at dealing with a situation where cashless payments ought to be removed. As I mentioned a moment ago, discussions are very active—very live—and I hope there will be an announcement in the near future.
Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)
As chairman of the all-party group on heritage rail, may I say that this matter affects heritage railways up and down the country? They often rely on volunteers and charitable donations and I add my voice to those urging quick action on the problem.
Norman Baker
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to draw attention to the impact on heritage rail. With the Bluebell railway partly in my constituency, I am very well aware of the impact on individual bodies such as that, which are sometimes less able to respond financially than the public sector. I am afraid that all sections of society are being affected by selfish metal theft and it is important that we take action to deal with it.
Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)
11. What proportion of central Government spending on transport is spent in the north-east.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Norman Baker)
According to the latest figures published by the Treasury, of the £10,380 million spent on transport in the UK directly by central Government in 2010, £293 million was spent in the north-east, which was broadly comparable with expenditure in the preceding years under the Labour Government. An additional £363 million was spent by local authorities, with some of the funding coming from central Government.
Chi Onwurah
The Minister referred earlier to the transport spending announced in the autumn statement, but the Institute for Public Policy Research found that of that only 0.04% was spent in the north-east. The Government will be spending £2,731 per head in London compared with a mere £5 in the north-east, and we know that high-speed rail will not even get as far as Leeds until 2033, so will the Minister look at decentralising transport spending so that the north-east does not continue to be left behind?
Norman Baker
First, we are looking at decentralising transport spending. Secondly, the proportion of expenditure in the north-east is not particularly out of line with the population there. Thirdly, the IPPR report to which the hon. Lady refers is not complete; it did not, for example, include the December announcements on local major projects and did not take into account the further £1 billion from the regional growth fund. It is not a complete analysis.
Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)
One way of improving the north-east’s share of transport expenditure would be to bring forward schemes to dual dangerous single carriageway sections of the A1 that have already been prepared by the Highways Agency. Will my hon. Friend discuss with his ministerial colleagues the urgency of bringing forward some of those schemes as soon as we can?
Norman Baker
I am happy to say that the discussion has already taken place to some degree. The Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning), is looking at those schemes as we speak.
Mr Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)
12. What plans she has for future use of variable speed limits.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Mike Penning)
Mandatory variable speed limits will continue to be used as part of the management of traffic on controlled and managed motorways on the strategic road network. Three schemes will be started this year and there will be a further 10 schemes by the end of 2015.
Mr Knight
I am grateful to the Minister for that reply. We heard calls earlier today for the greater use of 20 mph speed limits, but is the Minister aware that often the danger that justifies a 20 mph limit is transient, such as outside a school, where the danger is present only briefly during the school day—in the morning, at lunch time and in the afternoon? As we already have the lowest speed limits in Europe, will the Minister encourage local authorities to make greater use of variable 20 mph limits so that once the danger has passed the limit will default to 30?
Mike Penning
That is exactly what is being looked at in the Department at the moment. On the motorway network, where variable speed limits help us to sweat the assets, where we can stick to national speed limits we shall continue to do so.
Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Con)
15. What progress has been made on the northern hub railway project.
The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Mrs Theresa Villiers)
The Government have given the go-ahead for the construction of the Ordsall chord and the electrification of the north trans-Pennine route between Manchester and York via Leeds. These schemes will allow faster trains between the north-east, Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool. Network Rail is undertaking further work on the remaining northern hub schemes. We will consider these in developing the Government’s high-level output specification for rail investment from 2014 to 2019.
Eric Ollerenshaw
Does my right hon. Friend agree that if we could complete all parts of the scheme it would be a tremendous demonstration of our continued commitment to further investment in the existing rail structure and to further investment in the north-west?
Mrs Villiers
This is exactly the sort of issue that we will consider in preparing our HLOS statement. I recognise the crucial importance for the northern economy of improving rail connections in the north. That is why we have already given the go-ahead to such important parts of the northern hub—earlier than many expected—and we will of course look very carefully at the whole project. It certainly looks to have a good business case, but delivering it will depend on what is affordable.
Gavin Barwell (Croydon Central) (Con)
T1. If she will make a statement on her departmental responsibilities.
The Secretary of State for Transport (Justine Greening)
Earlier this week I announced to Parliament my decision on High Speed 2, giving the go-ahead to a national high-speed network that will dramatically increase capacity and reduce journey times between our cities. Over Christmas, negotiations were concluded on a £188 million deal between Southern and Bombardier which will see 130 new carriages ordered from the Derby-based manufacturer. The Minister with responsibility for roads announced a £2.7 million investment in 3D laser-scanning technology. Before Christmas, I announced funding approval for a further 21 local authority major schemes, on top of the 20 schemes announced by the Chancellor in the autumn statement. The total Department for Transport contribution for all 41 schemes will be up to £972 million.
Gavin Barwell
My right hon. Friend referred to the procurement by Southern of more than 130 new carriages. Is that not fantastic news for hard-pressed commuters from my constituency and for Bombardier, its employees and its supply chain?
Justine Greening
I absolutely agree. This is a win for everybody concerned. Southern will deploy the new vehicles on its most overcrowded services, which will be of huge benefit and relief to passengers.
John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)
Today’s excellent report from the Transport Committee highlights the scandal of dodgy whiplash claims that are hiking up insurance premiums for honest motorists. Why, just a couple of months ago, did the right hon. Lady’s colleagues reject Labour’s amendments to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill which would have curbed whiplash claims? In light of today’s report will she reconsider that opposition?
Justine Greening
The hon. Gentleman would be better directing his question to the Ministry of Justice, which leads for the Government in this area. I very much welcome the Select Committee’s report and the work of the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) in raising the issue. The Government are already taking action to ban such things as referral fees. I assure the hon. Gentleman that I will work very closely with the Ministry of Justice to see what action we can take on this issue.
Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)
T4. Last month the Department announced funding for a number of road projects, including the Loughborough inner relief road. I thank the Secretary of State for that decision, for which we have been waiting 40 years. Does she agree that road infrastructure is critical for the regeneration of towns and cities such as Loughborough?
Justine Greening
I absolutely agree. The investment that we have been able to put into Loughborough will make a critical difference to Loughborough, not least in helping to regenerate the town centre, improving public transport access and reliability and, importantly, improving accessibility for pedestrians, cyclists and people with disabilities.
Jim McGovern (Dundee West) (Lab)
T2. I am sure that most hon. Members would agree that for many visitors to any town or city in the UK their first impression, and perhaps their last, will be of the train station. Will the Minister use her good offices to ask ScotRail, Network Rail and Dundee city council to look at improving Dundee’s train station?
The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Mrs Theresa Villiers)
As the hon. Gentleman has acknowledged, this is a devolved matter over which I have no direct power, but I am happy to raise it with ScotRail and Network Rail if he would find it helpful.
David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)
T5. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State on the announcements on HS2 and the longevity of the railway system in this country. May I press her to find out what steps are being taken to open up access on the west coast main line link so that passengers from Carnforth can get to London?
Justine Greening
As my hon. Friend may be aware, high-speed rail will enable capacity on the west coast main line to double, and Network Rail is now able to review the ability to use that released capacity to provide better services for constituencies across the country, hopefully including his own.
Graeme Morrice (Livingston) (Lab)
T3. The Secretary of State will be aware that many of the rail enhancement projects in Scotland, including the Edinburgh Glasgow improvement programme and Borders Rail, are being funded by borrowing against the value of Network Rail’s regulatory asset base, which is of course a Great Britain-wide asset. Does she agree that those projects and many in the future would not happen in a separate Scotland, given that there would be no GB assets to borrow against?
Justine Greening
That is one of many questions of this nature that a push towards an independent Scotland would raise. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to raise his concerns about the destabilising impact that independence would have, where none of the benefits hoped for by those who want independence would be realised, but many of the downsides would absolutely come to fruition.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
T8. Road crashes are the biggest single killer of young people aged between 17 and 25 in this country today. Will the Minister join me in congratulating Cheshire safer roads partnership’s “Think, Drive, Survive” scheme, which brings officers into schools to teach young drivers about better road safety? What more can the Government do in this respect?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Mike Penning)
I am sure that my hon. Friend is aware that I have done that excellent scheme in Cheshire and have the certificate on the wall in my office. One of the things we can do is ensure that the test taken before someone is given a driving licence is fit for purpose and that it is not simply a case of passing a test, but of giving the skills everyone needs, particularly young people, to be able to drive and enjoy the road safely.
Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)
T6. Driver fatigue and sleepiness is a major cause of road accidents, and it is estimated that one in six lorry drivers suffers from sleep apnoea. Does the Minister have any plans to increase health checks on lorry drivers to diagnose sleep apnoea?
Mike Penning
This is a condition that I have known about for many years, as I used to be a heavy goods vehicle driver, and it is something I am looking at now. The hon. Lady has met me and knows that we are working on this. I look forward to bringing forward proposals so that we can ensure that an industry that is already very safe is even safer in future.
Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD)
Chippenham station lacks disabled access, in large part due to restrictions on modifying buildings and structures considered to be historically important—I wonder what Brunel would think of that. Does the Minister agree that such heritage concerns ought to be applied proportionately so as not to frustrate either access to the railway or, indeed, impose an unreasonable financial burden on achieving it?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Norman Baker)
I agree with that proposition. One of the problems is that the Victorian infrastructure, which is marvellous in many ways, was not built with the needs of present-day communities in mind. The full Access for All programme is continuing, and I think that it should be possible in most cases to improve access while respecting the integrity of such buildings.
Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)
T7. All parties support the proposed new Mersey Gateway crossing, but there is concern that local people will have to pay a toll to cross the bridges. I believe that they should continue to pay nothing. My big concern is that the deal that the Government have offered Halton borough council means that they will take 70% of any excess revenue from procurement savings and 85% of any excess toll revenue, which will leave the council little room for manoeuvre to discount local tolls. Will the Secretary of State please look at this again?
Justine Greening
I think that the deal we struck with the hon. Gentleman’s local council is the right one, and one that it signed up to. It enables it to get on with the new crossing, which will provide welcome extra capacity for many people in the area.
Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)
The A47 is a vital strategic route from east to west, but in many places it is still single carriageway. Does the Minister agree that it needs to be upgraded to a national strategic route, as it was before the previous Government downgraded it?
Mike Penning
I am very aware of the significance of that road. This is something we are looking at and will continue to look at as we develop plans for future road improvements.
Cathy Jamieson (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (Lab/Co-op)
T9. I continue to receive representations from constituents regarding the Government’s plans for MOT tests. What assurances can I give them that concerns about safety have been taken into account, and what plans has the Secretary of State to update us?
Justine Greening
I will be announcing the next steps on those plans very shortly and can absolutely assure the hon. Lady that, as with any decisions I take, safety is of paramount consideration.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
May I thank the roads Minister for his interest in and commitment to the £110 million expansion of the A14 around Kettering, and, given its proximity to the town of Kettering itself, urge him to include as many noise reduction measures as he can when the scheme is constructed?
Mike Penning
I had a fantastic visit to Kettering and looked at the roads programme that is going to be developed, as well as at the town centre redevelopment, which is a huge success. We will ensure that noise reduction is part of the plan, so that the local community benefits from the new road and is not encumbered by it.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
T10. In Bristol, the city council is being forced to make savings of £2 million, directly affecting its subsidy to First Bus. Routes are being cancelled, operating times are being cut and fares, which are already far too high, are still rising. What efforts are Ministers making to ensure that local bus routes remain operational and affordable?
Norman Baker
I had thought that the hon. Lady might have written to congratulate the Government on the major investment programme in Bristol which we announced at the end of last year, with a number of schemes going ahead. She might have written to congratulate the Government also on the new “better bus area” programme, which includes an extra £50 million for buses, £20 million for more green buses and more money for community transport. So there is a lot of money going into buses, and we are doing a great deal to protect bus passengers and to improve bus services.
Amber Rudd (Hastings and Rye) (Con)
I know that the Minister is aware of the importance to economic growth of the Hastings to Bexhill link road, which he is now considering. Is he also aware of the enormous lengths that its promoters have gone to in order to mitigate environmental concerns, including the proposed building of dedicated tunnels for dormice that might have to cross the road?
Justine Greening
I was not aware of the proposals relating to dormice, although I very much welcome them. I have had many representations from people in that region about the importance of the scheme. We are considering them very carefully now, and I hope that we can announce our final decision on the scheme shortly.
Margaret Beckett (Derby South) (Lab)
Is the Secretary of State aware that, although there is a welcome on both sides of the House and in the city of Derby for her decision on the Southern contract, and indeed hope for her decision on eVoyager, the real touchstone of the Government’s approach to rail procurement will be the handling of Crossrail and, in particular, whether its financing is handled as was the Thameslink project? I know she has that in mind, and I hope that she can give us a favourable answer on it today.
Justine Greening
I am very pleased that the right hon. Lady has welcomed the deal that was struck between Southern and Bombardier. I had her in my thoughts on the day of the announcement, because I know how much difference it makes to the city that she represents. I assure her that I take incredibly seriously the negotiating process, ensuring that it is fair for all people involved including bidders such as Bombardier, and I will now work very closely over the next months and years with all people who want to bid for the important Crossrail procurement and ensure that that is fair. We have seen that when Bombardier bids for contracts, as it does, it can be successful.
Alun Cairns (Vale of Glamorgan) (Con)
Almost 50 years have passed since the 70 mph maximum speed limit was introduced, and in that time there have been significant advances in motoring technology. When does the Minister expect to announce the outcome of her review of the matter?
Justine Greening
I shall announce it very shortly, and we are absolutely committed to striking the right balance between looking at the important issues that my hon. Friend has just raised and doing what we can to maintain and, indeed, improve motorway safety.
Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)
Will the Secretary of State reject the previous Transport Secretary’s comments that high-speed rail would be affordable only for business passengers, and will she reassure passengers that the new high-speed line will be both affordable and accessible?
Justine Greening
I want to be absolutely clear: my predecessor was very clear that the new high-speed rail line needed to be a railway that was beneficial to all people, including of course business people who want to use it. The business case works on an assumption of standard rail fares, as we have on the current network, and I am absolutely clear in my mind that the way in which we are going to make high-speed rail successful is by having as many people use it as possible—and that means having value-for-money fares.
Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)
1. What assessment she has made of the effect of changes to tax credits on the income of women.
The Secretary of State for the Home Department and Minister for Women and Equalities (Mrs Theresa May)
We have had to take tough decisions to protect the economy. The UK has an unprecedented budget deficit, and spending on tax credits has become unsustainable. The savings from changes announced in the autumn statement allow us to take further steps to protect the most vulnerable, including significant increases in child care support to help women and families to get back into work.
Jonathan Ashworth
The Secretary of State will be aware that the median income of households with children is set to fall in real terms, so does she think it fair that a family with children are set to lose £1,250 annually, whereas a family with no children are set to lose £215?
Mrs May
We are aware that things are difficult for families. That is why the Government are taking a number of steps to help families, such as cutting fuel duty, freezing council tax and taking more than 1 million people out of paying income tax altogether, more than half of whom will be women.
Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)
On protecting women’s income, what safeguards are in place to ensure that charging people to use the Child Support Agency does not push mums who cannot afford to pay into further hardship?
Mrs May
I have had a number of conversations with the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Maria Miller) on the arrangements for access to the Child Support Agency. I am happy to say that the Department for Work and Pensions has put arrangements in place that, I believe, will make access affordable for women. We are taking steps to ensure that, in particular, women who have been subject to domestic violence are catered for.
Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) (LD)
2. What discussions she has had with ministerial colleagues on the effect of dieting on the health of women.
The Minister for Equalities (Lynne Featherstone)
I meet ministerial colleagues regularly to discuss a range of issues, including health, dieting and the body confidence campaign. Being at a healthy weight is important in helping people to reduce the risk of serious illness. The Government are committed to helping people to reach and stay at a healthy weight.
Jo Swinson
It is January, which means that adverts in women’s magazines everywhere are promoting diets and miracle weight-loss plans. The inquiry of the all-party parliamentary group on body image has heard evidence from the Royal College of Psychiatrists that not only do 90% of diets not work, but that for people who are susceptible, dieting can trigger eating disorders. How can the Government successfully promote fitness and healthy eating patterns against the onslaught of bad advice to skip meals, cut out food groups and obsess over every calorie, with all the negative health consequences that that creates?
Lynne Featherstone
I congratulate my hon. Friend on the work that she and the APPG do on body image issues. It is important that the link between dieting and eating disorders is looked at closely. She rightly mentions that 95% of diets fail. As a Government, we believe that a diet is not just for Christmas but must be about one’s lifestyle. The best advice is common sense. It is to eat healthily all year round and take appropriate amounts of exercise.
Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)
Dieting and calorie counting can be positive as well as negative, as has just been pointed out. A positive development might be to have calorific information on alcoholic drinks as well as the unit count. Have the Government given any consideration to that?
Lynne Featherstone
The hon. Gentleman raises an interesting point and I will take it up with the appropriate Minister.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
Given the beneficial effects of breastfeeding on weight loss and on the baby’s health, and that Britain has one of the lowest breastfeeding rates of any country in Europe, what work is the Minister doing with the Department of Health to encourage women to breastfeed their babies?
Lynne Featherstone
The issues around breastfeeding are very sensitive. We have to find the balance between raising the benefits that breastfeeding can bring and not making people who feel that they cannot breastfeed feel bad about it. The hon. Gentleman raises two important points about weight loss and what is best for babies. It also has benefits in relation to allergies. I work with the Department of Health on all these issues.
Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
It has long been a Liberal Democrat policy to make personal, social and health education compulsory in schools. That could include body image classes. Does the Minister regret that the coalition Government have set their face against making PSHE compulsory?
Lynne Featherstone
The Government are reviewing PSHE. The hon. Lady is absolutely right about body confidence. The Media Smart programme for schools is voluntary, but it has had the greatest ever number of downloads of any such programme. We should also use the big society and have other groups going into schools. Not everything should rest on teachers’ shoulders.
Dame Anne Begg (Aberdeen South) (Lab)
3. What assessment she has made of the effect of Government policies on efforts to tackle violence against disabled people.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Maria Miller)
The Government take seriously tackling hate crime against disabled people, and violence in particular. We are meeting the coalition commitment to improve the recording of such crimes and working with voluntary sector partners to encourage more victims to come forward.
Dame Anne Begg
Disabled people report an increase in the use of insults such as “scroungers” and “cheats” aimed at them, which reflects the language used by many media outlets when reporting the Government’s own welfare reform. What action will the Minister take to stop the Government adding to the perception that anyone on benefit is fleecing the system and is an acceptable target for such verbal attacks?
Maria Miller
I thank the hon. Lady for her question, because I agree that the use of such inflammatory language is not acceptable, and the Government will not use it at all. We believe strongly that it is the system that has trapped disabled people in a spiral of welfare dependency, and that is why the overhaul of the benefits system is such a priority. I hope that we can rely on her support for our work in that area.
Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
May I ask the Minister to examine MAMA—“Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks”—which is a new system for reporting hate crime against Muslims, to see whether its use would be appropriate in relation to the reporting of hate crimes against people with disabilities as well?
Maria Miller
I am sure that we can learn a great deal from many different areas about how to improve the recording of hate crime, which is still a work in progress. My right hon. Friend will be aware of the work that we are doing with organisations such as Radar to increase third-party reporting of hate crime, but I will certainly take up his suggestion.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
I know that the Minister is deeply concerned about violence against disabled people, and she will be concerned by the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) raised about reports of increasing threats of violence against disabled people. She will be concerned also about the fear of many disabled groups that that is being fuelled by the tone of some of the Government’s remarks and their approach. There is a fear that certain elements of the Welfare Reform Bill, for example, have crossed a basic line of decency. In that light, will the Minister look again at the measures that the Lords voted on yesterday, and particularly at the Government’s proposal to deny young people who have been disabled since birth and who cannot work the chance of getting contributory employment and support allowance?
Maria Miller
I thank the right hon. Lady for bringing up this issue. She is absolutely right that it is important that discussion of the Welfare Reform Bill is undertaken in an appropriate manner, although I think she is wrong in believing that the measures that we have put in the Bill are in any way adding to the problem. If we did not make the changes that are included in the Bill, which were voted on in the other place yesterday, where does she anticipate that we would make the substantial necessary savings?
Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)
4. What steps she is taking to increase the role of women in the economy.
The Secretary of State for the Home Department and Minister for Women and Equalities (Mrs Theresa May)
Using the skills and qualifications of women who are currently out of work would deliver economic benefits of £15 billion to £20 billion a year for the UK. The actions that we are taking, for example through the Work programme and our support for women’s enterprise, will ensure that that untapped potential can be used to stimulate economic growth.
Nadine Dorries
A year on from Lord Davies of Abersoch’s report on the number of women in boardrooms, minimal progress has been made. It seems amazing that men who can run boardrooms, businesses and banks so effectively are unable to introduce policies of fairness and equality. What further does the Minister think can be done to encourage organic change within businesses, banks and boardrooms and avoid a demeaning and degrading measure of quotas and shortlists?
Mrs May
I thank my hon. Friend for making the point that the best way to get change is not to impose a quota on a country but to encourage people to recognise the talents that exist within their companies. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) asks what is happening, and I am about to answer that, because it was one of the issues that my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries) raised. Since 1 March last year, 27% of board appointments to FTSE 100 companies have been female, and we are now down to only 10 all-male boards in the FTSE 100. Progress is being made as a result of Lord Davies’s report, but of course we continue to monitor the matter and will continue to work with companies to encourage them to use the talent available from the women who are in those companies and can be appointed to their boards.
Mrs Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)
Does the Minister agree with the independent report published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies last week, which shows that on average, the Government’s decisions weaken the incentive for those with children to undertake paid work?
Mrs May
What I would say to the hon. Lady is that the Government are already taking steps to ensure that we can help women into the workplace, particularly in the Work programme and the work that we will be doing through business mentors to help women who wish to set up their own businesses. The most important thing that will in due course help to ensure that women can get into the workplace, by making work pay, is the introduction of the universal credit.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
At the recent north-west women’s enterprise day in my constituency, 200 inspiring women who had started up their own businesses or were about to were given an excellent range of advice. What can be done to roll out that kind of scheme across the country, and in particular to encourage women to take the critical step from not just working in their businesses, but employing others and creating jobs?
Mrs May
I commend the women’s enterprise action that was taken in the north-west. That is a very good example of what can be done at local and regional level to ensure that we encourage women to use their full potential in the economy, which is to their benefit and that of the UK as a whole. Our introduction of business mentors is one thing that will help women not only to set up businesses, but to grow them in a way that will lead to them becoming employers.
Mr Iain McKenzie (Inverclyde) (Lab)
5. What assessment she has made of the effect of Government policies on efforts to tackle domestic violence against women.
The Minister for Equalities (Lynne Featherstone)
A progress review of the Government’s approach to tackling violence against women and girls was published on 25 November. It highlighted many of our achievements to date in relation to domestic violence, including, among many other measures: providing £3.3 million funding for multi-agency risk assessment conference co-ordinator and independent domestic violence adviser posts locally until 2015; introducing a requirement for multi-agency reviews after every domestic homicide; and piloting domestic violence protection orders in three police force areas.
Mr McKenzie
I recently visited a Women’s Aid project in my constituency. Is the Minister aware of the crisis in accommodation for women fleeing violence? Such projects have been left with little choice but to advise vulnerable women on how to minimise harm if they are forced to sleep on the streets.
Lynne Featherstone
I understand, with all that is going on in this age of austerity—there is not enough money to fund everything—that there are issues around some of the funding for women, but the Home Secretary and I could not have been clearer about the priority that the Government place on tackling violence against women, by ring-fencing £28 million of funding and by sending a loud and clear message to local authorities that they should not look for soft targets.
Mary Macleod (Brentford and Isleworth) (Con)
Does the Minister agree that it is important to give priority for council housing to women who have suffered domestic violence? Will she work with the Housing and Local Government Minister to encourage councils to give them top priority?
Lynne Featherstone
I thank my hon. Friend, who raises an important point. If there is nowhere for a victim of domestic violence to go, post coming out of a refuge, we are not solving any of the problems. I am happy to do as she suggests.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
Safe, secure accommodation is essential, as the Minister knows, for women fleeing domestic violence, and she must be aware of the concerns of providers of refuge accommodation such as Women’s Aid, which has talked of chaos in commissioning and its anxiety about the removal of the ring fence on the Supporting People grant, which means that refuges face cuts in funding of as much as 50%. Does she share my concern that the Government’s proposal to remove the support element from housing benefit payments and transfer the money to local authorities without protecting it for housing support is another nail in the coffin of a nationally funded network of refuges for women?
Lynne Featherstone
I would point out to the hon. Lady that the ring fence around the Supporting People budget was removed under the Labour Government, and that that £6.5 million budget has been cut by only 1%. If local authorities are not using it appropriately, I suggests she takes the matter up with them.
Lorely Burt (Solihull) (LD)
What action are the coalition Government taking to help victims of domestic violence who come here on spousal visas? They desperately need help but have no money and no recourse to public funds.
Lynne Featherstone
I thank my hon. Friend for that question. People who come on spousal visas—they are generally but not exclusively women—are left in a very vulnerable situation when they find themselves victims of domestic violence. The previous Government began the Sojourner project, which provided some breathing space for those women. We have continued and extended that project pending a long-term solution, which we are working on with the Department for Work and Pensions—[Interruption.] Mr Speaker, are you coughing at me? [Laughter.] I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead.
Mr Speaker
I have never coughed at the hon. Lady, and I was not intending to start, but I am grateful for her compassionate concern for the state of my health. If she had wanted to finish the answer, she could, but she doesn’t, so she won’t.
Business of the House
(12 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)
Will the Leader of the House please give us the business for next week?
The Leader of the House of Commons (Sir George Young)
The business for next week is as follows:
Monday 16 January—Opposition day [un-allotted day]. There will be a debate on individual voter registration, followed by a debate on the national health service. These debates will arise on an Opposition motion.
Tuesday 17 January—General debate on the future of town centres and high streets. The subject for this debate has been nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.
Wednesday 18 January—Consideration in Committee of the Local Government Finance Bill (day 1).
Thursday 19 January—Motion to approve European documents relating to integrated EU infrastructures, followed by motion on public bodies—scrutiny of draft orders—followed by continuation of debate on national policy statements relating to ports.
Friday 20 January—Private Members’ Bills.
The provisional business for the week commencing 23 January will include:
Monday 23 January—Opposition day [un-allotted day]. There will be a debate on an Opposition motion. Subject to be announced.
Tuesday 24 January—Continuation of consideration in Committee of the Local Government Finance Bill (day 2).
Wednesday 25 January—Motion to approve a European document relating to EU criminal policy, followed by: the Chairman of Ways and Means will name opposed private business for consideration.
Thursday 26 January—Business to be nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.
I should also like to inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall for 19 and 26 January 2012 will be:
Thursday 19 January—Debate to mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2012.
Thursday 26 January—Debate on the Culture, Media and Sport Committee report on football governance.
Ms Eagle
I thank the Leader of the House for that explanation of the packed legislative programme that he has brought to the House of Commons for the start of the new year. I notice that he has not announced the date for the Queen’s Speech, despite the fact that Paul Waugh of PoliticsHome announced it on his blog last week. We wait to hear some time in the future whether he was accurate.
We learned this week that the Committee stage of the Local Government Finance Bill is being taken on the Floor of the House—virtually the only Government business to be taken on the Floor in the next couple of weeks. The House of Commons Library has confirmed that over the past 30 years, only five local government Bills have been treated in this way: the 1984 and 1985 Bills that abolished the Greater London council; the 1987 Bill on block grants and rate limitation; the 1991 Bill on rate capping; and the 1999 Labour Bill that finally restored democratic government to London. Will the Leader of the House explain what in this local government Bill requires it to have its entire Committee stage on the Floor of the House? The Government are obviously struggling to fill the Commons calendar, so in the spirit of new year bonhomie, and wanting to help the right hon. Gentleman, may I ask him whether he could make time for a debate on the Government’s mishandling of their legislative programme?
On fat cat salaries, the Prime Minister, in his new year tour of the TV studios, announced that shareholder votes on executive pay would now be binding. However, in November he announced that his idea to address exorbitant boardroom pay was to appoint more women to boards, and in October he told us that the solution was boards asking themselves, “Is this the right thing to do?” Over the past year we have had plenty of press releases from No. 10, but FTSE 100 bosses have put their own salaries up by a staggering 49%, while average earnings have gone up by just 1.4%. To prevent the Prime Minister from touring the TV studios once a month with the latest wheeze, will the Leader of the House explain to him that if he is serious about dealing with fat cat salaries we need action, not more press releases? When will we get it?
Perhaps the Leader of the House could also have a word with the Chancellor and inquire when we can expect a response from the Treasury to Will Hutton’s report on fair pay in the public sector. In June 2010 the Chancellor announced—in yet another press release—that this was an “important review” and that it would play a “crucial role” in developing Government policy. Will the Leader of the House enlighten us as to what has happened since the report was published 10 months ago?
Given the defeat that the Government suffered last night on their shocking plans to deny benefit to cancer sufferers, will the Leader of the House join me in congratulating the tiny band of Liberal Democrats who joined Labour and the “Cross Benchers” in standing up for decency and fairness? Rather than using parliamentary time in this place to reverse the three votes that the Government lost last night, may we instead have a debate on fairness, to remind the Liberal Democrats why they claim they came into politics in the first place?
The Leader of the House will understand the concern over the safety of PIP implants. The Secretary of State for Health announced yesterday a “rapid review” of the safety of people seeking cosmetic interventions. Can the Leader of the House confirm when the review will conclude, and will he assure us that the Health Secretary will make a statement to the House when it does?
The House is growing weary of rapid reviews being announced by press release. Last November, the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, the hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) promised that the Government would publish by the “end of the month” proposals to clamp down on the access that lobbyists have to the Government. Since then we have had Mr Collins of Bell Pottinger boasting of the access to those at the top of Government that he can arrange for his clients, and now Mr O’Shaughnessy, one of the Prime Minister’s top aides, has signed up to another lobbying firm. What we have not had is the promised consultation. The last time the Leader of the House was asked about this, at the beginning of December, he told the House that the Government would publish proposals “in a few weeks”. Given that the consultation is now long overdue, will the Cabinet Office Minister return to the House to explain what has gone wrong? While he is at it, will he also explain the Government’s policy on freedom of information?
Before Christmas the Information Commissioner launched his first ever probe into a Government Department, because the Education Secretary and his advisers were communicating using the Education Secretary’s wife’s e-mail account. Given that the Secretary of State announced this week—not to the House—a new policy on information technology lessons in schools, perhaps the Leader of the House could arrange for his colleague to have some IT lessons himself, so that if he wants to communicate secretly with his advisers he can set up his own e-mail account, and will not need to use his wife’s.
Finally, Mr Speaker, may I wish you and all Members a happy new year? Will the Leader of the House join me in urging all Ministers to adopt a new year’s resolution to make announcements to this House first? After all, the ministerial code requires them to do so.
Sir George Young
I begin by echoing the hon. Lady’s good wishes to you, Mr Speaker, and to the House, for a happy new year. She began in a traditional way by asking about the Queen’s Speech. I am delighted that she is looking forward to the next one, which will be packed with legislative reform from the coalition Government, and I hope that she will warmly welcome it when it arrives. She will have to contain herself for a little longer, however. The date of the Queen’s Speech will be announced in due course in the usual way. In the meantime, I have given hon. Members some certainty about the House’s sittings: I have announced them up to October this year. By contrast, my predecessor gave the House two weeks’ notice of the Easter recess in March 2010. The House now has a degree of certainty about when we shall meet, and hon. Members can plan their work-life balance accordingly.
On Parliament’s work programme, I hope that the hon. Lady is not going to denigrate the work that the House is doing. This week we had two statements on Tuesday, on the referendum in Scotland and on High Speed 2. We had a statement yesterday on breast implants, as well as two Opposition day debates; I hope that she is not going to say that those were not worth having. Later today we shall have two important debates arranged by the Backbench Business Committee. As I have said before, this place is not a legislative factory. We are not going to make the mistake that the previous Government made of introducing too much ill-considered legislation.
The hon. Lady asked why we were having the Committee stage of the Local Government Finance Bill on the Floor of the House. I have in front of me a list of 18 non-constitutional Bills that went to a Committee of the whole House between 1997 and 2010, so let us not have any nonsense about this being unprecedented.
Let me give just one example of what the previous Government did. The Digital Economy Act 2010—50 clauses and three schedules—was rushed through the House during wash-up, without consensus, on the Floor of the House. Here we have a 10-clause Bill with three schedules and we are allowing three days for Committee. I hope the House will support what we are doing, as more than 600 experts on local government will be at hand here and able to take part in the Bill’s proceedings.
On executive pay, let me remind the Opposition that they did nothing about it for 13 years. By contrast, we consulted and we will set out in our response the action we will take to tackle irresponsible directors—something Labour did not do—and we are going to require greater transparency for directors’ pay and salary. We shall give shareholders a greater say through binding votes, and allow them to block unjustified pay-offs for failure. An announcement will be made in due course by the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills. I will, of course, pursue the matter of fair pay and the Government’s response with the Chancellor, and find out the date of the response for which the hon. Lady asked.
There will, of course, be an opportunity for the Government to consider in this House yesterday’s votes on the Welfare Reform Bill in the other place. I make the simple point that if we do not reverse those amendments we will need to make savings from other areas. Of course the Government will look carefully at what has happened in the other place. It is worth making the point that the amendments that were carried would not have affected the position of those in the support group—the most vulnerable—whose entitlement to benefit would remain unaffected. Nor would the Government’s proposals have affected those on means-tested benefits. It is a question of getting the balance right on the extent to which applicants draw on their own resources or on the resources of taxpayers. Let me remind the hon. Lady of what the Leader of the Opposition said in his speech of 10 January:
“in these times, with less money, spending more on one thing means finding the money from somewhere else. When someone wins, someone else loses.”
She might like to remember that when we come to debate those amendments.
On yesterday’s statements by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health, he announced three reviews in connection with what went wrong with the breast implants, and I know he will want to keep the House informed as those reviews make progress.
I am surprised that the hon. Lady raised the issue of lobbying. For 13 years the Labour Government did nothing about lobbying, yet she now criticises us for taking time to come up with the paper on our proposals. The consultation document will be published shortly, and there was no breach of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments rules by Mr James O’Shaughnessy.
Finally, I have announced an Opposition day on Monday, and I wonder whether the Opposition are going to compound the confusion they caused with their last one. On Tuesday their leader talked about responsibility regarding the deficit, but just hours later the Opposition voted against our modest measures for sorting out the mess in local government finance. On the very next day they tabled two motions that, far from reducing the deficit, would have increased it. They opposed every cut and promised to spend an extra £87 billion that we do not have, and they were in denial about the mess they created when they were in government. I wonder whether the time has not now come for another relaunch by the Opposition.
Mr Speaker
Order. A large number of colleagues are seeking to catch my eye, and I am keen to accommodate them. I remind the House, however, that two important debates are to take place under the auspices of the Backbench Business Committee, so it is imperative to have brief questions and characteristically brief answers from the Leader of the House. I am sure that a Member who has served for 28 years will set us a good example: I call Mr David Amess.
Mr David Amess (Southend West) (Con)
Paul Gilson, a local fisherman, was recently fined £400,000 for bureaucratic mistakes in relation to his catch. Will the Leader of the House allow us a debate on the issues surrounding quotas for small fishing vessels?
Sir George Young
I understand my hon. Friend’s constituent’s concern about what happened. As my hon. Friend will understand, it would not be appropriate for me to comment on a particular case. I imagine that, as with all decisions of a court, this man will have an opportunity to appeal against what happened. As I understand it, the confiscation orders are simply designed to put anyone who has profited from an illegal catch back into the position in which he or she would otherwise have been; they are not intended to be a punishment. I hope my hon. Friend will understand the constraints on Ministers when it comes to commenting on individual cases.
Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)
Would it not be more appropriate for Ministers to give serious consideration to the amendments that were carried yesterday in the House of Lords? Perhaps we could have a statement before the normal parliamentary procedure becomes involved. Does the Leader of the House not agree that to take action against cancer, bone and stroke patients is totally unacceptable? Indeed, it is sick. I heard the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) on the radio today trying to justify what has occurred, but I hope that the Cabinet will give further consideration to the matter. What has been agreed to by the House of Lords should be agreed to by the Government.
Sir George Young
As I said to the hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle), the Government will give serious consideration to the votes that took place in the other place yesterday. We have asked Professor Harrington to work with Macmillan to ensure that the work-related assessments are appropriate, although it should be borne in mind that the worst cancer cases would be in support groups and would therefore not be affected. Government amendments tabled to the Bill yesterday would have protected those whose condition subsequently deteriorated. Of course we will consider the matter seriously, but as I have said, if we do not make savings by means of that part of the Bill, we may have to seek compensatory savings elsewhere.
Mr Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
Although it is good that there is less legislation pouring through the House of Commons, we still do not have enough time to debate issues on great occasions. For instance, before the Prime Minister went off to the last European summit, all that we had was a little debate in Westminster Hall—which, admittedly, served its purpose in a way. Can the Leader of the House confirm that before the next European summit there will be a proper debate on the Floor of the House, as happens in other Parliaments, so that the Prime Minister can gauge opinion in the Chamber about his negotiating tactics?
Sir George Young
I understand my hon. Friend’s concern, but he will know that as a result of the recommendations of the Wright Committee, the time that the Government had in which to arrange such debates has been transferred to the Backbench Business Committee, as has responsibility for finding time for them, and the other debates for which the Government used to find time. It is to that Committee that my hon. Friend and others should apply, because it now has the time that the Government used to have.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
Is the Leader of the House aware of a growing tendency for Departments to give insubstantial answers to parliamentary questions in order to conform with the time scale? For instance, between 27 May 2010 and 9 March 2011, 53% of answers given by the Department for Transport were non-substantive, as were 41% of those given by the Ministry of Defence and 67% of those given by the Home Office. The failure to give real answers is a continuing problem, and I hope that the Leader of the House will take it up with Departments in order to ensure that Members receive proper responses to their questions.
Sir George Young
The hon. Lady is right: the House is entitled to prompt and informative answers from Ministers in response to written questions. I do not know whether she had an opportunity to raise the issue during the Transport questions session that has just ended, but, as Leader of the House, I do take steps to ensure that my colleagues answer questions promptly. I believe I am right in saying that we publish statistics each year on the performance of Departments, and I am always prepared to take up specific cases on behalf of Members.
Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
The Leader of the House has just announced that the first draft orders resulting from the Public Bodies Act 2011 will be considered next week. You will recall, Mr Speaker, the exchange that we had on a point of order relating to this matter before the House rose for the Christmas recess. Is the Leader of the House now able to confirm that the Select Committees concerned will be given notice before the orders are laid on the Floor of the House, and that a full 60 days will be allowed for consideration of each order by each Select Committee? Will he also make good the promise of a draft water Bill before prorogation?
Sir George Young
I will pass on the last question, because I am not conscious of having personally given such a commitment. As for the serious issues raised by my hon. Friend in connection with the Public Bodies Act, I hope that the Deputy Leader of the House—who, I believe, will be handling the debate next Thursday—will be able to respond to them, and to inform her of the progress that we are making in moving to a new regime for consideration of the draft orders that follow from the legislation.
Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)
The Leader of the House may not want the Chamber to be seen as a “legislative factory”, but nor should it be seen as just a political wii game in which many points are scored but nothing substantial is achieved. Once the session of keepy-uppy in which the Chamber is currently engaged has ended, will it be able to give commensurate consideration to the important issues in the Welfare Reform Bill that are being subjected to serious deliberation and amendment in the other place?
Sir George Young
I hope the hon. Gentleman will accept that the coalition Government have sought to be more generous than the last Government in allocating time for their programme to be dealt with on the Floor of the House. We have allowed two, and in one case three, days for the Report stages of important Bills, and we intend to maintain our good record of giving the House adequate time in which to consider legislation. That commitment also extends to important amendments that have been passed in another place.
Sir Roger Gale (North Thanet) (Con)
I personally welcome the fact that, unlike their predecessor, the present Government are providing the House with adequate time in which to scrutinise legislation properly. More is not necessarily better.
No doubt my right hon. Friend, as an early riser, listens to “Farming Today”, and will therefore know that a significant number of Europe-wide farm animal welfare issues are the responsibility of Ministers in the House of Commons. Will he find Government time for a general debate on those issues in the Chamber, so that they too can be considered properly?
Sir George Young
My hon. Friend will have heard me announce two debates on Europe-related matters on the Floor of the House arising from consideration by the European Scrutiny Committee. I will take his suggestion on board, but he may wish to ask the Backbench Business Committee for a more general debate.
Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)
At the beginning of this month the Government’s new web application system for the blue badge came on line. Ministers said that it would save money and lead to easier renewals, but it has been riddled with technical problems. Applications have been delayed or sent to the wrong place, which has caused chaos and backlogs, and councils have been unable to deal with the problem because the system is under the auspices of an IT contractor for which the Department for Transport is responsible. May we have a urgent statement from the Government on what they are doing to sort out this mess—which has been caused by their own mismanagement—so that those who need blue badges can secure them as soon as possible?
Sir George Young
The hon. Lady may have had an opportunity to raise precisely that issue with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport during Transport questions earlier. [Interruption.] As she was unable to do so, however, I will raise it with my right hon. Friend, and will ensure that I obtain a response. It is in everyone’s interest for those who are entitled to blue badges to be able to gain access to them without too much hassle.
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
A seven-year-old boy in my constituency called Zac has a very rare cancer called neuroblastoma. As a result of help from the former Labour Health Minister Ann Keen and my local primary care trust, treatment became available in Germany and was paid for by the NHS. Recently Zac needed another life-saving operation. It was decided that the operation should be carried out by the NHS in this country, but unfortunately it was cancelled twice. In desperation, Zac’s mother took him to Germany, where he had the operation yesterday. May we have a statement from the Secretary of State for Health next week, telling us what went wrong in this country and whether the parents’ costs will be reimbursed?
Sir George Young
I am sure the whole House hopes that Zac makes a good recovery from the operation that took place yesterday, and I will raise the matter with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health. As my hon. Friend knows, we have made more resources available to the NHS year on year, and responsibility for funding the costs of transport from this country to Germany would normally lie with the local primary care trust. However, I will try to establish whether my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State can play a role in ensuring that the parents can maintain suitable contact with their son.
Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)
I wish to ask the Leader of the House a question about his own remit. When Labour was in power and I was chairing the European Scrutiny Committee, he seemed to support the idea of reinstating permanent membership of the General Committees that debate EU issues sent to them by the European Scrutiny Committee. I have asked him several times—and the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash) has supported my request through the Committee—for the matter to be brought before the House. He has had plenty of time to arrange it, and there is plenty of room in the timetable. When will permanent membership be reinstated, so that people can learn properly about European business in General Committees?
Sir George Young
I commend the hon. Gentleman’s work on that issue. I would like to pursue the discussion through the usual channels, and then come back to him.
Lorely Burt (Solihull) (LD)
Given the increasing number of schools offering A-levels, there is an increasing anomaly with VAT, in that schools do not pay it but sixth-form colleges do. The Treasury has rejected requests from the Sixth Form Colleges Forum and others to rectify that. With VAT standing at 20%, may we have a debate to explore ways to equalise the situation and be fairer to sixth-form colleges?
Sir George Young
I understand my hon. Friend’s concern. There will be an opportunity on Monday to raise this issue with the Secretary of State for Education. For now, I think the appropriate answer to my hon. Friend is that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is in the process of drawing up his Budget, the date of which has been announced, and I will take her request as a bid for him to consider that matter as part of his broader Budget considerations.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
May I remind the Leader of the House that in this year of the jubilee and the Olympics there are diverse regions in our country, and many people in Yorkshire and Humber and the north-east and north-west get the feeling that everything is happening either in London and the south-east or in Scotland? Is it not about time that we looked at the Cinderella regions that get less investment, less focus and, now, less leadership?
Sir George Young
Many parts of the country are benefiting from the construction work on the Olympic stadium in London; the benefits go far wider than just the south-east. I also hope the hon. Gentleman will recognise that we have introduced measures to help the regions, such as the regional economic growth fund and concessions on national insurance to certain parts of the country, as well as measures to help those parts of the country that are worst hit by unemployment. I do not agree that the leadership in our country is entirely confined to London and the south-east as there are many parts of the country with first-class leadership, and it is up to Members of Parliament who represent the regions to do what the hon. Gentleman has done: stand up in this House and fight for the areas they represent.
Gavin Williamson (South Staffordshire) (Con)
Last year, all in South Staffordshire celebrated the fantastic news that Jaguar Land Rover was going to build a new engine plant in my constituency, in one of the Government’s new enterprise zones. May we have a debate on how we might promote more manufacturing in the west midlands, so we can build on that success?
Sir George Young
I am delighted to hear of the good news in my hon. Friend’s constituency, and he reminds the House that the 24 new enterprise zones will come on stream in April. They will bring a range of benefits, including access to capital allowances, business rate relief and new superfast broadband. That is a part of our strategy of rebalancing the economy by encouraging manufacturing and thereby getting a more sustainable foundation for the growth in employment that we all want.
Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)
At a recent meeting of the Sustainable Business Forum, it became clear that UK Trade & Investment had no strategy for green economic development under the local enterprise partnerships. Indeed, UKTI was not even aware that eight of the partnerships have been designated specifically for green economic development, and its website is still showing Vestas as one of the key British flagship companies in green economic development. May we have a debate in Government time about the Government’s strategy for green economic growth in this country?
Sir George Young
The Government are indeed committed to green economic growth, and a number of the measures taken by the Department of Energy and Climate Change have been designed precisely to ensure that. I will take up the specific issue the hon. Gentleman raises about UKTI to see if anything needs to be done there, and I shall draw his point to the attention of my ministerial colleagues at both DECC and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
May we have an urgent debate on the number of roads that are not brought up to adoptable standard by developers? This is a nationwide problem. There are roads in my constituency that have been awaiting adoption for 10 years, and Taylor Wimpey is refusing to engage with the local authority. We must debate this issue, especially if we are going to increase housing development in this country.
Sir George Young
I suspect that many other Members have also encountered precisely that problem, where residents living in recently developed estates find that the roads are still in the ownership of the developer, that they are not up to a standard that the local authority will take over, and that the developer will not bring them up to the appropriate standard. I will contact my colleagues at the Department for Communities and Local Government to see if there are any steps that the Government need to take to ensure private developers honour their obligations, often under section 106, so that the residents on such estates have roads of a quality to which they are entitled.
Fiona O'Donnell (East Lothian) (Lab)
The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs initially promised to publish in 2010 a report on the humaneness and effective use of snaring and then, in response to a written parliamentary question, said she would release the report by the end of last year. We have still not had the report, however, which is preventing debate on this issue not only in this place, but in the Public Petitions Committee of the Scottish Parliament. While the Government are in an enabling mood in respect of Scotland, please will the Leader of the House press for the report to be published?
Sir George Young
I understand the hon. Lady’s concern. There will be an opportunity next Thursday to ask the Secretary of State about that report. I will make sure that Ministers in that Department are aware of the hon. Lady’s concern and let them know that there is a strong likelihood that they will be asked about that issue in a week’s time.
Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)
May we have a debate on abortion term limits? Does the Leader of the House believe it is right that babies in this country are still being aborted because they have cleft palates or club feet?
Sir George Young
I understand my hon. Friend’s concern, but I have to be frank with him: the Government do not have plans to introduce legislation to reform the law on abortion. The issue was debated at some length in the previous Parliament. However, if he wants a debate on it, he may like to approach the Backbench Business Committee, because I appreciate that strong views are held on both sides of the argument.
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
As the Leader of the House is having so much trouble filling parliamentary time, why has he not been able to allow the Prime Minister to fulfil his promise of having a debate and a vote on fox hunting? Might that be because the Leader of the House is not looking very hard for that time?
Sir George Young
I suspect that if the first thing that the coalition Government had done was have a debate on fox hunting, the hon. Gentleman would have questioned our priorities. The Government have a legislative programme which is before the House, and we believe that is the appropriate priority for the House. There are three and a half years to go in this Parliament, and in due course that section of the coalition agreement will be honoured.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
At Health questions this week, I asked about reports that advertisements for personal injury lawyers had started appearing in hospital accident and emergency departments. The Minister who answered rightly said that it was not appropriate for such material to appear in NHS hospitals. However, the Compensation Act 2006, introduced by the previous Labour Government, states that hospitals are authorised to deal with companies under agreement, so may we have an urgent debate about the unwelcome consequences of that Act, which I believe has added to the compensation culture in this country?
Sir George Young
I am disturbed to hear that such advertisements are going up in hospitals in our country. As my hon. Friend says, unauthorised marketing by claims management companies is already prohibited without the approval of the management of the facility or the building, and that ban has forced a number of claims companies to modify how they advertise their services. To answer my hon. Friend’s specific question, a Command Paper on post-legislative scrutiny of the Act he mentions has been laid in Parliament today, and there is a related written ministerial statement, which he may like to look at.
Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)
Another dire statistic revealed this week that there are 210,000 households in the north-east in which no one is working. That, coupled with the highest unemployment, fuel poverty and child poverty rates in the country, does not bode well for the people of the north-east. Will the Leader of the House make time for a debate to discuss the future for the people of the north-east and the north-east economy?
Sir George Young
Of course the Government are concerned about the high level of unemployment in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency and the north-east in general. To put this in context, the Office for Budget Responsibility expects that between 2011 and 2017 total employment will increase by about 1 million, with a 1.7 million rise in private sector employment offsetting a total reduction in general government employment of about 710,000. As the hon. Gentleman will know, we have introduced the Work programme, the UK’s biggest ever single employment support programme. We are also introducing universal credit, which will improve the incentives to get back into work, and there is extra funding on apprenticeships and other such activities. I hope that will help reduce unemployment in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency.
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
Could we have a debate on value for money and effectiveness in local policing, so that other police forces can learn from the example of Bedfordshire police, which has just cut crime by 67%? We could learn about the police station exclusion policy of inspectors such as Frank Donnelly, who has made sure that officers are out catching criminals and not inside police stations.
Sir George Young
I commend the work of Inspector Frank Donnelly, who has shown that, within the challenging financial settlement that police authorities have had to live with, it is possible to reduce crime by getting officers out of the station and on to the streets. I was delighted to hear of the reduction in crime in my hon. Friend’s constituency, and I hope the example of Frank Donnelly will be copied elsewhere.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
The business that the Leader of the House announced was pretty threadbare, and although I agree with him that we do not necessarily want to be a legislation factory, I have a solution for him. There are 101 private Members’ Bills waiting for time and only two days when they could possibly be debated before Prorogation, when they all lapse. Some of them are on really important things such as adoption, firearms, daylight saving, metal theft, the registration of lobbyists—that would solve the problem there. Why does the Leader of the House therefore not give up some of the days he is using on footling business and allocate them to private Members’ Bills, which lots of Members on the Government Back Benches would love? [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”]
Sir George Young
That is a very populist demand which I know finds a lot of support on the Back Benches. I gently remind the hon. Gentleman that there are two Houses of Parliament and legislation has to pass through both. There is no point in stacking up more and more Bills in this House if the other House has not got the time to process them. He will know that the Welfare Reform Bill, the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, the Health and Social Care Bill and the Scotland Bill are all awaiting consideration in another place, and they have to complete their passage through the House before the end of the Session. There is no merit at all in adding to the queue in the way the hon. Gentleman has suggested.
Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)
Can the Leader of the House find time for a statement that could give an answer to the North Lincolnshire question? The question relates, of course, to the Scottish referendum and why a Scot working in North Lincolnshire for a few years will be denied a vote on the future of his country, whereas someone from North Lincolnshire working for a few years in Scotland will have the opportunity of a vote.
Sir George Young
I suspect that the North Lincolnshire question could be posed for almost any part of the country. My hon. Friend will know that the provisional decision is to use the franchise for the Scottish Parliament as the basis for any referendum, but there will be adequate opportunities in the debate that was launched on Tuesday by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland to discuss the broader issues surrounding the referendum. It would make sense for the House to reflect at some point on the announcement made on Tuesday, and that may provide an opportunity for my hon. Friend to pose his question; and—who knows?—he may get an answer to it at the end of that debate.
David Wright (Telford) (Lab)
Could we have a statement from a Health Minister about the introduction of the 111 service? There is real concern in Telford that the introduction of the 111 service might severely damage our excellent out-of-hours GP service, specifically consultations and out-of-hours cover.
Sir George Young
There was an opportunity to ask Health Ministers questions on Tuesday, but I will draw my right hon. Friend the Health Secretary’s attention to the concern that the hon. Gentleman has expressed about the 111 scheme’s impact on services and ask him to write to the hon. Gentleman.
Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)
Over 80% of people in employment in my constituency are employed in the private sector, many of them in small businesses. Those businesses should be given the support they need to enable them to grow and to create more jobs, so that we can get more people working in the private sector. Could the Leader of the House find time for a debate on that matter and the support the Government could give?
Sir George Young
My hon. Friend is right—we do look to the small and medium-sized enterprises to be part of the dynamo for growth and reducing unemployment. She will know that we have doubled small business rate relief for two and a half years. Originally, we announced a doubling of that relief for one year, and that was extended in the 2011 Budget, and again in the autumn statement for a further six months from October 2012. There are also other initiatives, such as cutting red tape and the loan guarantee scheme. I hope that all those will be of assistance to SMEs. We all have a role to play in drawing to the attention of SMEs in our constituencies the various schemes the Government have made available to assist them.
Mr Iain Wright (Hartlepool) (Lab)
The Leader of the House mentioned rebalancing the economy. Data from the US suggest that its manufacturing sector is expanding strongly and unemployment is at a three-year low. By way of contrast, British manufacturing has suffered the sharpest fall in activity since 2009, unemployment here is at an 18-year high, and yesterday’s trade figures showed that exports to countries outside the EU have declined. Given that next month marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, can we have a debate on a tale of two economies, so that this House can debate with Dickensian eloquence why the US seems to be pulling out of the mess but Britain seems to be going ever further into it?
Sir George Young
I point out to the hon. Gentleman that the decline in the manufacturing industry did not begin in 2009; there had already been a fairly substantial reduction in employment in manufacturing. One of the things we are seeking to do is to rebalance the economy, and the intervention a few moments ago from my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Gavin Williamson) showed the success we are having in promoting, for example, car manufacturing. Also, other sectors of the economy have been doing better, such as pharmaceuticals. However, the hon. Gentleman is right: we want to emphasise growth. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor will be drawing up his Budget, and I hope it will be possible to take further measures to address what the hon. Gentleman calls the tale of two countries. However, the US has not been without its problems: I think I am right in saying that growth in the last quarter in this country was higher than in the US.
Mr Matthew Offord (Hendon) (Con)
Can we have a debate on the Government’s energy policy in light of the Which? report stating that more than 4 million consumers were dissatisfied with their energy company, and in light of the Centre for Policy Studies report arguing that the introduction of the carbon floor price in 2013 will damage efforts to decarbonise the UK’s electricity supply?
Sir George Young
I understand my hon. Friend’s concern. Some of the issues he raises are a matter for Ofgem, with which the Government are working, for example, to have greater transparency on tariffs and to make it easier for consumers to switch from one to another. We have taken some steps already—we plan more—to give Ofgem more teeth in its transactions with electricity suppliers. I hope my hon. Friend will welcome yesterday’s and today’s announcements by two major companies of tariff reductions, and that that will take some of the pressure off the consumers he referred to.
Mr Dave Watts (St Helens North) (Lab)
Given that the Prime Minister guaranteed that rail fares would not increase by more than 1% above inflation, and that many are in fact increasing by up to 11%, can we have a statement or debate on the Government’s failure to control rail prices—and on the Prime Minister’s ability not to keep his promises?
Sir George Young
I am not sure where the hon. Gentleman was yesterday, but I think we had a debate on rail fares. We have already had half a day’s debate, and I remind him that in 2009, under the regime of the previous Government, rail fares were allowed to go up by 11%.
Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)
The Mary Portas review, which has been endorsed by the Government and the Opposition, highlighted the burden that parking charges place on our high streets. Will the Leader of the House grant a debate on why Enfield’s Labour council has persisted with massive increases in parking charges, including the introduction of Sunday charges, against the wishes of shopkeepers and churchgoers and despite vociferous opposition from the Enfield Independent and The Enfield Advertiser?
Sir George Young
I welcome my hon. Friend’s role as a champion of businesses in his constituency, particularly of the retail sector. He will know that I announced a debate next week on the Mary Portas review, chosen by the Backbench Business Committee. I hope that will be an opportunity for him to intervene at slightly greater length than he was able to today.
Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)
Could we have a debate on hospital parking charges? The hospital in my constituency has introduced big rises and has recently started charging for disabled parking. Sadly, it is not alone in doing so.
Sir George Young
I understand the hon. Lady’s concern. That is primarily a matter for the trust that runs the hospital she referred to. Often, the income from car parking helps to sustain a higher level of service than would otherwise be the case. However, the Government have devolved this matter to local trusts, and I am sure she will want to pursue the issue with the chief executive of her local trust.
Kris Hopkins (Keighley) (Con)
The Leader of the House will doubtless be as alarmed as I am to read reports about the continued widening of the division between the civilian Government and the military in the nuclear-armed state of Pakistan. May we have an urgent statement from the Foreign Secretary outlining the potential implications for our country of that country’s continued instability?
Sir George Young
I understand my hon. Friend’s concern. The Foreign Secretary will be at this Dispatch Box on Tuesday, when my hon. Friend will have an opportunity to question him. A strong, stable constitutional democracy is in Pakistan’s interests, but I take on board the point that my hon. Friend has just made.
Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)
May I ask the Leader of the House for an urgent statement to clarify the Government’s plans for increasing the number of private patients in NHS foundation trust hospitals? On Tuesday, the Minister of State, Department of Health, the right hon. Member for Chelmsford (Mr Burns) said that
“we are not changing the situation”—[Official Report, 10 January 2012; Vol. 538, c. 14.]
but of course the Health and Social Care Bill removes the private patient cap and the Government’s impact assessment assumes the inclusion of
“additional…overseas private patients… and patients who would have otherwise been treated on the NHS”,
so how can that statement be true?
Sir George Young
As the hon. Gentleman knows, the Health and Social Care Bill is being considered in another place; we have just had the completion of 15 days in Committee and a number of days have been allocated for Report. I have no doubt that the specific issue he mentions will be raised during the remaining stages of that Bill, and if the Bill comes back, there will be an opportunity for him to raise the matter again in this House. In the meantime, I will draw his question to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State.
Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)
From this week, credit unions enjoy important new freedoms to help them develop and grow. May we have a debate on financial inclusion, affordable credit and the important role that credit unions play?
Sir George Young
My hon. Friend’s suggestion is very timely in view of the reports over the Christmas holidays of the less scrupulous operators in that field, and he reminds the House of the role of credit unions. I cannot promise such a debate, but I know that Members on both sides of the House have expressed an interest in the subject, and the Backbench Business Committee may wish to add it to its list of requests.
Mrs Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)
Darlington football club is 128 years old and, as the Leader of the House knows, it is the club that gave the world’s first black professional footballer, Arthur Wharton, his big break. Sadly, despite the best efforts of local businesses, The Northern Echo and the local council, the club is in administration and has days, if not hours, before liquidation. When can we have a debate on the support that is available to help historic clubs such as Darlington?
Sir George Young
I am sorry to hear of the problems that confront the hon. Lady’s local football club. The statue of the footballer to whom she refers was made by a sculptor in my constituency, which is why I am aware of the case. I do not wish to raise her hopes, but I will draw her concern to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport to see whether there is any role for the Government to play in enabling the club to continue.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
May we have a debate on the likely effectiveness of the ban on sow stalls in the European Union from 1 January 2013, given that there is every indication that several countries will not be compliant? The UK rightly implemented the ban from 1999, but it has halved the sow herd. Clearly, more needs to be done in Europe to promote animal welfare and in Britain to ensure that our industry is protected.
Sir George Young
This country has always set high standards in animal welfare. I understand my hon. Friend’s concern that some of our competitor countries may not be implementing the new measures as quickly as they should, and I can tell him that we will be taking action to drive compliance by the slower implementers. As he says, the EU has banned sow stalls, but farmers in other member states are not implementing the measures as fast as farmers in this country, and I will draw his concern to the attention of the relevant Minister.
Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
Following the votes in the other place on the Welfare Reform Bill, may we have a debate in this House about the effect that the benefit changes will have on people who received contaminated blood products through treatment in the NHS and the fact that they will lose the very limited benefits that they are entitled to with the changes that the Government are introducing?
Sir George Young
The Welfare Reform Bill will of course be returning to this House when it has completed its consideration in another place. Depending on any changes made to that Bill, hon. Members may have an opportunity to raise that matter. The hon. Lady attended a meeting with the relevant Minister, along with myself and others. I will ask the Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Anne Milton) to refresh us both on the steps being taken as a result of that meeting, at which we met those who have suffered as a result of contaminated blood and believe that they are getting a raw deal.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
Given the difficulties that the Leader of the House has in filling parliamentary time, given that the Backbench Business Committee always arranges interesting, entertaining and well attended debates on topical issues that Members and the country want discussed, and given the large number of requests that he has referred to that Committee today, has he given any consideration to having a Backbench Business week, when all the business of that week can be determined by that Committee?
Sir George Young
My hon. Friend puts forward an interesting proposition. What we have tried to do is step up the number of days that we have made available to the Backbench Business Committee; it has a debate later today and one next Tuesday, and I announced another debate for the following week. I am not quite sure that it would make sense to block out a whole week and allocate all of it to the Backbench Business Committee.
Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)
Next Thursday, a by-election will be held in Redcar and Cleveland borough council’s Newcomen ward. The Liberal Democrat candidate has made openly Islamophobic statements on his Facebook site, yet he remains the candidate, despite Liberal Democrat “zero tolerance” to such instances of prejudice and discrimination. The Muslim Council of Britain is concerned about this, as are the Coexistence Trust and HOPE not hate. Does the Leader of the House believe there is any place in a mainstream democratic political party, especially one that is in government, for someone, such as Newcomen’s Lib Dem candidate, who holds such clearly expressed Islamophobic views?
Sir George Young
I am reluctant to get drawn into a by-election spat. If any criminal offence has been committed, it would be appropriate to refer it to the police. My only comment is that if a Conservative candidate is standing, I hope that everyone will support him or her.
Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)
There has been a great deal of debate recently about public sector pensions, but may we have a debate about the state pension, so that we can discuss the actions that the Government are taking to improve the lot of state pensioners and ensure that they never again suffer the indignity of the miserly 75p rise they got from Labour?
Sir George Young
We would welcome such a debate. This year, pensioners will see the biggest cash rise they have ever seen, and under our triple lock the state pension will always be increased, year on year, in line with average earnings, prices or 2.5%, whichever is the highest. This year’s increase of more than £5 a week contrasts, as my hon. Friend has just reminded us, with the 75p that the Labour Government gave pensioners in 1999.
Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)
The west midlands was hit hardest during the downturn and is taking longest to recover, so it beggars belief that £185 million of European regional development fund money—designed to boost the economy, attract investment and create employment—that has been earmarked for the west midlands is lying idle, along with £1.1 billion nationally. Will the Leader of the House get the Minister responsible for this shambles to come to the House of Commons to explain to us why this money is not being spent in the regions where it is needed?
Sir George Young
I assume that that is a matter for my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills. If that is the case, I will draw the matter to his attention and see whether there is a role to play in making sure that any funds that could be used for investment in the west midlands are unlocked.
Glyn Davies (Montgomeryshire) (Con)
Two of the greatest challenges facing us are energy costs, both to households and to business, and the need to reduce the impact of climate change. May we have an early debate about the progress being made towards the introduction of the green deal?
Sir George Young
I cannot promise an early debate on the introduction of the green deal. I believe that just before Christmas my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change made a statement to give us an update on the progress that we were making towards our targets. I imagine that such statements will be repeated at 12 month intervals. My hon. Friend might wish to approach the Backbench Business Committee to see whether it can find time for such a debate, so that we can outline the progress we are making on tackling climate change.
Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)
As we rebalance the economy towards business growth and entrepreneurship, may we have a debate on employer-supported child care vouchers, because at the moment the only people who cannot access such support are the self-employed?
Sir George Young
The vouchers are of great help; they help nearly 500,000 people balance their commitments to their family with their work. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor will be considering his Budget and I will pass on my hon. Friend’s suggestion that the scheme should be extended to include the self-employed.
Chris White (Warwick and Leamington) (Con)
Earlier this week, I was fortunate enough to meet young people in my constituency at our local youth forum. Their engagement in and passion about improving our community were excellent to see and showed their great potential to make a difference. Will the Leader of the House give Government time for a debate on how to get more young people involved in politics and make our institutions as relevant to them as possible?
Sir George Young
I commend my hon. Friend for what he has done. It is up to every Member of Parliament to engage with young people in their constituencies and to encourage them to take part in the political process in the way he has suggested. I was encouraged, as I know were you, Mr Speaker, and the hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle), by the quality of the debate when the Youth Parliament met here a few weeks ago and by the representatives' commitment to the political process. I hope that some of them will in due course sit on these green Benches.
Mr Speaker
Order. There is extreme pressure on time, as I mentioned earlier, and the level of interest in the first of the two Backbench Business Committee debates has necessitated the imposition of a very tight time limit. I am happy to take remaining colleagues on the explicit condition that we have single-sentence questions, led by Mr Julian Smith.
Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)
May we have a debate to support Ofcom’s excellent decision this morning to extend the coverage obligations on the spectrum auction for 4G from 95% to 98%, which will make a massive difference to rural areas in Britain?
Sir George Young
I would like to promise such a debate, but I would be misleading my hon. Friend if I said yes. I hope that he will go along at 1 o’clock on Tuesday to the salon chaired by the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel) and put in a bid for a debate on this important issue.
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
Towards the end of last year, I was pleased to be able to help launch the Royal College of Midwives’ “State of Maternity Services” report. There has been an increase in the number of midwives, but there has also been an increase in the number of births, so I would therefore be grateful if consideration could be given to holding a debate on the future of maternity services.
Sir George Young
That delivery took a little longer than Mr Speaker implied. My hon. Friend is a patron of the Royal College of Midwives and I commend him on his interest. The Government are committed to high-quality perinatal and antenatal care: hundreds more midwives are in service now than in 2010 and a record number are in training. I hope that my hon. Friend is reassured by that basic information.
Andrew Stephenson (Pendle) (Con)
Many businesses in Pendle have welcomed the reduction in the rate of corporation tax, but many are still struggling with an overtly complex tax system. May we therefore have a debate on tax simplification?
Sir George Young
I very much hope that the Chancellor will take on board what my hon. Friend has said. We are consulting on integrating the operation of income tax and national insurance contributions, but I am sure that that would be a step in the right direction.
Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)
For many years, my constituents in south Essex have suffered intolerable delays at the Dartford crossing. My hon. Friend the roads Minister has an innovative solution; it requires legislation, however, so, will the Leader of the House tell me and my constituents when that legislation will be brought forward?
Sir George Young
We have just had Transport questions, when my hon. Friend might have had an opportunity to raise that matter. It would be up to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport to propose such a piece of legislation and it would have to take its place in what, I have to tell my hon. Friend, is a rather long queue.
Mr Speaker
Colleagues have quirky ideas about commas and semi-colons; that is immediately apparent.
Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)
Men, too, are victims of domestic violence, so may we have a debate about the Government’s recent announcement of new money that is available to help voluntary sector organisations that provide vital support to those victims?
Sir George Young
I commend my hon. Friend for drawing attention to the fact that not just women are victims of domestic violence. I cannot promise such a debate, but I refer her to the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire and the Backbench Business Committee.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
Harrow clinical commissioning group has been informed by NHS London that it is not economically viable as a unit under the Government’s reforms, and that it must be replaced and join Brent, Harrow, Ealing, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster and Hammersmith and Fulham. May we have a debate on the implementation of the Government’s NHS reforms?
Sir George Young
The Government are encouraging group practices to band together to form clinical commissioning groups, but there is no central direction about how they should be configured. In the first instance, I suggest that my hon. Friend contacts NHS North West London and shares his concern to see whether there could be a better configuration of local practices that perhaps covered a slightly smaller area than the one that is envisaged.
Backbench Business
(12 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Pub Companies
(12 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Adrian Bailey (West Bromwich West) (Lab/Co-op)
I beg to move,
That this House believes that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’ proposals for reform of the pub industry fall short of the undertaking given to the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee in July 2010 and that only a statutory code of practice which includes a free-of-tie option with an open market rent review and an independent adjudicator will resolve the contractual problems between the pub companies and their lessees; and calls on the Government to commission a review of self-regulation of the pub industry in the Autumn of 2012 to be conducted by an independent body approved by the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee.
I thank the Backbench Business Committee for agreeing to allocate time for this very important debate. It might not be immediately obvious, but the motion addresses issues that are vital to some of the poorest people in our community—publicans, many of whom work very long hours and earn less than £15,000 a year. It is hardly surprising that many of them just give up and go elsewhere, and the consequences are visible up and down the country as pubs close day after day. The consequences hit not just publicans but the local communities they serve. Increasingly, rural villages are without a village pub and without the social hub and activity concentrated in that pub. That adds to the sense of alienation.
Even in my local area, where 10 years ago there were four pubs within a mile, only one is left. I know that experience is shared by Members up and down the country. There is obviously something profoundly wrong in the industry. Some of it is about social changes, but, to go to the heart of the problem, a huge volume of evidence now shows that the business model governing the relationship between pub licensees and the pub companies that own the pubs is crucial. The code of practice that governs the relationship between them is heavily weighted in favour of the pub company. I and others will be addressing some of the issues that arise from that.
Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)
I would be grateful if the hon. Gentleman clarified one small point that is missing from the motion: namely, that he is referring to large pub companies that own large numbers of pubs and that family-owned brewing companies that own fewer than 500 pubs, such as Wadworth and Arkells in my constituency, are specifically excluded from the statutory regulation for which he is calling.
Mr Bailey
Yes. Let me make it clear that I am basically speaking about the Select Committee reports, which were about pub companies, but I recognise that there is an issue with breweries and their tenancies that in some cases might be relevant to this discussion. I know that individual Members will draw the necessary distinctions in the debate and I hope to allay any fears they might have.
Kevin Brennan
Towards the latter end of the previous Parliament, when I, as a Minister, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) did a lot of work on this subject, there seemed to be a great deal of consensus between the then Select Committee and the then Opposition parties that such a measure was necessary. Is my hon. Friend surprised that we have reached a stage in this Parliament where we have to debate this matter because action has not been taken?
Mr Bailey
I need to make a little progress, as I am conscious that many people want to speak. If I have time, I shall take further interventions.
For the reasons I have outlined, the BIS Committee and its predecessor have held no fewer than four inquiries into the issues surrounding the trade. The previous report in 2010 under the chairmanship of the hon. Member for Mid Worcestershire (Peter Luff) gave the industry a year to get its house in order or have statutory legislation. That was agreed by the Labour Minister in 2010. Subsequently, after the general election, when the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills was asked whether he would uphold the previous Government’s position, he confirmed he would.
The current BIS Committee held an inquiry in 2011 and came to the unanimous conclusion that pub companies had not met the requirements of the previous Committee’s recommendations and that a statutory code with an independent adjudicator should be introduced. It also recommended that any code should have within it the option for a publican either to be tied to the pub company or to be free of such a tie and instead pay a rent to the pub company, which would be determined by a general open market review by a suitably qualified assessor.
The Government’s response to the Committee’s recommendations has been totally inadequate. The Minister’s pledge fails to meet the aspirations of virtually all sections of the industry apart from those of the pub companies and reneges on the pledge given previously by a Minister. In the time available, I cannot deal with every point of variance between the recommendations of the Government and those of the Committee, but I know that many of the issues will be teased out in subsequent speeches.
Greg Mulholland
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way and I pay tribute to his work and that of the Committee. He mentions the clear commitments given by Ministers. Is he aware of the e-mail from the office of the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr Cameron) to Justice for Licensees on 13 April 2010, saying:
“The Conservative Party support the idea that should the industry fail to deliver self-regulation by June 2011, the Government . . . should end up consulting on putting the Code of Practice on a statutory basis”?
Mr Bailey
No, I was not aware of that e-mail, but I am sure it will illuminate subsequent discussions.
I cannot deal with every issue that has arisen, but it is possible to summarise some of the key issues, the first of which is the statutory code of conduct and an adjudicator. Instead of doing as the Select Committee recommended and introducing a statutory code, determined after consultation with all sections of the industry, the Government have said they will make the existing codes between pub companies and their licensees legally binding. That might sound like a very subtle distinction, but most pub companies believe that their existing contracts with their licensees are legally binding anyway. This approach simply legalises and regularises a situation that is the source of the problem in the first place, and makes very little change.
The second key issue concerns the legal advice that the Government seem to have obtained in reaching their conclusion on the best way forward. On pressing this issue, it became clear to the Committee that the legal advice taken by Government was actually that given to the British Beer and Pub Association—the trade association of the pub companies. They do not seem to have taken any independent legal advice whatever.
Ann McKechin
My hon. Friend is very generous in allowing me to intervene. Does he share my concern that the key difference between a statutory code and a self-regulated one is that under a self-regulated code if a pub should be sold by the landlord to another company that was not a member of the said trade association, the tenant would have no rights, as currently provided under the code, whereas under a statutory code they would have rights?
Dr Murrison
The hon. Gentleman is being very generous. How does he believe the motion might be improved or amended to dispel the concerns expressed by family brewers of the sort referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray) that they would be affected by a statutory code when that is not the case?
Mr Bailey
I am not amending the motion, but I assure the hon. Gentleman that in the Select Committee’s consideration of any panel to assess the workings of the voluntary code the Committee would make the panel well aware of this issue.
The third issue is the weakness of the framework code. It is fair to say that the Government acknowledge that the existing framework code is weak, even though they are making it legally binding, but to date all the proposals for strengthening it seem to have come—surprise, surprise—from the British Beer and Pub Association. I cannot think of anything more likely to destroy confidence within the wider industry and among publicans than a code that has been supposedly strengthened on the advice of the BBPA.
John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way and I congratulate him and the Committee on the report. Does he think that the code will help Mr Wild, who runs a very popular pub in Rotherham, whose business is being throttled by the terms of his tenancy? He tried to arrange with Enterprise Inns to buy his cask ales free of tie. He was told it would be £10,000 to £15,000 negotiable but was then told, three days later, it would be £20,000 non-negotiable. He asked for that to be put in writing but was refused. He was then told that the agreement would be for each one of his cask ales, not all five, and that it would be not a one-off payment but an annual payment.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. A lot of Members want to get in, so we need shorter interventions.
Mr Bailey
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. The short answer is that the motion is designed to provide a way forward that will end that sort of abuse. Like other Members up and down the country, I am sure, I have several equally unjust examples.
A fourth and crucial problem is the concern within the wider industry that the proposals do not reflect the interests of all relevant sectors. Given that there is effectively a dispute between the pub companies and the licensees, it would be reasonable for all their interests to be considered equally, but this does not seem to have happened. I thank the hon. Member for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland) for the work he has done, through freedom of information requests, which has clearly highlighted that the Government always intended to have a voluntary code, rather than a statutory one, and above all that in their response to the Committee they have reproduced almost word for word sections of submissions made by the British Beer and Pub Association. That completely undermines the confidence that the wider industry had in the Government’s impartiality and commitment to finding an even-handed solution. That is one of my motives for wanting to put what I hope will be a fail-safe device in the motion to gain some sort of purchase on the process.
The fifth issue that I want to address is the Government’s refusal to accept the BIS Committee’s recommendations regarding the free-of-tie option with open market rent review, which I have mentioned. The Select Committee’s position is not that there should be one option or other, but we do say consistently in all our reports that that option should be available for new and existing publicans so that they can, on the best professional advice, make a decision about what most clearly meets the needs in their business plan. Unfortunately, that is not included in the Government reply.
It is fair to ask why the motion does not call for immediate statutory legislation. The original recommendations of the Select Committee were predicated on the assumption that any such statutory intervention would arise from genuine and inclusive consultation, but the overwhelming evidence—I again thank the hon. Member for Leeds North West for the information he has obtained through FOI requests—is that the process is being driven by the BBPA. It is for that reason that I included in the motion a requirement that an independent panel be set up, with membership approved by the Select Committee, to ensure that any assessment of the processes that the Government undertake to deliver their proposals is monitored, and that recommendations can subsequently be made.
It is important for Parliament not only to state clearly today the need in principle for a statutory code, but to retain control of the process to ensure that the code genuinely reflects the interests of all sides of the industry. That is why I changed the motion in that respect.
Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)
My point is about the timing of the review. A reasonable person looking at the motion would see that it mentions changes that are currently being implemented, but the hon. Gentleman is now calling for a review just a few months after they have been put in place. Will he explain the reason behind holding a review so soon after the changes?
Mr Bailey
The reason is that the Government started to implement their proposals for changes in the industry a month before Christmas, so it is reasonable to assume that by autumn 2012 we shall have some idea of how they are working. By setting up an independent panel of professionally qualified and suitably experienced people to assess the changes, we will be able to make a judgment about pursuing further statutory intervention.
Mr Bailey
No, I am sorry. I am coming to a conclusion and other people want to speak.
Concerns are reflected in a submission from the Association of Licensed Multiple Retailers, which comments on the Government’s existing proposals:
“We have seen no action plan or agreed procedure to ensure open consultation in accordance with Government standards of best practice. There are also no agreed criteria or timetable against which progress may be judged or successful outcomes determined. Finally, there is no process for ongoing monitoring of Government to ensure that these commitments are delivered or sanctions available if they are not.”
The proposals for an independent panel are designed to deal with that concern in the industry. My real fear is that if we pursue a statutory code without a mechanism for ensuring that it is based on the interests of all sectors of the industry, we could end up with the worst of all worlds—a statutory code based only on the interests of the BBPA.
The motion is not about more regulation; it is about liberating licensees, not regulating them. They are already heavily regulated in their contractual relationships with the pubcos. Our proposals for a statutory code would enable them to be free of some of those regulations. A properly constructed code of practice would provide a basis for some of our most entrepreneurial small business men to free up their talents and demonstrate how well they can serve the community.
I remind everybody in the Chamber that thousands of publicans up and down the country will be listening to and watching our debate, because they know that its outcome could be vital in determining their future. At the moment, they feel overwhelmingly let down. It is up to Parliament to pass the motion and to demonstrate today that we are on their side and that we will not rest until they get a fair deal.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I remind Members that Mr Speaker has not selected the amendment and that we have a five-minute limit on Back-Bench speeches.
Mr Brian Binley (Northampton South) (Con)
I thank my friend and colleague the hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey), the Chairman of the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee for his contribution. It has been an honour to serve as vice-Chairman under his guidance and I welcome the debate.
Mr Deputy Speaker, as you in particular will know, since 2004 there have been four Committee inquiries on this subject; I have had the pleasure of participating in two of them. Progress has been made, but many assurances have been given about the voluntary code that have not been upheld and that is not good enough.
The background is relatively simple. The nature of public houses and the associated brewing industry has changed much in the last 30 years. I recall a Monopolies Commission investigation as long ago as 1972, as a result of which breweries were increasingly made to question the value of maintaining their estate. In consequence much of the estate was sold, initially to entrepreneurs, but they were progressively usurped by the big players who developed massive estates of pub chains. They borrowed much to create those estates and therein lies the problem.
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
Is my hon. Friend talking about pub companies that own pubs, rather than breweries that have a pub estate? Is that the thrust of his argument?
Mr Binley
That is absolutely correct. I am talking about pubcos and I exclude family businesses that own fewer than 500 pubs. The big owners of pubs and their unsustainable financial structures are the real problem. Let me make it clear: this is not about family-owned brewery companies, who do a very good job indeed. I am talking about big pub companies whose model is unsustainable; it is based on excessive debt, misleading information and deception, as the inquiry has proved.
Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend clarify this point? Is it correct that large pub companies borrowed against future rental income, so they are dependent on that to sustain their high levels of debt?
Mr Binley
They borrowed against the value of the properties, and rental income is very relevant. That is absolutely correct. Therein lies the unsustainability of the model, when we bear in mind that the breweries built up their estate over a 200-year period.
Sadly, tenants are the victims of that unsustainable structure. In many cases they face prices higher than those on the open market, exorbitant rents and a quart-measure of misleading information. To make a pub work, individuals have ploughed in their savings on the back of distorted information, and as a consequence they have gone to the wall. Most publicans are dedicated and hard-working people. We should take note: they are influential opinion formers in our communities and many of them have been badly treated. All I seek is fairness on their behalf.
Following the Committee’s 2010 inquiry, there was a clear understanding that the industry would have a year to get its house in order, or a statutory code of practice would be introduced. I questioned the previous Government and received that assurance. I questioned the current Secretary of State, who confirmed that he would continue with that promise, but the Government have sadly reneged on that undertaking. I find that very sad indeed.
The Government’s proposals for a legally binding voluntary code are not good enough. They have performed a volte face on this issue and it is incumbent on them to explain why their proposals are superior. How will a voluntary code work? The Minister’s argument seems to be that the level of protection will be comparable to that provided by a statutory code, but why is a voluntary code preferred when it has failed in the past? If the answer lies within the industry, why has it taken so long to make such desultory progress? Why should this Minister have any more faith in the industry than his predecessors, who had similar confidence? What is the cost of the voluntary code? How does it compare with the certainties that statutory regulation would bring? How much will it cost tenants, when they are in trouble, to pursue an action under the voluntary code? Those answers I demand from the Minister today. Concerns about the future of the industry abound. Why should small tenants be made to pay the price? They have suffered enough. Were they not persuaded to take on these pubs under false pretences, under an unsustainable structure? Does not all the Committee’s evidence prove that to be true?
I want the Government to support the entire industry, including the tenants. That means that in companies with more than 500 pubs—that excludes the small businesses—tied tenants should have the option to become free of the tie.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the current relationship between many tied pub tenants and large pub chain owners is almost feudal, and is neither fair nor sustainable?
Mr Binley
I agree, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point.
We need an opportunity for an independent, open rent review within the terms of the tenancy. Those who choose to stay tied need to have the option of selling a guest beer. We need to give tenants more freedom to decide the style and structure of their business. Those things are not available within the pubcos at present. Those are fairly simple requests. I do not believe that they can be achieved without an independent ombudsman to monitor compliance—history and practice are on this side of the argument.
I do not know why the Government have sought to back away from their own commitments. I recognise the need to compromise in the way that the Chairman of the Select Committee has explained, but if we want, as I do, a virile and vibrant pub industry that is strong for the future, we need to deal with the cancer that is undermining it and putting its very existence under threat. That, Mr Minister, means that we need to change the proposals that have already been made. I expect the explanations I have asked for, and I expect the Minister to be compliant and say that changes will be made—
Ian Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley), whose eloquence I aspire to and whose passion I can only dream about. I know that he has much experience of the detail of this issue from the Select Committee. One aspect of it in particular has concerned me for many years.
Before I came to the House, I was a high street solicitor, although I try to keep that quiet most of the time. One thing that I found most surprising when I began to work on commercial leases, particularly in the licensing sector, was the existence of this curious anomaly called the beer tie, which seems to create an anti-competitive situation in the brewing industry that does not appear to be allowed in any other industry.
Andrew Griffiths
The hon. Gentleman talks about the anti-competitive nature of the beer tie. Does he accept that a number of Government reports and one by the Office of Fair Trading have said that it is not anti-competitive at all?
Ian Lucas
I shall come on to that, and I reject that decision entirely. I accept that the OFT has investigated the matter on a number of occasions. Like many Members of the House and publicans in my constituency and across the country, I have for many years been completely mystified by the inactivity of the OFT and by the conclusions it has reached. We all know that pubs in our constituencies are in crisis and that the beer tie is part of the problem.
Greg Mulholland
The hon. Gentleman will be aware that the OFT said clearly that the imbalance in the relationship between tenants and pub companies was not within its remit. It did not even comment on the substantive issue that we are debating today, so its report is not relevant.
Ian Lucas
Absolutely. The inequality in the bargaining power of pub companies and publicans is a central issue. We see that month after month in our constituencies. It is part of the crisis that is happening in town centres and high streets across the country. We must view the debate in the context of the important challenges that we all face, no matter what type of constituency we have.
I looked at this issue in detail before the last general election, when I surveyed publicans throughout my constituency on how their business could be improved. They were vociferous in responding, and one of the overriding themes was the existence of the beer tie. I am therefore astonished that the Government’s response to the Select Committee states that
“the Government therefore considers the debate over ‘tied’ or ‘free-of-tie’ to be largely a distraction. There is nothing in itself that causes the tie to be fundamentally wrong—and, in fact, in some instances, the tied model may be essential to the preservation of small British brewers and local beer—and, with them, British businesses and jobs.”
We have already touched on the position of small brewers. The inequality in the bargaining power of large pub companies and the publicans on our high streets is a central issue.
I was a Minister for regulatory reform before the last general election, and my view is that regulation should be a last resort. As far as I am concerned, this is the last resort, and this case desperately calls for regulation because we have to balance out the unequal bargaining power that is removing real choice from consumers on our high streets. When consumers go to their local pubs they are prevented from purchasing beers that they want because of the existence of the beer tie.
Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)
I am glad that my hon. Friend is talking about consumers. One of my concerns is that the number of pubs in my constituency has declined since 2005 from 52 to 33, which is not untypical. There is less choice for consumers, partly as a result of this issue.
Ian Lucas
That is absolutely right. We know that CAMRA, which has done superb work in this area over many years, takes the view that
“the ‘beer tie’ as operated by the large pub companies is a key driving factor behind the decline of the pub trade.”
These concerns have been recognised over the years by various Select Committee reports. We all know that it is a very complex and difficult matter of long standing and that it is of grave concern to our constituents.
CAMRA goes on to say that the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr Davey),
“both gave clear Government commitments that if the pub companies failed to meet a deadline for self regulation by June 2011 then they would act to require meaningful reform. These commitments have been broken.”
That is a very serious allegation, and I am sure that the Under-Secretary will want to respond to that in due course.
The commitments were given in the context of the build-up to the last general election. This was a major issue in campaigns in all parts of the House. When the election came there was a broad consensus about what action needed to be taken. It is unfortunate that the parties in government have not carried that consensus through to the implementation of policies that are broadly based and command respect throughout the House.
We know that there is a crisis on the high street and that pubs on those high streets play an extremely important part in a functioning and vibrant local community. The Government have the power to make a real impact on high streets by dealing with this issue, and they must do so simply by fulfilling the commitments they gave before the general election and that Ministers have made since. They need to respect publicans, the pub trade and our high streets and follow through on those commitments.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. Time is very tight, so perhaps Members could ease back on interventions. Those Members who wish to catch my eye, if they have already intervened, will have to go lower down the list, because otherwise it is unfair on those waiting to speak. If Members can try to make the most of this and shorten their speeches, the better it will be.
Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) (LD)
I echo my earlier comments commending the Select Committee on its excellent work. The all-party save the pub group has been delighted to work with the Committee and support its work. I am disappointed that we have to have this debate. As has already been made clear, in the past 18 months we received unanimous, cast-iron commitments from Front-Bench spokesmen of all three main parties that, if self-regulation failed by June 2011, a statutory code of practice would be introduced, including the all-important genuine free-of-tie option.
If people ask why this should be reviewed in the autumn, the simple answer is that it has been going on for seven years and generated four Select Committee reports. The last attempt at self-regulation was supposed to be the final one, which makes the Government’s response even more baffling. The sad reality is that their response simply does not deal with the fundamental issue, which is that the big pub companies take too much from each pub and it makes it difficult or impossible for those licensees to make a living, and that also shuts pubs. The Government’s response does nothing whatsoever to address that.
I am afraid that the Government have also been sold a pup. The immediate improvements outlined in their response are illusory. First, there are no substantive changes in the new framework code of practice produced by the British Beer and Pub Association. Secondly, and even more worryingly, the whole idea of putting the new codes on a legal footing is a mirage. The BBPA’s own legal advice—let us all be clear that it is the representative organisation of the pub companies—based on a legal authority that goes back 100 years, the Carlill case, has made it clear that, if we are to rely on that case, those codes are already binding. A letter was sent to pubco lessees over Christmas that worried them considerably. It suggested that the 2010 company code of practice would become binding if they sought to use it in any case, which is clearly an offer to ensnare them in further obligations to their landlords not already covered in the lease.
The first question to the Minister is this: how on earth can anyone be seeking to put on a legal footing codes that he himself has said are inadequate? He has written to the Select Committee Chair, stating:
“In some case, primarily where the letter was sent in advance of the new code being agreed, the link to the industry Framework Code led to the former version rather than the enhanced version, of the code; however, this will be superseded by the new version of the code once it has been agreed.”
The simple problem is this: which code and which offer? There are so many codes floating around, it is an absolute mess. The Minister needs to know that many licensee organisations believe that the Government, accepting the advice of the BBPA that it is a good idea to make the codes legally binding, will actually make the situation worse for licensees, not better.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (Mr Edward Davey)
For the sake of clarity, it is the industry framework code that will be legally binding, and it is the strengthened industry code as agreed with the Federation of Licensed Victuallers Associations and the BBPA on 22 December last year.
Greg Mulholland
Not only was that code opposed by all the other organisations, but it was the old company codes that were mentioned in the letter, and the Minister has not adequately addressed that point.
Kevin Brennan
Is the hon. Gentleman surprised at what has happened, given that before the general election we worked closely together, he as a Back Bencher and I as a Minister, as did the Select Committee and the Front Benches, to come to an agreed position? Does he have any explanation for why the Government have taken this stance?
Greg Mulholland
Sadly, I am afraid that the explanation appears to be clear from the freedom of information request submitted by the save the pub group: the so-called Government response is basically the BBPA’s own report, with some passages and commitments taken word for word—indeed, there is even a typo in the BBPA report presented to Ministers that was directly cut and pasted into the Government’s response. I am afraid that the evidence is damning, which is why many organisations are saying that the Government should halt their entire proposal for reform in its tracks.
Greg Mulholland
I apologise to the Minister, but I have given way twice. He will have plenty of time to respond.
This is clearly not an industry solution. I am afraid that the Minister has been misled by the BBPA, because its report, which was copied into the Government’s response, clearly stated that the Association of Licensed Multiple Retailers and the Guild of Master Victuallers had agreed to be part of the pub independent conciliation advisory service. However, the chairman of GMV has stated:
“We as an organisation have neither agreed to, or been presented with, any proposal in respect of our participation in PICAS at this time.”
The Minister needs to ask why he has been misled by the BBPA and then answer to the House.
Let us be clear that the Government’s proposals for reform are not industry proposals. They are not supported by the Independent Pub Confederation, the GMV, the Federation of Small Businesses, the Forum of Private Business, the ALMR, CAMRA, Fair Pint, Justice for Licensees, Licensees Unite or the all-party save the pub group. Why on earth did the Minister suggest throughout the Government response that it is an industry proposal? It is not even the Government’s response, but the response of the pubcos trying to avoid the self-regulation that he agreed was necessary.
The Prime Minister rightly talks about dealing with crony capitalism, and I absolutely agree with him on that. In 2010, after shares in Enterprise Inns collapsed—they fell from 770p in 2007 to 26p in January this year, a decline in value of 96.6%—Mr Ted Tuppen awarded himself a 50% pay rise of £412,000, taking home £1.22 million, including a bonus of £558,000. At the same time he was closing pubs and making things impossible for tenants. I am sorry to say that the Government’s response has backed the pub companies and crony capitalism in the worst sense.
We now need the statutory code of practice, including the genuine free-of-tie option. That was promised by the Minister, the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister before the election. We have waited long enough. We will wait until the autumn, but no longer.
Fiona O'Donnell (East Lothian) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey) on securing today’s debate. It is about so much more than a fair deal for publicans; it is about the vital role pubs play in so many of our communities, particularly rural communities. In the village where I live in East Lothian, the pub is one of the few remaining facilities. It is where local community groups and organisations meet and where a newcomer like me goes to get to know the locals and find out what is going on in the community. Pubs are also vital employers in rural communities, but that is being hit hard by the Government’s failed economic plan. The flexible working and shift patterns often fit well for women and provide them with vital employment opportunities.
We need to give publicans a fair chance to make a decent living, and as a new Member I have been amazed at the scale of the problem and at the number of publicans who have come to me to seek help. I am regularly copied into correspondence that extends to dozens of e-mails between them and the pub companies, and I cannot begin to imagine the stress that the situation causes publicans as they try to negotiate a fair deal. In that process, they often manage to negotiate a fair deal in one area, but then the pub company raises costs or reduces income in another. It really is time for the Government to do something about the situation.
Fiona O'Donnell (East Lothian) (Lab)
I am afraid that I will not, because I am aware that many Members want to contribute.
Indeed, in my constituency one publican, Mr Laurence Brunton, contacted me when he heard the Government’s response to the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee report, and said that the
“government’s lame response to BIS committee recommendation makes a laughing stock of a hard working publican who is earning £10k a year.”
Has the Minister had any conversations with the Chancellor about how much the taxpayer is having to pay out in tax credits to subsidise the way in which many of our publicans are being ripped off?
The problems that I hear from publicans in East Lothian are about pubco-packaged beer prices, as well as those for alcopops and soft drinks, being almost 100% more expensive than the wholesale price. They describe rent negotiations as totally one-sided, and they feel like they are being bullied. The correspondence that I have seen certainly seems to back that up. Pubcos are often slow to carry out repairs or they do not carry them out at all, and that affects a publican’s ability to generate income and to achieve the targets that the companies set them. Many publicans survive only because of their family’s help, often paying the minimum wage to family members in order to keep the business running.
The hon. Member for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland) described the Prime Minister as talking about a fair system of capitalism, but actually the Leader of the Opposition has been leading that debate. It is good to see the Government catching up, if a little belatedly, but this is an opportunity for them to take some action to redress the imbalance in the pub industry.
I should like also to make some positive suggestions to the Minister and, indeed, to invite him to my constituency to see some different pub models that are fairer and give something back to the community.
Does he have any plans to encourage mutual pub models? The Prestoungrange Gothenburg pub in Prestonpans is an example of a pub giving back to the local community. It has recently won prizes and awards from the Campaign for Real Ale, as the best new enterprise in East Lothian, and, just last year, as Forth Radio’s pub of the year. Its website describes just what the Prestoungrange Gothenburg does. It is
“under the management of the East of Scotland Public House Company Limited which trades wholly within the original Gothenburg Principles its founders established. After a 5% pa cumulative return on the capital employed in the enterprise, all further surpluses are Gift Aid granted to the Prestoungrange Arts Festival which is a charity devoting all its resources to using the arts to stimulate and encourage the economy of Prestonpans and its vicinity.”
I should like the Minister to come to Prestonpans; I will even buy him a pint if he does. I hope to welcome him there soon.
Andrew Griffiths (Burton) (Con)
I pay tribute to the work of the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, which has been diligent and dogged in taking this issue forward and looking at the pressures and problems that publicans and pub owners face throughout the country. I also thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing this debate, as it demonstrates the real commitment on both sides of the House to ensuring that the Government do something to support pubs and brewers and get our pub industry back on its feet.
It is a pleasure to follow, in particular, my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley), who has immersed himself in pubs more, and has more experience of pubs, than any other Member. I have no doubt that everybody taking part in today’s debate has read the Science and Technology Committee’s report and abstained for at least two days this week in order to contribute this afternoon.
I should also declare an interest as the chairman of the all-party beer group, and because in my constituency I have Punch Taverns, Spirit Group and Marston’s, a family brewer that also owns pubs.
I think we all agree on the need to clean up the pub companies’ act and the way in which tenants are treated. None of us disagrees on that, and we all want to see healthy and vibrant brewing and pub industries. I do not defend the actions of some pub companies, as uncovered by the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, but although the hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey) said earlier that he was concerned that pubs are over-regulated, his solution was to increase the regulation on pubs.
Andrew Griffiths
I think we both agree that pubs are highly regulated, but I assert that introducing a statutory code would increase regulation. We want to allow anybody taking on a pub to have access to information, we want transparency, and we want them to understand what they are taking on when they take on their pub.
Dan Rogerson (North Cornwall) (LD)
It is absolutely right to point out those in the pub sector and brewing industry who are doing all they can to create a thriving industry and to secure jobs, but we need the backstop of regulation. It should not be brought to bear daily in every pub throughout the country, but I believe that if we have a review in the autumn, it will prove that the threat of such regulation is necessary to ensure that the worst practices in the industry are ruled out.
Andrew Griffiths
I agree that we may well wish to consider a review in future, but as for the idea that we should bring in new regulation and new requirements and then, within just a few months, review them again, I worry that companies will be concerned more about the review than about implementing the changes themselves.
Andrew Griffiths
I have given way twice already, so I shall continue, if I may.
We have to be careful what we wish for. More mature Members will be fully aware of the beer orders—well-intentioned regulation to improve the lot of publicans and pubs throughout the country, which, I argue, got us into this situation in the first place. We have to be careful before we reach for the lever of regulation, because once it is imposed, the costs, burdens and unintended consequences are there for everyone to see.
We all recognise that pubcos are drinking at the last chance saloon, but today I heard the accusations made against the BBPA and I am, quite frankly, staggered. Hon. Members have mentioned several small family brewers, but all are members of the BBPA. It is not some sinister organisation, and although it is made up of pubcos, it also includes family brewers from up and down the country, so the idea that it has some sinister hand on the Minister’s shoulder and is influencing him in an underhand way is blatant nonsense, as is the idea that the Minister should develop policies for the brewing and pub industry and not have a proper dialogue with the biggest trade body in the industry.
We have a proposal to bring in a tough industry code. It will provide transparent information as a matter of course to anyone who is thinking about taking on a pub, and provide people with legal redress. The code will now be legally binding, so anybody who finds that their pub company or family brewer has not upheld the code will be able to have their case heard in court. There will be a process of arbitration so that anybody who feels that they are being dealt a bad hand by a pub company or the pub industry can have redress through independent arbitration. Those are the things that any tenant who feels hard done by requires to get the assistance and redress that they need. Most importantly, that will be delivered through self-regulation, which I believe will be cheaper, more cost-effective and speedier in producing remedies. We can all point to Departments that have brought in regulation or arbitration that has not worked. We do not have all the answers in government. It is far better to allow the industry this last chance to get its act in order.
Finally, the idea that the tie is the only thing that is leading to the closure of pubs is blatant nonsense. Yes, it is an issue, but we have to consider the impact of people’s drinking habits, the power of below-cost selling by supermarkets, and the red tape and regulation that we have loaded on to pubs. We should not for one minute think that if the motion were passed and the Government introduced the statutory code, it would solve the industry’s problems. It patently would not.
Paul Murphy (Torfaen) (Lab)
I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this important debate. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey) for securing the debate, and to the hon. Member for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland) for the tremendous speech he gave and for the work that he has done over recent years.
The work of the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee has been a model for what a Select Committee should do, not only under the chairmanship of my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West, but under that of the hon. Member for Mid Worcestershire (Peter Luff). The Committee is absolutely right to point out the inadequacies of the pub companies system, and in trying to bring the Government to account and asking them to do what is right. The report, which I have read a number of times, shows the tenacity, doggedness and hard work that members of the Committee put into the investigation. My hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West is right that landlords and tenants across the country will be interested to see what happens at the end of the debate and to hear Members’ contributions.
Kevin Brennan
The hon. Member for Burton (Andrew Griffiths) said that pubcos were drinking at the last chance saloon. Given how long the Select Committee has been working on this matter and how long that metaphor has been used, does it not seem that the last chance saloon is somewhere where time is never called?
Paul Murphy
I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. He and I have drunk in many pubs together over the years, and understand the importance of that.
I entirely support the recommendations and conclusions of the Select Committee, including a statutory code of practice, a free-of-tie option and an open market rent review with an independent adjudicator. What comes through in the report is the frustration and loss of patience of Committee members with the pub companies. I hasten to add that we are talking not about our family brewers, such as Brains in south Wales, which are respected and good employers with good public houses, but about companies that lack transparency in what they do, and did not impress the members of the Select Committee when they gave evidence. A cursory glance at the evidence given to the Committee shows how the pub companies tried to evade and wriggle out of the important issues.
Greg Mulholland
Does the right hon. Gentleman find it odd that the first response of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to this wonderful Select Committee report was to rush out an invitation to the pub companies to a meeting to talk about how to circumvent the report?
Paul Murphy
I was not aware of that. I know that the hon. Gentleman has done a great deal of work on these important issues using freedom of information requests and so on. It is obvious that the Government must speak to the trade association—it would be daft if they did not. However, there is a difference between speaking and listening to the members of that association and engaging in one of the biggest acts of plagiarism that we have seen in responding to the Select Committee. The Government appear to have put into their sloppy response the wishes of the pub companies in their entirety, including the typing errors. That was a great disappointment, because it was clear that all Front Benchers agreed that there should be a statutory code of conduct and with all the other issues that the Select Committee put forward.
I have been looking at this matter for three to four years in my constituency. Every Member will have examples of tenants, landlords and publicans in their constituency who have come to the end of their tether with the way in which they are treated by the pub companies. In my constituency, Mr Phil Jones, the landlord of the Open Hearth public house in Pontypool, has been a doughty fighter on this issue. He has given evidence to the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee and its predecessor. He has shown how shamefully the companies have treated their tenants. It is about time that changed. Like many of his colleagues up and down the country, he has shown Members of Parliament the personal tragedy and misery caused by the way in which those systems operate.
The Government have to change their mind. Outside in the country, there is a genuine desire for tenants and publicans across the country to be treated fairly and properly. There is no doubt, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Lothian (Fiona O'Donnell) has said, that public houses play a tremendous part in our national life and a huge integrated part in our communities. I hope that the Government will listen to Members across the House, change their mind and implement the recommendations of the Select Committee.
Andrew Stephenson (Pendle) (Con)
I congratulate the Backbench Business Committee on granting this debate and the hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey) on his efforts to secure it. I am a great fan of the British pub, so much so that I live next door to one and have worked shifts behind the bar at three of my local pubs over recent months—the White Swan in Fence, the Four Alls in Higham and the George and Dragon in Barrowford.
As many Members have said, the future of the pub looks far from rosy. UK pubs are in crisis, with 25 closing every week. Pubs are under pressure for many reasons, including the tough economic times that we are in, rising beer prices and taxes, and below-cost sales of alcohol in supermarkets, which I am particularly against. I believe that there is increasing evidence that the beer tie, as operated by the large pub companies, plays a significant role in the decline of the pub trade. I point out explicitly that I am referring only to the behaviour of some large pub companies that own more than 500 pubs, not to family-owned breweries, which tend to act much more responsibly.
In my constituency of Pendle over the past few years, seven pubs have closed in Brierfield, five in Barnoldswick, seven in Nelson, three in Colne and numerous others in the surrounding areas.
Andrew Griffiths
We want to keep more pubs open and to stop pubs closing. Does my hon. Friend agree that all the evidence shows that free houses are closing faster than tenanted pubs?
Andrew Stephenson
The evidence that I have seen does not suggest that. In my area freehold pubs have certainly been able to buck the trend and survive because they have additional flexibility in the products that they can buy and in the other costs of the pub. I have seen some of the practices of the pub companies hindering rather than helping the pub trade in my area.
Karen Bradley
I should like to add my personal experience to the debate, because I am the daughter of a publican who was tied to a large pubco but now runs a free house. I can reassure my hon. Friend that having a free house is a much more favourable position, and that being free of the beer tie is very important.
Andrew Stephenson
I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. That is why I am speaking in support of the motion’s call for a statutory code for pub companies, despite the fact that I am normally in favour of voluntary regulation.
A case in point in Colne, where I live, is the North Valley pub, which closed about two years ago. Like a number of pubs in Pendle, it was owned by a large pub company that completely refused to reduce the rent, although the landlord was experiencing vastly reduced sales, partly because of the tough economic times and the smoking ban. I am sure that if there had been an open market rent review and an independent adjudicator, that pub would still have been open today, but instead the landlord had to hand back the keys and the pub is now a plumbing merchant’s premises. I am sure that the pub company involved would say that it was no longer viable, and that it was always going to close down in the long term, but I do not believe that voluntary regulation is delivering what we need. We therefore have to consider putting things on a firmer footing.
As things stand, the business model of large pub companies is based on extracting an inequitable share of profits through excessive rents and forcing tied landlords to purchase beer and other products at a premium of about 50% on open market prices. That figure has already been mentioned in the debate. Some pub companies, when they set their beer tie, seem to ignore local circumstances completely. From what I am led to believe, landlords in my area tied to Punch Taverns have to pay the brewery something between £1.32 and £1.56 per pint that they buy. In the town where I live, Colne, the Derby Arms sells Foster’s and John Smith’s for £1.49 a pint, and the Wallace Hartley and the Duke of Lancaster sell Foster’s for £1.79. [Interruption.] Move up north. Some of the large pub companies are forcing their tied landlords to buy the product at a higher price than that for which other local pubs are selling it to the man in the street. That inevitably forces pubs out of business, because they cannot compete in the local market conditions. I therefore have no hesitation in supporting the motion and calling on the Government to reconsider self-regulation and stop the large pub companies abusing their position.
Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab)
York’s pubs are part of the heritage of the city. Some of them have been open, welcoming guests and serving beer, for hundreds of years, whereas others have of course opened more recently, but they are all valued by local people and attract thousands of tourists to the city and contribute to the local economy.
I meet the members of the Licensed Victuallers Association in York from time to time to discuss business conditions, and recently I conducted a survey of 160 pubs and working men’s clubs in my constituency. In their responses, the licensees were extremely critical of the relationship between lessees and pub companies, and one commented:
“It’s like me renting you a house for a market rent but telling you that you can only do your food shop in Harrods, ie: at top prices”.
The beer tie, which of course covers a lot more than beer—soft drinks, peanuts and practically everything that a pub sells—is clearly anti-competitive and not in the consumer’s interest.
The previous Government endorsed the then Select Committee’s recommendation that, over a period of time, all existing and new lessees should be offered a free-of-tie lease with an open-market rent. In its recent report, the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee revealed that only 16% of new lessees and 9% of current lessees had been offered that, which is clearly completely unacceptable.
The Government’s response is out of touch with the industry. We are told that the tie is a lawful practice, so that is all right. However, the Select Committee argues that there should be legislation to give lessees the opportunity of running a business without the tie. The Government’s response also expresses the view that whether a lease or tenancy includes a tie is simply
“a commercial decision on the part of both parties.”
That is like suggesting that the competition for road space between a juggernaut and a bicycle is a competition between equals. It is not a satisfactory response.
If one of the major clothing retailers decided to get into the business of renting out small shops, but restricted its tenants to selling only its own brands and then insisted on selling those brands to the tenants at double the market price, we would immediately say that it was anti-competitive, unfair and wrong, and we would not allow it, yet that is exactly the relationship between the pub companies and many of their lessees.
I wish to refer to one other issue, which is the retail price of alcohol in supermarkets and off-licences. In my survey, 76% of York licensees said that alcohol sales at supermarkets were the leading cause of their falling profits, and 96% thought that supermarkets should not be able to sell alcohol at cheap rates. Indeed, 70% wanted a minimum retail price for beer sales on licensed premises.
Before the general election, I wrote a chapter of a policy pamphlet in which I proposed a minimum retail price for alcohol on health grounds. I suggested a price of 50p a unit, which would equate to £3 as the minimum cost of a bottle of wine, or £1 for a pint. Pubs would not go out of business if we had a minimum price of that level; nor would it prevent people on modest incomes from going to a supermarket and buying an occasional bottle of wine or beer to enjoy. However, it would stop the sale of alcohol as loss-leaders by supermarkets, which is doing so much damage to both pubs and public health.
I believe that the Government’s response is intellectually incoherent. They say that there is no need for legislation on the terms of leases, because they affect lessees rather than consumers. Yet on the subject of the beer tie, they propose taking no real action because it would affect consumers rather than lessees. They should concern themselves both with the viability of pubs as businesses and the rights of consumers, but they fail to do either of those things in their response.
Charlotte Leslie (Bristol North West) (Con)
I congratulate the Backbench Business Committee on bringing the debate forward. It is massively important, because as I think we all agree, pubs play an incredibly important role in our society. If we are to talk about the big society, we should recognise that an awful lot of charity ventures and community groups and activities involve a pint, whether of beer or orange juice, at the local pub at some point.
The subject is massively important also because pubs are a place for social, intergenerational drinking rather than the isolated drinking that very cheap supermarket alcohol can often encourage or the antisocial behaviour caused by preloading—kids drinking a lot before they go out. Pubs are important for all sorts of reasons, as I know we all agree.
The issue of the beer tie is one part of the equation that is leading to many of our pubs closing. Although we must recognise the importance of that, we must also recognise the other factors in the closure of pubs, which have already been mentioned. Cut-price supermarket alcohol is a massive one and social changes are another, and there may also be things that we can do about business rates and licensing to help to create a level playing field for pubs.
Greg Mulholland
Of course there are a number of factors affecting pubs, but when we compare a tied pub and a free-of-tie pub, we see that the fundamental difference that shuts a tied pub is the pubco’s unreasonable terms.
Charlotte Leslie
I thank my hon. Friend for that, and I am just coming to the role of the pub tie and the pub companies.
It is a shame that there seems to be a lot of distrust among the various factions about how the Government’s response to the Select Committee has come about. I know that figures have been put forward stating that non-tied pubs close faster than tied pubs, but those figures are in dispute because tied pubs tend to be sold to developers before they close down, so they are not listed as tied pubs by the time they close down. There is also the issue of large businesses reporting business failures. There are therefore doubts about the statistics on whether a pub is better off being tied or non-tied.
Greg Mulholland
To be clear, the CGA Strategy figures, which no one disputes, show that between December 2008 and June 2011, the number of tied pubs fell by 3,216, and that in the same period the number of free-of-tie pubs increased by 425. Does the hon. Lady agree that it is baffling that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills simply accepted the British Beer and Pub Association's misleading representation of those events, which, as she says, omitted transfers that happen, in some cases deliberately to distort the figures?
Charlotte Leslie
It is very obvious—this is crucial to the debate—that there is a strong feeling that the response was unilaterally informed. I am not in a position to say whether that is the case, but it is difficult for the Government’s response to have authority, particularly on such an important issue, when there are allegations that it was overly unilaterally informed. I take my hon. Friend’s point. The dispute over the figures is very much a case in point. Another result of the beer tie is the substantially lower earning of the publicans who try to manage those pubs.
That is statistics, but anecdotally—we are all very aware of the limitations and strengths of anecdotes—we hear of people opting out of the beer tie to find their rent increasing. Publicans who have been in the business for a long time and who took on pubs under big companies 20 years ago report how much more restrictive pub companies have become in recent times. Given the upward slope that pubs face in making themselves viable, that seems a counter-intuitive direction for pub companies if they want pubs to succeed.
Other areas of distrust that are not at all helpful to the debate include disputed membership of the Pub Independent Conciliation and Arbitration Service, which my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland) also mentioned.
I shall vote for the motion. Given the lack of success of self-regulation in the past, there is a question mark over whether it will work in future. I am not one to run for more regulation—there are lots of unintended consequences.
Charlotte Leslie
My hon. Friend makes a good point. One issue at stake is the efficacy of a voluntary code. Although there might be problems with the timing of a review, a review of the kind of voluntary code that the Government have suggested would be extremely valuable—it will set in place many of the issues that we are discussing.
I do not want to take up too much time because lots of hon. Members want to speak. As a Conservative on the Government Benches, I do not believe that regulation is always the answer, but it is sometimes. It must be looked at—it cannot be dismissed out of hand out of religiosity. I also believe that if a business model is not sustainable, it must be allowed to fail. However, the key thing is that pubs face an uphill struggle—it is not a level playing field—in so many aspects of their operation. Looking at the relationship between pub companies and publicans is just one factor in levelling out that very uneven playing field, which has devastating effects on community cohesion not only in rural communities, but in communities all over the country.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
I congratulate the hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey) on securing this important debate and commend the excellent Business, Innovation and Skills Committee report.
It is deeply worrying that the pub market in the UK has become so dominated by just a handful of companies. Tenants are being ripped off by those companies, which can overcharge for beer because the tenants are tied to them. The pub tie has been instrumental in hundreds of successful local pubs going to the wall, which continues.
Lessees can currently buy only a limited range of beer, often at inflated prices, which restricts pub goers’ choice, prevents small local brewers selling to such pubs and remorselessly accelerates the number of pub closures. That scandal must stop. The Chair of the Committee has reminded the House in both his motion and his speech that the Secretary of State promised action to save our pubs if the industry did not get its house in order, but neither the industry nor the Secretary of State has delivered. That is why this debate is so important.
I welcome the introduction of a new arbitration service, and requirements to follow rental guidelines and to publish national wholesale price lists, but the package as a whole will do little to stop pub closures or to provide meaningful support for sustainable local community pubs.
Greg Mulholland
Apart from concerns about the misrepresentation of PICAS, does the hon. Lady share licensees’ concerns that although PICAS is set up to be an independent arbitrator, it will be funded and controlled by the British Beer and Pub Association, and therefore the pub companies?
Caroline Lucas
That is a good point. I was trying to find something positive to say, but the hon. Gentleman is right that there are concerns about that aspect.
The Government’s response has failed to address the key issues of providing lessees with a genuine free-of-tie option. It will therefore not rebalance the relationship between struggling licensees and large pub companies. I am also concerned that even the limited package that has been announced will not actually be delivered, given the pub companies’ history of broken promises and abandoned commitments.
As other hon. Members have said, pubs are central to our communities. Chris Beaumont, the landlord of The Greys in the Hanover area of my constituency, tells me that his is the only pub in the area that has not closed and reopened in the last nine years. The London Unity has had three owners in two years, The Geese has changed hands four times in six years, and the Horse and Groom recently closed and reopened. In the pub trade, such closing and reopening is known as churn. Churn matters, because it means ruined livelihoods for the individual landlords and their families. It also means instability for our pubs and our local economy. It takes years to build up a great community pub. A high turnover of pub landlords as pubs regularly close and reopen sends out a negative message that times are not good and that it is difficult to survive in an area, which clearly does not help other local businesses. The tied scheme was a significant factor in all the closures I mentioned, but the pubcos would prefer that we did know about it: the data on pubs that close do not tell of pubs that close and reopen.
The other thing that pubcos are less than honest about is that when they sit down and negotiate with lessees, they claim that lessees can always be free of tied options, yet often fail to mention that they must pay a premium to qualify for that. On wines and spirits, the charge is between £4,000 and £5,000 extra per year. It is a similar amount for bottled beers. To put that into context, the typical annual rent for a pub tenant in Brighton is around £25,000 a year. Pubcos are therefore essentially extorting an additional 20% increase on the rent to free landlords from the tie. Furthermore, pubcos do not generally offer an untied option on draught beers or lagers.
The Government must listen to lessees such as Chris and the many others in my constituency represented by the Brighton & Hove Licensees Association. They are all deeply worried and believe as I do that it is high time the Government acted to protect community pubs and lessees. Pubs are pivotal to the economy and the tourist industry, so the health of the sector has a particular resonance in my constituency.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
The headquarters of the Campaign for Real Ale is in my constituency, and we host the annual beer festival. I completely concur with the hon. Lady on the importance of tourism and pubs together. Tourism and pubs mean not just casual drinking, but major economic activity in the local area, and she is right to highlight that.
Caroline Lucas
I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. I agree that pubs are good not just for the community, but for the local economy—in fact, they are often essential to it.
In Sussex, for example, we have an impressive range of local breweries, including micro-breweries. If they are to thrive, we need to change the situation that has arisen with ties. We must not allow big business to continue to wield such unfair power over pub lessees by restricting access to locally produced ales. We must make it possible for local brewers to sell their beers to local pubs. Without statutory regulation to ensure fairness, a huge part of the potential market for our local ales is closed off.
If the Government act to protect and promote real community pubs, they could begin seriously to promote a strategy to encourage responsible drinking and the enjoyment of local ales, ciders and other drinks.
I fully support CAMRA’s championing of functioning and well-run community pubs. An effective approach to reduce alcohol-related harm must involve support for good community pubs, which provide a safe and responsible place for people to drink. Therefore, parallel to the statutory code of practice described in the motion, our community pubs should be supported with a policy of minimum pricing of alcohol in supermarkets. That would begin to tackle seriously the problems caused for our pub trade, and indeed for wider society, by the off-sale of cheap alcohol, which is often low quality. I accept that is a topic for another debate, but it is not unrelated to the intention behind today’s motion, which is to protect our community pubs.
In conclusion, I fear that the Government are being cavalier in rejecting the recommendations of the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee and instead putting their faith in the very companies accused of malpractice to put their house in order finally. The future of community pubs is at stake, so, in common with many other Members, I call on the Government to eschew the grasp of the large pub companies and instead to champion, protect and increase the number of local pubs. The tied pubs in Brighton, Pavilion want to know when the Business Secretary will keep his promise. We need a statutory solution that better reflects the wishes of all publicans and pubcos, as well as the careful work of the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee.
Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)
I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate and to the hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey) for securing it.
Before I came to this place, I spent 27 years as a chartered surveyor. During that time, I carried out rent reviews on most types of business properties, although my experience with licensed premises was peripheral. Underpinning most rent review valuations is a requirement to assess the open-market rental value. That is the best way of establishing a rent that is fair to both parties, providing landlords with a fair return on their investment and tenants with a reasonable opportunity to build a sustainable business into the long term. If the two parties are unable to agree, the matter is referred to an arbitrator or an independent expert.
It is bizarre that a procedure that is routine for the vast majority of business people who lease premises is not available to a particular group: pubco tenants. Research produced by CAMRA shows that such publicans are at a considerable disadvantage compared with non-tied operators. They are worse off financially and work harder for a lower return, normally burning the midnight oil, tackling red tape and filling in the dreaded VAT return.
The tied system has some advantages in that it can provide an opportunity for people to set up their own businesses without having to raise large amounts of capital, and it continues to form an important part of many family brewing businesses. However, it should have the potential to act as a stepping-stone, with people then moving on to own their own businesses, as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley); it should not drive people out of business altogether.
The tied system was devised in a different era, which is long since gone, when the pub market was dominated by many family brewers, who wanted to ensure that their pubs sold their beer. Those brewers had a vested interest in ensuring that their pubs were well run, and landlords duly received support. In return, they bought their beer directly from the brewers, with no middleman in between. Many of those breweries were household names, but they have long since gone. Tollemache, Cobbold, Lacons, Bullards and Manns owned pubs across Suffolk and Norfolk. Today, only Greene King and Adnams remain, along with micro-breweries such as Green Jack in Oulton Broad in my constituency. Greene King and Adnams continue to run their tied houses well and successfully, but the market is now dominated by pubcos, which do not brew their own beer; they are middlemen taking their margin, and they have different business objectives from the family brewers. Given those changes, it is appropriate that the tied system should be reformed, and the proposals in the motion appear sensible and logical.
As we have heard, there are other issues that need to be addressed: the taxation of beer; the reform of licensing laws, which, since 2003, have made it more difficult to play live music; and the below-cost sale of alcohol by supermarkets. However, for me as a chartered surveyor, there is one other subject that needs to be addressed: the rating system. Many publicans scratch their heads over how the Valuation Office Agency has arrived at such a high rateable value assessment for their properties. The art of rating valuation has, I am afraid, become totally abstract and distant from reality. Town centre drinking barns, which are subject to a different rating regime, seem to have an unfair advantage over community pubs. That anomaly needs to be addressed, but that is a debate for another day.
Mr Davey
I wanted to intervene on the hon. Gentleman before he finished his remarks, because he is a chartered surveyor. I therefore invite him to welcome the fact that, in our negotiations with the BBPA, we secured a strengthening of the industry framework code, which will specify that all rent review assessments must comply with Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors guidance, and that rent assessments for new full repairing and insuring leases must be signed off by a RICS-qualified individual.
Peter Aldous
I am grateful to the Minister for giving that clarification.
In the meantime, let me conclude by saying that although there are other issues that need to be addressed to enable pubs to compete on a level playing field, we have an opportunity to address an iniquity that, in many respects, is leftover from a bygone age. I therefore support the motion.
Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)
I represent a constituency that includes 197 community and city centre pubs, as well as five breweries. Almost 4,000 people are employed in the industry in one way or another. I cannot miss the opportunity to point out that CAMRA held its last annual conference in Sheffield and, in effect, endorsed us as the real ale capital of the country, praising our unrivalled choice of real ales and pubs—I challenge the Minister to come and sample some of them. I am also a member of the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee. Furthermore, in one of my jobs before being elected to this place I ran a £5 million licensed operation consisting of several bars and pubs.
We are talking about a sector that employs about 500,000 people in 54,000 pubs. As the hon. Member for Pendle (Andrew Stephenson) said, the sector is in crisis, with about 25 pubs closing every week. We know that, and we see it in our communities. As several Members have said, that is a loss to not only the landlords and the people who work in the pubs but the communities.
As the hon. Gentleman said, there are several reasons for those business failures, but a key factor is the way in which the big companies, which own almost half our pubs, squeeze unreasonable returns out of their landlords to support their own flawed business model. To respond to a point made by the hon. Member for Bristol North West (Charlotte Leslie), it is that business model that should be allowed to fail, not the business model of the individual small business men and women who run the pubs.
It was not supposed to be like this, and those behind the 1989 beer orders legislation cannot have expected such an outcome. The legislation was supposed to open up the market to give small players a better chance; instead, the big corporate interests regrouped, and seven pub companies now dominate the industry. However, Parliament has responded, as has been said. In 2004, the Select Committee on Trade and Industry highlighted concerns about the unhealthy and unbalanced relationship between pub companies and their lessees. Five years later, the Select Committee on Business and Enterprise revisited the issue, concluding that little meaningful reform had taken place.
As several Members have said, that was accepted by the then Labour Government. When the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee report was published in March 2010, the then pubs Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), gave notice to the pub companies that if in the Committee’s view the voluntary code was not working as well as it should be by 2011—this is crucial—the Government would put it on a statutory basis.
The coalition maintained that commitment. When the Secretary of State was questioned in July 2010 by the hon. Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley), who is the deputy Chair of the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee—he is a relentless champion of small business, and I am sorry he is not in his place to hear me say that—he confirmed that commitment. He said that pub companies were “on probation” from the Committee and that “the commitment is to give them until 11 June and if they have not delivered a more satisfactory arrangement then there will have to be legislative action.” So, in 2011, the Select Committee reviewed the position and gave the Government its report on the industry’s probationary period. In our report, Members from all three parties represented on the Committee agreed that there had been
“a process of implementation which can only be described as half-hearted”.
We also found that the
“BBPA (British Beer and Pub Association) has shown itself to be impotent”,
and that there had been
“a lack of meaningful sanctions”.
We concluded:
“This latest attempt at reform has failed…We therefore conclude that the reforms do not meet the test set by our predecessor committee.”
That should have been the end of the matter; following several years of consideration by successive Select Committees and clear pledges from successive Governments, the time had come for legislative action and a statutory code.
At that point, however, the Government reneged on their commitment and put the corporate interests of the big pub companies before the interests of the small business men and women who run our pubs, and before those of the consumers who use them. Not only did the Government make the wrong call following our report; appallingly, it became clear—thanks to the work of the hon. Member for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland)—that they had already made their mind up before receiving our verdict. The Minister should be held to account for that. The industry needs action now, and I support the motion.
Stephen Lloyd (Eastbourne) (LD)
Pubs are a significant feature in all our constituencies. In Eastbourne, when people ask where I live, I say, “Just up the road from the Lamb”, and everyone knows where I mean. That is just a small way of illustrating how valuable pubs are across the UK.
I pay tribute to the hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey) for securing this debate, and to my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland), who has been leading on this issue for a number of years.
Before becoming an MP, I had observed over the past 10 years or so a rapid decrease in the number of pubs. Since coming to the House, I have received representations from publicans and constituents in Eastbourne, and I have carried out some research. Much of what I was going to say has already been said, and I shall not repeat it, but I want to mention some research by the Institute for Public Policy Research. My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West and many others today have expressed with passion the fact that we have visited this issue on numerous occasions, under the previous Government and this one. The same issue keeps coming up, and the Select Committee keeps working away at it, focusing on what needs to be done. The Government of the day listen, say that they will do something about it, and then do nothing. The reason that we have to keep coming back to it is that the major players behave deplorably; there is no other way of putting it.
The more I researched the matter over the past few months, having spoken to my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West, the more I kept asking myself, “What is going on? What other industry would keep saying that it was going to do something, yet keep breaking its word?” Then I thought, “I’ve got it! It’s investment banking!” I am very much a business-wing Liberal, and, like my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Andrew Stephenson), who is not in his place, a great believer in light-touch regulation. There are exceptions to every rule, however. I do not like light-touch regulation for investment banks, because that is what got us into the mess we are now in. Nor do I think that the argument not to regulate the pubcos stacks up.
Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD)
It sounds as though my hon. Friend, like me, hopes that the motion will be successful today. He has had a great deal of experience working with the Federation of Small Businesses. If he were giving business advice, would he ever advise someone to become the tenant of a pubco?
Stephen Lloyd
My hon. Friend is so right: a lot of the work that I did for the FSB before coming to the House involved meetings with landlords who had pubco tenancies. Some of the meetings were among the most desperate I have ever had, because those people were getting absolutely nailed by the pub companies. So, to be perfectly honest, I would not advise anyone to become a tenant under the present criteria. That is absurd, because I am massively pro-small business; it is precisely that sector that is going to get us out of this economic mess. At the moment, however, the playing field is much too uneven, and something really has to be done.
Let me cite the recent research by the IPPR, which was called “Tied Down”. It talked to 550 publicans, and some of the resulting figures are quite startling. It found that 57% of those subject to the ties that oblige tenants of the big pub groups to buy beer from them were struggling financially, compared with 43% of non-tied landlords. That is a difference of almost 20%. The IPPR’s associate director, Rick Muir, said:
“Thousands of publicans across Britain are being put under significant financial pressure by the ‘beer tie’. Our survey of publicans shows that they have suffered worse through the recession because of this tie. A recent select committee report shows that the higher prices tied publicans have to pay for their beer are not adequately compensated for by lower rents.”
That is why we need regulation. The original theory was that the publican would pay a lower rent because of the tie, but some of those absolutely deplorable companies got themselves into such a mess financially because they were so heavily leveraged in debt that they leant on their tenants to a quite disgraceful degree, and lifted the rents hugely.
The time has come for the Government seriously to look at regulation. I could, just possibly, be persuaded to give the companies nine months and review the situation in the autumn, but this has been going on for years, and I would urge the Minister to agree to a review. Furthermore, he should publicly state on behalf of the Government, in the Chamber, that if the pub companies do not come up to speed this time—and, my God, they have had so many opportunities in the last chance saloon—we will regulate.
It was noted earlier that pubcos have a lot on their mind at the moment, and we were asked whether we really needed to put them under this pressure. Well, yes we do. How many times are we going to allow them to say that they are going to do something, only for them not to do it? I urge the Government to tell them that if they have not come up with voluntary proposals within nine months, there will be statutory regulation. That is the compromise that I am prepared to accept. I know that the Minister has worked hard in this area, but if the companies do not change, to the extent that we have to regulate, they will have brought that upon themselves. I urge the Minister to take action.
Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)
I should like to praise the hard work of the hon. Member for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland) on this issue over many years; it has been well documented. I also want to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey) on securing this debate.
Licensees in my constituency are getting a poor deal from exploitative pubcos, and the Government have to act. At present, on this issue the Prime Minister is dodging his round at the bar. Louise Gibben of the Huntsman in Guisborough in my constituency has told me that, after paying Enterprise Inns £20,000 a year in rent, plus her overheads, her business rates and her Performing Rights Society licence, she is left with next to nothing. That is not because of a lack of hard work, or because the pub is of poor quality. Indeed, new local customers have documented the fact on a website that her staff are “great” and that she has made
“every effort to make the pub a success”
by serving meals and making it a family-friendly environment. Unfortunately, however, the rep for Enterprise Inns has told her to try harder.
Sadly, this situation is not unique to Louise. She is not the only one who is struggling to keep her pub afloat despite the rent and contractual conditions imposed by a pubco. For example, nearly 30,000 tenants face the problem of being tied to a specific brewery as part of their tenancy. While tenants are struggling to survive and pubs are closing, pubcos are still reporting millions of pounds in profits. Enterprise Inns, for example, reported a pre-tax profit of £157 million last year, despite the harsh prevailing economic circumstances, yet its tenants in my constituency are struggling to maintain their livelihoods.
Large pubcos are not producing value; they are exploiting the small business people who, through their own endeavours, are trying to make a living. It is also obvious to everyone that they are not giving their tenants the respect that they deserve. The Government have to act to ensure that relations between the pubcos and their tenants are fair. The self-regulatory framework that the Government are proposing does not go far enough. According to the Fair Pint campaign, it will not require any concessions by the pubcos, and it will result in very little, if any, change to the wholly unsatisfactory status quo.
The Government’s measures might enjoy the support of the large pubcos, but I know that tenants in my constituency, as represented through the Independent Pub Confederation, feel betrayed and very disappointed by the lack of a genuine free-of-tie option accompanied by a review into open market rent. They feel that any self-regulatory framework will not help them to secure a fairer deal. We cannot trust these pubcos to regulate themselves. I urge this Government, for the sake of tenants and the future of pubs in my constituency, to ensure that any code of practice exists by statute rather than by the will of the people whom we wish to regulate.
Mr Marcus Jones (Nuneaton) (Con)
Pubs are not just places we frequent to buy beer; they are vital community hubs that can be fundamental to our lives. I can say that, given that I met my wife in a pub called the Chetwynd Arms in my constituency back in 1997. Given that it was in 1997, I conclude only that it was probably the only good thing to come out of that year. Since those heady days, we have lost much of that community heritage that our pubs give. At the moment we risk the continuing demise of the good old British pub. Part of the demise has no doubt been exacerbated by the relationship between the pubcos and their lessees.
History tells us that the arrangements between pubcos, lessees and tenants, which emanated from the break-up of the estates of the large breweries back in the 1990s, were not initially dissimilar to the situation that obtained under the breweries. Where the model differs tremendously, however, is that the pubcos are middlemen—yet another middleman between the product producer and the end user of the product. That has necessarily added costs over a number of years. The costs seem to have been met quickly by the tenants and lessees who have seen many changes over that period: metered pumps, tighter reins on guest ales, loss of machine income, reductions in the will to help with refurbishments—these are probably only a few of the additional burdens that lessees have had to face. We need to be aware that much of that stems from 1980s legislation in the context of the fundamental shift towards the large pubco estates that we now have.
I welcome much of the work done by successive Select Committees on the practices of pubcos, but I think we should be careful about what we wish for as we look to legislate now. We could end up out of the frying pan into the fire, because we are in a very different world today than we were when the Select Committee first considered this issue in 2004. Back then, pubs were still in decline, but there has been a huge aggregation of issues since. We have had the smoking ban, increased regulation on alcohol sales, beer duty rising by 35% over the last four years alone, below-cost selling at supermarkets becoming more prevalent and, to top all that, we have suffered the deepest and longest recession since the 1930s. These factors have no doubt strained even further relations between pubcos and their lessees.
Jason McCartney (Colne Valley) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way and would like to add to his list of other factors affecting our local community pubs. We heard about Performing Rights Society licences from the hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Tom Blenkinsop). There is also the cost of live television sport in pubs; one of my local landlords needs £800 a month to pay for that. My hon. Friend mentioned regulation a few moments ago. Does he agree that self-regulation of the pubcos is not working; will he join me and many other Members in supporting this motion and setting a timetable for the Government to look again at self-regulation?
Mr Jones
I thank my hon. Friend for his comments. I shall come on to the issue of self-regulation.
The relationship between pubcos and lessees has been exacerbated by external factors. That has not been helped by the fact that, as many hon. Members have mentioned, the pubcos are now greatly overleveraged. That leads me to be a little concerned about what we seem to be wishing for. The overleveraging of the pubcos makes the position very difficult for them in comparison with 2004, as the horse might now have bolted. Perhaps we should have done the legislating back then when the circumstances were different.
When it comes to the external factors I mentioned, there are many things—in addition to what the Select Committee report raised—that the Minister with responsibility for pubs and the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr Davey), who is to reply to this debate, need to look at and address. The Select Committee focused its mind on the relationship between the pubcos and lessees. That is important when we have reached a position in which the pubcos are looking at things in a different light, albeit not quickly enough for many lessees.
I believe that the voluntary measures put forward are positive and I welcome the industry framework code, which will be legally binding. I welcome PICAS, the three year accreditation code and the strengthening of the framework code. I particularly welcome having a new pubs advisory service. More advice, training and information is vital to potential lessees, who need to go into these businesses with their eyes fully open. Having the right training for the lessees going into them is important. Under the old breweries, most of the lessees coming into pubs as tenants had managed pub groups for many years. They knew their trade inside out. That is why they ran successful pub businesses. In that respect, there is a gap now.
Voluntary measures will be positive only if they are adhered to and only if PICAS has teeth and the pubs advisory service has more independence. That is why I fully support a review of these arrangements over direct, immediate regulation. I think we need to give more time to see whether the voluntary arrangements being put in place are going to work.
We must try to avoid making the mistakes of the past, which happened when the big breweries were broken up. Voluntary regulation is important. It must be monitored carefully, and we must not look to deal with this issue in a silo or depend only on this aspect to solve the problems that our community pubs face.
John Pugh (Southport) (LD)
I begin by paying full tribute to the Select Committee for its work, particularly for the sterling work done by the hon. Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley) and my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland)—usually the quietest and most self-effacing of men. They have clearly been angered by this issue.
This seems to be a debate about two solutions to a commonly recognised problem—the unfair trading practices associated with the tie, and the relationship between tenants and the pubco. The problem is not one of competition, and it is not one of competition failure or consumer choice. It is connected with associated issues, which hon. Members have mentioned, such as the decline of community pubs, the decline of community cohesion and so forth—generally regarded as a social ill, except perhaps in temperance circles. What we are debating now is not necessarily connected with that problem, however, as free houses are also closing, disappearing and depriving their community of their benefit.
At its simplest, the issue is about the running of the tied pub and how it can be made uneconomic for tenants through unfair and non-transparent terms of trade. It has been suggested that this is not an unwelcome outcome so far as the pubcos are concerned, because they are short of capital and in some cases anxious to sell off. That the terms of trade are penal, non-transparent and arbitrary is simply not in dispute anywhere in the Chamber. It has been demonstrated by the turnover of tenants, who are coming and going all the time, by the Select Committee’s reports, and by the Government’s own undertakings to do something about what they have clearly identified as a problem. The issue that divides the House, if indeed it does divide it, is how to find a way out.
The Government are arguing for a non-statutory code, for fairly straightforward reasons. They dislike regulation in principle—they have said as much—they prefer effective self-regulation, and they believe that a non-statutory code represents a quicker fix. It clearly does not help that their favoured solution is also the favoured solution of the accused—the pubcos, in this instance—and that there has obviously been collusion in the refining of the suggestion, but that in itself does not invalidate the solution.
John Pugh
I refer the Minister to the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West, who presented a fair amount of prima facie evidence that I think impressed the House. However, I want to do the Minister a favour here. It could be argued that the consent and co-operation of the pubcos will make any solution more workable—just as restorative justice is often preferable to sheer penal justice—especially if a self-regulatory code is given some legal significance, although, as other Members have pointed out, a statutory code would lead to more compliance and less legal recourse. That sounds pretty reasonable, apart from the fact that the Government clearly promised something else and have lost trust, and the fact that the pubcos have a dismal record of keeping to commitments, as the Select Committee’s report made clear.
Overall, the Government’s response represents the triumph of hope over experience, or of realpolitik over trust. There is a long and—as must not be forgotten—sordid history of a connection between politicians and the brewing industry over the ages, dating back to the time of Gladstone and before, with the tenant often perceived by the Liberals as the victim. Ultimately, this is the Government’s call. If they ignore the Select Committee’s advice, they will risk being considered untrustworthy; I think that that is inevitable now. They gamble on the good faith of the pubcos, but what if they are wrong? That is my main question to the Minister. If this is not a solution but in fact an evasion, statutory regulation must be the only conceivable answer.
Mr Dave Watts (St Helens North) (Lab)
Is it not clear that in virtually every case self-regulation does not work, and that Governments are eventually forced to regulate for that reason rather than because they want or prefer to do so?
John Pugh
I think self-regulation might work sometimes. What we are debating is what will happen if it does not. What do the Government intend to do in that event? I think it incumbent on the Minister to state plainly that if self-regulation does not work, statutory regulation remains an option. If the Government have an objection in principle to statutory regulation, they must make it clear to the House, because that is the most honest and forthright approach.
Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)
I have been following the hon. Gentleman’s argument closely. Does he agree—indeed, I think this is his conclusion—that if self-regulation is to work, the industry needs to know that if it does not in fact work, the Government will be prepared to follow up with statutory regulation?
John Pugh
I think that the Government must say that. The industry has been given a second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh—however many chances we may care to cite. If the Government do not intend ever to introduce statutory regulation, they can and should say so at the Dispatch Box today.
Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)
I pay tribute to all the Members who have shown a real commitment to supporting our essential network of community pubs. That is incredibly important, because we politicians are often accused of not debating issues that are discussed in pubs up and down the country. On this occasion, we can raise a glass to that.
My local brewery, Arkell’s, which was established in 1843, is an example of good practice in terms of pub ties. I intend to describe the challenges that it faces, and then present my brief conclusions. Arkell’s has about 106 pubs, many of which have tied tenants. That has several benefits. It allows low-cost entry, providing an easy way for someone who feels that his calling in life is to be a landlord to get into the industry; there are economies of scale, and the skills assistance and training which, in most instances, transform the “I think I would be a very good landlord” attitude into some form of reality; and, crucially, it enables an enthusiastic landlord to delegate a number of tasks that he may not himself wish to perform, perhaps preferring to focus on good customer service rather than dealing with the accounts, the portable appliance testing and the insurance.
Moreover, as a family brewery, Arkell’s has a long-term commitment—historical and emotional—to local communities, and will make long-term investments. My local pub, the excellent Tawny Owl, is installing 85 solar panels which will have a 25-year payback return. Arkell’s has the confidence that that is worth doing. When local community pubs start to struggle, it does everything it can to keep them going. Although sometimes a community will no longer wish to have a community pub and the pub closes, Arkell’s considers itself to be a brewer first and believes it needs to sustain a network to sell its beer.
The head of the Arkell’s family brewery is James Arkell. When I spoke to him, he highlighted that he felt the problem with the pubcos is that over the past 20 years the bond of trust has been broken. Many speakers have highlighted a number of the issues involved in that, including increasing costs and service charges, and lack of transparency, so that when an enthusiastic potential landlord signs up they are not 100% sure of what they are signing up to, as well as lack of support and aggressive changes in contract terms, often driven by the fact that the pubco has decided it no longer wishes to have that pub site as it will make more money if it sells it. Such behaviour is often driven by the fact that many pubcos are drowning in debt. They are accountable to shareholders, and therefore tend to make short-term decisions. I think that all Members agree that action was needed.
I welcome the voluntary code. One of its advantages is that it can be implemented quickly, but the Minister must make it clear that if the industry does not sort itself out and act responsibly, the voluntary code will be replaced by regulation. As a good, proud Conservative, I do not normally favour more regulation, however, so we must try to address this issue in the best way.
We must also be careful what we wish for, because we all seem to want both sides of the coin. At the end of the day, these buildings have to be paid for. As I have said, one of the advantages is that this is a cheap form of entry into the industry. What would people think if franchisees who operate under the McDonald’s badge instead wanted to sell KFC because that might be more profitable? This has to work both ways, therefore.
We must continue to review progress, and the pub sector must know that we are doing so. We must then focus on the other issues affecting the pub industry, such as tax, red tape and training. Training is crucial because pub failures are often a result of poor-quality landlords. The next generation of landlords must be able to step up to the challenge and address problems such as the social changes of recent times. Fewer people are inclined to go to the pub, and people tend to go less often. Landlords have to be able to address such trends by providing food and offering quiz nights and sports opportunities. We must therefore look at hospitality management courses in universities and colleges. They train people to work in the restaurant industry, but they should also be proud to train them to work in the pub industry so that we have a new generation of pub landlords who can meet the challenge of protecting those valuable community assets.
Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)
The importance of this subject is clear from the number of Members present for this debate. That is unsurprising as pubs are an important part of being British; they are an important part of what holds us together and of what, literally, brings us together. This has been a difficult time for the licensed trade as a result of Sky TV costs and Performing Rights Society costs, as well as changing social habits leading to a decline in wet sales, combined with the underlying structural problem that prices go up by price inflation but the biggest cost, which is people, goes up by wage inflation. There are clearly far too many pubs closing in our towns and villages, and we need to find ways to stop that. Changing the tie arrangements is not the right way, however.
I should declare an interest: I used to work in the pubs and brewing business, but I no longer do so. The industry is built on partnerships between large companies and individual entrepreneurs. As my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) said, that brings many people into the business who otherwise would have no way in. However, whenever there are two businesses working together there is always potential for conflict, and this business certainly has its fair share of that. We should also make it clear that there are many happy tenants and lessees, however; not everybody is at loggerheads with their partners.
At its heart, the tie is a way of sharing risk between the real estate owner and the individual entrepreneur. Different sectors do that in different ways: they have franchise fees as a percentage of revenue, turnover-related rents or whatever it might be. In this sector, it just so happens that it is done primarily through the tie. Everything that I know about economics and business tells me that loading all cost on to fixed cost and de-variablising it would increase, not decrease, the number of business failures because of the increased operational gearing.
There is a somewhat false impression implicit in much of this debate—in the wider sense; not so much today—that, were the tie to go, everything else would stay the same, so nobody’s rent would go up. Of course, that is not true at all. There is a required return on every piece of real estate; the market expects a required return from quoted companies.
Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)
Does the hon. Gentleman not accept that hardly anybody in this debate has asked for the tie to go? We are talking about rebalancing the power relationship between lessees and pubcos, so that there is greater incentive for pubcos to provide a more generous arrangement for small businesses.
Damian Hinds
The motion does in fact specify a “free-of-tie option”. Many pub-owning companies would say that some sites are appropriate for leases—where the partner can build the value of the lease by building up the food business, for example—whereas others are more appropriate for a traditional tenancy-type business. The motion as stated would conflict with that approach.
In addition to that false implicit impression, there is a confusing conflation of tenants and lessees. On the one hand, we seem to be saying that this is only about very large pub companies that run leases; yet a number of those who have spoken in favour of that proposition have referred to the people in question as tenants. I am not entirely sure where the cut-off point of 500 sites comes from. It is possibly intended to target just a couple of companies, but frankly, coming up with a regulatory package for the whole industry is probably not the best way to do that. I fear that that would pull in a couple of other companies it is perhaps not intended to target.
Most importantly, there is little evidence that I know of that traditional, smaller, integrated brewers have any difficulty with the tie, which suggests to me that there is no problem with the tie per se.
Mr Davey
My hon. Friend is right, and that is one reason why the Government response made a big distinction between the tied tenancy model and the leasehold model of full repairing and insuring leases, with which most, if not all, of the real detriment and problems have occurred.
Damian Hinds
The Minister is correct, and that is indeed in the Government response. Unfortunately, the BIS Committee report, which is a fantastic report and to which we are to some extent referring, does not make that distinction quite so clearly.
What should we do if the tie is not the answer? Let me start with what we should not do. The Government response puts it rather well:
“Government should not intervene in setting the terms of commercial contractual relationships”
where, according to the OFT, there are no competition issues that significantly affect consumers; and
“whether or not a lease or tenancy includes a tie is a commercial decision on the part of both parties.”
Damian Hinds
I am afraid not.
We do need to make sure that there is fairness and transparency and that properly informed people come into this business. On fairness, I welcome the commitment in the new framework code to having no more upward-only rent reviews in full repairing and insuring leases. On transparency, I welcome the commitment to publish national wholesale price lists, although I am not quite clear how that would work. In this business, where pricing is a complex art, wholesale prices are not necessarily that much use unless the actual prices charged and tariffs are known. My hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi)—he is not with us today—suggested to the Select Committee that, through the medium of the internet and the wisdom of crowds, it might be possible to use these data in ways hitherto not possible.
I also welcome the industry’s commitment to look again at common formats for shadow profit and loss accounts to make it easier to compare different pub owners. I agree with the predecessor Select Committee’s finding in 2009 that all the information on a pub’s trading history should be available to the potential licensee. However, it is also important that we understand the limits of that. Pub companies will say that they would love to know a lot more about the trading history of various sites, often having limited sight of that information. We need properly to inform people who are going into the business. I welcome the pre-entry awareness training, but I also agree very much with the Committee’s judgment that we need deep vigilance on its quality. None of that invalidates the tie.
If we want to be totally focused on keeping pubs open, as I believe all hon. Members do, we have to address two fundamental things. The first is pubs competing on price, partly against the supermarkets, but also, as some hon. Members have said, against managed houses, particularly urban “vertical drinking establishments”, as they are known in the trade, which often severely undercut the traditional tenanted trade. The second is alternative usage value, as one way of keeping pubs open is to make it harder and more expensive to secure a change of use for these premises. That will focus minds on making sure that companies are supporting sustainable businesses.
Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)
I congratulate the hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey) on promoting today’s motion. He is a fellow Robins fan, and I know that he, like me, will have wanted to toast, in a pub somewhere, Cheltenham Town’s phenomenal, confident performance against Spurs last week—but as he rightly points out, the choice of pubs is becoming much more limited. That is happening for many reasons, but the pub tie is clearly one of the factors contributing to pub closures.
I promoted a private Member’s Bill on this subject last year. It received very wide cross-party support, and that same level of cross-party support has been evident in the backing for early-day motions; the all-party save the pub group, ably led by my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland); the Select Committee reports that have repeatedly set a timetable, which has now passed, for introducing a statutory code; and, of course, today’s debate and motion.
When I promoted my Bill I received a lot of correspondence, especially from the trade. I did receive one letter from Enterprise Inns, which pointed out the value of the tie. Indeed, the company generously took me round my constituency and demonstrated that the tie can sometimes deliver real benefits; that is true, especially where extensive capital investment is required. Yet the overwhelming volume of correspondence from the trade was supportive of a statutory code with a free-of-tie option.
One of the most powerful letters I received came from someone who said the following:
“I have the misfortune to have a successful pub/restaurant…under a tied Enterprise lease…Having taken the lease last May from previous tenants who couldn’t make the business work, looking back no one seems to have had success since Enterprise bought the pub”.
Jason McCartney
The hon. Gentleman makes some excellent points, as many colleagues have done on the basis of their own personal experience, be it from meeting their partner in pubs or having worked in the industry. My experience is of my two local pubs in Honley, in Yorkshire. The Allied has had three tenants in 18 months—it is on to its third lot now—and the Coach and Horses, after numerous tenants over the past three years, has just closed. Although an Indian restaurant called Balooshai is going to open, which I welcome, I no longer have a pub within a minute’s walking distance. For those reasons, as well as because of all the other points made in the Chamber this afternoon, does my hon. Friend agree that action needs to be taken?
Martin Horwood
Yes.
My correspondent also said:
“The local rep visited at my request this May, only his 3rd visit and I now prefer to deal with him by email to have everything in writing.”
That supports the points that have been made about loss of trust. The letter continued:
“He first volunteered the figures from the brulines system, showing my doubling sales, food has also gone from nothing to a very good business and is the only way to make any money on this lease. I then put to him that at £5.5k breakeven I am paying about £23k rent and £50k through the beer tie. This equates to around 17% return on the value of the property while I will struggle to even repay my investment let alone make a return on it or pay myself an income. When I put to him that unless he rebalanced this I would be selling up and moving on he confirmed that I have a lease in order that I can do this.”
As my correspondent pointed out, the pubco representative would
“make a mean poker player.”
My correspondent continued:
“I’m waiting to see what comes from Westminster…Last resort is to sell up and move on.”
He points out that this is not just about the price of the beer either, saying:
“Aside from paying between 1.5 to 2 times wholesale value within the tie. Enterprise restrict what I can buy, for example I can not have Crabbies Ginger Beer”.
I have never heard of that. [Hon. Members: “Oh dear!”] Other hon. Members obviously have.
The letter continues:
“this may seem petty, but Crabbies is heavily marketed and is hence what customers ask for.”
He concludes:
“With a monopoly to supply 7,000 pubs, the service is understandably poor, why would you offer more than a week or 2 payment terms, daily delivery, knowledgeable staff, sale or return, dependable deliveries, useful special offers, volume discounts, why would they? It’s not as if I can take my business elsewhere.”
That inequality in the power relationship between struggling small businesses and the major pubcos demonstrates my point.
Mr George Howarth
As I am ever anxious to be helpful, may I tell the hon. Gentleman that Crabbie’s ginger beer is made in Knowsley?
Martin Horwood
The right hon. Gentleman will have to buy me whatever the relevant quantity is in a pub sometime, if we can find one.
To be even-handed, I must say that I have had quite a lot of complaints and correspondence from lessees of Punch Taverns, too. One wrote:
“I am a Punch Lessee, I am at present on the biggest discount”—
in other words on beer price—
“that Punch can give me, I am paying what is in my view an extortionate rent, an example of pricing is as follows:
My buying price from Strongbow Cider at highest discount from Punch = £110 + VAT—Price from free-trade Moulton Coors = £64 +VAT.
This comparison is throughout the range. What chance have I got of staying in business. The truth of the matter is that the prices we have to charge to customers = empty pub.”
That is the unequal power relationship we need to have tackled, and that view is widely held across the trade.
The Minister should take credit for the positive steps that he is taking, but none of them really sort out the central issue, which is not the need to abolish the tie or even customer choice and competition among pubs for customer trade but the need to rebalance the relationship between publicans and the pubcos, and the lack of any real incentive for those highly leveraged businesses to offer better terms and avoid pub closures. It is increasingly clear to everyone in the trade, to the Select Committee, which has repeatedly considered it, and to Members across this House, that the only way to do that is to introduce a statutory code with a free-of-tie option. We should not force all pubs out of the tie, but give the pubcos an incentive to rebalance the relationship and offer more generous terms to those struggling small businesses. The pubcos have been drinking in the last chance saloon for so long that they must be under the table by now, and it is time for Ministers to join us all in saying, “Time” and “Enough”.
Lorely Burt (Solihull) (LD)
Although several Members have a lot of knowledge of the pub industry, I think I am the only Member who has spoken today who has operated under a tie. Admittedly it was an awfully long time ago, but the experience of operating under a tie is principally the same now as it was when the beer orders came in.
I agree with the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) that the tie is not the problem. In my view, it represents the symbiotic relationship between the company, which owns the pub, and the tenant, who puts his or her labour, blood, sweat and—often literally— tears into the equation. Landlords have always complained about the unfairness of the tie—they did it in my day and they do it today—but people should enter into tenancy agreements with their eyes wide open, not with the starry-eyed image of being “mine host” behind the bar obscuring the economic facts. I am glad to see that the new pub advisory services will be established to support would-be tenants and ensure that they understand what they are getting themselves into.
The difference today is that the vast majority of tied pubs are owned not by breweries but by companies whose purpose is not just selling beer but owning properties that they expected to accrue in value. Several changes over the years have made that a less and less attractive business proposition, including changes in drinking habits, drink-drive legislation and so on. The property bubble has now burst and the pubcos can no longer rely on increasing property values to square a decreasing profit circle. To their shame, some pubcos have resorted to imposing increasingly punitive terms on their tenants to make up the difference, including the full repairing and insuring leases that have been mentioned, along with many other examples.
Martin Horwood
Does not the point that my hon. Friend is making underline the difference between the kind of tie under which she operated with a brewer and those under pub companies, which have no incentive not simply to sell their pubs and take the cash, as that helps their balance sheets?
Lorely Burt
I agree with my hon. Friend to a degree, but the principle of the tie is the same. We need to make sure that the tie operates fairly.
These problems must stop, but should the answer be legally to require companies to offer a free-of-tie option? The balance has indisputably tipped too far towards the landlord, but I think we are tipping the baby out with the bathwater. For the breweries, what would be the point of having their own pubs if they could not impose a tie? Why would they go to the trouble of buying and refurbishing property and recruiting suitable tenants only for those tenants to start in competition against them, selling someone else’s beer? Breweries have been anxiously awaiting the Government proposals because they want to invest in the industry, but they will not do that if they cannot keep the tie.
Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)
Does the hon. Lady accept that one problem with the current situation is that it prejudices against local ales? I am thinking of McGivern ales in Ruabon. Its ale is hugely popular and I would like to see more pubs selling it, but the current situation prejudices against that.
Lorely Burt
Indeed, but the Office of Fair Trading report found that there was not detriment to the consumer in response to the tie. The pubs I go to tend to have all sorts of guest ales as well, so there is still that possibility.
Lorely Burt
I am grateful for that intervention.
As for the pubcos, those over-relying on the property model have become increasingly unviable and they are being hoist on their own petard. Punch is selling off 2,000 pubs and Enterprise is selling 500. Those that are left will be protected by the code of practice. Why should we wait for two or three years to introduce legislation, given that 98% of the industry has signed up to the code of practice today? The code of practice is stronger and is legally binding. Rents must be based on independent guidance from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, and unhappy tenants can appeal easily and cheaply to an independent mediation service and to the courts. On the whole, this is a good deal for landlords and customers. I can support the proposal in the motion for a review to ensure that the voluntary code and other measures are properly implemented and that they work, but I would be happier if a little more time were given to assessing whether they are working properly.
Where I think that we as a Government have failed is in not taking strong enough action against the supermarkets and their pernicious cheap alcohol policies. Several colleagues have mentioned that. I should like to say, “Well done,” to my hon. Friend the Minister for the safeguards and changes he has managed to wring from the pubcos, but can he now persuade his right hon. and hon. Friends in the Treasury to substitute for the lily-livered excuse for a minimum charge for alcohol of VAT plus the rate of duty, a proper minimum charge to protect our pub industry and the health of our nation?
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to stand here at the culmination of this excellent debate, which has shown the House in a tremendous light. Let me start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey) on securing and opening the debate. I congratulate also the hon. Members for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland) and for Northampton South (Mr Binley) on their work on this issue. It is to the Minister’s shame that despite diligent research and the magnificent campaign fought by many interested organisations, we are debating how to put safeguards into a policy that was announced without proper consultation and in direct contradiction of assurances given by him.
I shall refer to the remarks of some Members during my contribution, but I must pick out specifically the brilliant and passionate speech of the hon. Member for Northampton South. He described how the Government have reneged on their undertaking, and pointed out that the problem was the major pub companies that have more than 500 pubs. The hon. Member for Leeds North West spoke brilliantly and exposed the shameful collaboration of the Government and the BBPA. That point was also taken up by the hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh).
My hon. Friend the Member for East Lothian (Fiona O'Donnell) talked about the impact on jobs. That is a vital issue: every week hundreds of people lose their job as a result of the number of pubs that are closing.
The hon. Member for Burton (Andrew Griffiths) spoke up for pub companies, but said that they were drinking in the last chance saloon—and my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Paul Murphy) rightly said that the last chance saloon sounded like a pub where time is never called.
Toby Perkins
I am afraid I do not have time.
The hon. Member for Bristol North West (Charlotte Leslie) felt that on balance there needed to be some regulation. She defied those who think that a Member cannot make a serious speech wearing a scarf—something that may catch on.
My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) talked about how, because of their flawed business model, the big pub companies are squeezing out unreasonable returns. My hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Tom Blenkinsop) said that the Prime Minister was dodging his round at the bar. The hon. Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones) reminded us of the role of the pub in uniting couples over the years. He reflected on the good fortune of Mrs Jones to have been drinking in the right pub at the right time.
There were interesting contributions from my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen and my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley). The hon. Members for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) and for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) spoke about alternative ways in which pubs might choose to improve themselves.
Today we have heard a lot about the history of this issue, but it is worth reminding ourselves that we have had seven reports and there have been four inquiries by the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee. The Government’s response has many flaws, which other Members have exposed, but I want to talk about two specifically.
On the issue of pub closures, which was exposed by the hon. Member for Pendle (Andrew Stephenson), the Minister has swallowed the big pub company line that free-of-tie pubs are more likely to close. He must know that in general tied pubs do not close permanently, because, as the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) pointed out, they have a history of churning through huge numbers of landlords who try and fail—another business going under, another life unfairly ruined. One pub company had a churn rate of 65%, so although the hon. Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt) says that people should go into such arrangements with their eyes open, that does not reflect the reality experienced by many tenants and lessees. Like the hon. Lady, my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray) was previously a landlord—for Enterprise—and has strongly made the point that many people’s lives were ruined because they were not aware of what they had let themselves in for.
In March 2010, a Federation of Small Businesses survey found that 84% of tied businesses believed that their relation with the pubco did not allow them to compete effectively, 90% believed that the arrangements meant that they could not make a fair profit, and 87% indicated that they wanted to be free of the tie. Despite that evidence, the Government say in their response, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas) pointed out, that the debate over tied or free-of-tie status is a distraction. We think that is entirely wrong.
The FSB is not the only organisation to study the issue. The Institute for Public Policy Research also questioned tenants and lessees, and its findings showed that free-of-tie landlords manage pubs longer, are more optimistic about the future, are less likely to be struggling financially, and earn more. According to that study, 46% of tied publicans earn less than £15,000 a year. The hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) noted that the IPPR found that 88% of publicans who claim to be struggling financially identified the beer tie as one of the most significant factors in their financial problems.
The Minister, in his written response, built a man of straw, claiming that the critics were calling for the tie to end completely. He must know that that is not the case. All the critics are saying is that if the traditionally tenanted arrangement is such a good deal, why can the big pub companies not offer both tied and free-of-tie options, and let their tenants decide?
The Select Committee discovered that at every turn the big pubcos had failed to take the actions they had promised. In desperation, the Committee said in March 2010 that it would give the industry a final chance to prove that self-regulation could work. It was supported by a sympathetic Government who promised to back its findings. When there is such knowledge and such commitment and when the industry has been given every chance to put its house in order, how can the Minister possibly write that the issue is more complicated than the critics realise?
What the critics may have failed to understand is not the issue surrounding pubcos but the developing relationship between the pubcos, the BBPA and the ministerial team. As the hon. Member for Leeds North West said, the save the pub group has discovered, through freedom of information requests, that throughout the process the referee was getting changed in the same room as one of the teams.
Toby Perkins
The Minister’s colleagues, the hon. Members for Southport and for Leeds North West, were deeply uncomfortable about the relationship. The findings of the save the pub group, through freedom of information requests, show that parts of the BBPA’s report—including the typing errors—were just cut and pasted into the Government’s response. I do not know whether the Minister is still listening to me. It is difficult for him to say that there is no evidence when Members who sit on the same side of the Chamber as him feel that the relationship is deeply unhealthy.
It transpires that before the Select Committee report came out the Minister had made up his mind that he would not consider legislation. As I said, the Government’s response to the report is, in substantial part, the BBPA’s own report. As my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West said, it is now clear that the Minister has had no independent legal advice on the legality of the framework, and instead has relied on legal advice provided by the BBPA. It has become clear that his officials were assisting the BBPA with the wording of a press release as early as October, when as far as interested bodies were concerned the Minister was still sticking to his commitment to push through legislation. In fact he was merely paving the way for the BBPA’s preferred option. That is just what we know. Other information requested by the save the pub group has been hidden by the Government. How much worse can it be?
The verdict of the all-party save the pub group is damning. It says that the Minister has not been naive; the action is deliberate and, at best, a lazy response by him in the hope of clearing his desk. The verdict of the Federation of Small Businesses is equally clear. It is extremely disappointed by the Government’s response to the Select Committee inquiry and extremely concerned that this agreement appears to have been negotiated with the BBPA and the larger pubcos without substantial consultation with interested parties.
If a Minister were able to come to the House and create a policy that united opinion throughout the House, including the Select Committee, and among the numerous groups referred to by the hon. Member for Leeds North West, we would call him a genius. I have no idea what the word is for the opposite of a genius, but the Minister appears to have achieved the absolute opposite of that united opinion. Who else is calling for the Government to legislate on this issue? Who else does the Minister think simply does not understand its full complexities? Alongside the Select Committee, the Federation of Small Businesses and the all-party save the pub group, there is CAMRA, the Independent Pub Confederation, Fair Pint, the GMB, the Association of Licensed Multiple Retailers, the Guild of Master Victuallers, Unite, the Society of Independent Brewers and the Forum of Private Business. If the Minister could leave the Chamber and come up with a policy that united all those people in his favour, he would take a huge step forward in his career.
As has been declared, this was an opportunity to take steps to resolve the problems faced by the 87% of landlords who indicated that they wanted to be free of the tie. The Minister has wilfully and deliberately set out to avoid living up to that commitment. He says in the Government’s response that the industry will waste no time in living up to these demands, given the parliamentary interest in the matter. As the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) made clear, that is a risible claim, as all the evidence we have seen from the pub companies over the years demonstrates.
Who has the Minister let down? He has let down the Select Committee, which worked so hard and which he promised to back, and all those who contributed to its hearings. He has let down the small family brewers who have been shut out of many pubs as a result of the pub companies’ market domination. He has let down the Federation of Small Businesses, which campaigned so strongly, and let down CAMRA and the Fair Pint campaign. He has let down the 25,000 publicans across Britain who run tied pubs. Most of all, he has let down the customers who were relying on him to secure a fairer balance between landlords and the pub companies.
Never before has there been such a concern about crony capitalism or such an expectation that the Government should stand up for small businesses. This issue confirms what we have always suspected: beneath the warm words, what we are getting from the Government is business as usual. They are on the side of the rich and the powerful, standing up for large vested interests and leaving publicans to fight for themselves.
Ultimately, this issue set three tests for the Minister. Would the Government intervene to ensure a fair relationship between big pub businesses and small business people? Would they keep their word and do what was right, even when a big, powerful lobby asked them not to do so? Would they listen to the voice of the people, the voice of small businesses and the publicans at the coal face of the industry or, when they were needed, just back down? On all those tests, the Government have failed.
This is not a party political issue. Everyone agrees that the Government have got it wrong, as we heard today from Conservative and Liberal Democrat Members. A huge opportunity has been missed and the pub lobby will not believe that this House is serious about action, but it is not too late. Members must ensure that the industry is held to account by supporting the motion, ensuring that an independent body is allowed to come in and monitor what actually happens. Only then will there be any chance of people having a serious hope that the House will take action. I commend the motion to the House.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (Mr Edward Davey)
It might surprise the House to learn that I am very grateful for today’s debate and for all the contributions made by hon. Members, not least because our deliberations will be read by the industry, including the pubcos, and because there is agreement on a number of issues. We all agree that, while we want to enable businesses to generate growth and jobs, we also want them to operate fairly. There is no doubt that the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee identified a number of concerns about how the pub industry is operating. I strongly agree with the importance the Committee and hon. Members attached to the role of pubs in communities the length and breadth of this country.
Before addressing some of the specific issues raised today, I would like to outline the reforms that the Government recently secured from the industry so that no one is in any doubt about them. The reforms deliver on our promise to take action and are much more significant than many Members have suggested today. The industry framework code is to be made legally binding, and I can tell the House that all six of the big pubcos, as well as a number of the smaller family operators, have already declared publicly on their websites that they are legally bound by this code and sent letters to their licensees setting out an open and unlimited offer to this effect. That already represents over 70% of the tied trade and 100% of the large pubcos.
A pub independent conciliation and arbitration service—PICAS—is to be set up. It will provide mediation and arbitration on any matter relating to the framework or company codes and the results will be binding on both parties. That will be done by the end of next month. There will be a three-yearly re-accreditation process for company codes, administered by the British Institute of Innkeeping benchmarking and accreditation scheme through examination of annual compliance reports and spot checks. A new pubs advisory service—PAS—will provide an initial offering of free advice to all prospective and current tenants and lessees. There will be a strengthened framework code, with a particular focus on full repairing and insuring leases and on issues such as rent, insurance, transparency and pre-entry training. This strengthened code was agreed between the BBPA, the BII, and the FLVA, which is a licensee organisation, on 22 December. Those reforms have the potential to deliver real change for tenants and lessees across the country, and they are being brought into effect far more quickly than legislation could achieve.
There have been suggestions of collusion, with allegations that in the process the Government listened only to the BBPA and were deaf to the voices of licensees. That is simply not true. I have met CAMRA three times over the past year; I have met my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West, the chair of the all-party save the pub group, four times over that period; I have met the Independent Pub Confederation; and I have met representatives of the Association of Licensed Multiple Retailers, a licensee organisation, with which we were in detailed discussions while negotiating with the BBPA.
Toby Perkins
Did any section of the representations from the groups that the Minister has just mentioned find its way directly into the Government’s response, or was it simply the BBPA’s representation that turned up there?
Mr Davey
I heard the concerns of those organisations and the problems in the industry, and that is why we have taken action. The hon. Gentleman tried to say that this was not a party political issue, but he made it into one. He and his hon. Friends had 13 years to take action, but they took none.
During this process, I have read copious reports on and information about the concerns of licensees, and we have taken action to address their concerns when we have felt that action is appropriate. We will always listen—
Mr Iain Wright (Hartlepool) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is a former Business Minister.
Mr Davey
I will give way later on; I want to make some progress, because some serious allegations have been made.
Reference has been made to the freedom of information request, which is alleged to show that we just accepted the status quo and the views of the BBPA. The Government have now released more than 90% of the documents requested under the recent FOI request, and more than 500 pages of documentation can now be found on our website, including discussions and minutes of meetings with the BBPA, the ALMR and CAMRA. They show clearly that we listened to all sides and negotiated hard with the BBPA.
For example, there are the minutes of the meeting with the BBPA on 12 October, in which I laid down the conditions that any self-regulatory deal must satisfy. Otherwise, we would have had to consider regulation. The minutes show that the key conditions were those that I laid down—that the code must be legally binding, that the code must be strengthened and that there must be an independent dispute resolution service.
Following my initiative, the BBPA went away to write its report, which it sent to me on 20 October, and I can assure the House that in the meeting on 12 October the BBPA did not want to give the concessions that we wrung from it. Indeed, an e-mail on 20 October, which is in the FOI request, shows that my officials contacted the ALMR, a member of the IPC and a licensee organisation, within half an hour of receiving the BBPA’s offer in order to seek that organisation’s opinion. In the freedom of information request, there are e-mail exchanges in which we pressed the BBPA on how it was to make the code legally binding, and to give firm dates for implementing its commitments and establishing PICAS. That information is available on our website, and I am happy to place it in the Library.
Mr Davey
No, I want to make some progress. [Hon. Members: “Oh!”] I will give way to the hon. Gentleman in a bit, because in two and a half hours’ evidence to the Select Committee he quizzed me for an hour, so let us be clear that I have answered an awful lot of questions from him.
Why did we not legislate? Some in this Chamber wanted the Government to step in and regulate, and some even believe that we promised to do so, but we promised to take action, and that is what we have done. We have had to consider all the evidence and the action that we would take, and I believe that the action we have taken is appropriate and effective.
We did not legislate because, first, we wanted to act now, not in two or three years’ time. To legislate, we would have had to carry out a lengthy process of consultation, of drafting and of pre-legislative scrutiny, and after that we would have had to fight for a slot in the legislative Sessions. It is highly unlikely that such a slot could have been found quickly.
Secondly, this is a deregulatory Government. Additional regulation should always be a measure of last resort. For the Government to intervene in the commercial contractual relationships between two parties, they must have very good reason. That is in line with the Government’s top priority of achieving strong, sustainable and balanced growth, and generating a climate that supports enterprise and creates jobs.
Thirdly, the Office of Fair Trading found in October 2010 that there were no competition issues affecting consumers in this market. That is a critical point, but I am afraid that the Select Committee report did not discuss it. I am aware that in some circles, it is believed that the OFT is wrong. That is not a view that I share. As Minister with responsibility for competition, I have high confidence in the rigour and accuracy of the OFT. Without evidence of competition issues, the rationale for Government intervention is significantly reduced. That is in contrast to the situation in the groceries market, where the Competition Commission found evidence of competition issues. The Government have therefore committed to introducing a groceries code adjudicator as soon as parliamentary time allows to ensure that large retailers treat their suppliers fairly and lawfully.
Mr Davey
I will in a bit, but I want to make progress.
What we have delivered instead of regulation is a self-regulatory regime much stronger than we have had before. As a result of commitments made by the pubcos, they will be obliged to comply with the code and it will be delivered at least two or three years sooner than under an Act of Parliament. That is in line with the Government’s commitment to focus on delivering reform for small businesses right now, not in a few years’ time.
I have listened to campaigners on the issue of the tie, including the IPC, CAMRA and hon. Members. After careful reflection, I disagree with them. I say careful reflection because, like other Members, I have always been worried by the tie, primarily because I had assumed that it must be interfering with competition and was therefore against the interests of consumers. That is why, like others, I was keen for our independent competition authorities to consider the matter. The OFT’s investigation concluded that consumers are well served by British pubs, that there is choice and that a wide variety of beers is available. To override an independent competition authority would be a serious decision for a Minister to take and would require significant evidence that the authority had failed to deliver. As CAMRA decided not to challenge the OFT further, presumably it did not have further evidence; we certainly did not.
Mr Davey
No.
Secondly, when one examines where the relationships between pubcos and licensees have gone wrong, it quickly becomes clear that the major problem is not with the traditional tied tenancy, but with full repairing and insuring leases, which are mostly, but not exclusively, used by the pubcos. There are problems with pre-entry training, transparency and rent guidance not being followed, but not with the basic question of whether a pub is tied for beer. That is why my solution targets full repairing and insuring leases and leaves alone the traditional tied tenancy model, which is used successfully, and for the most part amicably, by local and regional brewers alike.
Thirdly, the market is driving a solution. The figures show that since December 2008, slightly more free-of-tie pubs closed than tied pubs. That is true whether one uses the gross closure rate or the net closure rate, which CAMRA says is more important as it takes account of churning. Furthermore, big pubcos are selling off hundreds of pubs a year, many of which are being bought by family brewers or converting to being free-of-tie. Since December 2008, three times as many free-of-tie pubs have opened than tied pubs and a further 1,300 pubs have converted from being tied to free-of-tie. Where the market is working, the Government do not need to intervene.
Mr Binley
I am most grateful to the Minister for giving way. I remind him that I asked the Secretary of State whether he would uphold the undertaking given by the previous Government that they would act on recommendations from the Select Committee if they were meaningful and in its report. Will the Minister confirm that the Secretary of State said that he would uphold that undertaking? Does he accept that that is the truth of the matter?
Mr Davey
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said that he would take action, and we have taken action. Let us be clear that what the Select Committee wanted was legislation to deal with the problem. Through negotiation and using contract law, we have got legally binding codes of practice that are in the spirit of what the Select Committee asked for. More than that, the Committee asked for an adjudicator, and we will have PICAS to adjudicate on the code by February. Not only are we tackling the issues that the Committee raised, we are doing so far more quickly than expected. I would have thought that the hon. Gentleman would welcome that.
Toby Perkins
It is one thing for the Minister to argue that what he is doing is better than what he undertook to do, but it is simply wrong for him to try to claim that he is doing what the Secretary of State and he undertook to the Select Committee to do. He must know that the commitment that the Secretary of State gave is not what he is delivering. Why does he not just be honest and say that?
Mr Davey
Throughout my speech I have shown that the hon. Gentleman was wrong in almost everything that he said to the House, and he is wrong again.
I recognise that some Members would want us to have gone further, yet our reforms, including the strengthening of the code, its establishment on a legally binding footing and the soon to be completed establishment of PICAS, will mean real change for licensees and tenants across the country.
Martin Horwood
I believe that Members can welcome the positive steps that the Minister has announced but still believe that they do not really tackle the key issues, which are not about compliance and competition but, as the debate has shown, more about the relationship between struggling small businesses and big pubcos. If we are to have one last drink in the last chance saloon, what time scale will he now unambiguously put on the self-regulatory regime before statutory action is taken?
Mr Davey
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. We do need to give the self-regulatory regime time to work, and I pay tribute to him, and even to my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West—[Hon. Members: “Even?”] I say “even” because we do not always see eye to eye on every measure. However, both my hon. Friends have campaigned very hard, and I can tell the House that in my meeting with the BBPA, my hon. Friends' campaigns and the Select Committee reports were critical to my being able to make it absolutely clear that, this time, the pubcos really had to come up with the toughest self-regulatory regime imaginable, or else Parliament would wish to take action. We have come up with the toughest self-regulatory regime imaginable, but it needs time to work. I commend our response to the Select Committee to the House.
Mr Bailey
A lot of points have been raised in the debate, and I will try to respond to them in a very brief time.
First, a number of Members have raised the issue of regulation. I wish to make it quite clear that the Select Committee put the ball in the industry’s court to find an appropriate level of regulation to address the problems that we highlighted. It has had any number of opportunities to do that and failed.
The Committee is not instinctively a body of regulators. It has a coalition majority, and at the time of the report it included a former publican, a former pub company owner and, I believe, a former brewery regional manager. There was a level of expertise and historic involvement in the industry that meant the Committee would not favour excessive regulation.
There are issues to consider about the brewers and their tenants and about the pub companies and their licensees. An adequate consultation with all sectors of the industry would have enabled those issues to be teased out and the introduction of an appropriate regulatory regime that would have addressed them sufficiently. Now, the question is whether the Government will conduct such an inclusive consultation to ensure that that takes place.
Another issue that has been raised on many occasions in the debate is the OFT verdict, which is a red herring. The OFT did not give the pub companies clearance in their contractual relationships. It said that the matter did not come within its remit. The Government have used that as a basis for saying that we should not interfere. I find that rather strange, given the fact that Governments have historically introduced many statutes to deal with injustices and imbalances in contractual advantage.
The Government's response is therefore not sufficient, and I find the Minister’s approach to be somewhat incoherent. On the one hand, he says he cannot interfere, but on the other he argues in the House that he is taking action. Either he can interfere or he cannot, and he is either taking action or not taking action, but he cannot marry the two.
At the end of the day, the Government’s approach will be judged by the industry as whole, and not just by the BBPA. We will be able to judge the success of their approach by changes in the relative balance of income on the two sides of the dispute, which has implications for the rate of closure within the industry. In effect, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.
The motion provides a mechanism for a professional, comprehensive and inclusive judgment of whether those changes happen. If that mechanism does not work, the Minister, whether he likes it or not, will have no alternative but to introduce a statutory code that will be inclusive and representative of all bodies within the industry.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House believes that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’ proposals for reform of the pub industry fall short of the undertaking given to the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee in July 2010 and that only a statutory code of practice which includes a free-of-tie option with an open market rent review and an independent adjudicator will resolve the contractual problems between the pub companies and their lessees; and calls on the Government to commission a review of self-regulation of the pub industry in the Autumn of 2012 to be conducted by an independent body approved by the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee.
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker, of which I have given you and the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod) notice. Hammersmith flyover in my constituency has been closed for three weeks. Although we hope for good news as early as today about the reopening, it is clearly a serious matter for my constituents. The hon. Lady has convened a public meeting—nothing wrong with that—to discuss the matter, but she has advertised and convened it in my constituency. She has invited various public bodies, but not me, to the meeting to discuss these matters—she has not invited me to be on the panel.
This goes beyond the ordinary trespassing that Members sometimes commit. I have never heard of an event of this kind. In reality, it means that the public bodies may not attend, because the meeting is now party political. I ask for your guidance, Mr Speaker. The hon. Lady is a new Member and might not know the protocols of the House as well as others do.
Mr Speaker
I will restrict my understanding thus far, and I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for notice of his intention to raise the point of order. It will almost certainly not be a matter of order for the Chair, but, reserving my position, I think it only right before I say anything further—I am sure he will accept this—to ask the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod) to offer her own thoughts, of which I have had some notice, on the Floor of the House.
Mary Macleod (Brentford and Isleworth) (Con)
Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. This public meeting is being held purely to help local residents. It is for Transport for London and Hounslow and Hammersmith councils to update local residents and help them. Frankly, that is what I came into politics to do.
I am extremely disappointed that the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) has attempted to threaten, intimidate and bully me into doing what he wants and play political games. He knew what was happening—I told him at the earliest opportunity. I invited him to the meeting verbally and in writing. He said initially that he was happy with the plans for the meeting.
I have worked well recently with my Labour Hounslow council and expect to have a very positive working relationship with the new hon. Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra). It is really sad that we cannot help our local residents without an hon. Member trying to stop us. We should work together for the good of our local residents and our constituencies.
Mr Speaker
Order. I assume the hon. Gentleman’s point of order is on an unrelated matter. [Interruption.] Order. Before the hon. Gentleman jumps to his feet, let me say this: I am grateful to him for his notice and for his attempted point of order, and I am grateful to the hon. Lady for what she has said to me via e-email and on the Floor of the House. I do not think this is a matter of order for the Chair; it concerns a matter that is operational, outside of the Chamber of the House. I would want to reiterate the exhortation to Members to co-operate on matters affecting neighbouring constituencies and to observe the customary courtesy of informing other Members about actions and visits proposed in another Member’s constituency. These are, however, not rules of the House; they are conventions. I intend to leave this matter here for today. I say this with no discourtesy to any hon. Member, but because there is pressing business of the House to which we need to move.
Mr Speaker
Before we do so, I must, of course, take what I gather is a totally separate and unrelated point of order from the hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas).
Ian Lucas
On a point of order, Mr Speaker, that is indeed completely separate. In the previous debate, the Minister, speaking on behalf of the Government, expressly contradicted the content of the motion in an intervention on me, but the Government did not oppose the motion when it came to a vote. Can you offer me guidance on ascertaining the Government’s position on this matter?
Mr Speaker
Thankfully, that is not a matter for the Chair. I have no influence over the conduct of the Government, the decisions they make about policy or the way in which they choose either to vote or not to vote. In saying that, I think that the hon. Gentleman will hear my expression of relief.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. Notwithstanding what you have just said, it is a matter of order that it is the custom of the House for a vote to follow a voice. If the voice spoke in one direction, but did not follow that up with a vote, that would surely be disorderly.
Mr Speaker
I think if somebody says one thing and then votes in a different direction, that would be a breach of order. I think if an individual Member—be that a Back Bencher or a Minister—gives an indication of a view, but chooses not to vote in the Division, that is qualitatively in a different category. I have a sense coming on of a potentially stimulating but arcane and preferably delayable exchange on this matter with the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant). Perhaps we can now move to the second debate, which is of great interest to a great many Members, on parliamentary representation.
Parliamentary Representation
(12 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Dame Anne Begg (Aberdeen South) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House welcomes the fact that there are now more women hon. Members and hon. Members from Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities than in any previous Parliament; notes that the need for greater diversity in the House has been accepted by the leadership of the three main political parties at Westminster; is concerned that increased competition for seats at the 2015 General Election may leave under-represented groups more poorly represented among approved candidates, and in the House thereafter, unless mechanisms are employed to tackle continuing inequalities during candidate selection; and calls on the Government and political parties to fulfil commitments made in response to the Speaker’s Conference (on Parliamentary Representation) in 2010, including the commitment to secure the publication by all parties of diversity data on candidate selections.
I thank you, Mr Speaker, and the Backbench Business Committee for allowing us time this afternoon to debate the important issue of the representation of this House. If Parliament and, indeed, the Government are to be successful and to be able to make the best decisions for the country, the people taking those decisions need more closely to reflect the society we purport to represent. I make that point because the desire for a Parliament made up of Members from a wide range of backgrounds comes not from some political correctness, but from the belief that a Parliament that does not reflect society will not be effective.
The proposal in the coalition agreement to give anonymity to people charged with rape horrified female MPs from all political parties, who united to force the Government to back down. If only one or two MPs had objected, would the coalition have changed its mind? Probably not—but the critical mass of female MPs, speaking with a common voice, made the Government realise they had got things badly wrong.
There should be a place in this mother of Parliaments for individuals from all sections of society. We should ask ourselves why certain groups are under-represented. The reason is not that the electorate will not vote for women, people with disabilities, people who are gay or people from ethnic minorities—they clearly will; otherwise many of us would not be here—but that political parties do not choose enough candidates from diverse backgrounds to fight winnable seats. Furthermore, if not enough of those candidates want to become an MP, we must examine how we do our business and how we run our politics and our Parliament to identify the barriers. Many of those people would make excellent MPs, and the loss of their expertise and talents results in a diminished Parliament. Such a Parliament could lose legitimacy; indeed, it might never have had legitimacy because it had never been properly representative.
Why are we having a debate on this subject, more than three years away from the next general election? The timing is pertinent for three reasons. Two years ago yesterday, the final report from the Speaker’s Conference on representation was published. One of its recommendations was that there should be a debate on the Floor of the House every two years to review progress. Well, we are one day out, but in parliamentary terms I think that that is pretty close.
The second reason for holding the debate is that, although this Parliament is more diverse than previous ones, we still have some way to go before the House of Commons reflects the population more closely. Only 22% of MPs are women and only 4% are from an ethnic minority, and the proportion of those who have a disability or are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender falls far short of the numbers in society. Establishing a lasting improvement in the diversity of Parliament, however, requires cultural change. There is no quick fix: it is necessary to keep making the arguments and to keep refocusing people’s minds on the need to tackle under-representation.
The third reason for the debate is that the gatekeepers to the selection of MPs, the political parties, have already begun to select their candidates for the 2015 general election. That election will be accompanied by a reduction in the number of MPs, and it is therefore important that the leaders of the political parties are reminded of the commitments that they made to the Speaker’s Conference to take action to improve the diversity of candidates. At the 2015 election, established MPs will have to fight each other for their seats, and those who lose in the selection process could be promised a vacant seat elsewhere. The parties might therefore be tempted to suspend their attempts to select candidates from different backgrounds, preferring instead to look after existing MPs. It could therefore be harder for candidates from under-represented groups to be selected. As a result, the next Parliament could be even less diverse than this one.
Members who do not think that could happen need look only at the 2005 election in Scotland, when we faced the abolition of 13 seats. The Labour party’s use of all-women shortlists was suspended in Scotland, and the number of women MPs dropped. At the UK election that year, however, for the first time in history more than 50% of the new Labour intake were women. That shows that mechanisms such as all-women shortlists work, and that when they stop operating the number of women who are selected, and consequently elected, drops.
Fiona O’Donnell (East Lothian) (Lab)
As someone who benefited from an all-women shortlist, I wonder whether my hon. Friend would go further and address the issue for working-class women. Does she support my view that we should have a ceiling on the amount that a candidate can spend during the election process, and that they should have to declare donations?
Dame Anne Begg
My hon. Friend makes a very good point. There are enormous economic barriers that prevent not only women but people from lower socio-economic groups from getting into Parliament. The political parties should certainly look at her suggestion in relation to their selection process, and consider capping the amount that can be spent. At the moment, it can get into the thousands, and that can rule out many candidates.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
I want to add some statistics to those that my hon. Friend has given. In Wales, in 2001, when all-women shortlists legally had to be suspended, the Labour party had to select 10 candidates for seats in which the sitting Member of Parliament was retiring. In every single case, it selected a man. Does not that highlight the problem of what happens if there is not an all-women shortlist?
Dame Anne Begg
Indeed. That ties in with my fear for the 2015 election—that the advances we have made could start to be reversed. While huge advances were made on the representation of women in the 1997 Parliament because of the use of all-women shortlists, the number of women in Parliament dropped after the 2001 election. That happened not just in Wales but across the whole country, because this mechanism was not available to the Labour party to use in its election process.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
Our constituents tend to be interested in the skills and experience of Members of Parliament and candidates, and they are interested in their occupational background—perhaps even more than in their membership of particular social groups or minority groups. In that regard, why does the hon. Lady think that the number of MPs from manual worker groups and from professional groups has declined since 1979, and what can we do about it?
Dame Anne Begg
The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. This is a problem not just for the lower socio-economic groups, for whom the economic costs of putting themselves forward as a candidate can be prohibitive. Those working in the professions are often too busy doing their daily work, so they might not have enough time to invest in politics, making it difficult to build up the reputation they need to become the kind of candidate of whom the “selectorate”—the party members—would approve. The professionals might not have been seen knocking on doors or delivering leaflets, which puts them at a disadvantage in the selection process.
I strongly believe that we should have a Parliament of all the talents, with people from different and varied backgrounds. Although this Parliament might be more diverse in terms of ethnicity and gender, there might have been a narrowing of the routes whereby people are able to get into Parliament—perhaps a drift towards the professional politician. Those involved in politics are more likely to be selected than those who have been getting on with their life by doing another job.
I believe that the key to getting more people from under-represented groups into Parliament is to improve the supply side, which perhaps answers the question of the hon. Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison). This means identifying and encouraging people from these groups to think about a life in politics. Some welcome progress has been made in dealing with some of the supply-side barriers—for example, the establishment of the Commons nursery, making Parliament more accessible both physically and culturally and the Government’s commitment to develop a strategy for access to elected office. Further progress is still required, however, on the House’s sitting hours and on recognition of family life in the rules operated by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority. Normal people with normal family lives have to feel that they, too, could be an MP. I think we are still some way from achieving that.
A key recommendation of the Speaker’s Conference that remains unresolved is on political parties publishing diversity data relating to candidates’ selection. It is worth setting out again the reason the conference thought this was so important.
We recommended the creation of a formal monitoring scheme, requiring political parties to publish anonymised data on the gender, ethnic background and other characteristics of candidates selected. The work people did before putting themselves forward might be one of those characteristics. Knowing that the parties already hold this type of information, the conference gathered it from them and published it in the six months preceding the general election. We are very grateful for the support of the parties and their leaders in enabling this to happen, which shows that it can be done easily.
We also secured an amendment to the Equality Bill—now section 106 of the Equality Act 2010—to make such monitoring permanent. Since the election and the end of the conference, however, the central publication of data has stopped. Section 106 of the Equality Act has not yet commenced, and the Minister might want to reflect on that. I still believe that a formal publication scheme for this data is essential. Transparency forces the issue up the agenda as it enables the parties to compare their performance and challenge each other to do better. The mechanisms of publication require comparatively little effort, and there is a consensus that greater transparency would be helpful. To make the process effective, the monitoring scheme needs to be structured so that it is clear that the data from each of the parties is directly comparable, that precisely the same information is given in each case and that it is reported within the same time scale.
I have been trying to obtain information from the political parties for nearly six months, with few results. An honourable mention should go to the Green party, which provided information following the initial request, although the fact that the party has only one MP may have made that easier. My most recent letter was sent to the party leaders just before the Christmas recess. I thought that if I went to the top I might receive an answer, but to date I have received only one substantive reply, from the Deputy Prime Minister: all credit to him.
Given that, I am sorry to say, the Liberal Democrats’ record in terms of the diversity of the MPs is the poorest among the main political parties, it is heartening to know that the Deputy Prime Minister is taking seriously the need to rebalance his party’s parliamentary representation. It is also good to know that the Liberal Democrats finally recognise that work needs to be done on the supply side, and that mechanisms are needed to encourage people from a variety of backgrounds to put themselves forward. I hope that the 40 candidates identified by the Liberal Democrats will eventually be selected for seats where they have some prospect of being elected—for it is not good enough to select candidates for all the unwinnable seats; they must be selected for the winnable ones as well—and I hope that, having been named and shamed, the other party leaders will respond soon with commitments to do all in their power to demonstrate that they too are taking the issue seriously.
Given that the Speaker’s Conference no longer exists, central management and guidance are required in regard to the provision of this information. It would be helpful if the Minister could tell us what progress has been made in that regard, and whether her Department might be able to act.
I believe that parties must adopt specific mechanisms to improve the diversity of their MPs. Although I think the Labour party has proved that all-women shortlists have been effective, I appreciate that that may not be the way in which other political parties wish to proceed—which is fine as long as they develop their own mechanisms to address the shortfall, rather than arguing that candidates from the under-represented groups would somehow suddenly appear if only they were good enough.
As has already been mentioned, one category in particular is still under-represented in this House. I refer to members of the lower socio-economic groups. It is likely that disabled people will also belong to that category. The cost of putting oneself forward for selection is prohibitive for anyone who does not have a reasonable income, and I urge the political parties to address that issue as well. I hope that some suggestions will be made later this afternoon.
Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)
Does the hon. Lady agree that both people with manual backgrounds and those in the professions are discouraged from putting themselves forward by awkward economic considerations? Those in manual trades cannot afford the whole process of campaigning, taking time off and so forth, while those in the professions cannot afford to give up the salaries to which they have become accustomed.
Dame Anne Begg
That is an excellent point, which may explain some of the narrowing of the backgrounds of some of the people who are now trying to stand for Parliament. It is crucial for work to be done to deal with that. We, as political party animals ourselves, should be spotting people’s talents and encouraging them. Many people out there have never dreamt of being Members of Parliament, but we know that given the right chances and the right encouragement they would make excellent MPs, and we diminish this place by not giving them such encouragement. Some women are a bit more diffident than many men, and may need that extra push. Once they have bitten the bullet and put themselves forward they may make excellent candidates and excellent MPs, and be a credit to their parties.
I congratulate the Government on going some way to helping disabled people to overcome the financial barrier which may exist by means of their access to public life fund, which I understand is due to be launched next month. The Minister may want to say something about that as well. However, although the fund will provide financial help with the extra costs of having a disability, there will still be the basic cost of becoming and being a candidate, which can be prohibitive for many people.
Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is clearly immensely passionate and knowledgeable about this subject. She mentions the different socio-economic backgrounds of people entering Parliament, and she will be aware that nowadays one of the main routes to becoming an MP is working in Parliament, perhaps on an internship, many of which are unpaid. Does she therefore support the access to public life fund, which could offer financial assistance to help people to come and work in Parliament?
Dame Anne Begg
I am aware of the work my right hon. Friend has been doing in encouraging people from lower socio-economic groups to put themselves forward, which does, of course, take money. I would like to see how the access to public life fund works for disabled people. Perhaps the Minister will tell us a little more about how it will work in practice. All these routes should be open, but that is not a responsibility of Government alone; political parties might also look at how they finance candidates, and they might be funded in order to do that work. We suggested that in the Speaker’s Conference report.
There is some good news to report, but there is still a long way to go in achieving a fully representative Parliament in this country. It will not happen by accident or because large numbers of people from disadvantaged groups suddenly have a burning desire to be an MP and will be able to leap over all the economic and practical barriers to get selected as a candidate for one of the political parties, which to many remain secret societies, and then arrive here in Parliament in a blaze of glory.
Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
Does the hon. Lady agree that one of the biggest disadvantages a man from a working-class background in one of our large inner cities might face is the existence of all-women shortlists, as they may well feel that their route to joining us in this place is closed before they even start?
Dame Anne Begg
I would accept the hon. Gentleman’s argument if every seat had an all-women shortlist, but only 50% of Labour seats has an all-women shortlist, so the man to whom he refers has access to 50% of the seats. This issue is not just about women or people from ethnic minorities; it is also about people with different backgrounds and life experiences. The political parties should therefore be encouraging that man and helping him, and perhaps providing some funding to allow him to get selected in the seats that are available. That is not happening at present, but it should happen.
Dame Joan Ruddock (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)
My hon. Friend might also say to the hon. Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) that historically it was the practice of the Conservative party to have all-male shortlists. What was the disadvantage to the men with manual skills in those all-male shortlists?
Dame Anne Begg
Indeed, and work has been done on the all-male shortlists of all political parties in the last general election.
It will take a culture change and a lot of hard work before the people out there can look at us in here and say, “They represent me.” I hope Members will agree that that work needs to continue.
Mr Speaker
In view of the extensive interest in this debate, I have had to limit the time for Back-Bench speeches still further, from eight minutes to six.
Adam Afriyie (Windsor) (Con)
First, may I thank you, Mr Speaker, for convening the Speaker’s Conference and giving it your support? I think that has made a huge difference. I also thank the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) for the careful tone in which she presented the conference findings and for recognising that parties may strive in different ways to achieve the outcome that all Members want, which is a more diverse, representative-looking Parliament. That Parliament might not be proportional to the exact numbers of the various groups in society, but we must have a Parliament that is in touch with the people it serves and that is able to understand and feel the issues that are important to the public.
I made a pledge to myself that I would seldom talk about issues of race, ethnic minorities and diversity in front-line politics, and I made that commitment for two or three key reasons: first, and not least, because I do not think that race actually exists in biological, genetic or evolutionary terms anyway. Above that, categorising people into clear groups can often be more divisive than allowing things to evolve to begin to reflect a nation over time.
I have broken that pledge today because, as the first black Conservative MP in the party’s history, I thought I would share one or two insights into my journey here, the barriers and obstacles I have met, and the approach that can be adopted by political parties and Parliament in future. I shall try to do so as quickly as I can within the six-minute limit. I am happy to take one or two interventions—which may help to some degree.
Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend. He does a fantastic job for his constituents and I hear fabulous reports about him at all times.
Adam Afriyie
I am sure I would flush up if I was able to; I thank my hon. Friend very much for his intervention.
As I said, I want to share some insights and experience, but if the House will bear with me I will make a couple of points very crudely because I do not have time to put them more subtly; I hope the House will understand that they are well intentioned, and that if I had more time I would elaborate slightly further.
A key reason why I joined the Conservative party, about which I will say a few words in a moment, is that I felt that during the ’80s the Labour party was quite patronising towards ethnic minorities. There was a sense on the part of the incumbents in politics—those with power—that ethnic minority groups were somehow hapless and weak and needed all the support and help they could get, and all sorts of extra support in order simply to compete. I rejected that prognosis—[Interruption.] Please bear with me: I am putting this very briskly; with more time I would put it more subtly. I rejected that notion because, irrespective of which group in society one comes from—whatever one’s physical or socio-economic characteristics, whatever one’s background or heritage—everybody is equal. It is a question of whether the opportunity exists to get involved in the political process and to be recognised for ones innate, equal abilities. That is part of the reason why I joined the Conservative party, and something to reflect on.
Chris Bryant
By way of counterpart, I joined the Labour party because I found that the Conservative party was not just patronising about homosexuals, but downright dismissive and aggressively so, and used the full force of the law and of Parliament to legislate that homosexual relationships were nothing other than “a pretended family relationship”.
Adam Afriyie
We live in a wonderful world where both parties have progressed enormously.
The Conservative party is interesting, in that it tends to take slightly more time to respond to society and to the change in social mores, which is partly because we are conservatives by nature—with a big C and a small c. However, over time the party does seem to progress quite rapidly, once it gets the gist of things and begins to respond to and reflect the society around it. It is interesting to note that the Conservative party was the first party to elect a Jewish Prime Minister, and a bachelor as a leader of the party; and of course, it elected the first female Prime Minister and leader of the party. We will see what the future holds, but interestingly, despite some of the criticisms of the party, in many ways it has been quicker to reflect the make-up of society, certainly in its leadership.
Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) (LD)
I wanted to help the hon. Gentleman slightly by pointing out that he omitted to mention that his party was also the first to elect an out gay woman as the leader of any party within the UK. It became that when Ruth Davidson was elected as the Scottish Conservative leader.
Adam Afriyie
That is absolutely spot on. Sometimes the image projected is not quite the same as the reality of how the Conservative party functions and, more importantly, the results it delivers.
At the last election, my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Mr Vara) and I were the only two ethnic minority—if hon. Members wish to box us in in that way—Conservative Members of this House, but our number has now increased significantly to 12. That occurred not through positive discrimination—it was not done through all-black, all-black-and-ethnic-minority shortlists or all-female shortlists—but by an organic process; it was an evolution that gradually reflected the society around us, and I am delighted at those results. There are now 49, rather than 17, women representing the Conservatives in this place, which is a huge step forward, and it has been made without the need for those draconian, divisive and often counter-productive measures.
However, there is a generational lag, which we must, to some degree, accept. Equally, if any hon. Member here was to move to another country and seek, as an adult, to become a Member of the Parliament of that nation, it is unlikely that that would happen or it would be exceptional if it did. There are so many ways in which we can split society into groups—by gender, skin colour, sexuality, disability, socio-economic background and so on. Hon. Members from all parties in this House have a joint desire to see this place be more representative of the country we serve. My biggest plea today is that we do not rush in and embrace quotas—all-women or all-black shortlists, or shortlists with only people with disabilities on them—because such an approach is counter-productive. In a way, it ingrains a sense that there is an elite and that somehow these hapless groups have to have this extra special support, and it alienates others. That form of “groupism” in society is, in many ways, more dangerous than a short-term under-representation over a period of a few years.
I do have a dream that this place will be more representative of the nation at large—that is happening at a rate of knots in most parties and I hope it will continue. But if I was to urge anything, from my own experience, I would urge us not have a knee-jerk reaction and have exclusively feature-based shortlists at this time.
Dame Joan Ruddock (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) on securing this debate. May I say to the hon. Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie), for whom I have great respect, that the Fawcett Society estimates that at the current rate of progress it would take 14 Parliaments—nearly 70 years—to get equality, so he may need to reconsider his view?
I understand that there have been 4,897 MPs since 1918, of whom just 366 have been women, including the 142 serving today. When I was elected in 1987, this place was not a comfortable place for women. Sexist behaviour and intimidation were rife, as was documented by the redoubtable Tory MP Teresa Gorman, who had to put her age back by 10 years to get selected. There were no shrinking violets in the 1987 intake, but there was no women’s agenda either. The House was clearly deeply unrepresentative of society as a whole, and I often said that it was a cross between a boys public school and a working men’s club.
So some of us were very much committed to making great changes, and we encouraged others to stand. During the 1980s and 1990s the number of women candidates did rise significantly, but of course they did not get elected because they were in the unwinnable seats. We Labour women knew that we had to get our hands on the seats where sitting Members were retiring or the seats that were targets for our party and likely to be won. For that sole reason, we adopted the all-women shortlists. As my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) said, when they were challenged, the number of women MPs of course fell back in 2001 after the tremendous progress of 1997.
Following the 2001 election a report was produced by Laura Shepherd-Robinson and Joni Lovenduski, and I want to refer to their findings as they are so relevant. They stated:
“Although fewer women than men come forward for selection, women are not selected in proportion to the numbers…Instances of overt discrimination…occurred to a greater or lesser extent in all the political parties…There exists a self-perpetuating male candidate syndrome whereby selectorates choose candidates that match their pre-conceived idea of what an MP ‘should be like’—i.e. like the last one…‘Favourite sons’ who are virtually guaranteed selection before the process even starts were reported as a problem in all the political parties…Ethnic minority women faced additional problems…Justification for this was…that voters would discriminate against the candidate and selecting them was therefore ‘too much of a risk’.”
Those findings are highly relevant today, because we still have female representation of only 22% from a population of 51%, and ethnic minority representation of less than 5% from a population of more than 10%. People with disabilities are hardly represented at all, even though they are provided with the incredible role models of my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South and my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett).
As the motion says,
“increased competition for seats…may leave under-represented groups more poorly represented”
in future. It is more than likely that under the pressure for places, parties will revert to the type described in the study I cited, and there will be an expectation that progress on equality should be delayed.
What can be done to increase the representation of women, ethnic minorities and people with disabilities? First, this House must continue to reform itself so that it becomes a place in which ordinary people feel that they can be productive, effective and able to sustain a private life alongside a parliamentary and constituency life. Further reform of the hours, the calendar and procedures must be undertaken, and I am glad that we will have an opportunity to do that this year.
We must also ensure that our parties remain resolute in the aims they have all espoused of greater equality of representation. That means constant vigilance and analysis of how selections are progressing, financial help for those who need it, and the creation of level playing fields so that people from diverse backgrounds can come forward, attend all the selection conferences and stand a fair chance.
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
As a new Member, I sat in the Members centre and beside me was another new Member, from the Opposition. I watched and was alarmed that she spent two and a half hours on the telephone from the Members centre trying to find accommodation and failing. In the end I said, “What’s the problem?” and she said, “I’ve just got no money left and I can’t live.” That is wrong and we must put it right as soon as possible.
Dame Joan Ruddock
I support the hon. Gentleman absolutely. Of course, we had the MPs’ expenses scandal and of course there were abuses, but we have gone in a direction that means that it is very difficult for people of ordinary means to support a second home and everything that goes with being an effective MP. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that that is yet another reason why it will be increasingly difficult to get the equal representation in this House that we all seek.
Recent experience from all parties demonstrates that only determined positive action can produce the results that we need. When sitting MPs are displaced as a result of the boundary changes and the reduction in numbers, that will be much more difficult. All-women shortlists will have to continue in the Labour party and, frankly, I think it must be obvious to the other parties that that is the only mechanism to have delivered really big numbers.
There are two possible ways in which a group’s interests can be represented—by the presence of its members in the decision-making process or simply by having its interests taken into account in that process. History shows that the interests of women, ethnic minorities, other minorities and those with disabilities have not been fully taken into account at any time, and if we do not continue to assert our rights to direct representation, our numbers will fall and our democracy will be much the poorer.
Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) (LD)
It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Dame Joan Ruddock), who has long been a campaigner on this issue. I warmly welcome the debate, which comes at a timely juncture two years after the publication of the Speaker’s Conference report. I was proud to serve as a member of the Speaker’s Conference and would like to place on record my thanks to you, Mr Speaker, and to your predecessor, for your chairmanship of it. I thank also the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), who was a marvellous vice-Chair and did so much work to produce the report and body of work that resulted.
It is absolutely vital that we address these issues of representation, for some of the reasons that have already been outlined, such as the legitimacy that this Chamber can have in the real world out there. There is also the loss of talent from which we suffer because there are people out there who would make fantastic Members of Parliament but who at the moment do not think they could come here. The evidence from business and elsewhere shows that diverse teams work better, and that is as true here for MPs on Select Committees and in Government and Opposition teams as anywhere else.
Let me touch on some of the developments we have seen since the Speaker’s Conference report and highlight some of the areas that have not yet been acted on. A few Members have spoken about the background of people who come to this place as Members. In 1979, 3% came from a political organiser background, but that figure rose to 14% in 2010.
Thanks to the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) and the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw), whom I have worked alongside, there is now the Speaker’s parliamentary placement scheme. We are grateful to you, Mr Speaker, for supporting the scheme and to the House of Commons Commission for finding some initial seed funding, which has been backed up by generous support from the private sector. Of course, we would still encourage more private sector companies to get on board and support the scheme, which is enabling us to open up internships and parliamentary placements to people who would not otherwise have the means to come here and experience working in Parliament. I hope that some of those individuals will go on to work in different roles within politics. Indeed, I look forward to the day when one of them sits on these green Benches.
I am fortunate to be participating in the scheme and I have a wonderful young woman in my office, Nyree Barrett-Hendricks, who is bright, personable and hugely enthusiastic, but who would never have had the opportunity to come and work in Parliament otherwise. I very much hope that the scheme will be able to expand in future and be part of the solution to dealing with the issue of background. Clearly, however, much more needs to be done.
Dame Anne Begg
Will the hon. Lady also pay tribute to organisations such as Operation Black Vote, which does a very similar thing to help people gain experience who might then consider standing for Parliament?
Jo Swinson
The hon. Lady makes a very good point; I certainly pay tribute to Operation Black Vote, with which I have also worked in previous years and had people shadow me, and I know that many other Members have done the same.
There has been a lot of progress that we should celebrate. Recommendation 56 that civil partnership ceremonies should be allowed to be held in the House has been actioned. Indeed, I think the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) might have been the first to take advantage of that change. [Interruption.] Perhaps he was not the first but there have been several, which is great.
Recommendation 51, about having a nursery and crèche within the House of Commons, has been implemented. That facility is used by many Members I know, and is very welcome. Even the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, which does not always have a good reputation in the House, has implemented recommendation 52, which allows Members to take part of their salary in the form of child care vouchers. Previously, that option had long been open to other members of staff in the House but not to MPs.
There has been progress through the coalition agreement on the establishment of a disability democracy fund, but I hope the Minister will say more about where exactly that has got to. I know there was a consultation last year and it would be good to know when that will come to fruition.
There is also the recommendation that section 141 of the Mental Health Act 1983 should be abolished to prevent discrimination against Members who have mental health problems and have been sectioned, who currently are not able to retain their seat. I understand that there is a private Member’s Bill before the other place, but I should welcome any response from the Government about their commitment to the issue.
Mr Sam Gyimah (East Surrey) (Con)
I welcome the points the hon. Lady is making about what Parliament as an institution should be doing to lower the barriers for entry to the House, and to teach people who want to be Members of Parliament the rules of the game, but does not the prime responsibility fall on political parties? They need to make sure that they improve representation. On the Conservative side the numbers of women, and certainly of non-white candidates, increased substantially at the 2010 election, but that was because of the efforts of the party rather than of Parliament as an institution.
Jo Swinson
The hon. Gentleman is right. That point is vital, and I shall refer briefly to parties later.
Progress has been less good on other recommendations. Recommendation 4 is that Parliament’s education service should have its objectives changed so that it explicitly encourages a wider range of people to become candidates. Unfortunately, that recommendation has not been accepted by Parliament; a response to a parliamentary question was that it could be effected under existing objectives. That does not go far enough. When someone comes here for a tour of the House it is one of the most opportune times to ask them why they do not consider standing for Parliament and becoming an MP. That is the moment when there may be the most inspiration, and we should make that an explicit objective of the education service.
The hon. Member for Aberdeen South touched on recommendation 5; she talked about political parties being honest in publishing exactly where they are at in terms of candidate selection. That monitoring data should be in the public domain so that researchers can analyse it and use it to show where some of the issues are. That still has to be put into action by all the parties, although some have made more progress than others. I hope that today’s debate may encourage more movement, although we should congratulate the hon. Lady on managing to say something positive about the Deputy Prime Minister—I hope she did not find it too difficult—and I am delighted that he responded in full to her letter.
Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way; I could not resist intervening. She will be aware that the Speaker’s parliamentary placement scheme has been included by the Deputy Prime Minister in the coalition’s social mobility strategy. On that basis, does she agree that if the Government wish to take some credit for that, they might also consider making some financial contribution?
Jo Swinson
As usual, the right hon. Lady puts her point eloquently. I believe there is an event for the social mobility strategy this evening, so I may have the opportunity to bend the ear of individuals about it.
I want to talk a little about what the Liberal Democrats have been doing, because I accept the point made by the hon. Member for Aberdeen South that we do not have good enough representation. I have been working on the issue in the party for 10 years, with some success, but equality guarantees are not always guarantees of seats. In the last Parliament, half the seats where a Lib Dem MP was standing down selected a woman candidate, without positive discrimination mechanisms, but that did not result in the election of those individuals. That is certainly one of the difficulties with the measures that are implemented, but I am looking forward to attending, on Sunday, a candidate leadership programme weekend to meet 40 inspiring candidates, whose biographies I have read. I am sure that will help to yield results in future.
What next? I shall briefly make two points, because I know time is pressing. First, recommendation 54 of the Speaker’s Conference urges changes in our sitting hours. Over the next few months the House collectively has the chance to do something about that, when the Procedure Committee report comes before us for debate. I very much hope that Members will bear that recommendation in mind and vote accordingly.
Secondly, as well as a debate every two years, we need to go further and think about a mechanism for regularly holding the Government, the House and the parties to account. For example, we might consider something like the questions we have in the Chamber to the Electoral Commission and the House of Commons Commission on a five-weekly basis.
Mr David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)
I apologise to you, Mr Speaker, to the Minister and to the House if I am not able to be here at the conclusion of the debate.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), not only on securing the debate but on the work she did under your patronage, Mr Speaker, leading the Speaker’s Conference. Some of us in the House today spent well over a year of our lives—not full-time, but it seemed a lot—on the Speaker’s Conference and I hope that the recommendations can be followed through and that it will be possible to make progress.
In order to avoid repetition, I say at the beginning that the issues surrounding the next general election, not only the lower number of Members of Parliament, but the dramatic boundary changes, present a challenge for all political parties. We need to appeal to them to take the matter very seriously if we are not to take a step backwards on gender, on sexuality, on ethnicity and on disability. I am genuinely deeply worried. I hope that the access to public life fund and the initiative of my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) on internships will assist.
On a lighter note, I think that we have made progress in the 25 years since I came to the House. I was asked when I first came in with my dog whether there would be a problem with animal noises, and I gave an assurance that the dog would not be disturbed at all by the kind of thing that he was likely to hear in Prime Minister’s questions at that time. I did, however, face the enormous problem of persuading people that additional resources would make it possible to work on equal terms. It was a fiasco. We had a working party between the two Houses under the chairmanship of Lord Jenkins, as he became. The recommendations had to be voted on on the Floor of the House. We have come a long way since that terrible embarrassment. One Member, who is still in the House, said to me, “You’re very lucky to get these extra resources.” I said, “I’ll swap you any time.”
Chris Bryant
My right hon. Friend may be interested to hear that when I was helping to organise the memorial service for John Smith at Westminster abbey and I said that we would need a bowl of water put out for my right hon. Friend’s dog, the usher said, “I’m not putting a bowl out for any bloody socialist’s dog.”
Mr Blunkett
All I can say is that I wish he had not discriminated on political grounds.
There are major challenges facing us. The nature of the Palace of Westminster has changed to some degree, but not enough. It is not quite the old boys’ club that it was when my right hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Dame Joan Ruddock) and I joined in 1987, but people still have in their minds a major psychological barrier about what they will experience here. There are also practical barriers, which have been referred to, in the procedures of the House. I hope that we can be more radical in the next three and a half years than we have been in the 25 that I have been here. Unless we change the way we vote, the knowledge about votes, the way in which the day is organised and the support for families, we will not have the diversity and the reflection of society that all of us in this House want.
I congratulate those who have broken through even bigger barriers than I have been able to challenge in my life. To win a by-election as a member of an ethnic minority is a real step forward. Reflecting on the years gone by, I think that it has been shown that the way in which society gradually changes is reflected here, but we have a role in accelerating that change by the way we behave.
The thing that I have probably done best in my public life and am most proud of is not something from my eight years as a Cabinet Minister or from my time as leader of a council. It is having changed attitudes outside— the way that people perceive not only others but, sometimes, themselves. That is a comfort when things go badly wrong.
I agree that we need to revisit the way in which we encourage diversity in supporting Members. I have to pay tribute—I know that it is not fashionable—to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority in relation to disability issues. It has been extremely understanding and helpful in a way that I hope will be reflected in further revisions to support family life, particularly in terms of gender challenges. I look forward to IPSA responding to that challenge.
It is important that the Government are able to respond too. I think that Departments have improved. I hope that the Office for Disability Issues will continue and will be able to make progress, along with the access to public life fund. However, there are still ingrained challenges in terms of covert discrimination. There is no question but that people are sometimes grumpy about being expected to go the extra mile to help those facing a challenge that is perfectly manageable and can be overcome with a bit of thought. People do not like to talk about it; they do not even like to think about it; but, believe me, they do behave in quite extraordinary ways.
What I want to emphasise this afternoon is that we must go right back to the way we develop an understanding of citizenship in schools and persuade the Secretary of State for Education, even at this late stage, not to downgrade the programme we put in place 10 years ago and instead to build upon it. It would be an irony indeed if newcomers to this country who were becoming naturalised were more savvy about politics and better able to get to this House than the population as a whole because they had experienced the necessity of passing the dreaded test. Once we have done that and we have continued to change the nature of our politics and the way we speak to each another, we might get even more progress within political parties.
My hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) has kindly indicated—I have no buzzer—that I have only a few seconds left, so I will bring my comments to an end. Political parties have made progress, as has been mentioned this afternoon, but, my goodness, there are still major blockages. Unless the political parties take a lead, how can we expect the nation as a whole to do so?
Amber Rudd (Hastings and Rye) (Con)
I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak in this important debate. I feel very strongly, as I know do many fellow Members, that it is important to raise diversity issues constantly in the House in order to get a better outcome for everyone. I saw a very good film this week about a young woman who was very clear and focused on what she wanted to achieve, despite the obstacles in front of her. She became a Member of Parliament and then Prime Minister. As we reflect on the issues we can address in order to raise diversity in the House, I feel certain that many people who see that film, whatever their politics, will be as shocked as I was at the sight of one woman among so many men. The film shows very clearly the difficulties she faced but nevertheless overcame. [Interruption.] I now have to put my glasses on—my diversity is something to do with age as well as gender.
We have come a long way since Lady Thatcher, but there is still a lot to do, which is why we are having this debate. Each party is addressing diversity in its own way, but it is absolutely clear to me, having listened to the debate this afternoon, that everyone is committed to it. It is important to say that it is not right to think that there can be one solution for all parties. Each party has different political philosophies and it is inevitable that we will have different ways of approaching the diversity issue. The Labour party has dealt with it through all-women shortlists and quotas and has had its success as a result—of course it has; they are all-women shortlists—but I do not believe that that is a desirable way of introducing more women into Parliament.
Adam Afriyie
In all frankness, had there been all-black shortlists or anything of that sort in the Conservative party, I can honestly say that I would never have applied and made my way to this place, because one’s whole life is based on achieving things through one’s own abilities, talents and effort, and I would have found it very difficult indeed to have been put on a list based on a physical characteristic.
Amber Rudd
I thank my hon. Friend for his contribution—it is always nice to have one’s views confirmed in so eloquent a way.
Where are we now? Some 16% of Conservative MPs are women. Only 12% of Liberal Democrat MPs are women, but it is nice to hear that the Deputy Prime Minister has that in his sights. The figure for the Labour party is 32%, which brings us to an average of 22%. I believe that the figures for the parties masks a very significant success for the Conservative party in introducing more women. It was suggested earlier that the Conservative party effectively had all-male shortlists before, and those of us who have followed party selections and elections to Parliament for some time were slightly surprised at the 2001 general election when only one of the 26 new Conservative Members elected was a woman. However, from that very low base the party has made a tremendous change, and I think that the evidence for that change is the fact that we could achieve it by persuasion, nudge and training.
Between 2005 and 2010, we had a clear strategy to deal with the issue. We had an organisation called women2win—
The Lord Commissioner of Her Majesty's Treasury (Mr Brooks Newmark)
Hear, hear!
Amber Rudd
It was ably supported by my hon. Friend—who is here and a man; it is always nice to have a man stand up in support of more women in Parliament—by Baroness Jenkin and by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), who is of course the Home Secretary. That organisation did an enormous amount in mentoring and training and, if I may say so, in persuading the Conservative party to improve the training of those who make the selection, because they also need to understand that there are different types of MP.
Dame Anne Begg
I appreciate that all-women shortlists are not for the Conservative party, and that great strides forward were taken at the general election, but the lesson from the Labour party is that if such pressure is not kept up, and if the mechanisms that the hon. Lady describes, which the Conservative party put in place ahead of the 2010 election, are not repeated at the next election and the one after that, the danger is that things will go backwards.
Amber Rudd
I agree. It is absolutely essential that the item remains at the top of the agenda for all political parties, but my point is that my political party will not, I believe, be introducing all-women shortlists. Most of my colleagues agree with that, because it is not the only way to achieve this much-needed increase in the diversity of representation.
After the 2010 election, we had 147 new Conservative MPs, of whom 36—or 25% of the new intake—were women. Now, 25% representation is a big step up from the 9% that we had before 2010, so that approach has been a tremendous success, and we have achieved it without the undemocratic approach of all-women shortlists.
The problem that we are trying to address is not just to do with Parliament, however, because there is a problem with women’s representation not just at Westminster but, as we have discussed in previous debates, in public companies, at the top in boardrooms and in different elements of life. I picked up a copy of The Guardian recently, and it stated that
“78% of the UK’s newspaper articles are written by men, 72% of Question Time contributors are men, and 84% of reporters and guests on Radio 4’s Today show are men.”
Women and ladies, we need to do something about that.
Margot James
I wonder whether my hon. Friend noticed on the “Andrew Marr Show” at the end of last year its review of 2011. It was a wonderful canter through all the year’s political highlights, and approximately 20 politicians featured—but not one woman.
Amber Rudd
I am so grateful to my hon. Friend for improving on my case.
My point is not to hide from the important problem that we have to address in Parliament, but to say that it is a wider problem that the Government as a whole need to address in order to ensure that we get all women to the top of the ladder, and to demonstrate to young women that they, too, can achieve and get to the top. As we have heard, it makes good business sense, and in public life it is absolutely essential, because if we want to be truly democratic we have to reflect the diversity of the whole country. It is more important in Parliament than anywhere else.
It is an incredible privilege to be a Member, but we have a responsibility to ensure that Parliament as a whole reflects the diversity of the country. We should not, however, have a system of mandatory quotas beyond each individual party deciding to make its own case for them, because each party must have its own approach.
To me, and to my colleagues in the Conservative party, all-women shortlists are a form of surrender, because what do we admit if we introduce them? We admit that somewhere the problem is so ingrained that we have to impose a shortlist. It is far better to ask, “What is the problem? Why are we not getting more women, more people from ethnic minorities and more disabled people? And what can we do to support them so that they are equally valued and equally selected in a selection process?” Let us not surrender. Let us not approach the matter in terms of quotas. Let us look at the root of the problem and, in that way, try to encourage more people to come through and, like us, become Members of Parliament.
Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)
I was proud to serve as a member of the Speaker’s Conference. I apologise to the House for the fact that I will not be here at the end of the debate, because I shall be chairing a charity function.
All hon. Members have agreed that a more representative Parliament is better for politics, above all because of the issue of justice and so that everybody has an equal chance of being elected. It builds people’s confidence in democracy to see people such as me in Parliament. It also, and I do not think that we have talked enough about this, leads to better decisions. That is at the heart of the matter.
My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) told me that when she was first elected child care was not regarded as a political issue and Parliament never debated it. She and my right hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Dame Joan Ruddock) were among those who made sure that the issue was normalised in politics.
Shortly after I was elected in 1997, I telephoned the Clerk of the Select Committee on Defence to research how much of a difference women had made in politics. In its 17-year life, that Committee had never had a woman member. There were two women members after the 1997 election. The Clerk said, “Fiona, of course there is a difference. We always used to talk just about weapons and ammunition, and now we talk about the families of the soldiers.” We know now how critical the family members of those who are fighting in battles overseas are to their success. Having different voices in Parliament changes the terms of the debate.
In the 1997 Parliament, which recorded the biggest difference in the number of women, we saw our effect in the Budgets. In the Budgets of ’97, ’98 and ’99, the amount of money in women’s purses increased by £5.30 a week, compared with an increase of £2.30 in men’s wallets. Having more women does not automatically bring that result. We can see, depressingly, that the cost of recent Budgets and the last comprehensive spending review to women has been £8.80 a week, compared with a cost of £4.20 for men.
This issue is not just about representation but about power. Women can have power, but we need to ensure that we have it. One thing that I admired the Prime Minister for saying in opposition was that he aimed for 30% of his Cabinet to be women. There is not enough progress on that aim. In Parliament, one has much more power when one is a Minister. I am shocked that 11 out of 24 Departments have no women Ministers. I urge the Minister for Equalities, who will respond to the debate, to take action on that. Many of the women Ministers are in the other place. There is a shortage of women’s voices in Departments, and not just in the little Departments. In the Ministry of Justice, the Department of Energy and Climate Change, the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office there are no women Ministers. I urge the women on the Government Benches to do whatever they can to change that. If they do not, we will carry on having stupid decisions.
This debate has been partly about the problem of women-only shortlists. I do not regard them as a problem. The only person who has ever called me a quota woman is the woman who stood for the party that held the seat before I took it. Nobody has called me that since. Women shortlists are a tactic, but that does not mean that people who have got here in that way are diminished. There are other tactics that can work, but I do not share the optimism of the women on the Government Benches about the progress that their parties have made.
The hon. Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie) has something to be proud of in the representation of ethnic minorities on the Conservative Benches, which has changed enormously. I respect the Conservative party for that change. It did not happen through quotas or anything like that, but through a psychological change in the Conservative party, which I genuinely welcome.
I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) for her work on the internship programme. We need to consider the fact that, as The Daily Telegraph put it, the main qualifications of people in this House are having gone to public school, having gone to Oxbridge and having been in a profession. Two of the three apply to me, although the representation of my profession, school teaching, has reduced. We need more progress on getting more people from manual occupations into the House.
In that regard, I would say that Conservative Members tend to disrespect not only women-only shortlists but the trade union movement. The working-class members of the House have overwhelmingly been able to come here because of the work of the trade unions, and we need to respect the ability of the movement to bring people into politics. It will be one of the ways in which we can get change in the future.
Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)
I am very glad to have an opportunity to participate in the debate, and I add my congratulations to the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) on helping to secure it. I support the motion, although I must express slight disappointment that it omits to mention one fact that we should celebrate, in which I declare an interest—that in this Parliament we have a record number of Members who are openly gay or lesbian.
Dame Anne Begg
The remit that was given to the Speaker’s Conference did not specifically include that matter—it included “other connected purposes”, but interest in the issue was implied in everything that we did.
Iain Stewart
I am very grateful to the hon. Lady, and I acknowledge that she mentioned the matter in her speech.
Relatively recently, declaring one’s homosexuality was completely taboo. It is only just over 25 years since the now Lord Smith publicly declared himself as the first out gay Member, although I think there were quite a number of Members of that persuasion before that who chose not to say so, especially on the Conservative Benches. It is significant that for the first time the majority of LGBT Members are on the Conservative Benches, which represents an enormous transformation for our party. It would not have happened even relatively recently.
There is still sometimes a stigma, however, and some negative campaigning still goes on. Although all parties are signed up publicly and at leadership level, at constituency level there can sometimes be discrimination in subtle or unsubtle ways. I personally had no problems at all in my campaign in Milton Keynes. My opponents did not make any reference at all to my sexuality, and we had a completely fair and open contest. However, I know that in other constituencies where there were openly gay candidates, some fairly nasty comments were made. Other candidates would proclaim their family credentials, or there would be mentions on commuter trains that a particular candidate happened to be gay. Little things like that still represent a barrier, and we all have a job to do to ensure that such prejudice is stamped out.
I agree with much that has been said in the debate about how we can widen the diversity of this place so that it is representative of the nation as a whole. One of the most powerful things that we can be is role models. That applies to people who are of a visible minority and those who represent diverse backgrounds, be they professionals, carers or people from modest council house backgrounds. People who might be inspired to go into politics need to be able to see that there are people like them in Parliament. That is one of the most powerful ways of getting more people involved in politics.
We should not underestimate the role of individual Members in being ambassadors in our constituencies and encouraging people to engage in politics and come forward as candidates. I do a lot of work going around schools, both primary and secondary, to make pupils aware of politics and Parliament. Sometimes that can lead to some awkward questions in primary schools—I went to one school and the first question I was asked was, “Why are you here?” The supplementary was whether I had met Doctor Who. We have to be prepared for such eventualities. Engaging with schools, being visible as an MP and talking about the role of Parliament are incredibly important. I also organise a schools parliamentary debating competition each year and bring the finalists here to give them experience of Parliament.
With my colleagues in the constituency, I have set up a community engagement group to make myself accessible to the different minority ethnic and religious groups, so that they feel that I have direct contact with them. Through that, they can be inspired to come forward as council or parliamentary candidates. There is a lot that individual MPs can do.
Jo Swinson
I am listening to my hon. Friend with great interest. He is absolutely right that MPs have a role and responsibility to encourage others to get involved in politics. Does he agree that asking a women whether she wants to be a parliamentary candidate is perhaps the sole occasion when if a woman says no, it does not always mean no? Sometimes people need quite a bit of nudging and encouragement before they feel they have the confidence to stand for election to this place.
Iain Stewart
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. Another way we can do that is by bringing young people into our offices, whether that be for a short period of work experience or for a longer period as interns, to give them an insight into what we do.
Hazel Blears
The hon. Gentleman mentions parliamentary internships. Does he recognise that it is often difficult for people from working class backgrounds who do not have money or financial backing, or people who do not have parents who live in London, to be interns in Parliament? Would he support a campaign to ensure that there is sufficient financial support so that we can redress that balance?
Iain Stewart
I agree with that—and it leads me very neatly to my next point, which is on support for people who want to stand for Parliament.
I was very lucky. I was a candidate for three general elections before I got in—[Interruption.] I got here in the end. I was lucky as I did not have a family to support, and I had a relatively well paid job and an enlightened employer who was willing to give me the time to do all the work a parliamentary candidate must do. Many people who would come forward as parliamentary candidates are inhibited because they do not have the financial wherewithal or the time because of their employment. That is an important aspect.
I am running out of time, but let me highlight one thing that we should do and two that we should not. Parties should use professional head-hunters more to encourage people who might not otherwise think of a parliamentary career. I used to be a head-hunter, but no longer, so I do not have to declare an interest. Part of my role was to find people for commercial companies and the charity and public sectors to make boards more diverse, so that they reflected society as a whole. That should be extended to the political arena.
Let me quickly put on record a couple of things that I do not think would be helpful. Although I accept that it should be for each political party to decide, I do not agree with quotas. I would hate to be here because I was elected from an LGBT-only shortlist. I would find that incredibly patronising. I got here on my own merits, because I competed with anyone else who wanted to go for the seat.
In my last few seconds, I should sound a discordant note on reforming the hours of the House to make them more family friendly. Such reform is a red herring. If we want to tackle the hours of the House, we should look at the resources we have and the work that Members have to do, not at chopping and changing the order in which we do that work.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Order. I should point out that it is a coincidence that I am in the Chair for this debate, but I guess it could not be more appropriate.
Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart) and to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg). I have rarely been in the Chamber when there has been such agreement and such good-humoured and good-tempered debate. It is very encouraging to see that, because we want to make progress.
I was thinking about why it is important for Parliament to look like the communities we represent, which is something we have been talking about for what seems like decades. It is important in terms of fairness and justice, but, more and more, it is about good governance, competence and making the right decisions for the future of this country. I have always believed, including in every job I held before I came to Parliament, that if we get a good range of people with different life experiences around the table, we often make the right decisions.
If we think about some of the decisions we make in relation to politics, education, social services, transport, jobs and the economy, it is clear that nothing can be more important to the lives of individuals, communities and families than political decisions. That is why I feel passionately about the fact that this House is not representative. It will take us a long time—decades, we have heard—to get where we want to be in terms of equality between men and women.
We should talk about these issues, and the report provides an excellent anchor which will enable us to do the monitoring and the evaluation and really to push this agenda. However, we can talk all we like—what we need is practical action to make sure that we make progress on this agenda, and that is what I want to talk about.
It is important that we recognise how far we have to go. Research at the last election showed that 10% of the 2010 intake of MPs came from just 13 schools, while 33% of all MPs were privately educated, compared with just 7% of the total population. All three party leaders were educated at Oxford or Cambridge, which is no fault of theirs. The Government contain a preponderance of people from a very similar background. I am not criticising the Government, because the same applies to all political parties, and we have seen that trend increase in recent years. That is one reason people outside think Parliament is not full of people like them or a place where they can go and make their contribution.
Another trend is making politics even more exclusive. During the past 20 years, one route to becoming an MP has become increasingly common. People come to work for a Member of Parliament in Westminster and perhaps go on to become a special adviser, before being selected for a safe seat in pretty short order. Of course, it took some of us 12 years to get to Parliament, which is something I have in common with the hon. Member for Milton Keynes South. After that, people might become Ministers, before ending up in the Cabinet. That means that a very narrow group of people make some of the most important decisions in this country.
Three years ago, when I was in the Cabinet, I made a Hansard Society speech, in which I said I was very worried about the health of our democracy because of the growing trend I have described. In 1970, 3.4% of MPs said they had a background as a political adviser. In 2005, the figure had gone up to 12%. In 2010, it was 24%—a quarter of Members of Parliament, from all political parties, had come through this political route.
One thing people do is to get internships in Westminster, but that is difficult for those who do not live in London or do not have parents to provide financial backing, because many internships are unpaid. Recommendations 15 and 16 of the Speaker’s Conference report say that there are several problems. Often, internships are not advertised, and people find out about them by word of mouth—it is about who you know. If internships are unpaid, that is difficult. It is also difficult for people to plan things, because internships are sporadic, and it is not clear when they will arise.
I have therefore spent the past year with the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson)—she is my hon. Friend in this context—and the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw) working on fundraising so that we can have a paid internship scheme in Parliament. We have the enthusiastic backing of Mr Speaker, who has been marvellous. The Speaker’s parliamentary placement scheme has a small seed fund of £25,000 from the House of Commons Commission. We have now raised several hundred thousand pounds from organisations such as Morrisons supermarkets.
Amber Rudd
I am fortunate enough to have one of those interns in my office. He is a huge asset to the office, so I congratulate the right hon. Lady and the other hon. Members who have pulled this off, because it makes an incredibly important contribution to democracy in this place.
Hazel Blears
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that comment. I am also grateful to hear of the excellent role model in her office. All the reports I get back are positive.
As I said, we have had support from Morrisons supermarkets, which has been great. We have also had support from Clifford Chance lawyers, Prudential, AXA, Aviva insurance, Diageo and Sahara Group. We are constantly on the lookout for more people who would like to support us, so if any hon. Members are aware of possibilities, it would be helpful to hear about them. We have had help with housing from the Broxbourne housing association. It is virtually impossible for people to come and work here in Parliament if they do not have housing. We also have a firm of head-hunters, Ellwood and Atfield, helping with CV-building and interview techniques.
The interns work with their MPs from Monday to Thursday, and the House authorities are providing a brilliant training programme for them on Fridays. They are working in education and outreach, and in statistics and research. They are learning how the House works, and how we get a Bill through the House, for example. It is a fantastic, life-changing experience for them.
Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)
May I also add my congratulations to the right hon. Lady on working so tenaciously on that important scheme? Would it be possible for MPs to top up the scheme with any left-over Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority allowances? I have a bit of money left, but it is not enough to employ a full-time intern. However, I would like to contribute to the pool. Is that a possibility?
Hazel Blears
That is an excellent idea. The more innovative ideas on this agenda we have, the better. Money is tight, and Members of Parliament often have hardly enough money to run their offices, but if any small amounts are left over, it is a great idea to use them to enable us to create more placements.
We have 10 interns this year. They started in November, and they are amazing people. They have been through a rigorous selection process. The Social Mobility Foundation is administering the scheme for us, and I want to place on record my thanks to David Johnston, its chief executive, and, in particular, to Katharine Sanders, who has gone above and beyond the call of duty in organising housing and passes, for example, and giving pastoral support and genuine personal support to the interns. Neeta Patel, who is working on the House training scheme, is also doing a marvellous job. All the interns will also get placements within the sponsor companies, which will give them commercial and business exposure. The Deputy Prime Minister has also agreed that they can have placements in Government Departments, which will give them experience of what it is like to see Ministers at work, as well as learning about the work of the House.
I want to mention a few of the people on the scheme. They might well be watching the debate. Deborah has a background in retail—she has worked in Marks & Spencer—and she has worked in the charity sector. Abdul, another of our interns, was kidnapped at the age of eight in Liberia and forced to be a child soldier. He has since worked his way through university and now wants to make politics less brutal than the politics that he has experienced. James was an unemployed joiner in Glasgow, and he is now working with the Leader of the Opposition, so his life has changed quite dramatically as well.
The scheme will change people’s lives. Some of those involved might want to work here full time; others might want to stand for office. It is a small scheme, but we are hoping to take on more people next year and the year after. I want to put it to the Minister that, as the Government have put the scheme into the social mobility strategy, they should have a responsibility to provide at least matching funding for it. The private sector contribution should continue—it is a great way of getting industry and commerce involved—but the Government need to stand up and get behind the scheme. I would very much welcome the Minister telling us today that it is their intention to do so.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Order. We have exactly half an hour left for Back-Bench contributions, so, in the spirit of this consensual debate, will Members please remain conscious of the time?
Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)
It is a pleasure to speak in this important debate, and I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), and to the Speaker’s Panel as a whole, for putting the report together. I also note, as have others, that we have had a general election since it was published, and that that has given rise to a more diverse Parliament.
I have listened carefully to the concerns about what might happen in 2015, but I have to say that I do not share them. I have tremendous respect for the Labour party as an institution, but I have never attended a Labour party meeting. I pray to God that I never will! Culturally, Labour has a very different attitude to the Conservative party, and I think it is fair to say that what works for Labour would probably not work for us. I love the Conservative party dearly, but I sometimes think that, in regard to candidate selection, there is a bit of push-me, pull-you involved. The more people try to tell us what to do, the more we rebel against them. My hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie) made it clear that there was a sea change on this side of the House at the 2010 election, and I do not think that we will go backwards from that point. We are an evolutionary party. Changes occur gradually and then suddenly, whoosh, they start to occur very rapidly. I therefore have much more confidence than some hon. Members.
I am reluctant to serve up cold maiden speeches from two years ago, so I will not do so, but I made the point that, although I did not want to dwell on my physical disability, my cerebral palsy or my epilepsy, I was likely to end up as a role model, whether I liked it or not. That has certainly been the case.
Many people come to me saying that they want to get more involved in public life generally. I think this is a fundamental issue that has been missed in the debate so far, as it is not just about getting more diverse Members of this House. I was at a RADAR—Royal Association for Disability Rights—reception at Downing street, and I pay tribute to the work it does in this field. It told me that it wanted more leaders in public life as a whole, not just in this Chamber. It is vital that more diverse people act as counsellors, as these are the people who will be acting on selection panels to select our successors and our candidates. By broadening the political base, we are contributing to broadening the membership here.
I echo what the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) said about section 141 of the Mental Health Act. People might think that it is a rather abstruse measure or small print in legislation that needs to be tidied up at some point. However, I think it is fundamental, and the longer I think about it, the more strongly I become convinced of that viewpoint.
I am one of two MPs who have announced in the Chamber that they have epilepsy. This is the first Parliament to include MPs who have been open about that. In the past, for reasons I have never quite understood, people were concerned not to talk about it. Because my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys) and I have been able to talk about it, we have seen a more rapid change in Government attitudes towards epilepsy. When I spoke about my own personal experiences in a Westminster Hall debate—not just about my epilepsy, but about speech therapy, cerebral palsy and all sorts of other issues on which my life gives me a unique perspective—I was surprised when other Members came up to me afterwards to say, “That’s a really useful contribution you made.” It struck me that what I said was utterly unexceptional and that I was just filling time in the parliamentary schedule, as it were, yet others were saying, “That was fantastic; that was wonderful.” It really makes a difference. If more people are able to talk about their experiences, it will improve policy. I think that echoes a point made by the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears).
Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)
The hon. Gentleman raised an important point about the contribution of diverse communities to public life as a whole. I was involved in running a cross-government diversity programme aimed at increasing the contributions from all communities to our public boards. Does he agree, however, that the focus has to stay on increasing diversity in Parliament? According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, our Parliament ranks joint 49th in the world when it comes to the number of women in Parliament. Should not all parties try to maintain our goal of making our Parliament more representative of Britain as a whole?
Paul Maynard
I thank the hon. Lady for that thoughtful contribution. It brings me back to what I said earlier—that it is for each party to find its own path towards the greater diversity that we all wish to see. Conservative Members will have their path; the hon. Lady and her party will no doubt have their path—but we all want to get to the same destination.
My bigger concern is that in 10 years’ time, a Speaker’s Panel will be aiming not for a more representative Parliament, but for a Parliament of people who are not independently wealthy. My big fear is that what is really happening in politics at the moment is that people from ordinary backgrounds, like me, who have struggled to fund their own campaigns and to make ends meet are going to be excluded. I am not trying to say that I am poor by any means, in view of my salary, but I was a candidate who lost his job before the election and was not quite sure what to do. It was a genuine struggle to make ends meet. Thank God I had a credit card!
We have a problem. There will increasingly come a time when unless candidates are of independent means, having made their money before they chose to enter politics, politics will not be a practical option for them—no matter what their family circumstances, no matter what their skills and no matter what minority or political party they seek to represent. We will have a much narrower democracy. That is why I welcome the internship scheme that the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles mentioned. That is why, in Blackpool, I am trying desperately to explain to people why Parliament is relevant to them. It is also why I want more schools to come here. I am delighted that next week the first primary school from my constituency will be coming. It has been a battle, but at last the schools are starting to come down to Westminster. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart), I go around schools trying to explain what I do, and I get more pleasure out of my politics every time someone comes up to me and says “I would never dream of voting for you—I cannot stand your party—but I like what you are doing as a human being.”
I want the general public to see in their MPs people who they feel are just like them. That, to me, is the most crucial thing of all.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
I slightly disagree with the last remark made by the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard). If we are honest, we are all a bit weird, are we not? After all, by definition, we wanted to come here. The hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) is pointing at me. That is not very kind. I could point back, because I do not think that she is any less weird than I am.
There are two fundamental principles. The first is that we should never judge people according to the colour of their skin, their gender, their sexuality, the school that they went to or the accent with which they speak. We should only ever judge people according to the strength of the convictions that they hold, the strength of their personal character, and whether they are able to see their convictions through in their lives. Surely the political system should embody that principle.
The second principle is that, broadly speaking, Parliament should look like the country that it is meant to represent. There are several reasons for that, some of which have already been given today. First, it makes Parliament more effective and efficient, and we end up with better legislation. People can spot some of the holes in an idea that is being advanced because they know from their own lives whether it works or not, and how it affects them. The advent of women in Parliament undoubtedly meant that a whole raft of legislation was improved, because, frankly, men simply did not know what they were talking about. I can see hon. Ladies thinking that perhaps that happens all the time generally.
Secondly, Parliament is more likely to embrace the people’s priorities. Rather that its being obsessed with a few things that might have interested a self-chosen elite, the views of the whole of society are expressed on its Order Paper and on the agenda for political action, and that must surely make it better.
Thirdly—this has not been mentioned yet—it is all very well in politics to legislate, to pull a lever, but if the legislation has no effect out in the country because it has no public support, it will have no real chance of effecting change. A Parliament that looks more like the society that it is meant to represent is able to carry that society with it more effectively, and that means that can effect change more convincingly.
We are, I think, nowhere near being able to meet either of those two principles. A number of Members have reminded us today that for many centuries no women were allowed to vote or to sit in here. Of the first two women who were allowed to sit in here, one was a countess and the other was a Lady—not that I have anything against Ladies, or against Dames, who seem to be multiplying on the Opposition Benches, or even against pantomime dames. Similarly, I believe that two of the first women to arrive in the House of Lords were the daughters of viceroys, and that one was married to a viceroy. The change needs to be far more substantial.
I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart) for what he said about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Members. It is significant that we now have more out gay Members of Parliament than ever before. Indeed, sometimes when you go into the Strangers Bar you feel as though you are in Rupert street. It is virtually a gay bar now, and my husband sometimes worries about whether I should be allowed in there any more.
Even the numbers that we have, however, do not come near matching the numbers in the country in terms of the percentage of the population. It is a great sadness to me that there are still only two out lesbians in Parliament, because two prejudices have been, as it were, tied together to form one. I pay tribute to those who have come out. That is difficult however, as not every gay person wants to be out, and I do not think they should have to be. I disagree with what the hon. Member for Milton Keynes South said about role models. I hope to God nobody will ever think of me as a role model in relation to anything whatsoever at any time. [Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman says that I should not worry about that, because nobody does. That is very generous of him. I was once described in the Daily Mail as an ex-gay vicar; I just want to point out that I am an ex-vicar, but my gayness is extant.
Turning to disabilities, it is important to remember that not every disability is visible. There have been disabled MPs for many centuries, including Philip Snowden, Labour Chancellor in 1924, and the first Earl of Salisbury, who was profoundly disabled and a Secretary of State. The barriers for many people with disabilities are still great, however, such as in terms of this building itself and the way in which we do our business—the way we vote and so forth.
As the Member of Parliament for the Rhondda, I would also like to point out that the biggest difficulties of all face working-class people who may want to enter the House. That is partly because of finances, as standing for Parliament is prohibitively expensive. Ironically, there is now also a problem at the other end of the scale, in that the pay and conditions in Parliament seem prohibitive to people in professional jobs who expect to earn £100,000, £120,000 or £150,000.
This issue is not just about being representative; it is also about representing, and we should do that with courage and determination.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Five Members still wish to speak, and we have just over 15 minutes left, so according to the maths if each of them speaks for about three minutes everybody will get in—a bit of moral blackmail there.
Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)
First, I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) on securing the debate, and on the important contribution that she makes to this whole subject area.
The main parties have each in their own way done a great deal to reduce discrimination in the candidate selection process. The difference that the Labour party made in 1997 was phenomenal. Although I do not agree with all-women shortlists, I certainly do not have a closed mind on the subject when I see what they have achieved for the party. The difference for Conservative women just between 2005 and 2010 has also been amazing. In 2004, when I was applying for a seat in Berkshire, I was given an interview and told in a letter that were I to make the final round, I would be welcome to bring my wife to drinks beforehand—and I do not think that its authors were so forward-looking that they were taking into account future gay marriage legislation.
One of the main reasons why still not enough MPs are women or from minority groups is that they do not come forward for selection in adequate numbers. There are many reasons for that, several of which have already been mentioned. I would add that the personal, and sometimes sexist, coverage of women MPs in the media is also a factor, as is the general level of aggression in some aspects of political debate. Moreover, the opprobrium that is heaped on MPs who make a misjudgment or get something wrong is often out of all proportion to the seriousness of the supposed offence. We have already seen that this year in respect of one hon. Member. The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority is another factor, but I will not dwell on that.
Those factors put many people off entering public life, but they put off a higher proportion of women and people from minority groups. There are certain things we can do, and some of them are in the gift of the Prime Minister. I was delighted to hear that he is intent on having one third of his Government made up of women by the end of this Parliament. The hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) has drawn attention to some of the many Departments that have no woman Minister. It is breathtaking that not one of the 15 Ministers in the Departments of State that face the outside world—the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development—is female. What message does that give to women who are struggling for the most basic human rights in the developing world?
Returning to the broader issue of diversity, I want to place on the record my gratitude to the Prime Minister and the previous but one Prime Minister for the amazing progress made since the turn of the century in the area of gay equality. The number of openly gay MPs in my party increased sixfold or sevenfold, as we have heard, at the last election. That is testimony to the legislative changes introduced by the Labour Government under Tony Blair, and to the cultural change in the Conservative party brought about by the present Prime Minister. I would not be standing here today without them, and I am deeply grateful to both of them, and to others such as the chairman of the Stourbridge Conservative association when I was selected, Councillor Liz Walker. These people have made possible a journey that I embarked on at the age of 16, and I am deeply grateful.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Order. I am introducing a three-minute limit, just to focus people’s attention.
Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
I believe that when political parties are selecting candidates, what most people want to see is that they are selected purely on merit and not according to a given particular characteristic, be it gender, faith, disability or what sort of relationship they may be involved in. Everyone should have an equal opportunity to apply to become a candidate, and by all means, we should be encouraging as many people as possible to come forward for selection. However, personally, I do not want to see the imposition of quotas, which in reality mean fixing the result of the selection process before it has even begun. By their very nature, the use of all-women shortlists, for example, discriminates not just against men as a whole, but, by extension, against men belonging to a group under-represented in the House, such as those from a working-class background.
It is entirely wrong that those who seek to remedy what they perceive as discrimination against women should adopt as their solution the practice of all-women shortlists, which discriminate against men. We should oppose all forms of discrimination and not seek to legitimise it, as happened with the passing of the Sex Discrimination (Election Candidates) Act 2002.
Good candidates will always rise to the top. As has been mentioned, Margaret Thatcher became leader of our party, and Prime Minister, without the need for any special help. As she said in her book “Statecraft”,
“the use of quotas applying to the appointment or promotion of individuals because of their collective identity or background is an unacceptable incursion on freedom, however well-intentioned the motives. Nor does it help those who are its intended beneficiaries. Individuals from these groups may well feel patronised; their professional reputations in posts which they would anyway have attained on merit are diminished, because they are thought to occupy them by special privilege; and they are likely to become the targets of resentment and possibly even ill-treatment.”
The report of the Speaker’s Conference stated:
“at present few people think that members of Parliament understand, or share the life experience of the people they represent (their constituents). Building and restoring public faith in Parliament is of crucial importance to the future of our democracy.”
One certain way to alienate voters up and down the country is to put forward as candidates to be their potential representatives people chosen on the basis not of merit but of their gender.
Mary Macleod (Brentford and Isleworth) (Con)
I thank the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) and the Speaker’s Conference for reminding us of the importance of this issue by holding this debate. The comments made by hon. Members from across the Chamber have shown that this is about improving our democracy and recognising the contribution that a more diverse group of Members can make to this Chamber.
I want the focus of my few remarks to be the issue of women. The issue of female representation arises not only in Parliament, but in the boardroom, where the level of representation is just 15%. In addition, the level of female entrepreneurship is less than half of that for men, so there is still a lot of work to be done. However, like my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Amber Rudd), I watched the scenes from “The Iron Lady” this week and I can tell the House that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart) said, role models are important. The first female British Prime Minister inspired me and many others to get into Parliament, as she showed that women can believe in themselves and achieve the highest office. We have made a difference, because whereas female MPs made up 3% of this House when Margaret Thatcher came to power, the level is now 22%. So some progress has been made and, although there is room for improvement, a third of coalition female MPs have a Government role, including Parliamentary Private Secretaries. Defence has been mentioned, and we certainly have a great PPS in defence with my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry).
In the world rankings in this area, the UK comes 49th in the national Parliaments list, below Cuba, Uganda, Afghanistan and Iraq. That puts things in perspective and it is why I set up the all-party group on women in Parliament. It is important that this House reflects the vitality and modernity of our democratic processes.
Margot James
On the international point that my hon. Friend makes, does she accept that in some of those countries a lot of the women who fill those quota places are, sadly, place women and often they are not there on any particular merit other than their connections to—mostly male—members of the establishment in those countries?
Mary Macleod
I agree with my hon. Friend. There is certainly more work to be done in communicating with Governments elsewhere about what else they can do to increase female representation in their Parliaments, and not necessarily by using things such as women-only shortlists, with which I do not agree.
I wish to make a point about the importance of media coverage in politics, a subject that has been mentioned by my hon. Friends the Members for Hastings and Rye and for Stourbridge (Margot James), as it does play a part in the perception of women. How can we increase the number of women in Parliament? We have to start with people who are at a very young age; it is about teaching politics in school, and engaging these young people in community projects and on local issues. We need to show them that they can make a difference, even as a young person, to their local communities. The hon. Member for Aberdeen South talked about the importance of making a continuous rather than a one-off effort. The Conservative party is maintaining that approach by continuing the encouragement and support of female candidates, stretching out and finding new and great people who can represent our country in the future.
In conclusion, we might in future need to examine the challenge of the “gang”, hostile culture in the Chamber. I sometimes think that it would not be accepted in the classroom or the boardroom, so why is it accepted in the Chamber? Women are a growing force in employment and in public life, and it is incumbent on each of us to encourage and inspire the next generation of people in this country, from all backgrounds, to shape the future of our country.
Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)
I recognise the merits of a diverse Parliament, both in the quality of what we do and in the perceived and actual relevance to the country of our work. However, I do not think that being middle aged, middle class, white or male are disqualifications for this job, any more than they are recommendations. I am not in favour of all-women shortlists or quotas. If I were, perhaps I would be asking today why we should just stop at measures focused on would-be candidates and why we should not just ask half the white male MPs to vacate their seats at the next election. I think that would strike most people as unfair, but it is no less unfair than a measure that seeks to remove prejudice on the basis of skin colour or gender by denying a generation of candidates their chance because of the particular colour of their skin or their particular gender. The only sort of under-representation about which we should be concerned is the under-representation of talent.
As we have heard, the three things that principally stand in the way of the talented minority candidate are money, prejudice and process. For example, a friend of mine who was a would-be candidate was lucky enough to get through to the latter rounds of several constituency selection panels, but unfortunately for her they were all on the same weekend. She had to spend in excess of £700 to transport herself and her husband around those meetings and on child care, so Members can imagine her despair when she received the ironic feedback that she had not been selected and that the only blemish on her impeccable score sheet was that her husband had not bought a raffle ticket. Even worse than such petty reasoning is open prejudice. The way to tackle any instinctive opposition to female, BME or other candidates is not to deny local associations their liberty to chose or to constrain them to pass over a generation of talented men in the name of all-women shortlists, but to bring the process out from the dusty backrooms and into the light of day. There should be much more training, advice and education for selection panels on how to score candidates against one another properly.
Parties must also recognise that candidates cannot fund themselves to the nth degree. Travel and other reasonable costs incurred by candidates seeking a seat should be paid from central party coffers. That would not only encourage the less well-off to come forward but focus the minds of those who decide who makes it on to the approved lists. In tackling that financial burden, the central parties should also assume responsibility for co-ordinating selection meetings. Local associations should be able to choose their agendas, but they should have to fit in with a national grid on which all associations should block their selection meetings. For example, a prospective candidate with a caring responsibility who was therefore tied to a particular geographical location might be unable to take up the handful of opportunities to be selected for such a seat because all the selection meetings had been scheduled on the same morning. A bit of basic organisation would substantially increase that person’s opportunities.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
I call Simon Hughes, who has until 5.33 pm.
Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to make what might be my shortest speech for a long time, which might be a consolation to many people.
A friend of mine called David Buxton, who stood to be a councillor, was the most profoundly deaf person ever to become a councillor in England. He taught me a long time ago how difficult it is for someone who comes from a disadvantaged position to be treated equally and given equal opportunities. The debate has shown phenomenal consensus in Parliament and between the political parties about where we go next. The messages are clear: a more diverse Parliament gives us better decisions, better debates, better information, better credibility and more interest in Parliament. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard), who made that point so effectively.
We need to send out an appeal: in this House we need more young people, more old people, more women, more people from the black and minority ethnic communities, more people with disabilities, more people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender and more people from the faith minority communities. We also need more people from working class backgrounds, council house backgrounds and lower income groups. We need to go on with that agenda until half the House is made up of women and until we reflect fully the ethnic minorities of our country.
I promised that I would sit down at 5.33 pm, so let me end with the following point. Above all, we must ensure that every one of our political parties has a membership base in its constituencies that reflects the constituency and a councillor base that reflects the constituency, too. If we have a proper base, we can have a Parliament, chosen from the people, of whom we can be proud in the years to come.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to respond to a debate which, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) said, has been characterised by so much harmony. Across the board, beginning with the welcome opening speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), we have seen a recognition that a Parliament that is unrepresentative of the make-up of the country is, by definition, a failure of democracy. Although we can all be proud of the progress that has been made, no one can doubt that we still have a great deal to do.
Important points have been raised by hon. Members across the House about party processes and procedures for encouraging, preparing and selecting parliamentary candidates. Important points have also been made about the experiences of Members and their staff in carrying out their parliamentary duties and about the barriers that might need to be dismantled. I hope to touch on a number of the comments on those areas, which were addressed in the recommendations of the Speaker’s Conference. The recommendations covered party practices and processes to promote diversity among candidates, issues to do with meeting the costs of candidacy, on which a number of hon. Members have rightly commented, and ways of working in Parliament.
Let me start by picking up on comments about the processes to encourage more women to apply to become parliamentary candidates on the all-women shortlists. I am proud that Labour introduced all-women shortlists and I am proud of the significant improvement in female representation that we achieved as a result. I am also pleased that we took the opportunity in the Equality Act 2010, at the end of the previous Labour Government, to extend to 2030 the possibility of parties’ using all-women shortlists. However, I remind hon. Members that that is a choice for political parties and there is no sense of imposing on any party the use of all-women shortlists within the political process. None the less, it is undoubtedly a tactic that has produced a significantly improved outcome not just for my party but in setting the tone that other parties have been able to pick up and follow in seeking to meet the success we have had.
I am proud to have been selected on an all-women shortlist for my constituency. I have never felt that I needed to apologise for that or that it suggests I am in some way less capable of doing the job than any other parliamentary colleague. Indeed, I strongly suspect that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) said, few Members would be able to identify which women had been selected through an all-women shortlist once they were in this place.
There has been progress in other areas, as well as on improving the diversity of the membership of this House, and I pay tribute to the House administration for the improvement we have seen there. I particularly welcome the establishment of the workplace equality networks, which are proving effective and successful for parliamentary staff and visitors to Parliament. Other hon. Members have commented on the work of the Select Committee on Procedure in consulting on parliamentary hours and the parliamentary calendar, and I was very pleased that my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) pointed out that even the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority has done its best to be more supportive. I pay tribute to a number of hon. Members in that regard, including the hon. Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie), who has done a great deal to encourage IPSA to take a wide-ranging and imaginative view of the family responsibilities that hon. Members face.
There has been progress, but there is much that we need to do to offer to MPs and their staff a working environment that bears greater resemblance to the normal working world outside Parliament. I am often told, and by no means just by those who have spent many years in the House, that that is not an apt comparison, but I strongly beg to differ. An unhealthy, dysfunctional and non-family-friendly working environment is not good for hon. Members or for our effectiveness and it is simply off-putting to many people outside Parliament who might otherwise aspire to join us. It provides a poor exemplar of good, modern behaviours and practices in employment more generally and I am very pleased that the Speaker’s Conference took notice of that specific issue.
I want to spend a couple of minutes discussing the recommendations of the Speaker’s Conference that deal with stimulating and supporting individuals from a diversity of backgrounds to come forward and be successful in seeking selection—a subject that a number of hon. Members have touched on this afternoon. The motion is right to highlight concerns about the impact of the Government’s planned changes to parliamentary constituency boundaries. I hope that all political parties and Parliament itself will take the opportunity to conduct an audit of the impact of that change so that we can be informed collectively about the steps that might need to be taken in light of those changes to secure and promote the greater diversity that might be at risk as a result.
Even if that is not a worry, the continuing under-representation in Parliament of minority and protected groups must concern us. As many parliamentary colleagues have said this afternoon, the legitimacy and effectiveness of Parliament depend on its diversity and representativeness. Political parties, parliamentarians and Parliament itself must therefore pay attention to how we attract future parliamentary candidates. As others have said, for many people in our country, the idea that they could ever enter Parliament is simply unimaginable. The consequence is that we have a Parliament that still looks too much like a place for a narrowly drawn and privileged elite.
That is the case for all political parties. It is not to say that we lack empathy or that we are not doing a good job, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South said in her opening remarks, we all bring our life experiences to Parliament. Perhaps the most eloquent contribution we heard this afternoon, which highlighted why that is important in the way we act as legislators, was the speech of the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard). He showed us powerfully how important it is that a diverse range of life experiences is reflected in the House. If those life experiences are not adequately reflected, if they are too limited, we shall inevitably have less insight. We risk making poor and poorly informed decisions, and we shall lack credibility as legislators. I hope that careful note will be taken of the recommendations of the Speaker’s Conference which will help to make entry to Parliament a real option for people from a much greater diversity of background.
In that context, I endorse the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough about education and citizenship. There is an opportunity to do more in schools and, as the Speaker’s Conference recognised, with social and community groups. Like others, I suggest that it is important that we get in early and work more proactively with young people. In that regard, I am pleased that we continue to welcome the Youth Parliament to the Chamber—I do not think that has been mentioned this afternoon. It is a great opportunity to open up to more young people the concept of representative democracy and the possibility of being part of this Parliament. I hope we continue to do that in the years to come.
I endorse the points alluded to by both the hon. Members for Blackpool North and Cleveleys and for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) about what is going on in other legislatures and Chambers. What we do in Westminster should serve as a model for local government, the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament, for the election of police and crime commissioners, for our MEPs and, for that matter, for the Youth Parliament. Indeed, as the hon. Lady pointed out, in some cases they are already outstripping us, which is not something we should be proud of.
I want finally to say a couple of things about money. Hon. and right hon. Members are right to refer to the substantial barrier it presents to people coming into this place from not just low but typical incomes. Like other Members, I very much welcome the efforts of my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles in establishing the parliamentary placements initiative; it is a great opportunity for us to bring more people from low-income backgrounds into Parliament at an early age.
There are many other financial obstacles to be faced by those seeking selection, so I hope that in her response the Minister may be able to update us on the Government’s intentions in relation to the recommendation that a consultation should take place during this Parliament on the proposal for the introduction of a scheme enabling local parties to apply for funding linked to their receipts from membership subscriptions. As others have said, I also hope she will tell us what progress is being made on looking at the possibility of a public fund to support disabled Members.
This has been an important debate. We all bear responsibility for making progress on the issue. Others have commented on the old saying that what gets measured gets done, which is why the publication of diversity data, as highlighted in the motion, is important. Perhaps we could add that what gets debated gets done, so I am very pleased that we have been able to hold this debate and I pay tribute to every hon. Member who has taken part.
The Minister for Equalities (Lynne Featherstone)
We have had a fulfilling debate. It makes one proud of the House when all the contributions—every one, across the Floor—work in the same direction. We might work in different ways, but there is not a single person who does not believe that we would be much better off if we were more reflective of society and the people we represent. I assure the House that equality is at the heart of the Government’s agenda, and it is central to building a strong economy and a fair society. If we are to achieve that, as so many have said, it is vital that our democracy is representative of the people we serve.
Although this might be the most diverse Parliament ever, it is clear that there is some way to go. That is why the Government welcome the report of the Speaker’s Conference and support the broad thrust of its recommendations. We have, to date, implemented the provisions in the Equality Act 2010, which enabled political parties to use positive action, should they wish. As was pointed out, it is not mandatory but optional, because clearly there are different views in different parts of the House. The measure is there to be used by those who want to make a difference in that way, to encourage participation in politics among under-represented groups. Obviously, within that, all prospective candidates should be considered on their individual merits. I add that because, whatever the selection, it is quite obvious that one should select the person with the most talent, but if the group of people in question is not diverse, by definition it is not the best group to choose from.
We have extended to 2030 the ability to use women-only shortlists, a point made by the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green). I sat here this afternoon and listened to points being batted to and fro. Members on opposite sides of the Chamber say, “We are fantastic, but they are dreadful.” That is the whole point. Political parties can choose to become more representative in their own way. I congratulate Labour on its all-women shortlists. That caused a step-change that was admirable. I congratulate the Conservative party on its methodology, which has certainly delivered results. Had we won what we thought were the winnable seats in which we had women candidates, I would be able to congratulate the Liberal Democrats, but we did not win them.
Following last year’s consultation, we have announced our plans to support disabled people in accessing elected office, and I hope shortly to announce a detailed plan of action, including new funding. I shall go into that in a moment. We have made a start, but there is much more to do.
Three areas are crucial to achieving equality: young people, political parties and the public sector. Hon. Members mentioned young people, and those in all parts of the House are doing a good job, going into schools to spread the message that politics is life and that we are human beings, which is a good start. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) is not sure about that. He says that we are weird. I think that we are all human, and it would be a good thing for the House if we showed a bit more of our human side and a bit less of our automated side. I shall now go into automated-speak.
Engaging young people is central to increasing diversity in Westminster. Without that, we miss a vital opportunity to change the political landscape. We have to look to the future and inspire the younger generation. We hear people complaining that young people are not engaged, but I do not think that is true. The hon. Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) was present the evening I spoke to the girl guides. The 2011 results of Girlguiding UK’s annual survey of girls’ attitudes showed that they are perfectly aware of global events. They care about them hugely; they are passionate about them. However, the survey highlighted that they often feel powerless to be part of world events. Representation here is part of empowering those girls to feel that they have a voice and a place. As I said to them that night, “Be a person. Speak up for yourself, in politics or out of politics. That is what counts.” We must encourage today’s young people, girls and boys, to have aspirations and confidence in themselves.
There must be leadership by political parties. More than ever, political parties need to reach out to young people, engaging their interest and encouraging them. There are simple things that we can do to achieve that. I note what has been said about internships, which are fantastic. I shall go on to praise the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears). A recent report by the Institute for Government found that one of the factors that helped to encourage women and other under-represented groups to stand for election was simply being asked to stand.
That was my own experience. I wandered late into politics. I am a sort of accidental politician. Somebody said to me, “You should think about standing for Parliament.” I said, “Who, me?” That sparked a thought and, gradually, a belief that perhaps I could do that, although I did not go to university, do not have a degree and do not have “the right background”. Somebody had a belief in me; they saw something and said, “You can do this.”
The report also pointed to the need to make the selection process more transparent and make it easier for people to understand how to become an MP. My officials will hold a round-table meeting with representatives of the political parties later this month to see how best to do this, and that will include a voluntary approach whereby the parties would publish data on the diversity of their candidate selection. I know that the Liberal Democrats do that, but I think that the parties need to work together on this. Someone called for central control and command, but I am not sure that we need that and think that ultimately the parties must move forward first.
Lastly—I want to get on to responding to Members—the Speaker’s Conference rightly pointed to the importance of leadership by public sector organisations. Public bodies must lead by example, which is why we now require them, through the public sector equality duty, to publish equality data every year and set equality objectives.
There have been many thoughtful contributions, not all of which I will be able to respond to, but first and foremost I want to pay tribute to the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), who gave a tour de force on this agenda. I am pleased to be able to pay tribute to the work she has done for the Speaker’s Conference and in her own way, fighting for things and being seen in a wheelchair in Parliament. Although Members have said that they do not want to represent what they are or are seen to be physically, those role models are nevertheless vital. When a person sees that someone who looks like them can do it, that changes the world.
The hon. Lady asked about diversity data. The Government support the principle that parties should publish diversity data but believe that in the first instance we should pursue a voluntary approach. As I have said, we are holding a round-table meeting on that.
The recommendations of the access to elected office for disabled people strategy—a number of Members referred to access to public office—are being taken forward. The public consultation ran from February to May 2011 and sought views on a range of policy proposals. The Government published their response on 13 September, setting out our intention to take forward five of the six proposals. We are currently working with political, disability and other stakeholders to take forward the proposals, which include: the establishment of a dedicated fund to help individual candidates with disability-related costs; new training and development opportunities; proposals to raise awareness; and work with political parties to share good practice on disability and explain legal obligations. We will make a further announcement relatively soon on how the funding is to be distributed.
A number of Members referred to the boundary review and the impact it will have. The motivation behind the boundary changes was to create fairness in numbers, because there is a huge differential between some constituencies. For example, Arfon in north Wales has around 40,000 voters, but East Ham has more than 90,000. It would be a terrible irony if, in our efforts to introduce fairness in what our votes are worth, we suddenly found that we were being unfair in other respects and that our diversity representation was getting worse as a result. I simply say for the record that I would expect all political parties to look at this most carefully when the dust settles on exactly where the boundaries will be, look at the impact in their own parties, take note and, more importantly, take action to ensure that we do not, ironically, increase unfairness in that area.
My hon. Friend the Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson), who also gave a tour de force on this agenda, referred to section 141 of the Mental Health Act 1983. The Government support the proposal in principle and on 3 February 2010 announced our intention to repeal that section, which sets out the process by which an MP’s seat is vacated if they have a mental health condition and are authorised to be detained under mental health legislation for six months or more. The Government supported Lord Stevenson of Coddenham’s private Member’s Bill, the Mental Health (Discrimination) Bill, at its Second Reading on 25 November, but we wish to retain the option to introduce a Government amendment at a later stage. Given the timing of the Bill’s Second Reading, it will be extremely difficult for the measure to gain Royal Assent in this Session, so if necessary Lord Stevenson intends to reintroduce his Bill in the next Session, in which case the Government will be pleased to support it.
The hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) is no longer in her place, but she raised some really important points, with which I agree wholeheartedly. She said that women—my attention is on women at this point—need to get their hands on levers, on budgets and on power in order to deliver real change, and she highlighted the lack of women Ministers in the Government ranks. I can say without declaring an interest, as I am already in the Government, that such change would only be of benefit—and is promised by the end of this Parliament. I am sure that the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister are listening very carefully and taking note as I speak.
My hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart) referred to the stigma that still exists subliminally in political parties: we say things, but then push comes to shove. In political parties, probably across the board, we will have all encountered the nod, the nudge, the wink—that sort of thing—and we all must work to eliminate it.
I pay tribute to and congratulate the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles on her internship scheme, which is hugely important. Recently, the Deputy Prime Minister called for all internships to be advertised to stop the “who you know” culture, because some have been about not just access, which is absolutely right, but the idea that if one knows somebody one will be given an internship, and it is vital that internships are open to all.
In my constituency office, I have another way. I take part-time interns, some even for one day a week, so that they are able to work the rest of the week and, therefore, support themselves, because not everyone has parents who can help them, and not everyone is from London.
Lynne Featherstone
I do not know whether the right hon. Lady wants to intervene, but I have only one minute left—unless it is something new.
Hazel Blears
I am not looking for any praise at all for the scheme; I am looking for a Government commitment. They praised the scheme in their social mobility strategy, so I should like the Minister to say whether that will result in the Government providing some support.
Lynne Featherstone
I apologise. I forgot about the funding, which was the right hon. Lady’s essential point. I am sure that she is being listened to, and I shall find out whether there is any such intention in the Government. I have no inkling at the moment, because it has not been discussed—with me at least.
We obviously have Government internships, too, with which we are progressing. The right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) asked how well we are doing with our equality agenda in Departments, and that is a very important aspect. Last night I was at the Stonewall employer of the year ceremony, and—[Interruption]—I cannot talk any more, but—the Home Office came second, and was first last year.
Dame Anne Begg
The hon. Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt) summed the issue up extremely well when she said that what we in this House should be concerned about is the under-representation of talent. For decades, talented individuals who would have made excellent MPs have not made it into the House, either because it was never suggested that they would be very good at it, or because the barriers were too high for them to overcome. We do not get the best person for the job if the best person does not even apply for it.
It has therefore been important today to reflect on the fact that political parties have to have a mechanism to encourage people of talent to come forward and make it into this place. For the Labour party, all-women shortlists have certainly worked and created a critical mass; for the Conservatives, it has been their A list, their support and mentoring and the changing of party members’ attitudes. But the mechanisms have been put in place.
The Speaker’s Conference identified that the case for widening representation rests on three principles: justice, effectiveness and legitimacy. We have to keep up the pressure. Without that pressure, we could start to slip backwards. That is why I hope that the House will support the motion.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House welcomes the fact that there are now more women hon. Members and hon. Members from Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities than in any previous Parliament; notes that the need for greater diversity in the House has been accepted by the leadership of the three main political parties at Westminster; is concerned that increased competition for seats at the 2015 General Election may leave under-represented groups more poorly represented among approved candidates, and in the House thereafter, unless mechanisms are employed to tackle continuing inequalities during candidate selection; and calls on the Government and political parties to fulfil commitments made in response to the Speaker’s Conference (on Parliamentary Representation) in 2010, including the commitment to secure the publication by all parties of diversity data on candidate selections.
Business without Debate
(12 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Academy Status (Haringey)
(12 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
I am grateful for the chance to debate the decision of Ministers to force four primary schools in Haringey to become academies, against the wishes of their governors, parents and teachers. Those schools are Downhills primary school and Coleraine Park primary school in Tottenham, and Nightingale primary school and Noel Park primary school in Wood Green. I am sad to see the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone) leaving the Chamber as I begin this speech.
Although this debate concerns those four schools primarily, Ministers have suggested that hundreds of schools around the country could be forced to convert into academies. Schools in Birmingham, Bristol, Durham, Essex, Kent, Lancashire, Leeds and Northamptonshire could be next in the firing line, so this debate is of interest to Members throughout the country and on both sides of the House.
I will deal with three issues. The first is the absolute importance of standards in primary schools and the other interventions that could be made to drive up standards. The second is the fundamentally undemocratic way in which Ministers are taking this decision. The third is the need for collaboration, not confrontation in ensuring that our pupils achieve the maximum that they are capable of achieving.
My remarks will focus on Downhills primary school, but they apply just as strongly to the other three schools in Haringey that are affected by the Minister’s decision. I have known Downhills since 1975, when I first stepped through its doors as a pupil. The school has been serving the local community for more than 100 years. Last week, I received a letter from a gentleman who attended Downhills during the second world war, which stated:
“I have memories of an excellent education—I was even appointed School Captain. My primary education at Downhills led to later success. I was not alone there. We were encouraged to succeed. I hope your current efforts to secure the appropriate status for Downhills Primary School will be successful and that they will help present and future pupils to have a brighter future.”
It is not just me who shares that history and is angered by the Minister’s decision.
I want to make it clear that I do not oppose academies. I support academies that work with parents and the local community to raise standards. I am a pluralist in education. I supported the academies programme of the previous Government, of whom I was a member. However, just as there are good community schools and poor community schools, so there are good academies and poor academies. The Government’s attempt to force schools in Haringey to become academies assumes that academies are the only way to raise standards and that academies always raise standards. Neither is true. The Government’s actions also ignore the fact that schools perform best when central and local government work in collaboration with parents, teachers and governors, rather than against them.
I will start by focusing on school standards. The Secretary of State has branded the parents, governors and teachers at these schools as
“ideologues who are happy with failure”
and “enemies of promise”. However, not one of us is an apologist for poor results. That is why Downhills is under a notice to improve, and we support that. It is worth looking at the Downhills governing body—the very people who are supposed to be opposing this action for ideological reasons. It covers the whole range of the community. It has a solicitor, a former nurse, a senior civil servant and a hedge fund manager, all working for free to make the school better. Is that not what the big society is all about? Should not those people be praised rather than removed? How will getting rid of all of them and imposing a sponsor make the school and society better?
The governing body and I know that if a pupil leaves primary school without the basics, they will struggle at secondary school and potentially struggle throughout their life. We had riots this summer that reminded us of that fact. We are at the coal face, and we do not need to be lectured by those who, frankly, have limited experience of the inner-city context.
We believe in supporting a school to improve, and that is exactly what we are doing at Downhills. Results from 2011 show that the school is above the Government’s floor target for English and maths. Some 64% of pupils achieved the national average level in both subjects, and among pupils who had been in the school for at least four years, 75% did so. More than 90% of parents are happy with the school. We are not resting on our laurels with that 64% figure, because it still leaves too many pupils who do not succeed, but the argument that the enormous upheaval being foisted on the community is justified by the results just does not hold water. Downhills is above the national primary school average. Will its improvements continue if the school is forced through the process of becoming an academy over the next few months, against the wishes of the entire community?
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend for how he is representing his constituents in support of Downhills school, which is an improving school. Like many in the country, it is improving because of investment, people’s determination, parents’ support and teachers. Does he have any idea why Downhills and a couple of other schools in Haringey have been selected for this treatment, when other schools have not? Is there a process by which the Department for Education is threatening all primary schools in the whole country?
Mr Lammy
My hon. Friend raises a good point. It is not clear why, perhaps apart from political reasons, Haringey has been selected. I certainly want to know whether the Department intends to go after the 2,500 primary schools in the country whose performance is lower than that of Downhills. I will come on to that point.
At Downhills, 72% of pupils have English as a second language and more than 40 languages are spoken by the pupils. More than 45% of pupils are eligible for a free school meal—I mention that fact because I, too, was eligible for free school meals when I attended Downhills—and the number of families living in deprivation is double the national average. Enormous numbers of pupils join and leave the school during the school year, and it has one of the largest Roma populations in the country.
I raise those points not to make excuses for failure, but to point out that pupils from deprived backgrounds at Downhills actually do better than the national average. Speaking another language at home or being from a deprived background is absolutely not taken as an excuse for failure at the school, whatever the Secretary of State might think. We can just look at the results—they speak loud and clear.
Looking further into the figures, the capricious choice of Downhills becomes even more dubious. In 2011, 2,594 primary schools obtained worse results than Downhills primary. In the Secretary of State’s own education authority of Surrey, 26 primary schools obtained the same results or worse. In West Sussex, the area of the Minister of State, the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), who will respond to this debate, another 26 schools obtained the same results as Downhills or worse. Does he propose—I hope he will answer this question—to force those 2,594 schools to become academies as well? If his answer is yes, we really will be seeing a revolution in education in this country, and it will certainly get him on the 10 o’clock news. Is that about standards, or is it about politics and ideology? I want to hear the Minister’s answer when he stands up. When we look at the results, we find that London schools do much better than schools in other parts of the country. That is not complacency; I am simply pointing out that if the Minister’s choice of schools to target was based purely on results, he would not be targeting schools in London to begin with.
If the Minister were motivated solely by results, would he not have waited for the second Ofsted inspection into Downhills school, which will show how the school has raised its game since the notice to improve? I remind him that when Ofsted made its monitoring visit in September, it said the school was on the road to improvement and praised the senior management team, including the head. Why is the Minister casting Ofsted aside and saying from Whitehall, “I know best”? Can he explain that new approach to localism, which has emerged in the past few weeks?
The Minister must ask himself whether now is an appropriate time to cause upheaval in the Tottenham schools system following the riots of last September. I urge him to demonstrate the sensitivity that is required after a constituency has experienced what mine experienced—it was witnessed on TV screens not just by hon. Members, but by the rest of the country and internationally.
By focusing only on forced academies, the Government have ignored all the other tried and tested ways in which standards in primary schools can be raised. A relentless focus on teaching and learning, booster lessons, a renewed management team, federation with thriving schools and new buildings all contribute to improving standards in education. All could be tried, and many have been or are being tried, but they have all been cast aside and ignored by the Government.
At Downhills, six teachers have been replaced in a year. A new head was brought into Coleraine Park school to turn the school around 18 months ago, and a new deputy head was brought in from an outstanding school just a few miles up the road. The results show that those changes are working. The trouble is that the Government are ignoring the results and focusing only on forced academies. That approach ignores the fact that, just as there are good community schools and bad community schools, so there are good academies and bad academies. The last results for Marlowe academy in Ramsgate were even described by the former principal as “disappointing”. Mossbourne academy in Hackney is rightly held up by all as a vision of what can be done, but that goes to show that a one-size-fits-all approach to reforms in struggling schools does not work.
It is clear that those reforms need funding. I understand that times are tough, so this is not solely about spending, but it is right to put on record that the Government set up a free school in Muswell Hill last year that will cost the taxpayer £6 million. It has 30 pupils at the moment. For the Minister’s geography, Muswell Hill is a few miles up the road in the London borough of Haringey. The Secretary of State could have given £100,000 to every Haringey primary school and reached 30,000 children rather than 30. Given Muswell Hill’s demographic, the Minister will understand why my constituents are a little concerned and alarmed.
The Minister has remarked that Haringey’s primary schools are the worst in inner London. They are. So why does he not fund them at inner-London rates? Haringey has the same challenges as Islington, Camden and Hackney, but receives £1,500 less per pupil in schools than those areas. For Downhills, that underfunding is worth about £600,000 a year, which is equivalent to one extra teacher in every classroom. Where would Downhills primary’s standards be if we had the money in the London borough of Haringey that we deserve? The Minister’s account in the newspapers this week suggested that mine is an inner-city constituency, but one that has suburban funding. I hope he will say something about what he will do to redress that balance so that we can achieve the improvement we want.
The reforms are working, and the results are improving. Results and standards are vital, and although the Government might ignore the results, we will not. We say loud and clear that standards matter, and we do not tolerate poor results or low aspirations—I certainly do not, and there is no record of my doing anything of the sort in this House over my years as the MP for the area. Results have not been good enough, but they are improving, and we will be relentless—working, I hope, with the Department—in seeking to improve them further. People want the best for their children. This mixed community, which is represented by the governing body, but also by the wider deprivation demographics I mentioned, wants the best results for all its young people.
I am also concerned about the undemocratic way in which these things have been done. In 2010, the Secretary of State said that academies could become the norm, but that it was “down to individual schools” to make the decision, and I support that. Has he changed his mind, or was it always his intention that schools could decide their own destiny, as long as they chose the destiny he had chosen for them?
Two of the schools affected—Nightingale primary school and Noel Park primary school—are in the Hornsey and Wood Green constituency. The hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green supports forced academies, but her party’s manifesto in 2010 promised to give all schools the freedom to innovate. It is a strange freedom that allows schools to innovate on the ground, but only so far as the Secretary of State will allow from Whitehall.
That freedom is not worth the name, and it is fundamentally different from the freedom the previous Government’s academy programme offered parents and pupils. The Labour academy programme took failing schools—schools that parents were running away from in droves, and where discipline had gone out the window—and gave them the freedom to innovate in the best interests of pupils, with the support and assistance of teachers and parents. That differs hugely from the current programme.
The Government talk the language of localism and pluralism, but when it comes to the crunch, we see something quite different, which is driven solely by mandarins in Whitehall. That is fundamentally undemocratic. There is no collaboration whatever. Given that the Department’s Ministers are so well educated, it is a disgrace that not even the elected MP was worthy of a phone call or a letter. That is not the way one would usually expect Ministers to behave when such massive decisions are being made. The Minister has not even sought to get to the school or to spend any time there. Indeed, there is no record of his having spent any time in a Haringey primary in Tottenham. That is of huge concern, given the decision he is about to make.
The proposals are a massive shift and a departure from the policy under the previous Government. The intellectually bankrupt idea that excellence is synonymous with only one structure is of huge concern, and it does not hold water. It should be abandoned, and I ask the Minister to give some contrite indication of a change of position.
The Minister of State, Department for Education (Mr Nick Gibb)
I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. I know he has a close personal and constituency interest in the issue.
Last June we made it clear that our absolute priority is to turn around underperforming primary schools by finding new academy sponsors for them. Our motivation is simply to raise standards for children. We want to find lasting solutions to underperformance so that all children have the same opportunities in life—opportunities that are enjoyed by children in areas neighbouring Haringey.
The 2011 key stage 2 tests show that Haringey primary schools went backwards, dropping 4 percentage points and taking them below the national and London averages in English and maths. Haringey primary schools are the worst performing in inner London. They have the highest number of primary schools currently below the floor—
Mr Lammy
I must ask the Minister to correct his use of the term “inner London”. The Department does not categorise Haringey schools as inner London schools, and it certainly does not fund them as such. Will he also confirm that the performance of the Isle of Wight, the Medway towns, Peterborough and Norfolk are all below that of Haringey, and tell us whether he will be seeking to ensure that they, too, will be forced to have academies?
Mr Gibb
On the right hon. Gentleman’s first point, we agree with him that the funding system, which we inherited from his Government, is unfair and opaque. We want to increase its transparency, and we have put out a new approach for consultation. We will report on that in due course. We are taking action against all underperforming schools in the country. We are working co-operatively with local authorities that are co-operating with us. A different approach is being taken by Haringey, however, and that is why there is a difference in this particular instance.
Mr Lammy
I think that the leader and the chief executive of Haringey council would want me to place on record that they have been very co-operative with the Department in holding conversations about this matter. The Minister will know that the mainstay of resistance in Haringey has come from the schools themselves.
Mr Gibb
That is very good to hear.
I should like to continue with the point that I was making. Haringey has the highest number of primary schools currently below the floor, out of all London authorities, and 12 primary schools there have been below the floor for three or more of the past six years. Demographically similar local authorities such as Hackney, Camden, Newham, Southwark and Tower Hamlets all outperform Haringey at primary school level.
The floor standard is a basic acceptable level of performance by a primary school. For the record, a school is below the floor if fewer than 60% of pupils are achieving level 4 or above in English and maths or failing to make average progress in English and maths. Insisting that schools educate their pupils to level 4 standard is not a huge objective; nor is it unachievable. Level 4 involves just the basics. To achieve a level 4 in reading, pupils need to be able to interpret and understand the meaning behind a simple story. In maths, all that is required is to be able to understand simple fractions and to add, subtract, multiply and divide without the help of a calculator.
It is unacceptable that so many children in Haringey are being let down. As the right hon. Gentleman said, if a child leaves primary school without the basics, they will struggle at secondary school and throughout life. Those pupils face real disadvantages when starting secondary school and have extreme difficulty in catching up later.
In my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State’s speech last week at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hatcham college, he said that pupils cannot read to learn if they have not learned to read. They cannot begin to deal with more advanced mathematical concepts, or with physics or chemistry or any number of other subjects, if they have not grasped the fundamentals of arithmetic. No matter how good a secondary school is, there is a limit to the extent to which it can pick up the pieces. It is for that reason alone that we want to take action to secure sustainable improvements in a number of Haringey’s underperforming schools.
Mr Gibb
I will not, if the right hon. Gentleman does not mind, because I want to continue to make my argument and address the points that he has made.
Those are schools whose history of underperformance and ability to sustain improvements are causing us real concern. Downhills primary school was judged inadequate by Ofsted in 2002 and placed in special measures. It came out of special measures three years later in 2005, but improvements were not sustained, and in January 2010 it was again judged inadequate by Ofsted and required significant improvement. Key stage 2 results show that the school has failed to meet the floor standard since 2005. In 2011, 61% of pupils achieved level 4 or above in English and maths, with the other 39% of pupils failing to achieve that basic level. I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman will agree that it is unacceptable for any school to have a large proportion of its pupils failing to achieve minimum standards year after year. We know that those standards can be met, however.
Mr Gibb
Let me make this final point before giving way. We know that that can be done. There are schools across London with intakes as challenging as those in Haringey, with proportions of pupils on free school meals and where English is not their first language, that are performing well above the standard. Let me cite one school I have visited in Tower Hamlets. In Osmani primary school, for example, 95.8% of pupils have English as an additional language and 58% are eligible for free school meals, yet that school has 88% achieving level 4 in English and maths. That is what we want to see happening in Haringey.
Mr Lammy
We all want to see that, but I say again to the Minister that in the boroughs that he prays in aid, each pupil is funded a great deal more than pupils in the London borough of Haringey. Why does he imagine that we do not need extra teachers and extra support to bring up those pupils’ standards, but that a structural change into an academy will fix that problem? Will he say something about why the structural change per se will fix that problem? Where there are academies that are failing—and there are—what will he do about it in five years’ time, given the autonomy that academies have?
Mr Gibb
I have to say that the academies programme was inherited from the right hon. Gentleman’s Government, as indeed was the funding system. Academies have made a tremendous difference in transforming underperforming schools, especially in secondary schools where this approach has been applied. The professionals have autonomy and new leadership is brought in. It has worked in practice.
Let me make one or two things clear to the right hon. Gentleman. First, no decision about any school in Haringey has been taken at this stage. Officials have met the local authority regularly since July and they have met the relevant head teachers and chairs of governors in October, offering to visit any school wanting a further conversation. At all stages we have been clear that our goal is school improvement, and that we believe that the best route for achieving that is through schools becoming sponsored academies. We have sought to work with the local authority and schools to find solutions on which everyone can agree, as we have done successfully in many parts of the country, and as we continue to do successfully throughout the country.
I agree about the importance of consulting the governing body, and this is why officials sought another meeting with each school in early December asking for their views on these proposals. The schools in Haringey have been given time to provide representations to the Secretary of State on his proposed action. Before giving us their views, we fully expect them to engage with the wider school community. We have already received a number of representations from parents, governors and the local community, both in support of and against the approach we are taking in Haringey, which we will take into consideration. When we have the representations from the schools, we will take a final decision and inform them. It would therefore be inappropriate and premature for me to comment further on the specific Downhills case until we have fully considered all those representations and the circumstances of the case.
Mr Gibb
Discussions with the local authority have been going on in Haringey since July, and this is part of that process.
Let me say that this is not happening in Haringey alone. The last Government opened 203 sponsored academies and we have opened another 132 since the election. We are working with local authorities across the country to secure better outcomes for their pupils by transforming these underperforming schools. Over 300 schools have now opened as sponsored academies, a further 1,194 have converted to academy status, and more than 700 maintained primary schools are either open to becoming academies or in the pipeline. Those range from small rural primaries to large urban primaries such as the 843-pupil Durand school in south London.
I would like to assure the right hon. Gentleman that we recognise the real effort that the governing bodies and staff of schools are making to improve the standards of education at their schools in the most challenging of circumstances. We want to help schools that, despite the best efforts of the staff, are struggling to sustain improvements. We believe that substantially different solutions are required—solutions that will help the most disadvantaged pupils to succeed. Academy status led by a strong sponsor is the best way of providing quick and sustainable improvements in order to prevent more children from leaving the school without at least the basic literacy and mathematical skills.
Academy status has been very successful; it is a tried and tested model. A large body of evidence of pupil performance and independent reports show that the academy model—
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Westminster Hall
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Policing
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
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Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)
The House will know, Mr Brady, that over the past 10 years, you and I have had the honour of co-chairing the Westminster kids club Christmas party, but this is the first time that I have served under your chairmanship, and it is an enormous privilege to do so.
I welcome this opportunity to discuss the report by the Select Committee on Home Affairs, “New Landscape of Policing”, which we published on 23 September 2011. A new Government always want to put their imprint on an important area of policy, but in my 25 years in the House, I have not seen the kinds of changes to policing and the policing landscape that this Government initiated when they took office. The Government propose abolishing the National Policing Improvement Agency and the Serious Organised Crime Agency; creating a new National Crime Agency, a professional body for policing and a police-led information technology company; centralising non-IT procurement; supporting collaboration; and ending unnecessary bureaucracy.
Our report was a response to those fundamental and far-reaching proposals for policing reform. Given the significance of the changes to this £997.3 million budget, the Committee decided to examine the proposals in great detail. I am pleased to see that three members of the Committee are present—my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Alun Michael), and the hon. Members for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) and for Cambridge (Dr Huppert)—as well as the official spokesmen from various parties.
We have received more than 50 pieces of written evidence and heard from 29 witnesses, including the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice, the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert). We have also held an informal meeting with the Police Federation, attended by its chairman, Paul McKeever, and Derek Barnett, who represented the Police Superintendents Association. At the invitation of the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth, we have also held two public meetings—in Sheringham in Norfolk and in Cardiff in Wales. We put the public at the centre of our deliberations; after all, the police exist to protect the public and uphold the rule of law. To increase that involvement still further, we ran a nationwide polling exercise on our website, asking people what they wanted the police to prioritise. In total, 2,000 votes were cast, and the highest public priority for the police was dealing with murder and serious violence.
Despite the Government’s desire to unclutter the landscape, we concluded that it seems likely that the new landscape of policing will contain more bodies than the current landscape’s six. It is possible that the Government’s changes will lead to a more logical and better functioning police landscape and ultimately make the police more successful at achieving their basic mission of reducing crime and disorder, even though we will end up with more bodies. We believe that as the scale of the change is unprecedented, the possibility for mistakes may be large and with us for some time. That is why, at the point of publication, the Committee had particular reservations about the timetable for the changes, including the transfer of functions from the National Policing Improvement Agency by spring 2012 and the setting up of the National Crime Agency by December 2013.
It has taken the Government more than a year to announce where the functions of the NPIA will go. As the NPIA has an annual budget of £447.6 million, it is extremely important that we know those facts. The continuing uncertainty was damaging to the morale of the 2,000 people who work for the agency, and to the efficiency and effectiveness of the police service as a whole. I am therefore glad that the gap or loophole was rectified by the Government’s acceptance of our recommendation that the phasing out of the NPIA be delayed until December 2012, and by the announcement on the future location of some of the agency’s functions. It is not immediately clear whether further functions from the NPIA will transfer to the NCA, and how some of the functions already earmarked for transfer to the NCA will relate directly to operational responses to organised crime.
Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)
I thank the right hon. Gentleman, who chairs the Committee, for giving way. Does he agree that, while it has certainly not been perfect, the NPIA has done a very good job, and that there is some concern that an impression has been given that it has not been valued by the House? It has had many disparate functions, many of which have been developed very well. It is important that we put on record our appreciation for the NPIA’s work during its existence.
Keith Vaz
I thank the hon. Gentleman for, and agree with, his intervention. It is important that we put on record the achievements of the NPIA in certain areas. The fact that organisations are being abolished does not mean that we do not recognise the work done. I will come on to some of those organisations later.
The fact that the location of all the NPIA functions has not been announced remains a concern. I hope that, during his winding-up speech, the Minister will finally give us the list of all the outstanding functions and tell us where they will go. Many of the NPIA functions bound for the NCA will have to move to the Serious Organised Crime Agency, which itself is due to be abolished and co-opted into the NCA by December 2013. This shifting of resources between agencies due for closure, before finally shifting them to the NCA, makes heavy weather of the Government’s important principle of uncluttering the landscape.
SOCA was set up by the previous Government, of which the shadow Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), was an active member—one of his roles was that of Policing Minister—and our Committee has been concerned about it for a number of years. In our most recent report on the agency in 2009, we found that its budget of £476 million was used to hire 3,800 members of staff; that it was spending £15 of public money for every pound it seized from criminal gangs; and that it lacked transparency in the way that it operated. Despite improvement in its performance, it is essential that the Government’s new crime-fighting agency be set the correct targets and can use its resources cost-effectively, so that it does not become another SOCA. It is also not clear whether SOCA will be given extra resources to help it manage the NPIA functions during the short-lived transition. I hope that the Minister will offer clarification on that point.
The lack of detail regarding the creation of the NCA was one of the central concerns of the Committee, and that remains the case. We were concerned about the delay in appointing a head of the agency, and the lack of detail on the objectives and—most importantly—the budget of this new policing agency. We welcome the appointment of Keith Bristow as the head of the NCA since the publication of our report. We felt, however, that someone occupying a position of that importance ought to have appeared before the Committee before taking up his formal appointment. We also remain concerned about the lack of detail on his role and objectives. Will he be a civil servant, or the head of the No. 1 crime-busting agency in the country? Will he be Sir Humphrey or Eliot Ness? Perhaps we will find out when he appears before the Committee on Tuesday to answer some important questions.
The Committee still awaits the figures on the agency’s budget. When the Minister first appeared before the Committee on 28 June, I asked his director of finance whether he knew the budget. He replied that it would be a little higher than SOCA’s, which is £476 million. Luckily, he had the Minister next to him, who told the Committee that although the budget for the NCA had not yet been set, the lion’s share of it would come from SOCA. The Minister came before us again on 20 December 2011, following the announcement that the destination of some of the NPIA functions would be the NCA, and he could still not inform us of the budget. This is not a game of “Play Your Cards Right”—a little higher here, a little lower there. We want the figures. Parliament needs to know exactly what the budget of this new agency will be, particularly as it is the flagship of the Government’s new policy.
There remain many areas where the agenda for the future of policing is unclear. One such area is police IT. Despite costing the public £1.2 billion annually, we concluded that
“IT across the police service as a whole is not fit for purpose,”
and that that affected the
“police’s ability to fulfil their basic mission of preventing crime and disorder.”
The Home Office has made rectifying that, through changes to police IT, a top priority.
It was an error of judgment on the part of the Home Office to prevent Lord Wasserman from giving oral evidence to our inquiry. As the author of the police IT review that preceded the Home Secretary’s announcement of the creation of a police-led information and communications technology company, and as chairman of the board setting up that new IT company, he is central to any future plans. He hosts seminars on behalf of Ministers, he speaks on behalf of Ministers, and he advises Ministers. I have received many invitations to seminars that the Minister for Policing was unable to attend, and Lord Wasserman is sent in his place. It appears that Lord Wasserman is, in fact, acting as a Minister, so it is very odd that he has refused to appear before the Committee. I hope that the Minister will have some good news for the Committee, in terms of agreeing to allow him to attend. The Committee unanimously wrote to the Home Secretary again on 20 October 2011 asking Lord Wasserman to come before us and give us answers on the development of the new company. That request was turned down.
One of the areas that the Committee has been focusing on with regard to policing has been the policing protocol.
Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)
I know that my right hon. Friend is going through a lengthy period of not being controversial—somewhat like me—but is he coming to the point when we deal with morale in the police force?
Mr Winnick
I can assure my right hon. Friend that I have not seen a copy of his speech.
Keith Vaz
One thing is certain: my hon. Friend did not write it for me. We will be coming on to police morale in a moment.
I pay tribute to the excellent work done by the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood in pursuing the issue of the protocol. In the past, the Minister has been willing to engage with the Committee on a number of issues. I find him a very accessible Minister. He may well be top of the league table, as far as my dealings with Home Office Ministers are concerned.
Keith Vaz
I do not have a list for shadow Ministers yet. However, uncharacteristically, on the issue of protocol the Minister has let himself down. We were very keen to engage with the Government on the protocol, as it is very important. However, there has been no engagement. The Committee nominated the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood to be our representative at any meetings that took place, but unfortunately that offer was not taken up.
As hon. Members know, the protocol sets out the critical relationship between police and crime commissioners, the first of whom are to be elected in November 2012, and the police. I note that a Committee member, my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth, has announced that he will seek the Labour nomination for his local area. I wish him well in pursuit of that. I hope that the fact that he has been endorsed by the English Chair of the Home Affairs Committee will not mean that he does not get the nomination.
The Committee was the body that recommended that there ought to be a protocol, in its report on police and crime commissioners. That move was put to the Committee by the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood, and we put it in our report. We were delighted that the Government took that recommendation on board and created a draft protocol that the Committee commented on in detail. Of course, the problem is that although they allowed us to comment on the draft protocol in detail, none of our suggestions have been taken up.
The ability to engage with Parliament on that critical issue was important, especially as there are no police and crime commissioners yet and the number of elected people involved in the process was pretty limited. What happened was a lost opportunity, which is why the Committee wrote to the Leader of the House. I understand that on Monday there will be a debate at 4.30 pm in the Chamber on that very issue. I hope that the Minister will approach that debate in the same way that he approached the Committee’s suggestions. The shadow Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn, is shaking his head; I thought it was he who told me, as I walked into this Chamber, that there was a debate on Monday.
Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)
Before the Chair of the Select Committee moves on from the protocol, I would like to put on the record my thanks to the Government and the Treasury; I apologise, but I do not know the constituency of whoever makes these decisions. The protocol is an excellent document that will be very powerful, and it is important that there be an opportunity for Members of Parliament, as well as members of the Association of Chief Police Officers and representatives of police authorities, to have their say. I very much look forward to that debate and would like to put on the record my thanks for it happening.
Keith Vaz
The debate is taking place in no small measure because of all the work that the hon. Gentleman has done.
I turn to the issue of police morale, which was raised in an intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick). For police officers up and down the country, the role and future of the police service have been at the forefront of the national agenda since July 2010. The service will suffer more than 16,000 job losses before the next election, and uncertainty remains over how pay and conditions will be affected by the Winsor review and the ruling this week by the Police Arbitration Tribunal. In addition, there is the two-year public sector pay freeze and the capped 1% increase beyond those two years. We have heard from the Police Federation that the proposals for changes to police pay and conditions will have a detrimental effect on the morale of the police service.
In a Police Federation survey of 43,000 police officers last year, 98% said that they were demoralised by how these matters were progressing. When the issue of police pay has been settled, and when that is coupled with all the other challenges that they face, there could be a fundamental shift in the standards and motivation of police officers all over the country. We would be grateful to hear from the Minister about the progress on that subject, and about any other discussions that he has had with the Police Federation.
I have to say to the Minister—again, this is uncharacteristic of him—that I was very disappointed with the reply that he gave to my parliamentary question when I asked how many times he had met the Police Federation. He gave me no reply. He said that he could not tell me how many times because that is what the previous Government did. That is very odd. I thought that this Government were committed to transparency. When the Chairman of a Select Committee tables a parliamentary question to the Minister of Policing asking when he met officially—not socially or informally—the chairman of the Police Federation, he deserves a reply. I shall take that up with Mr Speaker.
Mr Winnick
I am sure that my right hon. Friend recalls that when I—and indeed he—pressed the chief constable of the west midlands on the effect of cuts in that region, he said that it was bound to have an effect. Over the period concerned, cuts in the west midlands will be somewhere in the region of 26%. That is not disputed. It will mean 1,100 fewer police officers and around 1,100 fewer police support officers. That is bound to have an adverse effect on dealing with criminality.
Keith Vaz
My hon. Friend is a distinguished Member from the west midlands, and I accept what he says. That is exactly what the chief constable of the west midlands said to us when we met him about these matters, so they have to be taken very seriously. On the question of the reply, I will take that up with Mr Speaker, because it is a reasonable question for hon. Members to ask. If we accept that we will never get an answer to questions about who Ministers meet officially, then, frankly, there is no point in coming here and no point in tabling questions.
Despite those difficulties, we need to accept that officers in police forces all over the country work extremely hard and are very dedicated. The riots across the UK highlighted the length to which officers will go to protect their communities and to have a positive impact on local areas. Yesterday, along with the Minister, other Ministers and hon. Members, I attended a reception at Downing street organised by the Prime Minister to thank police officers who had taken part in trying to quell the riots. The Prime Minister spoke eloquently about the bravery of those officers. It is right that we realise and recognise that, during these difficult times when budgets have to be cut to some extent, police officers face enormous problems.
In the week after the Stephen Lawrence verdicts, when there has been some criticism of how the police operated during the original investigation, may I give the Minister an example of really good practice? On Boxing day, a young student was shot in the head in Manchester when he was out attending the sales. He was an overseas student. I was involved in this matter, because an e-mail came from India from his family in Gujarat, and they asked me to ensure that things were in order. I am full of praise for the work that was done by Greater Manchester police. I would like the Minister to look at the letter that I have sent to the Home Secretary today. Within seven days, Assistant Chief Constable Dawn Copley and her team in Greater Manchester arrested someone and charged them with the murder. They sent two police officers to India to inform the family of what was happening. When the family came over here, they looked after them and communicated with them on an hourly basis to tell them what was happening. We now have a date for the hearing of the person who is alleged to have murdered Anuj Bidve. That is an example of good practice, which we should acknowledge when we look at what happened in the Lawrence affair; we can see how far forward we have moved in the past few years.
The Government’s changes are the most far-reaching proposals for the police service since the 1960s, and are among the most significant since Sir Robert Peel laid the foundations for modern policing nearly 200 years ago. Ministers must be commended for thinking outside the box in their desire to improve policing in Britain in a radical way. However, the structures must follow their vision for policing in the 21st century. All the Committee is seeking to do in its report is caution the Government to think carefully before putting their structures in place, so that they are fit for purpose and achieve their laudable aim of reducing crime as much as possible, and provide intervention from the centre to guide long-term policing. It is for that reason that we suggest, in the very last words of our report, that change on this massive scale requires clear and strong leadership from the Home Office, and effective communication with the stakeholders involved in this very important process.
Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship once again, Mr Brady. I welcome the opportunity to debate the “New Landscape of Policing” report produced by the Home Affairs Committee and the Government’s response to it. I welcome, too, the fact that many of the Committee’s members are here today.
I begin by saying, very much in the way that the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), started his contribution, that there is a very busy picture when it comes to policing matters. As he stated, the NPIA will wind down by the end of this year, and SOCA will take on some of its responsibilities before being wound down. We expect the National Crime Agency to be fully functional by the end of next year. The elected police and crime commissioners should be in post by November, and the police authorities are being wound down at the same time. The protocol has recently been published. There is a shadow strategic policing requirement and an organised crime co-ordination centre.
They are just some of the things that have been established or are in the process of being wound down. At the same time, it is clear that the UK remains under threat, as it has been for many years. We have had other threats or incidents—the riots in August have been mentioned—and the diamond jubilee and the Olympics are upcoming. The changes present a complex picture of what the policing landscape will look like in a couple of years’ time, against a backdrop of a high level of threat to the UK.
The Home Affairs Committee has an important responsibility to scrutinise all those activities, and it has shown itself perfectly capable of doing so. The Minister with responsibility for policing will no doubt be personally responsible if any of those bodies fail to act in the way that they should, but it is clearly not possible for him to have a day-to-day handle on the progress that is being made across all those different areas of policing activity. Who, therefore, is actually responsible for having oversight on a day-to-day basis of all those different activities to ensure that one is not having a knock-on effect, or an unintended consequence, somewhere else?
As the Home Affairs Committee report highlights—this is reported in the Government’s response—those changes, even when complete, will not be set in stone. For instance, the point about the protocol in paragraph 38 in the Government’s response, Command Paper 8223, is likely to change once the police and crime commissioners are in post, because they may seek to make sensible changes. There is also the issue of what will happen to counter-terrorism. I certainly support what the Committee has said: it would be wrong to make changes to where counter-terrorism sits at present, but, post-Olympics, there is a strong case for including it in the National Crime Agency, given that it affects all parts of the United Kingdom. It is, therefore, a moving picture in more respects than one. I am sure that the Minister will want to continue to ensure that these matters are reported to Parliament on a regular basis so that, almost month-by-month, we can see the progress that is being made on all these different restructuring activities.
I raised the issue of the scrutiny of police and crime commissioners by the police and crime panels and the Government at Home Office questions on 12 December. I wanted reassurance that the budgets for the police and crime panels would be sufficient to allow them to scrutinise the police and crime commissioners in the way that was intended. The Government have said that £40,000 is set aside for that. In his response, the Minister may be able to set out how that figure was derived. On the face of it, £40,000 for a panel to scrutinise the activities of the police and crime commissioner does not sound like a lot of money, certainly not in comparison with the budgets of the police authorities, although they have other responsibilities that the police and crime commissioner will take on.
Mark Reckless
With the exception of two individuals, the police and crime panels will assist elected councillors who already receive allowances and may lean on other support from their constituent councils. Surely, at least part of the process must be to provide funds to allow appropriate scrutiny, rather than putting in great dollops of additional money.
Tom Brake
Councils may make a contribution in that respect, but at some point a police and crime panel might need to call on expertise that is not available in local authorities. If people are trying to access such expertise, which may be required for the panel effectively to undertake its scrutiny role, it does not take too long for a substantial bill to build up. I hope that the Minister will set out precisely how it will work and will reassure hon. Members that resources will be sufficient for the important task that the panels will undertake.
I hope that the Government will quickly review their role in scrutinising the police and crime commissioners, or at least the way in which they have been implemented. Given that activity is already starting in relation to London, it is not unreasonable to hope that by sometime in 2014, say, when the police and crime commissioners have been active for a couple of years, the Government may want to consider whether those bodies are delivering the sorts of things that we expect them to, in terms of increased accountability, greater involvement of the public and ensuring that the police and crime commissioner and the chief constable are engaging effectively with the people who are, at the moment, excluded from that consultation and engagement process.
I am sure that many hon. Members—possibly all hon. Members here—will at some point have attended the ward panel in one of the wards in their constituencies. I have done so occasionally in Wallington, South. It is clear that those panels receive useful input from key individuals in the community. It is true to say that young people are rarely present on those panels, and I suspect that those on lower incomes are underrepresented. The Government will want to consider whether police and crime commissioners and chief constables are beginning to engage more effectively with such groups to see whether their views, concerns and priorities, from a policing perspective, are properly taken on board.
The Home Affairs Committee report and the Government response contain a large body of information about the professional body. I support that and want it rolled out quickly and, as the Committee has suggested, in an all-encompassing way that is not exclusive in terms of its membership. That body should be doing some things at an early stage, including considering national minimum recruitment standards for the police force, considering whether there is scope for learning from the Teach First scheme, to see whether there are ways to get a different group of young, qualified people into the police force, and looking at whether there is any prospect of using some of the expertise that has been built up in respect of teaching schools to see whether there is any role for some of our larger police stations in that respect.
Keith Vaz
I was remiss in not recognising that the right hon. Gentleman appeared as a witness in the Committee during its inquiries.
The Government’s proposal to completely and radically reform the way that police officers are trained and to look at standards is exciting. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree with the Committee that it is important to bring the profession with us when having a discussion of this kind and to have the widest possible consultation, so that we have something that will last beyond this Government—the worst possible thing would be to have too much party politics in this—and that we should be getting people on board and united behind a new method of education and professionalism?
Tom Brake
I welcome this proposal and agree that the profession must be brought along and that that requires consultation and engagement, although, of course, it may be difficult to get a single view of the profession from all levels of police officers about what that professional body will look like. However, it is clearly essential to engage with all of them, whether chief constables, superintendents, police constables—the whole range—or staff.
I hope that the professional body will look more carefully at black and minority ethnic recruitment into the police force and how BME officers do or do not make progress within the ranks. It should take that task on at an early stage.
As an aside, the professional body should, rightly, concentrate on training. What training will be available for both police and crime commissioners and police and crime panels? In relation to the former, what training might be available to candidates who are going to be, or want to be, police and crime commissioners? Such training could be beneficial. I am concerned that some candidates for those posts may not have the experience, knowledge or expertise that is required. Although coming to the job with a fresh approach may be welcome, understanding the environment in which people are going to work will also be beneficial.
I shall mention efficiency, touch on one major omission from the new landscape and then conclude. On efficiency, the report clearly and rightly highlights the importance of getting more out of the procurement process and out of IT. However, it is short on detail about ensuring that the police are taking the most effective approach to tackling types of crime.
I want to see more in terms of drawing into the centre the evidence base for what is effective from a policing perspective, so that we can make that information available widely to all the police and crime commissioners and chief constables and can be certain that, when they launch an initiative—whether tackling antisocial behaviour or organised crime, at NCA level—they are using a policy or approach that evidence suggests will be the most effective possible. Doing that may require universities and others to be more heavily involved in the research than may currently be the case.
The Home Affairs Committee did not focus enough, to my liking, on the linkages that should exist between police and local authorities. The Chair of the Committee has visited Sutton, as has the Minister with responsibility for the police, to look at the partnership between the local authority and the police, which has drawn together under one person police and local authority resources to tackle antisocial behaviour and so on. I would like to have seen that agenda pushed more, because there is no doubt that it has been effective in Sutton not only from a policing perspective, but in ensuring that the police, the local authority, the fire service and the voluntary sector work together effectively. I would like it to have been more prominent in the Committee report and in the new landscape of policing more generally. From a policing perspective, these are exciting and challenging times, and there are lots of opportunities, which is why we need to keep the situation under constant review. I hope that the Minister will reassure us there will be an ongoing and heavily engaging process for all Members.
Alun Michael (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)
I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak in the debate. I declare two interests: first, my son is the chief executive of the North Wales police authority—something that I declare when we discuss policing in the Select Committee on Home Affairs—and, secondly, that I have announced my intention to seek nomination as the Labour and Co-operative candidate to be the police commissioner for South Wales, as the Chairman of the Select Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), mentioned.
My decision to stand for office was made not out of admiration for the frenetic pace of change since the general election, but out of enthusiasm for protecting the best features of police work and continuing the drive to cut crime and reduce reoffending. That enthusiasm is for the whole of England and Wales, which is why I particularly enjoy my work on the Home Affairs Committee, but it relates particularly to south Wales, which has experienced considerable success in recent years in reducing crime. I want that process to accelerate, rather than flag—a point that I will return to in a few minutes.
I do not want to repeat what is in the Select Committee report, and I certainly cannot deal with all the issues that it raises, which are reflected in the list of Government initiatives to which the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) referred. I want to reflect primarily on the nature of policing and the Government’s role.
Reorganisation is sometimes inevitable, but it almost always leads to a drop in performance and effectiveness in the short term, so the advice to anyone considering it is to lie down in a dark room and reflect on whether the proposed reorganisation is really necessary. The drop in performance often happens even if the ground is well prepared and the objectives clear. A problem now is that the objectives and the eventual landscape are not altogether clear and the ground has not been properly prepared everywhere.
I give the Minister credit, because he is genuinely committed to his role and wants to make improvements. I think that we would agree on many points of principle about the purpose of policing and the Government’s role. At a time of front-ended cuts to the police coming too fast and too deep, the challenge is compounded by the enormous scope of the reorganisation of central functions in which the end pattern of organisations and responsibilities is not yet clear. That is a serious drawback. The map has not yet been accurately drawn. It looks like one from the middle ages in which certain parts of the landscape are just marked by the words, “Here be dragons”, without giving full details of what is happening in those territories. That is a pity, because some changes might prove to be beneficial in the long term, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East said. If there is no certainly or clarity, the short-term drop in performance might be significant.
As the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington said, we need more transparency and more clarity about the evidence on which the approaches are based. I agree with him on the need to ensure that new systems connect with local authorities. For example, when we took evidence in Wales, we saw the benefits of the Welsh Government making a joint appointment with the Youth Justice Board to ensure proper understanding of national priorities and how they link to the work of local government and youth offending teams in Wales. That is important, because the reorganisation of national organisations is not the only challenge facing the police.
The challenges range from international terrorism, organised crime—it seems to get more business-like by the day and sometimes looks as though it benefits from university-level business studies more than perhaps some businesses do—and the significant use of the internet for criminal activity, across to the riots in August 2011 and the ever-present problems of daily and weekly local crime and disorder. I will touch on those logistical challenges for the police and others in a moment.
In evidence to the Select Committee, the Minister stressed the importance of the Peelian principles. Sir Robert Peel underlined two principles particularly when he established the first police force: first, that the first responsibility of the police is to reduce crime and offending, which the Minister quoted in evidence to the Select Committee; and, secondly, the rather delphic utterance:
“The police are the public and the public are the police”.
To unpack that, it means that there must be confidence on both sides of the equation—there must be trust and an understanding of the roles of the community and the police. Of course, Sir Robert Peel laid down other issues on integrity, trust and how policing is done, which is all very important, but we must stress the practical implications of putting the first priority of the police at the forefront of all our discussions and debates.
The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 gave clear focus to the creation of local crime and disorder reduction partnerships. That legislation has been enormously successful, as the Minister has been kind enough to acknowledge. Since then, the partnership work between the police and local authorities has been more integrated into the local and wider scheme of partnership working. In general, that is a good thing, but there is always a danger that the specific focus on crime reduction could be eroded, and we must be careful in future to ensure that that is not the case.
I underline the lessons to be drawn from violence reduction in Cardiff. I apologise to members of the Select Committee who have heard me expand on that topic more than once in the past, but it is a significant demonstration of what can be achieved. With a clear focus on the nature of violent incidents—what provoked them, where they happened and what could be done to prevent them—violence in Cardiff has reduced by roughly 25% ahead of the reductions in equivalent cities in England and elsewhere. Not only is that measurement based on police figures, but it has been tested in a peer-reviewed article in the British Medical Journal based on evidence of the number of people who go to accident and emergency units requiring treatment, and it therefore has real validity.
The figures show a significantly reduced number of victims, and Victim Support has stated on more than one occasion that more than anything else, victims want to know that they will not become a victim again—it is not retribution that they seek, but confidence and security in the community. The reduction in offences is enormously important from that point of view. It reduces the waste of police time. That is significant because police can attend to other things: reassuring the public and investigating crime. It also reduces the burden on the NHS. Putting people’s faces together after a serious attack is significant and expensive for the NHS, as has been commented on by Professor Jon Shepherd, who has led the work. We have seen that success.
I feel safe in the centre of Cardiff, because I know the figures show that it is a relatively safe place. However, it is significant that evidence from some programmes undertaken by John Humphrys two years ago demonstrated that a lot of people find that the activity and feeling on the streets—the discourtesies, such as the noise and the ebullience—make them feel less safe. People’s behaviour is not based just on the facts of crime; they also react to their environment. We need to focus on the accurate measurement of crime and its reduction to ensure that people are safer, but we also need a greater focus on enabling the public to know the facts and to feel safe, if they are, and to know that any remaining problems are being addressed.
In a leader column last week, The Guardian expressed worry that the election of police and crime commissioners would turn into a rat-catcher’s election. I am not entirely sure what was in the mind of the writer. I think that they feared that we would go to the lowest common denominator in debating policing and crime and populist sloganising in the approach to the elections. I assume that they did not want to imply that a police commissioner would be unpaid and, therefore, take revenge along the lines of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, by leading all the children of the police force area into the river.
Mark Reckless
The right hon. Gentleman said earlier that Peel’s principle was that the police should be the public and the public should be the police. Is the problem not that the two have become disengaged? What will change under the new landscape is that, through the process of election, a police and crime commissioner will be able to bring them back together.
Alun Michael
One approaches this either with pessimism or optimism. I admire the hon. Gentleman’s optimism, as I do often in our discussions in Committee. I hope that proves to be the case. I was reflecting The Guardian article’s fear of populist sloganising, rather than a base of evidence. That is one reason for my decision to stand, and why all parties interested in the matter need to ensure, given that the legislation has gone through and that we will have police and crime commissioners, that they are people who can add value to the process and address the public’s experience. I hope very much—perhaps we all need to contribute—that the outcome desired by the hon. Gentleman will be the one that we see.
The same leader referred to me as more of a builder of partnerships and consensus than a rat-catcher. I think that I take that as a compliment, because it goes back to Peel’s principles of trying to build consensus, reflect the public will and ensure that crime is reduced.
It is of course important that the police and crime commissioner should hold the chief constable to account. There is the responsibility of appointing the chief constable; there is the responsibility of deciding the budget and the policing plan. All those things are vital and need clear leadership. The commissioner will also need to take a lead in connecting and reconnecting the police and the public, as well as the police and the local authorities and other organisations. One of the biggest lessons that came out of the report of the Select Committee on Justice, “Cutting crime: the case for justice reinvestment”, was that most things that affect offending are not only outside the aegis of the police, but outside the criminal justice system. Therefore, connecting that, looking for evidence of the real problems experienced by the public and ensuring they are addressed through a partnership approach, must be an absolute priority for the commissioner, as well as for the chief constable and those who lead policing locally and lead local authorities.
Some of the costs of policing cannot be avoided, even if it is possible to reduce crime locally. I am grateful to the Minister for meeting me and Chief Constable Peter Vaughan of South Wales police. I stress that that meeting took place long before I decided to stand as commissioner. When we met the Minister, we focused on the capital city challenge that the south Wales police force faces, as well as policing the two great cities of Swansea and Cardiff. It also faces the challenges of a top-slice to its finances, to assist other police forces in Wales. The Minister listened carefully and promised to take away the points that we made. I hope that that will be reflected at some point in a reconsideration of the police funding formula.
I was on the streets of Cardiff when we had a visit from the English Defence League, a much larger demonstration and march by Unite Against Fascism and an element of conflict, with some people wanting to turn it into a pitched battle, which good policing prevented. That took place on the same day as South Africa was playing Wales at rugby at the Millennium stadium, the West Indies were playing England—and Wales, if I can put it in those terms—in the SWALEC stadium, and the Stereophonics were in concert in the city. That was an enormous addition to the normal day-to-day work of policing. Both Cardiff and Swansea are doing well at sport and seeking to grow and expand as cities. Given that set of capital-city challenges, a formula that gives Cardiff and therefore the South Wales police rough equivalence to the policing of similar-sized cities that do not have those capital-city responsibilities places an additional burden. I ask the Minister to continue to reflect on that and find out whether he can develop the formula to help meet that challenge.
The police have to plan in the light of the riots that took place in a number of cities, including a number of parts of London, last August. The Select Committee produced a good report, which I hope will inform Government policy and assist the police in planning and responding to such matters, but I still have a concern. Although our approach is evidence-based, we still do not have the sort of in-depth report that Lord Denning produced in response to riots in the 1980s. That report was enormously important and influential. [Hon. Members: “Lord Scarman.”] I apologise. I am sure that I am referring to two equally distinguished Law Lords. It was Lord Scarman’s report, and I am grateful for that correction.
It is important to note a lesson coming out of the riots. There was an initial concern that social networks might have played a part in accelerating the activity and some of the damage. The question was asked whether something should be done to control or even close down the social networks for a period. That was answered by chief constables who appeared before us, including the chief constable of Manchester. They thought about it for about two minutes and then realised that what they had to do was engage and not try to control. There was very intelligent use of networks by some forces, again particularly in Manchester. Networks were used to warn that, if there were riots in certain places, the police would be there to deal with them, and to encourage people not to be on the streets where there were clear dangers.
Keith Vaz
My right hon. Friend has been consistent. He has felt all along that there ought to be a much more in-depth study into what happened during the riots. Darra Singh’s report is due out shortly—next week, I think—and does my right hon. Friend not agree that it would be appropriate to look at that first, along with what the Select Committee has done? The police are undertaking their own review. Once all that information is available, we can see whether anything further needs to be done.
Alun Michael
My concern is that the trail will have gone a little cool by the time that we arrive at that position, but my right hon. Friend is right that it would be best to get all that information. I ask the Minister, however, to accept that we should not rule out the need for an in-depth look at the causes by a body that could do more such work than the Select Committee. The report does credit to the Select Committee and to the Select Committee system, which is developing in positive ways.
I am not criticising, but I believe that we are still in danger of many individuals thinking that they know what caused the riots, when we do not. We know a lot about the riots. We know more as a result of the reports and we will know more as a result of further reports, but we will not have a single, comprehensive analysis that can inform us for the long term.
There is now agreement on the enormous importance of the policing protocol. I have some concern that the protocol has been written when the Home Office has every right to say what it expects from the new arrangements and when the Association of Chief Police Officers is in existence and able to play a significant part, but not when the commissioners are in place. When they are, there will be a need to revisit the protocol. I am sure that there will be many interesting discussions between different organisations and with the Minister. In a sense, what we have is a framework, and what will be needed for the longer term is more along the lines of conventions, agreements and building on experience.
In particular, I agree with the comments made about the professional body. It is important that it is not only a successor to ACPO. I note the agreement in the Government response to our report that the body ought to be inclusive from the outset, with a separate chiefs’ council, but what is not clear from the response is whether such a council would have any policy-making function for professional activities. Such a body ought to be separate from the professional body, and the professional body needs to be owned by all police. A new body is needed, starting with a fresh, clean sheet and a focus on the professionalism of the police, rather than its becoming confused with the variety of different functions currently held by ACPO.
I was one of those who argued for the establishment of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which continues to need our cross-party support. I urge the Minister to look again at the serious suggestion of extending its role and its flexibility to look at service improvement. Often, when people make a complaint, they do not want someone to be hung out to dry or suspended from work for six months or six years—it is sometimes for very extended periods. What they want to know is that their concerns will be addressed and that they will get a proper response. A lot is about how the police respond to customers and about quality control and quality management. Giving more flexibility to enable the IPCC to address such issues might help to avoid some of the expenses arising from complaints that fall into the sort of category to which I refer.
As a suggestion for the Minister to take elsewhere in the Government, it would be good for the police service if the Ministry of Justice looked again at the composition of the Sentencing Council, which is too focused on judges and legalities and not sufficiently focused on what works. What in sentencing makes a difference to the likelihood of reoffending? I am repeating something that I said as a member of the Justice Committee under a Labour Government, but I commend it because I still believe it to be right and true, now as then.
On collaboration and IT, I urge the Minister not to be overambitious in thinking of IT schemes as a quick solution or providing major savings. I have some experience in Government IT procurement, such as of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’s e-nabling DEFRA programme, which no one hears about because it was a success—that is why I am proud to refer to it—but there are many examples of central Government procurement, in particular by the Home Office, I am sad to say, that do not inspire confidence and were perhaps over-engineered and ended up not delivering as expected but being more expensive and late coming into place. Learning lessons and ensuring proper procurement are enormously important. The IT company might or might not be the right vehicle for delivery, but the Minister would need to take a keen interest in how a project develops—the question is about not so much the vehicle as the processes adopted and the expertise brought to bear to ensure that the right work is done, the right things procured and the objectives actually met.
I have touched on a limited number of aspects of the Select Committee’s work on the landscape of policing, as well as a number of other aspects of policing. An enormous amount of change is going on. I look forward to being a part of that process of change and ensuring that the initiative, which is now in law, results in us improving the quality of policing and the service given to the public, to ensure that we continue to drive down crime and reoffending and, in particular, to drive up public confidence in the police.
I certainly commend to the House the Select Committee’s report, and I very much hope that the Minister will continue to listen to our consensual and cross-party comments and suggestions. In Committee, during our discussions, we challenge each other, sometimes quite vigorously, but our findings—as with the Justice Committee recommendations on justice reinvestment—give food for thought, which Ministers and the Government as a whole would be wise to heed.
Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)
Thank you for calling me in the debate, Mr Brady, even if only to prove that one does not have to be a member of the Privy Council to be allowed to speak. It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Alun Michael)—perhaps one should expect a Welshman to look for the dragons in the landscape. I do not intend to describe every single aspect of that landscape, which has already been done well by the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), who went through a number of aspects of the report as well as some of the comments and suggestions that we, as a political party, had to make. Instead, I will pick out a valley here or a hill there, say a little more about those and perhaps suggest a few routes to take through the landscape.
The Government seek to undertake the most radical change to policing in 50 years, and there will be significant changes by the end of this Parliament. We will see dramatic structural changes, which will have a significant impact on the ground. What the public will care about is what will directly affect them. We should accept that the merger, abolition and creation of all sorts of agencies that members of the public have generally never heard about will not be what they care about, and that is not what the most interesting headlines will be about. The reforms, however, underpin delivery, so we have to get them right.
One of the key issues is the relationship between the democratic right of citizens to decide policies and how policing should happen—those policies might be developed in this place and by the Government—and the right of the police to use their expertise and knowledge to determine operational matters. Those two rights are distinct, and we need to ensure that we understand the difference between them. The police obviously need to be policed, but if our control over what they do is too strong and our grip is too tight, then they will lose that freedom of movement and expertise, their purpose will be undermined and policing in this country will simply dissolve.
I am concerned about how the system will operate. Currently, operational matters are dealt with by chief constables, but a huge amount is driven centrally by the Association of Chief Police Officers, which issues directives. A former Cambridgeshire chief constable has said, “I have an ACPO directive to do the following”. That may not be how the system should work in theory, but, as has been said, in theory, theory and practice are the same thing, but in practice they are not.
ACPO has a role in co-ordinating strategic responses and policing strategies, and it advises the Government on important operational matters. It uses that expertise, under the direction of Sir Hugh Orde, to direct police forces throughout the country and to provide policy advice. Generally, it does that well, but it has been in existence since 1948 and, like any Government-backed organisation with significant independence and vital responsibilities, it is liable to mission creep.
In 1997, ACPO became a private company limited by guarantee, so the body that sets the direction for policing in this country is a private company. There were technical reasons for that, but the message that it sends is worrying. Similarly, ACPO was not subject to freedom of information, although that has now been updated. It received increased responsibilities, such as control over the world’s largest per capita DNA database, which I am pleased is changing, control of undercover policing and control of the policing of political groups in the UK in addition to a growing number of income-generating activities, which stretch the definition of what one might call occupational guidance to breaking point.
There are a number of examples of how occupational guidance can be stretched. I have the great privilege of leading for the Liberal Democrats on transport policy, and when the Secretary of State for Transport announced a review of whether motorway speed limits should be raised from 70 mph to 80 mph, a key question for me was to work out the Government’s policy on how speed limits should be enforced. The current 70 mph speed limit is realistically enforced not at 70 mph but at 80 mph. The speed limit depends on enforcement, and 80 mph meaning 80 mph is a different policy from 80 mph meaning 100 mph. Those are two different policies, but who decides which is implemented? How would the Secretary of State decide? I have been told that the decision on what that policy means—the effective speed limit in this country—was taken not by the House or the Secretary of State for Transport, but by the ACPO lead officer in the area. That is not a case of ACPO deciding what equipment should be used, what the practicalities are or where police officers should be sent. A whole range of matters is for ACPO, and I would not expect the Department for Transport to decide them, but the effective speed limit applying on our motorways should be controlled democratically. Similarly, I found that ACPO guidance advises police forces not to enforce 20 mph speed limits in cities. ACPO should not determine that when the Government have made it clear that they support more 20 mph speed limits in appropriate areas.
Under the Labour Government, ACPO—a largely unaccountable body—was given responsibility for safeguarding some of our basic human freedoms. A private company had the role of deciding how tasers should be used when such weapons, if misused, can be deadly. It had similar control over DNA. ACPO sent me an astonishing letter when questions were being asked about how people could have DNA data deleted from the police national computer. I will happily provide a full copy of the letter to anyone who wants to read it. It is dated 2006, and it advised that the following procedures should be adopted:
“Upon receipt of a request for deletion of a PNC data entry the force”
should check that it can correctly identify the subject. That is absolutely fine. The letter goes on to say that
“an applicant may request the deletion of”
their
“record/DNA sample and profile/fingerprints”
and so forth when there are special circumstances. When that request is made, a check should be made on whether the data entry is correct. So far so good. It continues:
“In the first instance applicants should be sent a letter informing them that the samples and associated PNC record are lawfully held and their request for deletion/destruction is refused”.
There is nothing before that in the letter requiring anyone to find out whether the information is lawfully held, and to work out whether to refuse it. That is a glaring omission. The letter then says that the applicant may write back explaining why the data should be deleted, after which the chief constable should look at the matter and decide whether there is a case to answer.
That is not what we should expect, and I hope that it is not what ACPO intended, but the letter certainly went to several police authorities, including mine, as guidance on the rules. The guidance was that applications should be rejected, and if that was questioned, the police should find out whether the data were correctly held. That should be reformed.
To be fair, ACPO is in a difficult position, and I think that Sir Hugh Orde has accepted the need to change how it operates. It has a grip on national policing but, as Sir Hugh has said,
“it is not through any choice; it is because someone has to do it.”
It is partly the Government’s responsibility to ensure that the right people are fulfilling the right tasks, and that we do not say, “These are tasks that the Government will not do,” and force them on ACPO by accident. It is clear that we need to fix ACPO, and that the Government should have that role. I totally endorse the Government’s decision to create a new professional body to provide leadership and to develop the police as a profession. That is an extremely positive step, and I am delighted that the Government are taking it.
I also support the idea of a body where chief constables can meet to discuss important policing matters, to deal with operational issues and to advise the Government with their expertise. That is right and proper. Chief constables should have that role, and I support its facilitation. We can keep the best bits of ACPO, and get rid of the other bits. We must ensure that those organisations, whether councils or bodies, are accountable and transparent. Will the Minister comment on whether they will be private companies and whether they will be subject to freedom of information? They must not decide the law of the land, so how will the Government decide what is an operational matter, and how will the powers be outlined?
There is more we can do. During the Committee’s investigation, it became clear to me that we still do not have a good handle on evidence. This country has a long tradition of not using evidence-based policy, which applies to policing. It would be helpful to have an organisation that could provide reliable, independent and world-leading advice on policing. We need evidence-based policing, as well as more general evidence-based policy. I welcome the recent establishment of the British Society of Evidence Based Policing, and I hope that the Minister has had an opportunity to speak to it, and to hear what it has to say. One could come up with a number of interesting conclusions about policing styles and techniques that are driven by evidence. Britain leads the world. We train police officers in many parts of the country on executive leadership programmes, and the Minister, with the Chair of the Select Committee, kindly spoke at one of those events just before Christmas.
Much of that has been driven by an academic who is now based in Cambridge. Professor Larry Sherman is professor of criminology at that university, and he has a lot to say on this matter—I hope that the Government regularly listen to him. He recently gave the 2011 Benjamin Franklin medal lecture at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. He said many interesting things, and I commend his speech to anyone who might be interested. He argued for the creation of a British academy of policing, which would be
“a civil society organisation uniting police associations with university faculties of policing in a self-governing professional body”,
and could
“extend the global influence of British policing”,
and provide politicians attempting to navigate a new policing structure with rigorous academic material. I endorse that, because it would be excellent to have the academic knowledge from our universities linked up with policing.
We have one of the best policing traditions in the world, but we must be able to reform it and we must be able to proceed on cogent evidence. There is always inertia with such a force, and some of it is necessary, but it should be changed from an evidence-based position. We need that rigorous change, and I hope that the Government will continue to head down that route.
I want to discuss some other issues. We have discussed the police IT company and organisational matters. I would like the police to deal with that better and to become more innovative by using small-scale ideas. I shall give two examples, using companies that are, not coincidentally of course, in my constituency. I have mentioned them briefly in the House.
Sepura makes radio handsets that are used by the police and other emergency services. It is doing some excellent work with West Midlands police in using those radios to record information about stop and search—I will not discuss the wider aspects of stop and search—and to log the location, time and other details of an incident that has just happened. I understand that that is extremely successful, because it saves time for police officers and provides more accurate and more accessible results. I am sure that the Minister remembers writing a letter to Sepura congratulating it on that work. I hope that we will see it rolled out in other areas, and that there will be other innovations.
Real VNC does similar work, but sadly only with the police in the United States, where there are similar systems. Hand-held devices can be used to access the main police computer in a secure and controlled way, so that the police can be more active, and can record directly at the scene instead of having to wait. It goes without saying that all existing IT systems need to be made to work. My experience with Cambridgeshire constabulary, from an evening that I spent with the police, was that it took about an hour and a half to download a video from a head-mounted camera. We need to fix such problems as well as be more innovative.
My final plea is that we should not focus too much on organisations. What matters in policing concerns what happens on the ground and with individuals, and the ward of East Chesterton in Cambridge, which I used to represent as a county councillor, contained excellent examples of that—I apologise to hon. Members who have heard me make that point previously. I would love to claim credit for all the brilliant innovations in that ward, but they were not mine and were largely driven by PC Nick Percival—I still think of him as that, although he has now been promoted. He came along as our community beat manager and carried out a whole range of measures that made a difference in that relatively deprived part of Cambridge.
In his first year on the beat, Nick Percival managed to halve the amount of antisocial behaviour and crime that was reported, which was a huge achievement. If all our officers could manage such things—I realise that it is not that simple—this country would be a different place. He also managed to arrest fewer people than was usual for that area. Some saw that as a cause for criticism, but I saw it as a great triumph. Successful policing involves reducing the level of crime, and a greater number of arrests is not the aim.
I would like to highlight two things done by PC Nick Percival. First, he created a link with young people. That is important, especially when looking at the factors that led indirectly to the riots. We used to have a problem, particularly during school holidays, of young people getting bored, hanging around, causing trouble and smashing up bus shelters or engaging in other forms of small-scale antisocial behaviour. Nick Percival came up with the idea of a voucher scheme. Any young person in the ward who was seen playing well during the holidays by a police officer or a PCSO—we have had a great team of PCSOs over the years—was given a signed voucher by that officer. At the end of the holiday, everybody in the class at school that had the most vouchers received a £15 voucher for the local shopping centre. That was a cheap measure, and it transformed the area. Rather than having groups wandering around feeling bored, people would play and hope that a police officer would walk by. They desperately hoped that the cop would come over and find them, and they would say, “Hi PC Nick, good to see you.” It would be fantastic to see that sort of relationship in more areas.
Tom Brake
My hon. Friend provides me with the opportunity to flag up an exciting proposal that has been put to me by an organisation called Cricket for Change. It is keen to work with those responsible for the training of PCSOs, and embed within that training a unit aimed at providing PCSOs with the skills that they need to engage young people in sport through games such as street cricket and tag rugby.
Dr Huppert
The idea outlined by my right hon. Friend sounds excellent, and I hope that it does well. There is much we need to do to engage with young people because of the risk that some see themselves as somehow detached from existing organisations. When the Committee took part in visits after the riots, people described how distrust of the police already existed and said that from an early stage they and their families had grown up distrusting the police. We have to break that down, and any initiative that leads to normal friendly relationships between the police and the general public must be a good thing.
The other initiative was a system called e-cops that originally started in East Chesterton but is now used across Cambridgeshire. It is a regular newsletter sent by the police to anybody in that area and includes information such as which roads PCs have been walking down. It was transformational in East Chesterton because instead of people saying, “Why do I never see a police officer on my street?”—frankly I would be worried if I always saw a police officer on my street—there was a hugely increased level of satisfaction in what the police were doing at minimal extra cost. One of the great things about e-cops was that it was set up in an informal, chatty style; it was clearly written by a PC or PCSO writing as themselves. The initiative was successful and spread across Cambridgeshire. It is now used more as a communications device, and I think that the formality has weakened some of its effect. The idea, however, was for people to know their local police as people, not only as a force to complain or argue about.
Policing is ultimately for and about people, not just national organisations. I hope that if we implement a number of the necessary reforms, albeit with many of the caveats described by the Committee and colleagues who have spoken in the debate, we will remember to think about people and look at what we can do to make things better for them.
Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)
I, too, welcome your chairmanship this afternoon, Mr Brady. Right hon. and hon. Members have already stated that policing and police organisation is a complex issue. In essence, however, I agree with the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert), because the issue boils down to some simple truths, as is reflected in the contributions that have been made. Quite simply, how do we reduce crime and the fear of crime in an efficient and effective way that is accountable to the Peelian principle, already mentioned, that the public are the police and the police are the public? How do we ensure that those who work in that service on our behalf are treated fairly and with respect? I would like to explore those issues as they relate to the helpful report by the Committee and its Chair, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz).
First, however, I pay tribute to the work that our police officers, and the civilian staff who support them, do daily to tackle crime and keep our communities safe. The public value that work highly and want a continued, visible policing presence. How we ensure that and manage the landscape in which police forces work is an important issue. As the hon. Member for Cambridge said, the public are not concerned about the organisation, the machinations involved or even, on occasion, accountability. They are concerned about outcomes. The Committee’s report is an extremely thoughtful and comprehensive look at the new landscape of policing, and it raises important issues for our consideration.
[Mr Clive Betts in the Chair]
I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Betts. It is a pleasure to have you join us at the end of a fruitful discussion, and I hope that the Minister and I will summarise the debate in a way that gives you a feeling for it.
The Committee, under the able chairmanship of my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East, hunts in a pack; I know that from personal experience. It makes a great impact, and its ideas and suggestions are well considered and thought through. The report highlights a number of questions, some of which have effectively been answered by the passing of time since the report and the Government response were compiled. There are, however, still some important issues for consideration.
My right hon. Friend mentioned the phasing out of the National Policing Improvement Agency, and the impact and timing of that. Together with other members of the Committee, he looked at the position of post-Olympics counter-terrorism and the National Crime Agency, and he urged the Government to appoint the head of the National Crime Agency. The former chief constable of Warwickshire, Keith Bristow, has now taken that post. My right hon. Friend also raised the issue of the professional body for policing proposed by Peter Neyroud in his report, and we must discuss and flesh out some of those issues.
The importance of collaboration was also raised. The previous Government focused on that issue, and tried to allow police forces to obtain clear financial and operational benefits from collaboration. The Committee looked at IT, and I will return to that issue. The IT systems are not fit for purpose, and having 43 forces use different forms of IT is not a productive use of public money. That, too, is an issue that we need to address. The Winsor review of pay and conditions—a live issue even this week—is another subject to which I will return. There is also the work on bureaucracy undertaken by Jan Berry; that work is reflected on in the Committee’s report. There are many issues to consider, and we have already heard useful contributions to the debate.
I say with genuine regret that the pace of change, and the Minister’s drive and vision, which I accept is a genuine vision, still leaves the policing landscape muddled. That has impacted dramatically on the morale of police and police officers, which I believe is at an all-time low—my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick) touched on that issue. Police officers to whom I speak are not opposed to reform and recognise that changes need to be made. They object, however, to the manner in which the Government have gone about the work, and officers seem to have a feeling of conflict, rather than seeking to bring people together with the Government on some of the important changes.
When I was fortunate enough to hold the Minister’s position, some of the issues that I tried to drive through were similar to those that he is trying to drive through. In the Home Office, there were issues around efficiency, procurement and ways to improve pay, conditions and morale, which were—and are—important. However, I think that the handling of those issues has dampened morale and led police officers to feel that the Government are not on their side when it comes to fighting crime, reassuring the public, building confidence and providing a public service. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East mentioned, that has all been done against a background—I must refer to this—of massive cuts in public spending. Those cuts are well over and above what the previous Government planned, and are being made at a speed that we did not plan. They are front-loaded, which is not what the previous Government would have done. Cuts of 20% are being made. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Alun Michael) said, that is going too far, too fast.
Before the Minister says so, I will say that when I was in his position, we identified £1 billion in savings, or 12% of the policing budget, in areas such as procurement, overtime, reorganisation, collaboration and sharing, which are important. Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary, under Sir Denis O’Connor, confirmed that savings of 12% were achievable, but any more would affect the front line. I fear that not only the pace of change to the landscape, but the level of funding reduction, will affect the service and add to the morale issues, which are important to the members of the Committee who are here.
Mark Reckless
Is not one of the issues with morale that there is confusion between the 12% cut to total budgets and the 20% cut to the central grant? The front-loading that we hear about reflects, to a significant degree, a pay freeze in the early years. Yes, we must pay our police officers well, but if police officers are on average getting more than what 80% or 90% of people in their area do, as Blair Gibbs of Policy Exchange says in work published this week, we must take that into account and get a balance. We need the sort of reward that gives police pay for the right reasons, and not just because historically the work happens to have attracted an allowance.
Mr Hanson
I appreciate that. I know that the hon. Gentleman took an interest in policing matters as a member of the police authority in Kent before coming to this place. I hope that he recognises that we tried to address some issues, such as pay and reward, overtime and a whole range of allowances, in the policing White Paper produced in 2009; that paper fell, due to the small event of the general election in 2010. I recognise that those issues exist and must be tackled. I simply say to him and the Minister that the pace of the changes, coupled with massive cuts in public spending generally, over and above the 12%, has added to morale difficulties and will affect the front-line policing service.
Last year, a 7.5% cut was made in the policing budget. This year, an 8.7% cut will be made if the police grant settlement is approved when it comes before the House in the next few weeks. I repeat for the benefit of the House that the HMIC figures for the future—they are not our figures—show a loss of 16,000 officers and a potential loss of 16,000 civilian police staff. That makes a difference. Greater Manchester will lose 1,592 officers over the next three years, the Metropolitan police will lose 1,907 over the next few years and the West Midlands police will lose 1,250. Even Sussex will not be protected by the Minister, who represents it; it will lose 500 officers in that period. Those are not my figures; they were produced by the HMIC independently. That must have an impact on the policing landscape. Forces operating the A19 scheme, such as mine in north Wales, could lose some of their most experienced officers, ultimately replace them with less experienced officers, and then spend money on training to improve skills.
We need to consider the Select Committee report in the light of those cuts and concerns. Crime fell year on year for 14 or 15 years, not only under the Labour Government but during the last two or three years of the Major Government, but what is the record for the Minister’s first year in charge? I say this with deep regret: in the first full year for which we have figures, crime has risen. Burglary has increased by 10%, household theft by 13%, and theft from persons by 7%. Even during the recession under the last Government, crime fell; normally, crime rises during recessions. In the policing landscape, due to confusion, change and the speed of change, funding and all the other issues that we have discussed, crime is rising. The reduction in resources is being implemented unfairly and too fast, which is causing great difficulties.
The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Nick Herbert)
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. He always reminds me of the importance of measuring crime by the British crime survey. Will he tell me by how much crime has increased, according to the British crime survey, during this Government’s first year in office? He criticised the A19 procedure, under which police officers can be asked to retire after 30 years of service. Will he clarify whether he believes that that procedure should be scrapped?
Mr Hanson
The A19 procedure can be a useful resource; I am not against the general principle. The point that I am trying to make to the Minister, in a measured way, is that it is being used not because the principle is useful, but because forces such as mine in north Wales must save resources due to the budget cuts that he is imposing on them. However, that is background. This debate is about the landscape, not budget cuts, but I cannot divorce the budget cuts from the landscape, as I think the Minister will accept.
In addition, the inaugural election of the first swathe of police and crime commissioners will be held on a cold and possibly wet Thursday in November this year. I am not against elections on Thursdays in November; if they are good enough for the President of the United States, they might be good enough for police and crime commissioners.
Mr Hanson
I bow to the hon. Gentleman’s American knowledge. It may be that it is Thursday by the time I wake up after watching the elections and receive the results. That is an additional pressure. My right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth is participating in the election for police and crime commissioners. For clarity, the Minister knows that although we oppose the principle, we will contest the elections and will see what happens. I hope that whoever is elected, we will have a series of competent, effective individuals who manage big budgets and big chief officers with experience, and who deliver a measure of accountability to the public. I disagree with the approach; I think that we can find accountability in different ways, and we considered the ways of doing so in police authorities. Those are some of the key concerns that we face as regards the policing landscape.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East discussed the new National Crime Agency. I welcome the appointment of Keith Bristow, former chief constable of Warwickshire, as its head, and I welcome its broad direction. My hon. Friend the Member for Tynemouth (Mr Campbell) and I, when exercising our responsibility for the Serious Organised Crime Agency, considered some of the concerns and believed that changes needed to be made.
I welcome the broad direction of travel, but the Minister must answer certain points raised in the Select Committee report and in this debate. The design of the National Crime Agency is still—I will give him the benefit of the doubt—emerging. We need legislation for it, and the detail of how it will operate. When will that be forthcoming? Keith Bristow is now in post, and it will be 12 or 15 months before he will begin to have a real impact. What are the key elements of the design of the National Crime Agency? I understand that e-crime and fraud still sit outside the new agency. Are they likely to be brought in? What will be the clarity of approach? What will be—again, members of the Select Committee touched on this—the governance arrangements? What will be the status of the head of the National Crime Agency? How will the Minister, Ministers or the Home Secretary have an impact on the day-to-day operational issues for the agency? What objectives will they set? What budget will they provide? Those are big vacuums regarding an issue that is of importance to me and my constituents, and of importance to how we effectively fight crime, nationally and internationally, at a time when the terrorist threat is significant.
Keith Vaz
The points that my right hon. Friend raises are similar to those raised by the Select Committee, and I welcome what he says about the Opposition supporting the general thrust of having an NCA and the appointment of Mr Bristow as its head. Our concern—and, it seems, my right hon. Friend’s concern—is that the timetable may be too short; too many gaps in the landscape may not have been filled in before the agency is asked to do its work. The issue is not the principle, but the implementation.
Mr Hanson
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his intervention. I wish the Minister well on these issues; I know how difficult they are. There are real issues of international crime, ranging from drugs to terrorism to people trafficking. There are real issues of inter-regional crime, which the crime agency can deal with. There are issues of e-fraud, too. There are things that I have not thought of that, in four years’ time, will be major crime issues and will have an impact on my constituents and the Minister’s constituents. I wish Keith Bristow well, in the sense that I hope that the Minister will provide clarity on the objectives and the mission, give an indication of the budget and the areas of responsibility, bring forward the legislative framework and give an indication of the outcomes and the governance of the agency. That would be very helpful.
I say that because at the same time that the Minister established the National Crime Agency, he gave a firm indication of notice to the National Policing Improvement Agency, which did a very good job in some areas, although—as with all of us—in other areas, there was the potential for criticism. It is one thing to have a bonfire of the quangos and to remove the NPIA from the policing landscape, but that announcement was made in July 2010. Fourteen months on, what progress is being made on the definition of the transfer and on the protection of the public as a whole? The NPIA is due to vanish in December 2012. Perhaps it is me, but I am still unsure where the home is for police training, leadership development, forensics, the police national computer and the DNA database. As I said, that might be me. I will give the Minister credit. I do not have the information flow that he has. Perhaps that information has been provided, but I would like to know from him what is happening on those points. I say that because the uncertainty means that staff are leaving. Staff will not stay on the ship when they are not sure where the ship is going.
Whatever its difficulties and challenges, the NPIA did bring together, for the first time, national support for change in people, processes and technology. It did deliver some technology and change programmes; it helped with the development of neighbourhood policing, for example. I am not sure where that strategic view is for the future. The NPIA is due to go in December 2012. Police and crime commissioners will be elected by their local communities, but anyone could be elected. We do not know what the individual qualities will be of each person elected. Where is the strategic examination for the future?
I worry about a changed landscape in which new police and crime commissioners are coming in, finding their feet and getting up and running at a time when crime is not just finding its feet, when the NPIA is exiting the stage, when the functions have not necessarily been finalised, and when the crime agency is not yet up and running. I worry that crime and criminals will continue to find ways to seep through the gaps. We need to be ever vigilant; criminals will be. I worry about the speed at which things are happening and the lack of clarity about the journey’s end.
We also have a concern about information and communications technology. Again, I can be helpful: the Home Secretary, on 15 December, confirmed that
“the Government…intend to establish an information and communications technology…company. The company will be responsible for the procurement, implementation and management of complex contracts for information technology”.—[Official Report, 15 December 2011; Vol. 537, c. 126WS.]
Indeed, I saw a tweet—that new modern technology—only two hours ago from the chief of the NPIA, who says that he is in a hot room in London talking about ICT as we speak.
Mr Hanson
I think that the information he gives—“I am developing a computer system to close you down, and to help support policing”—is not necessarily operationally significant. The point that I am making to the Minister is that we are in January 2012, and he has said that the elections for police and crime commissioners will be in November 2012. He wants police authorities to be signed up to the integrated computer technology, and he wants the police and crime commissioners to be signed up to it in due course, yet months after the initial announcement, we are still at the stage of the Government saying, “We intend to establish a company.”
Let me ask the Minister this: how many police authorities have signed up to that company? Does he intend to force collaboration with the Government if they do not sign up to it? What does he anticipate the company doing differently in the next 12 months? What will be the two-to-three-year plan for the company? To whom is the company accountable? When the company is formed, what happens if someone stands for election as a police and crime commissioner on a platform of wanting an independent police computer system for a police authority, and is elected? Will the Minister compel them to take part?
We need to explore those issues as part of the ongoing policing landscape. I just wonder about the pace and scale of the changes. I wish the Minister good luck in establishing the computer system, but will he please help us to give him that good luck by giving us answers? Will he give us the when, where, why, and how, and say who has signed up, what will happen and what will be the pace of the change?
With the NPIA going, I wonder who will be the value-for-money arbiter. Who will undertake the role of establishing the overall scheme of policing for the future?
Let me deal with the Winsor proposals, because the police arbitration panel has this week produced its report. Traditionally, police arbitration panels have always been difficult places for Policing Ministers to go. I will not disguise the fact that I, my predecessors and others have had occasion to engage in a hand-to-hand way with police arbitration panels. That is not a national secret. However, I would welcome the Minister’s saying today when he intends to respond to the current police arbitration panel report. Given the letter that the general secretary and the chairman of the Police Federation sent to the Home Secretary on 10 January saying that they are willing to abide by the arbitration panel’s decision, even though it causes them some difficulty, as the Minister knows, I would particularly welcome a response from him.
Without giving us too much information today—although if the Minister is able to give us information, that would be great—is he minded to let us know whether he intends to abide by the police arbitration panel decision? More importantly, if he does not abide by it, will he give the House of Commons, as he promised before the election, an opportunity to debate and, potentially, vote on that decision? I would hate him to break an election promise. That was what the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) did when he promised 3,000 extra police officers and then voted to reduce the number by 16,000 over the next three years. I would love the Minister to stick with his election promise and accept the police arbitration panel decision—or, if he does not, allow a vote in the House of Commons.
I would like further information on how the Minister will monitor the police and crime commissioners in the new landscape. In a written ministerial statement from just before Christmas on the National Policing Improvement Agency, he said that it currently advises on value for money, and that it will continue to do so until November 2012. Is it his view that after that date it will be part of the policing landscape for police and crime commissioners to be solely accountable for value-for-money issues relating to policing in their area? They will be accountable for that, but I would like to know who will monitor that. Who will monitor their performance, and will there be targets or guidance from the Home Office? In the written ministerial statement, he said that
“police and crime commissioners will drive value for money in the police service with further support where necessary.”
What does he mean? Is he going to set the ship of state sailing, or will he have some central examination of the issue?
Finally, I have two responses on the issues of policing. The first relates to leadership. I echo what the hon. Member for Cambridge said in his speech about the police constable, whose name I have forgotten at the moment. What struck me about the hon. Gentleman’s case study is that it is about leadership. In April, I will have been a Member of Parliament for my area for 20 years, as will you, Mr Betts. In my 20 years, I have had 14 or 15 inspectors in my area. Most have passed through like ships in the night, on the way to either retirement or promotion. The ones who have been very good are those who have really shown leadership. The performance of the police on the ground—the police constable example makes that explicit—are the people who have the best leadership skills and who show vision, commitment and energy and therefore deliver an energising impact. I welcome the focus on leadership that has been discussed by Peter Neyroud and others in relation to improving the skills and qualifications of police officers, because it is very good to energise the police in that way. I ask the Minister how that will be done at a national level. There are real issues that we should examine, so that we can have a flavour of how that will be done in future.
I had a last point, which I will make when I find the right piece of paper—it appears to have slipped my notice at the moment. To conclude, we cannot consider the changes to the policing landscape without looking at their financial implications. The speed and pace of changes introduced by the Minister is, in my view, damaging to police morale. That is the end-point of this experiment—I use the word advisedly—in changes to policing that the Minister is making. My right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East and his Select Committee have reflected concerns about the demise of the NPIA, the approach of the new National Crime Agency and the damage-to-morale issues.
Helpfully, I have recalled my final point, just before I finished. It relates to the wind-down of the National Policing Improvement Agency, and to the new policing professional body. In principle, that is a good thing, because it relates to the leadership point that I mentioned. Raising standards, skills and investment in policing, and looking at professional standards and at how the Association of Chief Police Officers interfaces with the rest of the policing world is important. I would welcome clarification from the Minister on whether Police Federation members are signed up to the new professional body, and on how he will bring those important participants with him on his journey to his final nirvana. What consultation has he or the Secretary of State had with them to date on that issue? If we are to achieve an effective police force, we need not only the confidence of the public and to ensure that criminals are borne down on, but to take the staff who work in that service with us.
My contention is that although we share some views with the Minister, and our desired outcomes are probably the same—reduced crime, increased confidence, better efficiency and valuing the staff in the service—the Minister and I have a different approach. The Select Committee has raised some concerns that the Opposition share, and I look forward to hearing the Minister answer not only my questions but those asked by the Members gathered here.
The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Nick Herbert)
I welcome the report of the Home Affairs Committee on the “New Landscape of Policing”, to which the Government have responded, as being a very considered and thoughtful contribution to the changing landscape of policing and the Government’s reforms. I also welcome the debate that the Chairman of the Select Committee has introduced today and the opportunity that it has given for the members of the Select Committee, the official Opposition and, indeed, the Government to consider, in a very constructive manner, the challenges that currently face British policing.
Precisely because right hon. and hon. Members have referred to the pace of change of the reforms and because those reforms are significant, as the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) said, it is important for me to remind them of the reasons why the Government embarked on such a reform programme. It is not, as the right hon. Gentleman suggested, because the Government wish to make their mark, because they are a new Government or because change for change’s sake is a good thing. None of those is an adequate reason to embark on a reform agenda of such a scale.
The reason for the reforms is that policing faces significant challenges, which have changed—some have changed recently and significantly—and we should ensure that British policing is equipped to change with them. Clearly, crime and the need to fight it are ongoing challenges, but new challenges are emerging in relation to new forms of crime. There is ongoing concern about certain forms of crime, not least serious and organised crime—hon. Members have mentioned cybercrime—and there is considerable public concern about antisocial behaviour, much of which is criminality that we must ensure the police can deal with.
Therefore, there is a challenge of dealing with a high volume of crime locally and ensuring that policing is equipped to deal with national problems and national threats. As that is a twin challenge, we have had to look again at the structure of British policing. The Government are not the only ones who have taken that view. It is also the view of policing professionals that the structure of British policing needs to adapt to deal with those challenges. However, there are differing visions of what those new structures should be, and I will return to that point later.
The second new challenge is an obvious one—it was referred to by the shadow Policing Minister, the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson)—and it is the funding situation. It is a fact that funding for policing is being reduced during the four-year period of the spending review, because the Government have to deal with the deficit. The right hon. Gentleman admitted that funding would have been reduced by his party if it had remained in power. Therefore, under any Government, the police would have to deal with significant reductions in funding. There is a debate about what the level of those reductions should be, but there is no doubt now that, under any Government, the police would have to deal with a very significant reduction in funding. At the end of a period of considerable expansion, during which policing resources have risen year on year and police numbers have risen accordingly, that reduction in funding is obviously a very significant change that the police have to deal with.
The third challenge, or issue, had been neglected, at least in part, for too long, although it was referred to by some Members during the debate, and it is the role of the public in partnership with the police to help fight crime. Indeed, what exactly is the relationship between the police and the public? That relationship can be tested and has sometimes come into focus when we have experienced or debated certain events in policing, whether they are highly controversial police operations—for instance, public order policing operations—or events in relation to the ongoing discussion about community policing and the importance of a strong connection between the police and the public, which is necessary to ensure that there is community policing that commands public confidence. As the right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Alun Michael) reminded us, Peel—the founder of modern policing—bequeathed to us the important principle that the police are the public and the public are the police. The legitimacy of British policing is conferred by policing by consent and by public confidence in the great public service that is the police.
The Government did not believe that it would be possible for policing to rise to any of the challenges that I have mentioned—maintaining both public confidence in the police and a strong link between the police and the public, dealing with declining policing budgets, ensuring a continuing fight against crime and dealing with the new challenges in fighting crime—with the existing structures, nor with the means by which the previous Government had sought to drive up standards. I say that in a non-partisan manner, but essentially those means were top-down targeting and direction that sought to lever up standards by central control.
With that approach came a proliferation of bureaucracy and a level of direction that had not been experienced in policing before. The policing pledge is a very good example. It was a highly prescriptive central pledge that told police forces exactly how they should behave—for example, even how they should answer telephone calls. This Government have had a different approach to the delivery of public services, which is to seek to decentralise and reduce—or even eliminate—all that top-down central direction. Instead, we have tried to ensure that there is greater accountability, as a means of holding public services to account and making them responsible for the outcomes that they are required to deliver.
I entirely reject the suggestion made again today by the shadow Policing Minister that there is a lack of coherence—indeed, that there is a muddle—in the agenda that the Government have set out in relation to police reform. I would argue strongly that our approach is an entirely coherent one that enables the police to meet today’s challenges. I say that because, as I have argued before, there has been a paradox in policing in the last few years. That paradox is that central Government interfered far too much in local policing matters and were far too directive where they should not have been, while they were not always strong enough on the national policing matters that required central Government to exert a stronger view or influence.
We have sought to turn that paradox on its head and to restore local accountability, professional freedom and professional discretion where it is proper to do so, thus freeing up the police to be the crime fighters that they want to be and ensuring greater local accountability, while refocusing the role of the centre and the Home Office on those matters that they should be focused on, particularly national threats, to ensure that we have a strong policing response not only to the terrorist threat but to other threats—for example, serious and organised crime.
The alternative vision that has been set out by some, but not all, in policing was experimented with by the previous Government, and it is to create regional police forces as a means of addressing the new challenges that we face. That vision did not find favour in the country or in the House, and in the end the last Government decided not to proceed with it. I do not believe that it is a deliverable vision. In the absence of the creation of regional forces, if we say that we want to retain 43 individual forces—43 or thereabouts—we must then answer this question: how do we ensure that we have a structure that enables those 43 forces in England and Wales to be accountable to their local communities, where the chief constable is responsible for the totality of policing and those who are holding the chief constables to account hold them to account for the totality of policing, but that ensures that those 43 forces co-operate and collaborate, so that they can work efficiently, driving out unnecessary cost, and deal with serious and organised crime and those threats that cross force boundaries?
In my view, it is absolutely coherent—indeed, it is entirely the right approach—to say that we should on the one hand enhance local accountability through the election of police and crime commissioners, while on the other hand introducing a new national crime agency to strengthen the fight against serious and organised crime, to strengthen our borders and to deal with the new crime threats. Moreover, that new agency will not only work with police forces but have a significant new role in its relationship with those forces, as expressed through a new strategic policing requirement.
Alun Michael
The Minister is reflecting the tension that exists between ensuring that strategic national and regional issues are dealt with and ensuring that there is proper local accountability. Obviously, the Government have chosen the election of police and crime commissioners as their instrument to ensure local accountability. However, does he accept that part of the last Government’s approach—I suspect that it is something that he might agree with—was to strengthen the element of local partnership by requiring the police, down at local commander level, to work with the local authorities in their area, by putting a responsibility on local authorities and other agencies to engage in that partnership approach and by ensuring a connection between police interpretation and the public view of crime that needed to be dealt with? In particular, at that local level, the police should be judged on their success in reducing crime and disorder.
Nick Herbert
I was going to come to that, but I am very happy to respond to the right hon. Gentleman and to repeat what I have said to him, to which he has kindly referred. The development of partnerships between the police and local authorities and, indeed, other partners was an important step forward, and he played a particularly central role in ensuring that that was delivered under the previous Government. I think that it is widely accepted that such partnerships can be effective in reducing crime, and the Government wish to see them strengthened and continued, in spite of diminishing resource.
Up and down the country, I have seen action-oriented partnerships with a purpose that are not bureaucratic and that can deliver the kinds of results that the right hon. Gentleman was discussing. Others are more bureaucratic, and they need to adapt to the new world in which resources are at a premium and to ensure that their focus is very action-oriented, but we wish the partnerships to continue. We also wish to ensure that the police and crime commissioners are part of the arrangements and do not work against them, and we have conferred duties on all sides to ensure that. I am happy to endorse the important principle of partnership.
We need action locally and nationally to ensure that policing is structured such that it can meet the demands both of the volume of crime and of the population, in relation to the day-to-day antisocial behaviour and crime issues affecting it. However, we must also ensure that policing is equipped to deal with more serious issues, which, in the end, also affect people’s everyday lives. Drugs issues, for example, are linked to serious and organised criminality. A new strategic policing requirement will ensure for the first time that police forces and the newly elected police and crime commissioners are equipped to deal with those national threats. The creation of the National Crime Agency, along with the Organised Crime Co-ordination Centre in an intelligence-led approach and the introduction of police and crime commissioners is a strong, coherent and powerful response to the challenges that I have described.
The Chairman of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East, reflected on the Government’s ambition to declutter the policing landscape, and I welcome the fact that he noted that that would not necessarily relate to the number of bodies but could involve a more logical ordering of the existing national policing bodies. I of course believe that the phasing out of the National Policing Improvement Agency was the right decision, and I have said so to the Select Committee. There were accountability issues, in spite of the many good things that the agency did and does—I certainly join others in paying tribute to its functions, and I have noted the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert). Wishing to change the accountability arrangements for the functions, however, to find a better home for them, is not the same as saying that the Government do not value them. The agency clearly does important things, but it has become a kind of Christmas tree quango, with many policing functions loaded on to it and ownership and responsibility for what it was doing neither clearly with the Government nor with the police service.
We think that it is both coherent and right to seek greater accountability for the agency’s two principal functions. Of course, it is responsible for many other things. On the one hand there is IT and the development of improved information and communications technology for policing, which is so important, and has been referred to, and on the other is the training and development function, which is equally important to policing’s human resources. Separating those functions by creating a police-owned and led ICT company, for which the police service will accept responsibility, is the right solution to ensure better IT and a more coherent approach. These issues have bedevilled policing for too many years, and since we are having a sensible debate, we must reflect on why, even after more than a decade of rapidly rising resource for policing, we have still ended up with police IT systems that, frankly, are not good enough. They are disjointed, require multiple keyed entry by police officers and add to the bureaucratic burden.
Mr Hanson
I want to be helpful. Will the Minister address the question I asked: how many police authorities have signed up to or bought into the principle of a national IT company, and what is the scope for police commissioners, when elected, to withdraw from such a company?
Nick Herbert
We made the announcements about the destination of the functions and the establishment of a police-led ICT company in December, and we will make further announcements in due course. The principle, however, is clear: we wish police forces to buy into this—to use the right hon. Gentleman’s words—and we expect them to do so, because it is the means by which they can secure better IT in the future.
Nick Herbert
As I have said before, I might not have been in the House of Commons for as long as the right hon. Gentleman, but I have learned not to answer hypothetical questions, and I do not intend to answer that one. We expect that chief constables and police authorities, and in succession to them police and crime commissioners, will be incentivised and want to be part of this new arrangement for delivering IT, because it will ensure a better service for them. It is the right approach to securing better ICT in the future.
On the other side, we have the training and development function, and I am pleased that the Chair of the Select Committee and, I think, Members on both sides of the House have welcomed the idea of the creation of a professional body for policing. I am immensely encouraged that the approach has captured the enthusiasm of police leaders.
In answer to the question about the involvement of the Police Federation, it is true that the federation expressed concern about the Neyroud report, which we had commissioned and which first proposed a body of some kind, partly because it stated that effectively the Association of Chief Police Officers would be the body’s heart and soul—I think that that was the expression used. The federation expressed the concern, among others, that it would not, therefore, be a body for the rank and file.
Nick Herbert
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend; that was indeed the expression.
We have made it clear that we wish to reconceive the idea of a professional body for policing and to ensure that it is inclusive. That is one of the important principles that I have set out, and I have a working party looking at how we would set up such a body. I am very pleased that in spite of the continued reservations of the Police Federation, which I acknowledge because I do not wish to mislead Members, the federation’s chairman has been attending the working party meetings. The Police Superintendents Association is also represented, as are the ACPO representatives and UNISON, and we now have representation from the police and crime commissioners’ side as well. I am also seeking some independent advice for the working party.
Alun Michael
Unless I missed it, I do not think that the Minister referred to the Police Superintendents Association, and in my experience its contribution, at that level of senior but local management, can often provide a crucial element in such discussions. Is the association included?
Nick Herbert
I agree with the right hon. Gentleman about the value of the advice of the Police Superintendents Association. I certainly share his view and have mentioned that the association is represented, which is important. I want to make it clear that we envisage that this will be an inclusive body. It is important that we raise our sights and consider the great advantage of the creation of a professional body that will have responsibility for standards, professional development and training. That is something that I think has been absent from the policing world. It is surprising that policing does not have such a body, which will be immensely positive.
I will explain briefly why this is so important. The development of professionalism in policing—the acquisition of the right skills—is an important part of our agenda to ensure that police officers are equipped to deal with modern challenges without the kind of bureaucratic approach that we have seen in the past. If we are to develop in policing an agenda of trusting professionals and the extension of professional discretion, we must ensure alongside that that police officers are trained, equipped and incentivised in a way that reflects the exercise of professional judgment, skills and discretion that commands public confidence and trust.
Mark Reckless
The Minister has said that he has secured representation from the police and crime commissioners, but I am puzzled because they will not be elected until November. In his report, Mr Neyroud suggests that there could be ministerial representation on the body in charge of the professional body, but he is not so keen on the elected commissioners, whom he wants to see on a consultative panel on the side. Has that been reviewed? Will the Minister clarify his remarks?
Nick Herbert
I noticed my hon. Friend’s puzzlement, so I should have offered clarification. What I meant is that Kit Malthouse, the deputy Mayor of London who has responsibility for policing in London, now attends the working party that I have set up, as does the chair of the Association of Police Authorities, Mark Burns-Williamson, who is also the chair of West Yorkshire police authority. That side of the tripartite is now represented, as are the policing professionals, which is important. Moreover, on Monday the arrangements will change so that, effectively, the first police and crime commissioner will be created in London. That is what I meant.
Alun Michael
With the greatest respect to the Minister—I do not want to introduce a note of disharmony—to describe the deputy Mayor of London as equivalent to a police and crime commissioner is, frankly, ridiculous. The whole point of the principle of police and crime commissioners, as the Minister has spelled out, is that they should be elected and accountable for policing issues to the electorate of the police force area. My personal view is that the exclusion of the Metropolitan police and the City of London police demonstrates a lack of confidence on the Government’s part in the posts that they are establishing. I do not object to their engagement in what will be such an important function, but they really do not have the authority to be there as precursors of the police and crime commissioners. The engagement of the APA’s representative is sensible in terms of continuity, but there is still a gap.
Nick Herbert
I disagree with the right hon. Gentleman. I know that he is keen to become a police and crime commissioner—I welcome that—but he must not get ahead of himself. It is sensible to ensure, as we did in the negotiations on the protocol, that there is representation from those nominated by existing police authorities and from the deputy mayor, because he has responsibility for holding to account a quarter of policing in England and Wales. As I have said, on Monday the Mayor will become the police and crime commissioner, in law, for London, so it is entirely appropriate to have that representation on the working party. I emphasise that it is a working party.
Nick Herbert
I am surprised that the right hon. Gentleman is shaking his head. It makes sense to have those two individuals on the working party, given the acceleration of this process in London ahead of the election of police and crime commissioners, the date of which—this November—will, as sure as night follows day, be firmly noted in the right hon. Gentleman’s diary.
Alun Michael
As I have said, it makes sense for representatives of the police authorities to be involved in the discussion, because they have experience, which helps continuity. However, although the situation in London may end up in law via the attachment of the words “police and crime commissioner” to an individual’s name, that is not what the Minister is putting in place everywhere else in England and Wales, namely the direct election of somebody to be responsible for policing in a police force area. The situation in London is inevitably muddled, and the Mayor is also involved in decisions on a number of issues that are relevant to police in the rest of England and Wales. That may be reviewed in a couple of years’ time, but at the moment such decisions go well beyond the Metropolitan police area. The situation is not as clear as the Minister suggests.
Nick Herbert
Yes, it is. I am completely bemused by the right hon. Gentleman’s intervention. The Mayor has responsibility in London. That will become an enhanced responsibility on Monday, because the Metropolitan Police Authority will be abolished and the Mayor will take full responsibility for policing and will become the police and crime commissioner for London—in law. The first police and crime commissioner will be created.
Nick Herbert
In law, on Monday. It is up to the Mayor whether he wishes to delegate that function. That power of delegation was, of course, established by the previous Government, so I am sure that there will be no criticism of it whatsoever. It makes sense for us to ensure that the deputy Mayor of London, as the person responsible, at present, for holding to account the country’s biggest police force and a quarter of all police officers, takes part in such discussions, because he can give voice to those who hold, and who will hold, police forces to account.
Mark Reckless
When I was a member of the Kent police authority, I was appointed by Medway council, which is an elected body. Surely that provides an analogy with Mr Malthouse, who has been appointed by the elected Mayor. The purpose of this reform is to increase democratic accountability. Although I welcome what is happening in London, it is different from elsewhere. I am not sure that Members are convinced by the idea that someone who is merely appointed by someone who is elected, or who is an independent member of a police authority, can somehow represent, in advance, elected commissioners. To the extent that there is to be an elective impact, whether with the protocol or other developments, that should come from hon. Members, who are elected, and we ask the Minister to consider our views, rather than look to people who are appointed by others.
Nick Herbert
I do not consider that to be an alternative. I pay attention to all views expressed on the issues, but I certainly have no intention of placing a Member of Parliament on a working party for the development of the professional body. The working party consists of policing professionals and representatives of policing organisations. I have sought to add, in a way that is entirely sensible, those who hold police forces to account. Of course, we will continue to discuss with the Committee and with hon. Members the development of a policing professional body, which is an entirely sensible thing.
That brings me on to the second part of my speech. The first phase of the police reform agenda was about structures and that work will continue as we set up the National Crime Agency.
Keith Vaz
I am sorry to take the Minister back to an earlier point in his interesting speech, but a number of us who were involved in the Committee report have raised the issue of where the functions of the NPIA will go, and he has said that he will announce the destination of the rest of those functions shortly. Can he be more specific than that? Some of us have been around for a long time and know that, when Ministers say that something will be announced in spring, summer or winter, the issue tends to go on beyond the season mentioned. Can we have a definitive date—perhaps the end of February or January—or something more specific?
Nick Herbert
I am sorry, but I will not be able to give the right hon. Gentleman a definitive date. I can give him three words in due course, and we will announce the destination of those functions. It is important to consider and consult on these matters carefully, and that is the approach we have sought to take.
An issue relating to the next phase of the police reform agenda that is so important and relevant to the discussion we were having on the professional body is that of people. Of course, people—police officers and staff—are the greatest asset of any police force. It is those people who enable us to fight crime, and it is important that we ensure that they are remunerated appropriately. We also need to ensure that they are motivated and are working in employment conditions and structures that reflect the demands of today’s age, that are up to date and that ensure that resources can be directed to the front line.
It is in that regard that we established a pay and conditions review led by the independent rail regulator, Tom Winsor. He reported in part one of that review and made proposals for changing pay and conditions. The Government accepted the principles that he set out. Those proposals were remitted to the Police Negotiating Board, which failed to reach agreement, so they therefore went for arbitration. As the right hon. Member for Delyn has pointed out, the Police Arbitration Tribunal has this week made recommendations in relation to the Winsor proposals. He will know that I cannot be drawn into giving him any indication of the Government’s response to those proposals, other than to say that the Home Secretary will consider them very carefully in line with her statutory duties.
Police officers do an immensely important job. They often do difficult and dangerous work, they are unable to strike and it is important that the country values them. They are relatively well-paid, and it is important that they should continue to be so and that they continue to be valued. I appreciate that this is a difficult time for those who work in the police service, given that there are budgetary reductions, to which I will come shortly, and given that police officers are being asked to accept a two-year pay freeze and changes to their pension, which is also true for other public services. I therefore appreciate the issues about morale that were raised by hon. Members from all parties. However, it is important that the Government take action to deal with the deficit and ensure police forces are equipped to deal with challenges and that resources are directed appropriately.
Nick Herbert
I am afraid that I cannot satisfy the right hon. Gentleman on either count. That is the second hypothetical matter he has raised this evening. As I have said, we will consider the recommendations of the Police Arbitration Tribunal very carefully, and it is absolutely right that we should do so.
I join right hon. and hon. Members in paying tribute to police officers and, indeed, staff. The Chair of the Select Committee referred to the reception that was held in No. 10 Downing street yesterday by the Prime Minister to mark the contribution of those who helped to deal with the disorder last summer—not only police officers, but police staff and those who worked in the other emergency services and local government. The Prime Minister spoke fulsomely about the importance of what they and their colleagues had done in the summer.
I myself was reminded of what police officers do for us by the dreadful stabbings of three officers that took place in the Metropolitan police area before Christmas. Those young officers bore serious injuries. We should always remember what an important job the police do for the country. It is also important that the Government restate to the police service that we are having to take difficult decisions in common with those that affect other public services. None of that should allow the police service to believe that we do not value police officers or want to do the best for the police service in the future. I certainly wish to do the best for the service in the future, and for those who work in it.
I will pick up one or two specific points before I conclude. My right hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) mentioned the budget for police and crime panels and questioned how it is derived. It is important to restate that police and crime panels are not ongoing police authorities with the responsibilities of police authorities. Those responsibilities will be taken by police and crime commissioners. Police and crime panels have an important scrutiny role in providing a check and balance that is carefully defined in the legislation that we debated. Their role should not be expanded, and they do not need anything like the kind of resource that police authorities have. The limited funding that has been provided to panels will enable them to do their scrutiny job. My hon. Friend the Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless), who intervened, made that point very effectively.
I agree with the comments made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington about the police professional body and the importance of dealing with diversity issues. That is a very good example of the kind of thing we could expect a police professional body to take up. It is difficult to see where responsibility for those issues lies at the moment. One of the things a professional body could be responsible for is ensuring that we can make greater progress in recruiting a diversity of police officers.
My right hon. Friend spoke about the importance of collaboration with local authorities, to which I referred in my response to the right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth. I endorse that. As my hon. Friend noted, I visited Sutton, where there is a very good example of police force and local authority co-operation. We would like to see more of that, but we are not going to prescribe it. We seek to enable and encourage such an approach, but we do not want to have a directive or master plan that tells police forces how they should go about it.
The right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth launched his campaign to be police and crime commissioner for south Wales. I wish him the very best of luck in that regard and genuinely welcome his candidacy. He raised again the issue of the status of Cardiff as the capital of Wales and made a bid for the force receiving some kind of grant in recognition of that in the same way that the Metropolitan police receives a capital city grant. He has raised that issue with me before, and my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Glamorgan (Alun Cairns) has also raised it with me separately. In response to my hon. Friend, I asked the chief constable to supply me with the financial information that would make the case for such a grant. Clearly, resources are tight. It is a difficult request, because it would require removing grant from those who would otherwise be receiving it. These are the decisions that Ministers have to take, but I have undertaken to consider the issue in a sensible manner—I am happy to reassure him about that.
My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge, whom I welcome to this debate of Privy Counsellors, spoke about the importance of evidence-based policy in policing, as did my right hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington. I strongly agree with both of them on this matter. I welcome the ideas set out by Professor Sherman, whom I would like to meet again shortly to discuss these matters. I do not know whether my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge can organise a convivial dinner in Cambridge, but I would be very happy to attend.
Dr Huppert
I am not sure that I have ever had a Minister make a request for such a meeting before—not that way around. I would be delighted to host him and Professor Sherman. I am sure that we can arrange that.
Nick Herbert
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend. That is a deal. I would be delighted to come up to the town of my birth and discuss these issues with Professor Sherman, because they are important. The absence of greater academic co-ordination and interest in the evidence for good policing practice is something that we should collectively seek to try and redress.
Nick Herbert
That is a very good question to which I do not have an immediate or off-the-cuff answer. I am loth to suggest the creation of some kind of Government-sponsored body for obvious reasons—we are seeking to reduce the number of quangos and declutter the policing landscape—but that is not to say that there is not a value in looking at who might be responsible for, or encouraging in academia, this kind of work. I am not necessarily endorsing Professor Sherman’s call for some kind of British institute as an additional policing body, but it is worth having the discussion about where this kind of evidence-led approach could be developed. It could be that there are aspects that can be led by the professional body. Professor Sherman thought otherwise—he thought that it would be for others—but these two things might not be mutually exclusive.
May I turn—briefly, because I am aware of the time moving on and I apologise for that—to some of the remarks made by the right hon. Member for Delyn? I have sought to deal with some of them in relation to what I consider to be the coherence of the Government’s policing reforms and the issue of the morale of police officers. I cannot leave unremarked his point about police numbers and the cuts in policing. Of course, the kinds of reduction in police funding that the previous Government have admitted that they were considering —cuts of £1 billion a year in police funding—would inevitably have resulted in fewer people working in policing. It is impossible to see how they could have made savings year-on-year without a smaller work force. Therefore, it is important that those in policing should understand that reductions in manpower were going to happen under any Government. Of course, the issue is the extent to which that has to happen, but I point out to the right hon. Gentleman that Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary’s report on what has happened so far in those reductions in funding shows just a 2% reduction in officers on the front line.
We know that in the back and middle offices of policing, using the definition supplied to us by the inspectorate of constabulary, there are approximately 25,000 police officers. It is therefore simply wrong to suggest that a reduction in manpower necessarily means that the front line will be affected or damaged. The right debate is about how policing should be transformed, restructured and made more efficient so that resource continues to get to the front line. Police forces up and down the country are showing that that is possible, and that the kind of characterisation of the debate we have seen from the Opposition is wrong and will be shown, in the end, to be wrong. I believe that police forces are rising to the challenge of reorganising, driving out cost and ensuring that they can continue to deliver a service to the public.
The right hon. Gentleman raised the issue of who would be responsible for ensuring that police and crime commissioners would deliver value for money. Of course, there is the ongoing responsibility of Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary in that regard, but ultimately police and crime commissioners will answer to the public—that is the force of this reform. We are not appointing police and crime commissioners, because the public are electing them. The commissioners will be strongly incentivised to deliver value for money for the British public. The right hon. Gentleman asked whether we are going to set further targets. No, we are not going to set targets for police and crime commissioners. We have abolished policing targets, because we seek a different approach that gives greater freedom.
That concludes the remarks that I want to make in the debate. I apologise for speaking at some length, but I wished seriously to engage with the points made by hon. Members. I welcome the Home Affairs Committee’s interest in these matters. I note that its report is not critical of the changes in the policing landscape, although it has things to say about the pace of change and so on. The Government have taken those comments seriously and have responded. Some of the reforms relating to the establishment of police and crime commissioners have been controversial, despite the cross-party buy-in to the new office. However, other aspects of the reforms command the support of the whole House, such as the creation of the police professional body, the better way of dealing with policing IT, the de-bureaucratisation of policing and the creation of the National Crime Agency. Far from being matters of party division or contention, we can have a good debate about how to make the reforms work while recognising that those are the right changes to ensure that policing can rise to the challenges of the 21st century and continue to ensure that crime is fought effectively and that the public are kept safe.
Keith Vaz
With the leave of the House, I would like to respond very briefly to the debate. The Minister is absolutely right that we have had a good debate about a number of issues. I want to thank those members of the Select Committee who are here this afternoon: the hon. Members for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) and for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless), and my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Alun Michael). I thank the Minister, the shadow Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), and the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), the Liberal Democrat spokesman on Home Affairs—we miss him at our Select Committee deliberations, but we always see him at these debates.
The Government have set an agenda that is, in effect, going where no person has gone before. It is rather like being on the Starship Enterprise, with the Home Secretary as a 21st-century Captain Kirk and the Minister as Mr Spock—only with much nicer ears than Mr Spock could offer us. What I can promise from the Select Committee is that we will continue to keep a watching brief on these developments. We look forward to seeing the Minister on these and other matters in the future.
Question put and agreed to.
Written Ministerial Statements
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Anti-avoidance
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (Mr David Gauke)
The Government are committed to tackling tax avoidance to ensure the Exchequer is protected and fairness is maintained for the taxpayer.
HMRC has recently become aware of a contrived and aggressive avoidance scheme that seeks to generate post-cessation trade relief for set-off by users of the scheme against their other income or capital gains. This scheme relies on arrangements that have a tax avoidance purpose. The Government do not accept that these arrangements have the effect that is sought, but to remove any doubt, and to prevent scheme providers continuing to devise and operate even more contrived schemes, prompt and decisive action is being taken to protect the Exchequer.
I am today announcing that legislation will be introduced in Finance Bill 2012 to prevent post-cessation trade relief being given where a qualifying payment or qualifying event arises from arrangements entered into in which the main purpose, or one of the main purposes, is to obtain a tax reduction. The legislation will have effect from today and will protect significant amounts of revenue.
We have acted quickly to prevent the use of this particular scheme and we will not hesitate to close down other schemes representing a significant risk to the Exchequer as we become aware of them.
Draft legislation and further details of this measure are being published on HMRC’s website today.
Further Education Skills Funding
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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The Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning (Mr John Hayes)
Following publication of the annual skills investment statement for the 2012-13 academic year by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills on 1 December 2011, the Skills Funding Agency issued 1,030 initial funding allocation statements, announcing recurrent funding allocations to FE colleges and other skills providers in England, on 16 December.
The allocations in question total £2.3 billion, which includes the largest ever allocation of funding to support apprenticeships.
Some providers will be able to access additional funds not included in the initial funding statement. These include initial additional learner support and discretionary learner support allocations, which will be issued on 27 January 2012. Initial 16 to 18 apprenticeships programme allocations and adult safeguarded allocations have also still to be issued.
Final funding statements for all budget lines for 2012-13 will be issued on 30 March 2012.
The Skills Funding Agency and the Young People’s Learning Agency will monitor the impact of funding allocations.
Capital funding allocations for the £100 million two-year FE college capital investment programme, which I announced in August 2011, were confirmed by the Skills Funding Agency on 21 December.
All FE colleges in England were eligible to apply for capital renewal grant funding, which they could spend on urgent capital works, or on the fees associated with developing enhanced renewal grant applications.
A total of 244 FE colleges across England were each successful in securing up to £100,000 in renewal grant funding. In addition, 46 of these were also successful in securing enhanced renewal grant funding of around £1.9 million, taking their total grant funding up to £2 million.
A further 19 colleges met the required quality thresholds but could not be funded on this occasion. I have asked officials of the Skills Funding Agency to continue to work with the colleges concerned to consider how these projects might be helped to proceed.
This latest programme builds upon the Government’s previous FE capital investments, including the £50 million college capital investment programme which provided 154 eligible colleges with a renewal grant of up to £225,000 each. Of these, 21 also secured enhanced renewal grant funding of up to £775,000 taking their total funding to £1 million.
The programme also builds upon the additional £25 million that we made available to 239 eligible FE colleges through the capital works grant.
The grand total of Government’s capital investment through these programmes of £175 million is expected to leverage over £525 million in total project funding.
Red Tape Challenge
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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The Minister for Housing and Local Government (Grant Shapps)
My hon. Friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Baroness Hanham, has made the following written ministerial statement:
I would like to inform the House that the Government are launching the housing and construction theme on the Cabinet Office’s red tape challenge website. The theme will include housing and construction related regulations and consider whether excessive or complicated legislation is a barrier to reinvigorating housing and construction in this country.
This review should be taken in context of the policies and measures announced in November’s housing strategy. That strategy outlines how the Government are committed to better environmental standards; more affordable housing; security of tenure; legal protection for tenants and leaseholders; and support for the elderly, vulnerable households and those on low incomes.
We have already taken a series of steps to cut unnecessary red tape, including abolishing home information packs, reducing burdens on short-term holiday lets, removing blanket regulation on houses of multiple occupation that would have reduced choice for tenants, and introduced new freedoms and flexibilities for social landlords via the Localism Act. This review will help inform the scope for farther reductions of such unnecessary and disproportionate red tape.
Taxation in Gibraltar (European Court Judgment)
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr William Hague)
On 15 November 2011 the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) published its judgment in appeal cases brought by the European Commission and Spain against the United Kingdom and the Government of Gibraltar on the issue of whether corporation tax changes proposed by the Government of Gibraltar in 2002 breached EU rules on state aid. In this judgment the ECJ has set aside the earlier judgment of the General Court of the European Union (General Court) dated 18 December 2008 and has found that the proposed tax regime, which was abandoned some time ago and was never implemented in Gibraltar, constituted state aid on grounds of material selectivity.
The background to this case is that in August 2002 the UK notified the Commission, pursuant to article 88(3) of the then EC treaty (now article 108(3) TfEU), that Gibraltar proposed to make changes to its tax system that would involve the introduction of a payroll tax and a business property occupation tax (BPOT). The Commission’s decision of March 2004 found that the payroll tax and BPOT were materially selective because they would inherently favour offshore companies that had no physical presence in Gibraltar and which, as a consequence, would not incur corporation tax. The Commission also found that the proposed changes to Gibraltar’s tax system were regionally selective on the grounds that they provided for a system under which companies in Gibraltar would be taxed, in general, at a lower rate than those in the UK.
The UK and the Government of Gibraltar both contested the Commission’s decision in respect of both material and regional selectivity. On 18 December 2008 the Court of First Instance (now the General Court) annulled the Commission’s decision. The General Court found that Gibraltar’s tax proposals did not breach EU rules on state aid on grounds of material selectivity. Moreover the General Court ruled that the frame of reference for assessing whether Gibraltar’s proposals were regionally selective corresponded exclusively to Gibraltar’s territorial limits. The General Court therefore upheld, under EU law, Gibraltar’s freedom to set tax rates that are different from those in the UK.
The Commission and Spain both brought appeal actions asking the ECJ to set aside the General Court’s judgment. The Commission’s single ground of appeal was on the question of material selectivity. Spain appealed on both regional and material selectivity. The ECJ’s judgment of 15 November 2011 is the final ruling in these proceedings. The ECJ found that Gibraltar’s tax proposals were materially selective in that they granted selective advantages to offshore companies. It held that in view of its finding on material selectivity it was not relevant to examine whether Gibraltar’s proposals were regionally selective.
The ECJ’s decision not to examine the issue of regional selectivity means that there has been no change in the principles established by the Court in the Azores case (ECJ case C-88/03 Portugal v Commission). According to those principles autonomous regional bodies within an EU member state may set lower levels of tax than in the rest of the member state without giving rise to state aid provided that certain criteria for determining the autonomous status of the regional body are met. In accordance with its constitutional arrangements, Gibraltar is a fiscally autonomous entity with responsibility for the management of its economy, including taxation, vested in the Government of Gibraltar. The UK is committed to upholding the Gibraltar constitution. The ECJ’s judgment of 15 November 2011 does not change Gibraltar’s constitutional relationship with the UK or Gibraltar’s freedom to set a tax regime that differs from the UK’s.
It is for the Government of Gibraltar, as the authority responsible for the tax system in Gibraltar, to consider the implications for Gibraltar of the ECJ’s ruling on material selectivity.
On 15 November 2011 the then Government of Gibraltar issued a statement which stated that the judgment would have no adverse impact on Gibraltar since the proposed tax scheme that was examined by the ECJ had never been implemented and the proposal had since been abandoned in favour of an income tax of 10% for all companies. The new Government of Gibraltar takes the same view.
The Government will keep the House informed of any further significant developments.
Sri Lankan Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission Report
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Alistair Burt)
I would like to inform the House of the Government’s views on the Sri Lankan Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission’s (LLRC) report, which was published on 16 December 2011. The LLRC was established in May 2010 to look into the conflict between the Sri Lankan Government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
The British Government welcome the fact that the LLRC report has been published in full. We have read the report closely and have considered in particular its findings relating to: reconciliation and an enduring political solution in the north and east; accountability for alleged war crimes committed during the conflict; and ongoing human rights issues in Sri Lanka.
We have noted the Sri Lankan Government’s initial response to the report. We have also seen statements from political parties in Sri Lanka, from respected human rights organisations and from other Governments.
The British Government believe that the report contains many constructive recommendations for action on post-conflict reconciliation and a political settlement. Implementation of these recommendations, however, is the real test of Sri Lanka’s progress.
We note the commission’s conclusion that the root cause of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka lies in the failure of successive Governments to address the genuine grievances of the Tamil people and the recommendation that the Sri Lankan Government should take the lead in delivering a devolution package. We urge the Sri Lankan Government to implement quickly this recommendation and the LLRC’s call for the Northern Province to be returned to civilian administration. We note the Sri Lankan Government’s recent assurance that they will ensure the withdrawal of security forces from all aspects of community life and restrict their role exclusively to security matters.
We agree with the recommendation that more action be taken to help internally displaced persons rebuild their lives. We also agree that the Government should make available to relatives a list of all detainees in custody since the end of the conflict; publicly declare all detention sites; and allow family, judicial and International Committee of the Red Cross access. We support the call for anyone responsible for unlawful detentions to be prosecuted.
The British Government are, on the whole, disappointed by the report’s findings and recommendations on accountability. Like many others, we feel that these leave many gaps and unanswered questions. We welcome the acknowledgement that “considerable civilian casualties” occurred during the final stages of the conflict and the recommendation that specific incidents require further investigation. But we note that many credible allegations of violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law, including from the UN panel of experts report, are either not addressed or only partially answered. We believe that video footage, authenticated by UN special rapporteurs, should inform substantive, not just technical, investigations into apparent grave abuses.
The British Government believe that the report’s recommendations on ongoing human rights issues in Sri Lanka are well founded. We hope they will be implemented vigorously. We welcome especially the focus on tackling attacks on media freedom and disappearances —including thousands of outstanding cases.
We encourage the Sri Lankan Government to move quickly to implement the LLRC report’s recommendations. Some recommendations could be completed in a matter of months. Others may take time to implement fully, but initial steps can be taken now. Ultimately, the success or failure of the LLRC will be judged on the Sri Lankan Government’s implementation of its recommendations.
On accountability, implementing the report’s recommendations would represent a useful first step. But we continue to believe it is important that an independent, credible and thorough mechanism is put in place to investigate all allegations of grave abuses.
The British Government have consistently condemned terrorism in all its forms. The LTTE is a brutal and ruthless organisation which remains proscribed in the UK. Our long-term interest is in a stable, peaceful Sri Lanka, free from the scourge of terrorism, and as a fellow member of the Commonwealth, conforming to the standards and values which Commonwealth membership requires.
Sri Lanka’s aim of achieving reconciliation amongst its people is one we value. It can be achieved through an honest acknowledgement of the past and processes, in which all parties take part, to ensure justice, reconciliation and political progress.
We remain committed to helping Sri Lanka achieve lasting peace and reconciliation and will work with international partners to this end, including with the assistance of relevant international organisations.
Health and Criminal Justice Liaison and Diversion Programme
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Department of Health (Paul Burstow)
In March 2011, I announced investment in the development of health and criminal justice liaison and diversion services of £5 million over the course of the year (2011-12). I am pleased to announce that investment in these services will be further increased to £19.4 million for 2012-13.
Liaison and diversion services aim to ensure that wherever offenders are in the criminal justice system, their health needs or vulnerabilities are identified and assessed and they are linked to appropriate treatment services. Information about their needs can then be provided to the police and courts to enable them to make informed decisions about charging and sentencing. Addressing their needs is also expected to contribute to a reduction in the likelihood of their reoffending. Liaison and diversion services will be accessible to all offenders—whether adult men or women, children and young people, and whether they have a mental health or substance misuse problem, learning disability or personality disorder.
Work over the past year has allowed us to set up a liaison and diversion network, consisting of 94 adult and youth pathfinder sites, alongside 10 police forces who are exploring the transfer of commissioning responsibility for health services in police custody suites to the NHS. These pathfinder sites are leading the way in developing how diversion services will work in the future, as well as understanding the costs and benefits they generate, to inform a decision about rolling out new services across the country.
Over the next three years, this network of sites will focus on developing an implementation plan which will include:
guidance on good practice;
quality standards and outcomes; and
work force development and training plan.
Increased investment will also allow selected pathfinder sites to test different elements of service provision, and will include looking at treatment-based options for sentencers as an alternative to custody for those with health needs or vulnerabilities. This testing work will be particularly important for developing a consistent service model and informing the set-up of the remainder of diversion services during roll-out.
The pathfinder sites are already providing information on their services which will contribute to the development of the business case (due for completion in early 2013), which will inform a ministerial decision on full roll out. We will also undertake a fuller evaluation to capture the best of local learning and explore options for making schemes available nationally by 2014. An evaluation of six existing youth justice liaison and diversion pilots has already taken place and the report from this work is due to be published early this year.
These services are integral to the delivery of the Government’s vision for the rehabilitation of offenders, as well as the cross-Government strategy on improving mental health outcomes, both of which were published last year. Both the Department of Health and Ministry of Justice are committed to this work, as reflected in both departmental business plans, and are working together to deliver liaison and diversion services across the country by 2014.
Compensation Act 2006
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Kenneth Clarke)
I am today laying before the House the Government’s memorandum to the Justice Committee on post-legislative scrutiny of the Compensation Act 2006. Copies have been placed in the Libraries of both Houses.
The Compensation Act 2006 contains provisions relating to two separate and distinct areas: part 1 contains provisions restating and clarifying the law of negligence and breach of statutory duty, and provisions addressing a practical difficulty that had arisen in relation to proving liability for the asbestos-related disease of mesothelioma; and part 2 provides the framework for the regulation of claims management services.
These reforms have been implemented, in line with the stated objectives of the Act, as detailed in the memorandum.
Electrically Assisted Pedal Cycles
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Mike Penning)
I am today publishing the responses to a public consultation which sought views on proposals to provide closer alignment of GB regulations with European rules.
The consultation was launched on 5 January 2010 in conjunction with a related consultation on electric personal vehicles (EPVs) and ran until 30 March 2010. The EAPC regulations were also included within the “Retail” and “Road Transportation” themes of the “Red Tape Challenge” which ran from 7 April to 17 June 2011.
The Department has considered the responses and supports recommendations to harmonise power limits (from 200 watts to 250 watts) with similar provisions in place across the EU—allowing consumers access to a wider range of electrically assisted cycles.
Regulatory proposals will be developed to update power limits and consider other amendments, for example on weight limits, once EU discussions on a much wider group of two, three and light four-wheeled vehicles conclude. The outcome of EU discussions could have implications for the regulation of EAPCs, and it would therefore be unhelpful to make amendments at this time which might need to be subsequently repealed.
A detailed summary of the responses to the consultation will be available in the Libraries of both Houses and will be available on the Department’s website at:
http://www.dft.gov.uk/consultations/dft-2010-02
Welfare Reform Bill
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Chris Grayling)
The Department for Work and Pensions has obtained approval for a second advance from the Contingencies Fund of £3.737 million to allow for the continuance of work related to the introduction of employment and support allowance (ESA) time-limiting and the abolition of ESA youth, including the development of IT, before Royal Assent. This is a second advance, required as there is now greater clarity around the date for Royal Assent now that the Welfare Reform Bill has reached Report stage in the Lords. In September 2011, I informed Parliament of a £2.705 million advance for the same purpose.
This second advance will allow the ESA time-limiting and abolition of youth project to continue to work to its current design and development timetable and enable continuity of third-party supplier engagement. Subject to Royal Assent, this will enable the change to be introduced from 30 April 2012. This will bring ESA more in line with other contributory benefit regimes. It will also simplify the rules governing ESA, making it easier to administer and preparing the way for the introduction of universal credit.
Parliamentary approval for resources of £3,737,000 for this new service has been sought in the main estimate 2011-12, but is subject to the approval of the Welfare Reform Bill. Pending that approval, urgent expenditure of £3,737,000 will be met by repayable cash advances from the Contingencies Fund.
Welfare Reform Bill
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Chris Grayling)
The Department for Work and Pensions has obtained approval for an advance, prior to Royal Assent, from the Contingency Fund of £1,000,000 . The funding will allow for the development of the IT changes required to introduce new benefit fraud and claimant error sanctions.
A tougher fraud and error regime was set out in the “Tackling fraud and error in the benefit and tax credit systems” strategy published in October 2010 and changes to sanctions and penalties are included in the Welfare Reform Bill. They provide for the introduction of a civil penalty for claimant error and strengthen sanctions for benefit fraudsters. To enable their introduction changes to the Departments’ IT systems will be required. The contingency advance will enable the IT provider to begin work in January 2012 giving them sufficient lead in time to commence changes in 2012.
The advance from the Contingency Fund will allow essential work to commence on the detailed process design and IT changes.
Parliamentary approval for resources and capital off 1,000,000 for this new service has already been sought in the main estimate for the Department for Work and Pensions, subject to the passage of the Welfare Reform Bill. Pending approval of that Bill, urgent expenditure estimated at off 1,000,000 will be met by a repayable cash advance from the Contingencies Fund.
Welfare Reform Bill
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Chris Grayling)
On 22 December 2011 the Scottish Parliament voted on a legislative consent motion to the Welfare Reform Bill which is currently at Report stage in the House of Lords. Although social security is a reserved matter, legislative consent is required from the devolved Administrations for a number of aspects of the Bill.
Legislative consent was given, where required, in respect of the provisions in the Bill relating to data sharing, industrial injuries disablement benefit and the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission. However, it did not provide consent in respect of the provisions in the Bill which give Scottish Ministers the power to make consequential, supplementary, incidental or transitional provisions, by regulations, in relation to the introduction of universal credit and personal independence payment. The Scottish Government have opted to bring forward legislation in their own Parliament in due course to make the required changes.
Therefore, in order to ensure the UK Government adhere to the principles of the Sewel convention, they will bring forward amendments at Third Reading of the Welfare Reform Bill to remove the relevant provisions from the Bill.
These amendments will not affect the implementation of either universal credit or personal independence payment.
Noble Lords will be given an opportunity to consider these amendments further at Third Reading.
Grand Committee
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Protection of Freedoms Bill
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve
My Lords, I want to speak to Amendments 147A, 147B, 148A, 148C and 148D. I will also comment, but much more briefly, on the more comprehensive Amendment 151, in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton, Lady Warwick and Lady Benjamin, which I support, and I will comment very briefly on one of the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. Before doing so, I would like very much to thank the Minister and the Bill team for their exemplary courtesy and helpfulness in explicating their thinking on Clause 100—not, I think, the simplest clause of the Bill. If we have not reached agreement, it is not for lack of effort on their part.
Secondly, I would like to make it entirely clear that I am in favour of making scientific data more open. Science needs openness for its own purposes; it needs to have open data so that it is possible for others to check and challenge, and openness allows data to be put to unanticipated uses. Therefore, I am in much sympathy with the overall purpose of this part of the Bill. Of course, it used to be feasible—and it was standard practice—to publish data within articles in scientific journals. That is no longer feasible because of the size and complexity of many scientific data sets, so openness now has to be sought in other ways.
However, I believe that the Bill is based on too confident a view of the effectiveness and adequacy of the system of exemptions established in the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and of their capacity to avoid undesirable and unintended effects—particularly in this area, which is essentially that of scientific databases. Clause 100 proposes a seemingly minor, but in fact very substantial, change in the application of the freedom of information requirements to the release of data sets by public authorities. I will not at this stage say anything further about the use of the term “public authority”, as I think that we all understand that this means a publicly funded authority, which may, however, be a research institution or university that also has charitable status.
On the surface, Clause 100 simply requires the release of data sets in reusable electronic form, but I believe that in practice its demands will create a number of risks and problems. Let me therefore begin with Amendment 147A. The present drafting of the clause is, I believe, ambiguous, in that it requires data to be released upon request if the data are, or form part of, a data set held by a public authority. Amendment 147A seeks to restrict that requirement to “completed” parts of a data set held by a public authority. While it is reasonable to require that completed parts of still incomplete data sets be disclosed if requested—for example, the data pertaining to a past year in a continuously updated series—there is no benefit to anybody in disclosing an incomplete part of a data set. Indeed, requiring disclosure of incomplete parts of data sets could be misleading as well as damaging to research projects and to those provided with the incomplete, and perhaps misleading, data.
The clause would currently require disclosure of data sets while data were still being entered and had not yet been checked. At that stage, the incomplete part of the data set might be misleading. To take the example of a multi-centre clinical trial, requests for disclosure of incomplete parts of the data set could lead to the release of data that related only to a distinctive subset of patients whose data happened to become available at an earlier stage than those of other subsets of patients whose results might differ—that is, after all, the reason why the structure of clinical trials is quite elaborate. Such misleading releases might, I fear, falsely raise or dash the hopes of patients suffering from a serious condition, who would read the incomplete data set released as indicating that they had grounds for hope or despair.
I think that this issue arises because the drafting actually conflates two very different types of incompleteness in data sets. A data set may be incomplete because it relates to an ongoing project. In this case, completed parts of that data set relating, for example, to completed periods or phases in the project may indeed be available and could be released upon request.
In the second case, a data set or parts of a data set may be incomplete because the data are not yet fully available for entry, have not yet been entered or have not yet been checked. It could be highly misleading to require disclosure in the second case. Amendment 147A seeks to limit such requirements to disclose to the completed parts of data sets, where the danger of misleading is less.
Secondly, Amendment 147B requires that access is provided on request to data sets in reusable electronic form. Again, I stress that this is in principle an admirable thought. Where a data set is, for example, a relatively simple spreadsheet, this requirement would create no more difficulty for research databases than it does for government data sets. However, some scientific data sets are of orders of magnitude larger and do not use standard software; even if it is feasible, it may be extremely costly to render them usable by others or, indeed, reusable even by others with technical skills. We have to remember that those of whom data are requested will not know the skills of those who request them. In such cases it may be necessary to provide metadata or to process data further in order to make access to them more feasible even for competent others. It is more usual to make research data available by archiving data sets or by setting out a publication or so called data sharing scheme that will provide access for others and also secure the crucial benefits of professional data curation and data security.
Amendment 148B will permit holders of research data to undertake to provide those data using these normal and reliable routes. At present, the Freedom of Information Act grants an exemption once data sets have already been placed in the public domain in this way, such as in a data archive or through a data sharing scheme. This amendment seeks to postpone access where such archiving is not merely foreseen but is something that data holders have undertaken to provide. In effect, it would create a temporary exemption for the data concerned. The Minister might see this as an opening for procrastination. However, if he is sympathetic to the realities of the problem, he might perhaps wish to consider at least a version of the amendment that offers a limited time for this exemption—for example, six months after the completion of the relevant research project or phase of the research project. It is a question of trading off quality for instant gratification, I suppose.
Amendment 148A concerns the charging of fees. It seeks to address the real financial implications of seeking to make large and complex data sets available for reuse. The Bill provides for the charging of fees but does not allow public authorities to take account of the real costs of making data available to others. These costs may include not only additional checking and making metadata available but above all—and this is the main concern in the scientific community—the diversion of highly skilled and specialised time from research projects to the satisfaction of freedom of information requests. I have drafted the amendment to make it clear that it is the real costs of disclosure that matter. As noble Lords will have noted from the very helpful briefing provided for this section of the Bill by Universities UK, these costs can be very significant. It would not be reasonable, in my view, to require research projects or universities to bear these costs, which they cannot in principle have known about when seeking and obtaining the funding to do the research.
The last two amendments to which I shall speak very briefly are Amendments 148C and 148E, which are relatively uncontroversial. At present, the Bill restricts the operations that may be performed on data sets prior to required disclosure to calculation. That is just unrealistic. Those who compile data sets also need to check the data, which will be done using a variety of methods, and take steps to ensure data integrity and security, particularly at the point at which data are to be disclosed on request. Amendment 148C provides for this; Amendment 148E is consequential on Amendment 148C.
On Amendment 148, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, from what I have already said and what the UUK briefing—now supported by the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Wellcome Trust and other scientific and medical bodies—has documented, the complexity of scientific databases rules out a solution along these lines. It would be very nice if it were feasible, but I believe that it is not feasible.
Amendment 151, tabled by the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton, Lady Benjamin and Lady Warwick, is a substantial amendment. It takes the more radical step of seeking to define an additional exemption to freedom of information requirements and in the process achieves a number of the specific objectives that I have tried to achieve by more economical means in the amendments that I have tabled. However, their approach has one great advantage, which I believe—although I have racked my brains on this one—cannot be achieved by the more modest approach that I have taken. It recognises the risks to UK science and business and to the personal safety of researchers in certain fields—for example, involving work with animals—and to research subjects that will be created by Clause 100 if it is not amended. We are simply being naive if we imagine that we can rely on all those who request data respecting the intellectual property of those whose efforts produce data sets. We no longer live in a world where that is true, and we can all imagine many scenarios in which data disclosure is sought on behalf of others who work in jurisdictions where intellectual property is widely disrespected, with the aim of getting a free ride on the basis of work done by others without the payment of any fees. In those jurisdictions, legal remedies are not effective. I look forward to hearing a great deal more about Amendment 151. I beg to move.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I have a clutch of amendments in this group. I will not at this moment comment on those proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, although I am looking forward to listening to others’ contributions on that subject. But it is very important that when a group of scientists ask us as a Government or community to take action based on results that they have published, the data underlying those results must be open to scrutiny. I understand that that has a difficult interaction with the questions raised by the noble Baroness, but I look forward to others’ contribution on how to solve that.
The first amendment that I have in the group is Amendment 148. I should declare that I am an extensive user of freedom of information legislation, particularly as regards universities, which I have found unutterably tiresome and difficult to deal with. One of their more tiresome habits is to refuse to provide information in anything other than PDF format. They get it in Excel, or whatever form, and translate it into PDF to provide it to me, merely to cause me extra work. I have to buy a program to suck it out of the PDF again. PDF is not a transmissible format, as it were, and they are merely trying to make life difficult by putting it in that format. So I would like to be sure that when data are provided they are provided in a properly reusable format. I have never come across a data set that cannot be reduced to tabbed, delimited text. Maybe that happens in a collection of tables, but data are essentially a simple thing. Although the data may be held in an immensely complex form in the program that the scientists are using, in any program that I have come across it should be easy—if only for the purposes of sharing with other people—to drop out at least the base data into relatively simple form.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe
My Lords, I rise to support the amendments tabled in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill. There is some confusion outside this House about the definitions of “dataset” and “re-use” in this Bill. Although the provisions in Clause 100 do not actually change any of the obligations under FOI, other than so far as they relate to the format of the information provided, this clause has stimulated some debate about what it is that might need to be provided, as the Bill says, in a form which is, “capable of re-use”. In particular, there is a question about whether we are talking about raw data, which, as the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, has argued, may be pretty meaningless in themselves, or the associated metadata—information which would allow someone to interpret the data. This might include the information identifying the individual records to which the data relate, or, say, the geographic location of a sample. In some cases this might be relatively straightforward. Indeed, I think that the Bill envisages data sets as something relatively contained and manageable—say, an Excel spreadsheet.
In the context of university research, however, data sets might be very much more complicated. Universities UK has given a very helpful example. The European Bioinformatics Institute’s 1,000 genomes data set comprises approximately 200 terabytes of data equivalent to the capacity of 3,200 iPods or 40,000 DVDs. The metadata are stored separately from the data themselves and accessing the data requires specialist software. As it happens, this data set is already in the public domain, which brings me to my next point.
There is already a move towards making data more widely available. This is a requirement of several major funders—the Wellcome Trust and research councils, for example. I believe that we should encourage this as the best way to ensure that access to data can be provided in such a way as to increase the transparency of research. We know that there is already important work under way on this issue, not least the work by the Royal Society to which the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, has referred. In addition, the Government’s recently published Innovation and Research Strategy included a commitment to look at the potential to increase access to data assets, including through providing funding for the world’s first open data institute. The Government will publish an open data White Paper this spring. This will be informed by the work of a group chaired by Dame Janet Finch on improving access to research publications, which will also report shortly.
In addition, the research councils are setting up a UK gateway to research, which will allow ready access to research council funding, research information and related data. For this reason I particularly support Amendment 147B in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, which states that public authorities should,
“provide … or undertake to provide”
access to their data, which I take to mean that an adequate data-sharing plan should be sufficient to satisfy their obligations under the Act.
Will the Minister in his response comment on some specific questions? If the research team uses specialist software to organise their data, is there an expectation that it should have to alter the format to make it accessible to a non-specialist user? Would the cost of making data available in an alternative format be chargeable under FOIA? Does the Act require researchers to provide metadata to aid interpretation of the data set? Would the costs of providing metadata be chargeable under FOIA? If the Minister is unable to concede to an amendment exempting research information at the pre-publication stage, could he reassure the research community that robust data-sharing plans will be favourably considered by the ICO as evidence of intention to publish, and thus consistent with the appropriate use of the existing Section 22 exemption?
Lord May of Oxford
My Lords, I support the set of amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady O'Neill, and Amendment 148B, which the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has put down. I begin slightly narcissistically by saying that I think I have form in relation to openness. As Chief Scientific Adviser, I put in place the protocols for science advice on policy-making, which have gone through rounds of revision, saying “No more closed rooms. Everything open. We want to see it published”. I have been associated, and still am, with two of the three major journals in science—the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US and Science—in both cases promoting more open access within the framework of profit-making journals. More generally at the Royal Society, when I was its president I made our journals much more available, particularly to people in countries that could not afford to pay for them.
I am all for making things available but, at the same time, I shall mention something which is perhaps tactless—if not even politically incorrect—which is that the Freedom of Information Act has, as many of your Lordships will know, been used as a weapon of harassment in some circumstances. The climate change community in general, and the community at the University of East Anglia in particular, have not only been subject to criminal invasion of their databases, carefully timed for particular events, but are continually bombarded with very elaborate requests for information that go well beyond the sharing of basic data, so we have to be careful in how we draft this.
That brings me to two specific elements of the amendments suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady O'Neill. On the suggestion that data should be provided in a format which the user requires, while I am sympathetic to the argument that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, gave that it can be very inconvenient, on the other hand it invites the abuse of saying, “I want the data in some manner which is extraordinarily inconvenient”. This can be only partly protected by the other thing that I draw particular attention to: recognising that there is a cost associated with providing this data in any form and that it is only reasonable that people should be allowed to charge for it. I can see an offsetting, in some sense. If you allowed that people could request the form in which it be given, the offset would have to be really realistic. In some cases, that could reflect the degree of harassment and so on, so there are complexities nested within this.
I also like Amendment 148B, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, simply because, like him, I could not understand what the provision meant.
Baroness Blackstone
My Lords, very briefly, I support the amendments put down by the noble Baroness, Lady O'Neill. I should perhaps declare an interest as a very recently retired vice-chancellor. I also associate myself with the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord May, about the care that we need to take in this area. These are very complex and difficult matters and some of the issues are highly technical—more technical than someone who is not particularly IT-literate, such as me, is able to follow totally and understand. I want in particular to follow up the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and repeat the question which I think my noble friend Lady Warwick put, about whether the costs of providing metadata would be chargeable under the Freedom of Information Act. This is an important issue as these costs become greater and greater. Universities that wish to pursue research that requires using this sort of data will be very stretched unless this is allowable.
I also want to ask another question. To what extent can universities make a charge for removing or redacting personal information from databases prior to making them available under the FOIA? Again, this is a practice that is going to have to become more frequent and common and, in a time when universities are extremely pressed as far as their funding is concerned, the cost could be very high.
Lord Bew
My Lords, I rise briefly to support Amendment 148A, in particular, and to make the point even more starkly that in an era when these requests are more and more common, unless some protection for universities, as envisaged in the amendment, comes in, there will be an implicit negative tax on research, as researchers will have to take these possibilities into account. That is the last thing that our universities need at present. I support Amendment 148A very strongly. The real cost of complying with the requests that currently come in is a stark issue.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
My Lords, I, too, rise briefly to support the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bengarve. My experience now is somewhat dated, but back in the early 1990s I was responsible for supervising a group of researchers putting together a substantial database on bibliometrics. The difficulties of cleaning up such a database are extreme and costly. The group of four young researchers I was supervising worked for two or three years in just cleaning up the database. One issue that we were looking at then was the advantage of concentrating research into large laboratories rather than having a lot of smaller researchers. You cannot do such research until you have cleaned up the database. Someone coming in and using your data is clearly something that we need to protect against. We also need to make sure that the costs involved in putting databases together are fully met.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Henley)
My Lords, I start by saying that I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, for her opening remarks when she talked about discussions that have already taken place. I understand her concerns. I understand them now possibly in spades as I look at the serried ranks of academe facing me. I ought to make it clear that further discussions will have to take place between now and Report as there are real concerns in the academic and research community. The noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, reiterated concern about costs and her noble friend Lady Blackstone referred to burdens on academe. Concern was expressed about safety, particularly for those involved in research relating to animals. I can well understand that, having had some responsibility for that issue when I was a Minister in Defra.
I shall try to explain our intention behind Clause 100 and what we initially think of the amendments. I should make it clear that I am more than happy to have another meeting with the noble Baroness and any others who wish to come along, as we want to ensure that we get this right and can meet those concerns. I shall say a few words about the background to Clause 100, particularly as this is the first amendment in the group. I shall not go on at this stage to Amendment 151, to which the noble Baroness referred, as I had better do that when it is moved in its proper place.
Clause 100 gives effect to the Government’s commitment to provide greater transparency and create, in particular, a new right to data so that government-held data sets can be requested, used by the public and published regularly. We believe that that will help the public and organisations to hold the Government to account. It will redirect and shape public services to reduce the deficit and deliver better value for money in public service spending. It will realise significant economic benefits by enabling individuals, businesses and not-for-profit organisations to build innovative applications using that public data.
The Freedom of Information Act 2000 currently provides for the release or publication of the recorded information held by public authorities covered by the Act but makes no provision for reuse at the point of publication or release. It requires only the provision of access to the information and only upon request, which means that repeat requests have to be made over a period of time to gain sets of information or data. There is no obligation for public authorities to provide such data in an electronic format that promotes reuse—for example, machine-readable or open, standard format. I note the comments of my noble friend Lord Lucas about his trials and tribulations with the university sector, particularly with its use of PDF, which causes him problems.
These changes to the Freedom of Information Act, as set out in Clause 100, are intended to promote the proactive release of more data sets and to ensure that when data are released they are in a reusable format and, where possible, free for reuse. This will, in turn, promote the use and development of the raw data held by public authorities to provide useful products and services.
Additionally, the Government announced their intention to ask Parliament to undertake post-legislative scrutiny to see how well the Act is working in practice and whether there are any further changes to be made. In advance of this, the Government must act on their commitment to transparency and open data to release the benefits of open data to the public as soon as possible. There will be further post-legislative scrutiny to see how well that Act is working, and we will come to that in due course. When we have that, we can respond.
I turn now to the amendments in this group and will deal with them, but I repeat the commitment I made at the beginning that I am more than happy to discuss these in greater detail afterwards with whoever the noble Baroness wishes to bring along. Amendment 147A seeks to add the word “complete” to the definition of data sets allowed to be requested. However, I believe that the use of the word “complete” would not improve the definition of data set and could introduce a degree of uncertainty and confusion around the operation of this provision. For example, data sets may be continuously updated depending on the publication scheme set out by a public authority, and one could argue that a particular data set is never complete per se. The Government do not wish to be overprescriptive on this matter and defer judgment to the public authority to decide when its data are ready to be published in the interests of all parties.
I appreciate that the noble Baroness raised concerns at Second Reading in respect of these provisions, and we have exchanged correspondence and had meetings in response to her concerns about the potential impact on the higher education research community, which has argued that some of its data would be releasable in transient form until final publication. I reassure the Committee that Clause 100 as it stands does not alter the status quo in relation to the release of information in draft or of incomplete status, and such information is already adequately protected by existing exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act. Furthermore, the Information Commissioner’s office has produced specific guidance for higher education institutions by recommending those institutions to have a robust information management regime that will tackle issues about disclosure of data that is incomplete or in a draft form.
Similarly, Amendment 147B, which amends new Section 11(1A) of the Freedom of Information Act, is unnecessary as the provision already covers the circumstances that the amendment seeks to specify. The duty to provide a data set to the applicant in a reusable format, as currently drafted, adequately covers the effect of a public authority undertaking to provide the data set as requested in a reusable format. We consider that Clause 100 and the Freedom of Information Act as a whole already make adequate provisions for charging and that the noble Baroness’s Amendment 148A is not appropriate or necessary. Further, the Government will be providing guidance in the revised Section 45 code of practice on reusable formats and on when it will be considered reasonably practicable for a public authority to convert a data set into a reusable format for release, so that it will be clear what should be expected for both the data holder and the requester. The costs for releasing a data set in a reusable format falls to the public authority, as does releasing other information under the Freedom of Information Act, and the same freedom of information provisions apply here in terms of releasing that information.
With regards to the noble Baroness’s Amendments 148C and 148E, which seek to amend the definition of a data set, we consider that the current definition provided for in Clause 100 is fit for purpose. We do not believe that it would be sensible to introduce further limbs into the definition of a data set as, inevitably, the addition of any new terms, such as “data integrity and security”, could raise as many questions as to their meaning as the terms which they are intended to clarify. We believe that it is preferable to address such matters through the supplementary guidance for public authorities, which will be provided in the revised Section 45 code of practice.
As regards Amendment 148, in the name of my noble friend, I take a similar view. It seeks to define what is meant by the term “capable of reuse”. Again, we believe the appropriate place for any necessary clarification of the terminology used in the clause, and of the reusable formats to be adopted, is in the revised code of practice, which will be produced under Section 45 of the Freedom of Information Act.
We will be revising the statutory code of practice to provide greater clarity on certain aspects of these provisions. Among other things, the revised code will provide guidance on what constitutes a reusable format and sets out those factors that a public authority should take into account when deciding whether it is appropriate to include a data set in a publication scheme. We will also issue administrative guidance to central government on best practice.
On my noble friend’s Amendments 149 and 150, it is important that the changes we are making preserve existing regimes, specifically when it comes to charging for reuse of copyright material. Currently, public sector bodies under the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations may charge on a reasonable return of investment basis, and the policy is to maintain the status quo. Maintaining this right continues to allow public authorities the flexibility to charge should they wish and, where justified, in accordance with the Treasury’s guidance, Managing Public Money, which we all take enormously seriously.
We would expect, as now, most data sets to be provided free of charge for reuse but it is right that public authorities should, in appropriate cases, be able to charge. Any such charges would normally be set at the level necessary to recover costs, and no more, but fees can be set at a level to provide for a reasonable return on that investment. This would be appropriate in circumstances where the public sector has followed the Treasury’s guidance, Managing Public Money, and its accounting principles, and has taken into account the value of that data set and the costs incurred in resourcing the collection of the data.
With regards to my noble friend’s Amendments 148B and 148D, I would respectfully recall the reasoning behind the clause whereby the intention is to create a new right to data through the request for data sets for reuse and, where reasonably practicable, in a reusable format. The extension as proposed in my noble friend’s amendments goes beyond the realm of data sets and therefore is not appropriate in this instance but may be considered, again, as part of the post-legislative scrutiny that we are offering on the Freedom of Information Act which is currently under way.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I am very grateful for my noble friend’s replies to my amendments. If I might take up his offer of a meeting I think that would sensibly shorten the proceedings of this Committee. Would that be all? In that case I shall sit down.
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve
My Lords, I too am very grateful for the offer of a further meeting. I am slightly puzzled because I thought I had gone a considerable way to meet the very specific objections the Minister made to my previous drafts of these amendments in his letter and which also members of the Bill team have made. They are very narrow amendments and have a considerable protective implication because I have not suggested that it is incomplete databases but incomplete parts of databases that should not be released. If one thinks through the difference between the two one sees that whereas it might be open to a public authority to go on saying, “Oh our database is incomplete, we are perfecting it, we are polishing it, we are taking it into the next time period,” it could not say the same of each part of a database. So I believe that that move achieves the purposes of open data while not undermining them by licensing the disclosure of data that then have to be pulled back with the comment, “Well, it was only 10 per cent of the data points you got because that is what we had when your request was granted,”. It is a substantial amendment. Nevertheless I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 147A.
Baroness Brinton
“( ) In section 22 (information intended for future publication) after subsection (1) insert—
“(1A) Information obtained in the course of, or derived from, a programme of research or research project is exempt information if—
(a) the programme or project is continuing with a view to a report of the research (whether or not including a statement of that information) being published by—(i) a public authority as defined by section 3 of this Act; or(ii) any other person; and(b) disclosure of the information before the date of publication would, or would be likely to, prejudice substantially—(i) the programme or project;(ii) peer review of the programme or project;(iii) the interests of any individual participating in the programme or project;(iv) the interests of the authority which holds the information or the interests of any party collaborating with the authority in connection with the programme or project; or(v) the physical or mental health of any individual.””
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, as has already been mentioned, Amendment 151 seeks to insert an entirely new clause designed to correct an anomaly within the Bill. As a matter of principle—and as a former university administrator—I welcome the opportunity to help people get more information from the public sector, as is absolutely their right. However—I am sure it is inadvertent—there is a gaping hole in the Bill regarding universities and their research, research councils and other public research bodies. I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bengarve, for her previous amendments, which are most helpful and with which I agree, and I shall not talk specifically about the detail of data sets as a result.
The amendment seeks to amend the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to create a new qualified exemption for pre-publication research. It is modelled on an amendment to the FOI Act in Scotland which was accepted by the Scottish Government during the passage of that legislation. Exemptions with similar effect also exist in Irish and US freedom of information legislation.
The amendment makes clear that it has to be shown that disclosure would result in substantial prejudice to the research, those conducting it or the university, and I believe also—perhaps more seriously—that it threatens the international competitiveness of UK research. This is necessary because at present, taking it at its most simplistic—I hope those with considerable experience of academic research will allow me this hypothetical exemplar—it would be possible for individuals, organisations or, worse, industrial spies to get access to confidential data which may be pre-patent or copyright, part of a commercial research contract, or raw research which may be part of a long project over a number of years, which is not unusual for leading edge research in this country.
I have spoken to the deputy vice chancellor at Cranfield University to make sure that I can give the Committee this hypothetical example. As noble Lords will know, Cranfield has a global reputation for its inspirational teaching and research; 85 per cent of its research submitted for assessment is internationally recognised as original, significant and rigorous, 15 per cent is world leading, and it has won the Queen’s Award on three separate occasions since 2003 for its ground-breaking work. It would argue very strongly that it is that strength that brings commercial businesses to it to contract on very specific work.
Cranfield has a specific expertise in aero and motor research and houses specialist research beds for grand prix racing—not many people know that. Highly confidential and sensitive research is carried out for a number of the world’s top grand prix companies. Under the Bill as proposed at the moment, it would be possible for a competitor to demand data sets which may form part of the meta set of an academic’s broader work from commercial research contracted with one company. This cannot be right.
Like the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, I particularly thank Universities UK for its helpful and extensive briefing. The guidance for the higher education sector from the Information Commissioner on the FOI Act, to which I will refer in some detail, makes it clear throughout that the legislation is not designed for pure research and the way in which the data are used in universities. Interestingly, there are frequent references in that guidance to the lack of case law in this area for university research.
I am grateful to the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, for his letter of 23 November in which he set out how he believed the current exemptions under the Bill and in the FOI Act would work for university research. I believe that there is enough evidence from the guidance, as well as experience of universities, to question the points that he has made. The letter of the noble Lord, Lord McNally, refers to the key areas where he believes the current exemptions work. The first is information which is intended for future publication. In section 4.2—Information intended for future publication —the guidance for universities states:
“To be covered by the exemption, the information must be held with the intention of publication at the time the request was made. It will not be permissible to argue an intention to publish the information when that decision was only made after the request was made. It is not, however, necessary to have set a publication date. Publication will often be publication in accordance with the publication scheme of the public authority”.
The FOI guidance goes on to say:
“You may be able to reduce the number of requests for information and the number of times upon which you may need to rely on section 22 by providing the public with a clear description of planned publications, including a publication timetable. … It may also be helpful within publication schemes to indicate the likely date of publication within the description of the class of information. For instance, many public authorities include minutes of management board meetings as a class of information within their publication schemes. It may be helpful to indicate that the minutes will be published within a week, a month etc of the meetings. It may also assist if drafts of documents include intended publication dates and an indication of whether any or all of the information could be released prior to publication”.
It is absolutely clear, especially from that last sentence, that the commissioner is applying what I would describe as an administrative and secretarial approach to publication. It is not common for those engaged in pure research, especially highly confidential leading-edge research, to detail the research for management board meetings, nor is it common to have publication schemes for elements of the work at an early stage. This guidance is much more for the effective conduct of public affairs—for example, Ministers, councillors or civil servants—in collecting data.
The guidance shows absolutely no understanding of the way in which research is carried out. For example, the advice says that you must state at the time—and each time—when you want to use the exemption for future publication and you must prove it. You must then quote each of those instances back when you have received an FOI request. For a longitudinal research project that might last decades, this is a complete nonsense and certainly provides real problems for retrospection. Even for a more standard research project of three to five years, it is not always obvious when collecting data that the data may be something that you want to declare as exempt. I suspect that the commissioner would not be happy if all university research projects developed a policy of exempt declaration at every step of the way just in case they fell foul of the need to prove at the research stage why the information is exempt.
Frankly, there is also a disruption to the work of researchers who have to deal with some of the detailed FOI requests for data. The University of Oxford gave the example of a request for research data from a large nationwide health study submitted by a company with a significant commercial interest in the data.
“The university released some background information but attempted to refuse the bulk of the request by using existing exemptions relating to the cost of compliance, personal data, future publication and prejudice to commercial interest. These were not accepted by the requester. After a drawn out process the company finally wrote to the University saying that it had decided not to pursue the request further at that time (this may have been related to a take-over situation.) Had this not been the case it is understood that it had been strongly implied the requester would have sought a decision from the Information Commissioner. Had the university been ordered to release the data, it is believed that this would have undermined the credibility and sustainability of the research programme and affected future research. The research group had one year of research time disrupted in attempting to rebut the request and the institution incurred significant legal costs”.
Herein lies the nub of the problem. The whole nature of academic research is how widely the information is used, which frequently does not follow a simplistic linear progression of project specification, grant award, research, patents, peer assessment and publication. Even a PhD student working on a project may include some of the data relating to work on their PhD as yet unpublished. Some data sets may be used repeatedly by different academics assessing the information in different ways over a period of many years. A leading academic said to Universities UK,
“If I'm forced to simply hand over work that has taken me decades to produce so that someone else can interpret it without understanding the full background, then I'll refrain from doing it”.
Baroness Benjamin
My Lords, I support the amendment, to which I have put my name, as it provides an opportunity to improve the existing freedom of information legislation by explicitly recognising the needs of researchers in universities as highlighted by Universities UK. I appreciate the support given to the amendment earlier by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill.
Before I continue, I declare an interest as the chancellor of the University of Exeter, and I speak from my experience gained at the university. At Exeter, which strongly supports an open and transparent approach to research, we are developing an open-access data store for all of our published work arising from public funding, so that it is freely available to the widest possible audience. We at Exeter have a strong track record of complying with freedom of information requests about the work at the university and are deeply committed to public engagement in research, organising many public events, school visits and open days to highlight and explain the research that we do. Public interest in research is very positive indeed and we do all we can to encourage that legitimate interest.
However, the exemption proposed in the amendment is of value in preventing premature publication of research for several reasons—such as in commercial work where the university is working closely with a company to carry out research that might lead to a commercial product and where release of information might prevent a patent or a product emerging. For instance, our researchers might be developing a new vaccine with a company; that could be prevented from being developed if information was released by a third party too early. In sensitive areas of research, premature release of information can be misleading or impact on our ability to be seen to be impartial and independent. In global security, revealing details of research at a premature stage might be misleading or endanger individual researchers or other UK nationals working in areas of conflict. Incidentally, all the research carried out at Exeter is ultimately published in any case, when completed.
On many indicators, the UK is second only to the US in terms of our research performance. The processes which we here in Britain have for promoting and overseeing the quality of research, which are underpinned by peer review, have helped secure this position. We have worked hard to achieve and maintain that. As my noble friend Lady Brinton has already said, the exemption for pre-publication research in certain circumstances already exists within Scottish freedom of information legislation, and that of other countries. This provides a safeguard that can protect the integrity of the research process, if it is needed, which is not covered by existing exemptions in English legislation.
I, too, believe that the English legislation was not designed with research in mind. Openness and transparency in research is important but distribution of early, incomplete or speculative research findings can be potentially very damaging to public confidence in research and the reputation of UK universities. This could also have the unintended consequences that some international collaborators and investors will be unwilling to allow UK universities access to data and information for fear that it will be released prior to peer review and appropriate legal protection. This is causing great concerns—financial concerns—to universities such as Exeter.
Universities are fearful that at a time when there is widespread recognition and support for scientific research as a driver for economic growth, the Freedom of Information Act, as currently constituted and applied to universities, could adversely affect UK research and is very damaging indeed. Therefore, I hope that the Government will consider carefully the consequences and respond positively to this amendment.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe
My Lords, I added my name to this amendment because, as noble Lords will know, I have a long-standing interest in promoting the interests of our universities. Like others, I feel that when the Freedom of Information Act was passed, this House did not foresee how its provisions would relate to the university context. The Act’s intention—to increase public access to information held by public authorities—is right.
In relation to university research, like others, I strongly support access to research data and the transparency of the research process. That is a culture that the Government should encourage, not least because it will increase public confidence in science and research and will also help the research community to make the most of the products of its collective work. However, access to research information must be balanced with the need to support the research process itself. It is not in the national interest to provide access to information in a way that inhibits research in contentious areas, discourages people taking part in research projects or drives commercial research funders away from the university research base. Nor is it in our national interest to put a brake on the competitive position of our universities internationally.
There are already exemptions that can be used by university research staff to refuse to disclose information requested under FOI. The ICO has done much to explain, in sector-specific guidance as the Minister indicated, how the exemptions can be applied by universities, but I do not believe that they go far enough. For example, although there is an exemption for commercially sensitive information, how does that apply to university research? Research is a competitive business, where the challenge is always to publish first. If your findings are already in the public domain, it becomes quite difficult to get a journal to take your article. Your standing in the research excellence framework will be affected. Your ability to secure future funds, grants and contracts may be compromised. Your reputation, and that of your institution, will be hit.
Can the Minister explain what protections exist to prevent a competitor academic requesting your research data as they emerge? Universities UK, which supports this amendment and has provided an extremely helpful briefing to which other speakers have referred, has given an example of exactly this situation, in which a researcher was subject to FOI requests from a former collaborator who was now at a different institution. Another example comes from Queen Mary, University of London, where a research team was subject to an FOI request while still conducting its analysis. The university believed that,
“releasing data at the individual-participant level would prejudice publication of future study papers … and could set a precedent that may affect our ability to attract research funding and participants in the future”.
Releasing data before the process of validation and analysis is complete also carries the risk that misleading information will get into the public domain. We know that this is a particular concern in medicine, where misleading information can have serious consequences for public health. The peer-review system in the UK is one of the major strengths of our research base because it ensures that, before findings are published, they are checked by experts. This helps to ensure that poorly designed and executed research with dubious findings does not enter the public domain. As the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, mentioned, the Environmental Information Regulations include a protection for,
“material which is still in the course of completion, to unfinished documents or to incomplete data”.
Why cannot FOI have something similar?
We all want universities to do more to work effectively with business. Indeed, the Minister of State for Universities made an announcement about this only last week. The fact that university research can be subject to FOI causes difficulties in working with commercial research partners. Negotiations can often be long and difficult. Businesses will look at the recent cases where research findings have been requested by companies with a commercial interest in the data and wonder—quite legitimately, in my view—whether they would not be better off doing research with non-university research bodies that do not carry that responsibility.
I, too, want to mention that in Scotland there is now a pre-publication exemption—on which the proposal in the amendment is modelled—which has been used to deal with exactly this point. Let me quote an example from one Scottish university, which received an FOI request for the annual report written for the funder of some early-stage research. There was no commercial value in the findings to date, but the report described avenues that could, with further investigation, yield commercially valuable results. Not surprisingly, the university wanted to use this information to apply for further funding, but that would have been compromised by releasing the report to potential competitors. The request was refused using the Scottish pre-publication exemption. Will the Minister tell the Committee whether he believes that it is right that researchers in Scotland and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has said, in Ireland and the United States should have this protection that our universities do not have?
I note that Universities UK is not alone in calling for this House to scrutinise the way in which this Bill relates to university research. The Wellcome Trust, the Association of Medical Research Charities and the Ethical Medicines Industry Group have all written to noble Lords in relation to this, especially in support of the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill. I urge the Minister to consider whether he can accommodate these concerns by accepting this amendment. I do not believe that it will do any harm. It is clearly limited in its scope and it could do a great deal of good.
Lord Scott of Foscote
My Lords, I rise to express my complete support for the spirit and intention behind this amendment, which has been so cogently and lucidly explained by the three noble Baronesses in whose names it stands. I rise simply to make a drafting point on the amendment, which some of your Lordships may think is a rather tedious reason. It proposes two conditions to be applied to,
“Information obtained in the course of, or derived from, a programme of research”,
to enable that information to qualify as exempt information. The two conditions are under paragraphs (a) and (b) of new subsection (1A) that the amendment would insert into Section 22 of the Freedom of Information Act.
My point relates to the condition under paragraph (a), which states that,
“the programme or project is continuing with a view to a report of the research … being published by”,
bodies specified in paragraphs (a)(i) and (a)(ii) in the amendment.
I puzzled over the identity of the possible publishers who would fall under those categories. Paragraph (a)(i) refers to,
“a public authority as defined by section 3 of this Act”,
which would exclude other public authorities that are not so defined. Paragraph (a)(ii) refers to “any other person”. When the word “person” is found in statute, it may include, according to the Interpretation Act,
“a body of persons corporate or unincorporate”,
but that depends on the context. An authority which is not a public authority as defined in Section 3 could be a corporate or unincorporated body and could qualify as a person. It is the contrast between the two that might, if someone wanted to argue the contrary, raise some doubt.
I began to wonder why it was necessary to identify the proposed publishers at all. The important condition is that,
“the programme or project is continuing with a view to a report of the research … being published”.
It really does not matter by whom the matter will be published because anyone will do. I think that that is the intention behind paragraphs (a)(i) and (a)(ii), although the language used might suggest the contrary. Therefore, I respectfully suggest that the words in those paragraphs (a)(i) and (a)(ii), and the preceding preposition “by”, should go and that the condition in paragraph (a) should simply refer to,
“the programme or project is continuing with a view to a report of the research … being published”.
Doubt and confusion is simply raised by the attempt to specify the individuals or organisations which fall under paragraphs (a)(i) or (a)(ii).
Baroness Blackstone
My Lords, I support these amendments but I, of course, defer to the noble and learned Lord who is much better versed in the legal aspects of the drafting of this amendment. I ask that the Government accept the amendments in principle but possibly come back with a redrafted version with the omissions proposed by the noble and learned Lord.
Quite a lot of comments have been made about scientific and medical research, but I want briefly to speak as a social scientist. When they undertake empirical research, social scientists are heavily dependent on the agreement of individuals to participate in surveys, whether they are large-scale quantitative surveys or small-scale qualitative surveys.
I respectfully suggest that, unless this amendment or something like it is accepted, it will be more difficult for social scientists to carry out their work. Advanced data manipulation techniques make it much more difficult to guarantee the anonymity of data even where personal information has, as far as possible, been removed or redacted from data sets. I noticed that the Minister did not respond to my particular question about whether financial support would be given when extensive redaction has to take place. This causes particular concern when highly sensitive information is provided by individuals whose identity may need to be protected to save them from harm. Given the difficulties of guaranteeing effective protection of identity, the research community in the social science world has raised a number of concerns that the very process of securing informed consent from potential subjects of research may stop them participating at all. That would be a disastrous consequence.
Finally, I want to pick up the point made by several speakers about the fact that other jurisdictions have managed to come up with legislation whereby the issues raised today have been dealt with. This may be a sensitive week in which to ask the Minister to have a look at Scottish legislation passed in the Scottish Parliament. Nevertheless, I think that he and his officials should do so. Moreover, it is also very important that we look at the Irish legislation, which is rather broader based in how it treats universities for these purposes or research associated with academic work—it may not be done in a university; it may be done in a separate research institution. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, read out the section of the Irish Act. Mention has been made of the United States. I ask the Minister a direct question. Has he looked at those three pieces of legislation in those three countries? If so, what has made him decide not to follow the same route? It would be very helpful to have a direct answer to that question.
Lord May of Oxford
I express my approval of the amendment. I would go beyond the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, in saying that I understand science to embrace the social sciences within it. In this case, it goes wider than that in extending increasingly the large areas of the humanities that use large databases. It is a really important problem and the spirit of this amendment addresses it in a significant way. I very much hope that all that has been said here is taken to heart.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
I would like to say very briefly how much I support this amendment. The noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, asked the Minister expressly whether he had looked at the Scottish and Irish legislation. I would bring his attention to the American situation, because we followed America in introducing a Freedom of Information Act and we also regard that country as being foremost in terms of publications and citations in scientific and social science research. We follow America in many senses, but it has specific legislation that has guidelines providing the constraints that we are looking for. It seems sensible to have an exemption, as in the Scottish model that we can follow, which has over the past few years been satisfactory. It would be easy to follow, and it picks up all the reservations that those of us had who spoke in favour of the amendments proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill. It picks up a lot of the points made by those amendments and puts them neatly into one clause. I support the amendment and hope that the Minister and his advisers are looking at the models in other countries.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I rise to support the amendments in the names of the noble Baronesses.
Amendment 151 provides both clarity and the appropriate safeguards for the UK’s research centres and its academics. Like other noble Lords, I wonder why the Minister has decided to go down a different route from that being trodden in Scotland, Ireland and the USA. It seems to me that by taking a different route we are putting our universities at a competitive disadvantage. That would obviously be a retrograde step.
It is clear from everything that has been said by noble Lords, who are far more well versed in these issues than I am, that the guidance provided by the Information Commissioner is completely inadequate in relation to competition and confidentiality. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Scott of Foscote, has commented that the amendment is probably defective. However, unless the Minister is prepared to accept the principle behind it, the contribution which our academic and research institutions make not just to the cultural and intellectual life of this country but to ensuring that we have a competitive advantage in many areas will be adversely affected. Therefore, I urge the Minister to accept the amendment in principle.
Lord Henley
My Lords, I start by saying that whatever arguments I put forward will not be based on those of the drafting point made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scott. However, I take his point that new section (1A)(a)(i) and (ii) are possibly unnecessary as they seem to include everyone. It would therefore be possible to delete the words from “by” onwards and just talk about what is published.
I make it clear to the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, and others that the Scottish, Irish and United States legislation have not been my bedside reading for some time. I am not completely and utterly familiar with them but I will no doubt make sure that I am made totally familiar with them and look at the consequences of what they do. An important point to remember in all the arguments put to me is the remark of the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, that, if it does no harm, the amendment ought to be accepted. I am not sure that one should accept amendments merely because they do no harm. I want to make it clear that we are committed to transparency in this area. We will not introduce new exemptions from disclosure unless the necessity of doing so has been clearly demonstrated.
I recognise that a number of noble Lords have expressed considerable concern. We have devoted almost three-quarters of an hour to this matter. I commend my noble friend Lady Brinton for the admirable brevity with which she set out her case and expressed her concerns. I am aware that there are major concerns in the whole sector about the potential for the disclosure of information under the FOI Act which could undermine the United Kingdom’s academic research. We all accept that the UK is at the very forefront of international research and that it is vital that that position should be maintained. We wish to do that. I am more than happy to see noble Lords between now and Report if they want to make the case for needing to go further and to explain why they believe that the existing exemptions, properly applied, do not provide the appropriate protection.
I am aware that only in January of last year the Science and Technology Committee recommended in its report in relation to events at the University of East Anglia’s climate research unit that the application of the Freedom of Information Act to research material required clarification. There is in fact little evidence to demonstrate that existing provisions within the Freedom of Information Act do not provide adequate protection for research-related information. The circumstances provided for in this amendment are already provided for in existing exemptions. For example, exemptions exist which may be used, subject to a public interest test, to protect information the disclosure of which would at least be likely to prejudice commercial interests, health and safety, and the effective conduct of public affairs, as well as information intended for future publication. There is a clear public interest in protecting research information from disclosure in appropriate circumstances, and the Act passed by the previous Government—and I do not know why the Opposition now wish to amend it when there is no evidence that it needs amendment—is designed to ensure that public interest factors are given proper weight when exemptions are applied. Furthermore, the Act contains provisions protecting information provided in confidence and in relation to personal data.
Any new exemption within the Freedom of Information Act would also have no relevance to research on environmental matters. Requests for environmental information are considered not under the Freedom of Information Act but under the Environmental Information Regulations, and this amendment would not affect those. All information held by the higher education sector, including that relating to research programmes, has been subject to the Freedom of Information Act for seven years. The noble Baroness will remember, as she was probably a member of the Government at the time when it was passed in 2000 and came into effect in 2005. The Freedom of Information provisions within the Bill, in Clauses 100 to 102, build on a regime that is already firmly in place. I know that my noble friend Lady Brinton will be aware that the Information Commissioner has recently issued guidance for the higher education sector in response to the Science and Technology Committee’s recommendations. This is one reason why it is possible that it will not be necessary for me to study the provisions of the Scottish Act, as well as what they are doing in Ireland and America. The guidance will assist higher education establishments in dealing appropriately with requests for research-related information, and withholding it when it would not be in the public interest to disclose.
As a coalition Government, we are committed to greater transparency. I want to make it clear that we will not introduce exemptions into the Freedom of Information Act unless we can have that clearly demonstrated. I do not believe that it has been clearly demonstrated, but I am more than happy to see my noble friend and others if she feels that she can put a further case. I repeat to the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, and others, that I will study what is happening in Scotland—it is near to my heart. But what goes on in a devolved Administration does not necessarily have to be copied in this country. There are times when we can learn from them and times when we find that what they are doing is not necessarily appropriate. I am more than happy to look at it, but I do not think that a case has been made on this occasion. But my door is always open and I am always prepared to see my noble friend and others to discuss this matter, if they feel that I have not got the message appropriately.
Baroness Brinton
I thank the Minister for his comments and for his offer of a meeting, which I think myself and others will be very grateful to accept. I start by saying that in addition to the comments that I made, the comments from everybody else who spoke started to provide the evidence that the Minister was looking for in showing how there are problems with the current arrangements. In defence of the Information Commissioner, can I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, that I have no issue with his guidance, which is based on the FOI Act? One of the key points that I was trying to make was that the FOI Act did not envisage the complexities of university research, which is where the issues have arisen. I know that the UUK briefing, which the Minister mentioned that he had just received, will provide some evidence, and I am sure that UUK and RCUK would be delighted to provide more information on specific cases for the Minister to look at.
I want to pick up the point raised by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scott, about paragraphs (a)(i) and (a)(ii) of the proposed subsection (1A) of the amendment. As I understand it—and I may be wrong—the key point about the Freedom of Information Act is that the only authorities affected by it are public authorities. That is why it is so specific. Thereafter it refers to individuals because there are individuals who work within those authorities. I would be delighted to be proved wrong but that is the basis on which I understand it. If others with more expertise in drafting want to correct that I would be delighted to concede that point.
We have taken some considerable time on this amendment and the only point I want to consider before we finish is to say that the evidence is clearly there. It is also evident from Scotland, the USA and Ireland that these arrangements are working and working well and I hope the Minister will be able to satisfy himself on those accounts. The key point I want to keep returning to is a very selfish one about the commercial viability of English and Welsh universities. They are now on the back foot compared with Scottish universities. I believe that that is inappropriate. We believe very strongly across the House that we want our universities to be able to succeed in the commercial market that is academic research today. Providing a clearer framework for academics through this clause would do that. It would not endanger transparency and access to freedom of information for people who genuinely need it. This is purely protecting a number of areas where there is a complete muddle at the moment that is beginning to affect how our universities can work effectively in the research market. On that basis, and thanking the Minister for his offer of a meeting, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Wills
“Consultations with a view to designating public authorities
In section 5 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (further power to designate public authorities) after subsection (3) insert—“(3A) The Secretary of State shall publish an annual report setting out the persons he or she has consulted under subsection (3) and the decisions which he has taken in respect of consultations under that subsection.””
Lord Wills
My Lords, in contrast to the weighty and important matters we have just been discussing these are two modest amendments the Government ought to have no problem accepting. They seek to encourage the Government to maintain transparency and extend it as the coalition agreement pledges them to do. They do not in themselves legislate to extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act but they should help ensure that the benefits of the Act are not lessened over time through inertia and should help prevent legislative change in other areas having an adverse impact on the scope of the Act.
At present the Secretary of State must consult anybody the Government propose to designate under Section 5 of the Act as public authorities—bodies with public functions or contractors providing services on behalf of public authorities. However, the Government do not have to announce who is currently being consulted or which bodies they have decided not to designate after consulting. Amendment 151B would require the Secretary of State to produce an annual report saying which bodies they have consulted with a view to their designation and what decisions they have made. That in itself is an extension of transparency, something the Government are in favour of, and it would enable the Government to be held to account for their progress or lack of it in extending transparency.
Amendment 151D would require a compliance report from all public authorities. This is designed simply to bring all current public authorities, including local government among others, into line with practice in central government. Some public authorities are excellent in the way in which they discharge their obligations under the Act but the performance of some of them, including some local authorities, is deplorable. Compliance reports such as those proposed in this amendment have been shown to improve the compliance of central government with the Act. Imposing them more widely in this way would hardly be onerous on other public authorities—they already should keep a record of all the information stipulated in this amendment and all they would have to do is to collate and publish it. Such transparency could significantly improve their performance. I beg to move.
Lord Rosser
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Wills has set out the objectives of the amendment, which seek to improve the delivery of a transparent and open system of government through the previous Government’s groundbreaking Freedom of Information Act. They are in line with the Government’s own pledge to improve and extend the drive for greater transparency. The Freedom of Information Act provided a mechanism for the Government to extend the scope of the Act, as my noble friend has already explained. By placing a duty on the Government to report annually on their activities to maintain or extend transparency through further designation of public authorities and on public authorities to report on their efforts to comply with the Act, the amendment will create a driver that will strengthen and adhere to the principles and purpose of the Act. I very much hope that we will hear a positive response from the Minister to the amendment.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, as my noble friend has already made clear this afternoon the Government are very committed to greater transparency and to making sure that the Freedom of Information Act introduced by the previous Administration operates as effectively as possible. That is behind our commitment to introduce post-legislative scrutiny of the Freedom of Information Act, which is now under way and being carried out by the Justice Select Committee.
As the noble Lord, Lord Wills, explained, Amendment 151B would place a duty on the Secretary of State to publish an annual report detailing the Government’s actions in relation to Section 5 of the Freedom of Information Act, which enables the Act to be extended to bodies performing functions of a public nature or providers of public services under contract. Amendment 151D proposes that public authorities are required to publish annual reports containing prescribed classes of information about their compliance with the Freedom of Information Act and environmental information regulations.
In relation to Amendment 151B, I fully appreciate the need for transparency in relation to the Government’s exercise of the power in Section 5 of the Freedom of Information Act. The Government are, and will continue to be transparent in this area. We have given advance notice of planned consultations under Section 5 and, of course, any order made under that section is subject to the affirmative procedure. We see no practical benefit in introducing a requirement to publish an annual report. I also agree with the sentiment behind the noble Lord’s Amendment 151D regarding the transparency of freedom of information activity. Public authorities should be accountable for their performance in respect of freedom of information requests and actions. However, I am not persuaded of the case for introducing a statutory requirement to publish an annual report along the lines proposed here. We need to be alert to the resource implications before placing any new burdens on public authorities. That said, I recognise that the transparency of freedom of information performance across the public sector is also something to which Parliament may wish to return, as I have already said, in the post-legislative scrutiny that is now under way. While I sympathise with the sentiments behind the amendment, in light of the fact that that post-legislative scrutiny will provide a forum for such proposals to be properly considered in the round, I hope that he will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Wills
I am grateful to the Minister for her gracious and largely positive response, although I am slightly baffled as to why the Government have not seized on these simple amendments. This would be an easy thing for them to do. When in the future I stand up, as I will probably feel obliged to, to berate them for their slow progress in extending transparency, they would be able to hold it up and say, “Look, we’ve done this already”. I say with all respect to the Minister that the announcement about the consultation on Section 5 came quite late in the Government’s lifetime, after many occasions on which I and others had had to badger them about their lack of progress on it. It is not a regular occurrence—the amendment would make it obligatory for that sort of transparency to be provided only annually, so I am slightly baffled as to why the Minister has not seized on this offering more gladly than she has. However, I am grateful for her positive words and I will, of course, withdraw the amendment. I hope that she and the Government will understand that it is important that post-legislative scrutiny should not be used as an excuse to delay all action on this indefinitely. They will be held to account on their pledge to extend transparency and, the sooner they deliver on it, the better for the health of our democracy. For the time being, though, I am happy to beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Wills
“Freedom of information and contracts
(1) Any contract for any sum over £1 million made by a public authority with any person after the coming into force of this section shall be deemed to include a freedom of information provision.
(2) Where such a contract is to any extent performed by means of a sub-contract, that sub-contract shall be deemed to include a freedom of information provision.
(3) In this section a “freedom of information provision” means a provision stipulating that all information relating to the performance of the contract which is held by—
(a) the contractor,(b) a sub-contractor, and(c) any other person on behalf of the contractor or sub- contractor, is, notwithstanding any contrary provision, deemed to be held on behalf of the relevant authority for the purpose of section 3(2)(b) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 or regulation 3(2)(b) of the Environmental Information Regulations 2004.”
Lord Wills
My Lords, I am sure that the Minister and her officials heaved a heavy sigh when they saw these amendments on the Marshalled List, because they have seen them—or something similar to them—before, during the passage of the Localism Bill through this House. I made the detailed arguments for the amendments then and those arguments remain essentially the same, so I will not detain your Lordships for long by rehearsing them all again. However, the Government’s unsatisfactory response to my previous amendments has pushed me into tabling them again. There is no difference between us on the policy objective. The Government are committed to greater transparency. We all agree on the importance of that, so again I am baffled as to why the Government persist in producing such unsatisfactory reasons for resisting what I continue to believe are modest, practical amendments designed to realise their own policy objectives.
Amendment 151C deals with the information that the public can obtain under the Freedom of Information Act about the work done for a local authority under contract using the public’s money. This has become particularly important since the passage of the Localism Bill, which envisages that a growing proportion of local authority functions will be carried out by other bodies under contract. Under the Freedom of Information Act as it now stands, the public will be denied the access that they currently have to increasing amounts of information about local authority functions discharged on behalf of the public, for the public, using public money. This amendment would ensure that the public retained at least some of that access to information about those functions, even when they were subcontracted to private sector companies. The amendment is proportionate. Very small businesses would not be caught by it, as there is a limit of £1 million on the size of contract that would be covered by it. The Freedom of Information Act and regulations already contain exemptions to protect the legitimate interests of business, trade secrets or information likely to prejudice commercial interests.
Why do the Government resist this? There is no good reason that I have yet been able to discover. The Minister, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, said that the Government are committed to reducing the regulatory burden on business. I agree that that is a desirable commitment, but it is not in all circumstances an overriding one. Of course, businesses find regulations irksome and burdensome, but Governments still impose them in the public interest. The Government are doing it now with the banking sector, for example. The noble Lord, Lord McNally, then said that he does not want to deal with transparency issues piecemeal but would rather look at this after post-legislative scrutiny of the Freedom of Information Act. We have heard that argument for resisting amendments many times this afternoon. I understand the reasons for it—it is commendable that the Government are doing this post-legislative scrutiny—and it might be a plausible argument for resisting this amendment were it not for the fact that the Government have already done what the Minister said that they should not do. In other words, they have dealt with the issue of transparency in local government piecemeal, pre-empting the results of post-legislative scrutiny of the Freedom of Information Act. They have done that through the passage of the Localism Bill which has the effect not of increasing transparency for local authority functions but of restricting it. If they were to follow their own logic, they would not have put through the Localism Bill in that way, pre-empting the results of post-legislative scrutiny.
All this amendment does is to seek to maintain the status quo—not to deal with it piecemeal by extending or restricting it—for public access to information about local authority functions carried out on the public’s behalf using public money. I really cannot see any good reason for resisting this amendment and I hope that the Minister will no longer do so. I live constantly in hope.
Much the same arguments apply in support of Amendment 152A, which would bring companies controlled by local authorities within the scope of the Freedom of Information Act. Again, there have been exchanges on this and the Government previously rejected it on the grounds that it would, “create uncertainty” for requesters about the coverage of the Act,
“given that companies could pass in and out of transfer of shares”.
As I said previously, I agree that there might occasionally, if not often, be some such uncertainty. These transfers of shares are not a frequent occurrence, as the Minister will be aware, but this sort of thing can easily be clarified. It hardly constitutes a compelling argument for keeping secret from the public important information about how their money is spent.
Clearly, when the noble Lord, Lord McNally, was making this argument he must have recognised that it was not altogether compelling because he then tacked on another argument on the back of it. His letter said:
“Where a company is only partly owned by the public sector, there is an increased likelihood that areas of its business will be unrelated to the public sector”.
Of course that is true, but again it is not a reason for keeping secret from the public those areas of business which are paid for by the public and operate on their behalf. I know that there are very clever officials advising the Minister, and very clever lawyers advising Ministers as well. They are perfectly capable of drafting this amendment better than I have been able to do to cover this eventuality. I hope that the Government will extend transparency and ask their officials and lawyers to get drafting. I beg to move.
Lord Rosser
My Lords, once again my noble friend Lord Wills has set out the purpose of these amendments. As he has said, one of them extends the duties under the Freedom of Information Act to a public authority, including local authority services which have been contracted out, where the contract made by a public authority with any person is for any sum over £1 million. The second amendment extends the definition, as he said, of a publicly owned company for the purposes of falling within the terms of the Freedom of Information Act to extend to companies where at least 50 per cent of their shares are held in public ownership—that is, by one or more relevant authorities.
One point that my noble friend homed in on has been the desire of this Government to move more and more activities away from being directly provided by public authorities, including local authorities—he referred to the Localism Bill—and instead to see them contracted out. Yet when they are contracted out in this way into the private sector, it removes the access to information which is currently there through the Freedom of Information Act. On the one hand, then, we have a Government who say that they want to increase transparency and, on the other hand, through Bills such as the Localism Bill we find that on issues and activities where it was formerly possible to obtain information under the Freedom of Information Act when a public authority, including a local authority, was undertaking them, it will no longer be possible to get that information. The Public Bodies Bill was another Bill which will encourage this move.
Unless the Government are prepared to indicate some sympathy with this amendment and to look at going down this road, at least to accept the amendment’s spirit if not its direct terms—and, as my noble friend has said, not to try and fob everybody off by saying, “Well, there is post-legislative scrutiny taking place”, because nobody knows how long that is going to take—then I suggest that their claims to want to extend transparency are somewhat hollow, since their own activities as a Government are reducing that level of transparency.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wills, for introducing and explaining his amendment, and also for the supplementary comments from the noble Lord, Lord Rosser.
I am not going to apologise for the fact that this Government are carrying out post-legislative scrutiny of the Freedom of Information Act and that I will refer to it on several occasions during the course of these debates. Such scrutiny is a very important and proper way of looking at existing legislation to see whether it is working effectively and operating as intended and for looking at ways in which it can be improved in the round. As a new Member of your Lordships’ House, on many occasions over the past year I have heard references to the need for post-legislative scrutiny and how that would be an important part of any legislation that passes through Parliament. Therefore, we should see as a good thing the fact that we have that mechanism in place for this Act and that it is happening at this time.
The noble Lord, Lord Wills has explained his amendments effectively, so there is no need for me to repeat any of what he said. However, as he said, these two amendments are similar to those he tabled during the passage of the Localism Bill through this House. I am sorry that the noble Lord does not feel that his concerns were adequately addressed on that occasion. As he says, my noble friend Lord McNally stressed during the debates on the Localism Bill the Government’s commitment to the Freedom of Information Act and described some of the measures that we are taking to extend its scope. For example, as the noble Lord is aware, the Bill includes a provision to extend the scope of the Act to companies wholly owned by two or more public authorities. We have also made an order under Section 5 of the Act extending its scope to, among others, the Association of Chief Police Officers. In addition, we are currently consulting more than 200 further bodies about their possible inclusion, and we intend to extend this consultation to more than 2,000 housing associations later this year.
Our continued opposition to the proposals within these amendments does not stem from any lack of commitment to the cause of transparency. As my noble friend stressed last year, it is important that we ensure that changes to the ways in which public services are delivered do not undermine our pledge to increase openness and accountability. I absolutely share the point made by the noble Lord about that.
This issue is already being considered as part of the Government’s response to the Cabinet Office consultation on a draft transparency and open data strategy, which is due to be published early this year. It is also an issue which the Justice Select Committee may wish to consider during its post-legislative scrutiny of the Act. It is, of course, open to noble Lords—I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Wills, with his experience and expertise in this matter will do so—to make representations to the committee as part of its work.
More generally, it is important that we assess carefully the likely impact of any change against the benefits that it will bring. This is to ensure that transparency is both maintained and enhanced but with due regard to any burdens that might be imposed. For example, under Amendment 151C, it would be problematic for both contractors and public authorities to comply with freedom of information requests for contract information. Public authorities would need to have access to any information held by the contractor that is potentially relevant in responding to the request. Such a requirement to share all such information with the public authority so that it could comply with freedom of information requests could adversely affect the effective delivery of that contract. In particular, it might, for example, provide the public authority with commercially sensitive information on other matters to which the authority would not—or, arguably, should not—have access.
In addition, Amendment 152A, for example, which seeks to make all companies more than 50 per cent owned by the public sector subject to the Act, would increase the risk of activities not relating to the public sector being made subject to the Act given the varied interests that these bodies might have. The noble Lord made reference to that argument before, but it is a very compelling argument. If there is a strong argument for including a specific body in relation to the specific things that it does, this is better achieved through other means, such as an order made under Section 5 of the FOI Act. However, as I have indicated, we are already extending the scope of the Act to all companies that are wholly owned by any number of public authorities, as provided for in Clause 101 of the Bill.
Amendment 152A relates solely to the local government sector. As my noble friend Lord McNally explained to the House at the Report stage of the Localism Bill, it would not be appropriate, as is proposed in the amendment, simply to amend the Freedom of Information Act in relation to bodies that have entered into contracts with local government. In addition, although I do not think that this argument was deployed by my noble friend during the passage of that Bill, in preparing myself for today’s debate it seemed to me that the proposal could act as a disincentive to competition among contractors. That is another argument and reason why we should not necessarily go down this route.
To conclude, I would like to reiterate to the noble Lord, Lord Wills, that our opposition to his proposals stems not from an aversion to increased transparency but from our desire to ensure that effective and proportionate solutions are developed. I hope, therefore, that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Wills
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for her broadly constructive, helpful and typically gracious response. However, I say to her that she does not have to persuade me, as I am genuinely trying to be helpful. When I was a Member of Parliament, 75 per cent of my casework—I dealt with about 1,200 different cases every month—was complaints about Swindon Borough Council. What most people really want to know about is what their local authority is doing for them. At some point in the future, unless the Minister makes good on the warm words that we have just heard from her and brings back under the scope of the Act those local authority functions that are being given out to private contractors, every MP on the Government’s side will be battered by complaints from their constituents, who will ask, “Why can we not find out more information about this work, which our money is paying for—work that is being done on our behalf—because of the result of legislation that you have passed?”. That is the current situation.
I would be very happy to give way to the Minister. If she is going to reassure me, I will be delighted.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
I simply point out to the noble Lord that my understanding is that, although a local authority may contract out a service to a provider, the local authority is still accountable for the delivery of that service. Therefore, any individual should be able to request—using the Freedom of Information Act if necessary, or through correspondence with their local MP—the information that they need to be able to satisfy themselves that what they pay for through their local taxes is actually providing the service that they expect and that they deserve to receive.
Lord Wills
I am grateful to the Minister for what is a very valiant attempt, if I may say so. I will not detain the House at length, as I am about to withdraw the amendment. However, if she refers to the column in Hansard where I originally raised this point, during the passage of the Localism Bill, she will see that that is not quite the case. There are many instances where services have gone to private contractors that people just cannot find out about. For example, on the issue of parking tickets, many people are very suspicious about the way that private ticket companies operate. People suspect that the ticketing is a revenue-raising operation rather than an attempt to ensure that the traffic can move safely and securely through town. When people want to find out about that, they cannot do so because private sector companies are not covered by the Act. As I say, the Minister does not have to persuade me, but all the Members of Parliament in the other place will be besieged by constituents in the years to come unless this Government make good on their pledge to get this information back into the public domain. There will be a heavy price to pay—that is all that I can say.
For the record, I am afraid that I am not persuaded by her arguments, for what it is worth. Of course post-legislative scrutiny is a good thing, and the Minister is quite right to bang the drum about that. I support the Government on that, but they have ignored their own good practice in this case by removing such matters from the Act in having already taken a piecemeal decision about this.
However, I remain willing to be persuaded about the Government’s good intentions. I believe that the Government want to extend transparency, but I make the point—I tried to make this point to the noble Lord, Lord McNally, as well—that open data is an admirable project, on which the Government are doing great work. That work was begun by the previous Government, and I support this Government in the way that they are taking it forward so vigorously. That is a great thing, but it is different from freedom of information. There is one crucial difference. As regards open data, it is for the Government to decide what data they release. They have been open and are pushing the transparency agenda vigorously—all credit to them for that—but the Government decide on that matter. As regards freedom of information, the citizen decides what information he wants. It is bottom up as opposed to top down. They complement one another and they should be working together, but they are different. That is not an adequate excuse in my view.
However, I have detained the Committee long enough and, for the time being, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Thornton
“Information to be communicated
(1) In section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (general right of access to information held by public authorities) after subsection (4) insert—
“(4A) Should the communication of information under subsection (1)(a) and (b) be delayed beyond the time limit for compliance specified under section 10(1), the applicant will be given the option of requesting that the information communicated is the information extant at the time of final release, taking account of any amendment or addition of information made between the time the request is received and the time when the information is to be communicated, unless there are grounds for significant new concerns as to the exempt nature of any new information under Part 2 (exempt information).””
Baroness Thornton
My Lords, I am delighted to be taking part for a short time in this distinguished Grand Committee, whose debates I have been following with interest. I suspect that I am not the first noble Lord to realise the relevance and immediacy of the debates that have been taking place here, particularly on this part of the Bill, concerned, as it is, with the use of and access to public information, or, in the case which I wish to draw to the Grand Committee’s attention, lack of access.
I hope that the Grand Committee will forgive me as an interloper into its deliberations but I wish to put a particular issue before it which seems pertinent to the matters it is discussing. I wish to move Amendment 151E and speak to Amendment 151F. Amendment 151E aims to tackle the problem of information that is communicated post the appeals process being out of date by granting applicants the option of receiving the most up-to-date version of the said information, if relevant. The relevant part of the amendment states, in proposed new subsection (4A):
“Should the communication of information under subsection (1)(a) and (b) be delayed beyond the time limit for compliance specified under section 10(1), the applicant will be given the option of requesting that the information communicated is the information extant at the time of final release, taking account of any amendment or addition of information made between the time the request is received and the time when the information is to be communicated, unless there are grounds for significant new concerns as to the exempt nature of any new information under Part 2 (exempt information)”.
I will go on to talk about the dilemma that we face in the House in general at the moment, but we have tabled this amendment because, if you go through the whole freedom of information appeal process, it could be many months before the Information Commissioner grants that appeal and says that that information should be released. If the information you are seeking is updated regularly, obviously the information that you need may be that which is available now, not that which was available eight months ago when you started down the road of putting down your freedom of information request, so this is about up-to-date information.
Amendment 151F seeks to insert a new clause. This aims to prevent a government use of appeals to block the release of evidence for a specific period of time—that is, when a Bill is being debated—by prohibiting the Royal Assent of any Bills where the release of key information is still subject to an appeals process. The amendment seeks to appeal against information notices by public authorities. Subsection (1) of the proposed new clause states:
“In section 57 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (appeal against notices served under Part IV) after subsection (2) insert”,
the points as outlined in our amendment.
In all the time that I have been in your Lordships’ House—since 1998, and certainly since the passage of the freedom of information legislation—I do not recall a situation like the one facing the House at the moment. In a nutshell, the House is being denied what might be—and probably is—pertinent information during the passage of legislation, and is being expected to scrutinise a very large and important Bill without full information that might influence its view about parts or all of it. I bring this dilemma to Grand Committee for consideration, and amendments that might remedy the situation. I am sure noble Lords will be pleased to learn that I have no intention of exposing the Committee to the rights and wrongs of the Health and Social Care Bill. However, I would appreciate the Committee’s consideration of an important issue—one which might occur again.
Lord Henley
My Lords, I welcome the noble Baroness to this Bill. When I saw she was going to be moving this amendment I wondered whether I should have asked my noble friend Lord Howe to step in and deal with it, but I think he has quite enough on his plate at the moment. As the noble Baroness made quite clear, she does not want me to deal with this from the point of view of the Department of Health. She accepts it has every right to appeal the issue and that the Government can appeal it further through all the appropriate courts. Although this is a matter for the Department of Health, it obviously has implications for wider government. Therefore it is of concern and they have the right to appeal these matters.
As she asked me to do, I will confine my remarks—particularly when I get on to Amendment 151F, the second of her two amendments—to the broad principles, because that is what she wants me to address on this occasion. No doubt she has had and will find ways of debating these matters further, and at some length, when she continues the debates on the health Bill. I want to deal first, rather briefly, with Amendment 151E, which proposes that where a response to a freedom of information request is not issued within 20 working days the applicant must be given the option of requesting any updated or new information,
“unless there are grounds for significant new concerns as to the exempt nature”
of such material. I want then to deal with the broad principles relating to Amendment 151F, concerning,
“Appeals against information notices by public authorities”,
and why we do not accept that her amendment is an appropriate way of dealing with this.
First, with regard to Amendment 151E, I accept that we would certainly want to encourage all public authorities to provide the most up-to-date information in such circumstances where it is appropriate and reasonable to do so, but the proposal we have here is fraught with difficulties. It could make it very difficult to conclude a request taking more than 20 working days, even where the deadline has been extended for legitimate reasons, given that new information might continuously be produced and the existing information would be continuously updated. That could have real disadvantages for the requester of that information if previous versions of the information that they might be interested in seeing were not ultimately disclosed because the obligation to disclose those versions had been superseded by an updated request.
Further, the effect of the option to request updated information being exercised will be to create in effect a rolling request for information each time the 20-day limit is exceeded. That might delay the information originally requested from reaching the requester, and will mean that the public authority expends time answering one version of the question only to see that work disregarded if it is superseded by an updated request. Neither of those are sensible results. I also believe that the amendment could lead to the undesirable outcome where public authorities rush decisions to complete cases within 20 working days, even where there are legitimate grounds to take longer. Therefore they either withhold uncontentious information or release sensitive information inappropriately.
I turn now to the second of the amendments—
Baroness Thornton
I would be grateful if the Minister could address the issue. The register of risk is a very good example of this. Were my honourable friend and the Evening Standard to have succeeded ultimately and were the Government to have acceded to the Information Commissioner’s ruling to release the information, the register of risks of November 2010 would not have been the relevant document. It was mentioned that it would not be very much use to my honourable friend because it would be that of November 2010, not November 2011. There is a genuine issue here which I would be very grateful if the Minister could address.
Lord Henley
I do not really see how it applies in the particular case that the noble Baroness is referring to, when she is talking about a 20-day limit and, if that is exceeded, how it would affect the November 2010 or November 2011 health risk register.
I shall come on to what I think is the more important part—
Baroness Thornton
I am very sorry to press the Minister on this matter, but I think I have been completely clear about this. I explained that a register of risks is a living document. It is a traffic-light process of red, amber and green in terms of the risks in any given policy area. The Minister must be very familiar with it because all government departments use them. A register of risks published in November 2010 would not be relevant in November 2011 when we in the House of Lords were discussing the health Bill.
I am perfectly happy to accept that this may be an incompetently worded amendment, but the Minister has not answered the question. Are the Government saying that when, under freedom of information, people ask for information that is then outside the 20 days and it goes to appeal, and the Government lose that appeal and the information may therefore be a year old, the Government will ensure that the up-to-date information is made available, if that is relevant?
Lord Henley
Obviously we want to provide the most up-to-date information that is appropriate. If this goes to appeal and it is found that we should be providing this information, we would provide that November 2010 information, but it would then be open to the noble Baroness to put in a request for the later information. Having had that decision by the tribunal, the court or whatever, that information would then be provided in the appropriate manner, because we would have lost that case and it would have become clear that that sort of information was that which should be provided.
Baroness Thornton
For the record, if the Government lose this appeal and publish this register of risks on this Bill, it will be not the November 2010 register of risks but the November 2010 risks plus the up-to-date version. Is that what the Minister is saying to me?
Lord Henley
I am not going to give an absolute guarantee of that sort without proper notice at this stage. However, I would have thought that it is fairly obvious that if something has been through the courts or the tribunal, or at whatever stage the Government decide that they are not going to appeal any further, and the courts have decreed that that sort of information ought to be available, it would be proper to provide the later information because it would be the same information that was being requested, other than the fact that it was at a later time. It would still be the same request being made, and it would have been decreed that that was appropriate. We would be bound by that decision.
Perhaps I might move on to the noble Baroness’s second amendment, with which I have even greater problems. In Amendment 151F, she proposes that no Bill may be submitted for Royal Assent where information directly relevant to that Bill has been requested under the Freedom of Information Act and where an appeal against an information notice issued by the Information Commissioner in the course of an investigation into the handling of the request is under consideration.
Baroness Thornton
I am sorry to interrupt the Minister again but did I understand him to say that it was disproportionate to delay the passage of a Bill? But what if the information is relevant to the passage of the Bill? This is the problem we have now. I am sure the noble Lord intends to enlighten me on that point.
Lord Henley
Yes, I think it is disproportionate to use the FOI process to delay the passage of a Bill and I do not draw back from those remarks— particularly when the appeal is under way for entirely legitimate reasons, as my colleagues in the Department of Health have made clear.
Perhaps I may go on, if the noble Baroness will let me. It also brings a political dimension into the process. The commissioner, who again I stress is independent of government, would obviously have to be mindful of the likely impact on the passage of a Bill were he to issue an information or decision notice during the passage of related legislation that he might expect to be appealed. Given that a decision on whether and when to issue a notice might indirectly impact on the passage of legislation, there is a real risk that his actions could be viewed through a political prism. That is not what we want and would have an adverse effect on his ability to act in a way that is—and is seen to be—both proper and impartial.
Baroness Thornton
Is the noble Lord saying that the ruling of the Information Commissioner—and the words he used, which I quoted to the Committee earlier in my remarks—was political in some way?
Lord Henley
I have not said that at all. I have said that what the noble Baroness is saying in her amendment would bring in a political dimension because it could cause delay to the passage of that Bill.
Obviously that risk could be avoided by the commissioner simply refusing to issue a notice while any Bill that he thought was related to the request was passing through Parliament. However, that would then cause even greater delay in him deciding whether or not to issue the notice, with an obvious disadvantage to the parties involved, particularly to the person who has requested the information. In either case, this would be to the potential detriment of the effective operation of the Freedom of Information Act and to the perception of the commissioner’s independence.
Baroness Thornton
This is really very important. Is the Minister saying, suggesting or even inferring that the use of freedom of information by Members of Parliament—and I have put the odd one in myself, and been a victim of it, from time to time—is not appropriate during the passage of any legislation, because a Member of Parliament may want that information to assist them in their deliberations or their input into that scrutiny?
Lord Henley
I regret to say that the noble Baroness is now getting to the stage where she is deliberately trying to misunderstand me on every occasion. There is no desire to stop people putting in a request for freedom of information. All we are saying is that her amendment, which in effect delays the passage of the Bill while that process is going on, is not an appropriate way in which to deal with it, and brings in the political dimension to the Bill. The amendment also undermines the premise that the Freedom of Information Act is motive blind by introducing a requirement to consider whether information has been requested in connection with a particular Bill.
Lord Scott of Foscote
Can the Minister help me or the Committee in indicating whether law officers have given any advice on the implications of this amendment from a constitutional point of view? I have in mind the prospect of a Bill being introduced in one or other House—it does not matter which—being passed in that House and going to the other House and being passed in that House too, perhaps with a commencement date specified in the Bill. All that would be needed to become part of the law of the land would be Royal Assent. If the result of the proposed amendment becoming embodied in the statute is to bar the presentation of the Bill, passed through both Houses, prevent it from receiving Royal Assent and becoming law of the land according to its tenor and the will of Parliament, it would be a very strange constitutional state of affairs. It would mean that the previous Act would fetter the ability of the current Parliament to pass and bring into effect its own Bills. Does the Minister think that this is the sort of point on which a constitutional opinion from the law officers would be necessary?
Lord Henley
My Lords, as I am sure that the noble and learned Lord will be aware, we never comment on the advice that we might or might not have received from the law officers, and I am not prepared to comment on this occasion. However, I join the noble and learned Lord in speculating on the very odd constitutional effects that an amendment such as this could have on the passage of legislation. It cannot be right that by submitting an appeal an outside party can restrict the passage of legislation. That is the crucial point in relation to this amendment. I will give way to the noble Lord, Lord Wills, in a moment if he can just keep calm. It would restrict the passage of legislation in Parliament and in effect govern how this place or another place does its business.
Lord Wills
I am perfectly calm, but I am very interested in following this debate, which has been fascinating. I understand the point that the Minister is making. The noble and learned Lord has raised an important constitutional question. However, could the Minister seek to find a way to reassure those of us who are worried about the other side of the argument? I am not making any comment on this particular Bill but, in the event that the suspicion arises that information is being deliberately withheld by the Government in an attempt to prevent proper scrutiny of a controversial Bill, which then goes through without that information being available—particularly to this House, whose particular role is to scrutinise on the basis of expert opinion and all the rest of it—what reassurance can he provide that this Bill and the processes of the Freedom of Information Act will not be used by the Government of any party to subvert proper scrutiny?
Lord Henley
I can give the assurance that the coalition Government have given again and again of our desire for genuine transparency. That is why we were committed to making the Freedom of Information Act work as well as it can, which is why we have brought forward amendments to the Act in this Bill. I can go no further than that in trying to reassure the noble Lord. There is a genuine commitment by this Government, and I do not believe that any Ministers would wish to subvert our processes by deliberately withholding information as the noble Lord seems to suggest. He will just have to take my word for it.
The noble and learned Lord put it best. It would be a novel and dangerous proposition and one that I cannot believe is in the best interests of Parliament that some outside party could restrict the passage of legislation through Parliament and in effect govern how Parliament does its business by putting in requests of this sort and causing delays. Therefore, I hope that the noble Baroness at this stage will not press the amendment—well, she cannot do so because we are in the Moses Room. I hope that she is content to withdraw the amendment, but I also hope that she has further discussions with my noble friend Lord Howe. No doubt they will keep those discussions to the Health Bill as it proceeds through this House.
Baroness Thornton
I cannot guarantee the last bit from the Minister—that this issue is over for this Committee or for the progress of this Bill. This is a matter of constitutional importance to this House and an issue between the Government and Parliament. The Government had a choice. When the Information Commissioner ruled that this information on the register of risks was relevant to the passage of this Bill, he made a very important constitutional point. By denying the House that information, the Government are asking the House of Lords to consider a Bill without the information that it needs to do so. We are not saying that any third party should seek to stop the passage of any legislation—and I am perfectly happy to take advice and redraft the amendment. But the Minister has completely failed to address the constitutional point that it raised here, which is not about the Health and Social Care Bill but about what happens if an Information Commissioner says that some information is relevant to the passage of legislation through this House and any Government deny it to the House. That is a very serious matter indeed. Of course, I will withdraw the amendment, but I do not think that the matter ends here or that it is limited to the Health and Social Care Bill.
Baroness Hamwee
“(b) in the case of an authority which is listed only in relation to particular information, that authority in respect of other information”.”
Baroness Hamwee
Since I will find it so difficult to explain my concerns, I suggest that after those interesting exchanges noble Lords might like to give their minds a bit of a rest for a moment.
I apologise to the Minister for raising this matter at this stage, but I started to question the wording of the provision only a very few minutes before time ran out for tabling amendments at this stage. As I said to him, it is better to be shown to be an idiot than to fail to ask a question that needs to be asked.
This amendment would alter the definition of a relevant public authority for the purposes of the meaning of a publicly owned company. It appears to exclude an authority listed only in a limited fashion entirely from the definition of the component part of a publicly owned company. One rapidly gets into the dangers of double negatives, but I would have thought that the exclusion should extend only to the information, which is not referred to in the schedule to the Freedom of Information Act. In other words, if an authority is listed in a limited fashion, it should nevertheless be included to the extent of that limit.
Lord Henley
My Lords, I am sure that my noble friend is right when she says that it is better always to ask the question rather than, as she put it, to take the risk. As I understand it, the amendment proposes to extend the scope of Section 6 of the Freedom of Information Act beyond the extension already proposed in the Bill. However, the amendment seeks to do so in a way that I think is at odds with the approach taken in the Act.
At present, Section 6 of the FOI Act brings within the scope of the Act only companies that are wholly owned by the Crown or any single public authority listed, with limited exceptions, in Schedule 1 to the Act. Companies that are wholly owned by more than one public authority, or by the Crown and one or more of those Schedule 1 public authorities, are not currently subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Clause 101 therefore amends Section 6 of the FOI Act to widen the definition of a “publicly-owned company”, with the effect of extending the Act to companies wholly owned by the wider public sector. This simply means that any combination of public authorities subject to the Act, with limited exceptions, or by one or more of those bodies and the Crown, will be brought within its scope.
I mentioned that there are limited exceptions to this change. In one such instance, where a company is owned in part or wholly by a body that is itself subject to the Freedom of Information Act in respect of only some—and not all—of the information that it holds, the company will not be covered. It is this exception that my noble friend proposes to remove, so that such companies are subject to the Act.
I appreciate the intentions behind my noble friend’s proposal. Although relatively few public authorities are subject to the FOI Act only in respect of some information, and the number of companies excluded through the current proposal is likely to be small, the case for adding such bodies may well often be strong. However, I do not consider blanket coverage for these companies in the way proposed to be the most appropriate solution. As their parent body does not exercise wholly public functions—hence their partial coverage by the Act—it follows that some of these companies will also perform functions that should not automatically be subject to the Act.
That is not to say that it will never be appropriate for such bodies to be subject to the Act. Indeed, that may well be the case where any company of this sort exercises, for example, functions of a public nature. However, in such cases other means exist, and are already being used by the Government, to extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act. These include secondary legislation under Section 5 of the Act to include bodies performing functions of a public nature. It would be more desirable to consider adding companies of the type relevant to the amendment on an individual basis where strong reasons for including them exist. We think that, as it were, a piecemeal approach, rather than the blanket approach proposed by my noble friend, is the better way for doing that.
I hope that that explanation is of some use, but if it is not I hope that my noble friend can at least read what I have said and consider whether that is satisfactory from her point of view.
Baroness Hamwee
I thank the Minister for that response. I follow everything he says, except, perhaps, his conclusion because I was not seeking blanket coverage. My draft would deal with the coverage of particular information only. I will read what he said, and I wonder whether I may be able to discuss this with him or his officials in order to understand whether the Government have in mind examples of the piecemeal extension to which he referred. Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Lucas
“Means by which communication to be made
In section 11 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (means by which communication to be made), after subsection (1)(c) insert—“(d) the provision to the applicant of a copy of an existing record containing the information,”.”
Lord Lucas
This amendment would give people seeking information the right to see that information in its original context. I beg to move.
Lord Henley
I thank my noble friend for speaking to his amendment with such brevity that he caught me unaware. He has set out how he seeks to introduce a provision into the Freedom of Information Act to the effect that, so far as is practical, and where they request it, applicants must be supplied with a copy of the original record containing the information in which they are interested.
I accept that disclosing copies of documents is often the easiest way of responding to freedom of information requests and that that practice is widely followed. In some instances, it may be reasonably practical in terms of cost to supply copies of the existing record, but there may be legitimate reasons why it is not proportionate to do so when the benefit to be gained is balanced by the burdens imposed. For example, the most reasonable interpretation of the amendment would mean that the additional information need not be released if it has not been requested, but if it is, the public authority would be obliged to provide pages of blacked-out text in order to provide the full existing record. I do not think that that would be the most appropriate way forward. Leaving the position that public authorities can provide copies of the original where necessary but they are not obliged to do so is possibly the more appropriate way to deal with this matter, and I hope my noble friend will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Lucas
I am grateful for that reply. I shall think carefully about what the Minister said, and if I need to ask further questions I shall do so when I meet his officials. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Wills
“Changes to the offence of altering etc records with intent to prevent disclosure
In section 77 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (offence of altering etc records with intent to prevent disclosure) after subsection (4) insert—“(5) Notwithstanding anything in section 127(1) of the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980, a magistrates’ court may try an information relating to an offence under this section if the information is laid—
(a) before the end of the period of three years beginning with the date of the commission of the offence, and(b) before the end of the period of six months beginning with the date on which evidence which the prosecutor thinks is sufficient to justify the proceedings comes to his or her knowledge.(6) For the purpose of subsection (5)—
(a) a certificate signed by or on behalf of the prosecutor and stating the date on which such evidence came to his or her knowledge shall be conclusive evidence of that fact, and(b) a certificate stating that matter and purporting to be so signed shall be treated as so signed unless the contrary is proved.””
Lord Wills
The two amendments in this group tackle a problem with policing the Freedom of Information Act that the Information Commissioner has identified as a priority. Under Section 77 of the Act, a person or authority commits an offence by deliberately destroying, amending or concealing a requested record with the intention of preventing the disclosure of its contents. Currently, the offence is triable only in the magistrates' court where the maximum penalty is level 5 on the standard scale, which is currently £5,000. The Information Commissioner, who is responsible for policing the Act, has argued that such offences should be triable either in the magistrates’ court or the Crown Court. The latter option would permit a fine greater than £5,000 to be imposed in more serious cases. The Information Commissioner has identified this as a real problem in ensuring compliance with the Act. Amendment 151K would provide that option.
Allowing offences to be tried on indictment would have a further benefit. At present, proceedings for offences which are triable only in magistrates’ courts have to be brought within six months of the offence occurring, but it can take several months between a request being made, a complaint about it being made and it reaching the Information Commissioner’s Office. The Information Commissioner’s Office’s investigation is likely to take several months and, by the time any offence is discovered and the evidence accumulated, it is likely to be too late to prosecute. However, cases triable on indictment are not subject to the six-month limitation. In providing this option, the amendment would have the advantage of allowing prosecutions to be brought more than six months after the offence had occurred and would make policing the Act considerably more effective.
Amendment 151J provides an alternative approach to dealing with the six-month time limit. Under the amendment the offence would remain triable only in the magistrates’ court but proceedings could be brought within three years of the offence provided that this was no later than six months after the prosecuting authority had obtained the necessary evidence. There is precedent for the wording of the amendment: it is identical to that already found in several statutes which have also been amended or designed to avoid the six- month limit on prosecutions. These include: Section 31 of the Animal Welfare Act 2006; Section 11A of the Employment Agencies Act 1973; Section 64A of the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984; and Section 12(4A) of the Theft Act 1968.
I hope the Government will look favourably on these amendments, which would give the Information Commissioner an additional weapon that he feels he needs. All of us want to see the Act enforced effectively. I beg to move.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I support the thrust of the two amendments, or either of them. As the noble Lord, Lord Wills, has said, it is important to give the official who is tasked with applying the legislation the tools to do the job properly. After all, he and his office are in the best position to analyse where the obstacles are. This is a clear problem and he has been clear about the need for a solution. I hope we use this opportunity—I do not like the jargon—to add to the toolbox.
Lord Rosser
I support the amendments. I certainly do not intend to explain the purpose of them because my noble friend has already done that. The key point is that it is the view of the Information Commissioner, based on his or her experience, that there should be the opportunity, if necessary, to have cases heard at the Crown Court. Obviously, this relates to the severity of the fine that can be imposed because there is a restriction if a case is dealt with in the magistrates’ court. The issue of the timescale within which proceedings have to be initiated has also been raised.
I hope the Government will be able to give a sympathetic response, not least because the amendments are based on views that were expressed, I think in evidence to the Justice Select Committee on 13 September last year, by the Information Commissioner and the changes that that individual felt were necessary in the light of experience.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate. I agree that any person guilty of an offence of altering or destroying information that has been requested under the Freedom of Information Act should be prosecuted, and they should not be able to evade prosecution because the Information Commissioner has been unable to consider the case within six months of such an offence occurring. I am aware that the Scottish Government have recently launched a public consultation exercise which, in part, asks for views on whether to lengthen the time limit for bringing prosecutions under the equivalent provision in the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act, from six to 12 months. I am also aware that the current time limit applicable to Section 77 of the UK Act has been the subject of some comment by the Commons Science and Technology Committee in its reports into the events, which have already been mentioned today, at the University of East Anglia.
The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, made reference to evidence given to a committee in September by the Information Commissioner. In the Government’s response to the Commons Science and Technology Committee last year in May, we stated that we would work with the Information Commissioner’s Office to determine the extent to which perceived difficulties with the current six-month time limit for initiating prosecutions stand up to scrutiny. To date, there is a lack of concrete evidence to demonstrate that prosecutions have not been brought as a result of the existing arrangements. However, because the Government share the concerns expressed by noble Lords today, should evidence emerge of a widespread and genuine problem, consideration will be given to the most appropriate means of remedying this issue. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Wills, will not be surprised to hear me say that this issue might be one that could be looked at as part of post-legislative scrutiny.
The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, made reference to the Information Commissioner’s evidence in September last year. That is something that I was not specifically aware of, but I understand that we are in discussions with the Information Commissioner’s Office. It may be that measures similar to those proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Wills, would be the most appropriate way of responding to conclusive evidence in favour of change, should that emerge. Certainly, the solution proposed in Amendment 151J to lengthen the period from six months from the commission of an offence to three years, but within six months of the prosecuting authority being furnished with relevant evidence, is commonly used when a longer timescale for bringing a prosecution is justified. However, we would need to consider what was most appropriate to ensure the right measures were put in place. I am sympathetic to what he is saying, but the Government are not in a position to commit to it.
Amendment 151K seeks to address the issue in another way, that is, by making the Section 77 offence triable either way. The six-month time limit for bringing a prosecution of course applies only to summary offences. I take it that the noble Lord envisages that the maximum penalty for the offence, when it is tried on indictment, should be an unlimited fine. We need to bear in mind that Clause 79 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill removes the limits on fines of £5,000 or more on conviction by the magistrates’ court. That being the case, it may be more efficient to continue to try these offences in the magistrates’ court.
Both the time limit and the maximum penalty are issues that the Justice Select Committee may wish to consider during the post-legislative scrutiny of the Freedom of Information Act. I hope that on the basis of what I have been able to say today, the noble Lord will feel it possible to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Wills
I am very grateful to the Minister and I am reassured by her response. I shall, of course, withdraw the amendment, but could I ask her to do something? She rightly said that there has to be a need for compelling evidence—or concrete evidence, I think, was the expression that she used. Could she contact the Information Commissioner and ask him to produce the evidence that he has to that effect and the problems that he has encountered and why he thinks it is a problem? Perhaps if I tabled these amendments again on Report she could tell the House what the response has been, what evidence there is or whether there is any evidence. With that, I am happy to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Wills
“Time limit for decisions involving the public interest
In section 10(3) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (time for compliance with request) after “circumstances” insert “provided that it complies not later than the fortieth working day following the date of receipt”.”
Lord Wills
My Lords, when I tabled these amendments I thought they were typically uncontentious, modest little amendments that would not detain the House for very long. However, having heard the previous debate on Amendments 151E and 151F they seem to be perhaps slightly more significant than I first thought because, in trying to tackle problems of delay, they could help resolve the clearly difficult and contentious issue of the risk register. I hope the Government will look at these amendments sympathetically, not only for their own sake but also as a way of resolving the difficult issues raised in the previous debate. All three amendments seek to tackle the problem of undue delay in complying with freedom of information requests. I was the Freedom of Information Minister twice in my political life in the other place and this issue came up over and over again as a real problem. These delays are not necessarily malign but there is a problem with delays in the system. Therefore this is an attempt to go round it and put new controls in place.
Amendment 151L imposes a time limit for decisions involving the public interest test and limits the possible extension of the 20-working-day limit to a further 20 working days so that a response would have to be provided no later than 40 working days after the request. In general, authorities must respond to FOI requests promptly and in any event within 20 working days, but where an authority considers whether to disclose exempt information on public interest grounds it can extend that 20-day period by,
“such time as is reasonable in the circumstances”.
There is no maximum period to this permitted extension.
In some cases—not all—the delay is necessary and is there for very good reasons, but in other cases extensions have been repeatedly claimed, leading to delays of more than a year before freedom of information requests have been answered. This clearly is unacceptable. It is unacceptable if these delays are the result of the incompetence of officials—and, indeed, Ministers, where they are involved—not getting their act together in time and just putting things off. It is even less acceptable if the result of delay is to save the Government of the day some sort of political embarrassment. This is not unknown in government and it is not acceptable. The amendment is in line with the Information Commissioner’s guidance which states that normally an extension should not be needed at all, but where it is the extension should not exceed a further 20 working days.
Amendment 151M requires every public authority to produce as part of its publication scheme an annual report setting out the number of requests it has received and the number with which it has complied within the statutory time limits. This information would have to be provided for requests made under both the Freedom of Information Act and the Environmental Information Regulations. As I said earlier, the Ministry of Justice provides such information quarterly for central government bodies. There is no requirement for other bodies to publish these basic statistics and many do not choose to do so.
It is crucial that such transparency is in place. It is the Information Commissioner’s policy to subject authorities that consistently fail to comply with the Act’s time limits to a three-month period of monitoring, and if their performance does not improve during this period enforcement action may be taken. The decision on which authorities to monitor is partly based on the number of complaints of delay which the Information Commissioner’s Office receives. Any authority which fails to comply with at least 85 per cent of requests within the time limits is also selected for monitoring. However, as authorities are not required to publish their compliance figures, poor performers may not always be detected. This cannot be acceptable and this amendment would help to ensure that that situation is put right by getting the necessary figures published.
Finally, Amendment 151N would insert a time limit into the Act for complying with internal reviews. Under the Act the Information Commissioner is not required to investigate a complaint unless the authority has first carried out an internal review into the contested decision. However, the Act lays down no time limit for completing such an internal review. It merely says that the commissioner is not required to investigate until this review has been “exhausted”.
The amendment defines what “exhausted” means as one of three things: first, that a decision has been communicated to the applicant, which is the current position; secondly, that no decision has been communicated after 20 working days, which in effect gives the authority 20 working days to carry out the internal review in ordinary cases; and, thirdly, for exceptionally complex cases, no decision has been communicated after 40 working days. This is obviously consistent with the previous amendments in this group. This would give an authority, in effect, 40 working days for internal review in complex cases. Authorities would have to notify the applicant within the initial 20 days that they needed to take this extra time, and the extension would be available only if the issue was genuinely complex. This would implement the Information Commissioner’s current guidance, which is that internal reviews should normally be done within 20 working days but should never exceed 40 working days.
These seem to me practical and sensible measures which put right what were probably mistakes or errors of drafting in the original Bill. We obviously did not think it through fully enough. I hope that the Government will look at the amendment sympathetically. I beg to move.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, these amendments merely seek to ensure that the process operates as quickly and as efficiently as possible by providing a duty on public authorities to expedite requests through the relevant processes as quickly as possible and within a certain period of time. I believe that they are entirely reasonable and are a matter of enhanced transparency and good governance. My noble friend is right when he says that they could also help to resolve some of the deeper problems that we discussed earlier. Therefore, I very much hope that the Government will support these reasonable, clear and sensible amendments which would ensure that the system worked better in favour of public accountability—which is, after all, what the FOI Act was designed to serve.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wills, for explaining his amendments so clearly. I will not attempt to summarise them and take up the Committee’s time unnecessarily. I agree with the sentiment behind the noble Lord’s amendments in relation to the timeliness of public interest deliberations and internal reviews, which tally with the Information Commissioner’s best practice guidance.
The Government are firmly in favour of public authorities answering requests and internal reviews as quickly as possible. It is not acceptable that they should drag their heels in responding, and any extension to the time limit for responding to FOI requests should be claimed only where absolutely necessary.
The introduction of new statutory deadlines is certainly one potential way of strengthening the Freedom of Information Act, providing that it does not lead to hasty decisions that are not fully informed. Having an absolute limit of 40 days, even in the most complex cases, must raise some concerns about the potential for such an effect. Accordingly, careful consideration of the impact of such changes would be necessary before their introduction, and for that reason I cannot accept these amendments today. However, as I have said when we discussed other amendments, this might form part of the Justice Select Committee’s post-legislative review.
The noble Lord referred to his experiences as Freedom of Information Minister. I would never claim to have held any such senior position anywhere. However, I spent nine years working in the corporate end of the BBC and saw the internal conflicts that sometimes arose between the editorial part of the organisation using the FOI Act to obtain information and its corporate end having to be subject to the same Act. I am aware of the very careful deliberations that are necessary when an information request comes in and the complexities involved in that. It is sometimes necessary to take a bit of time to get to the point where the right decision can be made on releasing information. That said, in that public authority it was my experience that as the organisation got used to the FOI Act, it got quicker at dealing with the requests, the appeals, the internal reviews and so on.
Lord Wills
I am very grateful to the Minister for that response, which I think is encouraging. I will make one or two points in response to what she said because she raised some important points. Of course I understand the need to wait for post-legislative scrutiny of all these matters. However, given that this is really uncontentious and that no one seriously thinks that extraordinary delays of a year or more are acceptable, notwithstanding the problems of dealing with highly complex cases and all the rest of it, the fact remains that here is a legislative vehicle to do something which is relatively uncontentious.
By the time that post-legislative scrutiny is finished and the Government have churned over it, there will be the usual battles within government. I put all Ministers on notice that the moment they get any chance to look at freedom of information the entire Civil Service, with the exception of those in the Ministry of Justice, piles in looking for an excuse to emasculate it. Many of the Minister’s colleagues in the Government, no matter what the Government's stated policy, will also suddenly discover all kinds of reasons to shield themselves from its effects.
These processes will take months, if not years, and then there will be the question of finding a legislative vehicle for it. We are looking at any statutory action to deal with this being years away, practically, whereas here we have the wonderful Protection of Freedoms Bill—what a wonderful title—in which to put this worthwhile amendment.
I ask the Minister to look at this again. I will help her by tabling these amendments on Report so that she will have a chance to come back and tell your Lordships what she has been able to discover. I note carefully that she says that she cannot accept it today, but maybe when we get to Report she will be in a slightly different position.
The Minister made various points about statutory provision. I absolutely understand her point about very small public authorities. It is perfectly possible to include a provision exempting them in the legislation. This should not be an absolute barrier to dealing with the delays that we have seen in central government and in large local or public authorities which have the effect, whether deliberate or not, of thwarting the public's right to know.
This requirement for publication is not particularly burdensome—the authorities have the information already; it is just a question of collating and publishing it—so will the Minister look at it again and perhaps come back with a view to getting a more positive response to these amendments or some version of them? The wording is not necessarily perfect and I am sure that officials and lawyers can do far better than I have been able to do in order to get it into the Bill. It is here and it can be done now. It would be a massive improvement in the working of the Act, but I am happy to withdraw it for now.
Lord Soley
“Right to information regarding the ownership of land
After section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (general right of access to information) insert—“1A Right to information regarding the ownership of land
(1) Any person making a request for information to a public authority about the ownership of land is entitled to be informed whether—
(a) the land is owned, and(b) there has been a registered owner in the last 100 years.(2) The relevant public authority shall have a duty to provide such information upon request.
(3) Where—
(a) such a request is made in relation to a dispute over the ownership of the land, and(b) the information is not held by the public authority,the public authority shall also have a duty to search for the information requested.””
Lord Soley
After that last debate and listening to my noble friend who is as ever persuasive, knowledgeable and everything else, I am surprised that the Minister did not invite him into the department and offer to let him run it while he took a holiday. My noble friend was so convincing I was fully signed up for it. Let me try my best to get some assistance on this one, too.
Amendment 152 addresses a very complex and problematic area around the ownership of land and what I shall call unadopted roads. There are many different names for unadopted roads—unowned, private, and so on—and they are all grouped together. It is not a small problem; there are some 40,000 in the United Kingdom—about 4,000 miles of such unadopted road—so we are not talking about a small problem. It involves rural and urban areas. I want to encourage the beginning of a process and the Minister will be relieved to know that I am not asking her to pick this up and develop it as a full policy because it is a complex area. I am asking her to take on board the complexity of the issue. I have already made some approaches to the Select Committees of the two Houses to see which would be the most appropriate to take the matter forward in recognition that the problem affects a lot of people and causes real difficulty, not just for individuals but for communities living along those unadopted roads. I shall attempt to spell that out a bit more.
First, I declare an interest: I live on such an unadopted road and have seen some of the problems at first hand. Only the other year I was involved in giving advice to people who lived in an unadopted road in the county of Surrey where one resident was getting a company to clamp vehicles that were left in the road and the other residents were being charged large sums of money to have them unclamped. I know that Clause 54 of this Bill makes that unlawful and I am pleased about that. I dealt with other cases as an MP and by talking to other Members of this House and the House of Commons, I am aware that this situation has caused a lot of problems.
Let me say what those problems are and how they have emerged. This is not a scientific appraisal but it seems to me that a lot of the problems emerged in the 19th century when towns were expanding and fields were being sold off in plots for housing, leaving between them areas that ended up serving as roads or tracks. They became the unadopted roads. The Land Registry in an exchange of letters said that there is no such thing as unowned land. It said that,
“the fact that the ownership of land is not registered does not mean that the land is ownerless. In fact, all land will be owned by someone, even if that ownership cannot be readily identified”.
I have my doubts about that because it seems to me—I am not a lawyer—that if somebody who owned that field originally before it was sold off in parcels dies intestate, I am not sure that there can be any owner if that person had no known relatives. To say there is no owner is a vague and difficult concept. It is a curious situation that will have implications for people who live along that road, which is what I want to discuss in a moment.
It is also true to say that one of the main problems that ought to be addressed with some degree of concern is the problem of maintenance. These roads are very difficult for people to maintain if their house fronts on to the road. There are rules about what you can do in order to repair, and if the community is functioning well it will often group together and work out a solution. One of the things that troubles me is that it is not clear what the rights are. I draw attention to a good document on unadopted roads produced by the House of Commons Library in October 2010, which makes the point rather well. It states:
“Even if there is no information about the owner, the frontagers can take over the management of the road and will be protected by law from all but the true owner”.
The problem is: how do you know who the true owner is or if there is one? At the moment, you are protected if there is no known owner, but only up to the point when an owner suddenly materialises and you have a problem. You have a problem that action may possibly be taken against you if you do something on that road or if you repair it and then the owner appears and decides to charge for that. There are real problems about this.
When I discussed this situation with lawyers, the best advice they could give, which was very good coming from lawyers, was to try to avoid going to law on this because it is incredibly expensive and the law is not clear. My main message to the Minister is that we need to clarify this. What I am asking for on the information side is that the Land Registry tells everybody that they can come and inspect its registers, for a certain fee, and see who owns what land. The Land Registry will then say that it cannot be sure about the boundaries. The land may stop at the side of the road or somewhere else, and there is no clarity about where the boundary is. If you then ask who owns the road, the Land Registry will say that it does not know, but there is an owner somewhere. That is what I rather doubt. There are very real questions for the Land Registry about how it prepares and investigates this ownership.
One of the reasons why I put down in this amendment a duty to say whether land has been registered with an owner in the past 100 years is that it would enable people who were thinking of taking over the maintenance of a road to ask whether anybody had owned the land in the past 100 years. I have chosen 100 years as a fairly arbitrary figure, but it is good enough to give people some confidence that they could proceed. If it has not been owned for 100 years, it might be worth the community trying to take over the maintenance of the road either through the local authority or directly. Maintenance is not a minor issue. Many of these roads are not lit and are often, but not always, rights of way, so people are passing up and down them. If the weather is seriously inclement—last winter, for example—the road will be heavily pitted and iced over, and people fall and have quite serious injuries. The question is: how can we address this issue in a way that makes it safer for people to use these roads? It is a little easier when the road is not also a right of way, but it is still a problem for the people who live along it.
There is also the sad problem of ownership disputes. I dealt with situations where people parked cars, put obstacles in the road, grew hedges into the road and did a host of other things. Occasionally, the police are called in, but they cannot possibly solve what is basically a neighbourhood dispute. It is largely about the lack of clarity in the law. Increasingly, I came to the view when dealing with other cases and going by my own experience that Parliament has a duty to address this complex issue. I will be delighted if the Minister offers to take this away and come back with it in a way that enables people to get more information than is available at the moment, which is not that helpful. We need to acknowledge that this spills over into legal areas, so the Ministry of Justice would be involved. I am not suggesting that this Bill is necessarily the right way of doing it, but I am saying that the information combined with some sort of legal structure is necessary. The department, perhaps in conjunction with other departments, could work out something. It may even need an individual Bill drawn up between the departments or, initially, one of the Select Committees to take it on board and have a detailed look at it. If I can get support from the Minister on that approach we could begin a process that might help us solve this problem.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I have little or nothing to add to what my noble friend has said. He is right to raise this complex and extensive issue. It is one that has clearly caused many problems for citizens and it would seem that my noble friend’s proposals might be a means of assisting people in their quest for information. This could lead to the roads on which they live being better maintained and safer. It may also assist in resolving difficult and lengthy disputes. I recognise this is an extraordinarily difficult area and I look forward to the Minister’s reply. I wish her well.
Baroness Hamwee
The advice “Don’t go to law” might be extended to “Be very careful about buying a house on an unadopted road”. The former private enterprise, which the noble Lord, Lord Soley, described, of clamping one’s neighbours’ vehicles is quite extreme.
Perhaps I may ask a few questions. I do not suggest that the problems the noble Lord has described are not important but, on the amendment, first, is he suggesting that this extends to any public authority beyond the Land Registry? I suppose that local authorities holding a local land charges register might be relevant, but this is all public authorities. Secondly, did the letter from the Land Registry refer to land having gone to the Crown in the situation of intestacy, and thirdly, is there a concern about more than the adoption of roads? The amendment is more extensive than that, as I understand the thrust of it.
Lord Soley
Perhaps I should answer those points briefly. The reason for including other public departments is because there can overlap. For example, some of these roads are part-owned by a local authority, so you cannot rule out an interest by another public authority. The noble Baroness’s second point about the Crown is very important. I had thought of adding to it but I had already said enough, in a sense. It is said—although I have never known this to be tested—that if you can prove there is not an owner you can approach the Crown to buy the road. It is interesting because that is in direct conflict with what the Land Registry is saying, which is that all roads are owned. My understanding, from talking to one of the lawyers involved in a case, I think, was that if you proved it is not owned—presumably you would have to do that by checking back through wills and so on—you can then approach the Official Solicitor to buy the land. The duty is not on you to prove that it is unowned—I am not sure you can do that in this context. I think that is an important point.
I am not quite clear what the noble Baroness meant by the adoption issue. There is a whole range of names for these roads: private roads, unowned roads, adopted roads. Is that what she means—
Baroness Hamwee
Further to the issue about roads and the general situation described, the amendment could apply to all sorts of situations, I suggest.
Lord Soley
The noble Baroness may be right although I asked for it to be drawn up with a specific focus on this. If it does I am not sure that it is the end of the world but the intention is basically on unadopted roads.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, I want first to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Soley, on his staying power this afternoon. Beyond myself and my noble friend he is one of the few Members who has been with us throughout the proceedings and it has been very nice to see him here.
On his amendment, I recognise the difficulties that can be encountered when attempting to establish land ownership and recognise the noble Lord’s intentions in seeking to address this point. The way in which he has described the problems is very clear and compelling. However, this amendment would go well beyond the intentions of the Freedom of Information Act. It is not intended to require public authorities to carry out detailed, time-consuming and potentially disproportionately expensive research for information they do not hold.
However, where a request for information made under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act requires a public authority to provide a reasonable degree of advice and assistance to applicants this would, where information is not held, include advice about how they might obtain answers to their questions from other sources themselves. In terms of process, this strikes the right sort of balance between the need to use increasingly limited resources sensibly and assisting the public where possible. However, as the noble Lord has identified, the problem he has expressed today goes way beyond this and is currently—it sounds simple from the way he has described it—almost impossible to solve through any route available to anybody at this time.
I was interested in his suggestion of pursuing this problem through a Select Committee route and exploring it because it sounds as if it is a significant issue that requires proper consideration in isolation and separate from this legislation. In respect of the Land Registry, the proposal in his amendment to require an authority to go further than provide the information it has via the FOI Act which receives a report would not just catch the Land Registry, but any other body with an interest in land ownership. I am not sure that was the noble Lord’s intention. I feel that he has raised an important issue. It is certainly useful for us to be aware of it and certainly in the presence of officials from the Ministry of Justice who are considering FOI. I think it goes wider than that and I would be more inclined to support the noble Lord in his effort to pursue this through a Select Committee than to do it through this Bill. On that basis, I invite him to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Soley
My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for that reply, for the constructive way in which she has addressed the issue and for her interest—I think that was the word that she used—in my proposal that the matter should go to a Select Committee. I can assure her that the report of this Committee’s proceedings will be brought to the attention both of the clerks to those committees—I have not quite worked out which would be the best committee and, actually, it might be best dealt with by a Joint Committee—and of the chairs of those committees, one of whom I have already spoken to.
I will also draw the issue to the attention of the Land Registry, which I think needs to think about what sort of answers we might need on this. I accept the Minister’s point that the issue goes much wider and I recognise that only a small part of it could come within the scope of the Bill. What I am struggling with is finding a way in which Parliament can address the issue to resolve the problems that confront people and that are, in many cases, very immediate for them. As I said, I could have referred to a number of cases that have been brought to my attention, and I am sure that there are many other such cases around the country.
I am grateful for the Minister’s comments and happily beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Henley
“Trafficking people for exploitationTrafficking people for sexual exploitation
(1) The Sexual Offences Act 2003 is amended as follows.
(2) For sections 57 to 59 (trafficking people for sexual exploitation) substitute—
“59A Trafficking people for sexual exploitation
(1) A person (“A”) commits an offence if A intentionally arranges or facilitates—
(a) the arrival in, or entry into, the United Kingdom or another country of another person (“B”),(b) the travel of B within the United Kingdom or another country, or(c) the departure of B from the United Kingdom or another country,with a view to the sexual exploitation of B.(2) For the purposes of subsection (1)(a) and (c) A’s arranging or facilitating is with a view to the sexual exploitation of B if, and only if—
(a) A intends to do anything to or in respect of B, after B’s arrival, entry or (as the case may be) departure but in any part of the world, which if done will involve the commission of a relevant offence, or(b) A believes that another person is likely to do something to or in respect of B, after B’s arrival, entry or (as the case may be) departure but in any part of the world, which if done will involve the commission of a relevant offence.(3) For the purposes of subsection (1)(b) A’s arranging or facilitating is with a view to the sexual exploitation of B if, and only if—
(a) A intends to do anything to or in respect of B, during or after the journey and in any part of the world, which if done will involve the commission of a relevant offence, or(b) A believes that another person is likely to do something to or in respect of B, during or after the journey and in any part of the world, which if done will involve the commission of a relevant offence.(4) A person who is a UK national commits an offence under this section regardless of—
(a) where the arranging or facilitating takes place, or(b) which country is the country of arrival, entry, travel or (as the case may be) departure. (5) A person who is not a UK national commits an offence under this section if—
(a) any part of the arranging or facilitating takes place in the United Kingdom, or(b) the United Kingdom is the country of arrival, entry, travel or (as the case may be) departure.(6) A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable—
(a) on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or both;(b) on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 14 years.(7) In relation to an offence committed before the commencement of section 154(1) of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, the reference in subsection (6)(a) to 12 months is to be read as a reference to 6 months.”
(3) For subsection (1) of section 60 (sections 57 to 59: interpretation) substitute—
“(1) In section 59A—
“country” includes any territory or other part of the world;
“relevant offence” means—
(a) any offence under the law of England and Wales which is an offence under this Part or under section 1(1)(a) of the Protection of Children Act 1978, or(b) anything done outside England and Wales which is not an offence within paragraph (a) but would be if done in England and Wales;“UK national” means—
(a) a British citizen,(b) a person who is a British subject by virtue of Part 4 of the British Nationality Act 1981 and who has the right of abode in the United Kingdom, or(c) a person who is a British overseas territories citizen by virtue of a connection with Gibraltar.”(4) Omit section 60(2) (sections 57 to 59: jurisdiction).
(5) Accordingly, the title of section 60 becomes “Section 59A: interpretation”.”
Lord Henley
My Lords, in moving Amendment 152B, I will speak also to Amendments 152C, 163A, 169A, 169B, 170A, 171A, 172A and 178.
As the Committee will be aware, the United Kingdom opted into the EU directive on human trafficking in October last year in order to send a strong message that the UK is not a soft target for those looking to exploit others. The directive builds on and supports existing international instruments designed to combat human trafficking, in particular the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, to which the UK is a signatory. The UK is already largely compliant with this directive but it requires important changes to our criminal law, which these government amendments address.
Before I move on to spell out the detail of these amendments, I wish to pay tribute to my noble friend Lord McColl, who has through his Private Member’s Bill been a strong advocate of tightening the law in this area.
There are two areas where our criminal law on human trafficking currently falls short of the requirements imposed on member states by the directive: namely, the requirement to establish extraterritorial jurisdiction where the trafficker is a UK national and commits a human trafficking offence anywhere in the world; and the requirement to criminalise labour trafficking within the United Kingdom. Amendments 152B and 152C insert two new clauses into the Bill that will broaden the current human trafficking offences by extending extra-territorial jurisdiction over UK nationals and criminalising labour trafficking that takes place entirely within the UK.
The first new clause relates to trafficking offences for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Under Sections 57 to 59 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, it is already an offence to traffic a person into, within or out of the United Kingdom for the purposes of sexual exploitation. In the interests of clarity, Amendment 152B proceeds by consolidating these existing trafficking offences into new Section 59A and adding the necessary additional provisions to ensure extraterritorial application of the offences where a UK national commits a trafficking offence anywhere in the world.
The new clause introduced by Amendment 152C, which relates to trafficking offences for the purpose of labour or other exploitation, follows the same approach as Amendment 152B. In addition, Amendment 152C fulfils another requirement of the directive. At the moment, it is not an offence to traffic someone from Manchester to London, for example, for the purposes of forcing them into slavery, unless the victim has previously been trafficked into the UK. This amendment removes this requirement. This brings labour-trafficking offences into line with sex-trafficking offences, ensures our offences comply with the requirements of the directive and provides better protection against trafficking. The other amendments in this group make consequential amendments to other enactments as well as to the extent clauses and the Long Title.
These provisions will apply to England and Wales only. We have been advised by the Scottish Government that, following the enactment of provisions in the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2010, the criminal law in Scotland already satisfies the criminal law requirements of the directive. The Northern Ireland Administration intend to bring forward separate legislation in the Northern Ireland Assembly to achieve a similar effect.
The Government are committed to implementing the rest of the EU directive on human trafficking. These amendments deal with those points of the directive that require primary legislation. The rest we will implement through secondary legislation or by other appropriate means. I commend the amendments to the Committee.
Lord McColl of Dulwich
My Lords, I welcome the fact that the Government are moving swiftly to give effect to certain requirements in the EU directive on human trafficking. The Minister was kind enough to write to me about this matter further to my own trafficking Bill, which, incidentally, goes a little further than the EU directive in a number of key respects and had its Second Reading in November last year.
As the Minister has stated, Britain is already largely compliant with the directive, although the areas of our non-compliance certainly make opting in very worth while, and I am glad that we have done so. However, having carefully examined the directive clause by clause and the current level of UK compliance, I have to say that I think there is a need for legal changes in other areas above and beyond those accommodated by the Minister’s amendments.
The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, regrets that she had to leave this session early but she will propose appropriate amendments next week during the passage of the LASPO Bill. Of course, I understand that the Government may well address all these other areas through secondary legislation and operational matters, as the Minister has said. However, having looked at the other areas of non-compliance, I am rather struggling to see how they can all be adequately addressed in this way. I will not try to list all the relevant areas now, but they include, for instance, implementing Article 2.3 on the definition of exploitation and Article 2.4 on the legal definition of consent for adults. Then there are provisions in Articles 12.4, 15.3 to 15.5 and others to ensure witness protection during criminal investigation and proceedings. Would the Minister be good enough to write to me outlining in some detail the areas where he intends to introduce secondary legislation and operational measures to achieve complete compliance, and would he place a copy of the letter in the Library?
As well as questions about what the amendments do not address, I also have a question about the drafting of the new clauses. Specifically, it is not clear to me whether the requirement under the EU directive for businesses as well as individuals falls within the scope of trafficking legislation and is upheld by the proposed changes. I would be grateful if the Minister could address that concern in his response.
Finally, while the Government are taking steps today to become compliant with the directive, I am concerned that they may be taking steps elsewhere that will make us non-compliant. The provision of legal representation for victims of trafficking, including for claiming compensation, is necessary if we are to be compliant with Articles 12.2 and 15.2 of the directive. However, civil legal aid for claiming compensation under the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme is specifically excluded under Schedule 1, part 2, paragraph 16 of the legal aid Bill that is currently being considered in Committee. As it stands, unless there is some other mechanism that the Government have in place for trafficking victims to claim compensation, I think that they may be in breach of the EU directive on this point. I would be grateful to the Minister if he could allay my concerns.
I conclude by welcoming again the fact that the Government are taking steps today to help Britain become compliant with the directive. For the reasons I have explained, however, their actions also prompt a good many questions, and I look forward to the Minister’s answer. I say in closing that I very much hope that my own trafficking Bill will soon be granted its Committee stage so that we can debate in greater detail its key provisions, which go beyond the directive.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
I am grateful to the Minister for introducing the amendments and for the letter that he wrote to noble Lords earlier this week. We welcome the government amendments as far as they go. Like the Minister, I commend the noble Lord, Lord McColl, for his tireless and extraordinary efforts on this important issue and the fact that he introduced his Private Member’s Bill, which I believe paved the way for the amendments before us today. As the noble Lord said, his Bill goes further than the EU directive and I, too, look forward to seeing it in Committee in the near future.
These amendments represent a clear admission by the Government that they were wrong in their initial decision to opt out of the EU directive on human trafficking. The claims made at the time by the Prime Minister about the EU directive were ill informed at best when he said,
“does not go any further than the law that we have already passed”.—[ Official Report, Commons, 15/9/10; col. 873.]
As the Minister explained, the government amendments serve to implement Article 9 of the directive, which requires member states to establish extraterritorial jurisdiction where the offender is one of their own nationals and grants member states discretion over the establishment of jurisdiction over non-nationals, where any part of the offence was committed in a member state’s territory or the victim is a national. We welcome the Government’s amendments to introduce extraterritorial jurisdiction over UK nationals who traffic or facilitate the trafficking of people. We also welcome the introduction of jurisdiction over non-UK nationals who commit or facilitate trafficking from within the UK. However, I ask the Minister to confirm three things about the jurisdiction extensions. First, will the extension of the UK’s jurisdiction also apply to those cases where the offence is committed for the benefit of a legal person established in the UK even if no trafficking activities took place in the UK? Secondly, will it extend to offences where the victim is a national or resident of the UK? Thirdly, will the amendments also extend the same extraterritorial jurisdictions over legal persons of the UK operating overseas or benefiting from trafficking perpetrated overseas as required by Article 5 of the directive?
The Government’s amendments to extend the UK’s jurisdiction to cases of trafficking connected with but not perpetrated in the UK is a welcome move and brings us closer to compliance with the EU directive. However, we are deeply concerned that the Government have sought to act in a way that presents us with an absolute bare minimum compliance and that without further primary legislation the UK could fall short of compliance. In particular, the government amendments do nothing to address the disappearance from the system of child victims of trafficking in this country. With 32 per cent of identified child victims of trafficking having gone missing from care between 2007 and February 2010, it would seem clear that the present system of care for child victims is not working. Charities such as CARE and Ecpat UK, which campaign to end child prostitution and pornography and trafficking of children for sexual purposes cite lack of continuity in care and children being passed from one professional to the next as a key reason for the disappearance of these children and have called for the introduction of a system of guardians to address the highly specific needs and risks that child victims of trafficking are exposed to. Articles 12 and 13 of the directive make it clear that signatories must provide, “assistance, support and protection” for child victims of trafficking and ensure that the,
“necessary assistance and support measures are provided for child victims of trafficking, taking account of their individual needs and concerns”.
I ask the Minister how the Government consider the UK currently complies with Articles 12 and 13 and, in particular, how present arrangements for the care of child victims of trafficking are uniquely tailored to the particular needs and vulnerabilities of these children, as required by Article 13. I also ask the Minister how many child victims of trafficking are known to have gone missing from care in the last year, and whether he thinks that the present and proposed arrangements go far enough to protect against disappearance.
There are other areas, too, where action is required in order to bring the UK into compliance with the directives that are not touched upon by these amendments. Article 16 of the directive requires that the UK establish a national rapporteur to independently monitor implementation of the directive. The Government have stated that they believe that the current Joint Ministerial Committee should be sufficient for this purpose. However, I would ask the Minister how the committee can operate independently of government and how regularly it publicly reports.
Finally, as the noble Lord, Lord McColl pointed out, the directive requires that adequate provision is made for access to legal counselling and representation for victims of trafficking under Article 10. I am specifically concerned about how cuts to the legal aid budget currently being considered in the LASPO Bill will affect such provision to some of the most vulnerable individuals. I should be grateful if the Minister could tell me what measures the Government are taking to ensure that the UK is compliant with this article.
In a debate in this House the Minister stated his view that:
“The remainder of the directive can be implemented in full through secondary legislation and through various operational measures and operational routes”.—[Official Report, 25/11/11; col. 1281.].
I am somewhat sceptical about whether secondary legislation can deliver many of the changes necessary to bring this country into compliance with the directive and, crucially, whether it can provide better protection for the hundreds of vulnerable trafficked children who have gone missing from the system. I note the request from the noble Lord, Lord McColl, for further information about the secondary legislation envisaged and I look forward to receiving that information from the Minister.
I welcome the amendments brought forward today and I look forward to hearing from the Minister what additional measures the Government will be introducing to fully implement this important directive.
Baroness Hamwee
The opt-in to the directive is of far more than technical importance: the message that the opt-in sent was of great significance. I do not want to repeat much of what has already been said but, on the issue of a national rapporteur, I echo the noble Baroness and what the noble Lord, Lord McColl, has said previously about the importance of its independence. The Government have recently published a trafficking strategy and—because it is human nature—to expect them not to defend their own strategy and to see the issues in a more objective way is to demand more than is reasonable.
I also echo the request for an analysis of the matters that can be dealt with by secondary legislation—it is quite clear that the previous speakers have a much better grasp of the detail than I do—so that we can be assured that every point has been picked up, rather than an assumption that secondary legislation will do the job.
Lord Henley
My Lords, I hope that I can respond relatively briefly but I will have to write a number of letters to noble Lords.
On the issue of what further work we have to do through secondary legislation and other means, I shall write in detail to my noble friend, both noble Baronesses who have spoken and place a copy in the Library setting out exactly what we intend to do. The advice I have is that, although we were very nearly compliant, there were certain things that we had to do through primary legislation—and we have found this vehicle through which to do them—and other things that we can do through secondary legislation. Obviously it would be right for me to spell that out in detail.
My noble friend also had some queries about the drafting of the new clauses. In particular, he was concerned that the new clauses referred to offences committed by “a person”. I can assure him that “a person”—as I am sure the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scott, would have confirmed if he was still in his place—includes legal persons. That will include companies and other bodies, other than an individual as he and I understand that. That is the nature of the law.
Lord Henley
“Trafficking people for labour and other exploitation
(1) The Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc) Act 2004 is amended as follows.
(2) For subsections (1) to (3) of section 4 (trafficking people for labour and other exploitation) substitute—
“(1A) A person (“A”) commits an offence if A intentionally arranges or facilitates—
(a) the arrival in, or entry into, the United Kingdom or another country of another person (“B”),(b) the travel of B within the United Kingdom or another country, or(c) the departure of B from the United Kingdom or another country,with a view to the exploitation of B.(1B) For the purposes of subsection (1A)(a) and (c) A’s arranging or facilitating is with a view to the exploitation of B if (and only if)—
(a) A intends to exploit B, after B’s arrival, entry or (as the case may be) departure but in any part of the world, or(b) A believes that another person is likely to exploit B, after B’s arrival, entry or (as the case may be) departure but in any part of the world.(1C) For the purposes of subsection (1A)(b) A’s arranging or facilitating is with a view to the exploitation of B if (and only if)—
(a) A intends to exploit B, during or after the journey and in any part of the world, or(b) A believes that another person is likely to exploit B, during or after the journey and in any part of the world.”(3) In section 4(4)—
(a) in paragraph (b)—(i) omit “under the Human Organ Transplants Act 1989 (c. 31) or”, and(ii) after “2004” insert “as it has effect in the law of England and Wales”,(b) in that paragraph, the words from “as a result” to the end of the paragraph become sub-paragraph (i), and(c) after that sub-paragraph insert “or(ii) which, were it done in England and Wales, would constitute an offence within sub-paragraph (i),”.(4) After section 4(4) insert—
“(4A) A person who is a UK national commits an offence under this section regardless of—
(a) where the arranging or facilitating takes place, or (b) which country is the country of arrival, entry, travel or (as the case may be) departure.(4B) A person who is not a UK national commits an offence under this section if—
(a) any part of the arranging or facilitating takes place in the United Kingdom, or(b) the United Kingdom is the country of arrival, entry, travel or (as the case may be) departure.”(5) Omit section 5(1) (section 4: jurisdiction).
(6) In section 5(3) (section 4: interpretation)—
(a) for “In section 4(4)(a)” substitute “In section 4—“country” includes any territory or other part of the world,”,
(b) the words from ““the Human Rights Convention” to the end of the subsection become the next definition in a list, and(c) after that definition insert—““UK national” means—
(a) a British citizen,(b) a person who is a British subject by virtue of Part 4 of the British Nationality Act 1981 and who has the right of abode in the United Kingdom, or(c) a person who is a British overseas territories citizen by virtue of a connection with Gibraltar.””
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, I shall also speak to the other amendments in the group. This final group contains various minor amendments, a number of which are consequential on other government amendments agreed during the Committee of the whole House. I will be happy to provide further details if necessary, but subject to that, I beg to move.
“After section 81(8) (general interpretation) insert—
“(9) References in this Act to provision which, if it were contained in an Act of the Northern Ireland Assembly, would deal with a Northern Ireland transferred matter or (as the case may be) a transferred matter (see sections 23A(7)(b), 32A(8)(c) and 77B(3)) do not include references to any such provision which would be ancillary to other provision (whether in the Act of the Northern Ireland Assembly or previously enacted) which deals with an excepted or reserved matter (within the meaning given by section 4(1) of the Northern Ireland Act 1998).””
“In section 113BC(1) (suitability information: power to amend), after paragraph (b), insert “;
(c) amend section 120AC(4)(b) in consequence of an order made under paragraph (a) or (b).”In section 114(3) (application of other provisions of Part 5 to an application under that section), for “Section 113A(3) to (6)” substitute “Sections 113A(3) to (6) and 120AC”.
In section 116(3) (application of other provisions of Part 5 to an application under that section), for “and 113BA to 113BC” substitute “, 113BA to 113BC and 120AC”.”
“( ) After subsection (3) insert—
“(3A) The Secretary of State by notice given in writing may require a person who has a certificate which is subject to up-date arrangements under section 116A to attend at a place and time specified in the notice to provide fingerprints for the sole purpose of enabling the Secretary of State to verify whether information in the possession of the Secretary of State that the Secretary of State considers may be relevant to the person’s certificate does relate to that person.
(3B) If a person fails to comply with a requirement imposed under subsection (3A), the Secretary of State by notice given in writing may inform that person that, from a date specified in the notice, the person’s certificate is to cease to be subject to up-date arrangements.””
“( ) In subsection (1A), after paragraph (a) (but before the word “or” at the end of the paragraph) insert—
“(aa) the provision of up-date information under section 116A;”.”
“( ) After subsection (5)(c) insert—
“(ca) a sample of cases in which the chief officer of a police force has decided that information should be disclosed or not disclosed to the Secretary of State for the purpose of the provision by the Secretary of State of up-date information under section 116A.””
“( ) Section 120 (registered persons) is amended as follows.
( ) In subsection (2)—
(a) for the words from the beginning to “the”, where it first occurs, substitute “The”,(b) after paragraph (a) insert “and”, and(c) omit paragraph (c) and the word “and” before it.( ) After that subsection insert—
“(2A) Subsection (2) is subject to—
(a) regulations under section 120ZA,(b) section 120A, and(c) section 120AA and regulations made under that section.””
“(1) Section 124 (offences: disclosure) is amended as follows.
(2) In subsection (4)—
(a) in paragraph (b), omit “(5) or”, and(b) for “subsections (5) and (6)” substitute “subsection (6)”.(3) Omit subsection (5).”
(a) a request under section 116A(1),(b) an application as mentioned in section 116A(4)(a) or (5)(a), or(c) a request under section 120AC.”
“Part 9ATrafficking people for exploitationChildren and Young Persons Act 1933127A In Schedule 1 to the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 (offences against children and young persons with respect to which special provisions of the Act apply)—
(a) in the first entry relating to the Sexual Offences Act 2003 for “57” substitute “59A”, and(b) after the second entry relating to the Act of 2003 insert—“Any offence against a child or young person under section 4 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc) Act 2004, or any attempt to commit such an offence.”Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984127B In section 65A of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (questioning and treatment of persons by police: meaning of “qualifying offence”), in subsection (2)(p), for “59” substitute “59A”.
Proceeds of Crime Act 2002127C In Schedule 2 to the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (lifestyle offences: England and Wales), in paragraph 4(2), for “any of sections 57 to 59” substitute “section 59A”.
Criminal Justice Act 2003127D In Part 2 of Schedule 15 to the Criminal Justice Act 2003 (sentencing of dangerous offenders: specified sexual offences), after paragraph 143, insert—
“143A An offence under section 59A of that Act (trafficking for sexual exploitation).”
Sexual Offences Act 2003127E (1) The Sexual Offences Act 2003 is amended as follows.
(2) In section 60A (trafficking for sexual exploitation: forfeiture of land vehicle, ship or aircraft), in each of subsections (1) and (5), for “sections 57 to 59” substitute “section 59A”.
(3) In section 60B (trafficking for sexual exploitation: detention of land vehicle, ship or aircraft), in subsection (1), for “sections 57 to 59” substitute “section 59A”.
(4) In Schedule 5 (relevant offences for the purposes of notification and orders), in paragraph 63, for “59” substitute “59A”.
Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc) Act 2004127F (1) The Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc) Act 2004 is amended as follows.
(2) In section 5 (section 4: supplemental)—
(a) in subsection (11) omit “In so far as section 4 extends to England and Wales,”, and(b) omit subsections (12) and (13).(3) In section 14(2)(n) (immigration officers’ powers of arrest) for “59” substitute “59A”.
Serious Crime Act 2007127G In Part 1 of Schedule 1 to the Serious Crime Act 2007 (serious offences: England and Wales), in paragraph 2(2), for “59” substitute “59A”.”
Lord Henley
“In section 120(2), paragraph (c) and the word “and” before it.” |
“In section 124— | |
(a) in subsection (4)(b), the words “(5) or”, and | |
(b) subsection (5). |
“Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006 | In Schedule 9, paragraph 14(5) and (6).” |
“Part 8ATrafficking people for exploitation
Short title | Extent of repeal |
|---|---|
Sexual Offences Act 2003 | Section 60(2). |
Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc) Act 2004 | In section 4(4)(b), the words “under the Human Organ Transplants Act 1989 (c. 31) or”. |
In section 5— | |
(a) subsection (1), | |
(b) in subsection (11), the words “In so far as section 4 extends to England and Wales,”, and | |
(c) subsections (12) and (13). | |
UK Borders Act 2007 | Section 31.” |
Lord Henley
“(a) Chapters 1 to 3 of Part 5 (and Parts 6 to 8 of Schedule 9 and Parts 5 and 6 of Schedule 10), or(b) section (Trafficking people for labour and other exploitation) (and Part 9A of Schedule 9, and Part 8A of Schedule 10, so far as relating to the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc) Act 2004),”
Lord Henley
Lord Henley
“(aa) the repeal of section 22 of the Crime and Security Act 2010 in paragraph 4(2) of Schedule 9 and Part 1 of Schedule 10,”
Baroness Hamwee
Baroness Hamwee
My speech moving Amendment 177 will be a little longer than the previous speech. This amendment takes us back to powers of entry to probe one particular point. I must make it clear that I support the restrictions on powers of entry. I know that the matter is likely to be pursued further on Report, and there are bound to be particular issues around particular powers. This power is one where I fear we may be in danger of throwing out a long-standing baby with the bath water.
My amendment would mean that the commencement of Schedule 2 would not be automatic but dependent on an order by the Secretary of State. It is merely a device to raise an issue which came to my attention only a few days ago, well after we had dealt with Schedule 2. Paragraph 12 of that schedule repeals Section 8(2) of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, which gives a landlord power to enter premises to view their state and condition. I had minor experience of this in the first flat I lived in in London. The landlord with, I am sure, entirely benign intentions used to come in and potter around. I could tell from the grains of coffee left around that he had been there, and on one occasion, he repainted the kitchen, but did not move the towel hanging on the back of the kitchen door and painted around it. That is minor against the issue of a property being fit for human habitation, which is the subject of Section 8 of the 1985 Act.
The landlord has an obligation to keep the property fit for human habitation. Most modern tenancies have a power of entry written into them—a contractual power, if you like—so there is no need for a statutory power, but the British Property Federation, which has raised this point with me, estimates that of the 120,000 or so regulated tenancies, many of which are very old and rely on statutory terms and conditions, something between 18,000 and 24,000 rely on statutory powers of entry. In other words, there is a legal and, I would say, moral obligation on a landlord, but he will have no means to inspect the property and fulfil the obligation. Unlike modern assured shorthold tenancies, these tenancies often encompass some of the oldest parts of the housing stock, from before 1919. They tend not to have turned over frequently and there is a pretty high probability that if they are not kept up to a good standard, they may become unfit.
I know that this matter has been discussed between the Home Office, looking at it from the point of view of the powers of entry, and the Department for Communities and Local Government. I also know that an issue has been raised that because these tenancies are subject to very low rent limits, they would not in fact come within the scope. I want to anticipate that argument by saying—again, I understand this from the British Property Federation—that the rent limits are those that were in the original contract and cannot really be cited now because that is the historical event which brought them within the scope.
The British Property Federation is very clear that the provisions in the 1985 Act are not redundant. It seems that there is a real issue here, where we should not let our enthusiasm for the principle over powers of entry obscure the need to address it. I would be the first to say that this amendment does not address it. I am merely trying to bring the issue into play at this stage—a late stage, I know—and I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say on this. I suspect that it may be another matter where I am going to add to his diary commitments by suggesting that detailed discussion might benefit us all, but for the moment I beg to move.
Lord Henley
My Lords, as my noble friend has explained, the amendment relates to concerns that have recently come to light over the proposed repeal of Section 8(2) of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, as provided for in Schedule 2 to the Bill. This provision in the Landlord and Tenant Act grants landlords a power of entry to ensure that their properties are fit for habitation. The Act sets very low rent thresholds for London and elsewhere, which were agreed some considerable time ago. Because those rent levels were so low, it was originally our belief that there were no longer any existing tenancies to which the Section 8(2) power still applied. That being the case, we thought that the power could sensibly be repealed. It has since come to our attention from the same source that my noble friend mentioned, the British Property Federation, that there is a significant number of legacy properties to which this provision continues to apply. The BPF has indicated that there are in fact some 18,000 to 24,000 tenancies where this power of entry would continue to operate.
Landlords have a duty to ensure that the properties they rent are fit for habitation. In the overwhelming majority of cases, we would expect tenants freely to admit the landlord into their property to inspect it. In such cases, landlords have no need to use their statutory power of entry but in isolated cases the tenant may not be co-operative and there is therefore a continued need for this power. While we still intend to repeal this power of entry we propose to introduce a saving provision, using the order-making power in Clause 110, to ensure that the power remains available in respect of existing tenancies. In the case of any new tenancies, a power of entry can be provided for in the tenancy agreement as would normally be the case, as my noble friend will be fully aware as a solicitor. I thank her therefore for raising the matter. I hope that we do not need to have a meeting on this occasion, that she is satisfied by the explanation that I have given and that she will be happy to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, that is extremely helpful. I wonder if I might chance my arm by asking whether there might be any chance of seeing a draft of the order before we get to the next stage, in case technical concerns continue. I am not sure whether the Minister would want to reply to that. However, in response to his point about tenants allowing a landlord in, there must be many properties where there is more than one unit of accommodation within a house and where one could have one tenant who is entirely reasonable and another who is not and who prejudices the position of other people, potentially quite seriously. I am very grateful for that answer and I hope that it is not necessary to have a meeting. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Henley
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Hooper)
My Lords, the question is, that Clauses 26 to 39, Schedule 2, Clauses 40 to 53, Schedule 3, Clauses 57 to 61, Schedule 5, Clauses 62 and 63, Schedule 6, Clause 85, Schedule 8, Clauses 86 to 109, Schedules 9 and 10 and Clauses 110 to 115 of the Protection of Freedoms Bill, be reported to the House with amendments.
House of Lords
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Introduction: The Lord Bishop of Durham
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Introduction: Lord O’Donnell
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Prisons: Population
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)
My Lords, the Government have embarked on a series of policies to make the public safer—in particular, by breaking into the cycle of reoffending. Our policies, including measures in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill now before this House, are expected to impact favourably on the size of the prison population.
Lord Dubs
My Lords, does the Minister agree that since the coalition came to power, the number of people in prison has risen to a record figure of over 80,000, the highest ever for England and Wales, and that, even if the impact assessment on the legal aid Bill works out fully, that will barely bring the prison population down to what it was before the coalition came in? Is it not fair to say that the Government have given up on this?
Lord McNally
My Lords, on the contrary, what the Government have not done is to play the numbers game. People are in prison as a response to offences committed and sentences imposed by the courts. Simply making arbitrary decisions on prison numbers is pointless, but what we are doing is putting into place policies which, as I have said, particularly tackle what I think is one of the major problems in the upward trend in our prison population—that is, the unacceptable level of reoffending. That is why we are putting a lot of effort into policies on the rehabilitation of offenders.
Baroness Knight of Collingtree
My Lords, will my noble friend bear in mind how many times we have seen news of a prisoner who has been let out of prison early causing great trouble, including murder? We must always keep an eye on the danger of letting people out of prison too early.
Lord McNally
My Lords, that is the mirror image of the Question put by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs. There is no doubt that every time you release a prisoner, there could be a danger of reoffending. That is why the assessment is very thorough and the management—the Opposition Front Bench is nodding as though I was saying something brilliant. I am not changing policy at all, and what we are certainly not going to do is let out 80,000 people early because we have mismanaged the prison building programme. If anyone wants to talk about mismanaging prisons, we can look at the record over 10 years of the previous Government. In terms of the question asked by my noble friend Lady Knight, it is absolutely correct that Ministers are aware of public concern about the management of ex-prisoners. That is why we take great care in these matters and why, when we look at the alternatives to prison, we make sure that the public have confidence in the policies we put in place. That is the reality.
Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate
My Lords, does the Minister agree that one of the greatest deterrents to the commission of crime is the fear of being caught? How is this helped by a 20 per cent cut in police funding?
Lord McNally
Again, there are great nods from the Opposition. Apparently the reality of the necessity for cuts has reached the Leader of the Opposition, yet any specific cut is met with shakes of the head. The police are being asked, as are many others, to carry through efficiency programmes, but we remain confident that they will deliver in terms of public safety while carrying out the programmes that have been requested of them.
Lord Woolf
Does the Minister agree that more important than when a prisoner is released is whether, when he is released, enough has been done while he is in custody to ensure that he does not quickly return to prison by reoffending?
Lord McNally
That is exactly the point that my right honourable friend the Lord Chancellor made. It is the rehabilitation of offenders that we must look at. Yes, people who have committed serious crimes should be put in prison but, unless you are going to keep them in prison for ever, you are going to release them at some stage. Therefore, the policy aim must be to put in place programmes of rehabilitation to avoid reoffending wherever possible. It was put to me on a prison visit that the best chance of avoiding reoffending is for prisoners to have the prospect of a job, a place to live and a relationship. Those are difficult things to put in place but that is, and will continue to be, the thrust of our policy.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, can my noble friend tell the House about any progress that is being made in reducing the number of women in prison, both on remand and following sentencing? I know that he shares my view that this carries a huge cost—not just a financial one but in particular a social one.
Lord McNally
My Lords, there are about 4,000 women in our prisons at the moment, and anyone who takes a moment to study these matters will say that that is far too large a number. We are taking forward a range of measures to look at how women who have committed crimes outside the prison regime can be treated. I pay tribute here to the landmark Corston report from the previous Administration. We are pursuing most of the recommendations, as did the previous Administration, but, like them, we have found the key recommendation specific to small units too costly to pursue. It is widely said that women need a different kind of treatment and I believe that to be the case. This is a serious problem and one that we are taking seriously in terms of initiatives on drugs, debt and treatment outside. Those are the facts.
Lord Bach
My Lords, when the Government were in their first flush of enthusiasm, they were full of claims as to how much smaller the prison population would be by the time of the next general election. Who was playing the numbers game then? How times have changed. Particularly bearing in mind the increase in crime that is now being reported, what is the current forecast of what the prison population will be at the next election in May 2015? What a contrast all this is with the days of the previous Labour Government, when crime was being reduced by 43 per cent.
Lord McNally
The commitment that we have made is to try to bring in a raft of policies that address specific problems about reoffending which are key to the size of our prison population. I am not going to play a numbers game; indeed, we never have. I look across at some of the heads shaking and nodding opposite, but I personally find this matter far too serious to play a numbers game.
Lord McNally
I know that they do not like it but the fact is that during their period in office the Labour Government oversaw a massive increase in our prison population without tackling at any time scandalous levels of reoffending, ranging from 50 to 70 per cent.
Lord McNally
Time, yes; and it is time that the Labour Opposition faced up to their appalling record on crime.
Health: Pathfinders
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Jolly
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what support and guidance is being offered to pathfinder clinical commissioning groups in commissioning integrated health and social care services.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Earl Howe)
My Lords, pathfinders are receiving national and local development support. With their SHA and PCT cluster, pathfinders are exploring approaches to clinical commissioning, including integration of health and social care. Key to this will be engagement with local authorities and secondary care. Our national learning network allows pathfinders to share learning and best practice. Pathfinders will be authorised to take on their full commissioning functions only when the NHS Commissioning Board is certain that they are ready.
Baroness Jolly
I thank the Minister for his reply. He outlined the fact that local authorities will play a key role in this new world. We hope that they will commission for patients and not for the condition. For the health and well-being boards to operate effectively, they, too, need support. What support are the Government able to offer, and what support are they offering pathfinder health and well-being boards within local government at present?
Earl Howe
My noble friend is right. We were very pleased to see the NHS Future Forum says that running right through the Health and Social Care Bill is the desire and aim to integrate services. That is certainly right. We recognise that there is a balance to be struck between allowing local ideas to spring up and people to progress their own ideas and having the necessary support from the centre to do that. We have established a national learning network for pathfinders to complement the support given to them by strategic health authorities and PCTs. Those learning networks will ensure that best practice is spread and, specifically, that pathfinders support other local groups which are less developed.
Baroness Thornton
My Lords, perhaps I may ask a question concerning clinical commissioning groups and the legal advice and support they might be receiving. Has the Minister taken advice on the impact of EU procurement law as regards the tension in commissioning and delivering integrated services and the legal requirements concerning procurement of services which are integral to the Health and Social Care Bill that is before the House? Will the Minister make any such advice available to us?
Earl Howe
My Lords, my understanding is that procurement law, which already applies in the NHS, is certainly part of the learning sets that clinical commissioning groups have been provided with. I would be delighted to supply the noble Baroness with further information but I do not have it in front of me.
Lord Carlile of Berriew
Can my noble friend confirm that the NHS will take fully into account the success of pilot pathfinder projects in places as diverse as Newcastle, Swindon and Bedfordshire so that the NHS itself encourages the development of pathfinder projects? Will he also take into account the fact that GP co-operatives were very successful as long as they lasted, but the discouragement they were given by the previous Government brought a disastrous end to some very good schemes?
Earl Howe
I am grateful to my noble friend. I think everybody agrees that integrating services, however one defines that—although the common denominator is surely from the point of view of the patient—is a good thing. We do not wish to lose sight of the lessons that have been learnt so effectively in the places mentioned by my noble friend. It is true that other areas have yet to catch up. We recognise that, and the focus over the next 12 months will be very much on sharing the lessons that have been learnt by the pathfinders that we know are working well.
Lord Laming
Does the Minister agree that the success of this scheme depends a great deal on the facilities within the health service becoming much more community orientated and much more available to people in the community? It is not either social services or the health service. Both have to play their part. What are the Government doing to achieve that?
Earl Howe
I do recognise that. It gave rise to the fairly famous quote by Sir David Nicholson, the chief executive of the NHS, who went down to Torbay to see the work being done there. He came away saying:
“I have seen the future and the future is Torbay”.
There was good reason for him to say that because Torbay has established close relationships between social workers, district nurses, therapists and allied health professionals through a single point of contact so that intermediate care services are delivered effectively, thus avoiding the need for patients to be admitted to hospital.
Baroness Gardner of Parkes
Can the Minister tell me—sorry, I would have given way to the right reverend Prelate. I had better press on. Does the Minister believe that the new legislation will change the problem that has always existed—that social care always felt that health should pay and health always felt that social care should pay? There may be good will and a wish to integrate, but can he assure me that the new financial systems in the health service will cover this point and prevent that problem continuing?
Earl Howe
My noble friend is right. This has been a perennial problem. We are addressing it in a number of ways. There are measures in the Bill which lay out duties on bodies. We are constructing the outcomes framework in a way that encourages integration of services with the right metrics. We are trying to align the outcomes framework in the NHS with that for social care and public health as well so that everybody is working to the same agenda.
Railways: Train Design
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Bradshaw
To ask Her Majesty’s Government, following the recent award to Bombardier of the contract for 130 new carriages, what further plans they have for maintaining train design or manufacturing capacity in the United Kingdom.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, we believe that in most cases the procurement of rolling stock should be led by the rail industry, but in cases where the Government are involved we will take on board the conclusions of the Government’s recent review of procurement to give suppliers confidence to invest in their capability to meet future demand by publishing pipelines of future government needs and taking action to remove barriers to growth.
Lord Bradshaw
The announcement of the new train order to Bombardier took place 1,000 days after the last order was placed. There is no doubt that the Government are deeply involved because the short term of franchises means that no rolling stock company can get its money back in the duration of the franchise. The Answer that I have been given is quite disingenuous. I really want some assurance that British industry will be supported. It has only 100 days work from this new order and it is time that something was done to extend that period.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, noble Lords will know that this Government have made considerable investment in the rail industry and will continue to do so. Noble Lords should also be aware that there is considerable refurbishment work available on the existing rolling stock in order to make it compliant with new accessibility requirements.
Lord Berkeley
My Lords, is the Minister aware that his first Answer to the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, demonstrates the inconsistency or lack of policy not only on who procures rolling stock but on who operates it and how many coaches there are? The OJEU notice on the First Great Western new franchise says in one paragraph that,
“the franchise operator will be expected to take responsibility for the provision of rolling stock”,
yet immediately follows that by saying that it will supply the IEP—the intercity train programme. How can any manufacturer or operator plan on such an inconsistent policy?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, the noble Lord will be aware that the IEP is in principle a bi-mode—electric and diesel—rolling stock project and is designed to run across several franchises. Central government therefore has to have an involvement. In general, it is a matter for the rail industry to procure rolling stock. However, central government has to ensure that the rolling stock contract is sustainable in case, as the operator of last resort, it has to step in and run the franchise.
Lord Glenarthur
My Lords, my noble friend will be aware that the Treasury and the Scottish Government announced recently that they would each put £50 million into the refurbishment of Caledonian railway sleepers, which many of us are delighted about, particularly if we use them twice a week as I do. Will the new franchise agreement, which I think will follow in 2014, also enable the train operating company—whoever takes on that franchise or continues with it now—to get good value for any commensurate investment that it might make in parallel to provide a really superb service?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, the noble Lord has strayed a little from the Question, but I am confident that there is good news and I will write to him with further details.
Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, the House will recognise that the Government have had a somewhat torrid time with the carriage supply since the Siemens contract. However, would the Government take a constructive approach in these terms: can we not reduce the number of designs of carriages in order that suppliers work to a much more restricted form of contract and thereby provide much more cheaply the carriages that we all know we need?
Earl Attlee
On the noble Lord’s first point about the Siemens contract, he will understand that we operated the procurement process set up by the previous Administration. We look forward to the NAO investigation that will probably take place after the contract award in order not to interfere with the process. The noble Lord’s second point is an extremely good one. We have too many types of rolling stock. One difficulty is that the rolling stock has a 30-year life cycle and it is quite easy to end up with a large number of areas, but the noble Lord is absolutely right.
Lord Roberts of Llandudno
My Lords, does the Minister understand how important it is to place orders early to secure jobs in Bombardier and other places and to have long-term investment? Without that, who will take on apprentices or make a dent in the youth unemployment problem? We need immediate action by the Government to secure these news jobs and new youth employment.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, the noble Lord is absolutely right in everything he says; that is why we have the Crossrail project and other large infrastructure projects. The mischief is the feast and famine, which I am sure all policy-makers over many decades have tried to avoid.
Lord West of Spithead
My Lords, a contract has recently been let to move spoil from the Crossrail system. This means moving stuff from central London to the Thames estuary. It will all be done by German ships with German crews. Bearing in mind what the Government intend to do to support British industry, will we be putting measures in place to help British shipping in the same way as the German Government do to support German shipping so that we are working on a level playing field?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I am not aware of the particular issue to which the noble Lord refers. However, we have to be careful not to interfere inappropriately in favour of UK operators, otherwise we could fall foul of all sorts of regulations.
Health: Breast Cancer
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Morgan of Drefelin
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the implications for women with breast cancer of the recent concerns regarding Poly Implant Prothese implants.
Baroness Morgan of Drefelin
My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper. In doing so, I declare an interest as chief executive of the research charity Breast Cancer Campaign.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Earl Howe)
My Lords, the expert group chaired by Sir Bruce Keogh concluded that, on the available data, PIP implants are not associated with a higher risk of breast cancer than other silicone gel implants. Women who have had PIP implants on the NHS following surgical treatment for breast cancer will be able to consult an NHS doctor and if they wish, in the light of that clinical advice, have the implants removed and, if appropriate, replaced.
Baroness Morgan of Drefelin
I thank the Minister for that Answer. I welcome the Statement made by the Secretary of State for Health in the other place and the reviews being set up to look at both of the issues here. This is an issue that is causing a huge amount of concern for women with breast cancer. I welcome the assurances of the Secretary of State that, where women have been treated on the NHS, the PIP implant will be removed, and where patients have been treated privately, and those companies refuse to remove the implant, they can then seek help from their GP from the NHS.
Baroness Morgan of Drefelin
I apologise, but I need to get the detail right. I am concerned about women who are diagnosed with breast cancer, treated privately and are then refused help from that private practitioner. At the moment, when they come to the NHS they are only promised the removal of that PIP implant, not subsequent replacement and reconstruction. I do not think that is right, and I hope the Minister will be able to reconsider that.
Earl Howe
My Lords, I understand the point that the noble Baroness is making, but I think that most people would agree that it would be wrong to let private providers off the hook. In the first instance, we are saying that the woman, if she has been treated privately in the circumstances the noble Baroness has described, should seek advice from her private clinician. Only then, if the clinician or the clinic let her down, will she be able to have recourse to the National Health Service. I think that that is fair.
As regards the replacement of the implant, we do not think that other NHS patients should be disadvantaged in this way. Every time the NHS picks up the tab for the private sector, we are displacing patients of the NHS who are in need. Therefore, there is a balance to be struck here and we have made our decision on a very good basis.
Baroness Hussein-Ece
My Lords, how is it that these PIP implants, which are now declared unsafe and substandard, were given the European CE mark—the safety kitemark? Does the Minister share my concern and dismay at the Harley Medical Group’s announcement yesterday? This is a group which for years and years has ruthlessly advertised, sold and fitted these substandard PIP implants to nearly 14,000 women and is now saying that it will not replace them. Is it not time to take action against these unscrupulous—it seems—private practitioners to make them take some responsibility?
Earl Howe
We believe that in many instances private practitioners have a legal duty—certainly a moral duty —to address these matters on behalf of their patients. Eight private companies are offering to replace implants for their patients. We welcome that and are urging the Harley Medical Group to follow suit. I was encouraged to hear that the professional bodies representing cosmetic surgeons have sent out a letter, urging surgeons not to charge for their time when they remove these implants privately.
As regards the first part of my noble friend’s question, it remains to be seen whether there has been a failure of regulation. We are looking here at a deliberate criminal act by the manufacturer of these implants. It is very difficult to see how regulation, however tight and effective, could pick up something such as this, where there has been a deliberate effort to conceal facts from the inspectors.
Lord Low of Dalston
Would the noble Earl not agree with me that the kind of behaviour by private companies that we are talking about, whereby they seek to wash their hands of problems that they have created, is the kind of thing that we will see a lot more of once the provisions regarding increased competition in the National Health Service contained in the Health and Social Care Bill come into force?
Earl Howe
I could not disagree more with the noble Lord. He refers to the policy of “any qualified provider”. That policy gives absolute assurance to every NHS patient about the quality of the treatment that they get if they are treated by the NHS, whatever the provider setting. Therefore, the idea that this incident has any bearing on the provisions of the Health and Social Care Bill is absolutely misplaced. I cannot emphasise that more.
Baroness Thornton
The noble Lord, Lord Low, asked a legitimate question. Any qualified provider goes through a process of approval in which the CQC is responsible for regulating clinics and services. That is exactly what the CQC has done for these private clinics. They have all been given a stamp of approval to carry out these operations by the CQC. That, surely, was the point of the noble Lord’s question. Therefore, what are the implications for “any qualified provider” under the fragmentation and increased marketisation of the NHS by the Bill?
Earl Howe
The “any qualified provider” policy was instigated by the Government of the noble Baroness. There is no suggestion that these clinics have been carrying out procedures badly; the issue is around the quality of the implant, which they could not be expected to know about. Nevertheless, the CQC is conducting inspections, some of them unannounced, on cosmetic clinics to assure itself that everything is being done properly. I will not stand here and say that any of these clinics have carried out the procedures badly. We have no evidence to show that they have.
Business of the House
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Strathclyde
That the debates on the motions in the names of Lord Wills and Baroness Smith of Basildon set down for today shall each be limited to 2½ hours.
Immigration (Biometric Registration) (Amendment) Regulations 2012
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Strathclyde
That the draft order, rules and regulations be referred to a Grand Committee.
Electoral Registration
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Wills
That this House takes note of Government policy on electoral registration.
Lord Wills
My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to introduce this debate, which takes note of the Government’s policy on electoral registration. This is often a highly technical issue, but it is always an important one. The struggle for the right to vote defines the history of our democracy but electoral registration makes that right a reality. This debate is a timely one, as the Government have embarked on a significant change to electoral registration, with potentially profound consequences for the health of our democracy.
Many issues could be addressed under the rubric of this debate. For example, it would be possible to explore why the Government have been so dilatory in pursuing proposals put forward by the previous Government to ensure that service personnel serving in conflict areas can cast their votes themselves. It would be possible, for example, to discuss the abolition of the edited register. There is also a range of other more technical issues that could be discussed. I hope that the distinguished noble Lords who will follow me in this debate will address some or all of these issues.
I want to focus on the introduction of individual voter registration. Most people, in all political parties, believe that the Government are right to bring in individual voter registration. The previous Government legislated for it—and I declare an interest as the Minister who brought in that legislation. I did so because I believed that it was right to do so. It is right, as a matter of principle, that citizens should be responsible for their own eligibility to vote. Individual registration can help to tackle fraud, although, as I will discuss later, the extent of fraud should not be overstated nor is individual registration a cure-all for it where it does exist. However, there is widespread concern about the way that the Government are introducing this change. I am particularly worried by their abandonment of the bipartisan approach adopted by the previous Government. I am also worried about the damage that they risk doing to the efforts to secure a comprehensive register, which must be the foundation of our electoral system.
For all its merits, the introduction of individual registration carries with it the severe risk that significant numbers of people who are eligible to vote will not be registered to do so and so will be unable to vote. This was the case in Northern Ireland when it moved to this new system of registration a few years ago. The report by the independent Electoral Commission on the experience in Northern Ireland found that the new registration process disproportionately impacted on:
“Young people and students, people with learning difficulties and other forms of disability and those living in areas of high social deprivation”.
That report concluded—and this is important, because of the specific circumstances of Northern Ireland—that:
“While these findings relate directly to Northern Ireland, they are not unique and reflect the wider picture across the UK. They present a major challenge to all those concerned with widening participation in electoral and democratic processes”.
In evidence to the Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee of the House of Commons, Jenny Watson, the chair of the Electoral Commission, said that it is possible that, under the Government’s proposed changes,
“the register could go from around a 90% completeness that we currently have to around, say, a 60% completeness”.
There is already a serious problem with the electoral register in the United Kingdom. The latest estimate from the Electoral Commission suggests that at least 6 million people who are eligible to vote were not registered to do so in December 2010. The fact that so many people who should be on the register are not, despite all the measures taken by the previous Government to increase registration—measures which I am pleased to see the current Government are taking forward—shows how intractable this problem is. It damages our democracy when so many eligible citizens cannot vote because they are not on the register.
The introduction of individual registration risks making a bad situation significantly worse. That is why its introduction was delayed for so long. The improvements it is likely to bring to the accuracy of the register are balanced by the deterioration it is likely to bring in the register’s coverage. The previous Government sought to reconcile these competing objectives by tying the implementation of individual registration to the achievement of a comprehensive and accurate register by 2015, as far as it was practicable to do so. This timetable allowed for a phased introduction of the new system. However, that Government showed their commitment to meeting the timetable by giving the Electoral Commission the power to oversee the process independently and the obligation to report annually to Parliament, so that if Parliament wanted to make any changes as the system progressed it could do so. We also gave the Electoral Commission substantial new powers to carry out these objectives.
The previous Government spent a great deal of time and effort building cross-party agreement on this approach. In the debate in the other place on 13 July 2009, which was the major occasion when this issue was debated there, the Front-Bench spokespersons for both the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrat Party supported the government approach and the timetable, and they did not vote against it. The present Government could have continued with this approach, but for reasons that they have never adequately explained they did not do so. They are rushing forward with the timetable for individual registration and removing the key safeguard of the requirement for a comprehensive and accurate register.
That is not all. The Government threaten to make the register even less complete by proposing to remove the civic and legal duty to register to vote, and to abolish the annual household canvass in 2014. I am sure the Government will say that they are taking measures to mitigate these potential risks just as the previous Government did—and I give them credit for that: they are—but nobody can be confident that such measures will solve the problem.
So why have the Government abandoned the previous Government’s careful, non-partisan approach to this important issue? They have suggested threats to the integrity of the register as a possible reason for this haste. In the words of the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, a few months ago in this place:
“for the first time certainly in my lifetime, the integrity of the voting system was starting to be called into question”.—[Official Report, 31/10/11; col. 974.]
So, by implication, the Government appear to be arguing that the need is so urgent that there can be no delay in bringing in a measure that can help tackle electoral malpractice. But independent bodies tasked with safeguarding the integrity of our electoral system do not share this assessment. The analysis carried out by the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Electoral Commission, for example, into the 2010 elections stated that,
“no evidence of widespread systematic attempts to undermine or interfere with the May 2010 elections through electoral fraud”,
was found. They said:
“we are not aware of any case reported to the police that affected the outcome of the election to which it related nor of any election that has had to be re-run as a result of electoral malpractice”.
There is never any justification for complacency about even a single incident of malpractice, but the evidence does not suggest that the level of electoral malpractice justifies the risk that the Government are running with the electoral register.
A report in 2008 from an independent body, the Rowntree Reform Trust, concluded:
“It is unlikely that there has been a significant increase in electoral malpractice since the introduction of postal voting on demand in 2000”.
It added that any malpractice that had taken place,
“related to a tiny proportion of all elections contested”.
Nor will individual registration, for all its merits, address all the cases of malpractice. The Association of Chief Police Officers and the Electoral Commission have concluded that the very nature of recorded electoral malpractice changes; as measures are introduced to tackle one form of malpractice, the problem shifts to other forms of it.
Indeed, I would say that the Government themselves do not see the problem as disproportionately pressing, because they scrapped ID cards. Whatever the justification for scrapping ID cards, they did scrap them. Whatever problems noble Lords may see with them, ID cards would have helped tackle the single largest category of alleged malpractice, which is voting offences, which includes personation at a polling station. The Government scrapped ID cards despite a recommendation by the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Electoral Commission that to strengthen the security of the electoral process, the Government should review the case for requiring proof of identity of voters at the polling station.
The weakness of the Government’s case for their approach is matched by the damage they risk doing. They risk excluding millions from their democratic right to vote. Their approach junks the principle, followed for good reasons by successive Conservative and Labour Governments, that fundamental constitutional change, particularly when it relates to the electoral system—the very wiring of our democracy—should only proceed, wherever possible, on a bipartisan basis. Their approach means that the boundary reviews in 2015 will be conducted on the basis of a profoundly flawed register, and therefore will subvert all the high-minded principles that the Government have advanced for these boundary reviews.
The increasingly unrepresentative register that is likely to result from the Government’s approach will restrict the pool of those available for jury service, and so it will threaten the quality of justice in our country. Scope has warned that,
“the transition process must be handled carefully so that it doesn’t inadvertently exclude disabled people”.
Finally, the Government’s approach risks turning our electoral arrangements in this country into a matter for partisan dispute for the first time in over a century, and this is potentially toxic for our democracy. Most agree that those eligible voters not registered to vote are most likely to vote Labour when they do vote. It is true that the Liberal vote in the inner cities is also likely to suffer. The Electoral Commission has found that,
“under-registration is notably higher than average among 17-24 year olds … private sector tenants … and black and minority ethnic (BME) British residents”.
It also found that the,
“highest concentrations of under-registration [are] most likely to be found in metropolitan areas, smaller towns and cities with large student populations, and coastal areas with significant population turnover and high levels of social deprivation”.
The evidence suggests that the party that will suffer least, if at all, from a fall-off in registration is the Conservative Party. Electoral registration is only 90 per cent complete in Labour seats, but 94 per cent complete in Conservative seats.
Politicians and Parliament have been falling into disrepute in recent years—it is a matter of grave concern, I know, to everyone in this House and in the other place. I ask your Lordships to consider the impact on the health of our democracy if it turns out, as it might, that the outcome of a general election has been determined by the fact that millions of eligible voters could not vote because they were not registered to do so, and that this was the result of a government policy deliberately pursued despite all the evidence that it would have precisely this consequence. Whatever the motivation behind the Government’s precipitous abandonment of a bipartisan approach to individual registration, they still have a chance to return to the approach adopted by the previous Labour and Conservative Administrations.
Independent bodies have now reported on the Government’s approach and expressed concerns about it. The House of Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee, on which the Government have a majority, has noted,
“serious concerns that the Government's current proposals will miss an unacceptably large number of potential electors”.
The Electoral Commission has argued that the UK Government and UK Parliament should make a number of changes, including requiring electoral registration officers to run a full household canvass in 2014, abandoning the government proposal to allow voters to opt out from registration, publishing a detailed implementation plan, considering how to ensure the change is delivered consistently and ensuring that sufficient funding is available for the activities involved in implementing the change from household to individual electoral registration.
I hope that the Government will now take the concerns of these independent bodies more seriously than they have done up until now. I suggest to the Minister that one way of addressing all the problems that the Government’s approach risks creating would be to set up a working group, consisting of representatives of all the political parties represented at Westminster, to agree how best to tackle the problems that have been so widely identified and by independent bodies. There are many distinguished Members of your Lordships’ House, many of whom will speak in the debate today, who I am sure could make a major contribution to such a working group. I recognise that the Minister may not be in a position to respond substantively to this suggestion today, but I would be grateful if he could agree to write to me with a considered response if he is not able to do so today. If he rejects this proposal, could he set out in detail whether he accepts that the introduction of individual registration will lead to increased numbers of eligible voters falling off the electoral register? If he does not, can he guarantee that this will not happen?
This is a technical issue but, as I hope I have indicated in these remarks, it is one with potentially profound consequences for our democracy. I hope the Minister will not brush these concerns aside, but respond to them constructively and in a way that can re-establish the bipartisan approach that should always characterise public policy on such constitutional issues.
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville
My Lords, the initial language of speeches in debates such as this is conventional, even to the extent of seeming Chinese. However, on this occasion, which is also the 180th anniversary year of the Great Reform Act, convention can be thrown to the winds and the noble Lord, Lord Wills, can be thanked for and congratulated in an old-fashioned, John Bull-ish, Hogarthian way on the immense service that he has done to your Lordships’ House in securing this debate and opening it so well, even if sometimes controversially.
To genuflect towards the Great Reform Act, I remark in passing as a former Member of Parliament for the City of Westminster that my predecessor, Charles James Fox, required seven votes to be elected in Midhurst and 13 in Malmesbury, but was confronted by an electorate of 6,000 when he came to Westminster, on a property franchise so liberal that the electorate actually fell after the 1832 legislation. The noble Lord, Lord Wills, will be aware that, although the House of Commons Library note on this subject was intended as briefing for an opposition day debate in the other place on individual electoral registration on 9 November 2011, he will also be aware that that debate did not take place and never has since. So this debate is the subject’s first parliamentary outing since the White Paper of last summer.
My noble friend the Minister who is replying to the debate is himself a living embodiment of the coalition. I am happy to say that voter registration is a subject on which the two coalition parties do not in principle seem to have differences of opinion. I can still recall, in opposition in your Lordships’ House, my agreeable surprise in another such debate when my now noble friend Lord Goodhart, speaking after me, said that he had agreed with almost everything that I had said in preceding him. I also derive satisfaction for having spoken in the Second Reading debate during the passage of the Electoral Fraud (Northern Ireland) Act 2002 in your Lordships’ House—a debate that precipitated the wholesale rewriting of the Bill at the behest of the late, great Lord Williams of Mostyn between Second Reading and Third Reading and the requirement therefrom for people registering to vote to provide their personal details, including a national insurance number, an event that provides forbear ancestry to this debate. The fall of 10 per cent in the Northern Ireland electorate was a consequence but not, in my view, an inexplicable one. The new electoral register involved a sharp reduction not only in duplications but in those removed to a higher place by death without having been removed from the electoral register as they crossed the bourn.
In Great Britain, after the boundary changes leading up to the 1983 general election, my inner-city seat had the lowest turnout in the country at 58 per cent, a level the country itself reached two elections ago; clearly, where Westminster leads, so goes the nation. I told my agent, the admirable Donald Stewart, who retired last year, that this position in the turnout list must never be repeated. Over my next three, and final, elections, we rose 24 places in the turnout list, overtaking not only other inner-city seats in the great cities of the nation but some Northern Ireland seats as well. Personally, I enjoy election canvassing, but I enjoy it the more when I am confident in the security of the register. I also have profound consequential admiration for inner-city postmen.
I hope that I am not telling tales out of school when I say that some years back the Conservative Party’s research department’s statistical side did some research into the electoral registers of marginal seats. As its motivation was primarily political, it did not go further and compare its data academically with those for other, less marginal, seats. However, the outcome was very similar to that which emerged from the post-2002 Northern Ireland data. One additional element was the significant number of aliens on the register not yet entitled by citizenship to vote. I am not in this regard implying fraud, although of course there may have been some. An alien with imperfect English might well feel that he was obliged by law to fill in the annual household electoral request from the local authority. Nor do I blame electoral registration officers for failing to conduct a full electoral canvass. Funding for electoral registration officers is not ring-fenced, to pick up where the Welfare Reform Bill Report stage left off last night. Moreover, as the House of Commons Library note says, the Electoral Commission,
“initially saw the change as being an essential ‘building block’ for e-enabled elections but individual registration was later seen as an important measure to guard against electoral fraud”.
All this, however, militates in favour of a full 2014 canvass at this stage in the programme’s evolution, rather than relying on an updated 2013 register.
One of the incidental consequences of the international détente of 1989 and the fall of both communism and the Berlin Wall was the exposure of UK electoral experts, often as election observers, to the practices of the eastern European countries, where it transpired that voters very much had to prove who they were, not least in the Balkan imbroglio. My late first wife was a Brazilian citizen who also carried a British passport, but I did not then realise that in Brazil too you had to prove at the time of voting who you were. The majority of countries now require a photographic card or even a specific electoral registration card.
I realise the bias against identity cards in this land and the distaste for indelible ink on our hands, but I wonder whether we are not being offered the opportunity to learn from the experience from others. We had the first industrial revolution and other countries learnt much from it—indeed, improving on it in the process. We were, with the exception of Albania, the last country in Europe to create a modern national lottery and, as the Minister who introduced it, I can testify to how much we learnt from the experience of others to create what is widely regarded as the best lottery in the world. I know that we are the mother of parliaments, but perhaps humility might help us to make the giant leap to an electoral registration card ourselves. We are conscious of the importance that the coalition attaches to the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011. The same importance should be attached to a copper-bottomed improvement to the whole electoral procedure.
On a final elegiac note, one of the losses from 18th-century electioneering history is the gradual disappearance today of constituency agents from the ranks of our political parties. As the farm labourer disappears from the land, so does a great deal of knowledge of country lore. For the benefit of the Hansard writer, I spell that word with an “o”. The same is true of agents —and I spell “lore” in that instance with both an “o” and an “a”.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, I join the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, in congratulating my noble friend Lord Wills on raising this important issue. Like many Members of your Lordships’ House, I spent many happy hours, extending to 50 years, using the electoral register for the purpose of canvassing. As my noble friend has said, the keystone of any working democratic electoral system is, of course, that there should be an accurate and comprehensive register. As he said, all political parties have subscribed to the view that individual registration is desirable, albeit that that necessarily involves much more work and perhaps more cost to ensure its efficient administration than the situation hitherto.
The electoral register primarily serves as a function of democratic politics but it also serves other purposes. We may well hear in this debate about the uses to which the register can be put—for example, in relation to jury service, the avoidance of fraud through the use of the register by credit agencies and the like. On the downside, there is legitimate concern about the use of the register by commercial organisations for the purposes of marketing and so on, but that is a subsidiary question to the one that we are addressing in your Lordships’ House today.
Democracy ultimately depends on participation, and the attitude of the Government appears to be that inclusion on the register is to be voluntary—a sort of lifestyle choice. I suspect that most of us in your Lordships’ House would take the view that inclusion on the register is in fact a civic responsibility. Many of us would go further and say that voting is a civic responsibility. Some of us might be tempted to say that voting should be compulsory, but that is not within the province of this debate and would no doubt be a more controversial proposition.
It is clear that there is a real risk of a significant decline in numbers registering under the present proposals. My noble friend has referred to the Electoral Commission’s estimate of a 65 per cent effective register. The numbers have been declining in any event over recent years; 65 per cent would put us at less than the United States, whose record in these matters generally is regarded as pretty deplorable. In evidence to, I believe, the Electoral Reform Society at an event that it staged, the returning officer for Hackney predicted a reduction of 25,000 to 30,000 from an already low base of an electorate of 165,000. That is a very significant reduction.
Of course it is right, as noble Lords have already said, to create barriers to electoral fraud, but as my noble friend rightly points out, fraud essentially has been pretty minimal. There had been concerns around postal voting, but I have to say that postal voting has substantially sustained turnout in local elections. In my own authority in Newcastle, one of the experimental policies in 2004 was to have 100 per cent registration for postal votes. Since then, the turnout in local elections has resulted in 70 per cent of those with postal votes actually voting, with only a 15 per cent turnout among those not using the postal vote. There has been no evidence or even any suggestion of postal vote fraud in that authority. So postal voting, properly administered, can certainly help sustain turnout.
Making registration voluntary is surely a mistake. It is necessary to have the sanction of a possible fine—although very rarely, if ever, used. I think that perhaps a few more cases would engender more people registering now. If voluntary registration appears to be the order of the day, it is likely to engender a significant further fall, as has happened in Northern Ireland, as has already been said. When a few years ago the poll tax was a hot political issue, we saw a substantial decline in registration. People effectively sought to evade the poll tax by keeping their names off the electoral register at a time when there were potential sanctions to be applied. Without sanctions, there may very well be an even worse level of registration and therefore turnout. As my noble friend has indicated, this is particularly likely to be the case with young people, with people from ethnic minorities and with private tenants. When one goes canvassing, as I was doing last weekend, it is striking how in areas of private-rented housing one comes across a significant number of properties where there is no name on the electoral register; it is much less the case in local authority housing or in owner-occupied areas. That constitutes disenfranchising—admittedly by omission on the part of the residents—of a significant proportion of the population.
This has effects beyond just the turnout in individual seats. Potentially it influences hugely the drawing of parliamentary boundaries. Clearly, under registration, it could significantly distort the pattern of parliamentary boundaries that was determined under the legislation passed last year. The boundaries are now to be reviewed every five years instead of approximately every 10 years, and that could, of course, significantly affect the political outcome.
One area that has not really been touched on is the position of voters who, like Members of your Lordships’ House, are entitled to vote in local elections but not in national elections. That includes EU residents. I do not think that their position has been canvassed—to use an appropriate phrase—at all in these discussions. It is perhaps a matter that ought to be considered. They are entitled to vote and there is no reason why they should not vote, since they are paying local taxes. It seems to me that it ought to be part of the responsibility of the electoral registration process to ensure that EU citizens in this country with the right to vote in local elections are included in the register.
The Political and Constitutional Reform Committee of the House of Commons considered these matters and clearly took a strong view that the offence of failing to co-operate with the electoral registration officer should be retained; that the Electoral Commission should promote a public information campaign on a regular basis to inform people of their rights and responsibilities in this respect; that there should be, as the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, confirmed, a full canvass in 2014, which will be critical as we approach the next general election—assuming that we have to wait until then; and thereafter that the register should be adequately maintained.
There is a resource implication. Local authorities’ budgets are under huge pressure and it is tempting to dispense with the necessary investment in keeping a register up to date. However, the temptation should be resisted and resistance would be facilitated if a grant were specifically ring-fenced for this purpose. I am not normally in favour of ring-fencing grants to local government, but this has implications for our whole political system and is a case for which I certainly would be prepared to make an exception. A project of data-matching is also under way, and that should also be evaluated.
The Welfare Reform Bill, which has occupied the House —and will continue to do so—for some time, threatens to take us back in certain respects to the 19th century Poor Law. I hope that these changes in the electoral system do not take us back to a 19th century electorate.
Baroness Rawlings
Perhaps I may remind noble Lords that when the clock shows seven, they are already in their eighth minute.
Lord Rennard
My Lords, first I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wills, on securing this debate. It comes at a good time because the recent report by the Electoral Commission highlights a number of weaknesses in the current electoral registration process, especially in the completeness of the voting register. It suggests that perhaps 6 million or 7 million people who should be on the register are not. The current household-based processes for registering voters in Great Britain are not consistently applied. The system is not accurate and is antiquated in that it requires action by someone acting as head of household—a position that does not exist in any household that I would recognise.
Any unnecessary change to the system beyond a simple switch from household to individual responsibility that might risk missing out many more voters while doing nothing to improve accuracy would be a very bad step in the wrong direction. I am pleased that any changes will now be open to very considerable pre-legislative scrutiny. Many representations have been made suggesting that the recent White Paper probably puts accuracy above completeness as a priority in the registration process. However, both principles are very important. Fraudulent entries on the register are abhorrent, but the absence from the register of people entitled to vote fundamentally weakens our democracy. I am pleased that the idea of encouraging voters in effect to disfranchise themselves through a so-called opt-out box on the registration form has been dropped; it would have sent a totally wrong signal about responsibility.
There is agreement among the parties on the principle of individual electoral registration, but, in considering any other changes to the process, clear evidence of the benefit of the changes to the accuracy and completeness of the electoral register must be shown if they are to be made. Many people consider that the main strength of our existing registration system, and the reason for widespread compliance, is that it is based on a legal requirement. Electoral registration officers clearly consider this requirement to be vital to the process, because the registration forms that each officer designs make the requirement clear above anything else.
I shall quote from some of the forms that I have been able to collect from different local authorities which are sent to every household as part of the registration process. Exeter City Council’s form says in bold near the top of the form:
“You are required by law to give the information requested on this form”.
Wandsworth Council’s form says in large print at the very top:
“You are required by law to provide the requested information even if you do not qualify to vote”.
Elmbridge Borough Council’s form says in large bold type under the address of the recipient:
“By law you must return this form every year even if there are no changes to make”.
Edinburgh’s form emphasises that the information is “required by law” by emboldening those three key words. Lambeth Council’s form says at the top:
“By law you have to register every year”,
and this form, like many others, also leads with the fact that,
“You can be fined £1,000 if you do not reply”.
Eastbourne’s form also states most prominently in bold print the legal requirement to comply with the process and also features the sanction of a fine of up to £1,000 if you fail to do so. In fact, every single form that I have been able to collect strongly emphasises this point of legal requirement. I suggest that this is clear proof that the statement is considered to be of significant value by those most concerned with the detail of the process.
Of course, prosecutions for failure to comply are very rare, but the threat of legal sanction is considered to be very effective. The Electoral Commission has relayed to me the views of the Association of Electoral Administrators. These administrators are the people who employ those who go round visiting homes and chasing the forms to try to ensure that they are returned and that the register is as complete as possible. The association says that interrupting households to ask them to fill in a form is never easy, and if completion becomes a voluntary activity—simply a polite request—it does not think that the forms will be completed. The fact that it is a legal requirement is what persuades the vast majority of people to comply with the registration process.
The Electoral Commission clearly agrees. It concludes that:
“Without some form of sanction, we would expect a lower rate of response to requests for information than is currently achieved”.
The threat of legal sanctions is what makes the existing register as comprehensive as it is. Without them, the completeness of the register is likely to fall considerably. Removing legal sanctions would put the quality of our democracy at great risk—for no benefit to that democracy. That is why I will not support any change that does not satisfactorily preserve this legal requirement to comply with the registration process on everyone who should fill in a form to register to vote. Registration to vote is not a personal choice in our system and it should not become one. It is voting or not that should remain a personal choice. This is not just about the fairness of elections but about the fairness of the way in which constituency and ward boundaries are drawn up.
I am sure that Ministers will remember the many occasions last year on which they defended the electoral register—as it now is—as the basis for drawing up constituency boundaries. They said that we could be proud of an estimated 92 per cent compliance with the registration process. They must now realise that if we change the basis of the register in fundamental ways, it may no longer be fit for purpose for redrawing boundaries.
There are many issues that I would like to raise in relation to this, particularly the need for a full and comprehensive canvass in 2014. We know how important that is, but for reasons of time I have chosen to concentrate on that specific issue, which I consider to be of paramount importance. I hope that my noble friend Lord Tyler will shortly take up some of the other issues about which I am also very concerned.
Lord Lexden
My Lords, our country has before it the prospect of a new system of individual electoral registration. That prospect has been widely welcomed, and rightly so. In one part of our country the new system is already a reality. It has operated for a number of years in Northern Ireland, for which I have a strong and enduring affection.
As a deeply committed supporter of Northern Ireland’s union with Great Britain, I hold firmly to the view that, in matters affecting the UK as a whole, the same approach should be followed throughout it. In Northern Ireland, it is a criminal offence not to complete a voter registration form when asked to do so. No such provision is currently being proposed for Great Britain. A thoroughly undesirable distinction will, therefore, be created between the system in Northern Ireland and that elsewhere. Equity demands uniformity. As the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee of the House of Commons noted last November in its report on the proposed new system:
“There appears to be no reason why failure to complete and return a registration form should be a criminal offence in Northern Ireland but not in Great Britain. The Government should take steps to remedy this inconsistency”.
I hope that when my noble friend the Minister comes to reply to this debate, he will be able to tell us that the necessary steps will be carefully considered.
Action to establish better arrangements for electoral registration will be deficient and incomplete if it does not tackle a problem that has been allowed to continue for far too long. I refer to the position in which the vast majority of our fellow countrymen and women living abroad find themselves. Two simple statistics need to be borne constantly in mind. It is estimated by the Electoral Commission that 5.6 million British citizens are resident in other countries. Just 30,000 of them are registered to vote alongside their fellow citizens in the country to which they belong. Yet today, to a greater extent than ever before, many British expatriates retain close ties with their country and, in doing so, keep a strong feeling of attachment to it, however extensively they may involve themselves in the practical affairs of the communities where they reside. In the age of the internet, our fellow countrymen abroad can follow closely what is happening in their native land and contribute powerfully as online participants to developments taking place here, whether they reside in Berlin, Brisbane or Buenos Aires.
Sadly, however, for many expatriates a feeling of attachment to Britain cannot gain the full expression that it naturally seeks. After 15 years’ absence, the right to vote ends. No one has ever argued that a sense of belonging to our country dies after 15 years’ absence from it. The withdrawal of voting rights after a decade and a half rests on no clear, settled principle. Their termination could equally well occur after other periods of residence abroad—indeed, it has done so. Participation in our elections was originally closed after five years’ absence. Then the qualifying period was quadrupled to 20 years. No rationale was offered for these sudden changes, nor for the decision to slice five years off the total, which has brought us to the present position. Our fellow citizens abroad are surely entitled to a firm, stable set of arrangements. Instead, they have been subject to arbitrary upheavals.
Other advanced democracies have not chopped and changed in this extraordinary fashion. The United States of America, France, Italy and the Netherlands, among others, all provide lifelong voting rights for their nationals living in other countries, as do Australia, Canada and New Zealand. It is true that some countries are more restrictive. Germany, for example, grants lifelong voting rights to its citizens living in other EU countries but voting rights for 25 years to those living outside the EU. However, no other leading democracy takes as restrictive an approach as our country. It is high time that the United Kingdom joined the international consensus.
How is this to be achieved? The forthcoming legislation to introduce the new system of individual registration can provide the perfect vehicle for change, as my friend Mr Christopher Chantrey, chairman of the British Community Committee in France, pointed out in his evidence to the Commons Select Committee. The unjustifiable time limit on the right to vote abroad should be swept away completely, bringing us into line with the United States, France and other countries.
Our fellow countrymen abroad already have individual voter registration but in a particularly cumbersome and inefficient form. The existing complex and time-consuming registration arrangements have deterred many who do meet the existing qualifying conditions from claiming their right to vote. As Mr Chantrey stated in his recent submission, overseas voters, as opposed to UK resident voters, can be positively identified through an official document: the British passport. A simple system, he went on, could easily be established to enable overseas voters to register electronically or by post, providing the basic information needed to confirm their identity. Once a general election or referendum was called, Mr Chantrey concludes, a ballot paper would immediately be electronically generated or printed, and e-mailed or sent by post to the overseas voter.
Great men and women—John Bright, Gladstone, Disraeli, in his idiosyncratic fashion, and the Pankhursts, among others—campaigned with vigour and conviction to make the franchise the birthright of their fellow countrymen and women. Of course it never occurred to them that, in a future age, over five and a half million British people would live and work abroad without the right to vote in the national parliamentary elections of their countries of residence. For far too long, far too many of them have been effectively disenfranchised. Now, a great opportunity has arisen to end their disenfranchisement. We should seize it.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Wills for initiating this debate about a very important aspect of our democracy. We take voting for granted in modern Britain and it is fundamental to our basic freedoms. We have, however, become rather sanguine about the downturn in voter turnout and casual about the ways in which the voting system is corrupted.
Vote-rigging is, in fact, much more widespread than some of our speakers have indicated, and there has perhaps been just too much complacency about the things that have gone wrong. It has been proven to have occurred in Birmingham, Slough, Peterborough, Reading, Bristol, Burnley, Blackburn, Halton, Guildford, Havant, Bradford and other towns and cities. The judge who presides over the Election Court, Mr Justice Mawrey, has much to say about the reasons why this has been taking place. In fact, he concluded in the 2004 Birmingham City Council case that the elections would have been a disgrace to a banana republic. I recommend to this House a booklet by Sam Buckley about the many cases that have taken place during the past decade and a bit.
I chaired the Power inquiry, and we looked at the reasons for the downturn in electoral turnout. One thing that we found was that the habit of voting was not being established in the young. When this was not established—certainly before people were 30—it was very unlikely, as used to be the case, that they would start voting once they had a family, a household and so on. Many people do not ever turn to it.
The recommendation before this House is that we introduce individual voter registration. I support this, but not as a sole response to problems. It should exist alongside the current system. It should be possible for somebody who somehow or other has failed to get their name on to the register to be prompted to do so—and to do so individually with much greater ease than is currently possible.
I do not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, when he says that he does not know households with a head. I think that now we would talk about heads of households where families take very different forms and where people may consider themselves, in marriages and partnerships, much more equal. What we want, however, is for one of the heads of a household to take responsibility for trying to get people’s names on to the register. I, like the noble Lord, believe that there should be a legal sanction, because if there is not, the seriousness of being on the register will not be accepted.
The noble Lord, Lord Lexden, raised the question of why there is some kind of discrepancy between here and Northern Ireland. It is, of course, because the long history of gerrymandering in Northern Ireland has made it a sensitive issue. However, it should be becoming more of a sensitive issue here, given the history of hearings before the Election Court that have taken place in the past decade.
The Representation of the People Act 2000 was introduced because of falling voter turnout. In the 1997 election, only 71 per cent of those who could vote turned out, and it was the lowest since the Second World War. That led to an inquiry and, in turn, to the legislation. We would now be thrilled if we could go back to those figures. In fact, over the past 14 years we have seen participation hovering at around 60 per cent, so we have seen a serious reduction. Therefore, despite the remedies that have been sought, we have not managed to improve things considerably.
We have expanded postal voting, but I am afraid that I still see it as the wrong solution to the wrong problem. It was a misidentified problem because politicians always want to believe that the reason people do not vote is because they are too busy, it is too complicated, they are too preoccupied or some other such reason, when in fact most of the time it is because people do not see the point in doing it. In conducting the Power inquiry, we found that people did not vote usually because they felt that it did not affect the outcome. They believed that lobbyists and vested interests had more power than they had, along with many other different reasons, but it was rarely because it was too difficult to go across the road or to find the voting station. Postal voting has operated successfully in some areas—certainly for those with infirmities, those who are living abroad or are going abroad for a period, and for other good reasons. However, removing a rationale for using a postal vote and making it available on demand has, I am afraid, expanded fraud.
We have to call it fraud and not just the word that was being used by my learned friend—malpractice. We have seen serious fraud taking place. The change to postal voting on demand was followed almost immediately by instances of fraud. Within a year, in local elections held in 2002, we had an instance of fraud where postal votes were being abused in local elections held in Birmingham. John Hemming, who is now an MP, showed that four fraudulent postal votes were cast in the Billesley ward, where the majority achieved by the candidate was three votes. We started seeing this happening with much greater frequency. I urge noble Lords to read the judgments of the Election Court. Of course, Birmingham in 2004 was the worst example. Some 70,000 postal votes were registered within days of the election, because you only have to register within five working days of an election and you do not have to give a reason. Suddenly, there was an inundation of applications for postal votes, 40,000 of which arrived within the marginal days of the deadline. In one ward, 8,241 people applied in the final days before the election. This is not about malpractice, mistakes or whatever; it is about crime and the stealing of elections, and it is a problem that we have to address if we take our democracy seriously.
I remind the House that some of the reluctance of people to register started with the poll tax. Noble Lords will remember that it was instilled in the minds of many people that being on a register to vote would affect other aspects of their lives and would have a financial impact on families. Lots of people did not want to register to vote. Until we have a secure and separate electoral register which people do not feel is going to impact on other aspects of their lives, we are going to see, particularly among the poorest in our society, people being unwilling to register.
However, what I really want us to consider is the business of postal voting because I think that it should be revisited. If we are going to look at ways of making our electoral system better, we have to revisit it. Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights requires Governments to hold free elections that will,
“ensure the free expression of the opinion of the people in the choice of the legislature”.
That is important whether it be for local elections, European elections or our general elections. In 2006, a motion was placed before the Council of Europe that there was enough fraud involved in the system of postal voting in the UK to make us fall foul of our duties under Article 3. I am afraid that we were criticised by the Council of Europe for the system that we have in operation, so it should be revisited.
I believe strongly in the democratic moment. I believe that going into the polling booth and putting your cross on the paper matters, and we have to instil the importance of that in new generations. As others have said, it is our birthright, and I do not think it should be treated like filling in a questionnaire or a consumer survey. If we want to look at registration, we have to look at it in the round of all the ways in which people come to vote.
Viscount Astor
My Lords, I would like to concentrate on postal voting, particularly postal voting from overseas, and on the comparisons between the previous general election and the AV referendum. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wills, for giving us the opportunity for this debate. I should declare again that never in my life have I been able to vote in a general election, although I have been able to vote in other elections, so I have no interest to declare in that way.
In the 2010 general election, 6.9 million people—15 per cent of the electorate—were issued with postal votes, and 83 per cent of those issued with a postal vote returned it. That compared with six out of 10 people registered to vote at a polling station exercising their vote. Almost one in five votes at the count was a postal vote, so it is an interesting statistic which shows how successful postal voting is. In the recent referendum, there was an increase in the number of people voting by post to 7.2 million, which is around 16 per cent of the electorate, and 72 per cent of those returned their postal vote. That compared with fewer than four in 10 registered at a polling station actually turning up to vote. We can see that postal voting is increasing in this country and is likely to grow even more. Merely 11 months ago we had a debate on this issue and the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, who answered for the Government, said that they would consider the issues of postal voting with urgency. I think that 11 months just about qualifies as “urgency” for any government.
One of the issues we discussed then was the depressing fact that in the 2010 general election, only about 500 soldiers out of 10,000 who were serving abroad, mainly in Afghanistan, actually managed to return a postal vote. The Minister gave assurances to your Lordships that he would try to improve on that before the AV referendum. I wonder whether the Minister who is to respond to the debate has any statistics to show whether he was successful or not. It was bizarre that there we were in Afghanistan trying to encourage the introduction of an electoral system into that country while our brave soldiers serving over there were unable to join in the electoral system in this country. I would be interested to know what the statistics are. The Minister also agreed that we should take a radical look at voting for overseas residents, and I wonder whether the Government have any statistics on how many people resident overseas voted by postal ballot in the AV referendum compared with the previous general election.
The Government have made a welcome proposal to extend the timetable for UK parliamentary elections from 17 to 25 working days from the dissolution of Parliament to polling day, with a longer period between the close of nominations and polling day. However, I am concerned that the full benefits of this extended timetable will not be available to all postal voters. The Government have not indicated that they intend to amend the relevant rules which specify that ballot packs cannot be dispatched until 5 pm on the 11th working day before polling day. We are concerned that they may not arrive in time. Perhaps I may quote a counting officer at the last election who said, “The timescale is too tight to allow sufficient time for overseas electors to complete and return their ballot papers. They are basically being disfranchised every time an election is held. One overseas elector called on polling day as he had just received his postal vote, despite an early turnaround and issue by airmail”.
That is the problem, and as my noble friend Lord Lexden said, there were only just over 30,000 overseas voters on the register at the last election out of 5 million British citizens who live abroad, of whom at least 3.5 million are probably eligible to vote. We ought to do something in this country to encourage them to take part in the electoral system. Many people go abroad or work abroad, but that does not mean to say that they have lost interest in this country. They read English newspapers on the internet every morning, and indeed many of them want to return to this country at some point in the future. They should be able to take part in our electoral system.
Lord Borrie
My Lords, the debate has mostly been concerned with the direct application of the register and the changes that will be made in it to individual registration from the present system of head of household registration. We have asked what that means and whether it will make it more difficult to avoid fraud. But there is a secondary purpose that I want to mention in the debate, which is that for many years, at least 30 years to my knowledge, the electoral register has been used commercially to indicate the truth about residence, permanency of residence and so on, along with identification of people on the register by credit reference agencies. I hope my noble friend Lord Beecham does not mind me saying that they are commercial entities; they are in business for commercial reasons. But they provide a useful public purpose in that, both for creditors and indirectly for consumers, they indicate various pieces of key identification and household information to suggest the creditworthiness or otherwise of the consumers to whom credit providers are inclined to offer credit.
Credit reference agencies have for many years had the privilege of being entitled to have access to the full electoral register. They are approved or licensed by the Office of Fair Trading at the present time and in future by the Financial Services Authority, and that is an indication of the probity of the particular agencies I am talking about. There is a small reference in paragraph 13 of the White Paper on this subject to indicate the significance of credit reference agency use of the electoral register.
There is a change suggested by the Government in the White Paper to individual electoral registration but the Government propose to remove existing penalties for non-registration. As I understand it, admittedly from a sitting position, my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours does not think much of penalties because they are very rarely imposed and people are very rarely prosecuted. I would suggest, as the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, indicated in his useful speech, that if there are to be penalties, as there have been in the past, they will be quite useless unless, at least from time to time, there are examples of prosecutions and fines imposed and whatever other penalties it is thought desirable there should be for non-registration.
I am very concerned about paragraph 16 of the White Paper, which makes the point that it is not compulsory for anyone to vote in this country, unlike in Australia, and the Government do not intend to compel people to vote. It then goes on to say, displaying a bad sense of logic, that it is sensible that registering to vote should also be a choice for the individual concerned. I do not think one thing follows from the other at all. Surely one can be in favour of allowing people the freedom to vote or not to vote on election day and yet regard it as a valuable requirement to make the comprehensiveness of the register a reality. I think the noble Lord, Lord Rennard would agree that they are separate matters. From the point of view of the secondary value of the electoral register that I am referring to, I would say that it is a helpful indication in relation to the creditworthiness or otherwise of individuals. It would be a severe loss if the register was much less comprehensive than it has been, let alone more comprehensive. So I doubt the logic of the Government’s view on this matter.
Others have said that this is not the subject of this debate but I may surmise that voting should be compulsory. There are indeed arguments to that effect. I am certainly saying that registration to vote is a public duty and should be enforceable by appropriate penalties. As I understand it, leading credit reference agencies as well as the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee in the House of Commons want registration to be mandatory. I entirely agree and I agree with the value of the 2014 household canvass that has been referred to by others in this debate.
In principle the move to individual electoral registration seems to me to be correct and we want to ensure that that principle is backed up by a greater reality than seems likely from the current proposals. As my noble friend Lord Wills has indicated, the reason why the proposals are inadequate at the moment is that the Government have rejected compulsion and various other ideas, especially those formulated by people outside the Government, and they have failed to go along a bipartisan route.
Lord Lipsey
My Lords, this is a very timely debate that my noble friend Lord Wills has called for today. We were reminded of just how timely by the publication yesterday of the proposal by the Welsh Boundary Commission for the new Welsh seats—a proposal greeted with universal disbelief. There should not have been disbelief because it was an inevitable product of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act. It reminds us of the importance of the rules of the electoral game, which is what we are discussing today. That Act is on the statute book so there is no point in going over it. At least it was subject to a good deal of public examination, not least thanks to the reasonably extensive debate it received in your Lordships’ House. By contrast, the Government’s proposals on electoral registration, though scarcely less important in their potential impact, have received practically no public scrutiny. There was an excellent report by the Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee of the Commons, a useful seminar recently at the British Academy with experts and academics, and a well informed article—the only one I have read in the press—by Martin Kettle in the Guardian, but that is just about it. If you asked 100 electors what was proposed, I doubt you would get one coherent response.
The desirability of the change in principle is common ground across politics and across parties, with the main aim being to eliminate potential fraud. It is also common ground that the switch is likely to cause a drop in registration. The completeness of the electoral register has been declining gradually for a number of years, from north of 95 per cent at its best to perhaps 91 per cent or 92 per cent today. There was, however, one big drop, and that was when the Thatcher Government introduced the poll tax. According to estimates by the academics Iain Maclean and Jeremy Smith, this can account for slightly more than one-third of the estimated 1 million person shortfall between the electoral register and OPCS population estimates—in other words roughly 300,000 people stripped of the vote.
Estimates of how far registration will fall as a result of individual registration vary for two reasons. First, it depends on how it is done, and I will come back to this. If the Electoral Commission’s excellent proposals for a household canvass and for compulsion are followed, there will be much less of a drop than if they are not. Secondly, however, we are in the field of the unknowable, and speculation is inevitable.
There are estimates, however, and they vary from the worrying to the simply terrifying. In Northern Ireland, individual registration caused a shortfall of roughly 11 per cent. In evidence to the Commons committee—the noble Lord, Lord Wills, referred to this in his introduction—the Electoral Commission floated an Armageddon scenario in which all those who do not vote in general elections do not bother to register either. On that basis, the fall would be from 92 per cent to perhaps 60 or 65 per cent—in other words roughly one in three of the people who appear on the register at the moment would not appear. That is not quite as bad as it may sound, because a lot of the people who do not register would not have voted anyway. As completion of the register goes down, the turnout figure will go up—no doubt we shall all congratulate ourselves on that—but it is still a worrying thought that a third of the people now able to vote might not be able to do so.
When a proposal about elections comes before Parliament it is the duty of this House to satisfy itself that what is being done is being done not for partisan reasons but for reasons of merit. The fact that individual registration has been the policy of successive Governments shows that nothing too wicked is being done, but I cannot emphasise strongly enough that the effect of the change in the system will be completely different from what it would have been under the previous Government’s proposals, simply because of the parliamentary voting Act.
It is less likely that Labour voters will register than Tories because they are younger, and all the evidence is that younger voters register less. That will not affect the result of the general election much, because most of them would not have voted in any case. However, what it will affect greatly—on the Armageddon scenario —is the partisan distribution of constituencies, because when the Boundary Commission comes to work on the next review of boundaries, it will work on the basis of the register and will be obliged, as we all know, to make sure that constituencies have, plus or minus 5 per cent, the same number of registered electors. Labour constituencies, where registration is likely to be down greatly, will be too small; Tory constituencies, where registration will be reduced by less, will be too big. Labour constituencies will have to be abolished and Tory constituencies increased in number. It is likely that this will help to counter the current anti-Tory bias in the electoral system, which is a very good thing, but it may create a new pro-Tory bias which I am sure the whole House would agree would be as bad a thing as the present pro-Labour bias.
Here, I find myself slightly puzzled, because it sounds from that as if we have to worry greatly about partisanship. But what gives me pause for thought is that this is not an exclusively Tory Government, it is a coalition Government. It is a Tory/Lib Dem coalition. In allowing this change to go forward without the assurances required on compulsory registration and on the household canvass, the Lib Dems are committing electoral suicide. One thing to emerge from the Royal Academy’s survey, with all the greatest experts present, is that it is Lib Dem voters—younger, mobile voters—who are the least likely to register, and therefore it is Lib Dem seats, particularly urban Lib Dem seats, that will be reduced most by the boundary redistribution resulting from this register.
Perhaps I may end on a slightly light-hearted note, though it may not seem so light-hearted to the Lib Dem Benches opposite. There are lots of predictions as to how many seats they will win in 2015. Some people think they may have enough to fill a minibus; others think that a London taxicab will suffice. I express no opinion on this, but when one looks to the election after this, and unless the necessary steps are taken to make sure that registration under the new system is adequate as the Electoral Commission proposes, I think that a Smart fortwo should comfortably suffice.
Baroness Berridge
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wills, for securing today’s debate. I agree that this is an incredibly important issue. However, I fear that I must begin with a confession lest I be accused of hypocrisy. Late last night, to my horror, I realised that I am not currently registered on the electoral register.
I moved flat a couple of months ago, so I am inaccurately registered. This is one of the ways in which we lose people permanently from the register. It got me thinking as I walked home about the question, “How do you trace me?”. I thought, first, of my self-assessment tax return, but then thought that it might not be too wise to get HMRC involved in this issue. I then turned to my utility bills as a way of being traced, but they were not all in my name and I switched provider in the move. But I then came up with an idea that is perhaps worth the Government investigating. I redirected my post. How many people who move use this facility? Would it be worth requesting that the Post Office add to the form the question, “Do you wish to be added to the electoral register at the address to which you are redirecting your post?”. With 13 to 15 per cent of people now missing from the electoral register, I ask the Government to consider whether this is worth investigating.
I realise that that is a very pragmatic beginning to a speech on an issue of the highest principle. I shall seek briefly to speak about the lack of party consensus on the matter and the current “nudge” philosophy of this Government. The Minister in the other place stated on 15 September 2010:
“The need to improve the accuracy and completeness of electoral registers is an issue on which there is cross-party consensus. As we move forward, it will be important for us to maintain consensus and we will be seeking to work closely on implementation with political parties across the House”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/9/10; col. 885.]
However, when I googled this issue, I found that there is anything but party consensus. So often during the past 11 months in your Lordships' House, I have been told, “You have joined at rather a strange time”, or, “We are not normally this party political”. If one were to think of elections and government as analogous to a board game then issues such as the number of MPs would be part of the game, and the system of voting, AV or otherwise, would be rather like the rules. However, the electoral register determines who gets to participate in the game. This issue is fundamental to our democracy and sits in a different category of issues, rather like judicial independence. Therefore, to see cross-party fault lines develop on this issue concerns me greatly. I know that this can then lead to the argument, “It was not we who party-politicised—it was you”, but I believe that we must depoliticise this issue, and swiftly. If the Minister were willing to consider the working group suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Wills, I would add that political parties should be supplemented by—or there should perhaps even be a majority of—independent representation, which would greatly assist in rebuilding public confidence in our system.
This is a Government who believe in the “nudge”, a theory perhaps best explained by example. If you wish to apply for a driving licence, you must now answer the question whether you wish to be an organ donor before your form can be processed. If you do not answer the question, the form will not be processed, the theory being that there will be a higher level of organ donors as the system will have nudged everyone to answer the question. That being so, surely the Government would want to nudge people to ensure that there is the highest level of voters on the register and the highest level of people eventually voting. Had the behavioural insights team that now exists in No. 10 Downing Street been asked about the opt-out mechanism, I doubt that it would have been proposed.
In Northern Ireland, one has to complete the voter registration form, and I wonder why the British Government are taking away this minimal form of compulsion when undertaking the greatest change to UK elections since the granting of universal suffrage. Why do I have to fill in the self-assessment tax form and register my car, if I own one, with the DVLA, but not have to fill in this form? I would be grateful for further evidence from the Minister that making the whole system voluntary will not affect the completeness of the electoral register.
I note that the report from the Information Society Alliance states:
“Compulsory registration does not in all cases yield registration rates notably above those achieved in countries without compulsory registration”.
But will it be so in our case? Were the four of us who shared a house alone in knowing that someone had to fill in that form so we could not leave it hanging around forever?
Finally, I have much sympathy with the need for a full household canvass in 2014, as the Electoral Commission has stated that about 20 per cent of people eligible to re-register will not actually be written to in the first write-out in 2014. I presume that that 20 per cent is in addition to the 6.5 million people who are not even on the register at all. I am not convinced that a full household survey in 2013 is more important than in 2014, if resources are the issue at stake.
Accuracy and completeness of the register are but a means to an end, that end being public confidence in the outcome of the election. Is it impossible for the UK to have problems? Let us look at the United States and the hanging chads of the presidential election in 2000. In 2015 it could be a tight race, again. It could be in poor economic conditions. We know that there will be a reduction of MPs to 600. Moreover, 2015 will be the first truly Twitter, Facebook, internet election, with potentially restless people in touch by smartphone. Any complaints or hyperbole, whether well founded or not, travel fast nowadays—August’s disturbances taught us that if nothing else. Let us not take anything for granted, especially our free, fair and peaceful elections.
Lord Maxton
My Lords, like everyone else, I thank my noble friend Lord Wills for introducing this particular subject and for his excellent introduction. He has raised a subject that is at the very heart of our democracy: the people's right to vote and therefore to be on a register. That is more important than what appears to be the underlying theme behind what the Government are doing—a point that other noble Lords and noble Baronesses have remarked upon—that the prevention of fraud is more important than the right to vote. Electoral fraud appears to be the driving force behind this particular move, and the Electoral Commission makes that quite clear. That is wrong. It ought to be that people have the right to vote and we investigate if there is fraud. This is not new. Anyone who has studied history will know that people have been defrauding in that sense for some time.
It might not surprise many people here that I take the view that the register is just part of an outdated, very old fashioned electoral system. We now live in an age of hi-tech science and development. No wonder a lot of our youngsters do not go out and vote and are disillusioned with our electoral system; they consider it to be so out of date and old fashioned. They vote for their favourite characters in “The X Factor” and “Strictly Come Dancing” by mobile phone. They do not have to traipse along a road on a cold wet night, to be crossed off a paper register and given another piece of paper on which to put a cross after going into a booth, thus deciding how they are going to vote and putting it into a box. Afterwards, there is a long drawn-out process whereby those ballot papers are taken somewhere else and counted by various people. It takes long hours. I have been through this process. I was an MP for over five elections. We sat for night after night, waiting for the result to come in for our particular constituency.
Surely, in this day and age, it is time we started to use modern technology as part of our electoral system. Many of those who have opposed this measure so violently will disagree with me, but I am sorry to say that we have to have a national identity card and a national register to go with it. Then the electoral register could be drawn up on the basis of that national ID card register. It would be a smartcard. Smartcard technology has moved on so fast in the past four or five years that it is no longer the problem that it was even a few years ago. The cost is also considerably lower, because that is the nature of technology—the price comes down all the time. It also solves some of the problems of service voters. If you are in Afghanistan, why wait for a postal vote if you can vote using your ID card in some form of electoral machine that will allow you to do that?
The starting point for that register is an ID card that is compulsory: that everyone must have. They must update their address when necessary or the penalty will be severe, a measure which the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, wants to apply to electoral registration anyway. He, of course, was massively in favour of the abolition of the ID card but is now in favour of it.
I should say in passing that I was the spokesman for the Opposition in the other place when the Scottish poll tax Bill was introduced. If the noble Lord is worried about the £1,000 fine, it was increased by the then Tory Government to deal exactly with the problem of people possibly coming off the electoral register. The fine used to be £50 if you did not send in the form. It then became £1,000 to deal with the poll tax problem.
The fact is that we should have such an electoral register. To start with, we would not move straight to electronic voting. That ought to be the way in which we are moving. Instead, we seem to be standing still, not moving with the times, technology or science on this. Not just youngsters, but 75 year-olds like me, use smartcards, which we all have in our wallet, all the time. I do not think I bought anything with cash over Christmas. I used my bank card, which is a smartcard, or I bought online with it. Why should I not be able to vote in the same way, or at least prove my identity to electoral registration officers and those at the polling booth in this manner?
Surely we must move to having some form of compulsory ID card in this country in order to ensure that we have as full a register as possible and do away with some of the electoral fraud that might take place. When going to vote, you would have to produce an ID card with your photograph on it. It could then be checked whether the right person was actually voting. Surely that is the way forward. Instead, we are tinkering around with a system that is increasingly old fashioned, out of date and not working properly. It really is time that we moved on rather than standing where we are at the present, using a system that is completely out of date.
Lord Tyler
My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Wills, and not just for initiating this very timely debate. He has also had an impeccable track record of support for the advantages of individual electoral registration, against equally determined delaying tactics from some members of the previous Administration, for whatever reason. It is right that we should look very carefully at the extent of cross-party consensus on this issue. I agree with him and other Members of your Lordships’ House who have made this point.
I should remind noble Lords that the Electoral Commission, to which I have been privileged to give informal and obviously non-remunerative advice with a cross-party group for some time, recommended the move to IER as long ago as 2003. If we reach that point in 2013, 10 years is an awfully long time.
One major change that we should recognise in the context of our debate is that there has been a tendency in recent years to think that the present system is pretty good. Yet the latest research that has just reached us in the last few days from the Electoral Commission has pointed out that it is very inadequate. The present register, far from being 90-plus per cent accurate is somewhere down in the 80s and has got appreciably worse since the 2010 general election. There are all sorts of reasons for that, but none of us should be satisfied with the status quo. That is probably an accepted point around your Lordships’ House. The noble Lord, Lord Wills, said that the danger is that a “bad situation” could become “significantly worse”. I directly quote what he said and he was spot-on. Of course, it also means that the urgency—or lack of it—in the last Parliament with the last Administration is frankly inappropriate. There is a greater urgency to move on and try to ensure that any new system is better than the existing system in all the respects that have been referred to across all sides of your Lordships’ House.
I want to pick up on one or two points that my noble friend Lord Rennard was not able to address because of the time constraints. It is very important for the citizen to have confidence in the register and the consistency of the register throughout the country. If there is wild inconsistency from one area to another, think what effect that has on confidence in the jury system. It is a very serious issue if in inner cities it is thought that the pool available for jury service is very limited for various reasons—social, economic, age group and so on—and you get juries that frankly are not representative of the wider community. The role of the electoral register as the pool for jury service is extremely important. We cannot have a postcode lottery on something as important as that in different parts of the country and different social and economic circumstances. The register must have consistency.
That has very important implications for the powers, responsibilities and moderating role of the Electoral Commission. It has a role to ensure that there is a consistency of approach nationally, not just in general terms but in every different area. It may be that that means more resources have to be put into particular areas where there is more churning between general elections.
There is a particular issue about the use of the national insurance number. This is something that my noble friend Lord Rennard has referred to previously. The Electoral Commission estimates that 18 per cent of eligible voters will be less likely to register if required to give their national insurance number. Imagine circumstances in which this issue comes to the fore at the same time as, for example, a proposal to recall MPs. Imagine the circumstances in which triggering the recall of an MP—one of the considerations that all three parties have been looking at—has to depend on signatures. If there were no authenticated signatures on which to base that, you can see the considerable challenge that there could be to the whole process.
In all parts of the House—I have heard this from several noble Lords—there is a view on the absolutely critical importance of reinstituting the 2014 full canvass. The churning in some areas in a matter of months since the 2010 election makes it absolutely essential that there is a full canvass in 2014—again, the Electoral Commission made this clear. Of course there are resource implications, but let us recall that there is a statutory responsibility on the electoral registration officers and processers to make sure that their register is as accurate as possible. There will be cost implications there. If we do not have that canvass, those officers and authorities will have to use extra resources to try to make their register more accurate.
I will briefly address some of the positives about the principle of individual registration and about the progress that we can make by being more innovative about getting people on to the register. For example, the Electoral Commission should be specially told that it must find better ways of ensuring that the Armed Forces are given every possibility of being registered in good order and good time—a point made by the noble Viscount, Lord Astor. Frankly, that cannot be that difficult. The Electoral Commission should be asked to look at that urgently with the Ministry of Defence. I understand that the ministry has not been very enthusiastic about looking at that, for whatever reason.
We must ensure that, if handled properly, individual registration is an opportunity to revolutionise, modernise and improve registration, not just to mitigate some possible problems, to which others have referred. For example, instead of relying on parents to register 16 and 17 year-old children, we should facilitate registration at school, with each pupil signing their form as part of a citizenship lesson. There have been good examples of this—there is a good record of success in Northern Ireland. We should follow that up.
We need to ensure that the Electoral Commission can take a proper lead in ensuring best practice at registration with better designed forms. It is ridiculous that my noble friend Lord Rennard has to look at all these different forms from different parts of the country. Why can we not have a standard form? It should of course include the standard wording about the obligation and the penalty for failing to register. We are already seeing some attempts at pilots on data matching.
We should also ensure that the distribution of poll cards should be earlier in the process as that often prompts people to recognise that there is someone in the house who does not have one and so should be registered. We perhaps need to look at the late date for registration. Again I understand that Canada has been very successful with that in getting people involved when they start to see the battle hotting up in that constituency or in the general election generally.
As has already been referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Borrie, businesses selling to customers, credit reference agencies and countering fraud could all be improved by this exercise if we get it right. There should not be a real downside in terms of social mobility, if exclusion from the register leads to exclusion from credit. For some of these reasons, I feel that the edited register should continue, although that is for another day.
I hope that my noble friend the Minister, when he responds to this extremely timely debate, will be able to give your Lordships clear reassurances that the Government are prepared to look very actively at the two most fundamental issues raised by so many noble Lords—the need for an individual legal obligation to register to remain with proper penalties and the need for a full canvass in 2014—and, if necessary, consult with other parties to make sure that the consensus continues. I hope that he will take forward with his colleagues the many excellent points made on many sides of the House today. This has been a timely debate but there is a remarkable consensus, too, about the obligation on the Government to make cross-party consensus a reality.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
My Lords, I would like to congratulate my noble friend Lord Wills on securing this debate on government policy on electoral registration. It is a very timely debate, as other noble Lords have said. I am well aware of my noble friend’s passion on the subject, and his desire to see individual registration properly introduced and for that to improve both the completeness and accuracy of the electoral register. I had the pleasure of working with my noble friend when he was the Minister responsible and it is to his credit that much was done in legislating for the introduction of individual electoral registration. We sometimes seem to forget in this House that individual electoral registration is already on the statute book, introduced by the last Labour Government.
I should advise your Lordships’ House that I am a member of the Electoral Commission. I was appointed as one of the first political commissioners. Like other noble Lords, I want to ensure that we have the most accurate and complete registers possible. We should all work with the Government, the Electoral Commission, local authorities and the professionals on the ground—the electoral registration officers—to ensure that we have the best and most robust system in place. The suggestion from my noble friend Lord Wills that there should be open, all-party talks on this matter, with a view to achieving a bipartisan consensus on the way forward is one that the Government really should take up and run with. Many noble Lords from all parties could play a decisive role if that offer was taken up.
It is also important that the Government are open to ideas and suggestions on what is best practice and that we get the widest possible consensus on where we are going on this subject, so crucial to the health of our democracy. I want to see real consultation with the Local Government Association, SOLACE and the Association of Electoral Administrators—the EROs’ professional body.
Like other noble Lords, I want to refer to the research that the Electoral Commission published before Christmas. This research was funded by the Government and provided a very welcome wake-up call for us all. I hope that it will be used in a positive way to shape the Bill that will come before Parliament in the next Session and will seek to speed up the process and make a number of other changes. All noble Lords in your Lordships’ House should work to ensure that nothing in the proposals from the Government, when they come before the House, weakens measures to improve the accuracy and completeness of the register. If we allow that to happen, we will have failed the citizens of the United Kingdom.
The research tells us that parliamentary registers are 82.3 per cent complete and local government registers are 82 per cent complete. This equates to 8.5 million people unregistered as of April 2011. I fully accept that not all those people are necessarily entitled to vote, but the research goes on to estimate that at least 6 million people who are eligible are not registered to vote. That is a really shocking figure.
I recall, not least when the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill was before this House, Members on this side of the House suggesting that there could be more than 3 million people missing from the register. That sometimes received a sceptical response from the government Benches opposite. I wonder how different the proposals from the Boundaries Commissions of the United Kingdom would be if all those people actually registered to vote. Is it really surprising that accuracy and completeness levels are lower where residents have moved since the previous canvass; or that the lowest level of completeness is recorded among 16 to 18 year-olds and 19 to 25 year-olds; or that in black and minority ethnic communities, completeness is 9 per cent lower than in white communities? I want to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, a real expression of willingness to work with everybody and anyone to improve the situation.
It is important also to incentivise people to return registration forms, as many noble Lords have mentioned, and to ensure that they understand that it is a civic duty to participate in our democracy. I recently thought that one possibility could be a scheme where every property that had an individual or individuals registered would qualify for a £50 discount in its council tax. I think it should be looked at. Of course other issues need to be addressed as well, but in the short time available cannot be covered in great depth.
We hear many debates and all noble Lords know that life is very tough for people at the moment. If we have more people falling off the register, life just gets tougher for them. Being on the register is one of the most important factors in respect of your credit rating. If you are not on, you are either not going to get credit or you will be forced to the more expensive end of the market. Noble Lords will be aware that I have raised the issue of financial inclusion many times. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, will give a commitment to the House today to speak to his colleagues in the business department about this possibly troubling, unforeseen consequence if this is not managed correctly.
In conclusion, I again thank my noble friend Lord Wills for calling this debate. It has been very worthwhile and I look forward to the contributions from my noble friend Lord Bach and the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, from the Government.
Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, in speaking in the gap I would like to express the hope that Ministers and civil servants will very closely read the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, today in this Chamber. He set out a powerful argument which is supported universally—certainly within the Liberal party and the Labour Party—as to what the problem is with the proposed system. I do not intend to rehearse the arguments that I have used over many hours in Committee and on the Floor over two Bills, in which I expressed my total and unalterable opposition to this whole exercise, which I believe is going to be a disaster for the British electoral system.
Many of the arguments that have been deployed in the debate today were predicted—in fact, not just many of them but all of them. They were all predicted during the course of those previous Bills. Everything that has been said in terms of alerting the House to the dangers inherent in the proposed system were all commented upon in great detail over the course of a number of amendments. However, that is the past, and while I remain totally hostile, we have to move forward and find a way to try to make what I believe to be a stupid system work.
I want to make a proposal which the Government might wish to consider. Over the coming few years, as more and more evidence surfaces as to the inability of this system to secure what was its original intention, why do the Government not introduce a grant to local authorities—and we will come to the funding of that grant in a moment—whereby local authorities are paid per elector who is registered? In other words, for every elector who is registered, they will receive a sum of money—it might be £10 per elector; I do not know, but that is the figure that comes to mind. I have discussed this with some people in offices of local authorities, and they are concerned about how it would be funded—because it would probably be funded in part by a reduction in revenue support grant elsewhere. However, it is the only way I can see whereby we can build into the system an incentive to encourage local authorities to carry out this requirement.
Furthermore, local authorities could then advertise in local newspapers explaining that individual registration meant more money for local authorities, and that it was the duty of each citizen to register so as to enable that authority to secure that sum of money. It would help the elector identify more directly with local authority expenditure. I hope Ministers will consider that proposal.
Lord Reid of Cardowan
My Lords, I would like to make two brief comments in the gap: one about the short term and one about the medium to longer term. In the short term, the Government have found themselves in a problem largely because they are trying to row in two directions at the same time. I agree with the short-term measures to patch up the electoral registration system and the voting system that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, mentioned earlier on. They are sensible if we are going to stick with the present system. However, to do it in the context of the introduction of legislation which is going to have a counterbalancing and opposite effect seems to be completely non-productive. We have a plus and a minus, and I cannot see how, in the context of the present legislation, even the introduction of the advantageous advances mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, would compensate for that.
It is really about the medium and longer term that I want to speak. When I read and listen to these debates, the elephant in the room has been ridden by every other component in our society, such as retail trade, financing trade and social networks. It is electronic communication. It seems to me absolutely inconceivable that we can be planning for a future without three elements using modern information technology: first, individual registration; secondly, ease of access to voting; and, thirdly and very importantly because the first and second require the volunteering of information, the protection of information should it be lost or stolen or otherwise accessed by others.
I know the controversy that surrounded this, but it was precisely that third element that lay behind voluntary ID cards. That is because online registration is now prevalent for bank accounts and necessary to receive benefits. The amount of information that one supplies to the Government which is sitting there in huge data banks will be added to by any form of electoral registration, particularly if national insurance numbers are added. That electronic information, just like paper information, is going to be lost or stolen. When and if it is lost or stolen, it is not an argument against biometrically protected ID cards. It is an argument for having biometric identification, because in those circumstances, no one can access that information. No one can go into your bank account unless they happen to have your five fingers and your iris. It is precisely about the protection of the individual.
Therefore, I would suggest that at least some serious consideration is given to online registration and the introduction in the medium to longer term of some form of identification that protects the individual’s identity through their iris and fingerprints. I do not entirely agree with my good and noble friend Lord Maxton; I have never been in favour of compulsory ID cards. However, I am in favour of compulsory registration. I believe that the future is having an ID card in your pocket. I have one and it was massively convenient in allowing me to walk into France and Germany without a passport, giving inviolable proof of my identity to anyone, unlike every smart card in my pocket.
Lord Bach
My Lords, I start from the Front Bench with a cry from the heart. Unlike the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, I have been lucky enough to be able to vote in general elections, but that right has been taken away from me and I have a severe grievance about it, as do many noble Lords around the House. It would be good to think that the Government might consider that issue when they come to their Bill in the next Session of Parliament.
My noble friend Lord Wills deserves huge praise for and congratulations on securing this debate in the first place and praise because he has expertise in this field that is matched by very few. As a fellow Minister of his—now a little time ago—I was always impressed by his clear-sightedness and forward thinking. We saw that again today. I have also been extremely impressed by the experience and expertise of all the other speakers in the debate. The House has a huge amount of expertise in this field and I very much hope that the Government will listen. I know that the Minister will listen and pass on what has been said but I hope that the Government as a whole will listen to the points made largely consensually, as the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, said, in today’s debate.
I had the privilege of taking the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009 through this House. It had been made clear in the other place by my noble friend that the then Government intended to add clauses to the Bill to introduce individual registration. The manner in which this was to be done was carefully thought through. While the accuracy of the register would be improved by the introduction of individual registration, this had to be balanced by the equally obvious proven risk that the completeness of the register might well be harmed by introducing individual registration too soon. How to marry these contradictions was the issue for government. That is what we attempted to do with a gradual introduction—a voluntary start, followed by compulsion, with final decisions to be taken, as I remember, in 2014. It seemed then—as it does to me now, I must confess—an excellent solution. My noble friend is right when he reminds the House that the then opposition parties in another place, when this matter went back there, agreed too. I have quotations here from what they said in that important debate but I will not waste the House’s time with them now.
I am not sure why there is the change in timescale, why there is no voluntary part of this process or why that was agreed by the two coalition parties when agreeing their programme for government some 19 months ago. I wonder whether it was slightly the result of a somewhat desperate effort to find as many items as possible on which those parties agreed rather than any great matter of principle.
The Statement made by the Minister, Mr Harper, on 15 September 2010 really started this new phase of the debate. In that Statement, he argued for the opting out from registration itself. That is when the issue first raised its head. I have to say that I agree entirely with what the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, and other noble Lords said about it. The noble Lord, Lord Lexden, also referred to it. We are absolutely opposed to any such step for a number of reasons. One is the erosion of civic duty. At a time when there is concern about the decline in public participation in the formal political process, it would seem an absurdly retrograde step to remove one of the few legal obligations in this area.
As has been said, registration covers much wider areas than just elections, important though they are. There are the issues of juries and credit agencies, which arise under this argument. Of course the act of voting can reasonably be regarded as a personal choice, not least because of the secret ballot. However, we believe that registration is and should remain a civic duty and we were pleased when the Deputy Prime Minister said some months ago that he is minded to change the position on that when the Bill is published. However, I hope the Minister will forgive me if I press him to find out what the latest position is on that. Can he tell us whether the Government have made up their mind about what they intend to put in its place? We hope that they will just remove that part of their thinking completely.
My next question is about the 2014 canvass. Strong arguments have been made around the House that there should be such a canvass under the system that the Government are proposing. I do not need to repeat them now. I should be grateful if the Minister could, in summing up, tell us what the Government’s position now is on the need for a full canvass in 2014.
I move on to my next item, about which I should like some information from the Government. As has been raised in the debate, it is a matter of concern that, while the draft legislation contains a safeguard to ensure that the next general election, in 2015, is not undermined by a significant decline in registered electors, there is no such safeguard for the boundary review that is due to take place later that year. If people registered under the old household system are to be carried forward for the general election, it is surely sensible to ensure that they are also carried forward for the boundary review a few months later, or that the May 2015 register is used for the purpose of the boundary review. I wonder whether the noble Lord can say anything about the Government’s thinking on that.
We believe that funding for local authorities should be ring-fenced for electoral services. Do the Government also believe that there should be ring-fenced funding for that crucial matter? Once that funding starts to disappear, all the problems that have been raised today will just get worse. I also ask the Minister about data-matching pilots. We know that they have been tried and we welcome that. We wonder how well they have gone and whether the Minister can tell us something about that, too.
We have praised the Government for the pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill. That is something that we encouraged, and we encourage the Government to do it on all occasions. Alas, they have not done it for all constitutional Bills but they are doing it for this one, so let me be generous about it.
The point about broad consensus is of crucial importance. If I may say so, I was very impressed by the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, on this point. If the Government of the day, whatever their political colour may be, do not look for consensus in this sort of field, anarchy potentially reigns. In other words, it can get completely out of hand: points are taken that are simply partisan and we do not look for the better solution for the country. I am delighted that around the House there is the feeling that what is needed here is consensus if it can possibly be achieved.
I am about to sit down. We have a real and pressing problem in this country. Six million to 7 million of our fellow citizens who are all eligible to vote in elections are not at the present time on our register. This is a grievous problem. Indeed, it has been worked out that that is the equivalent of the electorate of 79 of the new constituencies set up under the controversial Act last year. It is a scandal. I hope and presume that the Government will respond in all that they do to that scandal and will try to remove that huge number of people from being unregistered in our system. We need as many citizens as possible to vote and they cannot vote unless they are registered.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wills, very much for giving us the opportunity to have this debate, which, as one or two noble Lords have remarked, was intended to take place in the other place some months ago. It is very good that we are now focusing on this important matter.
We are one of the very few countries left in the world that has a household basis for registration. I think it dates from the Reform Act 1867 and is possibly a little outdated by now. The case for moving from household to individual registration was in every party manifesto and is generally accepted. The question is how we do so while ensuring that we end up with as complete, accurate and trusted a register as possible. I wish to stress those three aspects as being very important. The register has to have integrity—it has to be trusted by everyone and must not be subject to too much fraud; it has to be as accurate as possible; and it has to be as complete as possible. Those three things are difficult to achieve together and the question of balance is always a very different one.
The system of registration also has to have the support and confidence—that is part of the question of integrity—of all those concerned. We now have the Electoral Commission as a non-partisan, trusted umpire for us all to listen to. The research paper that it has just produced has been a very valuable contribution to the debate. One of the things that it shows us is that we are not half as good in the current system as we thought we were. The current system does not itself provide full registration. It was not at 90 per cent, as the study in 2000 suggested. Last year’s study suggested that we are now down to between 82 and 85 per cent. We are right to ensure that when we move to the individual system we are at least as good as that.
Let us recognise that we are not necessarily losing vast numbers of people as we move from one system to another: we have already suffered to some extent from a range of social and other trends. We all need to recognise that one reason why electoral registration has fallen is that popular commitment to the electoral process has also fallen. Popular alienation or disengagement from politics is part of the problem, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, said. All parties share a duty to respond to that disillusion rather than to concentrate on Westminster games.
I can assure everyone that the Government will listen to and read this debate. I will take back and discuss with others the question of a working party. I will certainly also include in that the suggestion of the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, that, if we are to have a working party, it must include not just the beneficiaries of the current system—the two parties to which the noble Lord, Lord Wills, referred so frequently in his references to bipartisan agreement—but the wider group of those who do not support either of the two main parties. I remind noble Lords that in the last two elections the number of people voting for the two major parties slipped well below three-quarters and down towards two-thirds of those voting. In his rather uncharacteristically sour speech, the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, was obviously hoping that we would go back to a two-party system. I think that that is one of the things least likely to happen in the future.
We all have partisan interests in this. We recognise that the Labour Party is deeply concerned about the boundary review. I heard—again, from the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey—the argument that Labour represents the unrepresented and the unregistered. It is an interesting but untestable conclusion. The Conservatives are a little partisan in the assertion that the voting rights of overseas citizens are very important. This is another very large issue, and I simply remind the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, that the American system is that citizens abroad should all vote but should all also pay full tax on their global income—no representation without taxation. We will perhaps need to consider that issue in parallel with any extension of the rights of overseas voters. The Liberal Democrats, as noble Lords will know, are very concerned about the fairness of the current voting system—something about which the Labour Party has very mixed views.
We have to be concerned, above all, with the question of how we re-establish the trust of our voters and our citizens in the system that we have. The register is much less complete than it was, and we therefore need now to look at how we might improve it. There are some philosophical issues underlying this, such as questions of citizens’ responsibilities as well as their rights, how far the act of registration and the act of voting ought to be considered something which every citizen should do, the relationship between the individual citizen and the state, and the concept of civic duty. We all share a broad interest in addressing the extent to which our citizens now talk about rights but not sufficiently about responsibilities and seem to think that they may have contact with the state without having obligations, in return, to the state. One of the issues that we have been talking about in looking at data-matching with regard to the DWP database and others is how you might provide incentives. As people meet with their benefit office or apply for a driving licence, or whatever, you remind them that now is also the time to consider the other part—what you contribute to your public, national community as well as what you get out of your state.
We are looking carefully at the issue of compulsion. As noble Lords will be aware, at the moment it is not an offence not to be registered; it is an offence not to return the household registration form. To extend the compulsion to the act of registration itself would be extending the degree of compulsion. I hear very clearly what the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, said and I note that this is widely supported around the House. That is something that the Government will consider further.
To my great surprise, the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, said that this proposal had received very little scrutiny. It has received full pre-legislative scrutiny. The Government will provide a response to that very shortly, which will take us a degree forward. The Deputy Prime Minister has already responded to a number of concerns. This is an area where the Government are still listening. We all know that we have to have a dialogue about a new system which will command the support and trust of all those concerned.
The question of how far registration should be compulsory takes us on to the issue of nudge and whether we can push people without frightening them at the same time. Uncharacteristically for a deep liberal, the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, wants to frighten people with large notices on the top of their forms. That may perhaps be necessary, as with cigarette smoking and other examples but, again, it is an area at which we need to look a little more. We do not see that moving to individual registration will necessarily lead to a net reduction in those on the register.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
Although we support individual registration, many of us are concerned about the young—the 18 year-old who is not in school. I very much support the idea of doing some work in schools, as the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, suggested, but what do you do about the poorest who are not in school and who therefore may not be registered? The provision on households helped, whereby it was the single-parent mother—or whoever’s name was on the lease—who put all the names on the registration form. How do we deal with that issue?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
The Government and the Electoral Commission are both looking at this. Regarding the question of where canvasses are concentrated and how far one looks at suggestions such as the need to supply postal addresses on envelopes, council tax bills and utility bills, other Governments have experimented with, for example, the need to provide utility bills. This is part of the issue of asking what relevant data one might be able to use to help to pick up, as the noble Baroness said, particularly those who are young and unmarried, who move much more often or who live in private rented accommodation—those who, as we all know, are in the vulnerable sector.
One thing that we have done is to publish draft legislative provisions to extend from 17 to 25 working days the timetable for registering to vote in parliamentary general elections. This will take effect in time for the intended 2015 general election. Part of the reason for that is that we have discovered a surge in late registrations once an election has been announced. As the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, remarked, once polling cards are sent out, people living in multi-occupancy accommodation sometimes think, “Oh dear, I didn’t get a polling card. I am not on the register, and I must register”. On the other hand, that of course opens opportunities for fraud, particularly regarding late applications for postal votes. Therefore, there has to be sufficient time for some checking of late applications in those terms. That is the game we are attempting to negotiate, so to speak.
The noble Lord, Lord Maxton, says that voting is rather old-fashioned in the electronic age and that we should be using much more modern technology. The Government propose to move towards electronic registration, but we are approaching somewhat more cautiously the issue of moving towards electronic voting. Once I had been briefed on cybercrime, cyberwarfare and the ease with which one can hack, I was a little less enthusiastic than I had been previously about moving immediately to electronic voting.
As to the problems of citizenship engagement, I have some sympathy with the preference of the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, for the democratic moment in which the majority of people—
Lord Reid of Cardowan
Going back to the cyber question, it is a big problem. Is the Minister aware that the best protection against misuse or fraud on cyber issues is biometric protection? With identification by your own iris or fingerprints, no one else can pretend to be you.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I take that point on board and we will feed it back into our considerations, as and when the issue of electronic voting comes up.
I was commenting on whether the physical act of voting in a particular place, within a particular community, or—for those who are deeply committed to single-Member constituencies—within a particular constituency, ought not to be part of the way in which the citizen relates to his community and thereby to his state. We should not entirely rule out the importance of that.
A number of noble Lords asked about pilots. The Government, in their response, will discuss some of what has been learnt through the attempts at data-matching—comparing different databases, not integrating them. A certain amount has been learnt and this is part of the way forward for picking up those who would otherwise have been missed. Again, we have been looking at international comparisons of electoral systems and the Electoral Commission has produced a useful paper on them.
Other uses of the register were raised by the noble Lord, Lord Borrie, and others, ranging from the letter I received from a number of charities, which talked about the importance of access to the register in order to send out fundraising letters, to commercial use and credit checks, as well as jury service, which is also part of the citizen’s obligation to the state.
The noble Viscount, Lord Astor, asked about members of the armed services. The new employment model for the armed services will enable many more armed services members to have a longer-term home base. We already know that a number of service members are registered from their home base, and the number of those who are voting from abroad by postal votes may therefore indicate that the system is underestimating those who are able to vote. A number of us have family members serving abroad. My wife currently has a proxy vote for our son, who is on postdoctoral study in the United States. That issue also extends to the armed services. The new employment model will therefore help considerably with the levels of service registration.
The question of fraud has been raised. That is part of the issue of integrity. There is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, remarked, some not insignificant fraud in particular constituencies, and I am well aware that it takes place. Therefore, we have to maintain an effective system of checks, and that is part of the reason why we have to close down late registration and late applications for postal votes some days ahead of each election in order to provide sufficient time for adequate checks.
The noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville, raised the question of—
Lord Wills
Before the Minister leaves the question of fraud, does he accept the repeated judgments and findings of independent bodies such as the Association of Chief Police Officers, the Electoral Commission and the Rowntree Reform Trust about the very limited extent of systemic fraud in our elections?
Lord Wills
Perhaps I may press the noble Lord on this point, because it is fundamental to this debate. Does he accept the findings of those independent bodies? Just a yes-or-no answer will do.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I am not familiar with those particular reports. We wish as far as possible to prevent fraud in the system. That is an important part of any approach to the electoral system. We have to have the maximum degree of trust in its integrity.
On the question of the full household canvass in 2014 and ensuring that for 2015 we have as complete a register as possible, the Electoral Commission has suggested carrying out a canvass in early 2014, rather than in late 2013. These subjects are still under full discussion, but the Government are of course well aware of the importance of having as complete a register as possible, both through the transitional period between 2013 and 2015 and after the election, as a basis for the new boundaries.
Lastly, the noble Lord, Lord Bach, asked when Peers would be allowed to vote in general elections. I rush to assure him that that is of course an issue that will be caught up with the House of Lords Reform Bill, which I know he is much looking forward to—as are so many other Members of the House.
Lord Campbell-Savours
Can I press the Minister on whether he will consider within the department the question of a grant to local authorities per elector registered?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I had my ear bent at considerable length by an electoral registration officer in Wandsworth two days ago, when I phoned him up about something else, on precisely how Wandsworth does this. We will look at ring-fencing. However, I believe in localism and I am against ring-fencing in principle. But the question of how much it will cost—
Lord Campbell-Savours
Forgive me—it is not ring-fencing but a grant directly from the Government to local authorities per elector registered. It is an incentive.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
Both the Government and the Electoral Commission are looking at how we manage to ensure that an adequate canvass is maintained throughout the transition period and after. There are regular consultations between electoral registration officers, the Electoral Commission and the Government, and they will of course continue.
This has been a useful debate and I just wish to end where I began. The Government are still in listening mode. We are all committed to a transition from a household system of registration to a system of individual registration, and we all have a strong interest in ensuring that the new system which emerges is accurate, complete and widely trusted. That is our aim; we shall continue to consult and will then take the Bill through both Houses while continuing to listen as the Bill goes through both Houses. I trust that when the new system emerges we will find that we have achieved those aims as far as is possible in a highly mobile society. We live in a country where a substantial proportion of those who have contact with the state are not necessarily British nationals, and some of those who have contact with the state and fill in forms are functionally illiterate or do not fully understand English. Nevertheless we aim to overcome those problems as far as we can and achieve, we hope, as complete and accurate a register as we can, both for the next election and as a basis for the next boundary review.
Lord Wills
We have had a very wide-ranging and useful debate. I am grateful to all those noble Lords who have contributed their experience and wisdom, and in the case of the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, some valuable historical insights as well.
There is a consensus across the House that this is an important issue, and I think there is also agreement on the diagnosis of the problem. My noble friend Lady Kennedy placed this in the wider context of the state of our democracy. There is widespread agreement, which I am glad to see the Minister has noted, about the importance of the 2014 canvass. We heard some very powerful speeches in favour of the legal requirements and graphic illustrations from the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, as well as powerful speeches from my noble friends Lord Borrie, Lord Beecham and Lord Bach. There has been a widespread feeling that it is very important that this subject is approached on a bipartisan basis. We heard that from the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, from the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge—
Lord Wills
The noble Lord is quite right to correct me on that. When I say bipartisan, I actually mean a cross-party, all-party basis. We heard a very important speech from my noble friend Lord Lipsey illustrating the dangers of the Government’s approach. I very much hope that the Government and all Members of this House will study his speech in Hansard because he illustrated with great precision the dangers of the approach that the Government are taking on this. My noble friends Lord Kennedy and Lord Bach also placed great emphasis on this.
The noble Lord, Lord Lexden, quite rightly raised the question of overseas voters, and although there are issues about expatriates and those who do or do not pay tax, there is a very real issue about those who are on international service working for international organisations or studying abroad but particularly those who are working for organisations such as the United Nations. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, who is not in this place today, raised this with me when I was a Minister. We were looking into how we could address this problem. I am not sure where the Government have got to on this, but maybe the Minister will take that away and look at it.
The noble Viscount, Lord Astor, very importantly raised the question of service voting. There were plans to deal with this issue under the previous Government but they seem to have been put on the shelf by this one. I hope the Minister will take them off and get on with it. It is a very important issue, as I think all sides of this House recognise.
I am grateful to all those who came forward with positive solutions—the important issue of ring-fencing mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, and the useful and helpful contribution from the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, on trying to get electoral registration tied into the way that citizens interact with the state. These were both measures that I tried to introduce as a Minister and I regret to say that I failed. I failed to get ring-fencing and to secure the sort of measures that the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, was advocating. I hope that this Government will be much more successful than I am in taking these measures forward. They are very important. We heard some far-sighted contributions from my noble friends Lord Maxton and Lord Reid about the importance of electronics and information and communication technology. This has to be part of the future.
Finally I am grateful to the Minister for his constructive and reasoned response. I am slightly surprised about how insouciant he appears to be about the risks of the register being damaged significantly by the approach the Government are taking. There is no evidence to support such insouciance, but I welcome his undertaking to explore further this question of a cross-party group. I particularly welcome the suggestion from the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for a more independent component as well as the cross-party complexion of it. I hope he will set this up quickly so we can deal with all these issues.
I am not sure how I am meant to conclude this new form of debate, but I have said all I should so I am now going to sit down.
Motion agreed.
Green Agenda
(12 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Baroness Smith of Basildon
That this House takes note of the Government’s green agenda.
Baroness Smith of Basildon
My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity for today’s debate on the Government’s green agenda. It seemed to me that 20 months into this Government it would be helpful to have a look at the Government’s green agenda and green policies and how they measure up to the Government’s own commitment to be, as David Cameron announced on 14 May, “the greenest Government ever”.
The Minister will recall my reaction when he announced in an earlier debate:
“My Lords, whether you like it or not, we intend to be the greenest Government ever”.—[Official Report, 2/11/10; col. 1576.]
I assured him then that we did like it and would support that approach but we would hold the Government to account should they fall short of achieving their objectives. It is a laudable objective and a benchmark against which the Government can be judged on the progress they are making towards their target, although I think it is disappointing that having made that pledge, which was received with great enthusiasm and hope, the Government did not set up any mechanism to allow for any scrutiny of that pledge.
It is even more disappointing then that the Government abolished the Sustainable Development Commission. I understand, perhaps more acutely than most, that it is not always comfortable for Governments to be held to account for their promises, yet perhaps it is more important for this Government as the coalition programme for government was never endorsed by the public. When Ministers make statements such as “the greenest Government ever”, it is important that progress against that pledge can be measured.
Many have taken the opportunity to do so. Noble Lords may have seen that the Guardian has a green-o-meter which seeks to track how the coalition is faring on a range of issues, such as climate change, wildlife and conservation, energy efficiency and renewable power. As of October it had judged 10 policies as being green, 13 as not being green with the jury still out on four. It reserved its strongest criticism for the Chancellor’s Budgets and Autumn Statement, describing Budget day in March 2011 as a “green catastrophe”.
Wildlife and Countryside Link is an umbrella body of 35 wildlife and countryside organisations, representing more than 8 million people and managing more than 690,000 hectares of land. In its document Nature Check: An Analysis of the Government’s Natural Environment Commitments it reports a mixed bag of results on the 16 major commitments on the natural environment. It praises the Government on two of their commitments on the international environmental stage but classifies seven as amber (delay and underdelivery) and seven as red (not delivered or delivered poorly).
Probably the most extensive of all the reports looking across Government is that from Friends of the Earth entitled “The Greenest Government Ever: One Year On”. In its fairly forensic examination it concludes:
“At this stage, the likelihood of the Coalition Government living up to its ‘Greenest Government Ever’ pledge is vanishingly remote … It is … unavoidably depressing to see just how rapidly things have gone backwards since May 2010”.
The RSPB says:
“If we’re honest, Cameron’s greenest Government ever feels like it is being unstitched day by day”.
Then, following the Government’s backward move to review the targets for halving emissions by 2025, the Environmental Audit Committee said:
“It makes business think that David Cameron is not really serious about being the greenest Government ever”.
Perhaps most worrying for the Government is the response from the CBI, which has accused the Government of failing to provide the leadership that business needs for green growth. Those changing decisions on feed-in tariffs, the green investment bank and zero carbon homes make business and investors cynical and somewhat nervous about the Government’s intentions and commitments.
Despite those criticisms, my sense is that these organisations—their members, investors and the public—really want the Government to succeed in being the greenest Government ever and they want green growth. If we go back to “like it or not”, as the noble Lord said previously, we would like to note that, despite some rare successes with which the Government do themselves credit, the record and the omens so far are not too good. However, I hope that the Minister and the Government would be sensitive to such informed criticism—the Minister seems to find it quite amusing—and would want to respond positively to the concerns that are raised. As I say, those organisations want the Government to succeed. I will address just a few of those causes of concern, and my colleagues will raise others. I hope that the Government can find some way of addressing these to bring them back on track on their pledge.
The Green Deal is the Government’s flagship policy for energy efficiency, thereby reducing carbon and providing warmer homes. I certainly support this objective, and the Minister has publically acknowledged how constructive we have been. Cold homes are a serious environmental, social and economic problem, and the Government have recognised that. A Save the Children study found that over half of parents on the lowest incomes worry that their children’s health will suffer because their home is too cold. They are right to worry. It is estimated that cold homes cost the NHS £145 million every year. The real concern, however, is the detail of the secondary legislation that will make the difference between success and failure. The Minister has been very helpful and we had a short briefing on this yesterday, but I understand that the Government have now delayed the implementation because of the amount of detail that still has to be worked out. Even the Committee on Climate Change has felt the need to send an open letter to the Secretary of State to express its concerns about some of the details of the Green Deal and the energy company obligation. It is right to delay if it is a matter of getting things right to ensure that the Green Deal will work, but can the Minister tell me when he thinks that the first home will have energy measures installed through the Green Deal? How long is that now going to take? Despite our doubts about the details, we welcome it and want it to succeed.
A huge concern is the initial exclusion of the private rented sector, which has many of the least energy efficient and coldest homes. I welcome the statement in May from the Secretary of State, Chris Huhne, in which he said:
“From 2018, the rental of the very worst performing properties—those rated F and G—will be banned through a minimum energy efficiency standard”.—[Official Report, Commons, 10/5/2011; col. 1064].
That would be great, but they will not. They will be banned only if they have not had any energy efficiency measures implemented through the Green Deal. If they have had those measures installed but are still, in Chris Huhne’s words, one of the “very worst performing properties” they can still be rented out. I do not understand the logic of that. Either a home is one of the very worst performing, producing excess carbon or being cold, which should not be rented out, or it is not. I urge the Government to address this as a matter of urgency. Clearly, the Secretary of State thinks that it is policy, so it should not be too difficult to change.
The announcement of the green investment bank was warmly welcomed by green groups, businesses and investors. The initial announcement of £1 billion was topped up with £3 billion in the March 2011 Budget, but not only does this fall short of the £4 billion to £6 billion estimated by Ernst & Young as needed to make it work, but the money is dependent on the sale of assets which creates uncertainty. As the bank is unable to borrow or raise money until 2015, there has to be an indication from the Government, in actions as well as words, that they remain committed to the project, and that funding will be available to make it effective. The Pew Environment Group reported that the UK has fallen from sixth to 13th in the ranking of countries encouraging green investment with a 70 per cent fall in such investment. That is a dreadful condemnation and a serious retreat from the green investment under Labour.
Let us be clear. We want the green investment bank to succeed, but there is a lot more to be done before that is the case. The Minister is nodding his head; if he could give us some reassurance on that, it would be really welcome. Investment and investor confidence are crucial and are critical to the success of the green investment bank. The Government have to show leadership and commitment to ensure the confidence of investors.
I will examine one area of government policy on renewables that has badly shaken that confidence and offer a way forward. The solar feed-in tariffs were brought in by the Labour Government with huge success. The Chancellor announced a cap on funding in the comprehensive spending review and, in February, announced a review of all solar PV plans over 50 kilowatts. They were then ended. He then swiftly announced further changes in funding. It was not quite as straightforward as that. It seemed to be regular announcements coming out of the department on the changes that were going to be made and consulted on.
I know that the Minister is aware that the industry is reeling from so many significant changes so quickly. The real shock was when the level of the FITs was halved. I hope that, in trying to explain or defend this, the Minister does not fall into the trap of caricaturing the opposition to changes in feed-in tariffs as those who do not want any change at all. I know that he knows that that is not true. He knows that investors, installers and customers understood that changes and cuts were needed. But it is the speed, scale and way in which the changes were made that is so hugely damaging to the industry and its capacity to grow and further reduce costs. We now see something like 20,000 jobs at risk.
I do not know whether the Minister is aware that when he capped the scheme at 50 kilowatts, that is exactly what the energy companies originally lobbied for. Friends of the Earth has taken the Government to court over this. The hearing on the Government’s appeal against the court’s decision is tomorrow. It would be more helpful if, rather than appealing, the Government looked at and discussed it with the industry to see what less drastic action could be taken to ensure that the industry could continue to grow to a point where any government subsidy, if it was needed, was minimal. There is no doubt that the Government’s credibility with investors has been severely damaged at a time when the Government’s own energy White Paper confirms that £200 billion of investment is needed in our energy system to make it fit for the 21st century. Ernst & Young has stated that the whole investor market has been ripped up by the feed-in tariff review and that revisiting FITs at such an early stage of their existence has undermined investor confidence not only in the UK solar industry but also potentially in the wider UK renewables market.
There is still a way forward on this. The court case is tomorrow, but I urge the Government, even at this late stage, to seek compromise. The Minister will find, if he talks to those who are taking the action, that they are realistic business people who want solar to succeed and understand the Government’s concerns over funding.
When the Government announced that their final remaining flagship carbon capture and storage project at Longannet had failed, the dismay felt was tempered by Chris Huhne’s announcement, confirmed to me by the Minister, that the £1 billion of government funding would remain and that they expected further promising bids. Chris Huhne said, “Absolutely. No backsliding”. But what now? In his Autumn Statement, the Chancellor raided the budget. Again, we come back to investor confidence, and whether investors are prepared to trust the Government on their track record. We all understand that the economic situation is difficult, but the constant merry-go-round of policy changes on CCS, FITs, the green investment bank and even on airport expansion is creating the very situation that the Government need to avoid: that of lack of direction and confidence. Investors need the Government to show leadership.
The real opportunity to show leadership and commitment to the greenest Government ever was in the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement. The message that has come out is that environmental protection has to be sacrificed for jobs and growth and that businesses should not be burdened with social and environmental goals. This completely undermines positive initiatives such as the green investment bank and the natural environment White Paper.
I genuinely want to give credit where credit is due. The Green Deal could be a success. I hope that it is. We will work with the Government to do our best to ensure that it is. The Government’s role at the 2010 Nagoya meeting was widely applauded. The 2020 biodiversity target deserves congratulations. The UK position on whaling and ivory continues to be firm. The Government’s own carbon reductions exceeded their target. The Government have continued our commitments on climate change. However, the issues I have mentioned—the downgrading of zero-carbon homes, the scrapping of the Marine Renewables Development Fund, cuts to the Carbon Trust and Energy Savings Trust, badger culling, the proposed forestry sell off, the U-turn on airport expansion at Gatwick and Stansted, bringing forward the previously ruled-out proposals to build an airport in the Thames estuary and the one-third budget cut for Defra in the first spending review—all cause alarm. We all know that these are difficult economic times, but there is a real prize to be won if the Government can stimulate significant investment in green growth to meet their carbon reduction targets and create jobs.
The big question for the Minister today, after the débâcle of FITs and the lack of commitment from HMT to carbon capture and storage, is how the Government will be able to reassure investors and encourage green investment. That is really the response that I am seeking from the Minister today. If he can give reassurance that the Government have such a commitment, want to ensure that they are the greenest Government ever and want to attract genuine and significant investment that can address some of the concerns that have been raised, that would be a welcome response. The Government are right to have the objective of being the greenest Government ever. There is just a little more to do to match action to those words.
Lord Dixon-Smith
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to me to stand up and play Essex boy to the noble Baroness’s Essex girl. Like me, she is an Essex native and I like to think that we are something special.
Lord Dixon-Smith
Flattery gets you everywhere. I wish to look at this issue of the Government’s green agenda from a slightly different perspective and take a different line across country. I remind the House that we are talking about a great international problem, and there is no future in our finding a solution to our problems if the result is that other countries simply replace what we are doing and carry on in the way that we are at present. This is a problem that in the end every country will face. Third World countries living relatively simply today will have to look at measures such as those that we are examining.
The other point that is worth noting at this stage is that the two biggest carbon dioxide emissions countries in the world, the United States and China, are also the two biggest countries investing in green technologies. Perhaps there is something in that; it is a real and remarkable point. The fact is that every major economy in the world is concerned about this issue.
I am going to begin with an interesting fact. I have obtained some information from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center at Oak Ridge in Tennessee, in the United States, where a group has plotted graphically the carbon emissions performance of almost all the countries in the world. In the instance of the United Kingdom, that goes back to about 1750. We can all make those comparisons, and it is worth looking at what has happened in the past.
For the purpose of today’s discussion, I wish to tell the House that we have pledged an 80 per cent reduction in our 1990 emissions. That implies that we are going to reduce our emissions to a point that we passed in 1850 when the population of this country was 22 million. That is the breadth and depth of the task that we have set ourselves, and it is a big one. We now have three times the population using five times the amount of energy, and modern society is energy-intensive and will continue to be so.
It is inevitable that our approach to begin with is based on what we can do immediately, because that must be the quick and easy way to start. We have the Climate Change Act and we have set targets. The Climate Change Committee actually reduced the targets —I am sorry; there is a question of whether it is a reduction or an increase—rather, it set a more severe target as soon as it was formed, giving us the 80 per cent figure that we have to go for. However, the question that tends to be asked is, “What do we have to stop in order to solve this problem?”. My concern with that question is that the public at large see that as a negative question, and they do not like negative questions. Somehow we have to turn it around to a positive one: “What do we have to do in order to ensure that we can keep everything going?”. That is a very different approach and one that would be much more acceptable to the general public who on the whole—I say as far as I am capable of experiencing the public’s views—are rather bored by the entire subject and think that it does not really apply to them. At least if we get the long-term implications right, we should begin to make some progress.
The present problem is exacerbated by an approach that appears to treat all carbon dioxide emissions equally. I am not going to say that carbon dioxide emissions are ever beneficial, but some are much more essential to society than others. When we look at the severity of that 2050 target, I suggest to the House that we are simply looking at having emissions by that date that are essential for society—everything else has to be emission-free.
I am going to be a bit daring and suggest some possibilities that are essential. We cannot do much about emissions from agriculture, currently about 8 per cent of total emissions. The food business is an international problem. The emissions largely come from livestock—it is not really an arable sector problem. Food is both essential and the biggest single emitter of the categories that I am going to enunciate.
The smelting industries are essential to society; we cannot do without our metals. Cement manufacture is essential to society; we cannot do without construction. And finally—I nearly used a phrase that I used once before and which got me into trouble—international transport, both aviation and shipping, are now essential to all communities across the world, and we cannot cut those back. We may need to think about treating the emissions from those sectors—other people may wish to add to that list—in a different way from how we treat the generality of emissions. Outside that field, everything has to become zero-emission.
That is a harsh analysis, but we need to be moving in that direction now. We need to start thinking about those distinctions so that we know where we are going, because they define the depth of the problem that we face in trying to make homes and all land-based business and transport zero-emission. We already have a basket of technologies that would make that possible. However, there is a problem: we do not know which of those technologies will in the end be successful in the international field. We are a country that lives by international trade and development going on across the globe. As I have already said, this is an international problem, so that factor is very important.
What particularly concerns me is that in the short term we can take decisions, partly as a result of this approach, that will actually make it more difficult for us to hit the long-term targets, partly because we shall be committing ourselves to technologies that are expensive and in fact will have to be written off because they do not prove to be internationally competitive. I regret to say that I see no solution to that risk—I wish that there were one—so it is one that we are going to have to take in our development. That means that we should not put too many eggs in one basket. It also means that we should not go too quickly at present. I do not care for the targets for 2020, 2025 or even 2030, unless and until we have totally considered the 2050 target and its implications for society at large. I am satisfied that that can be done. If you supply a house with nothing but emission-free energy, then by definition, Green Deal or no Green Deal, that house is zero-emission. The same applies to every business and, if we can do it, to transport; the technologies exist. We need to take a careful look at the long term, and use that to apply our policies today.
Lord Teverson
My Lords, I will not get into the Essex origins because we went through this in a previous debate and, as the noble Baroness has indicated, it is probably absolutely the wrong route to go down.
I will reflect very briefly on some of the history of climate change. It is now 15 years since the Kyoto Protocol was first signed, although it did not come into effect until 2005. Of course the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, was very involved in making sure that that was delivered, and it was a very important role for the United Kingdom at that time. We had climate change science at that time that meant that the international community really made choices and decided to move forward, not in a perfect way but it actually moved forward. It started by setting itself targets, it determined who should be in and who should be out, and so on. Of course, since that time the scientific evidence for climate change really happening has become stronger because of the actions of human beings on this planet. So that is the background to this debate.
During that time, certainly over the first decade, we had real motivation to make sure that not only the United Kingdom but the European Union and the global community started to bring in policies, targets and plans that would make a real difference to the future of our planet and to global warming. We had the boost of “An Inconvenient Truth”, the video from the other side of the pond; in our own actions we had the Climate Change Act 2008 that went through this House and the other place with broad all-party consensus. On the whole, everything was gung-ho until a couple of years ago.
Now we are in a very difficult place in many ways, because climate change is no longer fashionable, it is disputed by many people despite the facts, and we have tabloid papers particularly criticising electricity bills because of renewables—very understandable in terms of the problems of increased fuel poverty. I was very pleased that the report of the Committee on Climate Change, showing the vast increases in energy prices between 2004 and 2010, of an increase of around £450, only about £30 was due to renewable technologies. However, we have had various other assaults in terms of climate change and the green agenda, some of them very properly driven not least because of the current economic climate. What is clearly on the minds of most households and families, and therefore on the minds of most democratically elected Governments, is their economic and financial survival. They are not looking to the year 2050, as we did with the Climate Change Act.
However, that does not change what is important and what is not. We have to solve both of those crises —one medium and long term, the other immediate—in terms of getting through the democratic processes and ensuring the planet’s survival in the future. One of the main reasons I was very committed to the coalition after the last election when that possibility arose was the very strong green and environmental core to the coalition’s programme. Of course, at that time we knew that there would be economic difficulties. We did not think that everything was fantastic in terms of the economy, but we did not realise just how long those difficulties would go on.
I will come to some of my caveats later, but I want to congratulate the Government on the number of things that they have done already. Earlier this week we had the announcement of HS2. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who was in his seat earlier in this debate, brought that back on the agenda, and this Government have moved forward with it. There has been the Green Deal, as the noble Baroness mentioned. As we went through that legislation in Committee, we had reservations about a lot of things, and there still may be a lot of things that have to be tweaked to make sure that it works. However, certainly on briefings that we have had since then, I am very pleased that the Government are putting a lot more emphasis on the involvement of local authorities to make sure that streets and districts as a whole are converted so that that really happens. Of course, the thing about the Green Deal is that it is around energy saving. So often in the past the emphasis has been on new technologies, on ways of decarbonising power—all of which are important. However, energy saving, which is one of the cost-effective ways of producing a decarbonised and less energy-intensive economy, has often been left behind. I hope that that programme will last for decades.
We have had the announcement about the third runway at Heathrow. What we will do in the future about air travel is a more difficult issue, but the UK Government have backed Europe in terms of the EU ETS and airlines. Despite considerable resistance from China and the United States, we have gone ahead with that programme. The smart meters programme is continuing. The renewable heat initiative—again, brought in by the previous Government—although a direct cost on taxpayers in these difficult times, fiscally is still going ahead. The carbon budgets have been confirmed by this Government and go way off into the future. So even during these difficult fiscal times, we have a government programme that the coalition has stuck to. It is delivering those commitments despite great opposition from some Members of the Conservative and Liberal parties in terms of wind power and other such issues.
I would be interested to hear about particular policy decisions in certain areas. The Green Investment Bank, which has been mentioned, is clearly a very important part of the Government’s jigsaw in moving the green agenda forward. I think that needs to be in place and functioning fully in its ability to bring in funds well before the next election. I would again ask the Government to look at biodiesel, a very important UK industry, to make sure that that is not held back by some of the changes announced in the Budget. On the point that my noble friend Lord Dixon-Smith mentioned about carbon-intensive industries, the Government should start to look at carbon footprint accounting on carbon budgeting, as well as the production base, because that actually gets around that problem. One is not a substitute for the other; both of them should be taken into consideration.
I will mention two last measures. One is company reporting. In the Climate Change Act we had an amendment that brought in mandatory carbon reporting. The CBI is very keen that this starts and that it is defined properly. I would like to see that introduced. The last one is the whole area of research and development. It is something that we ought to be doing right across Europe, particularly when we have the new financial framework in Europe between 2014 and 2020. It is a combined European effort on research and development in climate change technologies.
I think that the Government have done well in resisting the pressure—sometimes even from the office of the Chancellor of the Exchequer—to pull back on their green agenda. I think we need to move ahead. We have not had a great result in Durban; we have had a much better one in Copenhagen. Now we need to get the rest of the world to follow us.
Lord Prescott
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on getting this debate on climate change, particularly as we did not get a Statement after the Durban negotiations. I understand the reasons and cast no blame, but it is important that we continue to debate this. Funnily enough, there may be more public consensus on this big issue than on the economy. The Government are basically carrying through policies that we implemented. Therefore, I congratulate them on bringing forward their statements on green schemes and policies. They are statements at this stage and we need to see how far we progress with them. Whatever we decide on the matter of climate and negotiations, to achieve green policies there are number of areas in which we have to operate. It is not sufficient to get good agreement on a global scale; we must have policies and implementation at a lower level, where it really makes a difference.
Three phases are essential to implementing such a policy. One is the global one. I have to say that what the Government achieved—particularly the Secretary of State for Energy and the Environment—at the Durban conference that I attended, has continued the principles we established at Kyoto in 1997. They fell a bit at Copenhagen, and in debates in this House I have constantly said: “You will have to extend the period beyond the Kyoto date of 2012. You will have to make sure that you have the money and you cannot have the legal framework at this stage, although hopefully it will come”.
In a debate in this House in November I asked the Government if they would adopt the “stop the clock” policy that I developed as a rapporteur at the Council of Europe. I am glad to say that that is exactly what happened. They have now extended the period. They have not got rid of the Kyoto deal but have extended it to 2016. That means that the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. When they meet next time at Rio this year they will have to flesh out the bones of the framework that was established at Durban. Thank goodness this brought us back from the disastrous conference at Copenhagen. We are on the right track but we certainly have not solved the problem. We need now to make sure that we have green policies at national, local and regional levels. The green schemes that we talk about are the nitty-gritty. If we do not get it right in these policy areas we will not readily be able to achieve the targets that we accepted in international negotiations.
I come to the second strand. We are on the right path with global negotiations but we must put flesh on the bones that were agreed at Durban and must have policies ready by 2016. We are already behind time in achieving what we thought we would through the Kyoto agreement. Perhaps we have not made a big step for mankind but we have made a small one, and that is important; we are going in the right direction. However, I wonder sometimes whether the sledge and the huskies are going in one direction while the driver is getting himself into a quandary about whether food will be provided for the dogs to allow them to achieve their target—I am flogging that metaphor to death. Basically, it is important that the national policies are right.
Of course there are things that we could do more or less of with national policies, but there is not a great deal of disagreement on the general policies on energy, on the statements that we made and certainly on the statutory requirements that set our targets. No other country has done that. It started under the previous Government and has continued under this one. They have toughened up the requirements and we are going in the right direction; there is major consensus on that. As other speakers have mentioned, that is an important step forward in keeping the show on the road to achieve those targets.
I am a little doubtful about the 80 per cent target; that is a bit of climate rhetoric. I said to the Energy Minister: “You’ll be dead by then so you won't know whether you're right or wrong”. We should try to avoid that rhetoric because it will give my former Permanent Secretary a chance to get up and say that it is not realistic. No doubt he will say that again today. We did not say that in government, but I understand that this House is a different place. The national policies have achieved a great deal of what we wanted to secure to keep to the targets that we agreed.
The third strand is how policy develops from national to regional and local levels. I will make specific points about that and look at the demands for low carbon. The move to renewables means major changes in this kind of industrialisation. It is a new form of industrialisation. There will be major changes in the economy, in attitudes and in culture. We want people in the communities to play their part. At the moment they are sitting, observing and thinking that it is just a global problem. That is not the case. I will use my own area of Hull as a good example of regional policies. The Humber estuary is one of the few areas in which there are developments on both sides of the river. Perhaps we built the Humber bridge to remind ourselves of this. The Humber played a major part in the first industrialisation. The port did manufacturing, importing and exporting. Coal was brought in and exported. Industrialisation was located in coal, steel and iron—all in that area. Those industries are now very much on the sidelines, although I think that there is still a role for coal. I understand all the carbon arguments, but sequestration may help us towards a balanced energy policy that includes coal. Those debates will come.
Yorkshire, with its steel and coal, was almost the centre of the development of energy, wealth and manufacturing. That was the substance of the first industrialisation. The second industrialisation will be built on renewables. Investment in the assets of the estuary is already turning it into a major part of the new, low-carbon industrial development. The Humber has assets on its banks that are associated with that kind of development. It will play a major part in this change. We see that in many ways as we try to get a reduction in carbon. The Humber is almost the highway of the new industrialisation that will take place along its banks. Some of the old assets are being converted to a new, low-carbon development. Right at the bottom of the estuary one finds Drax with biofuel. It is a very important development that we seem not to treat as fairly as we do the wind industry. That argument will continue. There is a mix of coal and bio, with the deep water necessary for the estuary and the promise of building more biofuel plants.
I say to the Minister that there is a tendency to look at energy distribution and pricing in terms of the lowest price that the world market has decided, but one has to have a mix of energy. That is why we had nuclear power to begin with. We need to recognise contributions to achieve carbon reduction targets. It may be a little more expensive to use one fuel than another but we have often lived with that. We now have to put into the price analysis how it reduces carbon production. That is the target we have set ourselves. We need mixed energy. It is no good concentrating simply on what is cheap internationally. We already have gas coming from certain parts of the world that we are not very happy with. I think we are all agreed that we need a balanced energy policy, although there will still be arguments about the mix.
When we contrast investment in biomass with that in the wind industry, we find that we do not give generously to the biomass industry. Those arguments will continue and I will contribute to them. We are also developing tidal power on the estuary. That is very important. It is difficult but it is certainly part of the development that is already going on now. The maritime port of Hull now calls itself a green port because it is the area in which Siemens is investing. Billions of pounds will be invested in wind turbines. Whatever the arguments about that, it is under way. We are a major centre for production, too. Coal sequestration was referred to. We have the infrastructure that brought gas in. With sequestration we can take it out of the coal industry and put it into the empty holes in the North Sea from which we originally took gas. That, too, is important infrastructure for lowering carbon emissions.
Best of all, we have wind, wind, wind. We no longer have just fishing and ports. Wind is our biggest asset at the moment. I know that it is controversial, but there is a lot of it up there. A lot of our people in east Yorkshire are not very happy about it; they do not like the high towers. They do not mind lighthouses or electric pylons but they do not want these things, which spoil their picture-book view. However, I am concerned about prosperity. My final point is that the local council, led by Steve Brady, is very much involved in the green city of Hull.
I will finish with one quick point. The community must do something. I managed to get my community to work on one idea. We are an energy poverty area; lots of people are in energy poverty. We got E.ON to agree to put smart meters in people's houses. The Archbishop Sentamu Academy works to get children to take the meters home. If you want to influence parents, get the kids on your side. They will soon say: “Why are you using energy in this way? Can you cut the cost of energy? Can we reduce carbon?”. Cutting the cost of energy means that they improve the quality of their life. That is a better way to put the point across.
For all these things—in culture, technology and the regions—I invite the Minister and the Government to come and look at the estuarial development of low carbon, a new river of prosperity. It is good for the region and good for the country, and I hope with their green investment funds and other bodies they will take that into account and look at perhaps prioritising investment on a regional basis in the Humber, in Hull, and in the areas surrounding Humberside.
Lord Turnbull
My Lords, in a short debate, I will concentrate my remarks on one issue only, the governance of the science, as this is vital for the credibility of the thinking upon which the Government’s policies are based.
In a debate in December 2009 on a report by the Committee on Climate Change, I said:
“Below the surface there are serious questions about the foundations on which it has been constructed”.—[Official Report, 8/12/09; col. 1051.]
Over the subsequent two years my concerns have increased rather than been assuaged.
The governing narrative for our climate change framework can be summarised as follows. Our planet is not just warming—this is not in dispute—but the rate of warming is projected to accelerate sharply: rather than the increase we have witnessed of less than 1 per cent per century, by the end of this century the planet is projected to be around 3 degrees centigrade hotter, taking the centre of the range. Some time during this century we will pass a 2 degree centigrade threshold, which is portrayed as a tipping point beyond which serious harm to the planet will occur. The main driver of this is man-made CO2 and the principal response must be the almost complete decarbonisation of the economies of the industrial world less than 40 years from now.
This narrative is largely based on the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, so the competence and integrity of the IPCC are of huge importance if it is to drive the massive social and economic changes being advocated. The reliance that one can put on the report of the noble Lord, Lord Stern, is also at issue, since it adopted large parts of the IPCC framework.
Over the last two years, there have been three separate reports on the IPCC. They are: the report by the InterAcademy Council, a collective of the world’s leading scientific academies; the report written by Professor Ross McKitrick, a Canadian professor of economics who for a time served as an expert reviewer for the IPCC’s fourth assessment report; and a book, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, written by Donna Laframboise, a Canadian journalist. Although they write from three different perspectives, in different styles, the message is the same: there are serious flaws in the competence, operations and governance of the IPCC.
The reality is a long way from the way that the IPCC describes itself. The IPCC claims that it employs the top scientists in the field; it uses only peer-reviewed material; its staff are independent and impartial; its operations are transparent; its procedures for review are rigorous and free of conflicts of interest; and its role is to present objective scientific advice to policymakers, not to advocate policy responses. None of these claims is true.
There are many instances where it has not employed the top practitioners in the field, and worse, many instances where it has employed researchers who have barely completed their PhDs—and in some cases not even that. There has been substantial use of “grey”—that is, non-peer-reviewed—literature. The IPCC has been extensively infiltrated by scientists from organisations like Greenpeace and WWF. There is no transparency about how its lead authors and reviewers are selected and what their expertise is. It has been obstructive to outsiders seeking information on data sets and working methods. It is resistant to input from those who do not share the house view. It was specifically criticised by the IAC for not giving sufficient weight to alternative views.
Its review procedures are flawed, allowing too much latitude to lead authors in choosing which of its reviewers’ comments to accept or reject. It has allowed lead authors to introduce new material after the review phase has been completed. Its policies on conflict of interest are inadequate. It blatantly adopts an advocacy role rather than confining itself to scientific advice. Its Summary for Policymakers is a serious misnomer. The scientists prepare a draft but this is redrafted in a conclave of representatives from the member Governments, mostly officials from environment departments fighting to get their Ministers’ views reflected. In short, it is a Summary by Policymakers not for Policymakers.
In a pamphlet I wrote last year for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, I said:
“In my opinion, the IPCC and its current leadership no longer carry the credibility which politicians need if they are going to persuade their citizens to swallow some unpleasant medicine. It is therefore regrettable that the UK Government has taken no steps to find an alternative and more credible source of advice”.
I see no signs that serious reform of the IPCC is on the agenda for the fifth assessment. The IAC specifically recommended that the chair should serve only for one cycle. Meanwhile, Chairman Pachauri doggedly clings on.
In the field of governance, things are not a great deal better in the UK. We have seen a second instalment of the CRU “Climategate” e-mails, which tell us little new but confirm the culture of shiftiness, obstruction and the stifling of debate seen in the first instalment. We still hear from time to time the mantra of, “The science is settled, the debate is over” from politicians and even from some scientists.
Therefore, I was very heartened to hear Professor Brian Cox, the pin-up boy of British science, and his colleague Professor Jeff Forshaw on the “Today” programme recently. Professor Cox said:
“Science is an improvement in our understanding of nature ... There are no absolute truths in science. It’s the only human endeavour where that level of modesty applies”.
Professor Forshaw said:
“We are always trying to improve on the theories we have got ... And we always expect that they are going to be just temporary structures and that they are going to be replaced at some point”.
So let us have no more “the science is settled/the debate is over” nonsense, particularly in the field of climate science, which is so complex and so young.
My view on the Durban conference is that while many of the participants came away disappointed, it was a sensible conclusion—in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, to “stop the clock” on the emissions issue for a decade—while the science improves and the evidence accumulates, an approach I have heard suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Rees of Ludlow. However, there is good news to report. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has drawn the UK back from its extreme unilateralism, for which he should be congratulated rather than criticised.
Finally, I have a few personal observations. In my pamphlet I wrote that,
“if a technology exists only by virtue of subsidy we only impoverish ourselves by trying to build jobs on such shaky foundations”.
The debacle in the solar sector was, therefore, entirely predictable. My second observation is that if a debate with the same title as today’s had taken place 15 years ago when I became Permanent Secretary at the old Department of the Environment—where I had a very happy year working for the noble Lord, Lord Prescott—it would not have been so dominated by decarbonisation but would have been much more about those aspects of the environment people care deeply about: air and water quality, habitats, birds, forests and the countryside. How sad that the issues have been pushed so far down the agenda, accelerated by the misconceived transfer of climate change from Defra to DECC.
In 40 years engaged on public policy, I have come across a number of cases where there was a strong international consensus among political elites, but for which the intellectual underpinning proved to be weak, as those elites were slow to acknowledge. The first was the so-called Washington Consensus which came to be seen as promoting globalisation with the maximum liberalisation of trade and finance and the minimum of regulation, but it turned out to overestimate the efficiency of markets. I confess that I swallowed that one pretty much whole. The second is the euro, where the European political elite pressed on despite warnings about the internal contradictions of the project and even now, it has yet to acknowledge the full extent of the problem. I never bought into the euro from the start.
Climate change—or more accurately, the current decarbonisation project—is in my view the third. Originally I bought in to the IPCC narrative on the science and its impacts while remaining critical of the policy responses. However, the intellectual certainty is beginning to crumble. In the next 10 years I believe we will see the current narrative replaced by something more sophisticated —perhaps drawing extensively on the work of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Chesterton, who will speak shortly—more eclectic, less alarmist and, in Professor Cox’s words, more “modest” in its claims.
Baroness Worthington
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Smith for securing this important debate. I would like to take a minute to respond to the statement made by the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull. It strikes me as not at all modest to suggest that we should stop our investment in alternatives to fossil fuels and wait for 10 years. If it happens that the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, and similarly sceptical climate commentators are wrong, we are risking the future of the planet. If we turn out to be wrong, all we will have done is diminish our reliance on fossil fuels, which seems to me a good thing given that they will run out anyway and that they lead to lots of additional problems to do with air quality. It is not modest at all to say that we should stop; it is terribly arrogant to assume that we should risk the entire planet. Anyway, I am sorry—I shall return to my speech.
On the coalition’s record on stimulating green growth, I will come across as being quite negative, although I will end with a positive, as it is not all bad. What I want to focus on is where the main problem lies within government. It is not with DECC; in fact, I think that the Department of Energy and Climate Change has done quite a good job of continuing many of the policies that were introduced under our Government, with substantially less budget, so I think that congratulations are in order. The problem lies with the Treasury and particularly the hypocrisy of our Chancellor on this topic. He is responsible for introducing revenue-raising policies masquerading as green initiatives, which, in reality, push up the costs of energy prices while delivering no environmental benefit. Yet it is the same Chancellor who is undermining investor confidence and risking the increase of the cost of capital for investors by calling into question the UK’s green ambitions. This seems ludicrous.
I shall use a couple of examples. The carbon reduction commitment—I have to admit that it was never a very attractive policy—applies to downstream emissions of greenhouse gases from large commercial energy users. A large portion of these is already capped upstream, so it is, in effect, a duplicatory policy. However, it was at least designed to be an awareness-raising policy in boardrooms. It was also designed to be revenue neutral, with the proceeds of all the auctions being returned to the participants. One of the first actions of the coalition Government was to change all this by deciding that the revenue should be kept by the Treasury. This, of course, raises costs for all the participants, which in turn will be handed on to consumers. Does it deliver a significant environmental saving? No. As I have just mentioned, a large part of these emissions is already capped. Any savings will simply be traded away within Europe as a result of the way in which the Emissions Trading Scheme works. While the Chancellor may claim that he is putting the brakes on our getting too far ahead of Europe, it is in fact his department that is doing exactly that. He is adding additional costs relative to our European neighbours through his redundant policies.
The second and possibly more worrying policy is the carbon tax, which takes the form of a floor price in the carbon market. This policy applies directly to participants in the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme, which applies to 50 per cent of the UK’s emissions and covers our largest point sources of emissions—our power stations and heavy industry. This flagship European policy is currently failing. It is not stimulating a significant investment in abatement—in reduction—in emissions because, for three of the four years during which it has operated, the cap on emissions has been higher than the emissions themselves. The regulation has, therefore, become almost redundant.
The solution is to adjust the cap to create greater ambition. That would rebalance the market, make sure that there were more buyers in the market than sellers and help to boost the price. That is the solution. It has not, however, been achieved to date. Sadly, that is partly because of this Government’s inability to control their Conservative MEPs, who, last July, voted against efforts to tighten the cap. While we see Conservatives in Europe blocking progress, we have a Chancellor at home deciding to take unilateral action to increase the cost of emissions allowances in the UK. This is the Treasury’s policy and it pushes up costs again relative to the rest of Europe. How can the Chancellor be putting a brake on our ambition? It simply does not add up.
The question is: to what end? There is certainly no environmental benefit to this policy. As I said, the way in which emissions trading works is that, if any reductions are achieved additionally in the UK, this simply frees up allowances to be sold to would-be polluters in Europe. It does not, therefore, have any additional environmental ambition, which can be achieved only if we remove the allowances, rather than just making them more expensive.
The stated aim of the policy is that it should create investor confidence, which will lead to the building of new infrastructure, particularly in the power sector. That is a laudable aim, but is this the best policy to achieve it? I would say that, if such large amounts as are being raised by this tax are being raised, there should be at least some guarantee that they will be spent on something that is actually built. The renewables obligation definitely adds to energy bills also, but it is designed in such a way as to ensure that something is actually built. There is no such guarantee with the carbon floor price. It is simply a means of raising revenue for existing players in the market. The main beneficiaries of the carbon floor price are the owners and operators of existing low-carbon infrastructure, who receive a large windfall as a result of not being exposed to the unilaterally inflated carbon price. This translates to British Energy and EDF. The income that they will receive from this policy may or may not be spent on the building of new nuclear reactors, or it may simply disappear into the company coffers.
The clearest indication that this policy is not delivering what is claimed is the fact that, on top of this, the Government are currently consulting on radical changes to our electricity market. If this un-green carbon tax were doing what it was supposed to do, why would we need to consult on a long-term fixed price contract for new build, which is part of a proposed package of reforms to our electricity system? It seems to be a belt and braces approach, which indicates that perhaps one of these policies, at least, is not needed. If the Chancellor is concerned about green policies and the fact that they might be putting an undue burden on our economy—when, in fact, they are probably stimulating growth and investment—he really only has himself to blame. His policy is the least useful and most expendable among the mix.
This leads to strange outcomes. Unfortunately, the Business Secretary, Vince Cable, was very damning about the UK’s carbon budgets, but in fact they are a sensible policy and he would have been far more effective if he had focused his ire on the carbon floor price and the changes to the CRC scheme, which directly raises costs for the businesses that he represents. His intervention has led to a conditionality being applied to the carbon budgets, which now sends mixed signals. The UK’s landmark Climate Change Act is seen as an example by many around the world of solid leadership on climate change. Indeed, earlier this week I was lucky enough to take part in a meeting hosted by Globe with a delegation of Chinese lawmakers who had come over here keen to learn from our experiences as they draft their own legislation on climate change. Sadly, we have gone from a good policy to the introduction of a review clause that muddies an otherwise crystal-clear policy that can create good, sound investor confidence.
The other serious issue that I want to raise in relation to the Government’s performance is their handling of policies that are designed to stimulate investment in clean technologies. I will not dwell on the feed-in tariff fiasco, which my noble friends have already touched on. My concern is a more general one. The Government appear not to be able to see the difference between winners and losers in the race to develop new low-carbon technologies. They seem to be enslaved by slightly flawed economic models of how the world should behave and are not applying themselves to noticing how it does behave in reality. If we are guided purely by these models, my fear is that we will continue to be forced to cut off at the knees industries that are starting to blossom while vainly clinging to the notion that some of the tried and failed technologies will one day come and rescue us.
I want to mention the renewable heat incentive and the renewable transport fuels obligation, which are both examples of policies that can lead to the stimulation of jobs in new industries. However, we must learn the lessons from our experience of the feed-in tariff and have sufficient flexibility to ensure that, if those policies introduce changes, we can give sufficient notice to the industries concerned.
I shall end on a discussion of whether the tried and failed technologies that we talk about a lot will deliver, and by that I mean the current generation of nuclear reactors. We often hear the promise that we are going to build eight or even 10 new reactors to replace the ones that are closing. My reading from those whom I speak to in the industry is that there is a great deal of cynicism about this. It is very unlikely that we will see the scale of build that the Government are anticipating because our current reactor designs are simply not attractive. As one executive who had looked at both designs put it to me, “They are both pretty awful and we do not like them”. I think that a nuclear renaissance is possible and indeed desirable, but it will have to be achieved by looking at the full range of new generation nuclear reactors. It will come as no surprise that I shall mention thorium molten-salt reactors, because of all the technologies that I have looked at in relation to climate change this one has huge potential. If we were able to match the amount of money that we are currently spending on nuclear fusion, there is no doubt that we would develop a technology that had massive potential for export. I would like to mention the Lords Science and Technology Select Committee report on nuclear research and development. It is an excellent report and I hope that the Government will respond to it, because we really do need to look again at our spending.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, on securing this debate, but I note that her Motion talks just about the Government’s green agenda. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, on one point: it would be regrettable if we interpreted the green agenda as meaning just carbon reduction or even climate change; it goes much wider than that. As for his other remarks, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, that what we should be talking about is our use of resources and the need to drive down our use of non-renewable resources, even if the science of climate change is wrong and the survival of the planet is not under threat. Trying to preserve as many resources as we can for future generations is our absolute responsibility.
I shall confine my remarks today to a completely different issue on the green agenda, and that is food. Of course, food encompasses energy use, land use and water use, while the food we waste has big implications even in terms of climate change when we consider methane escaping from landfill sites. That leads to my first question for the Minister. Other countries in the EU have now set a final date in many cases of 2015 for ending the dumping of biodegradable waste in landfill sites. Is the UK going to reconsider this? There are so many useful ways to utilise waste food. Separation technologies have progressed a long way, so it is no longer only a question of anaerobic digestion processes. However, anaerobic digestion allows the heat generated to be used and the resultant fertiliser to be used on farmland. There are a lot of interesting things to think about in this area. One of the most useful things that has happened recently is the quality marking given by the Environment Agency and WRAP to the fertiliser produced by this process. Farmers can now be sure that they are using a quality product and do not have to worry about it.
I also want to share with the House today a couple of particularly inspiring matters that Members of the House may have heard about on the BBC Radio 4 “Food Programme”, which itself deserves an award. The first is the Derek Cooper Award, which recognises long-term work. In this case, it went to a partnership between the Health Education Trust, Garden Organic, Focus on Food and the Soil Association for all their work with schools on improving school food and children’s understanding of where food comes from, as well as every aspect of how children are impacted by the food they eat. I cannot think of anything more important. The noble Lord, Lord Prescott, referred to the effect that children can have in their homes by influencing their parents, so this is not just about the children.
In schools where the Food for Life Partnership has worked, there have been tangible benefits. For example, twice as many primary schools received an “outstanding” Ofsted rating after working with the Food for Life Partnership. Nothing could be more tangible than that. I am very pleased that this Government have been encouraging that sort of very practical and important work on food in schools. Sarah Teather, the Minister with responsibility for schools, has brought in new powers so that schools will, for example, be able to offer price promotions on meals to particular pupils, encouraging more children to try a healthy school lunch. There has always been a bit of tension between local takeaways encouraging children to go in and buy a portion of chips and school canteens selling a healthy school lunch. Freeing up schools to be able to offer healthy food cheaply sometimes, as a special promotion, is really important.
The other award went to Jeanette Orrey, who has probably done more for school food than almost anybody else. She was a dinner lady but I guess she does not have much time to be a dinner lady now. She got an MBE in the New Year Honours List for services to food in schools. Those people have influenced the up-and-coming generations tremendously.
Two other examples of communities—one very big and one very small—greening themselves were outlined recently in your Lordships’ House on 6 December 2011 to the All-Party Group on Agroecology. The group heard first from Rosie Boycott, who is chair of the London Food Board and its subset Capital Growth. She told us of Capital Growth’s ambition to create 2,012 new growing spaces for people to grow their own food in London. This is incredibly important when you consider how few allotments there are and how long the waiting lists are—you can be on the waiting list for just about your entire adult life. This organisation has set about creating new growing spaces in, for example, skips behind Kings Cross, which is being developed. When the development moves to its next stage, the skips can be moved. Some have been created on unused land that is earmarked for development. So far, Capital Growth has 1,460 vegetable growing spaces in the capital, 50,000 volunteers, which is a phenomenal number, and 50 hectares of land. The project involves 21 London boroughs, 10 housing associations and 10,000 schoolchildren.
One of the very interesting things that Rosie Boycott told us as she showed us some fantastic illustrations of beans growing up the sides of buildings and beehives on the tops of buildings was that the spaces are never vandalised. The tangible, measurable benefits include better health, literacy rates going up, obesity rates dropping, an increase in science uptake in schools where there is vegetable-growing, lower crime rates—the police said that a community vegetable space means that fewer bobbies on the beat are needed—attractive routes to work and an entrepreneurial impact. Therefore, some of the work that the London Food Board has been doing reaches out far beyond food.
At the other end of the scale in terms of size but certainly not in terms of impact, the all-party group heard from Mary Clear, who has led a project in the small town of Todmorden, which has renamed itself “Incredible Edible Todmorden”. She was probably the most inspiring person I heard speak last year. She told us why food is an agent for change and why growing food builds communities. She described how they had even persuaded the police to allow a vegetable garden to be built outside the police station. When the PCT was going to be rebuilt and had £20,000 for landscaping, they hijacked all the money in order to plant orchards and an apothecary garden. They also have pick-your-own herbs at the station. The fire station joined in, as did six primary schools and a secondary school. It is hard to put over the enthusiasm and energy that this town has brought to this project, but it has clearly brought the whole town together and the streets are lined with vegetables and fruit trees. It is quite incredible. If that can happen in the sort of climate that you find in the north of England, it could happen anywhere in the UK.
We should think of food as an agent for change and for reminding people why “green issues” means something much wider than just carbon reduction. We need to see it from an entrepreneurial perspective as helping economic growth as well. We must return to thinking of the green agenda as being wide, and a very good place to begin is with food. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, for giving us the chance to debate these issues today.
Lord Hunt of Chesterton
My Lords, I am extremely pleased to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Miller. I used to be on the allotments committee of Cambridge City Council and tried to connect allotments with education, but without great success. Maybe, 20, 30 or 40 years on, this great development will occur. I welcome this debate also for the presence of the noble Lord, Lord Marland, who I know has put huge effort into his position as Minister, and some great benefits have come from that. But this is obviously the sweetener before a few critical remarks.
The broad aim of green policies is to preserve the natural environment for present and future generations, and to enable people to live safely and well in harmony with the environment. Most people now live in the very complex, unnatural and artificial environment of urban areas. As we have just heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, that is an area, too, that we can be very creative about.
I declare an interest as a director of an environmental company and president of an environmental NGO, ACOPS.
In an open democracy, environmental policies should be not only acceptable but actively supported. All this requires that information and advice should be available to politicians, local government and the public. Although the climate change committee, which I am pleased to say survived the Government’s culling of NGOs and bodies and agencies of that sort, will continue and is certainly proving its independence, I regret that there has been a considerable abolition of the bodies that have been important in providing environmental information. The Audit Commission had an important role for local government; the Health Protection Agency has been “secretised”; research councils have become partly “secretised”. I heard recently that scientists in research councils have been told not to talk to politicians without permission from BIS. This is an extraordinary situation. It is a bit like Russia in the 1970s, when we used to have conversations with the taps running, or Washington, where I can talk to government scientists only by going to Starbucks. I hope that we have not reached that stage, but it is looking like it.
The UK has a history of bold and innovative environmentally oriented policies, even when these required people to change their lifestyle and pay more. They began with the banning of open coal fires in the 1950s, which was a massive cultural change in the UK—it was of course introduced by a Tory Government. Pedestrianisation, as I know from Cambridge, was a considerably controversial matter. In London the congestion charge has been a great success and has brought about a 20 per cent reduction in traffic, whereas, as we heard this morning in a meeting to do with green policies in local government, it seems to be politically impossible still for any other borough in this country to introduce something like it. The present Government are not campaigning on that issue, yet air pollution in London and all cities of Europe is exceeding health standards and is not significantly improving.
I am delighted that the present Government are continuing the Labour policy of investing in urban rail systems, which is an important part of reducing traffic pollution, but they are not campaigning or legislating to reduce motor vehicle traffic in towns. With 20,000 to 30,000 deaths per year caused by air pollution, this should be a central policy for a green Government. Indeed, this Government are now proposing to increase the speed of cars. I suppose that you might say that the only green thing about Mr Toad was the colour of his skin.
Regarding another environmental issue, 2012 will be a very important test for the Government and particularly for Defra. I am pleased that the people in the Box today can talk to their colleagues in Defra. Defra will be implementing the marine Act, which was the really important environmental measure of the previous Government. In general, it was not a party political Act. Importantly, this year there will be a number of marine protected areas around our coasts. It is of great concern to NGOs and many bodies that the Government will weaken and not resist certain fishing, extractive industries and leisure interests, so there will not be as many MPAs, strongly policed, as there needs to be.
One of the points made during the pre-legislative scrutiny of that Act was that we had uncertain data from Defra but extremely clear data from the European Commission. A witness talked about the reduction of fish in the waters of northern Europe and of the urgent need for these marine protected areas. New Zealand, of course, has shown emphatically that a rigorous programme of MPAs can lead to the preserving of fish stocks. We are in a critical situation. Any green Government should regard this as a very serious matter. It is also very important to negotiate with our EU partners because there are complications about applying marine protected areas when there is European fisheries legislation.
Another crucial area which many of us have discussed today is the environmental policy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The present Government have certainly pushed with gusto—I think that is the word I would apply to the Minister—Labour’s policies for international agreements plus a vigorous national programme for lower carbon energy systems. I am particularly delighted that, like many of our Lib Dem Members, Mr Hoon has changed his spots and now strongly supports nuclear energy. The Government have also pushed forward the large offshore wind and energy conservation programmes. The noble Lord, Lord Prescott, referred to the wind programme. The UK should certainly reach the target of 30 per cent or more of its energy coming from zero or low-carbon sources by 2030. It will perhaps even exceed that. However, we should not be too boastful because in France, which of course has the lowest carbon footprint of the developed world, the Left and the Right are debating whether nuclear sources will provide 80 per cent or 50 per cent of its electrical energy. We are a long way off that.
I hope the Minister is also thinking about our nuclear programme, in so far as we do not want to repeat the mistakes of the 1960s when the two famous great nuclear Lords, Lord Marshall and Lord Hinton, produced a variety of nuclear solutions which led to Britain never exporting a single nuclear power station except Latina in Italy. So we very much hope the new programme will be systematic, and that we will use this investment to develop a UK industry. However, we will not do this by having five different nuclear power stations.
As political parties advocate the UK’s contributions to reducing global emissions, they all have to acknowledge that there is a reduction in popular support for measures to deal with global warming. There is overwhelming scientific evidence for climatic events resulting from the effects of greenhouse gases, especially in developing countries and Arctic areas. Politicians in Durban and South Africa pointed this out at a meeting in Bangalore in the summer to discuss Asian climates. The consensus is emphatic.
Some of the popular understanding comes about because of the statistics of the measured trends. It is a fact that over the last 10 years the average of the temperature of both the land areas and sea areas has been static. However, over the land areas the temperature has risen significantly and over the sea areas, particularly in the eastern Pacific, it has fallen. There is a technical oceanographic phenomenon of cooler water coming up from this area. It is remarkable that an area of a couple of thousand square miles off South America can affect the global average surface temperature. In the deeper layers of the ocean, the temperature is getting warmer. This is why we are seeing strongly a steady rise in sea level.
At Durban, the director general of the World Meteorological Organisation presented the explanation that I have given today. I understand that an explanatory leaflet produced by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology—POST—will be in the Library in a few weeks. A consensus of modelling suggests that, with the emissions going on around the world, we should certainly see a rise of three or four degrees by 2100. These are extremely serious effects. It is why China has such a strong programme: it has already seen a rise of two degrees since the 1960s.
Finally, I should emphasise that the Government are continuing the programme of the previous Government, that green policies must also include the vital element of adaptation to climate change. We have a very strong sub-committee on adaptation chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. It is important to have precautions against extreme precipitation or flooding and, if possible, to do the kinds of things that they do in the Netherlands of having dykes with windmills on top so that we combine adaptation with mitigation.
Lord Judd
My Lords, as a former director of Oxfam, I start by paying tribute to the quality of the work, research, analysis and advocacy on the issues we are debating contributed by NGOs such as Friends of the Earth, Oxfam, Tearfund, Save the Children, Christian Aid, CAFOD, ActionAid and others. I am sure that my noble friend, whose debate is so timely, would agree that their thousands of dedicated supporters across the country deserve our warm appreciation for making possible our input to these deliberations. The briefs are impressive and helpful. I just hope that I can do justice to those for today in what I want to say.
Notwithstanding the gravity and scale of the economic challenges facing the nation, Europe and the international community as a whole, by far the greatest challenge remains climate change. The Prime Minister on taking office seemed to have grasped this with his “greenest Government ever” prediction. However, George Osborne’s contribution to the last Conservative Party conference was an explicit break with the broad consensus that has emerged in recent years that tackling climate change and protecting the environment are essential to and not in contradiction with a modern, successful economy. Indeed, the CBI and the Federation of Small Businesses recognise that. Why has the Prime Minister failed to challenge the Chancellor and reassert his own commitment? Economic discipline requires that we get the climate change priorities convincingly in place. If we do not, the economic catastrophe that will face us all will dwarf our current preoccupations.
The feed-in tariffs have been a resounding success, creating 30,000 new jobs delivering community ownership of energy, reducing energy bills significantly, including some for the poorest people in social housing, creating green energy and transforming how people think about energy. Yet I am afraid that the Treasury-imposed cap and the way that the Department of Energy and Climate Change handled the reduction in tariffs needed in line with falling solar panel costs is jeopardising the jobs created and the future of solar in the United Kingdom.
Instead of appealing against the High Court’s decision in favour of the challenge brought by Friends of the Earth, Solarcentury and HomeSun on the handling of the case, why have the Government not ended the damaging uncertainty over the tariff level and established a system which enables feed-in tariffs to fall from mid-February, in line with the falling costs of solar technology, thereby supporting the continued growth of the industry and the employment opportunities? Why have they not increased the overall budget for the feed-in tariffs, using tax revenues generated by the jobs created, thus enabling more households to benefit from solar power? Why on earth have they not excluded housing associations, schools, council and other community projects from the damaging proposal to give multibuilding projects ever lower financial support? As things stand, if one thing is certain it is that they are making foolhardy, short-term economies at the price of aggravating the long-term economic costs and dangers to the nation. The noble Lord, Lord Stern, has estimated that in the long term, climate change could cost 5 per cent to 20 per cent of gross domestic product. He argued that this projection must be factored into the current discussion about the UK economy. Here at least the Government deserve commendation for having adopted the recommendations of the climate change committee in setting their most recent carbon budget: a 60 per cent reduction on 1990 levels by 2030.
As the key NGOs with front-line experience keep reminding us, it is the poorest countries, like Ethiopia, Sudan, Malawi and Bangladesh, which are most exposed and vulnerable to the consequences of climate change. The World Bank lists the main existing impacts and the accelerating future threats to such countries as droughts, famine, floods, sea-level rises and adverse impacts on agricultural production. The Humanitarian Response Review, led by the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, underlined that climate change was likely to increase the frequency of disasters and that from 2015, such disasters might affect 375 million people every year. Tearfund, for example, describes as “imperative”—they use that word—the prioritising by Government of international climate change issues and of identifying and securing long-term additional finance to meet the challenges of mitigation in the reduction of emissions and of adaptation.
Tearfund, Oxfam and others, with their invaluable experience, firmly welcome the role played by DECC in international negotiations. Nevertheless, while recognising that the agreements recently reached in Durban are positive in laying the foundation for a comprehensive framework from 2020, they, like many of us in this House, are dismayed at the lack of short-term targets for reducing global emissions. Surely the Government should continue to press for a European target of a 30 per cent reduction by 2020 and to champion climate finance and the redirection of fossil fuel subsidies as the way of driving low-carbon development.
The UK has arguably made a good start by delivering on its fast start climate finance commitment of £1.5 billion and establishing the international climate fund at DfID. The emphasis on using the available finance for adaptation is sensible, but deep concern remains that this money comes from our overseas development budget. The World Bank has estimated that adaptation alone will require between $75 billion and $100 billion a year in addition to existing essential aid commitments. As the current annual global aid flows are between $129 billion and $150 billion, it is obvious that we cannot continue to raid aid budgets in order adequately to finance climate action on a necessary scale.
Under the previous Government, some of us argued hard for a financial transactions tax. This was a cross-party drive; some of those who argued most hard are sitting on the coalition Benches. I can see one prominent player with us today. Some are even on the Front Bench. Why do the Government remain so obdurate and so firmly against this tax? A minute rate of tax could make a huge contribution towards meeting the challenges of climate change and securing a more positive prospect for the global economy and global well-being. Virtually all the relevant experienced and authoritative organisations call for this. In 2011, Bill Gates’s report to the G20 argued its virtues, saying that,
“the IMF and World Bank proposals to tax shipping and aviation fuels can help countries start making the necessary adjustments … If a modest portion of these revenues were devoted to helping poor countries adapt to climate change, it would protect the livelihoods of millions of very poor people”.
Angela Merkel herself told the German Bundestag’s Development Committee on 30 November last year that she was open to some of the proceeds of the European FTT, which she so strongly favours, going to finance the costs of dealing with climate change and overseas development. For the record, she said that one could talk about the use of part of the revenue from the FTT for development and climate adjustment.
Rio next June will be a make-or-break occasion. If it fails, the future costs and consequences for humanity will be incalculable and catastrophic. We must all get behind the Government in ensuring that the UK is second to none in striving for its success. This will necessitate disaggregated, specific, formal and legally enshrined commitments by Governments, but it will also involve, as my noble friend Lord Prescott so powerfully argued today, disaggregated and specific requirements for local authorities and those with regional responsibility. We are talking about no less than the survival of the human species as we know it. On climate change, we are literally all in it together. There is no corner of the world where people will be sheltered from the consequences of failure—certainly not the people of the British Isles.
Viscount Hanworth
My Lords, I am in a position to repeat and summarise some of what has been said today in the course of this debate. I particularly appreciate the remarks of my noble friend Lord Judd. However, my own appraisal is by no means as sanguine as some that I have listened to. Also, the tendentious attack on the science of the IPCC that we have heard has filled me with despair.
In the run-up to the most recent general election, the Conservatives made some remarkable commitments that undoubtedly improved their image in the eyes of the electorate. They claimed, for example, that the NHS would be safe in their hands. They proposed immediately to curb the power of the bankers. They promised to take steps to foster industry and enterprise by favouring small and medium-sized businesses. However, perhaps the most remarkable of the Conservatives’ promises was that they would become the greenest Government ever. Of late, it has become clear that every one of these promises has been broken. Today we have been discussing the Government’s retreat from their much proclaimed green agenda. It might be debated whether these pre-election promises were made in a spirit of cynical bamboozlement or were instead the products of self-deception. I should imagine that they were a mixture of both ingredients.
However, if the espousal of a green agenda was a marketing ploy, it was a brilliant one. We know that, from a right-wing perspective, a concern for the environment is often seen as a preoccupation of wishy-washy sentimentalists and nostalgic romantics. It must have seemed to many that if it could adopt a green agenda, the Conservative Party had surely changed out of all recognition. Such a seemingly changed and reinvented party could easily divest itself of the unpopularity of previous Conservative Administrations.
A clear indication that the Government have relinquished their green pretences came from the Conservative Party conference in May 2011. There, the Chancellor, George Osborne, roundly declared:
“We’re not going save the planet by putting our country out of business”.
In effect, provisions that are crucial to our long-term survival were being regarded as luxuries that we cannot afford. George Osborne’s dictum summarised his attitude to the environmental policies and protections that he and his allies are keen to dismantle. Some recent examples of the effects of this attitude should be mentioned.
The Government have proposed a new National Planning Policy Framework in which, in their own words, the presumption should be in favour of the developer. They have proposed to sweep aside the accumulation of planning laws and regulations that date back to 1947, which have served over many years to protect and preserve the rural environment. They wish to allow developers to exploit land that had hitherto been off-bounds but which has not benefited from the ultimate protections of the existing system. This is at a time when an unprecedented number of brownfield and post-industrial sites are available for development.
Under the cover of an urgent need to consolidate and simplify the existing planning regulations, the Government are proposing a wholesale deregulation. Natural England, which is the wildlife watchdog, the Environment Agency and the Forestry Commission have all been told that they are forbidden from commenting on the policy. They have, in effect, been subject to gagging orders. This has not prevented other organisations not under the control of the Government, such as the National Trust, English Heritage and the Campaign to Protect Rural England, among many others, from voicing their concerns.
We should not forget either that long before the issue of these planning laws arose, the Government had intended to sell the woodlands owned by the Forestry Commission in England. There had been no mention of this idea in either the Conservative manifesto or in the coalition document. Public outrage stopped these plans.
A further weakening of environmental protection is an inevitable consequence of the Government’s recent Localism Act. The Act aims to transfer power from central government to local authorities and local communities. The Act removes responsibility from central government, and does nothing to ensure that local authorities will assume the responsibility instead. One wonders, for example, how the overriding commitment to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide can be maintained when councils are free to pursue local priorities and when they are accountable only to local residents. In times of economic stringency, it is inevitable that local priorities will take precedence.
The Localism Act enshrines one of the cornerstones of a conservative political philosophy. This is the belief that individuals and organisations, if left to pursue their own ends, will be led, as if by an invisible hand, to promote the interests of society at large. This is a central tenet of neoclassical economics, which was famously expressed by Adam Smith. Those doctrines may have had some relevance to the conditions of Britain in the middle of the 18th century, but they are dangerously out of touch with modern realities. There is nowadays a pressing need for strategic thinking and for concerted action to deal with modern environmental problems and to take the necessary initiatives to sustain a competitive modern economy.
Given the increasing cost of carbon-based fuels and given the manner in which their consumption threatens the global environment, a modern economy must be based increasingly on carbon-neutral and fuel-efficient technologies. It is in this connection that the Government seem to be failing to live up to their promises and our expectations in almost every respect.
Early in July 2010, the Government announced cuts of £34 million in the support provided to low-carbon technology. Capital grants to support the development of offshore wind farms were reduced by £3 million. Support for biofuels was cancelled, saving £4.7 million. The technology trials of the Energy Saving Trust were to be curtailed and the low-carbon building fund, which was to provide grants to help householders to install small-scale renewable sources of energy, was to be withdrawn, saving £3 million. These are very small sums serving important purposes, and it is absurd to withhold them. It seems that some much bigger expenditures have been deferred. We suspect that these deferments are really cuts in disguise.
The plans for the green investment bank, which was intended to make loans to households and businesses to enable them to invest in carbon-reducing measures including insulation, have effectively been suspended. George Osborne has drastically limited its powers by ensuring that it cannot borrow funds until the Government have completed their deficit reduction plans in 2015 or later.
The Government have drastically curtailed their subsidies for solar power—first they imposed a cap on the available finance, then they slashed the feed-in tariff for big installations over 50 megawatts so as to concentrate the subsidy on householders. Now they are planning to halve the subsidy for them and for everyone else. They intend to reduce it even further for multiple installations and to specify that buildings must meet high energy-efficiency standards before they qualify for a rebate. These cuts threaten to have a fatal impact on Britain’s solar industry.
From my own point of view, one of the most distressing spectacles recently in Westminster has been the announcement in the House of Commons of the outcome of the Durban climate conference. The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Chris Huhne, was able to tell the Commons that talks had resulted in an agreed plan to begin negotiations for a new agreement. This agreement would not take effect before 2020. The goal of limiting average temperature increases to below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels had been relinquished. Notwithstanding the evident satisfaction of the Secretary of State at the outcome of the conference, which had seemed to be in doubt until the eleventh hour, the long delay before any effective international agreement can materialise is a frightening prospect. The Chamber of the House of Commons was virtually empty on that occasion. Very few Members from the Conservative Party were present. This speaks of an extraordinary insouciance in the face of the pre-eminent threat to the global environment.
The Earl of Lytton
My Lords, I apologise to the House for being a late addition to the debate, but the opportunity to speak for four minutes in the gap is a great aid to energy efficiency delivery—so here goes.
I very much welcome the opportunity to debate this extremely important issue. As I explained to the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, before the debate, I have strongly felt all along that there has been a moral and economic imperative, as a baseline starting point, to be less profligate with our energy use. I have a few interests to declare. I am a landowner, a chartered surveyor with a particular interest in older building stock, a member of the Country Land and Business Association and its heritage working group, and I chair a small energy panel for the South of England Agricultural society, of which I am a trustee.
I very much welcome the policy on green energy, and my only concern is that it could work better. That is where I am coming from. I am glad to say that my first point has been much more ably made by the noble Lord, Lord Judd, with regard to the changes to the solar photovoltaic feed-in tariff. They were a somewhat lamentable move. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, mentioned investor confidence—and so do I. We need to move to somewhere near a single-pot budget that is allocated according to cost-benefit rather than having different little pots that risk running out and being hypothecated towards only certain aspects. We need to look at energy in the round.
Many projects, apart from solar and photovoltaic, have to reach a very advanced stage before they can be certain of getting any subsidy allocation at all. This lack of security and certainty adds to the costs and risks, and makes such projects relatively unattractive to prospective applicants. The financial prop that the Government could offer through effective preregistration would significantly reduce the risks and raise a scheme’s viability. I do not suggest that this be done without due consideration to the cost-efficiency of the scheme in question.
The minimum code C level of thermal efficiency for buildings with solar photovoltaic that are to benefit from a feed-in tariff is another concern. The site and location of a PV panel is a very different concept from the nature of the fuel and the energy efficiency of the building or structure to which it is attached. The two are not ad idem. There has been a little incoherence here and I should like that issue to be addressed. Only 9 per cent of properties in the UK, according to my understanding, achieve code C. Their energy use and generation may coincide, but given that 75 per cent of homes are not heated by electricity, one can begin to see the disparity. I would hate to think that we were eliminating good and worthy green energy-generation sources simply because of some other relatively unrelated criterion.
Consumer knowledge of and control of how energy is used is vital. The cost-benefit of the myriad schemes and products with which we are presented is an issue that is reaching a level of incoherence. Although smart metering will help, it will deal only with the electricity aspect. What we need is a complete lifecycle energy assessment for all products and processes, and informed choices could thereby be made. That will empower people and lead into a better concept of energy conservation. It would certainly—to use the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull—avoid people chasing grant and subsidy regardless of the internal efficiency of the project or product in question.
I shall conclude there because my four minutes are up, but I thank your Lordships for your indulgence.
The Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells
My Lords, I thank the House for its indulgence in allowing me to speak in the gap today, and I am sorry that you are not hearing the rather more mellifluous tones of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, who was expected to speak today. Sadly he has been called away to the bedside of Lady Runcie, the wife of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who is believed to be in the last hours of her life.
It is a tribute to Members of all parts of this House that although there is debate on the various issues in the green agenda, it has not become a denominator in party politics. This is one of the most depressing aspects of political life in the United States, and it is vital that the environment does not become a political football. But there is a temptation, in a time of economic anxiety, for the green agenda to lose priority. I believe that one of the reasons for that is that the “economy”, in common parlance, is conceived in narrow financial terms, such as the inflation rate or gross national product. The gross national product is, of course, calculated excluding externalities such as costs to the environment. If we want sustainable prosperity then our accounting practices must be developed to include such factors.
A focus on sustainable prosperity suggests that growth without limits is not a plausible option. At the same time, all the world’s wisdom traditions regard human beings as accountable tenants for the earth, responsible for the web of life from which we have emerged. Perhaps “economy” is best understood as the laws of home and management, and truly sustainable prosperity and well-being requires us to broaden our concept of the economy.
Here I must declare an interest as a member of the Church of England’s attempt to put its own house in order as a response to the green agenda. The programme goes under the name of Shrinking the Footprint. Indeed, my own residence, which is the rather splendid palace in Wells, has become the first residence to have instituted a truly green restaurant, shop and education centre on an ecclesiastical property. It is also developing a community garden, very much following many of the suggestions made by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, in her speech, and I am particularly pleased about that. Why? Because it helps make the global local, and the local global, and if people are to understand these things, they have to be able to see them being worked out in their reality.
That in some ways draws me to the main purpose of my short speech. In view of the somewhat abrupt change in the level of feed-in tariff incentives for installing solar photovoltaic panels, I believe that it is important that we continue to recognise this as the most practical and potential way for so many people. Will the Minister give me a response to three quite specific requests which affect all places of worship? Would it be possible to allow places of worship until 31 March to complete and install projects in the pipeline with the benefit of the current FiT regime? Speaking for my own churches I believe that some 200 were actively planning to install panels when the cut came into place. Secondly, would the Minister give consideration to including churches alongside other community projects for a specific community tariff after 1 April? We have been working closely with the Jewish community in this particular area. Finally, would the Minister consider exempting churches—because of their special characteristics which often preclude the kind of alterations necessary to get close to even a C-rating—from the need to obtain energy performance certificates, providing that some other suitable benchmarking audit system can be put in place?
I want to give just a note of praise to the chairman of Shrinking the Footprint, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, who has an alternative benchmarking scheme which has been developed with expert partners in the Diocese of London. To offer a little help to the Government, that could, with government approval, become a national test of energy efficiency in respect of church buildings. Thank you.
Lord Grantchester
My Lords, this has been an excellent debate on one of the fundamental challenges we face at a transition to a low-carbon economy with environmentally sustainable new technologies. It is also an excellent time, as we draw near to the end of the first Session of the Conservative coalition, to assess the reality of actions against the prospectus of promises of the new Administration.
In her opening remarks my noble friend Lady Smith gave a telling assessment of the new Government’s commitment to be the greenest Government ever. She longed to be impressed by the coalition but remains unconvinced.
On inheriting the momentum set by the Labour Administration, the coalition agreement included more than twice as many green polices as any other area. In their first days in power, the Government signed up to, and subsequently met, the 10:10 pledge to reduce government emissions by 10 per cent in their first 12 months. On the international stage, the Government continued the leadership of Labour by working as part of an EU delegation in Durban to pave the way for a new, legally binding treaty by 2020.
At home, the Government signed up to the climate change committee’s fourth carbon budget to halve the UK’s carbon emissions by 2027, giving the UK one of the most ambitious emissions reduction plans in the world. However, the week of speculation and rumour of a Cabinet in deadlock that preceded the decision betrayed an increasingly stark divide on the environment at the heart of government. It is a divide between the fair-weather environmentalists, who still perceive environmental considerations as an afterthought—an expendable burden—and those who argue that a sustainable economic future and a sustainable environment are necessarily dependent.
The green agenda means nurturing change through growth options, encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation even through tough times, rather than restricting future options. We have heard how, in the Autumn Statement, the man setting the Government’s financial priorities is firmly in the “fair weather” camp. By painting environmental regulation as a ridiculous cost to business, the Chancellor has shown his true colours after his rhetoric of 2009 when, as shadow Chancellor, he described the choice between economic growth and the environment as “a stale argument”.
My noble friend Lady Worthington today extended criticism of the Treasury into the emissions trading scheme and the balance of revenue with its expenditure on green policies. My noble friend Lord Judd also asked searching questions of the Treasury. The Chancellor singling out the habitats directive in particular in his Autumn Statement is perhaps emblematic of an underlying attitude, and especially counterproductive as the Government, recognising the resonance of things such as “Hugh’s Fish Fight” with the public, have taken up the debate in Europe on the issue of progressive reform of the common fisheries policy, which has presided over the current overfishing of European waters by 73 per cent. The habitats directive is key to delivering an ecosystems-based management of our marine and coastal resources. Watering down—if I may use that expression—the habitats directive will undermine the key framework needed to deliver a sustainable future for our fisheries.
These sorts of confusing mixed messages towards the environment must serve as a harsh warning to the Government. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, for placing her remarks on resources, agricultural impacts and the challenges faced with food in schools, on the record.
The various voices within government that create a false opposition between the environment and economic growth fail to recognise two important things. First, the biggest deterrent to the emerging high-tech innovations that our low-carbon economy needs to be built on is uncertainty: market uncertainty fostered by policy reversals, particularly the solar industry retrenchment that has landed the Government in court; investor uncertainty, fostered by ideological divisions, particularly the lack of clarity over the Green Investment Bank; and financial uncertainty fostered by a lack of vision, particularly delays on the first carbon capture and storage project.
Secondly, short-term budgetary belligerence can come at a high long-term cost: the high cost of ignoring that growth needs encouragement and a commitment to policy stability. My noble friend was particularly critical of the Government’s contradictions. Of concern are the proposals in the draft national policy framework which will allow developers to recoup legal costs from environmental agencies and other statutory bodies advising on future developments, which will serve as a significant deterrent to agencies already threatened by significant budget cuts to doing their job in critiquing plans for the future. I know that this may not be in the Minister’s portfolio, but do the Government believe that the draft national planning policy framework will lead to fewer challenges to planning applications on environmental and sustainability grounds? What areas of the habitats directive do the Government believe should be rolled back, and what impact does the Minister anticipate this will have on the delivery of ecosystem services? What steps are the Government taking to implement the proposals of the natural environment White Paper?
In the energy sector, the coalition recognised the direction of travel set by the previous Labour Administration. The transition to a low-carbon economy will require investment. By investing in more diverse energy sources, the UK will be less vulnerable to fossil-fuel-distorted price hikes. By investing in insulating buildings and homes better and creating more fuel-efficient cars and methods of transport, the UK demand for energy can be reduced. By investing in industries that suit our geography and skills, such as offshore wind and carbon capture and storage, the UK can develop competitively priced energy security.
All the contributors today recognised in some way the size of the challenge. In recognising the problem, the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, brought to our attention the question of whether there is an absolute to achieve in carbon reductions. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, was happy with the achievement so far in recognising the core green agenda, but asked for far more emphasis on the Green Investment Bank and looked for more research to inform our decisions. The noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, took up the challenge with an interesting overview of the unintended consequences of government monetary levers, which my noble friend Lord Judd also drew attention to, and the contradictions between short-term finance and long-term objectives.
My noble friend Lord Prescott also drew attention to this global recognition, and asked for it to be translated into good regional and local action plans. He drew my attention, at least, to the problem that transfer pricing will require differing energy sources as it translates into energy pricing. The noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, was concerned about the lack of alternative scientific and views, and about how that may be constraining in our policy objectives.
The financial benefits of the various low-carbon support mechanisms accrue either to big utilities or to wealthy investors, and the cost is often borne by ordinary energy consumers. Perhaps the Government need to reflect on this and on how the impacts of their policies translate across the economy. The principal delivery mechanism has been the renewables obligation and the pledge that, by 2020, 20 per cent of our electricity should be generated from low-carbon sources. This transition investment has led to a fierce debate about the rising costs—I am sorry, I have been confused by the time; it says five minutes in front of me—and about who should shoulder the burden and in what percentages between industry, household and government.
Green energies to build a low-carbon economy could be no more expensive than other options. DECC’s Chief Scientific Adviser, David MacKay, has been reported in the media confirming similar findings by Mr Mackenzie in the EU 2050 roadmap and Ofgem’s Project Discovery. This concludes that the renewable/highly energy-efficient combination scenario comes out cheaper than the high-nuclear/less energy-efficient scenario. There is a strong economic case in favour of renewable technologies beyond climate change and energy security reasons.
The renewables industry still needs the coalition Government to develop a coherent industrial policy around the renewable energy target. Joined-up government is, as ever, hard to achieve, and schemes such as the electric vehicles show that BIS, DECC, the Department for Transport, CLG and the Treasury need to understand the important role that renewables can play in rebalancing the UK economy and supporting newer manufacture.
The call to transform the new economy needs to be met by all sectors. Labour’s leader has coined a new term to draw attention to the impact of this conservatism—the “squeezed middle”. In this debate we do not mean hard-pressed families, we mean mid-sized technologies between domestic and utility scale, which are being squeezed out as being unable to contribute. On the one hand, EMR is too complex for many important investors such as mid-sized companies, farmers, and public sector and community schemes—all could be catalysts for a new economy; on the other hand, the feed-in tariff has focused on the domestic and is now in chaos. Will the Minister say how these vital new investors can be encouraged and included within the wider policy framework?
The coalition Government are barely one Session into the new Parliament. There is still some way to go before half-time. Have not the Government to regroup quickly and urgently if they are to get the UK economy into a game-changing performance?
Lord Marland
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, for initiating this debate. I am sure that I speak on behalf of all noble Lords here in saying that our thoughts are with the former Archbishop and his wife at this very difficult time and I quite understand the reasons why the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London is not in his place today.
The reason I am very grateful for this debate is that it is very important, as a number of noble Lords have said, that we keep the green agenda at the forefront of people’s minds because there are signs that people’s attitudes are changing towards it. Therefore, it is fundamental that in a debate like this we pursue the green agenda. It is very important for me because I learn a lot. We have seen today a broad canvas of ideas, views and information that I find extremely valuable, as I am sure everyone else does.
The delivery of this agenda is clearly critical. Before I get to the excellent work that the Government have done, I will deal with one or two specific points from noble Lords. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, as a native of Essex, along with the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith—I am glad to see that the natives are not revolting from Essex—asked quite reasonably about scrutiny. Here we have it before our very eyes. We have eminent Lords and Baronesses challenging us on every occasion as to government policy, and, of course, the Committee on Climate Change, which does a fantastic job, sets targets for us. Therefore, I do not believe for one moment that there is no scrutiny in this area.
The noble Baroness asked about the Green Deal. Clearly it is a very complicated project, made more complicated by the very significant and excellent input from this House in the legislation. We have a very good working dialogue, as the noble Baroness referenced. Yesterday we had another session where we sought to inform each other and move the matter along. We want to get it right, and it is very important that we get it right for consumers, that there are warranties in place to protect them and that we do not go off half-cock. We are committed to getting this off the ground in 2012 and, as the noble Baroness knows, no one is more committed to it than I am.
I will deal later on with her points on solar PV, which a number of noble Lords mentioned. As for CCS—carbon capture and storage—we did pull the plug on the first coal-powered power station. I was responsible for the negotiations. I was not prepared to commit taxpayers’ money to something that was being incorrectly priced by the only winners we had in the project. However, we are working to a very fast and hard timescale and I am convinced that by this time next year we will have established a winner for a gas carbon capture and storage project. It is quite clear that the Chancellor has committed the £1 billion of funds available. Through that, there will be leading technology, jobs and growth.
My noble friend Lord Dixon-Smith asked whether the targets for 2020 were the right ones or whether those for 2050 were right. I think that he preferred the latter. It will come as no surprise to him that we have targets for both. We look at both very carefully and have to interweave them because, as the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, said, there is no one product fits all policy for delivering energy to the country. We will have to deal with all manner of policies, get the mix right and deal with inclement weather. For example, if there is another nuclear incident in Europe it will lead to the destabilisation of our nuclear policy. We will have to deal with that. Therefore, we will have to have flexible targets. However, the noble Lord is quite right to say that we have to look to 2050.
As always, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for his support and various comments. The noble Lord, Lord Prescott, rightly referred to the Humber estuary with its wonderful deep waters. We were delighted that Siemens decided to move there. I know the area well and looked very carefully at potential sites where more infrastructure buildings could be put. The area of the Humber estuary has a very knowledgeable workforce and I believe that it can become one of the great offshore gateways. Like the noble Lord, I was disappointed that the Statement on Durban was not debated here. Of course, that was an opposition decision. I was rather relieved that I did not have to stand on my feet for another 40 minutes.
The views of the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, are well known. I will not engage with him on the IPCC. It is not something that we can unilaterally change. It will require international agreement. Some of his points are well known, and quietly we have made our position well known to the IPCC. I am also grateful that he was right on the euro.
The noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, criticised the carbon price floor. I do not know how we will get nuclear power—or even thorium nuclear power—off the ground unless we have a carbon floor price that sets out a very clear pathway and an encouragement to the nuclear industry, as well as a negative view of those who are producing high-carbon electricity. Therefore, I think that the carbon price floor is a very positive step. Of course, we could go on for a long time on the subject of thorium; we have had some good exchanges on that.
We welcome the great knowledge about food shown by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer —much more knowledge than I was able to deal with. Her main point was about landfill. The Treasury has done the right thing in raising the landfill tax by £80 a tonne by 2015. Capturing methane and turning it into electricity is a positive way forward to make sure that landfill is dealt with properly. Push and shove methods are far better than very prescriptive policies.
The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Chesterton, gave us a very good overview from his position as an eminent scientist. He complained that we do not have enough quangos. I do not complain about not having enough quangos. I am interested in delivery and do not believe that quangos in general are delivery bodies. Obviously some are, but they often get in the way of delivery, which will be so fundamental to what we must do. I was also grateful for his words about my gusto.
As always, the noble Lord, Lord Judd, made a very intelligent contribution. The work of Oxfam should not be denied; it has been very formative. We are delighted that it is subscribing to the climate change agenda. As he rightly—and often—says, we are all in this climate change thing together. There is no point pretending we are not and it is a fundamentally wise thing to say.
Listening to the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, I must say that I thought that I might go out and kill myself. He was so gloomy and in despair over my own great party, and I could not really agree with a single word he said. However, he is right to tell us about the economies and great benefits of the low-carbon technology. It would be interesting to know what Adam Smith himself would have made of it all.
We were grateful for the intervention of the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, with his great knowledge of councils. He quite rightly said, as did the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, that we should not set up grants where all people end up doing is chasing them. That indeed is what the solar panel FIT became—a grant-chasing product—with disastrous consequences.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bath and Wells raised a number of items. I have worked very closely with the Church of England on “Shrinking the Footprint” and have attended a number of events. We think it is a remarkably good scheme. It is so good because it shows leadership, and that is what the green agenda is all about: showing leadership, and showing people the reasons for doing it and why they should be doing it. We are very grateful for the leadership—from all churches, actually—on this issue, but I know that he is not expecting me to make special exceptions for his churches, even though I am a great admirer of his wonderful cathedral in Wells.
The noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, asked me questions way beyond my mandate. It is bad enough having to know what is going on in your own brief, let alone other people’s. Fisheries—for heaven’s sake! He has time to withdraw—he can tell me afterwards—but if he really insists on me writing on our fisheries policies, the ecosystem, the natural environment White Paper and our policy on that, I am totally happy to write to him or get someone even cleverer than I to do so. He is quite right that it is about joined-up government.
However, I must rebuke noble Lords. I felt that, as in “Hamlet”, you doth protest too much. You should lift your eyes upwards and not down, navel-gazing. Look up and think of the achievements that you have made and that we have made. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, because he was so positive in what he had to say about what is going on. He did not bring any party politics into it—which was a bit of a change, actually, I must confess. It was being recorded and may well be on YouTube. The noble Lord was positive, and because he was positive and because my Secretary of State is so positive, we are leading the world in the climate change agenda; and because noble Lords throughout this House have been positive, we have been able to keep the green agenda at the forefront.
To those who criticise this Government for not doing anything—there is only one thing that we have done that is predictably different from what the previous Government had done, and that is stop the feed-in tariffs on solar PVs. Why did we do that? Because we did not think it was fair on taxpayers to spend £8 billion to achieve 0.1 per cent of our electricity demand. There are far better ways of committing that money for heavy lifting—and there was a scam. There is still a scam going on. Last week, my phone went at my home. “Mr Marland”—shows how out of date they are, six years out of date—“I have got a government-backed scheme guaranteeing this for solar panels. Are you interested?”. I said, “I think you have got the wrong man here” and put the phone down pretty quickly. But this scam is still happening and it is not in the best interests of taxpayers. Let us get it off the agenda and let us stop moaning about it. Let us move on to the really big points of nuclear, of clean gas, of all the things that will keep the lights on in this country—and renewables. Let us not run away from renewables. Renewables will be fundamentally important, because they give us security of supply and help us with regard to our agenda.
Lord Teverson
My Lords, perhaps I may suggest to the Minister that he is being too modest. Although it was a difficult period and a difficult thing to do, we have a solar power industry that will survive into the future, which would not have happened. It could have been done better, but it will still be there and will, I hope, resurge as those prices come down. We are not out of solar. We can actually keep solar because of that decision.
Lord Marland
I am grateful. The Whip has just said that it is very rare that I am modest, so it is quite nice of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, to say that. The fact of the matter is that the solar industry is going on. That is what my story indicates. It is still out there selling and that will go on if people want to do it. Frankly, that is what it should be about.
What have the Government done? The Opposition talk about the green investment bank. We have committed funds to the green investment bank. It is highly technical and difficult to set up a bank. We have committed funds—we set aside £3.1 billion for the investment bank—and that will happen. As I said, we have committed £1 billion of new money for carbon capture and storage. We have the world’s first incentive scheme for heat Nowhere else in the world is that happening. We have put £400 million to support low-emission vehicles. We have a mass rollout of smart meters by 2014, which will allow the consumer—merely by putting on their reading glasses—to see what they are spending on electricity. We are reforming the market to encourage investment, which is absolutely critical, as the noble Lords have said. We have had the fourth carbon budget, which requires us to cut emissions by 50 per cent. We fully subscribe to that and we are on target for it. We have cut our own government emissions by 14 per cent despite the 10 per cent target we set ourselves. We even got No. 10 to cut its emissions by 10 per cent—it was a very close-run thing. We cut our own government emission by 14 per cent last year. It will be 25 per cent by 2015—not a small target.
As I said, Durban was, largely, a triumph. As the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, says, it is rebuilding the mess that happened at Copenhagen; it is rebuilding trust among countries. There is also work towards a legally binding agreement—a fantastic achievement. Twelve per cent of our capacity now comes from renewable electricity. It will be 15 per cent by 2020. We are on target for that commitment and making very good strides. Around 40 per cent of households now recycle their own waste. This is good for the green agenda. Some 3.5 million more homes will be insulated by the end of 2012. We have spent £92 million cleaning up our rivers. We have had the big tree plant campaign, which was launched to plant 100,000 trees. The Green Deal, which we talked about earlier, will unlock about £7 billion of private sector investment. That should generate 100,000 jobs. We are, therefore, doing a lot.
Contrary to what the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, was saying, we have increased our grants. Seventeen grants were awarded to separate companies last year—a total of £18 million. We spent another £28 million in 2009-2010 across the Government. We continue the commitment made by the previous Government. We have six wave and tidal companies receiving grants of £22 million through our own good offices. The Opposition are, therefore, wrong to criticise us. By criticising us, the Opposition are criticising themselves—they have been fundamental to this development. We have done this together. I go back to the words of the noble Lord, Lord Judd. We all know that we are in this together—up to our eyeballs—and it is our job to make sure that the consumer is at the heart of our decision-making. We must help to educate consumers that the green agenda is part of the important decision-making that supports them. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, for this excellent opportunity to respond.
Baroness Smith of Basildon
My Lords, as ever, the noble Lord is engaging and entertaining in his responses, and as ever, he has failed to answer the most significant questions that were put to him. I take some exception to his comment that the House doth protest too much because it means that he has misunderstood the nature of today’s debate. He said that noble Lords had been saying that the Government have not done anything. No Member of your Lordships’ House suggested that the Government do not have any achievements. In fact, no one denied those achievements and they were praised. What the debate was around was whether this is the greenest Government ever, as the Prime Minister promised, and if it is not, whether there are areas in which the Government can improve, which the noble Lord seems to have rejected. So I am sorry he has treated the debate in this way.
I put one major question to the Minister which he failed to answer. I hope that he will come back on it. Whatever he says about the decision on feed-in tariffs, there is no doubt that it has had a major impact on businesses and investors. Many business people and investors are now very cynical about the Government’s commitment. That confidence needs to be rebuilt if we are going to achieve the Government’s own targets on investment for green growth. That is why I asked him most specifically whether he could give assurances on green growth and the Government’s commitment. What actions are the Government going to take to improve the perception, which is justified given some of the decisions that have been made, that the Government are not serious about green growth? I am sorry he failed to answer the question. He often promises to write to me, and if he wants to do so on this occasion, I would be grateful. Otherwise, I assume that the Government have no plans to encourage the green growth that is so necessary.
We have had a very worthwhile and interesting debate. It was tabled with the intention of putting forward suggestions, recognising successes and looking at where improvements can be made. I had hoped that the Minister would respond a bit more positively by saying that changes can be made. Finally, I would add that I am proud to be a native of Essex. I suspect that my accent is more Essex than that of the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith. It is not something I regard as derogatory, but with some pride.
Financial Supervisory Framework: EUC Report
(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Harrison
That this House takes note of the report of the European Union Committee on The EU Financial Supervisory Framework: An Update (20th Report, HL Paper 181).
Lord Harrison
My Lords, I present the report entitled the EU Financial Supervisory Framework: An Update produced by the European Union Sub-committee on Economic and Financial Affairs and International Trade which I have the honour to chair. The global financial crisis has demonstrated that the existing structures for supervising financial institutions and monitoring systemic risks are inadequate. This in turn has triggered a debate on how best to redesign the financial supervisory architecture of the European Union. Consequently, in September 2010, the EU passed legislation which laid the foundation for a new EU supervisory architecture. The new framework has two strands. The first is the overarching European Systemic Risk Board, which has responsibility for macroprudential oversight of the EU financial system and for assessing and proposing ways to reduce systemic risks in the financial sector. Below the ESRB are the three European Supervisory Authorities: the European Banking Authority, the European Securities and Markets Authority and the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority. These ESAs strive to harmonise and co-ordinate the work of member states’ national regulatory bodies. They draft and implement technical regulatory standards, and mediate between national supervisors where conflicts arise. When an emergency situation is declared by the Council, the ESAs have enhanced powers to co-ordinate member states’ responses and, if necessary, to make binding decisions on national supervisory authorities or indeed on individual financial institutions. In general, however, financial institutions continue to be supervised by national authorities.
The committee examined the proposed legislation setting up the new EU financial supervisory system in its 2009 inquiry on the future of financial regulation and supervision. After the new ESAs were established on 1 January last year, we decided to return to the topic by taking evidence from the UK national regulator, the Financial Services Authority as well as from the European Banking Authority. We wanted to discuss how matters had progressed and to explore key issues that we had previously raised with the Government in our area report. This report was published in July and the Government’s response, for which we are grateful, was received in September.
The committee’s key conclusions were as follows. First, we affirmed support for the single rule book, operable across the member states. Given the cross-border nature of many financial services, it is important that national supervisors apply the same regulatory standards enforced with the same powers across all the member states. However, the financial sector is a global industry and we asserted that global co-operation is also essential to ensure that risks are minimised rather than simply relocated. The committee was anxious to enshrine the principle that day-to-day supervision of financial institutions should remain at the national level and we stressed that this should be reflected in any new legislation proposed at the EU level. However, we noted that there were some situations in which the ESAs could and should override national supervisors, especially in response to an EU-wide crisis or emergency. Our witnesses sought to assure us that there were safeguards in place to prevent such powers being used routinely or inappropriately, and we expressed the hope that this will indeed be the case. Furthermore, we expressed the wish to be consulted if the Government were ever to envisage asking the Council to declare an emergency and, similarly, to be informed forthwith if they detected that another member state or ESA was likely to request that an emergency be declared.
We also endorsed the principle that national supervisory authorities should occasionally intervene in exceptional circumstances to impose temporary restrictions on certain financial activities in order to ensure general financial stability. We welcomed the co-ordinating role of the ESAs to ensure that such actions take place in a uniform and co-ordinated way across the European Union. However, in our view ESAs should only have the power to temporarily ban certain activities or products in a crisis when an emergency has been declared by the Council. Where the legislation setting up the ESAs allows for the ESAs to be granted enhanced powers in certain areas without the need for the Council to declare an emergency, we argued that future sectoral legislation should only confer such powers as the exception, not as the rule.
One such exception to the principle, in our view, related to short selling and credit default swaps. Given the highly cross-border nature of this trade, we argued that giving ESMA such intervention powers might be necessary to preserve financial stability in the European Union. I wonder whether the Minister has pondered the far-reaching consequences of this ban on CDSs and on short selling. In relation to contributing to macroeconomic stability, the committee stressed the importance of information-sharing among the supervisors. We also welcomed assurances by the EBA that bank stress tests would be strengthened in the light of the failure of these tests in 2010. Indeed, we concluded that the rigour of the stress tests would be an important measure of the independence of the EBA.
Finally, we reflected on the United Kingdom’s influence. The UK is the centre of financial services in the European Union and we emphasised the importance of the United Kingdom Government and the FSA taking leadership roles. We commended the FSA for its constructive approach in seeking to engage with the ESAs. Yet we were concerned that the Government’s proposal to abolish the FSA and replace it with the Financial Conduct Authority, the Prudential Regulatory Authority and the Financial Policy Committee could compromise the UK’s leadership role. We called on the Government to explain what structures and mechanisms they planned to put in place to ensure that the new bodies work together effectively to present a cohesive and unified face as well as ensuring that the residual task of the seceding FSA should be covered by the United Kingdom’s new national supervisory structure.
Although the Government’s response broadly reflected the committee’s point of view, there were some differences of emphasis. The Government continued to express concern about the use of the triggers for ESMA’s intervention powers in relation to short selling and credit default swaps. On the question of keeping the committee informed about any such emergency, the Government stated that they would inform it as far as is possible about a Council declaration of an emergency, or of subsequent use of emergency powers by the ESAs, in a form consistent with any restrictions resulting from the possible confidential nature of such decisions—perhaps that could be elaborated. On the domestic supervisory role of the United Kingdom, the Government stated that they would legislate to require establishment of a statutory memorandum of understanding between the Treasury, the Bank of England, the PRA and the FSA, and would support the further use of memoranda of understanding to frame the new regulators’ relationships with other UK authorities. I look forward to the Minister’s reply, which I am sure will explain the Government’s position in more detail.
So where do we stand today? Events have moved on since the report was published, in particular as the euro area crisis has deepened, and the new bodies have played a high-profile role. For instance, the European Banking Authority’s December assessment that European banks needed €115 billion of funding to withstand financial shocks underlined not only how serious the crisis had become but also the EBA’s active and interventionist role. Moreover, the UK Government’s reported demand, in negotiations at the Brussels summit in December, that the EBA remain in London demonstrated not only how important this body has become to the Government but also the potential isolation that they face as a result of not joining in with the other 26 member states. However, the collapse of Dexia in October, in spite of the fact that it had comprehensively passed the EBA’s stress tests as recently as July, once again called into question the effectiveness of its system of bank stress tests. ESMA’s role in the regulation of high-frequency trading, over-the-counter derivatives and credit rating agencies, as well as its power to ban certain activities or products, continues to be subject to intense debate, as does EIOPA’s controversial assessment of the solvency of pension funds.
Are the Government sure that British experts are available for use with the new structures? Do we have sufficient resources accorded to the new supervisory authorities to ensure that they do their work?
ESMA has had responsibility for credit rating agencies since 1 June of last year. This forms a new and important departure, and I would welcome the Government’s response to this development within the single market in financial services.
Lord Marlesford
My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Harrison. It is not just that he made a very good speech on our report; he has also been a very good chairman of Sub-Committee A, a committee which is quite tough to guide because there is such a diversity of view on the EU among its membership. That diversity is thrown into ever sharper focus as one EU crisis develops into the next.
I suppose that in your Lordships’ House and in the country as a whole the views can be seen as stretching from the totally disillusioned, who now feel that the whole enterprise should be abandoned—at least by the UK, to those whose tribal loyalty to the EU leads them to feel that we have to stick with it come what may.
I am not saying that either of those persuasions is directly represented on the committee. But inevitably, as events unfold, we are aware of those positions even if neither of them is actually an option. Incidentally, I should say that I do not regard myself as either a euroenthusiast or a eurosceptic. I suppose if I am anything at all, I am a eurochallenger.
The second reason it is a tough committee is that there is a very high technical content to many of the issues we seek to address. What makes it particularly hard is that factual information is often either deliberately concealed by the parties or simply not available.
This has, of course, been the case since the world financial crisis first started to unfold back in May 2007, when the depth and breadth of the toxicity of financial instruments, initially mainly inside the United States, started to emerge.
What a far cry it is since the American state-sponsored mortgage-granting agencies, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, appeared to be a brilliant concept for increasing home ownership, an objective that the now shrunken giant of American banking, Alan Greenspan, so enthusiastically and unwisely espoused. But the lesson in all this is that, to quote the NKVD man in Kravchenko's I Chose Freedom:
“Comrade Stalin has taught us to trust one another but at the same time to check and recheck”.
I make no apology for saying once again that it is now recognised, as it was by many at the time that, conceptually, the euro was flawed from the start, based as it was on a single monetary policy but independent fiscal policies. From that emerged the myth, peddled over the past 10 years, that the sovereign debt of all euro countries was equally safe. This suggestion on its own has created a moral hazard of the ECB having a potential liability which it could only meet by switching its printing machines onto constant. And we all know where that leads.
To state that the necessary change for the system to work is the establishment of a euro-area ministry of finance is futile, as the people of Europe show no signs of wanting it. We therefore have this plethora of new supervisory bodies: ESRB, three ESAs, EBA, ESMA, EIOPA—which the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, and our report have described very clearly. The whole question of these bodies being able to override national supervisors is a central issue. It has been suggested that this should only be done in emergencies but who defines an emergency? If the existence of an emergency is seen as too sensitive to be revealed, what then?
There is the crucial question of whether the European Banking Authority has the capacity to carry out the stress tests which are intended to give early warning that banks are in danger of going bust. As banks spend a great deal of their time concealing the reality of their financial positions, I would put my money on the bankers hiding what they wish to hide.
I have for some years been concerned about credit card debt in this country, the £60 billion debt on which interest is being paid, currently at a rate of 17 per cent. It amounts to nearly £1,000 for every man, woman and child in Britain. At my instigation, the noble Lord, Lord Myners, when he was the Minister responsible in the last Government, wrote to the banks, asking them at what level they were valuing these assets. Only one of them even replied. One thing on which I warmly congratulate the Government is their decision to separate high-street banking from the much more risky investment banking. This is being done in the teeth of opposition from the banks.
I am worried about the way in which some of the senior eurocrats are suggesting that they might be able to suppress inconvenient facts. I am thinking of course of Commissioner Barnier, who is keen to ensure that the credit-rating agencies do not publish inconvenient truths about the value of sovereign debt in euro-area countries. Having realised that his edict would not be enough to get what he wants, the Commission is now putting together a complicated set of procedures which credit rating agencies would have to comply with before the European Securities and Markets Authority allowed them to publish their credit rating. There was an interesting piece in yesterday’s FT by Martin Fridson, in which he expresses considerable doubt as to the merits of such proposals. I certainly share those doubts. I have absolutely no brief for the credit rating agencies—which Sub-committee A has also recently studied—which failed investors and savers deplorably with their absurd endorsement of doubtful financial instruments of debt.
Finally, to illustrate my readiness to see the merit of regulatory action in financial matters on a European level when it is appropriate, I would like to make a specific proposal, which I hope the Minister will communicate to his Treasury colleagues. There has been much fully justified criticism of the way in which overseas entities and individuals have been able to avoid paying stamp duty on transfers of expensive houses in the UK. This could be dealt with at an EU level by simply requiring full compliance with national law, including tax, before any transfer of real estate is accepted as having taken place. In the UK, the courts would simply refuse to recognise title unless the proper stamp duty had been paid on a change of ownership. That, I think, would fix it.
In conclusion, I am rather doubtful that Humpty Dumpty can be put together again. I hope that he can, because I am a strong supporter of the EU single market and even the EU as a global political player. Sadly, the debacle over the eurozone has diverted a vast amount of the time—some say as much as 80 per cent—that Europe’s top leaders have been able to apply to world problems of peace and stability. I fear that that means that EU influence has greatly diminished over that period. As Britain is probably the most financially sophisticated and experienced country in the world, it is crucial that we play a full part in offering our expertise to help the euro-area put together the best financial supervisory framework possible. I hope that the House of Lords Sub-committee A can play some small part in that.
Lord Newby
My Lords, this is a very timely debate given the state of play in the development of both the EU financial supervisory framework and our own financial services architecture. Nobody could accuse the EU or the British Government of not acting to put in place new structures which aim to stand a better chance than their predecessors of preventing another bubble-based banking crisis. As the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, pointed out, at the EU level we have the ESRB and three sectoral regulatory bodies. Here in the UK we will soon have a new Financial Policy Committee, a Financial Conduct Authority and a Prudential Regulation Authority, along with the Treasury and the court of the Bank of England involved in setting and implementing financial regulatory strategies.
All these bodies are new or in gestation so there is a considerable degree of uncertainty about how well they will work, both individually and—possibly more importantly—in relation to each other, particularly at times of financial crisis. The noble Lords, Lord Harrison and Lord Marlesford, talked about how the European bodies would operate, what constitutes an emergency and what powers they would exercise in those circumstances. The truth is that, at the moment, we do not quite know because they are so new that they have not yet had to invoke those powers. From the evidence that the sub-committee took, it is clear that they are still feeling their way in some respects on how those powers would actually be used.
I have had the privilege of serving on the Joint Committee on the Financial Services Bill and as part of our work we looked at how the new UK bodies would relate to their European counterparts and how the UK interest would be best represented. It is on this area of the sub-committee’s report that I would like to concentrate my remarks this afternoon.
There are several obvious problems. First, the structures of the European and British bodies are quite dissimilar in that at the European level, we have three sectoral bodies covering banking, insurance and markets and at the UK level, we have two: one covering prudential regulation and one covering conduct of business regulation. These clearly are not equivalent bodies. When those involved in the FSA or the EBA have been asked whether this matters not, it has been pointed out that across the EU, there are many forms of regulatory structure and the twin-peaks approach that we are going to be adopting is by no means unique. As a matter of principle, however, I do not think one could argue that three bodies playing two bodies with completely different remits is an ideal starting point. It is an issue that we have to address.
Secondly, as has been mentioned, the European bodies are very lightly resourced for potentially a very big job, particularly at a time of emergency. The European Banking Authority will have 120 staff; if there is an emergency tomorrow, it could be asked or expected to wield powers across the whole of the EU and it will clearly struggle to do it. There is no prospect in the foreseeable future of these bodies getting any additional resources, which is a bit of a worry. There is also a more general worry that its 120 staff are playing 3,500 staff of the FSA; no doubt, staffing will increase in the equivalent bodies across the EU. Therefore, it is going to be hemmed in as regards what it can do simply through the paucity of its own resources.
The third problem is obviously Britain’s relationship more generally with the EU. At the ill fated recent summit, it was regulation of the financial services sector that was cited as the reason for the UK Government refusing to go along with the rest of the EU. Some of the arguments that were advanced seemed to me quite bizarre. It was suggested that we should have, as a matter of principle, a declaration that there would be no moving of the European Banking Authority out of London. No one was suggesting that it would be moved out of London, so why was that a big issue? It was suggested that there was a huge problem in that the EU was going to stop us increasing the capital requirements in our banks beyond a certain level, when it was absolutely clear from both the EBA and Commissioner Barnier that, whatever they originally thought in this area, they were not going to push this as an issue. Therefore, we have been pursuing lines of argument related to the management of financial services regulations which seem to me to be bizarre. Whether they are or not, however, they have undoubtedly caused major difficulties in our short-term relations with at least some of the principal member states. However, it seems to me—I am sure everybody would agree, whatever their views on the euro, the eurozone and the Prime Minister’s strategy—that it is absolutely key for the UK to be in a position to maximise its influence in EU financial services regulation. Therefore, we now need to think about how we can best achieve this.
First, there is our role within the EU and, in particular, the supervisory bodies. I gather that, despite the screaming headlines, the attitude of many of those involved in managing the process in member states and EU institutions has not undergone a revolution; and that there is still a residual willingness to work closely with the UK on these matters, which is almost surprising in some cases. This is particularly true given, first, the small size of the resource at the European level; and, secondly, the even smaller resource and aptitude for involvement in detailed negotiations on many of the technical issues in many smaller member states with small financial services sectors. There still seems to be a very big opportunity for the UK to play a major part in those bodies. We have not been frozen out and we must make sure that we remain as active as possible.
Secondly, there is a problem with the new architecture throughout financial services regulation and how it relates to the European bodies. According to the draft Bill, the PRA will exercise the UK vote on the European Banking Authority and the insurance authority, while the FCA will exercise the UK vote on the European Securities and Markets Authority. However, substantial areas of the ESA’s work that are not the primary responsibility of the institution that holds the voting seat apply, so there will be a real problem there with the relationship between the UK and the European bodies. That can be dealt with only through good co-ordination at the UK end.
As the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, pointed out, the Government plan to have an MoU involving all our bodies here that are related to this. However, as we saw with the tripartite agreement, MoUs on their own are not worth the paper they are written on if the participants in the MoU never meet or if they have fundamentally different views about what to do. It seems that although an MoU is no doubt necessary, it is not sufficient in this area. In their evidence to our Joint Committee, a number of bodies—including the CBI and Nationwide, for example—suggested that a way of dealing with this would be to establish an international regulatory committee of the various bodies of the Bank and the Treasury here in the UK. It would be responsible for co-ordinating British involvement in the European regulatory activities. This seems to me to be an extremely sensible suggestion.
The Joint Committee suggested that this committee should, because of its importance, report to the Chancellor and be chaired by the Treasury. I agree, although I might add, in parenthesis, that it should be chaired by someone from the Treasury with a sophisticated understanding of how the EU institutions and authorities work and what is realistically achievable in both the short and medium term. This may be a big ask but it is the best chance that we have. These are sensible suggestions, which I hope the Government will adopt. I also hope that the Treasury and the Bank will encourage their brightest people to work with the EU bodies, either as UK reps on their various committees, or as permanent or seconded members of staff. British voices around the table need to be as numerous and as resonant as possible.
I realise that the Government are still considering our committee’s recommendations and it may be slightly premature for the Minister to give a definitive response on this issue. However, I hope he will urge those of our recommendations that relate to EU co-ordination on his colleagues.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard
The noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, was quite right to start with a tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, the chairman of Sub-Committee A. As a fellow member of Sub-Committee A, I strongly endorse these plaudits.
I want to commend our little report and to put three questions arising from it to the Minister. The questions follow, quite neatly, the logic of the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Newby.
The City of London, as one of the three great global financial markets, is recognised in most, though perhaps not all, EU capitals as a major EU asset. In most other EU capitals, with perhaps one significant exception, the health of the City is seen as important to the Union. The City’s voice is being given due weight, so witnesses told the committee, as the EU’s financial supervisory framework develops. This seems to be developing in ways in which the committee, certainly, and, we understood, the Government, supported. That was the message of the admirably clear and positive reply to the committee which the Financial Secretary sent on 21 September. I am grateful for that reply.
The UK is playing a leading role in setting up the new structure, as one would expect, given the pre-eminence of the London market. Of course, qualified majority voting applies, so we cannot be sure of getting our own way on every issue, but so far, so good. The City is pretty relaxed, the committee’s report is pretty reassuring and the Government’s response is equally reassuring and supportive. So far so good, or so I thought. Here I come to my first question to the Government. Is it the case, as reported in the press, that one of the safeguards sought by the Prime Minister in the middle of the night of 9 December was a carve-out from qualified majority voting and a return to unanimity specifically for decisions on the scope of the new ESAs; and, if so, why?
The City of London has benefited enormously from Mrs Thatcher’s success in securing qualified majority voting for the internal market in the Single European Act by persuading her colleagues in other European capitals, and, in particular, her colleague in a particular European capital, to drop the unanimity requirement for single market legislation—it had protected only protectionism. The City as a result grew much stronger, absolutely and relative to other EU markets, as a result of pan-European liberalisation made possible by the Single European Act. As a result, the whole EU economy became more competitive. The task is by no means yet complete, but there has been considerable net gain, and, in particular, a net gain for the UK as well as the EU. For that, we all owe a great debt to Mrs Thatcher.
Why would we want a carve-out now? Why would we want a return to unanimity, turning the clock back 25 years? Did we consider what use others, who are less keen than us on liberalisation, might make of the precedent that we were setting if we succeeded? Did we think we could maximise our chances of success by raising this arcane matter—if indeed we did, as I am asking a factual question—in the middle of the night with no prior warning or preparation of the ground? What were we on about, specifically with regard to the ESAs?
That is question one. Question two follows, and is pretty obvious. What is plan B? If, on the issue of the ESAs, there is a lurking threat, which the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, the witnesses who gave evidence to it and the Government, in their reply to the Select Committee, all failed to identify, and if the Government despair of finding sufficient allies to create a blocking minority to oppose this threat, how, following the failure of their proposal in the night of 9 December, do the Government intend to counter it? What, please, is plan B?
My third question is much more general. We know that new treaty articles, the provisions of which would apply only to the eurozone member states, are now being drafted. We know that their aim is to reinforce budgetary discipline, enhance economic convergence and thereby improve financial stability. My understanding is that they will spell out that this closer co-operation among the 17, which would be meeting much more frequently, must not encroach on the competencies of the union of 27 or undermine the single market, and specifically spell out that EU law will take precedence over these new provisions. Furthermore, provided no one tries to stop it, the Commission will be present in the room to ensure that there is no encroachment on the rights and no conflict with the laws of the EU of 27, because that is of course the Commission’s job as guardian of the treaties. Provided that no one tries to stop it, the Court of Justice will be watching to make sure that that is observed.
On the face of it, that is okay. Yet I am very uneasy. Eurozone meetings will be about financial stability. It seems implausible that they will not, in some informal way, touch on financial regulation and supervision, because they are, after all, the means by which financial stability is assured. The meetings will not of course reach decisions because the Commission, provided no one stops it from attending, will be there to ensure that no decisions are reached and to remind the 17 of the rules of the game. However, suppose that members reach an informal consensus on a regulatory or supervisory issue. For example, suppose the issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, the case for declaring an emergency and imposing bans on matters such as short selling, was discussed—and it is for the Council to define an emergency. Suppose that there is informal consensus that the Council should define an emergency and state that there is an emergency situation. It seems to be highly likely that the 17, having reached such an informal consensus, could find a qualified majority for it in the subsequent ECOFIN council—perhaps on the following day. Even if we strongly disagreed, even if the proposed decision was unwelcome to the City and even if the Government opposed it with all their customary eloquence in the Council the following day, the die would have been cast the night before. That is my worry.
To that extent, I understand why the Prime Minister wanted safeguards. I do not know what specifically he wanted—none of us does—and a number of us, including the noble Lord, Lord Lawson of Blaby, judging by his question before the Recess, are a little surprised about that. It surely would have been a normal courtesy to inform Parliament, and I rather think—although I will not say so in definitive terms in the presence of the noble Lord, Lord Roper, who is, as always, in his place—it may be a requirement for the scrutiny committees to be informed of a legislative proposal. However, so far, we have not been informed of what safeguards were sought. I am relying purely on press reports that one of them concerned the ESAs and the subject of our debate.
Nor do I begin to understand the tactics followed by the Government. Indeed, I find it hard to resist the unworthy suspicion that they may, for domestic reasons, have wanted to make impossible demands. That is quite unworthy, so I will not pursue it. I am anxious to be constructive. My final question is whether the Government will now adopt the course that seems to be the one most likely to provide the safeguard that the Prime Minister may have wanted, if I am right in defining the unease that may have led him to want safeguards. It is a course that would guarantee that the City’s voice was always heard from the start of any relevant eurozone debate and before any unwelcome informal consensus of 17 could emerge.
I again urge the Government to reflect on Article 136, the first of the articles in that section of the TFEU that comes under the title:
“Provisions specific to member states whose currency is the euro”.
Article 136 empowers the eurozone countries to consider and adopt measures applying only to them provided such measures are compatible with those adopted by the Union as a whole. It makes clear that all member states may participate in all such discussions, though of course only the eurozone member states may vote since the resultant measures will apply only to them.
My question to the Government is obvious. Does Article 136 not provide us with the precedent we need and the model we want? Is not the strongest safeguard we could have the right to be there, to be in the room, when—as I think they will—eurozone discussions stray informally on to matters which are, or should be, for the 27 members of the Union as a whole? Would not the best safeguard be to enshrine that right to be there by embedding the new articles in the existing treaties even though their provisions would apply only to the 17? There would of course be no question of triggering a referendum requirement under the European Union Act 2011 because no powers would have been transferred. Should we not be suggesting that the right course for all 27 countries is to expand the provisions of the title specific to member states whose currency is the euro, provided only that the crucial Article 136 survives?
Do the Government agree that this course would be likely, in practice, to be saleable? In my judgment it would be saleable, instantly, to most of our partners. It would be strongly supported by many of them, I know, precisely because so many of them see healthy competition and a strong City as important for the EU as a whole. I hope the noble Lord will ask Whitehall to reflect very carefully on this point and on Article 136. I do not press for an immediate answer now. I do not expect that. Indeed I would prefer a considered one and would be very happy if the noble Lord would agree to reflect and arrange a letter to come to me and to the rest of us taking part in this debate.
On a personal level, when I was lucky enough to be sent by Prime Minister Thatcher to Brussels as her negotiator, her parting instructions to me were quite simple and rather in line with the worried mother’s instruction, “Go and find out what they are doing and tell them to stop it”. I recall her explaining with some force why an empty chair policy is always wrong, and why we must always be there. I agree with her. It did not work for the French under de Gaulle. So I am very glad, as we were reassured at Questions this week, that we are participating in the discussions in Brussels, and not just as an observer but as a full participant. My concern is about the longer term and about the need to ensure that the outcome of these negotiations when it comes into force is not a two-tier Europe with the interests of the City and the country damaged by what happens in an inner tier from which we have excluded ourselves. I really think we should seek to avoid that outcome. I believe that outcome is still avoidable and I really hope that we are actively seeking in Brussels to ensure that it is avoided.
Lord Woolmer of Leeds
My Lords, first may I add my voice to the congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, on his chairmanship of EU Sub-Committee A and the way in which he has managed to take the committee to a unanimously agreed report. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, and I will be truncating some of my remarks at the end as a result, because that was the second theme on which I was going to remark.
I would like to start by making some observations on the operations of the three supervisory authorities, although I recognise that the Systemic Risk Board itself is of course of enormous importance. In your Lordships’ House I chaired the relevant Select Committee that examined the Lamfalussy proposals at the time, so I have always had a very close interest in them. Although there are successors to the level 3 Lamfalussy committees, they are very different animals. I should like to remark on a few of those differences.
First, the authorities have the power to create a single European Union rulebook in financial services. That gives them the power to issue binding technical standards, effectively secondary legislation. Secondly, they are in some cases being given market-moving responsibilities—that is, responsibilities which, when they exercise them, have the power to move markets immediately: for example the stress testing of banks; the endorsement and regulation of credit rating agencies; third-party recognition of CCPs; and other examples that noble Lords will think of. The nature of the legislation and the exercise of powers of the supervisory authorities needs to reflect that, because it would clearly be very market sensitive.
Thirdly, they have an enhanced ability to ensure harmonised implementation of supervisory practice in all member states. I will look with great interest at the extent to which they have managed to achieve that over 27 member states, but they are certainly pursuing it with some vigour. Fourthly—this has been remarked upon already, and I will return to it—all key decisions will be by majority vote, on policy matters by qualified majority voting, and on other matters by a simple majority. Finally, the link between regulation and financial stability has been strengthened by the establishment of the stability board but also by the contribution of the supervisory authorities to the work of the European stability board.
Now that these authorities have been established, increasing pressure on their workload has emerged. The financial crisis followed by the eurozone problem put a spotlight on financial services. There is a strong political sense, not only in this country but even more so in Europe and the European Parliament, that more regulation is urgently needed. There is mistrust of light-touch regulation and, to a degree, mistrust in some parts of the European Parliament of the position of the United Kingdom. In the face of this, the resources of these supervisory agencies are indeed very limited, as the noble Lord remarked earlier. They depend heavily on financial regulators and other member states. I regard this as a good thing. It certainly should be a very good thing for the United Kingdom because, in order to function at all, they need an enormous input of resources and expertise from member states. That should place the United Kingdom in a very strong position.
It is important that the supervisory agencies have proper time to develop proposals for legally binding standards, time to consult fully, time to undertake impact assessments, time to draft legislation rigorously and time to consult further on such draft legislation. On 11 October, the executive director of ESMA—the European Securities and Markets Authority—remarked that the authority is,
“extremely committed to stakeholder consultation but we are concerned that tight legislative deadlines for ESMA’s work on technical standards and advice will restrict our ability to consult as extensively as we would ideally like”.
A few weeks later, the chair of the authority commented as follows:
“writing … technical standards … is important for achieving a single rule book … The quality of technical standards is crucial for the proper implementation of Directives and Standards. ESMA has made it clear that on average it takes about 12 months to accomplish all steps required for good technical standards. A shorter period negatively affects, for example, the possibility to consult with stakeholders like you”—
he was talking to investment managers. He continued:
“In that perspective it is very unfortunate that the recently agreed Short Selling Regulation requires us to deliver technical standards by the end of March 2012”—
that is, in six months rather than 12. I make this point because there is enormous pressure from level 1 legislation on the supervisory agencies. The legislators, whether the Commission, the Council or the European Parliament, need to be realistic about the timetables for implementation that this means if we are to have effective regulation implementation by the supervisory agencies.
My question to the Minister is whether the Government believe that the supervisory agencies have the capacity to deliver what is expected of them. When I looked at the workloads in the 2012 work programmes for the three agencies, they looked to be extremely busy. Who in the Government—or is the FSA?—assesses the viability of the workloads of the supervisory agencies? What is the process within the UK for considering and endorsing the proposed workloads and priorities of the supervisory agencies? What is the political input into these?
I welcome the report in today’s Financial Times confirming the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, that the latest draft eurozone treaty omits a commitment to closer co-operation towards a single market, recognising that that is a province of the European treaties of the 27 member states. I share the noble Lord’s concern that in practice it is unlikely that the 17 eurozone member states will not indeed look carefully at and discuss the operations, priorities and actions of the supervisory agencies, including the stability of this board, when they meet. I add my support for the question that the noble Lord asked: how do the Government intend to respond to this situation? The constructive suggestion that the noble Lord proposed might be pursued seems an excellent idea.
The United Kingdom ought to continue to be welcomed as a major player in the development and implementation of financial services regulation in the European Union. We are indeed an asset to the Union, and it is simply in the interests not only of the UK but of the EU that the UK continues to be a major financial centre in global terms. I hope that the Government, in all their thinking and in how they address the political and diplomatic relationships and dynamics of the EU, will seek to ensure that that remains the case. I hope that the proposal of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, meets with the Minister’s approval.
Lord Dykes
My Lords, the noble Lord’s remarks indicated quite rightly that a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since those original days when it was in the Lamfalussy territory. Those were early days indeed, pre-crisis, before the world financial crisis started in 2007. I think that we are very grateful in this House not only for the debate today, initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, but for his chairmanship of this particular sub-committee. It has been going for some time and it has taken a long time, but all these complicated matters are bound to do so, as they do in the discussions between the member states. There is no need to criticise that severely, as the press often do. First of all they want it always to be done in a hurry, and then when it is done in a hurry they say that it was done wrongly and superficially and a lot of mistakes were made. These are very complex, technical matters of procedural co-operation, which take a long time to work out.
The noble Lord, Lord Roper, in this place has given excellent leadership in this matter, which is one of the most important subjects that we have discussed in the last 12 months, both on the European Union Select Committee and indeed in the particular sub-committee. The credit rating agencies report, too, has a place in this whole subject, and I will refer to that briefly in a moment. I, too, thank very much the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, for the very shrewd analysis that he gave and for the help that he gave us in framing those three excellent questions. I would like to be tagging along behind him, if he would allow me to do so, and also ask exactly those three questions, but couched probably in less elegant and precise Parnassian language than he is able to muster. There are indeed two procedural positions for the noble Lord, Lord Kerr; I call one Lord Kerr above the table, and the other Lord Kerr below the table. Both are equally valid, depending on the different circumstances of incredibly complex negotiations. His work as the secretary—I do not think the word “scribe” is adequate—of the convention on the constitution meant that he knew an awful lot about those various clauses that are now in the Lisbon treaty.
Once again it has been a period of education for people in this country about the need for us to really keep in step with the rest of the European Union on these matters and not to fall behind. That is not to say that in this case the particular sector that we are discussing is behind in any way. Indeed, the City of London is a leader in this field and all of us are very proud of the leading role that it plays in financial matters, investment business and banking. It is a leader not just for the United Kingdom, one has to stress, but for the whole of the European Union and, indeed, the whole of the world. The single market has mostly been developing with material things and retail rather than financial transactions so far, but now we are coming more and more into the field of financial transactions.
I suppose that one of the leading sectors in Germany would be the motor industry, a gigantic motor industry of which Mercedes and BMW are probably—I hope the Japanese will forgive me for saying—the two leading motor car manufacturers in the world. However, in no sense does that just belong to Germany. That belongs not only to the whole of Europe but the whole of the world. The effect of the German motor car production industry has huge ramifications in the whole world and indeed particularly in the European Union, not least in the new eastern European member states. When there are major sectors in each country, they belong to the whole Union, and the City of London does as well.
I declare my historical interest as a former member of the Stock Exchange from 1965 to 2000, a partner in a major institutional stock-broking firm in London for 10 years, from 1968 to 1978, and then, when politics was taking its sinister grip more and more, an associate of a very famous firm chaired by the then chairman of the Stock Exchange. One saw the attitudes there of the special feeling of apartheid and separation psychologically: the City was unique, nowhere else was like it, and how dare these continental chappies tell us what to do? That feeling persisted until quite recently.
Subsequently, the City began to realise that you do need Europe-wide regulation of all these matters, because if the City is a dominant market, the only way to make it really effective is to have the single rule book, as advocated in this excellent report—I agree with virtually all its contents—and have that imposed on all the others, which may be smaller market entities physically, although growing relatively much bigger all the time. Indeed, with the stock exchanges also merging together in other European capitals, they themselves become more significant. These things are international. I would say that the City of London is now populated mostly by originally non-British banks, and other investment institutions are often originally foreign-owned in the City and elsewhere. This is international. That feeling has now faded away. The general feeling in the City is much better and much more up to date. When one meets colleagues from yesteryear and colleagues nowadays at the rather nostalgic gatherings that we still have—City reunion dinners and lunches occasionally —usually nowadays they are dry, which I think is a very good idea because there is far too much to be discussed to have it over a glass of port, as was the norm in the old days. That feeling is now more modern and harmonised. There is a single market. Thank goodness we are the leaders; it provides a surplus for our non-trade, financial services balance that gives us an overall surplus on our current account. We have seen yet another increase in the trade deficit of this country because we always import far too much, particularly from other advanced countries.
The recent change in the Conservative Party took the clock back. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, did not mention it; he referred only to the late-night summit discussions of 9 December. There was a similar manifestation from our Prime Minister—accidentally, as far as I can tell. I am not sure what happened; no one really is, because there was no proper record. The UK representative at the time, and the Foreign Office, were discomfited by the lack of any preparation for what happened. There has been a manifestation in the Conservative Party of a combination of Bullingdon Club, old-fashioned nationalism and anti-European stuff. It has come out again and again in recent years since the coalition was formed, and has been getting stronger and stronger. The Prime Minister is rightly resisting it but not being successful in so doing.
The sudden, last-minute request caused a crisis and once again there was a ratcheting up of that feeling among the other member states—rightly and understandably, but tragically and sadly for this country—that, “Britain isn’t one of us; it's not a normative member of the Union; it always wants to stay on one side with exclusions, derogations and exceptions; it doesn't want to join the euro; its Prime Minister now says it will never join the euro”—although it has always been the official intention of this country to join the euro, which remains a strong currency despite the problems of one or two overindebted countries. That feeling caused major consternation and needs to be answered by the Government to reassure opinion not only in the other member states but here.
That feeds into the question of our national regulatory authorities rightly being the main agents of the new European structure of overall supervision under the ESA. They will have the power to guide the Europeans, some of whom will be relatively inexperienced in these matters. The situation is complicated by the fact that stock exchanges have only recently got together. That, too, is a very complicated matrix, against the bizarre background of the international debt crisis, which is not only in Europe but elsewhere. Japan is the most overindebted country in the world, with the highest debt ratio. International bond purchasers are now buying Japanese debt, so bizarre has the situation become. The second most overindebted country is the United States. The federal Government could be described as technically bankrupt, and most states are in the same position, although in most cases they can default.
Bringing the two aspects together will mean that we need new, strict and strong Europe-wide financial regulation for the markets, and the outlawing of certain practices that have certainly damaged industry. Speculative business, too, must be regulated properly. It is no good just saying that there must be a free market and a single rulebook that allows businesses to do what they like. They must be properly authorised and regulated. I have anxieties about folding back the FSA structure into the Treasury and the Bank of England. Their record over the years of controlling and supervising correctly and efficiently both the British economy and financial and banking matters has not been wonderful; I say that with sadness. We must get this right. The Government must recover from the mistake made on 9 December, fold in all the new provisions to the Lisbon treaty and come back to sanity so that we can have a proper single European market in financial matters.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
My Lords, now that the clouds have belatedly lifted from that Mount Olympus where the gods known to us as “the usual channels” meet, and a debate on the outcome of the European Council of 9 December has been scheduled for 31 January, we can treat the report before your Lordships' House—which, as other speakers said, covers matters that were at the heart of the discussions at that Council meeting—as an opportunity for a kind of hors d'oeuvre to that wider debate. For that reason, and also because this report is a thoroughly useful and professional look at an arcane and complex subject, I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, and his committee for making such a valuable contribution. I cannot leave the issue of the timing of that wider debate on 31 January without commenting—not for the first time, I fear—that the way debates are scheduled in this House sometimes seems to be carefully designed to minimise the extent to which any views expressed are still valid and topical. Holding the debate on the day after the next European Council seems a miraculous piece of sleight of hand of that kind—surely a perfect example of what I am describing.
Today’s debate is also a serious case of “Hamlet” without the Prince of Denmark, for reasons that my noble friend Lord Kerr has explained. Why is this so? At no stage have the Government brought to the attention of either House of Parliament, or of either House’s scrutiny committee, the text of the protocol on financial regulation that they are widely reported to have tabled at the December European Council, and which appears to have been rejected on that occasion by 26 out of the 27 member states. I can understand why the Government should not be particularly keen to draw attention to that lamentable fiasco. What I cannot understand is by what procedural sleight of hand they can possibly justify failing to convey to Parliament the text of an instrument that was clearly intended to be a piece of EU legislation, and which, had it been adopted, would have altered in a number of respects the further development of the financial regulatory framework which is the object of today’s debate.
I very much hope that the Minister will be able to fill this lacuna in our evidential base and perhaps he might place in the Library of the House tomorrow the text of this famous protocol, which clanks in and out of our debate rather like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. I very much hope that he will also be able to explain to the House why this lacuna has been allowed to occur in the first place. I really cannot see how the House can be expected to perform its required function of overseeing and scrutinising EU legislation if our own Government do not convey to it the text of a piece of EU legislation which it tabled itself. There are plenty of words to describe that action, some of which are not of a very parliamentary kind. “Respect for Parliament” is not an epithet that could be applied to it.
The report before us has some wise things to say about the financial industry being highly mobile, and about global co-operation being essential to ensure that parts of that industry do not relocate outside the EU. This consideration is highly germane to the proposed financial transactions tax, which I appreciate is not covered by this report. Am I correct in assuming that the proposed Tobin tax will be discussed at the next meeting of the G20 finance ministers in February and, if so, that that should provide a clear indication of whether there is any prospect of such a tax being adopted globally? If there is no such prospect—and the chances of the present US Congress enacting a new tax in an election year must be remarkably slender—the risks for the EU, the eurozone or any of its members that decide to go ahead on their own will become very clear, and would bring the rather unworldly debate on this issue down to earth.
Chapter 4 of the report before us is devoted to the UK’s influence on EU legislation in the field of financial services. As other noble Lords have said, Britain is the EU’s centre of this major industry and it is therefore clearly of the utmost importance that Britain’s influence should be deployed both wisely and effectively. Shortly before the December European Council, one of the Government’s supporters in the other place, Mr Jo Johnson, argued in an article in the Financial Times that the last thing London’s financial services industry should want was to be wrapped in the union jack—how wise he was.
If only the Government had paid attention to him—but they did not. The least that can be said about the manoeuvring at the December European Council is that it does not make the task of deploying that influence any easier. But it could be a good deal worse than that. The risks of marginalisation are very real, and the Government have yet to explain convincingly how they propose to avoid them. Perhaps the Minister will either do that when he replies to this debate or will take the matter away and reflect—I have no doubt that we will return to this on 31 January.
Altogether it is not easy to be optimistic about the developments in this field of financial regulation and supervision. The earlier unity of purpose in the G20 seems to be ebbing away—taking with it the prospects for strengthening the world’s defences against the next crisis when it comes along. There is a widely perceived leadership vacuum which is sapping the chances of restoring confidence in the financial markets. The people who cheered the loudest at the lamentably inadequate outcomes of the G20 summit in Cannes, and of the December European Council, actively want the eurozone to collapse and want Britain out of the European Union—either of which courses would have extraordinarily damaging consequences both for this country and for London’s financial services industry. It is surely time that the Government recognise that their mantra “we are all in this together” applies beyond the boundaries of this nation.
Baroness Valentine
I declare that I am chief executive of London First, a not-for-profit business membership organisation which includes financial institutions among its membership. I am also a board member of a Triple Point venture capital trust.
It is very easy when discussing complex regulatory matters to focus disproportionately on the detail of the regulations themselves. The risk is that we lose sight of the purpose of the regulatory regime and whether it is fit for that purpose. For that reason, I greatly welcome today's debate.
The regulation of the financial system—globally, in Europe and here in the UK—is going through tremendous change. This is an understandable reaction to the banking crisis of 2008, and it is necessary to restore public confidence in the system. However, the impact is doubled in the UK thanks to the fact that we are simultaneously implementing a wholesale restructuring of our own regulatory regime little more than a decade after the last such major change.
In my contribution today, I would like to touch briefly on three issues that arise from the UK's changing regulatory structure and its relationship with its European counterparts: first, the importance of protecting the international competitiveness of our financial services sector and, therefore, our potential for growth; secondly, the need to ensure optimal co-ordination and collaboration between the new domestic supervisors and their European counterparts; and, thirdly, the need to resource all these regulators appropriately.
First, on ensuring that the UK is globally competitive, while the financial sector has been the unloved one since the credit crisis, emotion should be superseded by good economic sense when determining how it is policed in the future. This is important because the financial sector in the UK employs around 1 million people directly—and many more indirectly. It is also a major contributor of income and corporate tax revenue. Finally, as we attempt to increase exports to compensate for stagnant domestic demand, financial services are a vital source of future growth as one of our primary export industries.
Across the piece, the financial sector exists to provide essential services to Governments, businesses and individuals. The more effectively it can provide those services, the better for us all. In this context, I am surprised that the Government have failed to include the international competitiveness of UK financial services within the objectives of the successor bodies to the FSA. It seems wholly inconsistent for the Prime Minister to wield a veto in Brussels, at great political expense—ostensibly to defend the City from uncompetitive EU regulation—only then to exclude competitiveness from the remit of our domestic regulators. Margaret Cole, the interim managing director at the FSA, which will form the core of the new FCA, has publicly supported the inclusion of such an objective, and I would urge the Government to take note.
Secondly, on ensuring UK influence in Europe, if the UK’s interests are to be given due consideration as the new European regime develops, we need to ensure that we have the right people in the right meetings saying the right things. Staff at the new UK regulators will have a key role to play in contributing to Europe-wide decision making through, for instance, regulatory colleges. I share the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Newby, that there is a potential risk here in that the UK’s new “twin peaks” model does not mirror the structure at the EU level. Consideration of retail banking regulation, for example, may well require insights from both the prudential and conduct of business perspective. As a result, when seeking UK representatives for ESA meetings, the UK may find itself trying to fit square pegs into round holes.
It is vital that our new agencies are joined up in their approach and that there is effective dialogue and information-sharing between them. I welcome the Government’s promise to legislate to require memoranda of understanding between the major players—the Treasury, the FCA, the PRA and the Bank of England. However, I join the noble Lord, Lord Newby, in supporting the suggestion in the draft report of the Joint Committee on the draft Financial Services Bill. It recommends the establishment of a committee to ensure that the UK authorities agree consistent objectives and exercise their functions accordingly. This further safeguard would give significant reassurance to the industry. Presenting a single, coherent voice with maximum influence in the international context is vital and should not be left to chance.
Thirdly, on resourcing our regulators properly, let me turn to the quality of regulatory staff. All of the new European supervisory agencies, the successor bodies to the FSA, the Treasury and the Bank of England need high-quality staff to deal with the extraordinary challenges that this sector faces. It is therefore vital that the new supervisors at both the UK and European level are not only adequately resourced in terms of numbers, but also offer sufficient remuneration to attract and retain the brightest and the best. In many cases, the best way of achieving this is to bring in employees who have worked or are working within the industry, and a more flexible approach to secondments from industry would be welcome.
I am heartened by the report’s recognition of the contribution that UK regulators, as supervisors of the largest and most sophisticated markets, have historically made within the European supervisory context. I hope that the expertise and experience of our regulators will continue to play an important role within the ESAs, and I encourage the FSA and its successors to provide more experienced staff to assist the new supervisors as widely as possible. We and our European partners have a common interest in ensuring their success, and such engagement can help to ensure that we achieve a co-ordinated and committed European approach rather than one in which individual member states operate unilaterally.
To conclude, over centuries and through many crises the UK has built a competitive advantage, a global reputation for being a safe and honest place in which to do business, and offers a deep pool of knowledge and expertise that has made it at least one of the world’s leading financial centres, if not the number one. It is right to review our regulatory arrangements in view of the recent economic turmoil, but one is left to wonder whether there is a limit to the number of times we need to reinvent this particular wheel. What is paramount is a stable and successful financial system that supports the country’s continuing economic growth.
Baroness Wheatcroft
My Lords, in taking advantage of the gap I know that I must be brief, but I hope that noble Lords will forgive me if, as a member of the sub-committee on financial services, I underline the point that has now been made several times that it is very important that we have a single organisation to represent the UK’s thoughts on financial regulation in Europe, and a committee to do that seems to be imperative. My second point concerns the use of the emergency powers that could see European organisations overriding national regulators. This should occur only in extremis. The noble Lord, Lord Harrison, has acknowledged that there are restrictions on when these powers could be used, but quite rightly his report also noted the comment by the FSA that,
“only time will tell whether in practice those restrictions prove to be sufficient”.
Given the EU’s constant efforts to extend its reach, a degree of wariness on this point seems justified. The Government, in their response to the committee’s report, said their expectation was that the calling of an emergency would not be a common event. Well, emergencies seem to have been quite common of late so we should not rest our guard on the principle that national regulators must remain in the driving seat.
That takes me to my next point concerning the current arguments over the capital requirements directive. This is the EU legislation intended to bring in the higher capital requirements detailed in Basel III. At the height of the financial crisis, when the G20 was trying to map out a route to greater financial stability, those requirements appeared to be setting a limit below which banks should not be allowed to go. Now, however, there are some in Europe who take another line. They are of the view that the capital requirements directive should be seen as declaring a maximum level of capital requirement. This would scupper Britain’s plans for implementing the Vickers report and so Britain is holding out against maximum harmonisation. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, tells us that we have nothing to fear on this front; that the argument is won already. Personally, I feel that we should remain vigilant until we know that the argument is won. Would it be entirely surprising if that thought had influenced the Prime Minister when he wielded the veto? I believe that separation of the banks is something worth fighting for. We are now all too well aware of the havoc that can be caused by a cavalier financial sector. If the UK judges that it needs more caution from our banks than some countries wish to impose on theirs, it should be our right to do so.
Finally, I would like to make a point about bank accounts. Bank accounts, as far as I am concerned, have become so complicated that they serve to mask the true situation rather than to unveil it. That is why, although we have already had comment on the ratings agencies, it is worth remembering that the banks were all given a clean bill of health in this country by their accountants and auditors. It seems to me that one of the useful things the new EU regulatory organisations could do is take another look at bank accounts and accounting standards and the auditors who police them because they probably are no longer fit for purpose.
Lord Liddle
My Lords, I declare an interest in that I chair the think tank, Policy Network, which has written a report for the City of London Corporation on the challenges of managing European financial regulation.
This has been an interesting debate, as most debates on the report of your Lordships’ European Select Committee are. The noble Lord, Lord Harrison, has produced an excellent report. It shows an admirable balance and expresses sensible and proportionate views on financial regulation. If I might use an F word in this Chamber, I think the system being developed is one of pragmatic federalism. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, that the national bodies which are closest to the financial institutions should remain in day-to-day control. However, if we are going to have a single financial market at EU level, we need a single rulebook and a power for the European agencies to override national agencies in circumstances of crisis.
I rather agree with the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, and from this side of the House share his concern that the institutional upheaval which our domestic financial regulatory system is going through may lead to some loss of influence in Brussels. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Newby, has put in much effort on the Joint Committee on domestic financial regulation. On the basis of the little work that I have done in this area, I believe that how we manage the Brussels relationship will be as important as, if not far more important than, the structure of British domestic regulation. There is a risk that we will become obsessed with the question of how we shift the furniture around at home when the real issues affecting financial regulation will be to do with what happens in Brussels.
There are grounds for concern about the way in which this relationship with Brussels is being addressed. I agree with the many noble Lords in this debate who have taken issue with the stance taken by the Prime Minister at the Brussels summit in December. It seems to us that, in place of the sensible, proportionate and balanced approach that the Select Committee here has adopted, the Prime Minister has portrayed what is happening in Europe as a torrent of EU regulation which threatens the City of London. This position is both exaggerated in substance and profoundly unhelpful to the City’s ability to secure its interests in Brussels. It is a profound mistake for the British Government to define the City of London as primarily a British interest that we need to protect against the European hordes. Rather, the way to win the argument in Brussels is to point out, accurately, that the City of London is a great global financial centre, the financial centre of the biggest single market in the world, and is an asset to the whole European Union. That should be the starting point of our attitude to Brussels.
The need for these European regulatory agencies has not just come out of the blue; it is not just some Brussels plot. It is due to our having had the most enormous banking crisis since the 1930s. I think that all sides of the House recognise that financial services need reregulation. There was colossal market failure. This involved a massive cost to the taxpayer. Frankly, our public finances are now in such a fragile state that we cannot afford to see it happen again, so we have to have much tighter regulation of the financial sector. It was obvious that that reregulation had to be done at European level because so much had been done to advance the integration of the European financial market. Indeed the much derided Lisbon strategy had a financial services action plan which greatly took forward the liberalisation of wholesale markets, so that when we got to the crisis and in its aftermath, the chairman of the FSA, the noble Lord, Lord Turner, was quite right to pose the choice that either we renationalised financial markets and abandoned integration across Europe or we accepted the need for reregulation at EU level. We must stick firm to that principle.
It is also what the majority of the City of London thinks. Of course there are people who will be quite happy in the City to see London as some kind of offshore centre from the rest of Europe. There would be people who would like to see that, but I think the majority view is that one wants to see sensible European reregulation of financial services. That would be particularly true of the American banks which have come to London because it is the route into the European single market. The fact that we are part of an integrated financial market in Europe is crucial to the presence of a number of European banks that have located here. We need to be part of a European market that is properly regulated and we need to secure a level playing field across the EU.
The attitude of mind towards the new agencies and structures has to be positive. We have to stop trying to fight old battles about retaining the national independence of our agencies. We have to make the new system work in all our interests. The City of London recognises that we have to make this new system work. However, there are bound to be concerns. The track record of the European Commission in the way it has put forward financial services regulations in the past has not always been the best. In a way, the existence of these new agencies is a source of strength, because they should be a source of expertise which understands the markets better than the European Commission might. This should be seen as an opportunity for London to influence regulation in a sensible way.
Many noble Lords, such as my noble friend Lord Woolmer and the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, made the point that we need to bolster the capacities of the new agencies. That is evident from the story of the bank stress tests. The problem with the tests has been that national regulators have been too defensive about their own banks and too unwilling to share information about them with the EBA. We need to break out of that mentality. There needs to be more information-sharing. That is an important UK interest.
There is a real problem for the UK in deciding on regulation. Sixty per cent to 70 per cent of the business in Europe is done in London but we have fewer than 10 per cent of the votes in the Council on issues that are decided by majority voting. There is a real asymmetry. We have to recognise that, in the aftermath of the banking crisis, there is a rise in hostility to the financial sector across Europe. I was recently at a seminar in Sweden where a former Minister said to me, “I always used to support you lot in Britain when you argued for light-touch regulation, but don’t think we are ever going to be taken in by all that load of baloney again”, or in some similar words in Swedish. We have to understand that the mood of the times is difficult. But the way to overcome this is to stress that just as the German car and capital goods industries are there because they specialise in the single market and are a great asset to Europe, and Italian shoes and French luxury goods are part of the specialisation of the European single market, so is the City of London. It is an asset for the whole of Europe.
In conclusion, I will just say two things about how we can be successful in ensuring that the regulation of the City is sensible. First, I agree so much with what the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said about not putting a union jack all over the City. That is not the way to defend it. Jo Johnson MP was absolutely right about that. Secondly, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said, let us make sure that we are in the room. We look forward to the Government’s reply in due course about the points he made on Article 136.
This has been an excellent debate. It is of vital national interest that the new arrangements work well from a UK point of view. The risk is that we mishandle this and, in doing so, destroy one of our great national assets.
Lord De Mauley
My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have participated today in—as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said—a thorough and insightful debate on the new EU supervisory framework. I particularly pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, and the members of the EU Sub-committee on Economic and Financial Affairs and International Trade for their report. It is of considerable interest as we seek to strengthen supervision following the recent financial crisis, both domestically and internationally.
In the United Kingdom, through the Financial Policy Committee, the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority, we are bringing greater judgment and foresight to micro and macrosupervision, ensuring that we put greater focus on the key links between the two. Likewise, as your Lordships have made clear, it is vital that we reform at the European level to ensure effective and consistent supervision of financial services, to realise the full potential of a single and stable market in European financial services. Noble Lords have also today referred to the very real threats that face us. That is why the Government—along with, I am pleased to say, the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, and all other noble Lords today—welcome and fully support the establishment of the three new European supervisory authorities as well as the European Systemic Risk Board. Indeed, we are very pleased to have the European Banking Committee here in London.
Together, this new framework has the potential fundamentally to improve the quality and consistency of supervision, to ensure more effective rule-making and enforcement, and to improve identification of risks in the system. I welcome the fact that the committee’s report shares those objectives and, along with its recommendations, supports the Government’s position on the European supervisory authorities. Of course, there is still much work to do to improve and refine supervision through this new framework to allow the new institutions to build a reputation for their independence and quality of rule-making. It is a substantial task and the drive by some to grant even more power and responsibility would in our view merely add to the challenges they already face and risk undermining the success that we expect them to deliver between now and the 2014 review. Several noble Lords have referred to resourcing issues. I will come to those in a moment.
The Government believe that there are three key priorities for the new EU authorities. First, as the committee has argued, it is vital to build a single rulebook and ensure the implementation of robust, internationally consistent regulatory standards in order to minimise the risks of regulatory arbitrage. That work needs to be based on open consultation and a rigorous assessment of the effects on growth and the competitiveness of EU business, balanced with the need to protect financial stability and users of financial services. Secondly, the actions of the ESAs should not undermine national supervision. Here again, the committee was very clear. The ESAs, when mandated by legislation, have rule-making powers and are required to ensure that those rules are implemented, mediating if disputes between supervisors arise. Day-to-day supervision and the exercise of judgment within the law are not within the ESAs’ remit.
Finally, we support greater co-ordination and the valuable role that the ESAs can bring in providing consistency of supervision across the EU. We see this as spreading best practice rather than forcing all supervisors to take the same approach. The business models, size and structures of firms—some very local, some global—require different approaches. It is vital that regulators have the capacity to deal with issues unique to their markets.
I would like to take the opportunity to comment on two further themes in the report. The Government strongly agree with the committee that UK influence in the ESAs is important. We have many talented people in the UK authorities and our history of consultation and impact assessments means that we have both the evidence and the experience to play a leadership role. I will return to this, if I may, in a moment.
The regulated community will also have an important role to play—not just in providing evidence of the cost, but also in assessing the potential benefits of effective regulation. We also agree with the committee’s assessment of the ESA’s powers and its wish to be consulted prior to an emergency being called. I will also come back to that point. Where emergencies are called, we will always endeavour to provide information in a timely manner.
The noble Lord, Lord Harrison, raised a number of specific issues. He was not entirely satisfied with the Government’s response to the committee’s request to be consulted if the Government envisage asking the Council to declare an emergency or detect that another member state is likely to do so. Given the rapidly moving nature of such situations—often outside normal business hours—there may be practical considerations. Perhaps more importantly, there is often a great deal of uncertainty in these periods: sometimes markets and commentators overreact, so absolute confidentiality is of paramount importance. There will, therefore, be the key issue of market sensitivity and so on. Within those constraints, I can confirm the Government’s intent to inform the committee as far as is possible about a Council declaration of an emergency.
Regarding short selling and credit default swaps, as an exception to a general rule about ESAs not having enhanced powers without the need to declare an emergency, the noble Lord referred to the committee’s argument that giving ESMA intervention powers might be necessary. Indeed, there was quite a lot of debate about short selling. The Government believe that there is a case for giving national regulators a reserve power to impose a temporary ban on certain asset classes where there is a threat to the stability of the market. This would probably be in the context of an emergency situation, but could be confined to one or more local markets where a ban may be appropriate and there is a need to respect that national decision. In these cases, ESMA should have a significant role in co-ordinating the response and ensuring that any decisions are implemented and enforced.
The noble Lord, Lord Harrison, mentioned that the committee had expressed a concern that the Government’s decision to abolish the FSA and replace it with the new regulatory authorities could compromise the UK’s leadership role in engaging with the ESAs. I understand the concern. The Government are fully committed to ensuring that the UK authorities continue to take a leadership role in European reforms, working both with one another and with the wider stakeholder community to deliver sound reform. This complements changes proposed to the UK framework. Given the relatively small size of the staff in each ESA, the ESAs will rely heavily on their members. We will expect the FSA—and, in due course, the PRA and the FCA—to put significant time and effort into ensuring that the UK’s voice is heard and that the ESA’s decisions are appropriate. The UK regulatory authorities will be well placed to influence and take part in the technical work of the ESAs—for example, the development of binding technical standards and the production of guidance and advice.
Alongside this, the FSA—and, again, in due course, the PRA and the FCA—will have a significant formal role in representing the UK’s competent authorities in the ESA board of supervisors and voting in the board on ESA decisions. Similarly, the Governor of the Bank of England will be represented in the ESRB and vote on any warnings and recommendations. Finally, it will also be very important that the UK regulatory authorities encourage their staff to take up temporary secondments in the new ESAs. I think the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, referred to that. The FSA is currently reviewing its staffing and deployment policies to ensure that they promote such participation in the new ESA. We will expect the Bank of England to take a similar approach to the ESRB. Therefore, I generally agree with the comments of my noble friend Lord Newby in this regard.
On macroeconomic stability, the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, spoke about the sharing of information. A memorandum of understanding that fully respects the confidentiality of individual firms has now been drawn up by the agencies and is in the public domain. I hope noble Lords will accept that we are moving in the right direction on that.
The noble Lord, Lord Harrison, referred to the Government’s proposal to legislate to require the establishment of a statutory MoU between Her Majesty’s Treasury, the Bank of England, the PRA and the FCA, and the further use of MoUs to frame relationships between regulators. I accept my noble friend Lord Newby’s point that an MoU on its own is not enough, but I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, that the draft legislation provides for the UK regulators to include in the MoU provisions relating to co-operation between any of them and a body exercising functions relating to the stability of the UK financial system or the regulation of financial services.
Perhaps I should also say that legislation can go only so far in setting down how a wide range of functions are to be conducted. Therefore, it is entirely reasonable and, indeed, vital that it is planned and conducted carefully, set down in detail and agreed and understood by all. There will of course be ample opportunity to debate the legislation over the forthcoming months.
The noble Lords, Lord Harrison and Lord Woolmer, the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, and my noble friend Lord Newby asked about the resourcing of the ESAs, especially the EBA. They are right: the ESAs, including the EBA, have limited resources in the sense of the number of officials directly employed. However, they can and do call on the resources of the national regulators. This enables them to secure the necessary expertise and experience. If an emergency were to be called, that co-operation from national regulators—including, importantly, those in the United Kingdom—would ensure that the necessary work could be undertaken. As I say, we are committed to providing that assistance.
I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Marlesford for his suggestion about stamp duty, which I will certainly pass to my colleagues at the Treasury.
The noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, and my noble friend Lord Newby referred to the recommendation of the Joint Committee on an international co-ordination committee. The Government welcome all the work that the Joint Committee has done. We are considering its recommendations and will respond in due course.
My noble friend Lord Newby specifically asked whether the capital requirements directive could limit our ability to implement the Independent Commission on Banking. My noble friend Lady Wheatcroft also referred to this. The CRD is designed as maximum harmonisation legislation. This could indeed restrict our ability to impose higher standards but others agree with us, including the ESRB. Therefore, in discussions in the Council and the European Parliament we will work hard with like-minded member states to ensure that the CRD, when adopted, will include flexibility to implement the ICB recommendations and, more generally, to impose higher standards.
The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, asked three questions, which my noble friend Lord Dykes echoed. Both noble Lords have given me much food for thought. I assure them that the United Kingdom will continue to use all avenues available to it to press its case, suitably evidenced by facts and examples of the costs and benefits of the UK’s thinking on the key issues. We do not expect to be outvoted by our European partners, but we have recently experienced Commission proposals that are not evidence-based, and could have a negative effect on growth and harm the EU’s global financial centre in London. Securing safeguards would have been helpful in ensuring that these concerns could not be ignored. The consequence of raising these concerns has been beneficial in focusing minds across Europe on the need to ensure that legislation is evidence-based and that the ESAs are not overburdened with new powers before they have built a reputation prior to the 2014 review. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, gracefully offered me the opportunity to respond further in writing, and I shall take advantage of that offer.
The noble Lord, Lord Woolmer, asked several questions. He asked whether the Government believe that the ESAs have a capacity to deliver what they are mandated to deliver. Yes, we do. The ESAs were established with a view to undertaking certain tasks and were resourced accordingly. Their operation and success was to be reviewed, as I have said, in 2014. However, if additional tasks are given, they will not have sufficient resources, nor are they likely to be able to procure the expertise or experienced supervisors. That is a matter that we need to keep a very careful eye on. He also asked whether we agree that engagement with the EU is important. Of course we do. Ministers and senior officials are engaging with our European partners on a daily basis, either in meetings, bilaterals, or through other means.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, that a financial transaction tax, the so-called Tobin tax, would need to be agreed globally. I note the continuing interest in the intervention of the Prime Minister in the European Council on 9 December. I am afraid that I am going to disappoint him on the matter of Hamlet’s father. I do not think that he will be surprised to hear that we do not publish informal draft text proposals. This has been government practice for a long time and continues to be so, particularly when those taking part are in the middle of negotiations.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
Am I to understand that the reason the Government give for not conveying the text of a proposal for European legislation to both Houses is because they were entering into negotiations on it? Can I deduce from that that they would have been willing to compromise on the text they put forward, and if so, why did they walk away from the table?
Lord De Mauley
My Lords, to answer that in detail would be way above my pay grade. I will see what I can find for the noble Lord by way of an answer, but I cannot promise anything.
The noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, spoke about the importance of UK competitiveness of financial services to the UK economy. I agree with her. Financial stability supported by an effective regulatory framework provides a strong platform for the growth of the financial services sector. She asked how we will ensure the UK’s influence in the ESAs. I have covered a lot of this in earlier answers, but I shall just say once again that the Government are fully committed to ensuring that the United Kingdom authorities continue to take a leadership role in European reforms, working both with one another and the wider community to deliver sound reform which complements the changes proposed to the UK framework. She asked a specific question about staff remuneration to attract and retain the best people. I agree that the ESAs need the best and most qualified staff.
The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, questioned our commitment to Europe. We remain a full member of the European Union, and this membership is—I am agreeing with him—vital to our national interests. It makes us the gateway to the largest single market in the world, which secures half of our exports and underpins millions of British jobs. I assure him that Ministers from all departments continue to engage actively in defence of UK interests in meetings in Brussels and bilaterally with their member-state counterparts. We will continue actively to engage on all financial services legislation and secure our national interests.
I am conscious of the time. If I have not answered any questions from noble Lords, I will, if I may, write to them. Today’s debate takes place a year after the new EU supervisory framework came into force. The European Stability Risk Board and the ESAs are now established. They have agreed their working procedures and recruited staff to support their tasks. The ESAs in particular face a challenging time in delivering a large number of technical standards in banking, securities and insurance. In doing so, we believe they will build their reputation if they concentrate on quality rather than quantity. The Government are committed to supporting the ESRB and the ESAs as they move forward. We will seek to resist overburdening them with new tasks and prioritise work and limited resources towards their core tasks—namely, improving the quality and consistency of supervision, delivering high-quality rule-making, ensuring effective enforcement and identifying risks to the financial system. The Government will continue our close engagement with our European partners to achieve these objectives.
Lord Harrison
My Lords, social commentators often identify a dank dark day in January after the Christmas celebrations, before the summer, as the time when the nation becomes its most despondent. I rather feel, along with the pathetic fallacy articulated by the romantic poets, that in bringing this debate before Parliament I might identify and echo a mood that is consonant with such depression.
What I am very pleased to say is that this has been an important debate and I welcome the contributions offered by each and every Member—particularly the late contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, who listened patiently to what was said. In contrast, I feel stimulated about the debate and I am quite sure that we will have to return to it in our examinations of these new and important authorities that will have such importance to the United Kingdom, the European Union and more widely.
Noble Lords should forgive me if I do not comment on every contribution, each of which was valuable. However, perhaps on a lighter note, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, on the subtle welcome he gave to the six-month Danish presidency of the EU by his reference to “Hamlet”. Perhaps he might provide such ingenuity on 1 July later this year, when the Cypriots take over the presidency, with a simple reference to “Othello”.