House of Lords
(11 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Drones
(11 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, Her Majesty’s Government and the UK Civil Aviation Authority are working with both the International Civil Aviation Organisation and the European Commission and EU member states on developing harmonised rules and regulation for the safe integration of civil remotely piloted aircraft systems into both European and global air space. The Ministry of Defence is not involved in any bilateral or multilateral discussions specifically on the regulation of the military use of remotely piloted aircraft systems but is involved in more general discussions on arms control, such as the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.
Lord Judd
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that encouraging reply. Does he not agree that, as far as the domestic situation is concerned, whatever the value of drones for emergency services and the like, their increasing availability makes the need for some sort of code an urgent priority? When it comes to the international scene, how do the Government define the difference between extra-judicial killing and legitimate killing? How can transparent accountability for every civilian, not least innocent children, be ensured? How can the use of drones in areas not defined by the UN as conflict zones be justified? Is there not a desperate need for something like the Geneva Conventions?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
The noble Lord has asked several complex questions and I will try to answer some of them. The development of civil systems is clearly a complicated area. Basically, for large unmanned systems, the same rules apply as for manned aircraft. For small unmanned systems—there are now some very small unmanned systems—provided they are within the sight of the person controlling them, regulations need not apply. Clearly, a lot more work is needed in that area. On the international dimension, the question of extra-judicial killings is something which, as those who have read this morning’s Guardian will know, is being actively debated in the United States as we speak.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine
My Lords, on 20 November 2012, the Senior Minister of State at the Foreign Office, the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, assured me that the UN special rapporteur for human rights and countering terrorism was preparing a report to the UN on the issue of drones. That was in response to a question I had asked her along the lines of the Question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Judd, today. Can the noble Lord tell the House what progress there has been in terms of Her Majesty’s Government’s contribution to the report of the special rapporteur and when we can expect it to be forthcoming?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I am not briefed on that specific question and will have to write to the noble Baroness. We are, of course, in conversations with others about the use of drones. On the specific issues being discussed in the United States at the present moment, I simply stress that the United Kingdom has used drones for military purposes only in Afghanistan.
Lord Singh of Wimbledon
My Lords, does the Minister agree that the control of the military use of drones is absolutely necessary internationally? The carrying out of extra-judicial killings in the sovereign airspace of other nations is a very dangerous precedent. Something needs to be done about it very urgently.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, the question is very much about the use across national boundaries in areas where there is not an active conflict. I simply stress again that the United Kingdom has used military drones only inside Afghanistan and that we are in Afghanistan at the invitation of the Afghan Government. There is an active debate in the United States about the American use of drones across national frontiers in areas where it is a question of terrorist threats to the United States rather than local conflict.
Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead
Since we know that 51 states now have the technology to use drones, does the Minister agree that it is essential that a proper legal framework is urgently put in place and that action is taken to ensure that there is accountability and reparation when things go wrong as a result of a drone attack? Does the UK support the stated view of the UN special rapporteur, who is to conduct an investigation into the spread of drone technology, that we urgently need to know the extent of civilian casualties, the identity of militants targeted and the legality of strikes where the UN does not recognise that there actually is a conflict?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, unmanned aerial vehicles are spreading around the world. My figures say that some 80 countries now have some capacity, or have been involved in purchasing such capacity, so this is spreading very quickly. Clearly, we do need to develop international law and practice on this. We also have large issues about what happens in ungoverned space, such as aspects of the Sahel and, until very recently, some parts of Somalia. I stress that the largest single use of unmanned aerial vehicles for military purposes is in surveillance and reconnaissance and not in direct strikes.
The Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells
My Lords, I welcome the Minister’s remarks about the progress in the United States. However, does not a world characterised by the proliferation of armed drones, without an internationally supported framework of regulation, undermine our core interests such as preventing armed conflict, promoting human rights and strengthening international legal regimes? Could the present role of the United Kingdom be one which enables and begins the process of trying to find some kind of international regulatory process?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, there are some benefits from unmanned drones, particularly in terms of reconnaissance—maritime reconnaissance off Somalia and so on—because these aircraft have much longer endurance than manned aircraft. I would add that the question of whether distantly controlled aircraft encourage people to be less careful in their use of military weapons is one which I have spent some time studying. I am rather reassured that, because of the ability of unmanned aircraft to loiter over the site, not only is target acquisition more carefully attended to than if you are in a fast aircraft but you are asked to look at what happened afterwards. I am told that this means that those who are controlling these aircraft have a thorough sense of responsibility for what has been done.
Lord West of Spithead
My Lords, following on from the Minister’s previous answer, whenever one makes war less horrible—war is horrible, death is horrible and being involved in the risk is horrible—and kills people remotely from some leafy suburb in the middle of one’s own country, it makes it remote, which has huge implications and is very worrying. It needs a lot of control. Does the Minister agree?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, the Armed Forces are well aware of that and that matter is under active discussion at the present moment.
Housing: Social Housing
(11 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Baroness King of Bow
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to improve the social housing stock during 2013.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for her Question. For 2013-14, the Government have allocated £411.5 million to 38 local authorities and £123 million to 13 housing associations, with stock transferred from local authorities, enabling them to bring properties up to the decent homes standard. This funding is, of course, additional to the local authorities’ own funding. Following self-financing, which was introduced in 2012, local housing authorities now keep their rental income, allowing them to ensure that their properties reach, and most importantly maintain, the decent homes standard.
Baroness King of Bow
The Minister will be aware that the figures that he has just outlined in areas such as Tower Hamlets represent a 60% cut on the money available to improve social housing in the spending review. However, is he also aware that backloading the social housing budget means that those in the worst housing conditions have to wait the longest for upgrades? Can he clarify whether the Secretary of State will ask the Chancellor to increase the amount of money in the next spending review to make up for that previous shortfall and, if so, will they abandon the backloading of the budget that hurts hardest those in the worst housing? Combined with the bedroom tax, this makes people in social housing feel that they are under a sustained and unjust attack from this Government.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
First, perhaps I may correct something that is misunderstood. The bedroom tax is not a tax; it is a benefit. My right honourable friend the Prime Minister made that clear, and it needs to be reiterated. On the point about decent homes and Tower Hamlets specifically, I will share the figures with the House. The decent home benefits grant in 2011-12 was £12.5 million; in 2014-15 it is projected to be £45 million. That, to me, is an increase in any terms.
Baroness Gardner of Parkes
My Lords, will the Minister tell me whether he is aware of the fact that there is quite a supply of housing in London, and that it is simply unusable because people have bought their flats in social high rise housing and now wish to move for various reasons, but no one will give a mortgage on those properties? They are completely locked into them because they are high rise and have a stigma attached to them because they were social housing. Doing something about that would release housing that people could obtain mortgages on, and they could feel confident that in due course they could move on.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
My noble friend is correct; London has a disproportionate amount of non-decent homes, primarily due to the high numbers of homes of non-standard construction that she has highlighted. It is important for the Government to work with the private sector to decide how these homes can best be released for greater housing requirements in London. That said, we are providing a greater number of funds available to London, and, of course, are working closely with the Mayor of London’s office to ensure that we meet the decent homes standard in London.
Lord Martin of Springburn
May I say to the Minister that many young couples went into housing that was post-war? Often these post-war housing estates, good as they were, were four and sometimes five-apartment housing. Now in their advancing years, if they have to leave and downsize, that means having to leave the community they love and have lived in for many years. The community-based housing associations have an excellent record of building two-apartment housing in these housing estates. I hope that every encouragement is given to them.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
First, I agree with the noble Lord about the challenges that young couples face in finding housing. It was not so long ago that my wife and I were a young couple ourselves. Nevertheless, to take up the specific issue, the noble Lord is correct. We have to ensure, as a Government, that we work both with housing associations and the private sector to provide a future housing provision across the country that works for the new generation.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
Will the Minister answer the specific question asked by my noble friend about the backloading of funding, which is extremely important to those who live in the worst conditions in social housing?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
That is a matter that the Secretary of State for the DCLG and the Chancellor will be discussing in the next budget round.
Lord Shipley
Does the Minister agree that there is an urgent need to build more new social housing and that one way that could be done is for the housing borrowing cap of local authorities to be removed and to be substituted by the prudential borrowing code, which enables the self-financing of social housing? That could be backed up by the Local Government Act 2003 so that Ministers have a power to cap any individual local authority that broke the rules. Given the importance of housing and the growth agenda, will the Minister look at that proposal?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
The housing issue, along with other proposals, will be looked at, but I want to make it clear that the Government are investing more in social housing. We are investing over £4.5 billion in the spending review period to deliver up to 170,000 affordable homes in England. This investment, importantly, as I mentioned to the noble Lord, Lord Martin, is about working together across the board in the housing sector, bringing different parties together. This £4.5 billion will leverage an extra £15 billion from the private sector investment, making a total of £19.5 billion investment in social housing up to 2015.
Lord Soley
In his reply on the backloading issue, the Minister referred to another Minister in his own department. May I say that that is not an adequate answer and that we will need an answer of some type to that, even if not at this precise moment? He might be able to give something in writing. When one Minister refers to another in the department, it suggests that the department does not know what is happening.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
I am sorry that the noble Lord feels that way, but it is a matter for the Secretary of State. That is what I said. I will, of course, write to the noble Lord, copying the noble Baronesses, Lady Royall and Lady King, in on the specific issues raised.
Young People: Personal Finances
(11 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they are taking to ensure that young people have a proper understanding of managing personal finances before leaving school.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash)
My Lords, I agree entirely with the sentiment underlying the noble Lord’s Question. The ability to manage one’s finances is a very important skill that all young people should have. The Question is also brilliantly timed as my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education is currently on his feet in another place, outlining the draft programmes of study for the national curriculum, among other things. The new national curriculum will place a renewed emphasis on mathematics, which itself will include a strong focus on arithmetic, money and percentages. In addition, citizenship will include a strong and specific emphasis on financial education.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
I thank the Minister for his reply. Leaving school with the skills, knowledge and confidence to manage money is vital—we agree about that. If those skills are not learnt in school they will probably never be learnt. I found out that the average age when a child makes their first purchase online is 10. What cross-departmental work is going on to ensure that those essential skills are learnt, and would he agree to meet me and some campaigners on the issue to discuss this in more depth and explore what can be done further?
Lord Flight
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, for raising this matter and for the Minister’s reply. This is territory on which I have sought to campaign. Within the two territories to which he referred—mathematics and citizenship—will the territory of understanding concepts be covered? One of the key problems is that unless people have actually had it explained to them, they do not know what a pension or a mortgage is. It is not just about mathematics.
Lord Nash
The noble Lord is absolutely right. The draft programme for study states that pupils will be equipped with the financial skills to enable them to manage their money on a day-to-day basis as well as to plan for future financial needs, and that they understand the concept of wages, taxes, credit, debt, financial risk and a range of more sophisticated financial products. I should hope that any proper education on that front would cover those points.
Lord Laming
Will the Minister assure the House that in his new ministerial responsibilities he will give particular attention to young people who have been in the care of the state? Does he agree that we expect the greatest coping skills from the young people who have had the fewest opportunities in life and do not have families to support them after they leave school?
Lord Tomlinson
Does the Minister agree with me that, on the basis of the Question from the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and with the emphasis that he has placed on the continuing development of these financial skills, one day a young person who might aspire to become Prime Minister might know the difference between debt and deficit?
Lord Addington
My Lords, does my noble friend agree that whenever it comes to an issue that needs to go into the national curriculum we always have our own hobby horse, and then another great cohort of us tells us that the curriculum is too crowded? Will my noble friend make sure, if we are going to take this on, that it is integrated into maths lessons?
Lord Davies of Oldham
The Liberals are part of the coalition. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Flight. This is not just a question of mathematics but of knowledge. It is quite clear that a very high percentage of adults who invest their hard-earned money in all sorts of organisations have no idea of the costs that have been taken from them by the people controlling the fund. The evidence is clear that a very large percentage of our population are quite ignorant of such costs. That is why we need financial education.
Lord Geddes
Does my noble friend agree that this is vitally important for those embarking for the first time on tertiary education—particularly the requirement to budget their expenses?
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
My Lords, I declare an interest as president of the Citizenship Foundation. With his very welcome news when he first answered this Question, does it mean that citizenship is now going to remain part of the core curriculum?
Lord Elton
Following the question of the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, does my noble friend agree that if eventually all the electorate were to realise that you cannot throughout your life spend more than you get, they would be more accepting of Budgets that would reduce the deficit and get this country back to where it should be?
Energy: Nuclear New Build Programme
(11 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they are taking following the announcement of the withdrawal of Centrica from the nuclear new build programme.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Baroness Verma)
My Lords, the Government are determined to make the UK a leading destination for investment in new nuclear, which will play a key role in our future energy mix. The decision by Centrica reflects the company’s investment priorities and is not a reflection on UK government policy. New nuclear in the UK is a highly attractive proposition, as the recent purchase of Horizon Nuclear Power by Hitachi clearly shows. With the reforms that we are introducing in the Energy Bill, we are confident that we will see investment move forward. In the last quarter alone, alongside the successful sale of Horizon we had the granting of the first nuclear site licence in 25 years at Hinkley Point.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
My Lords, will the Minister confirm that Centrica is in fact the third firm to withdraw from the new nuclear build programme and that it cited as the reason uncertainty because the Government have not yet set the financial framework for new nuclear build? The Minister again today, like earlier in the week, sounds rather complacent on this. Can she give the House a clear indication of when the Government will make the decisions that will end this uncertainty?
Baroness Verma
My Lords, if we are talking about complacency, I would remind the noble Lord that his party was in Government for 13 years and failed to look at long-term investment in the energy sector. This Government have taken that on board. I remind the noble Lord that the decision that Centrica took was, as with the other two companies he mentioned, a commercial prioritisation and nothing to do with UK policy. If the noble Lord will allow me, I will quote Sam Laidlaw, chief executive of Centrica. He said the decision was about the prioritisation of its commercial priorities.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
My Lords, I share the concerns about Centrica and discussed them at some length yesterday with EDF. I have a much more serious concern to raise with my noble friend. I am very worried about how the Cumbria county councillors were persuaded to vote against moving to the next stage of a nuclear waste consultation. I will quote from an e-mail that was inadvertently sent to a Copeland councillor, and obviously sent by an anti-nuclear campaigner. It contains a chilling message. It says that they need a campaign to tell the councillors of,
“the threat that they might be personally liable for irrational or reckless decisions, particularly ones which do not put care of their constituency at their heart”.
It goes on that,
“the point is, to scare the crap out of them personally when they go to vote”.
Is that any way to treat a serious government consultation? Why is it no one’s business to try to rebut these mischievous statements that have circulated around the county over the past three months?
Baroness Verma
I thank my noble friend for drawing my attention to that. I invite him to forward me the e-mail that he quoted so that my officials might look at it in closer detail. I know that passions were raised on both sides of the argument in Cumbria, but that is right and proper in a democratic process. However, my noble friend is right that a lot of scaremongering and misleading information was distributed out there. Unfortunately, when we go down the road of ensuring that this is a community-led, voluntary process, one of the by-products is that there will be misleading information. I will look very carefully at that and if it is something that I need to raise further and looks as if it is intimidation, I will take it as a matter perhaps for the police to look at.
Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, what is the status of that proposed project now that Cumbria has said no and yet the districts of Copeland and Allerdale have said yes? Where are we now in this whole discussion?
Baroness Verma
My Lords, the noble Lord raises an important point. I have taken the decision to reflect on why the process did not work as well as it should have done. I will be in communication with the councils again to see where we have learnt lessons and where we might have done a little better in our engagement with the broader public and local businesses. The process is the right one. It is a government policy and will remain one. I just need time to reflect on how to make the process better.
Lord Avebury
My Lords, reverting to the question of Centrica’s withdrawal, how does this affect the negotiations on the replacement contract at Hinkley Point? Is there any possibility of opening up competition on that site, considering that the contractor is said to be offering a strike price of £100 per megawatt hour for the electricity that will be produced, saddling future electricity consumers with a large additional burden?
Baroness Verma
My noble friend obviously has information on the strike price that I do not have because as yet no commitment on strike price has been made. We are still talking and we want to be able to reach a commercial term that is fair, affordable and value for money for all.
Baroness Smith of Basildon
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Foulkes spoke of the need to encourage investment in new nuclear. Under current plans we are still below the level that the Government say we need. To get to that level, we do not need investment alone; we also need to ensure we have a highly skilled workforce in engineering, manufacturing and construction. What discussions have the Minister and her departmental colleagues had with the nuclear energy companies regarding apprenticeships and training to ensure that we have the highly skilled workforce we need?
Baroness Verma
The noble Baroness is absolutely right. We need to ensure that our supply line is fully equipped and that we have the right skills in place as we move forward with nuclear. We are mindful that we are working very closely with the appropriate skills sector groupings on skills and we are making progress. We will give a further, fuller answer once we have got a more detailed plan in place.
HGV Road User Levy Bill
(11 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Earl Attlee
My Lords, HGVs play a crucial role in our economy by supplying businesses and servicing customers. Of course, HGVs are only one part of our national and international logistic system. We also have transport by sea, rail and air.
I am sure that the House will agree that we are well served by all those who work in transport and logistics. We should be particularly grateful for their sterling efforts during the recent bad weather, driving their vehicles and operating their equipment in horrendous conditions, often at night or during unsocial hours.
Approximately 1.5 million trips are made by foreign-registered HGVs into the UK each year; they contribute towards the well-being of our economy and are part of our logistic system. However there has been an inequality for some time in that UK hauliers are often charged when they travel abroad through tolls and other charging schemes whereas foreign hauliers are able to use the UK road network for no charge. This is a situation which the Government wish to address through this Bill.
The HGV Road User Levy Bill is a money Bill which comes to this House unamended from its introduction in the Commons on 23 October 2012. It will enable the introduction of a new levy for all heavy goods vehicles that weigh more than 12 tonnes and that are being kept on or are using the UK road network. This new levy is aimed at recognising the cost of the damage that HGVs do to our roads and ensuring that they make a contribution towards this.
The Department for Transport undertook consultation on this subject in early 2012. The results indicated that stakeholders, especially those in the logistics sector, support the planned changes.
Subject to the legislation being passed, we plan to introduce the levy from April 2014, when it will apply to both UK and foreign-registered hauliers. The levy, which is being introduced alongside other measures including reductions in HGV vehicle excise duty, is set at a level that will mean that, overall, more than nine out of 10 vehicles in the UK fleet will pay no more than now, with almost all the rest facing a fairly small increase in charges of up to £79 per year. Introducing the levy for foreign vehicles and offsetting the charge for the vast majority of UK vehicles will help the competitiveness of UK businesses, while ensuring that we continue to enjoy the benefits of free trade with Europe.
I know that the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, is interested in the subject of time versus distance-based charging. I do not want to pre-empt his speech and will address his concerns when I wind up.
As your Lordships will be aware, any form of road user charge is subject to the strict conditions set out in the Eurovignette directive. It specifies the maximum daily charge as being €11, likely to rise to €12 by 2014 to compensate for inflation, which will mean that it should equate with the £10 per day that we intend to charge the largest and heaviest foreign vehicles that use our roads.
To ensure that no additional administrative burden is placed on UK business by the introduction of the charge, UK hauliers will start to pay the levy in a single transaction with vehicle excise duty when it is renewed from April 2014, and will therefore be able to pay the charge either six-monthly or annually. For the annual rate, we have selected a fee of up to £1,000 for the heaviest vehicles as being a level where, subject to the restrictions already mentioned, the Chancellor will be able to offset the increase to UK hauliers through reductions in vehicle excise duty, which will be set out in the Finance Bill 2013,
For foreign operators, who do not pay VED, the levy will be payable through an online portal or over the telephone. Foreign operators will also have the option to select time periods varying between one day and one year, allowing them to pay the charge at the appropriate level for their trip.
As I said, in the case of the largest vehicles, the annual charge will be £1,000; for the smallest vehicles it will be proportionately less, at £85 for the year. However, most foreign vehicles that come into the UK are those in the heaviest two bands. For the largest, heaviest foreign vehicles, we consider the charge of £10 per day or £1,000 per year to be fair, proportionate and compliant with the relevant EU legislation. For the daily amount we are seeking to charge at the highest level permissible while remaining compliant with EU law.
I accept that for about 40 UK vehicles, the overall charge for hauliers will be much greater; it has proved to be impossible fully to offset the charges in those cases. However, I should make it clear that the increase is largely due to current VED rates being close to or below EU minimum levels, which restricts our ability to rebate fully to offset the charge, rather than the implementation of the charge itself.
Operators facing increased charges have the option to down-plate their vehicle, a simple paper-based exercise costing £27, which will fully offset the increase, although they may be more restricted in the loads that they are able to carry or the distribution of the load on the vehicle.
We estimate that the revenues gained by having foreign hauliers pay a charge are likely to be between £18.7 million and £23.2 million annually. Although I appreciate that that is not an enormous sum in the grand scheme of things, and I am sure that noble Lords would like it to be much higher, the charges have been set at the highest possible allowed by the Eurovignette directive, while allowing other measures—principally reductions in vehicle excise duty—that should ensure that more than 9 out of 10 vehicles in the UK will pay no more than now.
The way the scheme has been structured will ensure a fairer deal for UK-registered HGV operators, who should not have to bear an additional financial burden as a result of the levy’s introduction. While the revenues raised through the charge and the fines levied for non-payment will be paid directly into the Consolidated Fund and will therefore not be spent directly on transport projects, I would like to reassure the House that the Department for Transport will ensure that sufficient funds are directed to allow VOSA—the Vehicle Operator and Services Agency— to deliver effective enforcement of the scheme.
The legislation before the House today is not designed as a precursor to increased charges on businesses, or on wider road users. This charge has a very clear focused objective. I beg to move.
Lord Berkeley
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that helpful introduction. It has filled a few holes in my knowledge of the Bill and is a good opportunity to discuss the policy surrounding this.
My first question is: why is this a money Bill? It seems to introduce changes to policy and to methods of collecting charges for road vehicles which probably merit greater scrutiny in your Lordships’ House. Of course, we cannot do that for a money Bill, so perhaps the Minister can explain exactly why it is a money Bill.
In that context, the Minister will know—because I mentioned it in a speech on Monday in Committee on the Growth and Infrastructure Bill—that I think that it would be much better if the Government came up with a consistent policy for tolling, charging, or whatever we like to call it, for vehicles using the Dartford tunnel, the new tunnels, congestion charging in London and other cities, and possibly eventually on the M6 toll road as well, for a start. All of those are effectively distance-based, unlike this one which is basically time-based. I expect that this is meant to avoid any policy intention to widen it to other vehicles; and of course, on that basis, it has to comply with the Eurovignette directive. I believe that the Commission has started to look at a wider charging solution for roads across the EU which is probably designed, as much as anything, to try to reduce the congestion on the most congested parts. However, I would be very pleased to hear the Minister’s explanation for why this is a money Bill.
The Minister explained that this was intended to increase the fairness between UK-registered and continental-registered vehicles, because when continental vehicles come here they do not pay the equivalent of a toll or VED, but when our vehicles go to the continent they have to pay tolls on some roads—most of which I think are distance-based. However, can he explain whether the locally registered trucks in any of the closer member states—on the roads which our own vehicles probably use the most—pay something equivalent to VED which visiting trucks from the UK and elsewhere would not pay? It would be a comfort to know that the balancing on which this Bill is based applies both ways. I am sure that there is an answer to that, but I do not know it.
In the case of non-UK heavy goods vehicles, Clause 4(2) places the liability for paying this levy on the holders of Community licences. I know that “Community licence” is defined in Clause 4(8), but can the Minister explain to the ordinary human being what that means? What is a Community licence? Is it one similar licence which every truck in the entire EU has, or does each member state have a different one? Whoever is going to enforce it will need to be familiar with 26 or so different types of licence if we are not careful. That will be quite difficult. I shall come back to that in a few minutes.
The Minister explained that UK-registered hauliers will be able to obtain their licences under this levy in the usual way, with the VED, on a 12-month or six-month basis. He said that a foreign haulier coming into Dover could buy a licence on the web or on the phone. Presumably there will be a kind of booth at Dover, or something, where you can pay for the licence at the time. If, as I believe, everybody will have to have a sticker with the licence on their windscreen, there is a question about how a haulier going backwards and forwards across Europe will manage to collect his post with the sticker in it. Or will there be a place where he can collect it every time he comes into the UK? Otherwise, it will be a bit of a mess, really.
This morning I got an interesting briefing from the Freight Transport Association, which raised the question of whether these stickers were necessary. That begs the question of how the Government intend for this new levy to be enforced. Window stickers are fine on cars, because traffic wardens go along and look at out-of-date licence stickers, and you then get a nasty message from the DVLA. However, traffic wardens are not going to be much use in enforcing this on trucks, because trucks do not usually park in the streets where traffic wardens operate, thank goodness.
Anyway, in Clause 10 we have a definition of who can stop a vehicle, and that person is called a “stopping officer”. I have never heard of a stopping officer before. Is it a police officer? Who is it? The definition says what his powers are, but how many of these stopping officers will we have in the country? If they are doing it already—which would be something I do not know about—in how many cases a year do they achieve this stopping? I am not convinced that there will be any enforcement at all of this new licence. If it is to be done by number-plate recognition, as the congestion charge is in London, can the Minister explain how that will work with 26 different number plates from 26 different member states plus a few from outside the EU? We get Turkish and other non-EU vehicles here as well. Is a system in place whereby all registered number plates from around Europe and beyond can be registered? And when they are indentified, what will happen to them?
I hope that the Minister can explain how this enforcement system will work. My suspicions are that it will hardly be done at all. UK vehicles will have to do it because they are paying with their VED, but who is going to do it for the foreign ones and where are they going to do it?
Finally, the Minister explained the revenue gain of £18.7 million to £23 million, which is probably worth having. It goes into the bottomless pit of the Treasury, but that is probably all right. Can he tell us the cost of administering this new scheme, both for UK-registered vehicles and foreign ones? In the debate on road-user charging I also said I believed that the cost of administering the road-user charging system in London—which is very good, and at the time it was introduced there was no better technology—is somewhere between 30% and 40% of the revenue gained. However, I think that the cost of some of the new electronic systems on the continent is about 5% of the revenue gained, which of course is much better. Therefore, what will be the cost of administering this scheme? Let us hope that it does not exceed the extra revenue expected.
With those few questions, I look forward to the Minister’s answers and to seeing this legislation implemented.
Lord Snape
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Berkeley on this topic. I well recall nearly 40 years ago when I was first elected to the other place and was told that the most effective political lobby in the United Kingdom was the farmers. I came to realise that in that conclusion they may well have been right. After all, I seem to remember that the farming lobby managed to blame the spread of foot and mouth some time ago basically on Ministers in the Labour Government rather than on their own practices.
Certainly, one lobby that runs the farming lobby very close in its effectiveness is the road haulage lobby. Most of us in your Lordships’ House are old enough to remember the immediate post-war period when heavy goods vehicles—I think this referred to those above seven tonnes, but it was a long time ago so I would not like to put my shirt on it—had to carry a 20 miles an hour plate and were restricted to that maximum speed. Given the number of heavy goods vehicles that appeared on our roads after World War 2—many of the drivers were demobbed from our Armed Forces—that issue was the first campaign that I remember the road hauliers lobby indulging in. It was very successful and it has indulged in many campaigns since, many of which have been successful.
Since the end of World War 2, we have seen heavy lorry weights increase dramatically. I think that the maximum now is 44 tonnes, although the Minister will correct me if I am wrong. It used to be about 12 tonnes, so the industry has done well there. The length of heavy goods vehicles also has increased fairly dramatically over that period. Each and every increase in weight and length has been accompanied by a cry from the road haulage industry that there would be fewer vehicles on the road because they are bigger, longer and heavier, and that once the motorways had been built they would not be much of a nuisance anyway.
This is not strictly speaking a matter for this debate, but I would be interested to know—perhaps the Minister will tell me, or write to me if he does not have the figures now—how many heavy goods vehicles above the 12 tonnes figure mentioned in the Bill are on our roads now compared to, say, a decade or two decades ago. Although it is not a matter for this Bill, it would be interesting to see not only how successful the road haulage lobby has been but how accurate it was in its predictions.
Another of the lobby’s major complaints was about the number of foreign lorries on our roads. Reverting back to my experience in the other place, I chaired for 15 years the West Midlands group of Labour MPs. It was one of my duties—whether it would be considered onerous or not I leave to noble Lords to work out for themselves—to attend meetings of the Sandwell chamber of commerce, which covered my former parliamentary constituency. The chamber of commerce may not have been dominated by the issue, but certainly a strong presence from the road haulage industry raised the same issue more and more often. It questioned the number of foreign heavy goods vehicles on British roads, and how they were filling up on cheap European derv and able to snatch the bread from the mouths of British hauliers by demanding not only the freedom to travel on our roads, which of course they had, but to take loads back to the continent, which rightly should have been the job of British hauliers.
I was a bit cynical and not inclined to believe that entirely, because every time I asked how many of these wicked foreign hauliers were behaving in this manner I did not get an answer. I found it difficult to believe, and I believe that I expressed the rather unpopular view at the chamber of commerce that I could not honestly believe that Mr Norbert Dentressangle, in his brightly covered lorries, was as guilty of undermining the British road haulage industry as the allegation made at the time suggested.
The Minister talks about 1.5 million trips, which I assume refers to round trips. Are we talking about 750,000 heavy goods vehicles that will be covered, at least in theory, by this measure? I should like to know just how many of these wicked foreign hauliers there are. They cannot use the excuse that they are driving around on cheap, continental derv anymore, because I understand it is just as expensive on the continent as it is in the United Kingdom these days.
The Minister went on to say that the maximum price we could charge foreign hauliers on a daily basis was €11. That will make a big dent in the deficit, whether or not the Prime Minister was accurate in his summing up of it. I cannot off the top of my head multiply 750,000 times €11, but while it is not an inconsiderable sum it will not make much of a dent in the road budget, let alone the deficit as a whole. Therefore, is this piece of legislation actually necessary, given the amount of money it is likely to raise?
The Minister did not use the phrase “a level playing field”, but he implied that this would balance the differences between British hauliers and their continental counterparts. However, €11 a day does not strike me as a particularly large penalty if one considers that for a heavy goods vehicle to travel 100 miles on a German autobahn, it would pay tolls of between €35 and €46. We throw open the whole road network of the United Kingdom for €11, but if you drive a heavy goods vehicle through Germany it costs €35 to €46.
As I indicated, the Minister said that this mighty measure before your Lordships today would raise the sum of £19 million to £23 million. He might recollect that a few days ago we had a debate about toll roads, and I pointed out that there was a toll road in the West Midlands that was not used much by heavy goods vehicles. I have noticed that Eddie Stobart vehicles do use it, but by and large those are the only heavy lorries that I have ever seen on the toll road. The heavy goods vehicle industry generally uses the M6 motorway, which passes through my former constituency on an elevated section. During my 27 years as the Member of Parliament for West Bromwich East, I calculated that the taxpayer had spent something like £800 million repairing just that one section of the M6 because of the damage done to it largely by heavy goods vehicles. On the department’s own figures, the heaviest heavy goods vehicles do as much damage to Britain’s road network as 30,000 private cars. This great sum of £19 million to £23 million, therefore, might repair one archway of the Ray Hall viaduct in the West Midlands, but it will not make much of a dent in the overall road budget.
I therefore have to say to the Minister, as the wartime sign said, “Is your journey really necessary?” as far as this piece of legislation is concerned. We heard from him that continental hauliers can pay on a day-to-day basis—not something that is open to British hauliers, who pay through VED on an annual basis—so why give them this particular benefit, which will be not shared by their British counterparts? I do not know whether, again, this is a matter for Europe, but why not insist that lorries used in the United Kingdom pay on an annual basis? Then they could come and go as they wished. Why allow them to pay on a one-day, two-day or weekly basis: a privilege denied to their British counterparts? Perhaps the Minister could explain.
Of course the penalties for non co-operation, under this legislation, can only be described as pathetic as well. Is a maximum fine of £200 really going to deter a heavy goods vehicle driver with, perhaps, £30,000 worth of valuable cargo? It is surely not serious that we impose a penalty that is so palpably inadequate. The Minister and the Government ought to look again. Even that penalty is based, as I understand it, on a vehicle limit and the number of axles. Who in this country of ours would be able to tell the vehicle limit or count the number of axles?
That leads me to the point raised by my noble friend Lord Berkeley about enforcement. Is the Minister seriously going to tell your Lordships’ House that there will be proper and adequate enforcement of this legislation? If he is, I do not believe him. Let me refer him to one of this morning’s newspapers. I am sure that the Daily Mail is the Minister’s favourite newspaper. From its optimistic front page to its unbiased sketch writing, I always think of it as a newspaper of value and repute. Today there is a story in the Daily Mail which I cut out as, reading it on the train, I thought: “The Minister will be interested in this one”. It is headed: “Toll of illegal foreign cars on UK roads”. I appreciate that it is not about foreign lorries, but I will come to those in a moment. The story says that:
“Only four out of an estimated 15,000 foreign cars driving illegally on British roads were caught last year. And not one of their drivers was prosecuted”,
the Department for Transport said yesterday. Given that record, it does not inspire me with confidence that our jails will be full of non fine-paying continental lorry drivers. What can the Minister tell us about the likelihood of enforcement under this legislation?
About 15 years ago, the then traffic commissioner for the West Midlands, Mr John Mervyn Pugh, invited me to join him on what he described hopefully as a purge of overloaded vehicles on the M6 motorway, particularly foreign ones. My noble friend asked about an enforcement officer. I presume that that enforcement officer must be from the police, because we were accompanied by three or four police cars. Between Birmingham and Stafford, the police directed heavy goods vehicles off the motorway so that they could be checked.
Lord Berkeley
Clause 10 refers not to an enforcement officer but to a “stopping officer”. Perhaps my noble friend would like to comment on that.
Lord Snape
Whether stopping or enforcing, my only response is that I guess he would have to be in police uniform. Perhaps I might take your Lordships back 15 years to the enforcement on the M6. I still have the paperwork, which I kept. Out of 14 vehicles that were stopped, only three of which were foreign, six were overloaded. In two of them, the driver had exceeded the permitted number of hours. A couple were borderline, while one was taken off the road immediately because of its lack of roadworthiness. Only 14 vehicles were stopped because, within about 40 minutes, there were no heavy goods vehicles heading north on the M6. This is before the days of mobile phones; it was presumably in the days of CB radio, or whatever it was called.
The problems in enforcing legislation such as this are enormous. The fact is that we do not enforce the existing heavy goods vehicles regulations at the moment. How can we, when the traffic commissioner’s total staff 15 years ago was four to cover the whole of the West Midlands and Wales? Given the Government’s clampdown on the Civil Service, I do not suppose that there are 44 of them these days. I suspect that if those four positions are still in situ, that is about it. Are these the people who are going to enforce this particular legislation? I honestly very much doubt that.
The Minister says that there will be a reduction in vehicle excise duty for UK-based hauliers. I have to ask why. I have a copy here of the report of the Armitage inquiry, Lorries, People and the Environment, from December 1980. Your Lordships will be relieved to know that I have no intention of reading that fairly bulky document, but as I would summarise it it pointed out that the number of heavy goods vehicles on Britain’s roads in those days was possibly more than the road network could cope with. If we have moved on from 1980 to 2013, I repeat the question: how many heavy goods vehicles are there on our roads these days, compared with then?
I hope the Minister does not think that I have been too rude about this legislation but it is palpably inadequate and will not be enforced. I do not think that unenforceable legislation—given the present lack of enforcement, that is the only way this can be described—is at all sensible. It is not actually necessary because, despite the propaganda from the British road haulage industry, I do not see this as the great problem that it outlines. If it is, let the continentals pay exactly the same price as British hauliers pay to drive across Europe. If a Bill is necessary, I am afraid that this is not it.
Lord Wigley
My Lords, I will intervene very briefly and take up the last point emphasised by the noble Lord, Lord Snape, that there should be a level playing field and the same system of charges should apply. I do not object to the approach that the Government are undertaking, although the amount of money to be collected is miniscule in the context of the needs and indeed, I suspect, the damage that is inflicted on roads and the cost of adapting roads to handle the ever larger vehicles that seem to be coming over.
The point that I want to put to the Minister—he may or may not be in a position to reply—is that of course the highway system is devolved. We in Wales have a very substantial cost arising from the two main east-west roads, the M4 in the south and the A55 in the north, which carry a very large volume of traffic to and from the Irish Republic via Holyhead and the ports of Pembrokeshire. This means that a disproportionate cost lands on the budget of the National Assembly, and that is over and above the cost of adapting the small roads, bridges and all the rest to be able to deal with some of the very large vehicles coming from the continent.
Is the money just going into the Treasury as another source of funding that is not in any way related to expenditure on roads? If it is meant in some way to meet the additional costs arising from such transport, what mechanism is there to allow even a small proportion of this to go through to the budget of the National Assembly? On a 5% basis we would expect about £1 million, which is hardly going to fill the potholes that are caused by these vehicles. As a matter of principle, this is something that should be taken on board. Certainly, if this is a first step, I hope that there will be further steps to genuinely provide a level playing field.
Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, Her Majesty’s Opposition welcome the Bill, and regard a great deal of it as eminently workable. It will improve the situation and remedy a grievance that we have recognised for many years, as far as our road haulage industry is concerned. That does not mean that we do not have some criticisms of the Bill. I had a few carefully listed, but half of them have been made by my noble friend Lord Berkeley in his excellent speech, and the other half by the noble Lord, Lord Snape, in his similarly excellent contribution.
There was just one point that the noble Lords did not talk about, which was to do with a strategy for roads that might involve road charging. There is a provision in the Bill which clearly anticipates that the devolved Administrations must have some opportunity if they wish to do this, and the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, of course has presented the Minister with that question.
My speech is therefore greatly reduced, because on the whole I am very much in favour of the Bill and somewhat less pessimistic than my noble friend Lord Snape about the issue of enforcement. I am sure that the Minister is going to establish that technology has moved on with concepts like automatic number plate recognition, which allows vehicles to be identified with great readiness and pulled over and stopped effectively by VOSA, which of course is responsible for implementing this part of the administration.
Lord Snape
I apologise for interrupting my noble friend. There is a question that I should have put to the Minister, but perhaps he could do so equally well. Supposing a lorry driver is stopped for not having a proper piece of paper saying that he has paid £200. What happens then? Is he to be detained at the port of exit? Are we going to reinvoke the European arrest warrant if he heads home? Perhaps my noble friend could question the Minister about that.
Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, the driver is responsible for the vehicle and its legitimacy, so he will be stopped all right, and the vehicle will not be released until the necessary charge has been paid. I doubt if the driver will have £5,000—which is the maximum fine—in his back pocket, so the charge will go to his office in the country from which he has come, and that office will have to pay. I agree entirely that it is hard luck on the driver, if that is the sentiment my noble friend is putting forward—but the people who own the lorry have to comply with the law, and I understand that it will be enforced. We would all expect it to be enforced and modern technology will ensure that it is.
I have had sympathy with the road haulage industry and with British motorists for a very long period—from the first time I went to France and found that French autoroutes could charge heavily while we provided free roads for any French motorists who deigned to come to Britain. That always seemed a little unfair. The situation for road haulage is much more serious. After all, the industry shifts 68% of our goods and employs 220,000 workers. Many of them are skilled, because driving in modern conditions on all roads, both European and British, requires skill and concentration. We should recognise the importance of the industry. The issue became more acute when, as the House will recall, additional fuel tanks were placed on heavy vehicles so that not only did they not pay for the roads but they did not buy any fuel in Britain, because continental fuel was cheaper. The sense of obvious unfairness—the feeling that something needs to be done—has been with us for some time.
We will take advantage of the Eurovignette to make progress on this. When some critics of the European Community say that nothing good comes out of Europe, I commend the concept of the vignette—what a wonderful, attractive word to describe a piece of necessary legislation, particularly as it is derived from its original meaning of a small illustration with no defined borders. That looks entirely appropriate for the European directive on which this legislation is based. It will bring considerable benefits, but I expect the Minister to respond to the points made by my noble friends and the noble Lord, Lord Wigley. I am certain that he will make every effort to emphasise the necessary compliance procedures for these requirements, because the idea that people would flout these charges and get away with it after we have put the legislation in place would appal us all.
One issue that the Road Haulage Association always complains about, which did not come up, is cabotage—the deployment of these lorries to be used for transfers of goods within the country, at the comparative advantage indicated by lower fuel costs. This Bill does nothing significant about that. Perhaps the Minister will comment on it.
I am also most interested in the revenues that will be derived from the successful implementation of this measure. Both my noble friends emphasised the fact that these lorries cost a great deal in terms of the maintenance of our roads. I am sure that all noble Lords have travelled on our motorways and have noticed that on many roads the middle and outside lanes have reasonably good surfaces while there are almost two trenches on the inside lane where the heavy goods vehicles progress. Of course, the majority of those are British trucks, but it shows the cost to the roads system that heavy goods vehicles incur—in particular because Europe has been very much to the fore in increasing the size and weight of lorries over the years. My noble friend Lord Snape indicated that the 44-tonner was, after all, brought in on the basis of European initiatives.
What is going to happen to this revenue? The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, had his worries about where it was going and asked why this was a money Bill. It is a money Bill because the enforcement of the charges is a form of taxation. This money is not hypothecated to anything to do with road usage or necessity, but goes happily into the Consolidated Fund. We all know what the Consolidated Fund means in terms of priorities. What it certainly means is that we can guarantee that none of this revenue relates to road expenditure. My noble friends emphasised the costs to the road system.
There is another dimension that I want to bring up: road safety. The Road Safety Foundation has made it quite emphatically clear that the actual design of roads, which costs money to do well, is an important contribution to road safety. One particular group of road users who have been vulnerable to lorries in recent years are cyclists. The difference between the road structure in Amsterdam and the road structure in London is so evidently a crucial reason why Amsterdam cyclists feel safe and London cyclists often ride in terror—with just cause. We have had a number of serious accidents and fatalities where cyclists have been hit by lorry drivers who had no idea the cyclist was present.
Safety issues can be improved now because there is the possibility of fitting out lorries with sensors and mirrors that eliminate blind spots, but they cost money. We would need some enforcement. At present, the price of doing nothing is a risk to cyclists in all our cities and the price is becoming greater each year.
I cannot hope to direct the proceeds of this Bill towards safety because, as I say, there is no chance of hypothecation. However, I hope that the Minister will recognise that that which assists the development of road haulage and, in one respect, brings some sense of fairness between the British road haulage system and continental trucks coming into Britain should also be attended by some concern about road safety.
The Minister has quite a lot on his plate to answer, in the challenges that have been presented in the speeches from the Back Benches. I merely endorse the questions that have been asked, because they are exceedingly pertinent. I hope that the Minister’s answer is sufficiently strong for the Opposition to remain confident that this measure is an advantageous one for the country.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, as I stated in my opening speech, this legislation will help to deliver a fairer deal for UK hauliers and go some way to correcting an inequality which has existed for too long. For this reason, I believe the Bill should be welcomed. Turning to the aims of the Bill, we consider our plan to charge £10 per day, or £1,000 per year, for the largest vehicles, to be fair, proportionate and compliant with the relevant EU legislation. One of the challenges in dealing with this problem is that anything we do must be compliant with EU legislation. We must treat UK and foreign hauliers in the same way.
The noble Lord, Lord Snape, asked about the implementation costs. The total set-up costs are estimated at between £3 million and £6.7 million, which will be spread over the years before the scheme goes live for foreign hauliers. Thereafter, we estimate the annual cost to be £3 million to £4.8 million. These estimates are at a relatively early stage and will be developed further.
The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, asked whether there will be a vignette and whether there will be booths at Dover. There will be no vignette sticker, or booths at Dover or at any other port. The levy will be paid for by a website or telephone transaction, which will feed into a database that will be available publicly and to VOSA officials. Enforcement of the levy will be carried out primarily by VOSA officers, on a targeted basis, using the payment database to show which vehicles are in the country and which have—or have not—paid, alongside VOSA’s normal stopping process for enforcement.
Foreign heavy vehicles mainly travel on a strategic road network and therefore ordinary traffic wardens do not have a role in this. If they detect a vehicle without a vignette by chance, they can do something about it but, being realistic, a traffic warden will not be dealing with this problem. Using ANPR technology at both fixed and mobile sites, VOSA will be able to identify and stop vehicles that have not paid and hold them until a penalty deposit of £200 is paid. That is a penalty deposit and not an on-the-spot fine.
Lord Higgins
If the website shows that a particular vehicle has not paid the levy, will it be charged before it leaves this country, on the way out?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, if VOSA detects that a vehicle has not paid the levy, I suspect the vehicle will not be going very far—perhaps to the next service station—until it has paid it, which can be done electronically.
Lord Snape
The minimum penalty is £200. Is the driver supposed to pay that on the spot? If he does not have any British cash or that amount of money, under what powers will the vehicle be detained and where?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, that will be done under the powers that were wisely introduced by the previous Administration, who also set the level. I agree that it is at quite a low level and made that very point from the Opposition Benches—I cannot remember whether it was the Front Benches or the Back Benches—at the time we introduced the necessary powers. The key thing is that we will be able to stop the vehicle. That is extremely inconvenient to the operator, and I will have more to say on that point.
The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, asked me what a stopping officer is. Stopping officers already exist. They are appointed under the powers in the Road Traffic Act 1988, as amended, and are able to stop vehicles in relation to enforcement of vehicle roadworthiness and driver’s hours. Stopping officers are VOSA enforcement officers.
Lord Berkeley
I have a question before the Minister leaves that subject. There is presumably a database with every vehicle’s number plate on it. Are stopping officers lurking in every motorway service station or do they pick these things up from cameras above motorways? How are they going to find these lorries that have not paid even before they direct them into somewhere safe to deal with them? If I was a foreign lorry driver and did not want to pay, I would keep off trunk roads and go on the side roads, like many people do in France if they do not want to pay the motorway tolls.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I plan to address most of the points made by the noble Lord later on. To answer his point about leaving the strategic road network and going on to minor roads: an operator would have difficulties with that because the vehicle would be much less productive, while he would be trying to avoid only a £10 per day charge. I suggest that the extra cost of lowering your average speed by using local roads would simply not be worth it. For cases that go to court, the offence is a level 5, which can incur a fine of up to £5,000.
However, the real deterrent for operators is the inconvenience of being stopped, as well as another inconvenience that I will come to in a moment. VOSA already carries out risk-based stops for a number of different offences, including weight, vehicle defects, and driver hours, among others, and the levy enforcement will simply be added to this regime. I also suggest that when VOSA detects a vehicle that has not paid the levy, that is exactly the same as if the driver had put a big sign on the lorry which says “Stop me, because I’m a problem vehicle”.
I am aware that the British Vehicle Rental and Leasing Association has identified an area for a small potential cost burden to operators, which has been introduced due to the way that the levy is rebated, when compared to how VED is currently and will continue to be rebated. It may be helpful for me to say a few words on this. Currently when a vehicle is delicensed—typically, when it is sold—the previous owner can claim back the outstanding whole months of VED, with the rebate calculation done in twelfths. From the introduction of the levy in April 2014, UK operators will still be able to reclaim VED on the same basis, but the levy can be reclaimed only in tenths. To comply with EU law, and to maximise revenue from monthly charges, the annual rate is set at 10 times the monthly rate. This means that in effect it is discounted when compared with the costs of 12 monthly levy charges.
The decision to offer rebates on the basis of tenths is to prevent foreign hauliers paying for a year, using the vehicle for a month or less on the UK’s roads, and then reclaiming 11 months. The value of the loss incurred by the operator is entirely dependent on when the rebate is claimed.
The legislation before the House is not designed as a precursor to increased charges on businesses or on road users in general. This charge has a very clear, focused objective, and its introduction is entirely separate from the reviews on future road policy which the Department for Transport is currently undertaking.
I will now deal with a few other points. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, asked why it is a money Bill, and the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, very kindly helped me. The Bill only concerns money, and is certified as such by the Speaker of the House of Commons; it is not a matter for the Government.
On the wider points made by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, on the methods of tolling, following our debate during the passage of the Growth and Infrastructure Bill I offered a meeting at ministerial level with the noble Lord; I hope that that meeting, which is in hand, will be with me. I have mentioned detection. I was asked about VED in other countries. All EU countries have VED for HGVs, or a local equivalent circulation tax. VED or equivalent is required in the Eurovignette directive, and minimum rates are set. Our new VED rates comply with the minimum rate.
The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, raised a very important point about whether we should implement a levy on a distance or a time basis. I will say a few words about this important point. The HGV levy is a time-based charge which is both simple and inexpensive to operate. It allows more than nine out of 10 UK operators to be fully compensated through VED reductions. A distance-based scheme has been considered and has some benefits, in that hauliers who use the road network the most would pay the most. That seems, at face value, to be inherently fair. However, in reality it would cost hauliers more and it would not be possible to introduce offsetting measures for UK hauliers, which would mean that they would pay more than they do now. In many cases foreign hauliers would pay less than they would under a time-based scheme.
The introduction of a distance-based scheme has also been discounted as it would be very complex and costly to operate, and would potentially involve the use of a mechanism such as a fuel duty rebate, which is illegal under European law. This has already been tested in Germany. We also believe that the revenues gained from foreign hauliers would not cover the costs of operating this scheme. The Department for Transport looked at options for distance-based charging in 2010 and concluded that in order to fund it the scheme would have to be structured to be revenue-raising, and would therefore have a negative impact on UK hauliers, who would pay most of the charges.
Another difficulty is how to capture the distance-based data. That could be done with a tachograph, but the problem is that the tachograph and the records would have to be inspected by enforcement officers. In addition, the tachograph is in essence a safety device to ensure that drivers do not drive for too long. If we insert an economic effect into it, we would increase the chances that the drivers or the operator would interfere with the operation of the tachograph.
Lord Berkeley
I am grateful to the noble Lord. I will not go back over tolling, as we will have a meeting on that, and I am grateful to him. This is a tit-for-tat issue. He very kindly said that other member states also have a VED for domestic-registered trucks; for example, in France. Is there not a risk that those member states might play tit-for-tat and say, “Well, British hauliers going into France will be able to use the roads, with or without the tollings, but they won’t have paid the VED in France, so they’re getting an advantage”? Are we not in danger of getting a tit-for-tat situation across member states?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, the situation is, as I said in my opening remarks, that our operators often have to pay motorway tolls that no one pays in the UK, and because of the Eurovignette directive, whatever a foreign country did in terms of a vignette they would be limited to the prevailing limits of what you can charge. It could not, therefore, cost our operators more than €11 a day. At the moment our operators pay tolls to use the European road infrastructure.
The chosen time-based scheme, coupled with reductions to VED, is a simple, effective and targeted way of ensuring that UK hauliers pay no more than they do now. VED cuts are a time-based method of offsetting the charge, which means that they fit well with a time-based system. In addition, we need to remember that, in terms of administration, this scheme will have a negligible burden on UK operators.
I always enjoy listening to the noble Lord, Lord Snape. He asked many questions, and I will answer as many as I can. I have probably answered quite a few already, and of course, I will write to him on some of them. He asked me what type of penalties there will be. As I believe I have said, drivers will be charged £200 at the roadside. Fines can be enforced electronically, and they can be invited to pay by credit or debit cards. The noble Lord, Lord Davies, made the point that with modern systems of doing business it is easy to collect the charges.
The noble Lord, Lord Snape, also asked if, under the directive we have to offer periods that are appropriate for the trip being made. If we offer only six-month or annual levies to foreign drivers we will contravene the European directive. He asked about the number of foreign vehicles and I can tell him that 3.6% of miles driven by HGVs in the UK are by foreign vehicles. For HGVs of 12 tonnes and over, the percentage is higher. The noble Lord, Lord Wigley, asked about revenue in VED. All levies or fines go into the Consolidated Fund, as we discussed. There are no plans for hypothecation, as the noble Lord suggests, but we will ensure that VOSA, as the primary enforcement agency, will have sufficient resources to enforce the scheme.
I am grateful for the helpful interventions from the noble Lord, Lord Davies, and for his support for the Bill. He asked me about cabotage. The Bill does not change the rules on cabotage but it does do a little to level the economic playing field. It is a difficult problem to deal with. I am delighted that the Bill has been so positively received. It has been long called for by industry and others from across the political spectrum, and I am delighted to be taking it through the House.
Lord Snape
Before the Minister delights or otherwise in taking it through the House, can he just answer the specific question that I put to him? How many vehicles are we talking about? I know that there are 1.5 million journeys and 3% or 4%, or whatever, of total vehicle miles, but how many heavy goods vehicles will be covered by this legislation?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I cannot immediately answer that at the Dispatch Box. What really matters is how many vehicles are coming in; how many journeys are made. In my opening remarks, I said that there were 1.5 million journeys.
Accountability of Civil Servants: Constitution Committee Report
(11 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Jay of Paddington
That this House takes note of the Report of the Constitution Committee on The Accountability of Civil Servants (6th Report, HL Paper 61).
Baroness Jay of Paddington
My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to open this debate on behalf of your Lordships’ Constitution Committee. I am glad that we are able to debate our report reasonably soon after its publication as this is undoubtedly a fast-moving area. Since our report was published last autumn, the fallout from the cancellation of the west coast main line contract has continued. The Government have begun implementing some of the proposals of The Civil Service Reform Plan which was published in June last year, and other proposals remain the subject of considerable debate—often played out through briefings to the newspapers, which have usually given a rather negative view of the Civil Service.
The committee conducted its inquiry over several months last year and I am very grateful to the large number of distinguished witnesses, some of whom I am pleased to say are speaking this afternoon, who gave written and oral evidence. As always, the Committee was extremely well served by its official staff and by its legal advisers, Professor Richard Rawlings and Professor Adam Tomkins, who acted as special advisers for this inquiry. I thank them and other members of the committee for their hard work on this report.
As I said, the report was published in the autumn, in mid November, and I am very disappointed that only yesterday evening I received the Government’s formal response. Your Lordships will know that it is established practice that the Government respond to reports of this kind within two months of publication. In this case, that would have been by 20 January. I regard it as discourteous both to the committee and to the House that we have heard so very late from the Cabinet Office. This must mean that the committee has obviously been unable to consider the Government’s response and it is therefore impossible for me to respond to the Government’s reply, particularly on some of the points on which the committee and the Government seem to disagree. I look forward to the Minister giving us an extensive explanation of the Government’s position when he replies to the debate.
Coming to the substance of our report I should first make clear that this was not a general inquiry into the present state of the Civil Service. Our focus was specifically on accountability. We wanted to examine how well civil servants who play very significant permanent roles in our system of government are held to account. The increase in the size, functions and complexity of the state makes it important, of course, that all those who carry out responsible work on behalf of the public are properly accountable. One of the developing ways in which civil servants are held directly to account is through parliamentary Select Committees in both Houses, perhaps most prominently by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee which, as the House will be aware, has been recently involved in controversial dealings with senior officials.
The Constitution Committee started from the simple but indispensable point of principle: Ministers are responsible to Parliament for all of their department’s business. This means that, in addition to being responsible for the policies they devise, Ministers are also responsible for the actions and inactions of their civil servants, and for the administration of their departments. Accountability must extend to cover those arm’s-length bodies which report to a department and the committee is also clear that Ministers are personally responsible for their political special advisers, including ensuring that those advisers follow their own code of conduct. In our report, the committee concludes that this overall responsibility must be essential if Parliament is to be able properly to hold the Government to account. Your Lordships may remember that the Constitution Committee affirmed this principle very strongly during the passage of Health and Social Care Act during the previous Session. It insisted that the Secretary of State for Health must remain fully responsible for the health service, regardless of the changes that were proposed in the Bill. Section 1 of the Bill was amended in your Lordships’ House so that that the principle is now in statute.
The corollary of ministerial responsibility to Parliament is that civil servants must be fully accountable to Ministers. It is in this area that there has been much recent debate. Relations between the Civil Service and Ministers are said to be at an all-time low. The Prime Minister has referred to “bureaucrats in government departments” as the “enemies of enterprise”. The Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude MP, has said that civil servants need to focus more on Ministers’ priorities. Blame for errors in handling the west coast main line bidding process was pinned firmly on civil servants in the Department for Transport, resulting in three of them being suspended. Recently, one former Minister, Mr Nick Herbert, said that he had been better supported in opposition than by the Civil Service in government.
It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that The Civil Service Reform Plan contains proposals to alter the relationship between civil servants and Ministers. One of its aims is to improve civil servants’ accountability. Perhaps the most high profile of these proposals is to give Ministers a greater role in the appointment of their departmental Permanent Secretaries. As noble Lords will be aware, particularly those who have themselves been Ministers, Ministers are already closely involved in the process as they agree the job description and the composition of the selection panel; they can meet the shortlisted candidates and then provide their views on the candidates and the selection panel. The Prime Minister retains a power of veto over the candidate proposed by the Civil Service Commission—a veto that he apparently and reportedly exercised late last year in respect of the nominated candidate for Permanent Secretary of the Department of Energy and Climate Change. However, what Ministers do not do—and have not done up to now—is decide from a list of names put forward by a selection panel who should hold the top job.
The Civil Service reform plan indicated the Government’s broad intention to strengthen Ministers’ roles in the recruitment process for Permanent Secretaries. It did not specify how, but said that the Government would consult with the Civil Service Commission. However, since then, both the Prime Minister and the Minister for the Cabinet Office, Mr Maude, have made it clear that they prefer Ministers to be given the power to select from a shortlist of names when recruiting a new Permanent Secretary. Mr Maude has indeed indicated that he has not ruled out legislating to achieve this. The Government argue that such a change is important for ensuring that the Civil Service is working to the Government’s priorities. If Ministers are fully accountable for all the actions and omissions of their civil servants, the argument goes, Ministers should be given the choice over the principal civil servants who carry out their decisions. Interestingly, in evidence to us, the Government’s proposal was also supported by, among others, the right honourable David Blunkett MP, a senior Cabinet Minister in the previous Labour Government.
On the other hand, others who gave evidence to us, including the Civil Service Commission, objected to giving Ministers the final say over the choice of Permanent Secretaries. They argue that it will lead to Permanent Secretaries being seen as the creatures of Ministers and will undermine Civil Service impartiality and the principle of appointment on merit. The temptations of cronyism and favouritism might, it was thought, prove too great for some Ministers. Others questioned what will happen in departments where Ministers are moved frequently. Will each change of Secretary of State result in a new Permanent Secretary? If so, the word “permanent” in the job title rings somewhat hollow.
The committee heard evidence suggesting that the position may not be as stark and as black and white as is sometimes suggested. We heard, for example, from the former Labour Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, that when a relationship between a Secretary of State and a Permanent Secretary breaks down the official may just be quietly moved on. Another Conservative ex-Cabinet member, the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, said that Ministers are often already given a strong informal say in the appointment process, including expressing a preference.
One thing we should remember is that it was only three years ago that Parliament passed the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act which enshrines in law the attributes of the Civil Service—integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. The principle of appointment on merit clearly flows from these attributes. However, the Constitution Committee concluded that however the Government wish to modify the existing process for appointing Permanent Secretaries, they must continue to conform fully with those constitutional principles. We thought it would be odd if, having waited 160 years for the Northcote-Trevelyan principles and proposals to be put into statute, they were discarded so quickly.
We concluded that the same principles ought to apply to the Government’s proposal for so-called direct appointments. The Civil Service reform plan proposes that where a department lacks a particular expertise, a Minister should be able to make direct appointments into specific, fixed-term posts. On this occasion we heard concerns that such appointments might be used to create a new class of special advisers. We concluded that Ministers should be limited to requesting the category of expertise that they require. Permanent Secretaries should continue to make the individual appointments subject to the approval of the Civil Service Commission.
One member of the Constitution Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Powell of Bayswater, who of course has had a long and distinguished career in Whitehall, has expressed this succinctly. Unfortunately, he is unable to speak today. He has said that bringing in expertise from outside for specific jobs or to carry through new initiatives is eminently desirable—Ministers are fully entitled to ask for that. He believes, however, that they should ask for expertise—for example, “Go out and get me a really good tax specialist”—and that they should not ask for individuals whom they just happen to know. Least of all, he believes, we do not need a new breed of callow special advisers—seasoned experts are required for these sorts of jobs.
None the less, in the area of long-term project management, the Constitution Committee was concerned about the Civil Service’s record of delivery. The list of big government projects which have overrun and cost vastly more than was budgeted is depressing. It is not easy to identify solutions to these difficulties; one common problem seems to be the high turnover of officials working on such projects. High staff turnover is a widespread criticism of the modern Civil Service. We recommend that there should be a presumption that a single, senior civil servant will lead major projects from start to finish. This should improve the ability to hold the Executive, and specifically one official in the Executive, a civil servant, to account for such projects.
The Constitution Committee also examined not merely the accountability of civil servants to Ministers but also the direct accountability of civil servants to Parliament. As the House knows, it is now commonplace for civil servants to appear before Select Committees, sometimes alongside Ministers and sometimes on their own. Such direct accountability is undoubtedly welcome. Select Committees benefit considerably from being able to hear civil servants in this way. Constitutionally and importantly, however, the appearance of civil servants before Select Committees is a supplement to Ministers’ responsibility to Parliament, not a replacement for it. Only Ministers can participate fully in the proceedings of Parliament—answering Parliamentary Questions and responding to debates. For this reason Parliament cannot hold a civil servant properly to account in the place of a Minister.
The Cabinet Office has developed guidance for civil servants who give evidence to Select Committees. The guidance is widely known as the Osmotherly rules—called after Sir Edward Osmotherly the marvellously Trollopeanly named official who originally devised them. The rules offer guidance on what civil servants should and should not say to committees and when it is appropriate for a Minister to appear rather than officials. The committee’s view is that the Osmotherly rules are simply Civil Service guidance and nothing more. They should not be given any greater political or constitutional weight. The Osmotherly rules have not been endorsed by Parliament and do not bind Select Committees in any way.
We recommend that any future revisions of the rules should be published in draft to enable Parliament and its Select Committees to scrutinise proposed changes. In his evidence to us the Minister, Mr Maude, indicated that he would support such parliamentary scrutiny— perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, can comment on this proposal in his reply.
Although civil servants frequently give evidence to committees, as I have said, they do so on behalf of their Ministers. For this reason, committees usually accept whichever official or officials a department recommends are best placed to give evidence on any given topic. Sometimes, however, committees will want to question a named civil servant—for example, the official in charge of a particular project or policy. The Osmotherly rules include a “presumption” that Ministers will meet such a request. We think this should be strengthened so that a call for a specific individual should be refused only in exceptional cases.
Accountability would also be strengthened if committees were able to question someone who had left the Civil Service or moved to another post. This practice should apply not just to former accounting officers—as suggested in the Government’s Civil Service reform plan—but to other former senior civil servants. Sometimes it is only by taking evidence from former office holders that a committee can get to the bottom of an issue and we do not think the Osmotherly rules should stand in the way of this practice.
As your Lordships are aware, successive Governments have maintained the principle that advice given by civil servants to Ministers should not be disclosed to Select Committees or to anyone else. This of course maintains the principle of ministerial responsibility—civil servants giving full and candid advice but Ministers taking the decisions. The committee did not seek to undo this principle, but thought that the practice set out in the Osmotherly rules needed revision. For example, under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 it is possible to access Civil Service advice if certain conditions are met. The Osmotherly rules suggest that in no circumstances would such advice be disclosed to a committee. Therefore, if the rules are followed strictly, Select Committees may paradoxically have weaker rights of access than someone submitting a freedom of information request. This seemed to us obviously unsatisfactory and so we recommend that on rare occasions when committees need sight of such advice, they should be able to request it.
Our final recommendation concerns situations where the evidence taken by a committee points to an individual civil servant being at fault. The Osmotherly rules suggest that in such circumstances it is for the Minister to examine the matter and take any further action. We were conscious that Select Committees are not disciplinary tribunals. However, if evidence leads a committee to conclude that a particular civil servant has been at fault, we think the committee should be able to express personal criticism and, in extreme cases, suggest that the department concerned considers disciplinary procedures.
In summary, the Constitution Committee’s report underlines the pre-eminence of ministerial accountability to Parliament and civil servants’ accountability to Ministers. We make clear that any plans to reform the Civil Service must not undermine the accepted principles of accountability or Civil Service impartiality. The report also concludes that parliamentary Select Committees should have greater access to individual civil servants and that the informal rules governing their appearances before committees should be revised and scrutinised by Parliament. I look forward to what I know will be an interesting and authoritative debate. I beg to move.
Baroness Donaghy
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Jay on her presentation of this important report. We were both members of the Committee on Standards in Public Life and our tenure overlapped for a short while. I much admired her commitment and objectivity on the subjects covered in this report and I continue to admire her contributions in the House.
I was a member of the committee from 2001 to 2007, when it was chaired by Sir Nigel Wicks and Sir Alistair Graham, in two very different styles. I was also acting chair of the committee during most of 2007, pending the appointment of Sir Alistair’s successor, Sir Christopher Kelly. The committee covered all the subject areas in this report and I draw attention to its ninth report, Defining the Boundaries Within the Executive: Ministers, Special Advisers and the Permanent Civil Service.
One of the important jobs of the committee, particularly for the chair and secretariat, was meeting delegations from other countries that aspired to the principle of political impartiality: a Civil Service able to transfer its loyalty from one elected Government to the next, and upholding integrity and appointment on merit. Many of those countries were in a pre-Northcote-Trevelyan state, where patronage led to the appointment of,
“men of very slender ability, and perhaps questionable character, to situations of considerable emolument”,
in the Civil Service. Other countries aspire to our system. There is a very thin line—one that newly elected Governments do not always appreciate—between our system and the return to patronage and corruption. I particularly like the quotation in the report by the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton, who, in a plea to allow the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 to settle in, said:
“There has always been a tension in politics between patronage and merit; it is an old battle ... Merit ultimately won, but the patronage virus is never dead and constantly needs to be beaten back”.
It is particularly on the appointment of senior civil servants that this pressure is felt. I am concerned at the continuing rumours that the Cabinet Office Minister is seriously considering legislation to give Ministers greater powers of appointment. Francis Maude has said that,
“It would be perfectly possible under the legislation passed by Parliament in 2010 for the Civil Service Commission to provide ministers with a choice between appointable candidates. I am sorry the commission has decided not to support this”.
The Committee on Standards in Public Life often met organisations covering similar areas, including the Civil Service Commission and the Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointments. I presume that that still happens. We were aware then of pressures on the Civil Service Commission to change its criteria. I imagine that the same is happening now. I hope very much that the Civil Service Commission will stand firm on this issue of further ministerial involvement in senior appointments.
The report holds the line to a large extent, for which I am grateful. However, I cannot resist commenting on the recommendation that Ministers contribute to the appraisal of certain civil servants. When I was chair of ACAS, I was asked to participate in a Civil Service appraisal exercise to ensure fairness between departments. I freely admit that I was overwhelmed by paperwork, with a lever-arch file for everyone under consideration: a veritable mountain of information. How this involvement in appraisals will work needs careful thought. With the greatest respect to Ministers, some will be better able or prepared than others to enter this arena.
I welcome the fact that the committee does not recommend that accountability and responsibility are seen as two separate elements. That way confusion lies. Yes, I checked the Oxford English Dictionary this morning. “Accountable” is defined as,
“Bound to give account, responsible”,
and “responsible” is defined as,
“liable to be called to account”.
I also welcome the recommendation in paragraph 53 concerning the Civil Service as a constitutional check. Civil servants who are accounting officers take their role very seriously and it is a real check on ministerial nonchalance. I know of at least one example where a formal, written direction from the Minister was sought. To add any additional powers or be overprescriptive would act as a barrier to the working relationship of a Minister and his or her senior civil servant.
The committee is absolutely correct in paragraph 59 that,
“ministers are responsible for the actions of their special advisers”.
However, in practice it is all too easy for a Minister to distance himself from the rogue activities of a special adviser, and too little is known about the day-to-day working relationship of more junior civil servants and special advisers. Ministers have been known to encircle themselves with their special advisers—if it is possible to encircle with two people—who then act as a barrier to the extent that a special adviser starts to look very much like a manager. A civil servant wishing to do well and mindful of their future career is unlikely to complain to their senior about this. Of course, there are also examples of the relationship working well. I am simply saying that too little is known about the day-to-day practicalities.
On the issue of project management, I believe that this subject deserves a whole separate debate. There are huge timing problems on large projects, largely because of delays in releasing money, interdepartmental differences in priorities, constant revision of the details of projects and the appointment of consultants who charge the right price but are not up to the job. I am sure we could all write a book about that. The committee’s recommendation that,
“there should be a presumption that a single senior civil servant will lead the implementation of a major project from beginning to end”,
sounds good but will probably not work in practice unless the responsibility rests with a single department and no one has the right of veto. Peter Riddell referred to the fact that some projects lasted,
“the time of three Secretaries of State”.
That can be a very short space of time in some departments. At a more junior ministerial level, the Minister in charge of construction averaged eight months in the last Government.
My biggest concern about the report is in the area of accountability of civil servants to Parliament. I understand that there is probably huge pressure to change the rules and that the committee wants to tilt the balance,
“more in favour of the right of committees to request attendance of specific individuals”.
This is on the back of what is seen as a resurgence in the activities of Select Committees. It is not the first time and will not be the last; Select Committees rise and fall depending on the personality of the chair and the issues under consideration. I attended a number of Select Committees in the distant past, and received absolute courtesy from some and absolute rudeness from others. The big difference between my appearances—on dull and worthy subjects, it has to be said—and those of civil servants was that I could answer back. Civil servants should continue to give evidence to Select Committees,
“on behalf of their Ministers and under their directions”,
as stated in the Osmotherly rules. No one is trying to say that civil servants are,
“unfortunate, beleaguered public servants who cannot speak for themselves”.
I agree with Sir Alan Beith on that, but I do not agree with his conclusions. Of course Select Committees have the right to ask questions and elicit the truth, but care should be taken about the atmosphere surrounding such questioning. If I was a civil servant listening to the radio announcement that my head was going to be put on a spike by the chair of a Select Committee later that morning, I do not think it would encourage a free and frank exchange.
I hesitated about mentioning the name David Kelly as I feel sure his family do not want what happened to be resurrected and would want to live in peace. However, I was in a building with a number of senior civil servants when the news broke about his death. What was significant was not that they were terribly upset—of course they were—but they felt that their reputation had been impugned. It was an era when civil servants were being encouraged to be bold and imaginative and to take the initiative, and the encouragement of outside appointments was the order of the day. No one was going to be bold and imaginative after that day. So the context in which a civil servant is questioned, the tone adopted and the recognition that the quality of a policy is not for comment by that civil servant are extremely important.
Finally, with my ACAS hat on, I would advise caution about Select Committees recommending, even in extreme cases, that a,
“department consider appropriate disciplinary procedures . . . where there are strong grounds for doing so”.
What would the strong grounds be? If any Permanent Secretary found himself or herself in such a position, I would be very happy to represent them.
In conclusion, I am grateful for the opportunity to comment on this very measured and balanced report. The relationship between politicians and civil servants is endlessly fascinating, and we must not forget that the eyes of the world are on us whenever we make changes.
Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank
My Lords, I was a member of the Constitution Committee when it thought about examining the accountability of civil servants but I am no longer a member and I played no part in the inquiry.
I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, for being responsible for this valuable report, although I was a little confused by both her summary at the beginning of the report and the summary of the recommendations in Chapter 6. The two lists do not match in any clear sequence. However, on the substance, I largely agree with the report’s conclusions.
It is perhaps appropriate to mention that I was a Minister for 11 years in six different departments at different levels of seniority. That was a long time ago but today’s arguments about the relationship between civil servants and Ministers and Members of Parliament echo down the years.
More than that, they are resonant with Herbert Morrison’s book Government and Parliament: A Survey from the Inside, published in 1954—long before the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, brilliantly prised open Whitehall. Morrison says:
“It is my general experience that if the Minister in charge knows what he wants and is intelligent in going about it, he can command the understanding, co-operation and support of his civil servants”.
He goes on:
“The Minister should not be an isolated autocrat, giving orders without hearing or considering arguments for alternative courses”—
from civil servants. He then says:
“What the reader can be sure of is that the British Civil Service is loyal to the Government of the day. The worst that can be said of them is that sometimes”—
and this is familiar—
“they are not quick enough in accustoming themselves to new ideas, but then it is up to the Minister to educate them”.
Herbert Morrison had been at the centre of government in war and in peace for more than a decade. The book remains a very useful historic text on which a new or restless Minister might reflect. However, Morrison had little to contribute on the paragraphs of the report on Select Committees as his book was published long before the present system of Select Committees began to take shape. I remember in the 1970s that members of the Expenditure Committee questioned civil servants about the costs of Concorde but we had an unsatisfactory response as they often claimed commercial confidentiality. I broadly agree with the recommendations on Select Committees but Members of Parliament should not show off to or bully civil servant witnesses, and junior civil servants should not be put on the spot.
Among the eclectic issues that the Times is currently pursuing is the Civil Service and it has been running a special investigation. Splashed across the front page on 14 January there was the headline:
“No, Minister: Whitehall in ‘worst crisis’”.
There was, it said,
“an increasingly bitter power struggle between ministers and mandarins”.
Then on 28 January the Times had a headline:
“Ministers renew battle to control top Civil Service jobs”.
Caroline Spelman, who was sacked from the Cabinet last year, said that although she had been “supported brilliantly” by her civil servants, she could not understand why a Minister could not choose or—by implication—get rid of his or her Permanent Secretary. We have to read between the lines in the report as there is no real flavour of these apparent turbulent events.
There are good reasons for stability at the top of departments. Civil servants should not be sacked or moved elsewhere because of the colour of their eyes, their cautious language or implied political leanings. However it has always been possible for Cabinet Ministers—with determination and the agreement of the Prime Minister—to dispose of a very difficult or unsuitable Permanent Secretary.
It is fully on the record the way in which Roy Jenkins, on his appointment as Home Secretary in 1965, got rid of the formidable Sir Charles Cunningham, even if it took some weeks to achieve. On the matter of choice, when I was appointed Secretary of State for Transport, the head of the Civil Service asked me to choose a candidate for my Permanent Secretary from two senior civil servants, and to find another if I did not like either of them. I am sure there have been many similar occasions under different Governments over the years.
The Government require a dialogue between Ministers and civil servants but there is sometimes a serious dispute. When I was a junior Minister a civil servant might challenge my view and remain persistent. I would say, “All right, talk to the Permanent Secretary and if he agrees with you, he will talk with the Secretary of State”. As the report says, a civil servant has to be “candid and fearless”. In turn a Minister has to be responsive and fair. These are entirely routine matters. Good sense and tolerance, as Herbert Morrison might have put it, are the essence of successful government.
On major projects, in paragraphs 40 to 44, I am not entirely convinced. I cannot see how a single senior civil servant can see through a long project in terms of his or her maturing career. Apart from the lengthy procurement of defence equipment—and not just aircraft carriers—even a major road may take a dozen years from a ministerial decision to completion.
A fortnight ago, the Department for Transport launched HS2—high-speed trains planned to be in service by 2026. I find it unrealistic and against a civil servant’s interest for a single individual to guide the project from the beginning to the end. It is ironic that we will have six, seven or eight different Secretaries of State during that period.
The senior part of the Civil Service has—excellent as it was—changed for the better, as far as I observe it. Sixty years ago, my contemporaries joined the administrative class in the Civil Service mainly from Oxford and Cambridge or the LSE before the age of 25 or 26 and rose steadily towards the top. The current head of the Civil Service, Sir Bob Kerslake—Warwick University—joined the Greater London Council and became chief executive of Hounslow and then Sheffield. The noble Lord, Lord Bichard—Manchester—rose to become a Permanent Secretary after being chief executive of Brent and then Gloucestershire.
If Ministers were impatient in Herbert Morrison’s time, today’s Ministers are impatient about a new kind of civil servant with a different background and much wider training and experience. In reverse, it can be said that today’s Ministers now have less experience of running a large company or institution than 60 years ago. Of the 18 Secretaries of State and heads of department who gathered round the Cabinet table in May 2010, a couple of them had a substantial business career, and others had some commercial, financial or marketing experience. Half of the Cabinet were unfamiliar with a big organisation, which a government department is.
I welcome the report. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Jay: it is unreasonable that the Government have not responded to the report. I very much regret that. The report points in the right direction: to maintain and improve one aspect of our parliamentary process.
Lord Wilson of Dinton
My Lords, I welcome the report, which charts a careful and thoughtful path through complex constitutional issues which it would be easy to get wrong. There is much in it with which I agree and which I welcome. For instance, I welcome the endorsement of the principle of ministerial accountability to Parliament. As the Government recognised in their belated response, civil servants are accountable to Ministers and Ministers are accountable to Parliament. That is fundamental, and it is good to see it endorsed by the committee.
I also welcome the endorsement of what I think of as the Northcote-Trevelyan principle of recruitment on merit on the basis of fair and open competition. Those things may seem obvious, but they are bedrock to how we run our government, and it is important that they are understood, because we have no written constitution to which we can refer.
That said, inevitably, there are a number of points in the report which I would like to add to, retract or disagree with. The principle that Ministers account and that civil servants appear before Parliament on behalf of their Ministers is important to defend and understand. I note that it was asserted in evidence to the committee that the idea that civil servants are unfortunate, beleaguered public servants who cannot speak for themselves is from a past era. That I disagree with. You have only to watch some poor beleaguered civil servants still appearing before Select Committees to know that that is untrue. Civil servants go before Select Committees to explain the Government’s policy—they are not there in their own right. That has a consequence: it is necessary, if Ministers are going to have civil servants appear before Parliament to explain their position, that the Minister should be able to choose who does that.
If a Select Committee wants to summon a named official, it can of course do so, but there will inevitably be occasions when the Minister wants to choose who responds on their behalf. When I appeared before the Public Administration Committee as the Cabinet Secretary, the chairman complained after a while that, whoever he asked to appear, he always seemed to get me. I can understand the frustration that that caused, but it was the fact that the Prime Minister wanted me to explain the Government’s policy, the facts and, in the end, I think that the Government will hold to that position.
It is also the case that civil servants should in no way be disciplined by a Select Committee. Select Committees are not equipped to carry out that task. In many ways, they are arenas that can be very unfair and they are in no way equipped or trained to carry out the kind of fair processes that disciplinary arrangements require. I agree very much with the excellent speech of the noble Baroness, who I thought got it absolutely right. I agreed with pretty much everything that she said on that subject.
Similarly, I note and understand the view that retired civil servants should be able to be summoned before Select Committees. I argue only that there should be some form of statute of limitation. There must come some point when people are spared that recall. I remember one sad occasion in the 1990s, which people may not remember, where a former civil servant was summoned to account for something that had happened. He was not well—the Select Committee did not know that—and the whole thing covered everyone with a certain embarrassment. It is important that this should be done with some sense of proportion and appropriateness, but, in the end, Select Committees probably should be able to call back the only people who can explain what happened.
Other things in the report raised a wry smile. I noted the proposal that Ministers should be able to contribute to the appraisal of selected civil servants. This is not new. There was a process introduced in the 1990s that Ministers should be asked to comment on the performance of their Permanent Secretaries. I remember it. The Minister concerned will remain nameless—there could be more than one. I kept reminding him that he had not yet said anything for my appraisal. In the end, I went to see him to ask him to do it because we were way beyond the timetable and he said, “Will you draft me something?”, so there is a theory here which may not entirely conform with the facts. I do not ask the Minister to comment on that.
As to staying in the job, again, it is a noble ideal but it may not be so easily implemented in practice. When I proposed to Mr Blair as Prime Minister the setting up of the Delivery Unit, the concept was that the Government should select two or three topics in particular areas to which the Civil Service would pay close attention and devote its very best resources to achieve results over a given period, and that named officials should be assigned to those projects and remain with them until the end, accountable for whatever was required to happen. I do not think that it proved practicable. The world moves on; Ministers change; circumstances change; things happen to the people concerned. It is a highly desirable objective, but in practice it has to be tempered realistically with the way the world is.
I want to say two important things. First, I do not agree with the committee that accountability and responsibility are the same. The distinction between accountability and responsibility is useful. I think Ministers are accountable to Parliament in the sense of being liable to give an account, but I do not think that they carry responsibility for everything that they are accounting for. The air is thick these days with people demanding accountability and in the same breath demanding sacking. We need to be absolutely clear that the people who give an account are not necessarily the people who should be held responsible. I would wish to stick to this distinction, which originates with my noble friend Lord Armstrong from the Armstrong memorandum, if I remember correctly.
The other point I want to make is the importance of having the right people of the right quality in government. These proposals in the Constitution Committee’s report need to be seen in the context of the challenge that the Civil Service faces at the moment. The scale of reduction in the size of the service is astonishing. The reduction in size is bigger than the entire worldwide workforce of a company such BP. That is a challenge which no private sector company, other than one going bankrupt, has to face. It has been done at the same time as pay and pensions are under pressure, which is bound to affect morale. The Government are asking the Civil Service to implement major radical changes across a great broad front such as health, education, defence, Europe and welfare. All these things are demanding. It will require enormous skill and ability to implement those challenges, at a time when there is great churn. The choice of people for these jobs is crucial. It concerns me very much that so many people at the top of the Civil Service are leaving. I believe that only two out of 16 key Permanent Secretaries are still in post over the past two or three years. That is a big worry.
The last thing that the Civil Service needs at the moment is a demand for constitutional change. The Government’s best chance of achieving the scale of change that they are seeking is if they work closely in unity on a basis of trust with the Civil Service within a constitutional framework that is understood and accepted by everyone, without attempts to challenge what are bedrock principles.
Permanent Secretaries are in the public eye. If Ministers choose them, they will be perceived as people who are—I try to avoid the word “cronies”—the chosen people of that Minister. That could lead to very unfortunate consequences. If a Minister chooses a civil servant, that may not be the Permanent Secretary who his or her successor needs. Permanent Secretaries need to be people who can serve the current Minister, the next Minister and possibly a Minister from another Government. It is crucial that they are people who can serve Governments of any political complexion. If one Minister chooses them, that is something which is likely to lead to subsequent Ministers saying, “I want my person. If my predecessor had their person, I want the person who is my own choice”. The perception outside that it has become politicised is a real one. It is not theoretical—it is real.
However reasonable it sounds, there is a thin red line which the First Civil Service Commissioner is entirely right to defend. It is of fundamental importance. Noble Lords who have been Ministers will forgive me, but there is no evidence that the people who Ministers would choose would do the job better than the people who are chosen by the First Civil Service Commission. The importance of holding to the position which the First Civil Service Commissioner has outlined is fundamental. I would be very concerned indeed if there were to be any concessions on that.
Noble Lords will understand that there is much more that I wish to say. There needs to be a general acceptance of the constitutional deal that underlies the Civil Service. Governments who wish to achieve big change need to work within the constitution. It does not help to attack any of the principles that are bedrock to the way the Civil Service works.
Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield
My Lords, each generation needs to re-examine its notions of Crown service and the accountabilities that go with it. I add my thanks to the Constitution Committee, and its chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, for their resonant report of last November. It covers a great many of the crucial ingredients of what one might call the governing marriage at the heart of the British system; a marriage which brings together transient if, in the end, dominant Ministers and permanent, career, non-political civil servants in a relationship that one hopes will be greater than the sum of its parts. However, there has existed over the past 40 years a third party to the classic governing marriage in the shape of temporary, politically appointed special advisers who can bring great benefits to the work of the established couple but occasionally can also produce bursts of friction that can induce a serious domestic.
I am pleased—even relieved—that in general terms the Constitution Committee’s report has endorsed the main elements of the standard model in which civil servants are required to provide what the committee calls “candid and fearless advice” to Ministers in return for their Secretaries of State remaining can-carriers-in-chief in Parliament, in an age in which, quite rightly, senior officials are expected to give evidence to Select Committees of both Houses and to be visible and vocal to a degree not experienced by their forebears before the House of Commons created its departmentally related Select Committees in 1979.
I am particularly pleased that the Constitution Committee has emphasised in clear and powerful terms the indispensability of sustaining the classic career Civil Service virtues of integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality as enshrined in statutory form for the first time, as other noble Lords have mentioned, in Part 1 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010—a mere 157 years after the lustrous Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1853 declared that such essentials should enjoy the protection of statute.
It is this theme upon which I should like to concentrate today. Rightly or wrongly, there has been a whiff of potential politicisation of the very senior ranks of the Civil Service in the Whitehall air since last June when the coalition published its Civil Service Reform Plan. It is the so-called “Action 11” section of that plan that has simulated this tang of unease. Action 11 urges:
“Allowing Secretaries of State to have greater influence in the appointment of the departmental Permanent Secretary”—
as this—
“increases the chances of the relationship working successfully”.
Add to this the proposal for the appointment of,
“a very limited number of senior officials”,
from outside the career Civil Service,
“for time-limited executive/management roles”,
to fill gaps where,
“the expertise does not exist in the Department”,
and you may have created the possibility of seeping politicisation-by-stealth of the senior ranks.
I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, who is both a scholar of the workings of Whitehall—the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in particular—in his civilian life, if I can call it that, and a member of the new Civil Service Reform Board, established to implement the June 2012 reform plan, will be able to sing out a ringing declaration that this is not now and will not become the purpose and policy of the coalition as the promised review of Permanent Secretary appointments proceeds this year.
There have been rumours, mentioned by other noble Lords, that a Bill is being considered that would undo those parts of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 that capture the prized principles of a politically impartial Civil Service recruited and promoted on the basis of merit and not on the political beauty of a candidate’s opinions.
These principles were one of the greatest gifts of the 19th century to the 20th in our country. If they foundered in the second decade of the 21st, it would be as tragic as it was ironic, as other noble Lords have mentioned, given that the country had waited a century and a half to have these precepts draped in the protective clothing of statute only to have them torn away a few years later because a set of Ministers had become irritated with their particular partners in the governing marriage.
I have attempted to discover if this is so. Mercifully, so far, I have found no trace of a “Stuff Northcote and Trevelyan” Bill, which I offer as a suggested title, in the minds of the current Whitehall guardians of the constitution. Yet I remain anxious. Why? Because Action 11 sounds to me, to be candid, like a hissy fit: an audible sign that all is not well in at least some of the relationships between Ministers and senior civil servants above and beyond the usual tensions that arise when Governments seethe through their mid-life crises, when it becomes quite plain that the great intractables of British society— economy and government —have become no more malleable because it is you and your colleagues in office rather than your rivals.
During such political rites of passage, it is tempting to blame the civil servants, the permanent fixtures in the choreography and geography of our governing institutions. Could it be that my traditionalist instincts have masked, for me, a set of new realities in the nature of government and politics that make the mid-Victorian nostrums of Sir Stafford Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan invalid at best, and positively harmful at worst?
It was the begetter of the Northcote-Trevelyan inquiry and the implementer of their report, Mr Gladstone, who wished, as his biographer Colin Matthew put it, that:
“A civil service appointed by patronage and influence would give way to a non-political administrative class”,
and that while the 17th century had been an age ruled by prerogative, and the 18th by patronage, the 19th would become one of rule by virtue. There was intense resistance to this notion of meritocracy. Queen Victoria hated it. The Foreign and Home Offices resisted for decades. However, it became the norm for the Home Civil and Diplomatic Services, the Armed Forces and the secret services. Its prime virtue is that Crown servants, in civvies or in uniform, should speak truth unto power: to tell Ministers what they need to know rather than what they wish to hear. Sir Charles Trevelyan had seen this approach first-hand at work in the Indian Civil Service. On his return to the UK, he made his case to the Commons Select Committee on Miscellaneous Expenditure in 1848 and then, as Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, to his new Chancellor, Mr Gladstone, in 1852.
How are the Trevelyans of our day operating his legacy? The Northcote-Trevelyan principles are holding. The Whitehall Senior Leadership Committee, with the involvement of the Civil Service Commission, spins off bespoke panels according to the nature and location of the Permanent Secretary vacancy. It receives direct input from the Secretary of State in the department possessing the vacancy about the qualities and capacities they, the Secretaries of State, are seeking. The leadership committee carries out the interviews and places a handful of candidates above the line, indicating that they are both capable of doing the job and in possession of the Northcote-Trevelyan non-partisan characteristics which would enable them to serve equally well a Secretary of State or Government of a different colour. After all, as other noble Lords have pointed out, we need permanent Permanent Secretaries, not temporary Permanent Secretaries who last for the duration of a single Secretary of State. As has been mentioned, there is already an alarmingly high rate of churn at Permanent Secretary level. The Secretary of State and, indeed, the Prime Minister can veto the outcome and the process starts again. However, the key safeguard is that if you do not meet the Northcote-Trevelyan requirement, you do not get above the line.
It is vital that these processes and the safeguards hold and are not contaminated by the virus of politicisation. Walter Bagehot, in an 1859 essay on Gladstone’s great rival Benjamin Disraeli, wrote how rare it was for a Minister to,
“engrave something new upon his age”.
That is exactly what Gladstone did in unleashing Northcote and Trevelyan in the 1850s, and striving to implement their reform as Prime Minister in the late 1860s and early 1870s. The mark of that engraving is still visible.
I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, and her committee will continue to watch like hawks for signs of slippage back into the—for some—tempting restoration of political patronage at the top of the Civil Service. As a seasoned public servant put it to me recently, we want neither sofa government nor sofa public servants to sit on it.
I find it hard to believe that Mr David Cameron or his Minister for the Civil Service, Mr Francis Maude, for whom I have a lot of admiration, wish to overturn the Gladstonian gold standard. As for Liberal Democrat Ministers in the coalition, such as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, that would amount to parricide. As for Conservative Ministers, they have their talismanic figure, too. I am grateful to Mr Nicholas Soames for bringing his grandfather’s words to my attention. In praise of one of his former officials, Winston Churchill said that he was,
“this faithful servant of the Crown, self-effacing, but self-respecting, resolute, convinced, sure of himself, sure of his theme … Governments, Liberal or Tory, came and went. He served them all with equal fidelity”,
consigning his personal,
“sentiments as a purely private affair”.
That is the enduring gold standard.
Lord Morris of Aberavon
My Lords, I congratulate the Select Committee on its report under the chairmanship of my noble friend. It is both an illuminating report and enjoyable to read. However, I also share her regret about the extreme lateness of the Government’s response.
My experience of civil servants arises from having been a Minister for a very long time in five government departments. There is no issue with the integrity and dedication of civil servants. The real issue is whether they are organised in the best way to serve the state. The highest point for me, as a very young Minister in 1964—well before the Ark—was to be told by the person who was in effect running the Ministry of Power, Matthew Stevenson, that he had everything in place to implement the Government’s plans to bring the steel industry into public ownership, for which I had been given a small responsibility. In Stevenson’s words, by my recollection: “When I was a young man at the Ministry, I helped to nationalise steel. When I was older, now at the Treasury, I helped to denationalise it. Now that I am older still, I can assure you that I have the plans and staff to nationalise it once again”. That great civil servant was as true as his word, and put flesh on the bones of our shoulders, which had been pretty bare and innocent of too much detail. The low point for me was the Cabinet Office’s procedures for handling the memoirs I was obliged to submit to it as an ex-Cabinet Minister. All I would say is that I warn future writers to be wary.
A report not available to the committee was that of the Comptroller and Auditor-General. Had it been available, the committee might have pondered on its words:
“The Civil Service is badly managed, lacks vision … and fails to ensure value for money”.
It points to “fundamental management weaknesses” and recalls nine major attempts to reform Whitehall in the past 40 years: challenging words, to say the least.
I turn to some of the committee’s conclusions. First, it says:
“We maintain our view that there is no constitutional difference between the terms responsibility and accountability”.
I am not sure. The Government’s response points out an important distinction between them. The consequences can be different, so far as blame is concerned. Crichel Down is said to be the high point of accepting responsibility. Since then, a much more complex system of government has evolved, with the development of arm’s-length bodies. The growth of the modern state has led inevitably to the diminution of direct parliamentary accountability. Indeed, as a young man I was able to put a question to the Postmaster-General, asking why a letter to one of my constituents had been delivered late—another age.
Fortunately, the growth of Select Committees in the House of Commons, and the flexing of their muscles in demanding more evidence, is helping to fill the vacuum. I suspect that our committees still have some way to go to be as strong as the committees of the American Senate. That leads me to my second point: endorsing the committee’s recommendation that the right of access by committees to civil policy should not be weaker than those making a request under the Freedom of Information Act. The committee has struck the right balance in underlining protection for civil servants under the decision-making wing of the Minister. The Government’s response seems to accept that.
Thirdly, I turn to some interesting paragraphs, which have been touched on already, on the appointment of Permanent Secretaries. The committee rightly maintains that appointment should be on merit. I believe that Ministers are entitled to, and should get, the men and women they want as Permanent Secretaries. In a recent letter to the Times, the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, pointed out his experience on that score. The noble Lord, Lord Rodgers, in his contribution seemed to endorse that.
In 1974, when I became the Welsh Secretary I got my man, albeit in slightly different circumstances. For six years, I was served by the man in whom I had confidence and whom I wanted. The committee concedes that the Government’s proposals are in some respects the formalisation of practices that already occur. I agree with that too. I have considered the Government’s response, which underlines the involvement of the Secretary of State at each and every level. That must be so, and I accept and agree with it. I hope that the review being conducted will not ignore the reality of what happened certainly in my experience and in that of the noble Lords, Lord Jenkin and Lord Rodgers.
The bottom line is that a Cabinet Minister must have confidence that his Permanent Secretary will organise the department in such a way that it can deliver his policies. When, in 1966, I went with Barbara Castle to the Ministry of Transport, it was a failed department. The Minister was in the wrong job and he was sacked. He had failed to produce a transport policy. It was widely understood that the Permanent Secretary would not be sacked. He was sidelined and Barbara brought in a distinguished academic, Christopher Foster, an expert in transport, who distinguished himself as an adviser to many Governments to run the policy side of the department.
Fourthly, the Select Committee is nervous about having temporary civil servants on fixed-term contracts. Provided they have the vital qualities for a most senior civil servant, the appointment should be for the Minister to make and not have to be the Permanent Secretary, who may well have failed. The Government’s response seems to be the right one, which I warmly welcome.
Fifthly, the committee recommends the presumption that a single senior civil servant will lead the implementation of a major project from beginning to end. The Auditor-General welcomes the creation of the Major Projects Authority in 2010. Despite the difficulties that we have heard, I agree 100% with that laudable aim. An official should have a personal promotion, if necessary, in order to maintain continuity in the department. These projects are complex, and it is very important that a person should maintain their responsibility. I hope that the Browne review, to which reference has been made, will certainly ensure that there is an improvement on that score.
As well as persons in charge of projects, Permanent Secretaries come and go far too frequently, as do Ministers. Procurement Ministers should be in post for much longer. Over the years, the history of defence procurement is an indication of the lack of continuity of proper ministerial control. I am proud to have been a Minister of Defence for Equipment, although, fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, the electorate sacked the Government. I would have regretted very much not being able to continue with some of those projects, which have the gestation period of an elephant. The most effective Minister under whom I have served was the noble Lord, Lord Healey, who was Defence Minister for six years. He knew the beginning and the end of all projects in that time.
I could not help smiling when I read about a departing woman Permanent Secretary of great distinction complaining about the lack, perhaps rightly, of women Permanent Secretaries when she was moving on to other pastures. That seemed to me to be a very odd comment to make. The committee might have spent a little time scrutinising the length of tenure of Permanent Secretaries in one post. It is a great worry that they seem to go from one department to another incredibly quickly.
Finally, when I had been Attorney-General for only a few months, I was asked to approve the bonus of a distinguished government lawyer. It was the first time I had heard of bonuses. I thought that the rate for the job had been negotiated. How could I as a Minister of only a few months’ standing in a matter of months decide on the exceptional performance and worthiness of this distinguished senior lawyer? Past Governments have gone down the wrong road with bonuses. I welcome the recent Parliamentary Answer that the number receiving awards has been reduced since 2010 from the astonishing figure of 65% to 25% of civil servants.
I am proud to have worked with a large number of dedicated civil servants, but I will not enlarge on that. I hope that what I have said is sufficient. All I will say is that I had no more suspicion of any diminution in quality when I last took office in 1997 than when I first became a Minister of the Crown in 1964—a span of more than 30 years.
Baroness Tyler of Enfield
My Lords, I welcome today’s debate on this very important issue, and start by paying tribute to the work led by the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, and the members of the Constitution Committee for their excellent job. The committee’s strong endorsement of the basic principles of accountability in our parliamentary system and the convention of ministerial responsibility is very much to be welcomed.
My reason for speaking in this debate is to offer the perspective of someone who was a career civil servant for 19 years in six departments. You could say that it is the viewpoint of someone at the other end of the telescope from Ministers and Parliament. I should start by saying that I firmly believe in the principles that underpin an impartial British Civil Service. These principles go back to the Northcote-Trevelyan report and still hold firm today. I wish to continue to see a Civil Service that is appointed on merit and that people who advance in it do so on the basis of merit. I feel sure that the whole House would wish to see a Civil Service that is impartial, objective and honest, and that acts at all time with integrity. These are the watchwords of the modern Civil Service.
None of the above should prevent any of the welcome changes of recent years in the Civil Service, nor should they prevent it learning from elsewhere, be it from the private sector or elsewhere in international public administration. Indeed, I read with interest what is happening in New Zealand to sharpen accountability for senior civil servants and in Australia where there is a very different system for appointing and dismissing their equivalent of Permanent Secretaries. A greater level of exchange with other sectors, a greater level of professionalism in the Civil Service, particularly in relation to procurement and project management, and a greater awareness of the challenges of modern information systems and the rise of the 24/7 world of communications will all help to enhance the effectiveness of our modern Civil Service.
Indeed, the Civil Service reform plan has already made a start in setting out the type of changes needed to deliver a 21st century Civil Service. I welcome the commitment in that document, for example, to a greater focus on learning and development in the Civil Service, from talent spotting and developing a fast stream right up to addressing the training needs of Permanent Secretaries.
That said, I am concerned that some of the values of the Civil Service are being undermined by some of the current developments in parts of the Civil Service reform programme. I share the concerns that have already been voiced in this debate about the negative way in which the Civil Service is being portrayed by some Ministers, particularly when there is no right of reply and, as other noble Lords have said, at the same time as major cuts in staffing levels are being made throughout the Civil Service, with the impact that that is having on morale.
I have four key points to make on the potential risks of undermining the values that I have set out, values which I believe are fundamental to our democracy. First, a worrying trend is developing—we have heard about it already in this debate—of too much political interference in the appointment of Permanent Secretaries. There has been much discussion recently in the media and elsewhere about this issue, and the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, has already spoken most eloquently on this matter. In addition, the First Civil Service Commissioner has made very clear in his interventions that there is, in any case, always ample opportunity for a Secretary of State to make his or her views clear on the quality of the candidates being considered as Permanent Secretaries.
In a letter to the Times last year, Sir David Normington warned of the dangers of a more politicised appointments process, particularly if a civil servant becomes viewed as the personal appointment of a particular Minister rather than someone able and ready to work for a new Minister or a new Government. We all know how quickly the reshuffle merry-go-round takes place.
In my view, Ministers should not be able to overrule the decision of the Civil Service Commission. Some recent examples, such as the overturning of the commission’s recommendation for the post of Permanent Secretary at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, run the risk of undermining the principle of fair and open competition based on merit. I make no criticism whatever of the candidate eventually chosen in that department who, I know, is a highly regarded civil servant. However, the original candidate selected, and agreed by the Secretary of State, was, as I understand it and as was reported, subsequently overruled by Downing Street. If that was the case, then it was wrong.
Secondly, the proposal as part of the reform plan to contract out core policy functions and test the market in certain circumstances has real flaws and has not been properly thought through. If you are seeking impartial policy advice delivered to Ministers without fear or favour; if you are seeking people who can speak truth unto power it is best if those people do not have a financial interest in the advice they give. This is especially important when looking at long-term policy implementation, rightly one of the concerns of the Constitution Committee.
Of course Ministers will wish to have, and should have, access to a wide a range of advice from think tanks, other pressure groups, academics, management consultants with specific expertise and others. Of course, the Civil Service must not claim a monopoly of advice; it does not have it. However, there is always the risk that a private sector organisation, a think tank or any other organisation providing advice under contract to a Minister may be tempted to provide the advice that they think the Minister wishes to hear rather than what the Minister ought to hear, particularly if a future contract for that policy advice is in the offing. It is the role of senior civil servants to weigh up those at times conflicting opinions and give fair and impartial balanced advice to Ministers without any axe to grind or any personal or financial benefit to accrue to them or their department. I do not think there has been nearly enough attention or debate on this development and its serious implications for Civil Service accountability.
Thirdly, I wish to nail the accusation that the Civil Service is inherently risk-averse and that somehow this is an inbuilt weakness of the system and the way it is held accountable. Under successive Governments, but particularly recently, as we have already heard in today’s debate, the cry has gone up from Ministers that civil servants need to be more entrepreneurial and more willing to take measured risks. I wish to challenge that accusation. The work of the Civil Service is not capable of such a precise parallel with the role of the private sector. In the latter case, entrepreneurs take risks with other people’s money or with private money in the hope that they will generate more money and profits. Sometime they do and sometime they do not. On occasions, the businesses involved will lose money if the risk does not come off and the investors have to carry that loss.
In the public sector, and particularly in the Civil Service, it is not private money that is being invested. Rather, the Government are investing taxpayers’ money in public services. Civil servants, and at the top of each department accounting officers, have a constitutional duty, as the report of the Constitution Committee makes clear, to ensure due propriety in the spending of that money. Permanent Secretaries and heads of department are responsible to Parliament for the proper stewardship of expenditure. The Public Accounts Committee exists precisely for the purpose of scrutinising and challenging accounting officers on their management of public money. It would simply not be acceptable for civil servants to say, “I took a risk with public money and that risk didn’t come off. I’m sorry”. As a society, we rightly expect more of public money and public servants. Of course, civil servants must understand risk and be explicit in their advice to Ministers on the risks involved in pursuing particular policies. The idea, though, that civil servants across the board should be less risk-averse—the flipside of that is, as a result, more entrepreneurial—does not stand up to detailed scrutiny.
Finally, I think we need to look again at the relationship between Ministers and civil servants—something that I fear is currently at something of a low ebb, with a real impact on morale. We also need to look at the three-way relationship between Ministers, the permanent Civil Service and special advisers, and the benefits that that can bring to the system. The best special advisers—and I have worked constructively with many in the past—add value and protect that vital frontier between politics and the non-party political role of an impartial civil servant. I am very pleased that the committee reaffirmed the clear principle that Ministers are responsible for the actions of their special advisers.
The Minister-civil servant relationship needs to be strong and constructive, recognising the mutually beneficial role that each can play. In my experience—and in present company, I am going to try to put this as delicately as I possibly can—there are on occasion Ministers who are sometimes too quick to blame their civil servants when they would do well, initially perhaps, to consider their own effectiveness in particular circumstances. The best Ministers, and the ones who command the most respect from their departments, regardless of party, are those who set out a strong strategic vision, take decisions quickly, explain those decisions, recognise where the boundaries lie between their respective roles and, when things go wrong, accept personal responsibility, even when they have not been personally involved in the decision. In that sense, the spirit of Crichel Down lives on today, and that is why I agree with the committee’s conclusion on the convention on ministerial responsibility.
This is an important report and I very much welcomed the chance to take part in this debate today. I believe strongly in the values of the modern British Civil Service and, at the same time, support the need for it to change in order to preserve and support those values I have described.
I conclude with a quote from another report:
“the Government of the country could not be carried on without the aid of”,
a Civil Service,
“directly responsible to the Crown and to Parliament, yet possessing sufficient independence, character, ability and experience to advise, assist and, to some extent, influence, those who are from time to time set over them”.
I agree. These are not my words but those of Northcote-Trevelyan back in 1854. They are as true today as they were then.
Lord Armstrong of Ilminster
My Lords, I add my voice to those which have congratulated and expressed thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, and to the Constitution Committee for their measured, balanced and authoritative report which brings the threads together and presents us with some very sensible and well considered conclusions. The committee has done the state some service in robustly and, in my view, correctly reasserting the Haldane convention that civil servants are accountable to Ministers and Ministers are accountable to Parliament—it would put Ministers and civil servants into an unworkable tangle and morass of divided, dual and sometimes conflicting accountability if it were otherwise.
I am not going to join in the discussion of whether there is a distinction between responsibility and accountability. I simply note that there is an important verbal point in the committee’s view that there is no difference. It says that,
“there is no constitutional difference”.
I think that I am prepared to accept that. In other respects there is a difference between responsibility and accountability but I will not waste your Lordships’ time by going into that.
The committee is also right in arguing that the growth in the size and complexity of the state since the Haldane convention was formulated, and the development of Select Committees since 1979, require that the practice in operating the convention should be kept under review. It would clearly be impossible for Ministers to give all the evidence required by parliamentary committees, so the convention must be applied with understanding and flexibility within the framework defined by Lord Haldane—but it must not be violated.
It is particularly in relation to the work and the demands of parliamentary select and other committees that the lines in the sand need to be kept under review and redrawn if need be. The principle must be that the civil servant is accountable to his Minister when he gives evidence on the Minister’s or the department’s behalf to a parliamentary committee, as he is in everything else that he does as a civil servant. Normally there will be no problem about this. The Minister—or the department on his behalf—will select, and the committee concerned will accept, the civil servants who are best qualified to answer the questions likely to be asked. Occasionally, as the Constitution Committee recognises, a parliamentary committee will wish to hear evidence from a particular civil servant. The Minister will consent to allow that civil servant to give evidence if the Minister is content that he should do so; but if the Minister is not content that he should do so, the Minister is entitled to withhold his consent.
I do not think that a Minister can be forced not to withhold consent. If he does withhold consent, then the committee will be within its rights if it summons the Minister himself to go and give evidence, or to make available another civil servant to do so if the committee is prepared to accept that other person. I was involved in one case where a Commons committee wanted to call two named civil servants to give evidence but the Minister, for valid reasons, refused to allow them to go and, with the committee’s grudging acceptance, sent me to give evidence on the Minister’s behalf. I still remember with a touch of pride, though it got me into some trouble at the time, the Guardian’s lobby correspondent’s verdict on that encounter: “Mandarin 3, Select Committee 0”.
There will be other cases where a civil servant called to give evidence will be instructed by his Minister not to answer a particular question or questions, or not to give certain information to the committee concerned, because the information is of especial secrecy or confidentiality. The civil servant must be free to say that the Minister, who is himself accountable to Parliament and on whose behalf he is giving evidence, has instructed him not to answer the question or give that information. In my view, the committee is bound to accept that position and to have recourse to the Minister himself if it wishes to press for an answer. The civil servant concerned should not be put under third-degree pressure by the chairman or members of the committee to answer the question when he has been instructed by his Minister or is bound not to do so.
The Constitution Committee discusses the question of the appointment of Permanent Secretaries. The problem question here is the role of a Minister in selecting a new Permanent Secretary. It was all so much easier in my day. When I was head of the Civil Service, I chaired a senior appointments selection committee whose task was to consider a shortlist of candidates for an appointment and give the guidance on whom I should recommend to the Prime Minister. Before preparing such a shortlist, I took great trouble to consult the Secretary of State concerned to try to make sure that any candidates whom he favoured were on the shortlist and that any candidates with whom he thought he could not work were not on the short list.
The Prime Minister I served was not very happy if I recommended only one name; she liked to have more than one name before her, with a statement of my reasons for the recommendation I made. She would sometimes discuss my recommendation with me, with her customary forensic skill, before approving an appointment. She wanted to make sure that the appointment would not just be Buggins’s turn, but I cannot remember that in the end, after the discussion, she ever approved the appointment of someone whom I had not recommended.
That was a less formal arrangement than the existing system but it did not work badly. It seems to me that the existing system, as described in the Constitution Committee’s report, provides a Secretary of State with sufficient involvement in the process to make sure that his views are known and taken into account and that he will not have thrust upon him a Permanent Secretary with whom he feels unable to work. I do not think it would be right to go further than that and give the Secretary of State or departmental Minister the final choice, for all the reasons set out in the evidence to the Constitution Committee and by the committee itself in its report.
It would clearly be undesirable for the Permanent Secretary to change every time there is a change of Secretary of State or departmental Minister. The turnover of departmental Ministers can be quite rapid. I served for four years in the Home Office: for two as a deputy secretary, then two as Permanent Secretary. During that time I served three Secretaries of State, two Labour and one Conservative, and got on happily and constructively with all three. It would have been intolerable, not only for me but also for the Secretaries of State and the department, if the Permanent Secretary had changed every time there was a new Secretary of State.
The Constitution Committee discusses the question whether Civil Service policy advice should ever be disclosed to parliamentary Select Committees. I agree with those who said in evidence that a civil servant should never be asked to disclose the advice he has given to his Minister; if anyone is to be asked to disclose that advice, it should be the Minister. The general rule should be that advice given by civil servants to Ministers should never be disclosed. If civil servants were to believe that their advice might subsequently be disclosed, there would be a real danger that that advice would be less full, candid and fearless than it should be. Exceptions to the general rule should be extremely rare, if not non-existent.
I could discuss many other points on the report but I agree with very much of it and will not add more, save this in conclusion. In all this, I am reminded once again of the charge that Queen Elizabeth I gave to Sir William Cecil in November 1558, when she appointed him to be her principal Secretary of State—in effect, her Cabinet Secretary and head of the Civil Service. She said:
“This judgment I have of you, that you will not be corrupted by any manner of gift; and that you will be faithful to the State; and that, without respect of my private will, you will give me that counsel you think best; and if you shall know anything … to be declared to me of secrecy, you shall show it to myself only”.
As a lapidary statement of the duties and responsibilities of civil servants in relation to Ministers, it is difficult to improve upon that.
However, it is worth also remembering the advice that Sir William Cecil gave to his son and successor about what happened when he and the Queen disagreed:
“As long as I may be allowed to give advice, I will not change my opinion by affirming the contrary, for that were to offend God, to whom I am sworn first; but as a servant I will obey Her Majesty’s commandment, and no wise contrary the same, presuming that she being God’s … minister here, it shall be God’s will to have her commandments obeyed”.
I might not have put it quite like that; I might have referred not only to her divine mandate, but to her to democratic mandate too. However, I recognised instantly that that was how I felt in my dealings with Mrs Thatcher when she was Prime Minister and I was her Cabinet Secretary. The two quotations taken together seem to quite neatly and pithily encapsulate the duties of civil servants to Ministers.
Lord Wright of Richmond
My Lords, how can I follow that? I shall speak very briefly on three points. The first is to draw your Lordships’ attention to a remarkable speech made by the father of the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, Lord Callaghan of Cardiff, in a debate on the Recruitment and Assessment Services in 1996. Although I commend the whole of that speech to the House, I shall only quote two sentences which state that,
“the Civil Service is not the private property of temporary, fleeting Ministers to trifle with as they please. It is the property of us all, and Parliament has always accepted that”.—[Official Report, 8/3/96; col. 546.]
My second point is relevant to the use by the Lord Callaghan of the words “temporary” and “fleeting”. The report which we are debating refers only to the high turnover of senior responsible officials. Given the frequency with which Ministers, and even Secretaries of State, have been moved from one job to another, or to none, under successive Administrations, would it really be a sensible way to run the public service if all of them were allowed to dismiss and appoint their Permanent Secretaries?
My third point is somewhat outside the scope of the committee’s report. I make it not only as a former head of Her Majesty's Diplomatic Service but as a seconded civil servant for the two and a half years when I worked for two successive Prime Ministers in the 1970s. Having earlier in my career been Private Secretary to Sir David Ormsby-Gore in Washington, I understand as well as anyone the very special contribution which a political head of mission can make to a bilateral relationship. But here again, let us be very careful not to follow the American precedent whereby some 30% of senior diplomatic posts are filled with friends and donors of the party in power. It is said that for every top position in the American Foreign Service, a donation of up to $2.3 million is now required. Let us never forget, as the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, reminded us, that a key objective of the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms was to abolish patronage of that sort.
Lord Lexden
My Lords, I am very grateful to be allowed to fill the gap between the powerful contributions that have been made to this debate and the Minister’s speech. A small, narrow gap is perhaps the appropriate place for one of the newest and most junior members of your Lordships’ House’s Select Committee on the Constitution.
I was roused from my natural indolence by the arrival late yesterday afternoon of the Government’s response to our report—a report which had been in the Government’s hands for well over two months, as the committee chairman, the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, made clear. One of the most telling features of the response is that it deals at length with only one element of the report: namely, the appointment of Permanent Secretaries. To that it devotes six paragraphs, while no other recommendation in the report receives more than two paragraphs by way of reply. On the appointment of Permanent Secretaries, the Government state that they believe that it would be perfectly possible under the legislation passed by Parliament in 2010 to have an appointment panel which sifts through the candidates and ensures that they are above the line for appointment, and for the Civil Service Commission then to provide Ministers with a choice between those appointable candidates: an appointment panel to appoint this panel. Is the Civil Service Commission not the panel to which we naturally look?
No previous Government have sought to exert such firm control over the processes by which Permanent Secretaries are appointed, and I share the fears expressed many times during this debate that the Government’s proposals create dangers for the great principles of impartiality, merit and competition on which appointment has always rested, hinting at the patronage from which the Civil Service escaped as a result of the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms. I am not normally drawn greatly to the career and achievements of Mr Gladstone—Disraeli is more in my line—but on this, I am entirely with him for all the reasons so eloquently expressed by my noble friend Lord Hennessy.
It is important to remember that we already have a not inconsiderable element of ministerial patronage in the system, supplied by the existence of special advisers over whom Ministers have complete control. It is not clear that Ministers always make the most effective use of this power of patronage at the moment. Should not the emphasis today be on securing for government departments truly first-rate special advisers, providing well informed, political advice to complement the well informed, impartial advice available from career civil servants?
Thirty years ago, the following words were published:
“This country is fortunate to have a Civil Service with high standards of administration and integrity. The Civil Service has loyally and effectively helped to carry through the far-reaching changes we have made to secure greater economy, efficiency, and better management in Government itself”.
Those words appeared in the Conservative Party’s manifesto for the 1983 election. If Margaret Thatcher’s radical Government were able to work successfully with the top echelons of our country’s Civil Service, why are this coalition Government—dedicated also to radical change—finding it so difficult?
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
My Lords, I wish to welcome briefly this report, and to mention the special position of accounting officers in relation to the Public Accounts Committee. They are not required to act under the authority of a Minister, and of course there are a number of accounting officers who are not responsible to Ministers; for example, the accounting officer of the Supreme Court.
Baroness Smith of Basildon
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jay of Paddington, and the committee for the work that they undertook. We owe them a debt of gratitude for being able to have this debate today. The opening speech by the noble Baroness set the tone for a very thoughtful, insightful debate which has drawn on considerable expertise in your Lordships’ House. It is a very timely debate because the Government’s proposals for reform have reignited interest in the role of civil servants, the wider relationship between Ministers and civil servants and the key issues of accountability and responsibility.
I also concur with the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, and the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, on the timing of the Government’s response. As a former Cabinet Minister, I appreciate that people in glass houses should not throw stones. However, I was somewhat taken aback to find an e-mail in my inbox at 5.53 pm yesterday evening with the Government’s response. That is rather late in the day for a debate that is taking place in your Lordships’ House today.
The committee’s report identifies why it undertook this investigation. This includes the increasing complexity of government structures and functions, the Civil Service reform plan, and of course the previous report on ministerial responsibility following the introduction of the Health and Social Care Bill. For some Ministers, and indeed for some civil servants, that tension between ministerial and civil service responsibility proves difficult, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, highlighted some very pertinent examples of that. I will deal with that issue for a few moments. The committee’s report on the Health and Social Care Bill dealt with the specific issue of ministerial accountability, and the issue is again explored in this report in line with civil servants’ accountability. The committee has further considered that, and it has maintained its previous position when it says in the report:
“No distinction is to be drawn between ministerial responsibility, accountability and answerability … Likewise, ministerial responsibility to Parliament is not to be qualified. No distinction is to be drawn between ultimate and non-ultimate responsibility, or between direct and indirect responsibility”.
Most importantly, the report goes on to state that,
“no distinction is to be drawn between responsibility for policy on the one hand and responsibility for operational decisions on the other”.
In effect, it seems that the committee is saying that Ministers should not be able to abdicate or delegate their responsibilities, and that this is an essential part of holding ministerial office. Clearly, Ministers have to accept responsibility for the work of their department. That does not mean that they are responsible for every action or mistake; the example of the lost disc mentioned in the report is a good one. However, it means that they are answerable on operational matters as well as policy. These matters are not just for civil servants to deal with.
On answerability and accountability, the report refers to the “Today” programme test—that is, the political reality that the media and the public will seek answers from a Minister, not from a civil servant. Some Ministers find that difficult if they feel that they are not responsible and that it is a matter for which a civil servant should be held to account. I will suggest two other tests to your Lordships’ House. There is also what might be called the common-sense test. While some may bray for the head of a Minister in whose department someone has made a mistake, surely the test should be whether it was a simple and unintended mistake by a member of staff or whether there is a more systematic problem for which there must be ministerial accountability. My sense is that the difference is generally understood by Parliament, the press and the public, although it is not unheard of for someone to seek to make political capital out of such issues.
There is another test, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Aberavon, touched on it. It is ministerial accountability to Parliament, and where Ministers and Parliament see the boundaries of that accountability. When issues of service provision are raised, Ministers in your Lordships’ House regularly state that these are not matters for them but are operational or local decisions. However, it is central government that dictates and decides the limits, including financial parameters, within which local services have to work. Although the scope for local decision-making is limited by Ministers, this should not prevent them from answering questions about the impact of their policies.
I will give an example. In your Lordships’ House I raised with the noble Lord, Lord Henley, the issue of police station closures. He replied:
“My Lords, that is obviously a matter for the authorities”.—[Official Report, 2/11/11; col. 1229.]
That was despite the fact that his Government had set the budget within which that decision had to be made. That was not an isolated case. Recently I asked the noble Earl, Lord Howe, about an example from my home area where, because of the Government’s NHS policies, pathology services are being moved from Southend and Basildon hospitals to Bedford Hospital. The noble Earl replied:
“Decisions about the local configuration of pathology services are for local National Health Service commissioners”.—[Official Report, 24/1/13; col. WA 247.]
It is difficult to judge the parameters accepted by Ministers on responsibility to your Lordships’ House, but the wider and more serious issue is the one touched on by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris. It would be very helpful to have the Minister’s observations on this.
The Government have said that they are seeking to privatise the probation service. The judgment of the Constitution Committee is that Ministers cannot delegate accountability. However, if Ministers, while retaining overall responsibility for the provision of probation services, allow a private company to provide all or part of those services, will the Government consider that Ministers should answer Questions on those operational matters, or would that be delegated to a civil servant or the head of the private company? If Ministers do not answer, the ability of Parliament and of individual parliamentarians to hold the Government to account for the services for which they are responsible will be severely restricted. Other than in Select Committees, parliamentarians cannot question civil servants or private service providers, and it would be wrong for them to do so. However, where the Government have ultimate responsibility, surely Ministers should answer. Will the Minister confirm that in such cases it is entirely appropriate for Ministers to answer from the Dispatch Box on operational matters, as recommended by the Constitution Committee?
In its report, the committee also looked at the issue of distancing Ministers from the decisions of arm’s-length bodies. However, I do not think that a privatised service comes under that remit, and there are constitutional issues of accountability and of whether the public will lose their rights to freedom of information in such instances. The committee was also right to highlight the complexities of government structure and organisation. If we as parliamentarians find it complex, it must be hugely difficult for an ordinary citizen to try to navigate their way around Parliament or government. Therefore, I strongly welcome the committee’s recommendation that a map or organisational chart should be produced. This point was made by the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy. I suspect that it might be slightly more complicated than the bus route map of London.
In the brief time available, I looked at the Government’s response to the point made by the committee. I had an opportunity to look at the websites that the Government say address the issue, and I have to say that I do not think they do. The Government’s response to the report does not address the need to have an organisational map showing how departments and arm’s-length bodies work together.
On the related issue of civil servants giving evidence to Select Committees, the committee struck absolutely the right balance in defining what is appropriate and how the process should be conducted. There is a question for the Minister around the issue of defining a civil servant, and who Ministers can and cannot ask and instruct to give evidence to a Select Committee. I recently asked a Question about Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration. When I asked the Minister how often Ministers met him, the rather bizarre reply was that Ministers have internal meetings and talk to officials from time to time on matters of policy, and thus that it was an internal matter. I then obtained an entirely reasonable answer via a freedom of information request to the chief inspector’s office. Clearly, for Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector for Borders and Immigration to give evidence would not be in any way a replacement for the accountability of Ministers, but it would be of assistance to the committee in its scrutiny of ministerial decision-making. I would be grateful if the Minister would look at that point.
After reading various documents on the Government’s Civil Service reform plan, I have to say that when the Government deal with issues in the abstract, it is very hard to disagree, although sometimes there are strong echoes of an episode of “Yes Minister”. There are issues around strengths and weaknesses, better performance management, building on our strengths, reducing our weaknesses and so on. However, as noble Lords have illustrated today, it is when we get to the detail that alarm bells ring, particularly on the issue of the appointment of Permanent Secretaries.
Unfortunately, it appears from public comments and government leaks that the report was written against a backdrop of hostility to civil servants. The noble Lords, Lord Wilson and Lord Hennessy, expressed concern at the rapid departure of Permanent Secretaries under the coalition Government. The two may well not be connected, but it causes concern not to have that continuity in office. It is logical to have the involvement of a Secretary of State in the appointment of a Permanent Secretary. However, the fear is that the Government will stray over the red line that could lead to the greater politicisation of the Civil Service. The one thing we have to guard against is any suspicion or suggestion that the “Is he one of us?” culture could be used in the appointment of senior civil servants.
My noble friend Lady Donaghy spoke extremely well about the justification of why the British Civil Service is thought of as one of the best in the world, because of its professionalism and impartiality. That is not to pretend that on every occasion every civil servant is excellent at all times. All Ministers have accounts of the best and the worst civil servants with whom they have worked. What is so important is the principle of impartiality and accountability, and the relationship between the two. Clearly, a Secretary of State needs to have confidence in their Permanent Secretary. The working relationship has to be good, and has to be reinforced by each knowing and observing the extent and the boundaries of their respective roles and positions.
The current position seems to provide that, and I am not convinced that the Government have made a strong enough argument for change. I agree with the committee’s recommendation. I appreciate that the Government seek to give reassurance in their response, but if there is to be any change in the way in which Permanent Secretaries are to be appointed, and if the role of the Secretary of State is to be increased, this has to be based on evidence of what the problem is that the Government are seeking to resolve, and there must be broad consensus around any change that is brought forward so that there can be no substance to any accusations of politicisation. I appreciate that the Government seek to give reassurance in their response but I would like to see greater clarity, perhaps from the Minister today, about the problem that the Government are seeking to resolve.
I hope that the Minister has heard the concerns that have been raised about temporary appointments to the Civil Service. There is concern also about “secondments” being used to circumvent the provision of temporary appointees where the former are perhaps more in line with ministerial thinking. I am in the process of tabling some Written Questions for the Minister, so I do not expect him to answer my questions today, but if he is able to say something about the number of secondees coming into government, where they are coming from and the reasons for it, it would be helpful.
The report from the committee is extremely valuable. I hope that the Minister has taken note of the strong view expressed in the debate today that the way in which the Civil Service operates now works very well. No one is suggesting that there is no room for reform, for modernisation or for ensuring that the Civil Service keeps up with the times, but the Government need to guard against any increasing politicisation that would undermine the existing traditions or the principles of the Civil Service.
Lord Wright of Richmond
My Lords, the noble Baroness has quoted the question, “Is he or she one of us?”, allegedly asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher. I do not know whether she actually said it—a large number of quotations are wrongly attributed to people—but, if she did, it might be worth putting on the record that, in my five years as head of the Diplomatic Service, the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, never once queried a single appointment to a head of mission.
Baroness Smith of Basildon
My Lords, I appreciate the noble Lord’s intervention. I was tempted not to quote anyone but that quotation, attributed rightly or wrongly to the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, was trying to make the point that some people think it important to have a “one of us” culture, whereas I think that most of us in your Lordships’ House today would think that that was completely wrong with regard to Civil Service appointments.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I declare a professional and personal interest: I am, as the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, remarked, a member of the Civil Service reform board; my wife is a former civil servant; and I have a family member who is a current civil servant.
The Government welcome this report. We apologise profusely for the late completion of the response. We were keen to ensure that the committee received a carefully considered and positive response to the report and were hoping to include some of the ongoing work on accountability and Civil Service reform. That resulted in a delayed response, but I appreciate that it was a lack of courtesy to the committee to leave it quite so late. We look forward to the committee’s further work on this theme. The report is a contribution to a continuing discussion about our state, our constitution and the relationship between the Executive and Parliament.
We should not exaggerate the degree of current disagreement or discontent, or the supposed threat to the principles of Northcote-Trevelyan. It is clear that recruitment is still by merit, and I am happy that recruitment is going extremely well. The Diplomatic Service and the domestic Civil Service attract intense competition from graduates. Promotion is also by talent, although I have noticed during the past 30 or 40 years that ministerial favour has rarely hurt the careers of particular civil servants under different Governments. There are some queries about retention, particularly in the Treasury, where I think churn is one-sixth of staff a year. I am still puzzled as to why the Treasury should pay much less than some other departments in Whitehall. Those are the sort of things which some of us are querying inside government.
We still have the principle of a permanent Civil Service, although I think that it would be fair to say—and the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, will certainly remember—that when we had a large number of temporary civil servants in World War II, many of them turned out to be the great civil servants of the following generation. The idea that one has a permanent Civil Service in which there should be no movement in and out is one with which I think none of us entirely agrees.
There is of course a necessary and continuing constructive tension between Ministers and officials, and between government and Parliament. When I first came into this area as a graduate student studying under Max Beloff at the University of Oxford, the new Labour Government were then deeply suspicious of the conservatism of the Civil Service after 13 years of Conservative Government. Again, in 1974, a Labour Government came in who were suspicious of the conservatism of the Civil Service. When the Conservatives came in from 1979, there was, as the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, remarked, a mood of “Is he one of us? Are they too close to Labour?”. When new Labour came in again in 1997, there was some suspicion that many senior civil servants were too close to the Conservatives. We have now had a coalition from 2010, and some people have natural suspicions that people are too close to the previous regime.
The development of the role of special advisers during the past 25 to 30 years has, in my opinion, helped the relationship between Ministers and officials, although, of course, there are always exceptions to every case. The transformation of government during the past three generations has also changed the challenges posed to Whitehall. We have moved from policy to management, to a very large welfare state and thus to a much greater concentration on delivery, and from local delivery to central control. I note the argument as to how far the Secretary of State for Health should continue to be personally responsible and accountable for actions within the National Health Service across the whole of England. That is an interesting question. If one adopted the principles set out in the very interesting new report by the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, which proposes a substantial decentralisation of delivery, it would mean that Ministers would be less responsible for delivery on the ground. However, 50 years ago, delivery on the ground was the responsibility mainly of local authorities and not of central government. That is an issue which we will no doubt also continue to discuss.
The sharpness of financial constraints under which the Government are now operating, and they exist not just in the United Kingdom, pose real challenges for all departments of government. Major shifts in skills are needed. Permanent under-secretaries two or three generations ago did not think that they needed strong managerial skills. It is clear that in what we now call “the delivery departments” managerial skills are extremely important. Management of major projects, which the Civil Service reform plan is much concerned with, requires skills which are not always easily available within the Civil Service. We have just set up a major project academy and are well aware of the managerial failures during the previous Government and before in the management of major innovatory projects. Digitisation—which is just beginning to hit the Civil Service—might lead to a total revolution in the entire relationship between the state and the citizen, in which the state moves from paper to a much greater reliance on electronic exchanges, enabling us to have a smaller central state.
There is also the move to formal coalition, in which civil servants have to balance between two parties in government, although that is not entirely novel either. I cherish the senior official who said to me a year ago that this coalition was in many ways working much better than its predecessor because it was a formal coalition, meaning that we had to have argument in the open and in committees, unlike in the coalition between Brownites and the Blairites which had plotted behind closed doors.
There has been a comparable shift in the relationship between the Executive and Parliament: the rise of Select Committees, a far greater seriousness of parliamentary scrutiny and the development of committees in the Lords. As I sit in the Cabinet Office, I hear people talking about “the three key committees” to which the public service now relates; that is, the Public Accounts Committee, the Public Administration Select Committee and the Lords Constitution Committee. That relationship did not concern civil servants very much in the 1970s. I cherish a comment that I came across, on the recommendation of the author of the volume, a couple a weeks ago. It was made by a senior official during an off-the-record conference on open government in the late 1970s. The civil servant said to the journalist concerned that he had a “nightmare” of being subject not just to Parliamentary Questions but to Select Committee inquiries, investigation by the ombudsman, the Equal Opportunities Commission, the Community Relations Commission and an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. “And now”, he said, “you’re trying to impose freedom of information on us”. He said it was a totally different landscape from that which he had to steer policy through than the terrain he had entered as a young assistant principal in the 1950s. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, for that quotation.
We have moved a great deal, without, of course, resolving some of the central tensions within our informal constitution between executive sovereignty or parliamentary sovereignty. All Governments tend to favour executive sovereignty and all Oppositions tend to favour parliamentary sovereignty. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, has taken note and will use in his next volume the wonderful quotation by the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, that the lines in the sand need to be kept under review. That is as good a definition of our unwritten constitution as one could possibly hope for. It recognises that much of our constitution works on trust. We only go into demands for detailed writing down of rules when trust has broken down.
The Northcote-Trevelyan principles have been retained, but have to be reinterpreted for changing circumstances. I am not involved in great, grand parricide; we are involved in adaptation.
Civil Service morale is not as bad as the FDA report suggests. The Civil Service annual survey provides a much more confident interpretation of the way in which the Civil Service currently sees its role than that which the FDA itself has provided. My own informal conversations with my former students across the Civil Service suggest that morale is still good, although, of course, there are concerns about the rapid changes which are under way.
There is not an atmosphere of hostility to the Civil Service within the current Government. There were one or two temporary officials when the Government came in, but the leading force of hostility has departed to California.
The transformation of Government over the past three generations has taken us a very long way. The Prime Minister in his statement to the Liaison Committee said very clearly:
“I do not want us fundamentally to change the system from ministerial accountability with a permanent civil service”.
But there is scope to consider how we can sharpen accountability and make it more transparent in some areas. The distinction which is made and much contested between accountability and responsibility is part of trying to ensure that Parliament is able to get at a much more complex government machine.
There is a quotation in the report which remarks:
“When Haldane established the constitutional convention that Ministers are accountable to Parliament and civil servants are accountable to Ministers, there were 28 civil servants in the Home Office”.
Today, when one is dealing with a much more complex department, in particular the Home Office, with a number of executive agencies and arm’s-length bodies, Ministers have to retain responsibility and accountability, but, of course, Parliament is entitled to ask some of the heads of those arm’s-length bodies as well to come in and give evidence.
The noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, suggested that Mrs Thatcher had never actually changed the order of the recommendations that were given to her. I can remember, and I will tell him afterwards, at least one occasion on which she did indeed change the order of the recommendations given to her.
I regret that on Action 11 of The Civil Service Reform Plan we have had such a battle in the press about one of the less fundamental issues in Civil Service reform. I do not want us to go back to the situation in which Richard Crossman as Secretary of State and Evelyn Sharp as his Permanent Secretary hated each other and went on nevertheless living with each other. There has to be a relationship between the Secretary of State and the Permanent Secretary which is one of trust and it depends on both of them maintaining that level of trust.
Ministerial turnover has been much reduced since 2010. Permanent Secretary turnover has indeed been higher, although I am informed that one reason for that is that a number of Permanent Secretaries were asked to stay on longer than their original term of office in order to ease the transition between one Government and another. That I believe was passed by the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell. The Government believe that there has been far too much rapid turnover in the management of major projects. We wish to insist as far as possible that people appointed to manage major projects will spend longer in post. The degree of official churn from one job to another is a matter of concern to many of us. Civil servants move very rapidly from one job to another just at the point when skills have begun to be really well established in that particular post.
On the question of short-term contracts, I do not recognise some of what the press has been saying about this. Let me give one example of a temporary contract with which I am familiar. The Government digital service is concerned to lead on moving towards digital by default. The head of the Government digital service is on a temporary contract. It might be said that he had an unfortunate political background; he was previously developing the Guardian online, but that is not something that can be held against this Government as a political bias. The people I have met from the Government digital service are incredibly good and incredibly professional and have skills which are not easily available within the existing Civil Service. That is exactly the point that we are looking at.
On special advisers, I think that is more a matter to discuss another day. I hope noble Lords are familiar with the Commons Select Committee report on special advisers. Lines of accountability for special advisers are clearly set out in the Ministerial Code and in the code of conduct for special advisers.
On the question of appraisal, again, I compare what I see inside with what I hear from the outside. I have been asked to write appraisals, both on civil servants with whom I have worked particularly closely and on special advisers. I have not yet been asked to write an appraisal on a Minister, but I look forward to that with hope.
The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, asked about contracting outside advice. This is not entirely novel. The Government have contracted for outside advice over a long period. From the 1980s, when I was director of studies at Chatham House, we had a particular study contracted by the then Department of Trade and Industry, on which we got into a sharp argument between the officials who were trade negotiators and the departmental economists over which of them approved and disapproved of the tenor of our report, which ended up in discussions with the departmental solicitor over whether we were allowed to publish it. Government benefits from outside advice and it is cheaper to ask academics and think tanks than to employ large numbers of outside consultants to provide it.
On the Osmotherly Rules, the Cabinet Office has begun a review of the guidance given to civil servants on providing evidence to Select Committees and it will be liaising with the House of Commons Liaison Committee as part of the review and also with the Lords Constitution Committee. It would not expect there to be any change in the current position, which is that the document is a Government publication and has no formal Parliament standing or approval.
On the question of interviewing named civil servants for evidence for Committees, the presumption again is that Ministers will agree to meet such a request but that civil servants are doing so to contribute to the process of ministerial accountability to Parliament and on behalf of their Ministers.
On the question of responsibilities to Parliament, let me also underline that Parliament itself has some responsibility in return. The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, and the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers, talked about the bullying of civil servants by parliamentary committees. That is something which those committees have to take on board very fully. The case of Dr David Kelly is one from which we have all learnt a number of bitter lessons.
The noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, asked about Ministers answering to Select Committees and I hope I have given her reassurance on that. The Ministers will continue to answer to Select Committees and to be responsible to them. They will also answer for arm’s-length bodies, although others will be allowed to answer as well.
I noted the comments she made about the transparency of the structure of the Civil Service and will take back concerns about the transparency of the website. I do not have an answer on the number of secondments at present but will write to her on that.
Finally, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, that rumours of an amendment to the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 are much exaggerated and that no such rumour has reached my ears. On Action 11, I do not detect the whiff of politicisation that a number of noble Lords have suggested is there. I am reassured to hear that the informal arrangements which have operated across several previous Administrations are not too dissimilar from where we are now and reiterate that this coalition Government retain a high level of confidence in our Civil Service. We are committed to the future of a politically impartial and independent Civil Service and intend to maintain the principles of Northcote-Trevelyan, although necessarily and unavoidably adapted to the present day. I still have confidence in William E Gladstone and the legacy which he left us 160 years ago.
Baroness Jay of Paddington
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his comprehensive and thoughtful reply to the debate and for giving us a somewhat reassuring update on both the atmosphere in Whitehall and the state of the Government’s Civil Service reform plan. I am also very grateful for the erudition and experience demonstrated by every speaker who has taken part in the debate this afternoon. We have heard a wide range of views from relevant, authoritative perspectives and I am pleased that those have, on the whole, generally welcomed the Constitution Committee report and, indeed, shared some of the concerns which we expressed in that report.
Among a very wide variety of fascinating historical quotations that we heard all around the House this afternoon, the noble Lord, Lord Wright of Richmond, very kindly quoted the important speech of my father Lord Callaghan. As a dutiful daughter, I am obviously duty-bound to agree with every word of that speech. However, very seriously, I urge the Government to reflect on the quotation highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord Wright, and on the opinions of a contemporary kind which have been expressed this afternoon. I think the House is agreed that the government of this country will lose very much more than it gains if the fundamental principles underlying our Civil Service are challenged, either today or in the future.
Education: Curriculum, Exam and Accountability Reform
(11 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash)
My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat a Statement made by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education in another place this morning.
“Mr Speaker, with your permission, I should like to make a Statement on the future of qualifications, school league tables and the national curriculum.
Last September we outlined plans for changes to GCSE qualifications designed to address the grade inflation, dumbing down and loss of rigour in those examinations. We have consulted on these proposals and there is now consensus that the system needs to change. But one of the proposals I put forward was a bridge too far. My idea that we end the competition between exam boards to offer GCSEs in core academic qualifications and have just one—wholly new—exam in each subject was just one reform too many at this time.
The exam regulator Ofqual, which has done such a great job in recent months upholding standards, was clear that there were significant risks in trying both to strengthen qualifications and end competition in a large part of the exams market. So I have decided not to make the best the enemy of the good and I will not proceed with plans to have a single exam board offering a new exam in each academic subject. Instead, we will concentrate on reforming existing GCSEs along the lines we put forward in September, because there is consensus that the exams and qualification system we inherited was broken.
Our first set of reforms was to vocational qualifications. They were allowed to become less rigorous options under the previous Government. Alison Wolf’s report outlined how to improve the quality of vocational courses and expand work experience. It secured near universal support. It will soon all be done. We are also reforming apprenticeships. Under the previous Government the currency of apprenticeships was devalued alongside every other qualification. The Richard report on apprenticeship reform will restore rigour, as the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has explained so powerfully.
We are reforming A-levels. Schools and universities were unhappy that constant assessment and modularisation got in the way of proper learning. So we are reforming those exams with the help of school and university leaders. GCSEs will now also be reformed in a similar fashion. The qualifications should be linear, with all assessments normally taken at the end of the course. Examinations will test extended writing in subjects such as English and history, have fewer bite-sized and overly structured questions, and in mathematics and science there should be a greater emphasis on quantitative problem-solving. Internal assessment and the use of exam aids will be kept to a minimum and used only where there is a compelling case to do so, to provide for effective and deep assessment of the specified curriculum content.
Importantly, the new GCSEs will be universal qualifications and I expect the same proportion of pupils to sit them as now. This is something we believe the vast majority of children with a good education should be able to achieve. But reformed GCSEs will no longer set an artificial cap on how much pupils can achieve by forcing students to choose between higher and foundation tiers. Reformed GCSEs should allow students to access any grade while enabling high-quality assessment at all levels. The appropriate approach to assessment will vary between subjects and a range of solutions may come forward; for example, extension papers offering access to higher grades alongside a common core. There should be no disincentive for schools to give an open choice of papers to their pupils.
I have asked Ofqual to ensure we have new GCSEs in the core academic subjects of English, maths, the sciences, history and geography ready for teaching in 2015. These proposals will, I believe, achieve a swift and significant rise in standards, right across the country—equipping far more young people with the knowledge and skills they need to achieve their full potential.
Reforming qualifications alone is not enough to ensure higher standards for every child. We also need to reform how schools are graded to encourage higher expectations for every student. Existing league tables have focused almost exclusively on how many children achieve a C pass in five GCSEs including English and maths. Yet this deceptively simple measure contains three perverse incentives: it encourages schools to choose exams based on how easy they are to pass, rather than how valuable they are to the student; it causes a narrow concentration on just five subjects, instead of a broad curriculum; and it focuses teachers’ time and energy too closely on just those pupils on the C/D borderline, at the expense of their higher or lower-achieving peers.
So today I am proposing a more balanced and meaningful accountability system, with two new measures: the percentage of pupils in each school reaching an attainment threshold in the vital core subjects of English and maths; and an average point score showing how much progress every student makes between key stage 2 and key stage 4. The average point score measure will reflect pupils’ achievement across a wide range of eight subjects. As well as English and maths, it will measure how well pupils perform in at least three subjects from the English baccalaureate—sciences, history, geography, languages and computer science—and in three additional subjects, whether those are arts subjects, academic subjects or high-quality vocational qualifications. This measure will incentivise schools to offer a broad and balanced curriculum, with high-quality teaching and high achievement across the board. It will also affirm the importance of every child enjoying the opportunity to pursue the English baccalaureate subjects. By measuring average point scores rather than a single cut-off point, the new measure will also ensure that the achievement of all students is recognised equally, including both low attainers and high fliers.
Alongside today’s proposed changes to exams and league tables we are also publishing our proposals for the new national curriculum in England. Over the past two years we have examined and analysed the curricula used in the world’s most successful school systems, in jurisdictions such as Hong Kong, Massachusetts and Singapore. We have combined the best elements of their curricula with some of the most impressive practice from schools in this country, and the result is published today—a new draft national curriculum for the 21st century which embodies high expectations in every subject.
We are determined to give every child, regardless of background, a broad and balanced education, so that by the time their compulsory education is complete they will be well equipped for further study, future employment and adult life. All of the current national curriculum subjects will be retained at both primary and secondary levels, with the important addition of foreign languages, to be taught in key stage 2.
Our new draft programmes of study in core subjects are both challenging and ambitious, focusing tightly on the fundamental building blocks of study, so that every child has the knowledge and understanding to succeed. A key principle of our reforms is that the statutory national curriculum should form only part of the school curriculum, not its entirety. Each individual school should have the freedom to shape the whole curriculum to their particular pupils’ aspirations and priorities—a freedom already enjoyed by the growing numbers of academies and free schools as well as, of course, by schools in the independent sector.
Programmes of study in almost all subjects—other than primary English, mathematics and science—have been significantly slimmed down. We have specifically stripped out unnecessary prescription about how to teach and concentrated only on the essential knowledge and skills which every child should master.
In maths—learning from east Asia—there is a stronger emphasis on arithmetic and more demanding content in fractions, decimals and percentages, to build solid foundations for algebra. In the sciences there is rigorous detail on the key scientific processes from evolution to energy. In English there is more clarity on spelling, punctuation and grammar, as well as a new emphasis on the great works of the literary canon, and in foreign languages there will be a new stress on learning proper grammatical structures and practising translation.
In geography there is an emphasis on locational knowledge—using maps and locating key geographical features, from capital cities to the world’s great rivers. In history there is a clear narrative of British progress, with a proper emphasis on heroes and heroines from our past. In art and design there is a stronger emphasis on painting and drawing skills, in music a balance between performance and appreciation. We have replaced the old ICT curriculum with a new computing curriculum, with help from Google, Facebook, and some of Britain’s most brilliant computer scientists, and we have included rigorous computer science GCSEs in the English baccalaureate.
With sharper accountability, a more ambitious curriculum, and world class qualifications, I believe we can create an education system which can compete with the best in the world; a system which gives every young person, regardless of background, the high-quality education, high aspirations and high achievement they need and deserve”.
My Lords, that concludes the Statement.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch
My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating this Statement today. The Statement implies that the reason for this embarrassing U-turn is because the single exam system was found to be impractical. However, as the noble Lord is fairly new to his brief, he may not have been aware of the more fundamental cause for concern that was building up across this House and among head teachers, parents, employers and academics, about the broader issues raised by the EBacc.
Concern was expressed about the way the proposals were conceived and announced in the first place—without any consultation, looking for easy headlines rather than a strategy for genuine change. There were concerns at the speed with which Michael Gove proposed to implement the changes, even leading the Tory-led Education Select Committee to condemn the timetable as “too much, too fast”. Employers were concerned that the EBacc placed no value on subjects critical to our future economic competitiveness, such as design and technology, construction and engineering. Business leaders, such as the CBI, were also concerned that the proposals took no account of the rise in school leaving age and risked,
“putting young people into a ‘holding pattern’ for five terms, when they should be striving for a high standard at 18”.
The arts world was concerned that the creative subjects, such as art, design, drama and music, had been sidelined, despite the incredible value that our creative sector brings to the UK economy. Indeed, for a cohort of children this announcement is already too late, because 15% of schools have already dropped one or more arts subjects in anticipation of the original 2015 changes.
Teachers and parents were concerned that the new EBacc exams would create a two-tier system, dividing pupils into winners and losers at age 16, and resulting in many pupils leaving schools with a so-called certificate of achievement which would have had no value with employers and risked stigmatising young people in the way that those who failed their 11-plus were stigmatised in the past.
There were also concerns from across the education profession that the proposed curriculum was backward looking. Michael Gove seemed to relish its focus on the past, even saying to my honourable friend, Karen Buck, in the other place,
“I do not see anything wrong with having the 19th century at the heart of the English curriculum”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/12/12; col. 583.]
This was a flawed policy from the start. It demonstrated that Michael Gove completely misunderstands how to deliver change in the education sector and how to take those required to deliver the change with you. In fact, he appears to be having some difficulty in making the transition from being a journalist to running a large, complex ministerial department. Meanwhile, his constant vilification of teachers and constant demands for change have left the profession confused and demoralised. It is due an apology.
Many head teachers have already begun to implement the changes that were on the cards so that they would be ready for the 2015 deadline. They have been changing the timetables and recruiting teachers with different skills because even if they did not agree with the proposals and did not think that they were in the best interests of their pupils, they wanted them to do well under the new regime. So the damage has already been done. This misjudged policy will take time to reverse. I can only imagine what words are being used to describe the Secretary of State in staff rooms up and down the country today.
I am very conscious that I am laying the debacle firmly at the feet of the Secretary of State. It is true that he appears to relish running a department as his personal fiefdom, making policy affecting hundreds of thousands of young people on the hoof and chasing easy headlines. This is not the first time he has had to make an embarrassing U-turn when a policy unravels. But he is not an island, and Ministers around him, and the Prime Minister have to share the responsibility for allowing this cavalier behaviour to continue. I include the Minister, belatedly, in this.
Does the Minister now accept that the Government have burnt their fingers too many times by making ill thought out announcements, and that a different style of leadership and collaboration needs to be developed within the department? Can he tell the House whether an apology will be forthcoming to the heads and teachers who have already taken steps to change the curriculum based on the original EBacc proposals? Can he explain whether the difficulties in implementing the proposals for one exam in one subject was the only reason for the changes to the EBacc proposals, or does he accept that many of the other criticisms, such as those I have expressed today, have some validity? Can he assure the House that the Government take seriously the threat of a two-tier system of exams and that the proposal for a certificate of achievement will be scrapped?
Will the Minister agree to take time to properly consult teachers, parents and employers before he makes any new announcements on the reform of the performance tables so that we can be absolutely sure that they will focus on pupils’ genuine achievements and take so-called gaming out of the system? Does he now share the view repeatedly put forward on this side of the House, and by business leaders and others that we need a gold standard vocational qualification offer that is on a par with the academic subjects originally specified in the EBacc? Is the department continuing to consult on the proposal that course work will not form part of the new GCSE assessment because, setting aside the principle, there are a number of subject areas where this appears to be impractical?
By any measure this is an embarrassing day for the Government and for Michael Gove. Parents and teachers waking up to this announcement today will be angry and confused about the messages coming from the department. Rather than trying to cover up mistakes by making yet further announcements, the Secretary of State would benefit from a period of quiet reflection on the lessons learnt from yet another climb-down. Perhaps the Minister could take the message back to his boss that what this country needs is an education system that can deliver the skills needed for the future, not a nostalgic vision of the past. If he is serious about making lasting change he should consult widely, listen intently, and perhaps next time build a consensus before rushing to the press.
Lord Nash
I am surprised at the comments of the noble Baroness as it seems to me that by an excellent democratic process of consultation, we have arrived at a remarkable synthesis of views. Many people have advised that our exam system is in need of fundamental reform. The Select Committee, Ofqual and others advised that moving to a single exam board was a step too far, and we have listened to that advice. If criticising us for that is the Opposition’s best point, we must be doing most things right. No Secretary of State in living memory has done more for children’s education in this country than my right honourable friend. Contrary to what the noble Baroness said, I can assure her that he thinks most deeply about our education system.
We are making a great many changes, and quickly, because the state of the education system we inherited demands them. We need to make them in order to be internationally competitive. Over the nine years from 2000 to 2009 we fell from fourth to 16th in science; from eighth to 28th in maths; and from fifth to 25th in literacy. Even if we question the statistics, how many more NEETs do we need and how many more businessmen need to tell you that the people coming out of our schools are not fit for employment to realise that our education system needs fundamental reform?
On the question of embarrassing changes, perhaps the noble Baroness can tell us whether Stephen Twigg still supports a single exam board, as he stated last September. He seemed unable to answer that question in another place earlier today. Anybody who thinks that the current national curriculum is fit for purpose should get out there and sit through lessons, as I have done on many occasions, to see how content-light the current national curriculum is and how it is short-changing our pupils. That was brought home to me about four years ago when I watched a lesson by a so-called very good English teacher on “The Taming of the Shrew”. It was a 50-minute lesson and the sole material produced was a single sheet of A4 on which she had photographed the posters of the six films that had been made about “The Taming of the Shrew”. The subject matter of the lesson was how more or less the portrayal of the shrew in the photographs had been sexualised. Apparently that was relevant and something in which children could engage. That was when I realised what was going on in our schools.
We believe that pupils can achieve far more than we have hitherto asked of them and everything that I have seen in my experience confirms me in that view. EBacc is based on the best international systems that all have a core suite of academic subjects that sometimes is mandatory. We will substantially reduce controlled assessment, making exams linear, not modular. We will finally be ending the culture of dumbing down. We are putting in place an effective accountability regime which substantially reduces the chances of gaming and ensures all pupils receive equal attention, not just those on the C/D borderline. It encourages a broad and balanced curriculum in which all relevant GCSEs and approved vocational subjects will be treated equally.
Our exams will be modern; they will include computer science; they will be rigorous; they will require deep subject knowledge and understanding; they will test extended essay writing and problem solving and will give our pupils the skills they need for the future. We will also be stripping out unnecessary prescription as to how teachers teach, freeing them up to display their professional expertise and subject knowledge. One very important point, which has gone largely unnoticed so far, is that, as the chief inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw, says in every speech he makes, we no longer care precisely how teachers teach provided our students are learning and making progress. There is a perception among all teachers that there is something called a standard Ofsted lesson. It does not exist but it is perceived to be no more than five minutes teaching from the front; a plenary at the end; group work; peer group discussion and so on. Teachers find this a straitjacket which they live in fear of. We are determined to end this but that message has not got through yet to all Ofsted inspectors; however, we are determined to get it through. When we end this, it will free teachers up to display their professional expertise and their subject knowledge, and make teaching much more enjoyable. We are determined to allow teachers to take back control of their classrooms.
We believe that this curriculum and the examination system we propose will help give our children and young people the education they deserve.
Baroness Garden of Frognal
My Lords, just before we begin, I remind noble Lords to be as brief as possible to enable as many Members as possible to speak.
The Earl of Clancarty
My Lords, I thank the Government for listening to the many voices of concern, including those from the arts, about the operation of a two-tier system. We have had good news today; nevertheless, issues remain. Does the Minister accept that for the Government to be consistent in their response to these concerns, any performance measure should not continue to discriminate against subjects, including arts subjects? The Minister will be aware that this is currently having a significant effect in schools with the EBacc performance measure presently in place.
The Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells
My Lords, I speak on behalf of the Church of England but on a personal note to begin with, I failed the 11-plus, went to a secondary modern and got five O-levels, not including English and maths. I ended up as a teacher. I have three sons who teach and they thoroughly enjoy the profession they are in. I welcome the announcement, on behalf of the Church of England, and await more details of what it will mean for our schools. Our concerns about the Government’s EBacc plans have always focused on the downgrading of religious education as a core subject. In modern society, understanding about faith has never been more important for both civic discourse and cultural enrichment and we eagerly await the findings of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Religious Education to be published next month.
Church schools have always followed the national curriculum. There are dangers in anecdote because I spent a very fortunate three weeks in one of our local comprehensive schools observing the RE teaching, which was of a very high standard indeed. We hope that Mr Gove’s plans will put the good of all the pupils first and not just those who are academically gifted—as it is quite clear I am not.
Lord Nash
I have listened to the right reverend Prelate. I am delighted that his family enjoy teaching so much. In my view it is the noblest of professions. I take the point about the dangers of anecdote but I could give him many more and would be happy to do so on another occasion.
Lord Baker of Dorking
My Lords, I warmly welcome the Statement made by Michael Gove in the other House and repeated by my noble friend. When a politician changes his mind it should be an act of rejoicing. What Michael Gove has done in the House of Commons today can only be done by a big politician; little ones would not dare to do it. I very much welcome the fact that we are going back to eight GCSEs, with two more rigorous ones—that is Michael Gove’s initiative—in maths and English. There is a group that allows computer science, which I welcome, and another group that allows creative arts and performing arts and, as far as I am concerned, practical, technical and vocational education for university technical colleges. Therefore it is to be welcomed. We will wait to see where they will feature in the league tables.
Is the Minister aware that the broad and balanced curriculum we have heard about today is almost word for word what I announced in 1988 so there has been an erosion of time and good intention and he will have to screw his courage to the sticking place to ensure that this actually happens? Is he also aware that many schools, because of the more rigorous GCSEs, will find it much more demanding to meet these higher levels of requirement and I hope that will lead to them extending the school day so we do not see pupils leaving schools at 3 pm or 3.30 pm?
Baroness Taylor of Bolton
Will the Minister accept that while, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said, there may be rejoicing about this U-turn, it is particularly humiliating for the Secretary of State because of the bravado with which he announced his original plans? Maybe the Secretary of State can learn something from that. Many of us still worry that he does not understand the basic problem of trying to be too prescriptive about the national curriculum or an examination system, or the difficulties of not having a proper, coherent examination system in this country. Whatever the questions are, the answer is surely not to have a 19th century model of education, as the Secretary of State suggests.
Does the Minister agree that we can make progress on the national curriculum and the most appropriate system of examination in this country only by building consensus, and building it before the Secretary of State makes decisions? Surely that should be one of the lessons that the Secretary of State learns from this whole experience: you need to consult with head teachers, teachers, employers and parents before you come to a decision, not after you have decided and are trying to ram that decision through.
Will the Minister ask the Leader of the House if we can have a lengthy debate in the House at an early opportunity both on what is appropriate for the national curriculum and how we achieve an examination system that is proper and cohesive and includes both examinations that are academic and ones for those with vocational aptitude? A debate in this House that allowed wide consultation would be useful and constructive for the future.
Lord Nash
As the Secretary of State has said on a number of occasions, the Opposition seem determined to leave the less privileged in this country with a less good education. He has consulted extremely widely. On the accusation that is constantly made of a 19th century education, he has consulted widely with cognitive scientists who will tell you that modern cognitive theory is that knowledge is necessary in order to gain skills. The thinking that you can get skills without knowledge is itself out of date.
Lord Storey
My Lords, I welcome my noble friend repeating the Statement. On these Benches, we want a system where a child can succeed whatever their background. We want fair and rigorous examinations and a broad and balanced curriculum. That is why we welcome the Statement here today. I just wish other Secretaries of State, Ministers and Governments, when they consulted, were prepared to listen to those consultations. In our political system, when Governments listen and modify or change their policies, why do we always refer to it as a U-turn and people going back on what they have said? It is refreshing that when you consult you mean what you say.
I have three questions for my noble friend. Can the Minister confirm that coursework will continue to be a feature of GCSEs where it is essential for the child’s learning? Now that the national curriculum has been slimmed down, does the Minister agree that it should be taught by all schools? The Minister will agree that it is essential that all children leave school with solid literacy and numeracy skills. How will the Minister hold schools to account for their performance in these two subjects?
Lord Nash
I thank my noble friend for his remarks. I can confirm that coursework will continue where it is appropriate in the relevant subjects. As the noble Lord knows, the national curriculum does not run in academies and free schools and that policy will not change. The new accountability measure has two parts to it. The one that focuses on English and maths should satisfy his requirements on literacy and numeracy.
Lord Sutherland of Houndwood
My Lords, thank you. On the radio this morning, the debate about this—before any Statement had been made—seemed to focus on whether we called someone “stubborn” or “humiliated”. That does not seem to be the way in which to conduct a debate on a serious matter. We now have another term—“listening”—although I have noticed that most politicians require a very loud shout before they listen, but that is not unreasonable in the position in which they find themselves.
I have two comments and a question. I notice that in both the Statement and the letter to Ofqual the review of A-levels is canvassed, which is very important and relates to what we are talking about now. In that context, I hope that—as promised—the Government will listen to those university leaders who are involved in teaching, for example, subjects that require a strong maths content, because some who are involved in admissions found the AS-levels a useful prop or crib, but an inaccurate one, in my view.
Secondly, the paper proposes two new measures which I hope will help schools ensure that pupils have the opportunity to sit examinations at the right level. One of these is that the percentage of pupils in each school reaching an attainment threshold should be measured. The wording is very important—percentage of what? Is it the percentage of those sitting the examination, the percentage of those in the age cohort, or the percentage of pupils over the years in the whole school? It really has to be a complete cohort before the percentage tells us what we wish to know.
Lord Nash
I am grateful for the mature opening views of the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland. As a non-politician myself, I share his views on politicians’ listening skills. As far as A-levels are concerned, we have consulted widely with universities and will continue to do so in their formation. On the accountability measures, again we will be consulting on these. I could attempt to answer his question now but I think it would be better if we discussed this separately, which we can do.
Lord Clinton-Davis
Going back to what the Minister said originally, did not the Secretary of State describe his original proposals as a major chunk of the Government’s agenda? When did that change? Does he agree with what was said then or now? Is it not true that teaching trade unions, Ofqual and the All-Party Group for Education all condemn these proposals as unworkable?
Lord Nash
As I said earlier, we have listened to the consultation and have adapted our proposals accordingly. We have many changes to make to the English education system to render it internationally competitive, and it seems odd to me that when we actually listen and make some changes to one of our proposals, we get criticised.
Baroness Oppenheim-Barnes
My Lords, I would be grateful to my noble friend if he could elucidate on something that appals me, which is the return of coursework, unless it is divided where it would be appropriate; for example, in engineering and subjects of that sort rather than in the academic sphere.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I congratulate my right honourable friend on a very well judged Statement. Can my noble friend help me with a broad, value-added measure? Will the Government consider having a decent base measure for this as key stage 2 is inadequate and very coarse and will distort any measure of performance at key stage 4 if we do not improve on it? As far as the threshold measure in English and maths is concerned, can my noble friend confirm that this will be properly criterion-referenced so that if 95% of our young people achieve that level, they will be awarded it? Can Ofqual please be taught how to do this because it has made a complete Horlicks of it until now?
Lord Addington
My Lords, can my noble friend just elucidate one or two points he makes about standards? My interest in dyslexia will come as no surprise to the rest of the House; 10% of the population is in that spectrum. When he talks about improving standards of English will he undertake to ensure that teachers are better trained to deal with this very large minority group? Furthermore, will he undertake to ensure that the examination system treats this group fairly? Many dyslexics find the idea of one-off exams very intimidating and prefer coursework. You also have the problem of 25% extra time which has been abused. It is such a big group that there must be some consideration given to it.
My other point is: when it comes to heroes and heroines in history, who is judging? Is Henry V a hero because he won Agincourt or a villain because he killed lots of unarmed prisoners when he thought he might be attacked again?
Lord Nash
My Lords, we are investing in training for dyslexia. We have consulted widely on the matter of dyslexic and other pupils with SEN in relation to the examinations. I assure the noble Lord that we will take their needs into account. I shall not attempt to answer his third question, but we think it is important that pupils study not only the broad sweep of history but a variety of figures from the past, of both sexes and of all races.
Lord Bates
My Lords, I welcome the Statement. There is only one part I disagree with: although my noble friend’s regard for the current Secretary of State is admirable, the mantle of the greatest post-war Secretary of State for Education will be held for some time by my noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking. I ask my noble friend to reflect on that.
Secondly, I wholeheartedly welcome the removal of the artificial division and glass ceiling on attainment between the higher and foundation tiers, but I have one area of concern: the proposal that instead of seven exam boards there should be only one. Everyone in education knows that the competition between exam boards has been a root cause of grade inflation. Is it true to say that that could not go ahead because of EU procurement laws? If so, will the Secretary of State take that up as part of our renegotiation of terms with our European partners?
Lord Nash
My Lords, I have to tell the House that I met the noble Lord, Lord Baker, for the first time earlier this week over lunch. When I have had several more lunches with him, I may change my view. But in answer to the specific question, it is not true that those changes are driven by EU procurement laws.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, given that it is the Government’s apparent aspiration for the vast majority of, if not all, schools to become academies, what is the rationale for excluding them from the operation of the national curriculum?
Lord Nash
The purpose of the academies programme is to bring innovation and change to the education system. One of the freedoms that academies have is not to abide by the national curriculum. Most do, but an increasing number, including my school, Pimlico Academy, at key stage 3 are moving from it. We are keen to encourage good schools to have the freedom to do that.
Israel and Palestine
(11 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Falkner of Margravine
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the role of civil society in promoting peace in Israel and Palestine.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine
My Lords, this year marks 96 years since Arthur Balfour’s declaration and 20 years since the Oslo peace accord. It took just over 30 years from Balfour’s commitment to give meaning to the establishment of a state for the Jewish people. For the people affected, both Israelis and Palestinians, the past 65 years have not represented peace and security. In that period, three generations of Arab and Jewish people have grown up knowing the sorrow of bereavement, the insecurity of daily life and the uncertainty of their children’s future.
The historical involvement of the United Kingdom and our responsibility for these affairs is not what I want to talk about today, other than to say that people on all sides of this debate will commiserate for lives lost throughout that period. We have witnessed all the scourges of conflict and all the treasure expended for an ultimately simple goal: to share out a relatively small part of the earth to live together in peace.
On the whole, the day-to-day efforts of groups of Israelis and Palestinians to work towards a peaceful resolution on the ground are unrecognised by the international media. These peace activists have not given up on the peace process, even while their Governments either wilfully backslide or are powerless to move forward. They know what peace will look like, and we know that a majority of both of them want peace. For the Palestinians, peace is an end to the occupation so that they can get on with their lives without either Israeli soldiers or Israeli settlers over their shoulder. For Israelis, peace translates into an improved quality of life of security and without fearing the next terrorist incident. Both populations accept that they have to coexist to share a very small portion of land, to grow food, to undertake jobs and to bring up children to lead better lives.
Both populations participate in numerous civil society groups and NGOs to work towards using similar methods: to create a better understanding of each other through familiarity so that stereotypes are broken down; to be constructive in the face of violence; and to work towards limited and concrete goals to promote peace.
Today I want to highlight the work of just two, while paying tribute to the many that there is no time to mention. One such organisation is OneVoice, a youth-led movement working to end occupation and violence in Israel and Palestine. Based in Tel Aviv and Ramallah, its campaigns have attracted over 650,000 signatories with over 300,000 Israelis and Palestinians each. They train youth leaders to prepare them for public life, and campaign with a vigour at election times that Western politicians can only watch enviously. OneVoice Israel’s election campaign, Israel 2013, comprised events across the country to highlight the importance of electing politicians who were committed to the two-state solution. I am sure that when the election result is analysed in full we will see some link to their youth work.
OneVoice Palestine is at the forefront of peaceful opposition to illegal settlement activity, given that there are over 600,000 Israeli settlers living in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank—nearly 10% of Israeli Jews in total. I have been in parts of Area C and witnessed how Israel’s annexation policy works in terms of closing off an area of agricultural land, after some time declaring it uncultivated and then expropriating it for settlements. To counter this, in February 2012 OneVoice Palestine brought around 150 Palestinian youths to plant dozens of trees and Palestinian flags in a barren area east of Bethlehem that was under threat of confiscation by Israeli military order.
One of the greatest obstacles to genuine collaboration between the two communities is the difficulty of a common language. Unless both sides speak English, the barrier of Hebrew and Arabic keeps them apart, so these movements tend to be dominated by the better educated elites on both sides. However, they find ways to reach beyond their own socioeconomic class into the wider public. In April last year, OneVoice Palestine youth activists released hundreds of helium balloons along the 1967 line bearing the text in Hebrew of the 2002 Arab peace initiative. In marking the 10th anniversary of the peace initiative in this manner, they ensured that while Israeli media might not mark the event, their actions and the coverage of it made it more widely known.
Operating at another level, defending civil liberties and human rights is the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, ACRI, Israel’s oldest and largest human rights NGO, dealing with the entire spectrum of rights and civil liberties issues in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Since its inception in 1972, ACRI has been consistently successful in bringing precedent-setting litigation up through tribunals all the way to the Supreme Court. Its reputation for integrity and impartiality is widely respected within the legal community and among decision-makers, the media and the public.
ACRI is hands-on, too. Its education department produces material in both Hebrew and Arabic for use by key agents of change, who are teachers in the Jewish and Arab school systems, students, security forces personnel and social and community workers. In other words, building a more tolerant and just society has to be about working from the grass roots up to change attitudes and narratives.
Countering violence through emphasising rights and the rule of law is fundamental to raising awareness of the implications of harming a civilian population in the course of armed combat. In a landmark case that ACRI brought, a military judge has ruled that protesters in, and residents of, the West Bank are permitted to non-violently resist the unlawful orders of soldiers, and should not be viewed as having committed a crime. The importance of using the law in a democratic society to secure rights cannot be overstated. The mere fact of recourse to legal advice and assistance can serve as a hugely important confidence-building measure in divided communities.
I would mention dozens more organisations on both sides of the divide, but in the minutes I have left I will concentrate on some of the obstacles faced by civil society groups in mobilising for peace in such difficult circumstances. The first is the tendency on the part of donors, both on the ground and outside Israel and Palestine, to be deeply risk-averse. Stringent donor requirements result in a tendency on the part of NGOs to work with the converted rather than to work with those on the fringes: the extremists. It is for foreign donors to take the lead on this, and to provide funding that is less reliant on the “tabloid test” of what the headline will say if it transpires that we “backed” a terrorist. If we are to make a difference on the ground, we will have to take risks to support those who may appear extremist but who have sufficient leverage to be change-makers within their communities. Will my noble friend the Minister reflect on that?
A more specific constraint is the legal difficulty of establishing a joint structure when working in two parallel jurisdictions. Most NGOs have to have two separate structures. Travel between the Palestinian territories and Jerusalem is very difficult indeed. I have spoken to scores of OneVoice activists who told me how difficult face-to-face contact was between the two sides. If the idea is to break down barriers through personal contact, then the test of the state’s commitment to peace has to be judged by its ability to facilitate people-to-people contact. What efforts are under way in discussions between the Israeli and Palestinian Governments to allow for these joint organisations to operate as a single legal entity?
Finally, on funding, while the tri-departmental conflict pool between DfID, the FCO and the Ministry of Defence is there to deal with humanitarian emergencies and other protracted conflicts, what amount of FCO and DfID resources are dedicated to ongoing, long-term, grass-roots funding for civil society projects in Israel and the Occupied Territories? What funds are disbursed through the EU mechanisms to these bodies?
I end with the observation that while the peace process is often described as “dead”, in the words of Aaron David Miller, the US negotiator on successive talks:
“It is not yet buried and it will be back”.
When it returns, its foundations will have been laid by the thousands of activists on both sides who work day in and day out for that end. We all owe them a debt of gratitude.
Lord Sheikh
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Falkner for securing this debate. Achieving lasting peace between Israel and Palestine remains a significant priority for the international community. I am a believer in arriving at a two-state solution, whereby Israel has a guarantee of security and nationhood but in return must ensure that Arabs are fairly treated and have full independence.
I have visited both Israel and the West Bank with a cross-party group of parliamentarians. While in Ramallah, we had a meeting with Prime Minister Salam Fayyad of the West Bank and with other Arab leaders. We also spent the best part of a day in discussions with an Israeli army officer and senior officials in the Israeli Foreign Ministry. We wanted to hear points of view on both sides. The Palestinians have achieved a great deal in strengthening the institutions and delivery of public services, but there is lack of growth—growth that will of course be attained if they get their independence.
With the new Israeli Government and the re-election of Mr Obama, I hope that fresh efforts can be made to arrive at a peaceful settlement. Will my noble friend the Minister say what positive role we now are playing in the achievement of the peaceful settlement? A strong civil society is viewed as an essential component of a successful democracy. Increased social action through activities of civil society organisations is at the heart of promoting tolerance.
There are Jewish and Arab people working towards achievement of a peaceful settlement. I organised a meeting which was addressed by both a Jewish lady and an Arab lady. The remarkable point about the Arab lady is that several close members of her family were killed following the invasion of Gaza, but she bore no grudge against Israelis and talked about peace.
Several organisations in the region are doing amazing work. However, due to time constraints, I will focus on the efforts of two in particular. The YaLa forum has enabled young people in the region not only to discuss their political concerns but to find common ground in areas such as job creation and women’s empowerment. The YaLa peace conference, which took place in January 2012, was the first ever online conference for young leaders in the Middle East. During the conference, the YaLa young leaders proposed an agenda for peace, which they aimed to achieve through projects in areas including information technology, e-learning and training. The Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas; the Israeli President, Shimon Peres; and the former Secretary of State of the United States, Hillary Clinton, have signed on to the YaLa forum web page with messages of support.
The OneVoice Movement focuses on ending the conflict by the establishment of two states. Recently, OneVoice Israel campaigned during the Israeli elections on the importance of citizens opting for moderate candidates who are committed to a two-state solution. OneVoice Palestine is the second-largest youth movement in Palestine. Last year, it led a rally of hundreds of citizens through deserted lands to the east of Bethlehem to plant a foundation stone for a peace park to be built in the future. OneVoice Palestine has recently started a programme to educate and empower women from towns and villages to become leaders in their communities.
In yesterday’s debate on the Council of Europe in your Lordships’ House, we spoke of the merits of local democracy and the importance of local and regional authorities. It is also important to recognise that civil society organisations in the Middle East deserve credit for the innovative steps that they have taken to play their part in the quest for lasting peace between Israel and Palestine. Civil society organisations have the potential to assume a greater role in ensuring that the Israeli Government and Palestinian Authority guarantee human rights and equality for every citizen. I sincerely hope that the international community continues to support these organisations in a constructive manner.
Finally, I would like to state that I am a patron of a leading organisation that promotes peace and harmony between the Jewish and Muslim communities. We also discuss political issues affecting the communities.
Lord Judd
My Lords, the noble Lord has made a very powerful speech, which we need to take very seriously. I am sure that I will not be alone in thanking the noble Baroness for having introduced this debate. Her commitment on this issue is second to none. Last week, I was in Gaza, heading up an international mission from the IPU. Our task is to try to draw representatives of the people in Gaza, the Occupied Territories, the West Bank and Israel into more active dialogue so that one can build up a context in which leaders are able to take necessary action. It would be quite wrong for me to report in detail because we must wait until we have visited the other territories, which we hope to do next month. Of course, our talks with Israel will be every bit as important as any other part of the mission.
I think I can say one or two things from a recent visit about the situation as I saw it, some of which has been put before the House before. In every aspect of what I am about to say, the role of civil society is obvious. You cannot build a strong democracy or a strong future without a strong, thriving civil society. That places a huge responsibility on civil society in our own country to get into partnership in that building of the role of the civil societies and the dynamic of society.
I start with water. Some 95% of the water in Gaza is not fit for human consumption. Noble Lords should think of the voluntary and other agencies in this country that operate in the sphere of water; WaterAid springs to mind. Organisations like that have a tremendous role to play in working with the local community to put that right. It will not be put right, however, until the strategic dimensions of water can be tackled. It is an alarming thought that, within two or three years, the aquifer will break down totally because of shortages of the necessary spare parts.
We saw the overcrowded schools and the wonderful, happy—it has to be said—and neatly dressed children going to and from school. There are great things to be done in building partnerships between schools here and schools there, if only they could get on with it. There are 700,000 people out of a total population of 1.7 million—to use the jargon—who are food insecure. That means that they are dependent on handouts by UNRRA and the rest. It became absolutely clear that the population does not want to be dependent; it wants to build a strong economy, and that is what it cannot do in the present situation. People have said, “Has there been no improvement on the supply of goods through the blockade since the ceasefire was negotiated last November?”. I have a good deal of sympathy with people who said to me, “Wait a minute, do not start looking at the tactics. The principle is that somebody else has a hand on the tap and we are not able freely to get access to everything we need to build a balanced economy. We are not getting everything we need but we want to get on with the job”. There is plenty of evidence, even if you look at it very briefly, of people trying desperately hard to do constructive things for their society, but again, the role of civil society here in relating to all that is important.
I conclude by saying on a wider level, because I think I should share this with the House, that I was certainly encouraged by what I had not altogether expected: a lot of positive talk about coming together with Fatah and the people of the West Bank and the Occupied Territories. There really seems to be some hope that the talks that are currently getting under way, with thanks to Egypt for its assistance, can be fruitful. If we are going to do that, of course, there has to be a serious and positive response from the world by saying that these talks desperately matter in providing the context in which progress can be achieved.
Lord Palmer of Childs Hill
My Lords, my noble friend Lady Falkner asks an important Question. Civil society certainly has a role in promoting peace in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. However, real and elusive peace can only be reached by the Israeli Government and the Palestinians sitting down at the negotiating table without any preconditions. Civil society can pave the way but is not of itself a solution. Civil society groups offer Israelis and Palestinians a focus of identity and a catalyst for empowerment on efforts for peace and coexistence. Their activity is a vital part of encouraging their respective societies to engage in renewed negotiations towards a two-state solution.
The effectiveness and prominence of civil society groups is very much contingent upon the political environment. As a free and open democracy, Israeli civil society organisations are able to operate in a wide range of fields, including those very critical of Israeli government policy. However, it must be said that the lack of freedoms in the Palestinian territories and the political atmosphere make it harder for pro two-state organisations to operate there.
We have heard from other noble Lords, and I am sure we will hear more, about the position in Gaza, so perhaps I will concentrate on the Israeli part here—other than to say that my perception of Hamas is that it appears to have suppressed the development of civil society in Gaza by closing down NGOs, voluntary groups and charities which are deemed critical of Hamas rule. If you agree with Hamas, the situation is fine, but it has castigated those organisations that support normalisation with Israel. The noble Lord, Lord Judd, commented on water, which is an incredibly important subject. The way forward on that issue is to secure peace with Israel and to build desalination plants, organised by Israel, on the waterfront of Gaza. Israel is now getting vast amounts of its water from desalination.
Bilateral civil society peace initiatives are bolstered by Israel’s domestic civil society and by those who are working to spread a culture of peace. In addition, the democratic political environment, including freedom of speech and of the press, helps to foster a vibrant Israeli civil society. We have seen this in the recent Israeli elections. By my count, 33 parties contested that election and 12 parties obtained seats in the Knesset.
Israeli law provides for freedom of speech and a diverse and free media. Israelis—Jew, Arab, Christian or whatever else they are—can disagree with the Government and still live freely. The country has 13 daily newspapers, at least 90 weekly newspapers, more than 250 periodicals and numerous internet news sites, many of them popular internationally. All are privately owned and managed. Among any three Israelis you will probably find at least four newspapers. In addition, there are no government restrictions on academic freedom or cultural events in Israel. What other countries in the region could host the gay pride celebrations?
Israel is an incredibly diverse country. While over 70% of Israelis are Jewish, they come from across the world. Approximately half of Israel’s citizens today were born outside the country. In addition, Israel is home to Arab Muslims, Christians, Druze and Samaritans, as well as other religious and ethnic minority groups. What other country in the region allows such diversity? However, there is room for improvement. Minorities in every country, including our own, suffer discrimination and exclusion. Arab Israelis have served as elected representatives of the Knesset since Israel was founded and were elected in the recent election. They also serve on Israel’s powerful Supreme Court, which a noble Lord mentioned previously. However, despite equality in the law, socioeconomic gaps remain—an issue which the Government of Israel, together with numerous Israeli civil society organisations, are rightly seeking to tackle. More needs to be done.
I will give one example which is relevant to previous comments. Hand in Hand runs a network of four bilingual Arabic/Hebrew schools that serve more than 800 Israeli Arab and Israeli Jewish students in Jerusalem, the Galilee, Wadi Ara and Beersheba. Students study in Hebrew and Arabic simultaneously and each classroom is taught by both Arab and Jewish teachers.
In the short time available, one cannot deal with all the things in civil society within the region. Civil society plays an incredible part in creating the right climate both in Israel and in the Palestinian territories. I hope that the Minister will say how the UK Government are going to foster those civil societies on either side of the border. I hope that my noble friend will also say that, ultimately, there is no substitute for the two sides sitting down at the negotiating table without preconditions. I hope that the current Obama Administration, with this country and the EU, will foster those talks.
Lord Bew
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, for securing this debate. I listened to her initial remarks with the same pleasure and profit as always. I declare an interest as chairman of the Anglo-Israel Association and as the outgoing chairman of the British-Irish Association.
The noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, made the point that 2013 marks the 20th anniversary of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for a final status accord. The happy future that seemed to beckon in Washington in September 1993 has not come about. I want to make a point about this drawn from the Irish experience. The logic that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed, which successfully underpinned the Irish process, cannot apply in this more difficult case, in part because the Middle East is awash with selfish strategic interest of great powers, while Ireland, frankly, was not; and in part because of the level of hatred involved, which makes the good work which goes on in civil society even more important. A very recent example which has come to light is Mohamed Morsi denying humanity to Jews and talking about them as descendents of apes and dogs. I am well aware that things have been said by Israeli leaders which would have been better left unsaid. However, I recall no such language, despite the bitterness, in the Irish case. We are dealing with something qualitatively different here, and it means that a different process is required. The lesson from the failures and disappointments of the last 20 years is that the concept that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed is probably suitable in one case, but not in another. Instead, we should be looking for incremental and indeed in some cases unilateral steps towards peace; that is, of course, what makes today’s debate particularly important.
As has been remarked, Israel has an active and vibrant civil society. I want to mention and praise in particular NGOs such as the Alliance for Middle East Peace, which represents 70 leading NGOs that work to promote reconciliation; the Peres Centre for Peace; and of course those many groups and think tanks which focus on the possibilities for enhanced economic co-operation. On this subject, I particularly commend the ICSR Atkin series paper by Oday Abukaresh, which is included in the Library’s very helpful briefing pack for this debate. All of this work helps to explain why, despite the tensions and the frequent, bitter tides of public opinion, the latest poll for the Abraham Centre shows that 67% of Israelis support a two-state solution. This is in part due to the work of so many in civil society to promote a more complex understanding.
I conclude by taking one possible, very simple area for enhanced co-operation. This was suggested by another Atkin Fellow, Gil Messing, in a recent paper. He points out that an earthquake in the West Bank, for example, would affect both Israelis and Palestinians. Joint drills and exercises would be beneficial to both sides. Israel has significant experience here, especially with fire marshals, earthquake awareness, and flooding, and it should share some of this knowledge with the very disadvantaged Palestinian emergency personnel. This may seem to be a small example, but these small examples which stress the common humanity—unlike some of the language which I referred to earlier—are of particular importance.
At the beginning I talked about the ways in which the path to peace is unfortunately more difficult. I remember how, in 1993, we in Northern Ireland were lectured on the lines of, “Look, Middle East peace is about to happen and you can’t get your act together”. Unfortunately, the path to peace in the Middle East is significantly more difficult, for very hard reasons. However, one analogy between the two processes holds. There was only one possible constitutional settlement to the Irish question: namely, power-sharing plus an Irish dimension. At various times people said that it was dying or gone, that the unionists were too angry to permit it now that such and such had happened, or that the nationalists’ ambitions had gone too far and they would accept only something more radical. In the end we returned to what the human mind knew to be the only possible, logical compromise. In this respect this is also the case with the Middle East. The only possible, logical compromise that preserves the interests of both sides is a two-state solution. That is why the work of these groups in civil society that we talked about today is so important.
The Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells
My Lords, I welcome the opportunity afforded by the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, in this debate. Together with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester, I recently returned from a visit under the auspices of Christian Aid to Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, with the object of encouraging Israeli and Palestinian partners in the vital task of peace promotion.
Civil society is key to unlocking peace, and peace is the prize that all must seek for the welfare of generations of children growing up against the backdrop of uncertainty and fear. It ought to go without saying that advocacy for peace must include recognising the rights and security of both peoples, freedom of movement and access, and an end to aid dependency.
It was good to witness the work of Israeli pro-Palestinian bodies such as B’Tselem providing humanitarian efforts to restore dignity to all, regardless of ethnicity or religion, as well as offering support to communities seeking to develop economic resilience. However, as has been said in the debate, this is not a priority just for voluntary or pressure groups; Governments on all sides must increasingly see this as their priority.
Our delegation witnessed many people working at grass-roots level to help build conditions for peace by preparing communities through education and dialogue. I was particularly impressed and moved by being in the presence of a dozen or so 10 year-old Palestinian girls attending a post-conflict trauma group. Through pictures, writing and dialogue they articulated their dreams about the future. I listened as one after another spoke of their desire to be a doctor, a lawyer or a teacher; and watched, saddened, as some could only articulate their pain through dark drawings.
I found myself thinking, “How beautiful you are. Where can you be safe? To whom do you run when you are scared and confused? What kind of humanity leaves behind a child—any child—unable to hold on to its future?”. I am not seeking to make a partisan point here but a humanitarian one. Unless we can see in the eyes of the other the same human identity that is in ourselves, we risk only demonising the other.
There are encouraging signs. It is said that hope is believing in spite of the evidence, and watching the evidence change. Much of what is happening at the grass roots offers that hope, but it needs the commitment of Governments and those with power so that the fragile hope is not destroyed once again.
Building up a civil society requires that all abuses of power, human rights violations and discrimination, from whatever quarter, must be rigorously and consistently addressed. The recent ceasefire between Israel and Gaza offers hope for some measure of peace. As has been said, the forthcoming visit by President Obama offers possibilities of non-violent approaches to conflict resolution, not just between Israelis and Palestinians but for the region as a whole.
It is hard to be optimistic. Mutual suspicion and fear run deep. The politics of the latest atrocity—post-intifada syndrome—appear almost to be hard-wired into the psyche of both peoples. What is hopeful is an increasing sense among the young that this situation cannot last for ever, killing the spirit and blighting the lives of further generations. Wherever one looks, whether at Israeli or Palestinian children, one sees both beauty and vulnerability. Throughout the region they fall under the weight of war, corruption and human anguish, waiting for someone to pay attention. May this debate be a contribution towards that paying of attention, as we remember the words of the Jewish thinker Spinoza:
“Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia, quam rara sunt”.
Everything that is great is as rare to find as it is difficult to do.
Lord Clinton-Davis
My Lords, I begin by quoting the renowned Israeli author, Amos Oz. The first chapter of his book, How to Cure a Fanatic, which is recommended reading for those who are interested and involved in this tragic conflict, is entitled “Between Right and Right”. In it, Oz explores the roots of the conflict, with all its rights and wrongs through the years, and describes it as,
“a clash between one very powerful, deep, and convincing claim, and another very different but no less convincing, no less powerful, no less humane claim”.
Compromise, he contends, is the only route to peace.
This is, of course, an immense political journey. Wherever there has been a background of violent struggle, peace has had to begin somewhere. As the Question implies, the solution eventually has to arise from civil societies and the hearts and minds of both peoples. Palestinian and Israeli advocates for peace have to redouble their efforts to overcome the mutual hatred and suspicion, fuelled by fear, arising from false prophets and counterproductive actions and policies on both sides.
There is not a great awareness that some 20% of the population in Israel are Israeli Arabs. They have full citizenship and hold seats in the Israeli parliament. Nowhere in the Arab world is that replicated as far as Jews are concerned. Of course, faced with implacable hostility, many left their Arab homelands, often forcibly. I do not argue that all is well for Arabs living in Israel, although, by and large, they dwell under more favourable conditions than some of their brethren in Arab lands, and the legal protection of the Israeli justice system extends, rightly, to them.
Many Arabs, throughout the region and beyond, dream of Israel’s demise. The continuous call for its total destruction has in turn led to some of the adverse reactions of a beleaguered nation, and we have to remember that, prior to its victory in 1967, there was a very narrow gap between implacable enemies and the sea as far as Israel was concerned.
If only the Palestinians had accepted the 1947 UN partition resolution, I feel sure that the two peoples could have lived in peace and prosperity, arising from mutual trading interests, the sharing of resources and scientific co-operation to the benefit of both. There is nothing, however, to be gained by rehearsing what is by now almost ancient history. However, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that wise and courageous leadership, backed by a sufficient number of people of good will on both sides, could resurrect the realisation of this imagined future.
Israel’s recent elections provide a scintilla of hope. Netanyahu did not achieve the victory that he and his coalition anticipated. The eventual outcome is not yet clear. At least, free and fair elections were held, which is something of an exception in that troubled part of the world. However, I am not asserting that Netanyahu and his possible right-wing allies represent the aspirations for the peaceful two-state solution for which many Israelis yearn, contrary to the perceptions of some of our fellow citizens.
In the longer term, the emerging, left-wing Meretz—aligning itself, one hopes, with Labour and others, including the Israeli Arab party—points to a possible way ahead. Compromise must be the goal. It may be difficult to attain, but the alternative for the hot-heads, both Israelis and Palestinians, is a very dangerous one-way street to nowhere.
Lord Janner of Braunstone
My Lords, in my career and personal life I have been proud to work and continue to work for both Jews and Arabs in Israel and the neighbouring countries. I have spent much time building bridges between their communities, working together on their similarities and differences, and discussing how we live and more importantly how they can live happily together. This is why I believe it is essential that we work to support Israel and Palestine to create a two-state solution in which the Jews have their state, Israel, and the Arabs have their own state, Palestine.
The role of civil society is important for the continuing encouragement, stability and reconciliation of both Israel and Palestine, but this cannot be achieved without both parties emerging together through a combination of political agreements in conjunction with mutual trust and respect throughout all levels of society. Sadly, I feel at the present moment this mutual trust and respect do not solely exist.
We cannot ignore that both Israel and Palestine have a right to exist. It is important for the Palestinian people, but Hamas is still a strong influence within the region and is not there to benefit its people. It is not the Government; it is a terrorist group that uses its own citizens as shields to hide their operations and that publicly announces the annihilation of the State of Israel. That is impossible and very sad. We must acknowledge Israel’s right to defend its own country, and, for peace, Hamas cannot have power of influence or status within Palestine. Whether you say shalom or salaam, the word is peace—the single word to which we must always return.
There are so many NGOs internationally and in Israel and in Palestinian territories working to promote and to develop communities for Arabs and Jews to live together. Today, I would like to tell the House of a wonderful initiative based in Israel called Hand in Hand, which was founded in 1997. This organisation has created schools that teach Jewish and Arab children side by side, in coexistence. The students learn together and gain understanding about one another’s faiths, their traditions and their ideologies, because peace can truly blossom when it starts at the lowest possible level and not merely at our level and other higher levels.
At present there are four schools throughout Israel: in Jerusalem, Galilee, Wadi Ara and Be’er Sheva. The US Agency for International Development has provided Hand in Hand with a $1.08 million grant to help establish additional schools, because it recognises how important the existing schools are and how their number should be increased. Alas, these schools have not been welcomed by all citizens in Israel. Last February, their school in Jerusalem was vandalised by extremist settlers, as was a school building in Neve Shalom. These attacks are known as “price tag”: extremists targeting Palestinians and Israeli Defence Forces. By attacking these places, the extremists are targeting the number of Jews who want to build bridges and relations with the Arab citizens in Israel.
I am honoured to have visited a Hand in Hand school, and to witness students sitting together, learning Arabic and Hebrew, becoming friends and working and learning together. A remark from a mother of a student attending one of these schools sums up their importance:
“Our political leaders talk about peace. The school that we have started together as Arabs and Jews … is making peace, building it every day, every hour.”.
That is certainly correct.
The role of civil society must continue to expand in partnership with proactive institutions such as Hand in Hand. We need to ensure that NGOs and other organisations have the essential funding that is vital. In February 2011, I asked our Government about our role in funding civil society groups for co-existence projects in Israel and the Palestinian territories. The Minister replied that some £151,000 was distributed in 2009-10,
“through the bilateral programme fund in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem”.—[Official Report, 7/2/11; col. WA 26.]
I ask the Minister once again, some two years later, what current percentage of our country’s aid to Israel, and to the Palestinian territories that are represented, is used to assist in the development of current and future co-existence projects. I believe that such projects can only promote and enforce the process of peace.
No one can argue against the rights of the Palestinian people to have their own home, and this is of course true for Israel. We must all continue to discuss how they live and, more importantly, how they can live happily and together in the future.
Baroness Tonge
My Lords, it is 10 years since I made my first visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories of Palestine, which turned out to be a life-changing experience. Since then, the illegal settlements in the West Bank have made it increasingly difficult to envisage a viable state of Palestine, and some Israelis and Palestinians are now calling for a one-state solution, with all citizens having equal rights and opportunities.
The recent elections in Israel have shown a shift in mood among the people there, even though it was depressing to see how few Arab Israelis voted, despite exhortations from the candidates. On the other hand, the World Service this morning had what could be some good news, saying that Khaled Meshaal had told the BBC in the past 24 hours that Hamas was close to forming a unity Government with Fatah. Let us hope so. However, despite these tender green shoots, we see little real progress. That is why I congratulate my noble friend Lady Falkner on securing this debate and allowing us to explore the possibility of a solution that is enforced not from the top down but by civil society in Israel and Palestine getting together and insisting that their representatives do things differently. UNESCO has done sterling work in this area over the past 10 years, looking at the willingness of civil society on both sides to work together. However, that organisation points out the difficulties of working together, particularly the restriction of movement and action for Palestinians and Israeli Arabs.
Although it is a fairly unusual suggestion, I ask quite seriously whether it would be possible for our Government to plan a conference here in London to encourage this process of civil society getting together, inviting representatives from groups in Israel and Palestine as well as from our own Jewish and Palestinian diasporas in this country. My suggestions for invitations would of course include organisations such as B’Tselem, Adalah and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel that work for human rights in the Occupied Territories and within Israel. There is a long list of organisations doing sterling work in both countries. The three great religions must be represented, and perhaps we could make amends for the appalling way in which the Arab Israeli Sheikh Raed Salah was treated, on the advice of the Community Security Trust alone, when he came on a lecture tour in this country. He is the leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel and had wanted to highlight the difficulties for the Muslim and Christian citizens of Israel and the discrimination that they suffer in education, property rights and healthcare. He knows civil society in Israel, whether you approve of him or not, and he should be listened to and invited to a conference.
Another organisation should also be there. Last year I was privileged to meet—I believe through the activities of the noble Lord, Lord Stone—a group called the Israeli Peace Initiative, led by Mr Koby Huberman and other prominent business leaders in Israel. They expressed their frustration at the lack of progress towards a solution, which was affecting business investment and their activities in the region as well as presenting a danger to peace in the wider Middle East. They suggested that civil society should engage with partners all over the Middle East and build on the Arab peace plan, the so-called Saudi initiative. I understand that Mr Huberman is currently in the United States, trying to gather support for this plan.
It may be just a dream but a conference like this could be game-changing, and could show that our country still cares about the Israeli and Palestinian people nearly 100 years after the Balfour Declaration.
Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale
My Lords, I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, for presenting this subject. Like her, I believe that the role of civil society is of the utmost importance in promoting peace for Israelis and Palestinians.
Peace will not be achieved by violence but, as we all know, by a combination of political agreements based on mutual trust and respect, as my noble friend Lord Janner said, which have to be carefully, slowly—and, unfortunately, probably painfully—established at all levels of society. However, happily, as this debate has shown, we are not starting from zero. There are lots of good tales to tell, and there are some marvellous organisations working in the area for the achievement of a two-state solution and for a peaceful and happy life for the inhabitants of both a future Palestine and of Israel.
If more NGOs and organisations that one talks about are based in Israel, that is not because of any bias or anything other than the fact that Israel is home to some very highly regarded NGOs that promote peaceful coexistence and seek to foster greater understanding and collaboration between the two communities. There is greater freedom for this kind of activity in Israel even than in the West Bank, and certainly now in Gaza since Hamas took over, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, has said in more detail, has closed down NGOs and any voluntary organisations or charities that seem to support, to quote Hamas, “normalisation with Israelis”. That is an offence that means that you get closed down there.
Around one-third of Israelis are involved in social activism of one kind or another, and 25% of those are young people. Therein lies our hope. It is natural that they have this inheritance because, after all, the establishment of kibbutzim was a central part of the foundation of the Israeli state, and young Israelis are at the heart of nearly all the peace movements, especially, as noble Lords have already mentioned today, OneVoice, where you find a great majority of the young, both Palestinians and Israelis.
As other noble Lords have said, we do not have time to go through all the wonderful organisations that do great work in that area, sometimes in slightly dangerous circumstances for themselves. I cannot, for example, go into the trade union movement and what it is doing; the Israeli Histadrut and the Palestinian PGFTU have many projects together. There are many medical projects and co-operation between hospitals on the West Bank, and many religious organisations doing great work.
I want to speak about my favourite organisation, Hand in Hand, which has been mentioned more than once already. It is a marvellous organisation and deals with the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, raised in her speech, when she spoke about the terrible problem that the two languages present to any class of society that does not automatically have English or a mutual language. Hand in Hand does so well in that because it has bilingual schools in Arabic and Hebrew.
I had the same sort of emotional experience as that mentioned by the right reverend Prelate when I met young Palestinian girls. When I looked at the children in those schools together, I was filled with admiration for the courage of the parents and the teachers. There is an Arab and Jewish teacher for each class. The courage they show against prejudice inside their own communities brought back memories of a similar experience—the only other time that I have had such an experience—in Belfast. I visited an integrated school in Belfast where the parents and the teachers were bravely facing the pressures and threats from two communities. That is exactly what the Hand in Hand people do in Israel. I am very proud that the British Council now supports Hand in Hand. When I saw the bravery of the parents and teachers I felt that they were true peacemakers and deserved to be blessed in whatever religion one is a member of.
Baroness Deech
My Lords, on all sides of the House noble Lords are united in willing peace in the world, whether it be in Israel, Palestine, Syria, Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, and also Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran—the list is only too long. Indeed, in the previous parliamentary Session there were no fewer than 706 Questions on Israel and Palestine.
What contribution can and is being made by NGOs and the civil population? Are there instances when NGOs fan the flames rather than promote peace? Peace will come when Palestinian refugees are treated like other refugees in the world. Why are they kept in the state they are in, unlike the millions displaced at the end of World War Two, for example, from Pakistan, Cyprus, India, Germany and Jews from Arab countries? The NGO that militates against peace is the UN Relief and Works Agency—UNRWA. To an outsider, UNRWA seems a humanitarian group helping Palestinian refugees. In reality, it undermines the chances of Arab-Israeli peace and holds Palestinians back from rebuilding their lives. It was set up to take care of the Arabs of the British Mandate. It began with some 700,000 charges and now has more than 5 million. It perpetuates their refugee status, unlike the UN High Commissioner for Refugees that takes care of 50 million refugees with half the budget of UNRWA.
The issue is that UNRWA counts as refugees not only those displaced in 1946-8 but their descendants down to the fourth generation, including many who have never—and whose ancestors never—set foot in Israel and who are not in need. There are actually only 30,000 refugees properly defined under the UN definition of a refugee. The UN definition specifically excludes any person who has acquired a new nationality. UNRWA is the only refugee organisation in the world that considers citizens of another state to be refugees, and includes all descendants of original male refugees. On that basis, there will be a lot of refugees sitting in this House.
However, UNRWA does not push for citizenship in the host countries of others. Its budget is $1.23 billion over two years—98% of which comes from Europe, the US and Canada, while the oil states give only 2%. It has become an industry in itself, with 29,000 employees, overwhelmingly Palestinians, while the UNHCR has a mere 7,600 employees. There is one worker for every 157 Palestinian refugees. It needs reform. By limiting its largesse to those in need it should ensure that it is not partisan and that the children in its schools get a balanced and discrimination-free education and are not taught to hate Israelis and to glorify terrorism and suicide bombings. It should accept, and teach children to accept, the right of self-determination for all people, Israelis as well as Palestinians. In fact, UNRWA’s functions would be better transferred to other UN agencies and to the Palestinian Authority and it would be better if it were dissolved.
I do not have time to mention the noble NGOs other noble Lords have described, but I want to draw attention to the magnificent collaboration going on in medical research, in particular in Ben-Gurion University in Israel where researchers collaborate with Arabs on identifying a defective gene that causes a fatal calcium deficiency in Arab children. Professor Margalith of that university won the Tyler Prize for work on malaria and collaborated with Palestinian and Jordanian scientists to eradicate mosquitoes.
The Government should be spending their cash—and I hope the Minister will answer—on NGOs that work for coexistence, not those that are partisan. What can civil society in Britain contribute? Unfortunately, in the view of some, anti-Semitic language has entered the mainstream of political discourse here. You could argue that Israel behaves in the way she does in part because the lessons learnt from the Holocaust were that she can never rely on the armed strength or support of others. Trying to play down the goal and intention of the Holocaust, as we saw recently, or throwing around the word “apartheid” simply reminds Jews in Israel, and maybe elsewhere, how fragile is the barrier against their destruction in every generation. Support for Israel by churches and politicians here would do more than anything else to encourage Israel to take the brave steps it needs to take—steps that it thinks will endanger its existence.
Lord Stone of Blackheath
My Lords, elected leaders everywhere are politically limited. Consequently, they refrain from taking brave initiatives and yes, it is the role of responsible civil societies to engage with like-minded people across the region—to present new ideas, to develop worthwhile collaborative projects, to educate and together create hope for the next generation.
I want to use my time by listing briefly more civil society projects that are showing the way and in so doing I declare my interest in them, which is all non-financial. The first aims to press Governments to break the impasse and to agree a peace deal. As the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, mentioned, Koby Huberman came here from the region to present the Israeli Peace Initiative—the IPI—to a cross-party group. The IPI was developed through an apolitical movement of prominent Israelis in response to, and based on, the Arab Peace Initiative—the API. The IPI’s mission is twofold—to encourage the Israeli leaders to present an official response to the API and to communicate with civil societies in the Arab world to promote regional solutions jointly.
During the past 10 years, no less than 17 peace plans have been submitted but politicians on both sides have failed to listen to the voice of the majority of their citizens who want to live in peace in a two-state solution. Can we in your Lordships’ House help the IPI team to link with its Arab counterparts to get these two plans to become one?
On the ground, in the region, at OneVoice, which was mentioned earlier, John Lyndon and his team are now also looking at using civic, economic and media milestones as part of an ambitious programme called the Peoples’ Blueprint. They are persuading manufacturers, businesses, infrastructure and property developers, hospitals and universities to pledge that they will invest across the region once certain steps towards a peace deal are in place. Your Lordships may know others who might like to make similar pledges.
On food, as mentioned by my noble friend Lord Judd, Moon Valley has been helping Palestinian farmers to improve quality standards and efficiency to enable them to export their goods. Now master chef Yotam Ottolenghi and his team are helping us develop a wider range of traditional foods: freekeh, maftoul, grape molasses and olive tapenades. We will set up a factory in Jordan in partnership with Olives et Al, a UK-based fine-food manufacturer, and we are working in Lebanon with several women’s co-operatives. In the West Bank, to ensure that the Palestinian farmers themselves benefit we will embed our technical manager, Yamin Younis, inside a collection of co-operatives there called the New Farm Company. We are about to start selling these delicious Palestinian goods for them in the Gulf States as well. This is a true social enterprise and again we could do with more support.
This brings me to water, recognised by the World Economic Forum as the second most important risk factor in the world and again mentioned by my noble friend Lord Judd. This week Julie Arts spoke to me from Amman, where future leaders from Arab and European cities have been taking part in an itijah—which means “direction”. That was a four-day venture run by an international leadership organisation, Common Purpose, tackling this common challenge. During the four days, the group met with organisations such as the Red Sea-Dead Sea project, USAID and UNRWA, with the aim of producing innovative new solutions for the region’s water. The cross-region group came from 10 different cities including Benghazi, Alexandria, Istanbul, Amsterdam and London, and represented organisations as diverse as the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority, the Institute of Islamic Banking & Finance, the Libyan Centre for Consultancy and Human Development and Coca-Cola.
Included in civil society are the media and press. They can be responsible for stirring up war-like emotions and presenting biased sensation, or they can choose to report factually and mindfully. In this context perhaps one of the most heartening events is the International Media Awards, held annually here in London under the auspices of the Next Century Foundation. The awards bring journalists from Israel and the West Bank, Gaza and the wider Middle-East together with their counterparts from the West, who all enjoy each other’s company. I believe the media have a responsibility to promote peace, if only through honest and constructive journalism. It is a singular privilege to host these awards each spring. Noble Lords who are interested are invited to come to them.
I mention these civil society projects that thousands of earnest and well meaning citizens are engaged in because they need our support. They show the way to those politicians in the region who should be there to change the world for the better, rather than just playing out strategies to hold together their precarious, dubious and politically convenient coalitions. I ask noble Lords and Her Majesty’s Government to give support to these types of initiatives.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, I declare an interest as vice-chairman of the New Israel Fund UK, which supports a wide range of civil society organisations in Israel, including ACRI, which was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner. My late wife was heavily involved in and I support an organisation called Windows for Peace, which brings together young Jewish and Arab Israelis and Palestinians. It is precisely the kind of joint venture involving young people that, as others have said, can contribute so much to the future. Finally, I declare an interest as a member of the UK Task Force on issues relating to Arab citizens of Israel. On Sunday, I will be joining a third mission from that organisation. This year, we will look at mixed towns and cities and how the two communities and the political structures around them can work together, often with the support of local civil society.
The Israeli Declaration of Independence proclaimed unequivocally the right of equal treatment for all the country’s citizens, irrespective of gender, ethnicity or religion. Ten years on from the Orr Commission report following the second intifada, it must be said—and successive Governments in Israel have acknowledged—that there has been insufficient narrowing of the gap between the two communities. It is right to say, as others have said tonight and on other occasions, that in general the condition of Arab citizens in Israel is probably better in many respects than many of their brethren, but of course that is not the comparison that they make. They make the comparison with their Jewish fellow citizens. It is right that they should do so and that those gaps should be narrowed, not least in the interests of Israel itself.
The Palestinian minority in Israel is potentially a valuable economic force. The Palestinian diaspora has shown in many parts of the world that it can contribute significantly to economic and other developments. Moreover, it is inconceivable that a lasting peace, which we all seek, can be established on the basis that Israel treats its Arab citizens as in any way second-class. That is not what the Declaration of Independence proclaims and, in fairness, even the present Government have taken some steps towards narrowing the gap, although a great deal more remains to be done.
Last year the task force spent some time in the Negev in the south of Israel looking at the Bedouin community. We were disturbed but also in some respects encouraged by the activities that we saw there. I recall one particular visit to a co-operative run by women—and it is often women who take the lead in these matters—which is now one of the main providers of meals on wheels across the country, to the extent that the Ministry of Education has contracted with them to supply many other places. That is an example of a community-based organisation making a significant difference in its own community and beyond.
My noble friend Lady Ramsay referred to the trade union movement. It is sometimes forgotten—in this country, never mind in Israel—that trade unions are part of civil society. The Histadrut is very active on behalf of its Arab members—of which there are many—and also supports the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions. I find it disappointing that some trade unions in this country seek to boycott the Histadrut. They should be supporting the Histadrut and the Palestinian federation in their joint work.
Another civil society organisation, or NGO, is Friends of the Earth Middle East. Last year, in what passed for our summer, I was pleased to host on behalf of the New Israel Fund a reception and discussion with Friends of the Earth Middle East, which is the only joint organisation embracing a Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli component. Of course, it looks in particular at environmental issues, touching very much on the issue of water, particularly the state of the River Jordan, which brings in all three components. It is another kind of organisation which certainly needs the support of the UK Government. Some concern has been caused by moves within Israel by the unreconstructed right to limit donations to civil society organisations from outside the country. I hope and assume that the Government will urge Israel not to do so.
Two years ago I was privileged to visit the amazing Bialik-Rogozin school in Jaffa, which has both Jewish and Arab students but also about 40% of its pupils are children of refugees or migrant workers. It is an amazing place—children of a rainbow range of colours and different languages all get along famously with the most wonderful staff. I have a strong visual memory of this fine example of Israel at its best. I was being shown round the playground and saw some structures about three foot high scattered around. When I asked what they were, I was told they were the vents from the air raid shelters beneath the school. Civil society in Israel has a great part to play, with support from inside and outside the country, in ensuring that those vents will one day be removed.
Lord Triesman
My Lords, I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, and all the other speakers in this debate. There is a need, I believe, for realism about the weight of expectation that we place on civil society and institutions in any peace process. Civil society institutions in the region do a quite remarkable job and they should not be judged when the states or emerging states within which they work fail on the path to peace.
I have tried to understand the role of civil society over about three decades, principally because the whole process of making peaceful life the norm so often rests with them. I have tried to understand it in Israel, on the West Bank, in Gaza and when it reaches across boundaries.
About one third of Israelis are said to be involved in civil organisations. I suspect that, if you included sport, the proportion would be a good deal higher. In a diverse country, many of the most significant NGOs comprise Arab Muslims, Christians, Druze, Samaritans, Jews and small minorities. The complete inclusiveness of those organisations is sometimes remarkable.
As my noble friends Lady Ramsey and Lord Beecham said, I have always seen that inclusiveness as part of the DNA test of the trade unions in those countries. They have repelled any government interference and ensure that they are inclusive. That is now guaranteed in law. Histradut and the PGFTU in 2008 signed an agreement that has bound them closely together.
Like other noble Lords, I can identify several organisations which I think remarkable—the New Israel Fund, Kulunana, and many others. There are many other examples in the media, political life academic life and elsewhere. It would be foolish to say of any of them—or of Israeli civil society as a whole—that it exhibits no discrimination. However, I would like briefly to identify how the people of the region are coming to confront discrimination with potential momentum for peace.
First, Netanyahu’s Government attempted to curtail some of those freedoms. It was a hot general election issue. Israeli voters moved to support centrist and leftist parties and, at that macro level, that shift is significant. Secondly, there is a telling micro-example close to my heart—it is about football. One of the right-wing football clubs, Beitar Jerusalem, had a bunch of arrogant supporters who objected to Arab players representing the club. The club owner, Arkady Gaydamak, with a good deal of support from Shimon Peres, and Ehud Olmert, who, as it happens, is a supporter of the club and, in Gaydamak’s case is not a known softhearted political liberal, denounced that discrimination to the widespread support of the football community around the world. In that sporting environment, we see real change.
On the West Bank, where free movement is unacceptably restricted, it is clear that civil society organisations work much harder. The work of an EU project under the investing in people programme and the gender equalities programme is truly impressive. Organisations are now in place to promote women’s rights in health, justice, property, at work, in universities and we have seen a great deal of development using €1 billion of EU money between 2007 and 2013 towards those objectives.
The developments in Gaza appear far weaker. Hamas does not often encourage plurality. What courses through the veins of many successful civil society institutions is that they are robustly independent. They do not want to be told what ideology they have to embrace. Anti-collaboration threats make it much harder. With EU support, there is work on literacy, vocational development, disability programmes and many others. I believe that they can all contribute to peace if it is possible to deal with ideologies of hatred.
Perhaps we can learn from what has been achieved across borders. OneVoice has been mentioned. That is obviously a remarkable organisation. YaLa Forum has been mentioned. The economic projects between the West Bank and Israel, pioneered, among others, by the remarkable Sir Ronnie Cohen, give people an economic incentive to promote each other's success—an investment which works because it is to mutual benefit. The interesting intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Stone, was about another remarkable enterprise with which he is so closely associated.
That is the seed corn of regional, common market approaches building through the economic success of one another. The private and, I have to say, usually out-of-region discussions between senior Palestinian and Israeli academics, where the United Kingdom’s Association of University Teachers brought people together early in the Oslo process was a remarkable environment for peaceful work. What a sad, counterproductive turn of events that the AUT’s successor organisation has supported academic boycotts, blaming Jewish academics for the faults of which it accuses the Israeli Government.
Quiet and consistent work is being done elsewhere. I mention again the Football Association; developing football coaches and referees sponsored through the United Kingdom; proud of doing it; never easy; always rewarding; and perhaps giving a real meaning to the word “united” which is so often the word that comes up in football club names.
I ask the Minister if he could say specifically which organisations do Her Majesty’s Government support—and with what resources? What instructions does the United Kingdom ambassador in Israel have to support civil society organisations? Which organisations receive help in the United Kingdom from the Government or the Westminster Foundation? What is the Government’s attitude to academic boycotts and other disruptive and divisive measures?
Demands of civil society for peace may start with mutual suspicion, but it often moves to mutual interest—economic; intellectual; sporting; and anti-discriminatory. As the noble Lord, Lord Bew, put it, it is a journey of incremental peace.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, this has been a very encouraging debate and it is good to hear how many of the Members of this House are themselves engaged in working with enlightened civil society across the divide in the Middle East conflict; I am gratified to hear that. I knew, of course, quite a lot about it before and I hope that everyone will be talking about it as widely as possible and encouraging others to come in.
I am a disillusioned liberal. Not all civil society organisations promote peaceful harmony, just as not every charity is charitable to everyone in the society in which they operate. The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, referred to those who fuel the flames. There are civil organisations that fuel the flames on both sides, as we are aware—the extremist settler organisations and some of the more extreme organisations, particularly in Gaza. Therefore, we are talking about enlightened civil society, which we all wish to support and wish our Government to support in beginning to heal this embittered conflict.
Since the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993, dozens of Israeli, Palestinian and international non-governmental organisations have been, and continue to be, active in the field of promoting peace between the two peoples. Camp David and Annapolis were also usefully supported by civil society think tanks and experts. We need their help.
Of course, this cannot be separated from the wider issue of the Middle East peace process. I hope that all noble Lords are aware that the UK Government consider this a very urgent issue over the next year and a half, and give it one of their highest priorities in foreign policy, as my honourable friend the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs has said on a number of occasions.
We fear that the time left to preserve and reinstate a two-state solution is now limited. If we fail to make progress in the next 18 months to two years, it may possibly be too late. We welcome the announcement that President Obama will be going to Israel; indeed, the new US Secretary of State will be going to Israel and to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. We want to see intergovernmental negotiation back on track. However, fostering peace is impossible without a society that is willing to embrace it. Our fear is that with each passing day, month and year without progress, the prospect of peace becomes less likely and both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples lose hope that it is possible.
During these times, when formal negotiations remain stalled, it is very important to ensure that both societies continue to foster an environment for peace. Civil society organisations play a vital role in fostering that environment. Through our embassy in Tel Aviv and consulate-general in Jerusalem, we engage with two main groups of civil society organisations: first, those that are actively involved in promoting peace and coexistence as well as promoting a final settlement of the conflict; and, secondly, those focused on managing the conflict with a focus on monitoring, legal work or advocacy against certain practices that increase tension on the ground.
In the past year the Conflict Pool, the joint fund of the FCO, DfID and the MoD, has contracted just over £1 million to Palestinian and Israeli civil society organisations. This is in addition to wider FCO bilateral funding.
The noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, also asked about the EU. Its Partnership for Peace programmes disburse between €5 million and €10 million to 15 or 25 projects each year. Other Governments are of course involved. A recent joint study of textbooks in Palestinian and Israeli schools by scholars from Yale, Tel Aviv and Bethlehem Universities was funded partly by the US State Department.
The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, asked about moves to limit funds from the outside. I am well aware that this has been mooted within Israeli political circles. To follow the example of Russia, which has done so, would be regarded by all as deeply damaging to Israel’s reputation around the world. I sincerely hope that the new Government will not give in to their own right wing on that.
I hope that noble Lords will understand if I cannot mention in this short speech all of the organisations with which we engage. I hope to give noble Lords a sense of the breadth of British engagement with civil society, both in the region and in the UK. Our embassy in Tel Aviv is close contact with many of the organisations mentioned, including the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, OneVoice and the Peres Centre for Peace. I had not heard about Hand in Hand; it sounds fascinating and I look forward to hearing more about its work in future. The British Government have taken important steps to support such organisations, including contracting funds to various organisations that monitor settlement expansion and continue to work with the Israeli legal system and law enforcement authorities to reduce illegal settlement activity and violence against Palestinian civilians. As we have seen, one of the barriers to finding a way through the conflict is the increasing lack of belief among both Israelis and Palestinians that a solution is possible.
On the ground in Palestine, the situation continues to work against the achievement of a final status deal. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, the Geneva Initiative and Addameer all do important work to increase the prospect of reaching a two-state solution in which both Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace and security. Work also continues to be done to address the immediate issue of Palestinian rights under international law. Palestinian civil society plays a vital role in highlighting and helping to address some of the most negative aspects of the Israeli occupation, including human rights violations.
The UK firmly believes that the focus between the Israelis and the Palestinians should be on steps to rebuild trust, with the aim of giving momentum to restart negotiations. House demolitions and the evictions of Palestinians from their homes cause real suffering to ordinary Palestinians. We have made our position on this issue clear to the Israeli authorities. Our consulate-general in Jerusalem has supported the International Peace and Cooperation Centre, implementing urban plans and community surveys that help prevent house demolition and land confiscation. In December, for the first time, five IPCC master plans for Palestinian communities in Area C were approved. This is a major milestone for Palestinian planning efforts and the development rights of Palestinian communities.
I note what the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, said about UNWRA. I do not entirely accept what she said, either on that or on the position of Palestinian refugees. The FCO funded an independent report on Palestinian children in Israeli detention, which was released in June 2012. It was written by a team of respected British lawyers led by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland. The FCO funded and provided diplomatic support throughout the visit, on the shared understanding that the delegation was to be entirely independent. The content, conclusions and recommendations of the report are the delegation’s own.
The report’s conclusions focused on the legal disparity between how the Israeli justice system treats Israeli children on the one hand and Palestinian children on the other. It concludes that Israel is in contravention of various aspects of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which it asserts applies to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It also notes that the transportation of child prisoners into Israel and the failure to translate military orders from Hebrew are violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention. I am sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, as a fellow lawyer, will particularly wish to discuss that with the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland.
We continue to promote respect for human rights in the OPTs through work with local Israeli and Palestinian implementing partners. This year the Conflict Pool has contributed to the dismantlement of illegal outposts on Palestinian land, along with the return of hundreds of acres of Palestinian agricultural land in Areas B and C of the West Bank. It has funded groups that monitor and provide access to justice for victims of settler violence and lobby for more robust law enforcement. It has supported work to challenge Israel’s West Bank-Gaza separation policy and litigation on the right to education, livelihood and the freedom of movement on behalf of Gazans who wish to seek educational and economic opportunities or family reunification outside the Gaza Strip. The noble Lord, Lord Judd, mentioned the extremely important area of water; as he well knows, a great deal of work is going on regarding that but there are severe obstacles.
There are also a number of civil society organisations within the UK that do important work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The FCO has a regular dialogue with a wide range of UK-based civil society organisations at both official and ministerial level. The British Government consistently raise our concerns with the Israeli authorities regarding human rights abuses under the occupation. We value enormously the role that civil society can and does play in monitoring such issues. The UK will continue to work with civil society organisations and research groups to advance the powerful case for peace on both sides of the Green Line.
The role of British civil society, including our Jewish and Arab diasporas, is clearly an important contribution in getting away from this frozen conflict. We cannot leave the resolution of this embittered conflict to government alone. I pay tribute to all those, including many here, who do so much work on this issue. I am particularly glad to hear mention of my very old friend Ronnie Cohen—I think by the noble Lord, Lord Stone—who continues to do really superb work in this area.
Yes, of course, this is only palliative. Civil society can do only so much. Resolution of the conflict requires direct negotiation. That is urgent and, I repeat, Her Majesty’s Government consider this to be an urgent priority for the next year.