Grand Committee
(1 year, 3 months ago)
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The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)
Good afternoon, my Lords, and welcome to the Grand Committee. The time limit for this debate is one hour.
UN Biodiversity Conference: COP 15
(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Lord Randall of Uxbridge
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the outcome of the United Nations Biodiversity Conference: COP15, held in Montreal between 7 and 19 December 2022; and to what extent the United Kingdom is fulfilling all of its international obligations to protect biodiversity.
Lord Randall of Uxbridge (Con)
My Lords, this is my first entree into the Grand Committee Room, so I may get things wrong. I really welcome the opportunity to raise these important issues. Coming top of a ballot is rather unusual for me, so I think I will just give up now—I will not try the lottery or anything else like that.
I should start off, as usual, by declaring some interests as in the members register. I am a council member of the RSPB, a trustee of the Bat Conservation Trust, a vice-president of Fauna & Flora International, a chair of the Thin Green Line Foundation, which looks after rangers, and a council member of the UK Overseas Territories Conservation Forum. there are one or two more that may appear in the register; I may refer to some as I go through my contribution.
First, I pay great tribute to both my noble friends who are working on this: my noble friend Lord Goldsmith, who is here, and my noble friend Lord Benyon. Not only have they worked really hard, particularly on this issue with their dedication, but I know they are completely committed to the cause. I have no complaints at all about them. Any complaints that might occur a little later are directed more generally into the governmental ether, not to them directly.
I saw the COP result from a distance. I know there were a couple of complaints that the British media did not give it the import they could have, but as I was not there and could not see who was, I could only see what happened. However, I was so heartened to see a headline in the Guardian shortly afterwards by somebody who is not normally going to be necessarily complimentary: Craig Bennett, who is the chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts. The headline to his article was, “What’s this unfamiliar feeling I have after the Cop15 meeting? It might just be hope”. That is praise indeed, I would have said.
We have to be absolutely delighted that although, as I will go on shortly to say, more could be done, including what we have to do at home, we should be able for a short while to sit back and congratulate ourselves. I remember in my days as a retailer that once a year, when we had the sales figures in for that year, you could normally sit back and relax for about an hour and say, “We did very well”. Then, you all have to start all over again. This is that moment where we say, “We’ve done very well; now the work begins again in earnest”.
I have been fascinated and engrossed by nature from a very early age. My grandfather made me a member of the RSPB nearly 60 years ago, and only today I got a renewal from Butterfly Conservation, pointing out that I had been a member for 40 years when I thought I had only recently joined. The depressing thing is that I have seen in my lifetime at least one species of bird become globally extinct: the slender-billed curlew. It probably is extinct, although there may be relic populations breeding somewhere in its wintering grounds in Siberia. I was recently in Chile and saw a hummingbird there, a Chilean woodstar, which I think is down to its last couple of hundred individuals. It is all very gloomy and, looking through my old notebooks, it is not just internationally. Where I live in Middlesex, west London, 30 or 40 years ago I was seeing 20 or 30 turtle doves just by walking around the local gravel pits. They are now a complete rarity.
It is not only birds, of course. Throughout the world, every month, we are only just beginning to discover new species of, for example, insects. To be honest, some of them may become extinct just after they have been discovered. We know most of the reasons for this: climate change, habitat loss, human interference and indiscriminate use of pesticides.
I am sure that my noble friend the Minister will go into more detail on this but, at COP, some particular goals were raised, such as substantially increasing the area of natural ecosystems, ensuring that nature’s contribution to people is valued, maintained and enhanced, and sharing the monetary and non-monetary benefits of utilisation. I say this to all Members in the Room and further afield: we do not do enough publicity on the magnificent work of the Dasgupta review, which put out hard research into the economic benefits of biodiversity.
Another goal was to ensure that all parties, specifically developing countries, have adequate means to implement these aims. This includes financial resources, building capacity, technical and scientific co-operation, and access to technology. This is important because it is very easy to lecture countries, particularly developing ones, and say, “You must do more. You must protect this. You must protect that”—especially when we are not so good ourselves, which, to a large extent, we are not at the moment. However, we cannot expect them to be able to fund these things.
I want to put one idea forward. I am one of several vice-chairs of the all-party group for UK Aid Match, through which ODA money is matched by private money from institutions. It is already being done and could be increased to go towards biodiversity projects.
The other thing that should be mentioned is the requirement for transnational companies and financial institutions to monitor, assess and disclose the impact on biodiversity of their operations, supply chains and portfolios. I am still trying—I tried again in the financial services Bill—to get an amendment down about deforestation and making sure that UK money is not in some way aiding it.
The scale of the biodiversity crisis is huge. There is so much to do. However, I have to say that we are not exemplars in this country. I am delighted that I have 10 minutes to speak; I could probably go on for a lot longer but I am a stickler for these things. We talk about 30by30—it is a great idea—but are we doing enough? I see SSSIs being threatened. Are we doing enough to ensure that they are in a nature-ready state? Frankly, our national parks do not live up to the expectations of the ordinary member of the public. You think a national park is where you see herds of migrating wildebeest; in fact, our ones are pretty poor on biodiversity.
There are some good things. I am delighted about the measure on pesticides because insect loss is a huge problem. I am slightly surprised that the Government agreed to it because it is not necessarily what they want.
I have been extremely lucky in my life—from my grandfather making me an RSPB member all those years ago to my parents encouraging me. I have seen wildlife around the world and here in the UK. In those early days when I used to work on things that most Members in the Room at the moment are far too young to remember, such as Peter Scott’s “Look” programme—I remember David Attenborough from “Zoo Quest” rather than some of his later things; you can see how very far I go back on this subject—I could never have imagined, watching a black and white screen, that I was going to be lucky enough to visit some of those places and see some of those species, both here and abroad.
In the same way that I was lucky to see them, I have been extremely lucky to find myself in Parliament, first in the House of Commons and now here in your Lordships’ House. I made a vow to myself that the one thing I would concentrate on more than anything else, because wildlife, nature and conservation are my passions, was doing whatever I could to ensure that future generations can benefit from and enjoy the wonders of nature, just as I have.
Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, on coming top of the ballot and taking this opportunity to introduce a debate on this crucial subject, which deserves a lot more thought than the House tends to give it. He spoke feelingly about biodiversity. Biodiversity is inextricably linked with climate change. Our natural systems are crucial to economic and social stability, as well as to well-being and health, from mental health through to zoonotic diseases. This week, a report in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives has estimated that the global loss of pollinators is causing about 500,000 early deaths a year by reducing the supply of healthy foods. The health of people, animals, plants and ecosystems is interdependent.
In their strategic plan in 2011, the Government acknowledged that biodiversity is
“key to the survival of life.”
They also acknowledged then that there was a “biodiversity crisis.” However, the Government’s own evaluation in 2019 found that, of eight targets, five had been missed, while three were either at risk of being missed or data were lacking. In 2021, the Treasury published the Dasgupta review, which warned that biodiversity was declining faster than at any time in human history, leading to “extreme risk” and uncertainty for our economies and well-being. The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report in 2022 makes grim reading. We have all observed in our daily lives the rarity of what used to be familiar species, whether it is butterflies, bees, insects on our windscreens, wildflowers or birds— the noble Lord mourned the loss of the slender-billed curlew.
Yet there is far less focus by the public, the media and politics on biodiversity than there is on climate change. COP 27 on climate change was extensively reported as front-page news; coverage of COP 15 on biodiversity, equally an existential issue, was cursory and on inside pages. World leaders, even our own Prime Minister, flocked to Sharm el-Sheikh; only two leaders, not including our Prime Minister, turned up at Montreal. There was not the political pressure for them to do so. This is strange. Rachel Carson, in a hugely important book, Silent Spring, explained to the world back in 1962 the cataclysmic dangers of indiscriminate pesticide use. The response was to ban the use of DDT, but little more. Why this global fecklessness and improvidence? It is due partly to the power of lobbying by agribusiness, partly to the allure of cheap food and partly, perhaps, to the psychological difficulty for societies to acknowledge that their practices may be self-destructive.
Anyway, I welcome of course the Government’s signing of the global biodiversity framework at Montreal. I ask, however, what this may mean in practice. After all, by 2020 Governments across the world had failed to meet any of the targets they set themselves at Aichi in 2010, and Britain’s was among the Governments that did not do well. According to Wildlife and Countryside Link, only about 3.2% of land in Britain is well protected and managed in terms of biodiversity, and Natural England has found that half of Britain’s sites of special scientific interest are not in a good state. However, while in the latest Autumn Statement the Chancellor spoke about climate change, he said nothing about biodiversity.
There is too much wriggle room in the vague language of the GBF. For example, Target 7 on pollution commits signatories to
“reducing the overall risk … by at least half … and working towards eliminating plastics pollution.”
That does not put countries under any useful discipline. Will the 30by30 Kunming-Montreal commitment in Target 2 be the biodiversity counterpart of the 1.5 degrees Paris commitment? Fourteen of the 23 targets do not state a 2030 deadline. Moreover, the agreement at Montreal is not legally binding. Do the Government accept that honouring it is, however, morally binding and a prudential necessity?
At Montreal, the Government pledged “up to” £29 million in funding to support developing countries to deliver the 30by30 target on biodiversity, plus £5 million for British Overseas Territories, which are important in terms of biodiversity, plus a contribution to funding via the World Bank. They cannot be accused of extravagance. Will that £29 million go into the special trust fund? Will it be new money, or will it come out of the overseas aid budget or other existing budgets?
Target 4, on the need for “urgent management actions”, requires Governments to produce their national biodiversity action plans by 2024. What consultation will the Government undertake? There is complicated work to do. They will need to designate extensive new areas for protection and restoration, and these will have to be carefully delineated to include essential habitats. The Environment Act targets that Ms Coffey belatedly announced just in time for COP 15 included plans to protect only another 4% of habitats by 2042. This falls far short, in physical extension and timescale, of matching what is required.
Are the Government prepared to set aside their shibboleths? Instead of obsessing about abolishing EU law, will they focus on producing good new law? Target 15 is about regulation of businesses. Will the Government accept that biodiversity is an area where tough regulation of business is essential? Target 15 also concerns the provision by businesses of information to consumers, and Target 16 is about ensuring that people
“are encouraged and enabled to make sustainable … choices”.
Will the Government make sure that we are informed and, frankly, nanny all of us to do the right things?
Will the Government ensure that their own scientists are seriously committed to the GBF’s objectives? I ask this in view of intense concerns that Defra scientists have not properly examined the toxic effects on marine species, as well as on fishermen’s livelihoods, of dredging in the Tees. The biodiversity disaster that recently occurred in the North Sea off the coast of Teesside raises worries about the performance of the regulators, the Environment Agency and the Marine Management Organisation. Will the Government ensure that, in their haste to create freeports around the country—two more have just been announced—construction work does not have devastating effects on wildlife?
We will want to see that the Government are sturdy in resisting lobbying by vested interests, particularly the agricultural and food industries, against the necessary measures to preserve and restore biodiversity. Target 18 is to:
“Identify by 2025, and eliminate, phase out or reform incentives, including subsidies harmful for biodiversity”,
substantially reducing them by 2030. As things are, Governments across the world are providing $1.8 trillion—2% of global GDP—in subsidies that exacerbate biodiversity loss and climate change. Mr Gove expressed a clear willingness to tackle this problem; it is less clear that Ms Coffey is seriously committed to doing so. I hope that the Minister, whose personal commitment is not in doubt, can reassure us. Will our Government repurpose their agricultural support spending to prioritise the protection of biodiversity in the fight against climate change? The opportunity is there to create many new jobs in the protection and enhancement of nature, and in making a positive experience of nature more accessible to people whose well-being and health can benefit from it.
Do the Government accept that the GBF is an opportunity for businesses of many kinds to remodel themselves to stop damaging ecosystems? Will the Government support this process by redefining reporting requirements for businesses, regulating constructively and offering positive incentives? Will they encourage UK businesses to lead in this revolution?
Target 14 calls for the integration of biodiversity policies across all sectors. In their 2011 plan, the Government admitted that nature was “consistently undervalued in decision-making”. What procedures will the Government follow to ensure that the whole of Whitehall and its relevant agencies are involved in delivering GBF commitments? Will we see that reflected in impact assessments from all departments? How will the Government report to Parliament on their methodology and process?
We look to the Government for leadership on this massively important issue of biodiversity. I hope, in the wake of COP 15, that they will no longer be found wanting.
Baroness Walmsley (LD)
My Lords, I think the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, for introducing this debate. I assure him that I and the 100,000 little worker bees I have at home in my hive will continue to do our bit. However, while it must be accepted that the UK has shown a considerable lead on biodiversity protection internationally, it must be acknowledged that we have lost half our biodiversity since the Industrial Revolution. We are now ranked in the bottom 10% of the world and are the worst of the G7 nations for biodiversity. From this challenging starting point we embark on our response to the agreement into which we entered at COP 15.
These Benches are delighted that the UN Biodiversity Conference COP 15 saw a significant agreement, with 23 action targets to halt and restore biodiversity loss. One of the key targets was target 3—to manage 30% of land and sea for nature by 2030. The best way we can show leadership in this respect is to achieve that target ourselves.
The UK Government adopted 30by30 two years ago to great headlines—that is leadership—but progress since then has been very limited. We were starting from a very low base. Only 3.22% of England’s land and 8% of our seas were effectively protected in 2022. This means that we need a tenfold increase in the protection of land habitats and a fourfold increase in maritime protection by 2030. However, between 2021 and 2022, there was an increase of only 0.22% in land protection and 4% in sea protection. At this rate, we will not get anywhere near our target by 2030. The big question for the Minister is how the Government plan to up their game.
The wording of the COP 15 agreement is very specific:
“to ensure and enable that by 2030 at least 30% of terrestrial, inland water, and of coastal and marine areas, especially areas of particular importance for biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, are effectively conserved and managed”.
The crucial words here are “enable” and “managed”. That means action now and ongoing sustainable action into the future.
The implementation mechanism is a crucial part of the agreement. It is meant to underpin the framework with a clear agreed structure for how countries will make national plans and monitor, report and review their progress. We were therefore disappointed that the Government failed to produce new environmental targets on time last year. However, when they were published there were glaring omissions, including missing targets to protect and improve water quality and important natural sites.
Water companies in England have dumped sewage 772,000 times over the past two years, lasting for almost 6 million hours. Last summer, beaches across the south coast were closed because of sewage dumping, impacting both domestic holidaymakers and our international tourism business. National parks such as the Lake District have not been spared such spills. River pollution is now so bad that no river in England and Wales is free from pollution, but what have the Government done? They have pushed back targets to clean up the majority of England’s rivers, lakes and coastal waters by more than 30 years to 2063, yet the water companies continue to pay their managers massive bonuses for this failure. What is really needed is massive investment in infrastructure to separate rainwater from sewage water, and to improve treatment facilities and water use efficiency measures.
To achieve the clean water objective, we on these Benches would halt sewage discharges by mandating major sewage infrastructure upgrades as well as reducing other river pollution by reforming the planning system to ensure that decisions are compatible with nature recovery and climate change mitigation, while designating more areas for wildlife. Along with many others, we believe that tackling the nature crisis must go hand in hand with tackling the climate emergency, but, while we support investing in new technologies, we understand that a healthy, biodiverse ecosystem offers us the surest means of storing carbon and reducing emissions. That means that, as well as investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency, there must be large-scale investment in restoration of peatlands, heathland, native woodlands, salt marshes, wetlands and coastal waters, helping to absorb carbon, protect against floods, improve water quality and protect habitats. Of course, it also means tree planting. The second report of the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology, on nature-based solutions to net zero, published on 27 January 2022—an inquiry on which I had the honour to serve—made numerous recommendations about this.
Our farmers can be key allies in enhancing nature and tackling the climate emergency, and target 10 of the COP 15 agreement covered agro-ecological approaches. As the Select Committee emphasised in the report, a shift to sustainable agriculture will be key to addressing climate change, ensuring a healthy and secure food system and a restored natural environment, as well as bringing economic benefits.
It is vital that the new farm payment system gives farmers confidence to predict the future profitability of their businesses while ensuring they can continue producing good homegrown food for our tables. I hear that, under the new regime, the Government now plan changes to the ELMS farm payment system, which has already been announced and under which farmers have been planning their businesses for at least two years. Some of them are now withdrawing their co-operation with sustainable farming initiatives because of uncertainty. How does this help? Can the Minister say how the Government’s new environmental land management schemes will encourage farmers to co-operate on achieving their objectives under COP 15?
The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 was game changing in the protection of our important habitats, protecting sites of special scientific interest, which became known as SSSIs. I well recall this important legislation and noted that one of the earliest sites to be designated was the sandhills where I played as a child on my summer holidays. While the network of SSSIs is crucial to the protection of biodiversity, it is only a representative sample of priority habitats, and many existing sites are not in a good state. Indeed, too many are regarded as being in a poor state and therefore not protecting biodiversity very well. It is therefore essential, if we are to achieve our 2030 target, that we both expand the area of priority habitats protected under the SSSI legislation and improve the management of existing sites. As with much other legislation, it is all very well creating a new law, but its success lies in both initial implementation and sustained monitoring and management to ensure that the original objective is achieved for posterity. It has been proposed recently that in order to achieve the COP 15 objective we need to create 100,000 hectares of new SSSIs by 2030. The Government have not accepted this target, which is a pity, because it would create green jobs as well as protecting nature and helping to mitigate climate change. However, only 3,000 hectares of new SSSIs are created every year. At this rate, we would not achieve the 100,000 hectares until 2056. Will the Minister say whether the Government plan to accept the proposed target and what measures will be put in place to achieve it?
I mentioned earlier that the word “managed” was crucial in the COP 15 agreement. What I had in mind was the state of management of many of our SSSIs. The Environment Act 2021 is an opportunity to set in legislation ambitious and indeed essential targets to bring the management of SSSIs up to scratch. Nature NGOs have proposed a target of 75% of sites being restored to a favourable condition by 2042, with five-yearly interim targets to track progress. If we create a lot of new SSSIs and then allow them to go to wrack and ruin, we are wasting both the time and the cost of their original creation. Will the Minister therefore accept this target for restoration and renewal of existing sites?
The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, currently going through Parliament, presents a major threat to other measures already in place to protect nature. I hope that the Minister can tell us that something will be done about that.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Randall, for securing this debate. We would have had a Statement to discuss otherwise, so it is important that we are addressing this issue. I agree with the noble Lord that the Minister is genuinely committed and works hard on environmental matters. It is good to see him here.
The noble Lord, Lord Randall, clearly laid out all the pressures on our wildlife and his reasons for bringing this debate forward, so I will not go through the different goals in any detail. He and my noble friend Lord Howarth went through them. However, I agree that not enough work has been done on the importance of the Dasgupta review. My noble friend Lord Howarth also made the important point that COP 15, compared with COP 26, was very much passed over. What do we do about this? How do we, as parliamentarians, work with the media, for example, and within ourselves, to raise awareness of the challenges that biodiversity is facing and how important it is to tackle this alongside climate change, which is discussed so often?
I was really pleased that my noble friend Lord Howarth mentioned the disaster in the Tees. The Government must do more work on this. I hope that the Minister has some positive things to say on how we will move forward and ensure that such a disaster does not happen again.
Turning to the GBF, which is what is mainly being discussed following COP 15, the reaction to it was mixed. Two particular issues came up. First, there were concerns that the final text was forced through. According to a Guardian article, the Chinese President appeared to force it through moments after the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Environment Minister said that her country would not support the final text. The DRC objected to it because the GBF did not create a new fund for biodiversity separate from the existing UN fund, the GEF. The Chinese President’s interventions were reported to have then prompted further objections from Uganda and Cameroon.
These were all dropped afterwards but it does show that there are serious tensions in a conference such as this. Carbon Brief also said that there were tensions between the developed and developing countries regarding developed countries wanting to increase ambitions while developing countries needed assurances about sufficient resources. The noble Lord, Lord Randall, talked about money and resources to deliver. The Minister has experience in this, so it would be very helpful to understand better those tensions and whether they are any kind of threat to delivering on decision-making as we go forward, and to understand how we manage those competing interests between developing and developed countries.
Secondly, concerns were raised about the impact of the GBF on indigenous people’s rights. Target 3, the 30 by 30 deal, states that 30% of terrestrial inland water, coastal and marine areas must be conserved and managed by 2030 through systems of protected areas and conservation measures that recognise indigenous and traditional territories where applicable. Some felt that this was simply not strong enough. Amnesty International, for example, said that it believed that this threatened the rights of indigenous peoples by failing properly to recognise their lands and territories as a separate category of conserved area. Amnesty International’s adviser on this said that it only partly acknowledged indigenous people’s outstanding contribution to conservation.
Certainly, when I was at COP 26, there was a very strong presence of indigenous peoples there. I was not at COP 15, but I would assume that the same was the case. I would be very interested to hear the Minister’s thoughts on this and on whether he believes that more needs to be done in this area. If so, how would we go about it? If not, how do we reassure indigenous peoples that we are taking their concerns seriously?
A final concern that I want to raise is that some people have talked about an apparent lack of accountability within the GBF. In particular, a senior associate at PricewaterhouseCoopers UK argued that the GBF lacked “quantifiable measures”. In other words, it is more difficult with the way that it is drafted at the moment to hold countries and Governments to account. Clearly, without that ability to hold countries to account, it is much more difficult to ensure that we deliver on these ambitions. Again, I would be interested to hear whether there is any further work to be done on how you hold countries to account and ensure that action is taken.
Despite having raised those concerns, I think it is very important to recognise the enormous amount of progress made at COP 15 and to praise the GBF for what it is attempting to do and what it wants to achieve. It is incredibly important that, despite the concerns that I have raised, we manage to reach that agreement.
The International Institute for Sustainable Development said that “significant efforts” were now required from all societies and Governments to achieve the framework’s goals and targets. That is true, but it is true only because there is such an ambition within it. It is really important to acknowledge that. I follow the Minister on Twitter and I am aware that he described the GBF as a “huge, historic moment”. He is absolutely right—it is just a matter of how we move forward with this.
The key question now from our perspective is: how do we ensure implementation? My noble friend mentioned what happened at Aichi. We need to ensure that we do not have another failed set of agreements. From a UK perspective, I know that, to try to do this, the Government have committed to publishing a plan setting out how they will implement the GBF. A Written Question was put down in the other place on biodiversity in December and, in response to that, the Minister for Natural Environment and Land Use, Trudy Harrison MP, said that the Government would publish the environmental improvement plan “in 2023”—this year. The Minister said that the plan would
“set out our ambitions and approach to nature recovery”
following COP 15.
The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, made some really important points about the loss of biodiversity in the UK and talked about many of the challenges and concerns that have been raised over and over in your Lordships’ House and the other place. She made an important point about how we have failed to properly protect and manage our existing protected sites. That does not send out a very good message for how we are going to take this forward. She particularly talked about SSSIs, which have pretty much failed in recent years. How does our ambition to deliver on COP 15 sit with the missed support and targets that we have had in this country in recent years? She said, very importantly, that we need to lead more strongly in this area. We need to make more progress than we have recently. I know that the Minister is very committed to this, so I would be interested to hear what plans the Government have to genuinely turn this around? We have been disappointed by the Government’s lack of ambition, including in their own environmental targets, which we have only recently seen published.
I want to end by asking the Minister this: when will we see the environmental improvement plan? Will it be truly ambitious? There is cross-party support—the Government have our strong support to deliver on these ambitions. Please, give us something to support strongly.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park) (Con)
First, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Randall, for tabling this debate and for his continuous championing of the environmental issue ever since I have known him. I also thank other noble Lords for their contributions.
As many noble Lords appreciate—this was said in all the contributions—the catastrophic decline in the abundance, connectivity and diversity of life on earth is not only a tragedy but an existential threat. Everything that we have and need is dependent on nature and on our ability to reconcile our lives, our economies and our politics with the natural world. The Covid pandemic showed us what the world can do when it senses danger.
The reality is that the consequences of runaway climate change, biodiversity collapse and environmental degradation are vastly more serious. That is why tackling climate change and biodiversity loss is rightly a top international priority for the Government. It is why we have been campaigning internationally for the world to agree a “Paris moment” for nature. It is why we celebrate the outcome of the COP 15 UN Biodiversity Conference and all the progress made there to protect and restore nature.
The noble Lord, Lord Randall, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, asked why the media have shown so little interest in this issue. My guess is as good as theirs. It is depressing. It is hard to imagine a more important international summit than the one we saw in Montreal just a few weeks ago, but the media seem to reduce all environmental considerations down to the one issue of carbon. Of course, climate change is massively important, but the environment is much more than carbon. It is everything, as I have already said and as noble Lords said in their speeches. It is somewhat depressing that the press do not focus on this issue; perhaps it is a yearning on their part to focus on only the bad news. The UN conference in Montreal was good news; it was not perfect, as I will come on to in a second, but perhaps there is no market for good news in the UK media nowadays.
I note that the Independent has a new editor. Notwithstanding his many qualities, he is a climate sceptic, which I find worrying. We seem to be seeing a disconnect between the media and what we know exists in people: desperate concern for the natural world and a yearning for more biodiversity and improved nature. It does not matter which constituency our colleagues in the other place represent—there is not a single constituency in this country where a majority do not want more nature. They want leadership from government.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, asked about the potential discrepancy we see between developed and developing countries; I will come on to that in a second. I have been there. I have engaged with countries—north, south, east, west, rich, poor, nature-rich, nature-depleted—for as long as I have been a Minister. This matter is somewhat overstated. The majority of the engagement I have had with countries has left me feeling more, not less, optimistic. Yes, one or two African countries were concerned about the manner in which the agreement was reached, but many more were wildly enthusiastic. That is not to say that they did not have concerns, but those concerns were addressed, which is why we ended up with this agreement.
Let me add this: shift your focus to the small island developing states in the Pacific or the Caribbean, for example. They, too, had concerns about finance and many of the issues that have been raised today, but there is no doubt that their voice was louder than anyone’s in calling for an ambitious agreement. They wanted ambition. These issues are existential for small island developing states. It is not really a north/south or developed/developing divide; there are divides but they are overplayed. Overwhelmingly, the world is moving rapidly into the right position on this issue.
In the early hours of 19 December, world leaders finally agreed an ambitious global framework for action to put nature on a road to recovery. It was that “Paris moment” for nature that we had been asking for. Of course, the job now is to honour it in full. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework gives us a clear mission to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by the end of this decade. It includes a highly ambitious package of 23 targets for 2030 and four goals for 2050. These include global commitments to end human-induced species extinctions and to protect 30% of our global land and 30% of our global ocean by 2030—by the way, if that is not a newspaper headline, what is? This is an extraordinary commitment; of course, we have to make it real, but it is huge. It will be delivered through a package of nature financing, including a new international fund and the expectation that $30 billion will flow into developing countries to protect biodiversity every year by 2030.
We also agreed to establish a new multilateral system to share the benefits from the use of stored genetic information from plants and animals. To ensure that countries deliver on their commitments, the international community, for the first time, agreed a package of scientific indicators to track and report progress.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, mentioned the critical issue of indigenous people in local communities, and she is absolutely right. This has been central to our approach in the UK. She knows from COP 26 that we created as many platforms as possible to amplify the voice of indigenous people. That was noted, recognised and appreciated by the groups representing indigenous people and by the people themselves. We have continued that work.
For example, the delivery and design of LEAF—the biggest public/private partnership to support forests around the world—writes indigenous people all the way through its text and criteria. That has been appreciated. We also help to co-ordinate the donor group to ensure that the money promised to indigenous groups is properly delivered. I talk very regularly to representatives of those organisations to ensure that they are happy with the direction of travel and that we are getting advice from people on the front line. Some 80% of the world’s forest biodiversity is in land controlled and lived in by indigenous people. That is not a coincidence; they are the most effective at protecting nature and they need to be supported. Even if it were not for the moral issues, and just for practical considerations, the cheapest way to save nature is to look after the people who are doing it.
I do not say this lightly or with hubris, but I place on the record my boundless thanks to our excellent negotiators, because COP 15 was a triumph for UK diplomacy and soft power as well, with outcomes at the upper end of what we expected. Our negotiators—I saw this myself—played a critical role in raising ambition and galvanising momentum. I do not believe that we would have secured anything like the ambition we did without their Herculean efforts.
Our team was central to securing consensus on the highly contentious issue of digital sequence information; our science leads developed the important framework of indicators for tracking progress; we led the High Ambition Coalition and the Global Ocean Alliance, which helped secure the 30by30 targets, with relentless engagement and campaigning across the board; we convened and I led the High Ambition ministerial group to try to improve cross-regional co-ordination and strengthen ambition; and we worked over many months, alongside Ecuador, Gabon and the Maldives, to develop the credible 10 Point Plan for Financing Biodiversity, which has now been endorsed by 40 countries from five continents and was an initiative that played a visible and measurable role in unblocking ambition in the run-up to the CBD.
I also announced the Joint Donor Statement on International Finance for Biodiversity and Nature, alongside my friend and colleague the European Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius and my French counterpart Minister Christophe Béchu. That included new commitments from donors for the protection, restoration and sustainable use of nature, and a significant increase in nature financing, which was crucial for securing a consensus on finance in the GBF.
The outcome of the CBD COP was the culmination of years of hard work. I believe we can be proud of the role played by the UK. In Glasgow, in 2021, we brought nature from the margins of global climate politics and put it at the heart of our response. We secured an unprecedented package of commitments on forests and land use. Forbes described it as
“a Paris moment for forests”.
WWF said:
“Nature truly arrived at COP26.”
The Tropical Forest Alliance wrote:
“we’ll look back and realise that this was the day when we finally turned the tide on deforestation”.
We took the momentum we created from COP 26, as well as the networks we needed to secure it, and used that to help drive ambition at COP 15. Our responsibility now is to turn those commitments into action.
That is why the UK has committed £3 billion of our international climate finance to climate solutions that protect, restore and help manage nature sustainably. I want to take up the point that the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, made on extravagance. He cited a few examples of things we are spending money on in this regard, but implied that they were the totality of our commitment. They are not. The commitment is £3 billion, within which a lot of other new commitments are being made.
I would just say this. Who knows what will happen at the next general election, but part of this commitment will be delivered after the election. If we have a new Government then, it is absolutely crucial that this remains the cross-party issue that it very clearly is. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness opposite for the manner in which we always debate these issues. It is crucial that we keep that promise, because our commitments led other countries to make their commitments. If we break our pledge, they break theirs, and we will let a lot of poorer countries down all around the world.
At COP 15 we announced some specifics, some of which the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, mentioned: £29 million to support developing countries with their land protection commitments, helping to deliver 30by30; around £6 million for projects to study and restore nature across our overseas territories; £20 million in grants to protect healthy marine ecosystems and reduce overfishing; £17 million to the World Bank’s PROBLUE programme to support marine ecosystems; £7.2 million to a new nature positive economy programme, which will support Governments, central banks, businesses and financial institutions in developing countries to integrate the value of nature into their decision-making; and a nature facility to help integrate and safeguard nature in our own official development assistance with other countries. That is key because, as noble Lords will remember, we persuaded the G7 last year to make a commitment—which again was not reported but was huge, in my view—to ensure that all our ODA and our aid is aligned with nature and eventually nature positive. We will need these tools to deliver that promise as well.
Having worked so hard to secure these targets, and put finance in place to help achieve them, it is key that the UK also leads by example, a point made by all speakers. The Environment Act gives us all the tools we need to do so, including putting in place a new set of ambitious domestic targets on nature, air, water, waste, et cetera. Later this month, in our first statutory environmental improvement plan, Defra will set out the measures we will adopt to achieve them.
As has been said by I think all speakers, a key tool to deliver nature recovery is radical reform of farming subsidies in England. The noble Lord, Lord Howarth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, made this point; I think my noble friend Lord Randall did as well. Over a seven-year transition period, we are phasing out area-based agricultural subsidies and shifting our support for farm subsidies to deliver environmental goals.
That matters hugely for us in the UK, but it has global implications too. We are told that the cost of turning the tide on nature destruction is around $500 billion a year. By coincidence, that is roughly what is spent by the top 50 food-producing countries on subsidising often highly destructive land use every year. If we can persuade them to shift their focus in the way we are here, a gigantic finance gap can be closed. That is yet another reason why this Government, and successive Governments, absolutely must not allow this programme of reform to be derailed. That is critical. No matter what pressure is felt from those entrenched vested interests, it must be resisted.
Finally, we know that the global challenge ahead is huge, and that no country will face it alone. That is why the UK is at the centre of efforts to bring coalitions together of donor countries, philanthropists, nature-rich countries and the private sector to try to help turn the tide for some of the world’s key natural systems on land and at sea. Over the course of this year I hope I will be able to talk more about some of those initiatives in the Congo basin, the Amazon rainforest, Indonesia, et cetera. This is an absolute priority for me and, I am thrilled to say, for the Foreign Office and Defra.
COP 15 has provided momentum and a framework within which nature can recover and thrive. The UK Government played a really important part in the international effort to build that framework. Now we are and will remain committed to playing our part in full in a decade of global action to secure the abundance, diversity and connectivity of life on earth, and, in doing so, building not only a better future but a viable, liveable future for generations to come.
UK Mortality Rates
(1 year, 3 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Lord Sikka
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the paper by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health Bearing the burden of austerity: how do changing mortality rates in the UK compare between men and women? published on 4 October 2022.
Lord Sikka (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to open this debate and to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Rainow, to the House and to the ministerial merry-go-round. I look forward to hearing his maiden speech.
All too often, Ministers come to Parliament to present cold numbers about taxes, spending cuts, wages, pensions or benefits freezes and make absolutely no mention of the human cost associated with their plans. Never-ending austerity continues to deprive people of good food, housing and healthcare. It creates hunger, disease, anxiety, insecurity and mental health problems, huge waiting lists for hospital treatment and, ultimately, premature death. I have been in this House for just over two years now but have never heard any Minister explain the ethics of austerity or the human consequences of their cold decisions.
The paper Bearing the burden of austerity: how do changing mortality rates in the UK compare between men and women? was written by four renowned international scholars and published in October 2022. It reported that between 2012 and 2019 there were nearly 335,000 excess deaths in England and Scotland. The death toll includes over 250,000 men and 84,000 women. The cause of death is austerity imposed by the Government. The research methodology behind the paper is well articulated in it, if anybody is interested in critiquing it. Between 2012 and 2019, the Government handed billions in tax cuts to corporations and the rich. They also handed hundreds of billions in quantitative easing to speculators and gamblers. This free money fuelled asset price inflation and produced a record number of billionaires. However, the same process was not used to alleviate poverty, and the Government condemned millions to poverty. By 2019, some 14.5 million people, 22% of the population, were living in poverty. This included 8.1 million working-age adults, 4.3 million children and 2.1 million pensioners.
Since 2010, the Government have incessantly attacked low and middle-income families. The real wages of workers have been supressed and even today, the average real wage is lower than in 2007. Public sector workers have been especially targeted and have received below inflation pay rises. This hits women hard because more than half of the public sector workforce is female. Workers’ share of GDP in the form of wages and salaries is barely 50%, compared to 65.1% in 1976. No other industrialised nation has experienced this rate of decline in the wages of its workers. Low wages result in low savings, so people do not have an adequate buffer or resilience for a rainy day. The less well-off have a shorter life expectancy. The cause is not some invisible hand of fate but the visible hand of a Government who have impoverished people and condemned them to early death.
Lone parents, the disabled, carers, the unemployed and those experiencing hard times are particularly targeted by the Government. Women make up the majority of social security recipients and have been more affected by social security cuts and benefit freezes, which basically punish the poor for being poor.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has stated:
“From 2013-2019, ministers chose to reduce benefits in real terms by freezing their value or increasing them by a lower rate than inflation”.
If that was not bad enough, the Government also increased taxes on the less well-off. In 2010, the Government increased the standard rate of VAT from 17.5% to 20%. Inevitably, a greater proportion of less well-off people’s income goes in taxes. An analysis published by the TaxPayers’ Alliance, which is much closer to the Government’s ideology and cannot be accused of being a leftie organisation, stated that families in the lowest income categories paid 47.6% of their gross income in direct and indirect tax in 2017-18, compared to 33.5% paid by the richest 10%. Regressive tax policies continue.
The underfunding of public services has condemned perhaps millions, but certainly thousands, to hardship and death. In 2010, NHS England had a hospital waiting list of 2.5 million. By 2019 that had ballooned to nearly 4.5 million, due to underfunding, and now stands at 7.2 million. In 2016, the outcome of Exercise Cygnus informed the Government that the NHS would not be able to cope with a flu pandemic, but they still reduced the stock of PPE and the number of beds. Too many people have paid for that decision with their lives.
The Government’s taxation, wages, social security, public spending and other policies have inflicted death on innocent people. The paper which is the subject of this debate particularly draws attention to the gendered nature of the austerity, and notes that among poorer populations, death rates have worsened to a greater extent among females than males. Yet I have never seen a Conservative Budget that explains the gender impact of the Government’s policies. The last Budget, in November, mentioned women just once. There was really nothing there for women at all. I look forward to the Minister’s response and hope that he will refrain from citing the usual gaggle of this or that support being given to people, because none of that has prevented the death toll to which I referred.
We have just celebrated Christmas and its message that “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”, yet it hard to see any of that spirit in the Government’s policies when they focus only on the richer neighbours. Despite all the evidence, the deadly austerity policies continue. Can the Minister explain what the squeeze on low and middle-income families has achieved? People can clearly see that it has increased neither prosperity nor the happiness of the people. Millions rely upon food banks—tacit confirmation that government policies have failed. Schoolchildren are going hungry, while senior citizens are forced to make choices between heating and eating. Social squalor is increasing. Austerity has impeded economic development and deepened inequalities. It has increased insecurity and anxiety, and the need for health and social care. The underfunding of essential services has denied life to many.
During the Second World War, bombings by the Luftwaffe caused about 70,000 civilian deaths. Yet this Government have condemned 335,000 people to death, all in the name of some defunct economic ideology. Have any other UK Government inflicted this level of harm on their own people? If so, perhaps the Minister will name them. Every deceased person was someone’s relative or friend. Millions will live with that pain, knowing that their deaths were avoidable. What satisfaction do the Government get from their austerity policies? I would be grateful if the Minister, who speaks here for the Government, could commit to three specific pledges: first, to appoint an independent inquiry into the deaths caused by the Government’s policies; secondly, to redistribute income and wealth to reverse grotesque levels of inequality; thirdly, to ensure that the impact assessment of all Bills is accompanied by an assessment of the human consequences of the policies they contain.
The Lord Bishop of London
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, for securing this important debate. I also look forward to hearing from the noble Lord, Lord Evans, in his maiden speech.
The paper at the heart of this debate provides a useful focus, because it highlights one of the worst health outcomes that we have seen in the past 10 years: that of widening inequalities. It is also helpful because, by focusing on the impact of austerity, we begin to see that public health is impacted by many factors besides healthcare access—factors called the social determinants of health. Those include housing, our jobs, our environment, our education and much more. They can be summed up as the opportunities that we have to lead healthy lives. The Heath Foundation noted that 50% of people in the most deprived areas report poor health by the age of 55 to 59, which is more than two decades earlier than in the least deprived areas. It is not just about life expectancy; it is also about healthy life expectancy.
The debate is poignant also because it comes at a time of great strain on the NHS and on social care, and at a time when those other determinants of health are challenging for many of us. We are also at a moment when I hope we are beginning to realise the importance of prevention of ill health, which is essential for the sustainability of our healthcare system.
Over the years, many organisations have agreed on the need for a strategy for health and health equality, but the long-promised and long-awaited health disparities White Paper is nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, those subject to health inequalities are more likely to be affected by healthcare pressures and to struggle in the coming economic climate. It is in these conditions that inequalities in health can only worsen.
In the absence of a strategy to tackle health inequalities, I propose that recognising and supporting the work of faith groups could be key to a real improvement in both prevention and access to healthcare. Faith groups hold the deep trust of the people they serve, with unrivalled knowledge of their communities. I recently had the opportunity to convene the Health Inequalities Action Group, which brought together faith leaders, healthcare professionals and civil society leaders to explore the intersection of faith, health inequality and health in London. London currently has the biggest gap in life expectancy between its local authorities of any region in England.
Through two townhall sessions, we heard some extraordinary stories of faith groups which had stepped up in the pandemic to advocate for public health and deliver healthcare solutions in, for and with their communities. For example, we learned from a senior leader in the Jewish community in north London who had designed a vaccination service that hosted separate sessions for men and women with the Jewish Hatzola ambulance service. They also made sure that rabbis were vaccinated, because they understood the influence they carried in their communities. Another example was the setting up of a mortuary by a mosque in east London, because many were dying in the pandemic and “there was a lack of cultural knowledge about how a burial for the Muslim community happens, so we did it ourselves”.
Faith groups know well the people who often fall into the “hard to reach” category in public health. They are already serving them, not just with health services but for other needs. It is hard to overstate the value of this relational capital to advocate for good public health. There is a track record of successful partnerships between faith groups, local authorities and healthcare providers. For example, the South London Listens campaign saw community and faith leaders come together with citizens to work with three NHS trusts in south London to improve mental health services there post pandemic. The Faith Covenant, established by the APPG on Faith and Society and FaithAction, also does good work on collaboration and tackling mistrust between faith groups and local authorities.
However, there is still a variation of experience and a lack of literacy among both local authorities and healthcare professionals in how they relate to faith groups and vice versa. There is a lack of systematic recognition of the importance of faith to those who have one, which means that people do not feel that they have access to health services. On top of that, the extent of health inequalities can be misunderstood. There is also a lack of collection of ethno-religious data. As the Marmot Review 10 Years On makes clear, this is needed in the academic analysis of inequalities because, without such information, understanding ethnic inequalities is difficult.
We have had the opportunity to work to reduce health inequalities through both access to healthcare and the social determinants of health for prevention. Faith groups have something to offer here and could be transformational for health. What efforts are the Department of Health and Social Care making to engage with faith groups genuinely to ensure that health provision is being made more accessible? What effort is being made to ensure that effective data is collected so that we might have a clearer picture of local health inequalities?
Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble and, might I add, numerate friend Lord Sikka for obtaining this debate. It is a topic of much discussion and no little misunderstanding. I look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Evans. I cannot help but remember my maiden speech, which I had to give in Grand Committee; it does not have exactly the same grandeur as making your maiden speech in the Chamber, so the noble Lord has my sympathy, but it is the content that counts.
I want to talk more about mortality in general. Figures and comparisons relating to mortality always need to be considered with care. The report before us is important and topical; my noble friend Lord Sikka set out the issues clearly. I just want, in the few minutes available, to put them into a wider historical context and then say something about what we know from the latest mortality figures.
Throughout the 20th century, the United Kingdom saw significant increases in life expectancy, influenced not just by medical advances but, more significantly, by better incomes and living conditions, as well as changing habits—particularly the reduction in smoking. Yet, while mortality rates continued to improve during the first decade of this century, the improvements have stalled since 2011. For certain groups, they have gone into reverse. The work before us today, along with other reports, unequivocally points the finger for this regrettable turn at the impact of austerity since 2010—no little coincidence.
Of particular concern is the fact that inequalities in life expectancy between the richest and the poorest have widened since 2011. While people in wealthier areas of the UK continue to live longer, for those living in the most deprived areas, life expectancy is stalling or even reversing. What this tells us is that the adverse trends affecting the less advantaged groups in our society are not inevitable. It is a question of social policies.
To turn to the current situation, why are there reports in the press about very high excess deaths? It is because most of these reports compare historical data, but this underestimates deaths and demographic evolution and, as a result, overestimates excess deaths. What we need to do is to use the gold standard for this type of analysis, which is to use age-standardised mortality rates, removing the effect of the changing age structure. Clearly, as the population ages, we should expect more deaths.
However, if you dive into the figures, you find something interesting and important: there is little excess mortality explained by the demographics and Covid among the population over 65, but you find excess deaths in younger age groups, particularly those under 44. Two possible reasons for this can be dismissed; the pattern of excess deaths simply cannot be explained to any significant extent by the rollout of vaccines or the deferral of medical treatment due to the Covid epidemic that would otherwise have taken place. Absent these explanations, everything points to the increasing pressures on the NHS—particularly since last April—being the trigger.
I must refer here to the work of the Stuart McDonald, a partner at the consulting actuary firm LCP and star of this week’s BBC Radio 4 programme “More or Less”. I should mention in passing that I was once employed by LCP as a trainee many years ago. Stuart and his team have concluded in terms that:
“Our analysis suggests that a significant number of patients could be dying because of long delays accessing emergency care. We estimate this number at over 400 deaths each week between September and November, though it might be higher.”
He tweeted earlier today that:
“Data for December has just been published and paints an even worse picture. 2,200 additional deaths associated with A&E delays in December alone. That is 500 per week.”
Putting these two things together, the level of excess that we see is, to a significant extent, due to the long-term increases in waiting for medical treatment, exacerbated more recently by delays in accessing emergency care. This is the sharp end of austerity. The sooner it comes to an end, the better for the health and longevity of our whole population.
Lord Patel (CB)
My lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, for securing this debate and I welcome the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Rainow, to the House and his ministerial role. I wish him well and look forward to his maiden speech. It is a tough ask to give a maiden speech and answer the questions raised, but I have no doubt that he will do it well. I am aware that, not only as an experienced parliamentarian but with his background, he is well aware of the human cost of social deprivation and the resulting health inequalities and mortality.
The subject of today’s debate is austerity and its subsequent effect on health inequalities, including mortality. I will focus more on the latter—the health inequalities—but I accept the conclusions of the observational study reported on the subject in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
It is 60 years since the Black report highlighted the association of deprivation and ill health. The Marmot reviews of 2010 and 2020, already mentioned by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, spelled out in detail the health inequalities related to deprivation. Apart from the years from 1999 to 2009, no Government have tried to put in place policies to reduce health inequalities.
As already mentioned, deprived populations have lower life expectancies, spend many more years in ill-health, fewer years in good health, have a high incidence of long-term health conditions including cancers, and poor outlooks, not to mention an increased number of stillbirths and infant deaths. Health inequality means that the most deprived spend a significant part of their lives in misery. Government policies and major health events may exacerbate the situation, as I have no doubt that the current cost of living and NHS crisis will, but the root cause of health inequalities is social deprivation.
As inequalities are well characterised, the focus now should be on what interventions are effective and how they can be used. The perceived impression is that there is a lack of value placed on taking a long-term, whole-system approach to create a connected and cost-cutting policy and learning from previous approaches to reduce health inequalities. There is also an impression that the NHS is not given sufficient focus to reduce health inequalities. The message is that there is a lack of attention given to social determinants of inequality in current policy-making. The important question today should be: what plans and policies will the Government put in place to reduce health inequalities and therefore increase mortality in the deprived population?
I hope that the Minister can inform the House of the Government’s plans. The absence of NHS policies in the levelling up Bill is a missed opportunity to address the serious issue of health inequalities. We are told that there will be a disparity Bill, but when will that be? Perhaps the Minister can say. The increasing health inequalities will continue to drag the NHS down. The resulting ill-health will mean low productivity and less economic growth. The Government have suggested that a Cabinet-level forum will be established, and the Prime Minister has promised to tackle this issue. Therefore, I hope that we will soon have government policies to do so, although I fear maybe not.
There is an urgent need to develop cost-cutting policies that will affect positive change and take a long-term view, reflecting that success is predicated on leadership by government and action from a range of organisations, outside help and care systems. Will we see such a plan from the Government before next summer?
Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, for tabling this debate and bringing this important paper to our attention. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s maiden speech. I made mine some time ago, but I have only recently taken up a Front-Bench position. It is quite a transition to move from Back Benches to Front Benches in terms of workload and the need to learn quickly.
I congratulate the researchers on looking into this question and on the clarity with which they have presented their findings. As content licensing is a long-standing interest of mine, I was pleased to find that this is an open-access publication, licensed under a Creative Commons licence. This maximises the opportunity for people to share and build on the work done by the team, as long as they provide the correct attribution.
The paper helps to fill out a picture which has been emerging through a number of different research projects into the harmful effects of severe cuts in government funding on life and good health expectancy, particularly the cuts which took place in the early part of the 2010s. The linkage between austerity policies and mortality rates seems clear, as described very effectively by the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, and is something that we must have top-of-mind when considering policies for the new recession which unfortunately appears to be headed our way. The noble Lord’s call for Bills to be accompanied by an assessment of the human impact was well made.
While the paper does not reach definitive conclusions on its original hypothesis that women’s mortality would have been affected more than men’s, it adds to the evidence base for austerity affecting different communities and highlights the need for continued research in the area. I hope that the Government and the Minister encourage this, as there is a tendency for Governments not to look at things that appear to criticise previous government policy, but, in this case, the public interest strongly lies in us continuing to understand what happened during that period of austerity in order to inform future policy.
While the paper looked at lifespan, with its focus on mortality rates, I want to mention the importance of looking at health span, defined as the period of life we spend in good health, free from chronic conditions and the disabilities of ageing. This builds on the comments made by both the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London and the noble Lord, Lord Patel.
Health span is also likely to be affected by spending squeezes, especially if there are reductions in preventive health measures and delays in the treatments necessary to restore someone’s health. We can look at examples such as a delay in getting surgery to replace a hip or knee. That may not itself change your lifespan, but it certainly means more time spent living a life restricted by the health condition. This is the real cost of the increased waiting times we are seeing for elective surgery at present, which many people are sadly paying today: their health span has been reduced because they are unable to access surgery or other treatments that would enable them to live a fully healthy life again.
Similarly, a failure to provide timely advice and support to somebody who is at risk of developing type 2 diabetes may lead to them facing health problems that could have been avoided, or at least mitigated, with the provision of the right public health services. Again, any impact on their lifespan may be years down the line, but their health span is more quickly and immediately shortened. I hope the Minister’s response covers points related to health inequalities, as well as those related to mortality.
Reflecting on some of the points made by other noble Lords, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London rightly drew our attention to the multifactorial nature of the determinants of health. We certainly need to look at issues such as housing, as well as more obvious issues related to health treatment. The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, helped us to understand how we should look at the mortality figures. In the debate yesterday, I learned a lot about how actuaries think, and the noble Lord is providing an incredible resource for all of us in understanding how to look at the data.
I close by again looking forward to hearing the Minister’s response. I congratulate him on his arrival to the Front Bench, and I hope he will be equally supportive of encouraging and—dare I say it?—funding more research into the kinds of projects and questions looked at in this paper. It is essential from the public interest point of view that we do not shy away from difficult questions about the effect of policies on people out there, in the real world, that we and this Parliament have decided on.
Baroness Wheeler (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for securing this debate and for his comprehensive introduction on the context and key findings of the study. I also congratulate the authors on an authoritative piece of work underlining, in particular, the disproportionate affect that austerity has had on women, with a greater financial impact and the loss of key support across vital health, social welfare, housing and education services. I also welcome the Minister and look forward to his maiden speech and response to the debate, and to working with him in the future.
As noble Lords have said, this debate is timely, especially in view of the shocking figures from the ONS, which were discussed in your Lordships’ House earlier this week and were the subject of a brutal analysis on the front page of yesterday’s Times. Some 50,000 more people than normal died over the past 12 months and there were 1,600 more deaths during Christmas week, as the long wait for ambulances, cold weather and surging flu infections took their toll. Excluding the two pandemic years, 2022 was one of the worst years on record, despite the Government continuing to cite the pandemic as the main source and cause of the dire problems we face. I understand that, today, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities is publishing its excess death report on the causes that have contributed to these deaths. Can the Minister update the Committee on this and provide further insight to help us understand the extent of the crisis and the actions the Government need to take?
The study ranges across key community care and health inequalities, which have been ably covered by other speakers in this short debate. I look forward to the Minister’s response to the thoughtful and expert questions that have been raised. The study shows the adverse changes in mortality rates in the UK from the early 2010s onwards, with increasing death rates among more deprived areas, which the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London and other noble Lords spoke very forcefully about, particularly in relation to the work of the Black and Marmot reviews.
The study adds to the growing evidence of the deeply worrying changes to mortality trends in the UK, with a clarion call from the study’s authors to the Government to reverse harmful austerity policies and to instead implement measures that protect the most vulnerable in society. I look forward to the Minister’s response on this.
I have spoken many times on the adverse effect of austerity measures on women, as have noble Lords from across the House. These are clearly set out in the study: women are recipients of huge cuts in social security as lone parents, the carers of children, the elderly, people with disabilities and single pensioners without joint incomes. The axing of and cuts to vital public services in which women are employed, or which support families and caring activities, compound the impact on women and their physical and mental health.
I commend the excellent work of the Women’s Budget Group, which reinforces the extent to which public services have been weakened by 10 years of austerity going into the global pandemic in 2020. Its impact was reinforced by the statistics from my noble friend Lord Sikka and others. Government spending on public services as a share of GDP decreased from 47% to 40% in 2019, and central government funding for councils in England was cut by over 49% between 2010 and 2017-18. The group’s work with the Runnymede Trust showed just how austerity hit particular groups of women hard, especially black and ethnic minority women.
The JECH study refers to the intersectionality of gender, poverty and ethnicity in assessing and quantifying the impact of the cuts. For example, comparisons among the poorest of the population showed that white women lost 11% of their income compared with 8% of poor men, but for black and ethnic groups this was 14% and 9% respectively. Can the Minister tell the Committee what cross-government work is being undertaken to ensure joined-up work to address this?
I will focus especially on those with learning difficulties. The learning disabilities mortality review sets out the stark reality of the impact of increasing mortality rates on this key group. Currently, men with a learning disability die on average 22 years younger, and women 26 years younger, than their peers among the general population. Only four in 10 people with a learning disability live to see their 65th birthday, and in 2021 a shocking 49% of reported deaths were avoidable. Some 1,200 people die avoidably every year when timely access to good-quality healthcare could have saved them. These inequalities are national and systemwide, with huge regional differences in how services meet their needs. For example, those living in the north-west and the Midlands are at greater risk of avoidable deaths. Can the Minister explain what action the Government are taking to address the specific barriers to receiving good-quality healthcare for people with learning disabilities, regionally and nationally?
Finally, the charity Mencap has stressed the vital role that the GP learning disability register plays in raising awareness, but less than one-third of the estimated 1.2 million people in England with learning difficulties are recorded on it. Crucially, the register helps doctors and healthcare staff to understand the support needs of this key group. Mencap has called for a national campaign to increase the numbers on the register. It has also produced specific guidance to explain its value, aimed at black, Asian and minority ethnic communities. What steps are the Government taking to support the increased use of the GP register and ensure that GP surgeries actively encourage sign-up?
This has been an excellent and very thorough debate. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Lord Evans of Rainow (Con) (Maiden Speech)
My Lords, it is a great honour to be here to make the final contribution to this debate. I thank all your Lordships for your kind words of welcome. As a newly appointed Lords Whip, it falls to me to respond on behalf of His Majesty’s Government to this interesting debate. As your Lordships have all noted, this happens also to be my maiden speech.
If I may, I will now turn to the customary part of a maiden speech. I must thank noble Lords for the great welcome they have given me to this place. I also thank Black Rod, the Clerk of the Parliaments, the doorkeepers and police, and particularly my supporters: my noble friends Lord Davies of Gower and Lady Williams of Trafford. We are all very lucky to have such outstanding public services in this place. Needless to say, I am most grateful to my wife Cheryl and my children, George, Tom and Sophie, who have been very supportive in my political and business career. Unfortunately, that has meant I have not always been around in Rainow as often as I would have liked. For things such as homework, sea cadets, rugby, horse-riding and ballet, I have not always been there to support them. But Rainow is of course an idyllic, ancient and rural community; it is a wonderful place to live and work, and to bring up a family.
On a personal note, I am the product of a working-class family, born in a post-war south Manchester council estate. I attended a local comprehensive school, which I left with few qualifications to stack shelves in a local supermarket. However, I developed a passion for politics and an aspiration for business development. I studied at night school for 10 years to get qualified during that period. Working in the technology, aviation and hospitality sectors in senior business development roles, I was able to earn a good living and provide for my family. I hope and believe that my business background will add value to this place. Change is a constant and it is something we need to get right if Great Britain is to prosper in an increasingly competitive and uncertain world.
Turning now to the debate, I am pleased to respond to noble Lords who have contributed on this important issue and thank the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, for securing this debate. I pay tribute to the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health for its report, which explores whether there is a link between the Government’s action to reduce national debt and women’s stalling mortality rates. It concludes that the causal effect “remains unclear” but it raises important policy issues regarding gender differences in work and health, as well as health disparities more broadly.
As set out by the Chancellor in his Autumn Statement and reiterated in the Prime Minister’s address, the Government are committed to reducing the national debt. This is a top priority but noble Lords will agree that a better future is one where our economy grows. It leads to better opportunities for all, particularly in work. We are improving job opportunities for women and ensuring that when women are in work, they are paid equally to men. We achieve this through a range of initiatives including our Great Britain-wide network of jobcentres, the job entry targeted support and restart scheme and DWP’s new progression offer for those already in work. We are committed to working with businesses to accelerate progress and make workplaces fairer. This is enabled by our ground-breaking pay transparency pilot, a number of new returners programmes and our task force on women-led high-growth enterprises.
Turning specifically to women’s health, we know that work and health are inextricably linked. Improving health improves wealth, with long-term ill health a leading cause of economic inactivity. Therefore, as well as addressing women’s access to work, we must ensure women have equal access to healthcare that addresses their specific needs. Although women in the UK on average live longer than men, women spend a significantly greater proportion of their lives in ill health and disability when compared with men. Greater focus must be placed on women-specific health issues such as miscarriage or menopause, and much progress must be made to ensure that women are better represented in vital clinical trials.
The Government are absolutely committed to improving women’s health outcomes. Our recent call for evidence received over 100,000 responses, which informed the first ever government-led Women’s Health Strategy for England. This approach marked a reset in the way the Government are looking at women’s health. The strategy set out how we can improve the way the health and care system listens to women’s voices and boost health outcomes for women and girls.
The final point from the report I want to address is the assessment of the disparities in mortality trends. There are stark disparities in how long people live and how long they live in good health across England. The Government remain committed to the ambition set out in the levelling-up White Paper to improve healthy life expectancy by five years by 2035. As a significant proportion of ill health is preventable, as the noble Lord mentioned, we are focusing on the major conditions which contribute to early mortality and reduce years of good health, as well as on factors such as smoking, poor diet, and alcohol, which disproportionately impact some communities. For instance, we have funded 220,000 blood pressure monitors for people diagnosed with uncontrolled high blood pressure, to empower people to monitor their own health.
We are also modernising NHS health checks, which prevent heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and some cases of dementia and kidney disease, including developing a digital version to increase participation. The Government recognise how important it is to protect and promote the job opportunities and health of the British people, particularly the most vulnerable. The measures I have outlined today will help do that and I look forward to working with noble Lords across this House to share progress and improve the outcomes for women and girls.
I will attempt to answer as many questions as I can in the time available, but if I am unable to do so, please forgive me: I will write after this meeting. The noble Lord, Lord Sikka, asked me to explain why the Government have chosen to squeeze lower and middle-income families. We have announced further support for next year, designed to target the most vulnerable households. This cost of living support is worth £26 billion in 2023-24, in addition to the benefits uprating worth £11 billion to those of working age and the households of disabled people. I might also add that the Government increased the personal allowance to take some of the lowest paid out of tax altogether, while at the same time removing the personal allowance for the highest paid.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London asked about health equality in the White Paper. The Government are committed to supporting individuals to live healthier lives and at the heart of this is improving access to and levelling up healthcare across the country. No decisions have been taken in relation to the White Paper, but we will publish further information on addressing health disparities in due course. I congratulate the right reverend Prelate on the faith work that she has done. I too do that in my own parish of Rainow, walking from church to church, but there are a lot of hills and valleys in the way and you have to be committed to do it.
The noble Lord, Lord Patel, asked what plans and policies the Government will put in place to reduce inequalities. The Department of Health and Social Care is investing £170 million in essential services in the 1,001 days of the Best Start for Life period. We have funded 220,000 blood pressure monitors; we are also modernising NHS checks to drive prevention of heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes.
The noble Baroness, Lady Wheeler, and the noble Lord, Lord Davies, asked whether the Government will comment on excess deaths. A detailed assessment is not yet available but it is likely that a combination of factors has contributed to the ONS measure of excess mortality, including high flu prevalence at the moment, ongoing challenges post pandemic, Covid-19 and health conditions such as heart disease and diabetes. As I say, I will write further to noble Lords after the meeting.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)
My Lords, the disadvantage of the Minister making his maiden speech at the end of the debate is that there is nobody to welcome him at the end of it, so I shall just exceed my brief and congratulate him on an excellent maiden speech. I welcome him most warmly to the House.
Oak National Academy
(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Lord Vaizey of Didcot
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of their funding for Oak National Academy on the publishing and education technology sectors in the United Kingdom.
Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to have an opportunity to discuss this important subject. I want to take this opportunity to put on record my praise for the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Evans, which I was lucky enough to hear as I came in to prepare for this debate. May I also put on record my nervousness at appearing between my noble friend Lady Barran, one of our most formidable Ministers, and my noble friend Lady Evans, our former Leader of the House? I know this at least: both of them are going to give me both barrels. I have no idea what the other noble Lords and noble Baronesses in the Room are going to say on this issue.
I must quickly declare my interests. I advise a number of education technology companies, including Digital Futures and Perlego; they are not affected by Oak National Academy. I chair the UK-ASEAN Business Council, which includes Pearson as a member. I am a governor of St Paul’s School. I also advise an investment fund that invests in an education technology company that is nervous about Oak.
About 15 years ago, when I was a Member of Parliament in Oxfordshire, which has a significant number of education publishing companies, the BBC set up a free education service for schools called BBC Jam. It was a noble endeavour. We will talk about the pandemic in a moment—and we saw what a great and important role the BBC played during that time in terms of supporting our children. However, a lot of my constituents who worked for those education publishers came to me to raise their concerns, which I, as their MP at the time, felt were perfectly legitimate. They were in private companies that had to make a profit and compete in the marketplace but, frankly, when it comes to providing curriculum resources for schools, it is very hard indeed to compete against what is free. They felt that the BBC was overreaching itself, despite its noble aim in doing this, and had not taken account of the impact that its resources would have on the thriving private sector market that existed in the UK. I campaigned against it. It is not popular to campaign against motherhood and apple pie, but we were successful because, luckily, unlike the Government, the BBC had a regulator at the time, the BBC Trust, which looked at this matter and was under an obligation to look at the market impact of BBC initiatives. It decided that BBC Jam was a step too far, and withdrew the service.
Now, we switch to today and the Oak National Academy, which I would assert is a similar intervention in what is a very important marketplace. Again, Oak was set up with the absolute best of intentions. It was there to support our children during the pandemic, when they had to learn at home. It was a platform for education technology companies and education publishers. Indeed, I am given to understand that education technology companies gave something like £24 million-worth of resources, as they quantify it, to the Oak platform for free, while education publishers donated something like £8.5 million-worth of free content to Oak.
At the time it was, I believe, regarded as a temporary and appropriate intervention at a time when almost all pupils were having to take lessons and be taught online to ensure that a core curriculum of resources was available online. Obviously, it would be quite difficult for technology resources that a school had procured and that existed on its own systems then to be translated to individual pupils while they were working at home. However, unfortunately, it has proved not to be a temporary measure. Last year, the Oak National Academy became an arm’s-length body. It has £43 million of funding over three years, it is apparently intending to recruit, or has already recruited, something like 83 staff over the next three years, and its mission is to distribute a full set of curriculum resources. The announcement was made in March 2022, and the business case was published only in November after, in fact, Oak had already been established as an arm’s-length body.
Oak has one achievement to its name: it has already united the British Educational Suppliers Association, the Publishers Association, the Society of Authors—not known for its radical nature—and the teaching unions to oppose it and raise their concerns. My concern is that, in publishing, we have one of the most successful creative industries in the world and, in our education technology sector, again, one of the most successful sectors in the world. The education publishing sector alone in this country is worth some £552 million, about £354 million of which is exports. Some 40% of European investment in education technology companies goes to companies based in the UK. It is the fourth-largest sector in the world. In terms of joined-up government, the Government have announced their intention to achieve a target of £35 billion in education exports by 2030. Obviously, a lot of that includes our highly successful universities attracting foreign students to come and study here, but there is no doubt that an education technology sector that has a thriving home market has the opportunity to expand around the world.
The creation of Oak has already had an impact. We find ourselves in the insidious position whereby individual companies that come and talk to me will not go public. That is for two reasons: first, they do not want, as it were, to bite the hand that could potentially feed them—they do not want to make an enemy of the Department for Education. Secondly, they rely on their investors to have confidence, so they will not go public and say, “I’m sorry. Our domestic market has been upended”, but they tell me that their investors are already saying to them, “We’re not going to put more money into you if you’re going to concentrate on the UK market. We want you to look at markets elsewhere because we don’t think the UK market is going to be viable in the long term.”
Another point, and this is not just to promote the private sector overall, is about understanding what teachers actually want—and I am sure that other noble Peers will have a much greater understanding of that. Lots of opinion polls and surveys are going around about whether Oak is helping or not helping teachers, but my fundamental concern is that teachers want access to the bespoke resources that suit them as individuals or as schools, and they want a wide choice in curriculum materials but, in effect and slightly insidiously—because Oak is not making it clear that it is effectively a creature of the Department for Education —they are getting a nationalised, one-size-fits-all technology resource on which they have to draw. The more this goes on, the less competition there will be in the sector, the less innovation there will be, and the less autonomy teachers will have in choosing the resources they feel are appropriate for them and their pupils. It is a kick in the teeth to the many entrepreneurs who have a genuine passion for the kind of companies they are creating to provide resources for our schools, and it is a threat to the employment of the many hundreds of thousands of people who work across the education publishing and technology sector.
The Government and my noble friend should perhaps address three or four important questions at the conclusion of this debate, but no doubt she will hear many other opinions. First, there appears to have been no real consultation about why the Oak National Academy would be turned into an arm’s-length body or on this incredibly important intervention in the education market without taking account of the wide variety of opinion on whether it was the right thing to do. There has been an impact assessment—but my second question is whether the Government are really going to keep a watching brief on what will happen to the sector, because they rejected the submissions they received about the potential impact on the market. There are also questions about the data protection policies of the Oak National Academy and its ability to share data with third parties. Is it going to be clear about how it uses the data that it gleans from teachers and schools and who it shares it with?
My final question is: what is the Government’s fundamental thinking behind creating the Oak National Academy? What do they want it to look like in three, five or 10 years’ time? Will it be, as people suspect, the one-size-fits-all resource for education technology? Will schools be discouraged from going out to other providers to find the resources that they need and want? Instead of being defensive about Oak, or trying to obfuscate the purpose of establishing it, the Government should be clear.
One of the greatest difficulties we have had, of course, is that we have had dozens of Education Ministers coming and going over the last couple of years—I think we had one who served for 24 hours. I first got engaged with this when Nadhim Zahawi was the Education Secretary; then it was somebody else and it is now Gillian Keegan. We need a Minister who is the department for slightly more than 10 minutes to take an interest and have a long-term view on this intervention.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My Lords, I start by declaring my interests as a director of CENTURY Tech and of Suklaa. I also thank and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, for securing this debate and opening it in the way he did. I must also pay tribute to the founders of Oak for quickly establishing a useful set of resources during the early stages of the pandemic. Their success in attracting large amounts of public money has also been impressive; their continued success in doing so with limited process and scrutiny is of course extraordinary.
Five years ago, I was part of the executive team at Tes Global selling our large education business from one owner to another. I fielded countless questions about the impact on our recruitment business of the DfE setting up a rival recruitment platform. I did my best to reassure them that the teacher vacancy service would be a waste of public money because, however good the product, the Government do not understand the behaviours in the market. I am happy to have subsequently been proven right but, meanwhile, the DfE actions spooked investors and cost us millions in lost value. I now hear from similar investors who are assessing a British digital publisher of educational resources that is up for sale. What will be the impact of the DfE pouring £43 million into Oak? Why have the Government acquired a publisher? Are they going to start buying other publishers? I can reassure them on most points, but it is an added uncertainty that will cost another British business.
This is at the heart of my concern about the establishment of Oak as an arm’s-length body. It will damage the ability to grow of British businesses which need significant overseas investment, but which will be put off by this inexplicable intervention. I know this is not the intention of government or the people at the top of Oak; it is an unintended consequence of blundering into a successful, functioning market.
The reality is that there are plenty of high-quality educational resources being published all the time for teachers in England. Plenty are free and some are charged for. When I managed Tes resources, we regularly had over 1 million downloads every day by teachers of content created by other teachers. We made very little money from it but teachers loved us for it because we saved them huge amounts of time. There are many more—from Twinkl to more video-based offerings from the likes of Oak, to more personalised AI-powered resources that also include assessment, like CENTURY. These digital publishers then also compete with more traditional textbook publishers. There is lots of quality and lots of provision—why intervene? There are three possible reasons: to make it easier for teachers to find what they want; to further improve quality or value; or to increase central control over what resources are used.
I am not against an arm’s-length body for curriculum resources—one that specifies standards, agrees with the sector an API to improve the interoperability of resources from different publishers, and ensures that copyright and data protection are fully respected. These would all be valuable and appropriate functions for a government intervention to improve the functioning of the market. It could even call itself Oak for old time’s sake; it might even hold the old Oak content on its platform. But the takeover of Oak by government is about control. Why else would the DfE acquire an educational publisher? It has its own narrow view of what a good lesson should look like in pursuit of its narrow vision of a knowledge-rich curriculum. It wants to dictate to teaching professionals, not to respect their judgment in their contexts. And it wants to impose this through its new teacher training reforms, its prescription of the curriculum and this influence on pedagogy. This arm’s-length body is bad value for money, bad for education and bad for growth in education business.
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)
My Lords, I too welcome the opportunity to participate in this debate and I thank my noble friend for securing it. I am sure all noble Lords agree on the importance of providing teachers with high-quality resources to support them in delivering the curriculum to the highest possible standard.
I know from my time running the New Schools Network, which worked with groups setting up schools, particularly in deprived areas, that establishing and delivering an outstanding curriculum is a complex and challenging process. Research suggests that teachers spend up to five hours a week searching online for resources or creating lessons from scratch, adding to their already significant workload. With workload regularly cited as the number one concern of teachers, and indeed a significant reason for those leaving the profession, it is absolutely right that measures be taken to help reduce this burden.
I entirely agree that a vibrant and competitive market for curriculum resources which enables teachers to pick what is best for their pupils has an important role to play in this area. But rather than fatally undermine that, as we have heard and as I am sure we will hear more, the establishment of Oak National Academy as an arm’s-length body provides an opportunity to collaborate with and complement this commercial market, as well as to increase the variety and quality of resources available to teachers.
As has been said, Oak was created during the pandemic to provide free access to thousands of teacher-made, fully resourced lessons. Its focus is on improving teachers’ curriculum expertise while reducing their workloads. Independent research has found that Oak reduces workload by about three hours per week for around half of teacher users. In the context of today’s debate, Oak’s own data shows that there is plenty of space for it alongside commercial offers as, according to its most recent findings, no teachers were using Oak as their only source of material.
To allay some of the understandable concerns of firms currently operating in the publishing and educational tech sector about Oak’s potential impact, the Government have made it clear in their business case that it will not overlap with key elements of the commercial curriculum resources market. For instance, it will not create aids for phonics or A-levels, or provide CPD. Furthermore, Oak’s material will be accessible only digitally; it will not provide physical resources such as textbooks. In another step to encourage collaboration with the commercial market, Oak will share its code and data with the sector to allow other providers to build on or improve their own offerings with information from Oak if they so wish.
As an ALB, Oak will not create new resources. Rather, initially it has made £8 million available via an open procurement for primary and secondary maths, English, science, history, geography and music resources, providing investment into the market. As the Government say in their impact assessment, they plan to use Oak Academy to signpost to other high-quality commercial products.
To prevent further unfair advantage, the business case clearly states that Oak’s resources will be
“non-mandatory, and not endorsed by Ofsted”,
and that schools will be encouraged
“to continue using high quality commercial resources where this works best.”
So it is simply not the intention that teachers will solely rely on materials provided by Oak; rather, they will continue to draw on those that best suit their pupils and school context. I hope my noble friend the Minister can once again confirm that this is the case.
As we have heard, Oak was born out of the pandemic. Having spent taxpayers’ money on its creation and development so far, surely, rather than bin it, it must be right to make use of it where it adds value and supports hard-working teachers without distorting the commercial market. I believe that Oak is a positive development, but of course we have heard concerns and we will hear more today about its potential impact. I hope my noble friend the Minister can provide an assurance that, as Oak National Academy develops and expands its resource offering, the Government will continue closely to monitor its impact on commercial sectors and work with all parties to address any negative impacts, should they occur.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, and thank him for bringing this to our attention. We should have had a longer and deeper debate on Oak National Academy before this point and the Government should have brought it before us, as this important initiative could change the education landscape. I agree with every word my noble friend Lord Knight said, and am probably going to say similar things—only not as well.
I want to make two points. The first is about the motivation for this. The impact assessment says that it wants to save teachers’ time and reduce the workload. One of the reasons given is that the 2014 national curriculum changes took away the framework of support for teachers, which now has to be replaced. That was eight years of things going wrong because of the inadequacy of the 2014 curriculum reforms and this is about trying to put that back in place.
What worries me most and what I just cannot get my head around is this. If you went to teachers and said, “We are the Government and we have millions of pounds; what do you most want us to do to take workload off your shoulders?”, none of them would say, “Give a pile of money to the Oak National Academy and let it produce off-the-shelf lesson plans and curriculum packages.” The irony is that the DfE and Ofsted have argued for this. If you asked teachers who they would most cite as putting pressure on them, they would say the DfE and Ofsted.
I just cannot think through the fact that we seem to be creating a system in which it is easier for teachers to use off-the-shelf lesson plans, as that would give them time to fill in returns for Ofsted and the DfE. I taught for 18 years and the thing I most wanted to do was a lesson plan. That is what I went into the job to do. It was my skill and my training. If teachers spend half an hour a day looking for information on the internet, then thank goodness; they are professionals. That is what they are meant to be doing. Why would you put in place something that meant that a science teacher or similar was not spending half an hour a day looking for up-to-date information on the internet? If the Government want to reduce workload, I suggest that they are going about it the wrong way.
I think this is about control. The evidence for that is in the impact statement. The summary asks why Oak was chosen. It could not be the DfE, because the teachers would not trust it. It could not be private sector procurement, because it would not be “aligned with government policy”. Think about that: the Government are not doing it themselves, because they know that teachers do not trust them, and they are not putting it out to tender, because they do not trust private sector publishers to align with government policy, so they have set up an arm’s-length body to—as the impact statement says time and again—align with government strategy. That is the giveaway.
I have a great deal of time for the person who runs Oak. He is a star. He is a young educationalist who I hope has more and more influence on our education system in years to come, but this has not done Oak any favours.
My second point is to reiterate the point that the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, made about the BBC. It is the reason; it is the whole rationale. If you need one argument against this, it is: use the BBC. I tried a digital curriculum from the BBC prior to this, and what we were going to do was wonderful. We lost in the courts and some people’s professional careers were damaged because of that. It would have been good, and it would have had all the accountability, visibility and openness that the BBC would have brought to the process. I justified that because it is a public sector broadcaster, but Oak has none of that: it is not a public sector broadcaster, it does not have a public sector remit and it does not have that accountability. There are a number of reasons why we should ask the Government to reconsider.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
My Lords, I do not have any personal interests to declare in this discussion, as other noble Lords have—not that I use that to blame them for speaking about this, in any way. However, I happen to be a close personal friend of one of the people who was principally involved in establishing the Oak National Academy, who is probably the person my noble friend just referred to.
I learned about this during lockdown or, at least, in the periods during Covid when we could meet and talk about this. I was very impressed by what was being done to help education continue in this crisis. It was a noble endeavour and the academy should be fully congratulated on it. The tone of this debate does not recognise the contribution it made to keep education going when, I have to say, some—the education unions, for instance—were not very keen on going into classes. That point should be made.
Secondly, again for family reasons, I know all about the BBC thing and recognise that there are problems, but for goodness’ sake, this is a very small-scale public intervention. It is not the BBC. The tender is £8 million. Also, I have been told regarding Oak’s activities that there are two important differences from what the private sector offers. First, it is trying to have universal cover of all the subjects in the curriculum rather than just the ones out of which a lot of money can be made. That is an important difference that we should recognise. Secondly, use of its materials is heavily concentrated among schools that are teaching deprived kids. That does not surprise me, given the financial pressures on those schools and on their teachers, who deserve every possible help.
Therefore, I do not think that there is a problem with this. I do not understand why the publishers are trying to take Oak to court. I do not understand the point about this being an instrument of central government control, of a Tory Government who want to strangle the independence of the curriculum. This is an arm’s-length body. The definition of an arm’s-length body is one that is independent of ministerial control.
I recognise that these are industries of the future in which Britain has an important role to play, these being some of our competitive strengths in the world. However, what the education publishers are saying is like saying that you cannot have the NHS because it would stop all the investment in innovative medical activity. Let us be sensible about this. It needs a sensible conversation between the publishers and Oak National Academy.
Lord Strathcarron (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interest as a publisher, although in this case the interest is purely theoretical as none of my publishing group’s imprints is in the academic market. I therefore have nothing to win or lose from any of Oak National Academy’s proposed activities.
However, I am a taxpayer and a publishing professional, and I know that publishing is an extremely marginal business in which even the most experienced and successful managers find it hard to make a profit. How the Civil Service is going to equal them is a complete mystery. Why they should even be trying to do so is an even bigger mystery, and why a Conservative Government are proposing to set up a state-owned and taxpayer-funded publishing operation in direct competition to private enterprise publishing companies is an even bigger mystery than that.
The headline figures are that the taxpayer should invest £43 million to hire 83 officials over the next three years. I would treat all three figures with a great degree of scepticism. Let us take the £43 million. A quick Google search will show that the average government contract goes over budget by 29%. Of course, we will not know until three years from now how Oak has fared, but as the budget was prepared using taxpayers’ imaginary money, with no accountability and to prove a business model, there is no reason to suggest that the £43 million will not conform to the national average and become £55 million.
Then we have the 83 officials. If anyone can wade through Oak’s 75-page acronym and jargon-laden business case, they will find that there are not 83 officials but 82.6 so-called full-time equivalents, so some poor soul is going to be 0.4 of himself or herself short. We then find that their main responsibility is procurement: £16 million-worth of material over the period. Anyone can do the maths; that is £193,000 per person. As these procurements break down into 12 lots, that is £16,000 per procurement item.
Bearing in mind the costs of those 82.6 people and their overheads, I have never come across a less efficient purchasing KPI. But they have nothing to worry about because, amazingly, nobody is in charge. We eventually find somebody called the senior responsible officer, but that role turns out to have two names to it followed by “job-share”, in brackets.
Lastly, we come to the three years. Unfortunately, my four minutes will soon be up so I can only ask: has anyone ever come across a government department, quango or arm’s-length body that voluntarily liquidated itself after three years, no matter how worthy that liquidation may have been? I fear that, unless we prevent it from starting, we will be stuck with Oak for ever.
This is an absolutely classic case of departmental overreach: an ill-conceived and unnecessary waste of taxpayers’ money, which can only undermine the private sector for no benefit to anyone, except the people who work for it. I urge all concerned to hand the programme back to publishing professionals who know what they are doing, are accountable for their success and failure and do it for a living.
Baroness Blower (Lab)
My Lords, I have no interests to declare, except that I was extremely interested in the speech from the previous noble Lord. I have, from time to time as a teacher, of course, availed myself of textbooks and many other materials from the commercial education publishing sector. My brief intervention in this short debate, on which I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, is just to make a couple of points.
My first point is in relation to school funding. I understand that the current per capita funding for a secondary school pupil is about £6,000 per annum, which is not enough. As many of your Lordships know, schools are facing significant financial pressures and while the Minister will no doubt say that the Government are increasing funding, it remains too low. The fact that both the trade unions whose target audience is specifically heads and school leaders are either balloting for strike action or considering so doing is ample evidence for this.
I turn to the Oak academy. I have, as I have expressed previously, significant reservations about the Oak National Academy. My engagement with Jonathan Dando of the academy and my own perusal of the materials on offer, along with previous responses from the Minister—given, I have no doubt, in good faith—have done nothing to allay my concerns. I freely accept that the intervention of Oak academy materials during the pandemic played an important role in ensuring that distance learning could carry on, but that was of course supported heavily by the British Educational Suppliers Association and the Publishers Association—the figures have been previously given—to set Oak academy up in the first place.
However, the creation of Oak academy as an arm’s-length body, at a cost of £43 million to the taxpayer, is a different order of activity entirely. This £43 million will come from the DfE’s schools budget, which in my view is already too low. Yet research done by the British Educational Suppliers Association shows that only 5% of teachers polled by YouGov thought that centralised resources should be a priority, while 43% believed in funding schools so as to allow them to invest in materials that they thought worked best for them, and 36% believed that reducing class size would be a far better use of government money and would produce better outcomes for children and young people.
I think we all know that teacher workload is very high and burdensome, but it is not clear to me that the Oak academy materials, having spent time looking at them, would reduce workload—unless the Government intend to deprofessionalise teaching to a role of clicking play on a pre-recorded, one-size-fits-all, government-approved lesson. That is not an attractive proposition for a professional teacher, but it is in the same vein as the direction of travel for ITT referred to by my noble friend Lord Knight.
Of course, cost is a significant issue. The noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, put it completely aptly when he said that it is hard to compete with free. There is a big concern that the Oak academy materials will be perceived as being, if not compulsory, certainly preferred. This perception is reinforced by the promotion of Oak academy materials by Amanda Spielman, His Majesty’s chief inspector, at a conference in April last year and by Ofsted’s strong presence on Oak’s subject expert panels, which, according to the Oak briefing for this debate,
“will advise and shape our curriculum”.
Notwithstanding that the briefing note also says,
“Our materials will always be optional with no expectation of use”,
I think that Ms Spielman’s intervention tells schools a very different story.
I do not need to make the case for education publishers; they are making it themselves. However, in closing, I want to ask the Minister what she makes of the report I have had from an experienced colleague that they have been offered an Amazon voucher to join an Oak expert panel. Is that an appropriate use of taxpayers’ money? This colleague will, I am sure, use that voucher to buy some books.
Baroness Hooper (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to have been allowed to make a brief intervention in the gap. I thank my noble friend Lord Vaizey for his introduction and the issues that he raised, with which I agree fully; indeed, I agree with most of what has been said in this debate, both in favour of Oak and what it has achieved as well as everything else. I declare my interest as the honorary president of BESA, the British Educational Suppliers Association, which represents the interests of many small and medium-sized businesses involved in edtech.
It seems to me that what is important is how children are taught and how well they are taught. To achieve the best possible results, it is also important that teachers are able to be creative and responsive to the needs of their pupils—as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, clearly was—and not bound by rigid, inflexible rules. However, in saying this, I appreciate that some teachers are more in need of support than others. My question for my noble friend the Minister is this: what provision is made in teacher training courses for digital awareness, including ways in which edtech can support and supplement their teaching skills?
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, we must thank the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, for drawing the issue to our attention. I do not think that half of us would have known that this was going on had it not been for a couple of the interventions he has made. It is probably a case for the use of Parliament.
This is a very odd one. Initially, I looked at the debate and said, “Yeah, online teaching—great. Wonderful. Online tools and technology—let’s use them”. I remind the Committee of my interests in those fields. However, I suddenly thought, “If the private sector is doing this, why are we intervening?” Is it because we are saving a lot of money? It does not really seem that the case for that has been made so let us hear it. Let us hear whether we are creating money to give extra resources to classrooms because that would be a case for it. If we are damaging one of our commercial sectors—there seems to be a well-argued fear, shall we say, that this could be happening—let us hear what the Government are going to do to mitigate that.
For instance, are we going to go to the publishing sector and say, “You have the contracts to make sure that the Oak academy is up to date”? If you want to make sure that something works, you have to keep monitoring it. Have we established that relationship? Is it going to happen? Are we going to make sure that we have some incentive for people to carry on writing new material that is relevant and keeps up to date with developments? Look at the textbooks from 10 years ago and take a field such as archaeology. We all know now that the hippies were turning up at the wrong time for their big party and that it should have been in mid-winter. This is because scientists and archaeologists have gone out there and had a look. So all those primary school projects got it wrong. How do we get in and make sure that things are happening? Maintenance is a big issue here. If that supplier and incentive have been removed, you may well damage the quality of education in the medium term.
Also, when it comes to supporting classrooms, a basic model may be acceptable but how on earth, with the variability of a classroom’s components, can a standard model ever be anything other than the briefest of guides? I have made it a mission of my own to mention special educational needs on every occasion until the Government tell us when that review will be published. January was the target; there is not much of that left. If you have a higher percentage than average in one class, you will need a different plan and, if it is different types of special educational need or there is one dominant pupil, you will need a different plan. If you have different levels of ability and interest in that class, you will need a different plan. You need variation; there is only so much benefit to be taken from that. I hope the Minister will take this opportunity to let us know exactly what the Government think they will get out of this.
When you have the free market being defended by the Labour and the Conservative Benches, and greater government control being spread around the House, something is wrong—or very right. Let us get an idea. The Government have to give us some answers on value for money and how they will refresh this. Will they give us some answers on both those points? I hope I can go away slightly more comfortable about the answer and the situation when we come back. Let us see.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey of Didcot, for securing this Question for Short Debate. I do not normally speak on education matters so I was pleased to see so many experts with much more knowledge than me in the Room to take part in the debate. I expressed my concern to a colleague outside the Grand Committee. They replied, “I don’t know what you’re worried about; it’s never stopped you speaking before.”
Turning to Oak National Academy, it is clear from today’s debate that it is not without controversy. My noble friend Lord Knight of Weymouth was clear in his concerns that it could cause damage to the market, could cause huge difficulties and could have a detrimental effect. He set out a number of questions for the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to answer; I am sure that she will address those when she responds to the debate. I would also appreciate it if she could set out what she envisages the relationship between Oak and Ofsted will be. If the former is setting the standard for what the modern curriculum and lesson planning should look like, will Ofsted be responsible for assessing its outputs?
The Institute for Government has called for proper evaluation and assurance of Oak since it has had only limited formal evaluation in the three years since its launch. Does the department intend to conduct an independent impact evaluation of Oak materials? Otherwise, how can stakeholders—teachers and the public —judge how well it is working, and how can we tackle issues that emerge? My noble friends Lady Morris of Yardley and Lady Blower made really important points about what teachers would want this money spent on if they were asked. They made it clear that it would not be what we have got here today. That is a fair point: what would the teachers want this money spent on? What do they need to make themselves more effective in the classroom?
Can the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, say something about the operational independence of Oak? That has certainly been a concern of many noble Lords in the course of this debate. I note that the chief executive of United Learning, Jon Coles, has pulled out of the initiative, citing concerns about its running and the direction of travel. The Minister may say something in her response about how Oak will remain optional. How can we ensure that it remains optional? If Jon Coles and others are pulling out, the risk, of course, is that other suppliers will be crowded out, choice will diminish and schools will end up effectively being forced to use Oak. Can the Minister tell the Grand Committee what the mechanism is to ensure that that does not happen and reassure noble Lords? I would also like to hear from the Minister about how any negative impact on publishers might be mitigated and how innovation might still be encouraged in education resources and the edtech space.
I recognise that Oak was a help to many during the lockdown and had a positive impact on teacher workloads. That was highly welcome. However, we also need the robust evaluation that I mentioned earlier. Given the potential impact on an important and valuable sector for our economy—edtech is worth £3.5 billion—I hope that the Government are exploring every option to assess Oak National Academy thoroughly and address any unintended consequences. I will leave it there.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)
My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating my noble friend Lord Vaizey on securing time for this short debate. I am delighted to be exercising a pincer movement on him together with my noble friend Lady Evans, who is strategically placed at the other end of these Benches. I am also grateful to all noble Lords for their interest in Oak; I understand the strength of feeling in the Committee about protecting a thriving and competitive market for authors and publishers. I hope that, in the few minutes I have to speak, I can address those points as well as the absolutely critical reasons for our support for Oak, which the noble Lord, Lord Knight, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, questioned.
There are many in the Committee who are far more expert and have done the real job of teaching but we all know that designing a high-quality, carefully sequenced curriculum is both complex and time-consuming and requires significant subject-specific expertise. We also know that many teachers develop their curriculum from scratch, with the average primary teacher searching online for resources for between one and three hours per week. All this adds to their workload; teacher workload is one of the greatest threats to teacher retention. We fundamentally believe that Oak can help with this. I am surprised that there has been less emphasis in this debate on the impact on teacher workload, given how strongly I know your Lordships feel about it.
We understand the concerns that Oak may negatively impact on the market. Our analysis suggests that that impact is likely to be low but we are taking steps to mitigate the risk, which I will go through, and will continue to monitor it; I say that in response to a number of questions, including from my noble friend Lord Vaizey. Ultimately, it is the public benefit Oak will provide that must be the Government’s priority. I will cover this.
My noble friend talked about Oak’s achievement in uniting the publishing sector—for the first time, I assume. I cannot comment on that but a greater achievement, as my noble friend Lady Evans pointed out, is that almost half of users save three hours a week on average in terms of their workload. I say in response to my noble friend Lord Strathcarron that Oak users are more likely to stay in the profession of education. In the scheme of things, in terms of spending taxpayers’ money and in the context of a budget of £58.8 billion in two years’ time, if our £43 million goes some way to keeping teachers in the profession—although it is not our primary aim—it will have been money spent incredibly well. On funding, which was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, the IFS has confirmed that, in 2024-25, school funding will be the highest it has ever been in real terms; I hope she will bear that in mind.
My noble friend Lord Strathcarron made comments about handing back publishing to the professionals. In the case of schools, teachers are rightly creating their own content and their own curriculum. We believe that Oak will be an important catalyst in supporting them to do that even better than they do already.
As my noble friend Lady Evans pointed out, Oak was launched in April 2020 in response to the pandemic. During its busiest week, 2.5 million pupils used it. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, for so eloquently recognising the contribution of Oak; I absolutely support and echo the sentiments that he expressed.
Despite what some noble Lords have suggested today, we believe that Oak has developed into a respected national resource and that evidence of the need for its continuation is strong. We know that, in the first six months of 2022, on average 32,000 teachers and 170,000 pupils used Oak resources every week. We now see how teachers benefit from the adaptability of the resources by using them in the way they see best, opting to use parts of the materials to enhance their lesson design rather than taking the off-the-shelf, tick-box approach that was unfairly described by some noble Lords. I remind your Lordships that only 1% of teachers are using Oak resources exclusively.
As your Lordships set out, in September 2022—my noble friend Lord Vaizey mentioned March; it was actually September—Oak was established as an arm’s-length body, which is strategically aligned with but, like every other arm’s-length body, operationally independent from the department. We took the decision to establish Oak after careful deliberation, including engaging the publishing and edtech sectors and an assessment of market impact, which my noble friend Lord Vaizey asked about. Your Lordships can review the full assessment of the business case, which was published in November and is available on GOV.UK. To repeat: we will absolutely keep a watching brief on developments in the market, along with the impact on competitors and on workload, teachers and, most important, pupils.
Oak will bring significant benefits for teachers by providing high-quality, adaptable and, I stress, optional support, reducing their workload and increasing curriculum planning expertise. The noble Lord, Lord Knight, gave us three options on why, because he argued that there are plenty of resources. I would not disagree. His first option was whether they were easier to find. The answer is yes. The second was whether it would drive quality. The answer is yes. The third was whether it was about control. The answer is no. It is absolutely not because, as he knows, it is up to every individual school and trust to choose what materials they use.
I encourage all noble Lords, as some clearly already have, to look at the procurement that is already going on and the engagement with teachers and professionals in the sector to ensure that the resources produced are as good as they can be. Also, a significant proportion of the £43 million set aside over the next three years to support Oak is expected to be provided to publishers, schools and other organisations for the creation of resources—I think to many of the organisations that some noble Lords have been concerned about today.
In November, Oak launched the procurement for resources in six priority subjects, which was worth £8.2 million. In response to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Addington, about mitigation, that offers the commercial market an opportunity to be involved in the creation of Oak’s new content.
On the issue of children with special educational needs and disabilities, which I know is very dear to all noble Lords’ hearts, and rightly so, the adaptability and accessibility of Oak’s resources provide a real opportunity to improve the quality of education for all pupils, including those with special educational needs and disabilities in mainstream schools. Oak will continue to provide more than 600 lessons supporting specialist teaching.
We know that teachers in the UK benefit from a diverse commercial market of educational resources. Oak aims to complement and stimulate this market, not to displace it. My noble friend Lord Vaizey described a sort of Stalinist economy, with no choice and no limits on what Oak can provide. I would like to set the record straight on both those things. I think that I have talked about choice already but, on limits, Oak’s activity will be restricted to key stages 1 to 4. There are several thriving sections of the market into which it will not enter, including the publication of textbooks, certified assessments and CPD. It will also not be pursuing domestic or international sales to schools, teachers, parents or pupils. It will not be producing phonics resources or key stage 5 resources.
Importantly, Oak is working collaboratively to develop its content. It will also signpost users to excellent curriculum offers available elsewhere—something which I think concerned the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy—so teachers will have more, not less, choice in deciding what is right for their pupils. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, suggested that teachers do not want Oak, which is a little unfair. Of the teachers surveyed, 93% of those who use Oak plan to continue using it in the current academic year.
My noble friend Lord Vaizey asked why there was no consultation on the establishment of the ALB. There is no duty to consult when establishing an ALB and, as he acknowledged, a market impact assessment was carried out and the department spoke to the market on several occasions. In response to the question from my noble friend about data protection, Oak will obviously be subject to all data protection duties.
I will write to noble Lords whose questions I did not reach, but I would like to finish by reminding your Lordships what Oak means for children and for teachers. Teachers surveyed in the impact evaluation of Oak said that it increased their confidence in curriculum design, increased the quality of their lesson planning, improved delivery and improved the quality of the school curriculum. Most importantly, Oak users were 35.3% more likely to report that above 20% of their pupils were exceeding expectations. That is what we want for our children, and why we are supporting Oak.
Commonwealth: Zimbabwe
(1 year, 3 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Oates
To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to work with other Commonwealth nations to block Zimbabwe’s readmission into the Commonwealth until it is compliant with the principles of the Commonwealth’s 1991 Harare Declaration.
Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, I have initiated this debate to emphasise the severe damage that I believe would be done to the reputation of the Commonwealth, to the Zimbabwe people’s struggle for democratic and human rights and to the upholding of such rights throughout the Commonwealth, if Zimbabwe were to be readmitted while its Government remain in flagrant violation of the Commonwealth charter and of the Commonwealth’s 1991 Harare Declaration. Yet this is what we are told may happen following the visit of a Commonwealth delegation to Zimbabwe in November—possibly even ahead of Zimbabwe’s elections due later this year.
Members of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Zimbabwe, on which I declare an interest as co-chair, have all written to the Secretary-General on this matter and I thank them for that. We understand that the UK Government are not minded to oppose readmission, because they do not want to be seen as isolated on the issue. I understand the Government’s sensitivity given the UK’s deeply troubled history in Zimbabwe. However, ignoring the oppression faced by the people of Zimbabwe today does not atone for past oppression inflicted under colonial rule. On the contrary, it compounds it. I hope that, rather than bowing to the pressure of others, our Government will work with fellow member states to ensure that the core principles of the Commonwealth are not fundamentally undermined by Zimbabwe’s readmission, while being clear that, if necessary, the UK will stand in defence of those principles, even if it has to do so alone.
At the conclusion of the Commonwealth visit, the secretariat issued the following statement:
“Zimbabwe has made significant progress in its journey to re-join the Commonwealth family … This mission by the Commonwealth forms part of the broader membership process and we look forward to advancing this further.”
It is not clear what progress the secretariat had in mind, as little further detail was provided to support this assertion, but all the evidence from independent observers points to the opposite conclusion.
The Commonwealth statement was particularly puzzling as the Harare Declaration is unambiguous in asserting the Commonwealth’s belief in
“the liberty of the individual under the law, in equal rights for all citizens regardless of gender, race, colour, creed or political belief, and in the individual’s inalienable right to participate by means of free and democratic political processes in framing the society in which he or she lives”.
Zimbabwe’s paramilitary regime believes in none of those things, and is currently in breach of every single one of the principles of the Commonwealth charter that relate to them. Far from making progress towards these principles, levels of repression are ramping up as elections approach.
Just 13 days after the conclusion of the Commonwealth visit, a joint meeting of the APPG on Zimbabwe and the All-Party Parliamentary Human Rights Group heard in-person testimony from a young Zimbabwean activist, Netsai Marova, who was arrested in May 2020 for taking part in a protest, along with fellow opposition activist Cecilia Chimbiri and opposition Member of Parliament Joana Mamombe. They were taken to Harare Central police station, from which they were abducted and subjected to torture and sexual assault—an ordeal that lasted over 36 hours. I defy anyone to hear Netsai Marova’s harrowing testimony and to continue to argue for Zimbabwe’s return to the Commonwealth while such abuses take place.
While recovering in hospital, Netsai and her colleagues were charged with taking part in an illegal protest and later with faking their own abduction and making false allegations of sexual assault and torture. On 10 June 2020, five special procedures experts of the UN Human Rights Council issued a statement calling on the Zimbabwe authorities to
“urgently prosecute and punish the perpetrators of this outrageous crime, and to immediately enforce a policy of ‘zero tolerance’ for abductions and torture throughout the country”
to ensure the effective protection of women against sexual violence and to bring those responsible to account. They also expressed grave alarm over concerns that this was not an isolated instance, reporting that, in 2019 alone, 49 cases of abductions and torture were reported in Zimbabwe, without investigations that would lead to the perpetrators being held to account.
Two years on, Joana Mamombe and Cecilia Chimbiri continue to be harassed through the courts on these charges, despite their evident lack of merit. Netsai Marova managed to escape from Zimbabwe and was granted a scholarship by the Norwegian Government under their students at risk programme. Her life and those of her colleagues have been upended by the actions of the Zimbabwe state and they remain severely traumatised.
On 1 December last year, another youth activist and former leader of the Zimbabwe National Students Union, Makomborero Haruzivishe, spoke at an event at South Africa House hosted by Action for Southern Africa, formerly the Anti-Apartheid Movement. He laid out the gross abuse of human and political rights being perpetrated by the Zimbabwe regime and the need for the world to speak out against it. Mr Haruzivishe, who I hope will be with us later—unfortunately, his train has been delayed—has been arrested 37 times over the past decade and was detained without trial for nearly 11 months in Chikurubi maximum security prison.
In March last year, parliamentary by-elections saw widespread violence unleashed against opposition campaigners across Zimbabwe. Open incitement to violence in a speech by Vice-President Chiwenga at a rally in Kwekwe led to an attack the next day by ZANU-PF thugs on an opposition rally in the same city, leaving one opposition supporter dead and many more injured.
Every day, democratic space is closed down further. On 23 December, the regime gazetted the so-called Patriotic Bill, which grants extraordinarily repressive powers under the guise of “defence of sovereignty” and imposes sentences of 10 years on those who expose the nature of the regime to international audiences, while stripping them of their rights to vote or stand for election. The same month, the draconian Private Voluntary Organisations Amendment Bill, representing an all-out assault on civil society in direct contravention of Article 16 of the Commonwealth charter, passed in the lower House of Parliament. The new law allows the regime to designate NGOs as high risk, thereby allowing them to revoke their registration and remove or replace their leadership.
Meanwhile, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission continues to be packed with ZANU-PF supporters, including—extraordinarily—the daughter of former Vice-President Kembo Mohadi. The ZEC continues to refuse to provide access to the full voters’ roll, while opposition rallies are regularly banned and political repression increases. Only this weekend, footage emerged of the brutal beating of elderly people in villages for having attended opposition meetings.
As we participate in this debate, the opposition’s deputy chairperson, Job Sikhala MP, languishes in Chikurubi maximum security prison, where he has been held without trial since his arrest in June. At the time, Mr Sikhala was acting as the lawyer for the family of a murdered opposition activist, Moreblessing Ali. Her brother, Washington, to whom we offer our sincere condolences, will also join us here later. In response to Mr Sikhala’s detention, the Inter-Parliamentary Union stated on 22 October last year that it
“fails to understand how his detention in a maximum security prison could possibly be justified and is alarmed by allegations that Mr Sikhala is being held in inhumane conditions”.
It also said that it
“fails to understand the factual basis for the arrest of Mr. Sikhala”.
It is now clear beyond doubt that the Zimbabwe Government are intent on using violence, intimidation and the full power of the state to crush all opposition ahead of this year’s scheduled general elections. I therefore urge our Government and all Commonwealth member states to make it clear that Zimbabwe will be readmitted to the Commonwealth only when all political prisoners are released; when prosecutorial harassment of the opposition ceases; and when the rule of law, the constitution of Zimbabwe and the principles of the Commonwealth charter and the Harare Declaration are upheld.
In a powerful letter written to his fellow Zimbabweans from prison this month, Mr Sikhala said this:
“I understand you might be outside, and I am inside, but our suffering and pain is the same. We are all under attack … If I am killed … I am prepared to meet the fate in defense of values and principles I hold dearly; values of a free and open democratic society, exuding happiness, free of impunity and fear.”
He also said:
“What I know is that the world will not allow you to perish on your own dearest Zimbabweans … all outposts of democracy shall speak out in defense of our people under siege.”
That is Mr Sikhala’s hope and his faith. It remains to be seen whether our Government and those of other Commonwealth member states will live up to it. If we do not, a clear signal will be sent to the vicious Zimbabwe regime that it can continue to violate the democratic and human rights of their citizens with impunity. In such circumstances, the responsibility for subsequent events will lie heavily upon our shoulders and those of every member state that chose to stand aside, rather than stand up for the principles of the Commonwealth and the rights of its citizens.
Lord Swire (Con)
My Lords, I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Lords’ Interests in my capacity as deputy chairman of the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Oates, for introducing this topic. He paints a fairly bleak picture of what is going on in Zimbabwe and raises some astonishingly serious points. I suggest that they are slightly at odds with the finding from the most recent visit of the Assistant Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, Professor Luis Franceschi, in November 2022 and the subsequent statements from the Secretary-General, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland, who said that Zimbabwe is
“putting a great deal of energy and commitment to be readmitted back into the Commonwealth”,
and likewise the statement by the former Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, who said:
“The UK stands ready in friendship to support a Zimbabwe that fully embraces the rule of law, human rights and economic reform.”
I am delighted to say that, as part and parcel of the eventual rehabilitation of Zimbabwe into the international community, the Zimbabwe national trade and investment arm, ZimTrade, joined the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council in November 2022 and participated before CHOGM in the business forum that we ran in Rwanda in June, indicating that it was open to discussion and I think is seeking rehabilitation.
Clearly, there are some underlying problems that sit uncomfortably at odds with almost everything the Commonwealth purports to stand for. Given our long and not uncomplicated history with Zimbabwe—it is amazing to think that the Lancaster House conference was in 1979 and that Zimbabwe left the Commonwealth 20 years ago, although it started the process of reapplying in 2018—I ask the Minister about the amount of aid, if any, that we currently give to Zimbabwe. How much of it is hypothecated towards alleviating pensioner poverty, which has been debated in both Houses for many years and is admirably advanced by organisations such as ZANE, for those who worked in what was Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe who either have seen the value of their pensions greatly diminish by inflation or do not have pensions at all? I would like to know that, if possible.
When I talked to the Zimbabweans in Rwanda, we discussed farming. It is absolutely shocking that what was once described as the grain basket of Africa is today a net importer of foodstuffs, having exported wheat, tobacco and corn all over Africa and the wider world at its height. This is at a time when countries not far from Zimbabwe are suffering from malnutrition and starvation, and when there is a global wheat shortage due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I believe we can do a lot to help Zimbabwe in this respect, but we know that there were 4,500 violent evictions of white farmers. There has been a lot of talk about $3.5 billion of compensation, made up by a mixture of long-term bonds and international donors. Farmers believe that they should be entitled to something nearer to $9 billion, which is probably right. How is that going? It was meant to be within five years. Are we monitoring this? Are the white farmers getting the compensation? How is that being funded? We are beginning to see greater co-operation between white former farmers and farmers who seized the land to increase productivity. That is also something that should be welcomed.
All is not perfect within the Commonwealth. Some countries get expelled when they fall short of Commonwealth values, most recently Fiji, the Maldives and so forth. They then have to reapply by complying with Commonwealth standards. At the end of the day, Zimbabwe is looking at Commonwealth Africa and the opportunities afforded by a £13 trillion market. It is a question of how much more carrot and how much more stick; it is a mixture of them both. Membership of the Commonwealth is a huge prize for any country, particular one seeking to rehabilitate itself in the eyes of the international community. It is not a prize that we should give away lightly, but where there is willing and hope we should be there to encourage, not always to criticise.
Lord Leong (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Oates, on securing this short debate. I declare an interest as chair of the Council for Education in the Commonwealth. In this role and others, I have worked on finding solutions to a range of issues within the complex political sensitivities of this unique international organisation.
Zimbabwe enjoys a special historical relationship with the Commonwealth. In 1991, it was in its capital city that the Commonwealth Heads of Government agreed the Harare Declaration, committing their countries to a set of core values including democracy, the rule of law and human rights. These values are reflected in Zimbabwe’s 2013 constitution. Although there have been some positive developments in recent years, they have not been as significant, rapid or numerous as many of us had hoped, especially post President Mugabe. The country retains the death penalty and the rights and freedoms of women and girls are unequal, as they are for the LGBT community.
However, with Zimbabwe holding general elections this year, I draw your Lordships’ attention to the democratic process in the country. Official observers were critical of how the last elections were conducted in 2018. A colleague of mine who served on a Commonwealth observer group told me that he
“personally witnessed scenes of violence and direct intimidation by government forces”
and noted that an
“unlevel playing field”
had been created, which
“the Government considers it to its benefit to maintain”.
Moreover, there are serious concerns about an escalation in enforced disappearances and intimidation, including the torture and sexual abuse of political opponents of the regime, journalists and student activists. They are compounded by concerns over government control of the media and political interference in the police and judiciary.
In the context of Zimbabwe’s application to rejoin the Commonwealth, the 2023 election could and should be an opportunity for the Government to demonstrate their democratic credentials. Sadly, the portents are not good. However, I am both a pragmatist and an optimist. I believe that Zimbabwe’s willingness to rejoin the Commonwealth and to engage with the first stages of the process demonstrates a desire to change for the better. That is where I would encourage your Lordships to consider this question: will continually blocking Zimbabwe’s readmission to the Commonwealth help to move it in the right direction?
The Commonwealth is an immense force for good in improving the lives of its 2.4 billion citizens—almost a third of the world’s population. However, that does not make me blind to the flaws and inconsistencies of the organisation and of its constituent nations. On the issue of capital punishment, for example, only 37% of Commonwealth countries have abolished the death penalty in law, compared with 57% of all countries internationally. Indeed, several Commonwealth nations have fervently defended their sovereign right to retain it. Although we should loudly condemn many of the atrocious abuses of power being enacted in Zimbabwe, let us be wary of making demands of a country that, sadly, some current members would not themselves meet.
The Commonwealth can more effectively influence and change hearts and minds, and ultimately national laws, by working with the countries within rather than outside our family of nations. If we are too intransigent, we risk driving Zimbabwe to look elsewhere for international allies. Do we think that the lives of Zimbabweans will be improved, or their human rights better protected, if the country becomes dependent on powerful countries that are extending their influence in the region, especially China?
Democracy is not a destination but a journey. The UK, as a mature democracy and an influential member of the Commonwealth family, should be prepared to be pragmatic and take the long-term view. We must not lose sight of the ultimate goal—improving the lives of the Zimbabwean people—by making the perfect the enemy of the good.
Lord Loomba (CB)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Oates, for tabling a debate on this important topic. Since 1995, five countries have faced periods of suspension for failing to uphold the values set out in the Singapore and Harare Declarations—including Zimbabwe, which withdrew altogether in 2003 when its suspension was extended.
A number of humanitarian organisations have detailed continuing human rights violations since President Mugabe left office a little over five years ago, including post-election violence in 2018 and killings and rapes during the January 2019 protests. There are concerns about whether abuses against opposition politicians and activists are meaningfully investigated. New laws threaten further suppression and there are problems around the use of criminal law against opposition.
Such issues cannot be swept under the carpet; they must be addressed to achieve lasting improvement in Zimbabwe. The question is whether exclusion from the Commonwealth is useful in doing so. I am firmly of the opinion that it is not. The Commonwealth is founded on what is for most members a painful past and turns it into a force for good. Understanding wrongful behaviour, both intended and unconscious, creates an opportunity to put it right. That applies to all of us. For the Commonwealth to foster improvements in democracy and human rights, its members must be willing to work together towards that goal. The reason why Zimbabwe walked away in 2003 is that it had no intention of doing so and there was no prospect of a process that could see the suspension lifted. For all the questions that hang over Zimbabwe’s current record, I do not believe that to be the case now.
Let us remember that, in 2021, the British Government expressed concern about democracy in Bangladesh, Nigeria, Pakistan, Rwanda and Tanzania. In almost two-thirds of Commonwealth countries, homosexuality is illegal, mostly based on laws inherited from Britain. Today, 26 member countries have blasphemy laws and 16 million people across the Commonwealth are estimated to be trapped in modern slavery. On the positive side of the ledger, whereas widows face similar discrimination as elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, Zimbabwe passed a law last year giving equal inheritance rights to women in common-law marriages, which is a definite improvement and development. This is the point: if Zimbabwe, a country with as much claim as any to have suffered from its colonial past, wishes to be readmitted to the Commonwealth on the basis of its values and its charter, we should welcome that as a positive step and work with it, as we do with other members, to achieve progress.
The Commonwealth is a key channel for raising awareness of issues concerning democracy and human rights. I therefore urge the UK Government to engage constructively towards that end and support the readmission of Zimbabwe to the Commonwealth.
Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)
My Lords, this is a very timely debate—I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Oates, and congratulate him on securing it—because we are likely to see elections in Zimbabwe in the next six months. The rumours are getting stronger that the Commonwealth Secretary-General wants Zimbabwe back in before such elections. I am not sure legally that that could be done, but it seems to be the rumour and it comes from fairly senior people within other African countries. I hope that it is no more than a rumour, because the country has made no progress on human rights since it was suspended in 2003, with Mugabe then taking it right out. There has been no change. There has undoubtedly been a worsening of the situation. In the short five minutes I have, I shall not add to all the things that the noble Lord, Lord Oates, said, but there are many examples of what has been happening. Anyone stepping out of line is beaten up and arrested. It is an arbitrary situation, and the rule of law has gone—all the things that we believe are fundamental to a democracy. Today, we should show our solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe and those fighting back for justice; it is very difficult for them in a country such as Zimbabwe to show their opposition.
The coming year will be incredibly difficult in Zimbabwe. We will see a volatile social, political and economic situation. I do not see how anyone could think that getting Zimbabwe back into the Commonwealth before those elections would not be used by ZANU-PF simply to ensure that its election is carried through with the support of the international community and the Commonwealth. It would be a huge thing. It would give all that publicity to ZANU-PF and absolutely no help to the people of Zimbabwe.
We have had lots of new information recently about the lithium that has been discovered and has now been handed over to Chinese companies to look after. Some 3,000 commercial farms that were taken over and given to Zimbabweans have now been taken back to make a platinum mine. One looks at the land reforms and asks what on earth they actually achieved.
All this up-to-date information on the situation shows that the Zimbabwean Government, the police and armed forces are combining to plunder Zimbabwe’s resources with disregard for the rule of law and human rights, and it shows how the corrupt ZANU-PF elite is able ruthlessly to control every aspect of life in the country, including freedom of speech, movement and assembly, all of which are prerequisites to a free and fair election. Freedom from fear of retribution is also vital. Restoring that and rebuilding trust in the confidentiality of electoral processes take time, especially in rural areas, where even the distribution of food for subsistence has cunningly and methodically been placed in the hands of ZANU-PF loyalists and stooges.
I know that the United Kingdom cannot stop this happening if the majority of the Commonwealth countries decide that it should happen, but I hope that our Government will do all they can in diplomatic terms to ensure that other countries give support. I have heard from one or two noble Lords about the visit in November by the Commonwealth Secretariat. We saw a short press release about it. I wrote to the Commonwealth Secretariat and asked whether it could give me some more information. I asked whether there was a more detailed statement, as what I saw did not give a very detailed analysis of the real situation. I got a response which gave the impression that I would not understand how the situation worked. It said:
“The process of re-admission entails several rigorous steps and a Commonwealth member state that has withdrawn or been expelled … wishing to reapply … is expected to demonstrate that it upholds the principles and values of the Commonwealth.”
It said that a detailed report would later be submitted to the Commonwealth Secretary-General for review. I have written and asked whether we will see that report, because it is quite important that the Commonwealth itself gets serious about transparency and openness. We have seen nothing about who they saw when they were in Zimbabwe.
The report is made only to the Secretary-General and there is no opportunity for a wider assessment of the findings or to judge whether in any way it reflects the reality on the ground, or even addresses the concerns of those who have them for the rights and well-being of the people of Zimbabwe. It is not even possible to judge whether a suitably broad and representative range of people and institutions have been consulted. Who did they actually see? Let us see who it was. When the Commonwealth observer group is deployed, that is all open and can be seen.
Finally, we cannot go through all the Harare principles, but principle number 1 of the Harare Declaration is that the rule of international law be upheld. It is great to see Ben Freeth here in the Room, because the SADC tribunal proved that that was not being complied with. None of the things that the SADC tribunal said has been carried out. I say to the Minister: I know it is a difficult situation and that it might be embarrassing to be seen as out on a limb again, but we are not doing anything for the people of Zimbabwe if we support in any way Zimbabwe being allowed back in.
Lord St John of Bletso (CB)
My Lords, I join in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Oates, for introducing this topical debate. In fact, I got back from South Africa this morning, so I have been fully appraised of some of the developments in Zimbabwe.
In considering the case for Zimbabwe to rejoin the Commonwealth, it is important for us to analyse the reasons why it was suspended in 2002 and, more importantly, what has changed since then—for the good and for the bad. As we are all aware, in 2003 the so-called Commonwealth troika of South Africa, Australia and Nigeria refused to lift the suspension. It was on that basis that Robert Mugabe decided to leave. But when Mnangagwa became the President in 2017, I recall clearly him promising in an earlier speech that Zimbabwe would fulfil the required Commonwealth readmission conditions. He committed to trying to rejoin the Commonwealth, and those conditions were: meeting the preconditions of good governance; having media plurality and media freedoms; and to reset and respect the rule of law.
The noble Lord, Lord Swire, said that we need to have a balanced debate and I believe that credit needs to be given where it is due. There have been some achievements by President Mnangagwa. He has partially removed the indigenisation laws, which made it difficult to do business in Zimbabwe while choking the economy and increasing poverty. There is also more fiscal transparency and there has been an increase in exports. Moreover, interregional co-operation has improved, with several successful regional infrastructure projects. Here I refer to the Beit Bridge project as well as the Kazungula Bridge, which have both made a major difference by bringing revenue, but revenue which is not in the back-hand. This is revenue which comes by toll roads and goes directly to government.
That said, there has unfortunately been an escalation in corruption. Several senior operators in the country have vested interests in maintaining the status quo and, sadly, Zimbabwe has been arresting journalists, including Hopewell Chin’ono, who we all know well, for exposing corruption, along with arresting opposition leaders for fighting tyranny. The noble Lord, Lord Oates, made mention of just a few of those arrested and their horrendous maltreatment while in detention. Opposition supporters have been regularly beaten up, as happened just last week in Murehwa, just 110 kilometres from Harare. As noble Lords know, others who have been mentioned have had death threats, particularly the leader of the CCC. His supporters have been harassed by the ruling party’s regional leaders. When the evidence of these threats have been presented to the police, absolutely nothing has happened. This is inexcusable.
The noble Lord, Lord Oates, also made reference to the passing of the Private Voluntary Organisations Amendment Act. In effect, it immobilises NGOs, which are there to assist the poor and work to try to improve governance. This is in contravention of Article 16 of the Commonwealth charter. Time restricts me from talking in more depth about the impact of the Patriotic Bill but it would prevent the opposition and civil society engaging with foreign government organisations either to report violations or to seek help. If it is passed, in effect, Zimbabweans could be jailed for speaking to British Members of Parliament.
In the year of a general election—the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, mentioned that this is likely to happen in the next six months—a key hurdle must be addressing an up-to-date voters roll. However, this is highly unlikely to happen. A row has erupted over the redrawn constituencies and new boundaries, raising concerns about gerrymandering. Can the Minister elaborate in his winding-up speech on what technical assistance is being given to the Zimbabwe Government to support better governance and policy-making? There is also a dire need for more support to be given to the promotion of better education and improved healthcare.
I want to make it abundantly clear that I would be totally supportive of Zimbabwe rejoining the Commonwealth but the conditions have not currently been met. Readmission now without the preconditions being met would simply reward impunity.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
My Lords, as always, it is a real pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord St John. I admire his resilience, with his fresh experience of coming back overnight. He gave an eloquent response to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Swire, that the Commonwealth is not merely a transactional organisation but a family with a different set of mechanisms. I think that he also provided the evidence base against the assertions from the noble Lord, Lord Loomba. He is to be commended—as is my noble friend Lord Oates, who is to be commended both on securing this debate and on how he has demonstrated his consistency and passion on this issue.
As my noble friend mentioned in his opening remarks, we have been joined here by Makomborero Haruzivishe and Washington Ali, who are personal examples of suffering and those who have experienced loss at the hands of oppressors. They are testimony to why we are debating these important issues today.
The charter and the Harare Declaration have a purpose. A desire to be in the Commonwealth is not sufficient to be a member of it. I therefore take task with the noble Lord, Lord Leong. It is not intransigent to say that there should be a verification process to determine whether progress that satisfies the requirements of those declarations has been made. Setting aside due process, simply looking at geopolitical considerations and whether it would be desirable for a country to join the Commonwealth is regrettable.
Noble Lords do not need to take my word or that of my noble friend Lord Oates. The noble Lord, Lord Swire, thinks that my noble friend’s comments jarred with what the deputy Secretary-General said. I have taken all my evidence for my short remarks today from the Government’s report, Human Rights and Democracy, which was published in December 2022 for 2021. So, if the noble Lord takes to task anything I say, he is taking to task his Government and the FCDO report. Zimbabwe remains a priority country in which, as the FCDO has said, progress is not being made on civil and political rights, on judicial reform, on security sector oppression, on press freedom, on closing civil society space, on social policy supporting children, and on women and gender.
Therefore, the jarring element is in the statement by the deputy Secretary-General. I agree 100% with the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, that we are accustomed to having debates in this House based on published reports of fact-finding missions. I know that the Commonwealth is not a government organisation but I would prefer a statement that says that progress is being made and then to look at the substantial report on which that judgment is based. But I cannot see that on the secretariat’s website. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Swire, has had sight of it but I have not.
So I will refer to the FCDO, which cites that the
“Zimbabwe Peace Project recorded 2,391 humans rights violations, a similar number to 2020.”
This is not progress. The constitutional amendment in May for the President to appoint Supreme Court and High Court judges without interview was a retrograde step. Our Government said that the Zimbabwe Government
“failed to increase security sector accountability.”
Our Government have used the sanctions regime to hold to account four security officials responsible, as they say,
“for some of the worst human rights violations”.
Those individuals are under sanction by the United Kingdom. I ask the Minister whether we support membership of the Commonwealth for countries whose senior officials we have sanctioned.
With regard to intimidation, the Government say:
“The UK has not yet seen evidence of meaningful police investigations into these incidents.”
On press freedom, the Government highlight that Zimbabwe was ranked
“130 out of 180 countries in 2021”.
We have seen civil society space closed and, just this week, we have seen reports of intimidation and violence leading up to what may be the election.
I close with a question to the Minister that relates to our relationship with the Commonwealth. When she responded to the application by Zimbabwe to rejoin, the Secretary-General said:
“I urge the government, opposition parties, the election management body, civil society, and all stakeholders, to play their part in ensuring a credible, peaceful and inclusive process that restores citizens’ confidence, trust and hope in the development and democratic trajectory of their country.”
Everybody agrees with that. The question is whether it is being met. The Government’s FCDO report says that it is not, so what is the last dialogue that Ministers have had with the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth? I note that she met President Mnangagwa in December; has there been ministerial contact with the Commonwealth Secretary-General on Zimbabwe since then? As its membership is based on consensus, will the UK make its position public in advance of the discussions? If there is to be a gap, it will be if the UK supports rejoining while the FCDO report maintains that progress is not being made in some very clear areas.
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
My Lords, I apologise for the delay in starting; the previous debate overran. I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Oates, for initiating this debate and for his continued, powerful advocacy for a democratic Zimbabwe. It is for the people of Zimbabwe to determine their own future but continued violations of human rights, including impediments to free and fair elections, remain a significant barrier to their ability to determine that for themselves.
Unfortunately, state interference in elections, as well as broader violations of human rights, remain a significant barrier. The March elections last year were clearly neither free nor fair and formed part of a much wider undermining of democracy in recent years. In addition, civil society, including trade unions, is still routinely repressed and political arrests are still frequently reported.
We have heard the Private Voluntary Organisations Amendment Bill mentioned in this debate. I have raised it in previous debates and Oral Questions, and the Minister has responded. That Bill has now passed in the lower House. If it becomes law, it threatens to crack down on civil society in general and organisations that both expose human rights violations and hold the Government accountable.
When I last raised this in an Oral Question, the Minister expressed concern about its impact, acknowledging the risk to the delivery of development and humanitarian assistance. Of course, with the elections due in 2023, the Bill could be used to restrict the ability of civil society to operate, in a way that would be out of line with the Zimbabwe Government’s commitment to reform.
The Minister has said in previous debates that the Government continue to engage very widely, not only with civil society in Zimbabwe and through our overseas development assistance but also with neighbouring countries, including South Africa. Can he tell us what recent engagement has taken place with Zimbabwean civil society, including trade unions? I also stress the importance of talking to global trade union federations, which frequently offer support and assistance to Zimbabwe within the country. The UK Government have been right to implement asset freezes, arms embargos and travel bans on the Government; for the period that these remain necessary, it would be wrong to support readmission to the Commonwealth.
The Minister has said before that President Mnangagwa desires more engagement with the UK and that, in many respects, he shares that aspiration. However, he acknowledged that deeper re-engagement with the UK will require meaningful political and economic reform and respect for human rights and the rule of law, in line with the President’s own stated commitments when he took office. So, what is the latest assessment by the Minister and the FCDO of progress made? We have heard in this debate that it appears to be very little. Can the Minister update us on the implementation of these sanctions and any assessment of their effectiveness?
Finally, as noble Lords have mentioned, admission to the Commonwealth is a decision for all members, not just the UK, so it is important to hear from the Minister what discussions, if any, have been taking place with other national Governments in the Commonwealth on the question of Zimbabwe’s readmission.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park) (Con)
My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Oates, for tabling this debate and for his ongoing commitment to promoting human rights, democracy and prosperity in Zimbabwe as co-chair of the APPG. I also thank other noble Lords for their insightful contributions.
The United Kingdom would like nothing more than to see Zimbabwe rejoin the Commonwealth. As noble Lords are aware, that is a collective decision for all members to make if the Secretary-General makes a formal recommendation that Zimbabwe has met the criteria and is ready to be readmitted. The 1991 Harare Declaration and the 2012 Commonwealth charter were landmark moments that redefined the Commonwealth and cemented its place as a modern, forward-looking organisation. The core principles of freedom, democracy, peace and prosperity are as important now as they were then. They remain the basis for assessing any application to join or rejoin this family of nations.
The United Kingdom is committed to maintaining a constructive dialogue with the Government of Zimbabwe, including on the principles underpinning the Harare Declaration. The former Minister for Africa held frank discussions on many of these issues with Zimbabwean Foreign Minister Shava last summer. During his visit to Harare in November, Professor Luis Franceschi, the Commonwealth Secretariat’s Assistant Secretary-General, had a meeting, which has mentioned a couple of times in this debate, with a range of stakeholders from the Government, opposition parties, civil society groups and diplomatic missions. This included a meeting with our own ambassador to Zimbabwe, as well as a meeting with all Commonwealth ambassadors to Zimbabwe.
Discussion focused on the evidence of progress against the Harare Declaration principles and some areas of progress were noted, particularly on economic reforms. However, equally, concerns were raised about instances of political violence, the harassment and detention of opposition activists, and efforts by the Government to restrict the freedom of civil society to operate. I assure the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, that we, too, would like to see the Government of Zimbabwe meet their international and domestic obligations by respecting the rule of law, safeguarding human rights, and delivering genuine political and economic reform for all—obligations that are clearly articulated in the Harare Declaration and the Commonwealth charter.
All that as a package is the precondition of membership, whether new or renewed, of the Commonwealth. We will wait to see the Secretary-General’s assessment—we will see it but, as I understand, it is not a public document; I will get back to the noble Baroness on that if I am wrong. We will be able to see her views of the progress, or otherwise, against the Harare Declaration principles and her subsequent recommendation following the mission by the secretariat last November.
As the noble Lord, Lord Leong, said—in fact, it was a point made by a number of speakers—the general elections expected this year present the ideal opportunity for the Government of Zimbabwe to demonstrate progress against the principles of the charter; namely, respect for human rights and freedom for the political opposition, civil society and media to operate. The noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, made this point very clearly. She referred to some of the rumours of when submissions might be made. I would like to reiterate on behalf of the UK Government that we see the general election as the moment for the Zimbabwean Government to prove and to demonstrate their readiness to rejoin the Commonwealth. It seems to be the most obvious moment for that signal to be sent by the Government.
Of course, the UK does not support any particular candidate or political party in Zimbabwe. We will continue to engage with all parties across the political spectrum, as noble Lords would expect. It is for the people of Zimbabwe alone to choose their president and Members of Parliament. It is essential that this choice is exercised through peaceful, credible and inclusive elections in line with Zimbabwe’s own constitution. We will therefore continue to encourage the Government to implement the recommendations of the 2018 electoral observation missions ahead of the 2023 elections. Unfortunately, we note, as others have, that there has been only limited progress on most of the recommended reforms to date. Of particular importance are the independence of the electoral commission; an accessible voter registration process; publication of an accurate voter roll; the transparent use of state-owned resources; a transparent and accountable result-tallying process; and equal access to state-owned media for all participating political parties.
We will also continue to encourage the Government of Zimbabwe to allow space for the opposition and their supporters to—
Lord Hayward (Con)
My noble friend has made comments in relation to the upcoming general election. The noble Lord, Lord Leong, referred to the Commonwealth observers at the last election, of which I was one. I was party to the report that was prepared on that occasion. Given the positive comments that my noble friend made about the importance of the 2023 election, I ask that that message is given to all members of the Commonwealth so that they understand the judgment—which I think most of us would share—that no decision could be made before the general election and before observers’ reports are published.
Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)
I thank my noble friend for his intervention. There is no question in relation to our position on this. Our view, as I have just stated, is that the importance of the general election is hard to exaggerate in the context of the discussion that we are having now. That is well understood across the board.
As I say, we continue to encourage the Government to make space for opposition candidates and their supporters to campaign without fear of violence and for civil society organisations and journalists to operate without harassment, in line with the country’s own constitution.
As I said in the House last October, the UK has observed a trend of lengthy pre-trial detention of government critics in Zimbabwe. A number of examples have been cited already in this debate. While most of the opposition Members arrested in Nyatsime in June have now been granted bail, Members here have raised the specific case of Job Sikhala MP, and we are continuing to monitor his ongoing detention. In response to a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Oates, we of course remain concerned by the failure of the Government to address allegations of abduction and abuse of three opposition Members who he named—Joana Mamombe, Cecilia Chimbiri and Netsai Marova. We have raised our concerns with the Government and publicly called for an investigation into the allegations. We are, as I say, concerned by the trend of lengthy pre-trial detention of government critics and we regularly call for due legal process to be followed and for human rights—including those of prisoners—to be safeguarded.
Noble Lords will be very aware of the case of Makomborero Haruzivishe—I apologise for my appalling pronunciation—an opposition activist who I understand is here with us today. I welcome him to the House. As noble Lords will know, he spent 11 months detained without trial in Chikurubi, a maximum-security prison, and that his case is far from unique. I take this opportunity, not least because we have Washington here with us too, to echo the condolences to Moreblessing Ali’s family and friends, which were passed by our ambassador to Zimbabwe publicly. Our ambassador called for those behind that terrible crime to be brought to justice.
I also highlight our concern at the violent incidents around by-elections in Zimbabwe last autumn. We urge all political parties to refrain from violence and to adopt measured language, which will support peaceful campaigning. Any incidents of violence should be investigated in full.
Zimbabwe must allow space for civil society organisations to operate properly and fully in the run-up to the general election. The noble Lord, Lord Collins, mentioned the Private Voluntary Organisations Amendment Bill. Like him, our view is that if passed into law and implemented—which it has not yet been—it has the capacity to seriously undermine this principle and prevent civil society delivering critical development and humanitarian assistance across Zimbabwe.
The noble Lord, Lord Oates, raised how the UK will work with other Commonwealth nations on Zimbabwe’s application to re-join them. The UK, with our international partners, is committed to supporting Zimbabwe to make progress on reforms. We have deep and long-standing partnerships with many member states and we engage and consult widely on all issues of importance to the Commonwealth. For example, UK Ministers and officials speak very regularly to their South African counterparts, most notably at the recent South African state visit to the UK, on a broad range of issues, including Zimbabwe. I assure noble Lords that we will continue to engage constructively, openly and robustly with all relevant parties in the lead-up to this year’s elections.
The noble Lord, Lord Purvis, raised the issue of sanctions applied by the UK. As he said, our sanctions target five individuals—I think he said four—responsible for some of Zimbabwe’s worst human rights and corruption violations. I want to make it clear that those sanctions are not targeted at, and seek to avoid impact on, the wider economy and the people of Zimbabwe. They are not the cause of Zimbabwe’s economic problems. To lift the sanctions, the UK needs to see reasonable progress on political reforms and human rights.
My noble friend Lord Swire touched on our ODA, particularly pensions. The UK regularly underlines to the Government of Zimbabwe the importance of fulfilling their responsibilities to all those entitled to a Zimbabwe government pension, including former southern Rhodesian civil servants. The ambassador wrote to the Minister of Finance on 30 May 2022 on this issue, and the Government of Zimbabwe have assured us that they will resume payments when the economic situation allows. The Commonwealth veterans’ fund, which he mentioned, was in receipt of £430,000 last year, which I am told has provided direct support to 470 veterans.
We will continue to support the most vulnerable people in Zimbabwe through our broader aid programme. This financial year we provided £101 million, mostly focused on education and livelihoods, promoting health, standing up for human rights and supporting climate resilience. While we work constructively with government ministries on a range of those issues, none of this aid is channelled directly through the Government of Zimbabwe.
The UK wants to see Zimbabwe prosper for the benefit of all its people, including by rejoining the Commonwealth. We will continue to engage constructively with its Government wherever we can to help Zimbabwe achieve its ambitions, but meaningful reform is needed to achieve them. We sincerely hope that the Government of Zimbabwe seize the opportunities presented by the upcoming elections to demonstrate progress on meeting their commitments, by respecting the rule of law and safeguarding human rights. This would pave the way for Zimbabwe to be readmitted to the Commonwealth.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)
My Lords, that completes the business before the Grand Committee this afternoon.
House of Lords
Introduction: Baroness O’Grady of Upper Holloway
Oaths and Affirmations
Alcohol Duty Bands
(1 year, 3 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe
To ask His Majesty’s Government whether they have any plans to increase the top rate of the new alcohol duty bands, forecasted to take effect from August 2023.
The Parliamentary Secretary, HM Treasury (Baroness Penn) (Con)
We aim to keep alcohol duty rates under review during the yearly budget process and to balance the impact on businesses with public health objectives. In December we announced that the freeze to UK alcohol duty rates had been extended for six months, to 1 August 2023, providing businesses with certainty and aligning with the implementation date for our historic alcohol duty reforms. The Chancellor will reserve his decision on future duty rates for the Spring Budget 2023.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for her reply but she seems to have missed the Question; the Question is about the top band, and she made no mention at all of that. The reality is that a new system is coming in, which I generally welcome, that will actually yield less tax to the Government—which is a surprise, given that we cannot pay nurses enough but are not taking the taxes that we should be. We should be increasing taxes there, not reducing them, which is the case with the top band; in relative terms, it is going down. Would the Government please review this, and change it and increase it, so that alcohol such as vodka is taxed at a higher level than is presently proposed?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, the Answer that the Chancellor will reserve his decision on future duty rates applies to all bands. I take the noble Lord’s point, but the reforms that we announced in the alcohol duty bands are broadly cost-neutral, and they make an important move to taxing all alcohol by strength rather than the fragmented system that we had before. That is an approach that has public health at its heart, and I hope it will be welcomed.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, given that alcohol deaths have risen by over 27% in 2021 compared with 2019, and that in the under-50s alcohol is a leading risk factor for ill health and death, have the Government costed what these changes being delayed are incurring as costs to the nation in lost work, lost productivity and cost to the health service? Will all those costs be considered in the review that she has already spoken about in answer to the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, as I have said, in keeping alcohol duty rates under review we aim to balance the impact on businesses with public health objectives. The reforms we have made to alcohol duty rates are the biggest reforms that we have had in 140 years. It is right that businesses have the time that they need to adjust to those changes.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
Is my noble friend able to tell the House today what position the Government have taken on the public health aspect of reducing alcohol consumption between higher and variable rates of alcohol, depending on the strength of the alcohol, as opposed to minimum-unit pricing?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My noble friend is right that the Government’s preferred approach has been to reform alcohol duties and align them all based on the strength of alcohol. As I have said to other noble Lords, that is an approach that has public health at its heart.
Lord Rennard (LD)
My Lords, alcohol has become 72% more affordable than it was 35 years ago. Increasing alcohol duties in line with inflation, as was planned last October but cancelled last December, would bring in approximately £1.4 billion annually. Would this not help to pay for the costs to the NHS of alcohol-related harm, and for people such as the nurses who have to treat people with alcohol-related issues, including the many victims of alcohol-related crime?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, one of the big changes that we are making to alcohol duties is to ensure that higher-strength alcohol is taxed at a higher rate. This puts the points that the noble Lord makes at the heart of our approach. The normal process is to review alcohol duties on a yearly basis and take a decision in the round, and that will continue.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, what discussions have the Treasury and the UK Government had with the Scottish Government, who clearly have an interest in this in relation to two aspects—one being minimum-unit pricing, which has not had the desired effect that the Scottish Government expected, and the other being their consideration of implementing a tax on whisky producers in Scotland to raise money to cover some of the expenditure of the Scottish Government?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, the Government have regular dialogue with the Scottish Government—indeed, the Prime Minister is there today. I agree with the noble Lord that the minimum-unit pricing approach has not always had the desired effect. The UK Government’s position is to address this through the level of duties, and relating that to the strength of alcohol. That is the better approach, and one that we can take now that we have left the EU.
Lord Kamall (Con)
Can my noble friend the Minister tell us whether the Treasury, or indeed any other government department, has done any modelling on the effect of the new rates and whether they would lead or incentivise drinkers to drink lower-alcohol drinks and reduce their overall consumption of alcohol?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I am sure we have taken that into account in looking at this work, and that we work closely with the Department of Health and Social Care on it. Another aspect of the reforms we are bringing forward is to provide draught relief to allow pubs and other venues to be more competitive with off-licences and supermarkets selling alcohol.
Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)
My Lords, I am sympathetic to the Minister answering this Question: she is the victim of a bizarre system of government. Surely this is at least 50% a health issue. The decision-making should certainly rest within the Department of Health, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer should not be deciding what sin and health are about—he should be worried just about the Exchequer.
Baroness Penn (Con)
I reassure the noble Lord that if he looks at the consultation we did on the new duty rates, he will see that public health is at the heart of our approach. However, we need to balance public health objectives with, for example, the impact on businesses. For instance, Scotch whisky is an incredibly important industry in Scotland, and there are new breweries all across the country which are big economic success stories. We need to have a balance between those two approaches.
Lord Fox (LD)
My Lords, I am pleased that the Minister talked about business. Leaving aside the level of taxation—I have sympathy with my noble friend—this system is quite complicated. It is a sophisticated solution but it also makes it complicated for businesses to respond. So I ask that the Treasury, as well as looking at the level of taxation, looks at the number of different levels of taxation, because the more there are, the harder it is for small and medium-sized businesses to administer.
Baroness Penn (Con)
I appreciate the noble Lord’s point, but the reforms we have introduced simplify, for example, the number of different bands of duties that businesses pay. We have taken significant steps in that direction, and this Government always seek to simplify things for businesses where possible.
Lord Walney (CB)
Low-alcohol beers and spirits obviously have a lower duty, but the price to consumers is often comparative or even higher than that of other alcohols. What can the Government do to incentivise lower prices for alcohol-free products, which can have significant health benefits?
Baroness Penn (Con)
The noble Lord is right to point to the fact that, under these reforms, lower-alcohol products—regardless of the type of alcohol product they are—will have a lower duty. That is a significant incentive to people. I am not sure about the other drivers of the higher prices that he referred to; that would have to be looked at more carefully.
Lord Touhig (Lab)
My Lords, alcohol misuse is one of the prime causes of domestic violence of men against women. Surely increasing the duty should be part of the overall package of trying to reduce that kind of action; making alcohol more expensive might contribute to that reduction.
Baroness Penn (Con)
Through making higher-strength drinks subject to higher duty, we are making alcohol more expensive in that way.
Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)
My Lords, surely it is about the proportion of the cost. I am not clear that the noble Baroness has answered the Question. She has repeatedly said that this is to allow businesses time to adjust. I remember the days when the most eagerly awaited bit of any Budget Statement was the announcement of duties on alcohol. As I understand it, it was always then rushed through the House of Commons that day so that the increases could come in overnight. What is this period for businesses to adjust all about?
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, in addition to the annual level of the duties paid by businesses, we are introducing the biggest reform to alcohol duties in 140 years—for example, as I have said, by reducing the number of bands operating by linking very clearly the level of duty to the level of alcohol in a product. That is a significant reform, and one that businesses need time to adjust to. That is why we have aligned the introduction of the new duty rates with the new system.
Housing: Private Rented Sector
(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Lord Carrington
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the demand and supply of housing in the private rented sector in the implementation of their housing policy.
Lord Carrington (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interests in rural rental properties as set out in the register, and I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Baroness Scott of Bybrook) (Con)
Our priority is to ensure that everyone lives in a decent and secure home. The proportion of private rented sector households has remained relatively stable for nearly a decade, currently accounting for 19% of households. At present, demand for PRS properties is greater than the available supply due to a range of factors, and we continue to monitor the market. We will publish a full impact assessment, setting out the costs and benefits, of our planned private rented sector reforms.
Lord Carrington (CB)
I thank the Minister for her response. Clearly, the supply of houses for rent is an increasing problem. I want to focus on the methodology of energy performance certificates used by the Government for upgrading efficiency. By an early date yet to be confirmed, all rental properties must have an EPC rating of C, which is likely to be both very expensive and unachievable for many properties. EPCs were introduced in 2007 to measure the efficiency of a house based on average energy consumption. While there have been adjustments, the relevant standards still take little account of the age and character of the house, or the carbon embodied in it, so all houses are assessed on the same basis. Therefore, EPC remedies are often based on inappropriate standard assumptions. Please could the Minister tell us how and when this blunt tool will be replaced by a measurement that is fit for purpose?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My Lords, I do not agree that it is a blunt tool. We propose to apply to new tenancies a requirement for an EPC rating of C and raise the maximum spend that landlords are required to invest to £10,000 from April 2025, and to all tenancies by April 2028—the noble Lord is right. If we are going to meet our net-zero strategy, we have to commit even further to consulting on phasing in even higher minimum performance standards. That will take place through the social housing sector but also through the private rented sector.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, further to the noble Lord’s original Question, is there not an inevitable tension between the interests of the private landlord on the one hand, who wants access to his capital or property and is therefore interested in a short lease, and the interests of families and tenants on the other hand, for whom renting may now be the only tenure and who want a much longer lease? Should we not be moving far more quickly to the position that exists in most other countries, where good-quality rented accommodation is provided by financial institutions as a long-term investment, as they are more prepared to issue the long leases that tenants increasingly want?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My noble friend brings up an extremely important point. The Government have always welcomed new institutional investments in the private rented sector and will continue to do so. We have also made a number of interventions to support the build-to-rent sector, such as the build to rent fund and the private rented sector guarantee scheme. Build to rent boosts housing supply and diversifies the private rented sector, but it also increases quality and choice for renters in cities and towns across the country. I will take the noble Lord’s views back to the department, and we will look into this further.
Baroness Thornhill (LD)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her answer to the first part of the Question, but does she accept that part of the reduction in supply is due to some landlords choosing the more lucrative Airbnb lettings and platforms, and that the Government’s policy to restrict mortgage interest relief on buy-to-let mortgages has inadvertently contributed to this loss of homes by exempting those lettings from that relief? Will the Government look seriously at this and other tax issues to level the playing field in order to attract landlords back to much-needed longer secure tenancies?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
The noble Baroness brings up an important point. We know that this has become more important over the last year. We have committed as a Government to consult on the introduction of a use class for short-term lets; I think that is important. Subject to the outcome of that consultation, this will help local authorities to better control the increase of such uses where landlords seek to use existing homes for short lets, rather than using them for longer lets.
Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)
My Lords, given the ongoing cost of living crisis and the reliance of many people for survival purposes on food banks, what impact do the Government believe the lack of available homes to rent is having on the ability of councils and other providers to provide for the homeless?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My Lords, any shortfall in the number of permanent long-term homes available in the market will have a pressure on people looking for those homes and could put pressure on their household budgets, because if people are desperate for housing they will pay more than maybe they should have to. The Government are looking at all that. However, we have helped tenants and all people across this country. We have put in £37 billion of support for people who need it in 2022-23 to help us through this difficult time, and we will continue to look at making sure that we have as many houses of all types of tenure in our stock available for people.
Lord Bird (CB)
Is it possible to look at the tragedy of increased evictions that is happening now? Are the Government going to come up with a solution to these two opposites: the tenants who can no longer afford the increase in rent and the landlords who are stymied in a similar way? We need, and I recommend, a debate in the House about this problem.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
I am afraid that I have to answer the noble Lord that it is not up to me to agree to a debate, but I am sure that the Front Bench along from me has listened to what the noble Lord said. It would be an interesting debate.
Lord Naseby (Con)
My Lords, I recognise my noble friend’s sincerity in her initial Answer. Nevertheless, 95,000 families are living in temporary accommodation. In recent months, we have seen rent rises nationally of 17% and as high as 59% in some boroughs of London. Will my noble friend put some motion and activity behind a proper analysis so that we can produce an urgent way forward?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
The Government have made it clear that, within this Session, they will bring forward the private renters Bill, which will look at the issues that my noble friend raises, as well as many others. The Government have allocated £654 million in funding this year and next year on homelessness and people in temporary accommodation. Recently, because of those issues that we know are happening, we have topped that up in December by another £50 million. We are doing everything that we can in this difficult time to support these vulnerable people.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
My Lords, as a serving councillor, I deal with cases of homelessness every day. The number is increasing every day because of eviction from private tenancies and/or the affordability of those tenancies, and fewer landlords coming forward. With social housing waiting lists now at over 1 million due to decades of underinvestment in social housing and an annual loss of 24,000 social homes a year due to demolition and sales under the right to buy, what are the Government going to do to address the housing emergency?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My Lords, the Government are doing many things. When the renters reform Bill comes through—it was a Conservative Party manifesto commitment—it will look at these issues, particularly in the private rented sector. However, this is a much bigger issue across all sectors, as the noble Baroness said. We are doing an enormous amount, as I have said and am not repeating, and will continue to do so. Just to say, I think that an important thing that will come out in the renters reform Bill is that we will remove Section 21 evictions.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
My Lords, have the Government thought of supporting prefabricated buildings for the social sector?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
The Government have not considered that, although we may have to consider such measures for temporary accommodation as a result of pressures due particularly to immigration from Ukraine and Afghanistan. However, it is up to local authorities to find innovative responses to the pressures that they are under.
Residential Leaseholders
(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Lord Kennedy of Southwark
To ask His Majesty’s Government when they plan to introduce legislation to address issues faced by residential leaseholders.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper and declare my interest as a leaseholder.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Baroness Scott of Bybrook) (Con)
Ah, the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy—once again. The Government have been clear about our commitment to addressing the historic imbalance in the leaseholder system, as he knows. The Leaseholder Reform (Ground Rent) Act 2022 came into force in June last year. These changes to ground rent for future leases are just the beginning of our reforms. Further legislation will follow later in this Parliament. It is a complex long-term reform programme, and it is important that we get the detail right.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, I am aware and am grateful that the noble Baroness is committed to leasehold reform. I have no doubt about that. The Bill, when we get it, needs to: be ambitious by giving proper rights to leaseholders; enable them to purchase their freehold if they want to; make greater use of commonhold; or just get rid of the stupid, petty rules such as the colour of the curtains that one can hang in one’s own home or the outrageous rip-off charges levied against leaseholders, day in and day out. What assurance can she give the House that the Bill will be truly ambitious and transformative, not just a damp squib?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My Lords, the Government have already committed to: making it easier and cheaper for leaseholders to extend their lease or buy their freehold; banning new leasehold houses, so all new houses will be freehold from the onset rather than in exceptional circumstances; delivering a reformed commonhold system as an alternative to leasehold ownership for flats; and giving leaseholders more information about what their costs cover and ensuring that they are not subject to unjustified legal costs. I am sorry that the noble Lord could not find time to come to a meeting that I agreed to the last time I was at this Dispatch Box talking about the same issue. It was at that meeting that we discussed what noble Lords were expecting to see and how we could meet those expectations. However, as I say, we will bring forward further leasehold reforms later in the Parliament but I cannot say at this time exactly what date it will be.
Viscount Hanworth (Lab)
The Minister will be aware that the property companies that own freeholds are able to impose on leaseholders any legal costs that might arise from a leaseholder’s appeal to a tribunal in the face of the freeholder’s exorbitant service charges. When will this extraordinary legal anomaly be redressed?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
The Government believe that leaseholders should not be subject to unjustified legal costs and should be able to claim their own legal costs from their landlord. The Government are committed to taking action to address this as soon as possible.
Lord Bellingham (Con)
My Lords, the Leasehold Advisory Service does an excellent job, but is there an argument to have its remit extended to casework?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
That is an interesting remark that I will take back to officials to discuss further. I will come back to my noble friend.
Baroness Pinnock (LD)
My Lords, I want to pursue what the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, called rip-off charges, which the Government could take urgent action to address. I shall give the Minister an example. Fire doors are now to be inspected—rightly. Leaseholders are unable to make the arrangements for that inspection but freeholders or their agents do. One leaseholder contacted me to say that they are being charged £80 for their front door to be inspected each time—£320 a year. That is a rip-off service charge. What on earth are the Government going to do to address these rip-off service charges?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
I cannot comment on the individual case, but the law is already clear that service charges must be reasonable. That is set out in Section 19 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985. If leaseholders feel they are being ripped off, they can apply in First-tier Tribunals for determination on this. However, I agree that there is more to do. The Government are committed to ensuring that charges, particularly service charges and these extra charges, are transparent. There should be a clear route to challenge or redress if things go wrong.
The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford
My Lords, in light of the commitment made by the big six lenders to accept mortgage applications for flats with building safety issues from Monday 9 January, will the Minister confirm that the Government will monitor their lending decisions to ensure that this time their commitments will be fulfilled, so that this part of the housing market can be unfrozen?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
The right reverend Prelate brings up an interesting point. I do not know exactly what the Government will do, as the announcement was made only this week. However, I will find out exactly how we will monitor them and the process, and come back to her.
Baroness Andrews (Lab)
My Lords, I apologise to the right reverend Prelate. Can I press the Minister on the timetable? She said that she expects the Bill to be introduced before the end of this Parliament. Does she mean that it will be introduced before the election? It is not only disappointing that we have had delays but profoundly destabilising. For example, leaseholders no longer know whether it is safe to pursue enfranchisement or whether they should wait for the Bill. Another thing that has happened in recent years, with the extension of permitted development, is that there are blocks of flats with leaseholders held captive by freeholders who are pursuing upward extensions under permitted development, without the protection of law. These leaseholders do not even have protection in case they have to be decanted while building works are going on. It is a very serious situation and it is accelerating. I would like the Minister to advise on that point.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
As I have made clear a number of times at this Dispatch Box, these measures were in the manifesto in 2019. We have always said that we will bring forward a reform Bill in this Parliament and that is what we intend to do. We just have to wait and see; I am very sorry. I totally understand that this is causing some issues in the sector. That is why we will get the Bill through as soon as we possibly can, but it has been quite complex and we need to get it right.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, I welcome the commitment that my noble friend has just given to make it easier for leaseholders collectively to enfranchise, to make it easier for an individual leaseholder to extend the lease, and to move more towards a system of commonhold rather than leasehold. I understand that she cannot give a commitment about the timetable but, given that work on the Bill is clearly well advanced, can she consider publishing it in draft so that when it comes forward it can have a speedier passage?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
I would love to put the Bill out in draft, because I would love to stop these Questions coming every three months from the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy. We have committed as a Government to making enfranchisement easier and cheaper for leaseholders, and that is important. We have also committed to abolish marriage value cap ground rents in enfranchisement calculations and prescribe rates to be used. We have already made clear that this is what we will do. We just have to be patient until the Bill comes forward.
Lord Best (CB)
My Lords, back in 2018 the Government set up the regulation of property agents working group, which I had the honour of chairing. This came forward with proposals that managing agents for blocks of flats who look after leasehold properties should be properly regulated, to deal with a number of the issues that have been raised. Can I have the Minister’s assurance that this ingredient will form part of the new Bill?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
I have not seen the new Bill, so I cannot give that assurance. However, I am aware of the noble Lord’s review and I know that we are still considering it.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, this Question has been about the plight of leaseholders, and the previous one was about private tenants. There are also problems in social housing and for people paying their mortgage, or indeed being able to afford a mortgage in the first place. Do the Government not recognise that all the things the Minister has referred to are a piecemeal approach to this? We have a crisis in every different sector of tenure in the housing market. It is important that the Government do not rely on the smaller measures to which she has referred—and given no date for. We need a whole new approach to housing policy and a whole new relationship between the Government, local government, landlords and, particularly, the big house builders and developers, who seem to make more money from knocking down buildings than they do from increasing affordable supply.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
The Government are totally aware of the issues relating to all sectors of the housing industry in this country and those that affect tenants and home owners at the moment. We are dealing with this, but it has to be dealt with in this way; you cannot throw the whole thing up and look at it in one big piece. It has to be dealt with well and properly for the future, because a good, secure and decent home is what everybody deserves and is certainly something that is important for this Government.
Social Mobility Commission
(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Lord Watson of Invergowrie
To ask His Majesty’s Government whether they intend to review the skills and experience required for the role of Chair of the Social Mobility Commission, following the resignation of the previous chair.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Baroness Scott of Bybrook) (Con)
My Lords, leadership of the Social Mobility Commission requires a strong understanding of, and a demonstrated commitment to, the cause of social mobility, particularly in education and business. We sought a chair with excellent leadership and persuasive communication skills. Both Katharine Birbalsingh and the interim chair, Alun Francis, displayed these skills in abundance through their initial recruitment and their work at the commission in delivering a fresh approach to deep-rooted challenges. We have no plans to review the job specification for this role.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister is working overtime today. To ensure she is on the appropriate rate, I suggest she has a word with my new noble friend Lady O’Grady of Upper Holloway, whom I am very pleased to see in her place. I thank the Minister for her reply, but the resignation of Katharine Birbalsingh came after just 14 months and after a number of statements were made which demonstrated that she was ill equipped for the role. She was appointed in addition to her day job as a head teacher. The issues of social justice that need to be addressed are so pressing that I do not believe it is realistic to expect the person tasked with leading that work to do so in their spare time. Will the Government recognise those pressing issues and the increasing level of child poverty—which, incidentally, used to be in the title of the Social Mobility Commission—by refocusing, by renaming the body the social justice commission and by making its chair a full-time role?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My Lords, the Government have no plans to do that. Katharine made very clear why she left in her article in Schools Week. The Minister for Women and Equalities has been very clear about how grateful she is to Katharine for her time as chair and also to Alun Francis, her deputy, who has now taken over as interim chairman. The commission has done excellent work under Katharine’s chairmanship and Alun’s deputy chairmanship, and that work will go on, so we have no plans to change anything at the moment.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, as I have read it, the person who has resigned felt that they were doing more harm than good in the end. Can the Government make sure that they define exactly what they are supposed to do, and that the public know what that is, so that when the next person takes up this role on a permanent basis, we can all know what to expect and they can know what to deliver?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My Lords, it is very clear what the SMC should be doing. It is written down in its agreement with the Government. It has been delivering that, and it will continue to deliver that. I know that the commission met on 9 January under the deputy chairman, Alun Francis, and it is continuing to work and continuing with the priorities set previously by Katharine, Alun and the commission.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, I offer the Minister congratulations on answering three Questions out of the four, particularly since she has done so without any support from officials in the Box. I have never seen this before. In view of the debate that we are about to have on relations between Parliament and the Executive, does this indicate how the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities shows no real interest in the proceedings of this House?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My Lords, I assure noble Lords that I have been extremely well briefed—I hope—on this issue. This issue, interestingly enough, is not to do with DLUHC. It comes from the equalities grouping, which is the responsibility of the Cabinet Office. The reality is that when one is answering 10 or 12 questions in 10 minutes, one cannot get anything from the Box, so it is much better that the officials stay away and brief the Minister beforehand.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
My Lords, I start by congratulating the Minister on her stamina this morning. She deserves a cup of coffee after this. My noble friend Lord Watson mentioned child poverty, so I remind noble Lords that last year, the Social Mobility Commission reported that almost 700,000 more children were living in poverty than in 2012. Will the Government establish a new child poverty reduction unit in No. 10 to accompany the work of the commission?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
I am not aware of any plans to do that, but I will take the idea back. I have yet to meet my officials. I was officially put into this role only on Monday evening, so at my first meeting, I will certainly talk to officials about that and will talk further to the noble Baroness.
Lord Geddes (Con)
My Lords, does my noble friend consider it seemly that reference should be made to the most senior officer of a board as an inanimate object?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
I certainly would never want to be called a chair; I have always required people to call me a chairman. That is the name of it, but perhaps I am a little old-fashioned.
Baroness Hussein-Ece (LD)
My Lords, given that social mobility has been decreasing over several decades now, will the Minister define what the Social Mobility Commission and the new tsar should be doing to improve this? All the evidence shows that it is not working.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My Lords, it is working. The annual State of the Nation report from the Social Mobility Commission, published on 23 June, talks about the progress made towards improving social mobility in this country. Produced under the previous chairmanship of the commission, it sets out a new approach to social mobility. It introduces a new social mobility index, which provides a systematic way of measuring social mobility across the whole of the UK. Data will now be compiled annually and at longer intervals of five and 10 years. This is important because we need to show the trends and to be able to prove it, as at times we get conflicting evidence about what is happening to social mobility. Certainly, the number of children from deprived areas who are going to university is going up.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, the Minister will know that two months ago, the commission reported that schools were no longer agents of social mobility. She will also know that universities now are not always guaranteed agents of social mobility because of the high level of graduate unemployment or underemployment. Will she ensure that whoever becomes the head of this commission really understands that the curriculum in general schools today is not serving the purpose of social mobility for hundreds of thousands of students? At least 300,000 students are disadvantaged still.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
I thank my noble friend for that. I will certainly take that back. I am almost sure that anybody who will be chairing this commission or serving on it will have all that information in front of them and be looking at it in detail.
Lord Grocott (Lab)
In an answer to an earlier question, the Minister referred to the remit and the scope of the work of this body on social mobility. Is there not a glaring problem in this House, where there is a clear restriction on any kind of social mobility? I am referring to the 92 places that are reserved for hereditary Peers. Is there any progress at all towards greater social mobility among this sector, and if not, why not?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
I have no answer for the noble Lord on that one. The questions I am answering are on a completely different subject.
Lord Lexden (Con)
My Lords, as my noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking pointed out, the key to greater social mobility must lie in education reform. By a happy coincidence, this House is about to establish a Select Committee on that very subject.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
I agree with my noble friend that it has to start with education. That is why we had an extremely strong person in the chair at the time: her views on education were different, but they were extremely strong about the importance of education for children and for social mobility. I am pleased that we have a new Select Committee discussing this issue, and I hope that it will take forward those issues because they are important.
Windrush Lessons Learned Review: Implementation of Recommendations
(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Lord Coaker (Lab)
My Lords, is not the treatment of the Windrush generation one of the most shameful episodes in our post-war history? These people helped rebuild Britain, and their reward was that many were wrongly detained and threatened with deportation; 83 people were actually deported. Why have only 1,300 out of an estimated 15,000 been compensated so far? Why are the Government now going to implement only some of Wendy Williams’s recommendations, not all as originally promised? Can the Minister update us on the figure? Is it still eight out of 30? Have the recommendations for a migrants’ commissioner, and to extend the powers of the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, been dropped? We still have no anti-slavery commissioner appointed. Wendy Williams demanded cultural change, but on the 75th anniversary of the Windrush generation, we are still a long way from it. Would it not be the final betrayal of that generation if there were not the real change that Wendy Williams demanded?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Murray of Blidworth) (Con)
I agree with the noble Lord that the injustices of Windrush were an outrage. Clearly and unfortunately, it was Governments of all complexions who allowed that scandal to unfold. The noble Lord asked me whether the Windrush compensation scheme is failing. The Government—and I, as the supervising Minister for the Windrush compensation scheme—are very clear that we must compensate members of the Windrush generation and their families for the losses and impacts they suffered as a result of the scandal. We believe that we have made significant progress, having now offered a total of more than £59.58 million in compensation. As to the question about recommendations, the noble Lord knows that the Government will not comment on leaks, and I do not propose to do so today.
Baroness Benjamin (LD)
My Lords, this year there should be jubilant celebrations of the 75th anniversary of Windrush, a symbol of Caribbean people coming to Britain with good intentions. However, because of the Windrush scandal, one can be forgiven for feeling anxious, nervous and worried when we hear reports regarding government plans to go back on Wendy Williams’s recommendations. In my recent letter to the Prime Minister, I stated that this would be disrespectful and perceived as wicked, vindictive and heartless. This is a matter of national pride and we must be determined to right the wrongs, injustice and hurt. Compensation should be accelerated before more claimants die. Once again, therefore, will the Government categorically assure me, this House and the Caribbean community that these rumours are not true and that they intend to fulfil all their pledges?
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
As I observed to the noble Lord a moment ago, the Government do not comment on leaks, and I do not propose to do so now. On the separate question that the noble Baroness asked, I entirely agree that there should be a fantastic celebration of the 75th anniversary of Windrush, and the successes of the Windrush compensation scheme and the Windrush scheme in granting status are factors to feed into that great celebration. On the final aspect of her question—the speeding up of payments under the Windrush compensation scheme—I am glad to report that we have issued final decisions in more than 59% of the claims received and have concluded more than 43% of claims. In July 2021, we also published a redesigned primary claim form and refreshed casework guidance with the aim of reducing the time taken to process claims and improving people’s experiences of applying to the scheme. We are recruiting additional caseworkers, directing resources to maximise performance and refining processes so that cases can progress as quickly as possible. We have delivered on the promise to recruit and post at least 120 EO-level casework resources by the spring of 2022, and we will continue to recruit additional resources.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for outlining that next year we will celebrate the wonderful arrival 75 years ago of those who have given so much to this country, many of whom paid with their lives fighting for it. However, celebrations cost money. Can my noble friend outline what money the Government will allocate centrally and for communities to be able to celebrate this?
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
I do not have that information to hand; I will need to find that out and write to the noble Baroness.
Baroness Blackstone (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister’s Answer to my noble friend on the Front Bench on the meeting of claims for compensation was a bit complacent. Can he explain why the number of claims that were dealt with last year was much lower than in the previous year? There must be some reason for that. Can he also comment on the remarks made by Wendy Williams in her report on the delays to the training of officials dealing with the Windrush scandal? Why has this been delayed and what steps is he taking as the Minister responsible for dealing with this problem?
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
On the reduction, I hope the answer is demonstrated by the following statistics. Some 4,558 claims have been received by the Windrush compensation scheme, for which, as I said a moment ago, the total amount of compensation offered has been £59.58 million. There are 2,699 claims with final decisions—that is 59%—and 1,967 concluded claims: those are claims that received a final payment, a nil offer that has not been challenged in 60 days or rejected on eligibility, or claims that have been withdrawn. As regards the work in progress, there are 1,859 claims, and preliminary offers have been made in 666 of those. Only 522 claims are more than a year old.
Lord Cormack (Con)
My Lords, will my noble friend accept that we are getting rather fed up with the tardiness of the payment of compensation, whether it is to postmasters, those who had bad blood products or this very important group, the Windrush people? Will he therefore not be complacent about saying that there are 41% still to be dealt with but rather say that the 41% will be dealt with well before the end of this year?
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
It is certainly the department’s intention, and I thank my noble friend for that question. The department is making real efforts to reduce the work in progress and the time taken to consider claims, taking the steps I have already outlined by recruiting further caseworkers and accelerating the process. Indeed, we have a method of expediting claims, appropriating exceptional cases where it is necessary to consider a claim out of date order: for example, where the individual has a critical or life-shortening illness which means that there is a substantial risk that they would not receive the outcome of their claim if it were considered in date order.
The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford
My Lords, many of the recommendations in the Windrush Lessons Learned Review also have implications for how the UK should steer its current refugee and asylum policy: recommendation 9 concerning the creation of a migrants’ commissioner, recommendation 19 regarding direct contact with migrants and recommendation 25 requiring consideration of risks to vulnerable groups or individuals. What assurances can the Minister provide that there will not be a repeat of the mistakes made with the Windrush generation, this time with asylum seekers and refugees, and can he comment on any progress made on recommendation 9 and the appointment of a migrants’ commissioner?
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
I thank the right reverend Prelate for that question. As to the last point, I am afraid I cannot comment on the leaks in the Guardian, but on the first point, I can reassure the House that we are certainly very alive to the issues that the right reverend Prelate raises. The Windrush generation was rightly identified as British and had a right to be in this country. That remains separate and distinct from the enforcement policies on individuals who have no right to reside in the United Kingdom. It is only right that the Government do what they can to protect our borders and enforce the Immigration Rules. Successive Governments have done this, in line with public expectations. Wendy Williams’s Windrush Lessons Learned Review is not about being soft in our objective to protect the country or our borders. The Windrush scandal was about the appalling treatment of those who had a perfect right to be in this country. They were not here illegally. It is only right that the Government do what they can to protect our borders and enforce the Immigration Rules.
Lord Paddick (LD)
My Lords, as my noble friend Lady Benjamin said—her tremendous work in this area should be acknowledged in this House—the way in which the Windrush generation has been treated is disgraceful, with some dying before the wrongs they were subjected to could be corrected or compensated. Without commenting on leaks, does the Minister agree that a failure to implement all the recommendations of the independent Williams review would add insult to injury for the African-Caribbean community?
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
Tempting though it is to travel down that line of answer proffered by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, I am afraid that would amount to commenting on the leaks, and I do not propose to do so.
Democracy Denied (DPRRC Report)
(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Lord Blencathra
That this House takes note of the Report from the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee Democracy Denied? The urgent need to rebalance power between Parliament and the Executive (12th Report, Session 2021–22, HL Paper 106).
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, we are debating two unprecedented reports from the House of Lords Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee and the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. Never before have two committees acted in tandem to draw attention to a serious parliamentary problem. The number of noble Lords signed up to speak on a matter many would consider to be just a legal, technical, boring parliamentary issue is also unprecedented. The issues may be that, but when laws are passed without proper parliamentary scrutiny, they cease to be just technical, as they threaten the rights and freedoms of the individual. Both our reports express considerable alarm and criticise the increasing tendency of all Governments in recent years to adopt procedures that effectively bypass Parliament’s role in the legislative process.
Why are we reporting now? The Delegated Powers Committee and the Constitution Committee have drawn attention to the abuse of excessive delegated powers over many years. However, this time we did a comprehensive study and looked at these issues going back 90 years, and we found that the problems identified have been worsening over the last 20 years. The result of this trend has been an increase in the power of the Government at the expense of Parliament.
It is worth reminding the House and the Government that the committee members who drew up these two reports are not naive new colleagues. The combined parliamentary experience of our committee members is over 520 years, with some members having exceptionally long parliamentary careers. For example, the noble Lord, Lord Rowlands, entered the House of Commons in 1966, and the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, has 51 years’ experience of Parliament. That does not make us experts, of course, nor does it give us any moral authority over the Commons. It just means that some of us have seen these problems growing for a considerable time. Having reviewed the use of delegated powers over the last 90 years, we concluded that,
“a critical moment has been reached and it is now a matter of urgency that Parliament should … take stock, and consider how the balance of power can be re-set.”
Let us be clear that the reports and all our members accept that delegated legislation is absolutely essential; no democratic Government in the world can function without it. However, far too often primary legislation is just skeletal, with all the details filled in by secondary legislation, which may get little or no scrutiny at all. I shall let my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts set out the injustices caused by skeleton Bills.
Our Delegated Powers Committee report identified some other key issues and abuses. There is a completely inappropriate use of excessive Henry VIII powers. This, as your Lordships will know, is a 584 year-old device, which allowed the King to make and unmake any laws he liked by proclamation. That ancient power now rests with Ministers, who can use affirmative and negative resolutions to rewrite or abolish Acts of Parliament. Criticism of Henry VIII powers goes back to 1929 when the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Hewart, criticised them in his book, The New Despotism. If he thought that it was a bit despotic then, I think he would struggle to find language pejorative enough to describe today’s legislation.
We all agree that Henry VIII powers are necessary at times. However, after the European Union (Withdrawal) Act, where many powers were appropriate, we saw that departmental lawyers were tacking them on to tiddly little Bills. Their only justification was, “just in case”—but just in case of what? If some new emergency arises, both Houses can pass emergency primary legislation in a couple of days. We have all had examples of that. However, we have had examples of Ministers taking the power not just to amend a current Bill and other related, relevant Acts, but any Act of Parliament passed from 1066 onwards. That is utterly unacceptable; any Henry VIII power should always be very narrowly drawn and use the affirmative procedure.
The other worrying and increasing abuse we saw was legislative sub-delegation of power, or tertiary legislation. We see Ministers able to confer power on themselves and delegate it to some other body, which may include a power to amend or repeal an Act of Parliament. These bodies have, of course, impeccable credentials; they may be royal colleges or learned institutes, but they can make rules and regulations which determine the fate of individuals by setting entry standards, fees and procedures. We quote quite a few examples in our report. These laws can have a big impact on citizens, are legally enforceable and Parliament may never see them. We say that conferring legislative sub-delegation of power is potentially a more egregious erosion of democratic accountability than a simple delegation to a Minister to make secondary legislation. We say that any sub-delegation or tertiary legislation must be limited and specific and its exercise must be subject to parliamentary scrutiny, even if simply by laying it before both Houses. There must also be a statutory obligation to consult all those affected, and the delegated powers memorandum should set out the full extent of the power, why it is necessary and how it will be constrained.
We drew attention to disguised legislation. Noble Lords may ask how legislation can be disguised. It comes in various forms. First, there is guidance, which departments call advisory and say that it need not be approved by Parliament. The Department for Education is a serial offender. When I challenged it, for example, on the guidance on the new school uniform legislation, the response was that it traditionally never set out its guidance before Parliament, so why on earth should it start doing it now? No matter how extensive, new or radical the guidance, the arrogant attitude was that the department and its stakeholders knew best and that we in Parliament should keep our noses out of it.
That leads to another excuse for not consulting Parliament. Departments say that they have very wide consultation with professionals, experts and stakeholders who know the subject matter, and are much better qualified to comment on the legislation rather than ignorant parliamentarians. As Adam Smith said,
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
I suggest that the same can be said of experts and stakeholders, whose common interest may not be that of the ordinary person.
The other rapidly increasing trend has been guidance which one “must have regard to”. To all intents and purposes, this is treated like statute law by those who must have regard to it. Noble and learned Lords will rightly say that it is not legally mandatory. One can disregard it, provided that one has had regard to it in the first place, and then come up with impeccable, judicial review-proof reasons for disregarding it. However, in reality, 99% of people and organisations will treat it as mandatory, because that is the impression given in the guidance. It is in the spin of the government press releases which accompany the guidance, and people are simply afraid not to follow it. That is legislation in disguise.
The final bit of disguised legislation that we encountered was guidance or rules which were called lots of fancy names to hide the fact that they should have been statutory instruments. We came across instructions called “determinations”, “protocols”, “directions”, “arrangements” and even “public notices.” The last one was dear old Henry VIII’s Proclamation by the Crown 1539 Act in a new form. However, this time the proclamation of the new law by the Treasury would be published in the Times and the London Gazette.
Noble Lords may ask why all this matters. It is not just some esoteric parliamentary debating point. The way in which our laws are made have profound effects on everyone in the country. Delegated legislation is essential to run the country, but it should be open, transparent, debated and not disguised. The excuse that excessive delegated powers are needed because Parliament cannot move quickly enough has been proved false on many occasions, not least by Parliament’s reaction to Covid legislation. However, our committee did not stop at pointing out what was wrong. We attempted to provide solutions.
We said that we must challenge the culture of Whitehall. Making laws is a democratic process, not just a functional legal exercise for clever lawyers in the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel. We called for the Cabinet Office Guide to Making Legislation to be rewritten. This is the bible that legal drafters have to follow. The part on delegated legislation was not fit for purpose and deliberately directed young drafters to follow the easiest way to bash through secondary legislation without Parliament considering it.
We drafted a revised guide which puts parliamentary democracy at the heart of decision-making when drafting laws and we set out some principles, the first of which is that our democracy is founded on parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law and the accountability of the Executive to Parliament. We said that, where any provision in a Bill delegates legislative powers, departments must satisfy themselves that the delegation is framed in a way that takes into account, to the fullest extent possible, the principles of parliamentary democracy, especially Parliament’s ability to scrutinise it.
So that is what we said. What have the Government done since we reported? Well, to be fair, they have rewritten the Cabinet Office guidelines and incorporated some of what we said, but it is not really in the form of instructions to the 50 to 60 drafters in the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel. It says that the Delegated Powers Committee has said, “Here’s some revised guidance, and here’s a copy of it”—but I suggest that there is a subtext that they can take it or leave it. They do not have to follow it. I say that because there is a complete failure in the guidance to understand this House’s concern about delegated legislation and powers.
Section E of this 120-page guidance document, on Bill handling in the Lords, has the wonderful opening line:
“The House of Lords is usually the more difficult House to take legislation through”.
It then lists various spurious reasons for the Lords being difficult. This first of these is:
“The Lords minister and Whip taking the bill through the House is less likely to be familiar with the subject matter of the bill and will require additional briefing.”
We can all chuckle but, quite honestly, I find that offensive and plain wrong. It was my experience in the Commons, and I see it here in the Lords, that Lords Ministers and Opposition spokespersons are usually more able than their Commons counterparts. The Commons can have four or five Ministers in a department to cover the whole brief, but the Lords Ministers are usually on their own, possibly with a Whip helping out on a few amendments, and have to master the whole departmental brief.
So I ask my noble friend the Leader to please tell the Cabinet Office to rewrite this bit of the guide, and explain that the House of Lords is more difficult because we care about parliamentary scrutiny, about excessive powers being given to Ministers and others, about hidden laws, about Acts of Parliament being overturned at the stroke of a ministerial pen, and about skeleton Bills with the details filled in later outside Parliament. It is called parliamentary democracy and that is the only reason both our Houses exist. So the guidance is still not good enough. I accept that much of it has to be technical, but if the 50 or so legal drafters follow it as currently drafted, we will not see any change and abuses will continue.
Just before Christmas, the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, talking about the inappropriate delegated powers in the precision breeding Bill, said:
“It cannot be right for Parliament to abrogate the power. These Bills are drafted by parliamentary counsel. My conclusion from the debates we had earlier this year in January, and will have again next January on Government by Diktat, is that parliamentary counsel should be renamed ‘government counsel’. They are government employees located in the Treasury.”
Well, that is wrong: it is the Cabinet Office.
“They actually act against Parliament, because they constantly draft Bills, following instructions from Ministers, that remove powers from Parliament—not this House but Parliament—and give them to the Executive.”—[Official Report, 14/12/22; col. 713.]
The Office of the Parliamentary Counsel has a duty, in my opinion, not just to draft legislation which is clever and gives departments devious ways to change laws in future without coming to Parliament, but to draft laws with the maximum or appropriate level of parliamentary scrutiny, so that everything which affects the liberty, livelihood and freedoms of the individual is debated or has the chance to be debated—or even seen —by Parliament. That is what is required and nothing less.
The abuse of delegated power is in effect an abuse of Parliament and an abuse of democracy. Our reports will, we hope, be a prompt to strengthen Parliament in the coming years: not the Lords over the Commons, but the legislature over the Executive. We have identified the problem, produced the evidence and offered the solution. We call on the Government to rise to the challenge of delivering real parliamentary democracy. That will be good for the Government, good for Parliament and good for all the people of the United Kingdom. I beg to move.
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)
My Lords, my term of office as the chairman of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee comes to an end in a couple of weeks, but over the past three and a half years I have had the chance to see, at first hand, some of the ways that, almost imperceptibly, the Government have been gaining power at the expense of the two Houses of Parliament. It is that process that forms the background to our report, Government by Diktat.
We have just heard a very powerful speech from my noble friend Lord Blencathra, the immediate past chairman of the Delegated Powers Committee, our sister committee. I support entirely the points he made and the views he expressed. The DPRRC plays a vital role in drawing the attention of the House to the weaknesses in proposed legislation. However, once the legislation has gone through, its work, inevitably, is done. At that point, it is the SLSC that has to consider, examine and, where necessary, draw the House’s attention to the real-life consequences of what has been passed. The SLSC is supported by expert, informed and very hard-working staff, who will examine some 600 to 700 regulations every year. As my noble friend Lord Blencathra said, each of these binds on every citizen of the country as firmly as any primary legislation.
If I may use a cinematic analogy, the DPRRC takes a snapshot; the SLSC is a cine camera, recording the changes that go on week by week, month by month, as the regulations are brought forward. We have been concerned that our cine camera has seen yet more changes since the time we produced Government by Diktat. We have produced two subsequent reports: What Next? The Growing Imbalance between Parliament and the Executive, which we published in April last year, and then Losing Impact: Why the Government’s Impact Assessment System is Failing Parliament and the Public in October. While these two reports will come to be debated another day, they do provide important contextual background to the issues that concern us in Government by Diktat.
The concerns of the SLSC can be grouped into two primary pieces. The first is the growing misuse of secondary legislation. Secondary legislation should be restricted to what it says on the tin: issues of secondary importance. But, increasingly, this is not the case. My noble friend referred to the long-running saga of Henry VIII powers, but recent years have seen increasing use of what have become known as framework or skeleton Bills—or, perhaps more accurately, framework or skeleton clauses in Bills. As we pointed out in our report, these skeleton clauses are so devoid of content that they leave the real, practical application of the law to a ministerial pen or to regulation.
Now, again as my noble friend said, there are understandable reasons why regulation has to be used in various places. Particularly in the area of technology, the rate of change is faster than the rather stately pace of primary legislation can encompass. Regulation has to fill the gap. That is understandable and entirely reasonable. Less attractive is the impression that the intellectual heavy lifting required to think the policy right through has too often been avoided in favour of essentially making it up as you go along. Even more worrying is the possibility that Ministers do not even wish to have detail in primary legislation, because of the embarrassment if it proves that the wrong choice has been made: much easier to reset the policy direction by using secondary legislation.
Nobody in your Lordships’ House could reasonably argue that secondary legislation is as effectively scrutinised as primary. In part, this is a question of time—witness the number of regulations we have—but, much more importantly, it is a question of process. Secondary legislation is unamendable: it can be passed or rejected but it cannot be amended. For this reason, neither House has proved keen to press the button marked “reject”—and, on the very rare occasions where your Lordships’ House has pressed the button, we have had almost immediately the constitutional equivalent of full-scale nuclear war.
As issues coming through secondary legislation become more and more fundamental, I fear that the existing scrutiny procedures are proving less than adequate for the increasing weight placed on them. That is the summary of the SLSC’s worry about the big picture, but at the same time there are some disturbing short-term trends about the way the Government are increasingly casual about providing the information required under existing statutory provisions which is necessary to enable the House to scrutinise in sufficient detail and hold the Government to account.
There are two major areas. The first is impact assessments. I shall give the House some indication of what this means. Every regulation that has an impact of more than £5 million is supposed to have an assessment tabled at the same time as the regulation is tabled. I shall cite a practical example to give a bit of colour. The House will recall the controversy around the Government’s decision to require the compulsory vaccination of care home staff in the latter part of the pandemic. The wisdom or otherwise of that policy is nothing to do with the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, but the decisions that lie behind it are, and they are of such importance for the Committee to draw them to the attention of the House. The two essential issues were how many care home staff were likely to resign as a result of being forced to be vaccinated, either because they had religious views about it or, in the case of women, because they had worries about their fertility, and the long-term issue of the knock-on effects for the social care system and hence for the health service. When the regulations were laid on 20 June there was no impact assessment. We asked the Minister to attend our meeting on 13 July. He did, and we explained to him our concerns about the lack of an impact assessment. He agreed that there should be one and undertook to publish it. He did, on 9 November, four months later. In the event, by that point the policy was done and dusted.
The second area that we are very concerned about is that there is a statutory requirement for every regulation to be subject to a post-implementation review. In evidence to our committee, Christopher Carr of the Better Regulation Executive said that now only between 25% and 40% of regulations are so subject. Post-implementation reviews reveal what happened when hope and expectation met reality, and they surely have to be an important part of improving government performance and holding the Government to account.
Finally, and importantly, there appears to be absolutely no process for sanctioning Governments where their performance falls below what is statutorily required. Not only is this treating Parliament with disdain, but it is undermining confidence in the process of government more widely. As my noble friend Lord Blencathra said, providing opportunity for wider public scrutiny and challenge leads to not only better legislation but better accepted legislation.
So what needs to be done? It is no good just moaning on. There are two things the Government can do. First, they need to stop justifying the present procedures by claiming that this House has to approve all regulations. Technically that is true, but when the alternative is constitutional nuclear warfare, it is hardly a fair and open-minded decision. The Government should be more honest about this when they come to discuss these processes. Thy should also cease to claim that changing scrutiny legislation procedures would result in the whole work of government being gummed up. That is not right. Many aspects of the present procedure work perfectly adequately. What is needed is some form of triaging process to sort the sheep from the goats, the very important from the less important and the unimportant. About two-thirds of regulations that the SLSC examines are entirely technical. They are concerned with changing processes, upping fees or fines to reflect inflation and so on. There is no real concern as far as that goes.
Secondly, for the bulk of the remaining regulations, there needs to be a proper grip on process, the weakness of which I have talked about, so supporting documents and regulations are tabled in a timely manner and only in the most exceptional circumstances are regulations rushed through. That would have a sufficiently uplifting and effective result on this section to justify continuing with what we have at present.
Thirdly, for that small number of skeleton clauses, a new procedure needs to be developed. How might this work? I quote from the DPRRC guidance to Parliament:
“Skeleton legislation should only be used in the most exceptional circumstances. Where the government decides that such exceptional circumstances apply, the delegated powers memorandum should make an explicit declaration (“a skeleton legislation declaration”) that the bill is a skeleton bill or clauses within a Bill are skeleton causes.”
That should trigger a new scrutiny procedure to be agreed by the two Houses of Parliament, a process in which the House of Commons must play the leading role. As my noble friend said, this is not a Lords versus Commons issue and the Government must not be allowed to get away with that. This is about the legislature, the two Houses of Parliament and their powers vis-à-vis the Executive, the Government. For that new procedure to be effective, I have little doubt that there will need to be a power to amend.
We read frequently of a decline in confidence in our system of government to deliver effective, thought-through solutions. We are discussing today ways in which the system has been performing less well than it should. Within a few weeks, your Lordships’ House will begin proceedings on the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, by any standards the grandfather of skeleton Bills and Henry VIII powers. If I judge matters aright, there is a mood in your Lordships’ House to see whether this Bill can provide a focus point to discuss the various suggestions for improvement in scrutiny that have been made. I very much hope that His Majesty’s loyal Opposition and my noble friend the Leader of the House on behalf of the Government will be able to respond constructively to these concerns.
Baroness Andrews (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great privilege to take part in this debate. It gives me an opportunity to pay tribute to the outstanding leadership of the noble Lords, Lord Blencathra and Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, in bringing forward these reports. I also pay tribute to the clerks who deal with the scrutiny committees and have done tremendous service over the years, and I mention Christine Salmon Percival in this context. I am very much looking forward to hearing the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Prentis of Leeds.
I should say that, although I do not know where I fit into the 500 years’ scope, I have had the privilege of serving twice on the DPRRC and the SLSC. It has been a privilege, and a grim experience of watching the erosion of parliamentary control over a number of years. It is not as if this House has been colluding in this process. We had the Strathclyde report and the way the House and the committees responded to it. We have had the work of the Constitution Committee on delegated legislation, and now the Hansard Society has taken up the cudgels on behalf of rebalancing the power of Parliament. I declare an interest as a member of that advisory committee, as is my noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton, who cannot be with us.
These reports strike a very different note. They take the long view in both directions. They look at the evidence and recommend a profound shift in the always precarious relationship between Ministers and Parliament which we have witnessed. They make demands for change from the Government that go far beyond the usual admonitions that they should know better and act differently. The DPRRC has been adamant that there must be no less than a return to the first principle that legislation must be explicitly founded on and reflective of the principles of parliamentary democracy, not political expediency.
These reports are fluent in the language of the barricades. We have never heard before the language of diktat, of denial of democracy, or such a stark warning to Parliament itself of what we are facing. That presents us as parliamentarians with a real challenge. A reset is long overdue. As it is, our role in this House is largely to pull the Government back from the brink, but it has become increasingly difficult to do that. There are skeleton Bills, where no analysis or interrogation of impact is possible; policy-making is banished from the face of the primary legislation; outcomes are buried in delegated legislation; and Henry VIII powers are a routine convenience defended on spurious grounds with frivolous explanations. Added to that, as my noble friend—and I will call him my noble friend—has explained, disguised regulation has emerged, with ingenious devices, ingeniously defended. Directions and guidance are used as a proxy for legislation, and Parliament is an exasperated but essentially impotent onlooker. If Parliament cannot understand, interrogate or challenge perverse consequences, how can we protect people and communities from bad laws?
It is therefore all the more disappointing that the Government have accepted the easy stuff—14 recommendations, but none that change the culture or challenge Ministers. This attitude of “take it or leave it” has been well explained by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra. Guidance is not going to enable or empower the junior civil servant to stand up to a Minister who wants to do something quickly and does not want the bother of parliamentary interference. Since that response a year ago, not only has nothing changed but things have got worse this year. We have had the chaos of the Schools Bill; the summary powers set out in the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill; the extraordinary powers under the Health and Social Care Bill; the landgrab of the levelling up Bill; and the extraordinary powers in the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, to which we have already had reference, and all that that implies.
What is to be done if Parliament is to retain credit and purpose? I do not think Government will choose to do anything, other than perhaps to be aware of the danger of precedence. We have to take the initiative in this House as parliamentarians, and we are assisted in that in two ways. First, this is not a party-political issue; it affects both Houses, and it has arrested the attention of people outside this House who are concerned about the growing impotence of Parliament. The Hansard Society has made an excellent start in exploring how explicit principles for delegated legislation could be established, possibly by a new statutory instrument Act, for better processes to be created. We heard some of that—and that would inevitably, in my view, involve new procedures or avenues to involve the Government in thinking again. These might include stronger safeguards around legitimate claims of urgency and new joint processes for both Houses.
Parliament is in trouble. We need to be courageous and recognise the urgency of the situation we face.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, this is an extremely important debate and, as the Government by Diktat report says, we are talking about
“the principles of parliamentary democracy, namely parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law and the accountability of government to Parliament”.
The report says:
“In recent years, the balance of power between Parliament and government has shifted significantly towards the government, a trend that has been accentuated by Brexit and the pandemic.”
I recall the noble Lord, Lord True, in his previous position, declaring that Boris Johnson was accountable as Prime Minister to the British people rather than to Parliament, as ratified by both the 2019 election and the Brexit referendum—popular democracy against the alleged elitism of parliamentary democracy. I hope that, now we are on our second Conservative Prime Minister who has not been immediately ratified by the British people, the Leader of the House, with his customary flexibility, will now return to arguing that it is parliamentary democracy that supports a Prime Minister and a Government, rather than popular democracy as such.
I am worried about the extent to which a number of current Ministers have preferred a sort of permanent campaign to recognising that the hard business of government is worrying about detail and difficult choices, and that the devil is very often in the detail. We have talked about the problem of skeleton Bills. The DPRRC report says
“the principal aspects of policy should be on the face of a bill and only its detailed implementation left to delegated legislation”.
Some of us have been dealing with the Procurement Bill in recent weeks. The beginning of Part 2 is headed “Principles and Objectives”, and it states:
“A Minister of the Crown may publish a statement setting out the Government’s strategic priorities in relation to procurement … Before publishing the national procurement policy statement, a Minister of the Crown must … carry out such consultation as the Minister considers appropriate”.
That is as good a definition of a skeleton Bill as one could find.
The National Security Bill, with which we are currently dealing in Committee, has an entire part—Part 3—introduced in Committee in the Commons without pre-legislative scrutiny or very much detail at all on how it is to be implemented. The Minister in last night’s debate assured me that one needs to implement the possibility of guarding against threats to Britain’s national interest as strongly as against the Netherlands, China, Iran and Russia. I think it requires a little further scrutiny than it has so far had. We have heard from others already about what we expect with the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill.
I am concerned, as I think many of us are, about the declining quality of legislation coming into this House. The proper legislative process should start where necessary, with complicated Bills, with pre-legislative scrutiny, a Green Paper, consultation with stakeholders and early publication of draft secondary legislation and guidance. That has not happened with too many Bills currently before the House. There should then be post-passage scrutiny of secondary legislation, carefully undertaken as it goes through—and, if necessary, that draft secondary legislation should be sent back. We have to grapple with that one.
The likelihood of a change of Government in less than two years’ time should surely concentrate the Government’s attention on proper parliamentary government and the need for effective opposition in challenging Government as they go forward. Perhaps we can expect again cries of electoral dictatorship from the Conservatives as soon as they are in opposition. It is the role of this House to work to ensure that legislation is workable and easy to understand. I was struck in Committee last night by the ranks on the Cross Benches who knew a great deal more about national security and the intelligence services saying they did not understand parts of the legislation as currently framed. Legislation has to be clear and, as it goes through, command public consent, sufficient consent to last beyond the next change of Government. That is the role of this House as a revising Chamber, and that is what we should defend.
Baroness Fookes (Con)
My Lords, I think it is fairly safe to say that the term “delegated legislation” will never make the headlines in the popular press or cause stirs of excitement on social media. But the irony is that this can have such an impact on the individual citizen. We could see that during the Covid-19 regulations, which had such an impact on individual people.
I first became aware of the shortcomings of the system when I became a member of the Delegated Powers Committee, and subsequently its chairman. I congratulate my immediate successor on bringing forth this excellent and powerful report, most powerfully presented by my noble friend. I hope it will really become a turning point in this endless worry about the extension of government powers at the expense of Parliament.
My noble friend made many points and, in a short speech, I will make reference to only two. The first is the shortcoming, as I see it, of inappropriate wide powers in regulations. Departments will often say that they will interpret them in X or Y way, but that does not mean that the powers are not there when they have long gone and may be interpreted quite differently. They seem to have a touching faith in their immortality, which has no basis in fact.
I will give one example of something being used differently. Let us go back to 2015 and the infamous tax credits amendment regulations, which had powers to alter financial arrangements. I am sure they were intended to deal with issues such as the erosion of inflation on the values, but instead they were used to cut money out as a cost-saving exercise. In my view, that was a change of policy that required and demanded primary legislation. We all know what became of that and the furore that existed, but my point is clear: such regulations can be used in quite different ways by different Administrations.
I will also touch briefly on guidance, which my noble friend dealt with very clearly. One of my worries, in addition to it being disguised legislation, is that it has different meanings in different Acts of Parliament, which means that it is extremely difficult to give it a general meaning that is accepted. That makes for unclear legislation, which in itself is totally wrong.
What are we to do about this? Unfortunately, we are in the hands of the Government of the day as to how seriously they take these matters. My hope is that my noble friend will take on board seriously the various matters that have already been mentioned and the more that no doubt will be mentioned in this wide-ranging debate. I would like to feel that certain measures could be taken immediately.
First, let us deal with the Guide to Making Legislation. We have already seen the faults in that. As a former schoolteacher, I would like to put a stroke through it and say, “Not good enough—start again”. And start again with the useful points made in the report, which sets forth the principles before dealing with the actual issues. The other point is that, at that early level, where we are dealing with particular matters, we should see that ill-considered Bills are not let out of the Cabinet committee that is supposed to oversee their readiness. Too often that does not seem to be the case, and it certainly needs help. What is more, I believe that where regulations are going to be important, they should be ready in draft at the outset so that they can be considered by the various committees of the House when the occasion demands.
I turn briefly to statutory instruments, and thank my noble friend for his introduction. At the moment we have a system that is, in my vulgar parlance, “swallow it whole or spit it out”. I believe there should be a third way of dealing with this, by asking the Government to allow a House that is unhappy with a statutory instrument the chance to think again. I see that my time is up, so I will resume my seat.
Lord Janvrin (CB)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, and I am glad she was not my teacher. I declare an interest as a current member of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee and a former member of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. I too pay tribute to the staff of these two committees, who provide incredible support, week in, week out.
These two hard-hitting reports highlight the continuing and growing misuse of secondary legislation through unnecessary Henry VIII powers, skeleton Bills, and disguised and tertiary legislation. Together, they express real disquiet about what is going on. This is not surprising. As the titles of the two reports suggest, the concern about secondary legislation scrutiny goes to the very heart of the balance of power between Parliament and the Executive.
This is of major constitutional significance and, as we have heard, it has real, practical consequences. Effective scrutiny makes better law, but secondary legislation is not subject to effective scrutiny because, to be effective, scrutiny ultimately entails an ability to amend or at least to think again. This lack of effective scrutiny is the essence of the problem addressed by these two reports.
Of course, it is easy to see why nothing gets done. Parliamentary time is in short supply, the wider constitutional agenda is pretty full, and secondary legislation is seen as something for constitutional technicians. But above all, turkeys do not vote for Christmas, and Ministers are not going to fall over themselves to limit their own powers.
Let me try to remind the Minister why he might urge his colleagues to take a longer view. First, the current situation is a muddle and inherently unstable. Few understand the present complicated range of scrutiny processes and procedures, and the present all-or-nothing approach rests on a potentially fragile understanding, challenged in the past, that the Lords does not vote down secondary legislation. Secondly, the problem will not go away. Brexit and Covid have highlighted the problem, while the temptation to produce more and more contentious Bills seems insatiable. There is wide and growing concern, and not just in this Chamber. Thirdly, and most importantly, the issue is above all about public trust in our democratic system. As others in this Chamber so effectively remind us, we do well to recall the importance through history of the balance of power between Parliament and the Executive. We only have to look across the Atlantic to remind ourselves of the apparent fragility of even the strong democratic systems in a world of populism and social media.
What should the Government do? The very minimum would be to look again at the suggestions in these two excellent reports to make the existing procedures work more effectively. The government responses were disappointing and, in my view, short-sighted. I ask the Minister to spell out in detail why skeleton Bill declarations, a scrutiny reserve or more rigorous avoidance of disguised and tertiary legislation should not be pursued.
Beyond this, I urge the Government to review the whole question of how best to scrutinise secondary legislation, including the power to amend or think again. I suggest using as a starting point the current Hansard Society review, which is about to issue its preliminary findings. With his long experience of constitutional matters, the Minister is well placed to take a lead on this, perhaps by setting up a Joint Committee of the Lords and the Commons to consider a new secondary legislation Bill. Effective Commons engagement is crucial, despite the Strathclyde review on the balance of power between Parliament and the Executive—and not Lords versus Commons, as has already been pointed out.
This is a fundamental constitutional issue, with practical consequences for every citizen in the land. The present system is a mess and crying out for reform. It is surely time to act.
The Lord Bishop of St Albans
My Lords, as has already been noted by other speakers in this debate, delegated legislation is indeed a necessary part of the process, but I echo the concerns about the increasing use of skeleton legislation, Henry VIII powers, disguised legislation and tertiary legislation. I support these two excellent reports that look at how we might limit the use of delegated legislation and address the culture that is now taking it for granted. Both committees highlighted very valid concern about the transfer of power from Parliament, with clear democratic oversight and public scrutiny, to instead ruling by Executive edict.
The past few years have been turbulent times, although probably if anybody looked back over any decade in the life of this nation they would see that there have always been turbulent things happening. Therefore, I guess it is easy to understand why the Executive may need to respond in unusual and challenging circumstances with delegated authority. However, it is absolutely crucial that this is done sparingly and in a transparent manner. The Government’s response to the pandemic is the classic example of this. Of course, there are times when a national emergency will demand that we fast-track legislation, or grant broad delegated powers, but those should be exceptional and rare cases. The Government must always recognise the importance and value of parliamentary scrutiny. What is concerning, as is brilliantly highlighted in these reports, is that the Government’s widening use of delegated legislation is not limited to emergencies but is now being used routinely.
We were promised by this Government that we would “take back control” by putting power back into the hands of the British people through Brexit, but it looks as though the opposite is in fact happening. The DPRRC report has described Brexit-related Bills as some of the “starkest examples” of disguised legislation. A year ago, the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, who is speaking later in the debate, summed it up perfectly when he said:
“The real losers are our citizens.”—[Official Report, 6/1/22; col. 780.]
It is for them that we are standing here today, to appropriately scrutinise the laws that affect their daily lives. To take this away from them is to do all of us a great disservice.
His Majesty’s Government would be advised to think very carefully about the use of skeleton Bills, Henry VIII powers and so on, as they will have no grounds for complaining if a future Government of another political persuasion use the very same powers. If this becomes the norm, any Government will take it for granted that they can ignore scrutiny by Parliament. As a minimum, we need policies that have the support of both Houses and all parties and clear principles on what needs primary legislation and what can, in exceptional circumstances, be dealt with by delegated legislation. We also need to agree on more effective ways for Parliament to scrutinise things such as statutory instruments.
Parliamentary scrutiny is one of the core constitutional functions, and the Government need to have a willingness to be scrutinised, particularly on any matter relating to the rights of the individual: their privacy, security and right to speak or assemble. So, from these Benches, I reiterate our support for the recommendations of these reports and some of the interesting material that is now being produced by the Hansard Society—which we will need to look at when we have, I hope, more time and leisure—and express my grave concerns about the shifting balance of power from Parliament to the Executive.
Lord Rowlands (Lab)
My Lords, it was my very good fortune to have served for four years, under the noble Lord’s chairmanship, on the Delegated Powers Committee. It is currently my good fortune to be serving on the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson. As the noble Lord reminded me, I have been here rather a long time; I have seen some dozen Prime Ministers come and go. Throughout that period, the one thing has driven me—and I think it has driven all Members of this House and the other—is the profound belief that parliamentary legislative scrutiny is vital to the whole issue of parliamentary democracy. It is an essential, integral cornerstone of our constitution.
The Delegated Powers Committee report is a very fine one. First, it is rooted in detailed research, and for that we must pay tribute to the staff who advised us. It is a very finely researched report. Secondly, it all draws upon something like two decades of experience that the Delegated Powers Committee has. I recommend that Members of the House look at Appendix 3 of the report, which lists more than 30 Bills that the committee has reported upon, drawing attention to what it considers to be inappropriate delegated legislation. The findings and recommendations of this report are rooted in the experience we have had, over nearly two decades, in scrutinising delegated legislation. Therefore, the findings of report are, in my opinion, irrefutable.
There has been a growing and dangerous development: the increasing use of delegated powers legislation, such as skeleton Bills; Henry VIII powers; the new devices the report describes in detail; mandatory guidance, which is a quasi-form of legislation; and, of course, most obnoxious of all, tertiary legislation. The House might remind itself what tertiary legislation allows a Minister to do. It allows a Minister to give power to unelected bodies, such as a quango, to amend or repeal an Act of Parliament—after all the efforts both Houses make, power can be granted to an unelected body to repeal or amend. That cannot be justified in any sense.
Unfortunately, I think the quality of this report was not met by the initial response of Ministers in their letter of 2 January last year. The letter was signed by the then Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House, the right honourable Jacob Rees-Mogg. Unfortunately, in the very first line of this letter he thanks the committee for its letter dated 23 November 2021 and copy of the SLSC’s report entitled Democracy Denied? He got the wrong committee: it was the Delegated Powers Committee that submitted this report, not the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. That shows some of the character of the response we had and it seemed hopelessly inadequate.
I hope now, with a new Front Bench and a new set of Ministers, that we will have a much better and much more reasoned approach to the issues, and these very useful and not excessive recommendations. They are practical, useful recommendations that will allow this House and the other House to fulfil their fundamental role of scrutinising legislation. As we say in pages 4 and 5 of our report, this is not an “esoteric constitutional” issue but:
“The way our laws are made can have a profound effect upon the lives of millions of citizens … parliamentary scrutiny is a cornerstone of parliamentary democracy … As our historic account of delegated legislation shows, there have been times when the government of the day have been impatient of parliamentary legislative constraints. … But Parliament rightly demands patience in fulfilling its most important role—the making of our laws”,
because that is in fundamental to the whole nature of our parliamentary democracy.
I invite the Minister, when he replies, to take a new look. I hope he will come to the Dispatch Box with a better response than we received a year ago from the previous Lord President. I ask my own Front Bench to endorse, in the strongest possible way, the powerful recommendations in the Delegated Powers Committee’s report.
Lord Prentis of Leeds (Lab) (Maiden Speech)
My Lords, it is an honour to speak in this important debate. I thank noble Lords from across the House for having been so welcoming to me over the last few weeks. I especially thank my noble friend Lady McIntosh of Hudnall, who is sitting next to me; she is not my mentor but probably my carer. I also thank my noble friend Lady Wheeler, of Blackfriars, and my noble friend Lord Lennie, of Longsands, for introducing me to this House. We go back such a long way, and I thank them for their friendship, support and wise counsel. I also thank the doorkeepers, the police and all of the staff, who have been so professional and patient with me; they are public servants at their very best.
Like many Peers before me, I am proud to hail from the city of Leeds, or, to be more precise, from the streets of inner-city Leeds, a close-knit working-class community, with neighbours living from day to day, working hard but still struggling—yet kind, warm, considerate and putting their families first. Apart from a few political scandals, now recorded for posterity by Netflix, they have a grudging healthy respect for our democratic institutions.
At that time, there was an education system centred on the grammar school. I was one of the fortunate few: I passed my 11-plus. I spent eight years at a grammar school, followed by a degree in history from London University and a master’s in industrial relations at Warwick, and my future was set. In weeks, I was with the public service union NALGO, which, in the 1990s, merged with NUPE and COHSE to create a new, progressive and democratic union, UNISON, with over 1.3 million public service workers and over 1 million women, so many of whom are low-paid, working part-time and without a voice. I have been part of that union for over 45 years, and it has been an honour and privilege to serve its members as their elected general secretary for the past 20 years, and to be their voice, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, with Governments of every political persuasion, from Margaret Thatcher to new Labour and the Governments of more recent Prime Ministers—far too many to mention. I think of those public service workers today, as we take part in this debate. They are the very people whom we applauded during the pandemic.
Obviously, I stand in awe of the overwhelming parliamentary experience of the eminent noble Lords who produced the two reports before us today; I can only add weight to their call to rebalance our Westminster Parliament. But I come at this from a different perspective because, until only a few weeks ago, I was on the outside, looking in. Like many others, I have seen the growing public distrust of our parliamentary systems, not only in the devolved nations but across the UK. The reasons are complex, but we ignore at our peril the extent to which a democratic deficit can call into question the institution itself.
I accept that worry about the increasing use of SIs is not discussed in hospital wards or council canteens. It will not be discussed in the supermarket, in the pub or around the kitchen table, especially while more people are once again struggling. So why does it matter? It matters because the growing trend of Ministers avoiding parliamentary scrutiny calls into question trust and confidence in the whole institution. It matters because, from my long experience on the Court of the Bank of England and other public bodies, I know that confidence in the economy is inseparably intertwined with confidence in our democratic traditions. It matters because skeleton legislation really could lead to government by diktat, with little place for scrutiny, oversight and improvement, which are the very hallmarks of this House. It matters because it affects our reputation across the globe, as the beacon of democracy. I know this all too well, as president of Public Services International, the recognised world body representing public service workers.
Our reputation is waning. The issues raised in these reports are important, and they speak to a possible deeper malaise in, and distrust of, our political system. Our democratic institutions and our processes matter, which is why I support the recommendations in both reports. I look forward to playing my part in taking those recommendations forward.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the maiden speech of my noble friend, who has been involved in the trade union movement all of his working life, as he said. He has had significant achievements within that career. I first knew of him when he was working on the merger, which he talked about, of very different public sector unions: NUPE, COHSE and NALGO. He subsequently became the general secretary of the merged union, UNISON. I know how difficult weaving together those different cultures, traditions and interests was and still is. To have maintained the confidence of those members for 20 years, as general secretary, is no mean feat. He championed the cause of those working across the public sector, but he never forgot the particular challenge facing low-paid women, ensuring training and support for career progression for very many of them. As general secretary, he oversaw several successful equal pay claims, which have been transformative for all women, whatever workforce they are in. So I am delighted that he has joined these Benches.
My noble friend could not have arrived at a more propitious moment. The future of public services absolutely is dependent on their workforce, and no one is better placed than he to understand the elements of a well-functioning, motivated and, yes, productive workforce. We would all do well to listen to what he has to say and to work with him to deliver those public services from their current crisis into what the public have the right to expect. His outstanding speech today gives us some idea of what we can expect and what we should be working on.
I come to the subject of this debate. I thank the noble Lords, Lord Hodgson and Lord Blencathra, for two outstanding reports, which were published at a particularly challenging time for democracy. They and other members are right that much of this will often be described as boring, technical and so on. However, these reports show just how wrong we are when that is what we think about these committees. They go to the heart of the rationale for much of Parliament’s work, and they are searing in their critique of the creeping imbalance between Parliament and the Executives, and the dangers of that.
I am not a member of either committee, so I hope I am allowed to stretch a bit further. The problem is exacerbated because the reports were published at a time when it seemed almost fashionable to question the institutions that traditionally hold up democracy. These institutions are part of the proper balance of power, holding the Executive to account. Of course, prime among those is Parliament, but we in this House lost good Ministers, who had responsibility for how the rule of law was exercised through the criminal justice system, because of their concerns around all of this. Parliament was prorogued because the Executive felt that they could not get their own way, and civil society—another important institution for holding the Executive to account—has too often been criticised for speaking truth to power.
We have seen in other countries how democratically elected leaders have questioned opposition and the very process of elections. That means that we have to recognise the fragility of democracy. We have a responsibility not just to defend parliamentary democracy but to strengthen it in this country.
Having listened to the previous speeches, I am reluctant to blame civil servants, parliamentary counsel, clerks and whoever else works with us when we are in government for all this, because at the end of the day it is politicians’ responsibility. We are responsible and we must be accountable. I remember that, when I first became Chief Whip, the principal private secretary said to me, “I work for you 51% of the time, and I work for the other parties 49% of the time”, reminding me that, in a parliamentary democracy, opposition and different views are important, and we must reflect them.
I wanted to make two other points, but my time has come to an end. We must find ways to strengthen pre-legislative and post-legislative scrutiny, and this House is particularly well placed to do that. I hope we can think about changing how we do things here with the Government to improve post-legislative, pre-legislative and legislative scrutiny. We owe that to the public we seek to serve. Unless we take that very seriously, parliamentary democracy will continue to be under threat.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, I have a simple question to add to this excellent debate: are we set up, as a Parliament of two Houses, to achieve increased parliamentary scrutiny of the ever-swelling activities and plans of the modern Executive? We all want to see that and are all striving to find ways to do so, as the noble Baroness has just reminded us.
In putting that question forward, I will use not my own words but those of my noble friend Lord Hill of Oareford, a former Leader of the House. On Tuesday, he asked
“does a session in front of the Treasury Select Committee amount to proper accountability? Is the TSC properly set up and resourced to provide proper scrutiny? Clearly, the answer to both questions is no.”—[Official Report, 10/1/23; col. 1346.]
My answer is also no. In fact, I extend that to most of our hard-working departmental committees, all working under present limitations as they are. If we want proper evaluation of the stream of statutory instruments, many of which are highly technical, we must recognise that that stream is bound to increase as regulation, the powers of regulators and things such as complex trade agreements become ever more fast-changing and require more rapid responses.
In the 1970s, some of us took the decision that Parliament, as it then operated, could no longer call the Government to account effectively or really examine their swelling powers—that was 50 years ago. After a prolonged debate and some experiment, the Select Committee system for each department that we have today was set up and the old, weak Estimates Committee system was swept away. That innovation, agreed by all sides in Parliament and fully supported by the Executive, of which I then happened to be a part, has done extremely well over 40 years and helped shed new light on—and, in some cases, sharply limited—the expanding executive activity and acquisition of powers which is going on all the time and worries us so much. However, in the digital age of far greater executive power and control which has come about since then—everything shifting and evolving ever faster—the parliamentary system of scrutiny, of both legislation and executive programmes, clearly needs further strengthening in many ways. My belief is that, to match that greater spread and depth of complexity, we need a far stronger committee system in both Houses.
The Hansard Society rightly questions whether our clumsy and antique system of negative and affirmative procedures—we have all lived through endless examples of those—really work any more. Do they have any teeth? My instinct is they do not. The Hansard Society also wants a sifting committee to decide which SIs should really be scrutinised in depth. I can see what it is thinking, but that really misses the point: the sheer complexity of government and the need to move ever faster to keep up, especially on the regulatory and trade fronts, requires much more specialised focus to sift those instruments effectively than anything that can be provided by one single committee.
Trade agreements are living and changing processes; they cannot be fixed arrangements nowadays. We need all departmental committees to have the resources and powers to go in depth into those matters because, in the modern conditions of the digital age, that is what is necessary. To plunge deeply and effectively into the executive powers being sought, establishing whether they should have proper scrutiny and of what kind, requires the sort of intense questioning from many sides that only a very well-resourced committee with real powers and good relations with the media and public can deliver. Our committees are underresourced for the modern age and underpowered, compared with the committees of any other Parliaments.
In my last few seconds, I add the reflection that the first power needed is one which most committees in most other free Parliaments in most other countries have: some control over the legislative agenda. To the best of my knowledge, we at Westminster, supposedly the mother of Parliaments, are almost the only Parliament in which the legislative agenda and programme is left almost entirely under strong executive control. That too should change.
Lord Lisvane (CB)
My Lords, looking at these two excellent reports, I must confess to a feeling of helplessness. The phenomenon which the two committees analyse so tellingly is a familiar one and was most effectively criticised in the splendidly excoriating contributions of the chairmen of the two committees earlier in the debate. I declare that I am a former member of the Delegated Powers Committee and am about to come to the end of my term on the SLSC.
For many years now, the boundary between primary and secondary legislation has been moving steadily upwards, with matters of policy and principle, as has been said by many noble Lords, being increasingly included in secondary legislation, with commensurately low levels of parliamentary scrutiny. There are attendant risks: just look at what happened with the tax credits SI, which was an entirely self-inflicted wound. At the same time, the powers which Parliament is asked to grant Ministers to exercise, with little scrutiny, grow ever more extensive. We have the baneful Henry VIII powers, on which the noble and learned Lord the Convenor has waged unremitting war for some time but, I hope he will not mind my saying, without inflicting significant casualties. Those are bad enough, but when Ministers are given the power to amend not only any statute passed at any time but even the statute resulting from the very Bill under consideration, one must ask what value is to be placed on the legislative process as a whole.
Distinct from Henry VIII powers are the sweeping powers given to Ministers for barely specified purposes. As the reports point out, this means that, when the enabling legislation is passed, our fellow citizens may have little idea of what the law affecting them may eventually look like. I am extremely grateful to the right reverend Prelate for his reference to that earlier in the debate.
It is common ground that your Lordships’ House leads the way in the exacting process of scrutinising secondary legislation, and I am sure that I am not alone in finding it ironic that this House, so often the subject of naive proposals for reform, is so far ahead of the elected House in seeking to protect the interests of citizens in this way.
This afternoon, our focus is on secondary legislation, but I fear that this is symbolic of a deeper malaise in the legislative process as a whole. A previous Prime Minister used to describe proposals as “oven-ready”, but what we have to deal with is the half-baked. Even allowing for the chaotic uncertainties of the last couple of years, this is not acceptable.
Take the development of policy, for example. What happened—and this was well mentioned earlier—to the idea of Green Papers, followed by White Papers, followed by legislation? The former Leader of the House of Commons rather gave the game away in his letter of 24 January to the chairmen of the two committees, in which he said that
“there will invariably be times when greater flexibility may be needed when legislating, for example as part of an emerging policy response.”
No; legislate when you have agreed the policy, not before. Do not rely on delegated powers to rewrite—or write—the bits of the Bill that could not be settled before introduction. Do not try to solve business management problems by bolting together proposals which should be separate Bills. The Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill is a current and indeed fairly dreadful example of the species. Try and plan for more Bills in draft—they will save you trouble in the long run and, incidentally, they can be a sensible way of settling on appropriate delegated powers.
On secondary legislation, it is frustrating that the Government could, if they wished, change things fundamentally as a matter of good practice. But, at the moment, we seem to be told that this is the way that things are done, rather than the more important question being answered of whether it is the way that things should be done.
I commend the work of the Hansard Society and declare to your Lordships that I am a member of its advisory panel. I hope that, when it reports, the Government will approach its recommendations in a positive and collaborative spirit.
Let us not deceive ourselves: delegated legislation is a real problem area, but it is not the only one. The legislative process as a whole needs a fundamental overhaul, but that would take a lot more than my five minutes—which I have already exceeded.
Lord Goddard of Stockport (LD)
My Lords, I have the unenviable task of following the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, who is probably one of the most knowledgeable Peers in this House on procedure. It is always a pleasure, and with trepidation I will attempt to do so.
I joined this House in November 2014, and in 2015 I was appointed to my first committee, the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. After three years, I moved to the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, and next week, after a further three years, I will have my final meeting. With some trepidation, I wonder what my noble friend Lord Newby has in store for me next.
I say from the beginning that this is not a fight between this House and the other place. The crux of the debate today should be around the relationship between the Executive and Parliament. The pendulum swings one way and swings the other way, and it would seem from the flavour of the debate, and clearly from the reports, that the pendulum has swung predominantly towards the Executive. I am not saying that we do not need secondary legislation—in some circumstances it is necessary—but Parliament has at least a right to understand what powers are being delegated and for what purpose. Too many times the Executive ask for Henry VIII powers and skeleton Bills, usually in the “national interest” or a general emergency.
I remember a Zoom meeting that our Delegated Powers Committee had with Jacob Rees-Mogg during the pandemic. He was at home in his study, with tapestries and oak beams. It looked a bit like a grade 2 listed—the building, not Jacob Rees-Mogg. He was extremely supportive of this House and its scrutiny process. He said in correspondence following that meeting that skeleton Bills
“should not be used as a tool to cover for imperfect policy development”.
Perhaps the committees should ask for another meeting with Jacob Rees-Mogg to refresh their memories.
There is a Bill in the other place, on its way to this House—the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill. Let me say at the outset that this is nothing to do with Brexit. This is about Parliament understanding what powers the Executive will be seeking to achieve through secondary legislation. That Bill is riddled; it is a walking skeleton coming this way. The principle and reasons for any delegated powers should be at the front and centre of the Bill. As they say up north, it should say on the tin what is in the tin. If you buy a tin of peas and open it and it is full of carrots, I think you would feel cheated.
The other problem is that, once delegated powers are agreed, it is very difficult to remove them. Once the Bill is enacted, Ministers can act with impunity—rightfully so when they enact the Bill; that is their business. But the Bill should be right before it is enacted.
When that Bill comes to this House, I will be gone from any committee that will consider it, but I am certain, following six years sitting on legislation committees, that delegated powers will be writ large throughout it. We must remember that, once given up, these powers cannot be reversed easily. They are precious and protect our freedoms, and the Executive must understand that Parliament is ultimately sovereign and will seek to protect those freedoms at all costs.
Viscount Eccles (Con)
My Lords, this is our second shot at these excellent reports; we had a go almost exactly a year ago. It seems to me that our analysis of what flows from the extensive work that has been done has sharpened up. I find it quite difficult to know what to say after the speech from the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, with which I agreed 100%. Indeed, just before him, my noble friend Lord Howell also referred—and it is a good title—to the study of the legislative agenda. I think that that is where we have to be.
This is a very good prelude, but secondary legislation comes attached to and after primary legislation, and at the moment it is quite difficult to see how we will make much progress as the boundaries between primary and secondary legislation have, in my view, completely gone. They simply do not exist in the way that we understood them to exist.
When I think of the two Motions, I am not so sure about the Delegated Powers one, because it uses the word “power”. To me, that is not the right subject. The right subject is housekeeping. Are our Government and our Parliament conducting the housekeeping of our nation’s affairs in a proper manner? How much real power do they have to direct that housekeeping? I think it is better to think about it so there is not a great deal.
I want to make a point about the report from what I used to call the Merits Committee when I was on it. It refers to the efforts and the explanation of the efforts that the draftsmen have put into a piece of legislation and says that if, at the end of those efforts, the policy is not clear, the Bill must be “premature”. I would go further. There is always a possibility that the Bill was not necessary in the first place. What was the motive for putting it forward? Recently, the freedom of speech in universities Bill would be a good example of that.
When it comes to thinking about, for example, framework Bills and what the Merits Committee has said about the possibility that the legislation is not necessary, that is the end of the Environment Act. It is a catalogue of regulations and targets. As far as I can see, there is absolutely no way of evaluating how that Act is performing, because you will always get an answer back saying, “Well, as you know, most of it is to be done tomorrow and we’ll tell you in due process time”.
We have to then give one minute’s thought to the position of the Government. I think they might say, “We are having a very difficult time meeting democratic expectations if we are to be re-elected”. There are difficulties: climate change, biodiversity loss, freedom of speech issues, trans issues, mental health problems among teenagers, gambling addiction. Does any of us really think that we know how we would draft primary legislation to deal with this? Do we even think that, in all cases, primary legislation would be the relevant way of trying to cope with some of these issues?
I have one last thing to say. Please do not blame the parliamentary draftsmen. I think that if we were working with them, we would make exactly the same comments as we make about the staff of our own committees. I suspect that we are out of our depth, and that we need to find a way back to competent housekeeping.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
My Lords, although he is no longer here, I would like to congratulate my noble friend Lord Prentis of Leeds on his maiden speech. He is going to be a powerful addition to this House, not least on behalf of the low-paid workers who he has represented so well over the last decades. I would like also to congratulate the two chairs who introduced this debate. I agreed with 98% of what the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, said in his excellent speech—it is a very rare thing for me to agree with the noble Lord but I did agree with him. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, on his excellent speech. I served briefly under his chairmanship of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, and it was admirable.
The issues being raised today are fundamental. In simple terms, they go to the question of whether we live in an “elective dictatorship”, as the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, claimed fifty years ago, or in a parliamentary democracy where Parliament is truly sovereign. The issues are as important as that, and they are increasingly urgent and compelling.
On Tuesday, we debated the Second Reading of the Financial Services and Markets Bill. Unfortunately, I was not able to speak in that debate, but the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, made the very good point that the Bill itself does not give us any indication of the fundamental policy changes that are going to be made as a result of it. It empowers those changes to be made but it does not tell us what they are going to be. This is fundamental. It is about whether we avert another 2008 banking crisis; how we regulate so that the work of the City, which in many respects is excellent, works for the growth of the whole economy; and many other fundamental questions. But many of these will be decided by the delegated legislation which the Bill empowers, not by the terms of the Bill itself.
Other noble Lords have mentioned the Bill coming forward on the repeal of retained EU law. It takes sweeping powers that will affect a wide range of subjects: the environment, the rural economy, social rights, consumer protection—all these things are potentially going to be revised by delegated legislation.
How do we deal with this? First, I would like to see Bills examined by specialist committees set up by this House, where we would have the power to call expert witnesses and propose amendments to delegated legislation. Secondly, I would like us to examine the convention in this House that we do not vote against delegated legislation. It seems to me that we have to have a mechanism whereby we can propose amendments to regulations. If the Government reject them ultimately, the House will obviously give way to the views of the Commons, but we ought to have the ability to do that.
When I suggested this to some of my colleagues, I was told by a very distinguished former Chief Whip of this House that it would threaten the viability of the next Labour Government—we can all guess who that was. I think he is wrong for two reasons. First, we need to fundamentally improve the way we make policy in this country. There needs to be more consultation and cross-party consensus. We need legislation that is actually going to last and make fundamental change. Secondly, if we are serious about the role of this House as a revising Chamber, how can we say that we are not going to concern ourselves with these crucial policy questions which are now going to be decided by delegated legislation?
I hope that the Government and the usual channels will consider these questions urgently. There are difficult trade-offs to be made, but we cannot allow the status quo to continue to exist.
Baroness Prashar (CB)
My Lords, I express my profound gratitude to the noble Lords, Lord Blencathra and Lord Hodgson, and their respective committees for producing these two very important reports; they have done us a great service. I was so heartened by these reports that I was moved to speak today to support the excellent work they have done. I probably will not say anything new as so many points have already been made, but they are worth repeating or emphasising.
These reports, as we have heard, raise fundamental constitutional issues about our parliamentary democracy, the relationship between the Executive and Parliament, and the urgency of resetting the balance between Parliament and the Executive. They remind us that we are a parliamentary democracy and not a populist democracy. The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee issued a stark warning that the balance of power between Parliament and Government has for some time been shifting away from Parliament, a trend accelerated by Brexit and Covid; it recommends that the balance be reset and not just restored to how it was before these exceptional recent events.
Both the committees were so concerned that they recommended regular House of Lords debates and monitoring, which I hope will happen. The gravity of their disquiet is palpable in these reports but, despite that, the Government’s response has been disappointing. Although some of the recommendations have been accepted, the Government’s response, I regret, did not illustrate much appreciation of the fundamental issues raised or the urgency of resetting the balance. That was so much the case that, in their subsequent reports, both committees stated that the examination of Bills introduced after their initial reports were published reinforced their findings.
I hope that the well thought-through recommendations of these reports will not be ignored or watered down, and that the work done by the Hansard Society with the involvement of Members of this House will also be taken seriously. I strongly agree with the recommendation that, in resetting this balance, what needs to be reinforced by the Government is that primary legislation and powers conferred by it should be drafted on the basis of the principles of parliamentary democracy, and that the threshold between primary and delegated legislation should be founded on the principal aspects of policy which should be on the face of the Bill, and only its detailed implementation left to delegation.
There are three further comments which I would like to make: the first is about Henry VIII powers. While I agree with points made by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, it is worth repeating the point made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, in his excellent lecture in 2016:
“Save in a national emergency, only statute can repeal, suspend, amend or dispense with statute.”
The second issue is about the culture of Whitehall, which is not just the “Whitehall culture”; it is also about the leadership provided by political leaders. Parliament is seen as an irritant, a constraint which delays or obstructs business; the “getting business done” mentality, and seeing due democratic process as a nuisance, encourages inappropriate use of delegated powers. Guidance and manuals are important, but equally important is the understanding and appreciation of the fundamental principles of parliamentary democracy, which I fear is lacking.
As the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, said, parliamentary scrutiny matters. The making of laws affects citizens—their rights, their well-being, and their liberties. Our democracy is fraying at the edges, constant vigilance is necessary, and we have to safeguard every component of our uncodified constitution to ensure that there is no erosion or weakening of our democracy. We pride in promoting and teaching other countries about parliamentary democracy. If we behave in questionable ways it undermines our moral authority and international influence, which needless to say has much wider implications. Creating a culture where the fundamentals of parliamentary democracy are important is crucial.
My final point is about pre-legislative scrutiny, which I strongly support; I was pleased to see it highlighted in these reports. Although it is not mentioned in these reports, we should do more post-legislative scrutiny work too. In 2006 the Law Commission produced an excellent report on the subject and the then Government introduced post-legislative scrutiny. This House is ideally equipped for this work. I was pleased to be a member of a recent post-legislative scrutiny Select Committee which examined the Children and Families Act 2014 and highlighted areas where lessons could be learned; that experience has convinced me even more of how significant this area of work is.
I look forward to a positive and constructive response from the Minister.
Lord Norton of Louth (Con)
My Lords, I too welcome both excellent reports. My starting point is that good law is a public good, most law emanates from the Executive, and Parliament’s role is to ensure that the legislation that they bring forward is justified and as well drafted as it can be. We need therefore to have in place the means to scrutinise and influence legislation, be it primary or secondary; the need to ensure secondary legislation is scrutinised effectively is well made in the reports before us.
We have the means of scrutiny but we do not follow through in influencing the Executive. That is the problem, and I argue that there are two reasons for it. One is well identified in the reports before us—it is the attitude of the Executive—and the other is to be found in this House. On the first, as the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee makes abundantly clear, the culture of the Executive is to see the delegation of legislative powers as a matter of political expediency. Ministers and officials have got so used to the convenience of employing delegated legislation that they not only neglect the fundamental principles detailed in the committee’s report but exhibit at times a rather lazy attitude to drafting. It is part and parcel of a wider attitude to Parliament, one borne in part of ignorance of Parliament.
The government response commits to the inclusion in the Guide to Making Legislation of the principles adumbrated in the committee’s report in order
“to remind departments, both ministers and officials and also the PBL Committee, of the constitutional principles underlying the relationship between Parliament and the executive.”
But why do they need reminding of something that should be ingrained as part of their culture? What is in the Government’s response is not so much a concession as an admission of a failure to comply with the provisions of Section 3(6) of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. In replying, could my noble friend the Leader of the House explain what other steps are being taken to ensure compliance with this statutory duty?
I turn to the second part of my thesis: namely, that part of the reason lies with this House. The committees produce valuable reports, but they are toothless if the House itself is not prepared to act. There is little point giving a committee the power to bark if the House is not prepared to bite. As the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, said in Tuesday’s Second Reading debate on the Financial Services and Markets Bill, Parliament’s reluctance to reject SIs makes such power “purely nominal”. When an SI comes before the House, we debate it but then agree to it. A regret Motion may be passed, but that constitutes an expression of opinion—one that, as far as I am aware, is invariably ignored.
A Motion to reject an SI is deemed a fatal Motion. It benefits the Executive to use such language; it is misleading. Rejecting an SI is not akin to rejecting on Second Reading a Bill that comes from the Commons. Voting down a Bill kills it for the rest of the Session; voting down an SI kills it until the next day. The Government can simply re-lay it with the odd word changed. If we were to keep rejecting it, that might be a different matter, but simply voting down an SI when first laid is akin not to rejecting a Bill but to passing an amendment and inviting the Commons to think again. Rejecting an SI is to invite the Government to think again, which they can do and, if necessary, submit a fresh SI, accepting the points made by the House. Despite what some have claimed, there is no convention that we do not reject SIs. The House has asserted its right to reject SIs and on rare occasions has done so.
We will be effective in our work in respect of delegated legislation only if we have the political will to act. We have the power. We owe it to the two committees that have reported to be willing to exercise it.
Viscount Stansgate (Lab)
My Lords, I wish I could say that it is a pleasure to take part in this debate. In a way, because of the nature of the subject and where we are, it is not—but it is a very necessary debate. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, who has great expertise in this area. The House owes a great deal to him and to many others with knowledge far greater than mine. I congratulate the two chairs of the committees concerned on the way in which they produced the reports and introduced them. I also congratulate my noble friend Lord Prentis of Leeds, who is not in his place, on his excellent maiden speech. I am sure he will play a very big part in the life of this House. His analysis of the loss of public trust in institutions is very pertinent.
When I reflected on the number of names down to speak in this debate, I found myself in agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, who said earlier that it was a surprise—I took it as an encouragement. Today’s debate is just another example of the underlying issue of how we are governed. I personally think that this is the real importance of today’s debate, and the real importance of the subject. I am one of those who takes the view that the way in which we are governed is not good enough, and the content of these two reports well illustrates some of the problems. The more Members who take an interest in this the better, because something is going wrong. The balance of power between the Executive and the legislature has for some time been changing, to the detriment of the legislature—both this House and another place. The two reports help to explain how.
Both reports are excellent. I commend the Members, clerks and staff for producing them. I am tempted to say that these are also two excellent examples of titles of reports. When I first saw them laid out in the Royal Gallery over a year ago, I thought here are two committee reports that pull no punches. I am sorry that it has taken quite so long for us to debate them. However, that is a refrain that I have often heard in the short time in which I have been here.
The reports paint a picture of the erosion of parliamentary supremacy. Their analysis is broadly correct. When I ask myself how we have arrived at this situation, the answer is over quite a long period. I do not blame this particular Government, as much as some other noble Lords might, for the situation that we are in today, because all Governments are tempted by the easier life that they can have if their legislative objectives can be met by minimising the parliamentary scrutiny that would normally accompany and apply to Bills.
Our basic legislative process has the great merit of being able to change things. In the debate about secondary and tertiary legislation, part of the problem we face is that this House and Parliament as a whole do not have the ability to change anything. In the pressure cooker that is building up, something has to give.
I sometimes ask myself whether I am the only Member who sits here and thinks that the only way in which this or any other Government are going to pay any attention to this House regarding a statutory instrument is by voting it down. That would make people sit up and take notice. The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, referred to it as nuclear war, and I can understand why he said that. It would be a great shock to the system. I am fully aware that this is one of the issues in which the interests of both Front Benches are greater and have more in common than those of the Front and Back Benches of each side of the House. One day, the Members opposite who I gaze at are going to be sitting on these Benches, and my colleagues will be sitting on those Benches. We all know that a future Government of a different kind will not want to feel that this House votes down an SI. That is all very obvious, but we must counter the insidious shift in the balance of power between the Executive and the legislature.
Looking back, we see that ever since the English civil war Parliament has been trying to gain, and has gained, powers from the monarch, resulting in the constitutional monarchy that we have today. But that is not the end of the story—far from it. Powers once exercised by the monarch are, in effect, exercised by the Prime Minister, and the balance of power has shifted to an Executive who increasingly find Parliament to be an inconvenience and not a partner.
I have read the Government’s response to the report and can therefore anticipate what the Leader of the House will say in his speech. I join others in saying that the Cabinet Office rules should be rewritten entirely in line with the reports. I say again that, whatever the future solution to some of these problems is, it lies in this House’s power to amend.
Finally, I do not know how much interest in our debate will be taken outside the House but I wish that a debate such as this could be livestreamed into schools, colleges and universities where politics is taught, because people need to know that the debate about our parliamentary democracy is live; it is still going on, not somehow fixed in aspic. On the contrary, the debate is a living thing and, for that reason, I very much commend these reports and welcome today’s debate.
Lord McLoughlin (Con)
My Lords, like the noble Viscount, I congratulate the two chairmen of the committees whose reports we are discussing. It seems that I have spent part of my parliamentary life following my noble friend Lord Blencathra. I was his Deputy Chief Whip and became Conservative Party Chief Whip when he ceased to be so. He was chairman of the Delegated Powers Committee and I took over the chairmanship when he ceased to be chairman earlier this year. I know from experience that, when my noble friend Lord Blencathra sets his mind to a specific topic, he will not let it go until he sees some success. That is very much part of what we have seen in the report we are discussing today.
We have had many excellent contributions today, all narrating some of the problems that we now face. These are not new problems. Indeed, I remember from when I first joined the Cabinet in 2010 my noble friend Lord Strathclyde lecturing us on the contempt which the House of Lords has for Henry VIII clauses and telling Cabinet Ministers to try to ensure that they were kept to a minimum. I had not heard of skeleton Bills; they seem to have been a development as time has gone on.
One of the reasons why we are where we are today—it has not been talked about much in this debate so far; perhaps there is a nervousness to talk about it—is Brexit. Brexit has fundamentally changed the way in which we legislate in this country. I was not in favour of Brexit, but I accept that I voted for the referendum, and we have to accept the results of that referendum. However, it has changed the pressure on government and on these Houses. A lot of legislation and regulations did not need to come to this House, because they were brought in by European directives. That has now gone. That is not being anti-Brexit; it is just a change in the situation. I think it is an issue which perhaps has been slightly overlooked in some of the grander issues that have come about.
I well remember being told initially that the most legislation you should expect to get through in one year was 20 pieces. The last Queen’s Speech to the House, read by the now King, included 31 pieces of legislation. The demand of getting legislation through both Houses of Parliament has put added pressures on us.
While I very much welcome the reports, which are right in their way, the noble Lord, Lord Goddard, referred to the Bill on EU legislation that is on the horizon and that we will be discussing. That will facilitate reforms for over 2,400 pieces of legislation, and most of it is going to be done through regulations and orders. That is not about the House of Lords wanting to be very awkward about something—it is the House of Lords asking whether we are getting scrutiny of legislation right, the laws that people live by in this country. That is one of the key issues which both Houses of Parliament need to address over the coming years.
The points made by my noble friend Lord Howell on what was done 35 or 40 years ago in setting up the new Select Committees were absolutely right. We have moved to a new situation, and we need to reflect that in the way the committees of both Houses work. One of the things that has happened in the House of Commons is that everything is timetabled, so there is not the detailed scrutiny that there is in your Lordships’ House. That is one of the things that I have noticed most notably since my arrival in this House.
These reports set us challenges, and they set the Government challenges. The Government need to reflect carefully on them, but should try to do so in such a way that it is not only the Government who take them forward but the House and the Opposition as well.
Lord Shinkwin (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord McLoughlin. I agree with his important points about the legislative workload legacy of Brexit. I, too, thank my noble friends Lord Blencathra and Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts and congratulate them on the forthright and formidable reports which their committees have produced. These are weighty documents. As the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, told us, they pull no punches. Indeed, as my noble friend Lady Fookes implied, they pack a powerful punch, showing once again the invaluable, dispassionate and uncompromised contribution of your Lordships’ House to the health and well-being of British democracy.
I will not pretend that I found the technical detail of the measures, devices and procedures that we are discussing easy to understand, but then I assume that is the intention. However, what is clear from the reports and the Government’s responses, as well as from the two committees’ subsequent expressions of disappointment with those responses, is the direction of travel. In short, we are moving in the wrong direction. The danger is that, until and unless the Government accept the need to rebalance power by returning power to Parliament, the Government—the state—will continue inexorably to accrue more power. This is not good for democracy, because rebalancing and returning power to Parliament is not simply a technical matter; it is surely fundamental to restoring public trust in the political process, as the noble Lords, Lord Janvrin and Lord Prentis of Leeds, in his powerful maiden speech, reminded us.
The right reverend Prelate, who is not in his place at the moment, spoke of taking back control. My position on Brexit was informed by whether the British people would be able to hold their Government to account for decisions affecting the minutiae of their daily lives. I never intended that my vote to leave should somehow be misinterpreted as a licence for the Government to assume yet more control over our lives. That is not to say, of course, that in repatriating powers which were surrendered by successive Governments to the EU through statutory instruments and similar unaccountable devices during our membership of the EU, Parliament should then obstruct the Government’s promise to complete that process by the end of the year. However, it does mean that careful consideration needs to be given to what I remember as a student my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth described as the delicate balance between the effectiveness of government and the consent of the governed. Accountability is central to that.
I suggest that, in addition to continuing to champion the recommendations of these two very important reports, your Lordships’ House has a crucial role to play in facilitating that greater accountability. My noble friend Lord Howell of Guildford called for a stronger committee system. I wonder whether we could commission an examination of the impact of our committees in terms of government take-up of their recommendations, perhaps going as far back as 2015, including an analysis of what external stakeholders who have given written or oral evidence felt came out of it, in terms of their impression of the value of the inquiry and the committee’s recommendations, and what they thought of how the Government have responded.
Might that not be a pragmatic way, not only of this House showing that it is more than just a talking shop, but of Parliament and Government together demonstrating that we both recognise the need continually to earn the trust of the British people? We both have skin in the game here. That, ultimately, is surely what this is all about.
Viscount Hanworth (Lab)
My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. The traditional way of ensuring that the executive powers are responsible for their actions and that they are accountable for their effects has been the scrutiny of government legislation during the process of its enactment. However, this way of handling the issues arising out of detailed regulations associated with parliamentary Acts is no longer possible. Insufficient time is available to scrutinise these matters in sessions on the Floor of the House or in Grand Committee.
Increasingly, the regulations are enacted in secondary legislation via powers granted in the primary Acts of Parliament. The scrutiny of the regulations has been assigned to standing committees of both Houses. In the Lords, the recourse has been to assign the task of scrutinising secondary legislation to two committees. The Delegated Powers Committee polices the boundary between primary and secondary legislation, and it is empowered to object to inappropriate delegations of power to Ministers. The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee attempts, on a weekly basis, to scrutinise a plethora of instruments produced under those delegated powers. It is a committee of 11 members which is served by a highly competent secretariat. It is overwhelmed by its task, and is able to operate only by virtue of a sifting process undertaken by the secretariat that draws its attention to the most important or the most contentious of the instruments.
It takes time for the members of the committee to gain sufficient knowledge of the nature of the legislative processes that they must scrutinise, and to become familiar with the behaviour of the government departments from which the legislation emanates. The members are subject to the same rule as the members of other standing committees that limits their time on the committee to three years. By the time that they have gained a competence in these matters, they must move on. It should be noted that two-thirds of the current committee is due to retire shortly. This has been brought to the attention of the authorities that govern the membership of committees. The objection that these retirements are bound to prejudice the effectiveness of the committee has been met with the bland assertion that any 12 Members of the House who might serve on the committee should be as good as the ones whom they are liable to replace. This assertion speaks of an old-fashioned tradition of amateurism that dominates our politics.
The government departments doubtless find the scrutiny of the committee irksome but, if they are well appraised of our democratic norms, they are bound to accept it with good grace. However, there is tension, with both sides pushing against each other. The judgment of the two reports that we are debating today is that the Executive have pushed too far and that much of the secondary legislation amounts to government by diktat. Also, a Government who have been in power too long have become impatient with the processes of democratic scrutiny. They have tended increasingly to resort to so-called skeletal legislation, which gives Ministers unbridled powers to create administrative regulations where formerly they would have been expected to enact their policies via primary legislation.
There is also a widening gap between the mythologies of politics and the practicalities of public administration. Many in the Government take an atavistic approach to regulations, which they tend to see as infringements on personal liberties and as impediments to economic enterprise. This contrasts oddly with the Government’s increasing use of secondary delegated legislation. This negative attitude to regulation is common, and has fuelled the agenda of the proponents of Brexit to scrap the retained European Union legislation before the end of this year. The truth is that almost all of it will need to be replicated in British legislation, which will be a wholly unnecessary exercise that will pre-empt the resources of the Civil Service. The burden of the scrutinising committees will be markedly increased, as will the objections to the undemocratic administrative steamroller.
The reports from the two Lords committees call for changes within the existing framework that might serve to redress the balance between government and Parliament in favour of Parliament. I have to wonder whether these changes will be sufficient. It appears that something more radical is required to cope with the mass of secondary legislation and to bring it all under proper scrutiny. Perhaps committees could be appointed that monitor and scrutinise the secondary legislation that emerges from each government department, and they should alert the rest of the House to whatever they find to be amiss, with greater powers to hold them in check. The Commons already has committees that shadow each department. These might take a more active role in scrutinising secondary legislation. The advantage of having such committees in the Lords is that they would be further from the reach of the Government than their Commons counterparts. Therefore, they would be able to conduct a more critical and effective oversight of the legislation.
Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)
My Lords, in 2020 Dr Andrew Corbett from the defence studies department of King’s College London wrote:
“Coups happen in other countries—they are not something the public would ever expect in Britain.”
However, having listed some of the actions of Boris Johnson’s Government, he asked whether what he saw as an undermining of democracy amounted to “a very British coup”. While the Johnson Government’s apparent contempt for Parliament was signified most notably—but by no means solely—by the attempt to prorogue it, the rot set in much earlier. The two reports we are considering throw a light on the extent to which Parliament has been gradually undermined for years. Ernest Hemingway wrote that there were two ways of going bankrupt, “Gradually and then suddenly”. The same might be said of losing British democracy.
The titles of these two reports really say it all: Government by Diktat: A Call to Return Power to Parliament and Democracy Denied? The Urgent Need to Rebalance Power between Parliament and the Executive. I am very grateful for all the hard work that has gone into producing these reports, and to the two chairmen for their eloquent speeches today. They detailed the failings of delegated legislation to adhere to the principles of parliamentary democracy. This situation has not come about by accident. A determined Executive do not welcome scrutiny—even less so if it leads to opposition.
The noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, was first to remind us of the 2015 battle over tax credits. The noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, said that this was completely a failure of the Government’s making, through their trying to legislate on such a massive issue. Cutting vital tax credits to those who really need them should never have been attempted by statutory instrument. Nevertheless, the lesson that came through very clearly was that the Government did not wish to be asked to think again—and again. Threats to this House were hardly even veiled: if we were to continue to misbehave, we might have a very dicey future.
The noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, explained that, while these reports go a long way in detailing what is wrong, the problem is much deeper. The threat to parliamentary democracy goes way beyond what is happening in our secondary legislation. The scale of the legislation coming through at the moment makes scrutiny impossible. The noble Lord, Lord McLoughlin, explained that the demands of Brexit—whether one wanted Brexit or not—bring a huge legislative burden that is leading to things being rushed through. There is the scale of the Bills we are being presented with, as the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, said, which are half-baked—that is being quite kind. Then there is the weight of them; the Financial Services and Markets Bill runs to 346 pages. The levelling-up Bill runs to 408. It is what many would think of as something of a Christmas tree. It is a planning Bill with other little bits attached. Some of the little bits are quite interesting; it came as a surprise to me that some elected leaders of areas in this country could be known as governors in future. There are also other surprises in there, but very few seem to relate to levelling up—that will come later, much of it in guidance and secondary legislation.
One of the things that came through most strongly in these reports was the use of disguised legislation. To call anything mandatory guidance is, of course, as the reports point out, a complete nonsense. But “have regard to” is a very dangerous term. In particular, we saw in the Elections Bill the fact that the Electoral Commission must have regard to a statement coming from the Government setting out their strategic and policy priorities relating to elections. Now, that sounds—certainly to me—like interference with the Electoral Commission. This House was certainly concerned, but the Commons did not share our concern and so this chilling guidance is now in the Act. It will undoubtedly influence the way that the Electoral Commission, supposedly an independent body, behaves in future.
The report of the Delegated Powers Committee points out, quite rightly, that an instruction to have regard carries the implication that the guidance will be adhered to. So I ask the Leader of the House how he might respond should the Prime Minister ask him to have regard to the Prime Minister’s views on a particular issue: might we expect it to colour his thinking at all?
The democratic deficit that we now perceive may explain why, according to a report from the ONS last year, only 35% of people trust the Government of this country—one of the lowest ratings in the OECD. These reports propose some remedies which might go some way to addressing that democratic deficit. They deserve a better response than they have received from the Government, and so I think we should pay great attention to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, and maybe be a little braver in future in making our views known.
Lord German (LD)
My Lords, I would like to follow that by also looking at how we can be braver, in both this and the other House. Much of the debate today has focused on a call for the Government to mend their ways, but I would like to look at what Parliament itself can do. The key question I pose is whether the powers exercised by government have strayed beyond the founding concepts of our parliamentary democracy. There are wiser and more knowledgeable Members in this debate who have an exact understanding of these foundations, the history behind them, the royal prerogative and the nature of the powers transferred to the Executive.
However, I pose that the fundamental premise of our democracy must surely be that what Parliament has granted, it can take away or alter. The Government will undoubtedly argue that Parliament grants powers over secondary legislation by passing the primary legislation. However, the tools available at the primary legislation stage are very limited. My noble friend Lord Wallace, and many others, have cited the lack of policy intent which is described within the primary legislation. So what Parliament is usually left with is a choice between the affirmative or the negative procedure, perhaps occasionally throwing in the super-affirmative procedure, which is an infrequently used tool in the box. Following the premise that what Parliament can provide, it can also amend or take away, some solutions to the issues raised in these reports rest in the hands of Parliament.
I must say additionally, however, that there is a major impact on the Senedd, the Welsh Parliament, which is faced with secondary legislation in areas of policy it has powers over but has no way of making that secondary legislation itself and no veto over the powers that are made. This is particularly relevant to primary legislation enacted prior to primary legislative powers being granted to the Senedd, and where legislative consent Motions have been passed to permit Westminster to legislate on its behalf. There is some limited “consultation”, in inverted commas, with the Welsh Government, but there are no powers in the hands of the Senedd.
If we accept the fundamental premise of these reports, Parliament must take action to redress the balance. Obviously, any solution to this problem, as the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, has pointed out, must have the support of the House of Commons. It would be absurd for the unelected Chamber to assert democratic rights which do not have Commons support. This is some challenge because the Government rely on their majority in the House of Commons and will want to secure that majority for getting their legislation through unamended. To avoid the extent of that pull in the other direction, it would be sensible to focus on the small steps that lie behind the concerns expressed in these reports. To my mind, that means a sharp focus on the ability of Parliament to amend or require the Government to think again on matters contained in their proposed secondary legislation.
I very much value the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, about renaming a fatal Motion a “Motion to refer back”. Most organisations in this country will have policy motions before them—political parties do—which are referred back for further consideration. If we could make it absolutely clear in Parliament that that is our intent, there is no reason we should not refer back matters which this Parliament feels are inappropriate or need improvement or interpretation to be able to produce good law. The objective is to create one or two new tools in our parliamentary box that would allow us to deal with these matters and to lay them out.
The ability to amend is crucial as well. There are obviously some significant parts of secondary legislation where some amendment would make a difference and make it an improved law, so the ability to amend ought to be discussed with our colleagues in the other House as an important tool which would allow Parliament as a whole to do a better job of ensuring that legislation is fit for purpose and better law in general. The first small-scale reform process must be to create a dialogue within this House, within the House of Commons and between the Houses with the important step of taking forward a Joint Committee of inquiry so we can make these changes and make them stick. If we believe in the scrutiny powers of Parliament, we should not be afraid of amendment and making sure that Parliament takes action to address the balance in legislative powers.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I thank both committees for these excellent reports. What is more, I thank them for making them readable. The DPRRC apologises for its report being full of parliamentary nomenclature and technical procedural explanations like some “esoteric constitutional essay”. However, I thank the committees for their clarity and making the opaque accessible. The start of chapter 2 of Democracy Denied?, explaining terms such as “Henry VIII powers” and “skeleton legislation”, is invaluable, and, in the spirit of the contribution of the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, I will be recommending both reports as must-reads far beyond Westminster.
I especially commend the committee consciously aiming to make the report comprehensible to the public. As the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, explained, the issues raised are anything but esoteric and affect the freedoms and rights of every single person in this country. However, the public are not just objects of law changes; that is too passive a depiction. The report details a worrying shift in the balance of power. Evidence of the Executive’s power-grab is compelling, but when we demand that the Government be accountable to Parliament, we must also stress that Parliament needs to be accountable to the public. Too often in recent years the demos, the foundation of democracy, have felt that parliamentarians sometimes refuse to act on their wishes. If the Government promise the public that they will, for example, act to control borders but when they attempt to act the public see parliamentarians trying to block that action, does that not give the moral high ground argument to the Executive to breach convention to push through publicly supported laws? That is a warning to this unelected House about indulging in overreach, acting more as an Opposition than as a scrutineer, and using every tactic in the book to fight laws it does not like, even if the electorate do.
As we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Prentis of Leeds, in his impressive maiden speech, outside this House there is a growing visceral distrust of Parliament per se. Conversely, I agree with the report’s concerns that when laws are delegated, the public are done a disservice and in turn are confused when some laws sail through without parliamentary challenge. An example already mentioned was when in lockdown the Government scandalously made it mandatory for anyone working in a care home to be fully vaccinated or be sacked. This happened with no risk analysis of the cost-benefit impact on the care sector, and there was nothing parliamentarians could do about it. Some 40,000 care workers were driven out of their jobs then, and now almost daily we hear discussed the crisis of care worker shortages and never acknowledge how bad lawmaking contributed to this disastrous state of affairs. No wonder the public are confused and disillusioned. This is why it is so important to shine a light on anti-democratic lawmaking processes. The shocking use of disguised legislative instruments should, in fact, be front page news.
I have a couple of thoughts on solutions. In the reports, Permanent Secretaries claim that increased use of statutory instruments is due to the competition for parliamentary time. Is not the solution here obvious? There should be fewer laws. To the Minister, I repeat the question posed by Lord Simon in a 1990 debate:
“to ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they will reduce the quantity and improve the quality of legislation.”—[Official Report, 31/1/1990; col. 382.]
I suggest that lawmaking has become a technocratic substitute for political leadership. Is this because politicians lack the imagination or moral courage to try to persuade citizens of the need for social change and instead rely on the law to compel it? So many laws feel unnecessary and performative—headline-grabbing responses to demands that something must be done.
As we enter Report stage on the Public Order Bill, we have, as many noble Lords have noted, a statute book full of legislation that could deal with the egregious aspects of modern protest tactics. The problem is that they are not being enforced, and more laws will not solve this problem.
By the way, the enthusiasm for creating new laws to tackle all and every issue is not just a weakness of the Conservative Administration. Often, the Opposition’s main demands on Government are even more laws, if different ones, or myriad amendments so detailed that they could constitute new laws in their own right.
On time constraints, why are so many Bills such enormous, complex, impenetrable tomes, containing everything bar the kitchen sink? Is this the attempt of politicians to micromanage every conceivable aspect of the public’s autonomous choices because they do not trust the voters? Such expansive Bills are often far removed from their original intent. The Online Safety Bill is a case in point: once conceived narrowly but importantly as protecting children, now so huge it represents an existential threat to the free speech of adults. This is a crisis not just of democracy but of our freedoms.
Baroness Altmann (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Fox.
I urge noble Lords to heed the words of John Adams:
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. … There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
We are in danger, as the two reports point out. The rallying cry in 2015 of those angered by so-called EU edicts urged people to vote to leave the EU to ensure lawmaking power returned to our sovereign national Parliament. Parliamentary sovereignty means that Parliament is superior to the Executive. This is a cornerstone of our constitutional system. Replacing the fear of EU edicts with the reality of edicts from one political party’s handful of Ministers is obviously attractive to current leaders but must be resisted. The Government are not synonymous with the state.
EU membership never actually removed or overrode the UK constitution. Parliament always had the power to repeal the 1972 legislation which took us into the EU, but ironically, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans and these committees’ excellent reports have pointed out, not only has Covid legislation overridden some of our parliamentary scrutiny powers— this might be excusable on life and death, public protection grounds—but EU exit-related Bills have been at the forefront of those that seek to gather untrammelled powers to the Executive. Witness the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill or the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, which is coming up, as so many noble Lords have mentioned.
Brexit has happened. I am not speaking about rejecting Brexit. This is about parliamentary sovereignty and our democracy. These are just the most egregious examples of proposals seeking to take away Parliament’s powers of scrutiny or amendment, replacing them with ministerial diktats.
There may be some confusion about the meaning of parliamentary sovereignty. Sometimes the term “parliamentary control” has been used, but I prefer to think of this as parliamentary protection of the public interest. Democracy is about representation of the people. Authoritarian dictatorship is about control of the people and transferring powers to an Executive. This vastly increases the risk that the rights of the minority could be trampled on by a narrow majority. I urge the Government to resist the attraction of acting with a cavalier indifference towards the concept of parliamentary scrutiny which is incompatible with the reality of parliamentary sovereignty.
These two excellent reports sound a much-needed siren of alarm that the UK is in danger of sliding into being governed by executive fiat rather than parliamentary scrutiny, as is our norm. It appears that the national interest is being aligned with the specific interest of the political party currently in power, rather than the wider national interests of the state.
We must not wait to look back on the past few years with the solemn regret of hindsight. Almost perceptibly, as so many have pointed out, the Government have been gathering powers to the Executive to override parliamentary scrutiny, putting us on a slippery slope towards an elected dictatorship and putting our country’s precious democracy under threat. Framework skeleton clauses in Bills, Henry VIII powers, disguised legislation, mandatory guidance—which the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, mentioned—tertiary legislation and the absence of impact assessments are all removing Parliament’s ability to protect the public against this authoritarian type of rule. If these trends persist, Parliament may have no role in scrutinising or amending the laws that citizens of this country are meant to live by.
In my view, it is our duty as parliamentarians to oppose this power grab, and I am enormously grateful to my noble friends Lord Blencathra and Lord Hodgson, and all the committee members and clerks of the DPRRC and SLSC, for their excellent reports and for doing just that. I urge my noble friend the Leader of the House to take seriously these concerns from so many colleagues on our own Benches, as well as all other parts of the House, and encourage a change of approach plus acceptance of these recommendations.
Lord Hendy (Lab)
My Lords, I add my compliments to those of others in the House on the excellent maiden speech from my noble friend Lord Prentis.
I declare an interest as another member of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, the first and only committee in the House on which I have had the honour to serve. I take the opportunity to praise the diligence and insight of the committee’s members, many of whom have spoken today, and of course the two wonderful chairmen of the committee in my time on it, the noble Lords, Lord Blencathra and Lord McLoughlin. I echo others in praising our superb clerk, Christine Salmon Percival, and her assiduous assistant, Louise Andrews. After 45 years of practice at the Bar myself, I specifically praise the counsel to the committee, James Cooper, Nick Beach and Che Diamond. Their wise and concise notes on legislation before the committee have been, and are, simply magnificent.
As to the issues raised in the two reports under consideration, to me there appears so far to be virtual unanimity across the House as to the principles that ought to apply and that are so often ignored. Since the publication of Democracy Denied?, and indeed Government by Diktat, I have sometimes wondered whether the committee is wasting its time in making recommendations, essential for democracy, which are so often ignored.
I agree with my noble friend Lord Stansgate that this is not a party-political issue. It arises from a fundamental tension between the Executive and Parliament. After all, as he mentioned, we fought the civil war on this very issue some 500 years ago. It seems that the current balance is still wholly unsatisfactory; it needs reregulation. I agree, of course, with the conclusions of both committees, perhaps captured by the first recommendation of the Hansard Society, which suggests:
“A new concordat between Parliament and Government, including a set of ‘Principles for Legislative Delegation’, to reset the boundary between what should go in Bills and what should go in SIs.”
I would add “and in tertiary and disguised legislation” as well, as described so impressively by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, in opening this debate and set out in paragraphs 89 to 112 of Democracy Denied? I hope the Government will find time to reform along the lines proposed, whether by legislation or otherwise, to achieve the objectives desired on all side of the House.
Lord Hutton of Furness (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the speech of my noble friend Lord Hendy, and to hear the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Prentis. I have been a member of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee since 2021, and it has been a great privilege to serve under the excellent chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson.
As many others have said in this debate, at its heart this is a debate about the balance of constitutional power, and specifically the relationship between the Executive and Parliament. These two excellent reports chart the inexorable shift in this balance over recent years under Conservative and Labour Governments. In reading these two reports, there is only one conclusion to reach—that that balance has shifted decisively in favour of the Executive at the expense of proper parliamentary scrutiny. This is not a healthy shift. On one level, it undermines our democracy, it is not good for the law-making process itself and it has, from time to time, brought the law itself into disrepute, as we saw during the pandemic when extensive use was made of delegated legislation.
These two reports identify several problems with the process of making secondary legislation, all of which have been well referred to by the noble Lords, Lord Blencathra and Lord Hodgson. I want to highlight what I consider to be the greatest problem we are facing, which is the growing use of what has been termed “skeleton legislation”: primary legislation drafted in outline terms only and with all, or most of, the important policy details left to Ministers to determine by using their powers to make statutory instruments. Just in the past few weeks, we have seen some pretty good examples of skeleton legislation, with the Energy Prices Act and the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill. Crucial areas of the legislation are left entirely to Ministers to determine, and Parliament has had—at the time of considering legislation—little detail whatsoever. The real operation of this legislation is going to be determined entirely by the regulations made under it. Our report refers to many other examples of this type of legislation, and many Members of this House have referred to the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, which is probably the best example of them all.
Much of this detailed legislation will become law, as I said, with little or no consideration by Parliament whatsoever. I fully understand and accept that Governments will want to use secondary legislation to implement many aspects of policy, and that makes absolute sense. However, if Ministers want to use these skeleton legislative vehicles, they really should be prepared to accept that this sort of power should be accompanied by enhanced levels of parliamentary scrutiny. To me, that is a reasonable quid pro quo. This could be done in a number of ways. Delegated legislation in skeleton Bills could be subject to the super-affirmative procedure, as the noble Lord, Lord German, suggested. That would allow an opportunity for Members to comment on draft regulations and suggest possible amendments. There is a more radical option: using the precedent contained in Section 27 of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. Under this provision, amendments can be tabled, in either House, to any statutory instrument laid under the primary Act. I am not aware that this has ever happened. I am not sure whether, under the 2004 Act, any regulations have been brought forward, but that is not the point. It is possible to devise greater scrutiny over ministerial powers to make secondary legislation—and, if you want a precedent, you can find one in that 2004 Act.
I know that the Government do not favour any kind of enhanced scrutiny. As they said in their response to our report, they do not believe that such skeleton Bills can be readily defined. I do not buy that argument, and I do not think that anyone in this House today buys it. I fear that this is a smokescreen for further foot-dragging. We all know a skeleton Bill in this House when we see one. It is not beyond the wit of both Houses to devise a sensible procedure to deal with this glaring deficit in how we currently make most of our laws. It was a great shame and a missed opportunity that the Government responded to these two reports in such a cursory and dismissive fashion. But it is never too late for a change of heart, because we will have to find another way of doing things if we are serious about preserving the role of Parliament in our democracy.
Lord Cormack (Con)
My Lords, it is a particular pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hutton of Furness, because he made some extremely perceptive and very good points, particularly in the context of skeleton Bills. The defining feature of this debate—and I have heard all of it—has been support for the two committees of your Lordships’ House and a very real concern that the balance of power in our country is getting out of kilter. I pay tribute to my noble friends Lord Blencathra and Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts for their excellent and powerful speeches and, even more, for the reports that they have placed before us. It is indicative of government’s cavalier attitude towards Parliament that we have had to wait so long for this debate, and I deeply regret that.
When I entered the other place, way back in 1970, I was taken to one side, after taking the oath, by two very experienced parliamentarians: the late Sir Derek Walker-Smith and the late Sir David Renton, later Lord Renton. They said to me, “You are of course here as a Conservative Member of Parliament, and you will be expected to give general support to the Government, but that doesn’t mean agreeing with everything that they say. Remember”, said Sir David, wagging his finger at me, “it is the Government who are accountable to Parliament, not Parliament that is accountable to the Government.” I have tried to make that my watchword through the last 52 and a half years.
Certain messages come out of this debate. There is too much legislation. The question that should always be asked, before any Bill is introduced, is whether it is necessary. That is why it is so important—a number of colleagues have touched on this—that we should, as a matter of course, have pre-legislative scrutiny. We should also have post-legislative scrutiny, because we need to see how what we have enacted has impinged on the lives of our fellow citizens. The two Houses need to come together, because the fundamental flaw in parliamentary democracy in this country is that there is effectively no scrutiny in the other place: timetabling destroyed it. I was there when it happened, and I fought against it. Conservative spokesmen then said, “We’ll get rid of this”, but it was so convenient for the Executive that they did not get rid of it; they kept it. We will never have a true balance of power until there is proper scrutiny in the other place as well as this one.
In his excellent speech, my noble friend Lord Norton also talked about delegated legislation and our being rather afraid to use the power we have. That point was picked up by others; I think the noble Lord, Lord German, used the term “refer back” in his speech. We should have the courage to refer back to the other place delegated legislation that the Government have thrust upon us; we are not obliged to accept it. The Government are accountable to Parliament, but they will not be properly accountable to Parliament unless Parliament makes them so.
All these problems are not new; they are in a different guise. When I taught 18th-century history before I came to this place, I often talked about Dunning’s Motion of 1780, in which he said that the power of
“the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.”
If we substitute “Executive” for “Crown”, that is true today. We have to get a better balance and remember those very famous words that “the price of liberty”—of which we are the guardians and for which we are responsible—“is eternal vigilance”. There has been so much appalling legislation, to whose length the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, referred, put before this House in recent years that we should all be thoroughly ashamed of it.
This has been a good debate. It is an honour to take part in it and we are all deeply grateful to the two noble Lords who led it so brilliantly.
Baroness Drake (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lords, Lord Blencathra and Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, on their excellent committee reports. They have exposed the two key constitutional concerns: that effective parliamentary scrutiny is being undermined by the way in which Bills are framed and that important policy decisions are increasingly being left to delegated legislation, thereby weakening parliamentary scrutiny and increasing ministerial powers.
Those concerns are shared by the Hansard Society and the Constitution Committee. In 2018, the Constitution Committee, chaired by my noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton, published a report, The Legislative Process: The Delegation of Powers, which identified concerns that align with the conclusions in today’s reports. That report recognised that delegated powers are essential to the legislative process, allowing Parliament to focus on important policy decisions and leaving implementation detail to secondary legislation, but that the level of parliamentary scrutiny was increasingly contentious, evidencing a constitutionally objectionable trend for the Government to seek wide delegated powers that would permit the determination, as well as the implementation, of policy. For some, the determining factor as to whether to include a delegated power was whether Parliament would accept it, rather than any point of principle.
The report also emphasised that, where statutory instruments are used to give effect to significant policy decisions, without any genuine risk of defeat or possible amendment, Parliament is doing little more than rubber-stamping, which is constitutionally unacceptable. By working together, the Delegated Powers Committee and the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee have shone a spotlight on what my noble friend Lady Taylor described as the accelerating and unhealthy
“trends in what … Ministers think they can get away with without properly consulting Parliament”.—[Official Report, 16/9/21; col. 1604.]
They have directed ministerial and parliamentary attention to the need to address
“the culture of using delegated legislation.”
The Constitution Committee continues to highlight constitutional concerns arising from weakening parliamentary scrutiny and enhanced ministerial powers in its reports on Bills brought to this House, which align in many instances with the conclusions in the reports before us today. In its report Brexit Legislation: Constitutional Issues, the committee took stock of all the Brexit legislation and criticised the powers therein for being too broad, too ill-defined and lacking in safeguards. A distinguishing feature was the extent of the delegated powers—skeleton Bills, with little or no detail on the policy or institutions to be created. The European Union (Withdrawal) Bill required Henry VIII powers to facilitate the withdrawal and deliver legal certainty and continuity, but it granted Ministers
“far greater latitude than is constitutionally acceptable”.
The reports COVID-19 and Parliament and COVID-19 and the Use and Scrutiny of Emergency Powers highlighted the volume of SIs laid in response to the pandemic, the use of fast-track procedures, which severely limited Parliament’s ability to scrutinise and provide a constitutional check on the exercise of arbitrary power, and the blurring of the distinction between legislation and guidance.
The Sewel convention does not apply to delegated legislation, but it would be constitutionally questionable for Parliament to circumvent it by legislating in a way that intends delegated legislation to change devolved legislation in areas of devolved competence. This concern was highlighted in the committee’s reports on the Nationality and Borders Bill, the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill and the Energy Bill. Guidance utilised as disguised legislation was highlighted in its reports on the Public Order Bill and the Health and Care Bill. It was reasserted by the committee in its reports on the Energy Bill and the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill that delegated legislation to create criminal offences is constitutionally unacceptable.
The Delegated Powers Committee and the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee have had several exchanges with the Government on strengthening parliamentary scrutiny. Some progress has been made, but it is clear from the debate today that much more is needed. The governance of our parliamentary democracy is more important than ever, as has been stressed by many Members. One Government’s acts of expediency can be deployed by a future Government as precedent, taking us further down the road away from Parliament making our laws towards Ministers increasingly taking powers to change the rules and regulations.
Finally, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Prentis on his maiden speech. I am sure that he will be an asset to the House.
Lord Sandhurst (Con)
My Lords, these are two excellent reports; sadly, they are not the first. As the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, has just reminded us, the Constitution Committee expressed serious concerns in its 2018 report, The Legislative Process: The Delegation of Powers, about the use of statutory instruments to give effect to significant policy decisions. It identified the core problem as the absence of a genuine risk of defeat with no amendment possible, which I shall come back to.
During the pandemic, over 400 statutory instruments were made. The vast majority took effect with no scrutiny at all. Legal changes were often set out in guidance or announced in media conferences before Parliament had even had the opportunity to scrutinise them. I wrote papers about that.
In June 2021, the Constitution Committee, to which I and others gave evidence, reported in COVID-19 and the Use and Scrutiny of Emergency Powers. This identified serious weaknesses in the way a huge body of regulations was made. It pointed out that the Government are required to report, explain and defend their policies. When scrutiny is limited through the fast-tracking of legislation, or the extensive use of secondary legislation, essential checks on executive power are lost.
However, 18 months later, here we are again. What is to be done? I endorse the recommendations made in these splendid reports. Time is tight, so I will focus on four points. I acknowledge that delegated legislation is necessary. Modern society is complex and changes too fast. Government often needs speed, flexibility and adaptability if it is to serve society.
First, at the heart of the problem perhaps, as others have said, is the all or nothing principle. We must address this. We must at least make more use of the delayed affirmative procedure. Further, as others have said, the two Houses should work to introduce a convention and a mechanism whereby the other place may reintroduce a statutory instrument which this House has rejected, or send it back amended on the basis that it will not be rejected a second time. The elected Chamber will then prevail, but after consideration and after having heard serious debate in this House.
Secondly, sunset provisions should be used more frequently. These would clear undergrowth, make for cleaner regulation and lessen the burden on business.
Thirdly, tertiary delegation is dangerous ground. When I studied administrative law 50 years ago, the maxim was “delegatus non potest delegare”. It seems all that is gone. Not only is Parliament’s scrutiny lost—so is the oversight of the Minister. The Secondary Legislation Committee is absolutely right that, when a statutory instrument includes a delegation of power, the Explanatory Memorandum must provide a full explanation of why the power is needed and of its scope. In my view, this will make those in the Minister’s office show their reasoning. They will have to think about it first, like a judge does when he gives his reasons in court.
Fourthly and finally, I turn to statutory guidance. We have heard about this from others. The Department for Education’s website today says:
“Statutory guidance sets out what schools and local authorities must do to comply with the law. You should follow the guidance unless you have a very good reason not to. There is some guidance that you must follow without exception. In these cases we make this clear in the guidance document itself.”
In this way, statutory guidance has escaped all scrutiny. This morning, the Department for Education’s website listed—I have them here—53 unscrutinised statutory guidance publications for schools and authorities. Of course, there are practical reasons for this, but we really must look at this more carefully.
So I endorse entirely what my noble friend Lord Blencathra said on the issue of guidance. Something must be done. Let us take back at least a little control.
Lord Naseby (Con)
My Lords, I think this House should be extremely grateful to the two noble Lords who have introduced their reports today. Both of them have the joy of being experienced in both Houses. They bring years of dedication to public service, and here we have before us not large tomes of material but just a few poignant pages of the issues we have been discussing this morning and afternoon. I am not going to cover what has already been covered by other noble Lords, but I wanted to say to them, and to all Members who served on either of those two committees, my personal thanks, and I hope the thanks of all of us, for the dedication and commitment they have shown day after day on these committees.
I will voice my thoughts on one particular area. I had the privilege of being the Deputy Speaker and Chairman of Ways and Means in the other place. I remember there was a procedure—certainly in the Speaker and myself talking, and I think the other deputies also—of having brought to our attention when and why the Henry VIII clauses were being used, so that we, who were sitting in the Chair, had knowledge of the situation. I have to say to my good and noble friend Lord Blencathra, that was longer than 20 years ago, and I think Henry VIII has the ability to last through the centuries. From my point of view, that is a typical example.
I also had the privilege of sitting on the Public Accounts Committee for some 12 years. It was all-party and the joy of today is that this is all-party. That committee had the benefit of the work of the NAO to scrutinise what had happened to certain pieces of legislation and to put before our committee what we thought Parliament should do about it.
We, almost every time, set a sunset clause, and I believe that is one of the fundamental areas that must happen in every single piece of legislation. I have read carefully the two letters from the Leader of the House in the other place, and it seems to me, reading them, that the sentiment of those letters is that there is a willingness not just to listen but to act. Maybe not to act on every dimension that was raised in the two reports, but it seems to me that the climate is there, and that is so important in life.
We are a parliamentary democracy, and we do all care. Many of us have stood in the other place looking after constituents, and we still care for what we do, because that is our primary role for being here in the first place. By “we” I mean the Commons and the Lords, and this is one time when the two really must get together. My noble friend on the Front Bench has a degree of sensitivity to the nuances of Parliament. We should look at the titles of these two documents. The one from the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee is Democracy Denied? The Urgent Need to Rebalance Power Between Parliament and the Executive; and the other one is Government by Diktat: A Call to Return Power to Parliament. I look to my noble friend on the Front Bench to recognise the sincerity, the depth of work that has been done, and the real need for positive action on both these fronts.
Lord Judge (CB)
My Lords, I welcome these reports, as I have welcomed reports produced by these two committees and the Constitution Committee before 2021-22. I particularly welcome the unequivocal language in which these reports are expressed; there is no way that anybody can misunderstand their meaning. I also welcome the support on all sides of the House for what the reports have said, and in particular for the two speeches by the leading protagonists.
But at this stage of the afternoon, I want to ask myself a different question: what is the total sum? I do regret that the total sum seems to add up to the very distinct possibility, though it is not particularly underlined in the reports, that increasingly we are being governed by proclamation. Of course, we wiped out government by proclamation when the Stuarts were here, and there are many proclamations which are fine—there is a proclamation every time you drive past a speed limit sign, which tells you “That is the limit, that is the law”. When we are told to wash our hands more than three times a day for 20 seconds or more, that is advice, and there is nothing wrong with proclamations that set out the law or government advice.
The problem is where the Government of the day set out the sort of issue that arose during the Covid pandemic, “How do we deal with it?” I am not going to enter into the argument about it, but it undoubtedly was government by proclamation. The real question is, “What sort of proclamation rule do we have?” I am taking a word which has been used quite a number of times this afternoon; we have proclamations in disguise. The disguise is the parliamentary process. The parliamentary process, if you take every word down to its last theory, provides a perfect controlling system by which secondary legislation—statutory instruments—is controlled.
We all know that it does not work like that, and the reason we know that it does not work like that is twofold. First, when was the last time the House of Commons, which after all produces this material for us, actually rejected a statutory instrument? Gazillions of thousands of pages have been produced, but the last time was in 1979—is that a form of control being exercised? Then you have the other side of the same coin, which is, “Why do the Executive continue to do it this way?” The short answer is, “Because it’s very friendly to do it that way, and because the controls that are supposed to be available are not being deployed.”
I want to draw the House’s attention, really by way of summary, to the latest piece of legislation coming our way, the Transport Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill. It is a skeleton Bill with a supercharged Henry VIII clause, and it illustrates my point. The first clause is on “Minimum service levels for transport strikes”. It is actually declaratory and does not make any law at all. It is misleading, because in paragraph 4 of new Schedule A2A, you will find that there are relevant matters relating to health, national security, social care, education, the economy and the environment, and that:
“The Secretary of State may by regulations amend this paragraph to change the matters that are relevant matters”,
so they can just add to this list.
I should interrupt myself to say that I am not making any comment on the value or otherwise of this proposal; I am looking at it as a piece of legislation. Clause 3 tells us its extent, Clause 4 tells us its commencement and transitional provision, and Clause 5 tells us its Short Title—that is it. There is one real clause in it: Clause 2, about the “Power to make consequential provision”. Hang on a minute: about what? The Secretary of State
“may by regulations made by statutory instrument make provision that is consequential on this Act”,
and:
“Regulations under this section may amend, repeal or revoke provision made by or under”
an Act passed
“before this Act, or … later in the same session … as this Act.”
This is an important piece of legislation. We have all read the Government’s response to the two reports we are discussing this afternoon, but I do not see any link whatever between those responses and this legislation. We cannot go on like this.
Lord Newby (LD)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge. I start by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Prentis, on his maiden speech. It is always a particular pleasure to welcome a fellow Member of your Lordships’ House who was born in Leeds. I am sure he will make a very substantive contribution to the work of the House, and I look forward to hearing from him in future. I begin with an apology on behalf of my noble friend Lady Thomas of Winchester, who, as a former chair of the Delegated Powers Committee, was very much looking forward to taking part in today’s debate. Unfortunately, she is indisposed. I am sure she will be watching the debate avidly and have clear views on it.
The reports we are debating today deal with one of the most fundamental and fraught relationships in a democracy: that between the Executive and the legislature. There is an inevitable and natural tension between the two, and different democracies strike different balances between them. In the case of the UK, we have developed a series of conventions about how the relationships work, which, broadly speaking, have stood the test of time. These reports demonstrate that this relationship has shifted in recent years, in that the Executive have successfully sought to increase their control of legislation by reducing the scope of primary legislation—which is subject to full and detailed scrutiny, amendment and sometimes rejection—in favour of secondary legislation, over which there is very limited scrutiny, which is incapable of amendment, and which in well over 99% of cases results in the statutory instrument being approved in its original form.
As the reports make clear, this increased use of secondary legislation has a number of causes. Sometimes the Bill is presented to Parliament before there has been time to do the detailed drafting. Sometimes Ministers themselves seem unclear about exactly how they expect the intended legislation to operate. In what appears to be an increasing number of cases, Ministers simply seek to maximise their discretionary powers at the expense of Parliament. Since the reports were produced there have been a number of very clear examples of this principle in practice. The Schools Bill—now thankfully withdrawn—was one, as is the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, very eloquently pointed out, the Transport Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill is another. There is clearly widespread agreement, not just in the reports but in today’s debate, that the current trend towards skeleton Bills and the increasing use of secondary legislation is unsatisfactory and should be reversed.
In his evidence to the Delegated Powers Committee, the then Lord President argued that proposed ministerial powers contained in upcoming legislation via secondary legislation were subject to intensive scrutiny by the public bills and legislation Cabinet committee. I sat on that committee for three years from 2012, and that issue was rarely discussed. If it was, it was in the context of whether widespread SI-making powers would cause problems in getting the Bill through your Lordships’ House. It was certainly never about whether in principle the Bill was giving Ministers too much power. Maybe since then things have changed, as he suggested. But the evidence of many recent Bills is that, to the extent that they have changed, they have done so for the worse. It would be a bad mistake to place any faith in the PBL committee to redress things.
Instead, we look to reports. They contain a swathe of sensible proposals about how to improve the situation. If implemented, they would undoubtedly go some considerable way to doing so. But the reports do not completely address how Parliament should respond when faced with proposals that still contain far too many discretionary ministerial powers to be exercised by secondary legislation. What should we do about it?
In the medium term, one way of addressing that is to increase Parliament’s ability to amend or reject an SI, as several noble Lords, including my noble friend Lord German, have suggested. For the Lords, this could take the form of asking the Commons to think again, in much the same way in which we do for primary legislation. For the Commons, it might take the form of requiring an amendment to be made before the SI is approved. Such an approach is being proposed by the Hansard Society in its delegated legislation review, due to be published later this month, which I commend. Such new powers should be accompanied, as the Hansard Society proposes, with other measures that have at their heart a new concordat between Parliament and government that would establish a clearer boundary between what should go into Bills and what should go into SIs. If that approach were to stand any chance of success, all the main parties would need to sign up to it in advance of the next general election and include such proposals in their manifestos. This is a good time to contemplate that, and I hope very much that the parties will do so as they are beginning the process of putting together their manifestos.
However, the next election is not being held tomorrow. For the next 12 to 18 months, we have to decide how to deal with legislation either currently before us or that will reach us at a later date. There are two ways in which your Lordships’ House can and should exercise its authority if it feels that the Government are taking too much arbitrary power. First, as a Bill goes through the House, we should make it clear that when we see too extensive delegated powers we are prepared to vote against them at clause stand part. Even the threat of doing this can sometimes concentrate ministerial minds, as we saw with the Schools Bill. If the Government insist, we should put the matter to a vote. If the whole Bill is little more than a skeleton Bill, we should in extremis be prepared to vote against the Bill as a whole. Secondly, when, as happens from time to time, the Government bring forward SIs based on existing legislation that the House thinks goes beyond what was envisaged when the Bill was debated, or that are simply badly drafted, we should be prepared to vote against them. The noble Lords, Lord Liddle, Lord Norton, Lord Sandhurst and Lord Cormack, and my noble friend Lord German and the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, among others, suggested that as an option. I realise that those on the Opposition Front Bench are opposed to this proposal in principle; they will not do it, in case the Conservatives do it to them if and when they are next in government. However, this is not a principle but a political calculation.
I know that many on the Cross Benches are concerned that voting against an SI breaches the conventions but, as a number of noble Lords have said, the Lords has always had the power to say no in extremis, and it should be prepared to exercise it—not on a regular basis, but when an SI is particularly deficient. The only alternative to taking this action is that we simply let the Government get away with it. No volume of condemnatory speeches and no regret Motions have the slightest effect. The Minister might be slightly discomfited, but frankly that is a small price that the Government are very willing to pay to get their measure through.
For the world outside Parliament worried about a cost of living crisis and a collapsing NHS, today’s debate must seem a mile away from their day-to-day concerns, but the effectively unfettered use of ministerial power will affect many aspects of their lives. It is not what they expect of their democracy—and they are right.
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
My Lords, this has been an excellent debate. I start by thanking the chairs of the committees, the noble Lords, Lord Blencathra and Lord Hodgson, for their excellent introductions. I also want to thank all members of the committees for their hard work in producing these reports. We have heard that both committees collaborated closely, producing parallel reports and holding joint evidence sessions.
Crucially, as we have heard this afternoon, the overwhelming message is that the abuse of delegated powers is, in effect, an abuse of Parliament and of democracy. Despite the response from the Government, these reports, as the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, reminded us, will be a prompt to strengthen Parliament in the coming years.
It is worth repeating the words of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson. This is not a debate about Lords versus Commons; it is a discussion about how we strengthen Parliament. I will not be tempted to comment on what we might be able to do in Opposition and then as a Government. The fact is that our democracy is a parliamentary democracy, and it is how we strengthen Parliament that is now most important.
The conclusions of the DPRRC report are that it is now a matter of urgency that Parliament should take stock and consider how the balance of power can be reset. As it says, far too often primary legislation is being stripped out by skeleton provisions and, with the inappropriate use of wide delegated powers, it is increasingly difficult for Parliament to understand what legislation will mean in practice and challenge its potential consequences. We have heard numerous examples from across the House of such legislation being put before us, including Bills that are currently before the House.
Importantly, the committee’s report refutes the argument that parliamentary legislative procedures cannot respond swiftly to address urgent, unforeseen situations. As part of my responsibilities as shadow FCDO spokesperson, I have been involved in work on the war in Ukraine. We worked with the Government to ensure a speedy response to a very difficult situation. It did not avoid parliamentary scrutiny, but meant working collaboratively to address the urgent issues. Of course, both Brexit and the pandemic are other good examples of that.
The committee’s analysis of the historical account of delegated legislation shows there have been times when the Government of the day have been impatient of parliamentary legislative constraints. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton, says, Parliament rightly demands patience in fulfilling its most important role: making our laws—and making them good laws.
One of the things that I have done is work with the noble Lord, Lord True. We have had debates on Bills before this House in which we have pointed out that clauses had unforeseen consequences. To be fair to the noble Lord, Lord True, he has supported the Opposition in taking clauses out of Bills where that has happened, and I thank him for that. It is important that, in this debate, when we are critical of our procedures and of some of the things that the Executive do, we stress the importance of the work of this House and how well we do it. I do not accept that we do not force the Government to change—because we do. More often than not, 90% of the changes that we make are not via votes and defeating the Government; they are by winning the argument and making the case, which sadly does not happen too much down the other end. But we do it here, and that is really important.
The recommendation in the SLSC report that Parliament and the procedure committee should follow a special procedure for skeleton Bills with substantial delegated powers was rejected in the Government’s response. They argue that Parliament is able to consider each Bill on its own merits, and agree or disagree to delegating powers. In reality, of course, the ability to do this limited. As the DPRRC noted:
“The limits on Parliament’s ability to intervene in delegated legislation places an even greater significance on ensuring the appropriateness of the delegation in the first place.”
The tax credits situation is a really good example of that. It is also a good example of where we did not use our powers to push down something; we used them in an innovative way to say to the other place that it should think again. The problem that the Government of the day had in that situation was that they were not confident that they would have a majority in the elected House. Our role was not to abrogate the responsibilities of the democratic House; it was to say to the democratic House, “Here you are; think again”. That House was prepared to think again and changed its mind. That is the important thing in this debate.
The Opposition supports these committees’ recommendations. Substantive components of policy should be decided and presented via provisions on the face of a Bill, not devised and introduced by secondary legislation after a Bill becomes an Act. We have had many examples of that recently. I hope that the Minister could, at the very least, consider consulting on the merits of creating a new procedure for skeleton Bills. I hope that there will not be a closed-door situation here. The Government’s response to date on the recommendation that there should be fewer cases of poor practice and the improper use of secondary legislation and guidance is not convincing. Departments need to improve their efforts to ensure that a clear and appropriate distinction between legislation and guidance is maintained. The pandemic highlighted the inadequacies of this process.
The SLSC was not convinced by the answers it received in evidence about why sunset clause provisions are not used more often as a matter of good practice. I have moved amendments myself in recent times on why a sunset clause would be appropriate. The Government could now, of course, also consider a greater use of various forms of sunset clauses, such as a sunset and renewal clause.
In the Government’s report The Benefits of Brexit: How the UK is Taking Advantage of Leaving the EU, the Government said that they would
“provide guidance to departments on the use of sunset clauses in regulations and Legislative Reform Orders, including when they should be used”.
I would welcome the Minister sharing this guidance with the House, so that it could be formally reviewed. I realise that it may already be available, so I would welcome the Minister writing to me about it, particularly on the circumstances in which the Government consider sunset clauses should be used.
I am running out of time. I wanted to address a number of issues, particularly with regard to Henry VIII powers. Perhaps the Minister could tell us what progress has been made towards the DPRRC contributing to the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel delegated powers training sessions. As noble Lords said, this is a debate where we do not have to wait for legislative change. There is policy and practice that we can influence, which is why it is so important that these committee reports are reviewed properly on a regular basis.
My noble friend Lady Armstrong mentioned the importance of civil society. In fact, a lot of our work in reviewing legislation involves engagement with civil society and how we hear other voices. Here I take the opportunity to congratulate my noble friend Lord Prentis on his excellent maiden speech. That speech highlighted that our work is not limited to listening to ourselves; it is about how we reach out to communities, and support and confidence in our democracy is about how we engage with our communities. One of the things I have heard is about how we take back control. Certainly, taking back control is about how we empower our communities; how do we ensure that power is devolved to our communities and our towns and cities?
I conclude by saying that I have read the Hansard Society’s initial recommendations, which are due to be published, and I certainly think, like my noble friend Lord Hendy, that a new concordat between Parliament and government that sets out principles of legislative delegation would be a really good starting point. I hope the Minister can support the principle of that being adopted.
The Lord Privy Seal (Lord True) (Con)
My Lords, on that last point, obviously I look forward to seeing the Hansard Society report in full when it comes out; it has been referred to by a number of noble Lords, and I will address that at that stage.
I start by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Prentis of Leeds, on his excellent maiden speech. My beloved only brother, who died a few years ago, was for decades a member of the noble Lord’s trade union, first as NALGO and then as the amalgam. I once asked him, “What’s this Prentis like?” and he said, “He’s not one of the worst.” I have to say that having heard his speech today, he is clearly one of the best. That was one of the best maiden speeches that I have heard, a gracious maiden speech, and we look forward to hearing a lot more from the noble Lord and to his contribution to this House.
I feel that I am in an odd place here, because I started serving your Lordships’ House as private secretary to the Leader of the Opposition in 1997. I suppose I am a poacher turned gamekeeper now, but I retain something of the poacher’s heart. I love Parliament, and I have listened with great attention to this debate and understand the gravity of the issues raised and their importance to your Lordships’ House. I will not just reflect carefully on what we have heard and what we have read in the reports, as Ministers always say, but will consider ways in which we can have further discussions on some of these matters.
I thank my noble friend Lord Blencathra and the DPRRC, and my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts and the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee for their recommendations on this issue. I also thank all noble Lords who contributed today. Someone said that it is a disgrace that we have had to wait so long. My noble friend the Captain of the Gentlemen-at-Arms and I have been in these places for only a short while. We have sought to bring committee reports to your Lordships’ House and we will continue to do so to the best of our abilities.
I do not come to defend big Bills. I share the view of the ancient Greek poet that a big Bill is a big evil. Large Bills can certainly frustrate the process of orderly discussion just as much as skeleton—as they are described—Bills may. We need to reflect collectively on both of those matters and whether either of those extremes are the right way to go forward.
It has been a challenging and powerful debate. I have listened to it not only as a government Minister but, as I said at the outset, as Leader of your Lordships’ House. At times it has left one conflicted. It is in my part as Leader of your Lordships’ House that I repeat that I will reflect carefully and consider with colleagues the important points made today. I am old enough and conservative enough, like the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, who said in his important speech, along with others, to think that there was much to be said for some of the old ways of preparing and carrying legislation. This sentiment was shared by many of your Lordships.
As a member of the Government, I am also a member of the committee examining future legislation, to which the noble Lord, Lord Newby, referred. In government, I am not alone in believing that there needs to be a check on some of the perceived line of direction. In the last few years, all departments have been asked to appoint a Minister and senior official to be responsible for secondary legislation. Although departments are responsible for the quality of their own secondary legislation, Ministers can be—and are—asked to account for their department’s performance to the PBL Committee. All statutory instruments must now go through a PBL triage process, which is relatively new. Departments are given laying dates to limit the number of statutory instruments having to be considered at any one time by Parliament. Through this, we try to ensure that there is a steady flow of statutory instruments being laid before Parliament to facilitate scrutiny by your Lordships. These changes have strengthened the Government’s approach to secondary legislation.
The former lord president of the council, my right honourable friend Jacob Rees-Mogg, wrote to the DPRRC and other committees of your Lordships’ House setting out explicitly that
“Bills with substantial powers, though sometimes essential, should not be a tool to cover imperfect policy development.”
I think many of your Lordships have said that today. Those should not be empty words; I do not think my right honourable friend meant them to be. I hope that the PBL Committee will be able to live up to what the former lord president said.
As the noble Lord, Lord Hutton of Furness, said, a central question underlying this debate is about the balance of power between the Executive and the legislature. It is right that Parliament should challenge, as these reports do, and as your Lordships have done today. My strong belief is that the starting point of the balance is that Parliament must have what it needs to scrutinise legislation. This is in all Governments’ interests, as the noble Lord opposite implied. I stated previously that the quality of legislation is improved by properly conducted scrutiny and dialogue within your Lordships’ House and elsewhere.
There have been so many points raised in the debate. Of course, the dreaded words “Henry VIII” emerged from many mouths, starting with my noble friend Lord Blencathra and finishing with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge. The 1539 Act was obviously an undesirable constitutional development. I agree, and noble Lords will be pleased to hear that the Government agree, that powers to amend primary legislation must be strongly justified, precisely drawn and clearly defined. I agree with my noble friend Lord Blencathra and so many others that vague, sweeping powers are inappropriate. Each new power that the Government ask of Parliament is considered on its own merit within government, and of course in your Lordships’ House.
As set out in the response to the Delegated Powers Committee’s report, we are working to improve awareness of appropriate use of powers across Whitehall through existing guidance and the continuation of training on the sorts of factors that must be considered when determining whether they are justified. We will expect departments to continue to publish their justification for any Henry VIII power in the delegated powers memoranda that accompany each Bill.
My noble friend from the Cabinet Office was here for the end of the debate, and I am sure that she will have heard the interesting suggestion that DPRRC and other input could go into the training for civil servants and those drafting and preparing legislation. I know she will reflect on the suggestions put forward. I cannot, however, promise what the outcome of that reflection might be.
A lot has been said about the sub-delegation of power and disguised legislation. I think that this is a serious issue. There is a huge acquis which goes back through legislation over decades in relation to delegated and disguised powers, and powers which are operated by bodies below the level of the Government. It is something which we need to consider and think about. The Government continue to uphold the presumption against the sub-delegation of legislative power and therefore would expect any provision in a Bill which allows novel sub-delegation to be fully justified. The Government will update existing guidance for drafters to make it clear that the policy background section should provide an explanation of any proposed legislative sub-delegation.
Pre-legislative scrutiny was advocated, quite rightly, by a number who spoke. We are committed to pre-legislative scrutiny where possible, as there are often real, recognised benefits to doing this. I agree with those who made that point. My right honourable friend the Leader of the House of Commons wrote to the chair of the Liaison Committee on 21 June to confirm the Government’s approach to publishing Bills in draft. This Session we are planning for pre-legislative scrutiny to take place on a range of Bills: already published are the draft victims Bill and the draft mental health Bill, and later this Session we will publish the draft protect duty Bill and the draft media Bill. The Government will continue to consider which Bills would benefit most from pre-legislative scrutiny and inform Parliament in the usual way. However, in some instances, it is not practical; for example, immediately after a General Election or where an immediate legislative response is required.
The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, asked at the outset about post-implementation reviews, and that was a recommendation in the report. The Government note this recommendation, but the PIR process is now being reviewed as part of the proposed reforms to the Better Regulation framework. Government publications relating to legislation, including a PIR setting out the conclusions of the review, should be published online alongside the relevant regulations. The Better Regulation exercise is working with the National Archives to update guidance for departments to ensure that PIRs are published online. In addition, the National Archives is exploring options for improving the accessibility of PIRs.
A number of noble Lords, beginning with the right reverend Prelate, and including the noble Lords, Lord Goddard and Lord Liddle, the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, and others, referred to Brexit and indeed to the retained European law legislation as a difficult case in point. Well, we will see what happens when that Bill comes to your Lordships’ House. I comment only that it arises from a mass of legislation that was imposed, without any effective scrutiny, on this Parliament for over 40 years.
A challenging speech was made by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, and the sentiment was taken up in a thoughtful speech by my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth, with loud murmurs of assent from the Liberal Democrat Benches, which were then voiced by the noble Lord, Lord Newby. Others called for a power for your Lordships to reject statutory instruments or some power to amend. This arose—many noble Lords referred to it—in the context of the tax credits regulations in 2015. That precipitated the review by my noble friend Lord Strathclyde.
This House retains the power and the right to examine statutory instruments laid before it, and the Government support the Motion passed by this House in 1994:
“That this House affirms its unfettered freedom to vote on any subordinate legislation submitted for its consideration”. ”.—[Official Report, 20/10/94; col. 356.]
How nice it was to have the memory of the great Lord Simon of Glaisdale evoked by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox. How well I remember that voice rising from those Benches. The Government agreed with my noble friend Lord Strathclyde’s review on this that in that case the will of the elected Chamber should prevail. There is no mechanism for the elected Chamber to overturn a decision by this House on statutory instruments. The Government said at that time that it was not something that could remain unchanged.
I counsel caution in this area. I note the sabre rattling that was heard today, and I also understand the frustrations which lay behind some of that. After all, part of the answer, as the noble Lords, Lord Collins and Lord Newby, said, is to attack some of the issues that cause the frustration; for example, the scale of the delegation that is perceived. I think that untrammelled power should be considered carefully before being used.
It was in 1998 that the then Leader of the House, Lord Richard, described the DPRRC as
“one of the most effective weapons in the armoury of parliamentary scrutiny”—[Official Report, 13/5/1998; col. 1088.]
and how true that still is today. I certainly feel I have had a weapon at my throat. It is still the case for both committees, and the Government continue to take their work extremely seriously as a central contribution to parliamentary control over the Executive.
On delegated legislation in general, rather than so-called skeleton legislation, the Government must always seek to ensure that there is an appropriate balance between the detail in the Bill and the ability of the Government to deliver for the public, business and the country. Many noble Lords have recognised that that balance has to be struck. The ability to act quickly, the need to ensure that proposals are scrutinised appropriately and the effective use of parliamentary time must also be considered and judgments made. There will inevitably be times when the Government and parliamentarians disagree on how to weigh these considerations, and Governments must always seek to provide Parliament with the justification for their proposed approach. It is a matter of concern that your Lordships so widely feel that this balance is not currently being respected.
I was asked by the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, why we could not accept the call to declare Bills skeleton Bills. Your Lordships’ report itself noted in paragraph 37 that a precise definition of “skeleton Bill” or “skeleton clauses” would be difficult to prescribe. There was one suggestion that the Speakers might do so, but there is no analogy between Mr Speaker in the other place, who has no authority here, and the Lord Speaker, who has no authority in the other place.
Surely, what is more important than defining Bills of this type is that the Government should bring forward legislation in orderly time, effectively drafted, to fulfil their policy intent. With it, the Government should publish a full justification for any delegated powers they are requesting. Governments must work productively to ensure that Parliament has everything it needs to hold government to account. If the Government do not do that, they are not doing what they ought to be doing. Noble Lords are outstanding in their ability to scrutinise legislation and are pretty fast in sussing out when departments have not done all they need to do, and I will undertake, as Leader of your Lordships’ House, to try to be on the case.
The culture in Whitehall was referred to, and I referred to that briefly. My noble friend was not very kind about the Cabinet Office’s Guide to Making Legislation. We will have another look it. My noble friend sitting by me will, I am sure, take that away. We are making progress, we think, in training officials and Ministers on the use of delegated legislation—but we will continue at it. The training programme focuses on many aspects of the secondary legislation programme.
The Government recognise that impact assessments and cost-benefit analyses were not always possible because of the emergency nature of Covid-19. However, we must learn for the future if we are to improve policy decisions and deal well with major challenges. What is needed when significant SIs are made, even in an emergency, is a simple assessment of costs and benefits, including knock-on interventions and costs. In the case of Covid lockdowns, these might have included a range of estimates—the increase in waiting times for cancer and other operations, the impact of school closures and other harms. As we said in our response to the Government by Diktat report, we agree that the provision of impact assessment is important to be able to fully consider the impact of policy changes. We will also look at that in relation to the points raised on secondary legislation.
I must conclude now, but I will simply reiterate the point that it is a difficult balance here. There are frustrations, but important issues have been raised and, as Leader of your Lordships’ House, I will not only consider those myself but take the substance of this debate into wider consideration.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, first, I wish to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Prentis of Leeds, on his excellent maiden speech, made in the finest traditions of this House. I was particularly grateful for his powerful contributions in our report, which I did not expect from a new Member but am very grateful for. I think I and the whole House welcome and respect those who come to this place after a lifetime of experience, whether in business, politics, farming, trade unions or other trades and professions. In the Commons, I always liked and got on well with Ronnie Campbell MP, who was the authentic voice of mining. Of course, Ronnie voted against Tony Blair a lot, which was another reason I rather liked him. Today, we have heard the authentic voice of the noble Lord on trade unionism, with his vast experience, and I can tell him that, if I am called upon to form a Government of national unity, he shall have a place in my Cabinet. We all look forward to hearing from him again in the future.
Turning to our reports, I too wish to play a glowing tribute to the clerk of both our committees—Chris Salmon Percival. She is the clerk for the Delegated Powers Committee and the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, and that is handling a massive amount. Every Bill that comes to this place, she and her team handle it—and the thousands of SIs which go through each year. When I came up initially with the idea of this, I had some wild ideas for what we should cover. Chris put it into the sensible structure we have seen in the report. She then spent 12 months analysing in detail and researching, going back to the 1920s and then doing the draft report. She reminded me of the late and magnificent Lord Armstrong of Ilminster. I asked him a few years ago, “Robert, when you were writing up Cabinet minutes, did you write out the details of what the Minister said or just a summary?” He said, “Oh no, dear boy, I wrote out what the Minister would have liked to have said if he had thought of saying it in the first place”. That was rather like my report.
I am very grateful to all 35 Peers who have taken part today. If my sums are right, 34 of them were in complete agreement with our report and the general thrust that we have too much inappropriate delegation of power. I am very grateful to my noble friend the Leader for his largely supportive remarks, within the brief he has to stick to. I rather like to think—I wonder whether other noble Lords agree with me—that if perhaps my noble friend the current Leader had been in his post 12 months ago, we might have had a slightly different response to our report: a more amenable and agreeable one.
I will not attempt to summarise anything today, since I could never do it justice, we would be here for far too long and the speeches speak for themselves. I will pick up just two little points. I rather liked history and thought I was quite good at it. I think I got an A in my Scottish Highers and I knew about Henry VIII. But I can tell this noble House that in my 27 years in the Commons, 10 years as a Minister and four as Minister of State in the Home Office, bashing through a huge criminal justice Bill every year—which your Lordships largely rejected—I never once came across the term “Henry VIII powers”. I suspect that in all Governments—the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, told me this—Cabinet Ministers get to hear of it when a private secretary comes in and says, “Minister, would you sign this letter we are sending back to the Delegated Powers Committee?” “What’s it about?” “Oh, they’re complaining about Henry VIII powers.” “What are you talking about? What are Henry VIII powers?” I am fairly certain that is the case, and I would love to see that proved.
My second point is that we often got delegated powers memoranda that said, “Of course, we’re taking this extraordinary power, but the Minister doesn’t intend to use it, or won’t use it in this way or that way”. We always replied by saying, “It’s not how the current Minister says he or she is going to use it, it’s how the law says it could be used by any future Minister”.
Of course, there is a wider debate to be had on the whole way in which secondary legislation is made, especially now that we are out of the EU. That is a very valid discussion to have, and noble Lords have raised some of the points today. I would love to see that discussion take place on whether we amend SIs, ask the Commons to think again or have a refer back procedure or sifting committee, which worked remarkably well for the EU withdrawal Bill. But our Delegated Powers Committee report is not asking for any of that. I do not want to hear an excuse that our report is rejected because we are opening up a whole can of worms on how SIs are made and government would grind to a halt. All we want is proper scrutiny under the existing system. The worst the Government would have to do with our delegated powers report would be that Lords Ministers would have to do some more affirmative resolutions, either in this Chamber or in the Moses Room. That is not too high a burden to place on government.
I do not want to go through the Leader’s excellent speech in detail, but I am certain that we shall study it in detail in Hansard later. All I will say is that I rather welcome his tone that further discussions are necessary. I will make a suggestion to him—one of two suggestions I shall make. I refer to the 2019 Conservative manifesto, which states on page 48:
“In our first year we will set up a Constitution, Democracy & Rights Commission … and come up with proposals to restore trust in our institutions and in how our democracy operates.”
Of course, that was aimed at human rights law, judicial review and so on, which I now understand are off the table, but I suggest to my noble friend the Leader that we tweak that manifesto commitment promise and have a special Joint Select Committee of our Houses to look at how secondary legislation is done in future. Then the Government could spin it in the next manifesto that they implemented that promise.
I see the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, smiling. I think I noted that he said that the Opposition were completely in support of our report. I look forward to that firm commitment in the Labour Party’s manifesto.
My final request to my noble friend is this. I would like him to send 60 hard copies of today’s Hansard—not just a link—to every person drafting Bills in the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel. They need to read the real reason why the House of Lords is “difficult”. Perhaps then they will draft laws taking into account our legitimate concerns about parliamentary democracy and proper parliamentary scrutiny—and then they may find that the House of Lords ain’t so difficult after all.
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)
My Lords, it was 12.09 pm when my noble friend Lord Blencathra got to his feet, and now it is not far short of 4.09 pm, so I shall be extremely brief. I begin by adding my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Prentis, for his extremely splendid maiden speech, and I add my thanks to the clerks, to Christine Salmon Percival and the team at the SLSC. I thank all Members of the House who have spoken today. We have had some tremendous speeches, and a rich menu of suggestions and ways forward have been put forward for us to consider and reflect on. If the House will forgive me, I would particularly like to thank my fellow members of the SLSC who have taken the trouble to come along and speak today.
I was not surprised, but I was very pleased, at the degree of Back-Bench support from across the House. The road to constitutional reform will be rocky, long, steep and stony and it will be traversed only with a maximum degree of cross-party support from the Back Benches. It will be vital that we reach out to our similar-thinking colleagues in the House of Commons, again on a cross-party basis, or the slur that this is the unelected Lords trying to tell the elected Commons how to do their job will be game, set and match.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, that I recognise what a difficult line he had to follow, with the seductive thought of government, perhaps, within a couple of years. As my noble friend Lord Blencathra said, he dealt with that well. I am delighted to hear his support for the recommendations. I think that he and his party hold an important key, to unlocking the way forward in this particular regard. Without wishing to flatter him, he has a particular responsibility and ability to make things happen, if he and his party so wish. So, we will be watching carefully what he thinks about this in a more measured way.
Finally, my noble friend, the Leader of the House is as ever a polished and practised parliamentarian. He does not give much away; he always gives a very well-thought-through performance, which I enjoy hearing. I am grateful to him for his reassurance about various aspects of impact assessments. I was also grateful for his undertaking to reflect on what we have been doing. As a background to that reflection, I remind him of Admiral Beatty’s saying at the Battle of Jutland. He said:
“Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead”.
If that was the conclusion of his reflections—that we should go full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes—I think that would be a mistake.
Government by Diktat (SLSC Report)
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts
That this House takes note of the Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee Government by Diktat: A call to return power to Parliament (20th Report, Session 2021–22, HL Paper 105).
Preparing for Extreme Risks (RARPC Report)
(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom
That this House takes note of the Report from the Risk Assessment and Risk Planning Committee Preparing for Extreme Risks: Building a Resilient Society (Session 2021–22, HL Paper 110).
Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom (Con)
My Lords, we thought we were well prepared. Roger Hargreaves, the director of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, told us that our national security risk assessment was recognised very positively by Governments across the world, who regarded it as a gold standard for the assessment of risk. The risk of a pandemic was ranked as a highest-priority, tier-1 security risk. Okay, we thought that it would be a flu pandemic, but we were told that, if it were a coronavirus pandemic, it might lead to up to 100 fatalities. Some 211,000 deaths later, we now know that that was an underestimate. We also know that the initial chaotic reaction to the pandemic, not just in the UK but in other countries as well, showed a lack of preparedness that did not justify what can only be described as complacency. This led the Astronomer Royal, the noble Lord, Lord Rees, whom I am delighted to see in his place today, to approach the powers that be to suggest a special Select Committee to examine the ways in which we, first, assess and, then, plan for all manner of risks.
Ours was not a Covid committee, although we learnt from Covid: the country and the world face many different risks, from climate change to volcanos and from solar weather to the potential collapse of technology. It all sounds rather gloomy, which indeed it could have been—and no one would accuse me of being an optimist. But we considered many respects in which our processes could be improved so that we might be able to mitigate some of the threats that we face.
The committee was drawn from a wide range of different skill sets and experience. I pay tribute to the members of the committee for their expertise, dedication and sheer engagement. I think they enjoyed it—I know I did. We were supported by a superb team of House of Lords staff, to whom we could not be more grateful: Beth Hooper and Alastair Taylor, our clerks, and Sarah Jennings, Rebecca Pickavance and others. Your Lordships are lucky to have the quality of help that we received; our work simply could not have been done without it. We also had the benefit of the wisdom and experience of our specialist adviser, Professor David Alexander, professor of emergency planning and management at UCL, to whom we also owe a great debt.
Having thanked the committee and those who helped us, I should also thank the many people who spent a lot of time giving us evidence, both oral and written. I have not counted how many—let us just say that there were lots. It was high-quality stuff, not least from the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, whom I am pleased to see in his place. I declare my interests, as set out in the register, including as chairman of a resilience advisory company and of the advisory panel of Thales UK.
What we found was this. The risks that we face are changing, and changing faster and getting larger day by day. Technological advances have been a great boon to mankind, but they have brought with them a new dependency on things like electricity and the internet and the threat of the malicious deployment of technologies that previously did not exist. But Governments cannot deal with these risks alone, which is why we were, frankly, dismayed to find, in our evidence-taking, a risk-assessment and risk-management process that was secretive, opaque and centralised. It needs to be just the opposite: it needs to involve the whole of society, up and down the country.
The devolved Administrations are, within their territories, the part of government that needs to respond to threats, so it makes no sense that they have the feeling, as they do, that they are excluded from the loop on risk. Businesses are well used to assessing and managing risks. That is what the insurance industry, for example, does as its day-to-day work. The Government should work with the insurance industry to explore mechanisms which allow for the transfer, management and mitigation of risks which are too large for the private sector to address alone.
Voluntary organisations and communities leaped into action when Covid struck, and they would be ready to do so again. We had things to say about local resilience forums, which we felt should be given appropriate resources and brought properly into the process. Scandinavian countries do that well. Sweden, for example, has issued a pamphlet to every household entitled If Crisis or War Comes, with useful information on food, water, warmth, communications and general preparedness. We can learn from, and should work closely with, the international community to improve our resilience. The Swedish pamphlet was well received and well remembered, which counters the fears that British Governments have had of not wanting to worry the people. People will be less worried if they feel better prepared. The British people should not be treated like mushrooms; they are a valuable resource in times of danger.
When I say that the Government cannot do this alone, I mean that, to avoid complacency and groupthink, we found that they should lay themselves open to independent challenge. That is not easy for Governments, but it is essential. It is, in a sense, the whole point of democracy, and in the Ukrainian disaster we have seen the consequences of an absence of challenge to a dictator. For that reason, we recommended the establishment of an office for preparedness and resilience headed by a new post of government chief risk officer. The OPR should have a standing expert advisory council to provide independent challenge, oversight and strategic direction.
All these preparations should lead towards a comprehensive set of resilience plans. If the first time you try to set up a response to a crisis is when it hits, it is too late. If you do not have the tried and tested relationships between the emergency responders, formed over years of planning, training and exercising, it will be much more difficult to deal with the crisis. Last-minute improvisation is the enemy of good crisis response.
The Government’s old approach was too siloed. They examined risks on the basis of their likelihood as against their predicted impact, but did not include in that trade-off the key issue of our vulnerability to a particular risk. They took little account of cascading risks, and even less of those risks that they regarded as low risk, even if their impact would be very great. An example that no one will be surprised to hear me raise is a large solar flare, such as the Carrington Event of 1859, which could have devastating consequences for our electricity grid. If the electricity grid fails, the water system would fail, because water is pumped by electricity, and communications would fail, because the mobile telephone masts would lose their power. I do not know about your Lordships’ families but, without their mobile telephones, all my family would have nervous breakdowns. That would be a cascading consequence.
Is a massive solar flare—which would certainly have a high impact—a low-risk event? Until about 10 years ago, solar flares such as the Carrington Event were categorised as a one-in-100-year risk. Because there has not been one in more than 100 years, the Government recategorised it as a one-in-200-year risk. That seems an odd approach to probability. Nevertheless, there are some things that simply cannot be predicted; solar storms are one of them, because it is not possible to predict in which direction they will travel and whether they will hit the earth. We might have none in 200 years and then two in two weeks. The proper question to ask about low-risk, high-probability events is: if such a thing happened, would we want to be able to survive it? I hope the answer is yes.
This brings us to the next matter: the difficulty of persuading a Government to prepare for things that might not happen. If you go to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and say, “We need to prepare for something the world hasn’t ever seen before and may not see for the next 20 years but which sooner or later will happen, and we therefore need you to take money away from schools and hospitals that we know we need now,” you are likely to get a dusty answer. But responsible government requires you to do just that.
All Governments must prepare, not just for the enemy at the gate but for the enemy over the horizon and for things that will happen beyond their term of office. That is the rationale behind the Successor nuclear submarines. It is difficult but necessary. A power station investment rejected 10 years ago on the grounds that it would not come on stream for 10 years could now be helping us through the cost of living crisis. We all have to prepare for the longer term. We need to invest in our pensions, building our resilience and mending our roofs while the sun is shining. A stitch in time saves nine.
One key issue our report identified was the need to develop education, training and exercising in crisis management. That is not to say that we can predict everything that will happen and prepare for it. The one thing we know about government predictions is that they will be wrong. But if you are prepared for one type of crisis, the chances are that you might be better able to withstand another type of crisis. That is more obviously true if the key elements of your preparation, education and training are flexibility, agility and diversity. Diversity in your workforce brings particular benefits in avoiding groupthink. If everyone comes from the same educational background, work experience, gender or even country, they are more likely to think alike and have gaps in their approach.
The Government’s response to our report was positive. They accepted, in principle, the vast majority of it, and the two recommendations they rejected were not central themes. However, rather than go point by point through the Government’s response, it would seem more relevant and sensible to consider the new resilience framework that the Government published last month, something they had been working on during the time of our Select Committee and which took up many of the themes of our report.
The Government espouse three core principles. The first is a shared understanding of the risks we face, which speaks to our demand for more openness. That is a noble aim. The framework, however, is shy about our suggestion of independent challenge. I suggest that, without independent challenge, the risk of complacency remains. Parliament will have a role to play in holding the Government’s feet to the fire and ensuring that the Government’s soft words actually butter some parsnips.
The second government principle is prevention rather than cure wherever possible, because a stitch in time saves nine. It is essential that the Treasury is bought into this model. That is easier said than done, particularly during a cost of living crisis. We need, as we said in our report, to avoid the traditional disincentives to invest against possible risks, especially low-probability, high-impact ones. There is something ominous in the words in the framework:
“HM Treasury will continue to ensure that the UK Government is making investment decisions which represent the best value for money.”
That is not because value for money is a bad thing—it is not—but because continuance of the Treasury’s approach is not what is needed. We need, for example, an appropriate depreciation register for critical national infrastructure.
The third principle is that resilience is a whole of society endeavour. That is excellent. Look what happened during Covid—the people are willing and able to be involved.
This resilience framework is a start. Actually, it is a good start. But it can get better, and there is work to be done. I beg to move.
Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the committee’s chair, my friend the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, and thank him for his comprehensive and powerful opening speech, and for his adroit and inclusive chairing of the committee. I join him in recognising and thanking the clerks, the staff and our advisers for their exemplary support. I apologise, but if I am to have any hope of getting home today, I must leave before the winding up. I thank the Chief Whip, my own Whip, the Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, to whom I have explained my predicament; they all responded graciously and generously to the situation.
The report has contributed already to improving UK resilience. The Government acquiesced in all but two of its recommendations and the resilience framework published recently builds upon the work of the committee and its findings, as Oliver Dowden acknowledged in his all-Peers letter. I welcome the Government’s publication of the resilience framework. It is the first step towards the national resilience strategy mandated by the integrated review. Its publication, like this debate, is timely. We face several risks and many threats, all demanding swift and effective response. Russian attacks on Ukraine’s critical national infrastructure serve to underline the importance of looking to our own resilience and ability to respond to such external threats. That is true whether those threats are natural disasters, driven by hostile actors or an unintended consequence of anthropogenic activity.
The major risks are well known. However, the ways in which they manifest are fluid and subject to change. Any coherent resilience strategy must respect this truth: if we are to prevent, mitigate and diminish their impact, our response must be multifaceted and as adaptable as the threats. This requires nimbleness and a data-driven approach in the Executive, as well as better ownership of risk in lead government departments, but it also requires a whole-of-society approach, as suggested by the integrated review.
I regret to say that the Government have, over the last couple of years and an even greater number of Prime Ministers, inadvertently exacerbated the risks we face through structural failures. Shortly before Covid reached these shores, the Threats, Hazards, Resilience and Contingency Committee of the NSC was quietly and ill-advisedly disbanded. In answer to a Written Question, the then Defence Secretary downplayed this development, suggesting that its functions would henceforth be performed by the NSC itself, and would not mean a loss of capacity but merely reflected
“wider consolidation of Cabinet Committee sub-Committees”.
This sub-committee has been resurrected—a clear acknowledgement that the earlier disbanding of it was a mistake, as our report identifies.
It would be helpful to have a clearer explanation of why this decision was made in the first place, to what extent it compromised our ability to respond to emergent risks with speed and coherence, and how the structural changes that the framework requires can be protected from future, ill-conceived “consolidations” of this sort. We know that data is vital in risk mitigation, but so is institutional memory. If the Government’s approach to resilience is to succeed, institutional memory must be maintained.
What evidence is there that this Government can develop, publish and implement the promised national resilience strategy at the speed commensurate with the seriousness of the risks we face? Soon it will be two years since the integrated review which mandated the resilience strategy. It has taken 18 months for the framework to be published. I welcome the promise that we can expect the strategy to be published in “early 2023”, but I would be grateful for clarity on whether, and which, measures and their implementation are contingent upon other ongoing inquiries, such as the crisis capabilities review led by the Home Office Permanent Secretary. I welcome the creation of a head of resilience, a dedicated resilience directorate and the resurrection of the resilience sub-committee of the NSC.
There is much to commend in the context of accountability, both to Parliament and through risk ownership by lead government departments. The framework promises a real cultural shift. Here, the UK’s determination to embed climate change considerations within the culture of government offers lessons. I should be interested to know if a structure analogous to the Climate Change Committee has been considered. An independent body established by statute, offering external expertise and scrutiny of our approach to resilience, which is then empowered to report to Parliament, would enhance our ability to scrutinise the promised annual statement to Parliament on resilience and provide valuable context for subsequent debates.
While supply chains, global context and societal make up ensure that different nations must mitigate risk in different ways and with different emphases, universal challenges show us that preventive work, on which the framework places a welcome emphasis, can work properly only through international co-operation. I urge reflection on the response of the Centre for Long-Term Resilience to the framework. While commending it, it asks that, in recognition of the global nature of the threats, the Government advocate for a dedicated multinational resilience forum for greater coherence of the efforts of individual nations to protect their people.
In closing, I remind noble Lords of October’s report of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, as well as our own report on critical infrastructure, which was scathing about the Government’s ability to protect it. It called on the Prime Minister to
“get a much better grip”.
I trust that the resilience framework and the strategy that is promised will be a long-overdue step to getting a better grip on national security.
Viscount Thurso (LD)
My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, on the excellent way in which he chaired our committee. I can tell the noble Lord that I certainly enjoyed it, and furthermore I learned a great deal; my compliments also to the staff. I think we never managed to meet in person, but did every session online, which posed some interesting challenges to do with curtains and lights and things like that. It was an extremely well chaired committee.
The noble Lord has set out extremely well the main highlights of our report, so I want to briefly pick on a couple of points. I support the overall conclusion that the culture and practice within government of risk assessment and management of resilience need to change. How we go about that should be through adopting a whole-of-society approach and looking to general resilience more than to individual threats.
Let me begin with box 1, which sets out the threat from climate change. It could have been argued that we did not really need to set out climate change because it was so obvious and over such a long period, but it is interesting to note that we are now a year from COP 26 and already it is slightly beginning to slip down the agenda. For me, it was important to see it in there because, first, the extreme risks that come from it are all going to appear with increasing severity and likelihood on the national risk register, and, secondly, it serves as a lesson of what happens when the enemy at the gate perhaps overtakes the enemy on the horizon. It is a very good example of that.
I would like to draw attention to paragraphs 136 to 141 in the report, where we talk about the devolved bodies. I can do no better than to quote paragraph 137 and Shirley Rogers, director of performance, delivery and resilience for the Scottish Government, who said:
“There is a variable degree of understanding about what devolution settlements look like and what devolved Administrations’ powers are … My observation is partly that there is a tendency to treat us as if we are a department and consult us on the things that people think we will need to know about, rather than the totality.”
Correcting that is central to the Government’s approach.
I would like to comment on how we look at resilience and go about risk management. Currently, risk is looked at as identifying a single threat, rather like on your company risk register, and looking at how it can be mitigated. The risk is seen as a barrier to achievement. However, what I learned in the process of our committee’s deliberations was that extreme risks are not like that; they are things that we cannot avoid, and therefore we have to look at them in a different way. As the noble Lord has already pointed out, this needs a change of culture.
The resilience that we need comes not from looking at the individual threat but at all of the things that cascade together and ensuring that there is resilience in depth. That requires an investment, and that comes back to the Treasury. This is not about a cash spend that is going to be made in-year; this is about identifying something that will be invested in, and resilience automatically implies redundancy. There will be some part of the spend that will never be used, and we have to accept that as being central to what we are trying to do. If we do not understand that, just look at the supply chain and the fact that all the chips were being made in countries that are having grave difficulty, and now we cannot make cars in anything like the way that we would want to.
In the first 22 years of this century, we have had three extreme events: first, a financial crisis which cost us hundreds of billions in support; secondly, a pandemic, which was number one on the risk register but we got wrong, and which cost hundreds of billions in support for the country; and, thirdly, since our report came out, a war in Ukraine which was not particularly anticipated. I am sure we will have three more events in the next 20 years and that they will not be the ones that are predicted, so we have to have resilience to be ready for whatever may come. In that regard, I think the most important thing the chairman of the committee, the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, said is about getting the Treasury to change the way it looks at these things. We have to try to get the Treasury away from its complacent, cash-book comfort zone and into looking at investment for the future.
Ultimately, in any organisation, risk is the responsibility of the chief executive or the accounting officer. We need to put responsibility for risk higher up. We need a chief risk officer, and for Secretaries of State and the Prime Minister to take the responsibility.
Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)
My Lords, I add my tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, for his benign and effective chairmanship of this special inquiry, which illuminated crucial issues that are still underdiscussed. Indeed, we are still in denial about a whole raft of newly emergent mega-threats, which will be the focus of my remarks.
We are increasingly reliant on vulnerable globe-spanning networks for food supply and manufacturing, and novel viruses more virulent than Covid-19, perhaps even artificially engineered, could emerge at any time and spread with devastating speed. Our interconnected society is ever more vulnerable to other scenarios—massive cyberattacks, cascading failures of crucial infrastructure, or even accidental nuclear war—whose likelihood and impacts are rising year by year. Covid-19 must be a wake-up call, reminding us that we are vulnerable. Such worries cannot now be dismissed as flaky doom-mongering.
What does it take to enhance the UK’s preparedness for future threats? The first need is better joined-up government. Covid was primarily a medical catastrophe, but it cascaded into other sectors, including schools and, through its impact on supply chains, manufacturing. We have learned lessons about the trade-off between efficiency and resilience. For instance, there need to be firmer guidelines about who—regionally as well as centrally—has authority in emergencies.
Secondly, we need to optimise the use of limited resources in preparing precautionary measures. For that, we need a more rigorous assessment of what scenarios are most probable. As has been said, the published risk register has hitherto been inadequate. There is little input from external experts and too much secrecy, and no pandemic other than flu was rated a major threat. Moreover, the quoted likelihoods pertain to the next two years, but that is not enough when the threats may be rising year on year, as they surely are for engineered pandemics and massive cyberattacks. We need to plan maybe 20 years ahead.
As we have heard, the Government’s recently announced national resilience framework is welcome. It proposes a new institutional architecture to raise the profile of resilience within government and Parliament, with, as we recommended, a head of resilience equal in rank to the National Security Adviser; an annual parliamentary statement on resilience; a new national resilience academy to train up a new generation of risk-management professionals across relevant sectors; and a national exercising programme, embracing both military-style and virtual reality exercises to test our resilience to a range of risks. This measure was, incidentally, forcefully advocated by the two former Defence Secretaries we were lucky to have on our committee.
The credibility, acumen and perseverance of the first person appointed as head of resilience will be a crucial determinant of where the scheme as a whole ends up by fostering practical and effective action of the kind that our committee recommends. Also crucial is whether the Chancellor signs up to spending whatever sums of money—probably quite modest—are needed to implement the framework’s proposals. Given these prerequisites, we would be on the verge of making real progress.
However, cross-party consensus on the institutional framework is essential if we are to properly address measures that stretch far beyond the timescales of a single Administration. A good start, already signalled by the shadow Paymaster-General, would be a manifesto commitment to nominate a Cabinet-level Minister with full-time responsibility for resilience. Moreover, the Opposition could add a series of substantive points not fully covered in the framework—in particular, establishing a statutory, independent resilience institute on the model of the Climate Change Committee or the Office for Budget Responsibility that can report to Parliament on the reality or unreality of the claims for resilience being made by relevant Ministers. That again was recommended by our committee. The UK should lead campaigning for the international co-operation that is needed to minimise the extreme threats, which are global—as most are.
If the Government vigorously implement their new framework, and the Opposition push more vigorously in these directions, then our democracy will be working as it should to protect society from catastrophe.
The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, I, too, am grateful for the Select Committee’s work in tackling such an important subject and, in particular, I concur with the authors’ recognition that,
“the UK must move away from a risk management strategy which … often ignores or fails to appreciate the interconnected nature of our society”,
and that we must instead,
“produce a risk management system that ties all sectors of society together.”
Interdependence is a fundamental part of human nature and policies that follow the grain of that nature are far more likely to succeed.
I was disappointed, therefore, that although the report advocated for a whole-society approach, no reference was made to the role of faith groups in emergency planning and response. Faith groups and leaders across the country were an integral part of the response to Covid-19. A 2020 report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Faith and Society, based on research with local authorities, found that faith communities were instrumental in local responses by offering buildings, running food banks, information-sharing, befriending, collecting, cooking and delivering food, and providing volunteers for local authority programmes. Accordingly, the APPG found that local authorities developed a new-found appreciation for the agility, flexibility and professionalism of faith-based organisations, and that local authorities were keen to continue and build on those relationships in the future.
When I consulted with my own local public health team, I heard a similar account. In Leicester, throughout 2020 and 2021 there was a fortnightly faiths engagement group that brought together public bodies with faith leaders to co-ordinate how to translate and disseminate important messages about the virus itself and the associated restrictions. Our city’s director of public health, Professor Ivan Browne, told me: “I would argue that any strategic document that in any way considers a community response to a crisis must consider the role of community and faith groups.” Another example would be the 2016 floods, when Khalsa Aid, a Sikh charity, together with groups of Muslim volunteers, spent weeks in the affected towns in Lancashire and Yorkshire, serving thousands of hot meals and helping with the clean-up.
Across the UK, when there have been terror attacks or explosions, churches have opened to offer shelter and hospitality for those affected and places for emergency services to base themselves. Of course, there is also the Salvation Army, which as well as being a Christian denomination is one of the world’s largest providers of social aid and humanitarian assistance, frequently on the front lines of the response to earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis across the globe.
Even as we speak, faith-based organisations are responding to another national emergency, which might not require flashing blue lights or daily briefings, but is shocking in its scale nevertheless. Across the country, and for several years now, churches, mosques, temples, gurdwaras and synagogues have been hosting and supporting food banks and community pantries. Faith groups may appear to be superfluous stakeholders to government departments responsible for risk assessment and planning, but the children of God in need of food parcels may tell a different story.
Faith groups also have a distinct contribution to make in the face of crises. Beyond meeting material needs alone, they are often central in reinforcing a local sense of identity and the connections that comprise a community’s social fabric. The gift of our common life together can easily be disrupted by disaster or conflict yet cannot be maintained or mended by a statutory service, no matter how well intentioned.
As well as their institutional presence, most faiths have an other-centredness at their core that prepares their members to be willing, as well as able, to help. Week in, week out, most people of faith are working to grow in patience, generosity, temperance, wisdom and, most importantly, compassion.
With this in mind, I suggest that the Select Committee’s report should go further when it speaks about the role of education in building our society’s resilience. We should also consider how our education system can build what psychologists identify as the five pillars of resilience: self-awareness, mindfulness, self-care, positive relationships, and a sense of purpose. These are the building blocks of a resilient citizenry.
If the Civil Contingencies Act is to be updated, as the Select Committee recommends, to reflect the importance of several societal organisations not recognised in the current legislation, might I suggest that faith groups and faith-based organisations are also included?
Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)
My Lords, I should declare my interest as chair of the National Preparedness Commission and as a visiting professor of resilience at Cranfield University.
I start by paying tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, and his colleagues for producing such an excellent report. In the interests of transparency, I should point out that he and the noble Lord, Lord Rees, are both members of the National Preparedness Commission, and that I and another eight commission colleagues, including my noble friend Lady Twycross, were all witnesses in one capacity or another.
This debate is particularly timely. The UK Government Resilience Framework has just been published and I plan to focus on what it says, given the context of the committee’s report. As the framework says,
“We live in an increasingly volatile world”,
where the UK will face far-reaching crises
“greater in frequency and scale … than we have been used to.”
It is therefore right that, when it looks at the local level, local resilience forums are to be strengthened and better resourced. These require genuine partnership between central government and local services, but crucially must also work with local voluntary and community sectors and local businesses.
Within the framework, there are many references to partnership, but the Government need to recognise that this is about much more than simply communicating risks. Organisations need relevant, actionable information. A sophisticated approach is needed, so that these are genuine partnerships of equals that recognise the strengths and assets that the different sectors bring.
The framework is also somewhat weak on the role of communities. Again, partnership here should work both ways. This will require investment in voluntary and community sector infrastructure to enable proper engagement with the local statutory sectors.
The framework places a great emphasis on prevention and preparation. That too makes sense, but there needs to be an acceptance that this will not always be successful. Indeed, it is necessary to plan for failure, and it is irresponsible to encourage false belief in the myth of 100% mitigation. Then there will be risks, threats and crises that have not been foreseen or previously encountered.
The framework promises an annual statement to Parliament on national resilience. Again, this is sensible. However, there is a risk that over time this could become formulaic and not a hugely informative exercise. As a minimum, there should be an annual debate on this statement in both Houses, and consideration needs to be given to charging the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy—or possibly a new Joint Committee on national resilience—with monitoring and scrutinising progress.
The report of the committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, was a call to arms. We need to make every level of government, every organisation and every community more resilient. If we do that, we will create a sort of herd immunity for a society better able to address future global crises—another pandemic, a massive cyberattack, climate change or whatever else it might be. However, this will require a mindset shift: a change from a “just in time” approach that we have been following for the last 40 years to one where “just in case” is given priority.
This is a generational mission: resilience and preparedness must be built into society’s fabric, designed into government at every level, into our cities and communities, and into all our businesses and organisations. Sir Oliver Letwin, who was Minister for National Resilience, writing for the commission last September, warned that he had seen,
“at first-hand how short-term political pressures and the dynamics of Whitehall can combine to prevent serious efforts to improve our resilience”.
Other noble Lords have made similar points in their remarks today. He called for a national resilience Act, modelled on the Climate Change Act, saying:
“Without a mechanism of this sort to focus the mind of government on national resilience, we can be sure that Britain will remain singularly ill-prepared to meet a range of crises”.
The generational mission has to embrace us all. In all our interests, the new resilience framework must be the first step in delivering that generational shift. This Government, and their successors, must see building our nation’s resilience as central to their mission. The task of Parliament is to hold them to it for all of us, for our children and our grandchildren.
Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)
My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, on his skilled and very patient leadership in this important committee of inquiry. I join him in thanking and commending the staff who carefully listened to our deliberations and to the evidence presented, and who distilled, with such skill and mastery, an account of our conclusions. We are immensely lucky in this House to have people of such talent working for us.
In keeping with other members of the committee—especially those of us with some experience in these fields—I say that this special committee was a true eye-opener for all of us. To see in some detail just how ill-prepared our country and our people are for the kind of grave risks prevalent in today’s very dangerous—and increasingly dangerous—world was itself alarming, to say the least. Our study was both significant and timely, and it is possible to say that this is perhaps one of the most consequential reports that this House has produced in many years.
The fact that, in their response, the Government accepted all but two of our highly critical recommendations is evidence enough of the traction that we have created. The appearance in late December of the brand new UK Government resilience framework shows just how timely our report was and the effect that it had.
Of course, the Government’s position—I anticipate what the Minister will say—is that many of the recommendations that we made were already the subject of internal governmental consideration and action. That is easily said but if that was the case and the government machine was aware of the deficiencies in its risk processes, it did not actually say that during the time that the committee was conducting its inquiry.
We took evidence from the then Paymaster-General—then the Minister in charge of the national risk register—and her successor to give a view, and from neither, nor from the civil servant advisers, did we get the impression that the kinds of issues that we were confronted with were being treated with the appropriate degree of urgency. However, the new resilience framework begins to show that, however belatedly, Ministers have woken up to the nation’s vulnerabilities and are seeking to remedy them, and mainly in the ways that we proposed—better late than another grave disaster.
Time is limited in this debate so I will confine myself to making a couple of points that the committee identified. However, I would like the report itself to state its case. It merits reading and rereading widely, because a wider audience than this needs to know what we found and are now concerned with; our conclusions are so relevant and so important. I know that Professor Andrew Morris has already promoted our report to the Scottish Parliament in its post-Covid deliberations. We should make no mistake that our report was hard-hitting and highly critical and, frankly—I say this candidly—that not all of the deficiencies are to do with the last 12 years. Some of us who held government positions related to risk management must share at least some of the blame for historic vulnerabilities.
The main weaknesses in the current system that we identified were an overbearing and unjustified element of secrecy in the whole process and a lack of external challenge to internal government thinking. Both these problems have been addressed in the new resilience framework, and Parliament must be vigilant to see that its sentiments are translated into action.
The experience of Covid-19 has shone a bright light on the way that we look at the grave risks to this country’s safety and security. If we are to avoid the kind of cascading damage that we have seen over the last two years, we need more than fine words in a little-noticed framework document. We need to see its provisions put into effect, and quickly.
Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
My Lords, I express my own thanks to our chair, the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, not only for his excellent introduction today but for his superb chairing of the committee, especially given that meetings had to be conducted remotely almost throughout. I support his thanks to our terrific staff and advisers, and to my fellow committee members for their stimulating company and insights.
I joined the committee encouraged by some of the writing of the noble Lord, Lord Rees, especially in his excellent book On the Future: Prospects for Humanity, in the hope and expectation that we would grapple with how best to anticipate and mitigate some of the extreme and existential risks we face in the UK, particularly those arising from new technologies such as artificial intelligence.
However, the fact is that, in risk terms, we have rarely been thinking beyond a two-year timeframe, let alone a parliamentary term, and we found that our system is completely deficient in assessing and planning for chronic or long-term risks and has a bias against low-likelihood, high-impact risks. In his evidence to us, the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, chair of the National Preparedness Commission, rightly questioned whether the current political system, with short parliamentary terms and ministerial postings, allows for the proper consideration of risk. Sir Patrick Vallance, who it is clear will be playing an important role in government reforms in this area, was even blunter, saying:
“If you take a two year outlook, you get the wrong answer.”
We discovered that it was not just generational risks where risk assessment and planning were inadequate, such as with climate change or AGI—artificial general intelligence—but that we failed even when it came to the medium term. As we have heard, the great irony is that, prior to the onset of Covid-19, the UK’s approach to risk assessment and management—as the Institute for Government pointed out in its report Managing Extreme Risks—was admired. It is clear, however, that there are both cultural and institutional flaws in planning, assessment, mitigation and prevention. The time is never right for expenditure on prevention and mitigation, as the noble Lord, Lord Rees, says—another plug for his book—in his new introduction.
The risks we face are changing. As we say in the report:
“Technological advances have raised the threat posed by the malicious deployment of technologies which could be used for good or ill, while traditional threats such as those from nuclear or chemical warfare remain.”
We also found that the Government’s risk assessment process through the NSRA looks at only discrete risks and is unable to encompass the complexity of risks facing the UK. It has failed to account for interconnected or cascading risks, which go far beyond the failure of one part of a system.
In his prologue to his book Apocalypse, How?, one of our witnesses, Sir Oliver Letwin, posits a national emergency where the internet goes down, electricity supply fails across the country and no analogue communications backup is available. Given the way that BT’s Digital Voice programme to replace copper telephone lines with fibre seems to be taking place without any assessment of the impact on national resilience, it looks like we are heading for an emergency of exactly that type. Robert Harris, author of The Second Sleep, illustrated this graphically in his evidence:
“Sophisticated societies do collapse. Every civilisation collapses. You cannot think of one that did not face some terrible crisis, partly because they became so sophisticated.”
We further found that the central government risk assessment process has developed a culture of secrecy that impedes thorough scrutiny, expert consultation and information sharing with key partners, as experience with Exercise Cygnus and the DHSC’s more recent report on learning Covid lessons are already showing.
I welcome a great deal of the Government’s response and the new resilience framework, particularly the adoption of the overarching three principles adumbrated by the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, and action relating to local resilience forums and the voluntary sector—and, indeed, relating to the development of skills. But how will the resilience directorate and the new head of resilience be
“providing leadership for this system”?
It seems there will not be any teeth in terms of challenging lead government departments.
Then we have the lack of a statutory duty regarding critical national infrastructure threats, which could be the Achilles heel of our risk planning. How does this square with the commitment to deliver resilience standards in the private sector? What does action to “refresh” the NSRA mean? What methodology will be adopted? Why is there no commitment to looking more than five years out? These proposals all aim to ensure that we have a much better handle on the future. As Professor William MacAskill says in his recent book, What We Owe the Future, sacrifices can actually be win-wins for posterity. I hope the Treasury takes note.
Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)
My Lords, I declare my insurance and legal interests as set out in the register. Like other noble Lords, I welcome the Government’s resilience framework and its focus on building our understanding of risks and preparation. We have seen in recent times, particularly during the pandemic, how interconnected and complex our world has become. Having a common and comprehensive framework to build resilience and mobilise the whole of society around resilience is a significant step change in addressing the issues we face.
Many congratulations to my noble friend Lord Arbuthnot and his colleagues on this committee for producing what I feel, having now read it several times, is one of the best reports of its kind that I have ever scrutinised. As the report rightly observes, the Covid-19 pandemic exposed significant shortcomings in our national emergency planning. The considerable resilience that was displayed was all the more remarkable given those shortcomings. I do not know how many of my colleagues watched the film “Contagion”: if only we had paid a bit more attention to some of the episodes in that film, we would have been better prepared. Anyway, it is going to take many years for a definitive report on our response to the pandemic to appear, but it is, in my view, never too soon to start probing the ashes and thinking about what worked and what did not.
I do not think that anyone foresaw the profound disruption to the lives and education of students and pupils, many of whose vital exam years were horribly affected by the pandemic across three academic years—enough to blight a student’s entire time at university. The decades-long policy of reducing the number of beds in the NHS also began to look rather questionable, as those field hospitals were rapidly set up just in case the pandemic ran out of control.
Once again, the exemplary response of our Armed Forces was a model of its kind: brisk, efficient and to the point. As we look forward to future resilience planning, I think—as my noble friend pointed out in his opening remarks—that there is one aspect which is somewhat under-represented at present. A couple of days ago, we debated the Financial Services and Markets Bill, and I called for a closer partnership between government and our formidable financial services industry. My focus then was principally on the potential benefits for the industry and, streaming from that, for the UK economy. I think that the Government could gain too by drawing more upon the very considerable expertise that the private sector has to offer in the field of risk assessment.
I know very well from all my dealings with the insurance industry, particularly when I chaired the British Insurance Brokers’ Association, that the accurate assessment and quantification of risk is bread and butter for that industry. As the report rightly points out, the Government tend to focus disproportionately on higher-likelihood risks at the expense, in particular, of potentially high-impact risks that are believed to have a relatively low likelihood. The insurance industry, not least through its experience with climate change and, before that, long-tail industrial illness and asbestos-related claims, has learned the dangers of such an approach. I hope that colleagues on all sides will consider drawing more on private sector expertise in risk assessment and risk management.
Biosecurity, energy security, and food security—the very foundations of our social, economic and political order—are under severe threat. If we still believe, as I certainly do, that prevention is better than cure, then calmly, coolly and sensibly, I hope we shall follow the wise advice in this report and look to the future, not through rose-tinted spectacles, but in the light of the cold realities of 2023 and beyond in the longer term, using all the expertise at our disposal.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
I am very pleased to be able to speak as part of this debate. I declare an interest as London’s Deputy Mayor for Fire and Resilience, in which capacity I chair the London Resilience Forum, and as a member of the National Preparedness Commission, as are, I understand, quite a few noble Lords. I was a witness to the inquiry and gave evidence to the committee.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom, for enabling this debate. This is an important and significant issue that concerns the whole of society, not just this House. The report reminds us of the need for government to be better prepared, saying
“the UK must be better at anticipating, preparing for and responding to a range of challenging scenarios, including those which it has never experienced before.”
Humans learn through experience, and we are naturally inclined to try to prevent the recurrence of something we have already gone through. We are less good at recognising risks or preparing for risks that we have not yet faced ourselves. It is a failure of our collective imagination. It would be wrong to prejudge anything that may come out of the Covid inquiry, but this human trait is arguably why the UK was better prepared for repeats of a flu or swine flu pandemic than for a SARS coronavirus-type pandemic, because we had not felt the full force of one previously.
Were the Government to take on the recommendations in the report and adopt an all-risks approach, it would go a long way to improving the UK’s resilience. In my view, this is particularly key in relation the complex and cascading risks which have been referred to throughout this debate, including on climate change. The extreme heat last summer represents the thin edge of the wedge of what we can see on climate change. I concur with speakers throughout this debate on a number of issues in relation to cascading risks.
I shall make two further points in the remainder of the time I have in the debate. The first is that the Government need to demonstrate that they are taking the risk to the UK’s resilience seriously. I was disappointed that, rather than the long-heralded resilience strategy, we saw the resilience framework in the week before Christmas, at the point at which we were told to expect the strategy to be published. The strategic approach that it promises must not be instead of a strategy. It would be useful to get some clarity on when the forthcoming strategy is likely to be published and how the framework will be funded. The previously expressed vision of making Britain the most resilient country in the world should not be lost, nor should the potential for risks to be seen in the round, or the cascading impact of risks to be carefully considered and planned for be missed.
Clearly it would be ludicrous for home departments with expertise not to be involved in risk planning, but risk planning for hazards and civil contingencies, whether short shocks or long-running chronic incidents, is an area of expertise in its own right. Effective management of extreme risks cannot be fulfilled from a silo approach within departments, and this is where the proposals made by the committee in the report for an office for preparedness and resilience could make a massive and positive difference. This would require commitment and funding but, as the report also points out, and as has been noted in this discussion, prevention is significantly cheaper than cure.
My second point is one that I made to the committee, which is that there is a duty on local resilience forums to warn and inform their partner agencies and the public. There is no such duty on government, and the ludicrous level of secrecy has already been noted. There are many occasions when LRFs are asked to plan for risks but do not get access to the planning assumptions to which the Government are working nor, when they do, to the basis which those assumptions are made. This level of secrecy damages the country’s resilience and cannot be right. Government departments should also have a statutory duty to share information, not least with those tasked to prepare for and respond to risks to our country’s resilience.
There is much to commend in the report. I only regret that the Government have not taken up more of the recommendations as yet, and I look forward to clarification from Ministers on when the resilience strategy will be forthcoming. I hope that they will also ensure that the Government accept the points made by Members of this House during this debate and act on them and the recommendations in the report as a matter of urgency.
Lord Mair (CB)
My Lords, it was a privilege to be a member of this House’s Select Committee on Risk Assessment and Risk Planning under the expert and excellent chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot. We all welcome the Government’s positive and constructive response to our report, accepting most of our recommendations. We also welcome the publication last month of the UK Government Resilience Framework, already referred to in this debate by a number of noble Lords. Much of this embraces the key principle of strengthening our national resilience that we emphasised in our report. I will speak on the essential need for preparedness and resilience in the context of our critical national infrastructure, emphasising the crucial role of new technologies and data in achieving this.
We all rely hugely on electricity and the internet, but we are vulnerable to cascading failures that could proliferate rapidly and cause widespread devastation. Important interdependencies that exist across risks have been identified by the Royal Academy of Engineering in its influential 2021 report, Critical Capabilities: Strengthening UK Resilience. Understanding these interdependencies is crucial and calls for systems thinking. Where infrastructure systems fail, the effects often cascade, knocking out critical services. An example is the flooding of Lancaster during Storm Desmond in 2015, which led to the loss of electricity supply to 61,000 properties, the situation returning to normal only after six days. The loss of electricity resulted in loss of communications and internet signal. The hospital had back-up generators and fuel for 14 days, but A&E became the first port of call for many when access was lost to 111, GPs and pharmacies. Other care facilities such as nursing homes did not have back-up generators. Schools closed and faced a challenge of communication with parents. Retail was disrupted, with only a few ATM machines working. Water and sewerage were disrupted in the more modern buildings, since they also relied on electricity. This case illustrates just one example of the vulnerability of infrastructure and society to loss of electricity and the resulting cascading effects.
In its Global Risks Report 2020, the World Economic Forum places the failure of critical infrastructure among the top 10 risks to the global economy. There are tragic examples of the risks caused by deterioration of infrastructure and lack of maintenance. The I-35W Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, collapsed in 2007 without warning during evening rush hour, killing 13 people and injuring 145, involving over 100 cars. The bridge was only 40 years old. The Morandi Bridge in Genoa, which was only around 50 years old, collapsed during a summer rainstorm in 2018, killing 43 people. Both bridges badly needed design checks and maintenance. Neither bridge was equipped with sensors to give warning of deterioration or change in behaviour. Availability of such data would almost certainly have prevented the collapses.
Closer to home, there was a major infrastructure incident at the Toddbrook Reservoir in 2019, when a period of heavy rainfall triggered a partial collapse of the dam spillway. A complete breach would have presented a grave threat to life for those in the nearby town of Whaley Bridge. Some 1,500 people were temporarily evacuated from their homes. Professor David Balmforth, who led an independent review into the incident, gave evidence to our committee. He concluded that the dam spillway failure was due to both poor design and incomplete maintenance. The incident was clearly a near miss and highlights the need to quantify the progress of infrastructure degradation and prioritise spending accordingly. Our report recommended the creation of an appropriate depreciation register for critical national infrastructure that identifies ageing infrastructure. Will the Minister confirm that the Government support this recommendation?
The emphasis on risk assessment should increasingly be on preparedness and resilience. In the context of critical national infrastructure, innovative technologies now exist for obtaining the necessary data to achieve this. We are in a digital revolution. Fibre-optic sensing and wireless sensor networks, together with imaging from drones and satellites and the use of AI, provide rich sources of data on the engineering performance of key parts of our infrastructure, especially where it is ageing. This is particularly applicable to nuclear power stations, dams, flood defences, water and gas pipelines, railways infrastructure, tunnels and bridges. Combined with good modelling and “what if” experiments, such technologies are a much-needed, cost-effective investment to improve the degree of preparedness and resilience relating to our critical national infrastructure.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Mair, who is one of the most eminent engineers and experts in this field I have come across. I very much welcome this report and the work that the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, and his team have done. It is very persuasive, in part because of the amount of evidence gathered from so many different people.
My concern is about the Government’s response. I know that we have the resilience framework, but when one reads the response and finds that all but two of the recommendations are accepted, it is easy to say, “That’s fine; let’s sit back and do something else”. But when you look a bit further, you can see that the response is saying, in my words, “Yeah, we’ll talk about it a bit more and not do a great deal”.
One of the most important responses is to the second recommendation, on an office for preparedness and resilience, et cetera. It is interesting, but then the Government qualify it by saying:
“It will be important for any change to strengthen and complement existing and well tested accountability structures and to avoid unintentionally diminishing the accountability of those most responsible for managing risk.”
To me that means, “We are going to carry on as before and just pay a bit of lip service to some new organisation”. That is really worrying.
I declare an interest as living in probably the lowest property in relation to sea level in this country, on the island of Bryher in Scilly. We look at the waves, the high tide and the storms—this week is not a bad example —and wonder, “How long is it going to last?” There are many other examples around this country—not just sea, water or floods, as the noble Lord, Lord Mair, and others have said.
My concern is that it has taken the committee and the Government about two years to get this far, but what will happen next? As many noble Lords have said, the threat is changing very fast and widening. How will we monitor—independently, as the noble Lord said—the progress, or lack of?
I am a member of the Built Environment Select Committee in your Lordships’ House. We took evidence this week from the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, which all noble Lords probably know. I will not tell your Lordships what the chief executive said because it is probably still confidential, but if one looks at its annual report, which came out I think a few months ago, one will see that it now has a process for monitoring all the different projects that it chooses on their cost and progress and whether they are likely to succeed or fail. It publishes a sort of traffic light system. I always worry that it publishes this thing, but who in government takes any notice? The worst one I have discovered from about 150 projects on the list—noble Lords will be glad to hear that I will not read them all out—is one that we are probably all aware of: the emergency services mobile communication programme. This has been on the traffic light list for nine years, and it is still not working. This is emergency services communication, which of course will be fundamental to many of the crises that may happen in future.
I am sure the Minister will not be able to tell us why this has happened or whether that programme will work next week and so on, but it seems to me that something such as this, with the IPA keeping a monitoring role over all the recommendations from the committee and reporting regularly, would be a useful adjunct to whatever happens next. I will be pleased to hear the Minister’s response.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and as vice-chair of the All-Party Group on Adult Social Care. I was also health spokesperson for my party from January 2020, when my leader said that there was not much on the health agenda, and I retired from that post at Christmas. It is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and his very practical speech—I have just deleted a large section that I had about the strategic nature of support in the Government’s response because there is no point repeating it. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, and his committee on this extremely important report, on the evidence they heard and the recommendations they have made. As the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, said, it is an exceptional report.
For those of us who have been on councils through elective office or had Front-Bench responsibilities, or been in business, having full risk assessments and risk preparedness plans reviewed and updated on a regular basis is an absolute must, even if it is not business as usual to manage the unusual. My thanks also go to the Cygnus Reports organisation website, run by Moosa Qureshi, an NHS doctor who uncovered many other pandemic exercises in the run-up to 2020 that were not published.
The key lesson in both the report and our experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic is that cultural change to partnership working is needed across government, especially but not only with those who have a statutory responsibility to provide responses, whether or not to extreme risks. My noble friend Lord Thurso also highlighted this risk.
From these Benches, it is much regretted that there is not a clear commitment by the Government to the office for preparedness resilience or to a chief risk officer. The Government’s saying
“fold into … reform for our internal risk management structures”
can be read in a number of ways. Will the Government undertake to create both the office and the role of chief risk officer? Too many of the Government’s responses to recommendations use the words “agreeing with this principle”. I am afraid that would allow the Government to dilute these recommendations.
Pandemic planning is a perfect illustration of what went wrong in early 2020. The Government appeared to follow only Exercise Cygnus, which was for influenza. What was not mentioned is that in the preceding seven years there were seven exercises and reports, and that it took Dr Qureshi a series of legal challenges to government to be able to see and publish them. The first, in March 2015, was a report on Ebola preparedness. The second was Exercise Alice on MERS, published in February 2016. Then there was Exercise Northern Light, published in February 2016; a report on Exercise Typhon, a Public Health England command post exercise in 2017; an Exercise Broad Street high-consequence infectious disease report in 2018; Exercise Cerberus, a Public Health England national exercise, also in 2018; and a report on Exercise Pica, the NHS primary care preparedness and response to the influenza pandemic, on 5 September 2018. I read that list in full because it is clear that work was going on behind the scenes. The problem is that it was not used when we came to the pandemic.
The UK became aware at the end of 2019 of the emerging infectious disease that became known as Covid-19 from Wuhan, but it really took until March for actions to start, not least in advice to the public. As the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, outlined, that was a real problem. In February, as the health Front-Bencher for the Lib Dems, I talked to the Local Government Association and to directors of public health, who were already trying to manage cases arriving back in the UK after the February half term, especially those who had been to northern Italy for skiing.
Directors of public health were asking for help and strategic support from Public Health England and NHS England, and they moved ahead fast, with local partners, to set up volunteers to help those who were at risk of isolation and the reorganisation required inside councils to ensure that priority services worked. Yet, entirely separately, the Department of Health and Social Care suddenly announced its own nationally recruited volunteer scheme—there was much confusion all round.
I talk about the need for a change of culture because this is still happening. Ministers ran campaigns this summer to encourage autumn vaccination in preparation for winter illness surges, including influenza and Covid. But it appears that, despite knowing that all the experts were warning that this would be a very tough winter—it is already tough, and we have not even got to what is usually the worst time of year—resilience arrangements were unfortunately not put in place for strep A, for example, until there was a very public shortage of antibiotics. Why were they not ordered in excess this year? Children are ending up in ICU and, sadly, losing their lives much earlier in the winter season than expected. An Ebola response report from 2015 said that a review of surge capacity would be required around paediatrics.
In addition, this week the Secretary of State talked about the high number of influenza and Covid patients in hospital. Many of those patients acquired Covid in hospital, which was probably not unassociated with the extraordinary government decision to relax the mask mandate. During the outbreaks of diphtheria—a notifiable disease under the Public Health Act—and scabies, there were notable delays to the Home Office engaging, first, with the UKHSA and with local directors of public health. I remind the House that directors of public health have a statutory duty under the Public Health Act to start working immediately on any notifiable disease. It took too long for that to happen.
The large number of reports that I outlined earlier showed that the department, Public Health England and now the UKHSA were fully aware of the risks of a rapid spread of highly infectious diseases, including Ebola, Lassa fever and influenza, but they did not follow this. Are all these previous reports being used to assess in the current review inside government—assuming there is one—how to handle the pandemic, which is not yet over, by the way? We also have 9,000 Covid cases in hospital; many of them are the very vulnerable people who were asked to shield during the pandemic. The problem with the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care saying that the pandemic is over and we have all learned to live with it is that arrangements have not been made for this group of people, who remain extremely vulnerable.
The excellent book Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, by Laura Spinney, notes in its final chapter that excess deaths continued for some years afterwards—some were due to flu, but they were mainly due to lung disease and heart disease. The most worrying part is that, within three years, most public bodies were back to business as before, and all of the lessons were lost.
Comprehensive risk planning and assessment, with a dedicated team that is not distracted by changes of Ministers, general elections, et cetera, are not just vital for a future pandemic: organisations that plan effectively for high risks can adapt plans for unseen and unpredicted extreme risks. When I was a group leader on Cambridgeshire County Council in the late 1990s, we had severe flooding, chemical leakages and other crises. Our bunker came into use, and the local resilience forum got under way. When foot and mouth disease hit in 2002, the LRF was able to swing swiftly into action for the county on a totally unexpected pandemic, this time with animals.
The noble Lord, Lord Rees, my noble friend Lord Thurso and others were right to say that the Treasury should provide proper resources for that, and not treat it as part of an annual budget which can be cut when times are tight. Covid has shown us over the last three years that, to save a modest amount in extreme risk planning, billions of pounds have been spent and hundreds of thousands of lives lost.
However, I want to end on a positive note, because the Government’s creation of the resilience framework is an encouraging first step. We hope that, above all, it lays the foundation for a new way forward and that the Government will also accept the two outstanding recommendations, not least because that is the only way we will get the cultural change we need.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. Her experience as a shadow Health Minister during the pandemic brought to life the issues we are discussing today, and the debate has been all the richer for her contribution. More generally, this has been an informative debate, and I very much look forward to reading the book by the noble Lord, Lord Rees, which was referred to a number of times.
The report has enabled us to reflect again on our preparedness for extreme risks, including but not exclusively pandemics. The report, as my noble friend Lord Robertson said, has been of considerable consequence already, and that is to be welcomed. It is vital that we, as a country, take the opportunity to reflect and to consider, now that our preparedness has been tested so comprehensively and recently. Obviously, the Select Committee did not consider only pandemic risks, but Covid has shone a much-needed light on the benefits of preparation and on some of our previously unknown deficiencies.
The report emphasised the benefit of being inclusive and as open as possible. Covid showed us that a disaster such as that—a health impact—has consequences far beyond just health services: cascading risks, as we now know to call them. That was brilliantly illustrated by the noble Lord, Lord Mair, in his contribution. Every area of life—our economy, education, policing, transport, culture and the way we relate to one another—has been affected. As the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, said in his introduction, if the first time you think about how to respond to a crisis is when you are in it, you are already far too late. We know, as he said, that risk is dynamic and wide-ranging, and we need to learn and to plan in order to be ready. He said, more than once, “A stitch in time saves nine.” He also said that we should avoid groupthink, be flexible, do better at sharing our understanding of the risks we face, and involve the devolved Administrations, mayors and community leaders, which has benefits that we now understand but perhaps did not appreciate so well before.
Responding to national disasters or hostile acts requires a nimble approach to action and a long-term view from the Government—that has come up a few times. Resilience will not be improved by departments working in silos, and my noble friend Lady Twycross made that point very well in her excellent speech. Whether that is about gas storage facilities or structural issues, such as those identified by my noble friend Lord Browne, it is necessary for Governments in future to prepare for risks that may be unlikely to occur during the lifetime of that Government.
The Government seem to have broadly supported the report and agree with many of the recommendations. Since the report’s publication, the Government have said that they will create a new head of resilience role to oversee departments’ emergency planning work and to improve cross-government working. They will grow the Government’s advisory groups made up of experts, academics and industry experts to inform risk planning and to provide external challenge; they will create a new sub-committee of the National Security Council to specifically consider issues relating to resilience; they will create a UK resilience academy, built out from the Emergency Planning College, to make world-class, professional training available to all who need it; and they will strengthen local resilience forums in England by working across three key pillars of reform in the UK’s levelling-up mission: leadership, accountability and integration of resilience.
The Government’s resilience framework outlines three core principles. The first is that a shared understanding of the risks we face is essential and must underpin everything that we do to prepare for and recover from crises. Secondly, there should be prevention rather than cure wherever possible; resilience building spans the whole risk cycle so we must focus effort across the cycle, particularly before crises happen. But I encourage the Minister to consider the remarks of my noble friend Lord Harris, particularly, on this point. Thirdly, resilience is a whole society endeavour—and I think we have heard a few comments along those lines—meaning that we must be more transparent and empower everyone to make their contribution.
Like my noble friend Lord Berkeley, I have some questions for the Minister on the Government’s response so far and I hope that this is still early days and that the Government intend to continue to work on these issues with some energy and focus. In terms of learning from the experiences of the Covid pandemic, the Government’s use of emergency powers for any future national emergency should be addressed. The Lords Constitution Committee recommended that Parliament be consulted on any future draft legislation on a contingency basis to address a potential emergency. Will the Government commit to undertake a full-scale review of emergency powers? Will the Government also commit to an expedited review of the Civil Contingencies Act because that would also allow for fuller parliamentary scrutiny?
I note that so much of what we have learned through Covid rests on the importance of the public being confident in decisions that are being made on their behalf. Should we encounter a similar threat in the future, I think that given the experiences of Covid that is likely to emerge as an issue perhaps sooner than it did last time. The Government introduced a large volume of legislation in response to the pandemic, and by not using the Civil Contingencies Act some argue that the Government evaded the Act’s important constitutional safeguards.
The framework, which was published shortly before the Christmas Recess, was described as
“the first articulation of how the UK Government will deliver on a new strategic approach to resilience.”
Will the Minister confirm when the next articulation—as they are calling it—will be published or may be published in full? Will the Government reconsider the committee’s recommendation that the Government should place a statutory duty on all public and private regulated bodies which operate critical national infrastructure to produce and publish an audited business continuity plan?
The Government confirmed in December—I think it was Oliver Dowden—that they have refreshed the classified national security risk assessment and will update the public version, the national risk register, at some point in the new year, that being just past. Will the Minister please advise the House of a date perhaps when the revised risk register might be published? Can she also tell us what progress has been made in the creation of a new head of resilience role to oversee department’s emergency planning work and improve cross-government working?
When will the new UK resilience academy, intended to established competence standards and learning pathways in crisis management and resilience building, be established and ready to provide professional training?
The Government’s response to the committee report in March—and I appreciate that things have moved on since then—stated that they were
“exploring the idea of a Civilian Reserve cadre … formed of current and former civil servants, with civil service-specific skills, deployed to support government capacity during an emergency.”
At that point, it was suggested that the Government planned to undertake a pilot scheme to establish its viability and value for money. Will the Minister be able to inform the House today whether this is still planned and what progress, if any, is being made in establishing the pilot scheme?
I am extremely grateful to all those who have contributed to this debate. I note the high levels of agreement on all sides, and the desire to support the Government in making progress on this. I note also the helpful comments of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester on the role of faith groups and extending that to other community groups and volunteers up and down the country. We pay tribute to everything that they did throughout the pandemic. We would like to recognise their work, and to understand that it is likely to be repeated in future. We support the Government’s work in this area. This debate has been extremely timely, and I hope the Minister will be able to answer the questions that have been posed by me and other noble Lords. I am grateful to everyone who has taken part.
The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Baroness Neville-Rolfe) (Con)
Let me start by thanking my noble friend Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom for proposing this debate, and I give my thanks to all noble Lords for their excellent contributions. I have, as ever, appreciated the quality of debate today on a matter of great significance, which will impact our children and grandchildren.
The report of the committee, Preparing for Extreme Risks, fathered—or perhaps grandfathered—by the noble Lord, Lord Rees, is of the highest quality, as we have come to expect of the House of Lords. It has the sure touch and elegant thinking of my noble friend Lord Arbuthnot, and, as he said, of the high-quality contributions he received from Members, staff and those Lords and others who gave evidence. As the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, said, the report was eye-opening. It was eye-opening to me as a new Minister, and incredibly useful, timely, and influential—three very big things.
The risks are many and varied. We have had mention of unpredictable solar flares, malicious deployment of technology, the supply of silicon chips, risk to biological security, the collapse of the central infrastructure. It is a long list, and we are not even starting. My own list includes international risks: Russia and Ukraine, but also China, Taiwan and Iran. I worry about the failures at home, as others do—for example, the electricity system and, which is highly unlikely but worrying and I think not mentioned, the failure of the Gulf Stream, which makes our British nation and climate what it is. If that was to fail, that would be exceptionally serious.
Because of the panoply of extreme risks and their serious nature, we are all agreed on the importance of improving UK resilience. This has to address our plans and assessments looking forward and ensure an effective and flexible response to disasters as they occur. Of course, it is not possible to plan for everything.
I had a lot of questions from the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman of Darlington. We are working on these issues. Those include the training, about which she and I would both be very enthusiastic. We have appointed a head of resilience, and we published a review of the Civil Contingencies Act on 1 April 2022, which was taken into account in the resilience framework.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
Did the Minister say that they have appointed a head of resilience?
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
I always like to be the bearer of good news from the Dispatch Box.
We are going to be updating the risk register, as everybody has talked about. I cannot give an exact date, but I can say that we are working on these issues with energy. I am delighted to be working now in this area, and obviously very keen to make progress. I do not think that I can say anything today about the very important issue of powers, because I was on the Back Benches during all the Covid measures, so I very much understand the points that have been made. We have got a Covid inquiry that is taking place, and there has to be some sort of interaction between the Covid inquiry and what we do for the future.
I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Arbuthnot for his positive comments on the resilience framework. I am pleased that he recognises elements of his committee’s recommendations within it—in fact, nearly all the recommendations were accepted in whole or in part. My noble friend rightly raised transparency and challenge. We set our commitment to both in the framework and are already working to embed the principles across my departments, and across others. As an example, the national risk register, when it is published in the coming months, will include more detailed risk information and guidance than previous iterations, and it follows the new classified version of the national security risk assessment.
Noble Lords will be pleased to know that the development of the latter involved a great deal of external challenge this time, and the NSRA is more robust as a result. My colleague the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster will be chairing the next UK resilience forum in February—just one way in which we are incorporating more independent challenge and expertise from outside government. I hope that further work on resilience this year will demonstrate more progress, and we will update Parliament through our inaugural annual statement on resilience.
The noble Lord also raised the committee’s recommendation, as others did, for an office for preparedness and resilience, and the accountability issue was emphasised by the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, who sadly had to slip away. It is a key factor of the framework and, while have not chosen to establish a new body, we are taking steps to address the spirit of the committee’s recommendations. We agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, on the need for culture change—a point that she rightly often makes—and that is already happening.
The strength and function at the centre of government build on the approach that we have got under way on things like procurement and infrastructure, and I am sure that it will lead to much better coherence and accountability in the resilience system. We are also strengthening the lead government department model of risk ownership and are establishing a sub-committee of the National Security Council to enable Ministers to focus on national resilience, because ministerial involvement is important in getting things effectively progressed. I need hardly say that the Government also agree with the report’s emphasis on training, conducting exercises and performing dummy runs as a fundamental part of our collective resilience.
We are not just going to carry on as before, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, rather mischievously said, and I look forward to giving evidence to his Built Environment Committee on infrastructure next week and to discussing the improved way we now monitor the progress of hundreds of infrastructure projects.
I am sorry that it has been over a year since the committee’s report was published, but the Government, as I have already outlined, have taken a number of steps to address the points that were raised. It is worth reiterating three key themes. On finalising a new classified national security risk assessment, the changes were informed by recommendations from the committee, but also by an external review from the Royal Academy of Engineering in September 2021. The intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Mair, showed the importance of bringing in the engineers.
Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
My Lords, I apologise for interrupting the Minister but one of the key points is about the methodology adopted for the NSRA, and one of the key issues that appears to be emerging is that the Government do not seem to be committing to go beyond a five-year horizon. What assurance can the Minister give about the methodology that is going to be used, and whether we are going to be looking further into the future?
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
I think the noble Lord is right that the main focus is on the next five years, but I will perhaps come back to him to discuss that point further. It is clear from what I have been saying that we are looking at extreme risks, and they are not necessarily going to arrive tomorrow, so I understand and sympathise with the point he has made.
The second step is strengthening the crisis and resilience structures in the Cabinet Office with the creation, as I have said, of the resilience directorate and the COBRA unit. We are responsible for resilience planning and national crisis response, working closely with departments which have sectoral responsibilities. This includes identifying, planning and preparing for risks, and building capacity to respond effectively. The changes to how it is organised will help to ensure that the Government have the capacity and capability to respond to emergencies, which is obviously particularly important in the wake of Covid-19.
Thirdly, we are working to improve our resilience to chronic risks and vulnerabilities, such as climate change—which was emphasised by the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso—and artificial intelligence. We have recognised that this type of risk poses continuous challenges over time to communities, the economy and security, and requires a different type of response to more acute risks, such as flooding or terrorism.
The scale of the risks we face has required a new strategic approach to resilience. That is why we published the UK Government Resilience Framework in December, which previously had the working title of “national resilience strategy”, to respond to a point made by several noble Lords. It is a new strategy which is already being implemented across government. It reflects our ongoing commitment to resilience which we made in last year’s integrated review, and the new strategic approach will be reflected in further publications this year, with the refreshed national risk register, the updated biological security strategy, and the update to the integrated review itself, which has also been promised.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
The noble Baroness has given us some good information about progress being made but, as the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, said in his introduction, this is all a question of when it is going to happen and having some independent monitoring of progress. Does she not think that it would be a good idea to have something independent, rather like the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, as I mentioned? I can quiz her further when she comes to meet our Select Committee next week, but I would really rather hear it now.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
I thank the noble Lord for his intervention, and I will reflect further on the best way of satisfying him.
I emphasise that the framework is important and strategic. It strengthens the systems, structures and capabilities which underpin the UK’s resilience to all risks and those that might emerge. It is based on three key principles. The first is a shared understanding of the risks we face. The second is a focus on prevention rather than cure, wherever this is possible, as several people have mentioned. Some risks can be predicted or prevented, but it is more difficult to do so for others. The third principle is of resilience as a whole-of-society endeavour. Everyone seems to agree on the importance of that. We are more transparent, and we want to empower all parts of society to make a contribution, so I was glad to hear from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester about the possible role of faith groups and volunteers of all kinds. He is right about the contribution they make in crises, as I know from the work of the churches in my own local area of the Nadder Valley. Faith groups are also part of the local resilience forums. In London, for example, we have a voluntary, community and faith sector sub-group—but the key message is about resilience as a whole-of-society endeavour. Covid taught us the value of that.
Nobody has mentioned this, but central to delivery on those three principles is improving the communication of risks and impacts. We want people to better understand what they may actually experience, and what they can do to protect themselves, their families and their communities. We must drive early action on risks; that is at the core of the framework.
Some noble Lords will have looked at the framework, which sets out our ambition to 2030. It includes improved risk communication by growing the Government’s advisory groups to bring in experts, academics and industrial partners. We are strengthening local resilience forums, which has included extra DLUHC funding to improve multi-agency planning. I should say that my husband is chair of a parish council, so I know that resilience systems already assist in great detail towns and villages, and how important that was in marshalling voluntary effort during Covid. We need to build on those sorts of strengths. The measures include delivering a new UK resilience academy built up from the Emergency Planning College, thereby making world-class professional training available to all who need it. I have a lot of material on that, if noble Lords are interested. We are also establishing a new Cabinet sub-committee of the National Security Council. I suspect that we will have many more debates, because we are introducing an annual statement to Parliament on civil contingencies risk and the UK Government’s performance, which I hope will help noble Lords to hold us to account.
Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)
Excuse me, but the noble Baroness used the phrase “the civil contingencies risk”. That is contained throughout the new framework. Can she explain what exactly that excludes, and why?
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
I must make progress. If I can answer, I will do so—otherwise, I shall speak with or write to the noble Lord.
It is important to remember that data cuts through everything that we do—supporting innovation by helping us be more dynamic and spot risks early. At a local level, data enables us to support mutual aid between different areas to provide additional capacity where it is most needed. Data is also informing our approach to how we can use artificial intelligence to flag up areas of vulnerability or concern. We have strengthened our effort with the joint data and analysis centre in the Cabinet Office, as well as with the impressive National Situation Centre, which is providing real-time insights about what is happening across a plethora of urgent and high-priority topics and bringing data to crisis management.
We have to be realistic. There is much in life and politics for which we can neither plan nor prepare. While prevention is a key principle, it cannot replace careful and effective management of emergencies as they occur. For that reason, the framework also proposes actions to improve response, including in areas such as cyber and preparation for risks, and to ensure that partners throughout the system are able fully to play their part. There is a shift away from simply dealing with the effects of emergencies. It is fair to say—the framework shows this—that there has been a step change in ambition. We have the structures and focus we need to do much better.
I thank my noble friend Lord Hunt of Wirral for kindly bringing his expertise to this debate and I very much agree with much of what he said about the cold realities and challenges. The Government’s risk-assessment approach must draw on best practice from the private sector and we have made progress on this, as I have said. The framework commits the Government to creating a process for future iterations of the NSRA that invites challenge from industry, as well as from academia, the international risk community and others. Partners from the financial services are important. In the light of what my noble friend said, we will review opportunities to better engage the insurance industry, recognising the critical and practical role that it obviously places in forecasting extreme risk and dealing with national insurance.
The noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, raised the model of the Climate Change Committee, as did the noble Lord, Lord Thurso. It is the Government’s view that the existing committee system is the most effective means by which departments can be held to account for this responsibility. We will provide an opportunity for an overarching conversation on resilience through our new annual statement. The noble Lord also mentioned the report by the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy on critical infrastructure and climate adaptation. The framework sets out how we will continue to strengthen resilience across both public and private sectors.
The noble Lord, Lord Mair, drew attention to some very interesting examples. I do not think we can commit to setting up a register of critical infrastructure as he suggested, but I will keep that suggestion under review. We are very much focused on investment in ageing infrastructure and all departments are expected to monitor this, so I would like to bring his expertise to the piece in some way.
The noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, and the noble Lord, Lord Harris, questioned whether the Government are providing enough money and resources. The lead government department model for individual risks means we have clear accountability for individual risks, with risk owners responsible for ensuring investment in their areas and the Cabinet Office supporting. However, the framework will ensure that resilience is considered as an integral aspect of almost all policy-making. There is devoted funding for some specific areas, such as local resilience forums, and we have achieved systematic change by ensuring that investment in resilience is embedded into decision-making across government. It is always a difficult area, but the commitment, the framework and the new Cabinet committee will make a considerable difference to prioritisation.
The noble Lord, Lord Rees, talked about biological security. Our refreshed strategy will strengthen Euro-Atlantic security. It will stimulate R&D in the life sciences sector and underpin the UK’s international leadership and advantage across the life sciences and applied data science.
The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, raised many questions in a wide-ranging speech, mainly about health. I will look at what she said and see if I can add anything to what I have already said about the progress we are making.
The Government have already taken on board many of the recommendations of this report with individual actions, and the resilience framework goes even further. Building resilience is truly a whole-of-society and national endeavour. We are determined to work together to be better prepared for the challenges we face. I thank the committee warmly for its important contribution to this task. I look forward to further discussion in this House on these important issues and to bringing the immense expertise to bear in making our country more resilient and better able to deal with the crises that, sadly, from time to time emerge.
Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom (Con)
My Lords, the hour is late, so I shall be brief. It has not been an apocalyptic, or even a particularly gloomy, debate—he says with a rather sad look on his face. The Minister has been very helpful in making plain that there is further thinking and further work to do. I hope and am sure that this excellent debate will inform that further thinking and work. I want to pick up just one or two points.
I come back to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Mair, about a register for critical national infrastructure. If you do not have a register and a depreciation register, you do not know when it will be necessary to spend money on critical national infrastructure, which might be rather necessary rather soon.
The noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, made the excellent point that resilience implies redundancy. We had a lot of military input into the work of this committee. General Sir Richard Barrons has said that efficiency is, or can be, the enemy of resilience. The Treasury needs to recognise that.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester took the committee to task for failing to mention faith groups. He made a fair point. That brings me on to the importance of communities. We do not get resilience without strong communities and faith group are right at the heart of strong communities.
That brings me on to my final point, which relates to the issue of “whole of society”, the third principle of the Government’s framework. Elisabeth Braw gave evidence to the committee, and she said in a Times article a couple of weeks ago that while she welcomed the framework in general, it barely mentioned the public. She described it as an enormous missed opportunity. The opportunity is now; the people are ready. Let us bring them in and fire them up and set them free.