UK Constitution: Oversight and Responsibility (Report from the Constitution Committee)

Baroness Alexander of Cleveden Excerpts

Friday 4th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Alexander of Cleveden (Lab)]

My Lords, like my noble friend Lord Pitkeathley, I rise to speak not as a lawyer, a judge or a senior Whitehall insider—I cannot bring the insider wisdom that we have heard so much of this morning—but as a constitutional reformer whose experience has largely been of operating outside, at least until I entered this place.

Way back in 1997, I worked on the White Paper on devolution and what became the Scotland Act. I subsequently served in Holyrood. In 2010, I chaired a Scotland Bill Committee transferring substantive fiscal powers to the Scottish Parliament. All those years ago, I learned that bold constitutional reform can both embed and endure. My remarks today will be about, in essence, recovering some of that constitutional reform ambition.

I need to declare an interest. My brother is a Minister of State in the Cabinet Office. For the record, everything that follows is mine and mine alone.

As befits a Friday in July debating a cross-party report, I want to range beyond party lines and speak directly to my noble friends on the committee, encouraging them to return to how our constitution needs to evolve. On today’s specifics, I welcome the Government’s commitment to a centre of excellence in the Cabinet Office, to a dedicated Cabinet committee and to strengthening the standards landscape, albeit that, like others, I think that advisory bodies should be put on a statutory footing.

Like many noble Lords and the Government, I share the scepticism about the Prime Minister having one specific support around the constitution vested in the Lord Chancellor—although my objection is on a slightly different basis because, of course, the Lord Chancellor is an English law officer running an English territorial department. Notwithstanding the admirable stewardship of Lord Mackay of Clashfern, the noble and learned Lords, Lord Irvine and Lord Falconer, and the recently ennobled noble Lord, Lord Gove, all of whom instinctively grasped the four-nation character of the UK, we self-evidently cannot rely on the occupant always being a Scot.

I turn to my noble friends on the committee. I appreciate that the context of this report was the strains of the previous Parliament. Yet I also encourage the committee to continue to look forward to tomorrow’s constitutional challenges, to dig deeper, to be bolder and to be braver on how constitutional reform can contribute to national progress. This report comes at a time when the established political order is under attack across the democratic world. Given that precarity, do constitutional niceties matter at a time of so many other challenges? I believe that two major constitutional issues demand our attention because they are holding Britain back. The chief culprits are executive dominance and corrosive centralisation.

I turn first to executive dominance. As the committee recognises, the increasing use of delegated powers, accelerated by Covid, has shifted power from Parliament to the Executive. We need to address the power of the Executive, its control of the parliamentary agenda, the creep of performative legislation and the ordering of the centre of government. All of these things commend themselves for further scrutiny.

Next up is corrosive centralisation. The UK is the most centralised large country in the developed world. Let that sink in. Notwithstanding the welcome development of the Council of the Nations and Regions, the corrosive centralisation is most acute in England, as the most recent English devolution White Paper recognises. Yet I say to all noble Lords that it will take a cross-party consensus to drive power out of this place and back to where it belongs. I firmly believe that tackling these constitutional realities of executive dominance and corrosive centralisation could make a real difference, by unlocking the possibility of better governance and the opportunity to tackle the inequality that scars our nation.

That is a bold claim, so let me, in my time remaining, try to justify it. Decentralisation can deliver better governance, because getting Parliament out of the legislative weeds is a prerequisite for better and more strategic policy-making, of the kind that we have just heard about. Without wishing to lower the tone of the debate, I simply say that it cannot be right that here in the upper House of a nation of 60 million people we are discussing south Cambridge car parking arrangements or highly localised statutory instruments. We are drowning in detail that needs devolving back to town halls, as my noble friend said.

When it comes to inequality, the UK is the world’s most geographically unbalanced developed economy. Our north/south divide has become so normalised that we barely see the depth of its destructive impact. Thankfully, driving decentralisation and tackling the north/south divide are priorities for this Government, yet history suggests that constitutional reform and regional renaissance require cross-party support to secure legitimacy and longevity.

Many of the issues that I have raised today, and that have been echoed across the Chamber, are about improving the functioning of the state—functions in which many of our citizens have lost faith recently. Here, I echo the remarks of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Neuberger, and the noble Lord, Lord Bates. These issues straddle the constitution, the mechanics of government, Civil Service reform, regulation, judicial review and public service reform. Yet our current committee structure typically addresses these issues in isolation, while the public simply see a collective failure of governance. I commend to my noble friends that they consider nominating, for a House special inquiry in the next Session, a more holistic consideration of the crisis of governance that ails our politics. In so doing, this venerable Chamber would be getting ahead of the constitutional agenda and not merely looking in the rearview mirror.