Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

My Lords, I keep hearing the words, “It is a matter of judgment”. I heard them from the noble Lord, Lord Marks, on several occasions in connection with giving the electorate the power to decide. I just heard a reference to the importance of time for pre-legislative scrutiny and allowing people who are about to vote an opportunity to maturely evaluate the Government’s policy. I am beginning to feel as though we live in a different place, because we have a whole plethora of constitutional reforms before us, who have to vote on them, with no opportunity for pre-legislative scrutiny and no opportunity to see how the first bit, the second bit, the third bit and the fourth bit come together.

Then, in the middle of it all, is the bit of the Bill that perhaps worries me even more than the five and four years: who, how and in what circumstances the proposed five or even four years could be varied. I have heard a variety of ways in which a Prime Minister can decide that it is a good time for an election if he thinks it is in his interest, although I think that convincing the Opposition that it is a good time for an election will be quite a hard task. Having heard all these arguments, however, I am not allowed to see what this coalition Government propose to do. This is against a background of assurances that I keep getting that they know where they are going and they know who is going with them, but it sure ain’t me because they are not telling me where they are going.

I have been asked to vote on changing the system of votes, which is being put to the people in the AV referendum, without being told what is being proposed for people being elected to this House. All these things keep being thrown at me by people who say, “Oh well, it is a matter of judgment”. In the end, a bit like the dance of the seven veils, all will be revealed. However, I want to know the whole picture now before I am asked to start pulling apart some of the parts of the structure of our constitution. The argument is therefore surely that it would have been better if the coalition had concentrated on fewer Bills that made fewer changes to the constitution, had put them out for quick pre-legislative scrutiny and did not Christmas-tree them. Those who have been in government know that the minute the whole plethora of people in any department see a Bill looming, they start hanging little baubles on it, complicating it and muddying the whole picture. I am therefore uneasy.

On the use of the term “judgment”, I think that it is a bit arrogant of the coalition—a new form of government in this country for a long time—to say, “We are making a judgment about when you can vote to judge us, and we are restricting the way in which it is going to be done”. Perhaps, having a somewhat warped political mind, I can see that it is just possible, in reaching an agreement to form a coalition, that neither party trusted the other and so the five years had to be set in concrete in case either one pulled the rug from under the other. However, I am then assured that in the middle of the Bill is the opportunity for the Prime Minister of the day suddenly to pull the rug out anyway, although I suppose he would have to get his Deputy Prime Minister to support him.

On the argument about the length of time that it takes to bring in legislation, in my view the public out there have the right to expect to be able to voice their view on what happens in the future. It is just possible that, within the next two years, some people who are currently members of the coalition will not want to be tied to a fixed term of five years. They could be members of either party; it is not always the most adulterous one who ends up getting divorced.

I am concerned. Why cannot we have a big picture for all these constitutional changes? Why cannot we substitute this judgment that we ought to be laying in concrete an agreement of convenience for this particular Government? Why are we wasting our time legislating to set that in concrete? We are wasting our time because they can do that anyway. They do not need this Bill to do that, so why on earth are we being told that they do? I am beginning to get suspicious, because from certain Benches—from parties to this Government—I keep hearing, “Well, we are voting for this now. It is not what we really want, but we will get what we want next time”. I have met the odd person out there who has said to me, “Hey, I watched that debate, and the Lib Dems said that they do not really like AV, but it is better than what we have, and anyway it is a road to somewhere else”.

Finally, I cannot resist remembering when I sat on those Benches over there during the first stage of House of Lords reform. I heard a member of Her Majesty's loyal Opposition at the time—a former Home Secretary—come out with the words, “The wicked thing the Labour Government are trying to do is force an extension of the life of government”. Who is doing it? Not us. Can we please have the big picture, can we ask the British people what they think, and can we not patronise them by saying, “You need longer to be able to judge us”?

[Lord Wills]

My Lords, I think most would agree that there is merit in the arguments on both sides of the debate on whether the term of Parliament should be fixed. However, if there is merit in the argument for the term being fixed at five years, it is merit that passed by both the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats until the coalition agreement enlightened them. Nearly a year after that agreement, Ministers have still not managed to find a way of articulating that case persuasively.

The Government’s proposition is that they have a mandate for this proposal—this was one of the arguments used by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, on Second Reading—because an appetite for political reform was manifested at the last general election. That is a questionable proposition, to put it at its politest, because it conflates an arguable general distrust and dislike of politicians with a wish for a specific proposal for a five-year fixed term for Parliament. The Government’s argument that five years is somehow part of our political culture—the Deputy Prime Minister has made this argument—ignores inconvenient facts about the average length of post-war Parliaments. Of the last seven Parliaments, for example, four have lasted for about four years and three for five years. Moreover, the proposition, which Ministers have also advanced, that the Parliament Act somehow supports this proposal confuses setting a maximum term with fixing a norm. Then, of course, there is the selective quoting of international examples, nearly always in discussions of constitutional reform—a refuge for the intellectually desperate.

Does it matter that the Government have so inadequately made the case for a fixed term of five years? I think it does. This is not a matter of a finely balanced judgment one way or another, with there being really nothing very much to choose between a four-year term and a five-year term. Of course there is an element of judgment in these things, but, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, so eloquently set out, the overwhelming weight of expert opinion is in favour of four years. Anything longer inevitably—logically, inevitably—delays the calling to account of the Executive, and it creates an accumulating democratic deficit.

In the absence of any persuasive arguments for a five-year term, this flaw is toxic. It is particularly toxic because of the process by which this Bill has been brought before Parliament and the damaging perception that this has created the motivation behind the selection of five years as the fixed term for Parliament. Due process and perceptions of motivation matter especially for constitutional legislation because they can create public trust in the integrity of our constitutional arrangements or they can destroy it. A constitution which does not command the trust and respect of the citizens it serves is a constitution without value.

So what has been the process for this Bill? There has been no manifesto commitment to its key detail or any compelling argument for it. There has not been a Green Paper, a White Paper or public consultation. The process has consisted simply of ramming this hastily and poorly drafted Bill through Parliament as quickly as the business managers can get it through. This creates a perception which has been widely voiced. I am very grateful to my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer for telling the House about the account given in Mr David Laws’ history of the formation of the coalition agreement. I am sure that Mr Laws did not wish to be quite as unhelpful to his colleagues who remain in government as he has turned out to be. Nevertheless, the citizen might legitimately ask, “Why did the Government suddenly abandon a historic Liberal Democrat commitment to a fixed four-year term?”. Why would two parties which are locked in an uneasy embrace, trying to find a way to govern together that does not lead to an electoral annihilation for one or other or both of them, suddenly decide to extend the fixed term to five years?

My noble and learned friend Lord Falconer’s quote from Mr George Osborne tells us everything that we need to know about this. The Government have yet to come up with one good argument about why the motivation for this move to a five-year term is nothing more than the search for short-term, partisan, political advantage, seeking to stay in power, locked together, for as long as they possibly can. Sadly—I say sadly because I know that many Members on the Liberal Democrat Benches have long and honourable histories of espousing constitutional reform—this sort of short-term partisan manoeuvring is coming to characterise this Government’s constitutional legislation. It injects poison into the system. It creates suspicion where there should be trust and volatility where there should be stability. This really is no way to legislate for constitutional matters.

Accepting this amendment would help to neutralise this poison, but I fear that the Minister—characteristically amiably, no doubt—will try to find reasons for resisting it. I fear that the Government will ignore the reservations, which we have heard over and over again in this debate, which has gone on now for nearly one and a half hours, just as they have ignored all the other doubts about their constitutional legislation, and that they will just whip this Bill through. Despite that, I hope that the noble and learned Lord who moved this amendment will test the opinion of the House on the matter, if not now then at Report. This House should do its constitutional duty whatever view Ministers take of theirs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, I am sure that noble Lords opposite will have an opportunity to explain their points. Perhaps I may briefly explain the third reason for my having decided that five years is better than four years. It is again a question of consistency. We agreed relatively recently and after lengthy debate—the longest that we have had in the time that I have been here—on the system for parliamentary boundary reviews. It has been established that there will be five-year reviews of constituency boundaries. It would be madness to say that one should redraw the constituency boundaries every five years but then not to have general elections every five years. To have a general election every four years but to redraw the boundaries every fifth year would put the two processes completely and quite unfairly out of sync. On that basis, I decided that five years rather than four was more logical and more democratic.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

Would the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, care to comment on the fact that the first reason he gave for changing his mind applied before he espoused and promoted his manifesto for the election? Between his saying, “Vote Liberal Democrat; we’re in favour of four years” and reaching the conclusion that it should be five years, the people went and voted thinking that it was four. The noble Lord knew about the legislation that had been passed by the previous Government. I see a pattern however. I am grateful to him for his comment on five-yearly parliamentary boundary reviews and I shall go away and think about that very seriously.

[Lord Rennard]

I thank the noble Baroness, particularly for her latter point. In response to her first point, about how I should have known all this before 2005, I say very honestly that if all of us ignored all the evidence and all that we had learnt during the past six years, this place would be a poorer place and our legislation the poorer for it. I have reflected over the six years and have been convinced by many people that there should more pre-legislative scrutiny and more draft legislation. In 2005, I did not feel so strongly about that. Some of the more recent evidence points me in the direction of being strongly in favour of five-year, rather than four-year, fixed-term Parliaments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

The noble Baroness’s final point is a huge leap. As I explained at Second Reading—as did the noble Baroness, Lady Jay of Paddington—there is a spectrum between the complete flexibility that you have under the present system, which is subject to a maximum term, and the system in, I think, Norway, where there are quite rigid terms in which there is no way out if anything happens. There was a consensus that if we moved to fixed-term Parliaments, as I believe is right and as is proposed by the Bill, there should nevertheless be a mechanism to call an early election if certain circumstances arose. There was some degree of consensus on that. When we come to Clause 2, we will debate those mechanisms. I merely observe that the Constitution Committee thought that the mechanisms were fit for purpose in terms of what we are dealing with.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

We have heard in this debate references to all former Prime Ministers using their judgment in their own party-political interests and that of their own futures. How do I explain to people outside that the present Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, arriving on the figure of five years, were not doing the same thing?