South Sudan

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Monday 28th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

IGAD is currently consulting outside the country with potential civil society representatives who will be included in these discussions. This will in no way be a beautiful or perfect set of arrangements. If we manage to achieve some sort of transitional Government of national unity, we will have done extremely well.

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a trustee of the Disasters Emergency Committee and echo the Minister’s comments about the courage and commitment of the workers for those aid agencies who are out in South Sudan. They all report a desperate humanitarian situation in which it is not just the lack of resources—I pay tribute to what the UK Government have done in this—but ongoing fighting that is a barrier to those most in need receiving aid. Does the Minister agree that with more than 50% of farmers not able to plant in this year’s rainy season, unless a long-term enduring agreement is reached, this crisis will not only continue but deepen?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, there has never been an effective and functioning state in South Sudan. It is a new country born out of civil war. It is going to take a long time to construct an effective state administration with the ability to provide education and order within the 10 provinces with a large number of tribal groups and some 200 different languages. This is a major preoccupation with which all the states around South Sudan are engaged. Britain, the United States and Norway represent the troika of outside Governments who are most concerned. Of course we want other Governments to be concerned. It is good news that China has now recognised that it also has interests at stake and is considering providing additional troops to the UN peacekeeping forces.

House of Lords: Membership

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

My Lords, I echo the remarks that have already been made about the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, and the value he has provided for today in allowing us to debate this subject. As the noble Lord, Lord Steel, has already reminded noble Lords, the size of the House was already a problem when the Hunt committee reported. Far from seeing a reduction in numbers, as was proposed, we have seen a substantial increase, with all the difficulties that have been referred to today, including the effects on the reputation and, indeed, the workings of the House.

I want to take up the theme of party-political balance in the House. We have no agreement about what the relative strengths of parties in the House should be. However, we do have agreement, I think, that much legislation that comes to this House is badly drafted, inadequately scrutinised or not scrutinised at all, because of timetabling in the other place. Given those circumstances, I ask the Government to think very carefully about increasing by large numbers the proportion of party-political Peers in the House. Second Chambers exist to ask first Chambers to have second thoughts. We need to do our job of pressure-testing legislation, both for policy and for drafting, and to ask the Commons to think again when appropriate. The joy of our present system, and the reason why many of us oppose an elected House of Lords, is because democratic power, accountability and legitimacy lie with the Commons, which always in the end gets its way.

I have been a Minister in this place and I know that it is very disobliging and disrupting to lose votes, but in terms of the quality of the legislation that emerges I suggest that it is counterproductive for the Government deliberately to diminish the number of times they are asked to think again in the House of Commons. That can rebound politically, as those who were involved in the poll tax legislation understand very well.

As regards the proposals for not just not increasing the size of the House through new appointments but reducing its size through offering opportunities for retirement and resignation, I echo what has been said about Dan Byles’s Bill because I have always believed that having a statutory basis on which to build in a voluntary manner is tremendously important.

The other development that I think is important is the recently published report of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee. Many of the proposals in the Clerk of the Parliament’s memorandum are supported in that report and there are specific requests, not just from the Government but from the parties in this House, for the leadership to take those proposals on board and to respond to both the committee and the House as a whole. I hope that the Minister will indicate that the Government are willing to respond to that.

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[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Higgins. It has been an excellent debate. I have to say to my noble friend Lord Lea that I plead guilty as charged, although I hope that the Minister will also plead guilty. I notice that he left the Conservative Party office charge sheet, which rather disappointed me, but perhaps he just felt short of a bit of time.

I thought that the Clerk of the Parliament’s report was excellent, particularly paragraphs 36 and 37 in relation to a strengthened leave of absence scheme, including minimum levels of attendance and enforced leave of absence. Will the Minister state clearly what the Government actually intend to do to progress this? As noble Lords have said, the Leader of the House has already indicated that he is not in favour of it, but I think the House and the Committee are entitled to a proper explanation of why this should not be taken forward.

I also ask the Minister about the statement made by the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, at Question Time this morning. She made what seemed to me to be a new statement of government policy in relation to the balance between the parties. I would be grateful if he would expand on what the Minister said in the Chamber.

Thirdly, I come to the point raised by my noble friend Lady Hayman. We have what I think is a ludicrous coalition agreement policy of saying that in one Parliament the membership of the House should reflect the votes cast at the last election; clearly, we have seen lists of new Peers being announced in order to make progress towards that. Our estimate is that the Government will shortly have a political majority in the Chamber of more than 100. What is the point of it? We are a revising Chamber; if the Government cannot be defeated, revisions cannot take place. In my own experience as a Minister, as my noble friend Lady Hayman will know—

[Baroness Hayman]

The noble Lord is definitely my friend, but in procedural terms in this House he is not my noble friend.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, I am duly dealt with on that. The noble Baroness was also a health Minister. I would have expected to lose five or six votes on any health Bill that I took through, and I took through rather a lot. This does not happen any more, and I want to ask the Government whether they expect to win every vote. Is this the intention? If it is the intention, frankly, I do not see the point of your Lordships’ House. If the Government are not defeated on a fairly regular basis, we cannot send matters back to the House of Commons and there is no point to us. I am increasingly of the view that in that scenario the only way out is to get rid of the House. I do not think that the Government realise the significance of this. We cannot revise unless the Government are defeated a healthy number of times.

We should look at other reports, as well as the Clerk’s. My noble friend Lord Foulkes has given the game away, in the sense that there is a Labour group looking at some of these issues. The House of Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee has produced a very interesting report, with a number of suggestions as to how we might deal with these issues. We may not agree with all of them, but I particularly draw your Lordships’ attention to recommendation 10, on determining the relative numerical strengths of party groups in the House of Lords. In the end, surely we need to have sensible discussions and reach an agreement which will enable us to get a proper balance, allow the House to do its proper job in revising, and keep the numbers at a reasonable level.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, Members of the House of Commons earn their keep and are much more often in the prime of life. Most of us who come here have earned our salaries elsewhere and have pensions from elsewhere. That is part of the distinction that I am making.

[Baroness Hayman]

Not the women.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, asked about human resources. My noble friend Lord Gardiner remarked that that is partly because Cross-Benchers do not have Whips. Whips in this House see themselves not as enforcers but as very much a human resources department for their own party groups.

House of Lords: Appointments

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Tuesday 9th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I do not think that I ought to answer that question. I am very conscious that there are those who, in the Corridors of this House, have said to me, among others, that those who are asked to leave the House should be compensated for doing so. To that I would say that membership of this House is a privilege, not a right, and the idea that one has to be bought out before one leaves is not one that should be considered.

[Baroness Hayman]

Will the Minister now answer a question about which the Government have been reticent? To which of the political parties contesting the last general election does the coalition commitment that he has reaffirmed today apply?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, over lunch I made a calculation which, even though I was unable to find a calculator, I hope was correct. If one were to be strictly accurate, the Labour Party as represented in this House is roughly in tune with the percentage that it received in the last election. The noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, is as good as 10 people. The most underrepresented group, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, knows, is of course the Liberal Democrats.

Queen’s Speech

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman]

My Lords, I was going to start my speech by saying that it was a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown. It is certainly a challenge and I shall try not to take as long. I am glad to have this opportunity not least because his support for an elected second Chamber is, as he demonstrated today, both passionate and principled and I respect that. However, I hope that he will accept and acknowledge that it is possible to have as great a respect for democracy and for a parliamentary system without agreeing with him on the virtues of an elected House. It is possible for true democrats, honourable Members and noble Lords to disagree honourably on this point.

The other reason I was pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, was that I would like to echo some of the points that have been made about second Chambers across the world. I fear that in his rhetoric he employs a rather broad-brush approach and fails to do justice, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, has pointed out, to the complexities of bicameral legislatures. Over the past five years—something of a misspent late middle age—I spent a great deal of time visiting, discussing and studying second Chambers, and speaking to their members and debating with their speakers. The position is nothing like as simple as the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, suggests. He achieves the figure of only seven appointed Chambers by simply ignoring some countries that he decides to classify as microstates and therefore not worthy of consideration.

More importantly, if you look at the figures—whether it is 72 or 76—for me the crucial issue is that directly elected second Chambers are actually in the minority when you consider the large number of indirectly appointed second Chambers and put those together with the ones that are appointed. I say that not simply to parry debating points with the noble Lord, but to suggest that parliaments are rather like Tolstoy’s families at the beginning of Anna Karenina: lower Houses are basically all the same—representation by population—and second Chambers are all different—unhappy in their own way, as unicameralists such as the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, would say. They tend to be the product of political history or of political geography which, of course, explains federal countries and second Chambers in federal states. Their existence, their powers, their composition are subject to recurrent debate. They are abolished, as in New Zealand, created, as in Rwanda, and revived, as is currently happening in Kenya. The holy grail of achieving a second Chamber that is viewed as legitimate by the public, that adds value to the legislative process, that plays its part in holding the executive to account and in the better governance of our country, while not being either a fractious rival or a pale replica of a lower House, is not easy to find, as the coalition is now discovering.

I return to those issues of principle that are the noble Lord’s driving force for an elected second Chamber. One is that no one should participate in the legislature, whatever the limitations of its power, without an electoral mandate. As I understand it, that is what the noble Lord delineated. The principle stands alongside the mantra that we heard in the other place that law makers should be accountable to law obeyers. However, if the two principles of election and accountability are sacrosanct, I cannot comprehend how the current proposals can in any way be judged acceptable. If no one who is not elected should be a legislator, how could one justify appointing 20% of the Members of a reformed House? I agree with noble Lords who said that such hybridity would very quickly become unsustainable. If accountability is king, how can single, non-renewable 15-year terms with no constituency responsibilities be justified?

Clause 2—legislation by assertion—maintains that the current balance between the two Houses can be maintained. How can it be when it is the product of the lack of electoral legitimacy of this House? How can one argue that it will not be fundamentally altered by giving Members of your Lordships’ House an electoral mandate? This is not an abstract issue; I speak from personal experience. I proposed an amendment on control orders in your Lordships’ House in 2005. It was supported—I see the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, in his place. It was supported again when it had been overturned in the Commons and came back in the first round of ping-pong. However, after that round I stepped back—as did the rest of the House—because the House of Lords knows its place. It knows that its job is to revise and advise. It understands the balance of power between the two Houses. The idea that, if I had had any sort of electoral mandate at the time I would have stood back from what I considered to be an issue of principle, is ludicrous. Therefore, one cannot simply assert that the powers and the relationship would remain the same.

There were many speeches in recent debates about fundamental flaws in the proposals. I will not go through all the arguments but will simply say that the current proposals in no way provide a gain in democratic legitimacy and accountability that outweighs what would be lost in complementarity and differentiation between the Chambers and the single focus of democratic accountability that exists in the form of the House of Commons. Those who argue that the only route to legitimacy in a liberal democracy in the 21st century is election have not thought about some very powerful positions in our country for which some jurisdictions have elections. In some countries, judges are elected. I do not think that we would consider that an extension of democracy in this country. I do not believe that voting for police commissioners will be an extension of democracy. We must be prepared to take a more nuanced view on how legitimacy is gained in a liberal democracy in the 21st century. For me, involvement in the legislative process, as long as the powers exercised by such non-elected parliamentarians are commensurate—in the words of the Joint Committee—with their non-elected status, is acceptable.

I share the affection for this House that the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Hendon, expressed in her speech; it is deep-rooted in me.

Earlier in this debate, the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, spoke of the need,

“to avoid yet more incestuous self-congratulatory introspection”.—[Official Report, 10/5/12; col. 42.]

I fear that he may have thought that my intervention on him the other day was exactly that and I will attempt not to do that today. Let me say quite explicitly that there is much that is wrong with the House as currently constituted. There is much that needs to change—as much has changed in the past. When I was taking my 11-plus, every Member of this House was an hereditary Peer, a judge or a Bishop. There was not a single woman in the place. In my adult lifetime, we have seen tremendous change, particularly in 1958 and 1999, and I believe that we need to see change on that scale now. The lack of that sort of incremental progress is a serious failing. For me, simply to defeat the current proposals would not look like success.

Several noble Lords have referred to the evidence that I gave to the Joint Committee. In that evidence, I put forward what I considered to be the problems the House faces—size, no retirement plan and the lack of terms. I put forward an agenda for change—a substantial reduction in the size of the House, agreement on the proportion of party-political to independent Members, term limits for future appointees, a statutory Appointments Commission operating under clear criteria which the public understood and which could be changed through Parliament, an end to the position that those who had committed serious criminal offences or breaches of the House’s Code of Conduct cannot be barred from the House, an end to the link between membership of the House and the honours system and an end to by-elections for hereditary Peers.

I understand that not all those proposals will be agreed by everybody, but I suspect that within them, there is a core that would amount to substantial and quite radical change around which consensus—consensus in the conventional rather than the Strathclydian definition—could be achieved. It would require leadership and compromise, but I do not believe that it would be any victory to defeat these proposals by long-drawn-out and bitter hand-to-hand parliamentary combat.

Even more of a travesty would be to confront what I suspect, as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, suggested, would be the very small proportion of the British public who turned out to vote, with a referendum that gave a choice between a proposal as ill thought out and flawed as the one currently before us and the status quo of the House of Lords as it is today, with no progress or incremental change having been made since 1999.

Several speakers in this debate have referred to their anxieties, which I share, about the lack of respect for and trust in Parliament and politicians. We will not create that respect and trust quickly or easily and we will certainly not do it by putting two such unappetising alternatives to the public at a referendum. The key to slowly rebuilding that trust is to find reforms, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester has suggested, that allow us to do our job better. We can then demonstrate that to the public and show that we are representing them in the special and important way that this House does in Parliament.

I agree, if not with Nick, then with the Prime Minister. He is quite right: Parliament can do more than one thing at a time. We could both take measures to improve this House’s effectiveness and legitimacy through a Bill on which we have created widespread consensus and at the same time undertake the broader debate about the implications and desirability of an elected House in the context not only of Parliament as a whole but of the wider constitutional developments, which many have referred to, that are taking place in the United Kingdom at the moment. Or to put it in the more succinct words of the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, we could get on and “do the work”.

At the end of a speech made in this House in 2002 about very similar proposals, the late Lord Jenkins of Hillhead argued that there was an intellectual case for either a small, regionally based equivalent of the United States Senate or for a reformed, appointed House. However, he concluded by saying:

“But I am sure that we should face the logic of one course or the other and not fish around in the ill-thought-out and muddled middle”.—[Official Report, 10/1/02; col. 702.]

A decade on, I believe that we have not only the opportunity but the obligation to do better. It will require leadership, compromise and commitment, and I hope that the Government and Parliament will rise to that challenge.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

In which event, the primacy of the House of Commons is in very safe hands.

[Baroness Hayman]

The reason that the House of Commons is in very safe hands is that there is no elective mandate in this House. Election, to coin a phrase from a popular song, changes everything. Fundamentally, if legitimacy changes, so does the balance of power. The Minister has to accept that, for some people, that is fine—a rethinking of the powers between the two Houses, a concordat of how you resolve differences or a written constitution are prices worth paying for electoral legitimacy—but to suggest that we can continue as we are with just election is simply not realistic.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I do not want to keep the House too long or too late this evening, but the relationship between the two Houses is not a zero-sum game. A stronger legislature which is able to hold the Executive more clearly to account, between the two Houses and within both Houses, will provide more effective pre-legislative and post-legislative scrutiny. It will be a positive gain. If we do not wish to make the radical move to a written constitution, I am confident, and the Government are confident, that the conventions between the Houses will evolve. We are not an American Congress; we have not been created and an elected House would not be created to stand in opposition to the Commons. We would continue to be the second Chamber.