Coalition Government: Constitution Committee Report

Baroness Jay of Paddington Excerpts

Tuesday 13th May 2014 Lords Chamber

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[Baroness Jay of Paddington]

That this House takes note of the Report of the Constitution Committee on Constitutional implications of coalition government (5th Report, HL Paper 130).

[Baroness Jay of Paddington (Lab)]

My Lords, I am particularly pleased to open the debate on this important report in this, the last week of my chairmanship of the Select Committee on the Constitution. The debate gives me the opportunity not only to thank all the witnesses who gave us valuable evidence in our wide-ranging inquiry, but also to express my overall gratitude to everyone associated with the committee during my four years as chairman. It has been a great privilege to work with the senior members of the House who have served on the committee. They have been very assiduous in their activities and made consistently distinguished contributions to our work. I am delighted that several of them are taking part in this debate. As members of the committee we have been extremely well supported, too, by our officials and by our legal and specialist advisers, all of whom have given us first-class assistance and advice. I would like to congratulate them on their work, as well as thank them.

This report is the result of one of the most significant inquiries the Constitution Committee has conducted in this Parliament, and as the Parliament enters its final year its conclusions and recommendations are particularly timely. Today, as noble Lords are well aware, we are constantly told by the party leaders that no one is contemplating the possibility of another hung Parliament in 2015: all are fighting for single-party victory. This may well be the ambition, but is it the reality? The committee naturally understands that, following another unclear election result, much will be determined by the politics of the day. However, we think there should be greater clarity about a number of constitutional questions before the end of this Parliament, and certainly before polling day in 2015. The opportunities for so-called “muddling through” in a traditional British way should be much reduced. Of course, the date of the next election is so certain because the Fixed-term Parliaments Act is now in operation. That Act has been the backdrop to the present coalition Government and to our inquiry, and I will return to its effect on the issues we examined later in my speech.

We looked at other changes in constitutional practice, which, for better or worse, may become permanent changes even when a future majority Government are in power. The committee’s intention is for our report to offer analysis and conclusions which should provide valuable guidance on what could become a more regular feature of British politics. As your Lordships appreciate, with an unwritten constitution many of the rules and conventions of Parliament and government are based on precedent. It is worth reminding the House, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, reminded the committee, that this is the first peacetime coalition Administration since 1931, and the first ever coalition that has been the product of arithmetic following a general election. The last hung Parliament was in 1974 and that decade—the 1970s—experienced both minority Governments and arrangements on supply and confidence between parties in the House of Commons—arrangements which some have suggested sit more comfortably with our long-held conventions of Cabinet government.

The noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, with his personal experience of 1970s government, was one of our witnesses who supported this position and I am pleased that he is going to make a contribution to the debate in the gap. It remains to be seen if contemporary experience encourages today’s politicians to look at other solutions for government after an inconclusive election.

Our report covers four main areas. First, we look at the process of government formation after a hung election. Secondly, we examine proposals which aim to enhance the legitimacy of future coalition agreements. Thirdly, we consider how government and Parliament have and should operate under a coalition. Finally we address certain issues that we think will arise in the next few months, towards the end of the Parliament.

I begin with government formation. The House is aware that a succession of one-party Governments elected with large majorities has produced a modern expectation that Administrations change very quickly. The brutal, if effective, so-called “removal van in Downing Street” approach has meant that Prime Ministers are usually in their new place in less than 24 hours after the polls close. Evidently that was not the case in 2010, when negotiations took five days to conclude. We were told in evidence that all the parties felt under great pressure, particularly from the financial markets and the media, to conclude negotiations as quickly as possible. There was pressure on the Prime Minister to resign swiftly, with press headlines such as “The squatter in No. 10”, yet a period of five days for negotiation was by international standards very short. We concluded that although a Government should be formed as promptly as possible, five days should certainly not be seen as a template period for government formation after future hung elections. We were concerned by the lack of public and media understanding about the time that it takes to form a Government in these circumstances.

In particular, our witnesses told us that it was not only perfectly constitutionally proper for an incumbent Prime Minister to remain in office until the identity of a new Government was clear but that there is in some sense an expectation that he will do so. The Constitution Committee felt that—if only, frankly, to protect themselves as well as improve public understanding—the party leaders and managers should try to get these points across, particularly to the media, before the next election in May 2015.

One notable senior figure who thought ahead about the possibility of an inconclusive election was the then Cabinet Secretary, now the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, who I am very pleased to see contributing to today’s debate. Several of our witnesses paid tribute to his foresight in starting to plan for the outcome of the election. Importantly, arrangements were put in place for Civil Service support to be made available to any parties that were involved in post-election negotiations. In the event, the Conservative and Liberal negotiators took up logistical support only; they did not take up the offer of advice or briefings. On the other hand, we heard from the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, whose contribution I look forward to, about the experience in Scotland where the parties had fully taken up the offer of Civil Service support and found it very helpful indeed. Our report recommends that official advice should be automatically available after future hung Parliaments at Westminster. Clearly, it would be for the parties to decide what level of support they would take up but it should certainly not be up to the incumbent Prime Minister to grant this opportunity. We recommend that the current Government should commit in advance to make Civil Service support available, if necessary. I hope that the Minister will be able to give that commitment today.

Today’s coalition Government have often been questioned about their democratic legitimacy. No one voted for a coalition and it is argued that the coalition agreement of 2010 does not have the same status as the manifesto of a party that won a majority at the election. Some of our witnesses, albeit those from an academic rather than a political standpoint, suggested ways of closing a possible constitutional gap in legitimacy. One proposal was that after an election, the House of Commons should hold an investiture vote for a new Prime Minister; another that the Commons should vote formally to approve a coalition agreement. The committee did not accept these ideas. We thought that a prime ministerial investiture vote would risk making our system of government even more presidential and concluded that a traditional vote on the first Queen’s Speech is the appropriate test of whether the House of Commons has confidence in the Government and therefore approves a coalition programme.

I turn to those parts of the report which deal with the way in which the coalition Government have impacted on our constitutional understandings about how government and Parliament work in practice. Undoubtedly, the most dramatic departure from constitutional norms under this Government has been, as we heard, the frequent breaches of the convention of collective ministerial responsibility—a convention which is at the heart of Cabinet government. Noble Lords will recall that breaches have occurred on significant matters, such as the saga of the constituency boundary review where the Deputy Prime Minister unilaterally told Liberal Democrat parliamentarians to vote against a measure which, until then, had been seen as agreed government policy. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, whose involvement in this debate I am also grateful for, said in his evidence to us that that was “outrageous”.

However, on the Conservative side we have also seen the remarkable event of Ministers being allowed to abstain on a vote on the Queen’s Speech and therefore in effect not being required to defend the Government’s agreed legislative programme. Other witnesses spoke of the debate on the report by Lord Justice Leveson on the press, when the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister spoke successively from the same House of Commons Dispatch Box, but on different sides of the issue. Noble Lords will recall a similar situation in this House. There have been many more examples, yet in the current Parliament no Minister has resigned or been asked to resign because they have not been prepared to accept agreed government policy.

The committee considered whether this meant that collective responsibility should be explicitly set aside under a coalition Government. We also debated whether the principle should be generally downgraded in 21st-century politics, even when a majority Government are in power. We concluded that this would be a fundamental constitutional mistake. After all, the convention of collective responsibility is primarily important because it enables Parliament fully to hold the Government responsible for all their actions and policies. It means that Ministers cannot wriggle out of responsibility by saying that a certain decision was taken by another Minister and that they had nothing to do with it. Moreover, the committee agreed that the process of collective decision-making, which is an essential part of the convention, is more likely to lead to good government than making decisions in isolation.

I remind the House that when the coalition was formed, the agreement identified five issues on which the two parties would be permitted to express different views. Processes were set out whereby this could happen but, since then, divergence between the parties on other issues has clearly happened without any proper process being followed. I would say that the present row on education policy is probably a vivid example. The committee, of course, recognised that it is inevitable that two different parties will disagree on certain issues but we think that the convention is sufficiently important for collective responsibility to be set aside only as a last resort. We recommend that when one party wants to ignore the convention it should take the matter to Cabinet, so that it is the Cabinet as a whole that agrees to set aside the convention. This should happen only on specific issues, and preferably for a limited period. We think that a process along these lines should be set out in any future coalition agreement. Those who argue that the lack of collective responsibility we have seen in the present Parliament simply illustrates the unsuitability of coalition government in our system undoubtedly have a point. Certainly, given what has happened in the last four years there is a need to be more explicit and transparent about arrangements in future.

Turning to the effect of the coalition on your Lordships’ House, we found one perhaps unexpected side-effect: the relative lack of senior Ministers in this House. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, told us he had hoped that the number of senior Ministers in the Lords would increase over the Parliament, but in fact the opposite has happened. He regretted that, and so do we. Perhaps the noble Lord will expand on this point in his speech this evening.

The committee examined how the Salisbury/Addison convention should apply during coalitions, and we conclude that a coalition agreement does not have the same mandate from the electorate as the manifesto of a majority party. Therefore, the Salisbury/Addison convention does not apply to measures in a coalition agreement. Again, however, the committee recognised the political reality that a practice has evolved whereby the Lords does not normally block government Bills, whether they are in a manifesto or not. We saw no reason to dilute this practice when there is a coalition but still thought it important to state that a coalition agreement does not constitutionally equal a manifesto commitment.

The last chapter of our report looks at the final months leading up to the general election. It is worth reminding ourselves that, in the next year, we will be dealing with two unprecedented factors. First, we know exactly when polling day will be and, secondly, we have a peacetime coalition Government who proclaim that they will stay together until 5 May next year. The committee’s immediate conclusion is that the certainty about dates should cancel the need for the often unsatisfactory period of frantic legislation at the end of a Parliament. The legislation in the forthcoming Queen’s Speech in June should be planned so that the so-called wash-up is washed out. I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, as a previous Leader of the House, agreed with us. As I said, the prospect of two parties campaigning against each other while running the Government together is unprecedented and raises a number of political questions, which again the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, may shed light on from his experience in Scotland.

Once Parliament is dissolved and the formal campaign begins, the constitutional guidance on the purdah period is clear in the Cabinet manual. Our report emphasises that this guidance must be adhered to. When it comes to the different parties in government receiving advice from civil servants, we propose that a party with no Ministers in a particular department should be entitled to have contact with officials in that department in the same way as the Official Opposition would. This would prevent any party being disadvantaged in the run-up to the election.

As the committee’s report has demonstrated—although I have not covered every point—the constitutional effects of having a coalition Government have been profound. It should not of course be assumed that future hung Parliaments would automatically lead to a coalition Government; but, frankly, it would be naive for the political parties and others not to be taking that possibility into account.

I hope your Lordships appreciate that this inquiry by the Select Committee was extensive, and included evidence from a very wide range of authoritative witnesses. The report includes substantial analysis and practical recommendations on the basis both of our deliberations and the evidence we received. We published in mid-February and the report was designed to coincide with the conclusion of this parliamentary Session and the start of pre-election preparations. I am pleased that we have been able to debate it today, before Prorogation. However, I say to the Minister that I am extremely disappointed that the Government have failed to give any response to the report so far. It is a report of current interest and importance, yet the Government again have ignored the understood guidance, which asks for a response to Select Committee reports within two months of publication. Frankly, I regard that as not simply discourteous but, in this case, irresponsible.

During this Parliament the Constitution Committee has been disappointed by the Government in this way several times. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, can offer detailed comment on our recommendations when he replies tonight, but I am afraid that whatever is said will not be a substitute for a proper, written, official response.

I do not want to conclude on that disagreeable note; so I end by renewing my thanks to all who contributed to the report and to those who will speak in the debate today. It has been a great privilege for me to serve as chairman of your Lordships’ Constitution Committee. It has also been enormously enjoyable, and I look forward to the debate. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this has been a serious and worthwhile debate. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, both for this report and for her chairmanship of the committee. I have had the nervous privilege of appearing before it on one or two occasions, and I have always been asked extremely sharp questions.

I must apologise to the House that the noble Baroness has not yet received a governmental response. We had hoped that it would be ready before this debate. I will take back to the Cabinet Office the strong views expressed in this debate, and I will do my utmost to ensure that we have it available for the next chance that the House will have to debate constitutional issues, which I think will be the last day of the Queen’s Speech debate. I may not be able to deliver on that—I am conscious that in government at present the number of people who have to agree something of this significance is rather larger than it would be in a single-party Government; that is of course part of the problem of coalition government—but I will do my best.

Since the committee published its report in February, the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee in the other place and the Institute for Government have both published reports on the final year of a fixed-term Parliament, which I have also read, as no doubt have many others who have contributed to this debate. The reports also provide some very useful information—in the Institute for Government’s case, resting on extensive interviews with civil servants—about what we may need to think about over the next 12 months, and indeed over the next few months, in order to prepare for the final months of this fixed-term Parliament.

There have been some elements of knockabout politics in this debate and certainly some elements of nostalgia for a firm two-party system; I also felt that there was such nostalgia in a great deal of evidence given to the committee. The rose-tinted spectacles that the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, has for that classic golden age of British government of 1974-79 are fascinating. Some of us have seen that interesting play, “This House”, about the experience of the 1974-79 Government, and that is not quite the quality of government that I remember. Some of us will have our doubts on minority government reinforced by that experience and our commitment to stable coalition strengthened.

Much of the evidence to the committee—which I read with fascination on Sunday—suggested that coalition will prove to have been exceptional; that single-party government is purer and clearer than coalition; that voters can give only one Government a mandate; and that if no party gets a majority of seats, it will be cleaner and somehow more democratic for the largest party on its own to form a minority Government. The noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, got a little close to saying that in describing his attitude to mandate. Perhaps off the Floor of the House he and I might discuss the difference between the Burkean view of parliamentary democracy and the populist view of popular democracy in which a general election is in effect a referendum to choose among the manifestos of the parties. I am for a parliamentary democracy; and in the British constitution as conventionally understood, it is Parliament that chooses the Government, and the Government rest on maintaining a majority in Parliament.

As the noble Lords, Lord Lang and Lord Norton, said in the evidence, ours is an adversarial constitution based on the assumption that politics has to be based on the alternation in power of two mass parties contesting for power. As a number of noble Lords have also said, our constitution now has to adjust to the disappearance of mass parties and the splintering of popular loyalties. The latest public opinion polls, which your Lordships have all read in the past two or three days, show that the largest party is at 33.6% of the electorate. The second largest is at 31%, with two other parties at over 10%. There are some eight to nine different parties now represented in the House of Commons, depending on how one counts the Northern Ireland MPs. I note that the Prime Minister had a reception last week for the unionist MPs for Northern Ireland, which suggests that the potential for future government is being thought about in all sorts of ways. It is more likely that the diversity of parties will increase in the next Parliament, rather than decrease.

I note, from a discussion within the Labour Party and in the Guardian, the 35% strategy, and that Labour might perhaps hope to win a majority of seats on a third of the vote, or possibly even to form a minority Government on its own on the basis of 32% or 33% of the vote. There is a question of legitimacy here. I noted with great amusement in the 9 April evidence that the Deputy Prime Minister gave to the Constitution Committee that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, asked him what he thought was wrong with an appointed second Chamber. He said that there was a question of legitimacy, to which the noble and learned Lord said, “Only legitimacy?”. Legitimacy is a problem for government.

With this coalition Government we have had four years of remarkably stable government. I recall all the predictions from the Labour Benches in this House and the other place, to start with, that it would not last a year. It is highly likely at the next election that the people will fail or refuse to elect a majoritarian House of Commons for a single party. That will face us with the choice of changing the people, as the Leninists would like to say, or agreeing to adapt the constitution. I think that it is quite clear that we will have to adapt the constitution, and this report helpfully suggests a number of ways in which we should adapt.

From my experience of coalition Government, however, there are a number of coalition practices that ought to be practices of good government for any Government. We have returned to collective responsibility. We have had more formal meetings. Sometimes I feel that one of the problems with coalition Government is that it takes infinitely more time. There have to be more meetings—of our side and their side as well as of the two of us together. However, it means that government decisions are in most cases rather better considered. As the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, said, coalition strengthens the careful consideration of policies and limits unconsidered ministerial initiatives.

I also read in some of the evidence given to the committee a suggestion that coalition weakens the Prime Minister and that what we want is a really strong, effective, executive Prime Minister. After the experience of Tony Blair as Prime Minister, I think that there is quite a strong case for saying that having an Executive who are more effectively constrained by Parliament and collective discussion among different parties are good things for good government.

The noble Lord, Lord Norton, made some odd remarks about inexperienced Ministers. My recollection is that after 13 years of a Labour Government, virtually no incoming Ministers in the current Government—Conservative or Liberal Democrat—had prior ministerial experience. The question of whether there should have been more training—the sort of work the Institute for Government is now offering—is one that we will all have to consider further.

The rose-tinted spectacles also touched on what the final years of single-party government were like. I remember the Major Government in 1996-97, with all the remarks about the “bastards” doing their best to stab the Prime Minister in the back. We all have memories of the last year of the Brown Government in 2009-10 and of the last year of the minority Labour Government in 1978-79. All demonstrated that each of our established major parties is itself a coalition—and sometimes an unstable and ill-tempered coalition at that.

A range of issues was raised in this excellent report. First, on the formation of a Government, I think we can all strongly agree that it may well need more than five days, that we would not wish to follow continental practice by allowing it to extend too far and that an agreement that it would be 12 days before Parliament meets probably sends the right signal for government formation. I think we also agree that we have moved some way towards the concept of a caretaker Government. That is also a good thing in the circumstances. The question was raised of how much information and advice would be given by civil servants. I can assure noble Lords that Civil Service support for government formation negotiations will again be offered.

I strongly agree—and I trust that my colleagues in government in the response will also strongly agree—that the Queen’s Speech offers the occasion for a vote to accept a coalition agreement, although the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, was quite correct to say that it is a good thing if both parties are seen to accept it. My party had a special conference, and I have heard a number of Conservatives quietly say that they wish they had done something like that to tie their party into what they were doing. That would also perhaps be good practice.

A lot of time in this debate and in the report was spent on the issue of collective responsibility. I have to say that I was surprised to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, refer to “frequent” breaches of the doctrine of collective responsibility in this Government. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell—if I heard him correctly—referred to the “abandonment” of collective responsibility. The Cabinet Manual says that collective responsibility should rest upon collective decision-making:

“Before a decision is made, ministers are given the opportunity to debate the issue, with a view to reaching an agreed position”.

That is quite clear: collective responsibility comes from collective decision-making.

There have been occasions in previous Governments when Prime Ministers have taken decisions without consulting their colleagues—occasionally even the Chancellor of the Exchequer—and I would argue that, with a limited number of exceptions, collective responsibility in this Government works extremely well. The write-round has become much more the ritual procedure, partly because one has to make sure that Liberal Democrat and Conservative Ministers agree on things. It even reaches down to my lowly level. My stress level rose considerably last week when I received four 100-page reports with requests for my views on them by the close of play the following day because they had to go up to separate Secretaries of State. However, that is collective decision-making which ties us all in.

The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, and others remarked that a lot of this is to do with trust and a willingness to compromise, and we all know that in any Government there will be some with whom it is easy to work on a trustful basis and others with whom it will be difficult. I remember being told by officials that in the 1974 to 1979 Government there were papers marked, “Do not show to Tony Benn”. There was a lack of trust within the coalition that was the Labour Party. On the whole, in any Government one can write down the rules but one needs to have a degree of give and take and a willingness to make it work that keeps the Government together. From my own limited experience within this Government, I have to say that it works pretty well. There are, of course, exceptions from time to time—trust does break down—but we are still here, and we will be here until May next year.

I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, said that breaches of collective responsibility demonstrate the unsuitability of coalitions to the British system of government—although perhaps I misheard her on that. It seems to me that collective responsibility has had to adapt to coalition, and has adapted fairly well.

[Baroness Jay of Paddington]

What I said was that it lent some credibility to those who argue that the system of coalition Government was not as suited as others to our system of government.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

As it happens, I visited Hughenden two weeks ago and bought and have since read the biography of Disraeli by the noble Lord, Lord Hurd. I have now discovered the very odd conditions under which he made the great statement that coalitions are not suitable to the British constitution. I think that we all now agree that the British constitution can adapt to a stable coalition Government.

The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, and others raised the question of the Lords. Much of the question of what we do with the Salisbury/Addison convention was discussed in the Joint Committee on Conventions in 2007. I agree strongly with what the noble Lord said in his evidence, and has said again tonight, that the conventions have adapted since then. The Lords conventionally does not vote against the Second Reading of any Bill, but we are willing to amend it. The idea of the mandate and the manifesto Bill was much easier in the 1940s and 1950s, when parties got 48% or 50% of the vote. When giving evidence to that Joint Committee, I went back to that 1945 Labour manifesto, which has a page that lists a series of Bills that the Labour Party wished to take through. I compared that with the 1997 Labour manifesto, in which I could find no single firm commitment of that sort. We have all changed our manifestos in that way.

I have some sympathy with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, on the numbers of Ministers in the Lords and their degree of seniority—and I have, of course, intense sympathy with his remarks on those who are not paid, but perhaps we will save that for another time.

The question of fixed-term Parliaments has also been raised. The question of how we handle the final year of such a Parliament is clearly one that we all need to address fairly rapidly. Some interesting comments have been made about the opportunity that the final year provides to think longer term and to prepare. One area in which I have some responsibility is the national security strategy, which should be prepared in the fifth year of a Government for publication early in the new term of the new Government. That is something that we should think actively about for some other areas as well. For example, we could all consider long-term spending trends within government and how far we cope with the inexorable rise in health costs and pensions, which we all know are coming down to us. There is a great deal there to discuss further.

On access to civil servants, I confirm that there will be no change in the long-standing principles set out in the Cabinet Manual and that guidance on pre-election contacts will be issued to civil servants nearer the time when contacts are due to commence, at the beginning of October.

The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, raised the question of whether we have to have a wash-up. As we have just discovered at the end of this Session, one can never predict until the end of the Session whether we will have agreed all Bills by the time the Session comes to an end. We may hope that we will agree everything by then, but we will have to see what happens when it comes to it.

Lastly, we have not talked very much about the role of the Civil Service. The role of the Civil Service in holding a coalition together is vital. I hope that the Constitution Committee will return to the role of the Civil Service in further inquiries. From my own experience of the high quality of officials and their remarkable tact and patience in managing the coalition Government, I have to say that we have been extremely well served. I have found the work of the special advisers for both parties absolutely invaluable. The distinction between their role and that of officials is also something to which the Constitution Committee might return.

I again apologise to noble Lords that they have not yet had the Government’s response to the report. I thank the committee very much for this invaluable report. It is a subject which we all need to think about as we approach the next election. The opinion polls will no doubt go up and down in various directions, but after the election we will have to face the question of how we form the next Government, whatever shape that may be.

[Baroness Jay of Paddington]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his response and my noble friend Lord Kennedy for his comments. I, of course, accept the Minister’s apology to the committee and to the House for the delay in the Government’s response. I hope very much that his aspiration that it will be available in time for the Queen’s Speech will be fulfilled.

I am very grateful to all those who have taken part in this debate. Even by the usual high standards of House of Lords debates on Constitution Committee reports it has been exceptional. It has been illuminated by a great deal of first-hand experience from a former Cabinet Secretary, a former Leader of the House and those who have taken part in the Liberal Democrat proceedings. As I say, that illuminated the debate.

We should all take note of what the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, said about looking to the future rather than the past. I have to say in parenthesis that, when we look at the past, my sympathies are not surprisingly with the view of the past held by the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue. However, taking up the specific point made by the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, I think that we will face what has been described as a challenging 12 months in the fifth year of this Parliament and this Government. Whether we can hold our breath and do some work on the retrospective scrutiny of committee inquiries I rather doubt, but it is an extremely interesting idea.

As I said at the beginning of the debate, this is a very significant report by the committee. The debate tonight has illustrated again what we knew when we held the inquiry—namely, that the line between constitutional debate and raw politics is very fine indeed. This debate has reflected the findings of our inquiry in that even the most neutral and objective taking of evidence and deliberation, which we certainly seek in the Constitution Committee, can be translated into raw and tough politics. I hope that this subject will be mentioned in the Queen’s Speech. I look forward to that.

Motion agreed.