Queen’s Speech
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve Excerpts(8 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve (CB)
My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, set out clearly for us today, it is not obvious where the legislation on constitutional and devolution issues is in the gracious Speech, yet that is the topic of today’s debate. The so-called British Bill of Rights would of course be such a measure but, as we heard, it is still postponed. The gracious Speech refers to the referendum but the enabling legislation for that was passed last year. Yet, that referendum is the overwhelming constitutional issue, colouring every other legislative proposal. I make no apology for focusing on it.
As we all know, public debate is full of predictions and of adverse comment on other people’s predictions. Many of the predictions about the referendum are indeed implausible. We should spend rather less time making and rubbishing predictions, but should try to identify risks. Risks must be taken seriously, even where we do not have the metrics or models to make precise predictions.
Today, I focus on a particular range of risks of Brexit: those to the UK’s current constitutional settlement and in particular to the common travel area that links the non-Schengen UK and the non-Schengen Republic of Ireland. If the UK were to leave the EU, the island of Ireland would be divided by a land frontier with the European Union approximately 300 miles long and which runs—as many of your Lordships will know—through rough terrain. By contrast, if Scotland left the UK, there would be a land border of less than one third that length. We are talking about a much larger proposition.
The common travel area has been in place since the 1920s and allows for very light-touch controls. In fact, it is not just a travel area. British and Irish people enjoy full access to one another’s state and society, not just to travel but to work, live and vote. Those are important links. Of course, it was necessary to impose further border controls during both World War Two, when naval realities limited migration from elsewhere, and the Troubles, when political realities did the same. Both periods revealed that this border is very hard to police well. Thankfully, with the peace process—imperfect and incomplete though it is—there is no great need to police it with precision. The UK and the Republic of Ireland have co-ordinated their visa and immigration policies and jointly maintain controls for the common travel area. I grant that that is not perfect but it is very good.
If the land border across the island of Ireland had to be hardened to maintain UK border controls with an EU of which it was no longer part, the damage to the peace process, to the economies of Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and the entire UK, and to relations between the states would affect virtually all the proposed legislation. The effects could be very great. The most overt support for hardening the border that I have found comes from David McNarry, head of UKIP in Northern Ireland, who said:
“I support patrols, active patrols”,
and pointed out that otherwise the border would be,
“wide open for migration, for the clever traffickers, for the criminals”.
I suppose he is right in his inference. However, it may be that the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, the right honourable Teresa Villiers, who supports Brexit, is also in favour of ending the common travel area. I have not been able to establish that, although it seems to follow as a logical consequence of the policy.
A great success of the peace process has been that support for Irish unity among nationalists in Northern Ireland—among both SDLP and Sinn Fein voters—has greatly declined, to a remarkable extent in the most recent polls. If a hardened border made altering the constitutional settlement once more seem a more urgent goal, there would be a huge and understandable temptation for Sinn Fein to seize the opportunity. Sinn Fein, which at present opposes Brexit, would have been handed an all too potent reason to revive abandoned territorial claims. I hope that even ardent Brexiteers will understand what they are risking.
I do not think it is profitable to try to quantify the costs of Brexit, but nor should we fantasise about the supposed benefits. But major risks matter. As the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, has written recently, we could in the event of a vote to leave the EU lose not just one Union but two—not only the European Union but the United Kingdom. As someone with an Irish, a Scots, a Welsh and an English grandparent—three of the four were in uniform in World War I—I am a one-nation person, but my nation is the UK and I do not wish to see it dismembered. This, as I see it, is a risk that deserves all our attention and casts a shadow on every legislative proposal in the gracious Speech.
Deregulation Bill
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve Excerpts(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, my understanding is that it is going to be very difficult to bring them forward before the election. However, I will take that back and will be sure to write to the noble Baroness with any exact dates for the regulations.
No specific regulatory functions of any other particular named body are listed on the face of the Bill, and it is not necessary to do so in relation to the regulatory functions of the EHRC. The regulatory functions to which the growth duty is to apply will be set out in secondary legislation, as I have said before. Meanwhile, the Government have given a range of assurances that the EHRC is outside the scope of the growth duty and will be excluded.
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve (CB)
My Lords, I had not intended to speak because, as chair of the EHRC, it is difficult for me to do so, but before the Minister sits down, I think I can allow myself to say one factual thing. This is an unusual regulatory body in that it is subject to international inspection and rating—which will be done by the ICC. Unfortunately, as a matter of timing, all the evidence that the ICC requires will have to be submitted in June this year, and I think the Minister has just informed us that it will not be possible to lay the statutory instruments that exclude the commission from scope before that time.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I would simply reply that we are of course well aware that this is not the only body for which there are a range of international complications and obligations. Indeed, the RSPB briefing, which some Members will have seen, raises questions about EU legislation. We are very conscious that everything we do in this area, biomedical issues included, carries international implications.
Leveson Report
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve Excerpts(11 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, my briefing says that it is not appropriate for the Privy Council to consider more than one royal charter at a time on the same issue. The noble Lord may consider that the Press Standards Board of Finance has therefore been extremely clever in what it has done and may draw his conclusions from that—and that accounts for some of the delay.
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve
My Lords, in March, in the debate to which the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, has referred, there was an understanding that there was a cross-party agreement about the way forward on the Leveson recommendations. What is the state of that agreement now?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, there is a cross-party agreement on the way forward. However, as those who have lived through this debate in even more detail than I have will recall, we are attempting to build a much tougher self-regulatory principle of regulation for the press with the support of a royal charter. This is a very delicate process. Pulling the press along with a tougher system of self-regulation is not proving as easy as it might.
Electoral Registration and Administration Bill
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve Excerpts(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve
My Lords, this is not a subject on which I would often speak, but I have thought a great deal about the inconsistencies in our practice: having data protection legislation and yet an electoral register where you can opt-out of the publication of your address.
The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, is right—there are too many people who have an interest in having access to this information for good purposes, by and large. If this were on an opt-in basis, have the Government done anything to obtain a picture of how many people would be likely to opt in. I imagine that the value of the register would be wholly destroyed. We know how many people have learnt in the age of the internet never to tick any of the boxes that state that you are willing to receive any further information for any purpose, even a worthy purpose.
I have a feeling that we are on the cusp between information that has to be public and information that our clunky data protection legislation regards as private. It is incoherent. We have ended up regarding home addresses in some contexts as personal information that is not to be transmitted or disclosed to others without express permission, and regarding them in other cases as public information that is non-personal and that may be published. It is not so much the purposes that concern me, whether they are commercial or not; it is that ultimately the opt-in register might be radically incomplete and not useful for many purposes.
Lord Wills
My Lords, a change in public policy on this issue is long overdue, and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Norton, on his persistence in returning to it on Report. I associate myself with everything he said in support of his amendment. In the past, Ministers have talked about the register being used as an aid for business and commerce, and we have heard in this debate about its uses for charities and other organisations. However, in my view, so far Ministers have advanced no good arguments, either practical or principled, about why such a public subsidy—because that is what these uses of the electoral register represent—to particular business sectors should take precedence over all the arguments for the other side that have been put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Norton: weakened protection of personal data, the likely damage to registration rates caused under the present system, and the introduction of a commercial element into a relationship that should be founded on fundamental democratic principles.
When I was the Minister responsible for this issue in the last Government, I was minded to adopt an approach very similar to that put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Norton, both in Committee and today. Predictably, perhaps, I was vigorously lobbied by representatives of credit agencies who made fearsome claims about the potential detriment to businesses that would arise from any changes. Clearly there are arguments on both sides of the issue, so I asked those who had lobbied me to come back with detailed evidence of the potential damage: their analysis of what might be done to replace the electoral register as a source of data for them, how much the alternatives might cost, and a detailed principled case for public subsidy rather than their being put into the same position as other private sector firms that produce goods and services and fund their businesses from their own resources. I felt that when these people came back with the information, a proper assessment could be made of the advantages and disadvantages of different policy approaches.
I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, that the same arguments apply to charities and other non-governmental organisations that use the electoral register for wholly commendable objectives. The argument is not so much about the usefulness of the electoral register, because that is clear and I think we all agree on it. The argument I would put is whether this is the best use of public money. What principled case is there for using public subsidy in this way, and could the sums involved perhaps be deployed more effectively in other ways? I have never seen any evidence to that effect, either as a Minister or subsequently. If there were any compelling evidence I might be prepared to change my mind, but in the absence of detailed analysis and evidence it seems that the noble Lord, Lord Norton, has made a compelling case for change. I hope that the Government, even at this late stage, might think again.
Behaviour Change: Science and Technology Committee Report
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve Excerpts(12 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, our special adviser and, of course, the secretariat. This was a complex report to get together. The evidence was unusually disbursed, and I cannot say that we got together all the sorts of disbursed evidence that would be relevant. Here and there, I caught a note of disappointment that certain sorts of evidence had not been covered. I think that that is right. We took, if I may put it this way, a dipstick approach. We were looking for evidence and where it has not been collected there is no systematic picture of evidence. We did not look at what is delightfully called “renorming”, where you tell people what is the proper thing to do about something—what is the norm. For example, noble Lords have no doubt stayed in hotels where they are informed that their guests use their towels on average X number of times, as opposed to throwing them on the floor for the laundry. That is said greatly to reduce the demand for laundry and reduce laundry bills and energy expenditure because people think that the respectable thing to do is use their towel for three or four days and not throw it on the floor immediately.
In one way the Government’s response to the report is rather gratifying as they agree to a fair number of the central recommendations, but in another way it is not at all gratifying because, although they agree, they do not then explain clearly what they will do or suggest a timetable. The disappointment is that the Government have not specified what action they will take on the very measures that they agree are relevant within a specified timeframe. I have every sympathy with the Government on one point. Behavioural changes might—I say “might”, not “will”—provide an excellent solution to many problems from smoking to obesity or the excessive use of cars to the excessive drinking of alcohol. The question addressed by the Committee was the rather sobering one of whether and how well they actually work. We should remember that behavioural solutions are nevertheless appealing because if they work individuals will change their behaviour to some degree without the need for enforcement or penalties and the problem goes away. Choice is preserved, harms and ill health are avoided and costs are minimal—if it works. It is said that all that is needed may be a nudge, a minimal intervention that leads people to view a different, less harmful or healthier way of behaving as the default option—indeed, ideally as their preferred option—and they will change their behaviour accordingly. However appealing it may be it is not very useful if it does not work.
The patchy evidence that the committee heard, and the two detailed case studies of obesity and car use that it undertook, repeatedly showed two things. First, there was a dearth of evidence about the effectiveness of many behavioural interventions and, with that dearth of evidence a lack of robust evaluation. Secondly, there was insufficient evidence of the staying power of behavioural interventions, either taken individually or in interaction with other interventions. That was particularly marked in some of the evidence about the efficacy of exercise in addressing obesity.
The Government have pointed out in their response that they are funding the Policy Research Unit on Behaviour and Health, based at the University of Cambridge and directed by Professor Theresa Marteau to undertake rigorous evaluations. This work is admirable, but it is on a small scale. Often an intervention shows promising results but unless its cost and its efficacy are carefully compared with other approaches across various contexts in combination with other interventions, and its staying power after the intervention is monitored, promising initial results may turn out to have limited staying power. I hope that we will find policies that use behavioural interventions but provide robust and generalisable evidence of the efficacy of those interventions across situations. We need a broad and systematic approach, as other noble Lords have said.
Moreover, as others have also said, the report did not find much evidence of the efficacy of behavioural interventions taken in isolation. I make no apology for quoting that it noted that,
“the evidence supports the conclusion that non-regulatory or regulatory measures used in isolation are often not likely to be effective and that usually the most effective means of changing behaviour at a population level is to use a range of policy tools, both regulatory and non-regulatory”.
I suppose that that is hardly surprising. We have huge experience of the sheer difficulty of changing entrenched behaviour when we consider the more than half a century of strenuous efforts to reduce smoking. So far they have had a marked yet still incomplete effect, despite deploying a complex combination of behavioural, fiscal and regulatory interventions. This difficulty of achieving change, even using a mix of measures across a long time, is despite the reality that, as an editorial in the Journal of Public Health of February 2011 nicely put the matter:
“Tobacco is clearly an exceptional product; no other consumer product kills one in two users when used exactly as intended”.
Many of the changes in behaviour that the report discusses are of comparable complexity to giving up smoking. Although the harms they address appear less straightforwardly lethal, they are very significant harms. The same editorial in the Journal of Public Health suggests that while smoking and alcohol in combination account for fewer than 20% of deaths in high-income countries, the six most serious diet-related risk factors account for 17.5% of deaths in high-income countries. The figures are not as different as you might expect. This is not an area in which there is reason to hesitate about using fiscal or regulatory interventions if behavioural interventions are known not to be sufficient. The matter is urgent, and rising obesity and diabetes are heralds of a public health tsunami.
The Government’s response argues:
“It is not a question, therefore, of the use of regulation being ruled out altogether, rather that regulation is only used when satisfactory outcomes cannot be achieved by alternative approaches, or where alternative approaches would involve much higher costs”.
Evidently the Government are pinning quite a lot of hope on the efficacy of behavioural interventions or on finding effective ones, but they have also pinned quite a lot of hope, as others have mentioned, on the so-called responsibility deal with the food industry, by which it agrees to reformulate products to make them healthier. Yet the committee was told by Mr Justin King of Sainsbury’s that voluntary agreements were sometimes unsatisfactory. He said:
“There was an attempt by the industry to coalesce around a voluntary agreement together with the FSA … and we felt very strongly that it was coalescing around a lowest common denominator, when our customers had clearly told us they expected something more and better. And when we made the change”—
because Sainsbury’s did make a change—
“we were not the most popular people in the industry”.
How long are we to wait to establish whether behavioural approaches work? How much faith can be put in responsibility deals that have to be sold to the least as well as the most responsible companies in the food industry? The public health problems created by overeating an affluent diet are grave, and delay in taking effective steps to prevent these problems would be serious.
I shall finish with two questions for the Government. First, what steps are Her Majesty’s Government taking to ensure that food served in public institutions, where the available menu in any case limits consumer choice, does not contribute to the obesity and related epidemics? In particular, what steps are they taking to ensure that meals in schools, in prisons, in the armed services and in canteens catering to public services do not contribute to these epidemics? Will they rely on behavioural interventions in these contexts where more direct interventions are readily available and are, in effect, being made every day when menus are chosen? If not, what reasons can they give for offering unhealthy meals when healthy meals can provide equivalent choice, and need be no more expensive? A lot of meals are eaten in public canteens in this country every day.
Secondly, what steps are Her Majesty’s Government taking to evaluate the efficacy of the public health responsibility deal with the food and retail industries, and what benchmarks and timeframe have they set for the industry to demonstrate that the deal is effective? It would be unfortunate if the responsibility deal turned out to have created one more last chance saloon, in this case for the food industry rather than for the media, allowing the less scrupulous performers to spend a decade pretending to produce healthier food while continuing to peddle excess fat, sugar and salt.