Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Bill

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Norton of Louth

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 22nd July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Norton of Louth]

My Lords, I agree with my noble friend in opposing the amendment. This is not an imposition we should place on the sponsor body.

I start with a technical point, because the amendment is deficient in that it says:

“The Sponsor Body must make arrangements for the report to be laid before and debated by both Houses of Parliament”.


We can impose a duty on the sponsor body to lay a report before Parliament; we cannot give power to the sponsor body to make arrangements for debates in either House of Parliament.

I would link the substance of the amendment to our earlier discussions and relate it to a point that has not been raised and which leads me to be somewhat surprised that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, is supporting this amendment. If we have a temporary Parliament elsewhere, it is not only the cost of relocating Parliament, the cost of relocating parliamentary staff, the cost of relocating government so that it is near Parliament and the cost imposed on all those bodies that are in London because they want to make representations to government and Parliament and who would have to move, but, in relation to what we were discussing earlier, Parliament needs to be accessible to the people. They need to be able to come here. We need their visits and they have to be able to come and watch what is going on. They can do that because London is at the centre of the transport infrastructure—it is easier to get to London.

Where else in the country will you be able to create a transport infrastructure in the time available for this temporary relocation so that schoolchildren and any member of the public who wants to come and observe Parliament can do so? It will be extraordinarily difficult—indeed, impossible. London has the convenience that enables us to fulfil that particular function. The proposal is not feasible and it is not a burden that we should impose on the sponsor body, because it has far too much to do already.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I am surprised that, as a resident of Hull, the noble Lord thinks that London should be the centre of everyone’s attention in transport infrastructure.

[Lord Norton of Louth]

I did not say it should be; I said it is. That is the reality.

[Lord Adonis]

That does not need to be the case. Depending where you choose to locate your temporary Parliament, it could have good transport connections. I understand that we are talking about 2028 or 2029 for the move. That will be after the first phase of HS2 is opened in 2025, which will make a dramatic change to the economic geography of this country. I am trying to persuade my good friend the Mayor of West Midlands, Andy Street, to rename Birmingham International as “UK Central” because that is where it will be in terms of accessibility. It will be more readily accessible to most parts of England in terms of proximity than will London when HS2 is opened. The noble Lord has set out an old way of thinking which does not take account of the other changes that are taking place.

To bring Parliament closer to a large part of the country in the interim period is desirable, as we are going to have to move out anyway. The noble Lord, Lord Haselhurst, asked what is going to happen afterwards. The plan is that we would move back here. However, there will have to be an interim which will incur huge expense. The doing up of the QEII Centre and Richmond House and all the associated facilities will involve massive expense.

The suggestion in the amendment is well worth looking at. It would not involve any delay. I know the noble Lord is anxious that the sins of the past—ceaseless delay—are put right, but there will be no delay. It would involve the presentation of an assessment of the option alongside the presentation of the plans. Clause 7(2) provides that no work can take place until specific parliamentary approval is given. It states:

“No Palace restoration works, other than preparatory works, may be carried out before the Sponsor Body has obtained Parliamentary approval for … Delivery Authority proposals in respect of those works, and … funding, up to an amount specified in the approval resolution, in respect of phase two works”—


and it sets out elaborate provisions thereafter.

So there would be no further delay. Other work would be carried out alongside it; it keeps an option open; and it takes account of changing circumstances, including the dramatic improvement of the transport infrastructure which will make other locations accessible. It also meets the wider concerns which most of us share—the reason this issue is so live—that Parliament is too remote from the people, and not having all of the centres of government and parliamentary authority located in London would be one way of distributing power more evenly across the United Kingdom.

My own view is that this is a good idea whose time may not quite have come—it certainly has not come at 10.55 pm, a few days before Parliament adjourns for the Summer Recess, with 10 Members present in the House. But its time may be coming and, in the context of wider debates that will take place on constitutional reform in the light of Brexit—including what might well be a decisive move towards a federal United Kingdom in the not too distant future—may come soon. Therefore, making preparations to assess it now is sensible.

I am reasonably laid back about it because of the timeframe for the work. We will not, in any event, have the presentation of the full costed plan to which Parliament can give approval for two years, as we were told at the beginning of Second Reading by the Leader—but I suspect it could be longer than that before we even get the plan. We may not move to decanting into the temporary facilities for the best part of a decade, and it could be the best part of two decades before the work is finished. I suspect, therefore, that what is needed at the moment—as I am anxious to do and as my noble friend did in her very able speech—is to plant the idea in the public mind. In particular, we should encourage political leaders outside London—who are already starting to be interested in this idea—to begin to develop it further. The context of this may change dramatically in the years ahead.

[Lord Norton of Louth]

As noble Lords have said, the reason for the delay is the complexity of having to adapt the estate here, which just emphasises the difficulty of creating or finding space elsewhere where we can do what we are seeking to do here.

[Lord Adonis]

In many ways, it is actually much easier to do it if you are building on a greenfield site next to a major transport interchange such as Birmingham International, where the National Exhibition Centre is. That would be much simpler than the hugely complex, difficult and historic estate here. I wrestled with exactly the same argument on the question of whether we should upgrade a 200-year-old railway line to provide additional rail capacity between our major cities or build a completely new line. Often, building completely new is a good thing.

This is a debate that will run for the next few years, and we have done a good job of planting the idea. I strongly encourage my friends and colleagues who are mayors of the major cities and city regions in the Midlands and the north to advance this idea further. I am sorry to disappoint the noble Lord, Lord Haselhurst, but I suspect that he has not heard the last of this, by any means. Whatever decision is taken in this Bill, we will return to this, because it is a fundamental issue about the governance of the United Kingdom, alongside what will be a £5 billion, £10 billion or £15 billion investment—who knows what the final figure will be?—in the future of Parliament. I do not think that we will be able to keep these big strategic issues off the agenda.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Norton of Louth

Committee: 8th sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 19th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, we can already see this evening what will be the Government’s formula to get these statutory instruments through: they will produce them at 12 minutes past midnight, put forward the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, to propose them, and then they will go through on the nod with nobody daring to protest and us all thinking that it was the best possible thing that could happen.

The real danger facing us is not the procedure; I think we can get too hung up on that. In particular, I do not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, when he said that there was great constitutional tension caused by the rejection of the tax credits orders. The crucial thing to remember about that rejection is that the Government accepted it immediately—they did not seek to reverse the rejection in the Commons because they knew that they did not have the majority for it in the Commons. It was a legitimate use of your Lordships’ role, which is to require the House of Commons to think again. What in fact happened, under the smokescreen of the Strathclyde report, was that the Government were forced to think again, they did not have a majority and they backed down.

The real issue with these regulations, which no one has an answer to because we are in such unprecedented circumstances, is not the precise procedure—although it is better to have an affirmative procedure than a negative one for issues of consequence—but the volume of orders that will hit us. It is going to be colossal, given the scale of law that has to be transposed and the amount of consequential legislation that is going to follow in the process of transposing it. Nothing that I have heard in our consideration so far gives me any reassurance at all that we are going to be able to cope with the sheer volume of it—unless the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, with his great skill in these matters, manages to ensure that all these orders come before the House between midnight and 4 am, when they will be proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, and will all go through without us really realising what has happened, under a kind of parliamentary anaesthetic, which she does such a good job of imposing on us all.

[Lord Norton of Louth (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendments that have already been spoken to most eloquently by the noble Lords, Lord Lisvane and Lord Sharkey. I have added my name to Amendments 237A and 239A. The only reason my name does not appear on Amendment 237 is that others got there before me. I will keep my comments brief as I am conscious of the time and I do not wish to repeat points that have already been made by noble Lords, although I appreciate that that did not stop quite a lot of noble Lords earlier in our proceedings.

I serve on the Constitution Committee of your Lordships’ House, and to some extent these amendments cohere and flow from what we put in our report. I remind the Committee of what we said in paragraphs 227 and 228:

“The Bill does not give the sifting committee(s) power to strengthen the parliamentary control of an instrument, only to recommend that it be strengthened. We recommend that committee(s) should be empowered to decide the appropriate scrutiny procedure for an instrument, subject to the view of the House, in order to provide the necessary degree of parliamentary oversight”.


The report continues:

“In our view, the Bill as drafted proposes scrutiny measures that are inadequate to meet the unique challenge of considering the secondary legislation that the Government will introduce once the Bill is passed”.


The amendments that have been put forward meet the balance that is necessary in order to deal with the volume that will be coming to us but in a way that strengthens the House in relation to the Executive. They achieve some degree of the recalibration that is necessary in the Bill.

I have considerable sympathy for Amendment 238, tabled by my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, but the amendments that have been moved strike the right balance and I hope that the Government will look favourably on them because, if they do not, we may have to move more in the direction of the amendment proposed by my noble friend Lord Hodgson.

Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Norton of Louth

Tuesday 23rd November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, the noble Baroness has made an immensely powerful case and the House is deeply indebted to her and her committee for the work that they have done. Essentially what is being introduced here is what on the continent would be called a decree-making power. There is now a capacity well beyond the usual use of ministerial orders for the Government to legislate by decree. One needs only to look at the scope of the Bill and the headings of Clauses 1 to 6 to see how significant this is. Clause 1 is entitled “Power to abolish”—that is, to abolish wholesale a whole string of organisations listed in the Bill which have been established under a proper statutory procedure. Clause 2 is headed “Power to merge”; Clause 3, “Power to modify constitutional arrangements”; Clause 4, “Power to modify funding arrangements”; Clause 5, “Power to modify or transfer functions”; and Clause 6, “Power to authorise delegation”. This is essentially a wide-ranging, decree-making power which, if the Bill is passed in its current form, Parliament will be conferring on the Executive. This has very significant constitutional implications, and the seriousness with which the House has been addressing the Bill is well merited in this case.

My noble friend’s amendment looks to me to be the minimum necessary to ensure that this decree-making power—because that is what it is—is kept within proper bounds and that there is proper parliamentary scrutiny, including a requirement in each case for the Government not simply to explain their reasons but to explain why they are seeking to reject the expert opinion of a committee of both Houses expressed upon proposals put forward by the Government. It seems to me that this is exceptionally important. The amendment of my noble friend Lord Hunt would require the Government to explain why they are not prepared to accept the reasoning of a committee of either House and, where that committee recommends for good and sufficient reasons that proceedings on an order should not take place, it requires the authority of the two Houses for proceedings then to take place. It is called a super-affirmative procedure and, as always when we are discussing new things, it appears to be a significant enhancement of parliamentary authority. However, looked at another way, conceptually this is putting a proper curb on a decree-making power, which in the opinion of the noble Baroness and her committee is probably one that should in any event be vested in the normal legislative process.

In order to see that the Bill is kept within proper constitutional bounds, I believe that the prerogatives of your Lordships should be respected. A move of this kind is essential or we will be faced with claims that we, as a House, have given the Government a power to legislate by decree without even the capacity for the recommendations of committees of our own House to be properly debated before the Government proceed.

[Lord Norton of Louth]

My Lords, I shall be brief because the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas of Winchester, has said everything that I would have wished to say. I welcome the fact that the Government clearly heard what was said at Second Reading and have taken on board the comments concerning the need for the procedure to be changed so that there is a greater role for Parliament in the process. Therefore, although the Minister has heard, perhaps the problem was that we were not shouting loud enough. I welcome the moves in the right direction and the fact that we now have Amendment 118, but it raises the question of why it was not in the Bill in the first place. However, the amendment goes only so far, for the reasons that we have heard. When one contrasts Amendment 118 with the super-affirmative resolution procedure, it is clear that Amendment 118 diminishes the role of Parliament relative to the super-affirmative resolution procedure, for the reasons that the noble Baroness mentioned. Therefore, I think that the Government should take away this new clause and come back with something that builds in the role of Parliament, akin to the super-affirmative resolution procedure, so that we play the role that we should be playing.