Crown Dependencies

Debate between Lord Beith and Philip Hollobone

Thursday 16th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Sir Alan Beith]

I very much welcome the help that I had from the right hon. Gentleman in working on this report and the particular perspective that he brought to it. He is entirely right, and he makes a point that I did not have time to make in my statement. Letters of entrustment are one indication in the Government’s response that they are willing to enable the islands to reach international agreements that fit within the framework of their responsibilities. It is a necessary process, because the islands have trading links around the world. Given that so many of the United Kingdom’s trading links are now through the European Union, of which the islands are not members, it is often necessary for new treaties to be put together and agreed, and letters of entrustment are a way to achieve that.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

Can my right hon. Friend confirm that the Crown dependencies are not members of the European Union, and therefore clarify their relationship, in justice matters, with the Europe convention on human rights and the European Court of Justice?

[Sir Alan Beith]

I can indeed confirm that they are not members of the European Union. That is a decision that each has made separately. It is quite a complicated situation in some ways, because so many of their links are with the United Kingdom, which is in the EU. They are signatories to the European convention on human rights and subject to it. One of the United Kingdom Government’s responsibilities is to ensure that the treaties are complied with. In the case of Sark, of course, that led to significant constitutional changes that derived from responsibilities under the European convention on human rights.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hollobone]

I am grateful for the chance to remind the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) that, although he gave a good answer to the first part of my question, it was so detailed that he forgot the answer to the second part about the relationship between the Crown dependencies and the European Court of Justice.

[Sir Alan Beith]

I would need notice before giving a definitive legal answer, on which I would probably have to take expensive legal advice from people such as the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field). However, because the dependencies engage in significant trade with the European Union, they may sometimes come up against issues that have been subject to litigation in the European Court of Justice. To facilitate relations with the EU generally, the dependencies have been opening offices in Brussels, which by general consent has helped. If the hon. Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) needs to know more about the potential of the European Court of Justice to be involved in their affairs, I would have to look further.

Liaison Committee Report

Debate between Lord Beith and Philip Hollobone

Thursday 12th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady and, of course, the Public Accounts Committee produced a number of reports that are considered in the report to which I am referring today. My Committee, the Select Committee on Justice, believes that, just as the public pound should be followed wherever it goes, the information to which the public are entitled should remain their entitlement when services are carried out by private contractors, and that contracts should be written in such as way as to ensure that that access to freedom of information is not impaired by any privatisation process.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I commend the right hon. Gentleman and his Committee for his very powerful report, and for it being commendably brief and very much to the point. Rarely can there have been as damning a sentence in any parliamentary report as

“The Prime Minister’s evidence to us in September did nothing to suggest that the Government has a coherent analysis of why things in Whitehall go wrong.”

The Government have indicated that they want to see changes to the civil service, but is it not a shame that the Liaison Committee, the most powerful Select Committee in this House, has to seek the Government’s permission to set up a parliamentary commission? If the Liaison Committee does not get the answer from the Government that it wants, what will it do?

[Sir Alan Beith]

That, as Ministers often say, is a hypothetical question that I ought not to answer. What I can say to my hon. Friend—and I thank him for his comments—is that the House could set up such a body, but the point of the exercise is to ensure that Front Benches are committed to the outcome. That is why we want those on both the Government and the Opposition Front Bench, aspiring as they do to be a Government, to recognise that it is in the interests of good government that we equip the civil service and enable it to do the job that it will need to do in the very different circumstances of today.

Business without Debate

Debate between Lord Beith and Philip Hollobone

Wednesday 11th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I apologise to my right hon. Friend the Member for Saffron Walden (Sir Alan Haselhurst) for delaying his extended Adjournment debate, but given that he was expecting a half hour’s debate but can now have the best part of two hours and 15 minutes, I hope he will forgive me on this occasion. As somebody who no doubt has travelled a lot on the West Anglia rail line, he will be used to delays in any event.

I wished to catch your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker, because we have just had absolutely no explanation from the Deputy Leader of the House for why tomorrow’s sitting in Westminster Hall is to be changed. [Interruption.] The Chief Whip, who is just leaving, will be familiar with this argument, because we had this debate when he was Leader of the House. The Leader and Deputy Leader of the House are being too cavalier in simply excising three hours of parliamentary airtime. I take the view, and I hope other right hon. and hon. Members do as well, that the sittings in Westminster Hall are extremely important. If they were not, the House would not have decided to set them up in the first place. I am pretty sure that the Liaison Committee also regards them as important, because it regularly schedules important debates from the various Select Committees to be debated for up to three hours in Westminster Hall.

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

I appreciate the hon. Gentleman’s concern for the Liaison Committee, but I can assure him that it wants to take cognizance of other events happening tomorrow adjoining Westminster Hall and that I have made provision for the debate that my right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce), the Chairman of the International Development Committee, was going to introduce tomorrow to take place on another suitable occasion soon.

[Mr Hollobone]

I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman is acting with the best of intentions, but he was sitting in his place, as I was sitting in mine, when the Deputy Leader of the House rose simply to move this motion formally, without giving any explanation of the circumstances tomorrow whatsoever. I think the House deserves a better explanation. I understand that tomorrow there is an important celebration in the main Westminster Hall relating to the death of Nelson Mandela. No doubt, that will be a wonderful occasion, and it is right for the House to celebrate the great man’s life in that way, but we have been given no explanation for why the sitting in the small Westminster Hall tomorrow afternoon is to be cancelled. Is it to do with security, logistics, staffing? I do not know. I would welcome an intervention from the Deputy Leader of the House, if he wants to apprise the House of the reasons, but as far as I can tell no one in the Chamber knows why the sitting is to be cancelled.

I have no doubt that the Chairman of the Liaison Committee is acting in good faith, but scheduled on the Order Paper, as we speak, are two very important debates from the International Development Committee. I see in his place the esteemed Chairman of that Select Committee, who has been good enough to attend this afternoon, no doubt also anticipating an explanation from the Deputy Leader of the House for cancelling the sitting. These debates would have been on the subjects of global food security and violence against women and girls.

Justice Committee Report: Youth Justice

Debate between Lord Beith and Philip Hollobone

Thursday 14th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith]

In fact, we have been closing young offender institutions over the years because the number in custody is now much smaller. The Committee will continue to press its view that most of the work that can be done successfully with young offenders has to be done in small environments, where it is possible to devote sufficient attention to their problems.

There are a number of key things that I do not want to miss out. One is that the Government produced their own, “Transforming Youth Custody” document just as we were concluding our inquiry, so we did not have the chance to work on it in detail, although I have to say that there is not a lot of detail in it. One thing that puzzles us is the Secretary of State’s idea of creating youth colleges to deal with young offenders, because they are actually there, on average, for only 79 days. We fully support and applaud his interest in, and commitment to, sorting out the education of young offenders in custody, but the concept of the colleges does not fit well with the rapid churn of young offenders. In many cases it is important that we get them back into the education system. We have therefore recommended that schools and colleges could be incentivised to take young people back into education after they have completed their sentence, whether it is a custodial or community one.

The Committee had something to say about deaths in custody. It is unacceptable that so many vulnerable young people continue to die in the custody of the state. We await the Minister’s view on whether to set up an independent inquiry and will return to the issue when we have heard what conclusion the Government have reached.

We have many other detailed recommendations that I do not have time to cover today, but the message I want to leave with the House is that we must be prepared to make radical changes in the way we deal with young offenders if we are to stop them becoming the prolific criminal offenders of the future, which is often what they have the potential to become.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I congratulate the Chair of the Committee on the report. Does he agree that one of the most powerful pieces of evidence in support of his emphasis on getting the transition from custody to the community right is that which was given by the chief inspector of prisons, who said that

“the thing that unlocks everything else is accommodation. It does not mean that if you have settled accommodation everything else will turn out fine. It means that if you do not have that, nothing else will work”?

[Sir Alan Beith]

Absolutely. Accommodation in that context often requires support as well; it is not merely bed and breakfast and goodbye. There has to be some way of ensuring that an offender reintegrates into society, or indeed integrates into society for the first time, because they might have had an institutionalised existence prior to that, which is true of many looked-after children.

The second part of the message I want to leave with the House is that we need to ensure that new generations of children do not embark on crime. In order to achieve that, as was mentioned earlier, we must develop early intervention. As with adult prisoners, so much of the Ministry of Justice budget is necessarily committed to custody and to prison by policies that have been pursued over many years, yet the most important work of preventing people from getting into crime in the first place is deprived of money.

The Committee’s broad longer-term view is that we want to see resources not being needed to put people into custody or expensive sentencing processes because money has been spent dealing with troubled families and very young children beginning to show signs of later criminal behaviour—addressing that could prevent them from getting involved in crime in future. I am grateful to my Committee colleagues for the work they have done. We will continue to keep a close eye on Government policy in this area. We are glad to have had a good response to a number of our proposals, but a lot more needs to be done.

Question put and agreed to.

Freedom of Information

Debate between Lord Beith and Philip Hollobone

Thursday 24th January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Sir Alan Beith]

On a point of order, Mr Hollobone, you will have noticed that the Division bell did not ring audibly in this Chamber, and I wondered if you could look into whether that can be put right. As it happened, it did not matter, because the motion in favour of extending the franchise to vote to age 16 won by about two to one, but I would not have liked to miss the vote.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

Thank you, Sir Alan, for that point of order. The Clerk made us aware of the Division, but I will ensure that your comments are relayed to the appropriate authorities.

[Mr Llwyd]

As I mentioned, the Freedom of Information Act has developed—some might say radically—the extent to which the public are able to engage with the decisions made by public bodies. First, however, they must choose to engage.

Perhaps inevitably, the tendency of the media is to focus on the negative stories coming out of FOI requests; some say, which I believe could be true, that this may have led to a perverse incentive to hide information. The former Cabinet Secretary, Lord Gus O’Donnell, said in his evidence that he had experienced that at first hand:

“I decided to release, since I am not paid by anybody at the minute but I am a Member of the Lords, some hospitality information. I do not think anybody else does that. Surprise, surprise, you get a snidey press story in Private Eye as a result of this.”

The Select Committee, however, was very much of the opinion that the increased and, yes, sometimes unfair criticism of those in public life was a price well worth paying for greater openness.

To what extent has the Act facilitated decision making by public authorities and central Government? Regrettably, many witnesses thought that in trying to avoid the possible embarrassment of disclosure, fewer bodies were inclined to keep detailed records of meetings or to keep a log of policy information. Martin Rosenbaum, representing BBC News, argued that any change in culture brought about by the Freedom of Information Act had been inconsistent, and that the Act has done relatively little to advance transparency on account of the cumbersome nature of the FOI process. He said that

“the Act now enables us to obtain on a very crude level…facts and figures—how much was spent on this, statistics about the performance of public services and so on. The sorts of things that were harder to get previously now tend to be very easy to get, but what it has not produced, and the civil service is certainly very resistant to this, is internal discussion documents, policy discussion, minutes of meetings and so on.”

Witnesses spoke about the “chilling effect”, to which the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed referred, that has led to civil servants being less candid in their advice to Ministers, fewer external organisations being willing to submit information to the Government and fewer meetings being held with formal minutes taken—greatly damaging the official record. As Lord O’Donnell pointed out, that “chilling effect” not only impacts on the engagement of our own generation with decision making, but will make it increasingly difficult for future historians, too, to get an accurate picture of how decisions were made, as so little evidence will remain.

Other witnesses pointed out that that unintended consequence of the Act has the potential to weaken Cabinet collective responsibility, since many key decisions will not be made in Cabinet, where formal minutes are taken, but in safe places, be it on mobile phones or behind closed doors. On the other hand, it is imperative to draw attention to the fact that the Act contains safeguards against that problem—namely, exemptions to the right of access to information in exceptional circumstances, as well as other ministerial vetoes for when information is deemed too sensitive to release.

Information for Backbenchers on Statements

Debate between Lord Beith and Philip Hollobone

Tuesday 20th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hollobone]

First, I agree that we have a charming Committee Chair, and she has gone out of her way to ensure that the minority parties are invited to the Committee to give their point of view. Indeed, we received a representation at a recent meeting to that effect. Certainly on behalf of the Chair I can say that the hon. Gentleman would be most welcome to attend at 7 o’clock on the first Monday of the September sitting, upstairs in Committee Room 16. We would be delighted to hear a representation from him about what business he would like to include in a future Back-Bench business debate.

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

Does the hon. Gentleman not also need to recognise that the temptation that Ministers fall prey to is not merely the desire to get on the news, but the desire to present a more limited and selective account of the statement they are subsequently going to make at a point when it cannot be questioned by Members who might know quite a lot about the subject. That statement might be taken at face value by sometimes gullible journalists.

[Mr Hollobone]

My right hon. Friend is spot on. It is called spin. We in the House of Commons should be trying to un-spin things and ensuring that when statements are made to the House and new policy initiatives announced, we have the opportunity to fire in those questions. Actually, however, many of our constituents are beginning to say, “What is the point of having Members of Parliament, if you can read all about it in tomorrow’s newspapers?” The journalists are getting better access to Ministers about lots of policy announcements than we are in the House.