Queen’s Speech

Lord Bichard Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bichard]

My Lords, it is always tempting to believe that simple changes will solve complex problems. Indeed, many of us have reached these giddy heights because we have convinced others that we have a simple solution to their complex problem. Too often, our simple solution has involved changing the composition or structure of our national institutions, which is why so many of them have changed so rapidly over the past decade or more.

The reality, of course, is that changing the composition or structure of an institution rarely improves its performance. To do that, you have to look beyond the structure and examine how it operates and how the systems work or do not work. In the context of reform of this House, the lesson of experience is that changing the composition of the House will achieve little. Actually, that is not quite true: it will undermine the primacy of the other place; it will add yet further elections to our increasingly confused democratic landscape; and it will probably increase, rather than reduce, political patronage.

The sadness is that reform is needed; indeed reform is overdue. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and the noble Lord, Lord Steel, have pointed us in the direction of reforms with which we would probably all be able to agree, here and in the other place. Our reforms should also address the current shortcomings of Parliament, not just of this House. Regrettably, those shortcomings are not difficult to find. I say that so as not to be accused by the noble Lord, Lord McNally, of being smug. For a start, as other noble Lords have said, we simply have too much poor quality legislation. As the noble Lord, Lord Butler, found out by asking a Question for Written Answer in January, significant parts or all of 77 Acts from 15 departments passed between 2005 and 2010 have never even been brought into force. I am not entirely surprised about this because I remember how departments, Ministers and senior civil servants saw legislation as a way of demonstrating their importance, so they fought hard for their place in the gracious Speech. I have to say that it was also a very convenient way of occupying the excessive number of Ministers that most departments have.

If we are to balance this continuous pressure for more legislation, we urgently need a process for ensuring that the Government have to explain the purpose and the necessity of any new Bill. They have to set out for examination the likely benefits, as well as the costs and risks, and indicate whether real, reasonable consultation has taken place with those who are affected. As yet, we have no such system. We have committees to scrutinise statutory instruments but we have no similar scrutiny of primary legislation before it reaches the Floor of this House. That is why one of the key recommendations of the Leader’s Group on working practices was to establish a legislative standards committee. We have not yet implemented that, which I assume means that we are relaxed about spending huge amounts of our time debating legislation which will not even be implemented.

We seem similarly relaxed about the impact of legislation which has been implemented, because Parliament has little effective post-legislative scrutiny in place. In the other place, departmental Select Committees rarely, in all honesty, find time for rigorous post-legislative scrutiny, while in this House, although we have recently agreed to carry out one post-legislative review in this Session—of course, I welcome that—this again falls some way short of the recommendations of the Leader’s review and hardly represents a firm commitment to the rigorous scrutiny we need if we are to learn the lessons of success and failure.

The problems do not end there. As other noble Lords have said, in this House we often—even in my time—have had cause to express disappointment at the quality of legislative scrutiny in the other place. The noble Lord, Lord Phillips, remarked on this earlier. Programming arrangements mean that the Executive are often not held adequately to account, which means that draft legislation reaches this House in poor order. I have been shocked at the quality of some Bills which have come to this House during the past two years. Of course we take pride—justifiably, I think—in the quality of scrutiny in this House and many Bills have certainly been significantly improved as a result, but we also saw in the previous Session many examples of how reasoned amendments made in this House received very scant attention when referred back to the other place. The fact is that the balance of power has shifted away from Parliament and towards the Executive, in a way that is not healthy for parliamentary democracy and should now be addressed. Surely there can be no more urgent or important issue than that in a parliamentary democracy.

I could cite other issues which should give us cause for concern. For example, there is the continued relative lack of pre-legislative scrutiny. I welcome the increased number of draft Bills in this Session, for whatever reason, but pre-legislative scrutiny is not something to which we generally feel committed. There is the failure properly to engage interest groups and expertise beyond Parliament. I might even refer to the complete failure to codify, or even describe, the key constitutional relationship between central and local government.

Yet, in the face of these shortcomings, we prefer to debate at great length whether we should change the composition of the House. As has been said already, the public have shown themselves to have little interest in that. If we look, as the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, did earlier, at the latest audit of political engagement from the Hansard Society, we see the consequences of our failure to address the other issues that I have referred to. I make no apology for touching on those findings again. Less than one-quarter of the public thinks that the system of governing works reasonably well in this country. Only 49% agree that the issues that are debated and decided in Parliament have relevance to their lives. Only 38% agree that the Government are held to account by Parliament, and only 30% agree that Parliament does enough to encourage public interest and involvement in politics. Those results are devastating, and in the face of those devastating results we might just ask ourselves whether further lengthy debates about the future composition of this House will reverse those trends better than us showing signs that we are committed to genuine and radical reform of the way in which we and the whole of Parliament operate.

My view is that further debate will do further damage to the reputation of this House and of Parliament, but I am convinced that it will also further delay the necessary reforms that I and other noble Lords have referred to. Surely this is the time to withdraw this unwelcome Bill and commit ourselves to reforming Parliament in a way that the public will understand and recognise.