Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Harris of Haringey

Wednesday 23rd March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for putting this unexpected discussion before the Committee. I am conscious that there are 11 more groups, which, in the course of a normal Thursday, would need to be discussed in the next hour and seven minutes. Perhaps I can abuse the fact that I am now standing up to say that it would be very helpful if we could have a statement from the Government Chief Whip in, say, 15 minutes, explaining his intentions for the remainder of Committee. It is clearly unreasonable—to the Minister and the shadow Ministers—to be continuing in this way, making such slow albeit quite proper progress, because these are important issues. It would be extremely helpful if we had a statement from the Government Chief Whip about the Government’s intentions for dealing with the Bill because, frankly, this is not a sensible way for legislation to be properly scrutinised by your Lordships’ House.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, why can we not simply convert the first day of Report into a Committee day and have a proper debate on the day we come back?

Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament

Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Harris of Haringey

Monday 14th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, the Intelligence and Security Committee is an extremely important committee and is made up of Members of both Houses of Parliament. Perhaps the Lord Privy Seal can correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that it is funded by both Houses of Parliament, yet this House, which I think contributes a very significant proportion of the funding—it would be helpful if the Lord Privy Seal told us what proportion it funds—has only two of the committee’s members. Will the noble Baroness explain the rationale for that? Will she tell us what recommendations or representations she made to the Prime Minister about the Lords representation on this important committee?

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, I should like to clarify the position a little more. I understand that the Government intended that the costs should be shared between the two Houses but, because the Government could not find accommodation in the Commons or the Lords for the ISC to sit, it was decided not to go ahead with that arrangement, and now the Government themselves fund the committee’s expenditure. Following upon the original recommendation, though, we were told that serious discussions were going on about the need to increase the Lords representation, perhaps to four members but at least to three. What has happened to those discussions? If they have been derailed, could they now be put back on the agenda?

Draft Cumbria (Electoral Changes) Order 2012

Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Harris of Haringey

Monday 3rd December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

Did it have an obligation to carry out a review of the whole county on the basis of a single complaint about Dalston and Cummersdale?

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My understanding is that you cannot make a small change without there being repercussions elsewhere, but in any event the difficulty arises because of the nature of the dialogue between the council and the commission.

As I said, the Act gives the commission the power to conduct the review whether or not the council concerned wishes it to happen. One can understand the reasons behind that. Clearly, a council might want to maintain the status quo because it suited the members of that council so to do. I accept the comments that have been made that this is not the circumstance in these areas. The Act lays down that the council “must” assist the commission by supplying necessary information.

However, I am informed that in resisting the review, the council has in practice failed to comply with its duty to supply information. Clearly, one way in which the council could have moved forward is what happens very frequently with reviews of local government divisions: the county council or the council concerned puts forward its own set of proposals, which the boundary commission then measures against those criteria to see whether or not it applies.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

I am sorry to correct my noble friend, but I understand that the county council was more than helpful. The problem was at district level, so I think that he has been badly briefed by his commission.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

As I have said, I am in the position of so many Ministers before the Dispatch Box in that I have not got access to the primary material. However, I am told that, universally in these circumstances, the county council provides the information on population projections because it has the material across the county area. When the districts were asked whether they had comments, they were not able to comment on this because, they said, all the information on the projections was held by the county council. So we have this information, and we have to make the best of what we have before us.

Of course, the commission would have been ready to contemplate the much bigger and more complex review necessary to consider the district councils as well, but only if there had been a reasonable consensus on that being the way forward. Within the individual districts, there were not the same electoral disparities. There has never been that consensus. As I said, the district councils do not present electoral inequalities to merit the review in their own right.

A number of noble Lords have criticised the quality of the consultation. As a matter of course, the commission proceeds carefully through public consultations on council size. The quality of the maps has been criticised. My understanding is that the council was given the full mapping in electronic form, which would have enabled the council, had it so wished, to disseminate and generate local maps in whatever form and as flexibly as it wished.

My noble friend has suggested that the commission was unstoppable in its approach. The reality is that, as a result of the representations made by the county council, the commission extended its usual consultation periods, allowing in total 32 weeks, or eight months—a very generous definition of consultation for those of us who are used to systems of government consultation. It allowed six weeks’ consultation on the total number of councils required; 12 weeks of inviting submissions on electoral division patterns, which would of course have been the point at which the county council could have come forward with a proposal that would have dealt with the single anomalies; and then a further 14 weeks on draft recommendations for new electoral boundaries. By most normal definitions, that is ample opportunity for people to have their say. My advice—again, it may be challenged—is that the county council did not contribute. Its representations were directed only to challenging or delaying the review.

The council has also challenged the adequacy of the electoral projections used in the review, yet these were the projections that it supplied. It complained that because electoral registration is a district council responsibility, it could not be expected to do better. The commission responded that in no previous case has a county council insisted, like Cumbria, that it cannot or will not supply the requested information. That said, I am advised that the commission recognised that questions might be raised on the council’s figures, and took steps to mitigate any ill effects. It judged the council’s overall growth projections reasonable, and not indicative of unusual volatility in the number or distribution of electors over the coming years. It adjusted for known developments. Above all, in drawing electoral divisions, it secured high levels of electoral equality on current registration figures. That is important. If there were subsequent variations, the fact that there was this high level of accuracy at this stage would mean that it would be very unlikely that, over time, the imbalance would become too great.

The council says that the final recommendations will be defective because it had no worked projections for 2017. The commission has the council’s own projections for six years to 2016, which would normally have covered the five years from the completion date set in the Act. The only reason for the delay in completing the review was the extension of the consultation as a result of the county council’s own resistance—meaning that, in this case, the commission had no specific projections for the final year. However, the Act says that the commission,

“must have regard to any”

likely changes, and the commission has explained how it has done so.

Projections are necessarily inexact and the commission resists the council’s attempt to import into the Act the specific requirement to project figures for each year. My understanding is that if the council had persisted and wished to challenge it, it could have made a legal challenge. Indeed that would be the only normal remaining mechanism left to it. It chose not to, maybe because it could not afford to do so or maybe it received advice that the case was not as strong as it should be.

My noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours listed a series of questions, most of which, in terms of the specific costs, I am not in a position to answer. In his powerful contribution about the nature of democracy, my noble friend Lord Judd made some very valid points. Democracy is based on local representatives elected by local communities where there is an affinity between those communities and those who represent them. However, to achieve that affinity and electoral fairness requires a dialogue at local level and it is clear from the discussion that we have had in your Lordships’ House this afternoon that in this instance that dialogue was not as successful as it normally is in other cases.

I hope that on the basis of what has been said with regard to the commission’s rationale and the extensions to the consultation it provided, my noble friend Lord Liddle will feel able to withdraw the Motion in his name. I also hope that the commission will read very carefully the comments that have been made and reflect on their implications both for the way it conducted itself in this case but also in the way it conducts itself in future boundary reviews.