Economy: The Growth Plan 2022

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I start by congratulating my noble friend Lady Gohir on her excellent maiden speech and the noble Baroness the Minister on her new appointment, and wishing the right reverend Prelate well on his retirement from this House in what can only be described by our standards as early middle age.

I wish to pick up two points in this debate: one about poverty and the other about mortgages. In relation to poverty, as the distinguished and respected Conservative the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, said on Radio 4’s “Today” programme this morning, one of the consequences of the Chancellor’s Statement will be to send 450,000 people into poverty, including many children. Apparently, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor call that levelling up. Really? Of course, they may well abandon that policy, but it will demonstrate the muddle-headedness of their thinking.

I turn to mortgages and echo something that was said earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley. To quote last week’s Financial Times Lex column:

“Homeowners are watching UK mortgage rates head skywards, as their hearts descend to their boots. Some fixed-rate mortgagees will lose their homes when refinancings land them with month-to-month payments they can’t afford.”


Most of the 9.5 million households in this country with mortgages have fixed-rate loans. They face average increases of £500 per month. That seems to me to be no prescription for levelling up either. Indeed, I would suggest that it is dangerous and foolish to undermine the morale and ethics of those employed in national and local government, public health, education and the arts—all parts of our society that we commend.

If your Lordships feel tired after the long debate today, I recommend that when going to bed they read a few pages of the gardening writer Mirabel Osler’s excellent book, A Gentle Plea for Chaos. Mirabel Osler believed that strong growth depends on not destroying the best plants on the plot but adding flowers and seeds around them. What we are seeing here is a not so gentle, accidental plea for chaos, which will undermine many of the assumptions that our fellow citizens are entitled to make.

We in this House do not have constituents but we do have children and grandchildren—many of us have family members of the sort of age most hard hit by the policies announced by this Government. I do not think that we should tolerate that without fighting, still for growth of course, but growth that supports all our citizens.

Restoration and Renewal: Location of House of Lords Chamber

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I am very fond of Norwich personally, but I would not encourage further speculation in this area. I will only say from my personal experience that I was in York last week on a ministerial visit and I did not look at any alternative site for your Lordships’ House.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I declare the interest of having been brought up in Burnley. Would the noble Lord care to remind Mr Gove that we are one Parliament and not two, and therefore dividing the two Houses would be a very adverse and unconstitutional act? Therefore, if he wants Parliament to be in Burnley, it should be both Houses and not one.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, again, I am not going to speak for my right honourable friend, but the noble Lord makes a cogent point which would need to be considered by all of us within Parliament in respect of its future operation. Those of us who have had experience of a Parliament by Zoom know the importance of personal contact within and across the Houses to the good operation of government and Parliament.

Elections Bill

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Wednesday 27th April 2022 Lords Chamber

So that is all I am asking—those two assurances on the record.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, in relation to my noble and learned friend’s amendment, I have a short but I believe very important question to ask of your Lordships. What is your Lordships’ House here for if it is not this? My noble and learned friend has demonstrated beyond doubt that there is a risk—a measurable risk, not a fanciful risk—that the Electoral Commission might have its independence damaged and impugned if these amendments are not introduced into the Bill. What would the Government lose by accepting these amendments?

I therefore suggest to your Lordships that we have not yet heard any good reason why these amendments should not be sent back. I am unpersuaded by the argument that because some robes are hanging on hangers somewhere in the building, no doubt losing their creases—which is as good an argument as anything I have heard against my noble and learned friend’s amendments—we should not delay matters for another day, which is available. There is an option: the Minister can go and consult his ministerial colleagues and come back to the House in a matter of minutes and say, “I have listened to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge; he has argued a brilliant case and it may well be that he is right”. And if there is a risk that he is right—which is what I believe—we should not let this pass just because it is inconvenient to delay the end of the parliamentary Session.

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

My Lords, I had not intended to speak, but the fact is that, following what we have just heard, the Order Paper for Tuesday and Wednesday next week has Questions down from noble Lords. It is not as though we are slicing off tomorrow: the Order Paper is there, and it is there for a reason. Somebody worked out, in terms of the management of this place, that the House would sit. People put bids in for Questions, and they are sitting there on the Order Paper. The Minister —to whom I pay tribute for the way in which he has dealt with this Bill—did leave a gap open, which is not completely closed.

On what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, said, we are certainly going to find out what the mettle of the electoral commissioners is made of, as a result of this kind of legislation. This is going to test those individuals—both the officers and the commissioners—in a way that they never contemplated when they applied for or were appointed to their posts.

I do not want to delay the House, but the other day I was reading—and I have not finished it—David Runciman’s How Democracy Ends. I came across this page where he quoted an American political scientist Nancy Bermeo, who had identified six different varieties—David Runciman called them “coups”—of ways in which things get manipulated. These are two of them. I would just like the Minister to explain how this Bill differs from these two examples:

“‘Executive aggrandisement’, when those already in power chip away at democratic institutions without ever overturning them. ‘Strategic election manipulation’, when elections fall short of being free and fair but also fall short of being stolen outright.”


Now where does this Bill differ from those two definitions?

Constitution, Democracy and Human Rights Commission

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Thursday 14th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

Aside from the question of whether it be under the ambit of a commission, I believe that my noble friend puts his finger on something that is profoundly important about the way in which the context of politics and government is changing. Without treading on anyone’s feet, I would certainly be interested to hear your Lordships’ opinion on that in a future debate.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB) [V]]

Please could the noble Lord explain simply to a perplexed audience the relationship between Sir Peter Gross’s review of the Human Rights Act, the review by the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, of administrative law and the constitution, democracy and human rights commission being discussed today?

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, those are two separate workstreams as part of the constitutional reform consideration that we are undertaking. As my right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster said, we are eating the elephant in chunks. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act review is another part, so there are already three strands and they each deserve careful and individual attention.

EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Friday 8th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB) [V]]

My Lords, until 31 December last year the United Kingdom was a fully active member of the Schengen Information System. This gave the UK authorities immediate alerts and information about suspected persons, objects and dangers. We are now out of the Schengen Information System. Please will the Minister in his reply give us chapter and verse on how such important information will now be obtained as quickly and effectively as before? What is the “comprehensive package” for security referred to in paragraph 134 of Her Majesty’s Government’s summary of the agreement? Will the Government come clean today and tell us the other adverse changes affecting national security and the pursuit of crime?

How much slower will the process of disclosure of criminal records be? This is often vital in determining whether a suspect is truly a genuine suspect. How have these and many other matters of real security concern been left unresolved in the very general statements in part 3 of the Government’s summary of the agreement? If the UK and the European Union are to remain as safe as possible, how is this going to be achieved? Please can we have answers, if not in the debate then in a letter afterwards?

Finally, I just wanted to make a protest about how short this debate has been and how little time has been allowed. It gives the impression of a deliberate attempt to stifle informed debate on matters on which there is considerable expertise in your Lordships’ House.

Church of England: Disestablishment

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Wednesday 28th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I agree with the noble Lord. Who we are as a country is defined by our Church and our state and the relationship that has been developing over 400 years between them. The Government value that relationship; we think it adds value to both sides and is welcomed by the country. We have no plans to destabilise that relationship.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

Would the Minister like to reflect on the undoubted fact that the moral authority in the clergy in Wales is no less than that of the clergy in England, albeit that there has been no established Church in Wales for approximately a century?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

The noble Lord is right: the Church in Wales was disestablished in, I think, the 1920s. The four bishops that Wales sent to your Lordships’ House were then assumed by England, and I am sure no one would object to that. He is of course right about the validity of the authority and morality of the Church in Wales.

Capita

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Tuesday 24th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

There is nothing ideological about this. Governments of all persuasions have found that outsourcing certain activities enables them to focus on the key functions of government. A recent survey by the CBI showed that overall there was a saving of roughly 11% by going through the process of outsourcing activities, engaging competitive markets and awarding the contract to the contractor best able to meet the objectives.

I entirely agree with what the noble Lord said about SMEs. I think there is a contract with HMRC which, when it came to an end, we broke down into component parts. As I said in response to the noble Lord, an additional measure that we have taken is that, when a main contractor is slow in paying the subcontractors, that main contractor will be deleted from the opportunity to bid for future contracts. That is a good example of the steps that we are taking.

Subcontractors will have greater access to buying authorities to report payment performances, and suppliers will have to advertise subcontracting opportunities on the Contracts Finder website. Without repeating what I said a moment ago, we have a target of driving up from 25% to 33% the percentage of government spend with SMEs on these major contracts.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, can the Minister confirm that, as Capita refreshes itself and restructures, the Government will be totally intolerant of any attempt to reduce the standard of services for which Capita has contracted? If Capita attempts so to do, will the Government prioritise finding new contractors to undertake those services, including SMEs?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

The Government will hold Capita, and indeed other suppliers, to the terms of their contract and take appropriate steps if those terms are ever broken.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (LD)]

My Lords, I have an irresistible yen to return to the subject of the gracious Speech.

Very early last Wednesday morning, I was awoken by my annual fantasy in which the gracious Speech consists of the declaration that Her Majesty’s Government will introduce absolutely no legislation whatever in the new Session. It is, I am sure many would agree, an open question whether we would lose anything by a legislative sabbatical. However, here we are, again prospecting in a rich if opaque vein of home affairs and legal reform legislation—if you cannot think of anything else, saddle Parliament with seven or eight law reform Bills.

My first subject is the Bill of Rights, which of course is not going to be legislated in this Session but nevertheless will be discussed. I urge your Lordships to consider that what really is of importance in relation to the Bill of Rights is the quality and enforceability of rights, not their source, and that it would be wrong for us to be too hung up on whether the rights come from Westminster or Strasbourg. I agree almost entirely with the excellent speech of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, on this subject. I add that if a British Bill of Rights gives not less than the European Convention on Human Rights, and especially if it adds some rights that were not even thought of in 1950—for example, consumer rights, environmental rights and privacy rights—I for one will keep an open mind as to whatever is meant by the concept of repatriation of rights.

Turning to the proposed extremism Bill, here I strike a strong note of caution. I am sure that your Lordships will all wish to give anxious scrutiny to every detail of this Bill. As one academic analyst has suggested to me, there is a danger that we may make it an offence for a person to encourage another person to encourage another person to publish a statement that indirectly encourages another person to instigate someone else to commit an act of terrorism. That is the sort of flavour that has been suggested so far when there has been discussion about an extremism Bill.

My note of caution is founded on what I hope is an ethical principle. As the distinguished Professor Stuart Macdonald has said, there is a real danger that,

“it is contradictory—and, ultimately, self-defeating—to insist on a criminal justice-based framework without adhering to the features which give the criminal law its moral authority in the first place”.

Therefore, while I am open-minded about an extremism Bill, at least until I see what it says, I am concerned that the Government should ensure that it is examined for its compliance not only with the convention but with the assurance to your Lordships that it is proposed on ethical and realistic grounds. As a long-time jury advocate, I can put it another way: if the Bill is not going to result in convictions before juries—if juries are going to rebel against it because it is not the sort of thing they think people would be convicted of—it should not be brought before Parliament. I urge the Government to carry out appropriate analysis of whether the Bill will work in practice before deciding what its detail should be.

My final comment is about the Investigatory Powers Bill. I would have spoken about prison reform, but I entirely echo what was said by my noble friend Lord McNally. I absolutely deprecate what Mr Gove has been saying about the European referendum, but I am glad he is good at something. He has actually been rather good; he is the first Lord Chancellor or Home Secretary in a generation who has given us the opportunity to reform the penal system.

Coming back to the Investigatory Powers Bill, as a former Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, I have had the advantage of seeing a lot of intelligence and a great deal about the threat and risk that we face. I would say to your Lordships, perhaps particularly to my noble friends on this side of the House, that puristic libertarianism does not always provide a holistic sense of civil liberties. We must look at what is really required by the security services. That must be scrutinised, of course, but no Bill has ever been scrutinised more before legislation than this Bill. I recommend to your Lordships that we pay the closest attention to what was said by David Anderson, my brilliant successor as independent reviewer, and by the RUSI committee, and that we do not degrade the capacity of the authorities to catch the most dangerous people in our society.

Iran: Ghoncheh Ghavami

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we all know that Iran is second only to China in the number of people executed per year. That is an issue that we and others have raised during the UN human rights review.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (LD)]

My Lords, given that Iran has apparently been involved in bombing IS in Iraq, will the Government take great care to ensure that human rights are not decoupled from other activities in relation to Iraq, as well as Iran? Will my noble friend assure the House that representations will be made to ensure that the Iranian Government do not begin to hold sway over human rights issues arising in Iraq, where they are looking extremely influential at the moment?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, Iran is not the only state in the Middle East with which we have issues about human rights. We certainly do not intend to uncouple human rights from other issues, but we are also in the middle of some immensely complex nuclear negotiations with Iran, and then there are the many complications of the anti-ISIL campaigns.

Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

My Lords, to follow a speech of the quality that we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, and to be able to agree with it entirely, is a great privilege. I thank him for making it.

It has been said frequently in this debate that our judgment should be conditioned by experience, but some of your Lordships have been very selective about that experience. We should not simply rely on the last painful experience, or make a particular selection to meet the argument. The noble Lord, Lord Robertson, and my noble friend Lord Ashdown mentioned Bosnia, which was a lesson to us all of what can happen if you do not take action. Sierra Leone was also mentioned as an example of the benefits that can occur if you do take action. They are part of our experience, too.

As the grandson of a teacher and her postmaster husband who faced state murder by the use of poison gas in sheds, the sight of death by gassing in the streets of Syria raises a painful sense of disgust. The purveyors of those weapons are undoubtedly war criminals who should be brought to justice if at all possible, but I am not prepared to wait for that. They demean their country, one that we all wish to welcome back into the family of nations—but sooner rather than later. My view is that, all other things being equal, if we can act now, it is our duty as a moral component of the international world to do so.

However, those strong feelings alone would not in any way justify military action against Syrian military and political targets. For such action to be justified, it must first be founded on law. Then it must be based on evidence, it must be urgent, it must be necessary, it must be proportionate and, of course, it must be taken against a background of a mass of diplomatic activity. Some of the speeches that we have heard, including those from very distinguished former diplomats, seem to have suggested that we have not begun on any of the diplomatic activity, but we have had years of diplomatic activity—failed diplomatic activity. Now is the time, if at all possible, for the diplomatic activity to stop and for Syria to have a legal and lawful demonstration that the world, or at least part of the world, is prepared to act.

I regret that the, albeit cogent and persuasive, summary of the legal advice that has been given to Parliament and to the public is so short. Both Houses, in my view, had a reasonable expectation of seeing more of the detail, although not, of course, the whole advice—how the doubts weighed against the certainties, the checks against the balances. However, one has to trust one’s Government, at least up to a point. I accept on trust the Government’s legal advice that the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, or responsibility to protect, as it is sometimes called, applies here and that, therefore, the proposed action is lawful.

The essential question, however, is whether it should be taken. Will action play a significant part in removing the use of chemical weapons from disputes taking place on this planet? I believe that the time has come when we have to say yes in answer to that question. If we do not, we will look simply like supine appeasers while other parts of the world take action.

I accept, too, that we must await the evidence that there has been use of chemical weapons—if there be any doubt about that—and that, in that context, we should await the report of the UN inspectors. The UN, in its inspectorial role, is extremely good. I agree, too, that we should take the probably token step of awaiting the deliberative role of the United Nations, but I regret very much that the United Nations in that role is now looking tragically toothless and is simply going through the motions.

It is the role of brave and moral nations on earth, including ourselves wherever possible, to take steps to ensure that international humanitarian law is made to work. In my view, given the evidence that has been produced by the Joint Intelligence Committee, given the opinion that has been given by the Attorney-General, and given the trust in which we place our consciences in the hands of our Prime Minister and, in the case of my party, the Deputy Prime Minister, we should say yes to this stage and then we should assess the evidence. If the evidence is good enough, I fear that it is time to act.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

My Lords, this has been a very well informed debate. It is not to be unnecessarily partisan but rather to get my one party point out of the way first that I say that it has been a great strength to the Labour Party’s position that it has thought through many of the questions which have been posed for answer today. That was in effect set out by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, in opening from our Front Bench.

The speeches by the noble Lords, Lord Wright of Richmond and Lord Dannatt, reflected great diplomatic and military experience. It is perhaps not often recognised by people who have not been in the military that the logistics involved in anything that is being talked about are very considerable. If you do not have Brize Nortons scattered around the eastern Mediterranean, you have to get the stuff to Cyprus first and so on. It was with some incredulity that I kept reading that something was going to happen on Sunday, leaving aside the point, also made very tellingly, that the chemical weapons dumps are apparently spread around Syria and that to take them, or to do anything to make sure that they could not be used again, you would have to have thousands of boots on the ground. I ask the Minister to comment on that particular point in his reply. That rather suggests to me that that is probably true. We have a few days to reflect on where we are trying to get to. As the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, said, regime change is now not apparently our objective. If it is not, I do not quite follow the logic of some of the speeches that have been made.

I will pick one example from the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, who can correct me if I am wrong. Why, I ask myself, can we not arraign the President of Syria before the International Criminal Court and charge him with offences which, if proven, would cause him to spend the rest of his life in The Hague? I thought he meant by his argument that because that is very difficult we do not have to go through a process of jurisprudence. The noble Lord is a lawyer—I do not understand it. Who will take the President of Syria to the International Criminal Court, or does he not believe that we have a procedure other than a military one, which clearly is not a juridical procedure?

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

How does the noble Lord propose to get President Assad to the International Criminal Court physically?

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

Indeed. The question about what we did in Yugoslavia, et cetera, comes up. The noble Lord is shaking his head as if to say, “Therefore we should assassinate him”. I am sorry—I have given way once, and the noble Lord did not give way to me.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

Justify your accusation.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I am just putting the point that if we think that some surgical strike can stop his authority being exercised to do these things, why do we not make more of the procedure? If we think he is guilty of an offence under the chemical weapons convention, should we not give more thought to how we bring him before the International Criminal Court, and would that not be a productive way of engaging with the Russians, perhaps, as someone has suggested, with a conference of the parties signatory to the convention on chemical weapons?

The Foreign Secretary is fond of using a sort of metaphor in this debate that if the Security Council fails to do what we want—I think this is how the argument runs—we should ask what we call the international community to act. That has been said so many times. I ask the question: what, in this context, is the international community supposed to be if it is not just the less than 10% of the world who are our friends in this regard?