Sudan

Lord Elton Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am well aware of the noble Baroness’s recent visit to the region. It is a constant experience for those of us on the government Front Bench to answer Questions from noble Lords who have much more detailed knowledge of what they are asking about than those of us who answer. I thank the noble Baroness also for sending me a report of her findings, which are a stark reminder of the appalling conditions that the people of these regions now face. Somewhere between 750,000 and 1 million people have been displaced. Some of them have crossed the frontier and some are living in caves and elsewhere. The impact on the civilian population of indiscriminate military tactics, food shortages and lack of access to basic services is of course completely unacceptable. The Minister for Africa will attend the AU summit this week. The Parliamentary Under-Secretary at DfID is currently in Sudan. We are making our concerns very clear to the Government of Sudan, as well as urging the AU to lead the way in resolving the issue over the next few months with our full engagement.

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, the noble Lord said that we were exerting ourselves on the United Nations Security Council. Surely this is a clear case of genocide and should be treated by the Security Council as such. Will the noble Lord undertake to get the Government to urge the Security Council to treat it as such and to set up a committee of inquiry to establish what is going on and to secure free access of humanitarian aid?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we have to be very careful before we use the genocide label. There are some very nasty conflicts going on across the new and still not entirely settled border between South Sudan and Sudan. Some aid is going into the region from South Sudan but it is a dangerous area to cross. NGOs that have done so have found themselves in considerable difficulty. We need, therefore, also to work with the Government of Sudan to achieve, as far as we can, an end to the conflict.

Electoral Register: Young People

Lord Elton Excerpts

Thursday 17th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That is an interesting consideration. I will take it back to the Cabinet Office and discuss it with the Department for Education. I talked to several head teachers in Westmorland on Friday afternoon about citizenship education and how we involve young people in politics. Part of the problem we face is churn. Young people move, so even if they are put on the register when they are 17, they may well be off it—or be in the wrong place—by the time they are 20. So there are some real problems with keeping young people on the register as well as getting them on it.

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, if the noble Lord were to accept my noble friend’s suggestion, would he make sure that the opportunity to enrol in schools takes place after suitable instruction in the functioning of this country’s politics and constitution? While he should be on his guard against undue political influence from the teachers, he will be pleased to know that in my experience on all but very rare occasions when a teacher advises supporting one party, the class always follows the other.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I can remember the history sixth form when I was at school. As we got closer to the coming general election, the history teacher’s interpretation of the characters of Mr Disraeli and Mr Gladstone moved towards Mr Disraeli being better and better and Mr Gladstone being more wicked than he had been before. The idea of neutral school teaching is not one that is very easy. Citizenship education is important. The national curriculum is currently being reviewed and the issue of what role citizenship education plays both in the national curriculum and in sixth-form activity in schools throughout the country is one that clearly we need to consider further.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Elton Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, I do not know whether I was more surprised by the Queen’s Speech or by the debate that has so far followed it. Perhaps I can resort to metaphor. Your Lordships’ House is used to thinking of the constitution as being the house in which we live, where we are kept warm and dry and safe from our foes. It seems to me that both the Government and most of your Lordships’ House have spent their time in the sitting room, arranging how it should look so that it is a bit more efficient, without looking out of the window and discovering that we are no longer in a mansion standing in its own grounds. We are not even in a semi-detached; we are incorporated in a vast condominium which, in part, overlaps the structure in which we are living and the roof of which hovers over our heads as I speak. I was astonished to find that out of the 48 people who have so far spoken in this debate, only two have regarded Europe as significant to our constitution. But Europe is almost in flames. The wing at the other end of this row of apartments has serious subsidence and, very shortly, may burst into flames and disappear. It is the same structure. We cannot start rejigging the sitting room until we know whether we can keep the building in which we are used to living intact and efficient.

Why is there a rush to do this? We are deeply affected by what is going on. We said at the beginning that, if there is a currency union and if it is to work, you have to have a fiscal union. That has been proved. The structure will either disintegrate or there will be fiscal union in Europe in the next month or two, or certainly in the next year or so. To make matters worse, there will be a political structure; we are within sight of a federal Europe. Do we want to be Switzerland? Do we perhaps want to be Hong Kong? Or do we want to be part of Europe? It is a frightening choice. Many of us have dithered—some of us have dithered right through this debate—about what we want and about whether we want to be in or out. At a time when the nation needs leadership, I could see no mention in the Queen’s Speech of where the Government are heading. Where will we follow? Will they lead us anywhere? A host of questions arise.

In order to get out of this mess and structure a new Europe, there will have to be a treaty, or maybe several treaties, and under the present system treaties cannot be made without the signatures of all the members. That puts us on an equal bargaining basis with every other country in Europe. As the situation is desperate, there will be very serious negotiations ahead. I would like to know, as I think your Lordships would like to know, what the Government’s aims are. What powers, if any, do we intend to repatriate? What part of our sovereignty do we regard as inalienable? What formula do we propose to limit the net amount of money that we pay to our neighbours next door? How will we define, or redefine, those things that are our concern only and not the concern of bureaucrats in Brussels? How will we engage those bureaucrats with some of the realities of the things that they are regulating so that fewer absurdities come from there?

All that is trivial compared with the question of fiscal union and federalism, both of which will necessarily, and the latter essentially, affect our constitutional position. I do not know how the present Bill can be drafted to take that on board when the ball has not yet hit the pitch in front of the crease. I do not wish to mix my metaphors. I was warned a moment ago when the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, suggested that the Government should look for an exit from the box on which they had impaled themselves. I am still trying to work out how one can impale oneself on a box, unless it is a very odd shape—so I will drop my metaphor before I get into similar trouble.

I remind noble Lords that Europe and Britain are entirely different creatures. Europe has a revolutionary history and constitution; ours are evolutionary. Europe has a secular constitution; our constitution embodies—usually more visibly than it does now—the Church of England. Europe’s courts are based on Roman law, ours on common law. We are a monarchy. Europe—I must not say “they” because I would pre-empt my position—is a republic with a number of monarchical enclaves, including ourselves. European countries are recent; Germany was not 60 years old when I was born. Incidentally, unification started with a customs union, which is exactly what started the European process. That is why a few of us historians said at the time that this would be where it all finished. However, I had no idea that it would be such a mess.

We the Government have a duty to lead the British people, who are not awake to the precipice on the edge of which Europe is standing—as the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, accurately described it—to a safer place. If we do not do it, we shall be blamed. Elected or not, we shall be answerable—and the Government will be particularly answerable.

I have asked questions and pointed out dangers. Now I will add, in case my UKIP friends begin to scent a convert, that there is a deep motive for preserving Europe. I will illustrate it briefly and dramatically by reminding noble Lords that it all began with the European Coal and Steel Community, which was invented simply to tie Germany and France so closely together that they could never fight again. My father fought in the First World War, and lost two-thirds of his male friends. He was the only survivor of the sixth form of Rugby School, of which he was head boy in his final year. We do not want to risk anything like that happening again—not only now but perhaps after an awful, shambolic slide into chaos over 20 years. Who knows what will happen? We need a strong Europe.

That is the premise for what I will say briefly about the constitutional house that is at present in danger. I cannot help repeating myself in one or two particulars. I remind noble Lords that Parliament was invented to control government, and for no other reason. I remind them that in 2005 the then Government proposed to lock up British citizens on the say-so of one Secretary of State and the advice of one chief police officer. We can imagine the power that that would have given a corrupt Government—and it would have applied to all Governments still to come. The measure was taken repeatedly through the House of Commons and rejected repeatedly by this House—although it was anathema to noble Lords in the party opposite.

How was it that the Government got it through the Commons and could not get it through here? What was the difference? It was that Members of the other place not only had a great interest, because of their terms and conditions of employment, in maintaining their places there, but could only maintain them if they were not deselected. In other words, Members of the House of Commons do not have secure tenure and we do. I do not want to denigrate anybody, but I can see the power that a Chief Whip would have if I had a mortgage and children and no other profession to which to turn if I lost my job. That is the situation there.

Now the proposal is that we should have an elected House. At present it is proposed that the term of election should be 15 years. I would prefer it to be 20. Also, for the reasons that I have made clear, if anyone retired early they should be debarred from any government appointment, government employment or employment in any organisation receiving government funds until the expiry of the term that they had been elected for, and thereafter there should be a moratorium of another five years. The noble and learned Lord looks extremely surprised, but I hope that he is encouraged. What I am talking about is incredibly important. Parliament took power from government in the 13th century and government has been taking it back ever since. The only turn of the ratchet in the other direction in my lifetime was when Norman St John-Stevas, as he then was, got departmental Select Committees in under the wire before Margaret Thatcher—the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher—got the disease that all Governments get and thought that what we needed was more power to run the country.

I could go on at great length, but I beg your Lordships to realise that what we are talking about are two important things. One is the future of this country in relation to Europe—we really have to get that sorted in the next 18 months at the latest. The other is that we are preserving the electorate from a Government who would overrule the people who elected them. That is why I stayed in 1999. I admit I enjoyed the place tremendously; I would probably have stayed anyway, but my justification and main motivation was that I reckoned that this was coming. There would be a day when we had to recognise that there was nothing substantial between the domination of politics by a single party for the whole term of a Parliament and quite possibly beyond if it had absolute control.

We are planning not for the reasonable people we see around us—most of us are very reasonable—or for the reasonable and honourable people in another place. We are planning for how things may turn out in 10 or 15 years after the control and the safety lock have gone. To have a power such as the derogated detention powers as they were originally sent to us from the House of Commons in the Government’s hands would lead to the most terrible pressure on individual liberty. It is a fascist provision. That is what we are here for, that is why I stayed, and I hope that your Lordships will bear that in mind in the months to come.

Draft House of Lords Reform Bill

Lord Elton Excerpts

Tuesday 1st May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, of course, this is a debate to take note of the Richard report. It has been read extensively within the Government as well as outside. I trust that all noble Lords have read all three volumes, including the splendid compliment made by my noble friend Lord Cormack to the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Hornsey, in which he commented on her extreme youth. The conclusions will be considered within the Government, but the proposals on the table are those on which the Richard report commented.

I recognise that many noble Lords would like some entirely different proposals. Undoubtedly, if the proposals are brought forward, they will be modified by comments made in this House and elsewhere. That is the nature of the to and fro of democratic debate and those are the efforts that we all make in attempting to reach a consensus.

The question is, as the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, remarked: what is our central problem? Part of the central problem, which the Government aimed to address, was how to increase the legitimacy—

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, the noble Lord does not seem to be addressing, in the appropriate slot, what many of us, including me, regard as the principal issue at stake, which was sharply focused on by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, and by the noble Lord, Lord Ryder, in their recent interventions and which I rather cloudily tried to draw to the attention of noble Lords last night. How will they use this opportunity not to expand but to curb the power of government over Parliament? In reflecting on that, may I remind the noble Lord that he has been sufficiently long enough in government to be infected with the virus which makes people think that they will always see things from the Government’s point of view. However, the day—distant or near—when he will be sitting on the other side of this reconstituted House is of course drawing nearer.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank the noble Lord for his reminder that an issue that we need to take into account as we consider this is the balance not just between this House and the Commons but between government and Parliament, and that reform of this House should contribute to redressing the balance of power between the Executive and the legislature as a whole.

When we debate the Queen’s Speech, we will again discuss constitutional reform. If the Government produce a Bill on this, I hope that noble Lords will place this piece of the jigsaw of constitutional reform in the wider pattern of popular disengagement from politics and distrust of politicians. We need to look very carefully at the evidence. We need to consider the appropriate balance between representative democracy and direct, popular democracy before we slip perhaps a little too far down the road towards direct democracy. We need to have a concern to rebuild popular trust in our political institutions. Quiet, calm deliberation should be the way in which we seek to disentangle the knot of this highly tangled issue.

We heard some remarkably apocalyptic speeches in this debate, and even threats to wreck the rest of the Government’s legislative programme in order to prevent reform progressing. However, we serve in this House by appointment and by the privilege that that gives us—not by right. The way in which we discuss the future of the House will reflect, for good or ill, on our reputation. We will return to the subject—I hope a little more dispassionately—again and probably again.

Transparency

Lord Elton Excerpts

Thursday 10th November 2011 Lords Chamber

Moved By

[Lord Elton]

That this House takes note of Her Majesty’s Government’s commitment to transparency.

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, I beg leave to move the Motion standing in my name. I have to point out to your receding Lordships that, had things been different on Tuesday, I would now be moving a Motion for Papers and nobody outside this Chamber would have had any idea what on earth I meant. Now, following acceptance of Proposal 8 of the Leader’s Group on working practices, I am simply drawing your Lordships’ attention to something, and the rest of the world can understand what we are doing. Your Lordships are therefore already taking part in a miniscule footnote to a small sub-paragraph of history: a micromove in the direction of transparency; a tiny part of a much larger tide. Incidentally, the very next day, the House agreed the proposal from the Privileges and Conduct Committee to amend the code so as to remind Members that its underlying purpose is to provide openness and accountability.

Openness and accountability are not the same, and neither on its own produces the other. In an admirable report to the Cabinet Office on privacy and transparency, Kieron O’Hara points out that the,

“transparency philosophy contains two separate and independent agendas”.

He calls them,

“the accountability agenda … and the information agenda”.

The first, the accountability agenda, is gradually providing the means by which formal internal systems of maintaining accountability are supplemented by informal external means. This means that, as well as Permanent Secretaries breathing down the necks of Deputy Secretaries, the public are increasingly looking over the shoulders of both. The language in both cases is strictly figurative.

The wealth of information now available to the public —by the “public”, I mean principally the electorate—makes them increasingly able to judge the performance not only of the government machine but of Ministers who are driving it. So the coalition Government’s early commitment to what I regard as a breathtaking acceleration in the move towards transparency and openness in government was courageous. It was consciously courageous. They said:

“The Government believes that we need to throw open the doors of public bodies, to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account”.

They claimed that, by so doing, they would also secure,

“significant economic benefits by enabling businesses and non-profit organisations to build innovative applications and websites”.

The economic benefits of this appear to be part of the second O’Hara agenda. I shall allow that to distract me from the intricate, fascinating and sometimes opaque subject of central government transparency to which I am sure my noble friend will do ample justice in her reply. Some of us were a bit doubtful whether what emerged from the mill of transparency would lend itself readily to the sort of process, or have the sort of effect, that the Government expected. Sceptics remained doubtful when, at the Centre for Public Scrutiny conference a year ago, my noble friend Lady Hanham said that,

“releasing the data in its rawest state”—

your Lordships should note “rawest state”—

“will enable businesses and non-profit organisations to build innovative applications and websites which will make the data easier to understand”.

Did not the Treasury have to hold seminars for financial journalists on how to understand and interpret COINS before and after the publication of those data? Government, it seemed, was to produce data much as a mill produces flour—it would be for others to turn it into bread and cake.

We waited—really not very long at all—and they did. What is more, they made them easier to use as well as easier to understand. To take a small example: the Department for Transport’s parking database was not citizen-friendly material when it was published, but, today, if you put Transport Direct into your web search engine, you can find the nearest car park wherever you are on this island. That is useful not just if you are a holidaymaker; it saves time and therefore money if you are a retailer trying to find somewhere where customers arriving by car can park and get to your shop and spend money there. The same website has brought in data from other sources, both public and private, with a view to making it a tool to plan every aspect of a journey by road or rail, by public or private transport.

That example is outside the accountability agenda, so let me turn to one that falls within it. I quote the Prime Minister, who wrote in the Telegraph on 7 July that,

“five years ago, it was made far easier for the public to access, understand and use data on survival rates following heart surgery. And guess what happened? Those survival rates rose dramatically”.

In that case, transparency easily outperformed formal internal systems of maintaining accountability. Death rates for some procedures fell by 20 per cent or more. That is a figure to remember. The NHS extended publication of outcomes as a result to more areas of surgery and, today, it estimates that we avoid 1,000 deaths every year by doing so and acting on it. Opening the professionals up to the public also opens them up to each other. In any trade or profession, this identifies best practice and spurs emulation. Spread across the medical disciplines alone, results such as this can bring enormous benefits not only to patients but to the Exchequer and, eventually, to our own pockets and purses. Spread across the whole spectrum, not just of central and local government activity but across amenable private enterprises as well, they may well achieve the savings and the growth, predicted at £90 billion by some, expected of them.

Transparency can be a double-edged weapon. The protection of confidentiality disappears as completely as a net curtain disappears when the light is turned on in the room behind it. However, confidentiality is often both desirable and necessary. The patient who wants to know why his operation went wrong and who would benefit enormously if the outcome of all similar operations could be aggregated and published on a database is the same patient who very much does not want his personal details to appear on a public website. There are difficulties here, not just in deciding where the border between confidentiality and transparency should lie, but in retaining the confidentiality of anything that it is decided should remain behind it. Data on huge numbers of those operations can be aggregated and anonymised, but anonymising processes can be reverse engineered, and techniques for this keep evolving, because there is a market for the sort of personal information that we wish to keep private. All data sets are subject to this potential risk. Getting it wrong could have pretty dreadful results. I would be grateful if my noble friend could tell us what response the Government are giving to the 14 recommendations of the O’Hara report on this subject—perhaps not individually, as it would take too long, but in general.

From Monday’s debate on Amendment 20 to the Health and Social Care Bill, the Minister will be aware of the anxiety in this House over the balance between benefit and risk when it comes to imposing, for instance, a duty of candour on hospitals. There are major transparency issues also in the Localism Bill, which is also before the House. The public should take comfort from the energy and thoroughness with which this House examines these changes before deciding whether or not to accept them, and in what form. Had there been fewer people getting up at Question Time, I would have drawn attention to that when we had the Question of the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, a few moments ago.

I spoke of the coalition’s early commitment to a breathtaking acceleration of this move to transparency. That was no exaggeration. In 2010, 2,500 government data sets were made available. This year, the number is already 7,500. That is a 200 per cent increase. I understand that this country now has more government data accessible to the public than any other country in the world except the United States of America, and they keep ahead of us only because they have a vast surface area and they count all the maps as data sets.

The move to transparency is an international phenomenon. A very important aspect, and one in which Great Britain has taken the lead, is the introduction to transparency in the giving of overseas aid—transparency not only at our end of the transaction, but at the recipient’s end as well. To get transparency at the recipient’s end is the present aim and is only just beginning. The International Aid Transparency Initiative —IATI—was launched in 2008 and started by establishing a common format of published accounting for aid programmes. In January this year we became the first country to publish DfID’s aid information entirely in this form. At the next meeting of IATI, in Busan at the end of this month, will Her Majesty’s Government be pressing other Governments to join the eight organisations now publishing in this format?

Next Tuesday, the first international aid transparency index will be published. We should be among the top three of the 58 donor countries included. We now want to establish the same procedures in recipient countries as we have here, a move which has been recommended by Transparency International among others. To that end, will the Government exert themselves to secure from the EU early legislation to make it mandatory for oil, gas and mining companies to publish in common form all payments they make to foreign Governments, disaggregated by project as well as country? Like Tearfund, I believe that there should also be a requirement to publish production volumes, pre-tax profits, employee numbers and labour costs. The people of countries from which immensely valuable commodities such as oil, copper, diamonds and so on are extracted by foreign or international corporations are often exceedingly poor. By these means we can, for the first time, bring to them the benefits that transparency is already beginning to bring us. When that happens, I will gladly seek once again to draw your Lordships’ attention to Her Majesty’s Government’s commitment to transparency.

I have touched only the surface of the subject. I look forward to your Lordships contributions, especially that of the noble Lord, Lord Gold. I beg to move.

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, I would like to remind your Lordships that all Back-Bench contributions are limited to eight minutes and that when the clock shows eight minutes, time is up.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, I understand from the Table that the change in the nature of the Motion does not deprive me of the opportunity of replying briefly to the debate. I should like to start by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Gold, on a most interesting and excellent maiden speech, in which he confirmed Herbert Smith’s reputation as a formidable nursery of nobility and brought to our attention the importance of transparency in commercial, as well as national, transactions.

I will not pick up all the points everyone made, but I must reply to the noble Lord, Lord Wills. I readily accept that I should have been more courteous in accepting the efforts of the previous Government, but I remind him that what I actually said was not that the present Government invented transparency but that they started an acceleration of the movement—a breathtaking acceleration. I was careful to give 2008 as the date of clarity being brought to the surgical procedures to which I referred. I acknowledge that this movement is not new, but it is very much better and stronger.

Three specific points were raised that are worth following: the possibility of Waldegrave II; the need to look again at Section 27 of the Communications Act; and the importance of accessibility to transparent information if some of our citizens are not to be disenfranchised.

The noble Lord, Lord Prescott, made a forceful contribution, in which his expression was shared between his voice and his hands—the latter not always as courteous as his voice. However, his point was taken on board by my Front Bench, I am sure.

I conclude by saying that the purpose of this debate was to draw attention to the Government’s commitment to this breathtaking acceleration in transparency, and to point out that it has effects that spread through the whole polity and economy of this country. It raises highly sensitive issues of privacy, which have been discussed and raises the question that was central to the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Prescott: what actually is private? As I said at the outset, drawing the line is very tricky and technical, and it is important that it should be drawn impartially.

In their present initiative, the British Government are world leaders, as we have already seen. They are extending the benefits of transparency to disadvantaged countries in the world, which is entirely admirable. In the process, the Government are releasing an enormous possible gain for our economy—up to £90 billion, we are told. I therefore congratulate my noble friend Lady Warsi and the right honourable Francis Maude for the part that they have played in pushing forward this initiative.

Motion agreed.