House of Lords: Appointments

Lord Forsyth of Drumlean Excerpts

Tuesday 9th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the idea that we are packing the House with coalition Peers is a little idiotic. Of the 122 appointments made since May 2010, nearly one-third, 39, have been Labour Peers. That is not packing the House on one side. The largest group in the House remains the Labour Benches.

One of the ways in which we wish to maintain a vibrant House is to refresh the House from time to time. The committee on retirement has proposed that the statutory retirement scheme is now available. We regret that only two Peers have so far availed themselves of it. However, 20% of this House is now over 80 and, as we know that life expectancy in this House is very good, we encourage others to consider that scheme.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My Lords, how will my noble friend explain to the voters of this country the Government’s policy to reduce the size of the House of Commons in order to save public money when they are now proposing to increase the size of the House of Lords at public expense, having previously brought forward a Bill arguing the importance of reducing it?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Government are not proposing to increase the size of this House. Sadly, we have lost 40 Members since May 2010; I dare say that, sadly, we may lose more over the next two years. The question of refreshing the House from time to time therefore arises.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Forsyth of Drumlean Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

I am grateful to my noble friend, but I do not want to talk about 1911—I want to talk about today. Democracy is on the march across the world, and you cannot keep it outside that door. In the end, you will be dragged there. Let me make this proposition to noble Lords: the longer they delay it, the more ridiculous they will look. That is where we are in the eyes of many of the public, 69% of whom want to see a directly elected Chamber. [Interruption.] I am grateful for any support I can get.

I want to answer a few of the arguments that have so far been put forward to prevent this happening, to delay it, and to make sure that we hang on to our seductive comforts for as long as we may. The first is the most ridiculous, but it featured in our previous debates and there were echoes of it on Thursday—that we are not a House of Parliament but a committee. Some committee! We are told that we are a monocameral Parliament, that all we do is advise and that this is just a committee. We are invited to believe, therefore, that when we met King John on the banks of the Thames nearly 1,000 years ago we were not beginning with a Magna Carta and Parliament but creating a committee—and that when we invite Her Majesty to come here all dressed up in her finery, accompanied by a company of the guards and a clatter of the Household Cavalry, to sit on the Throne and read the parliamentary programme for the future to your Lordships, who are dressed in red dressing gowns while the other Chamber has to come and parade before us, we are no more than a committee. That is a preposterous suggestion, and those who make it, as the noble Lord, Lord Richard, said in a previous debate, simply do not understand our history or function.

The argument that is made to bolster this claim is that we do not contribute to the making of laws. You cannot make that argument on the one hand and then claim, as my noble friend Lord Phillips did, that we have done our function because we have changed and passed so many laws. The truth of the matter is that we contribute to the making of the laws in this country. In a democracy, those who do the people’s business should be the people’s representatives. We are the daily affront to that basic principle. How can we be satisfied with that? It is a desperate and ludicrous argument that gives little comfort or respect to those who continue to seek to make it.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

I am grateful to my noble friend for giving way. I notice that his wording has now changed to, “contribute to the making of the laws”. The Deputy Prime Minister said that those who make the law should be elected. Should we take this as an acknowledgment that the House of Commons has the final say on all laws that are made in this country?

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

Of course we should. The draft legislation that was put before us made it perfectly clear that the House of Commons should have primacy. That is not a contentious item. By the way, I said that we participated in the making of the laws. We contribute to the making of the laws. That should be done only by the power that is derived not from the Prime Minister or from patronage but through the ballot box.

My noble friends in the Conservative Party often ask, “Why should we address this constitutional issue at a time of crisis—is this not a distraction?”. Those noble friends should have a care as they, too, are interested in constitutional reform. As the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has just said, they introduced mayoral elections. Now we must vote for police chiefs across the country, whether we like it or not. It seems to me that my noble friends are interested in every constitutional reform except the reform of this place. They want to see the election of mayors and chief constables but not of anybody in this place. I say to noble Lords who love to make that point that it is a dangerous one to make.

It is also dangerous to make that point as we are facing not just an economic crisis but a democratic crisis. We should look at what is happening on the streets of Egypt and at what has happened here. Our economy is in crisis but so is our democracy. We should look at the turnouts in the local elections last week. You cannot solve the democratic crisis unless you can create more respect for, cognisance of and at least trust in the democratic process. We need a process of democratic renewal in this country. I do not claim that the House of Lords represents all of that programme but it is certainly a crucial part of it. You cannot resolve the deep economic crisis of this country if you do not also address the democratic crisis, and that is what we seek to do.

Another point that is often made is that famously there is no public call for reform of this place—we have heard it in the Chamber today—and that campaigners have knocked on many doors but not one person has called for democratic reform of the House of Lords. But they never do. This is not the people’s business; it is our business. There was no great public call for the Great Reform Act 1832. There was a campaign up and down the country, but in the Dog and Duck and other pubs around Britain in the 1830s there was no great public call in support of that or, later, the suffragette cause. The campaigners believed deeply in that cause and they fought for it, but the public did not, being largely uninterested in it, if not opposed to it.

The noble Lord, Lord Luce, said the other day that there have been four reforms of this place—in 1911, 1949, 1963 and 1999. None of those reforms was called for by the public. We initiated them to put our House in order. This has nothing to do with the public calling for reform. It is entirely to do with the fact that we should recognise that we have grown out of touch with democracy and that we have to put our House in order—no more and no less.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin of Roding, who has had such a distinguished career, mostly in another place. I remember it very well. Listening to his powerful and eloquent speech today reminded me of the dilemma that I faced over the weekend. I was standing in the shower—not a pretty sight, I know—having heard many of the speeches in the debate before the Recess on the future of the Lords and having sat through a lot of last Thursday’s debate. I thought, what is there left for those of us at the tail-end of the debate to add? It is a dilemma and it will be worse for the people who follow us, as my noble friend Lord Anderson points out. It is a difficult question.

I thought in the shower of the traveller in Ireland who got lost and asked one of the locals the way to Dublin. After the local had contemplated all the options, he stroked his beard and said, “You know, if I was going to Dublin I wouldn’t start from here”. If we were setting up a legislature, we would not necessarily start from where we are now, but we do not have a clean sheet. Even those of us who like a lot of the aspects of the House would not sit down and come up with a composition such as we have at the moment, with only English Bishops, 90-odd hereditaries and those strange by-elections that take place. I do not think that we would do that or that any of us accepts that it is an ideal option.

We are not like the founding fathers in the United States who were able to start with a clean sheet. They could have the separation of powers and a bicameral legislature but with clearly different kinds of elections and powers. As we have seen, there are those who advised post-war Germany in setting up its constitution with a federal system and the Bundestag and direct elections, and the Bundesrat representing the states of Germany. In each case, they have different powers and a written constitution to deal with any problems that arise. Like the traveller in Ireland, we are where we are and we have to start from the status quo.

What are the options? One perfectly valid option that we need to consider—I think that it was one of the options proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Phillips—is abolition. For a while, I thought that that was the best option, but I will explain why I do not think that now. Why do we need a second Chamber? Some countries work pretty well with unicameral legislatures; for example, New Zealand and, I am advised by my noble friend Lady Ramsay of Cartvale who knows Scandinavia very well, all the Scandinavian countries. It has many attractions. There is no question that it would save a lot of money. The issue of primacy would not arise and there certainly would not be any gridlock.

Abolition has a superficial attraction but I have been put off by the most recent experience—the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, will know why—at Holyrood, which reminds us of the dangers of one-party control of the Executive and the legislature without any checks and balances whatever. The electoral system in the Scottish Parliament was supposed to make sure that no party had overall control of the legislature but that has not worked. We have a unicameral system in Scotland which is becoming more and more authoritarian and creates problems. On balance, we need to look at a bicameral system, which would be better.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

Is the noble Lord suggesting that the Scottish Parliament should have this Chamber as a second Chamber?

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

It has been suggested that we should set up what could be described as a “House of Lairds”, which one might consider. I am not necessarily in favour of that and I will come to what I am in favour of in a moment. The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, is wont to lead me down the track of an interesting diversion. In relation to the second Chamber, we first need to consider its roles and functions. To have in the Queen’s Speech the wording that it is only the “composition” that will be included in a Bill is to put the cart before the horse. We need to know what it is for before we know how it should be constituted. A second Chamber elected on the same basis as the first would be a nonsense. It would be duplication. However, if its function is to act as a check on the overbearing and increasing power of the Executive, as has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, and with the House of Commons forming the Executive, we have got that responsibility. If it is to be elected, there is an argument for the second Chamber to be elected by a different system in order to give those checks and balances. There is an argument for that.

Another argument is for a different kind of second Chamber to represent the diversity of the United Kingdom. We have devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Perhaps we should have it to England. I would prefer devolution to England as a whole whereas some others would prefer it to the regions of England. But increasingly, as was said earlier, there will be more pressure to have devolution within England. We need to think ahead because, as so many people have said, our constitutional revision has been tinkering and piecemeal, and we have not thought ahead. An indirectly elected second Chamber might counterbalance the centralisation which can come from a unitary system. None of those options has been looked at by the Government or the Joint Committee. I absolve the Joint Committee of any blame because it was given a limited remit to do its work and therefore cannot be blamed.

My preference—I have said this on other occasions in previous debates and keep saying to the Liberal Democrats that they should think more about it—is for a federal United Kingdom. It is one of only three stable constitutional options for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We used to have one of the stable options—a centralised, unitary state whereby London controlled everywhere in the United Kingdom. That has been abandoned but it was stable. The other stable option would be to let Scotland, then inevitably Wales and then inevitably Northern Ireland secede. That is not a preferred option. It is a frightening thought. The United Kingdom has been one of the most successful economic unions anywhere in the world and we should fight hard to preserve it. But separation is a stable option.

The type of devolution that we have, which is unbalanced at the moment, is not as yet a stable option, which is why it should be seen as a stepping stone towards a federal United Kingdom.

Draft House of Lords Reform Bill

Lord Forsyth of Drumlean Excerpts

Tuesday 1st May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Richard]

That this House takes note of the report from the Joint Committee on the draft House of Lords Reform Bill. (HL Paper 284)

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My Lords, having listened to many of the speeches yesterday—I confess that I missed some of them because I went to the theatre to see a play appropriately called “The Collaborators”—and having read the others, it is difficult to know what to say about this debate that is different. But I wonder whether your Lordships remember the Austin Allegro. The Austin Allegro was probably the worst car ever built. It was completely unreliable, it had a totally underpowered engine, and its big selling feature was that it had a square steering wheel. This car was designed by the management for political reasons. They ignored the people who knew about cars and design and it was meant to save British Leyland. It was the management’s answer. In fact, they were so convinced that it would save the company that it was nicknamed the “flying pig”.

I do not know whether noble Lords can see the parallel that I am drawing here, but it seems to me that this Bill, which has been so comprehensively filleted by the Joint Committee, has many similarities to the Austin Allegro in so far as the Deputy Prime Minister believes it will save the Liberal Party at the next election. It was conceived for political reasons and without any recognition of the needs of the consumer and the customer—in this case the wider electorate.

The case is being made for “reform”. However, I think “reform” is the wrong word here because actually it is the abolition of this House that we are talking about and we are talking as well about the destruction of the House of Commons as we know it. So “reform” is the wrong word to use. It is the right word to use in the context of the Bill of my noble friend Lord Steel, which for too long has been ignored by the Government for reasons that are incomprehensible to me. The Government could perfectly well bring about some reform that would deal with most of the issues and avoid all the difficulties that the Joint Committee has so comprehensively illustrated.

I want to deal with two of the fibs which have been repeated during the course of our debate. The first is that this was a Conservative manifesto commitment. It was not a manifesto commitment. Our commitment was to seek a consensus on Lords reform. One has only to listen to the chiding given by the chairman of the Joint Committee to the excellently produced alternative report to realise that there is no consensus. A casual reading of the committee’s report will show that we have failed to reach consensus. So as far as I am concerned, as a Conservative, we have discharged our manifesto commitment.

The second fib which is told is that it was part of the coalition agreement. The agreement was that the Deputy Prime Minister would convene a hand-picked committee to look at this issue with a view to producing a Motion by December 2010. But as the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, pointed out as a member of that committee, it failed to do so. In fact, it failed to reach any agreement at all, to the point where the committee stopped having meetings because it was impossible to make progress. So on both of these counts, the obligations of the coalition agreement and the obligations of the Conservative manifesto have been discharged.

My noble friend Lord Strathclyde has come up with a new definition of consensus. “Consensus” is what the House of Commons votes for on a three-line Whip on a constitutional Bill. The play I saw last night was about Stalin, but not even he would have used that argument. I have to say, listening on the radio this morning to a beleaguered Minister trying to persuade the chief executive of British Airways, or whatever it calls itself nowadays—the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, may be able to help me with that—who had explained that there are queues at Heathrow, that they are not really as long as he said they were, made me wonder this: what does the country think? Do people think that it is better for us to spend money on 450 superannuated politicians rather than on immigration officers at Heathrow to deal with these problems? As the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, pointed out, this is not an issue that is central to the problems facing our country.

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

I wonder whether the noble Lord would allow me to intervene. I am most grateful to him.

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

My Lords, I knew that an intervention would be popular.

Can the noble Lord address the central question? Can he explain why it is that this Chamber cannot follow the same principle as the vast majority of second Chambers elsewhere in the world, which is by being democratically based? Is it because our democracy is so weak? Is it because we are totally unique in the world? Or is it because the House of Lords is, as it always has been, opposed to democratic reform?

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

I have to say to my noble friend that I read his speech with interest. In it he made that point repeatedly, along with the point that this House should have the right to decide whether we go to war. He did not actually explain what would happen if this House, elected by PR, voted against going to war and the other place, elected by first past the post, voted in favour. How would we resolve that? The point about this House—what makes it effective—is that it is completely different from the House of Commons.

In his speech, the noble Lord—my noble friend—said that this place ought to be able to decide things, which is a perfectly respectable point of view, but it is one that I do not agree with. That is because, like him, I served in the House of Commons. I love the House of Commons. It is the central feature of our democratic system. It is the body which guarantees our liberty and its sovereignty is crucial. By creating a competing House here, we will undermine it. Another noble friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, said in her speech that she was sick of hearing about people talking about turkeys voting for Christmas. The turkeys will be in the House of Commons, not in this House, if they vote for this legislation, for it will undermine the power of the House of Commons. It will turn this into a competing Chamber, and that will be a disaster for the House of Commons. So I do not agree with my noble friend that we should become a kind of House of Commons.

At the same time as we had the Austin Allegro there was a very popular programme on television which I used to enjoy—watching with my children, of course—called “The A-Team”. If we have an elected House here, it will be very much the B-team. Who in the A-team is going to want to be part of a Chamber that is perceived to be secondary? Who will put up with that? But if I had been elected on a 15-year term with a popular mandate, I have to say with regard to the Scotland Bill—on which I think I spoke for quite a long time—that under the powers which already exist in this House it would have been perfectly possible for me to kill that Bill. That is one of the things to consider when people talk about the existing powers. This House has enormous powers, but we do not use them because we respect the fact that the House of Commons is the elected Chamber. I could easily have killed the Bill, but I did not do so. Although I hate the Bill, I did not do so because I am not elected and I do not have a popular mandate. If I had a 15-year term, so that even if it was unpopular in my constituency I would never be held to account, I tell you what— I would certainly have done it.

That is the problem with this whole Bill: it will change behaviour. I can tell noble Lords something else. There are not too many Conservatives in Scotland. If I was elected as a Conservative Member of this House on a 15-year term, I would make it my business to secure in every constituency the election of other Conservatives to the House of Commons. I would be there for 15 years while the average term of a Member of the House of Commons is, I think, eight years. I would be there for 15 years, so I would know all the issues. I would be interfering in constituency business. The noble Lord, Lord Richard, said that, by not giving them secretarial services, they would not interfere. The noble Lord himself was a Member of Parliament— I do not know what his constituency was.

[Noble Lords]

Baron’s Court.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

Well, if the noble Lord casts his mind back, he will know that, just as today, constituents would not allow that to happen.

For the Government to say that the House is too large and to continue to make additional appointments to it will bewilder the electorate as it bewilders me. Sometimes, I think that the Government are behaving like Caligula, who appointed his horse as a consul. Everyone said, “He’s mad”. But he was not mad: he appointed his horse as a consul because he wanted to discredit the institution. By making more and more appointments while doing nothing about the size of this place, the Government are trying to have it both ways and are undermining its integrity and effectiveness.

The House of Commons should look out for this Bill. It will be decided in the House of Commons, not here. It is right that it should be decided in the House of Commons, because the House of Commons is sovereign. However, as it sees its powers being taken away by Europe, by assemblies, by Parliaments, by external courts and others, it should look at this Bill and realise what it is: it is a Trojan horse at the centre of our democracy and it should be rejected, and rejected comprehensively, by every Member of Parliament who cares about that great institution, the House of Commons.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord True]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, who adorns this House, and will continue to adorn the House even if the composition of the political Benches in the House is decided by the people rather than by patronage.

Many would say it is unenviable to be the 73rd speaker to address your Lordships in the last debate of a 293-day session, but I can conceive no more enviable privilege than to be able to address your Lordships’ House. However, I suspect I may have caught the selector’s eye this morning, since I do not share the certainty of many who have spoken in this debate that election of Peers to this House is unthinkable. Given the reaction of Peers to speeches yesterday and the witty speech of my noble friend Lord Forsyth this morning, perhaps as last man in I should have prayed for rain and stayed in the pavilion.

I would like to consider one of the refrains running through this debate—the primacy of the Commons. I suggest that we fret over that too much. Yes, the Commons has primacy, but the question is how well it uses it. I agree with the noble Lord, Norton of Louth, that we need to begin from the functioning of Parliament as a whole. Frankly, you would not begin constructing a strong and free Parliament by putting it under the primacy of one House shackled by executive-dominated procedures and telling the other House, however constituted, that it must not say boo to that over-mighty place.

The main case for introducing election to this place is—as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said the other day—that it would enable this House to hold by what it believes to be right, rather than knuckling under whenever the other House shouts “unelected”, “primacy”, “privilege” or what have you. Parliament is a trinity of the Crown, Lords and Commons, and in modern times one part of that trinity has, because it is elected, usurped effective power within it. It was not always so, and need not always be so. Indeed, for many centuries your Lordships were the dominant House, though after the 1670s generally accepting Commons privilege in finance. That did not stop your Lordships occasionally rejecting money Bills—for example in 1860, when you rejected paper duties as a tax on knowledge, then being circumvented by Mr Gladstone’s invention of what has become the modern curse of a multi-decker Finance Bill, which your Lordships could not touch, and still cannot, without bringing the whole House down, as happened in 1911. One consequence of an elected House—and the other place has to realise this, just as much as us—could be that if the Parliament Act is to be amended, as some propose, we might look again at the way that money Bills are defined and consider the Joint Committee of both Houses, which was offered by Mr Asquith and Lloyd George to the unionists in 1910, but was not ultimately accepted.

Our acceptance of Commons primacy on finance was rooted in the fact that, even then, the Commons was elected but it was mirrored, after the great privilege battles which raged between the two Houses back in the 1670s, by Commons acceptance of this House’s primacy in justice. Here, at that Bar and in the Benches before it, was embodied the supreme court in the High Court of Parliament and almost all of us will recall the noble and learned Lords who came here, or will have heard of the mighty Lord Chancellors who sat there in olden times, centuries ago. That was the historic, if largely unspoken, deal about primacy between the two Houses: primacy of the Commons on finance, primacy of your Lordships in justice.

I did not hear the other place troubling too much about your Lordships’ primacy on justice when they drove through the expulsion of the Law Lords and dismembered the Lord Chancellorship in the past few years. For my own part, if we are invited to embark on a reform which involves election I do not feel that your Lordships, if elected, need be too squeamish about the other side of the bargain, the Commons primacy on finance, and still less other, all-embracing claims to primacy that have quite recently been laid upon it on the basis that it is elected and we are not. When Parliament is functioning so badly in its prime role of checking the Executive and protecting the citizen against bad counsel—as they used to be called right back to the 13th century—and unjust and incompetent law, why must we always meekly be expected to say: “Oh, but the Commons has primacy and must not be challenged”?

As was said by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, the case for election is that challenge might become more confident in that case and stimulate another place to do its job better. A stronger House here, armed with the authority that comes from election, could deliver that refreshing and, to my mind, necessary challenge to an imperfectly functioning sister House. Yes, there would be a need for resolution procedures, as the noble Lord said, but in the history of these Houses, when they were roughly co-equal in power, there were perfectly good systems for addressing those problems and others could be devised.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

Can my noble friend help me and perhaps explain how it would be that if we had this elected second Chamber, it would not suffer from the same problems of the other place in the domination of the Whips and the power of the Executive, given that it was elected? How would we avoid that?

[Lord True]

My Lords, it is avoided precisely by the concept of the long mandate, which is non-renewable and with no right to go on to the House of Commons. That means that someone coming here would not be able to develop a political career and go forward to be a senior Minister of the Crown.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am talking about a wider and longer-term sense of public disillusionment with all political parties and all politicians, of which we need to be aware. The test for our House is how we handle ourselves on the question of further change in the unfriendly light of media attention and public cynicism. I respectfully suggest that we should not be too pleased with ourselves as we are. We have not entirely escaped popular disillusionment with the metropolitan elite. A run of hostile articles in the press would easily puncture our sense of how high our public standing is.

There is almost a consensus in the House on our self-image as a repository of wisdom and experience that stands above grubby party politics. There is even a hint that people like us would not stoop to stand for election—that, as the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, argued, an elected House would never attract candidates of comparable quality. The noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, stated sharply that an elected Chamber would bring in,

“a whole new gang of second-rate … politicians”.—[Official Report, 30/4/12; col. 1983.]

Not all elected politicians are second rate and, if I may suggest, not all appointed officeholders are first rate. The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, declared that an elected House would consist of 450 superannuated politicians. As a superannuated politician, I am not sure that he should regard that as necessarily a bad thing. What does he think this House consists of now? Seventy per cent of us in this Chamber are political appointees—here by patronage—and half of us have held elected office within the Commons, the European Parliament, the devolved Assemblies and local authorities. Indeed, when I first entered this House, I observed that much of the detailed work of scrutiny was carried out by former chairs of city and county councils. They had the most relevant experience and expertise and the strongest commitment to holding the Government to account.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My reference to “superannuated” related to paying salaries and pensions in a reformed House—something which we do not have now. However, on the point about the standing of Parliament as seen by the public, how does the Minister think the public will feel about constitutional change which results from a deal between two political parties, where the Conservatives get extra Members in the House of Commons and the Liberal Democrats get to control the balance of power in the House of Lords? Does he really think—and some of his noble friends have made this point—that that kind of deal will enhance the reputation of Parliament?

Scotland: Director General for External Affairs

Lord Forsyth of Drumlean Excerpts

Tuesday 25th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

Asked By

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what consideration was given by the Cabinet Secretary to the appointment of a new civil service post of director general for external affairs by the First Minister of Scotland, and the salary of more than £200,000; and whether it is correct that the duties of the post will include preparing for the break-up of the United Kingdom.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Cabinet Office’s Senior Leadership Committee, chaired by the Cabinet Secretary, approved the appointment of a director-general of strategy and external affairs in the Scottish Government and that the post would be advertised at a starting salary of between £115,000 and £125,000 per annum. The figure of £200,000 appears nowhere in the particulars of the post, although I saw it floated in the Scottish edition of the Daily Telegraph.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My Lords, I am most grateful for that Answer, but if the Cabinet Secretary believes that it is okay to spend public money on recruiting officials to work on reserved matters such as the constitution, is it okay for the nationalist Administration to use officials to work out policy on, for example, withdrawal from NATO or removing nuclear weapons from Scottish soil? Will my noble friend consider amending the Scotland Bill to put officials, Ministers and Members of the Scottish Parliament in exactly the same position as members in local government, whereby they will be liable to surcharge where they incur illegal expenditure?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

As a former Secretary of State for Scotland, the noble Lord is treading on slightly sensitive ground by comparing the Scottish Government to an English local authority. There is no statutory basis in the Scotland Act for such surcharges, but I think I hear the shape of an amendment that might be tabled to the current Scotland Bill when it reaches Committee.

Scotland: Civil Service

Lord Forsyth of Drumlean Excerpts

Thursday 6th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I entirely agree with that. It is important that the Civil Service working for the Scottish Government commands the confidence of Scottish Ministers of the day, regardless of their political complexion, just as it is for civil servants in Whitehall working for the UK Government.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My Lords, I recall being given a wigging by the noble Lord, Lord Butler, when he was Cabinet Secretary and I was Secretary of State for Scotland, for issuing an official press release from the Scottish Office in which I used the term “tartan tax”. Although my Permanent Secretary approved it, the then Cabinet Secretary told me that it was inappropriate for a Scottish Office press release to contain something that might be politically contentious. I accepted that advice: he was quite right and I was in the wrong. So what on earth is going on when the Permanent Secretary for the Scottish Executive circulates what is described as an internal blog—a newsletter—to civil servants in the Scottish Office, which, among other things, advised going to see a play about an army of occupation in 11th-century Scotland which he said,

“does genuinely speak to our present condition as a nation”?

What on earth are this Government doing in standing aside? Surely it is the absolute duty of the Cabinet Secretary to maintain the impartiality of the Civil Service, which is a centrepiece of our constitution.