European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 5) Bill

Debate between Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Lord Howarth of Newport

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 8th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

My Lords, noble Lords are saying that it is for the other place to set a date. My understanding is that it will have one hour to consider our amendments and every aspect of the Bill. It is apparent from the speech made by my noble friend that there is an issue here. As I raised on Thursday, I do not understand why the Bill did not have a money resolution. It is perfectly possible that, in return for agreeing a date, the European Union could demand even more than the £39 billion already offered by the Prime Minister, and that the financial consequences could be considerable. This amendment seeks some kind of time limit on the process, which is sensible.

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, we should be grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, for her amendment and for inviting us to consider the issues she identified. Any damage our economy is experiencing at the moment is on account not of the people’s decision in the 2016 referendum but of the highly protracted process and continuing uncertainty that is paralysing economic decision-making, particularly in investment and consumer decisions. The noble Baroness is absolutely right: we need the best objective assessment available as to the damage that the continuation of this uncertainty would cause. The proponents of a long extension of Article 50 must address the question of their responsibility for the continuing economic damage that would result.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Lord Howarth of Newport

Report: 6th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 8th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

My Lords—

Recall of MPs Bill

Debate between Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Lord Howarth of Newport

Tuesday 10th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours spoke compellingly on this issue at Second Reading and he has done so again today. He is right that the House of Commons made a mistake in reducing the minimum requirement for a trigger for the recall process from 20 to 10 days’ suspension from the service of the House. He has explained very powerfully why that was a mistake and suggested convincingly that the House of Commons inflicted this error on itself without having adequately considered what it was doing. It is surely essential that the Standards Committee is enabled to retain a sufficient scope and flexibility and a sufficient range of penalties and sanctions to be able to temper its judgments to the particularities of the individual case before it. If a 10-day suspension automatically triggers the recall process then the Standards Committee has become excessively constrained. As my noble friend has just described, the political consequences are very major indeed. The committee should not be boxed into a position where it very often has little alternative but to precipitate a by-election, with all the political and personal implications that follow from that.

Nor should this legislation diminish the standing of the Standards Committee. Part of the motive of those who voted in favour of the reduction from 20 days to 10 was that they had given up on the Standards Committee. They actually believe that it has ceased to be a useful instrument of parliamentary self-government. As I said in the previous debate, I, by contrast, believe profoundly that one of the ways in which the House of Commons can help to restore its reputation and public credibility is to be seen to strengthen its capacity for self-regulation and self-discipline, not the reverse.

To go back to a 20-day minimum suspension period triggering the recall process is not to eliminate the political difficulty that the existence of recall will introduce into the proceedings of the Standards Committee. It may be said that there is, in principle, no particular difference between nine days not precipitating recall and 10 days doing so and between 19 days not precipitating recall and 20 days doing so. However, it does diminish the difficulty because it will reduce the frequency of the occasions when the committee feels under inexorable pressure to pronounce or make a recommendation to the whole House that the suspension period should be 10 days or more. It therefore diminishes the force of that politicising pressure on the committee and that is very important. I am grateful to my noble friend for his exhaustive and courageous examination of these issues. He has given wise advice and this House should, in turn, give wise advice to the other place.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps I may briefly intervene. It seems extraordinary that in rising to support the Government in their original position, I am rising to support an amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours. They had got it right when they originally specified 20 days. In the 18th century, one was hung for stealing a cabbage, or for murdering your wife. If you committed any offence, you might as well get rid of any witnesses in order to avoid being hung for stealing the cabbage. We are rather in that position here.

If the provision is about persuading the outside world that the House of Commons takes bad behaviour seriously, I point out that most people would think that losing your pay for 10 days was not a particularly serious sanction. I therefore think that the nought to 10-day spectrum is far too narrow, and that nought to 20 days would be considerably more just and avoid the problem of the kind of political pressure that the noble Lord referred to.

The more that I, as a former Member, read and listen to the debates on the Bill, the more I believe that the House of Commons has lost confidence in itself. It is a bit like the situation at the moment: whenever there is a difficult problem there is a tendency to set up a public inquiry rather than actually address the issue. The public inquiry then goes on for ever, costs a lot of money and people feel, in the case of some inquiries, that no one has been held to account and it has all taken so long that the situation has moved on. That all adds to the sense of irritation on the part of the public.

What the noble Lord is proposing is eminently sensible and I am really looking forward to hearing the Minister’s response as to how he is going to explain how what I assume was a carefully considered Bill was presented to Parliament and amended in this way. We have almost gone into a competition to, sort of, wear the hair shirt—against the interests of Parliament. I am not being critical of the Opposition and I understand why they have done that, but it is a route that will lead to the destruction of the House of Commons in people’s eyes. If the House of Commons does not believe in itself and if it does not trust itself, how on earth can one expect the outside world to trust it if it demonstrates that it does not have the confidence to carry out its own sanctions?

It is a long time since I left it in 1997 but in the House of Commons that I remember, there is political partisanship—of course there is, which is why the point about the 10 days is important—but, on the whole, the House has a sense of its own worth and of its relationship with the public. It can be trusted to take the decisions that we are talking about and the amendment is immensely sensible. I hope that my noble friend will revert to the Government’s previous position and accept it.

Recall of MPs Bill

Debate between Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Lord Howarth of Newport

Monday 19th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise to the Committee: I have to go to the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy later this afternoon. No doubt, the Minister will be disappointed that I am not here to support him. I very much support the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter. During the last session in Committee the Minister appeared to be telling us that we should really mind our own business and that this was a matter for the House of Commons.

The thing that I find remarkable about this Bill is that if it has been designed and put forward by the House of Commons, it shows an extraordinary ignorance of what it is like being a Member of Parliament and how the process is carried out. Extraordinarily in my old constituency of Stirling, for example—I cannot do square metres, but know that it was 800 square miles—it took me from 6.30 in the morning to 8 at night just to drive to every polling station to thank the people standing there. Even then, people had difficult journeys and it was quite an expensive operation to do this. Quite what the cost, which is not accounted for, would be if one had to provide that kind of coverage over a longer period, I know not.

The noble Baroness is absolutely right: if this is an exercise in democracy and is to be carried out fairly, you have to make it possible for people to cast their votes in secrecy at a reasonably convenient opportunity and near where they live, whether they work or whether they do not. I guess I am with the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, in thinking that this needs to be at the discretion of the local authority. The local authority will have to find the money and the people to do all this, and to train them—and, of course, none of this is costed, so if the Minister is not prepared to accept the amendment on cost grounds, I have an elegant solution, which is that he abandons the Bill altogether.

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, was probably wrong to suggest that such a small number of constituencies—perhaps a couple of dozen—would find it impossible to cope if there were only one to four signing places. The constituency that I had the honour to represent for a number of years—Stratford-upon-Avon—was some 450 square miles in size and had 116 parishes. It is simply unimaginable that people would have been able to use the public transport available to get to one, two, three or four signing places. It is a very scattered constituency, so that is unrealistic.

I strongly echo the point just made by my noble friend Lady Quin. If the Government’s proposals in this regard are to have any credibility, they owe it to us to say what premises would be used. Clearly, public libraries, which are disappearing as we speak, will not provide the solution, nor can it be acceptable for schools to be disrupted for a period of eight weeks. That is one good factor to bear in mind when we come to the next amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Foulkes.

Finally, it would be helpful to the Committee if the Minister would give us a fairly detailed breakdown of costs. The impact assessment tells us that the best estimate the Government have made for the total cost of conducting a recall petition process in a constituency would be of the order of £55,000. I do not think that figure is remotely credible. It would therefore be very helpful if the Minister could give us his analysis of the costs of operating this aspect of the process.

I support the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lady Hayter, although I think there is also much wisdom in simply leaving it to the discretion of the petition officers to determine what is appropriate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, I shall be very brief because I know that noble Lords are waiting for the next debate. My noble friend has evoked vividly some of the realities of life as a Member of Parliament and some of the pressures that could be brought to bear on an MP in a recall petition situation. I know that he will also reflect carefully on the difficulties and dangers of limiting the freedom of the press in such a situation, notwithstanding the fact that we have reason to fear that the press may be very virulent and determined to create an even more charged atmosphere in which it is even less likely that the Member of Parliament will get, as it were, a fair hearing.

However, I want to ask my noble friend about one particular point, which is whether Amendment 55 would cover the publication of opinion polls undertaken in the individual constituency during the period of the recall petition. We are becoming increasingly accustomed to tactical opinion polling being commissioned and published for tactical purposes so as possibly to manipulate opinion and thus affect the outcome of the election. It seems that the same considerations that apply to limiting the freedom of the press more broadly may not necessarily apply to the regulation of opinion polling during such periods. One of the dangers we have to anticipate is that there could be manipulative polling to exacerbate the situation. I wonder whether my noble friend has that in mind in part in his amendment and what his view is on the issue.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My Lords, I am afraid that I cannot support the noble Lord’s amendment because it would be almost impossible to enforce, even if it was desirable in the age of blogs, the internet and everything else. I understand where he is coming from and, at the risk of repeating myself, I think that any Member of Parliament who finds himself subject to a petition is already dead in the water.

I was rather intrigued by our earlier discussion. If someone was present at the count of postal votes in any election and then inadvertently told someone else what the position was, they could very well find themselves facing a prison sentence and a recall petition of this kind. That is a good example of something which might be regarded as a matter where one could win the argument, but in practice it would be very difficult to stop the kind of comments that are made.

However, the noble Lord has done the Committee a service by underlining the key point in all this: once you get to the point of a petition being launched, it will not be about the issues surrounding the Member of Parliament; it will be about 1,001 grievances, political views or whatever. That is why I think that the Bill is fundamentally ill conceived. The House of Commons may think that where the committee has decided that someone should be sent away from the House for more than 10 days, that should start the procedure. However, it would have been better simply to have gone to the point of creating the by-election that would inevitably follow. It would save a lot of time, bureaucracy and cost, as well as a lot of grief and further damage to the standing of the House of Commons and the status of Parliament.

Wales: Devolution

Debate between Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Lord Howarth of Newport

Thursday 19th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, I welcomed the establishment of the Silk commission, but the terms of reference given to it by the Secretary of State are in some respects ill judged. The commission is tasked to consider issues of accountability but not of fairness. The block grant and the Barnett formula, along with the system and structure of democratic representation in Wales, are off limits. The commission is required to consider fiscal matters before it considers constitutional matters when the nature of political and legislative devolution should, I think, determine the appropriate fiscal devolution.

The Barnett formula provides nearly 50% of public expenditure resources in Wales. It is comprehensively discredited. This was stressed in the Welsh Government’s response to the Silk commission consultation, and a while ago a Select Committee of your Lordships’ House provided a comprehensive and devastating analysis of the inadequacies of the Barnett formula. The funding provided by the Treasury to Wales is computed on the basis of changes to spending in England in policy areas that are devolved to Wales and the extent to which they are devolved to Wales, and on the size of the population relative to that of England. So resources provided to Wales follow political decisions and events that occur in England. Notoriously, the Barnett formula is not a needs-based formula, in contrast to the principles on which resources are allocated to local government, social security spending and health spending. The Barnett formula is bizarre and unjust, and it makes a mockery of the principle of devolution. The effect of per capita funding under the formula has been what the noble Baroness referred to as the Barnett squeeze. Wales receives less than if it were an English region. GDP per capita in Wales in 2007 was 77% of the UK average, but Wales received only 8% above the UK average. Holtham, which examined these matters pretty definitively, found that Wales had relative need of 115 per capita on a scale in which England was 100. Wales is poorer on all the significant indices: unemployment, child poverty, social security claims, disability, housing, education, health and mortality.

Poor people in Wales, including unemployed under-25 year-olds in the Alway and Ringland estates in Newport, whom the Prime Minister thinks ought, in due course, to cease to have housing benefit, are subsiding Scots living in wealthy suburbs. Holtham told us that Wales, which has less than 6% of the population of England, is short-changed by a figure in the order of £300 million. I cannot overstate the importance of this issue to Wales. There is no statutory basis for the Barnett formula, which is opaque in its process and has no independent audit—it is a disgrace.

The Government have hitherto set their face against change to the Barnett formula. Why? For reasons of political cowardice? The Conservative Party had nothing to lose in 2010, when it was set on finding every means possible to reduce the deficit, by tackling the problem of the overpayment of some £4 billion to £5 billion to Scotland under the Barnett formula, but mysteriously it did not do so. Was it because Liberal Democrats representing Scottish constituencies held it to ransom or is it simply a product of intellectual indolence in the Treasury?

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

I agree with almost everything the noble Lord says, but in fairness he ought to deal with the point that the Select Committee report was to the previous Labour Government, who were equally unwilling to address this issue.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

The noble Lord has, as so often, a telling point. I do not disagree with him at all. I am pleased that discussions are now taking place between the Government of the United Kingdom and the Government of Wales. I hope that they will be fruitful, because for Wales reform of the Barnett formula is more important and urgent than any fiscal devolution. At a very minimum, as the noble Baroness said, there should be a floor in the block grant so that it does not fall below the level that would be provided under the English needs formulae. Of course, we need a properly developed needs-based formula for the block grant.

The coalition is obsessed with cutting public expenditure, deflating an already depressed economy. These issues are hugely important for Wales.

It is right in principle that if legislative powers are devolved, then tax-raising powers ought also to be devolved, including a power to vary levels of taxation. This satisfies the principle of accountability and will make for more responsibility and better value for money. It is appropriate that a Government elected by the people of Wales should have discretion to use resources as they judge appropriate for the benefit of the people of Wales. As the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, suggested too, these considerations ought to have been brought to bear at the very outset of the process of devolution.

What, however, would happen in practice if tax-raising powers were devolved? Wales needs more public expenditure or, at any rate, a less drastic reduction in public expenditure. It needs that if it is ultimately to be able to reduce the disproportionate size of the public sector in Wales. It needs to be able to invest in education and infrastructure and in a strategy to support the development of new leading private enterprise sectors in Wales. What Wales does not need is more and extra taxes laid upon people and businesses. I do not think anybody in Wales ought to nurse the illusion that the block grant would rise to compensate for tax cuts that might be introduced under fiscal devolution in Wales.

So, which taxes ought to be considered? Income tax is perhaps the prime candidate, but the power to raise or lower income tax by 3p in the pound would be a poisoned chalice. The Government of Wales have not sought that power. No doubt they would not refuse it if it were thrust upon them, but would they use it? I think it no more likely that the Government of Wales would than the Government of Scotland.

Then there is corporation tax, but there are problems defining Welsh companies. Holtham found that the only realistic way in which one might be able to devolve powers in relation to corporation tax in Wales was by reference to the number of people employed by Welsh businesses, but we do not want to create an incentive for Welsh employers to reduce the number of people that they employ. There is a broader principle. Competition between the territories of the United Kingdom to offer a lower rate of corporation tax might well not be in the interests of the United Kingdom as a whole.

I will not run over the whole litany of alternative taxes that noble Lords have already mentioned, but if there is to be fiscal devolution then choices have to be made from among the options of business rates, council tax on second homes, stamp duty land tax, capital gains tax on land and property, landfill, aggregates levy, air passenger duty, and so forth. If we examine the scope to use such devolved powers, we again run up against the problem that tax increases would be damaging to business and prosperity in Wales. The Welsh Local Government Association is right to insist that there needs to be a rigorous examination of the merits of devolving any one of these.

Borrowing powers seems a much simpler issue, whether for capital or to offset the volatility of revenue that would be consequent on Wales setting its own tax levels, but this is also excluded from the terms of reference of Silk. It was not, however, excluded from Silk’s consultation, nor from the responses. It is more attractive, but would Welsh Government bonds be underwritten by the Government of the United Kingdom? Is it realistic to suppose that there can be Keynesianism in one small country called Wales? How can fiscal devolution be a reality within a meaningful macroeconomic strategy for the United Kingdom?

The terms of reference of the Silk commission are very restricted on constitutional matters. I simply say that the constitutional matter that is most pressing and important for the people of Wales is the representation of the people of Wales in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The coalition has legislated to reduce the number of Westminster constituencies for Wales by 25%. The voice and the votes of the people of Wales are to be very substantially reduced, as is the quality of the representation of the people of Wales because of the absurd exigencies of the redrawing of the boundaries. Therefore, I hope that Welsh Liberal Democrat MPs will not hesitate to vote down the proposals to reduce the number of constituencies.

I hope also that people in Wales will consider the issue of an elected second Chamber because if there are to be Senators for one vast Welsh constituency, wandering round undermining the work of Assembly Members and Welsh Members of Parliament without any accountability, and they are to be Members of a second Chamber that is going to be much more assertive in fiscal matters, then they will find that this reform is travelling in the very opposite direction of the devolution that they want.

The proper considerations are how to improve the accountability of the Welsh Government; how to provide funding commensurate with the responsibilities that are devolved, having first defined those; how to ensure a fairness of distribution of money across the United Kingdom; and how to strengthen, not weaken, the coherence of representative government across the United Kingdom. Is there any resting point for devolution? These are issues for everyone, not just for the people of Wales.

Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Debate between Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Lord Howarth of Newport

Tuesday 29th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

Perhaps I have this wrong, but my understanding of the present position is that the Government may be defeated on a serious matter such as whether to go to war and may take the view that it is not a confidence motion. However, in such circumstances, the leader of the Opposition would table a confidence motion, which takes precedence over all business. If there is an argument about whether the issue is a confidence motion, it is up to the Opposition to bring forward a confidence motion on which there will be a vote, so why is this such a big problem?

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

I would very much like to be comforted by the noble Lord’s suggestion, but we are in an evolving state of affairs. I am not as confident as he is that the traditional formulations and conventions will necessarily be the only ones that the public will find acceptable in the future.

We have to think of what the role of the Speaker will be when it is contentious whether a particular vote may have this status. Let us imagine what would have happened if the Speaker had been required to issue a certificate as to whether, on 18 March 2003, the House of Commons had passed a motion of no confidence in Mr Blair’s Government, had that Government been defeated in the vote on the Iraq war. Mr Blair said later that he regarded that vote as a confidence vote, and that had he been defeated he would have resigned. How could the Speaker have certified in advance in those circumstances when the Prime Minister himself had not made it clear in advance that that was to be a confidence motion?

However, that is what the Minister, Mr Harper, confidently expects would happen. He said to the Constitution Committee:

“Our view is that the Speaker would make it very clear before such a vote took place whether it was a vote on which he would issue his certificate”.