Budget Statement

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Friday 12th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I echo what has been said by three noble Lords: the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, on our procedures; my noble friend Lord Shipley on regional importance; and, in particular, my noble friend Lady Scott of Needham Market on the importance of town and parish councils, and the way they are being significantly sidelined by the Government.

I have asked various questions of the Government on financial support for town and parish councils. I keep being told that the Government have no powers to support them. I find this extremely unlikely but, if that is true, it needs changing. In particular, they need funding schemes for investment projects that they cannot raise council tax for, as an important part of the levelling-up process. In many parts of the country, we are seeing local governments evolving; towns are again exerting themselves, developing a civic importance and becoming a centre of civic pride, which they have not had for quite a long time—particularly in places where large unitary authorities have been created.

Town councils are taking on ever more services and facilities, some of which are as large as the previous boroughs and urban districts that used to exist before 1974. The so-called red wall seats include many of these towns. It is town councils, with the focus of local involvement, civic dedication and commitment, which will be so important in these places. The Government need to look very hard indeed at how they support them in all the facilities and services they are increasingly getting involved in and taking over.

Essential Services: Large-scale Technology

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Tuesday 12th January 2021 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Greaves]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what risk assessment they have undertaken of the reliance of (1) the economy, and (2) society, on the use of large- scale technology for the provision of essential services.

[The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Lord True) (Con)]

My Lords, the critical national infrastructure includes elements of infrastructure that are critical to the availability, delivery and integrity of essential services necessary for the United Kingdom to function and on which daily life depends. The CNI comprises 13 sectors, each with a lead government department responsible for identifying elements of its sector’s infrastructure.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greaves (LD) [V]]

My Lords, that was interesting. Modern technology has created amazing and beneficial things but has also resulted in a huge increase in the size and scale of operations, not least in such areas as power generation and supply, transportation networks and, of course, digital systems through the internet. It has also increased centralisation in top-down networks, where major technology or human failures may have catastrophic consequences. Do the Government agree that there must be a radical redesign of our economy and society in order to build in qualities of resilience, recovery and survival, re-engineering systems on the basis of bottom-up and modular operation at as local a level as possible?

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord makes some important points of which the Government are aware. I refer to lead government departments and their responsibilities. They are tasked to undertake a review of all the critical national infrastructure sectors to ensure that understanding of what is critical and of risk is up to date and relevant. The review is ongoing, with each lead government department identifying the assets and systems which are essential.

EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Friday 8th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD) [V]]

My Lords, we are where we are, and it is perhaps time to take an overview of things. The Minister who introduced this debate, rather a long time ago, said that it was going to be a new chapter for “global Britain”, yet the trade deals that we have had so far are mainly no more than copy-and-paste jobs from existing EU agreements. The noble Lord, Lord Bridges of Headley, tried to give a better overview; he said it was a choice between paddling our own canoe and continuing in the EU’s wake, and we must answer that question now. It seems to me that neither of those options is terribly attractive.

This is surely an opportunity to start to reset our economy and our trade. The first general point that I want to make is that we ought to have less trade. That is perhaps controversial, but the idea that our future rests with more and more trade with the other side of the world, whether with China, Singapore, east Asia or Japan, is undesirable. Flying food around the world to the extent that we do is environmentally undesirable. While I am about this, it is time that we stopped exporting waste from this country to the far side of Asia—south Asia and elsewhere—which is just a disgrace.

Secondly, I suggest that it is time to radically restructure our economy and move towards what people call a circular economy rather than one that uses vast amounts of resources and throws a lot of them away. It is time to take economics as a practical discipline away from sterile economic algorithms and put it at the service of people and the environment—what the economist Kate Raworth calls doughnut economics. It is time that we changed what we did and how we do it. This is an opportunity.

Parliamentary Constituencies Bill

Lord Greaves Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I am not grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, for reminding noble Lords that it is my birthday, but I thank him for the commemoration anyway. At my age, I try to forget about it. I agree entirely with my noble friends Lord Tyler and Lord Rennard, so I will try not to repeat what they said. I have to say to the Labour Party that, if we want, we could spend the whole of the Bill refighting battles and arguments from 2011. I do not think that would be useful, because we need to co-operate to scrutinise carefully the legislation that the present Government are putting forward. That requires us to work together.

The 2011 legislation, the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act, was a shambles in almost every respect—while it was taking place, in this House and in the way it came out, on all sides. We should learn from that. It teaches a great deal of lessons that are not for today about how to work coalitions, should there ever be another one, and their internal workings. The shambles were a direct result of the internal structure of the coalition, which was far too top-down and dependent on negotiations and deals done between two people, who did not know much about many of the things they were dealing with.

The 5% is important. I have no problems with the Bill increasing the number of constituencies back to 650. I have no problems with 650, and could not understand why everybody was getting so worked up and agitated about the difference between 600 and 650. If people want to reduce it to 300 or 350, it would be something to talk about. I would not agree, but it would be an argument worth fighting if you did. This 600 to 650 is neither here nor there, nor worth talking about.

However, it will not help in Lancashire, where the two proposals were both very similar. People are restricted to 5% and, because they had to start somewhere—and they started on the coast and came inland—by the time they got to the Pennines, it was a complete botch-up. Since we will probably lose a seat because of the changes from present, I do not think it will make much difference. We can talk about that in Committee. I have used up my time. All I will say is: if we and the Labour Party want something sensible from the Bill, let us work together.

Finance Bill

Lord Greaves Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard) & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee negatived (Hansard) & Committee negatived (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 17th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

What a lot of good sense, my Lords.

The noble Baroness, Lady Verma, is in Leicester, which is having difficulties, and asked if there is any money left in the local authority coffers. I rise to tell her that there is not, and to talk about local government. I declare my interests, having been a local councillor in the Pendle area for most of the last half-century. Pendle is now working hard to avoid imposing a Leicester-type lockdown.

The Local Government Association estimates that the cost to local government of coronavirus will be about £7 billion. That is the shortfall after all the grants so far announced by the Government. One of the real problems is that the Government are not fully funding lost income. For the council in Pendle, of which I am a member, the overall cost for that small district is about £3 million, of which the Government have so far provided about £1 million, leaving a shortfall of £2 million. That may not sound a lot, but that is on this year’s budget of about £13.5 million, and so is a very substantial amount on top of all the cuts made in the last few years, which have cut council finances to the bone.

There are two specific grouses as far as we are concerned. The test and trace funding is going only to upper-tier local authorities in a shire county such as ours, whereas a lot of the hard work has to be done by the people on the ground: the district council environmental health officers and the public health staff, with the expertise and the local knowledge. In Lancashire, the money for the hubs which were set up to help people who could not afford food and other essentials during the worst of the lockdown goes to the county but is being spent by the district.

Finally, the cost to parish and town councils, particularly the big ones that provide leisure services and so on, has been very substantial. They are being left out altogether. Local government needs the shortfall of £7 billion to be addressed. The Government promised that they would provide whatever was needed. We are still waiting.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Duncan of Springbank) (Con)]

I am sure the House will join me in wishing a very happy birthday to the next speaker, the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes.

Social Housing

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I remind the House that I am a district councillor in Lancashire, and I too used to be chairman of the housing committee. I agree with every word that the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, said, and am absolutely sure I would have agreed with every word he would have said in his last four minutes.

For all the faults of local authorities over the years and some of the major mistakes that were made, council housing is one of the great success stories of the last century. The more that that is said, the better. I remember when social housing was a new term introduced from America and we did not like it, because in America it meant housing for the down and outs and people at the bottom of the pile. The problem, as some people have said, is that that is what it is turning into in many places in this country. Council housing at its best was housing run by and provided by the local community for the local community. It provided so many families with a decent quality of life.

The same was true of local housing associations when they started. They were set up as locally controlled and relatively small, providing for local needs. Nowadays, a lot of housing associations have simply turned into large non-profit-making housing companies. Why it is thought that affordable and social housing should be provided by companies like this, rather than by democratically elected local authorities, is a mystery to me. Yet many local authorities, including my own I regret to say, were bribed and bullied—by the Labour Government in our case—into a stock transfer to a housing association. We were bribed because of the vast amount of money the Government gave us. Some of it was for housing improvement, renovation and repairs, which was fine, but a lot of it was just money handed out to the council to bribe us to do it. We were bullied into doing it because, if we did not, we would not even get the money to repair the housing. Initially, it was okay, and it was a local housing association with local representation, but it has now become part of a large north of England housing company.

There are two major scandals associated with this. One is the fact that something like two out of five houses—probably more now—sold under right to buy are owned by private landlords. This is not a property-owning democracy where people own their houses under owner-occupation. It is simply a policy of the Tories handing over all this stuff to their mates and to private landlords. I have mates who are private landlords, and there are lots of good ones. But the large private landlord companies, particularly in the big cities, are responsible for a shocking deterioration in the housing stock occupied by the poorest people.

I do not have time to discuss the second scandal, the question of land, but it was referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield, and the noble Lord, Lord Best. Until the question of land is sorted out—in the cost of a new house in London and the south-east, something like 70% or more of that is for land; it is payment for nothing other than the uplift to the people who own the land—it will remain an absolute disgrace. The land ought to belong to the people. It does not, but we need some policies that move in that direction.

Constitutional Convention

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, is one of the nicest and most sensible Members of the House—of his party anyway—and he will be very much missed.

I will talk about the north of England. It is the second region of England after London and the south-east together, and has 15 million people—three times as many as Scotland and five times as many as Wales. It is a region that shares considerable cultural, economic and social cohesion and history, and many current problems. I speak about the north as a whole because the north should stand together as a whole.

What we have had so far is asymmetric devolution. Scotland, and to a lesser extent Wales have become increasingly fairly fully functioning units of a federal system, except there is no federal system for them to be the units of. This is not a system that is sustainable in the long run. We still have a highly centralised state, not least in England, with a number of peripheral anomalies. If I call Wales and Scotland peripheral anomalies, I do so with great admiration that they have been able to break free from the grip of London to the extent that they have. Then we have gimmicks such as EVEL.

We have people who believe that the answer is a fully federal system with an English Parliament, but the result of that would be the complete detachment of Scotland and Wales in due course and it would do nothing to change the concentration of economic and political power within England. We have had a series of feeble initiatives. There was the rather pathetic attempt of the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, when he was in the other place, to have a north-east England assembly with no powers, which was rightly rejected. In Labour’s regional offices, civil servants from different parts sat in the same building, usually on different floors, and talked to their bosses in London rather than to each other. There was the coalition’s regional growth fund and its local enterprise partnerships—nobody has really noticed that they exist.

The north of England is being fragmented into city regions in the name of devolution, but it is not devolution: it is almost entirely the reorganisation of local government. It is the concentration of power within local government, with all power going to the big cities, but what is that except the power for those involved to carry begging bowls on the train to Whitehall and Westminster and, if they are lucky, to go home with their railway fares? In so far as power is being concentrated in big cities through city regions and mayors, the people who suffer in the north of England are those in the areas on the edges and the places in between and particularly towns, which have lost so much of their civic culture, power and society in recent years.

However, we are getting a greater recognition of the north of England as a region in its own right, not fragmented into three or four different regions, but as a unit. We also have the northern powerhouse. It was a slogan invented by George Osborne when he was Chancellor, but it has resulted in meetings, conferences, projects and all sorts of things. It has resulted in the relabelling as northern powerhouse projects of projects that would have been happening anyway, but it might have some value in the recognition it has encouraged of the north of England.

Transport for the North is far more important. Here is a devolved transport body which has real powers. It still has to go with a begging bowl to London for pretty well everything but, nevertheless, it is a body with powers, it covers the north of England, and transport is perhaps the place to start. Network Rail and NHS England both have a director for the north; we have the Northern Housing Consortium; the IPPR has set up IPPR North, a dedicated think tank for the north of England; the Northern Powerhouse Partnership has meetings and, no doubt, lots of pleasant dinners; and we are told there is Northern Powerhouse Rail, whatever that turns out to be in the long run. The Mayor of Liverpool has said he is fed up with it all because there is no power: these groups put forward good proposals to London for why things should be set up and funded, and London says, “Well, you can have a bit of it”. It is not very satisfactory. He says the Northern Powerhouse Partnership was,

“set up by a Government which isn’t prepared to listen”.

The begging-bowl mentality continues.

I believe the future lies in devolution to the north of England, with a body which, in an asymmetric system—inevitably, as the legal and other systems are different—can stand alongside Wales, Scotland and, indeed, Northern Ireland, if it can ever get its act together again. The proposal for a UK convention, or even an English convention, is worth while, but what is needed before any national convention can take place is a convention of people in the north of England. It is time for those of us in the north of England to get together, sit together across the whole of the north of England, and work out the options for what we would like. This should be discussed by the people of the north of England; we would then come to a national convention and say, “This is what we want”. That is what Scotland did; it is what the north of England has to do. It requires a considerable change of attitude, not just by central Government but by people across the north.

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, I too pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, for a remarkable parliamentary career. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Greaves. I should reveal that, nearly 50 years ago, he was chair of the National League of Young Liberals and I was one of his very independently minded national officers, whom he had to control, mostly unsuccessfully—

[Lord Greaves]

I remind the noble Lord that he put out press releases in my name, which I had to forget about afterwards.

[Lord Hain]

That is what I meant, my Lords. I believe that, without wide-ranging constitutional reform, the very future of the United Kingdom is imperilled, not least by the strong possibility of Brexit triggering Scottish secession, and even Northern Irish secession through a referendum provided for under the Good Friday agreement.

One way to address this is through the new Act of Union Bill in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, printed on 9 October and available in the Printed Paper Office. It offers the holistic approach advocated, I believe, by the noble Lord, Lord Norton. As Members of your Lordships’ House may be aware, it is the product of discussions in the Constitution Reform Group, a cross-party group to reform the relationship between the nations and regions of the United Kingdom, which was launched in 2015 and on which I sit.

Until now, the main pressure for reform has come from Labour, Liberals, Greens and radical constitutionalists. But the CRG was initiated by leading Conservatives and is chaired by the noble Marquess of Salisbury, the former Conservative Leader of your Lordships’ House. Also on the steering committee is the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, former Clerk of the Commons, former parliamentary counsel Daniel Greenberg, Paul Silk, former Clerk to the Welsh Assembly and before that himself a Commons clerk, and the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Pittenweem, representing the Liberal Democrats. Joined by me from Labour on the steering committee is Lisa Nandy MP, who is doing some very interesting work on towns and their alienation, both economic and political, in our current culture.

We have identified important areas for reform and have suggested different options. These include addressing the asymmetrical devolution that has left England with an understandable grievance—not just on the political right—as the most centralised and therefore disenfranchised part of the UK, London excepted. As has been said, the introduction of English votes for English laws procedures in the House of Commons is an unsatisfactory symptom of this.

I believe that England outside London should have a permissive form of devolution, enabling regional government or city regional government to evolve as desired. Given the opportunity, Cornwall and the north-east would almost certainly go for regional government right now, to be followed perhaps by others, maybe with Yorkshire leading the way. However, crucially, these bodies must have real power, not the Mickey Mouse powers offered in 2004, which were defeated in the north-east referendum in which I campaigned.

On the House of Lords, some on the steering committee suggest that it should be abolished and replaced by an elected English Parliament. However, representing 85% of the population, it would be so dominant that it would effectively replace the Commons as the fulcrum of Parliament, sidelining Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland even more and thereby promoting separatism. My own view is that a senate or House of Lords should be majority-elected on the same day as a general election, ideally by a list system of proportional representation on the same boundaries as apply to European elections. That would enable each of the nations and regions within the United Kingdom to be properly represented, helping bind us back together again in a way that both Houses of Parliament have palpably failed to do.

However, a new settlement must not be drawn up—still less imposed—from on high. There must be wide consultation, as my noble friend Lord Foulkes has argued, through a constitutional convention similar to the one that successfully preceded devolution in Scotland.

It is not simply Scottish antipathy, Northern Irish instability or English discontent that threaten the future of the United Kingdom; there is now a widespread sentiment across the great majority of our citizens that our democratic system no longer represents their interests.

The Act of Union Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, addresses the main issues at stake, from finance to security. Crucially, it proposes a bottom-up rather than the top-down arrangement that we have had until now. It turns the devolution settlement on its head by creating a new federal structure in which the constituent parts or nations voluntarily vest the sovereignty they choose at the centre—for example, for foreign, defence and security, taxation and pensions matters. Otherwise, every policy area remains with them.

Our society today is hugely polarised by bitter Brexit divisions, towns left behind as metropolitan cities forge ahead, with never-ending austerity and widening inequality. The new Act of Union Bill does not and cannot address all the issues breeding these serious divisions, but it is an important start, because the bell is otherwise tolling for the United Kingdom as it is now.

Employee Shareholding and Participation in Corporate Governance

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 11th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Haskel, on getting this short debate on a topic that is suddenly topical again, quite rightly. The Question refers to two different ways to involve employees in the bodies they work for: greater employee shareholding and participation in corporate governance, which together might loosely be called industrial democracy. I believe they go together.

If we believe in the importance of individual people’s ability to control their lives autonomously but co-operating with other people in society in communities—this is fundamental to my political beliefs as a Liberal—this is a vital issue. Discussion of it has waxed and waned during my lifetime. Unfortunately, there has been a long period of quiescence, both in my party, the Liberal Democrats, and more generally, but in my lifetime it has ranged across the political spectrum, from the Liberal party, the Industrial Co-partnership Association, now the Involvement and Partnership Association, the Co-operative movement generally, the Institute for Workers’ Control, the Employee Ownership Association—I mention that as a plug for a wonderful pamphlet that has just been written by my noble friend Lady Bowles; perhaps she will refer to it in her speech—and, most recently, the announcements from John McDonnell, which have plonked this issue firmly back on the political agenda. He is to be congratulated on doing that.

I have some quotes that show how it has spread across the political spectrum. The Institute for Workers’ Control marched under a banner saying:

“No man is good enough to be another man’s master”.


Who can disagree with that? But look at the way we run society. The foreword of a report on the Liberal co-ownership proposals in 1948 was written by that great Yorkshire Liberal Elliott Dodds, who referred to,

“the saving sense of proprietorship”,

which says the same thing in rather different language. He goes on to write:

“This can be done in one way and in one way only—by laying it down that they shall have the opportunity to share in the direction and fortunes of the enterprises”,


in which they are employed. The motion passed at the 1948 Liberal Party assembly—before even my time—said that the employee is,

“to be entitled to elected representation on the board of directors”.

So the idea has been around for a long time, across the political spectrum.

At the first election I fought, unsuccessfully, in February 1974, the Liberal Party election manifesto said:

“Firstly, employees must become members of their companies just as shareholders are, with the same clearly defined right. Secondly, it must be accepted that directors in public companies are equally responsible to shareholders and employees. Employees must be entitled to share in the election of the directors on equal terms with shareholders”.


The high-water mark of the campaign for this kind of thing was the Bullock report in January 1977, the report of the Committee of Inquiry on Industrial Democracy, chaired by Lord Alan Bullock, which included such luminaries as Jack Jones, Clive Jenkins and one David Lea, now the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, who I look forward to hearing later. This was a thoroughgoing statement of co-partnership. The politics of that time meant that it did not succeed, but the majority report, at chapter 9, paragraph 13, reads:

“Our conclusion is therefore that there should be equal representation of employees and shareholders on company boards”.


There are lots of questions in the modern age relating to multinational companies, the global economic and financial environment, the flexible economy, the gig economy, bogus self-employment and all the rest, and how you deal with the public sector. I believe that this is a topic whose time has come again, both for employee share ownership and involvement that way, and involvement in the institutions of the companies. We had a letter this morning from the noble Lord, Lord McFall, the Senior Deputy Speaker, asking for ideas for a special inquiry committee for 2019-20. This is a brilliant topic on which the House of Lords could do a lot of useful work and I invite everybody here who is interested in the topic to write to the noble Lord, Lord McFall, and suggest that he put it forward.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, we are constrained on time and I urge all noble Lords to participate in the corporate governance of the House and stick to four minutes.

Housing: Availability and Affordability

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 12th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, that was an interesting speech and an interesting view of the future but not one that we share. However, I agreed with a substantial amount of what the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Leigh, said, and I thank him for introducing this debate. I remind the House of my local government interest as a member of a housing authority.

Year after year the Government say that they want to build more houses. However, they do not succeed; indeed, in recent years the situation has got worse. The philosophy is wrong, the analysis is wrong and the solutions are wrong. They continue to be wrong and things are not going to improve on the basis of present policy.

One real problem common to all Governments is that they are addicted to the idea of one policy fitting all—top-down rules, top-down planning and top-down restrictions. They do not allow local authorities and local people to get on with doing things appropriately in their areas, and it does not work. Then they always blame the planning system. I keep saying in your Lordships’ House that the plan-making part of the planning system is bust, but that is very largely due to the ever-growing plethora of top-down restrictions, top-down instructions and top-down attempted control by central government—something that we are now seeing again. By and large, the blame does not, in my view, lie with the development control system. Local authorities give planning permission for new housing and that new housing simply is not taken up. It is estimated that nearly 700,000 planning permissions have not been carried through.

Then we have council housing. We have a continuing central prejudice against local authorities buying and owning houses. The noble Lord, Lord Smith, referred to Harold Macmillan. Harold Wilson, who followed some time later as Prime Minister, used to refer to the 13 wasted Tory years in the 1950s and early 1960s, but those were the years when huge numbers of council houses were built. Building all those council houses was one of the greatest improvements made in the last century to the lives of ordinary people in this country. Yet we cannot do it anymore. We might refer to the 13 wasted Labour years we had before 2010, when the building of council houses dried up.

Why is this? Why is there such a prejudice against local authorities centrally? It is accepted that local authorities are the most efficient part of the public sector, and certainly the most democratic part. There is the problem, because democracy results in diversity: people do different things in different areas and solve problems in different ways. The civil servants and their ministerial colleagues at the centre simply do not like that, because it is out of their control.

A consultation is ongoing on Planning for the Right Homes in the Right Places. I keep reading and trying to understand this 60-page document in which the Government are offering to impose new housing numbers on local authorities. These local authorities have all established or are developing local plans and have worked out their housing numbers, and now they are all to be changed. Some will go up and some will go down. These are the numbers that the Government say will have to apply in each local authority, and yet they will not apply until there is a review of established local plans. That is nonsense. There will be a figure in the local plan, which everybody is using, and another figure handed down by the Government. In some places, such as my own authority in Pendle, the Government’s figures will be considerably lower than those in the local plan. In many other places, they will be higher.

Imagine the chaos that this will cause at planning inquiries when people appeal against the refusal of planning permission. Imagine the anger when local authorities say that they have to give planning permission for extra houses in the local plan, even though the Government are saying that the number might be half or two-thirds of what the plan states. There will be complete chaos. This is total madness.

How these numbers have been worked out is a mystery. The consultation document talks about a proposed approach to calculating the local housing need and to viability assessment; proposed numbers for housing growth, which can change radically from year to year; and something called the “median affordability ratio”. I do not know whether the Minister understands the median affordability ratio; I have tried to and I do not. I cannot imagine people walking down the street saying, “Have you heard the latest about the median affordability ratio? It’s a disgrace. What are we going to do about it?”. This is the kind of thing that brings government and local authorities into disrepute.

I say trust the locals. There is growing evidence around the development of neighbourhood plans that if you give local people the power to work out the future housing numbers and where they should be, they will suggest building more houses than the local plans say. Give local people and local authorities the power to work out what is needed in their area, in the light of the plans for those areas and what the people think is right, and they will provide the houses. All this detailed, top-down technical planning that changes year after year causes complete chaos.

Local Government Elections

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Greaves]

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of whether the law relating to local government elections is in need of improvement or clarification.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I want to concentrate on the offence of treating, which is a corrupt practice under Section 114 of the Representation of the People Act 1983. Subsection (2) says:

“A person shall be guilty of treating if he corruptly, by himself or by any other person, either before, during or after an election, directly or indirectly gives or provides, or pays wholly or in part the expense of giving or providing, any meat, drink, entertainment or provision to or for any person—(a) for the purpose of corruptly influencing that person or any other person to vote or refrain from voting; or (b) on account of that person or any other person having voted or refrained from voting, or being about to vote or refrain from voting”.


Subsection (3) extends the offence to:

“Every elector or his proxy who corruptly accepts or takes any such meat, drink, entertainment or provision”.


This wording has been passed down from the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act 1883. The last case law appears to be more than 100 years old. My reason for raising this is to suggest that this 19th century law as it stands is antiquated, uncertain and not fit for purpose in the 21st century.

Over half a century ago, when I learned the trade of running election campaigns, treating was taken very seriously. Candidates and agents were firmly instructed to make sure that any food or refreshments—in committee rooms, for example—were strictly for bona fide party workers and a small contribution should be asked for. Candidates were told to be careful about buying rounds in the pub during the campaign. But the practice has now grown of providing free food, including hot dinners, both in walk-in committee rooms and at public meetings addressed by candidates and their supporters before and during elections, notably in places with large numbers of electors of south Asian heritage. My immediate interest comes from activities carried out by two Conservative candidates in Pendle in the county council elections in May this year.

In brief, the events concerned were that four public meetings were held before the formal four-week election period started but after the candidates had been announced in press releases and the local press, on social media and in leaflets distributed in the area. At these meetings speeches were made by the candidates and other persons in support, including councillors and the local MP, urging people to vote for them. A hot dinner was then provided to the people present, free of charge, including curry and rice and soft drinks. In total, at least 1,000 people attended these meetings, most of them electors in the two divisions. Other than a small number of party officials and councillors, all the people present were Asian men. We estimate that the cost of providing the accommodation and meals and associated publicity, including leaflets, would not have been less than £3,000, and possibly rather more.

I made a complaint under Section 114 and provided a dossier of evidence, which the Lancashire police investigated, and I have no complaints about the work they put into that. I quote the conclusion from a letter that the investigating officer kindly sent to me:

“Unfortunately the decision has been taken that the matter will not be prosecuted due to a lack of evidence. It was deemed that the evidential threshold required to present the case to the Crown Prosecution Service for them to consider charges had not been met”.


He goes on to say:

“As I think we alluded to when we first met, this particular offence presents some unusual hurdles in terms of prosecuting”—


noble Lords will probably realise that I knew more about it than the police did at the time—

“and I found myself hitting these hurdles at regular intervals when looking at the matter through evidential eyes. I agree with your initial observation some three months ago, that perhaps this is an area of law that requires some modernisation”.

The Law Commission agrees. In its report Electoral Law: An Interim Report, published in February 2016 and produced together with its Scottish and Northern Irish counterparts, it proposes in Recommendation 11.3:

“The electoral offence of treating should be abolished and the behaviour that it captures should where appropriate be prosecuted as bribery”.


This follows a discussion about a similar situation which was considered by commissioner Richard Mawrey QC in the Tower Hamlets petition. It challenged the election in May 2014 of Lutfur Rahman as mayor of Tower Hamlets. Similar difficulties arose at that time over the offence of treating, described by commissioner Mawrey as,

“surely an obsolescent if not obsolete concept in the modern world”.

The treating part was then dropped. The Electoral Commission in its response to the whole report said:

“We very much welcome these proposals and believe that they will address many of the difficulties with the current law. It is important that the UK and Scottish Governments now agree that the Law Commissions can begin preparing draft legislation to implement these changes”.


Yet the problem remains, and I am not in any way suggesting that it is a problem for just one party. From inquiries I have made around the country in recent years, it is clear that putting on quite large amounts of free food at public events is a common practice across the parties in areas with large numbers of Asian voters. Of course, outside elections this is not unlawful. It is when it is done in connection with the promotion of candidates that it is at the least questionable. They are practices which have been imported into this country from abroad. The fact that it is happening will raise eyebrows in those other parts of the country where such practices would be regarded with horror. Imagine a candidate hiring a village hall and inviting the entire population of the village to a free dinner on the condition that the villagers listen to speeches telling them why they should vote for him or her. They would, I suggest, soon be up before the beak.

The Electoral Commission in its candidates guide states that,

“treating requires a corrupt intent—it does not apply to ordinary hospitality”.

What is meant by ordinary hospitality? Presumably if a neighbour calls on a candidate at home, it is okay to provide a cup of tea or even a full tea if they are friends who ordinarily do that, but not to invite the whole street for the first time three days before polling day. So is a hot curry dinner for a few hundred people “ordinary hospitality”? Among much ambiguity in this law, the interpretation of the undefined words “corrupt” and “corrupt intent” appear to cause problems. They imply an intention to affect the outcome of the election, but this is far from the clarity that good law requires.

Returning to the hot curry dinners targeted at Asian electors, the College of Policing authorised professional practice manual, Policing Elections—Investigating Electoral Malpractice includes the following:

“Cultural factors can affect this offence in that among many cultures the provision of refreshments is considered to be socially acceptable, and it would be perceived as an insult should refreshments not be provided”.


This seems very close to suggesting that electoral law is different according to the composition of the local community. If you live in a mainly indigenous village or a mainly white town such as Colne, where I live, and you put on free meals for voters, you will be locked up. If you live in a strongly Asian area and provide those meals for Asian electors, or even just for Asian men, as in Pendle, MPs and councillors will turn up and you will get away with it. I wonder whether this advice from the College of Policing has government support and should perhaps now be reviewed.

The law on treating is not fit for purpose. It is antique and it is not clear what it means. It is not clear that a law that was designed to prevent candidates providing food, drink, entertainment and provisions—whatever that means—to voters in the days of Mr Gladstone is able to deal with modern phenomena such as piles of chapattis in committee rooms open to the public to walk in and eat, and hot curry dinners open to anyone who walks in. Above all, candidates and agents in all kinds of areas need to know clearly where they stand with the law. I am not an election agent at the moment but I declare an interest, as I usually am every year. With tongue in cheek, I say that if the provision of hot dinners to voters on a large scale is now acceptable in electoral law, the nature of elections in this country might change quite a lot. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.