Charities

Lord Grenfell Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I strongly agree with the noble Baroness. We are also looking at the difficulties of payroll giving. The Government want to encourage it. A small number of, by and large, large companies make that easy for their employees. We would like to see an expansion of payroll giving. The figures suggest that older people are now much more generous than the younger generation, and we do not entirely know the reasons. Again, that is not entirely fitting. I trust that all Members of this House are giving at least 10% of their income to charity.

[Lord Grenfell]

My Lords, I spent some years living in the United States. I was always struck there by the efficacy of the system that they have, in which where contributions to charities are fully deductible. The US Treasury seems to have worked out that the more that is given by individuals, the less the eventual burden on the taxpayers because they are taking up a lot of the strain from the taxpayers. This is not rocket science. Successive Governments here never seem to look at this as a serious proposition. Why not?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I do not entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell. I have a relative in the United States who managed, by making donations of various sorts to his university library, to avoid paying almost any tax the previous year. One wants to encourage people to be generous. The Small Charitable Donations Bill, which we will be dealing with next week, is part of that. We need to consider how one asks for larger donations and makes them tax-beneficial. I remind people that legacies are also important, but a charity which I was talking to last week said that the problem with legacies is that people offer them to you, then stick around for many years.

Draft House of Lords Reform Bill

Lord Grenfell Excerpts

Tuesday 1st May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we will agree to differ and I shall check back. I think that we have changed a great deal since 1999.

Our current position is not sustainable as numbers creep up and habits in the Chamber mutate. If noble Lords were to carry out some of the threats that have been uttered in this debate to wreck the rest of the Government’s legislative programme in order to sabotage proposed reform, then not just the sustainability but perhaps the reputation of this House would be weakened further. We cannot preserve the current House in aspic; it will continue to change and evolve. The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, said that very few of us believe we can remain as we are; the question is which direction we go in terms of reform.

The current proposals have not emerged from nowhere. Since the 1999 changes, Parliament has already devoted more than 140 hours to debating further reform. Shelves of reports—from Wakeham to Cunningham, Mackay of Clashfern and Hunt of Kings Heath—and a succession of Green Papers and White Papers have been produced. Very few arguments have been put forward in this debate which are not already familiar to most of us, and we will return to the topic again in 10 days’ time, when we will be discussing constitutional reform in one form or another in our debate on the Queen’s Speech.

Last week, in addition to reading the Richard report and the alternative report, I reread, for the first time in 40 years, the classic study of academic procrastination, Francis Cornford’s Microcosmographia Academica. This is the volume which first set out the principle of unripe time, the principles of the wedge and the dangerous precedent, and the determination of opponents to die in the last ditch. It was written of course to explain why the Cambridge University Senate so determinedly resisted all proposals for university reform. It says that the most effective means of obstruction is the alternative proposal. It continues:

“This is a form of Red Herring. As soon as three or more alternatives are in the field, there is pretty sure to be a majority against any one of them, and nothing will be done”.

The speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, was an excellent example of the principle of unripe time—that the proposal before us may be right but now is not the right time to accept it. She argued that an elected House is in principle at some point a good thing but only after the economy has recovered, the Scottish issue has been resolved, the relationship between the two Houses clarified and a constitutional convention held. The time was never ripe in the boom years of Labour’s third term in government either, although it might have been thought to be an appropriate time. As Francis Cornford remarked,

“Time, by the way, is like the medlar: it has a trick of going rotten before it is ripe”.

The principle of the wedge has also been used by many.

[Lord Grenfell]

My Lords, the noble Lord is making an assumption when he says that we have to wait until all these problems are solved before we go ahead with Lords reform. That is not what we are saying. Goodness knows, we are not expecting the Government to solve these problems or we shall wait forever to get back to Lords reform. We are saying that it is very strange that, in the coming Session, so much time will be devoted to this when, at the moment, the Government should be focusing on problems which they probably will not be able to solve but on which they should at least be making an effort.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the amount of time in the next Session to be spent on this subject will depend partly on how dispassionately both Houses approach the issue.

On the principle of the wedge, if we accept this, it will be impossible to stop short of further and disastrous consequences: a written constitution, a judicially arbitrated constitution or, as the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, suggested, a republic. Others want a written constitution before we reform the Lords or argue that further reforms will fundamentally alter the nature of Britain. In considering whether this House might introduce an elected Chamber, my noble friend Lord Cormack told us that we are talking about the future of this country.

Alternative proposals have been scattered across the Chamber: an indirectly elected House, the modest reform put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and the noble Lord, Lord Steel, or a full constitutional convention. I was utterly surprised by the enthusiasm expressed around the Chamber for the Steel Bill, given the bitter opposition to so much of it in the Chamber over several years. I am still not sure whether the support has been expressed for the full Steel package or for the emasculated Bill that emerged from Third Reading.

We have had plenty of other arguments against change: constituency competition, the bug bear of former MPs. In one way or another, those of us who live outside the metropolitan south east already play some of those roles and we see them as part of our responsibility within an appointed House. I have been president of my party’s Yorkshire region; I spend time at weekends going to constituencies and conferences; and I run into Peers from other parties at various Yorkshire events. We already fulfil some of those constituency responsibilities.

The issue of costs has been raised. We must be very strict about costs, although if we have to have a referendum we will spend £100 million on it.

Primacy of the Commons is a wonderful obstacle against which one can kick. If necessary, we must do all that we can to defy the will of the Commons in order to preserve its primacy and its financial privilege. Conventions must be written in stone, although the noble Lord, Lord Cunningham, remarked that conventions, of their nature, are not rules and that they must be allowed to evolve and that a concordat between the two Houses would therefore be an appropriate way forward.

I hear some people say that there is not much interest in Lords reform among the public but, nevertheless, there must be a referendum. I respectfully remind Members of this House that one of the most fundamental constitutional changes that we have witnessed since I joined the House is the separation of the judicial function from the legislative function through the establishment of the Supreme Court and that was carried through without a referendum.

Hybridity has been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, as completely unacceptable because it would make the House unworkable. This House has always been hybrid; it consists of Lords Spiritual and Lords Temporal and, when I joined the House, it was partly hereditary and partly appointed. I recall a colleague in the Association of Conservative Peers saying that in the Conservative group the hereditaries referred to the Life Peers as “the day boys”. Only those who have been to boarding school know how dismissive that is; it refers to a subordinate body to the lifers. This would merely be a shift to another form of hybridity.

The argument has been made by the noble Lord, Lord Desai, and by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, that a second Chamber elected on proportional representation might even claim greater legitimacy than the Commons because it would be more fully representative of the opinion of voters as a whole, which suggests that we all prefer a less legitimate voting system than the one that might be used for this House. Above all, we have to wait for a consensus in this House or in the Commons.

EU: Repatriation of Powers

Lord Grenfell Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2011 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Lord Grenfell]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they have agreed a list of powers to be repatriated from the European Union, and, if so, when they expect to launch negotiations with the United Kingdom’s European partners.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Government are committed under the coalition agreement to examining the balance of competences between Britain and the EU. We have made no commitment to a particular outcome of this review. Work on the review has begun and is in its early stages.

[Lord Grenfell]

My Lords, I am relieved to read that the Prime Minister has recognised that Friday’s negotiations on a fiscal compact are not the occasion to try to repatriate any powers. That is good news, and it should at least save the Prime Minister from having another ASBO slapped on him by the President of France. The Prime Minister says that he wants to be constructive at these negotiations but that he will have some modest demands to make. Does the Minister agree that the chance to participate constructively in the negotiations being held among the 27 depends on them being among the 27, because that gives him a seat and a voice, whereas if negotiations were confined to the 17 eurozone members he would have neither? If the Prime Minister arrives in Brussels with a list of concessions which he wants granted as a price for his co-operation, there is a serious risk that the 17, tired of Britain’s repeated requests for special treatment, will simply close the door on the 10 outsiders and negotiate without them. What influence will he then have on the outcome?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we are now facing a clear difference of timescale in the things under way. There is a real urgency about managing the eurozone crisis. That is a matter of weeks. Examining the balance of competences within the European Union is a much longer-term investigation, with which the British Government are engaged, and on which we expect to have plenty of allies among the other member states of the European Union.