Queen’s Speech
Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts(11 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield
My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the Chief of the Defence Staff’s Strategic Advisory Panel, although naturally I speak this evening in a purely individual—perhaps even eccentric—capacity.
Unlike any previous Parliament in the years since 1945, we know when the next defence review will take place. By my calculation, it will be the 12th such review since VE Day and we will receive it in the autumn of 2015, a few months the other side of the May 2015 general election if the coalition does not collapse in the mean time and the House of Commons activates the get-out clause in the Fixed-term Parliaments Act.
Whitehall, quite rightly, is already gearing up for the next defence review with a series of preparatory papers already commissioned by the Cabinet Office on geographical areas of concern and functional topics of various kinds. As in the autumn of 2010, the 2015 strategic defence and security review will be twinned with a new national security strategy document.
I have considerable sympathy for the framers of the 2010 SDSR and NSS. They had to work at great speed and against a financial backdrop that resulted in the combined exercise possessing the characteristics of a fistful of absolutely desperate spending reviews overlain with the thinnest patina of strategy. The 2010 productions reflected, too, the usual British tussle between what Paul Cornish and Andrew Dorman have aptly described as “smart muddling through” and “grand strategy”.
There was, however, only one passage in the 2010 national security strategy which, to be a trifle unkind, clings to the velcro of memory. It was written under instruction to be boring and, my Lords, it succeeded. The sentence that stands out is truly in technicolour and it is in the introduction:
“The National Security Council has reached a clear conclusion that Britain’s national interest requires us to reject any notion of the shrinkage of our influence”.
I am a convinced supporter of the idea of a National Security Council. I think that it is an innovation of the Prime Minister that will endure. However, this product of its collective wisdom was a mixture of Tommy Cooper-style “just like that” assertion of the worst political kind and hubris, not least because the very next day the strategic defence and security review revealed that several of our instruments of influence in the world were going to be reduced—indeed, shrivelled —substantially.
The next pairing of NSS and SDSR in 2015 must do better than that. It must not fall into the trap described by the great cosmologist Carl Sagan of confusing hopes with facts, as the unfortunate 2010 NSS declaration plainly did. I respectfully suggest to whoever finds themselves in government in the summer and early autumn of 2015 that they open the next National Security Strategy document with a different kind of introduction. A 2,000-word essay—no more than that is needed—of Britain’s place in the world, the range of resources we can realistically apply to whatever aspirations the following pages display, and why and how we should deploy those resources effectively and successfully when and where we can.
I share the impulse that we should strive to be a force for good in the world, but in 2015 Parliament and the public will need a long, deep, illusion-free look at our country’s appetite to remain a global player given our size, wealth, population and economic capacities. None of the previous 11 post-war defence reviews did this satisfactorily—not one of them. Such a think piece must pass the Sagan hopes and facts test, too.
Allied to such an essay we would benefit from two extras. First, a statement of what the 2015 Government believe are the core musts of British defence provision. My list would be—and it is only a personal list—air defence of the UK; home defence of the UK, not least against cyber attack, and including the capacity of the Armed Forces to bring aid to the civil authorities if required; the sustenance of the UK nuclear deterrent; the security of the eastern Atlantic and the near north; maintaining our NATO commitments; and our duties to the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar. After this can come the almost limitless list of “wouldn’t-it-be-nice-to” if we had the kit, the money, the allies and the legal cover.
On the resources front, the drafters of and customers for the 2015 SDSR and NSS will need to remember the lessons of defence reviews past. Full funding for the settlement agreed is rarely forthcoming and unforeseen events usually change the picture, sometimes dramatically, in the periods between reviews.
On that score, horizon scanning is enjoying a welcome revival and boost across Whitehall, and not only in the politico-military departments, thanks to a review commissioned by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, last year and carried out under the supervision of Jon Day, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. It was declassified in January.
Finally, that second extra to a possible opening think piece in the 2015 National Security Strategy. We have up until now had three years’ experience of the National Security Council and its supporting apparatus at work. Might this be the time to review how all the inputting departments and agencies have adapted themselves to this new and welcome broader-gauge approach which, in structural terms, is better than any of its predecessor Cabinet Committees since 1945? An audit and a capability review of all these inputs would be of real value and a summary of its findings could be included in the National Security Strategy of 2015.
We can as a country do a great deal of good in the world, but let us not over-reach, let us not over-preach, and let us do in the world what we sensibly can with the skills and the capacities with which our history has endowed us, but no more than that.
Health and Social Care Bill
Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts(13 years ago)
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(1A) Such regulations shall”
Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield
My Lords, in the unavoidable absence of my noble friend Lady Williams of Crosby and the noble Lord, Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames, who send their apologies, I will speak to this amendment, which has my wholehearted support. I attempted to add my name to it, but it was already replete with noble Lords by the time I arrived.
The core purpose of the amendment is to make it a requirement for the Secretary of State to make regulations under Clause 17 and to ensure that they are kept up to date and reviewed regularly. The Bill is heavily laden throughout with powers for the Secretary of State to lay down regulations, not least for the huge matter of the functions and powers of the national Commissioning Board, of Monitor and of the CCGs—and even for the special health authorities that have not been set up.
Throughout our debate, many noble Lords expressed deep concern about the character and ethos of the health service that will be sculpted by the Bill. Therefore, scrutiny of the regulations is a matter of profound importance. My noble friend Lady Williams and I have often discussed the degree to which accountability for secondary legislation will become scarcely visible in the case of the negative procedure for statutory instruments, and only slightly more visible in the case of affirmative resolutions. There is a third procedure called super-affirmation, but it is rarely used. In effect, secondary legislation slips through Parliament scarcely scrutinised.
However, there have been some improvements lately in terms of committees. In addition to your Lordships’ Statutory Instruments Select Committee and its sister, the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, which have considered the vires of secondary legislation, there has been a very welcome Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee since 2003, but that, too, does not establish a sufficiently robust scrutiny procedure.
Health is a particularly difficult and complicated issue, as this Bill displays in neon lights. We have a duty to our people to make sure we get it right. In the all-party House of Commons Health Select Committee, we have a tried, tested and knowledgeable body, which has produced a stream of fine and well received reports. In the view of my noble friends and myself, that committee should have all the regulations placed before it in plenty of time to offer its wisdom as to whether or not they should be agreed to. The Health Select Committee already carries a considerable responsibility for advising on health policy and should not be overburdened. Therefore, my noble friends and I would suggest to the Government that the committee should be given the resources to employ an extra clerk and an adviser to select those regulations which in their view would have a substantial impact on the capacity of the health service to meet the needs of all its patients in England and the needs of society as a whole.
This amendment also fits with the Minister’s very welcome campaign of reassurance on the constitutional front, to which he has devoted so much time and effort since Second Reading, and for which I am truly grateful. I hope, therefore, that he will be able to accept the spirit, the detail and the practical value of this amendment. I beg to move.
Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield
I am very grateful to the Minister for his, as always, very thoughtful reply. I am grateful, too, to the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, for her point, which I fully accept, about the collective gift of this Chamber when it comes to detailed scrutiny. Quite naturally, I also note her point about the sovereignty of Select Committees in the other place. In some ways it sounds an innovative suggestion that the Health Select Committee should take on this scrutiny regulatory task, but there are some precedents—remedial orders under the Human Rights Act, following declarations of incompatibility, and orders under the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006, are all made only after scrutiny in draft by the relevant Select Committees.
I think that this matter is too important to the accountability question as a whole for it to be abandoned at this stage. Therefore, I am confident that several noble Lords will wish it to be re-examined once more on Report. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
House of Lords Reform Bill [HL]
Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts(13 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield
My Lords, it is a pleasure and an honour to join your Lordships’ House. It is a pleasure because of the immense kindness already shown to me in abundance by all who legislate and work here, and it is an honour to be able to work here with so many of your Lordships whom I have greatly admired, first, as a journalist writing about government and, later, as an outside observer of the British constitution from my academic home in the school of history at Queen Mary, University of London.
I have long had a fascination for the hidden wiring and the moving parts of our constitution, and now I find myself a small new particle of a very big and significant part of the British constitution—your Lordships’ House. The fascination began almost 44 years ago on an autumn evening in the library of St John’s College, Cambridge, where I spent my undergraduate years. What triggered it? My first reading of Walter Bagehot’s 1867 classic, The English Constitution, a magnificent work, brimming with brio and insight into this most ethereal of governing phenomena. Finding the British constitution has been, in one professional guise or another, an elusive quest for me ever since that evening in Cambridge—a fascination, I have to confess, that has not always been fully understood by less than empathetic colleagues and friends, who tend to see in it a dash of the young trainspotter that I was in the glorious days of steam.
In the context of today’s debate, it is intriguing and, I think, useful to plunder Bagehot’s chapter on the House of Lords, even though it was written in the mid-19th century, and I shall come to that in a moment. On the theme of utility, it is sometimes only in long historical perspectives that we can discern the retrospective work of your Lordships’ House. For example, it turned out to be the prefect receptacle when our country mercifully shed its habit of executing those it had come to regard as failed politicians. I made this point a couple of weeks ago to the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, when we were companions on a journey returning from the University of Aberystwyth. We partly filled the long slog home across mid-Wales by contemplating the value of your Lordships’ House and what might await in future. The noble Lord responded to my historical depiction of the House of Lords as an alternative to execution, and I have his kind permission to relay our conversation, by saying that he had made a similar point to the Russians while on a visit in his capacity as Secretary-General of NATO a decade or so after the Cold War had ended. He told his hosts that what communist Russia had lacked was a House of Lords of its own into which it could have decanted the likes of Leonid Brezhnev. “If you had possessed such an institution,” the noble Lord told the Russians, “you might still have a Soviet Union”.
Back to the real thing, though: your Lordships’ House. In 1867, Bagehot saw it as a Chamber of,
“temporary rejectors and palpable alterers”,
of draft legislation. It was imperative, he wrote, that the House should contain a “class of respected revisers”. He regretted that Lord Palmerston’s proposal for the appointment of life Peers had been rejected, and warned that without such an infusion of persons with professional knowledge and experience, the House of Lords could find itself in peril. He wrote:
“Its danger is not in assassination, but atrophy; not abolition, but decline”.
It took another 91 years before Bagehot’s prescription was fulfilled with the passage of the Life Peerages Act 1958, almost certainly the most transforming incremental reform of your Lordships’ House in its long history, with a powerful and cumulative effect that has made it what it is today—Bagehot’s House of respected revisers. That, in my judgment, is the crucial test to be applied to any of the new configurations of your Lordships’ House that may be proposed: could the Members of a reformed Chamber still be seen as respected revisers?
I was once in favour of an elected Chamber—a British senate of 100 legislators, elected on the basis of proportional representation by huge constituencies that embraced city, town and countryside, with one-third up for election or re-election every five years. I have changed my mind; indeed, it would have been improper to have applied for appointment to the Cross Benches of your Lordships’ House if I had not. There are two chief reasons why I have changed my mind. First, there is the high and continuing utility of having a group of people somewhere in the legislative process who are sensitive to politics and government but are not themselves partisan in a party-political sense. Secondly, in most trades, crafts, professions and walks of life, we are ever keener to widen the confluence of backgrounds, knowledge and experience when recruiting. In my judgment, appointment rather than election will remain the best and primary instrument for achieving this if it is a goal that we share.
Quite apart from election, which would create the danger of a replica Chamber that, by its very existence, would promptly inspire a tussle in terms of relative power with the other place, it is very difficult to imagine that elections would sustain the flow of experience and knowledge that the appointments system provides for your Lordships’ House, especially regarding those with a background in science and technology, business and industry. To rise in the other place, you need first to make your way there in your 30s or early 40s. With the best will in the world, that is usually too soon and too young to have acquired fully professional depth in the laboratory or the boardroom.
I know that undue controversy has no place in a maiden speech, and horizon-scanning is a perilous craft. I hope, however, that your Lordships will allow me a concluding thought on the Bill before us. Once we have seen a debate on the coalition Government’s proposals on reform of your Lordships’ House and they contain, as we expect, a dominant element of election in them, if the two Houses of Parliament find that they cannot reach a consensus on a new DNA for the revising Chamber, and if in the approaching twilight of their term the coalition Government are unwilling to reach for the Parliament Act, we have in the House of Lords Reform Bill in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood, a rational, valuable and relatively readily implementable alternative for worthwhile improvement that cuts with the grain of past changes—a means, in short, of effecting organic reforms as an alternative surgery.
Much of the British constitution remains unwritten, though a good deal of it, since I first read Bagehot in 1966, has moved from the back of an envelope to the front of a code and then to the face of an Act of Parliament. I have in mind particularly the Civil Service element in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. Yet much remains as magical and mysterious as when Bagehot picked up his pen to describe what he saw.
Constitutional statutes, when they are drafted and brought forward, are, in effect, the Companies Acts of the British way of government. They are often what Bagehot called the “latent part of legislation”, laden with unanticipated implications for other parts of the British constitution and dripping with the possibility of unintended consequences. Their scrutiny calls for the most special care.