Queen’s Speech

Lord Lisvane Excerpts

Thursday 13th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lisvane (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I add my warm congratulations to those of others and welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser of Craigmaddie, and the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, who I was very glad to know in a previous life.

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a serious effect on the legislative process in terms of quantity of proposals, shortness of notice, difficulty of scrutiny and, insidiously, the confusion of guidance or ministerial instruction with the law. The report published today by the Constitution Committee, chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, has provided an excellent analysis of the effect on Parliament and has given us our own parliamentary road map, as it were, for the future. I much look forward to hearing from the noble Baroness in a moment or two. It is vital that those baneful legislative effects of the pandemic should not persist, but that does not mean that all will be fine once the dial is reset.

On Tuesday, we were told of some 30 Bills that Parliament will be invited to consider in just a few months of this Session. So I think it is reasonable to ask how well Parliament is equipped to pass good law. However welcome it may be to have, in the often-used phrase, “taken back control” or taken back sovereignty—whatever sovereignty may really mean in practice—the dice are ever more heavily loaded in favour of the Executive, as my noble and learned friend Lord Judge pointed out so compellingly.

I am not being unrealistic, of course. For years, Bills have not really been draft legislation; they have been word for word what the Government of the day wish to see upon the statute book. But the rules of the game have been changing. We have extensive delegation of powers to Ministers in SIs, with minimal parliamentary scrutiny, Henry VIII clauses which can negate scrutiny of primary legislation, and the use of delegated legislation to provide for matters of serious policy. We may pride ourselves on line-by-line scrutiny, about which I have my doubts, but if we really wish to equip Parliament to pass legislation that is respected and which maintains the accountability of Ministers and the authority of Parliament, we need to do a lot more than just reset the dial.

Let me turn to the union for a moment. Whatever the prospects for indyref2, the debate on the future of the union remains focused upon Scotland, and it remains binary. On the one hand, there is the possibility—remote, perhaps, but nevertheless—of independence and, on the other, of carrying on much as we are, with the hope that increased investment and joint projects will keep the centrifugal forces in check. But what will remain in the eyes of many will be what I have described to your Lordships before as the imperial condescension of the UK’s central government.

A symptom may be the term “devolution”, which I suggest is rapidly becoming outdated. If you devolve, you are giving away part of what you control. If you are the owner of the cake and you decide how much to give away, however tasty the morsel, this will not stop recipients being rightly resentful. I suggest that what is needed is a reshaping of the relationships, powers and responsibilities of the four members of the union. This has been the aim of the Constitution Reform Group, convened by the Marquess of Salisbury, a distinguished former Leader of your Lordships’ House, and of which I am a member. In the last Parliament, I introduced the group’s act of union Bill. In this Session, I hope to put before your Lordships a greatly improved and developed version of the Bill, seeking to replace the present top-down approach, where the centre decides what powers are to be given to the other parts of the UK, with a bottom-up approach in which the four parts agree upon the powers they need to serve their citizens best and to take a full part in a union which has been astonishingly successful, culturally and economically.

My last point is constitutional, in that it relates to our parliamentary home. The sound of the restoration-and-renewal can still being kicked down the road is increasingly depressing. I have a personal interest in this, having commissioned the first condition survey, which initiated the whole process the best part of a decade ago. All the issues have been well exposed and, it seems, endlessly discussed. The questions of political embarrassment and the impact on the public finances are the same as they were 70 years ago, although of course the cost of not having tackled the problem for all these years now has to be added, month by month, inexorably. The reality that will not go away is that, if we have a catastrophic failure of services, we will probably not be able to remain in the Palace of Westminster, and all the decisions that have been put off for so long will come to a head in the space of 24 hours. In my maiden speech in your Lordships’ House I urged rapid progress. And that was six years ago.